Paranormal FAQ: Every Question, Answered

There is no objective measure, but the Tower of London and Hampton Court Palace are the places most often given the title, along with Borley Rectory, a house that was demolished in 1944. Borley's reputation rested largely on the work of one investigator, Harry Price, whose evidence was later judged unreliable.

Probably not. Her biographer Mary Jo Ignoffo found no good evidence for the famous story that a medium told her to build without stopping, and Winchester's letters show long pauses in the work. Much of the legend appears to have grown after her death in 1922.

Old buildings combine a real history of suffering with physical conditions that unsettle people: darkness, drafts, echoes and confusing layouts. Studies at Hampton Court and Edinburgh found that people reported more unusual experiences in reputedly haunted areas, and that those reports tracked ordinary features such as lighting and magnetic-field variation.

It has never been settled. The two investigators who spent the most time at the house believed some events were genuine but agreed the girls faked others. Other researchers, a magician and a ventriloquist concluded that the children's tricks could explain the case, and skeptics point out that the activity rarely happened while anyone was watching closely.

In the usual sense, a ghost or haunting is linked to a place and often to a figure seen or sensed. A poltergeist is a pattern of physical disturbances, such as knocks, thrown objects and moving furniture, that tends to center on one person, often a child or teenager, and to last weeks or months.

Investigators of every persuasion have noticed the pattern. Skeptics explain it as pranks or attention-seeking by a young person, sometimes under stress at home; a few parapsychologists proposed that the young person produces the effects unconsciously. The cases in which tricks were caught on camera or confessed support the first explanation.

Electromagnetic fields from ordinary sources: house wiring, breaker panels, appliances, lamp cords, transformers and, with some meters, phones and radios. There is no evidence that ghosts produce these fields, so a reading only becomes interesting once every electrical source nearby has been ruled out.

There is no evidence that they do. A spirit box is a radio that scans rapidly through stations, so it produces a constant stream of broadcast fragments. Words that seem to answer a question are explained by chance and by the brain's habit of finding speech in noise, and listeners who do not know the question rarely hear the same answer.

Electronic voice phenomena: sounds on a recording that listeners interpret as voices nobody heard at the time. Psychologists attribute them mainly to auditory pareidolia, the perception of words in random noise, along with stray radio signals and investigators' own unnoticed sounds.

Yes. In October 1888 Margaret Fox publicly confessed that the raps had been made by cracking her toe joints, and she demonstrated the technique on stage in New York. She retracted the confession a year later, saying she had been under pressure and in need of money, but skeptics regard the demonstration as the more telling evidence.

Through the ideomotor effect: small, unconscious muscle movements guided by the users' expectations. Experiments going back to Michael Faraday's table-turning tests in 1853 show that people sincerely feel the movement is not theirs even when it is.

Yes. Spiritualist churches and associations still exist in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, and communities such as Lily Dale in western New York hold services and readings. For members it is a religion built on the belief that the dead survive and can communicate.

It has never been proved either way. A man said in a 2004 book that he wore an ape suit for the film and a costume maker said he sold Patterson a suit, but their accounts have been challenged and no suit has surfaced. Bob Gimlin has always denied any hoax. Skeptics note that a costumed person explains everything visible in the footage.

No. Every hair or tissue sample attributed to Bigfoot that has been scientifically tested, including those in a 2014 Oxford-led DNA study and a sample the FBI examined in the 1970s, has come from a known animal such as a bear, deer, cow, horse, dog or human.

From sásq'ets, a word in Halkomelem, a Coast Salish language of southwestern British Columbia. It was popularized in English from the late 1920s by J. W. Burns, a schoolteacher on a reserve of the Sts'ailes people.

Yes. In 1994 researchers published the account of Christian Spurling, who said he built the monster from a toy submarine and a sculpted head and neck for his stepfather, Marmaduke Wetherell, and that a respected London doctor was used as a front to sell the picture to the Daily Mail in 1934.

Neil Gemmell's 2018 environmental DNA survey found no reptile DNA, which rules out a plesiosaur, and no sign of sturgeon, giant catfish or sharks. It found abundant eel DNA, so a large eel could not be completely excluded, though nothing in the data suggested eels of monster size.

More than 700 feet, or about 230 meters, at its deepest point, and about 23 miles long. It holds more water than any other lake in Britain, and peat in the water makes it dark and murky below the surface.

No. Federal investigators found that the bridge failed when a single steel eyebar fractured after a small flaw grew through stress corrosion and corrosion fatigue. The link between Mothman and the collapse comes from a 1975 book and later retellings, not from the investigation.

According to Benjamin Radford's investigation, the original 1995 Puerto Rico description closely matches a creature from the film Species, which the first eyewitness had seen. The doglike animals later called chupacabras in the United States have turned out, when examined, to be coyotes, dogs or hybrids with severe mange.

A Pine Barrens folk tale that a woman known as Mother Leeds cursed her thirteenth child in 1735, and that it was born a winged devil. The legend turned into a regional panic in January 1909, when newspapers reported hundreds of encounters in a single week.

At first some suspected it. When a preserved skin reached Britain in the late 1790s, George Shaw of the British Museum wrote that it was hard not to suspect deception, since faked composite animals were known. He nevertheless described it as a real species in 1799.

In December 1938, when a trawler caught one off South Africa and the museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer brought it to the attention of the ichthyologist J. L. B. Smith. Until then coelacanths were known only from fossils and were thought to have died out about 66 million years ago.

