Tag: paranormal

How This Remote Utah Ranch Became a Paranormal Activity Hotspot

Ihave been warned. This much is clear within minutes of ducking out of a helicopter onto the high-desert oasis of Skinwalker Ranch in northeastern Utah one searingly bright October afternoon. As a visitor approaching the dark and inscrutable paranormal forces patrolling this property, I could be targeted.

The admonition has come in several forms. There was the prayer for safe deliverance given by chopper pilot Cameron Fugal, brother of property owner Brandon Fugal, as we approached the ranch. This didn’t necessarily rattle me, as I’d recently watched Cameron deliver a similar invocation on season one of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, the hit History channel show that has generated mainstream attention for the property.

There was the surreal experience of being greeted on the helipad by about half the show’s cast, whom I felt I’d come to know during my hours of binge watching—standing stone-faced and shoulder to shoulder like some official tribunal ready to deliver grim news. Long-suffering ranch superintendent Thomas Winterton, looking typically Marlboro Man, shook my hand first, followed by glowering security chief Bryant “Dragon” Arnold. Erik Bard, the spritely scientist, and red-bearded security man Kaleb Bench chatted nearby. It was as if my arrival was the only thing holding up the start of the season five shoot. When we go inside, Winterton presents me with a liability waiver, which strikes me as highly unusual—there’s nothing on the day’s agenda beyond an in-depth conversation.

But what truly tweaked my antennae was a conversation I’d had an hour earlier, at the Fugals’ hangar in Provo. Brandon was on the phone, tending to his day job as a commercial real-estate titan, and Cameron and I were chatting amiably when he suddenly pivoted from a story about becoming a grandfather. “Every time we bring somebody new, the ranch interacts a little different,” he said. “Usually it’s been mostly mild. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.” This struck me as a roundabout way of saying I should at least be a little worried.

“We’ve had some guys that are like, ‘This is so stupid—we’re gonna show those aliens who’s boss…’” he continued. “And it’s messed with them.”

“What happened to those guys?” I asked. “Something physical, or their cell phones wigged out, or—?”

It was indeed bodily harm, Cameron said. The previous owner, Robert Bigelow, was haunted by the place, both during his time there and after, when “all the negativity followed him home,” Cameron explained. This sounded a little like the aftermath of a bad Red Lobster meal, but I’d seen the entire series at that point, and I knew what he meant. I’d just never thought of it happening to me.

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Romania’s Bermuda Triangle: The Creepy Hoia Forest

Outside of Romania, especially in the English-speaking world, Transylvania is a land associated with vampires, specifically Dracula. Inside Romania, where Vlad the Impaler is a national hero, his associations with the famed vampire are not as popular, though Transylvania is arguably still known for being home to one of the creepiest sites in the world. The Hoia Baciu forest, whether it is deserved or not, has earned the reputation of being the Bermuda Triangle of Romania.

Over time, the forest has gained a reputation for being haunted by unfriendly spirits, a site of UFO activity, and a place where cultists open portals to other dimensions.

The forest is said to have been named Hoia Baciu after a shepherd by the same name went missing there with 200 of his sheep. In the late 1960s, a biologist by the name of Alexandru Sift is said to have taken pictures of a disc or flying saucer hovering over the forest. In 1968, a military technician by the name of Emil Barnea is said to have taken a picture of a UFO. It is claimed that he had no reason to make the story up since he had nothing to gain because the communist government at the time considered belief in the paranormal to be a sign of insanity and a threat to the state.

Other strange stories have also been told about the forest. In one, a young girl disappeared for five years, only to re-appear again with no memory of where she had been. In another tale, over 60 visitors were seen trying to open a portal to another dimension. People also report seeing strange lights in the forest, hearing footsteps from unseen figures, capturing otherwise non-existent faces in photographs, and hearing unexplained laughter or female voices.

It is stories like these which have given it the distinction of being the “creepiest forest in the world.” Furthermore, people who have gone into the forest report being overcome by nausea, strange rashes, unexplained fatigue, and the feeling that they are being watched. Some people have also reported experiencing time lapses, with no recollection of what they did during the missing time.

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THE VATICAN HAS UPDATED ITS GUIDELINES FOR EVALUATING APPARITIONS AND SUPERNATURAL PHENOMENA. HERE’S WHAT THAT MEANS.

The Vatican has updated its process for evaluating visions of the Virgin Mary and other alleged supernatural phenomena in a new effort to prevent abuses and modernize its approaches amid the proliferation of digital technologies.

The announcement, made during a press conference in Rome last week, represents the first update to the Vatican’s procedures since 1978 and highlights growing concerns about the exploitation of people’s beliefs using technology. However, the new guidelines presented on Friday emphasize caution against making definitive declarations that discount such phenomena unless clear indications of fabrication can be discerned.

