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. 

Smoke Alarm Acts Spooky Just When I Think of Deceased Parents

 Last night something spooky happened, something I have never seen before. To explain the anomaly, I must first explain the behavior of my Google Nest smoke detector as I have observed it for every night prior to last night, for four years. 

The Google Nest smoke detector in my bedroom has a ring-shaped dim light and a motion detector. Whenever I get up from my bed to go to the bathroom, the dim light of the smoke detector lights up. When I return to my bed, the dim light of the smoke detector goes off within a few seconds of me returning to the bed. I presume that this is some feature designed to provide a little light for anyone trying to exit a room at night, when there is a fire. I think a better design might have been to only show the dim light when the smoke detector goes off.  The light of the smoke detector does not show during daytime, unless the alarm goes off. Below we see the Google Nest smoke detector. The first photo shows the dim light on, and the second photo shows the light off. 

Last night I awoke around 2:00, and began to have some vivid thoughts of my deceased parents. Just then I noticed something very strange, that I had never seen before. While lying in bed motionless, I noticed that the light on the smoke detector was still on for quite some time. Lying completely motionless in bed, I counted slowly from 1 to 120. During this whole two minutes, the smoke detector's light was on. I had never seen this behavior before from this smoke detector, not once in four years. Prior to today, its dim light always went off a few seconds after some motion caused it to turn on.  This Google Nest smoke detector is powered by a direct electrical current, and has no dependency on a battery. 

Wondering whether some insect might have caused this unprecedented behavior from the smoke detector, I turned on the regular light in the room, and looked for an insect. I saw none.  I then went back to sleep. 

Later around 4:00 AM I woke up again, and observed something similar. While lying motionless in bed, I noticed the anomaly that the smoke detector's light was on. I lay motionless in bed for five minutes, slowly counting from 1 to 300. During this whole time, the smoke detector's light was on. 

Again, I got up, turned on the regular light, and looked around for an insect that could conceivably have caused this unprecedented behavior from the smoke detector. I did not discover any such insect, and never felt or saw an insect that night. 

Why did the smoke detector act in this unprecedented way, which I have never seen in four previous years I have had this smoke detector in my bedroom? An interesting speculation is that the night's incidents were triggered by my vivid thoughts of my deceased parents. The unprecedented behavior of the smoke detector started while I was having such thoughts. See here for another spooky smoke alarm anomaly causing me to wonder whether some paranormal effect was involved. The 19th century provided very many reported anomalies (such as mysterious rap sounds and table levitations) in which people seemed to get signs from the Great Beyond. You can read about such anomalies here. 

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

It would make an interesting experiment for others with Google Nest smoke detectors to see whether they observe the same anomaly after having vivid thoughts of their deceased loved ones. 

Postscript: The next evening the Google Nest smoke detector in my bedroom returned to behaving as it had behaved for the past four years before this day, with its light always turning off a few seconds after the cessation of any recent motion nearby it. But there was on that evening the anomaly below, not looking like anything that showed up in the next photo of this window curtain from the exact same position.

Post-postscript: The next evening there was another strange, colorful line:

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. 

Like a Teleportation

A few minutes ago I picked up my house keys from the ledge in front of my TV set. Before I could take another step, I noticed something very baffling. A wristband that I keep on the same ledge somehow fell to the ground, landing about 4 feet (1.3 meters) to my right and about a foot behind me (I heard it landing on the floor). I keep the wristband on the same ledge (in front of the TV) where I keep my keys. I have failed to come up with any credible-sounding scenario that can naturally explain the event. 

The only thing I can think of is that the mere action of picking up the keys somehow caused the wristband to be violently ejected to the right, so that the wristband would land four feet away, to the right. The scenario seems unbelievable, and I failed to notice anything unusual in front of me.  

An alternate explanation is a paranormal one, that the incident is a supernatural omen. The wristband was a "Do Not Resuscitate" wristband I wear on walks, to specify that if my heart ever stops, I do not want CPR to be attempted. A spooky event involving such a wristband might be an omen of my death in the not-too-distant future.  

Below is the wristband as I saw it on the floor. 

Postscript:  The next morning I woke up and moved around in a living room for several minutes, without noticing anything unusual. I then noticed a rubber band in the middle of the small living room floor, the appearance of which I cannot account for.  This is a type of anomaly I have seen more than 31 previous times, as discussed in my posts here, with all of the cases involving rubber bands.  My policy is to immediately pick up all out-of-place small objects on the floor as soon as I see them, making such events baffling. No windows in the room were open. 