The first photographs of a live giant squid in the wild were taken in 2004 off Japan's Ogasawara Islands. A live one was filmed at the surface in 2006, and the first video of one in its deep-sea habitat was recorded in 2012.

There is no single answer. The footless yūrei became standard in Edo-period art and theater, and the 18th-century painting The Ghost of Oyuki, attributed to Maruyama Ōkyo, did much to fix the image, though earlier footless ghosts exist. Historians suggest stage conventions such as long robes, dim lighting and smoke also played a part.

In Irish tradition the banshee's keening foretells a death in certain families; she announces death but does not cause it. People looking for a natural explanation of real night cries usually point to barn owls and foxes, whose calls can sound startlingly human.

No historical woman has been identified as La Llorona. She is a legend with many versions, and scholars debate whether her roots lie in Nahua omens and goddesses recorded after the conquest, in the story of La Malinche, in European tales, or in a mix of all three.

The vanishing hitchhiker is one of the most widely collected, found across the United States and in many other countries. Other classics include the killer with a hook for a hand, the babysitter whose threatening calls come from inside the house, and the Bloody Mary mirror game.

FOAF stands for "friend of a friend", the distant, unnamed person to whom an urban legend supposedly happened. The British writer Rodney Dale coined the abbreviation in the 1970s, and folklorists still use it.

People have reported encounters with her along Chicago's Archer Avenue for decades, but no one has established who she was, and local historians have suggested several different young women who died in the 1930s. Folklorists see her as Chicago's version of the vanishing hitchhiker legend.

No one knows for certain. The leading idea is methane from decaying plants, ignited by phosphorus compounds or, in a 2025 proposal, by tiny electrical sparks between gas bubbles. None of these has been shown to reproduce the lights people describe, so the question remains open.

Studies in 2004 and 2008 attributed the lights they recorded to vehicle headlights on U.S. Highway 67 and to small fires, and mirages can distort such lights. Some longtime watchers believe a few lights remain unexplained, and the viewing area outside Marfa still draws visitors every night.

No real ship has been identified as the Flying Dutchman. The legend appears in print in the 1790s and the captain's name comes from fiction. Reported sightings, such as the 1881 account from HMS Bacchante, are often explained as mirages at sea.

Yes, in the sense that communities really did exhume and destroy bodies they believed were vampires, and officials documented it. The best-known records are from Habsburg-ruled Serbia in 1725 and 1731 to 1732, and from Mercy Brown's exhumation in Rhode Island in 1892. The bodies showed ordinary signs of decomposition.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, some rural New England families who lost several members to tuberculosis exhumed a dead relative, believing the corpse was draining the living, and often burned the heart. The 1892 case of Mercy Brown in Exeter, Rhode Island, is the most famous.

Yes. In the 16th and 17th centuries, courts in France and the German lands tried and executed people accused of being werewolves, including Gilles Garnier in the 1570s and Peter Stumpp in 1589. Their confessions were usually obtained under torture or reflected severe mental illness.

Almost always flash backscatter: light from a camera flash reflecting off dust, pollen, moisture or insects just in front of the lens, so close that each speck becomes a blurry disc. Orbs appear in front of everything, vanish when the flash is off and can be reproduced with a dusty cloth in a dark room.

No photograph has been shown to capture a ghost under conditions that rule out the known causes, such as backscatter, long exposures, lens flare, reflections and editing. A camera records light, so anything it captures should also be measurable in other ways, which is why the original file and the circumstances matter.

That is pareidolia, a normal feature of human perception. The brain responds to face-like patterns almost as quickly as to real faces, probably because missing a real face was once more dangerous than seeing a false one.

There is some evidence that infrasound can cause unease, sadness and irritability even when people cannot hear it, and Vic Tandy traced one "haunted" laboratory to a 19 hertz standing wave from a fan. There is little evidence that infrasound alone makes people see apparitions, and controlled studies point to suggestion as a strong factor.

Carbon monoxide poisoning can cause hallucinations, confusion and a sense of dread, along with headaches and dizziness, and a 1921 medical case described a family who saw figures until their faulty furnace was fixed. If you suspect it, get into fresh air, call emergency services if anyone feels ill, and use a carbon monoxide alarm.

The label comes from Vic Tandy's 1998 paper, in which a fan produced a standing wave of about 19 hertz. Later experiments used other frequencies and found only modest effects on mood, so there is no established single frequency that reliably produces fear or ghostly experiences.

During an episode the brain is partly in REM sleep, so dream imagery can appear in the real room. One leading idea is that the brain's threat-detection systems, alarmed by the paralysis, create a sense of a hostile presence and the dreaming brain gives it a shape, which is why the figure is so often frightening.

Usually from a few seconds to a few minutes. Episodes end on their own, although they can feel much longer because of the fear involved.

Usually not; it is generally harmless and many healthy people have it at some point. Frequent episodes, or episodes along with excessive daytime sleepiness, are worth discussing with a doctor, because sleep paralysis can be a symptom of narcolepsy.

Yes. Research by Elizabeth Loftus and others shows that suggestion, leading questions and information encountered later can add details to real memories and even create memories of events that never happened. People with false memories are usually sincere and often confident.

Carl Sagan made the phrase famous in 1980, but the sociologist Marcello Truzzi had earlier written that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The underlying idea goes back to Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814 and David Hume in 1748.

They can be, especially when recorded early, separately and in good conditions. But memory is reconstructive, and darkness, fear, expectation, leading questions and conversations with other witnesses can all change what people remember without them realizing it.