Paranormal 101: what are those shadows in the night?

Every unexplained sound, sight or dream is not necessarily something of a paranormal nature. Can a ghostly apparition be distinguished from an eerie shadow made more ominous by the dark of night?

Let’s take a look, from my own experience, at the logical side of a couple things that go bump in the night.

Shadow Play – You wake abruptly at 2 A.M. and groggy from sleep, see something swiftly pass by your bedroom doorway. You have no clue what it was, but shaken, you instantly feel it is something disturbing and you hunker down under the safety of the blankets.

I did this off and on for a month recently. I thought someone unseen was paying a visit to the old family homestead, which could be any number of family members who have passed over and who have indeed visited on occasion.

I was uneasy and tried to stay calm, but it was quite unnerving. After this situation happened the last time, I realized I was extremely thirsty. I waited what I thought was a “safe” amount of time (not feeling up to a ghostly visit that night) and crept out of bed to head down the hallway to the kitchen.

Just as I turned into the hall from my bedroom, a swish of a shadow passed over me and I stood frozen in my tracks. Within a second or two, the swish of shadow appeared again.

At the same moment, though, looking down the hallway to the next room, I saw my cat pass by the night light, which is located under an aquarium in that room. I also saw the same swish of shadow, caused by the cat, as she played with a dust ball under the fish tank. Mystery solved!

Unexplained Scratching Noise – There are so many explanations you can come up with to identify a scratching noise heard in the hours of darkness. Some of them are obvious; branches scraping the house on a windy night, mice in the attic or the antics of the cat prowling the house in the dark.

I was wigged out over a particular scratching sound I was hearing for a couple weeks at the start of an extremely cold winter. It only happened around 1 A.M. and I was very bothered by it. My husband investigated everything and could not come up with a reasonable explanation to suit me.

When I hear a strange noise in my house, I will hunt it down like a person obsessed. I will not relax until I can find the source of my anxiety. With this in mind, rest assured, I scoured the room I thought the strange sound was coming from, but I made the mistake of doing it during the day.

After hearing this scratching noise at night for weeks and finding nothing that explained it away, I got brave and decided to investigate the sound in the still of the night, which is when I would hear it.

I will make a long story short here. We had a new heating system installed that September, which included, in the middle part of my old home, a nifty wall heater that blew wonderful hot air into the coldest part of the house.

The wall heater was located directly across the room from a wall of closets, which were back to back with the wall behind the headboard of my bed. I discovered that every time that heater kicked on, it was around 1 A.M., the coldest part of the night.

The awesome new heater blew a pretty forceful airflow across the room, which went under the doors of the old closets, which in turn, made a silly cardboard tag inside the closet, flap in the airflow and scrape back and forth on the back of the closet.

That cardboard tag, while scarping the wall behind my headboard, left me terrified that my mother (passed over) was not getting enough attention and was doing whatever she had to do to get me to notice. Another mystery solved!

[Examiner.com]