I had an interesting dream the day after the wristband incident. In the dream I stood in front of a surface on which my house keys rested. Then suddenly in the dream there was an extra set of keys in front of me. In the dream I had the idea that the keys belonged to my late sister, and that the keys had teleported in front of me. Then in the dream my late sister appeared, smiling.  In real life I once witnessed the most astonishing event suggesting a teleportation of keys, an event I describe in my 2018 post here. 

Post-postscript: On May 3, 2026 I saw yet another example of the phenomenon of the mysterious appearance of a rubber band. It occurred at about 12:15 PM in a room I had occupied alone for two hours. I had been working in the room for two hours, on the couch, facing the TV. Suddenly I noticed the rubber band in a very noticeable position, on the floor  in front of the TV stand. I had not touched any rubber band or anything on the TV's ledge for hours. My long-standing policy is to immediately pick up from the floor any small objects such as rubber bands, coins and pens, as soon as I see them. So how could the rubber band have got to the position I saw it at? No windows in the room were open. Once again, I am baffled. I have now seen an effect like this more than 32 times. 

A Strange Occurrence

Today (alone in a house) I made myself lunch, and sat down to eat. Below is the view that I have when I am eating lunch (I always sit in a chair that gives me this view). 

Midway through eating my meal, about 8 minutes after starting the meal, I noticed something very strange. One of the two oven mittens was on the floor. I was very surprised by this, because my strict policy is to immediately pick up from the floor all out-of-place items I see on the floor, as soon as I see them. The moment I noticed the oven glove on the floor was after I had been back and forth in the area shown above quite a few times, to make my meal, without noticing any oven glove on the floor. It was also after about eight  minutes of eating in which I should have noticed any oven glove on the floor (it being right in front of me), but failed to do so.  While eating I was glancing at an I-Pad on the table. 

Trying to explain this, I came up with the idea that maybe by just walking back and forth in this area, I had perhaps caused one of the oven gloves to fall off the hook that holds it. I tested this idea, by walking back and forth near the gloves, trying to brush by them in a way that would cause one to fall off the hook. The test failed. It seemed that once one of these gloves is on the hook that holds it, the glove is very securely held there. Below is a closeup of the hook. 

I have one other hypothesis to explain the strange occurrence. Perhaps we have here a symbolic warning by some mysterious supernatural power. When one glove mysteriously falls, with one glove remaining, that makes a kind of "one left" symbolic motif. And that motif may symbolize that for me there is "one left" in my earthly life.  

But due to some vagueness in the phrase "one left," I need not worry too much. "One left" could mean one week left in my earthly life, or one month left in that life, or one year.  But it could also mean one decade left. And that is quite a bit of time. 

Postscript: There was a similar "one left" spooky event five days later, today, on March 15, 2026. I turned on the water faucet in the sink shown below. As I was holding a cup to let it fill up with water, to wash out the cup, I saw a knife  mysteriously leave the utensil holder seen at left below, falling into the sink four inches away from the utensil holder. This happened as I was standing right in front of the utensil holder, facing it, looking slightly to its right. 

 At first I thought to myself, "Maybe it fell through a hole at the bottom of the utensil holder." But an examination of the bottom of the utensil holder showed that it had only tiny holes, way too small for a knife to fall through. 

I can imagine no conceivable movements of my hand (to turn on the water) that would have caused a knife to fall out of such a utensil holder. Again we have the possibly symbolic "one left" motif.

I posted both of the reports above just after the events occurred. 

Below we see a mysterious orb I photographed on this day:

Band-Baffled

Today I saw yet another case of a rubber band anomaly I have now seen more than 29 times. When the anomaly occurs I will suddenly see on the floor a rubber band, in some very noticeable position, with its appearance at such a spot being mysterious and unexplained (with me having no memory of having recently touched a rubber band). My strict policy is to always pick up small items from the floor as soon as I see them (items such as coins, rubber bands or pens); so finding unexpected rubber bands on the floor of a room where no one else was is baffling. 

Today at 10:05 PM I saw the unexpected rubber band between my TV stand and my refrigerator:

Now, as it happens I took a picture including this area only 19 minutes earlier, at 9:46 PM. Below is a cropped part of that picture, showing the same area as we see above, but no such rubber band:

How did the rubber band get on the floor? No one in the room touched any rubber bands between around 9:46 and 10:05. 

