16 Ways to Tell if Your House Has a Paranormal Visitor
Are you encountering unexplainable footsteps walking down the hallway, items disappearing, lights turning on randomly? These may be signs that your house is haunted. All hauntings are different and can vary from hearing a door slamming occasionally all the way to seeing full apparitions.
It is important to understand if your house is haunted to determine the steps to take. According to About.com, below are the 16 signs that your house is haunted.
Common Signs
- Unexplained noises – These noises can include footsteps, knocking, banging, scratching, something being dropped. These noises can be subtle and other times they can be quite loud.
- Doors, cabinets and cupboards opening and closing – Very rarely will the experiencer ever witness this phenomenon take place. Most often the experiencer will hear a door open or close and when it is investigated the door is typically in the opposite position than it was previously placed in.
- Lights turning off and on – Lights will turn on and off when the experiencer knows they previously left it on or off. This occurrence is also rarely witnessed. This can also happen to electrically powered devices like TVs and radios.
- Items disappearing and reappearing – This phenomenon is called the DOPler Effect (DOP = Disappearing Object Phenomenon). Experiencers will place a normal, everyday object in a typical spot in the house. Later when they go to retrieve that item, the item is gone and nowhere to be found after a thorough search. Hours, days or weeks later, the object reappears in the exact position it was left in before it went missing.
- Unexplained shadows – Fleeting shadows are normally seen out of the corner of our eyes. These shadows typically take human forms, also known as Shadow People, while other times they are less distinguishable or smaller.
- Strange animal behavior – Dogs will sometimes bark at something unseen, cower without reason or refuse to enter a room they normally do. While cats seem to be watching something move about the room. Animals do have sharper senses than humans, many researchers feel their psychic abilities are allowing them to notice this behavior quicker and better.
- Feelings of being watched – Many people tend to get the feeling of being watched throughout the day, however, it may have a paranormal source if the feeling is consistently occurring in a particular part of the house at a particular time.
Unusual Signs
These next signs are rarer phenomena, but could be stronger evidence of a haunting:
- Mild psychokinetic phenomena – Actually seeing a door open or close, a light flick on or off, or a child’s toy turn on by itself. Others state that they can hear or feel something sitting on the bed next to them.
- Feelings of being touched – Some feel something brush past them, touch their hair or a “hand” on their shoulder. Others can feel a gentle poke, push or nudge.
- Cries or whispers – Some can hear voices, whispering, crying or even music from an unknown source.
- Cold or hot spots – cold spots in your house is one sign that your house can be haunted.
- Unexplained smells – a fragrance of perfume or cologne does not exist in your house. This phenomenon may be accompanied by shadows, voices or psychokinetic phenomena.
Very Strong Signs
Poltergeist activity is rare, but is strong evidence of a true haunting:
- Moving or levitating objects (severe psychokinetic phenomena) – some instances of this phenomena include plates sliding off the table, pictures flying off the walls, doors slamming with great force or furniture sliding across the floor.
- Physical assault – This type of phenomena is very rare, but includes scratches, slaps and hard shoves.
- Other physical evidence – This can include unexplained writing on paper or walls, hand prints and footprints.
- Apparitions – This very rare phenomena is a physical manifestation of a spirit or entity. These human shaped forms can be seen as mist, transparent or solid.
Interested in more? Check out our Halloween Collection
About the Author
Can This Brainwave Study Explain What Happens to Consciousness When We Die?
A new study records the brain waves of a dying person in detail for the very first time. Could the findings explain what happens in our transition into death?
While there is plenty of anecdotal evidence from people who have had Near-death Experiences or NDEs, there is little to no hard scientific data on what happens in the brain as people are dying.
Now, researchers who recorded 15 minutes of brain wave activity in a dying man, are speculating that the findings may explain the phenomenon of life recall or review that many near-death experiencers report.
Dr. Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon who, in 2008, experienced an NDE as he lay in a coma caused by a serious case of viral meningitis. After a miraculous recovery, he went on to write about the experience in several best-selling books.
“There’s a tremendous amount of evidence that, at the end of life, our consciousness does not just disappear as one might assume if the brain created consciousness,” Alexander said. “But in fact, our consciousness seems to expand in dramatic ways, and I think this is where a deeper understanding of NDEs is crucial for us to understand the mind-brain relationship and the nature of consciousness itself.”
To Alexander, while the study is a step in the right direction towards understanding what happens when we die, it is fraught with some misunderstandings.
“Now, there are many problems with this study and the main thing I’ll point out here is, first of all, do not confuse correlation with causality,” Alexander said.
“This is a common mistake in neuroscience and it results from the unproven assumption, and in fact, I would say a disproven assumption, that the brain is creating consciousness, and therefore, to find any change in phenomenal consciousness we must look for a neural correlate; some physiologic change in the brain. And modern studies just show that that reasoning is false, there’s more to it than just what’s going on in the brain.”
