Spooky Stop

Today I  witnessed a stove fan turning off by itself while I was cooking some spaghetti, standing a few feet from the stove, with no one else near it. I have seen this anomaly at least five times before, and my post here describes something exactly the same occurring on March 22, 2025, when I was also cooking spaghetti, and on October 6, 2025. This mysterious turning off of the stove fan also occurred on March 16, 2024, as described here, when I was also cooking spaghetti, and on October 25, 2025, as described here, when I was also cooking spaghetti, and on April 18, 2026, as recorded here, when I was also cooking spaghetti.  My wife (who uses the stove many times  more often than I do) has never reported such an effect, and I have never seen it happen when she was cooking. 

There are fancy digital programmable range hoods that allow someone to program a shut off after a specified interval. But the range hood I have seems to be a simpler affair offering no such possibility. Its only control buttons are the ones shown below.

An interesting speculation is that some of these hard-to-explain events are examples of after-death communication from my late father. In five of the last six cases I have recorded of the stove fan mysteriously switching off,  we have a mysterious turning off of a green light on a panel while I was cooking pasta (spaghetti being a type of pasta).  Of course, those could all just be phonics coincidences. 

(The sense of the paragraph above may be lost to those reading a non-English translation of this page. In English the word "pa" means "father," and the words "panel" and "pasta"  all begin with the same syllable, which by itself means "father." But in other languages that may be different.)

Opening the links above, I find that one of those has my account of me having "out-of-nowhere" thoughts about two people I had not thought of in many years, with me then soon learning that such persons had died hours before I had such thoughts. 

Freaky Fan

 Below we see a cool air fan me and my wife have used for years in a home with regular air conditioners. A fan like this is a great alternative to using an air conditioner. You get a flow of air that is cooler than the air coming from a regular box fan. 

About an hour ago I saw behavior from this device I have never seen before. The untouched fan repeatedly turned on and off, with the cycle continuing for quite a few seconds, there being quite a few different turn-ons and turn-offs. Manually turning the fan's power off and then back on restored the unit to its regular behavior. 

This is only the latest of many cases I have recorded of lights or electrical devices turning on or off mysteriously.  You can examine a series of 39 posts documenting such events by clicking here, and continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom. 

One of the best documented events in this series was the one here, when I got the video below showing my untouched camera taking 300 flash photos by itself. 

Haunted Holiday?

 Last night I was alone in the house where I live, its other normal residents all being away. On Friday night while cooking pasta I decided to try a little photographic test, to see whether I could capture photographically a type of spooky event I have seen four previous times (as recorded in posts such as here and here): a stove fan   mysteriously turning off while I cooked pasta. I simply made a video of the stove while I was cooking pasta. 

There was no dramatic mysteriously turning off of the fan as I have previously seen.  There was, however, a strange flicker in the light above the stove. This being a day in which power consumption was very high in the city where I live (because of a heat wave), I figured that there is no point publishing the video, as people would say it was just a power fluctuation caused by too many people using their air conditioners on that day. But while the test was mostly a bust, a very strange anomaly would soon unfold. 

That evening (Friday, July 3) I put out the trash and put out bags of recyclables, around 8:00 PM. At about 10 PM I suddenly thought to myself: maybe they won't even pick up such things tomorrow, because tomorrow is a holiday (July 4). I looked up online whether there was an interruption in the normal Saturday morning pickup. I found out there was, and that there would be no pickup of such items. I then went and retrieved from outside both the trash can I had put out in the back of the house, and the recyclables I had put out in the front of the house. Outside it was fully dark at this time. 

After having a nice sleep, I awoke and went upstairs. Alone in the house, I was very surprised to see that the overhead lights were on in the living room on the second floor (lights causing the entire floor to be illuminated).  I always make sure there are no lights on when leaving that floor, when I am alone in the house. As no one else was in the house, the event is baffling. 

To naturally explain this, you would have to imagine three different things:

(1) First, I would have had to have been so clumsy as to leave on lights when exiting a floor which I would always have left dark upon exiting the floor while alone in the house.  

(2) Then you would have to imagine me not noticing (when I reached the ground floor, where I sleep) that the lights were on in the floor above (even though the overhead lights strongly illuminate the whole second floor, in a way that is clearly visible from the hall of the first floor). 

(3) Then also you would have to imagine me not noticing (when I retrieved the garbage from the back of the house around 10:00 PM) that the lights were on in the second floor. The illumination from that floor would have been clearly visible when I returned from the back entrance, and entered the hall of the first floor, after I closed the furnace room door. As the second floor has windows on both its front and back,  I would also have noticed the second floor lights on while in the back of the house, retrieving the trash can.  

The combined likelihood of all three of these events seems negligible. So while I have a halfway-credible explanation for Friday's flickering of the lights, I would seem to have no credible natural explanation for finding on July 4 the second floor's overhead lights being on. 

As evidence of some mysterious invisible force, this incident is not as good as what I observed last Valentine's Day, when I very clearly saw (right in front of me) lights on the second floor mysteriously turning off and then quickly turning back on, when I was alone in the house. 

Postscript: There followed the next day (June 5)  a spooky event that I will not describe because of other blogging priorities. I will merely say that it had a strong "Other Side" motif to it. 

As If Some Invisible Finger Pressed the Button

 Below we see the control panel of my sturdy reliable General Electric dryer. When you press the circular button on the top left, the arrow button below starts blinking. Pressing that arrow button will start the dryer, causing it to run the number of minutes shown on the top right. 

