Which are the famous paranormal mysteries?
Once upon a time, there was a strange orange colored old man who had odd yellow hair, and who had a secret power of telling fantastic lies that many people believed. No one believed that he could become the President of a great country, but using his secret power, he did just that.
SO this is one of the paranormal mysteries, or, at least, abnormal mysteries of modern times.
Got bored, so have been reading back a bit;
There is a book by the self educated, but undisciplined, genius Colin Wilson, called “The Occult”, which has all kinds of fascinating paranormal events recorded.My favourite is probably Daniel Dunglas Home
The Book “Autobiography Of A Yogi” by Paramahansa Yogananda, is full of stories about 'living saints" including one who lived on air.
The first ‘real’ event I came across was the curious case of :“The Cottingley Fairies” some pretty interesting people believed it at the time. They Included Sir ArthurConan Doyle, inventor of Sherlock Holmes. He even wrote a learned book about the topic “The Coming of The Fairies” I first saw privately circulated photos in about 1970, before they had been published for modern readers. My reaction was that they were fakes, simple cut outs from a book or magazine. Check out the reference and make up your own mind.
One more; the Levitating monk St Joseph Of Cupertino.
Of Course, there is only one problem with each of the cases I’ve mentioned; none have ever been proved, most have been debunked.
IF, after all this, you are still interested, perhaps have a look at “The Book Of The Damned” by Charles Fort.
“There’s one born every minute” P T Barnum
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References:
Colin Henry Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013) was an English writer, philosopher and novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal,[1] eventually writing more than a hundred books.[2] Wilson called his philosophy “new existentialism” or “phenomenological existentialism”,[3] and maintained his life work was “that of a philosopher, and (his) purpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism”.[4]
Daniel Dunglas Home (pronounced Hume; 20 March 1833 – 21 June 1886) was a Scottish physical medium with the reported ability to levitate to a variety of heights, speak with the dead, and to produce rapping and knocks in houses at will. His biographer Peter Lamont opines that he was one of the most famous men of his era.[1] Harry Houdini described him as “one of the most conspicuous and lauded of his type and generation” and “the forerunner of the mediums whose forte is fleecing by presuming on the credulity of the public.”[2] Home conducted hundreds of séances, which were attended by many eminent Victorians.
The Cottingley Fairies appear in a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright (1901–1988) and Frances Griffiths (1907–1986), two young cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in England. In 1917, when the first two photographs were taken, Elsie was 16 years old and Frances was 9. The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted the images as genuine, others believed that they had been faked.
Interest in the Cottingley Fairies gradually declined after 1921. Both girls married and lived abroad for a time after they grew up, yet the photographs continued to hold the public imagination. In 1966 a reporter from the Daily Express newspaper traced Elsie, who had by then returned to the UK. Elsie left open the possibility that she believed she had photographed her thoughts, and the media once again became interested in the story.
Autobiography of a Yogi is an autobiography of Paramahansa Yogananda (January 5, 1893–March 7, 1952) first published in 1946. Paramahansa Yogananda was born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur, India, into a Bengali family.
Autobiography of a Yogi introduces the reader to the life of Paramahansa Yogananda and his encounters with spiritual figures of both the Eastern and the Western world. The book begins with his childhood family life, to finding his guru, to becoming a monk and establishing his teachings of Kriya Yoga meditation. The book continues in 1920 when Yogananda accepts an invitation to speak in a religious congress in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He then travels across America lecturing and establishing his teachings in Los Angeles, California. In 1935 he returns to India for a yearlong visit. When he returns to America, he continues to establish his teachings, including writing this book.
Saint Joseph of Cupertino, O.F.M. Conv. (Italian: Giuseppe da Copertino; June 17, 1603 – September 18, 1663) was an Italian Conventual Franciscan friar who is honored as a Christian mystic and saint. He was said to have been remarkably unclever, but prone to miraculous levitation and intense ecstatic visions that left him gaping.[1]:iii
Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 – May 3, 1932) was an American writer and researcher who specialized in anomalous phenomena. The terms Fortean and Forteana are sometimes used to characterize various such phenomena. Fort’s books sold well and are still in print. His work continues to inspire admirers, who refer to themselves as “Forteans”, and has influenced some aspects of science fiction.
Patrick D
There is a book by the self educated, but undisciplined, genius Colin Wilson, called “The Occult”, which has all kinds of fascinating paranormal events recorded.
Lois: there has never been a paranormal event recorded anywhere. There have been fictional events and actual events that have been misinterpreted as paranormal. There is not one scrap of evidence that any so-called paranormal event has ever taken place except in the imaginations of gullible people.
“Lois: there has never been a paranormal event recorded anywhere.”
Apologies, poor phrasing. I was of course referring to claims of paranormal events, of which there are many thousands. Neither have I ever seen ONE verified incident, anywhere.
