Paranormal Phenomena
A compilation of paranormal experiences, and an essay by me on the paranormal.
Introduction
What’s something supernatural/paranormal that you’ve done, experienced, or witnessed?* I asked many people this question. These people answered:
Adam Humphreys, Alan Rossi, Alec Zeck, Alex Perez, Amanda Fortini, Andrew Weatherhead, Anna Dorn, August Lamm, Blake Butler, Brad Cohn, Brandon Scott Gorrell, Brooke McPoyle, Camille Sojit Pejcha, Carlen Altman, Catherine Foulkrod, Danielle Chelosky, Dean Kissick, Gabi Abrão, Jordan Castro, Katherine Dee, Luke Goebels, Michael Clune, Nathaniel Duggan, Nicolette Polek, Noah Kumin, Olivia Kan-Sperling, Ottessa Moshfegh, Rebecca Grace Cyr, Riane Eisler, Robert McCready, Ross Simonini, Sheila Heti, Sherman Alexie, Walter Kirn, Writers Life Tips, Yuna Winter, Zac Smith, Zachary Emmanuel, Zans Brady Krohn.
I put their answers in an alphabetical list (“Answers to My Question”) located after “My Thoughts on the Paranormal” and “My Paranormal Experiences.” Feel free (of course) to ctrl+f to skip to the list. After the list is a section titled “Final Thoughts.”
*Everything that is supernatural is also paranormal, so I decided to use just the word paranormal in this post.
My Thoughts on the Paranormal
Materialism is the theory that only matter exists and that all phenomena arise from material processes. The earliest known materialists appeared around 500 B.C. in India and Greece as fringe groups, which remained marginal or waned over time. It was not until the 1600s that materialism re-emerged, in Europe, but it stayed non-dominant until the early 1900s. Most scientists before 1900 were non-materialists, holding religious or spiritual beliefs.
Today, materialism is (1) a foundational assumption in mainstream science globally, and (2) the dominant ontology (the study of what exists) in public school and academia in Westernized nations, including those in East Asia. Under materialism, the following phenomena—viewed as normal and real in non-materialist, spiritual ontologies—are labeled paranormal (“beyond normal”):
Nonmaterial entities (souls, spirits, deities, ghosts, angels, etc.) and their associated phenomena, such as hauntings, prophecy, revelation, divine intervention, life after death, near-death experiences (NDEs), and reincarnation.
Psychic abilities, which include extrasensory perception (ESP) (telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychometry), psychokinesis (“mind over matter”), bilocation, out-of-body experiences (astral projection), psychic healing, and mediumship.
Some materialists concede that certain paranormal phenomena may be real but have physical explanations which haven’t been figured out yet. However, most materialists seem to dismiss anything paranormal as a lie, fraud, coincidence, delusion, hallucination, coping mechanism, or misinterpretation of normal phenomena.
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Wikipedia is a good source for figuring out what the mainstream materialist view is on whatever topic. Wikipedia’s pages for “paranormal” and “parapsychology” seem to focus almost exclusively on (1) debunking paranormal phenomena, (2) attacking the credibility and findings of parapsychology (the academic and non-academic study of the paranormal), and (3) categorizing paranormal believers as uneducated, unintelligent, unscientific, superstitious, and mentally ill.
The “paranormal” page features a quote stating that “many academics explain the belief in the paranormal” by saying that people believe in it because “they're uneducated or stupid” (“ignorance”), because the beliefs “provide a way to cope” with “psychological uncertainties and physical stressors” (“deprivation”), or because they’re “mentally defective in some way, ranging from low intelligence or poor critical thinking ability to a full-blown psychosis” (“deficiency”).
In support of the “ignorance” argument, Wikipedia cites studies which found that “the most susceptible people to paranormal belief are those who are poorly educated, unemployed or have roles that rank low among social values,” and that “college students with better grades have less belief in the paranormal”—which to me means this:
People who are least educated and least involved in materialism have the least bias against paranormal phenomena, and the best students of materialism believe in the paranormal the least. (This is me saying this—it’s blockquoted for emphasis.)
The circular logic is not addressed: Of course if you’re taught that paranormal phenomena are fake, you’ll believe in them less. The unmentioned factor is that “education” is mainly “education in the veracity of materialism,” not “education in multiple ontological theories.”
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Wikipedia states, “Parapsychology has been criticized for continuing investigation despite being unable to provide convincing evidence for the existence of any psychic phenomena after more than a century of research.” Wikipedia’s reference for this statement is this highly inaccurate-seeming sentence from a book titled Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (2003):
It is important to realize that, in one hundred years of parapsychological investigations, there has never been a single adequate demonstration of the reality of any psi phenomenon. [Psi is the first letter in the Greek word psyche—mind or soul—and is presumed in parapsychology to be the source of psychic abilities.]
Scientific studies done at universities internationally since the 1930s appear to strongly support the existence of telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis (PK) (in humans and animals), psychic healing (of at least humans on animals), and other paranormal phenomena. Gertrude Schmeidler, who earned a PhD in psychology from Harvard in 1935, wrote this in Parapsychology: Its Relation to Physics, Biology, Psychology, and Psychiatry, a 1976 anthology she edited:
The major finding from psi (i.e., from ESP and PK) research is that ESP and PK occur. There seems by now to be unequivocal evidence for each, and the evidence is especially strong because it is contributed by investigators in different laboratories who work with different methods.
Hundreds of controlled studies since 1976—published in peer-reviewed journals—have further confirmed the existence of psychic abilities in humans and animals. A 2013 paper titled “Meta-Analysis of ESP Studies, 1987-2010” examined 91 studies on clairvoyance, precognition, and telepathy, and concluded that the studies found “significant psi effects above mean chance expectation,” and that the effect was “not an artifact of poor-quality experimental design.” Many other meta-analyses have come to the same conclusion.
Academic parapsychology, as described above, uses the same scientific methods (the gathering of empirical evidence via double-blind experiments; statistical analysis; peer review) as other sciences. But many materialists insist on calling it a pseudoscience. For example, Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (2003), which is written by a materialist, and which Wikipedia references repeatedly on its “paranormal” page, states, “The paranormal can best be thought of as a subset of pseudoscience.”
Labeling parapsychology a pseudoscience seems to be a crude, immature method to dismiss its findings, on par with calling someone an idiot to dismiss their work. To me, the inaccurate use of a dismissive term—along with the authoritative statements that parapsychology has not produced “convincing” or “adequate” evidence—indicates that materialists are in denial about the fact that science has confirmed the reality of a wide variety of paranormal phenomena.
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In the past three years, I’ve found probably more than a hundred pieces of convincing evidence—across disparate subcultures, from psychedelia to academia—for the existence of paranormal phenomena. Here are some of them, none of which are not mentioned on Wikipedia’s paranormal/parapsychology pages:
People who leave their bodies during NDEs perceive things near and far away from their unconscious or clinically dead body which are later confirmed to be true. Often, these details couldn’t have been seen or heard even if the person’s body was conscious and alert during their NDE. (See the book The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences for 128 such cases.)
Some kids, at age two or three, spontaneously begin to speak about their past life. Many of them state the name, location, and other details of their previous personality. These details are often confirmed to accurately describe an actual person who died in the recent past. (See the book Children Who Remember Previous Lives by Ian Stevenson.)
The U.S. government secretly employed psychics in more than 500 military operations from at least 1972 to 1995, mostly in Project Stargate. Jimmy Carter credited psychics for locating a lost military plane, and multiple Stargate psychics have given long interviews, vouching for the effectiveness of remote viewing (a form of clairvoyance) and other psychic abilities. (I recommend this six-hour interview with Joe McMoneagle.)
Rupert Sheldrake studied what he called phone telepathy and email telepathy. In his studies, participants guessed which of four people would phone or email them, and scored 42 and 43 percent accuracy when only 25 percent would be expected under materialism. Sheldrake’s ongoing studies have also shown telepathy in cats and dogs.
Many studies show psychic abilities in animals. In a 1968 study by Duval and Montredon, mice seemed to use extrasensory perception to avoid an electric shock 53 times more than expected by chance. Wild mice did it better than domesticated mice. A 1974 study by Craig and Treurniet found that rats who were killed the next day acted different—20.8% more active—than rats who were kept alive for at least three weeks, suggesting precognitive knowledge of their imminent deaths.
Daryl J. Bem, a professor at Cornell, published a study in 2011 titled "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect,” regarding experiments where participants studied a list of words after completing a memory test on those words. Participants were better at recalling words they later studied, suggesting the use of precognition.
The sheep goat effect. I will describe this especially egregious example of Wikipedia’s omission of evidence—an omission reflected in the broader cultural discourse on the paranormal—below.
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The sheep goat effect was discovered by the aforementioned Gertrude Schmeidler (1912-2009), whose research focused on perception and memory until she attended a seminar in 1942, seven years after receiving her doctorate. The seminar was on “psychical research.” She left feeling “half-fascinated, half-incredulous,” leading her to do a study, funded by Harvard.
In the study, she tested the psychic abilities of (1) people who believed in ESP, and (2) people who did not. The believers (called “sheep”) performed better than expected by chance in a test in which participants guessed the sequence of closed packs of Zener cards located in a separate room. Extra-surprisingly, the disbelievers (called “goats”) scored worse than expected.
The study suggested that (1) ESP is real, and (2) non-believers unconsciously used it to help them guess wrong in order to confirm their disbelief, but instead of confirming their disbelief, the disbelief-driven use of ESP generated evidence that cast doubt on their disbelief. In terms of human psychology, this seems both comical and typical.
“Psi missing” is the term given to the phenomenon in which some people score significantly worse than would be expected by chance on ESP tests. Mario Varvoglis, who earned a PhD in experimental psychology from Adelphi University in 1982, called psi missing “one of the most startling discoveries of modern parapsychology.”
Schmeidler repeated the study fifteen times from 1942 to 1951, all with similar results, and in 1958 she coined the term “sheep goat effect.” Other researchers replicated the effect, and a 1993 meta-analysis titled “Gathering in the sheep and goats,” covering 73 experiments by 37 researchers, confirmed it. Schmeidler wrote:
The data convinced me. Repeatedly, average ESP scores of subjects who rejected any possibility of ESP success (whom I called goats) were lower than average ESP scores of all other subjects (whom I called sheep). This was inexplicable by the physical laws we knew; it implied unexplored processes in the universe, an exciting new field for research.
