See-Through Something

 Photo date: July 30, 2022. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below a mysterious orb I photographed indoors.

A Pink Orb

 Photo date: July 26, 2022. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

The photo below shows a mysterious pink orb I photographed indoors. 

An Orange Orb

 Photo date: July 25, 2022. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below a mysterious orb I photographed indoors.

Plastic-Pushing Poltergeist?

I continue to get strange observations in my back yard, where there very recently occurred the spooky anomalies I described here and here. The latest anomaly involves mysterious movements of a trash can. 

Here is the normal appearance of the backyard of the house I live in: 

There are two trash cans that we always keep next to the right wall, in the space between the tool shed and the planters, as shown above. On July 23 my wife noticed one of the trash cans in the position shown below, and scolded me, saying I had left the can in the wrong place. I had not put the can in such a position, but had put it next to the wall earlier that day, in the same position as shown in the top photo. My wife and I were the only ones in the house on this day. The wind was only 9 miles per hour. 

The can has two wheels on one side, but none on the opposite side; so you can only roll it by tilting it, and pulling it. Our back yard is flat, and the can would never roll by itself. The next day (July 24) I noticed a similar anomaly. The can had been moved more than a meter away from its previous position. I found the can in the position shown below:

I did not mention this to my wife, who never would have moved the can to such a position. She's very much a "put things in their conventional positions" type of person. 

Before July 23 we had lived in this house for several months, and had not noticed any such anomaly. You can come up with a natural explanation for the movements, although it would be very far-fetched. You would imagine some dog coming under the fence, and then moving the empty cans, for some unknown reasons. But the odds of that occuring on two consecutive days would seem to be negligible.

As photographic evidence of something like a poltergeist, this post is far weaker than the much better example given here.

Postscript: On January 13, 2023 I found in the morning one of the two trash cans in the middle of the backyard, overturned. Its top was underneath the back gate. A check of the wind speed on the previous night showed it was only about 5 miles per hour, too slow to explain this event as the result of a wind gust.  On January 26, 2023 I woke up in the morning to see the backyard just like it did in the second photo above, with one of the trash cans greatly misplaced.  On January 28, 2023 I went out about noon to bring one of the trash cans from outside of the gate, where it had been placed to allow a trash pickup. As I always do, I put the trash can back next to the other can, and placed the can's top back on it. About 3:00 PM I noticed the trash can about a meter or two from where I had placed it a few hours ago. Now the can's top was off of it, on top of the other can. There was no noticeable wind on this afternoon. 

On April 3 I found both trash cans in the middle of the yard, overturned. I had noticed them against the white wall when I finished a long walk an hour earlier, and hand noticed no unusually strong wind on that walk.  

Hard-to-Explain Repetitions

 In the post here I reported an astonishing anomaly regarding purple flowers in my back yard. It's a rather long story, so I won't repeat it in this post. The anomaly was followed by another very strange anomaly. 

What was extremely odd was that it seemed on at least three and possibly four occasions prior to July 22, I noticed a sparrow in my back yard, seemingly in exactly the same spot, and facing in the same direction. The spot was about two meters away from my house's rear first-floor window, and about one meter to the right of the left fence wall. It seemed that in each case the bird was on the concrete ground, about three or four meters from some planters we have near the right wall of the back yard. 

Because the back yard of my house is solid concrete, it is very odd that a bird would appear at such a position, at least two meters away from anything that would interest a bird. What was most strange was that I had seemed to notice the bird at exactly this position on at least three days during the five preceding days of looking out my window first thing in the morning, between July 16 and July 21. I almost never look out that window. 

I have been a student of paranormal phenomena for a very long time, and I have never heard of any anomaly involving repetitive appearances of birds. So you can imagine how often such a repetition would have had to occur to attract my attention.  No one would have noticed such a thing after merely two repetitions. 

By July 22 because of such repeating observations I had resolved to start recording exactly what I observed regarding such a pattern. On that morning the first two times I looked out the back window (at intervals separated by at least ten minutes), I saw a bird at the exact position described above. The third and fourth times I looked out the window, I saw no such bird. On the fifth time I looked out, I once again saw a bird at the exact position described above.  In all six or seven of these "appearance repetition" cases between about July 16 and July 22, the bird seemed to be in the same position, facing in the same direction, on concrete ground at least two meters from anything that should interest a bird. 

Today (July 23) I saw no repetitions of the pattern, and seemed to see no birds at all in my back yard, despite checking it about 10 times. 