Once the dryer is finished drying some clothes, the lights shown above all turn off, and the top of the dryer looks like this (dark, with nothing lit up):

Less than two hours ago I finished drying my clothes. I checked the dryer to see it was finished. The dryer looked like the photo directly above -- nothing was lit up, and the control panel was all dark. I opened the dryer to take out my clothes. While removing the clothes from the dryer, I noticed something very strange. The dryer's control panel was now lit up, looking like the top photo above. The only way that can happen is if someone were to press the circular power button you see at the top left of the first photo. But I had not touched the power button. 

Speculating about how this could have happened to a dryer while I was right in front of it the whole time, I thought that maybe one of the clothes I had removed had brushed against the power button, accidentally turning it on. I tested that hypothesis, by taking a clothes item, and repeatedly brushing it over the power button. This did not cause the power button to turn on. Evidently the power button requires a firm press, and cannot be turned on by some clothes item merely brushing across it. 

The event was as if some invisible finger had pressed the circular power button while I stood in front of the dryer. I can speculate about a symbolic meaning of this anomaly. When the dryer looks as it does in the top photo, there is a 46 showing, which is a "time remaining" indicator. Maybe the inexplicable event was meant to symbolize the idea of "46 remaining." That could mean 46 days left in my life, or 46 days until some other big event. 

I recorded on paper the main facts of the event above immediately after they happened, and my account above matches the hand-written account. 

Postscript: There was  similar weirdness two days later. While my TV was on showing a particular channel, my PlayStation machine mysteriously turned on, as I sat two meters away from the machine and its controller, not touching any TV remote. 

Spooky Trifecta

 Tonight I was alone in the house where I normally enjoy the splendid company of my wife and one or more of my daughters. As I ate I enjoyed watching a youtube.com video entitled Twilight Zone (1959): 15 Weird Facts You Didn't Know. Before, during and after my watching of the video about the weird, spooky world of TV's Twilight Zone, I saw some weird, spooky things. Specifically:

(1) Upon walking up to the kitchen, I was surprised to see a light was on on the floor above the kitchen. No such light had been on when I had lunch using that kitchen, and no one else had entered the house since that time. 

(2) While I was cooking some spaghetti, the exhaust fan above the stove (and its green indicator light) mysteriously turned off. 

(3) Later in the evening a protective hat/helmet that was hanging very securely on a hook rack was mysteriously dislodged, with the hat/helmet crashing to the ground with a loud noise (while there was no change in the hook rack that had held the hat/helmet). No one was in the room where this occurred, and no one had been in it for quite a few minutes. I heard the sound of the hat/helmet crashing to the ground as I sat on a couch several meters away in the adjacent room. The hat/helmet had been hung on two hooks of the hook rack several hours earlier, and had not been touched for hours. 

All of these types of events I have seen before. As discussed here, I have seen three times before (in 2025 and 2024) the fan above the stove mysteriously turn off, always when I was cooking spaghetti. The hat/helmet has mysteriously crashed to the ground one previous time. I have seen many cases of lights mysteriously turning on or off, as you can read about in the series of 35+ posts here. 

Below we see what the hat/helmet looked like when it was on the hook rack that held it. 

And below we see what the hook rack looked like after the black hat/helmet had fallen to the ground. 

You can see from this side view how far out these hooks protrude, making a "just naturally fell off the hooks" explanation seemingly untenable. No breeze would have ever caused a heavy plastic hat/helmet to fall off hooks protruding out this far. 

I cannot imagine any natural explanation of what would have caused such a fall. No one was in the room that had the hook rack shown above. The room's door was closed, and its windows also closed. 

All I can do is chuckle, and say, "It's a Twilight Zone kind of evening."

I can think of one optimistic interpretation here. The mysteriously fallen hat/helmet symbolized protection. It's a hat/helmet like baseball first-base coaches wear to protect themselves from foul balls. I bought the hat a few months ago to protect my head from injury if I ever slip and fall to the ground while walking outside, as people my age sometimes do. So maybe an inexplicable mysterious event involving a symbol of protection is a supernatural sign that I have some degree of protection from a mysterious power, conceivably  some power rather like a guardian angel. 

Postscript: The event of a light above me seeming to have mysteriously turned on was repeated the next Tuesday. I left for a not very long walk in full daylight, locking the front door that is underneath a bright light inhabitants turn on only at night (using an indoor hallway switch). When I returned I was surprised to see that light was on. No one else was in the house. The light is sufficiently bright that failing to notice it being on when you lock the door is all-but-impossible, even during daytime. 

Was That My Valentine's Day "Kiss"?

 Today I was eating pasta alone in the house where I live, with the lights shown below on. At 8:00 PM the lights mysteriously turned off, and then turned back on a second or two later.  This event occurring on Valentine's Day may be no coincidence. Valentine's Day is a day associated with gestures of love. Maybe the event was some gesture of love from some mysterious spirit power. 

Whatever it was, it seemed to involve the whole house. Outside of the kitchen I have one of those old-fashioned alarm clocks, and the clock lost its set time (and started blinking) at 8:00 PM. But a check of Con Edison's power outage map shows no reports of power outages in my neighborhood. 

Anomaly Synchronization?

 This morning I turned on Netflix and selected a movie I had started to watch last night. I went to make a cup of coffee as the movie played. Suddenly I noticed my Playstation 4 device (just below the TV)  had mysteriously turned on. At the same instant I noticed a rubber band on the floor in front of the Playstation. I had noticed no such thing when turning on the TV shortly beforehand. I always pick up out-of-place objects such as rubber bands and coins from the floor of my living quarters, as soon as I notice them. 