I like when people encounter surprising evidence and adjust their views in a way that decreases their popularity and credibility, as Schmeidler seems to have done. Most people seem to deny or dismiss evidence—unconsciously if not consciously—to retain their status and the approval of their peers. (This isn’t necessarily a criticism—everyone, I believe, is affected by status and their peers to some degree; it’s an unavoidable, but minimizable, impediment to truth.)
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The sheep goat effect, psi missing, and even Gertrude Schmeidler—who published around 200 papers and wrote/edited various books, and whose work is archived at Duke University—are not mentioned on the Wikipedia pages for “parapsychology” and “paranormal.” Gertrude Schmeidler doesn’t have a Wikipedia page.
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A 2005 Gallup poll found that only 32% of Americans don’t believe in ESP (41% believe; 25% are unsure), and a 2023 Gallup poll found that only 18% of Americans don’t identify as religious or spiritual (47% are religious; 33% spiritual), meaning that less than 18% of Americans are materialists, despite materialism’s dominance in science, academia, and public education.
To me, these stats are (1) encouraging (because they suggest that people intuitively disbelieve materialism) and (2) make sense (because I believe humans fell into dystopia around 6,500 years ago (see my essay on this), and that in dystopian societies the masses are taught the opposite of what they believe).
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Most-to-all kids seem to believe in paranormal phenomena, also called magic. Under materialism, this can only mean that kids are “stupid” and “uneducated.” Under spiritual worldviews, which do not believe that matter is all there is, it’s evidence that materialism is indoctrinated into us, and that in the absence of indoctrination, no one, or almost no one, would be a materialist. Looking at history—this seems to be true.
We are spiritual beings with magical powers, and we know it.
My Paranormal Experiences
My innate belief in magic decreased throughout my childhood via school and immersion in mainstream secular culture, reaching a low of around 15% by the end of college, after which it gradually increased, especially in my thirties, as I used psychedelics and read about non-materialist perspectives, like those held by our Neolithic and Native ancestors. By age 40, my belief was at around 70%. Then, last year, in one year, during ages 40/41, I read 11.5 books on near-death experiences (see my essay on this) and my belief went up to 99%.
I’m now more than 99% convinced that (1) I’m an embodied soul, and that (2) as a soul, I have psychic abilities which go beyond what’s normally discussed. For example, people report that while disembodied during NDEs they had (1) omnidirectional vision, seeing in all directions at once, (2) the ability to teleport to someone by thinking of that person, and (3) “life reviews” in which they re-experienced their life simultaneously from their own and other perspectives.
As I deepen my belief and understanding that I am a soul, I will probably notice and experience more paranormal phenomena. I’ve probably ignored and dismissed many of them throughout my life. In my times of least belief, I may even have unconsciously used psychic abilities—via the sheep goat effect—to obfuscate or nullify paranormal phenomena to preserve my disbelief. And so I’ve had few paranormal experiences so far in my life.
Here are the ones I remember:
1—When I was 5 in Florida, my dad was driving me and my mom to the airport. We were going to Taiwan. Out of nowhere, I said my mom should let me carry half her money, in case someone stole it. We flew to New York. At JFK Airport, my mom’s bag was stolen; it contained her money (in the form of traveler’s checks) and our passports. We canceled the trip, returned to Florida. In the past, I mostly dismissed my money idea as coincidental. Today I’m more inclined to think I may have precognitively sensed the upcoming loss and tried to prevent it.
2—In my twenties and thirties, I had many psychedelic experiences, which I haven’t closely parsed yet for paranormal phenomena. Extremely stoned once, I seemed briefly able to explore a childhood memory in three-dimensions, flying through it, amazed. On LSD once, walking home after a yoga class, or maybe during the class, I zoomed out to a higher reality, where I ”saw” the “hands” of my soul operating a kind of instrument panel to “control” my body.
Last year, I began to (1) think of my body as a container which limits the soul which occupies and animates it, reducing vision to two eyes, cognition to one brain, mobility to two leg, etc., and (2) theorize that psychedelics loosen the body’s hold on the soul, varying freeing the soul to express its abilities which from inside the universe appear magical. This perspective, crediting the soul—not the drugs—as the source of psychic abilities, is why I include experiences that occurred while on drugs as paranormal.
(Besides psychedelics, other ways to loosen the soul from the body seem to include meditation, prayer, intervention from other souls or other nonphysical entities, sensory deprivation, binaural beats, techniques pioneered by Robert Monroe, vision quests, various ordeals, trance, breathwork, nearly dying, and dying. And maybe love and other positive feelings:
A 1965 paper titled “A Review of Results and New Experiments Bearing on Teacher-Selection Methods in the Anderson-White High School Experiments,” observed that in experiments where teachers gave ESP tests to students, scores were highest for pupils with both (1) favorable views of their teachers and (2) favorable ratings from their teachers. To me, this suggests that positive feelings loosen the soul. Maybe this is partly why positive feelings feel good: The “good” feeling is the natural state of the disembodied soul. Evidence for this: People report feeling better than they’ve ever felt while disembodied during NDEs.)
3—Twice when I was 30, and once when I was 40, I left my body after smoking DMT. Not like in NDEs, where people initially remain in physical reality while out of body, feeling lucid and peaceful, but in a disturbing, overwhelming way where I was suddenly disembodied in a nonphysical reality. (This is typical of so-called “breakthrough” DMT trips.) (See my longer accounts of these three trips here.) Later the same day after the third out-of-body DMT experience, I had this unique-to-me DMT trip which, unlike the others, was delightful:
I sat on my tatami mat on the front patio, smoked around 30 milligrams of DMT (a non-breakthrough dose), lay supine, and closed my eyes. I was in a pink-and-violet, multileveled, somewhat Escher-like structure, held up by three main columns. It had an original, beguiling aesthetic, fusing classical antiquity, computer graphics, and organism-like complexity, with subtly pulsing surfaces.
Something seemed to be showing me this structure, or invoking it, to make me feel comfortable. Smoke-like energies spiraled toward me, as if coming to investigate, and then dispersed upon reaching “me,” as if hitting a car windshield. The unseen entity generating the structure seemed friendly and relaxed.
My cat Lali was nearby, walking around. I opened my eyes and called her, thinking she might look different while I was on DMT. She looked normal. She didn’t seem to notice that I was on DMT. I closed my eyes, returning to the structure, which began to seem tonally like a bounce house—those inflatable playgrounds for kids.
I smiled and laughed. “Show me more,” I said, and the place became even more playful. Things were happening throughout the somewhat vast interior of the structure—things I’ve forgotten. “Show me more,” I repeated, feeling a little belligerent.
“I want to show you things too…my mandalas,” I said meekly, aware my art was woefully unimpressive compared to this living, seemingly more-than-3D structure. When I spoke, I felt distracted by my body. I tried to use telepathy, but it didn’t seem to work.
As the structure faded, I said, “Let’s keep in touch,” feeling vaguely comical. “You’re always here,” I said, mostly to myself. I wanted the experience to keep going—it seemed that a distinct entity could appear, or that I could leave my static perspective and more fully enter the structure—but after three or four minutes it was over.
4—Sometime in 2023, while 39/40, I seem to have briefly achieved a new mental state, like an abstract lucid dream, while meditating or dreaming—I don’t remember which. Maybe it happened while meditating, and I later attributed it to a dream because it seemed too fantastic to have happened while meditating. I wish I’d taken better notes on this. The experience felt both brief and outside of time. I saw what looked like musical notation, glowy, layered, in a strange space I hadn’t been in before. I felt fascinated and calm, like in the aforementioned DMT experience.
5—The morning after Dudu, my parents’ toy poodle, died in February 2024, I was at my computer on my front patio, which has a roof but no walls or screen. A type of small moth I’d never seen before landed on my computer screen, near an email to my mom with the subject “Dudu.” A moth had never landed on my computer screen in my four years in Hawaii, or maybe ever. It stayed for around a minute, then flew toward me, landing on my shirt on my chest before flying away. I was not especially close to Dudu, but I paid her a lot of attention, featuring her in my novel Leave Society, promoting her online, discussing her with my parents. My mom had a similar experience with a moth a week later.
6—On August 20, 2024, at around 3:30 a.m., I was 80% asleep in bed—I'd woken slightly from a dream—when I heard a loud clear meow. It wasn't my two cats. The room was empty and otherwise silent, and the meow was louder and sounded different than my cats. It sounded like a human saying "ME-OW!” It seemed to have come out of my pillow into my right ear. I lifted my head off the pillow, lay on my back, and stayed very still, feeling baffled and a little scared.
I’d never heard a sound come from nowhere like this. Was this the start of me being gang stalked via V2K (synthetic telepathy) technology? The content of the sound—a meow—didn’t fit this hypothesis. My mom later wondered if it was Leo, my cat who ran away the previous year. Maybe Leo had died and this was him saying bye. Or maybe it was one of my other cats, accidentally or experimentally “throwing” their voices into me from afar.
7—Last week, I was driving to the mail store. My dad was in the front passenger seat. My mom was in the backseat. A lizard came in the window and stood on my dad’s leg. It stayed on my dad’s leg during the rest of the 15 minute drive to the mail store, strangely unafraid.
“It’s Dudu,” I said, meaning not that Dudu had reincarnated as a lizard, but that Dudu was possessing the lizard to visit us, like she seemingly had via moths for me and my mom.
My mom said the previous night she’d mentally told Dudu, “If you came [with us to Hawaii], let us know.” (Before my parents left Taiwan to visit me in Hawaii—a week before this day—my mom had mentally told Dudu to come along too. Having read multiple NDE books, my mom knew that souls could seemingly go anywhere in physical reality instantly.)
When I got back in the car after getting mail, the lizard was standing by my window, looking outside like a dog would. As I drove, it moved to the dashboard in front of the steering wheel, acting Dudu-like, looking back at all of us. It let me pet it. I’ve never pet a lizard before. It wasn’t scared at all—it was unlike any lizard I’ve interacted with. Normally, I only saw green geckos, not dark lizards, in my car. “Dudu,” I said. “You came to visit us,” said my mom.
The lizard looked at us with an angled head, like a dog. It stood on the steering wheel, then climbed onto my hand. I drove with the lizard on my hand. It moved to my arm, facing the road ahead. It climbed up my arm and went to the floor of the backseat. My mom was in the backseat. She was afraid of the lizard, even though she believed it was Dudu. (She fears reptiles.) The lizard stayed on the floor.
