The Occult Section

We at the New York Paranormal Society are obviously interested in all things paranormal. So when I found this article, I got a bit of a tickle out of it. The scariest thing about spooky occurrences in your home, according to Consumer Reports?? Increased utility bills! Oh no! ANYTHING BUT THAT!!!!!

That noise coming from the refrigerator? It's not a ghost. I promise.

Kitchen doors and cabinets opening by themselves, appliances unexpectedly turning on and strange bumps in the night. In the wake of Halloween, it’s easy to connect strange incidents to the paranormal. But an industry expert says the real scary feature of these fairly common household occurrences is the increased utility bills they can cause.

“We joke about flying witches in this place, flying squirrels is more likely the culprit,” says Daniel Diclerico, senior editor of Consumer Reports.

Small animals and rodents often sneak through small holes into attics to nestle in the insulation, and get in to walls causing the strange bumps or scratching noises.

This lets air into the house, running up heating bills, Diclerico says,

“The best thing to do is to try to keep them from coming in in the first place and that means plugging holes around the exterior of your home.”

Diclerico recommends lighting incense and looking for the smoke to blow sideways, an indicator that there’s some sort of air leak or inadequate insulation nearby.

The potential safety hazard of kitchen appliances turning themselves on might be even more alarming, but again Diclerico says there is nothing supernatural there.

Last week, over 120,000 Electrolux Smoothtop Cooktops were recalled for doing just that.

And even mysterious movement in kitchen fixtures isn’t necessarily a poltergeist.

“It is low humidity — it’s going to cause the wood to shrink and doors and cabinets will start to open by themselves.”

I actually woke up at 5:15 a.m. this morning to find that my living room floor lamp had turned back on. I am more inclined to blame my cat or a faulty lamp than a ghost, though it was interesting. And funnily enough, my first thought wasn’t a ghost, but my utility bill! We’re in a recession! I can’t have my stuff turning back on!

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Usually cryptozoology (defined as the study of unknown animals) deals with phenomena like Bigfoot, lake monsters, chupacabras, and other such mystical beasts. But an offshoot of cryptozoology is “out of place animals,” animals that are scientifically known to exist but showing up in very unusual places. There are thousands of reports of out of place animals, from elephants in Brooklyn, kangaroos in the midwest, and black cats in Great Britain. Some of these reports have been explained, usually as an escaped exotic pet or circus animal. But many more of these can never adequately be explained. The UK in particular has a long history of reports of large black cats and dogs. This mythology has even made it into popular literature, most notably the Sherlock Holmes adventure “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” It is somewhat hard to believe that thousands of black panthers have been escaping from circuses in England for hundreds of years. The Daily Mail reports on a very recent incident:

A 15-year-old schoolgirl has told of her terror after being chased by a big cat she claims was a ‘black panther’ in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire.

Kim Howells & Sofie Gwynne

Kim Howells was enjoying a walk through the woodland on her 15th birthday with her cousin Sophie Gwynne, eight, when they came across the animal lying beneath a tree.

Ms Howells, who described the ‘panther’ as about the size of a Great Dane dog, with big eyes, paws and a long tail, said the creature began following them after they spotted it at around 8.30pm on Monday night.

She said: ‘I saw something out of the corner of my eye and at first I thought it was a log or something.

‘We carried on walking but then I looked back and it was sitting up looking at me.

‘It was definitely a big cat. I’ve seen wild boar and deer in the Forest before and it definitely wasn’t one of them.

‘What makes me sure is that it was still light so I could see it really clearly.’

Ms Howells added: ‘Sophie was asking what it was and then we looked behind us and it was about five metres away, following us.

‘I didn’t know what to do so we cut through the brambles and just started running.’

The pair then ran all the way back to Ms Howells’s family home in nearby Ruspidge

The girls ran all the way back to Kim’s home in Ruspidge, near Cinderford.

Ms Howells’s mother Cathy said: ‘They were in a real state, their feet were all cut and Sophie was in tears.

‘Kim is a very sensible girl and if that’s what she says she saw, that’s what it is.’

Not many cryptozoologists go looking for this kind of black panther...

Mrs Howells later showed her daughter a picture of a panther on the internet for her to confirm that was indeed what she had seen.

Mrs Howells said she now has doubts about letting her daughter and niece play in the nearby woods.

She added: ‘I used to think that they were much better off there than a public park or somewhere but now I’m not sure, it is a real worry.’

It is not the first time a big cat sighting has been reported near Ruspidge.

In June 2007, milkman Robert Brinton got an early morning wake-up call when he encountered a big cat in Railway Road.

Earlier the same year, firefighter Peter Bishop reported a black cat sighting in Cinderford and a lorry driver from Lydney also saw one on Valley Road.

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Following the recent tragedy in Haiti, as well as an earthquake in California, the question of animals and their ability to predict impending disaster is being discussed once again. It’s an interesting topic and seems to be more a matter of an animal’s ability to use their mind in ways that humans can’t (don’t they say we only use 10% of our brains anyway?)

After earthquakes and tsunamis, stories often circulate of animals acting strangely or seeming to know of the disaster long before humans. Following the Dec. 26, 2004, Asian tsunami, some (erroneous) news reports claimed that no dead animals had been killed by the tsunami (they had supposedly all fled to higher ground), confirming animals’ sixth sense.

A recent video showing a dog seemingly sensing an impending earthquake at a California newspaper office has popped up on YouTube.

What do we make of this? Is this evidence of a paranormal “sixth sense”, as some people claim?

Animals that detect impending earthquakes don’t necessarily have more senses than humans; they just have much higher sensitivity. The fact that animals have keener senses than humans is well-documented. Dogs have a remarkable sense of smell, birds can migrate using celestial cues, and bats can locate food with echoes. Elephants can detect faint vibrations and tremors (such as other elephants’ footsteps) from fantastic distances.

The mistake is in confusing that higher sensitivity with some unknown — perhaps paranormal — power.

Animals may sense unusual vibrations or changes in air pressure coming from one direction that suggest they should move in the opposite direction. If a herd of animals are seen fleeing before an earthquake, all that is needed is for one or two of them to skittishly sense danger; the rest will follow — not necessarily due to some supernatural earthquake-detecting sense, but simple herd instinct.

In fact, search-and-rescue dogs from around the world are being imported into the devastated country of Haiti as quickly as possible, their acute senses helping locate the thousands of missing and wounded victims.

Animals’ ability to detect impending earthquakes is interesting and amazing, but has nothing to do with ESP or a “sixth sense.”

Technorati Tags: animals, debunking, earthquake, paranormal, sixth sense, thoughts, tsunami