Below is a mysterious orb I photographed  indoors on this day. 

Postscript:  As of March 14, 2026 I have now seen this rubber band anomaly more than 30 times. I saw it again on the morning of March 14, 2026.  I woke up on that day and quickly noticed a rubber band on the floor, in front of my TV set. A photo of the same area I had taken just before going to bed showed no such rubber band. 

Was It Ghost Symbolism?

 I wear an eye shade while I sleep. Last night around midnight I tried to find the shade, and it was nowhere to be found. I thoroughly inspected all the sheets and a blanket and a pillow on the bed, but could not find the eye shade I normally keep near my pillow. I checked in the crack between the bed and the wall, but still could not find the eye shade. I was the only one sleeping in the room (my wife is on a trip). 

After searching for at least five minutes (and probably ten minutes) for the missing eye shade, looking all over the room, I gave up, and got a spare eye shade from my bed stand. During the night I made several trips to the bed stand shown in the diagram below. In the early morning (in early daylight) I looked out the window, to see whether there was snow accumulation. I then went back to bed and got more sleep. 

Finally my alarm clock went off, and I arose. I was very surprised to then discover the missing eye shade, which was in about the most noticeable position it could be: on the floor, at the foot of the bed. This was not my replacement eye shade, which I could see was still on the bed, near the pillow.  

We see below the layout of the room, and where I found the eye shade in the morning, marked by the X mark. When I get up at night, the room is dimly lit by a Google Nest smoke detector which has a motion detector and a dim light that activates when you walk around in the darkness. 

I realized there may be some symbolic significance to the spooky event involving the eye shade. "Shade" was a term used in nineteenth century English to mean "ghost or disembodied spirit." And in the English language "eye" sounds just like "I." So an eye shade may symbolize the phrase "I shade," which may be equivalent to "I ghost" or "I disembodied spirit" or "I am a ghost" or "I am a disembodied spirit."  

Below we see how the Merriam-Webster dictionary has "a disembodied spirit: ghost" as one of its definitions of "shade."

The event described here is similar to an equally spooky event involving an eye shade, one I describe here. 

Below we see a mysterious orb I photographed on this day. 

Postscript: Something very similar happened on April 11 2026. My wife was at her mother's place, and I was sleeping alone in my bedroom. Awaking about 1:00AM, I took off my eye shade, and went to the bathroom. Returning to the bed, I could not find the eye shade. After thoroughly searching the white sheets and a light blue blanket on the bed, I stood up and turned on the bedroom light, and in the full light thoroughly examined the bed and everything on it. The eye shade was nowhere to be seen. Removing one by one the three bed sheets and the blanket, and shaking each, I could not find the missing eye shade. So I got my replacement eye shade from the bed stand. 

In the morning I woke up and again thoroughly searched the bed and everything on it for the missing eye shade, seeing nothing but the replacement eye shade I had brought from the bed stand. Again, I shook each of the three sheets and the blanket, without any eye shade turning up.  After making such a search and failing to find the missing eye shade, suddenly I saw it, in the most noticeable spot it could be, right in the middle of the bed. There were now two eye shades on the bed. 

It was just as if the eye shade had been teleported away, and then nine hours teleported back to the bed. 

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. 

Reality Accentuates My "Mind Over Matter" Post

This morning after awaking I rose to take a quick scan of a post I had auto-scheduled for publication this morning. It was a post you can read here entitled "In 1923 an Editor of Scientific American Confessed the Reality of Telepathy and Mind Over Matter." Not wearing any glasses, I passed by my television set to get my I-Pad, noticing nothing unusual on the floor.  After making a quick scan of the article, I took a shower and got dressed. Upon returning to the living room, I was very surprised to see two rubber bands on the floor, in front of the TV. One was small and yellow, and the other was very noticeable, being red and about three inches in length. How, I asked myself, could they possibly have got there? No one else was around this morning, by wife being away on a trip. My strict policy is to immediately pick up from the floor any and all objects I see there (such as coins, pens and rubber bands), as soon as I see them. I had watched TV the previous night without noticing any such rubber bands on the floor in front of the TV. 