When I finished driving, arriving home after around 45 minutes in the car, the lizard jumped on my pants and stayed on me for another 30 or so minutes, climbing up my shirt to my back, staying on my back, on my shirt, as I sat on my tatami mat outside on the front patio in front of my low work table, typing an account of this.
Answers to My Question
I remember as a child I would sometimes experience this strange rushing sensation which often scared me and prevented my sleep. I will attempt to describe it. If I were laying in bed, I would find my focus on banal objects or features of them in the room. There was nothing special about these objects, they had no metaphysical qualities. Like, the corner of a chair in the corner of the room. But I would find my view quickly "pushing into" the object, which would give me the sensation of my body travelling through space, almost floating through space, towards the point of focus. Then I would be back where I was before, in the bed, then once again, in a pulsing and strobing rhythmic way, I would be pushing into, rushing into disparate places in the room. The rhythm was quite fast, and gave me this feeling almost like I was rushing into and out of my body, into these corners, these meaningless objects elsewhere in the room. I have never considered whether these experiences were related to the paranormal, but it was not unlike "tripping." I've hypothesized previously that this was some kind of "tripping" experience. I've not had this rushing sensation in over thirty years, but it stays with me and is all that comes to mind re your question.
A week after my aunt’s unexpected death, after the funeral, my mom said, “I haven’t seen her. No dreams, nothing.” She had “seen” her own mother quickly after her death; I too had dreamed about her, my grandmother. When my grandfather died, her father, at a relatively young age from lung cancer, my mother saw something of him too. On the way home from the hospital after his death, she passed four deer – three female and one male. The male had been hit by a car on the freeway and was dead (this is uncommon simply because male deer don’t just hang around with female deer). The female deer looked on, as if waiting, looking at the newly dead male on the road. My mom’s family was her, her sister, her mother, her father. Then the female deer moved away, looking back as if unsure they should go on.
But we had not seen her sister. I secretly worried about how the hospital kept her alive (through no bad intentions), static in my mind, as though her spirit had gotten stuck in a state between realities. On my flight home, after an emotional week of trying to be present for family, I felt free to think again. I wondered when I would next see my aunt or if I would. I stared out at the city below the plane. I let myself feel the desire to see her again. Eventually, I shifted my focus back to the book I was working on. I wanted to devote some time to thinking of it again, since it had been a week, and I wanted my mind to be elsewhere, not on this death, which had come so suddenly and shadowed everything else. I decided to think about the title.
The book is about two writers, two friends, who are struggling in various ways, one with severe mental issues – the nature of self is at the heart of the book. After thinking of many bad titles, I remembered that I’d recently read a book called The Second Body. Because my book is about glimpsing one’s larger self, the deathless Self, what the Buddhists call deathless awareness or child luminosity, I thought of the title The Second Self. I vaguely wondered if my aunt – who was an AP literature teacher and lover of Faulkner and Woolf and affectionate supporter of my own writing – would approve. I bookmarked the title in my mind.
I then picked up the book I was reading as research: William Styron’s Darkness Visible. I read a little on the page I had bookmarked, turned the page, and was met with this phrase: “A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self – a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it.” I quickly looked up, in disbelief, as though I’d see my aunt in front of me. But it was just the plane, just the world. Then, I knew I had seen her, and she’d approved the title, maybe even given it. As well as the epigraph.
When I got home, my mom had left a message on my phone: they had a lunch and a dinner after I left, and between each, a lamp they never used was on and flickering in the house. After finding it on after the lunch, my dad turned it off, saying that was weird. When they arrived home after the dinner, it was back on, flickering. This happened the next day, as well, days six and seven after my aunt’s death – the precise time that the “spirit” first returns home after wandering in confusion, in Tibetan Buddhism, to find a new body, to move on to the next bardo, or to be merged again in Mother Luminosity.
As I write this, my wife Kylee is 17 weeks pregnant with our third child—a surprise to us all. We hadn’t planned for it, nor had we discussed it. Almost three months ago, as Kylee and I were making breakfast in our kitchen, our son casually announced, “Mom, you’re pregnant.” And he was right. Kylee was pregnant. How did he know?
A similar experience had occurred two years prior. While visiting my grandparents in Oklahoma, I had a sudden premonition. After dinner as we drove to a park, I glanced in the rear-view mirror at my Grandpa and turned to Kylee, saying, “I think this is the last time I’ll see him.” My grandpa wasn’t sick, and there was no indication I wouldn’t see him again. Yet, two months later, he passed away unexpectedly. How did I know?
Recently, at an event in Mexico, I witnessed two young children reading blindfolded. I tested the younger blindfolded boy with a random paragraph on my iPhone covered with a piece of paper as an extra layer. Astonishingly, he read every word flawlessly. How could he, without physical sight?
Modern science, deeply rooted in materialism, struggles to explain such phenomena.
Alex Perez - “The West”
Ten years ago, I was at an artist residency in Wyoming, and it was there that I ran the fastest I’d ever run in my life. I’d been to California before, but this was my first time out west—in what I considered to be the great American West. On the way to the residency, which was located on a beautiful ranch, we encountered a bull in the middle of the road. The residency coordinator stopped the car and the four of us who’d come together to bum around for six weeks and write, paint, make music, watched the bull. We have to wait, the coordinator said. So we waited, the car’s headlights shining on the beautiful, unaware beast, and I thought, what if it comes at us. What a first experience out west that’d be, I thought. It’d make for a great story. We looked at the beast and laughed, but we couldn’t hide the fear. Come at us, I thought. And then the bull trotted off the road and disappeared into the night. We made it to the ranch, and I called my parents back in Miami and told them that I’d encountered a bull. The west, I said.
The residency supplied us with sleeping quarters and a cabin/office, which is where I would spend most of my time. I’d be there deep into the night, a hundred yards away from my room. The Wi-Fi wasn’t great, so I’d read and write and think about how much I’d been failing as a writer. I was failing out west now. It was lovely. At midnight, I’d walk back to my room in absolute darkness, thinking about the day’s writing. The days to follow, I’d wake up, have breakfast with my fellow artists, and head over to the cabin. I saw deer frolicking outside the window and hawks swooping down for their prey. The west was everything I needed it to be. I wanted more of it.
A few weeks in, I stayed at the cabin later than usual. It must’ve been 2 am when I stepped out and started locking the door. As I messed with the key, a fear I’d never felt before overtook me. I froze. I heard something. Did I hear something? Maybe it was so silent that I heard everything. I dropped the key and ran, the gravel at my feet bouncing up and hitting my face. Go, something said. Faster. I didn’t want it to catch me. I made it to my room and tried to calm down, but I had trouble sleeping that night.
I’d keep going to the cabin, but I’d always walk back to my room while the sun was still out. I didn’t try to figure out what had scared me, but I knew it was out there—it had always been out there out west. In America. The bull knew.
In the sad, hazy hours after my husband’s mother died in 2011, I was walking across our hotel room to turn off the television we weren’t watching, when my husband, who was lying on the bed drifting in and out of sleep, sat upright and gasped. A loud wheezing sound rattled inside his chest. I asked Walter what was wrong, thinking he’d just had a nightmare. It was late August, and we were in Iowa; we’d flown in from Montana the day before. His 71-year-old mother, Millie, had collapsed at the Iowa State Fair—she’d gone with her boyfriend—fallen into a coma due to an encapsulation in her brain, and died in a Des Moines hospital. We’d stood at her bedside, holding her hands as she passed. In that mystical, sacred moment, I’d learned that the body is merely a vehicle for the spirit, and you can see when the soul departs.
Now, back in our drab, beige, corporate hotel, my husband looked frightened. “I just saw my mother, a younger version of her, walk across the room and merge with you,” he told me. His eyes were uncharacteristically vacant, like they were focused on a realm beyond what I could perceive. I assumed he was in that hypnagogic state when strange hallucinatory images often float up from the precipice of sleep. It had been a hard, heavy day, the hardest and heaviest we’d ever experienced together. I got in the bed and curved myself around him.
The next morning, when I awoke and went to the bathroom, I looked at myself in the mirror while washing my hands in the sink. Deep, dark, purplish rings had appeared under both my eyes overnight; they looked almost like bruises, like someone had punched me in the face. I was startled. Yesterday must have taken a serious toll on me, I thought. I’d loved my mother-in-law—she was a brilliant, tough woman, a critical care nurse and uncompromising intellectual who had taught herself three foreign languages and read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in its entirety more than once. I was heartsick over her death. I’d planned on many years of friendship.
I smeared on some concealer. I didn’t have the luxury of worrying about eye bags. We’d rented a car and were setting off for Millie’s home outside of Minneapolis, where we’d sort through her possessions and hold a memorial for her on the banks of the Mississippi River. In her pin-neat bedroom, I went into her closet and tried on her shoes—I remember a pair of brown suede moccasins. We were the exact same size. From the jewelry box on her dresser, I picked out a ring. It slid onto my ring finger, which is unusually small, as though it had been fitted for me.
In the weeks we spent in Minnesota, I began to experience what I can only describe as a kind of nervous system dysregulation—episodes in which I grew nauseated and clammy while my pulse raced and my heart fluttered around in my chest. I assumed they were blood sugar attacks and ate more protein. When that didn’t help, I decided they were panic attacks. I was not prone to them, but I wondered if the stress of the ordeal was causing a fraying of my subconscious I wasn’t aware of. By the time we returned to Montana, the attacks were happening with such frequency and intensity that I was convinced I was gravely ill. I went to my doctor, who ordered blood tests and gave me an orange plastic jug in which to collect urine to test my cortisol.
Not long after, I told my friend Tricia, who owned a neighborhood boutique—it was filled with art, candles, incense, and New Age trinkets, and I spent many afternoons there—about my odd symptoms. She demanded to know when they started. Right after Millie died, I said. She looked stricken. “She’s probably attached to you,” she told me. “That can happen when people die. You need to see a shaman.” The whole notion was too much for me to wrap my mind around. It also scared me. I remembered a decade earlier, when I was living in New York City during 9/11, an Ayurvedic doctor I knew had told me not to go below 14th street because there were many souls not ready to leave this world who were haunting around looking for people to attach to.