The revised norms presented on Friday focus on the moral issues involved in the exploitation of people’s faith through the presentation of alleged supernatural experiences, which can be punishable under canonical law.

Traditionally, the Catholic Church has investigated claims involving various forms of supernatural phenomena, some of which have historically impacted the faith. Among the most famous examples include a series of purported Marian apparitions witnessed by three shepherd children at the Cova da Iria in Fátima, Portugal, in 1917.

Decades later, a group of six children in Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, claimed to have also seen and communicated with the Virgin Mary over several days in the summer of 1981, during a series of apparitional visions in which she purportedly appeared with the Infant Christ in her arms.

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Grieving daughters claim psychic medium led them to their missing mom’s body after police bungled the search… as eerie ‘paranormal’ details are revealed

Two grieving Louisiana sisters claim a psychic medium in Wisconsin revealed the location of their mother’s body after she vanished over a year ago. 

Ashley Deese, the daughter of Theresa Jones, 56, said police had been stumped over her mother’s disappearance, and criticized their investigation that was seemingly solved once medium Carolyn Clapper stepped in. 

Theresa went missing on February 2, 2023, and Ashley told KNOE that she spent hours searching for her mother alongside the Union Parish Sheriff’s Office’s K9 unit. 

Days later, Ashley and her sister Brittany reached out to Clapper in Wisconsin, who is well known among the psychic community over her claims of finding missing people. 

Ashley claimed she was able to provide eerily accurate details leading to the body, but remains unsatisfied as cops never spoke to the medium and ruled the death as an accidental drowning caused by methamphetamines. 

‘It’s been a year now since this has happened, and she has so much information pertaining to this case,’ she said. 

After contacting Clapper, Ashley said Clapper returned the request with a midnight phone call, and offered to offer her help pro-bono. 

Over a 45-minute conversation, Ashley claimed that the psychic gave her precise step-by-step instructions as to how to locate her mother’s body, which lay in a creek close to her home. 

It is unexplained how the police’s K9 unit and extensive searches did not find the body, which appeared to be only a short distance behind Theresa’s property around 200 yards into a wooded area. 

Describing what her ‘psychic visions’ apparently told her, Clapper said: ‘There would be a log, she kept showing me this pronounced log, a very big log in the woods.’

‘It wasn’t just little twigs and sticks, it was a log, a huge one,’ she continued.

‘You know you hit this log is basically what she said, you get to this log and my body will be there. There’s water, I saw a creek.’ 

Following the phone call, Ashley said she went out looking for her mother, and claimed the medium’s eerie accuracy even detailed the position of her mother’s body and its deteriorating condition. 

‘I immediately got ill, shaky, and sick, and started vomiting,’ Ashley added. 

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Vatican preparing ‘guidelines’ for ‘apparitions’, ‘other supernatural phenomena’

The Vatican is preparing to release a document giving guidance on how to discern supernatural phenomena. 

The Holy See Press Office announced the upcoming document will be published May 17 with a live-streamed press conference featuring Prefect for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández.

Fernández has previously said the dicastery is “in the process of finalizing a new text with clear guidelines and norms for the discernment of apparitions and other phenomena,” according to the National Catholic Register.

An “apparition” refers to an instance in which a divine entity — such as a saint, the Virgin Mary, or Christ himself — makes itself known to a person on Earth. The concept is a recurring theme in the Bible and most Christian denominations affirm the belief that such brushes with the supernatural can still occur today in various capacities.

The Catholic Church urges “extreme prudence” before ascribing phenomena to a supernatural force, warning that being too quick to attribute divine origin to explainable occurrences can damage the faith and warp belief.

Alleged apparitions are usually documented and scrutinized by the diocesan bishop’s office and then forwarded to Rome for further investigation.

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French woman found dead in Italian church was searching for ghosts in possible Tik Tok stunt, police say

A 22-year-old French woman whose blood-drained body was found in an abandoned church in northern Italy’s Aosta Valley over the weekend had been looking for a haunted house believed to contain ghosts, according to police.

She told family members about her plans before leaving the village near Lyon where she lived, a police spokeswoman in the town of La Salle told CNN.

Police believe the victim could have been attempting to carry out a TikTok stunt, adding that her death could be related to a ghost hunting competition being played in France on the social media platform. The other working theories are that it was a “consented murder” or sacrifice, or an attempt to carry out a social media prank in the deconsecrated church. Police are still searching for a young man who was seen with her. There are also two other missing persons cases in the area which police say could be related.

According to the spokeswoman, the victim and a male friend had been seen in the area dressed “like vampires.” A witness interviewed by police say the young woman was pale and “emaciated” and the man had dark hair and olive skin. The witness told police investigators that she looked like a “walking corpse.”

The dead woman, whose name has not been released, had been stabbed with what investigators say was a camping knife and had bled to death, according to medical examiner Roberto Testi. She also had two gunshots to her neck and one to her abdomen that police say may have been inflicted after she died. Some of the blood had been scraped off the floor and removed from the crime scene, police told CNN. There were no signs of struggle, police say.