The observed pattern seems fantastically unlikely to have occurred. There are perhaps 1000 ways in which a bird could appear in my back yard, counting all possible positions and orientations.  In a consecutive series of about 20 observations of my back yard during a period of about 6 days between July 16 and July 22, I seemed to have seen at least six or seven repetitions of a bird in the same position, facing in the same direction. I never saw more than 2 or 3 birds in the back yard during any of these days. 

The probability of such a thing seems much, much smaller than the chance of you picking the Queen of Diamonds six or seven times if you did twenty different card picks, each from a random position in a freshly shuffled full deck of cards. 

Postscript: Between July 26 and July 28 I noticed another hard-to-explain repetitive bird pattern with a starting point the same as the one mentioned above. About five different times I noticed a bird appearing at the exact spot described in the post above, and then always flying along the exact same path, crossing over the rear right corner of my back yard, from a starting point of near the opposite corner of my back yard.  The flight path is shown by the red arrow below:

Red-breasted birds are rather uncommon in New York City (where I live). We get very many pigeons and sparrows, but not many red-breasted birds. On August 3 when returning from a walk outside, I noticed a red-breasted bird (probably a robin) resting in the middle of the gutter atop the house where I live. It was joined by three other black birds. The next time I left the house (August 4) I noticed a red-breasted bird (apparently also a robin) in the same spot I noticed the red-breasted bird when returning the previous day: in the middle of the house's front gutter. Those gutters were replaced in the past year, and are not blocked; and also it has not rained in New York City in the past three days (August 4, 3, and 2). 

The pdf file here lists very many birds seen in New York City, and lists the American robin as one of more than 30 types of birds commonly seen in New York City (also listing dozens of other types of birds as being common in the summer).  What are the odds of seeing a red-breasted bird in the same high spot atop your house on two consecutive observations of the front of your house, on different days? Very tiny, it would seem. 

The next day (August 5) I saw another improbable bird event.  The first time I opened the second-floor window curtain on that day, an instant after I opened the curtain a bird flew up and landed right in front of me, as close as it could be, with only a window separating us. There was nothing nearby of any interest to a bird -- just a window and the bricks in front of it. 

Post-postscript (September 16): Having seen no repetitions in September of the bird pattern I saw three times on July 22, despite looking out my back window 75+ times in September, I am all the more impressed that on that day the pattern occurred on three of the five times I checked, all at different times separated by at least ten minutes.

Confounding Clock

Today I woke up around 8:50 AM and saw my alarm clock blinking, showing a time of about 2:10. Another machine (a sound machine with a digital clock and no battery) in the same room showed the correct time, just as if there had been no interruption in its power supply. It is just as if some mysterious force had unplugged my alarm clock about two hours before I awoke, and then plugged it back in. 

Basically the same thing happened on June 28, 2019 (as reported here), in a different building, on May 4, 2021 in another building (as reported here), and on May 14, 2022, as reported here (with only one of two electric clocks plugged into the same outlet showing such an anomaly, the other clock showing the correct time).  All of the clocks (or devices including clocks) mentioned in these posts were plugged directly into wall sockets, and none of them had batteries. The occurrences (suggesting something like a mysterious unplugging of a clock, with it then being plugged back in) may symbolize life after death, in which there might be an apparent loss of power (someone's death), followed by a restoration of such power (someone's afterlife). 

My Prediction About Mysterious Purple Flowers Quickly Came True

My late mother's favorite color was purple, and she was very fond of wearing purple clothes. The last conversation I had with my late sister (occurring quite a few years ago) was one involving the paranormal and a purple flower. I asked my sister whether she had ever experienced something paranormal or something she could not explain. She told me she had some experience involving a purple flower she could not explain. It seems that after my mother's death there were some purple flowers that had appeared  unexpectedly in my sister's garden, and a purple flower that had survived way longer than expected. I cannot recall precisely all the details, but I remember my sister saying that a purple flower from her garden had survived for years in her refrigerator. My sister seemed to think that this may have been some supernatural or paranormal sign related to my mother. 

On June 1 I had the 67th dream I have had of my mother since mid-November 2020 (when I started recording my dreams). The dream was a realistic one. In the dream I was in a store, talking to some woman named Yolande. After pointing to some Christmas decorations, I accurately described my mother's Christmas decoration habits, which were to fill the house with Christmas decorations during the time from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day.  How very strange that the name "Yolande" should appear in my dream. Prior to the dream, I had (as best I can recall) never spoken that name, and could not identify anyone (fictional or real) who had that name. Not knowing what the name meant, I looked up the meaning of the name Yolande, and found that it is a name meaning "violet flower."  

