12 Possible Ways the Deceased Might Signal or Communicate With the Living

The history of the paranormal and psychic phenomena include many reports of experiences in which someone got the impression that there may have been communication or a signaling effect between the deceased and the living. Based on such reports and various types of seemingly inexplicable phenomena, I can make a list of twelve possible ways that the deceased might signal or communicate with the living. By a signal I mean what might be some non-verbal indication in which a deceased person merely gives a sign that he or she still exists. 

1. Mysterious Raps

The occurrence of inexplicable rap sounds was massively reported in the nineteenth century, with a host of witnesses (many of them very trustworthy people) reporting such an effect.  I have been describing in great detail many of these reports in my "Spookiest Years" series of  posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.  The evidence for this phenomenon was very good even at the very beginning of the phenomenon, for reasons I explain in my post here.   It was not merely that great numbers of reliable witnesses reported mysterious rap sounds they could not explain. It was also that the sounds corresponded to intelligible communication. Very early in the phenomenon, witnesses developed a habit of reciting the alphabet while attempting to get intelligible communication from mysterious raps.  The tedious technique involved calling out the letters of the alphabet in sequential order, and writing down whenever a mysterious rap occurred just after a letter was recited.  Very many witnesses reported that intelligible communication would result from such a technique, with the letters written down after a rap forming into intelligible sentences and paragraphs. 

2. A Mysterious Sense of Presence or Mysterious Figures, Voices, or Touches

In the past fifty years it has been very widely reported by some people that they experience a "sense of presence" that the person may feel comes from some deceased person. For example, at some random time or significant event, a widow may report a feeling that her deceased husband is there with her for a while, even though there is no corresponding vision or image matching such a feeling.  Other times a person may report a mysterious figure, voice or touch identified as arising from a deceased person. 

Some relevant studies are below (I extracted all the numbers below from the original source materials):

• In Arcangel's study of 827 people, 596 (72%)  responded that they had had an "afterlife encounter." We read, "69% of respondents listed some form of visual encounter (Question 4), 19% were Visual only, 13% were a combination of Visual/Auditory, 8% Visual/Sense of Presence and 8% Visual/Auditory/Sense of Presence."
• Erlendur Haraldsson surveyed 902 people in Iceland in 1974, finding that 31% reported seeing an apparition or having an encounter with a dead person.  He did another survey in Iceland  in 2007 with a similar sample size, finding that 42% reported seeing an apparition or having an encounter with a dead person, with 21% reporting a "visual experience of a dead person,"  along with 21% reporting an out-of-body experience. 
• A large survey included some questions about paranormal experience, such as asking whether they had ever "felt as though you were really in touch with someone who had died."  According to Table 1 of the paper here, the number answering "Yes" to this question was 24% in France, 34% in Italy, 30% in the United States, and 25% in Europe overall. 54% of those in the US reported having an experience with telepathy. 
• A 1973 survey of 434 persons in Los Angeles, USA found that 44% reported encounters with the deceased, and that 25% of those 44% (in other words, 11% of the 434) said that a dead person "actually visited or was seen at a seance."
• As reported in the 1894 edition of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (Volume X, Part XXVI), an 1890's "Census of Hallucinations" conducted by the Society for Psychical Research asked, "Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, lad a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice ; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?"  As reported in Table 1 here (page 39), the number answering "Yes" was about 10%.  Because the question did not specifically refer to the dead, ghosts or apparitions, the wording of the question may have greatly reduced the number of "yes" answers from people experiencing what seemed to be an apparition of the dead or a sense of the presence of the dead. 
• In the March-April 1948 edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, page 187, there appeared the result of a survey asking the same question asked in 1894: "Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice ; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?"  According to page 191, 217 out of 1519 answered "Yes." This was a 14% "yes" rate higher than the rate of about 10% reported in 1894. 
• A 1980 telephone survey of 368 participants found that 29% reported "post-death communication." 
• The British Medical Journal published in 1971 a study by Rees that involved almost 300 subjects, one entitled "The Hallucinations of Widowhood."  Rees reported that 39% in his survey reported a sense of presence from a deceased person and 14% reported seeing the deceased, along with 13% hearing the deceased.
• A 2015 Pew Research poll found that 18% of Americans said they've seen or been in the presence of a ghost, and that 29% said that they've felt in touch with someone who died. 
• A Groupon survey of 2000 people found that more than 60% claim to have seen a ghost.
• A 1976 survey of 1467 people in the US asked people if they had ever "felt as though you were really in touch with someone who had died?" 27% answered "Yes."  The same survey found that large percentages of the population reported experiences such as ESP or clairvoyance, as you can see in the answers below. 

From the work here

 A 2021 study surveyed about 1000 widows or widowers. The 2021 study found 34% reported a sense of presence from a deceased person  and a higher percentage (46%) reporting a visual experience involving the deceased, along with 43% reporting an auditory experience. The 2021 study has this interesting quote, using the term "ADC" for "after-death communication":

"Surprisingly, 36.4% of our respondents reported that they were not alone at the time of their ADC, and of these, 21.0% asserted that the ADC was witnessed by their companions. Also related to the perceived evidentiality of the experiences, 24.4% of respondents stated that they had received information that was previously unknown to them (often concerning circumstances of the deceased's passing.)"

Below is a quote from the abstract of a paper entitled "Alleged Encounters With the Dead: The Importance Of Violent Death In 337 New Cases" by Haraldsson: 

"Personal encounters with the dead are reported by 25% of Western Europeans and 30% of Americans. Three hundred thirty-seven Icelanders reporting such experiences were interviewed at length. Ninety percent of them reported sensory experiences (apparitions) of a deceased person; 69% were visual, 28% auditory, 13% tactile, and 4% olfactory. Fewer than half of the experiences occurred in twilight or darkness. In half of the cases the experiencer was actively engaged or working. Disproportionately prominent were apparitions of those who died violently and crisis apparitions observed close to the time of death of the person who was perceived, although in the majority of cases, the percipient did not know that the person had died."