I put the possibility out of my mind. Weeks passed. The medical tests found nothing. The nurse who took my blood told me to eat full-fat Greek yogurt. The attacks continued. By mid-November, I was having multiple episodes a day, so many they were debilitating. I began to despair. My husband’s mother died unexpectedly, I thought, and fairly young—what if she wasn’t ready to go? Finally, I broke down and went to ask Tricia if she knew of a shaman. As it happened, there was a woman—her name was DeeDee—who had trained in Peru and had an office a few doors down from where we lived. I called her and made an appointment.
During our session, she didn’t touch me. She had me lie on a massage table, and, with her hands held about a foot away from my body, she moved along its perimeter. I felt a sensation of energy rippling, of goose-bumpy chills running up and down my arms and torso and legs. “She’s here with us,” she told me, “She’s hanging around in your field. She wants to stay near her son.” What could I say? Of course she did. I understood. When DeeDee finished her treatment, she handed me a piece of paper with detailed, typed-out instructions for a ritual my husband and I were to perform together. It involved ceremonial alcohol, lighting a candle, and saying a prayer. When I got home, I explained it all to him. That night, we lit the candle, said the prayer, and told his mother, whom we both loved so much, that it was safe for her to go.
I woke up the next day with a feeling of stillness. The symptoms were gone, never to return.
The week after Molly Brodak’s funeral, I was sitting at my desk trying to remember a story she had told me about her childhood pastor. He had said something unintentionally funny, a slip of tongue, in front of the entire congregation, and this was the moment Molly knew she would become a poet. But I couldn’t remember what the pastor had said, and it was driving me crazy. The more I tried to remember it, the more the words seemed lost forever and that I’d failed our friendship in some crucial way, had taken it—and her—for granted. I was despondent. Then I pulled out a yellow legal pad and began writing to her. I wrote: “we were eating bagels on the stoop of a church, and you told me that your pastor had said…” At this moment, the moment where my memory ended, the pen moved across the page without my conscious thought or effort. I lifted my hand (I’m lefthanded) and there were the missing words: “‘fucking the sun,’ when he meant ‘sucking the fun.’” I couldn’t believe what had just happened, and I remain mystified and grateful for this moment and think about it often.
I used to see and feel ghosts a lot when I smoked weed, which I don’t anymore. Some might say I was “just high,” but I honestly think the weed helped me tap into the spirits that are always there. I lived in the Bay Area at the height of my stonerism, and my more clairvoyant friends have said that San Francisco is a particularly ghost-ridden city (see also: New Orleans). When I was living in an old Victorian building in the Mission, my boyfriend at the time (yes, I had a boyfriend!) told me he saw a child hovering over our bed one night. I’d also hear footsteps in the halls when no one else was home, and random lights would flicker on and off. (I reject counter-explanations like faulty wiring or neighbors—I felt supernatural presences, I'm sure of it!)
But the most memorable encounter happened a few years later when I was living in Berkeley. A friend from college was crashing on my futon at the time. One night we went out and probably smoked a lot of weed—I don’t remember exactly what we did. I just remember waking up in the middle of the night and seeing, in exceptional clarity, two figures sitting on my couch. It looked like a man and his son. They both appeared kind of wavy, like TV static. I watched them for a bit, then fell back asleep. In the morning, my friend asked me how I slept. I’d forgotten about the figures and said, “Good,” then asked him how he slept. He said, “Good, but your apartment is definitely haunted.” I suddenly remembered the man and his son on the couch. I thought it was cool that we’d both independently felt or seen something paranormal that night.
Since I haven’t smoked weed in three years and now live in a newer building in Los Angeles, I don’t really see ghosts anymore. (Although this city is certainly haunted by the living.) But I think back on my paranormal experiences in the Bay Area fondly.
It was a month after my father died and my half-sister was giving a speech. It doesn’t matter what the speech was about. She was the guest of honor at a big event, and there were journalists and senators in the audience. I was wearing a name tag that identified me as a family member, but I still felt out of place. I hadn’t grown up with my half-sister, who was 25 years older than me. Only now, in the wake of our father’s death, were we finally coming to know each other. Picture my half-sister at six-foot-two, black-haired and sharp-featured, and me at five-foot-seven, a round-faced brunette. We were new to each other, our father, or rather his absence, being just about the only thing we had in common.
At the podium, my half-sister began to talk about death. This was surprising: she hadn’t seen my father in decades, their only contact being the annual letter exchange in which she explained why she did not want to be in contact. My father was charismatic but impossible. He lied and scammed and left his kids to fend for themselves, which we did, to varying degrees of success. “My father was,” my half-sister began, and just then the speakers exploded with feedback. It was a violent noise. Everyone in the audience reflexively covered their ears, flinching, ducking down as though to dodge gunfire. The noise was so loud that for a second we did not know exactly had happened, only that something had happened. Then it was over and we lowered our hands. “A complicated man,” my sister finished, and we laughed louder than any speakers could go. We laughed and laughed. We laughed because we knew: my father hated what we had to say, but he was too dead to stop us now.
One afternoon I was driving on a long, familiar route from my mother’s house to visit a friend. As I was approaching a bend in the road, past the entrance of a public park and ballfields, I saw a boy on a bike riding toward me in the opposite lane at a distance of about 400 feet. His eyes immediately met my eyes, like he’d been staring straight at me before I saw anything else about him. We kept looking at one another as we approached, up until the point he passed the point parallel to my window. He looked familiar to me in a way I couldn’t place, not quite familial and not a friend. I don’t remember his clothes or anything about him besides the energy. His face is a blur to try to describe, but in my memory he seems to be grinning at me in a menacing way, like Alfred E. Neuman. It felt like my mind slowed down trying to connect the dots. After we passed, I looked up into my rearview to try to get a better look, and he was looking back at me too, over his shoulder, while continuing to coast away. Our eyes again locked in exactly the same manner as the first look. We continued staring like that as I proceeded down the street around the bend that eventually made it impossible to see the road behind me, then he was gone.
Looking back from the rearview toward the front, my eyes gravitated to the right side of the road, where I saw the same identical boy again. Standing idle with the same bike, he became visible at relatively the same time the other disappeared. Like before, he was already staring right into my eyes as I approached, locked on like he’d been expecting me. I more vividly remember the way it felt to see his face, but still not his expression. As I passed, I looked again into my rearview to try to verify what I was seeing, and he had also turned toward me, passively watching me driving away in exactly the same lingering way as the first boy. I felt so shocked I didn’t slow down, continuing on to the end of the street another quarter mile ahead before I pulled over and tried to explain to myself what had just happened. Maybe they were twin brothers, pulling a prank, but it didn’t seem so, and that still didn’t explain the continuity or the mood. I turned around and drove back the road the way I’d come, slowing down around each of the two areas where I’d seen the two different boys, but I didn’t see anyone. When I got home, I looked up the street to try to find if there’d been any recent accidents in the area and found one about a boy who was hit and killed by a car, though I can’t actually remember if I did that or just thought about it.
In the summer of 2021, I took a vacation to Greenport with my girlfriend (now wife), my sister, and her fiancé (now husband). It was a couples trip. I had recently read a pirated galley copy of “Leave Society” by Tao Lin, where he described “dustwinkling” — small, wormlike, twisty, etheric emanations that were visible when you looked up at the blue sky on a clear day. At the time, I was becoming more open-minded to alternative perspectives and more disillusioned with the conventional views I’d previously embraced. As part of this exploration, I began seeking out and experimenting with new viewpoints, like trying to perceive “dustwinkling,” which Tao Lin also called “microfireflies.”
I spent months trying to see them, but never succeeded. Then, one night during our trip, I dreamt I saw them fluttering in the sky. The blue sky shone brilliantly and they appeared in shimmering white, seemingly popping in and out of this dimension. I was overcome by their beauty and became teary-eyed, the power of my emotion waking me from sleep.
The next day, walking along the beach in the late morning, I tried once again to see the dustwinkling. Gazing into the sky, my back to the sun, focusing about four feet in front of my face, they suddenly came into focus, just as they had in my dream.
A few months later, my girlfriend, soon to be wife, was sitting on the floor of my room, despondently on hold with FedEx. They had lost all of the 24 packages that she shipped across the country so we could move in together. The packages not only contained most of her clothing and belongings, but also held precious heirlooms handed down from her recently deceased mother. The FedEx delivery man wrote down all the tracking numbers, but they were never entered into the system, and customer service insisted there was no record of the packages anywhere. Naturally, she was distraught.
That evening, I had another vivid dream with a peculiar quality to it, almost like déjà vu, where my girlfriend received an email from FedEx stating that her packages had been found. The next morning, I told her about the dream and she checked her inbox. There it was: a message confirming that the packages had been located and were on their way.
About nine months later, after we were married and living in a new apartment, I had a dream where I kept trying to brew espresso but only water came out. My dream once again had that peculiar reminiscent quality to it as well as vivid clarity. I woke up, and indeed, my espresso machine was broken. I wrote a tweet describing it and reflected, “I’m gobsmacked, pondering the awesome responsibility that comes with the power of mundane prophecy...”
I don't believe in paranormal stuff as it is conventionally defined. But I think about a dream I had during an intensely depressing period in my life somewhat regularly. I was on a grassy slope at night overlooking a lake with others. We were watching things thrashing on the surface of the lake, which was a very dark, rich black. Whatever was happening there was a ritual, and we were the audience. Two people were sitting to my right in fold-out camping chairs. One turned his face toward me. His face was pale white, glistening, with hard bumps like a crocodile. His head was huge. He was wearing a black hood. He grinned at me, all his teeth were sharp. I was closer to the water and the thrashing was a number of creatures like the thing that had just smiled at me. They were doing something obscene, rolling around wildly. Whatever it was they were doing was obscene. I had a distinct feeling that I was seeing evil, and that I was in a place where I wasn't supposed to be, and the things here were going to enforce that imminently. If demons are real I am pretty sure I visited them in that dream. I don't really know how to think of the question "Are demons real" though.
When I was 6 years old, I lost my balance at a train station close to the yellow line and felt myself being sucked toward the tracks as a train was passing. A black police officer woman reached out to stop me, but when I turned to thank her, she was gone. On an empty train platform. I always thought she was an angel.
At 7, during a thunderstorm, I jumped onto a curb and suddenly experienced my consciousness leaving my body. I remember seeing the lightning bolt strike inches from my toe from multiple perspectives, as though I was observing from outside my own eyes. When the lightning recoiled, I returned to my body and felt electrified but joyful. I've had medicine men look at me and say "oh, that is why" when I have told that story.