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Scientists still baffled from giant human skeletons up to 10 feet tall decades after initial discovery

A series of mysterious giant skeletons up to 10 feet tall reportedly discovered in and around Nevada caves last century — dubbed the “Giants of Lovelock” — are still baffling scientists decades later.

The claims about supersized humans who roamed the area around Lovelock, a remote town 90 miles northeast of Reno, thousands of years ago are rooted in Native America lore, which tells of fierce, redheaded, pale-skinned giants who arrived from Central America by boat and attacked local tribes.

After years of war, the foreign invaders were chased into a cave and slaughtered en masse, according to stories passed down by the indigenous Paiute people.

Experts believe the tale of the giant warriors’ violent extermination is likely a legend, but reports of discoveries made in the area of Lovelock decades ago have continued to raise many unanswered questions.

The first foray into the Lovelock cave was made in 1911, when a pair of miners searching for guano, or bat excrement used as fertilizer, allegedly unearthed 60 human skeletons, including some measuring between 7 and 8 feet tall.

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National Parks Celebrate April Fool’s Day with Paranormal Pranks on Social Media

In honor of April Fool’s Day, a number of national parks turned to the paranormal in an attempt to pull a fast one on their social media followers. Perhaps the most impressive joke this year came by way of Zion National Park which shared a photo (seen above) that, upon first glance, appears to show a Sasquatch visiting the site’s picturesque Watchman Trail. “Though typically known to inhabit North America’s Pacific Northwest region, Bigfoot, like many visitors, has chosen Zion as her destination for recreation,” the park wrote on Facebook before, as is custom, revealing that the photo was a hoax.

Zion National Park was not the only location to enlist Bigfoot in Thursday’s tomfoolery as Whiskeytown National Recreation Area posted a typically hard-to-decipher image which they claimed was a “close-up photo of Bigfoot” purportedly “captured by one of our former employee’s wildlife cameras recently.” Showing some serious commitment to the bit, they went on to say that “scientists are struggling to come up with an answer for how this unique species has moved into the park from locations west” and detailed a number of theories for the odd turn of events until ultimately unleashing the all-too-familiar April Fool’s punchline.

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The Respected Oxford Professors Who Say They Time Traveled

ON A HOT AUGUST AFTERNOON in France, 1901, Miss Elizabeth Morison and Miss Frances Lamont, on holiday from England, took a trip to visit the Palace of Versailles, a former royal residence some twelve miles west of Paris. “We went by train,” they would later recall, “and walked through the rooms and galleries of the Palace with interest.” But it was not to be the pleasant day out that the ladies had anticipated.

As they started to explore the gardens, an inexplicable feeling of depression descended upon them, a melancholic atmosphere they described as “a dreamy haziness” and “eerie and unpleasant.” They began to encounter people clothed in strange attire. They saw “two men dressed in long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats,” and later a man whose “face was most repulsive, —its expression odious. His complexion was very dark and rough.” Passing over a bridge, they found: “a lady was sitting. I supposed her to be sketching. She turned and looked full at us. Her dress was old-fashioned and rather unusual.” Eventually, they found their way out of the gardens, and returned to their accommodation in a daze.

The oddness of their experience stayed with them. Later, returning to the palace to retrace their steps, they found this impossible. Buildings had changed, lanes had disappeared, and the bridge was no longer present. In fact, the whole layout was unfamiliar. Through diligent research, Morison and Lamont came to believe that, on that fateful day, somehow they had experienced the grounds as they had been in the late eighteenth century, and that the lady they had come across had been the infamous Queen Marie Antoinette.

The story was so extraordinary that they decided to document a full account in book form. That account, titled An Adventure, was published in 1911. It became the literary sensation of its day, running to numerous editions. As incredible as the tale was, perhaps the most astonishing part was yet to be revealed, for Morison and Lamot did not exist. The real authors of An Adventure were Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Moberly, the Principal and Vice-Principal, respectively, of St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford—two highly esteemed academics hiding their names to protect their identities.

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Do Most Humans Have a Spooky Encounter With the Deceased at Some Time in Their Lives?

There are very many case reports of people claiming to have seen apparitions of the deceased. A very interesting question to consider is: what percent of humans will ever have an experience like seeing an apparition of the deceased or hearing a voice of a deceased person or seeing or feeling something they regarded as being caused by a deceased person ? Will it be just a small percentage of humans that have such an experience? Or could it be that a very large fraction of the population will have such an experience at some time or another – a fraction as high as 33% or higher? Could it even be that most humans will have a paranormal or seemingly inexplicable encounter with the deceased at some point in their lives?

To try to estimate such a thing, I will need to examine reports of percentages of the number of humans who report seeing apparitions of the deceased or report having encounters or contact with the deceased. 

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