"We know this much about it: it is beyond the reach of all extant scientific detection equipment."
I'm not sure this is necessarily right. By most measures it should now be accepted that scientific equipment is far more advanced than human senses. It can hear, see, smell, things that humans senses just cannot. So if the claim is that such objects as ghosts are real and visible to something as "basic" as a human eye, then they would also be real and visible to current scientific equipment. As a very simple example, standard cameras should be enough, and those aren't all that advanced anyway. I'm not convinced that current scientific equipment isn't up to the job; and anyway the statement presupposes that the effects in question actually exist, which is currently still up for debate and is far more of an important question than how these things work.
"...scientists are good at analysing things but are weak on the creativity side e.g. they struggle to turn a discovery into a practical, profitable, invention."
Even this is somewhat unfair. Some individual scientists may lack creativity, but as a whole they are about as creative as anyone. In some ways, even more so (and in others, not so much). Struggling to make money says far more about business-savvy, or lack of it, than it does about creativity. Artists and musicians are also creative, but have their own limits in other ways. This doesn't detract from their creativity; an occasional lack of inventive prowess doesn't detract from the creativity of scientists either.
"...we can only guess at what this form of energy might be."
This is true, but I don't think it makes the guess and anything that follows it worthless. I've provided a couple of examples below. I'm afraid that this post is becoming a "lecture" -- sorry about that, but I have a lot to say.
In a very real sense, we still don't know what gravity actually is. Certainly Isaac Newton didn't. But this didn't stop him from making useful predictions about its effects. Predictions that were accurate enough to still be useful almost 400 years later, and even with Einstein's introduction of General Relativity, it still turns out to be un-necessary detail for most purposes. In short, there is no need to know how things work to be able to check if they actually do work, if they are real.
It is thus possible in principle to design a test that could determine the existence, or not, of any phenomena of this sort of nature. The "can't prove a negative" caveat will still hold, but you could put high confidence bounds on its not being real.
At a different level, one of theory, it still holds that you needn't know the full details to be able to make a theoretical prediction. For consciousness the word "energy" has been thrown around a lot. I think it's largely been accepted that this is for want of a better word, but, even though consciousness wouldn't itself actually be energy, it's almost certain that there would be some type of energy associated with it. This would be in essentially the same way that electricity isn't energy itself, but there is an "electrical energy" associated with it.
Sticking with the electricity example, we can use this idea of electrical energy being associated with electricity to make the following claims: electrical circuits become hot (because electrical energy can turn into heat energy); electrical circuits can drive motion (kinetic energy); electrical circuits can give off light (same again). These statements are all true -- hence lightbulbs, electric radiators, motors etc. -- but more importantly they can be made without knowing how this works.
The same claims can be made about "consciousness energy". If it's a real and new thing then regardless of how it works, the energy it carries will be capable of becoming heat instead. And without anything to sustain it -- the brain and body -- we should fully expect that this is exactly what will happen.