At 14, I was double-bounced on a trampoline by my cousin and stayed suspended in the air far longer than seemed possible. She jumped to grab my toe, and the next thing we remember is waking up 5 hours later with total amnesia but no bruises on our heads, just a complete lapse of time, no injuries. My cousin is a doctor now and she brings up that story with me still, as an adult, there is something peculiar about that moment we have both never shook.
From 12 to 22, I experienced nightmares almost every night. Most of them circled around being hunted, chased, and tortured to death. By the time I was 16 years old I felt I had watched myself die in tens of thousands of ways. At 21, I lost 5 close friends, each exactly 7 days apart over 5 weeks. This pattern created some natural PTSD for awhile. At 26, fragments of an unknown metal emerged from my right tricep, forming the shape of a backward 6. After four weeks, the final piece emerged, and the nightmares stopped completely.
At 28, I saw a UFO on New Year’s Eve in my front yard.
One of the most profound experiences was meeting a physical medium in rural Florida, an old Russian scientist and his wife. Together, they created a controlled magnetic space where objects moved in response to spirit communication. This encounter left me convinced that ether can hold organized consciousness when charged in specific ways.
Last year, there was a blue triangle shape that emerged from the walls of my home where my piano is. It was witnessed inside the house and outside the house simultaneously by two different people. The emotions around the event were happy, confused and curious, no fear was elicited.
A while back, someone owed me a large sum of money and was refusing to pay. Months of polite requests got me nowhere. I was broke, desperate, and venting to my friends at a house party when my artist friend Molly Crabapple decided to take matters into her own hands—with witchcraft. While we downed cheap beers, she crafted a paper effigy from objects the debtor had touched and sketched a series of ominous ink drawings visualizing his fate. Then, thirty of my friends joined in and placed our hands on the doll, chanting to manifest my speedy payment (and a few other things, just for fun). Molly lit the effigy on fire, and we carried on drinking. I didn’t think much of it, viewing it more as a gesture of solidarity than magic—until I woke up the next morning to find the money in my account.
My dad was born in the 1930’s and was the only Jewish kid in a very Italian neighborhood of New Jersey. As a child, he was picked on and had no friends and would spend all his time alone.
Out of loneliness and desperation for friends, he would sleep in graveyards hoping to have ghost friends. Unfortunately (or fortunately) no ghosts appeared.
He became jaded at the idea of the afterlife because of this experience and told me to not believe in ghosts and that there is likely no afterlife.
He described life like a television plugged into the electrical outlet and assumed that death was just like unplugging the TV and that the “show was over” when we died.
In his 80’s, he was diagnosed with cancer right after getting the flu shot and his health quickly declined despite being relatively healthy all his life.
He told me that if there was an afterlife that he would let me know he was “around” after death by flickering lights. He randomly added that he would “haunt the shit out of his ex girlfriend” who I once met as a child after my parents divorced, and I found her to be nice so not sure why he wanted to haunt her exactly.
I remember this girlfriend would feed squirrels and had a beautiful blue beta fish she would also feed by hand and I remember the brave little beta fish would jump into her hand to get tiny brown food pellets. It was so neat to see this as a child.
Anyway, back to the point, a week before my dad died, he was in the hospital about to enter hospice care, and a man came into his room and stood at the door, said nothing and then left.
When my dad told the nurse about this random man, she asked my dad to describe the man.
My dad said it was an old man in a red cardigan with thick brown glasses.
The nurse gasped and exclaimed with shock that this was the exact description of the man who had died in the hotel room before my dad’s arrival.
SPOOKY TIME!
Then my dad saw a white German Shepherd dog climb through the ceiling and poke its head down to look at him. My dad’s dog (also a German Shepherd, but brown)had been dead for over 20 years.
This completely changed my dad’s perception of the afterlife.
When my dad finally died a week later, I wondered if he would reach me.
The next day, the lamp that my mom uses for our pet turtles to bask in to get light from would flicker on and off without being plugged in. This happened a few times over the course of a week.
This experience changed the spiritual trajectory of my life and made me wonder if my dad’s ghost finally has friends, (and if he ever haunted his ex girlfriend. I hope they are both okay.)
I was living in Southern Italy in a tiny apartment I had rented by the sea to write a book. My lease was almost up, so I started looking for a new place closer to Naples. So, I met the owner of a potential rental. He was a very normal looking man, 65-ish-years old, balding, dressed in a preppy style with jeans and a nice button up shirt. He drove a fancy SUV.
The rental apartment was nothing special, but the man invited me for a drink after to discuss the price etc. Over drinks in this weird boat-shaped bar, at one point he looked at my hands and said, you’re very adaptable, perhaps too adaptable, that is going to help you a lot but it is also a burden. We then talked about other things for a bit then he asked if I wanted to go to his house. He said his wife was there and she could make us a snack. He didn’t feel creepy, just odd and eager to make friends, so I said OK.
At his house he told me that he had a special gift and could see things others cannot. He asked if I wanted him to tell me some things about me, and I said sure. He sat me in a chair and put his hand on top of my head. Again, he said, “Don’t worry, everything is going to be okay.” Then he said, “There is going to be a difficult period, but I see a man with a white beard. This man will protect you.” Then his wife brought us snacks.
At the time, I couldn’t figure out who the man with a white beard might be. No one came to mind.
But exactly one week later, my best friend died unexpectedly and I had to travel with his husband to the United States to go to the funeral. After the funeral, I wanted to go see friends in New York, but my friend’s husband begged me not to go and to stay with him instead. He said that’s what my dead friend would’ve wanted. So I didn’t go to New York and instead ended up going on a crazy month-long road trip with my dead friend’s husband.
I think we were trying to keep moving to not sink into total depression, but also, I was still in such shock and felt so bad for my friend’s husband, that I sort of just let him pull me along on his itinerary. Also, during all of this time, I felt like I was a portal. I don’t know how to explain it, but it felt like a vortex of powerful energy from some other plane was gushing through me. This was a very physical feeling. This energy was a wild force, too big for my body, but also incredibly benevolent.
My friend’s husband had a white beard. I think the energy was Love.
when I was younger I was very interested in the supernatural and sought it out often. at one point I had a ghost friend named Quinn, which made my parents concerned. I cared a lot less about the idea of ghosts as I got older. but in October of last year I read at KGB for the launch of Gabriel Hart's On High At Red Tide. to be transparent I was quite intoxicated. however as I was reading at the podium on the second floor I felt this presence behind me the entire time that distracted me so intensely I almost turned back to make sure nothing was there. I read at KGB again earlier this month at an open mic in the Red Room and the same thing happened, only the presence was in front of me this time. I could almost see it as I was reading. it was kind of grotesque and making funny faces, trying to make me laugh. but I just kept reading and wasn't as distracted this time because I was used to it. I was also drunk again but I've done about 10 readings under the influence and that spectral experience only ever happened at KGB. I wonder if anyone else has KGB ghost stories.
I’ve been visiting New York all week and lost track of things. But when I did sit down to write, I realized that—although I was obsessed with the paranormal and the supernatural in my youth—I have never had a single paranormal experience in my life, nor have I done anything paranormal. So it turns out I have nothing interesting to write about here.
I’ve seen ghosts in this room before, but never have they stayed this long. The entire corner where this spectral figure has appeared is now blanketed in a dark intergalactic buzzy static, akin to black sandpaper. A transparent yet defined form stands at the center of it. I can only see the back of her. I say “her”, because this ghost looks like a heavyset hipster woman from the 2010s, based on her outfit and mannerisms. An oversized jean jacket sits thick on her shoulders and what seems to be a drink in her right hand is held above a bent elbow. She appears to be at a party, but awkwardly so; the kind of movements you make when you’re buffering near the snack table. From where I’m sitting, however, she’s not at a party at all. She’s in my childhood bedroom, and I’m terrified.
I’ve closed my eyes and prayed twice for her to leave and she hasn’t. This has always been my impulse with ghosts, ever since I was a kid. At 28 years old, sharing a queen bed with my older sister during a visit to my parents’ home, I still hold the same instinct. “Go away, go away, go away” I pray to myself. I always regret this fearful reaction in the morning, realizing that I could have extracted more from the strange encounter, gotten “further”, whatever that means.
I shake my sister awake and she sleepily waves me off. I tell her that there’s a ghost in the room and it’s on her side of the bed, and in fact, she could reach it with her arm, and could she please do so? Half-asleep and irritated, she extends an uninterested limb into the static aura of the ghost. Nothing shifts. My sister grunts and turns over. She’s been living with my parents during a transitory time in her life, and my father, witnessing the depressive, low energy this has stirred, placed a specific plant in the corner of the bedroom earlier this morning to “help move the bad energy”. It just so happens that this ghost has manifested in the same space as the plant.
“Who are you?” I say out loud in the ghost’s direction, calm now. The figure turns around, and I finally see the front of her. She looks past me with dead eyes. It’s as if she heard me, but I’m invisible. She turns back around, facing the corner, as if she’s the one hallucinating, as if I’m the ghost. I sit with my knees up in the bed, observing the glitch. I get up to go to the bathroom, and when I come back, she’s still there. She grows less vivid, but never disappears. I fall into acceptance and fall back asleep.
I open my eyes that next morning to about two dozen black flies hatched on the ceiling directly above where the ghost stood, their bodies buzzing and buffering close together in a void-like fashion. My parents live on the third floor of an apartment building, and bugs are few and far between. I have never witnessed a scene of this sort. “Something out of a horror movie,” I think to myself. I remember that horror movies can often function as psyops designed to render us fearful and disbelieving of the supernatural.
I make my way to the part-living room part-office where my father has his glasses low on his nose reading a shipping label, organizing various boxes at his desk. I tell him all about the visit and show him the flies, acknowledging the synchronicity of the ghost’s location with his plant placement. I share how she seemed to hear me, but not see me, and he nods, explaining that the spirit world is ruled by vibrational exchanges. He returns to organizing boxes in his little glasses with his little bald head. He looks like a pharmacist.
I've been forgiven for lying, stealing, making mistakes that have caused people profound emotional or financial distress, and more.
I recently bought a doll that I believed had negative energy. I found her at a church sale and was unsettled by the expression on her face. Unsure whether to purchase her, I carried her around for a while. The moment I decided to put her back, I fell down a flight of stairs—that felt like a sign I needed to buy her after all.