Both types of anomalies are ones I have seen many times before. I often get an effect of the Playstation mysteriously turning on. And I have more than 25 times noticed rubber bands on the floor without being able to explain their appearance there. 

Spooky Start

 This afternoon I made my mid-afternoon cup of coffee as I normally do, using an electrically powered kettle, shown below. After putting a spoon full of coffee in the cup, I waited for the water to boil, and then poured in the water, turning off the kettle. After putting a little ice cream at the top of the cup, I went about 3 meters from the kettle, to sit on my couch. 

About five minutes later, when I was halfway finished drinking the coffee while watching TV, I heard the bubbling of water in the kettle. The kettle's blue light was on, and it was heating a little water left in the kettle.  The kettle had somehow turned on by itself, five minutes or so after I had last touched it. Turning on the kettle requires a firm press of a black switch. No one else was in the room. This brand automatically turns off when the water reaches a full boil; and I know there was only a small amount of water in it when I poured boiling water from it into my cup. So there is no chance that I simply failed to turn off the kettle at about the time I poured from it. 

This is only the latest of 30+ incidents I have recorded of lights or devices turning on or off mysteriously. You can read about many similar cases at the link here. 

Spooky Symbolism?

 In my bathroom is a GFCI electrical outlet that has a small green light that stays on continually. Since 2022 I have more than 55 times seen the light mysteriously turn off and then immediately turn back on when I was in the bathroom at night. In my post here I document all the dates in which this occurred. I've been updating the post each time such an event occurred. Over those years I have seen only a few times in which this green light would turn off during the day. 

Last night there was some rather interesting synchronicity involving such an event. Strangely feeling my ankles itching, I got a tube of hydrocortisone, which is the best stuff for relieving itching. After applying some to my ankles, I returned the tube to its original position in the bathroom. At the very second I placed the tube back to its original location, the green light on the GFCI outlet mysteriously turned off and immediately turned back on. 

I can speculate about metaphysical symbolism in this timing. According to the interesting theory of the nonearthly preexistence of the soul, discussed in my posts here and here, all of our souls originated elsewhere, in some heavenly realm outside of this planet; and to such a place we will one day return. So timing of a mysterious light event so that it happened at the exact second something was returned to its original location may symbolize the soul returning after death to its original location. The theory I refer to is suggested by near-death experiences in which people often report a strong sense of "returning home" while seeming to be transported to some mystical or otherworldly locale. 

Phantom Foot?

 I have in my bathroom one of those little waste baskets with a top lid and a little foot pedal at the bottom which you can press to lift the lid. It  is very convenient, because I can dispose of paper by just pressing the little pedal with my foot. That causes the lid to rise, and as soon as I take my foot off the pedal, the lid drops, making a little sound as it finishes dropping.

A few minutes ago I used my foot to open the lid of the waste basket, and dropped a piece of paper in it. I then walked a few feet away, facing in the opposite direction, to use the toilet.  Suddenly I heard a little noise from the direction of the waste basket. It was just exactly the sound that would have been made if someone had used his foot on the pedal to open the lid of the waste basket, and then taken his foot away. But there was no one else in the bathroom, and I was facing in the opposite direction, a few feet away. 

This anomaly I can never recall witnessing in the years I have lived at my current location; and the waste  basket has been in the bathroom the entire time. 

Postscript: The next morning (October 26) I was very surprised to see the sight we see below, which I did not arrange. It is a sheet of paper I had placed on my coffee table late on the previous night, having written a line on it.  Now the sheet was "standing up" on the floor, with only the bottom of the sheet touching the floor. What are the odds against that happening accidentally? Maybe the white sheet is some kind of ghost symbolism. Around Halloween ghosts are often depicted using white sheets of cotton. 

Post-postscript: On the same day I saw the anomaly shown above, I witnessed a stove fan turning off by itself while I was cooking some spaghetti, standing in front of the stove. I have seen this anomaly a few times before, and my post here describes something exactly the same occurring on March 22, 2025, when I was also cooking spaghetti. This mysterious turning off of the stove fan also occurred on March 16, 2024, as described here, when I was also cooking spaghetti.  My wife (who uses the stove much  more often than I do) was about five meters away. I asked whether she had ever seen the stove fan turn off by itself after she had turned it on. She said no, she had not. I cook grilled cheese sandwiches and salmon burgers just as often or more as I cook spaghetti. 

There are fancy digital programmable range hoods that allow someone to program a shut off after a specified interval. But the range hood I have seems to be a simpler affair offering no such possibility. Its only control buttons are the ones shown below.

An interesting speculation is that some of these hard-to-explain events are examples of after-death communication from my late father. In all of the last three cases I have recorded of the stove fan mysteriously switching off, while also recording what I was cooking, we have a turning off of a green light on a panel while I was cooking pasta (spaghetti being a type of pasta). And the spooky note found "standing up" involved paper.  Of course, those could all just be phonics coincidences. 

(The sense of the paragraph above may be lost to those reading a non-English translation of this page. In English the word "pa" means "father," and the words "panel," "pasta" and "paper" all begin with the same syllable, which by itself means "father." But in other languages that may be different.)