I have seen spooky-seeming anomalies like this  involving rubber bands more than 28 times, on various days, and some examples are reported in the series of posts here. I  have speculated that this may be some type of spirit manifestation effect, noting that if some invisible power had a slight ability to move matter in our world, such a power might show itself by moving very lightweight things such as rubber bands or coins. An alternate explanation is that of a subconscious mind-over-matter effect coming from my own mind.

I admit that this effect is "peanuts" compared to the effects that reportedly occurred involving Daniel Dunglas Home, who I dreamed about last night, while correctly recalling in my dream that quite a few witnesses had reported him levitating. On the same night I saw yet another example of the spooky "light turning off and on" anomaly reported here, which I have seen more than 65 times since 2022, with 95% or more of the cases occurring while I was arising to go to a bathroom in the middle of my sleeping hours.

Postscript: As if all of the above was not strange enough, on the same day (February 13, 2026) there was another strange event. Standing right next to the white power strip that you can see a bit of in the photo  below, on the far left, I used the button on the power strip to turn off the power to my TV. At that very instant (the exact same second) I saw a 4-inch-long feather jump from my TV stand to the floor. At the time I was standing motionless about a meter away from the feather. No one else was in the room, and the windows were closed, with no fan running. There is no heating system producing air currents, and the room's heater is several meters away from the TV stand.  The feather is one that showed up a few days earlier in a rather spooky manner.  Below is what I saw after this strange jump of the feather. 

I can speculate about a symbolic significance to this strange sight. If you interpret the turning off the power as a symbol for physical death, which involves a shutdown of electricity,  the movement of the feather at the exact same instant may symbolize a flight of the soul occurring at the moment of death. 

The photo below shows the position of the feather on the TV stand a few hours before this strange event. (It is from a photo I took to document the anomaly of the rubber bands, mentioned above.)  You can see the feather was not at all on the edge of the stand. These two were the only two feathers on the TV stand. 

   

Post-postscript: The next day I tried a little test, to see how hard it is to cause a feather to fall off the TV stand. I stood right in front of the two feathers above, and vigorously shook a bath towel, like some matador waving his cape. This did not cause either feather to move. 

They Said Apparitions Materialized Right in Front of Them

 I think it is very important to keep a list of surveys trying to determine how common are reports of paranormal experiences. Publishing such a list helps to show how common such experiences are, and helps to disprove false claims that only some tiny fraction of the population report such things. My list of such surveys appear as a bullet list in my post here. 

This afternoon I added a very interesting addition to that bullet list:

"A project entitled 'Investigation of the phenomenology and impact of perceived spontaneous and direct After-Death Communications (ADCs)' was conducted from February 2018 to January 2020, with results described here and here.  About 1000 people were surveyed. 460 of these people reported a 'visual ADC' which often corresponded to an apparition of the dead. We read, 'For 61.6% of our sample, the deceased seemed solid like a living being, for 12.5% the apparition was semitransparent, and 11.3% perceived a foggy silhouette.' We also read, 'For 59.8% the apparitions were already there when they perceived them and for 28.5% they were materializing right before their eyes. After a few seconds or a few minutes, they were fading away gradually (14.4%), dissolving instantly (28.1%), or not there anymore when respondents  blinked (18.0%). 79.8% claimed that the apparition conveyed a message, either in words, telepathically, or by expression of the face.' "

Just after adding this passage to my previous post, there was a strange synchronicity. In Season 4 of the very dry and down-to-earth TV series I was watching ("The Lincoln Lawyer" on Netflix) -- a season which thus far is something you might say is something that only a lawyer or a law student would love -- the main character suddenly starts talking to a ghost. It is the ghost of the father-figure character played by Elliot Gould, whose death we had been told about only a few minutes earlier. We soon learn it is a dream sequence. 

I thought this was a good moment to take a few photos of my TV, in hopes of getting an orb photo -- maybe something like the photo here in which I got an orange orb above the TV while my TV screen showed a depiction of fairy magic. So I took five photos of the main "Lincoln Lawyer" character talking to the ghost. My hope about the orb photo was not fulfilled. There was nothing unusual in the photos. 