Lots of reasons I guess. Much of it because P T Barnum was right in saying :“There’s one born every minute” . I also suspect that people will often choose to believe the fantastic explanation when the truth is prosaic. Newspapers have been doing that since they were first invented.
EG I think one of the most successful examples of believing the myth when truth was too ordinary is what I think of as the myth of Jack The Ripper. After a lifetime’s fascination, and reading many theories, I’ve returned to Occam’s razor: That Jack The Ripper wasinvented by a newspaper reporter seems at least as likely as any theory I’ve read. Sadly, I think another of those pesky unfalsifiable claims. Perfectly happy to agree to differ.
Some 30ish or more years ago on a trip with a group of friends, one of my friends was reading the National Enquirer that I had bought as a joke. On the side of that paper, opposite of where my friend was reading, I noticed an article with the headline: “Crazed Cannibal Plans to Cook Nixon”. I pointed this article out to my friend, to which he replied, “Hmmm… I’d like to have that recipe.”
So would I. It would certainly come in handy now. But I wouldn’t dare taste it. I‘d feed it to rats, but I suspect they’d turn their noses up at it, too.
I don’t know any famous paranormal mysteries, but I’ve heard a lot of people who have seen ghosts. Either they’re lying, hallucinating, or seeing ghosts. And there might be another option I didn’t think of. I’ve heard of people seeing the ghosts of their loved ones after they die, or a rocking chair suddenly rocking in the middle of the night, and they knew it was them. Other people have claimed objects were suddenly hurled across the room, sometimes several objects that go on for minutes. Do you think they’re lying?
Philosophicus
Another option would be are they are seeing something at the limits of perception, out the corner of the eye, or in a dimly lit room, and they are simply misinterpreting what they are seeing because they have an emotionally charged reason for wanting to see something. How can you “know” that a disembodied presence making a chair rock is one of your loved ones sending you a message? Obviously it’s not reason or logic at work there but emotions.
Advocatus,
I guess you couldn’t know if it was your loved one making a chair rock in the middle of the night, but what do you think was making it rock? I think a lot of ghost encounters are misperceptions, illusions, or an active imagination that makes you paranoid. But people have claimed to see full ghosts, like they were looking at a see-through person–a classic ghost. It don’t think their imagination could be that powerful, so it would have to be a hallucination or real. Maybe it’s psychosis, I don’t know. But I’m curious.
Philosophicus
Show a person a random inkblot, and he’s going to bend over backwards to see a human face in it, or a human figure of some kind. It’s the way our brains are put together. When see an ambiguous stimulus, we automatically try to impose some kind of order onto it. Human beings have a remarkable gift for imagination in that regard, and it doesn’t surprise me a bit that with just a little nudging, someone could imagine full-blown ghost. I’m just saying your original supposition – lying, hallucinating or seeing ghosts – isn’t quite complete, unless you count seeing a face in a cloud as a hallucination.
Advocatus,
True, a lot of paranormal sightings are pareidolia. I’ve seen pictures of waterfalls that are shaped exactly like Mother Mary. Nothing paranormal, just a coincidence. Some people might think God made the waterfall shape like that though, and I guess he could if he existed. I just don’t know how you’d prove it.
Philosophicus
There is a relatively new program on the CW channel called “Mysteries Decoded”, hosted by actress Jennifer Marshall (who is actually a licensed private investigator in real life). There have apparently been five episodes so far, but I only had the good fortune to catch the latest, on the “Montauk Project”. Watch it quickly because I doubt if it will be renewed for another season, the reason being that Ms. Marshall is too skeptical. She is not afraid to wrap up the show by pointing out that all the so-called “evidence” she was shown were just urban legends with not a shred of actual evidence to back them up.
Having seen two more episodes of “Mysteries Decoded”, it is a major disappointment. In the episode on “Roswell” for example, Marshall takes it for granted that the photographs of Major Jesse Marcel holding the wreckage of the “weather balloon” were a government coverup. The only investigation she does is take photo to a photoanalyst in order to enlarge and enhance a typewritten memo that General Ramey is holding in his hand, in an effort to prove it is a coverup. Unfortunately once it has been enlarged and enhanced it is completely unreadable. That doesn’t stop them from finding some suspicious “words” in the document and convincing themselves that they have found proof anyway. The problem is that she only talks to UFOlogists. She never gets the other side by talking to skeptics. Here’s an example. In the “Area 51” episode, she asks one of her “experts” if he believes the government is studying aliens at Area 51. He scoffs, “Of course not! The government has lots more secret bases than Area 51. That’s where they keep the aliens.” In other words, Area 51 is just a “front” to draw everyone’s attention from the real conspiracy. Next week: The Bermuda Triangle – if you think a dead horse can’t be beaten any more.