Greetings from SpectreCollector, host of the Paranormal Zone
DO YOU BELIEVE?
Welcome to the Paranormal Zone the portal to all things parapsychological, supernatural, occult and reason defying. I am SpectreCollector the arcane purveyor and submitter of all that you see here.
What is the paranormal? It is commonly accepted that paranormal events are purported phenomena described in popular culture, folk, and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described to lie beyond normal experience or scientific explanation.
Why do so many people believe in the paranormal? According to recent surveys, as many as three quarters of Americans believe in the paranormal, in some form, while nearly one in five claim to have actually seen a ghost.
What is parapsychology? It is the study of the evidence for psychological phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis, which are unexplained by science.
What is the Occult? The occult is anything relating to, or dealing with supernatural influences, agencies, or phenomena. It is beyond the realm of human comprehension.
Those scientists and psychologists who have studied these beliefs know that some paranormal experiences are easily explainable, based on faulty activity in the brain or combinations of exhaustion, drugs, alcohol, and tricks of the light could contribute to single, isolated sightings. Today, experiences such as Out Of Body are now accepted neurological phenomena in most cases … (but not all).
FUN FACTS
USEFUL TIDBITS
TYPES OF HAUNTS
Demonic Haunting – A haunting by a nonhuman entity. Can be very dramatic, even violent. Demonic hauntings often start out with subtle and relatively simple paranormal activity, then quickly increase to stronger activity.
Energy Hauntings – The majority of hauntings are not demons, ghosts, or spirits – simply negative energy that has attached itself to a space.
Intelligent Haunting – When spirits dwell in a specific area and demonstrate an inter-action with those here in the physical realm.
Residual Haunting – When a spirit is seen doing the same thing over and over, many believe this to be simply an energy imprint or residual haunting. In other words, a strong, traumatic event that occurred in some other time, repeating itself over and over.
Traditional Haunting – Is a place that has significance to the dead, therefor they have chosen to stay even after their life has ended. This can be a house, a building, a special place that had meaning to the one lost.
Situations connected to hauntings can include:
Influence: An invisible entity of undetermined nature, effecting the inhabitants of a dwelling. This may initially manifest as an inexplicable feeling of uneasiness, then be followed by more definite signs which reveal a haunting.
Imprint (Imprinting): It is theorized that events and strong feelings/emotions can leave a copy or record of themselves on places and objects. Most notably this occurs when a sudden and violent death occurs such as a powerful accident, a murder or other crime, a war or battle area etc. The energy that is left can result in a non-intelligent haunting, usually a residual haunting
Object Imprinting: The haunting can follow the object through several owners. This is often reported with items purchased at a yard sale or flea market.
Matrixing: The natural tendency for the human mind to interpret sensory input, what is perceived visually, audibly or tacitly, as something familiar or more easily understood and accepted, in effect mentally “filling in the blanks.”
PARANORMAL PHOBIAS
A paranormal experience can be very disconcerting and a source of anxiety to many people. During interviews investigators would consider if any might suffer from the following pre-existing conditions:
Achluophobia, Scotophobia and myctophobia are fear of the dark.
Coimetrophobia is fear of cemeteries.
Domatophobia, eicophobia, ecophobia and oikophobia relate to a fear of houses and/or the objects in them.
Lygophobia is fear of twilight.
Necrophobia is a fear of the dead and dead things.
Noctophobia is a fear of the night.
Nyctophobia is the fear of the dark or fear of nighttime darkness.
Phasmophobia and spectrophobia are the fear of ghosts or spectres.
Taphephobia and taphophobia include the fear of being buried alive, as well as a fear of cemeteries.
NATURAL PHENOMENA THAT ARE NOT PARANORMAL
There are natural occurrences that while odd or fantastical do not constitute paranormal activity. Old beliefs and superstitions both cultural and locational are often at the root.
Pareidolia
When you see a pattern in a photo, video, object or anything that can be viewed where what you see is actually not there. An example is something that we all have done as kids - what does that cloud look like? The mind will try to transpose a familiar image on random data so that we can subconsciously understand what we are seeing.
Creaking and Popping in the Night
A house or building is made up of many different materials. Different materials heat and cool at different rates so they expand and contract at different rates. This expanding and contracting can cause many different sounds that can be mistaken for footsteps or other activity.
Fairy Rings/Elf Circles
Fairy rings, also called elf circles, were once associated with supernatural phenomena, and often times considered dangerous to mortals. Fairy rings are a result of colonies of mushroom fungi that live in soil and thatch.
Foxfire/Fairy Fire
A fungus that can set itself aglow through bioluminescence. Foxfire, or fairy fire, is the result of chemical interactions between certain types of fungi and decaying wood.
Marsh Gas, Swamp Gas
This mixture of methane, hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide, produced naturally within some geographical marshes, swamps, and bogs. It has been known to self-ignite and burn with a green flame.
Glowing Waves
Another spectacle resulting from bioluminescence can be attributed to phytoplankton, which occasionally illuminate coastal areas and crashing waves with a magnificent neon blue hue.
Antarctica’s Blood Falls
While glowing shorelines might seem like the beaches of a magical alien world, Antarctica’s Taylor Glacier features a far more disturbing oceanic spectacle – a waterfall that stains the surrounding ice in a bloody hue. The blood red flow coming from the glacier is the result of iron-oxide.
Ball Lightning and St. Elmo’s fire
Ball lightning is a rare and controversial (but probably natural) weather phenomenon usually occurring in association with thunderstorms. One theory of what ball lightning could be is cloud of plasma2 created by the highly charged atmosphere during a thunderstorm. Another theory postulates that particles in vapor which may form when lightning hits the ground mix with the oxygen in the air, releasing chemical energy as the compound burns.
Fata Morgana
Fata Morgana is an optical illusion — an unusual mirage that can give objects the appearance that they are “floating” above the surface, usually above large bodies of water. It results from the bending or refraction of light as it passes through layers of air with different temperatures.
Hole-Punch Cloud
These clouds are circular regions of clear sky that are surrounded by clouds. These holes are caused by airplanes passing through the clouds, triggering the cooling of air over the plane wings, which creates ice. Hole-punch clouds are often mistaken for and believed to be caused by UFOs.
Moonbow
A moonbow is a rare natural atmospheric phenomena that occurs when light from the moon interacts with water droplets in the air through reflection and refraction.
Lightning Sprite
A lightning sprite is an electrical discharge that occurs above thunderstorm clouds. They form as a result of a positive lightning strike between the clouds and the ground and are almost always red on the top and blue on the bottom. Sprites have been mistaken for UFOs by witnesses flying in aircraft.
But, what about all those things that defy explanation over and over again? Those gray areas where we venture seeking answers and the truth? The places and things that give even seasoned investigators a jolt?
“Truth is stranger than fiction,” said Mark Twain, “because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities – truth isn’t.”
The paranormal has its own truth.
Our world is an extraordinary and complicated place and it is unlikely we will solve every mystery and break every code yet we can and should engage all possibilities to discover other realms and how they impact our lives.
So, take a walk through the Zone. Bring a flashlight ... and your nerve.
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