Once home, I placed the doll on my fireplace mantle and immediately felt as though she was watching me. My suspicion lingered, and soon after, I fell down the stairs again, this time in my own house. Eventually, I decided to accept her—to let go of my sense that she had negative energy—and tried to make her feel more at home. In doing so, she too seemed to become more comfortable, and I believed she would no longer be cruel to me. Now, things between us are fine. I think she is happy to be with me if not a happy spirit. I understand this sounds crazy, even schizophrenic, but I truly believe she wanted to live with me. She was just a little needy and maybe a little stern.
i fell in love with Ottessa.
When I hold my sleeved arm up to my window--full of the light greys and dark whites of a snowy day--so that the snowglare travels along the ridges in the velvet--I discover a color sparking inside the infinitesimal valleys of the shirt's texture that doesn't have a name. I will name this color "anti-matter." I have never heard any description of any supernatural entity or experience that comes close to the vivid inexplicable strangeness of my ordinary conscious experiences.
After college, I got a job in the city as a corporate mattress salesman, burnt out, quit and moved to the countryside with no plans whatsoever. To pay rent, I worked for this guy who lived in a rotting farmhouse, everything overgrown, rusted machinery left in abandoned piles. I dug holes for him. I don’t know what the holes were for, but he paid me $11/hr to dig them in his yard while he told me about his past. He had been abducted by aliens when he was younger, he said. He had gone out to the woods as a child exploring and then vanished for 24 hours, his parents unable to find him, although when he returned it felt as if no time at all had passed. The aliens had put something in his brain, he would tell me while I shoveled dirt, a small metal device that influenced his thoughts and feelings. He’d even had a medical scan done to confirm this, although he could never bring himself to look at the final results, to open the paperwork the hospital had given him. He was scared of discovering how much of his life had not been his own.
Once or twice, when I was a child, I encountered another child and felt a cold wind of terror, but the most deeply bizarre, supernatural thing, to me, is the life of Christ.
I have had a few different experiences of the supernatural—at least I would describe them that way—in dreams. Unfortunately all dreams seem banal when explained, and this one is no different. What's worth emphasizing is my absolute certainty, upon waking, that what I had experienced had no parallel in the everyday. The images and sensations were not, as Freudian psychology would argue, distortions of real-life experiences. I knew this the same way that people who have spoken to a being whom they call God "know" that they have spoken to God. I had not had a particularly memorable or interesting evening before I fell asleep and had the dream. The one piece of data that might be relevant is that I was feeling peculiarly hopeless—not in a depressed way, just without hopes or desires, consumed by the notion that "all is vanity." When I woke up I briefly wrote down my account of the dream in a diary entry which I have provided below. It was almost exactly ten years ago. I have since read texts that have given me potential clues to the meanings of the images and to the statement of the voice in the dream. This is the diary entry:
> Lucid dream, as falling asleep: 8, 21 -- neon-lit basketballs, each with its own number, as in 76ers emblem, orbiting one another and finally superimposed upon one another. A voice: “everyone connects to the moon.” Prior: animals marching (rather, black silhouettes of them) up a black hill against a lurid blue sunset sky.
We were driving out of Death Valley, this was January 2023. It was night, and our headlights illuminated a couple yards of highway, which was black, and otherwise nothing, which was even more black. And so from the moving car it was possible to imagine there was nothing else out there: the universe, in its resting state (nighttime), empty, and the road merely a strip of asphalt being generated dynamically from one second to the next, just in time for the headlights to move over it.
That is the kind of virtual-reality-engine-inspired metaphor you’d be prone to construct if you’d had to study software engineering. And the idea of “nothing” existing outside my own mind, car, computer is not that disturbing to me—I remember thinking this, idly, as we drove.
It was freezing, but I made my friend pull over; I wanted to see some geological thing indicated on the map. Technically it was the opposite of a thing: a place where there’d once been a volcano. I told my friend that, objectively, there was nothing to fear. I opened the door; I dropped the long drop from the truck to the ground. At the perimeter of the area of dust shown by the tail lights I saw the informational sign installed by the park. I approached, then half-read it with my iPhone, thinking that I’d shine my flashlight at the non-volcano and get back in the car.
But when I looked up, I realized I was surrounded by what I’d previously seen only from the car: this blackness, a complete blackness. Up close, the black was not the stuff of metaphor—it was awful. It was darker than sleep. There were no shades to this color, no depth; inside of it could have been concealed a massive boulder, inches from my face, or miles of desert. Or maybe I’d pull out my flashlight and see only more infinite void—I decided I didn’t want to find out. The fear that came over me as I stared at the place where I could NOT SEE whatever was the only thing left over from a volcanic eruption 300,000 years ago was more than a ghost passing through me–it was like a memory of death, some unimaginably large quantity of death and time compressed into this silent and suffocating nothing all around me.
I fell in love.
From ages three to six, I lived in the desert. Every summer, there would come a rain so hard and sudden, the yard flooded to my shins. In the winter, bits of cactus shuffled in strong winds. One piece flew into the bare ankle of my preschool teacher and got stuck. It hung from her like a boot spur and I wept. I was a terrific weeper. I was afraid most of the time. Bugs were apocalyptic. Fire ants bit my fingers, swarmed the Polly Pocket Playhouse, and dragged it off to some cavernous evil. One night, my brother and I woke to a terrible wailing. We followed it into the guest room and found our mother, squatting on an office chair, screaming and swatting at an ominous cloud of activity. It was a swarm of crickets. Peering out of the mass, I saw something in my mother’s eyes that signaled a private battle. She lunged off the chair, shut the door, and never spoke of it. For a single evening, after our babysitter moved away, we were given a 26-year-old with a tongue piercing. She showed it to my brother and I. The jewelry had been removed but a hole remained, and this is what we were presented with—this lack—waggling it before us—a fleshy thing and its scary missing center. Another time, I realized I could move my freckles around. I picked one off the back of my hand and placed it further down the knuckle, where it remains. A few days later, I pulled a miniature elephant from the TV during a commercial for Animal Crackers, but with this, I could not follow through. I pushed the elephant back into the commercial, onto a tram carrying the rest of the zoo. It did not surprise me that I could do this as much as it overwhelmed. Then one day, wheels of buffalo grass sod appeared in our backyard. My dad unrolled them over the dirt with the help of two Mexicans. As it was happening, I realized that a Beanie Baby of mine was going to be lost to the new growth. I saw from its view, briefly, as the grass rolled over my head and trapped me under the mulch.
This past Christmas Eve, my brother and I sat up late, talking about our childhood. Unprompted, he began to recount some of these strange, shared occurrences, just the way I’d remembered them—the floods, the attack of the crickets, the babysitter’s tongue, and even the freckle I moved; where it had been, where it is now.
Living with my wonderful partner-husband David Loye, who died 3 years ago and whom I miss every day, opened my mind to the question you ask, because of his belief in the paranormal.
I want to share three personal experiences confirming that the paranormal, or rather what we don't yet understand, is real.
First, and this takes me back to David, who when we met was a professor at the UCLA School of Medicine heading a study on the effects of television violence on adults (yes, it has an effect!). Thelma Moss had just been fired from the faculty for her work on the paranormal. Her small group studying mental telepathy approached David to ask him if he would become their faculty sponsor, which he did. The group, plus some interested outsiders, met periodically in the School of Medicine's basement to continue their experiments, where they were to tell a volunteer (usually an outsider) what they picked up telepathically from her or him. David invited me to their session, and when my turn came, I said that the image that came to me was a telephone book. To my astonishment, the woman whose mental images we were trying to pick up, announced that she had just come from searching the West Los Angeles phone book for the name of a relative she wanted to contact.
A phone book is hardly what "just comes to one" – yet it did. So skeptic or not I had participated in the paranormal.
Second, when shortly after that David and I went to Mexico, he asked some regulars studying mental telepathy to jot down images they got from our experiences there. When we returned, they said the strongest image was that of a rearing horse.
I was thunderstruck, because indeed it was the metal-strip sculpture of a rearing horse that had so excited us that, as David later wrote, I began to "dance around it."
Third, while doing research for my book The Chalice and the Blade, I was in my office library looking for a citation to add to the evidence from archeology, myth, and now also DNA studies, showing that for millennia of prehistory human societies oriented more to the partnership side of the partnership/domination scale introduced in that book. Without thinking, I reached for the bookshelf near me and opened a book to the very page with the citation I wanted!
Was it coincidence, or was it because something guided me to it? I don't know, or at least my mind trained to be "reasonable" does not know.
I am still skeptical of many claims about the supernatural, but I think that if we move more to the partnership side again, we may not consider these kinds of experiences paranormal. I believe we have untapped capacities that are suppressed by the traumas inherent in the domination family, economic, and social systems we inherited from more authoritarian, violent, traumatic domination times that prevailed for much of recorded or written history.
Robert McCready - “Double Healing”
Family Christmas photos come back with abnormalities. In a picture, Mom and I sit on the couch at Mema’s house. A line streaks across us. It looks like electricity or a piece of white string. A figure stands behind us. He looks fuzzy.
Mom says, “This is an omen.”
I say, “It’s just something wrong with the film.”
She says, “But why is it across us? Only in our picture. No one else’s?”
I say, “It’s a fluke. That ghost is probably a thumb print.”
She says, “The ghost is only in the digital version.”
A Baptist preacher visits our home one weeknight. Preacher brings a deacon. Mema is there. We sit on the couch. Preacher prays. It’s a nice prayer.
I begin sensing doom.
Journal entries from that time say,
“Sometimes I feel disconnected, distant”
and “I feel like dying. I think I am dying”
and “tonight in the shower I heard noises and voices.”
I crash the car. I fracture my pelvis, shatter my left shoulder blade, break 6 ribs, my left elbow, my neck, puncture my lung, rupture my spleen, lacerate my liver, and 1 kidney. It’s Maundy Thursday.
On Easter, I make a turn for the better. I leave SICU. I’m home after 15 days. I’m in a wheelchair a month later. I’m walking at the end of the summer.
The family watches Schindler’s List on Thanksgiving. Mom finds a lump in her mouth. Mema says, “I think it’s a salivary stone. Make an appointment with the oral surgeon.”
The x-ray shows nothing, but the doctor thinks he sees a salivary stone in-person.