Strange Saturday

 When I woke up this morning I picked up my smartphone, and was surprised by what I saw. There was displayed a message I had received months ago, some junk marketing message. Why, I asked, would that old message be displayed on the screen of my smartphone? Then I realized there was a connection between the message and the name of a deceased relative.  Was this just coincidence, I wondered? Or could it be that the deceased have some way to manipulate smartphones in a way that drops hints about their continued existence? I will "keep an eye open" for such an anomaly, but I cannot claim yet to have much in the way of evidence for it. 

Then there was the "ghost cat" that made a brief translucent appearance on my monitor. 

I had a dream this morning of one cat (either a living cat or a ghost cat) looking down at the body of a dead cat. I used Google's ImageFX to try and recreate what I saw in the dream. The resulting AI-generated image showed a cat with open eyes floating above a lying cat with closed eyes. The dream image rather hinted at the possibility that the soul of a cat may survive the death of a cat.  I posted the image on Facebook, saying that it was an AI representation of what I had dreamed. (I would post the image here, but a rule I have always followed is to never, ever publish AI work or art work on this site, with the exception of diagrams that are obviously diagrams.)  

My image was not quite what I wanted, because the "ghost cat" in my image did not look transparent. A few hours after publishing the AI representation of my dream on Facebook, I saw something weird on my screen. Somehow my screen was blending some post I was writing on a different topic, and the AI art of the floating ghost cat. But now somehow the "ghost cat" was translucent, which it was not before. I could see through the "ghost cat" to see text I was writing underneath it. Somehow, by some process I cannot explain, the intended image of a ghost cat had become translucent, as ghosts are often reported to be. I tried to reproduce the effect, but was absolutely unable to. 

Was this somehow some paranormal sign meant to suggest: yes, the soul of a cat really does survive its death? All I know is that I can't explain the translucency I saw. 

Postscript: As soon as I finished the post above, I walked outdoors to take a walk. Immediately (while still at the doorstep) I saw a large black-and-orange Monarch butterfly fly by me, no more than an arm's length away. This is the only time in the three and a half years I have lived at this location that I have seen such a Monarch butterfly at this location. I noted well the synchronicity between this symbol of life after death (the Monarch butterfly) and me just finishing a post mentioning life after death. Monarch butterflies are a symbol of life after death because caterpillars undergo a death-like transition before becoming butterflies that soar up into the sky.  Below is a quote from an earlier 2017 post of mine:

"A few days ago my wife's father died. This morning I had a dream that seemed to fuse together the symbol of the rainbow and the symbol of the butterfly. In my dream I saw a big butterfly in my apartment, one with a rainbow-like set of colors (I can never recall noticing colors so clearly in a dream). In my dream I simply opened the window of my apartment, and the butterfly flew out. I then awoke. It's the only dream I've ever had of a butterfly.

The symbolism of the dream seems striking: the rainbow theme, the butterfly theme, and the 'escaping from the prison' theme of the butterfly flying out of the apartment window. A metaphor for the soul escaping the prison of the body?"

To read about very, very many dreams I have had that seemed to symbolize life after death, and very many dreams I have had about the deceased, read my long post here. 

Also, upon returning from the walk I took just after writing the top part of this post, I noticed a small feather in the middle of the floor, in a very noticeable position in the center of a living room.  I cannot account for how the feather  appeared there, and there was no one else in the home during my walk. Some consider feathers as a life-after-death symbol, as angels are often depicted with feathers. About 2 hours before I noticed the feather, I took pictures of the area that the feather was found in; and the pictures showed no such feather.  The feather was found about 4 meters from a front door on a day not windy, leaving only the slimmest chance that its appearance where I saw it could have been the result of a gust of wind when I opened the door. I noticed no wind on my walk. 

Post-postscript: "Strange Saturday" turned into "Spooky Sunday." This weekend I am alone in a house until my wife returns mid-week. Last night in the middle of the night I was surprised to see an internet router device was lit up, one that I always turn off and make lightless before going to bed. After awaking in the morning I then walked up to the second floor of the house, and found the ceiling lights of the main living room were on, lights sufficient to light up the whole large room. I had (to the best of my remembrance) turned off the lights before leaving that room last night, at a time it was dark outside.  The physical arrangement of the stairs and room is such that accidentally leaving on the overhead lights at night is extremely improbable.  

Anomalous August

 A few days ago I observed something very strange. The back window of where I sleep has heavy curtains, which I keep closed all day long, there being no view outside, except the view of an empty lot.  When I went to bed the whole window was blocked by the curtains.  But in the middle of the night I saw that the curtains were open 2 or 3 inches, in the middle. I cannot explain how this happened. There may be some "let the light in"  symbolism involved.

Today I was busily at work on a blog post when I heard a very distinctive "click" sound coming from the same bedroom or its bathroom. I thought to myself "I should investigate that" but continued my work. About an hour later I went into the bathroom and tried to turn on the light. I found that the circuit breaker switch had been turned off in the bathroom. No one had been in the bathroom during the past 90 minutes.  When the bathroom is in the state it was in, steam-free and with no electrical cords plugged in, the circuit breaker switch can be turned off only by pressing the button next to the green light shown below, which makes a "click" sound just like the one I heard. It was just as if some invisible force or invisible presence had pressed the button. 

This is only one of very many cases I have recorded of lights or devices turning on or off mysteriously.  Click here to read about all such cases (pressing Older Posts when you come to the bottom of the page). 