How strange that again we should have an association between my mother and purple flowers. Last Monday (July 11) I had another dream about my mother. I dreamed that I found unlocked both the front door and front gate of the house where I now live. In the dream I looked around and found my mother kneeling in the back yard, as if she was gardening. Remembering the previous association with purple flowers and my mother, I made in my mind a prediction. I predicted that purple flowers would mysteriously appear in my back yard, even though no one had planted any flowers in the back yard. The back yard is all concrete, but others in my household have set up two meter-long planter bins  where they are growing vegetables. I thought that purple flowers might soon show up there, even though no one had planted them. 

Today I found purple flowers growing mysteriously in the back yard. They arose from a place where no one would ever plant flowers: in the area underneath the solid white fence that surrounds my back yard. I had not seen any such flowers when I checked for purple flowers in the back yard on Monday. Judging from the current size of the flowers, I would estimate that they started to grow on about Monday, the same day I predicted that mysterious purple flowers would appear, because I had the dream of my mother seeming to be gardening in our back yard. Below is a photo of the flowers. You can see what a "showing up against all odds" affair this was. 

Postscript: As of July 26 below is the current state of the flowers shown at top, with pink flowers (or flowers with the "lavender" shade of purple) coming out of the deep purple base.

Postscript: Below are the same patch of flowers as of August 17. We see quite a profusion of purple flowers. 

On August 21 I found that the entire patch of flowers shown above had vanished. No one in my household had any knowledge of why this occurred. Conceivably this could have been caused by some work by my next door neighbor on the other side of the fence. Six meters away, also from the area under the fence, a new patch of purple flowers has started to grow.  

Post-postscript:  By September 6 the events described above have been overshadowed by more dramatic "rainfall selectivity" events in my back yard, photographically documented in my post here. 

Below we see the area right next to where the flowers above appeared, as it looked on September 15. The set of purple flowers in the back is another set of unplanted purple flowers that arose two meters away from the original set of unplanted purple flowers that vanished on about August 21. In the front is some unplanted vegetation that includes both purple flowers and purple leaves. The foreground flower seems to be an Amaranth, the species Amaranthus cruentus. A source says, "this flower has been associated with immortality and eternal life because it does not die when cut....This flower is commonly known to symbolize immortality or eternal life." 

The same source has a photo of an Amaranth plant that is a very close match for the tube-like flower in the foreground. That source's photo of an Amaranth shows tiny yellow specks inside the purple stalk. I see just such things in this closeup of the flower above:

The source says this:

"Amaranth is a flowering plant that has been used for centuries as an important food and medicine. Amaranth in the Bible can be traced back to Biblical times when it was considered holy, and Jesus Christ himself may have eaten this cereal grain. The word amaranth means 'everlasting.' ” 

Amaranth flowers are rare in New York City where I live. You will have to walk an average of about 1 mile before seeing one. 

Postscript: Now in the spring of 2023, I find a whole bunch more unplanted purple flowers, this time in the front yard of the house where I live. This is despite there being lots of wood chips that should have prevented them arising in such numbers. 

Slightly Purple, With a Green Edge

 Photo date: July 11, 2022. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

We see below a mysterious orb I photographed indoors. 

When an Orb Spooked the Berkshires

Netflix has a version of the Unsolved Mysteries series much more recent than the original version. I recommend anyone watching it use the Netflix feature allowing you to choose particular episodes based on their content. Most of the episodes are rather boring cases of missing persons. But there are some interesting episodes dealing with paranormal mysteries. In the "Tsunami Spirits" episode around 35:30 a woman refers to killed people and says, "More and more victims of the tsunami started to enter my body," making a claim of spirit possession.

In the "Berkshires UFO" episode, we have eyewitness testimony of incredibly strange UFO activity occurring on September 1, 1969 in the western part of Massachusetts, near Great Barrington. At the 16:35 mark a woman named Nancy gives this narrative:

"And as we exited the bridge...I can remember this like yesterday. There was a light ball hovering, maybe about two stories high. We were amazed. I mean, we'd never seen anything like it. It was glowing."

Then at the 16:56 mark another witness of this event says this:

"And then as it rose, it fired these rods of light...My brother saw this orange orb, and it seemed to have this roll to it."

This is only part of the very diverse strangeness reported in the episode. 

A Yellow Orb

 Photo date: July 8, 2022. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

Below we see a mysterious yellow orb I photographed indoors. 

Orb Over Skinwalker Ranch?

At the 12:35 mark of the video interview here, we have Travis Taylor PhD state this about an observation at the mysterious Skinwalker Ranch: " We had a sphere fly over the ranch that was unmistakably an unidentified flying object, not just some aerial phenomenon."