There is a strong reason for suspecting that all of the survey numbers above underestimate the occurrence of such observations. The reason is that self-censorship by survey respondents probably reduces the reported occurrences very substantially. We must remember that authorities in our culture have a long history of shaming, abusing, misrepresenting, gaslighting and attempting to pathologize people who report experiences of the paranormal. For many decades and centuries such authorities (including professors, skeptics and clergy) have attempted to portray people reporting paranormal experiences as deluded, psychotic, liars, fakes, or fools. Consequently we should assume that there is a significant degree of self-censorship in which people who had paranormal experiences do not report them, for fear of "getting in trouble" or being embarrassed, shamed, slandered, criticized or gaslighted.  

3. Communication Via Mental Mediums

Following the beginning of the mysterious rap phenomena that began in 1848, there arose different types of persons calling themselves mediums.  There were mediums such as Daniel Dunglas Home, who were classified as physical mediums, because the mysterious effects reported around them were mainly physical effects such as musical instruments playing by themselves, and levitations of tables (or perhaps even a levitation of the medium himself). There were also mediums classified as mental mediums, who were involved with mysterious mental effects. A mental medium might claim to be able to contact the deceased by means of mental techniques long practiced by the medium, or by means of entering into a trance. Many of the mental mediums have used methods similar to methods that have been called "channeling" in recent decades. 

Some mental mediums held up very well to prolonged examination by scientists. The most successful mental medium was the American medium Leonora Piper. A long account of her case is given in my post here. Leonora Piper held up very well to many years of very close and careful examination by members of the Society for Psychical Research. The main person examining her case was a person (Richard Hodgson) who was very skeptical at first, but later became convinced that Piper was actually communicating with the deceased.  Innumerable times Leonora Piper seemed to display detailed knowledge of things that were known to her visitors, but should have been unknown to her, with the most impressive cases coming when Leonora did not even know the identity of her visitor.  Such knowledge often seemed to include knowing about obscure events or little-known persons known to her visitors, which she should have known nothing about.  This occurred around years such as 1897, where it was impossible to easily gather obscure information by techniques such as using the Internet. 

A British medium of the early twentieth century (Gladys Osborne Leonard) seemed to produce equally impressive results, results so impressive she was often called "the British Leonora Piper." The most impressive existing record of the results of Gladys Osborne Leonard is the 1916 book Raymond, or Life After Death by Sir Oliver Lodge, which can be read online for free here. The book is a meticulous account of interactions Lodge had with mediums after the death of his son Raymond. The book has transcripts of quite a few sessions Lodge had with mediums such as Leonard.  The results seem impressive, although very careful readership is required. 

In more recent times scientists such as Gary Schwartz PhD and Julie Beischel PhD have done controlled scientific studies of mediums in which they scored far better than non-mediums when trying to gather information about the deceased relatives of unidentified individuals. Julie Beischel seems to have some good experimental results, but unfortunately she is not very skillful at communicating such results in a way that the average person will find easy to understand, and she has a tendency to write results in a jargon-heavy professorial style that is hard for the non-scientist to penetrate.  

4. Apparitions of Those Who Recently Died

 A wraith is defined as "a ghost or ghostlike image of someone, especially one seen shortly before or after their death." In a large fraction of these cases, the person reporting the apparition did not even know that the person corresponding to the apparition was very sick or near death. I have cited many of those cases in the series of posts you can read below:

An Apparition Was Their Death Notice

25 Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

25 More Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

Yet Another 25 Who Were “Ghost-Told” of a Death

Scientific American's Very Lame "Ghost Explanations"

They Also Were "Ghost Told" of a Death

More Accounts of Veridical Apparitions

Even More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Serve as Announcements

Still More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Act as News Bulletins

They Too Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

They Seemed to Ghost-Learn of Someone's Death

 In an article in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research , on page 427, we have the interesting diagram below, one suggesting apparition sightings occur most frequently about the time of someone's death, but with quite a few sightings occurring well after someone dies:

5. Deathbed Apparitions

Some examples can be found here and here and here.  The first major reference to this phenomenon that I can find in the literature of parapsychology is the fascinating 1906 paper "Apparitions of Deceased Persons at Death-Beds" in pages 67-100 of the February 1906 Annals of Psychical Research, (Volume 3), which can be read here. The main work on this topic (one finding a strong effect) is the work "At The Hour of Death" by Osis and Haraldsson, which can be read here.  A survey of family members of deceased Japanese found that 21% reported deathbed visions. A study of 103 subjects in India reports this: "Thirty of these dying persons displayed behavior consistent with deathbed visions-interacting or speaking with deceased relatives, mostly their dead parents." A study of 102 families in the Republic of Moldava found that "37 cases demonstrated classic features of deathbed visions--reports of seeing dead relatives or friends communicating to the dying person."  We read the following on a page of the Psi Encylopedia:

"In 2017, Una MacConville carried out a study with Irish health care professionals. The carers reported that 45% of their patients spoke of visions of deceased relatives, often joyful experiences that bring a sense of peace and comfort."