Freaky Fall

 Below we see a fan I was using today. There seemed to be no possibility of it toppling, as it was supported by an extremely heavy base with the weight of marble, and also because I had used an extremely thick, strong and wide tape called Gorilla Tape (wider and thicker than duct tape) to secure the fan on both sides, affixing it to its base, making sure the heavy tape went several inches up the fan on both sides (6 inches on the right side), and about four inches down the base on both sides. 

I had run the fan for more than a half an hour, when I started to read some paper discussing the percentage of widows or widowers who report something like "contact with the dead" after the death of their spouse, which can take different forms such as an apparition sighting, the hearing of a voice, or a feeling of a sense of presence.  A few minutes later as I sat more than a meter away both units shown above mysteriously crashed to the ground, falling backward. Was there any causal connection between this mysterious event and what I was reading a few minutes earlier?  We cannot tell. 

Postscript: Today I went to get a thumb drive I keep in a suit pocket, to back up some files. In one of my suit pockets I found a "ghost detector" palm-sized unit I had bought years ago (basically a detector of magnetism at the milligauss level).  The detector was turned on, and its red light was flashing. The main oddity was that the device was turned on. It's a device I always leave off, to avoid draining its battery. This is one of countless cases I have seen in which lights or electrical devices seem to mysteriously turn on, as if some invisible hand was at work. In the past two days there were two spooky cases of misplaced objects, involving things (my wife's house keys and a remote control device I don't use) surprisingly found on floors where they do not belong. 

One Device Mysteriously Turned Off About the Time Another Device Mysteriously Turned On

 This morning I turned on a fan in a bedroom to dry a little item that had got wet. I checked at about noon to see whether the item had finished drying. It had not, so I left the fan running. Checking again at about 1 PM, less than an hour ago, I was startled by what I found. The fan was now off, and a sound machine about a foot away, on the ground, was on.  I run that sound machine at night, but always turn it off in the morning, as soon as I rise from sleeping.  The sound machine was off when I had checked the fan around noon. There was no one else in my home today. 

We seem to have here a case of one device (the fan) mysteriously turning off about the same time another device mysteriously turned on.  It wasn't that the fan had "died," because I was able to turn it back on. 

Early today I had observed about the 51st case of a green light in my bathroom mysteriously turning off and then turning back on about a second or two later, a phenomenon I describe in my post here. 

You might speculate about metaphysical symbolism here. The device mysteriously turning off might symbolize the end of an earthly life. The device mysteriously turning on about the same time might symbolize the beginning of an afterlife. 

Mystifying Morning

A few minutes ago I finished eating breakfast, and then noticed something very strange on the floor, a few inches in front of my feet, which I had not noticed while eating breakfast. It was a green pill, a type of medicine I take twice a day. There are two very hard-to-explain aspects of what I saw:

(1) The pill is a type of prescription medicine that I am extremely careful about using (I even record on a wall calendar every time I take the pill).  I always take only one pill out of the pill bottle I keep in the bathroom, and immediately swallow the pill, recording that act by making a mark on the calendar. I never leave a pill of this type lying around on a table or a couch. So for me to see one of those pills a few inches in front of my feet (on the floor) is totally unexpected, and very, very hard-to-explain. I had not yet taken the pill this morning. 

(2) I had breakfast alone on a couch, holding only a tablet device and a cereal bowl, without anything else to block my view, with a coffee table about two feet away from my knees. During the whole time I ate breakfast I should have seen the bright green pill if it had been where I found it, in a spot on the floor in front of my feet, where it was very plainly visible from the spot I had sat,  the pill being about 18 inches away, right in front of me. But I only noticed the pill after finishing breakfast. The floor in the room where I ate is hardwood, and a green pill on such a floor is very easy to see. 

It was rather as if at about the moment I finished breakfast the pill had been teleported to the location where I found it. 

Maybe the timing at the end of breakfast had some symbolic meaning. In English "breakfast" sounds like "break fast," so a symbolic warning about some part of the body breaking fast (i.e. malfunctioning soon) might occur exactly at the end or beginning of breakfast. But I admit such thoughts are highly speculative. 

Below we see what I saw when I noticed the pill. The top part of the photo is the bottom of my coffee table. 

Postscript (April 21):  About an hour ago (in the mid-afternoon) I went out for a walk, and after leaving the front yard of where I live, I looked back at the house where I live. I noticed the light above the front door was on. I had just locked that door, and do not remember turning the light on or seeing the light on (either when I left for my walk or when I got a package from the front door earlier that day). The light (shown below) is a strong light you cannot help notice when locking the door. Also the front gate was ajar. I always close it when leaving, to discourage dogs from entering. The house was empty, and no one else with a key was in the city, two of them being on a trip that will end tonight.  I've noticed a similar effect with the front door light several previous times.  The light above the door can only be turned on from the inside of the house, and the light is not one of those lights connected to a motion detector. 

You might suspect someone reporting things so strange as being a user of alcohol or drugs. But I'm a lifelong teetotaler non-drinker who has never used recreational or illegal drugs. I've never even tried any form of marijuana. 

There was one other spooky thing this afternoon. I went out to buy food, stopping on the way to photograph a particular set of tulips I saw on the street. As always when going to the food store I went to, I took a discount card specific to that store. When it came time to buy my food, I looked for my card, and it was missing. Upon returning back home I remembered how I had photographed the tulips, and I thought to myself: maybe my discount card had fallen out to the ground when I took out my cell phone to photograph the tulips. I walked out all the way back to the tulips, blocks away, to check this hypothesis. There was no discount card to be found where I had photographed the tulips. But very strangely I did find the plastic discount card lying on the other side of the street (a wide avenue). There was no strong wind that could explain such a thing, the wind being only about 8 miles per hour. 

