The paranormal world has been a source of mystery for millennia, with ghosts, demons and spirits plaguing well-known tales.
But if you’re really unlucky, you may believe you’ve encountered one of these ghouls in day-to-day life while at the centre of uncanny circumstances.
Eerily lifelike dreams, hearing strange noises and objects flying across the room are among numerous experiences that MailOnline readers claim to have experienced.
But what do they all mean?
MailOnline asked two experts to delve into what could be behind your encounter with the supernatural world.
Spooky precognitions
Michelle Baumeister, 76
‘I never believed in ghosts until I saw one. A short old lady was gripping the rails of our newborn child[‘s] [cot] looking down on him.
‘I then started having precognitions. Examples are hearing a crash, but finding no reason for it. Then later, hearing a crash in the same area and seeing all the pots that just fell from where [they were] tied from the ceiling.
Another example – hearing my baby crying – but he looked fine in his crib. Later, his crib collapsed. I wish I had taken that warning to remove him from the crib earlier.
‘[One time] I dreamed my mother’s house was on fire. I called her in the middle of the night. She checked all over – she knew what I had been experiencing – and finally found a plug in fireplace red wire hot.’
Michelle Baumeister, 76: ‘I never believed in ghosts until I saw one’
While many factors may have influenced Michelle’s spooky dreams, Professor Christopher French points to the concept of probability.
‘One of the most important is the simple fact that most of us do not really appreciate how probability works,’ the paranormal specialist, who heads Goldsmith’s Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, told MailOnline.
‘Suppose you have a dream that appears to match an event that subsequently takes place in real life and the chances that the match was just a coincidence were very low – let’s say, only one chance in 10,000.
‘You may well conclude that your dream had given you a spooky psychic glimpse into the future. But think about it for a minute.
‘There about eight billion people on the planet. Even if each person remembered only one dream per night, that is eight billion opportunities every single night for such a match to take place. It is inevitable that such coincidental matches will take place – what would be really hard to explain is if that never happened.’
Meanwhile, psychologist Dr Louise Goddard-Crawley, client Counselling Psychologist, told MailOnline that Michelle may instead be feeling the impact of confirmation bias.
Generally, this is a tendency to remember events that confirm personal beliefs and expectations, creating a not so accurate depiction of reality.
She said: ‘We naturally seek meaning and coherence in their experiences. When a future event resembles a dream, individuals may retrospectively create a narrative that connects the two, emphasising the perceived predictive nature of the dream while overlooking inconsistencies.’
Hearing spirits
June Killington, 65, of London
‘I’m 65 now and I’ve spent my life having the most incredible amount of experiences with the spirit world. I believe [in this] more than anybody else that I’ve ever met or read about.
‘But I’m actually quite normal – I’m a mother and grandmother and my background is Scottish and Irish. I was born in 1957 and things started happening pretty much straight away in the way of seeing and hearing spirits. My mam sat with me most nights and did psychic development exercises because she herself was a medium.
‘I never told anybody at school because I just always knew that it’s not for everybody. I started doing psychic readings and I did that for many years and my ex-husband was a a deep trance medium. We were together for 20 years and did amazing work together.’
June Killington, 65, of London: ‘I’m 65 now and I’ve spent my life having the most incredible amount of experiences with the spirit world’
Despite June’s perceived experience, Professor French believes mediums are ‘prone to auditory hallucinations’.
Although these can materialise as the sound of voices, music, animal calls and telephone ringing are among other hallucinations that can be heard too.
While some may find this distressing, he argued that many people view this in a positive light and see internal voices as a ‘gift’.
He told MailOnline: ‘In other words, they really are hearing voices, albeit voices that are a hallucinatory product of their own minds.
‘Psychologists are increasingly aware of the fact that such experiences are far more common amongst the non-clinical population than was once recognised.’
Flying objects
Anonymous
‘I grew up in a haunted house and had many experiences. No one believed me for a long time. Then things started happened to them as well.
‘[One time] my mom and I were on the first floor getting ready to walk out the front door and my father was on the second floor using the bathroom.
‘My mom and I both heard a crash and then heard my father yell ‘Something happened!’.