Stone removal surgery reveals a mass. The doctor doesn’t remove the mass. He tests the cells: spindle cells.
Mom goes to the ENT. He removes the mass. She takes an afternoon off work to get her results: sarcoma.
The family arrives at Mema’s. Mema gathers us in a circle. We hold hands, kneel, say the Lord’s prayer.
Granddad adds, “Lord, please heal Cheryl.”
Mema, Mom, and I drive to MUSC in Charleston. Delilah plays, “You’re In My Heart (The Final Acclaim)” by Rod Stewart on her radio show. We eat at Hyman’s. A plaque says that Oprah sat at our table. We stay in the Mariott. Mom skips rope in the morning.
The doctor removes Mom’s salivary gland, most of the tissue under her tongue, cleaning the margins.
At home, Mom watches Legally Blonde, Heartbreakers, and Shrek every day while she heals.
We travel to MUSC for a follow-up. A physician’s assistant removes her retainer. The doctor says, “The tests show a-typical cells.
Mom says, “A-typical sarcoma?”
He says, “A-typical. In-between. Almost cancer. You’ll never see it again.”
We celebrate at Hyman’s. We sit where Jodie Foster once ate. We go home.
The Easter bunny leaves a basket carrying a chocolate bunny, a card, and Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 by Rod Stewart.
On two occasions, decades apart, I have experienced a phenomenon known as sleep paralysis. Both events were among the most acutely terrifying of my adult life and I would be betraying myself if I did not acknowledge, in those moments, the felt presence of the supernatural.
Across various cultures, this same incident might be described in other terms: as a visitation by evil spirits, extraterrestrials, incubi, succubi, kobolds, or, on the Labrador Peninsula, “the old hag.” But when I recall my experiences, I do not think in any of these terms. I only remember the sensation of being suspended in a viscous atmosphere of dread.
During each instance, I came to closed-eyed awareness from sleep into in the place where my waking body lay. I was not in some uncanny, dream-copy of my house, but in my real, sobering surroundings. Here, I discovered myself paralyzed: unable to move or speak. When I tried to communicate to the person next to me, I could only produce a strained moan from the base of my throat — a sound my wife called “disturbing."
Soon after, I began to sense a new being in the house, something part human, part other, and unquestionably malevolent. I knew that it was moving toward me, and I could hear it opening the front door, creaking up the stairs, slipping down the hallway. It filled me with the kind of fearful madness that I have known only rarely in my life, usually as a young child, lost in the dark.
Unlike many other documented cases, the intruder did not crawl into my bed, onto my chest and begin to suck the breath from me. I have read dozens of such accounts and have known friends and family members to go through this kind of horror. (My mother experienced the ghost of a baby attempting to strangle her in my childhood home.) Luckily, I used my groans and micro-movements to break the spell of my paralysis and banish the being before it got close enough to harm me.
In small ways, I have attempted to make daylight sense of these occurrences. For instance, both of my experiences were closely followed by the two of the most emotionally devastating events in my life. It’s as if I were dropped into some parallel realm, where I could foresee the approaching darkness in my life, embodied in a poisonous spirit.
I also now wonder if such entities are what kill people in their sleep. While many people believe dying in one’s sleep to be the most peaceful way to go, I am no longer convinced. What appears to be peaceful silence from the outside may be an internal struggle with soul-drinking demons.
In the future, aspects of sleep paralysis might be explained scientifically; but the universal narrative of suffocating terror is shared by millions of people across history. On chat rooms of all kinds, in ancient mythology, and classical paintings, you find the same story. For me, this is too consistent to be explained away by some squirting nocturnal hormone.
I do not want to solely describe my encounter with religious, mythic, or science-fictional language, because I think each of these perspectives has been useful to me. Now, I am simply grateful to be alive after my paralysis, and am relieved have directly touched a world beyond the confinement of my own understanding.
At one writer’s residency, I saw the ghost of a woman. She was tall and wearing Victorian clothes. At another residency, I saw the ghost of a cat. This was in Mocajar, Spain, in the late 2000s. It was a dusty summer and outside my window there was a lot of constuction and ugliness, a bare field of dry mud, but in the distance, hills and sky and beauty. My small wooden bed was right beside the window, and one evening I felt the ghost of a cat jump though it and land in my arms. I instantly knew that it was “[name of senior female writer’s] cat” and it had chosen me, which meant that I would be the next [name of senior female writer]. I felt dismayed. That was not what I wanted to be. Years later, I interviewed the senior writer on stage and in the cold, on the street, walking to the restaurant after, I told her that I had met her cat’s ghost. I had been waiting ever since that night to ask her if she’d had a cat, and so I asked her, but I forget what she said.
I'm not a believer in the paranormal as such. I think the universe is much too vast to understand—we only have our limited senses—but that's not the same thing as paranormal. I've had visual and auditory hallucinations linked to my bipolar disorder but that's a whole other topic.
Walter Kirn - “The New Mark”
That it occurred on Christmas Day, when revelations are expected but seldom seem to happen (except to gullible children, around the tree), may be the oddest thing about this story. It was four in the afternoon, at my friend’s Mark’s house, as an open-house potluck dinner was winding down. I had retreated to Mark’s small den, where a football game was playing on TV. I’d overeaten. I’d over-socialized. I sank into the couch. I don’t drink alcohol or use other drugs – mostly because I used to overindulge in them -- so I wear out easily at holiday gatherings.
Mark drifted in as I sat and watched the game. Then my wife wandered in, then one of Mark’s grown sons. Mark was in his early sixties, the owner of a heating and plumbing business in our small town of Livingston Montana. He moved to Montana from Jersey
City, New Jersey in 1990, the same year I’d moved there from New York City. He is an Irish Roman Catholic guy who lets you know it in all kinds of ways, like painting a huge shamrock on his work van and rendering his business’s name in fancy Gaelic script. He
has a lilting wise-guy accent, part poet, part gangster. And he’s a storyteller.
I didn’t pay close attention to his story for the first few minutes, until the game broke for half-time and commercials. When I caught up with the story, I’d missed the set-up – all I knew is that it took place on Staten Island, in a bar where Mark had worked in his late
teens. The main characters were a couple of crooks. Mark was recounting their scams, their cons, their exploits, their relationships to the regulars at the bar. He nailed each characterization with a physical detail worthy of Joyce. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve never
heard a better storyteller, always lyrical, rhythmic, yet precise.
I watched him as he flowed and overflowed. I listened, but with my musical inner ear, not the faculty I use to gather and classify information. Mark spoke in the voice, or from the consciousness, of his nineteen-year-old self. And then he changed into his nineteen-year-old self. The transformation was swift yet not abrupt, a transfiguration from a religious scripture. But that is to oversimplify it, sadly. For what I saw before me, just feet away, was not a younger Mark or a glowing Mark, but an uncanny translucent overlay of Mark at every age until the present, with his teenage version at its stable center. He was all the versions of Mark at once, the way a tree consists of all its rings at once. He was a kind of compound Platonic Mark, conjured up, it seemed to me, by the energy of his storytelling.
There was nothing metaphorical or abstract about the visage before me. It was vivid and it had boundaries, structure, something I could sketch or paint. The other people in the room remained unchanged. It was only Mark’s soul that I was seeing. Accompanying the vision were two strong feelings, one physical, one intellectual. The physical feeling was like a strong vibration, a profoundly penetrating bass note deeper than any I’d ever heard or felt, but close to a sensation one might experience at an EDM show. It both shook me and held me still, as if I’d become of one substance with the couch, even with the earth itself. The intellectual sensation, if one could call it that, was of knowing that I was at last perceiving reality. I was convinced that my ordinary way of perceiving human beings was absurdly, pathetically superficial, as if until now I’d been seeing them only as photographs, as time-bound snapshots of their current forms, not as complete and ageless creatures.
“I’m having a mystical experience,” I thought. “I’m having what the apostles talked about when they beheld the illuminated Christ on a mountaintop after the Resurrection.” I decided not to speak my thoughts, just to let the game play on the TV as Mark unfurled his tale. The New Mark, the one who answered my childhood question about which version of a person goes to heaven (all of them at once, I saw), persisted in his deified form for a good twenty minutes after he first appeared. By then, my wife was urging me to go with her to another event we’d promised to attend, but even as I stood up to take my leave, the New Mark remained unchanged. I said goodbye to his spirit, not his body, though it was there as well, like the darker spot in the middle of a flame. I feared I was sinning in some way, by turning my back on such a holy figure, but I was late for something, so I left.
Or part of me left – the part that doesn’t matter --and another me, the real one, stayed where it was.
Pray a lot. Feel like my soul is more real than my body.
Seems obvious to me now that we just live in the supernatural. That normal life is just a supernatural thing, with a supernatural origin (God). It wasn’t obvious to me before. As a kid I used to think there was just a crude, random physical world with a couple mysteries, some cool hidden easter eggs you could find out about if you wanted, like aliens, ghosts, bigfoot, Illuminati. Don’t get how I thought these things got there–I guess I probably thought life was a simulation with some “glitches,” or something like that. I didn’t see any God doing any super obvious magic tricks to prove himself to me, so like Herod Antipas I dismissed Him–plus I watched a bunch of vids of Chris Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher making fun of guys on YouTube.