It is possible to interpret each of these spooky events as having symbolic meaning. I have already mentioned the possible symbolism of something spooky at the exact end of breakfast. A light above me turning on mysteriously may symbolize some spiritual illumination that lies ahead. The open gate may symbolize the opening of a previously closed pathway. But what about the very strange event involving the discount card? Involving strangely finding the card on the other side of the street, this might be some symbolism suggesting the Other Side of an afterlife.  A previous spooky event seemed to have Other Side symbolism. 

Below are the tulips I photographed:

Post-postscript: There were several additional events involving the unexpected sighting of rubber bands, occurring on several days. Particularly striking was what happened on May 8, 2025. At about 3:40 PM I noticed that there were two blue rubber bands on the floor, a few inches to the left of my coffee table. I was alone in the house at the time, and had been working the past five hours on a sofa about a meter away from where I saw the rubber bands.  I have no recollection of how the rubber bands got to that spot, where I should have noticed them immediately from the position where I was sitting. 

Post-post-postscript: The event about the light above the front door seeming to mysteriously turn on by itself occurred again on May 16, 2025. I checked that the light was off when I left for a walk, locking the front door. When I came back to the house, the light in front of the house was on. There was no one inside the house but me throughout this day.  The light can only be turned on from inside the house. 

The event seemed to occur again on June 12, 2025. Returning to an empty house after a mid-afternoon afternoon walk, I again found the light above the front door on. This occurred about an hour after another unexpected find of a rubber band on the floor in front of the TV, at a spot where it should have been clearly visible for hours previously, but I did not observe it, although sitting about 4 feet away for more than four hours.  Something similar happened a few days earlier, with the rubber band found in the exact same spot on the floor, but noticed when I first entered the room in the morning. 

It is easy to interpret anomalies involving light as having a symbolic significance, and a rubber band might also have symbolic significance, with the band's stretch capability perhaps symbolizing some mind stretching that may occur in the future. 

Post-post-post-postscript: On June 23, 2025 there were three striking additional examples of the "rubber band phenomenon" mentioned above. They all occurred in the same spot, a spot inches below where I was sitting and working. In each of the three cases I was surprised to see a rubber band within about 12 inches of where my feet were resting. The three cases of this happening occurred at different times of the day. I was not doing anything with rubber bands that might explain such appearances. 

Another Thought of Someone Shortly Before Learning of Their Death

 Last night I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep when I very oddly thought of two people who have been out of the news for 35 years: Michael Dukakis and his wife Kitty. Michael Dukakis was the 1988 Democratic nominee for US president. Both Michael Dukakis and his wife have been out of the news for about 35 years, so it was odd that I should be thinking of them. Today I learned that Kitty Dukakis died last night. Prior to today I had not read anything about either of the two for years. 

A similar event is described in my post here, entitled "A Thought of Someone Just Before Hearing of His Death." While lying in bed on a day last August, I oddly thought of Phil Donahue, a talk show host I had not  heard any mention of in years. After arising from bed, I learned that morning that Phil Donahue had died the previous night. 

It has long been suspected by parapsychologists that ESP can occur more strongly when someone is in an altered state of consciousness different from regular alert consciousness.  There is a huge body of written evidence for clairvoyance in subjects under hypnosis. You can read about some of that evidence in my series of 14 posts here, continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom.  For example, the post here describes evidence for hypnotic clairvoyance gathered by a chemistry professor at Scotland's leading university.  Besides such evidence (which mainly comes from the 19th century), there is a very strong body of very modern experimental evidence for ESP occurring during the sensory deprivation  produced under the Ganzfeld protocol. Read the post here for some details. Here is a quote from the scientific paper here:

"From 1974 to 2018, the combined ganzfeld database contained 117 studies. Of those, studies using targets sets with 4 possible targets included 3,885 test sessions, resulting in 1,188 hits, corresponding to a 30.6% hit rate. With chance at 25%, this excess hit rate is 8.1 sigma above chance expectation (p = 5.6 × 10^-16). Analysis of these studies showed that similar effect sizes were reported by independent labs, that the results were not affected by variations in experimental quality, and that selective reporting biases could not explain away the results. The Bayes Factors (BF) associated with the last 108 more recently published ganzfeld telepathy studies was 18.8 million in favor of H1 (i.e., evidence favoring telepathy). Given that BF > 100 is considered 'decisive' evidence, this outcome far exceeds the 'exceptional evidence' said to be required of exceptional claims.[48,49] By comparison, in particle physics experiments effects resulting in 5 or more sigma are considered experimental 'discoveries.' ”

The probability of 1 in 5.6 × 10^-16  cited is a likelihood of less than 1 in a quadrillion. So the ganzfeld experiments got results with a chance likelihood of less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.  

A person lying in bed with his eyes closed (in a drowsy state)  may be in a state similar to the state produced by the Ganzfeld sensory deprivation protocol, under which many very successful ESP tests have occurred.  In such a state a person might telepathically be more prone to acquire information coming from minds beyond this world, such as minds existing on some Other Side. This might be an explanation for some of these cases of a person lying in bed,  thinking of someone he has not thought of in years, and then soon learning that person died less than 12 hours ago. 