 A 1949 book states this: 

"It is a commonplace truth, observed by many physicians and clergymen, that a dying person, when conscious near the moment of death, acts or speaks as if he saw standing near loved ones who have already died. Dr. Russell Conwell told Bruce Barton in the interview quoted earlier in another connection, that he had witnessed this phenomenon 'literally hundreds of times.' "

6. Apparitions of Those Who Died Long Ago 

Apparitions of the dead seem to occur most commonly close to the death of the person corresponding to the apparition. But it is not all that rare for someone to see an apparition of someone who died long ago. I discussed some cases of this type in these previous posts:

When Apparitions Are Seen of Those Who Died Long Ago (Part 1)

When Apparitions Are Seen of Those Who Died Long Ago (Part 2)

When Apparitions Are Seen of Those Who Died Long Ago (Part 3)

When Apparitions Are Seen of Those Who Died Long Ago (Part 4)

There is no credibility in attempts to explain the more dramatic of such accounts as hallucinations that occur for the sake of comfort. While there can occur a kind of "see what you want to see" effect called pareidolia in which people interpret vague random fluctuating data in comforting but biased ways, there is no robust evidence that people have complex hallucinations to comfort themselves. For example:

1. As shown on the TV show American Greed, there are very many people who have been swindled out of their life savings, losing decades of their savings. But none of these people ever had a “comforting hallucination” in which they saw something like a stack of cash on their dining room table to make themselves feel better.
2. We have many historical experiences of people who put their hearts and souls into a war, only to be bitterly disappointed when their country lost the war, and was occupied by a foreign power. There are no cases of any such people having a “comforting hallucination” in which they learned that it was a mistake, and their side really won the war.
3. There are many people who learn they have cancer, and begin to suffer from it. None of them have “comforting hallucinations” in which they see a doctor telling them their cancer has been cured.

7. Visions of the Deceased During Near-Death Experiences

It is very common during near-death experiences for people to report going to some strange mystical environment and encountering deceased loved ones. Often the report will be that a deceased person told the person having the near-death encounter that he or she must "go back" and continue with his or her earthly life.  The Greyson Scale listing features of near-death experiences includes "saw deceased or religious spirits" as one of the characteristics of the near-death experiences, and surveys find an occurrence of such encounters in reported near-death experiences ranging from about 25% to as high as about 40%, with the number varying quite a bit from survey to survey. 

8. Dream Appearances of the Deceased

Dream appearances of the deceased are extremely common. In some cases such appearances might occur because of telepathic communication between the deceased and the living. Since November 2020 I have been logging all of my dreams during the night and early morning, as soon as I could recall them.  The result is an extremely long post first published in early 2021 but updated almost daily since then: my post "I Keep Dreaming of Danger, Death and Life After Death."  I log every single case of a dream involving a deceased person, and also many dreams that do not involve such people.  The two people who have appeared most often in my dreams are my father and my mother, both of whom died before 2020.  Each has appeared more than 100 times in my dreams.  In the case of the dreams of my father there has been a recurrent theme that makes me suspect that something more than mere chance is involved. 

9. Inexplicable Physical Signs

People often report inexplicable or extremely improbable events that they think may be signs from some deceased person. Such events are often interpreted as some kind of vague indication from some deceased person of his continued existence after death.  The response of skeptics to such claims is very lame. A skeptic will typically evoke the claim that there is zero evidence that physical events on Earth can be caused by spiritual intelligences outside of Earth. But in the nineteenth century there seemed to be a very great abundance of evidence suggesting that physical events on Earth can be caused by spiritual intelligences from beyond this Earth.  I am in the process of summarizing such evidence in my long series of "Spookiest Years" posts on another blog. You can read the posts I have published so far in this series here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.  I myself have experienced quite a few seemingly inexplicable physical events that seemed to suggest (with varying levels of strength)  mysterious signs from beyond the grave.  You can read about some of them in my posts here, here, here, here and here. 

10. Sudden Hard-to-Explain Very Old Recollections of the Deceased 

Normally recollections appear through a process of association. You may be thinking about topic x, which may you lead you to recall related topic y, which may lead you to recall related topic z.  But sometimes a person may recall some very distant recollection of the deceased, in a way that seems so hard to explain that the person may wonder whether some ESP is occurring. 

I will give a very recent example. I awoke this week after having a dream of sitting on a sofa with an unknown woman, while using some magical-seeming newspaper that seemed to have a built-in video player. While pondering this dream, I suddenly "out of nowhere" had an unrelated memory of an incident that had occurred nearly sixty years earlier, an incident I had not recalled in many years. The incident involved me as a young boy pushing a shopping cart too fast and accidentally cracking a display case in a supermarket. Seeing what happened, my mother paid a store clerk $20 to cover the damage (then worth about $50), and we kept on shopping. She did not get angry or even scold me. It was a wonderful memory of my late mother at her best. But why would a memory so distant suddenly have appeared? There seem to have occurred nothing in my thoughts that could explain the recall of a memory so very distant. When such things occur, we may wonder whether some deceased relative is telepathically communicating with us.

11. Voice Manifestations

I have no direct experience with ever hearing any mysterious voice sounding like the voice of a deceased person. But it seems quite a few people of normal sound mind report such a thing. The famous astronomer Carl Sagan said this: “Probably a dozen times since their deaths I've heard my mother or father, in an ordinary, conversational tone of voice,  call my name.”  Did Sagan accept this as evidence of the paranormal? No, he created a ridiculous hypothesis to explain it away, the hypothesis that he was spontaneously re-experiencing a previous sensation. He said, “I still miss them so much that it doesn't seem strange to me that my brain occasionally will retrieve a kind of lucid recollection of their voices.” This is a good example of the seemingly boundless ability of professors of physical science to invent absurd excuses for not paying attention to important evidence they should be paying attention to.  

There are quite a few accounts of warning voices from a deceased relative.  In some, a person will report something like this:  while driving a car, the person heard the voice of a deceased relative urging that the person pull off the road or switch lanes. After doing that, the person reportedly found that  the quick action caused him or her to avert some doom that lay ahead on the road, such as a crashed truck. 