First you witness a slow trickle to steady pour of media and culture encouraging demonic behavior and satanic worship. while simultaneously trying to convince consumers that religion is meaningless pentagrams and upside down crosses are just fashion statements witches are cool and powerful and fictional not real ouiji boards are parker brothers games like monopoly and boggle and then you read some wikileak email someone wrote to Hillary Clinton about sacrificing chickens to molech and you watch a youtube series on meditation by Ishwar Puri Ji and learn that consciousness is actually your soul that earth exists inside temporal and spatial dimensions and there are realms beyond time and space and the spirits within them experience intangible cascades of the ideal as if they have the image of a perfectly baked brownie but they cannot taste it only in this dimension, on Earth, he explains can one gather and transform ingredients and experience both the resulting tangible imperfect brownie and the mess of creation but your spirit can leave your body and go to there, he says when you sleep when you die and when you meditate and then you meditate more and more and you feel mind expanding feelings and you do yoga and feel flexible but you also realize that demons and heaven and hell might be real now and you think, how real can demons be? you watch videos about the illuminati and satanists marina abramovic and george soros and michael aquino bohemian grove and spirit cooking you wonder why isaac kappy is dead or what his last livestream was about. you read about Laura Silsby trafficking haitian children she claimed were orphans across the dominican border you think okay if the cultural elite is unironically worshipping demons icons of twisted values that would be weird and then you meet someone and start to date them and after a whirlwind period their pattern of abuse emerges they are lacking a certain human characteristic of empathy of care about another human of mirror neurons that can tell you when to lean into a hug how to embrace how to feel genuine compassion for others and to be with them is to be waiting for a party to start and you stay too long because they promised you it would be good and you are worried, if you leave now, it might get good you might miss this awesome party you've been promised but it is an awful party and you have encountered a narcissist and you wonder how demons and the new world order could personally affect you how any of these large scale schemes and child trafficking and elite freak off parties could have anything to do with your life or anyones But that feeling of unease of being treated with malice by someone with only the facade of humanity that feeling lingers until you feel very strongly that a demon has come to earth to make their brownie and resulting mess to feed off pain and perhaps inflict enough on someone young so they become another shell or vessel Clinical psychiatrists will tell you narcissists create narcissists what an interesting way to rob humans of humanity to damage them enough to forget their soul And you pray to God about this with a capital letter And if magic is real if the elites don't think it is a fashion statement if children are being trafficked for their sadistic entertainment Miracles are also real It is not so far-fetched to believe that.
i have only experienced one paranormal event in my life, and that was seeing a number of UFOs over washington, d.c. one summer night. i was visiting my friend, brent. he was doing an internship and rented a bedroom in a highrise apartment building which afforded him rooftop access. i visited for something like three nights and spent the days hotly wandering around the city and the nights drinking on the roof. one of the nights i remember watching a number of lights moving slowly through the sky around and behind the various monuments. they were steady, lazy balls of light that drifted straight upward for a while before quickly fading out. it felt pleasant, calm, strange, and somehow fitting, because it was washington, d.c. i don't know if i believe they were aliens or some other supernatural phenomenon, but i don't know what they were. i'm also unsure i would consider aliens supernatural, since i assume aliens exist, and as such would therefore be natural. i called brent yesterday to ask what he remembered about the UFOs so i could write this piece, and he said that he remembered the apartment, the roof, hotly wandering around the city, the specific beers we were drinking that night, and, me seeing UFOs. he seemed noncomittal about seeing the UFOs himself. i enjoy his framing of this: the UFOs were my thing, and not his. it makes the whole thing feel stranger and more dynamic. if you or someone you know saw UFOs floating above washington, d.c. during the summer of 2014, please let me know.
In 2021, for a story I was writing, I embedded with Spectral Research & Investigation (SRI), a ghost-hunting team based in West Virginia. I accompanied them on several adventures, including a a house call to a family who claimed their daughter was possessed and an overnight stay at an abandoned insane asylum. The leader of SRI, Brian, brought bags of equipment to each outing, including a Tesla coil, which he believed could attract spirits; thermometers, to detect any quick drops in temperatures caused by ghosts; EMF detectors, to measure unusual electromagnetic activity; and cameras, which Brian set up in every corner of the house, collecting dozens of hours of footage throughout the night, which he then spent the next few weeks obsessively, almost pathologically scanning for any proof of ghosts.
Nothing convinced me of any supernatural activity. That changed at the insane asylum. It was 3 a.m.—“the witching hour”—and we were sitting in the pitch dark. Nothing. Feeling bored and cheeky, I requested we turn off the cameras, and then I loudly said something like “I don’t know if there are actually any ghosts here.”
A few moments after, a disembodied, ghostly white head appeared eight feet in the air in front of me. Brian shot up. “Holy shit, did you fucking see that,” he snarled. A cold chill swept over the room. Someone yelled out that the temperature had just dropped five degrees. Suddenly, shrieking banshees poured into the air above us—actually, it was bats, someone screamed.
We covered our faces and fell to the floor as the bats circled in a frightening cloud overhead. After ten seconds, it was over. The bats suddenly disappeared into the hole they had emerged from, and the temperature went back to normal.
We all ran outside. Brian, the color drained from his face, panted that “That was the scariest shit I’ve seen in 25 years of doing this.” Brian and I corroborated that we had seen the same ghostly white face. Deeply unsettled, I decided to sleep in my car that night until morning, while Brian went back into the house, vainly attempting to replicate the experience with cameras on.
As I see it, there were only three possible explanations for the incident: one, there was a “mass psychosis,” which seems implausible given the group saw and experienced the exact same things. Two, it was an elaborate prank—which also which seems unlikely, given the network-television level of coordination needed to orchestrate an animal release and temperature drop in remote West Virginia, by a team with little budget at the specific moment when nothing was being recorded.
The third explanation is that it was a genuine paranormal experience. I find this to be the most convincing. I don’t expect others to believe in my experience. Privately, the incident shattered all my doubts about the existence of paranormal phenomena.
First semester of my freshman year of college. I was walking back to my dorm on Washington Square from the West Village. It was a pleasant day. Still warm. I felt happy, even if I was lonely. I had just moved to New York without ever having visited. I lived with two strangers, and the girl I shared a room with refused to speak to me. Her long-distance boyfriend stayed over on weekends. He practiced his trumpet in our room. They often had sex while I was there, just a few feet away, lying awake in my twin-bed.
I passed a fruit and vegetable seller. Wow, those cherries look really good. The dark-red Bing variety. Shiny and firm. But I didn’t buy them, and my cherry craving persisted for the next few blocks. I didn’t text or call anyone. I didn’t bump into any friends or acquaintances and mention the cherries.
When I got back to my dorm, there was a bag of cherries on my bed, propped against my pillow.
I texted my suite mate. Did you leave a bag of cherries on my bed?
No, she responded. I asked my room mate. Are these your cherries? She shook her head almost imperceptibly and returned to watching Friends on her laptop.
*
I was visiting my boyfriend in London. We both loved sweets, especially chocolate. We didn’t drink or do drugs or eat animal products.
For years, he had been telling me about his favorite cake, the Sachertorte from Hotel Sacher in Vienna. Apparently, this was the best chocolate cake in the world. The recipe is a family secret, though many imitations exist.
My boyfriend’s father had just returned from Austria on business and brought a Sacher cake back for us. It wasn’t vegan of course, but this was a special exception. It was unlike any other chocolate cake I’d ever had—the “icing” is dark and rich, but the actual sponge (separated by a layer of apricot jam) is not decadent or necessarily chocolatey. In fact, it’s quite dense and dry, but in a surprisingly pleasant, minimalist way, especially when you eat it with a dollop of schlag.
We devoured the cake in a few days.
A few weeks later, we walk into the kitchen to find my boyfriend’s father eating a rather generous slice of Sacher. Real Sacher, not a knock-off. It had the chocolate button to prove it.
Where did you get that? His father shrugged and pointed to the pantry, where we discovered an almost complete cake, resting in its custom-made Hotel Sacher wooden box.
A few years later, my boyfriend and I had broken up. I was visiting family in Northern California for the holidays. The doorbell rang. A package arrived. I opened it. A full Sacher cake.
Did you order this? Who got this? I asked everybody in the household. There was no return address or receipt. No one had a clue.
Did you send this? I messaged my ex.
No.
*
I consider them to be supernatural because of the supernatural feeling they produced in me. Of course, these incidents can be explained by someone just putting the cherries on my bed, or sending me the Sachertorte. This would be the relatively simple, easy explanation. But who? And why? And how did they know? And was it a person at all? So perhaps there is no simple, easy explanation, after all.
Final Thoughts
Thank you to all the contributors. Familiarizing ourselves with paranormal phenomena—from souls to telepathy—will help balance/counter the materialism that most of us have been immersed in since birth.
In my opinion, materialism is a bleak anomaly generated by millennia of dystopia. A cornerstone of our global dystopia, it belligerently simplifies and disenchants existence. Reality is more magical, complex, and mysterious than we’re taught to think.
I encourage people to share their paranormal experiences in the comments section.
A now-deceased coworker of mine had a medical condition that made him unable to walk without pain. One night in his late 20s he had a uniquely vivid dream that he was jogging down a residential street, before turning and entering into a beautiful house.
A treatment for his condition was found at some point, and he regained an ability to not only walk normally, but also run. He took up jogging because it was enjoyable to finally be able to move freely and quickly.
He married a wonderful woman, and moved to a new city with her. They were riding down the street with the realtor when he realized he recognized it: it was the street from his jogging dream. The house they drove to look at? It was the exact house from his dream. He put in an offer, knowing he'd get it.
A month or so later, he was jogging down that street, and turned and walked into that beautiful house.
This goes straight to saves because I need more time to get through all of it, but this is a brilliant and comprehensive piece of work.
I can see how it could be an academic paper or published someplace else (is it? Was it meant to be? I skimmed through the argument and read a few stories so far, I could've missed it).
I will eventually edit and post a piece I wrote for a literary nonfiction class at my university 5 years ago. I interviewed 3 people for it and connected them with a general thread about humanity's tendency to turn to the occult at times of uncertainty. I backed it up with academic research, too. I guess it makes the piece sound skeptical.
This is technically not incorrect, we indeed need a tarot spread when we're losing it rather than when all is clear and stable. But because my work was all anecdotal evidence, my goal wasn't to prove that these stories were real to my professor.
I guess I was a skeptic back then.
One of the stories was about a man who transferred all of his chronic headaches to a stone as a kid with the help of a mentor (they tried practicing with a plant first, and it dried up quite fast). The second story was more ridiculous, about a woman who was brought to the residence of a local cult, saw some shitshow, and got out fast. The third one is about my close relative who claims he was under a heavy love spell for 20 years, but no other family member corroborated that story.
Two years after I submitted that assignment, I met my magick mentor and proceeded to study a specific type of traditional Greek & Egyptian magick, but we ended up parting ways before I did any rituals, and I chose against continuing.
I then switched to softer, more organic, less forceful new-age stuff that's mostly meant to fix one's attunement with the world, themselves, and their higher self. It's closer to shamanism than to traditional church-related witchcraft. We dabble in clairvoyance there too, it's much more common than people think.
This type of practice did wonders for the quality of my life, especially when paired with therapy. My current teacher actually encourages everyone to only ever practice when they're mentally stable and/or in therapy, it can be dangerous otherwise.
I also have close friendships with witches, shamans, family constellation practitioners, occasional tarot readers, etc. I participated in many rituals they did throughout the years. Needless to say, I have good materialist friends as well :)