Today (March 22) about 40 minutes ago I was cooking spaghetti and had the stove fan running, as I always do when using any of the gas burners. Suddenly the sound of the fan stopped. I looked up and saw the green light had gone off.  I was worried that the fan had "died," having had in my life two or three times when fans stopped running and then never could be turned back on. But upon pressing one of the  buttons, the fan and the green light turned back on.  The fan on this stove has the quirk that you can only turn off the fan and the green light by pressing the button on the far right two times in quick succession.  But no visible person had done that. I was alone at home at the time, several meters away from the stove when the fan turned off.  The last time this happened was in March of 2024. I have cooked pasta many times in the past year without seeing any such mysterious turn off of the fan. 

There are fancy digital programmable range hoods that allow someone to program a shut off after a specified interval. But the range hood I have seems to be a simpler affair offering no such possibility. Its only control buttons are the ones shown below. 

Postscript: The same light and its fan mysteriously shut off on October 6, 2025. 

Freaky Friday

A few minutes ago I was alone on the first floor of the house where I live, when a hall ceiling light about six feet behind me turned off by itself. I instantly turned around and saw no one near the light's switch on the first floor. At first rather incredulous that this could have happened, I thought that maybe someone had turned off the light from the second floor. I tried all the light switches on the second floor, next to the stairway leading from the first floor to the second floor, and none of them were capable of turning off the light on the first floor. It could not have been a circuit breaker going off or a lightbulb wearing out, because the light on the first floor turned back on as soon as I tried it. 

Postscript: (January 19): A few minutes ago, I was about to go to bed, and I tried to turn on my sound machine which I run while sleeping, to make a waterfall sound. I accidentally pressed the wrong button on the machine, and turned on a light on the little round sound machine. I turned off that light (which I never use at night), and pressed the right button to turn on the waterfall sound. After going into an adjacent room for a few minutes. I came back to the area of the sound machine, and I was very surprised to find that the light I had turned off a few minutes ago was now back on again. There was no one else in either room.  Other cases of lights turning on or off mysteriously are reported in my "Spookiest Observations" post you can read here. 

Post-postscript (February 16. 2025): Less than 30 minutes ago, in the same hallway discussed in the first paragraph, the light mysteriously turned off as I was walking down the hallway, with no one else on the floor. I distinctly heard the sound of the button being pressed. 

A Smoke Alarm Triggered From the Great Beyond?

 Less than an hour ago a very strange thing happened in the house where I live. The house's state-of-the-art Google Nest smoke alarm system went off, causing smoke alarms to go off all over the house. I and another occupant of the house looked in every room, and found no trace of any smoke or mist. No one was cooking at the time. The last person to cook was myself. I had taken a few minutes to make an omelet about 25 minutes before the smoke alarm went off, but I had used the ventilator fan, and had turned off the gas. The electrically powered smoke alarms of the house are all on the ceiling, 9 feet or higher than the floor below them.  There was no electricity anomaly. 

We have the mystery of what caused the smoke alarm to go off. There was no sign of any smoke or mist in any room of the house when the alarm went off; there was no odd smell anywhere;  and all occupants are non-smokers.  The whole house was clean, and no one in the house or its yard had been doing anything this day to raise dust, or anything unusual  The Google Nest system (which gives audible messages) said the alarm came from "the den."  There is no room in the house we call a den. Conceivably someone setting up the system may have labeled one of the house's rooms as "the den." 

I have an interesting speculation that could conceivably explain the event. Maybe the event was caused by communication from the Great Beyond. My late father's name was Dean. Imagine that you are some invisible power that has the ability to make a fleeting manifestation in our world. You might choose some type of manifestation that has a  resemblance to your name. So if I died and my soul survived and I wanted to leave some manifestation indicating I had survived death, I might perhaps leave a mysterious mark on the wall.  That mark might be a sign that some manifestation had come from Mark. (The English word "mark" meaning a variety of things including "a small area having a different color from its surrounding" has the same spelling as my name Mark.)

In this case the word  "den" resembles my late father's name: Dean. How would a deceased Dean try to leave a sign? Maybe by triggering a smoke alarm in a way that would cause it  to speak a word ("den") close to the sound of his name, Dean. Of course, this hypothesis is highly speculative. Heightening the mystery here is that in the same clean room that the smoke detector went off without any smoke, mist or noticeable dust, there was another working smoke detector that did not make any sound. 

I do know that the same ceiling smoke detector mysteriously went off (when there was no smoke or mist in the house)  on the night a relative of mine died far away, as I reported here.  See my post here for something very spooky that happened where I live on my late father's birthday.

I get many mysterious-seeming events like this where I live, such as my PlayStation machine mysteriously turning on by itself ten times on ten different days, and a green light in the bathroom mysteriously turning off and on dozens of times. 

In the nineteenth century a huge number of people reported seeing dramatic signs they interpreted as manifestations from the dead. To read about the reports, read my "Spookiest Years" series here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,  here, here and here.

 Postscript: A mind-boggling event occurred in the hour after I finished writing this post -- one of those things that makes you say, "If this was coincidence, the chance of it was 1 in a million." Because the event is closely related to the content of another post, it is described in a postscript to another post in my series of posts with a tag of "miscellaneous paranormal events" that you can read here and continue to read by pressing Older Posts at the bottom right.  

In the event described above, part of the oddness was that the smoke detector failed to turn off after a few presses of its button, which should have turned it off, even though there was no sign of smoke, mist, vapor  or dust anywhere. Only after several minutes would a button press turn off the alarm. Later in the same day (also with no smoke, mist, vapor or dust anywhere) the smoke detector again went off, but this time a single press of the button made it silent.  The alarm was silent throughout the next week. 