12. Paranormal Luminosities, Including Mysterious Orbs

In my post "Paranormal Luminosities" I cite quite a few cases of people reporting mysterious lights, often ones that seem to be connected with someone's death.  In a similar vein, there are numerous reports of people seeing mysterious orbs with the naked eye. You can read some of these reports here:

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 1 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 2 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 3 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 4 of 4)

And what about all of the photos of mysterious orbs, with thousands showing orbs with colors such as blue, pink, orange, yellow, purple and green, and more than 800 photos showing mysterious orbs with strange stripes? You can see such photos using the links in the previous sentence, and the link here (and continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right), or by using the link here (for those who prefer continuous finger swiping). Are such manifestations signs from the deceased? We may never know in this mortal life. 

An Orange Orb

 Photo date: December 27, 2023. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below a mysterious orange orb I photographed indoors. 

The Prince and the Mysterious Yellow Orb

On page 3 of the March 12, 1875 edition of a newspaper, we have an account by Prince Emile De Sayn-Wittgenstein, who seems to be the same person described on the autobiographical page here.  Emile says, "I had, about a year and a half ago, tried in vain to convert a young lady to the belief that, under special conditions, her soul might quit her body and act independently of it." Eventually the woman give Emile one of her gloves, which Emile thought might help facilitate some experiment in which the two of them would test an ability to make a psychic contact with each other even though they were far separated.  Emile says that for weeks he intensely concentrated while holding the glove, thinking of the woman far away.  He reports this:

"I afterwards ascertained that she had often dreamt of me very clearly, and that she even remembered having once seen me writing at my table. Her description of my dress and of the room I occupied answered exactly to the reality. She also confirmed several facts and episodes of her private life, the particulars of which I had obtained in the way described."

Strangely, Emile reports that during what seemed like psychic contact between the two people far separated, he would see what could be described as a mysterious orb: "Every time her spirit answered my call, I felt a pleasant sort of shiver running down my back, while a sort of dim circular light, about as big as a plate, and of a pale, yellowish hue, appeared moving, to and fro near the ceiling."

A yellow mysterious orb? I've photographed 182 of those, as you can see by using the link here, and continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right. 

They Saw Mysterious Orbs

A researcher named Simon Young has done a survey of people reporting sightings of fairies or anything looking like a fairy. He has produced a 353-long document you can read online at the link here. I am surprised that so many people have provided reports to his survey. Maybe I should revise my previous opinion that there only rarely occurs claims to have sighted something like a fairy.  The accounts were gathered from responses to an online survey form here.

It would be too much work to summarize the more interesting accounts, so I will limit myself to accounts in the survey in which people claimed to have seen orbs.  Some are below:

• Page 20: "They looked like brightly coloured orbs that changed size sometimes. They were always smaller than my hand and the colours varied e.g. blue, red, yellow, green etc."
• Page 22: "We [Mexican and Belgian nationals] saw golden yellow orbs in Tintagel."
• Page 54: "I saw bright green orbs hanging in the air in the bedroom." 
• Page 125: "The orbs swirled about as I sat in the middle of the mattress with sheets wrapped around my lower half,... I found myself in the immediate company of hundreds of floating orbs that were doing wonderful impressions of soap bubbles."
• Page 126: "Moving again the orb passed by my ear and I heard a soft whirring sound that solicited goose bumps to rise on top of my clammy skin. I smiled and giggled aloud with the realization that this was an intelligent, living being, and it was responding in kind to my thoughts."
• Page 128: "I was around eleven years old when a friend and myself saw an orb of light floating above the trees in the back woods where I grew up."
• Page 138: " ‘I saw it flying in a circle like loop on way [sic] and then another through the kitchen window. It was really windy outside after a rainstorm and it moved against the wind. It had an organic movement to it....I want to say if I’m being very objective it was an orb."
• Page 155: "I’ve seen orbs and UFO type things."
• Page 165: "‘Fell asleep, woke up to the sound of bells tinkling. Looked around my room to see a small blue orb floating around for one to two minutes then it faded out."
• Page 175: "It was orb-shaped and looked to be about like one foot in circumference, and its color was a really bright pink....It was like a bright pink orb almost as big as a basketball."
• Page 182 "I have however, now in the last three to five years, begun seeing and experiencing light orbs, light beings, and even capturing them on the security cameras inside my home."
• Page 187: "I also have seen little light orbs floating around at sunset/nighttime." 
• Page 193: "I saw a winged creature in a golden orb playing with my aunt’s cat." 
• Page 199: "In my peripheral vision, I saw this beautiful, adorable, pink orb. It looked like it was fluttering in place, as if it had large butterfly wings. I looked directly at it, and it disappeared. I quickly looked away and it popped back out of nowhere still with fluttering pink wings. I did not see any face or body; it did not let me look directly at it."
• Page 211: "I also saw light orbs twinkling close to the wall and on the ceiling."
• Page 215: "We were on our front lawn at night, and we saw a small orb of orange light moving around in the forest, leaving a trail. It then hovered in one spot, maybe two hundred feet from us, for hours..... Then, night four, I saw several of these orbs, now bluish white, appear from a tree, then they flew, lit up, about one-hundred-and-fifty feet, and stopped directly in front of my house... A closer one appeared to be about three- to four-inches tall, fluttering goldish wings within a bluish orb."
• Page 217: " I walked across the backyard and just had that feeling that something was there and when I turned around, just a few inches above the ground was an orb. It was golden and full of light but inside it you could see swirls of colors such as blues, pinks and purples."
• Page 226: "They were blue orbs. And then they disappeared."
• Page 252: "The children were surrounded by thousands upon thousands of little lights. My youngest daughter had an orb with a visible baby’s face at her feet."
• Page 270: "At the end of my bed and to the right there was an orb, but almost like a sparkle. I would say it was white and yellow."
• Page 276: "A skyblue light, orb-like but with indistinct, fading boundaries flew slowly from behind me into my field of vision, about a foot or two from my face."
• Page 298: "I looked at my closet door and I saw many colorful orbs moving over its surface. There were at least five of them, each one of a different color. I remember the colors green, yellow and pink (and maybe blue and white). " 
• Page 321: "In 2005, an orb of light about six inches in diameter floating about six inches above the floor in our hallway one afternoon. It floated beside me and disappeared before passing near my husband’s shin. We were stunned and I wish I said or greeted this white light ball which seemed to have brighter light planes within it. My husband saw it also, but he only saw it glowing and didn’t notice the planes of brighter or denser light moving within."
• Page 328: " Coming by her side we witnessed the formation of orb-shaped lights of warm colours (red, yellow and green) hovering above my street, quite above the highest building in my neighbourhood but below the clouds. Maybe a hundred metres or lower. It’s hard to tell how big they were from that distance, but probably more than one metre in orb radius...There were six orbs that slowly changed colours, flying in the sky in a manner different from drones, planes or birds. At they were gliding slowly forming a ring, then suddenly they broke the pattern into three pairs circling each other playfully, something like chasing one another....The orbs felt more like living entities than devices or machines, their way of moving and changing colour felt playful and deliberate, like dancing or playing a game."

