How To Tell if Your House Is Haunted? 16 Signs To Look For
Are you encountering strange sounds, items disappearing, or lights turning on randomly in your home? These may be telltale signs that your house is haunted. All hauntings are different and can vary from hearing a door slamming occasionally to seeing full apparitions. Commonly believed to occur only in old homes in the middle of the night, as seen in many horror movies, hauntings have also been investigated in new homes and can occur in broad daylight.
Not every mysterious noise or vision has a logical explanation. It’s important to understand if your house is haunted to determine the appropriate steps to take.
Common Signs of a Haunted House
If you noticed these early warning signs, then someone else or something else could be occupying your home:
1. Unexplained Noises
These strange noises can include footsteps, knocking, banging, scratching, or something being dropped. These noises can be subtle, and at other times, they can be quite loud.
2. Doors, Cabinets, and Cupboards Opening and Closing
Very rarely will the experiencer ever witness this phenomenon take place. Most often, the experiencer will hear creaks as a door opens or closes, and when investigated, the door is typically in the opposite position it was previously.
3. 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.
4. Items Disappearing and Reappearing
This phenomenon is called the DOPler Effect (DOP = Disappearing Object Phenomenon). Experiencers will place an everyday object in a typical spot in the house. Later, when they retrieve that item, it 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.
5. Unexplained Shadowy Figures
Fleeting shadows are normally seen out of the corner of your eyes. These shadows typically take human forms, also known as Shadow People, while at other times, they are less distinguishable or smaller.
6. 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, and many researchers feel their psychic abilities are allowing them to notice this behavior quicker and better.
7. Feelings of Being Watched
Many people tend to get the feeling of being watched throughout the day, but if the feeling is consistently occurring in a specific part of the house at a particular time, it may be attributed to supernatural forces.
Stronger Signs of a Haunted Home
These next signs are rarer paranormal activity but could be stronger proof of a haunting:
8. Mild Psychokinetic Phenomena
Actually seeing a door open or close, a flickering light bulb, or a child’s toy turn on by itself. Others state they can hear or feel something sitting on the bed next to them.
9. 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.
10. Strange Sounds
Some can hear voices, whispering, crying, or even music from an unknown source.
11. Notable Temperature Changes
Cold spots in your house are one sign that your home could be haunted.
12. Unusual Smells
A fragrance of perfume or cologne that does not exist in your house. This phenomenon may be accompanied by shadows, voices, or psychokinetic phenomena.
Powerful Signs of a Paranormal Presence
Poltergeist activity is rare but is the strongest evidence of a true haunting:
13. Severe Psychokinetic Phenomena
Some instances of this phenomenon include plates sliding off the table, pictures flying off the walls, doors slamming with great force, or furniture sliding across the floor.
14. Physical Assault
This type of phenomenon is very rare but includes scratches, slaps, and hard shoves.
15. Other Physical Evidence
This can include unexplained writing on paper or walls, handprints, and footprints.
16. Apparitions or Ghostly Figures
This very rare phenomenon is a physical manifestation of a spirit or entity. These human-shaped forms can be seen as mist, transparent, or solid.
My House is Haunted, Now What?
If you suspect that your house is haunted, you have several options. Firstly, consider keeping a journal to document any unusual occurrences and their frequency. It may also be helpful to consult with a reputable paranormal investigator or psychic medium to assess the situation and provide support. Furthermore, you can perform cleansing rituals or prayers to create a sense of peace and protection in your home. Finally, if the paranormal activity persists and you feel unsafe, consider relocating to a new residence. Yes, this is particularly challenging for homeowners, but the alternative is having an evil spirit for a roommate.
Communicating with Spirits and Risks
While communicating with spirits can be tempting, it’s essential to approach such interactions with extreme caution due to the real-life dangers involved. Engaging in practices like using Ouija boards or participating in séances can open channels to the spirit world, inviting not only communication with loved ones but with negative energies or malevolent entities. Bad encounters can lead to emotional distress, psychological instability, or spiritual attachment if proper precautions are not taken. So, it’s crucial to be mindful of one’s intentions and boundaries when attempting to communicate with spirits and seek guidance from paranormal experts to ensure your safety.
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Parallel Lives in Comas and NDEs: Is This Proof of The Afterlife?
Have you ever awoken from a dream so seemingly real that you regret waking up, or maybe even question reality? One of those reveries that stays with you the rest of the day or for weeks to come? A dream that leaves you in a state of ineffable nostalgia?
But what if that dream was so realistic it put you into a state of depression, questioning whether it was more real than this reality? Such is often the case for people who live another lifetime while in a coma when knocked unconscious, or during a near-death experience (NDE), who come back believing they’ve found proof of an afterlife or another reality beyond.
These NDEs can add a layer of confusion to the existential questions of life – why we’re here, how we got here, and what happens when we die – or in some cases, it can add a layer of clarity.
The topic has become subject matter for massively popular books, movies, and shows, though academics debate the validity of such experiences, writing them off as anesthesia hallucinations or the product of an intense, prolonged dream. But often the subjective and convincing nature of these experiences forces disbelievers to question what they once thought was sacrosanct.
And it is within these stories that we begin to question the foundations of our own conscious reality.
Concussions and Strange Coma Stories
There is a popular story circulated on Reddit of a college student’s experience while knocked unconscious. And while it’s difficult to verify the story’s authenticity, there is a multitude of anecdotes in response from people who have experienced similar phenomena while in an unconscious state.
Often these accounts result in bizarre time distortions for the experiencer, in which years pass when in reality they were unconscious for only a few minutes. This same time dilation can happen under anesthesia, in dreams, and during intense psychedelic trips, leaving the subject confused upon resuscitation, questioning the meaning of reality and time itself.
This phenomenon is usually explained as our mind filling in the narrative of a dream with memories that seem to have been living. But this Reddit user’s experience titled, A Parallel Life / Awoken By A Lamp, recounts his experience living out a decade of another life, including the birth and upbringing of two children.
You can find the full story (here), but for an abridged version read on…
The Reddit user said that during his last semester at college, he was knocked out by a football player three times his weight. While unconscious he met a woman, was happily married, and experienced the birth of two children. Every day he walked into his children’s rooms and spent time with them before leaving for work. He had a great job, a beautiful relationship with his wife, and detailed emotional memories connecting him to this family.
But one day he noticed that a lamp in his house looked strange – it was inverted and just looked off. He spent the following days on the couch, staring at the lamp, trying to figure out why it looked the way it did. He stopped eating, drinking, and even using the bathroom. His wife grew worried and brought someone to the house to talk to him, before taking the kids to her mother’s house because she was so upset. Then he realized the lamp was not real, nor was the house, the wife, or the kids either. All of a sudden, he woke up to voices, screams, and a police officer picking him up and putting him in his car to go to the hospital.
Mere minutes had passed, but in his unconscious state, an entire decade of life ensued. He spent the next several years in a state of depression, trying to cope with the loss of a family he believed to be real, and a reality remarkably less pleasant than the one he believed he had lived.
Watch this episode of Open Minds with Raymond Moody the psychologist who coined the term “Near Death Experience:”