Post-postscript: On January 15 I got the orb below apparently next to the smoke alarm that was acting so strangely.

A Spooky Yuletide

A few minutes ago I was just reading up on the case of Luiz Antonio Gasparetto (1949-2018), a man who would go into trances and produce artworks in the style of great artists such as van Gogh, Manet and Renoir. You can read about him and see some of his art using the link here. Reading about the case, I decided to add a new entry to my long post "120+ Types of Paranormal  or Anomalous Experiences," which you can read here. So I added a line in my classification scheme, typing this line:

11.19 Mediumistic Painting and Drawing 

The word "mediumistic" refers to mediums, persons thought to be able to make contact with the spirits of the dead. 

Just after typing this line, my PlayStation machine mysteriously turned on. When this happens, I cannot fail to notice it, because the machine stops whatever TV show  I am watching, and takes over the TV set, making it look like this:

When this happened, I was alone in the room and sitting on a couch (two meters away from the PlayStation machine); my hands were busy typing; and the TV remote was an arm's length away. The only way to turn on the PlayStation from the couch is to get up and touch a button on the machine, or to use some combination of presses on the TV remote that requires pressing two different buttons.  So the turning on of the PlayStation machine was mysterious and inexplicable. I have seen the PlayStation mysteriously turning on by itself at least seven times in the past three years.. The synchronicity in today's case is interesting, with it occurring a few seconds after I typed a word ("mediumistic") referring to communication with the dead. 

Last night I had a vivid dream that I was demonstrating to someone some mind-over-matter powers. There was an element in the dream that may have symbolized the words "when die."  Could the dream have symbolized that the dead have mind-over-matter powers, and the ability to make physical manifestations in our world?

In the nineteenth century a huge host of witnesses reported during seances mysterious inexplicable movements and levitation of objects, including chairs, heavy tables and musical instruments. To read up about such reports, read my "Spookiest Years" series of posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,  here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Such witnesses were very often very good about promptly publishing detailed signed statements testifying to exactly what they had very recently seen, with the signed statements often including the names of several witnesses. 

Postscript: The event of the PlayStation turning on by itself happened again (a few minutes ago) on December 29, 2024, under conditions exactly the same as described above, with me sitting on the couch two meters from the PlayStation machine and its controller, and the untouched TV remote an arm's length away. This is the 8th time I have seen such a thing occurring in the past ten months.  Earlier this day I saw another repetition of the anomaly reported here. 

Post-postscript: The event of the PlayStation turning on by itself happened again (a few minutes ago) on January 1, 2025.  At the moment the PlayStation turned on, I was alone in the room, at a sink, meters away the PlayStation, its controller, and the TV remote. 

Post-post-postscript:  The event of the PlayStation turning on by itself happened again (a few minutes ago) on January 7, 2025.  with me sitting on the couch two meters from the PlayStation machine and its controller, and the untouched TV remote an arm's length away, and no one else in the room.  This is the tenth time I have seen such a thing. 

It is possible for me to turn on the PlayStation from the couch using a particular combination of two button presses (different buttons) on my TV remote. But doing that will cause an intermediate screen to pop up on the TV, and I have never noticed such a screen appearing during one of the times the PlayStation mysteriously turned on. So in the events described in this post, it was just as if some invisible finger has been pressing the On button on the PlayStation machine.  

Post-post-post-postscript:  The event of the PlayStation turning on by itself happened again (a few minutes ago) on January 22, 2025.  with me sitting on the couch two meters from the PlayStation machine and its controller, and the untouched TV remote an arm's length away, and no one else in the room.  This is the eleventh time I have seen such a thing. 

As in the first case reported in this post, the event occurred at a moment when I was  writing about a topic related to life-after-death. At the time the PlayStation mysteriously turned on, I was quoting some of the out-of-body experiences reported in the New York Times here. 

Post-post-post-post-postscript:  The event of the PlayStation turning on by itself happened again (a few minutes ago) on February 6, 2025.  with me sitting on the couch two meters from the PlayStation machine and its controller, and the untouched TV remote an arm's length away, and no one else in the room.  This is the 12th time I have seen such a thing. I noticed that in an adjacent room an alarm clock was now blinking with the current time, just as if might if it had been unplugged and plugged back in at the same time the TV anomaly occurred. 

Post-post-post-post-post-postscript:  On February 27, 2025 I was watching "Mad Men: on the LG Channels station on my TV, with the TV remote an arm's length away, when suddenly my TV started showing what I get when I press the Home button (with a house-shaped icon) on my TV remote.  But no one had pressed the remote. Again, we have an effect like some invisible hand pressing buttons. 

Ghosts in the News, Part 3

 Here is the latest in a series of videos I am making:

If you have trouble viewing the embedded video above, try the Youtube link here or the Facebook link here . 

Postscript (November 28): while working on another video in this series,  I again witnessed the spooky event of my PS4 PlayStation machine turning on inexplicably while I was in the middle of watching a TV show. Whenever that happens the machine takes over my TV screen. At the time I was sitting alone in the room; my TV remote was an arm's length away from me; and the PlayStation machine and its controller were two meters away from me. The PlayStation turning on by itself while I was in the middle of watching a TV show  (an anomaly which I have seen at least five times such as here and here) is as inexplicable as a room light turning on by itself.  Turning on the PlayStation machine requires either touching a button on the machine, or clicking a particular sequence of two clicks using the TV remote.