Below are some posts I have published about people reporting they saw orbs with the naked eye:

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 1 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 2 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 3 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 4 of 4)

Telepathic Alert?

 In a previous post I discussed an interesting case of me seeming to get "out of nowhere" just after waking up a recollection of some song lyrics I have not heard or recalled in many years. Something similar happened  this morning. Very strangely, just after awaking this morning I recalled some lines of the song "Do You Hear What I Hear?" -- a song I have not heard or recalled in many years. Nothing I had thought about or dreamed about in the previous hours had any resemblance or connection to this recollection.  The lines I recalled were these:

Do you see what I see?

A star, a star, dancing in the night

With a tail as big as a kite

With a tail as big as a kite

The song refers to the Star of Bethlehem, which the Bible describes as leading the  Wise Men to the birthplace of Jesus.  But the lyrics I remembered sound more like a description of a shooting star, as they refer to "a tail as big as a kite."  Struck by this improbable recollection, I remembered there is a December meteor shower producing shooting stars. 

It turns out tonight (December 13) will be the peak of the Geminid meteor shower producing "shooting stars," which make long streaks in the sky caused by tiny particles burning up in the atmosphere. And the sky will be clear tonight where I live, creating an ideal opportunity for me to see shooting stars at about 9:30 tonight. I wonder whether some mysterious external mind capable of telepathic connection to my mind alerted me to this rare opportunity for enjoyment.  The only night I saw shooting stars in high numbers was a night in 1976 when I saw very many of them while I was with my late father and two late sisters. 

A Yellow Orb

 Photo date: December 10, 2023. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

Below we see a mysterious yellow orb I photographed indoors. 

Melody Mystery

This morning a very strange thing happened. I woke up and immediately there popped into my mind  (without any apparent cause) four verses of a song I heard long ago, but had not recalled or heard in a very long time:

Inch worm, inch worm

Measuring the marigolds

You and your arithmetic

You'll probably go far. 

What I find striking here is why I would have recalled such a thing just after waking up,  without any apparent reason. None of my dreams that night (which I logged) had anything to do with worms, marigolds,  flowers, measuring, inches or going far. I could not even remember the source of the song, which I had not heard or recalled in many years. I incorrectly thought it may have came from a Frank Sinatra movie. The song by Frank Loesser actually comes from the Danny Kaye movie "Hans Christian Anderson." The clip above plays the catchy tune. 

Danny Kaye was my late mother's favorite actor. The speculation that the very improbable recollection came from her is a pleasant one. But there may be an unpleasant aspect here. Maybe the reference to an "inch worm" is a warning of death being very near. The worm is a symbol of death. The phrase "inch worm" may suggest being an inch from death. 

But there's a hopeful aspect. The line "you'll probably go far" may symbolize some trip to some far away afterlife realm following death. 

Orbs Last Night

Photo date:  December 8, 2023. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below two mysterious orbs I photographed last night. 

A Bright Orb

 Photo date: December 6, 2023. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below a mysterious bright orb I photographed indoors.  One edge is purple, and another edge is orangish-green.

Ghost-Warned of the Ship That Vanished With 500?

The book Real Ghost Stories by W. T. Stead is a quite interesting book that can be read online for free using the link here. On pages 85-87 we have a very interesting story that is told about the ship City of Glasgow that mysteriously vanished:

"Taking him into a private room, I said, ' Angus, Captain Morrison leaves the day after to-morrow. You had better get his things packed at once. And, by the way, what a lucky fellow you are ! If you did so well on the City of Manchester, you will in a year or two make quite a fortune in the City of Glasgow.' To my astonishment Angus replied, ' I am not going in the City of Glasgow — at least, not on this voyage — and I wish you could persuade Captain Morrison — the best and kindest master ever man had — not to go either.' 'Not going? What in the world do you mean, Angus ? ' was my very natural exclamation of surprise. ' Well, sir,' said Angus (the reader will please understand that our talk was in Gaelic). ' Well, sir,' said Angus, 'You must not be angry with me if I tell you that on the last three nights my father, who has been dead nine years, as you know, has appeared to me and warned me not to go on this voyage, for that it will prove disastrous. Whether in dream or waking vision of the night, I cannot say; but I saw him, sir, as distinctly as I now see you ; clothed exactly as I remember him in life ; and he stood by my bedside, and with up lifted hand and warning finger, and with a most solemn and earnest expression of countenance, he said, "Angus, my beloved son, don't go on this voyage. It will not be a prosperous one." On three nights running has my father appeared to me in this form, and with the same words of warning; and although much against my will, I have made up my mind that in the face of such warning, thrice repeated, it would be wrong in me to go on this voyage.' "