‘I ran up the stairs to find a lampshade on the floor at one end of the hallway near the bathroom door. At the complete opposite end of the hallway, about 15ft away, my dad’s office door was open.
‘There was a bookcase in that room that’s about 7ft tall that has a lamp on it. For that lampshade and only that lampshade to go off the shelf, around the corner, through the open door, down a 15ft hallway, and hit my dad in the shins with force, it would have taken a lot of momentum.
‘My father of course had to try and figure out how it could have happened and we did our best to come up with many attempts, but never any that made sense to the force the lampshade would have needed to travel that far.
‘Throughout the years electronics would turn on and off on their own. Lightbulbs would never last long in any light and I’d often be in the dark. To be perfectly honest I still have reoccurring nightmares of being in rooms with lightbulbs that don’t work.’
Anonymous: ‘I grew up in a haunted house and had many experiences. No one believed me for a long time’
Professor French struggled to conjure up an explanation for this one, but said: ‘Just because one can’t think of a non-paranormal explanation for the mysterious movement of objects or strange noises or electrical equipment malfunctioning does not mean there isn’t one.’
He pointed to one of his ‘favourite examples’ of this, being the story of 72-year-old Stephen Mckears who found that ‘the ghost’ tidying his garden shed was actually a mouse.
For weeks on end, the retired electrician was baffled after finding large screws, plastic leads, nuts and bolts neatly filed away each evening.
On one occasion, he even purposely scattered the objects around his shed, only to find them tidied up again the next morning.
Night-time camera footage eventually revealed that a mouse was doing all the work – sometimes attempting to lift heavy objects that were twice its size.
Mr Mckears and his neighbour filmed the mouse tidying away the metal objects from around midnight to 2.30am – an activity it had been doing every night for around a month
Meanwhile, Dr Goddard-Crawley pointed to other environmental factors such as air currents and draughts that can often cause objects to fall.
She told MailOnline: ‘Human perception is not always perfect, and we can misinterpret or misperceive events.
‘Objects appearing to fly across the room could be the result of misjudging the trajectory or not perceiving other contributing factors, such as drafts, vibrations, or the movement of nearby objects.
‘Physical events can be influenced by environmental factors. For instance, strong air currents, such as drafts or air conditioning, can move lightweight objects. Vibrations from nearby machinery or passing vehicles can cause objects to shift or fall.’
Ghostly figures
Becky-Ann Galentine, 31, Connecticut
‘I was sleeping and the door flung open.
‘There was a full figure – I could almost see the light in their eyes. I tried to wake up my partner but I had sleep paralysis and I was like, ‘This is how I die.’
‘And then I smelled this horrible smell like mothballs – worst smell I’ve ever smelled. And then it exited my door and went into my roommate’s room. So I was like, ‘Ok, my roommate came into my room.’
‘The next day I get a call and my roommate is trying to figure out what happened. Whatever was in the room, touched my roommate’s leg and then wisped down the stairs but never exited the house.
‘He also smelled the mothballs. I’d probably write it off if I didn’t experience it with someone else.‘
Beckie-Ann Galentine, 31 of Connecticut: ‘I was sleeping and the door flung open’
Sleep paralysis is a terrifying phenomenon that is often cited as an explanation for sightings of paranormal activity.
While doctors are unsure how exactly this takes place, it is generally believed to occur when a person hits a stage of rapid eye movement sleep (REM) – during which you’re most likely to have vivid dreams.
Those who suffer from sleep paralysis will often feel awake but may experience sensations of being pushed down or may see hallucinations in their room.
Both Dr Goddard-Crawley and Professor French believe that hallucinations experienced during these events are the product of our own imaginations.
Professor French said: ‘During an episode of sleep paralysis, you may experience a weird mix of normal waking consciousness and dream imagery.
‘The result can be absolutely terrifying. The imagery experienced during such an episode is no more and no less meaningful that that experienced during ordinary dreaming.’
Dr Goddard-Crawley added: ‘From a scientific perspective, these hallucinations in sleep paralysis are manifestations of our internal mental processes rather than meaningful messages from an external source.
‘Some people may perceive threatening figures or monsters, while others may experience more neutral or even positive hallucinations. The specific form that these hallucinations take can be influenced by cultural depictions, personal beliefs, and individual psychological factors.’