We are told that the ship soon sailed without the reluctant Angus: "Early in March of that year, the City of Glasgow, with a valuable cargo and upwards of five hundred passengers on board, sailed under Morrison's command for Philadelphia ; and all that was good and prosperous was confidently predicted of the voyage of so fine a ship under charge of so capable a commander."  The ship never reached Philadelphia. It was never heard from again. No one ever learned what happened to the vanished ship. You can read about its loss in the Wikipedia.org article here. Ironically the first person to publish the above story (W. T. Stead) himself died in an Atlantic crossing, being a passenger on the Titanic. 

For some equally spooky stories involving ships lost at sea, read my account here of a medium seeming to foretell exactly how the steamship Pacific would be lost at sea, and my account here of some very spooky occurrences surrounding the loss of the ship Lady Elgin. 

The vanished ship City of Glasgow

On pate 225 the author laments the lack of study of dreams, saying this:

"A generation which finds itself repaid in the study— close, minute, and elaborate — of the habits of earthworms, and the genealogy of the marine ascidian, may some day discover that Dreamland lies vacant and unexplored. In all the voluminous literature of scientific psychology is there one authentic human document wherein there is due note and observation made of the dreams of a single student for a year, for a month, or for even a week ? "

I am happy to report that such a document does now exist. It is my post here, which I have been updating for years. It now logs three years of my dreams, and it has some very interesting philosophical relevance.  

A Striped Orb

 Photo date: November 30, 2023. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below a mysterious striped orb I photographed indoor. See here for a free online book showing 800 other mysterious orbs I have photographed. 

Orbs Passing Through Heavy Matter?

Charlton Templeman Speer claims to have witnessed a variety of paranormal phenomena at seances of William Stainton Moses, a 19th-century figure greatly admired for his scholarship and moral character. One thing he claims to have witnessed is something resembling teleportation. He states this:

"The passage of matter through matter was sometimes strikingly demonstrated by the bringing of various articles from other rooms, though the doors were closed and bolted. Photographs, picture-frames, books, and other objects were frequently so brought, both from  rooms on the same floor and from those above. How they came through the closed doors I cannot say, except by some process of de-materialisation, but come they certainly did, apparently none the worse for the process, whatever it might have been."

Besides also describing numerous inexplicable scents and mysterious music, Speer tells us that orbs were seen rising up from the ground and apparently passing through a heavy table.  We read this:

"These lights were of two different kinds— objective and subjective. The former usually resembled small illuminated globes, which shone brightly and steadily, often moved rapidly about the room, and were visible to all the sitters. A curious fact in connection with these lights always struck me, viz., that looking on to the top of the table one could see a light slowly ascending from the floor, and to all appearance passing out through the top of the table — the table itself apparently not affording any obstacle to one’s view of the light. It is a little difficult to explain my meaning exactly, but had the top of the table been composed of plain glass, the effect of the ascending light, as it appealed to one’s organs of vision, would have been pretty much the same as it was, seen through the solid mahogany. Even then, to make the parallel complete, it would be necessary to have a hole in the glass top of the table, through which the light could emerge. The subjective lights were described as being large masses of luminous vapour floating round the room and assuming a variety of shapes. Dr. Speer and myself, being of entirely unmediumistic temperaments, were only able to see the objective lights, but Mr. Stainton Moses, Mrs. Speer, and other occasional sitters frequently saw and described those which were merely subjective. Another curious point in relation to the objective lights was that, however brightly they might shine, they never, unlike an ordinary lamp, threw any radiance around them, or illuminated the smallest portion of the surrounding darkness — when it was dark — in the slightest degree."

Fleeting Form

 Photo date: November 30, 2023. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

I took this photograph midday, without using the camera's flash.

An Orb and Spooky Mist at Her Deathbed

On the 68th page of the document here, showing page 182 on the printed page, we have an account from the March 25, 1922 edition of the publication Light.  The account is pretty good from an evidence standpoint. It is an account of what was seen two months earlier. The author (Dorothy Monk) is named, and she tells us that there were eight witnesses of one of the reported anomalies (a spooky mist at a deathbed).  We read this account by the author of seeing her mother's death. 

"The sister who first saw it about this time also saw a large blue globe-like light resting on mother's head, but none of the rest of us could see it. She explained that the  inside appeared all moving and gradually it turned to deep purple and faded out. About seven o’clock that evening mother’s lips parted and from that time we gradually saw a thick white mist collect above her head and spread across the head of the bed. It came from the top of her head, but collected more thickly to the opposite side of the bed to which she was lying. It hung like a cloud of white steam, sometimes so thick we could scarcely see the bed rails, but continually it was varying although it moved so slowly as to be scarcely perceptible. I and my five sisters were still with her all saw it distinctly, also my brother and one brother-in-law. The blue lights continued about the room, also tiny flashes of yellow, like sparks, appeared sometimes. All this time mother’s lower jaw gradually fell a little. For some hours we saw little difference except that a halo of pale yellow light rays came round her head; there were about seven in number; they varied in length from twelve to twenty inches at different times. By midnight every-thing had cleared off, but she did not die until 7.17 on the morning of January 2nd."

First an Orb, Then a Talking Ghost?

 The long and very fascinating work Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World by former US congressman Robert Dale Owen (which can be read online for free here) is a classic of literature about the paranormal. The 1872 book The Debatable Land Between This World and the Next by the same author is a worthy successor volume of equal length.  In that book on page 468 Owen reports on what we saw at a seance on October 26, 1860. To prevent any trickery, Owen was careful to make sure all the doors to the room were locked, and also made sure that throughout the session all of the four persons present joined each other's hands in the center of the table where they sat. Under such conditions, Owen reported seeing this: 

"After a few minutes, there appeared a luminous body of an irregularly circular form, about four inches in diameter, floating between us and the door which was back of Mrs. Underhill. It was somewhat brighter than when it first appeared on the previous occasion ; that is, on the twenty-first of October."

On the next page, Owen reports that at this session there appeared an illuminated mysterious figure, a kind of grayish cloud that eventually stated "God bless you." On the next page after that, Owen said he saw an outline of a head and face.

Owen recalls seeing in 1867 a luminous female apparition:

"It was a female figure, of medium height, veiled and draped, from head to foot, in white. The drapery did not resemble, in material, anything I have ever seen worn. It gave me, as on a previous occasion, the exact feeling of the Scriptural expression, 'shining raiment.' Its brilliancy was a good deal like that of new-fallen snow, in the sunshine ; recalling the text which declares the garments of Christ, during his transfiguration, to have been ' exceeding white as snow ; ' or, again, it was not unlike the finest and freshest Parian marble with a bright light on it, only more brilliant. It had not at all the glitter of spangles or any shining ornament ; the tone being as uniform as that of a newly-sculptured statue. It stood upright, in a graceful attitude, motionless."

On the next page Owen says, "Then it slowly receded, still facing us, to the center of the opposite wall... gradually diminishing in brightness ; and finally it vanished before my eyes."  Owen later says, "Certain it is, that I beheld the gradual formation of the figure ; that I witnessed its movements ; that I received from its hand an actual flower ;  that I saw the figure disappear."

On page 484 we have this account, mentioning Estelle, Mr. Livermore's late wife:

"Mr. L. sealed the windows, sealed and locked the doors, and placed heavy furniture against them ; then searched the room thoroughly and extinguished the gas. Soon came the words : ' I am here in form.' Then a globular light appeared, with crackling sounds. After a time it became a head, veiled : then, but for a single instant only, Mr. L. recognized the features of Estelle. Then a figure was seen : all this being visible by phosphorescent or electrical lights in various parts of the room. During all this time Mr. L. held both of the medium's hands. Then the mode of producing raps was shown : an orange-shaped luminous ball, with blunt point attached, bounding up and down on the table, and the sound, of each rap coinciding with the approach of the ball to the tabletop."

Mr. Livermore reported that a few months later there occurred an equally astonishing appearance of his late wife Estelle:

"The form remained in sight fully half an hour and each movement was distinctly visible. Then came the message : ' Now see me rise. '  And immediately, in full brightness, the figure rose to the ceiling, remained there a few moments suspended ; then gently descending, disappeared.  Afterward she showed herself between us and a mirror. The reflection of the figure in the glass was distinctly visible, the light being so bright as to show the veins in a marble slab beneath.  Here a heavy shower of rain fell, and there was spelled out: ' The atmosphere has changed. I cannot remain in form : ' whereupon both light and figure finally disappeared."

Later Mr. Livermore reports this:

" At last a luminous globe which had remained stationary some six feet to my left floated in front, and came within two feet of me. It was violently agitated, crackling sounds were heard, and a figure became visible by its light. Then there was revealed the full head and face of Estelle, every feature and lineament in perfection, spiritualized in shadowy beauty, such as no imagination can conceive or pen describe. In her hair, above the left temple, was a single white rose ; the hair being apparently arranged with great care. The entire head and face faded and then became visible again, at least twenty times ; the perfection of recognition, in each case, being in proportion to the brilliancy of the light."

Orbs Seen After a Death

 At the interesting thread here at www.citi-data.com, a user starts the thread with this comment

"My ex boyfriend passed away a little over four years ago. Four months after, I saw a gold/red colored orb in my bedroom. Without going into details, I just want to ask how many of you have received 'signs' after your loved one passed away?"

There are some very interesting answers in the nine pages of the thread.  For example, one user says, "My sister's broken grandfather clock started to chime when my grandmother passed away."

A user tells this interesting account:

"After my grandma died, she visited me in a dream, in her younger, healthier self, took me to this beautiful place that I remember describing as heaven (bright, pearly, just a lot of light and light feelings) and played games with me. She introduced me to her older brother who died when he was 7 (he still looked like a kid my age at the time) and we all played and she just made me feel...safe. She always had that ability. Anyways I woke up and my aunt who slept with me that night to comfort me told me that in my sleep I jumped up, raised my hands in the air and yelled, 'OH WHAT A BEAUTIFUL PLACE THIS IS!!!!!!!!!' And then laid back down. So I told her the dream. I told her about the little boy and my family looked shocked because they couldn't understand how I knew her older brother."

On another page of the thread a user says this:

"I smelled peonies in the dead of winter in my bedroom when my dads mom passed. It was her favorite flower and she grew them."

On another page a user reports asking his father for a sign after death, specifically mentioning playing the piano. He says that a while later his own son reported the piano in the house playing by itself. 

On another page a user says that soon after his mother died, "I did see an orange orb in my windowless dark basement." He says, "I then called my sister who explained that on her way home, she saw a ball of light in her SUV."  He also reports "a light shining up from the floor to the ceiling" in a house he had lived in for 20 years without seeing such a thing. 

When I was visiting the first of these pages, I got a spooky effect. The web page flickered like mad, very noticeably, on and on and on.

One Looked Fast

 Photo date: November 9, 2023. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

We see below some mysterious orbs I photographed today. 

Spooky Flame

Today my wife left around 10:00 AM to visit a friend, leaving me as the only one in the house, which no one else was in between 10:00 AM and 4:45 PM. Today upon arriving home about 4:45 my wife complained that the gas was burning underneath a pan. I explained to her that I had not used the gas all day long, and had last been in the kitchen around 1:00 to make lunch, without using the gas, and without seeing it on. At first I thought of some "accidentally brushing by the gas knob around 1:00" explanation, but soon I heard something that ruled out such an explanation. My wife said she found a little water in the pan above the burning gas. If the gas had been on for more than 10 minutes, the water would have boiled away.  There was no sign of a burn on the pan's bottom. 

We are left with an anomaly I cannot explain. Somehow a gas knob on our stove seems to have mysteriously turned on only a few minutes before my wife arrived, while there was no one on the floor that has the kitchen. The gas burner knobs are all a type that cannot be turned on accidentally, as they require a simultaneous turning and pushing in to turn on the gas flame.  The incident reminds me of strange events I have reported here and here and here. In all of these events it is rather like some invisible presence (nothing to be afraid of) is trying to leave some sign of its existence. If such a thing seems inconceivable to you, you may think differently if you read some of the posts in my "Spookiest Years" series  (here, here, here and here and here). I am never alarmed when things like this happen, as I've seen many things like this happen over the years, such as (in a different residence) a light turning on by itself, a locked door opening by itself, a toilet flushing by itself a few times, and a coin rolling up from behind me (on its edge) when I was alone in my residence. 

In some religions, flames are symbols, and candles are burnt in churches to symbolize spiritual themes. There could be some symbolism in the strange event described above. 

Postscript: My wife's report about the small amount of water left in the pan being inexplicably heated is consistent with the idea that there was 1 fluid ounce of water or 1 cup of water left in the pan. The incident may have been an omen signifying "one left."  That may mean one year left until I die, or maybe one decade until I die, with the predicted death being either about November 7, 2024 or about November 7, 2033.  The physical design of the burner (with a central flame-giving circle surrounded by a flame-giving outer circle) may suggest the idea of a year, with the inner circle being like the sun and the outer circle being like the circle our planet makes revolving around the sun. 

A Striped Orb

 Photo date: November 5, 2023. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below a mysterious orb I photographed indoors. This is one of hundreds of photos I have taken showing striped orbs with chord-like stripes, as you can see by using the link here and continuing to press the Older Posts link at the bottom right. 

In 2023 Orbs Dominate UFO/UAP Shapes

 Below is a visual from a newly-released US government report on UFO and UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). It's interesting that round shapes (in other words, orbs) now outnumber disk shapes by 10 to 1. 

An Orange Orb

 Photo date: October 17, 2023. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below a mysterious orb I photographed indoors. 

Spookier Than Halloween?

In a long previous post I described extremely spooky behavior from a sound machine I use at night to make a soothing waterfall sound. I described a wide variety of spooky effects coming from the machine between December 2022 and April 2023, which included things as eerie as a diminuendo effect of the sound slowly fading out, the digital clock time freezing for minutes, and an effect of the numbers on the machine's digital clock slowly fading out and fading in several times in a row, an effect I documented with a video you can see in that post. 

Between April 16, 2023 and October 15, 2023 I used the sound machine every night, and it worked perfectly, without any irregular behavior. This only makes the previous behavior seem all the more spooky, seeming to show that there was no mechanical issue with the machine.  On October 16 the machine turned off suddenly two times at night, doing this for the first time in about six months. Last night the machine mysteriously turned off seven times at night, all at very different times.  There was no change in a digital clock a few meters away from the sound machine.

There were some interesting synchronicities involved.  Three times the machine (about a meter away from my bed) turned off within a few seconds after I woke up. In these times when I turned the machine back on I saw a time of 12:00 or 12:01 (the machine resets to 12:00 when it turns off).  Another time just after the sound machine turned off mysteriously, I went into the bathroom and saw a tiny green light turn off and turn back on mysteriously. Another time the sound machine mysteriously turned off while I was thinking of my deceased father. 

I have got almost equally spooky behavior from a small green light in my bathroom, which I have seen mysteriously turn off and on, on more than twenty days, as I document here. 

Postscript: The next day (October 18) the sound machine mysteriously turned off nine different times at various scattered intervals. In the remaining days of October the sound machine mysteriously turned off a total of more than 60 times, and I saw on different days an eerie effect of the machine's clock numbers slowly fading out to become dark before returning to full brightness a few seconds later. 

From Orb to Phantom Head?

 The 1874 book Startling Facts in Modern Spiritualism (which you can read online for free using the link here) is a very astonishing account of paranormal phenomena occurring around the medium Mrs. Mary J. Hollis. The author N. B. Wolfe MD gives very many reports of the inexplicable appearance of phantom faces appearing near Mrs. Hollis. Some of Wolfe's accounts are corroborated by testimony he quotes from other writers he brought to Mrs. Hollis, such as a newspaper writer named Plimpton assigned to report on the mysterious events. On page 361 he quotes an account by a Colonel Piatt:

"After receiving four or five messages, a luminous ball, very dim, appeared at the aperture, grew lighter, resolved itself into a head, with the features clearly defined, and, for a second, gazed at us from the opening. Mr. Plimpton told me that that was his sister Mary, dead some years, and was very striking in its resemblance."