But at the very instant I finished checking the photos on my camera, I kind of go, "What on Earth!" I notice that in a very noticeable spot about a meter from where I am sitting, right in front of me, is a yellow rubber band on the floor. I had worked at the same spot for 5+ hours that day, with only me in the room, and had not touched any rubber bands in that room previously that day. My strict policy is to pick up from my floor any and all out-of-place items I see on the floor (things like coins, pens and rubber bands), as soon as I see them. So how, I ask myself, could there be a rubber band right in right of me, one that went unnoticed by me in the previous five hours I was working from that spot, where the rubber band would have been very noticeable? 

It seemed rather as if the rubber band had teleported to the spot I saw it at, at the very moment I was taking a photo of the TV ghost. I have seen similar anomalies involving rubber bands more than 27 times, and I report some of them in my series of posts here. An interesting speculation is that an invisible power may leave hints of its presence by moving or teleporting very lightweight objects such as rubber bands or coins, perhaps with synchronicity involved. I know (as I reported here) that only a few minutes after audibly stating that it was my late mother's 100th birthday, I was spooked to see a quarter on top of a bedspread I had just laid out a few minutes before making the statement.   

Postscript: The next day there was another spooky event. Standing in front of a sink, I ate a few mini-marshmallows from a bag. A few minutes later I was very surprised to see one of the mini-marshmallows on the other side of the room, about 2.5 meters away, aligned to the wall. I asked myself: how could that have happened? I came up with an explanatory hypothesis: maybe I dropped one of the mini-marshmallows, and it rolled 2.5 meters. I tested the hypothesis by taking a mini-marshmallow, and rolling it on the ground, rather as you might roll a bowling ball. The hypothesis failed, because friction caused the rolling to stop after much less than a meter of rolling.  We have in this strange sighting some possible "Other Side" symbolism. 

Post-postscript: The next day I had a striking dream that may be relevant to what I report above. I dreamed that I had forgot what street I lived on, and that I remembered that I lived on "Numen street" (which is not the actual street I live on). Very strangely, in the dream I thought something like, "It is important that I remember this word numen, so to help me remember I will recall that it sounds the same  as the Newman character on the Seinfeld TV series." When I awoke I did not know what the word "numen" means, it being a word I had never used. After awaking I looked up the definition of the word, which is: "the spirit or divine power presiding over a thing or place."

Post-post-postscript: Rather striking sights followed in the next days after. I noticed a light on the other side of my front door was on, which I could not explain. As I walked by a refrigerator, a piece of paper on its top (above all the food) mysteriously fell to the ground. A large triangular formation of honking geese flew over me as I was on my walk. When I came back from the walk, I noticed nothing unusual in the door area. Shortly later, a package was delivered. When I went to get it, I discovered a 4-inch long feather between my outer and inner door. 

Baffling Birthday

Today (January 29) is my late father's birthday. On his last two birthdays there were baffling anomalies:

• On January 29, 2024, as described here, I was lying in bed thinking of my father, wondering whether a dream I just had was a reference to him. At that moment the GFCI outlet in the bathroom mysteriously turned off with a loud sound. There was no one in the bathroom. Turning off the outlet requires a press of a button on the GFCI panel on the wall of the bathroom. 
• On January 29, 2025, as described here, around 12:50 AM, a structural panel in front of my sink mysteriously fell to the ground. The event was very surprising, as the whole floor had been remodeled a few years ago, and the panel was expected to stay undisturbed for many additional years. 

Today, January 29, 2026 I woke up about 1:00 AM, and went into the living room. I was surprised to see the thermostat showing a temperature of 67 degrees. I had set the thermostat to 60 degrees when going to bed at midnight, a temperature I keep it at when I sleep. I set the thermostat back to 60 degrees, and went back to the couch. A few minutes later I saw the thermostat was again showing a setting of  67 degrees. It was as if some invisible hand had moved the thermostat to the right, resetting it from 60 to 67. 

It is interesting that all three of these events involve a panel. The dictionary defines a panel as "a flat or curved component, typically rectangular, that forms or is set into the surface of a door, wall, or ceiling." The thermostat was in a wall panel, as shown below. The first syllable of "panel" is "pa," an English word meaning "father." 

Below is the description of this morning's event that I wrote on a notepad immediately after it occurred:

"1/29: Saw thermostat at 67 at 1:10. I turned it back to 60, which I had set it to at 12:00. A few minutes later it was mysteriously back to 67." 

The Google Nest thermostat has a Settings interface that allows you to look at changes in the temperature that get scheduled, under some capability of the thermostat to learn from your previous habits in switching the temperature. Around noon today I used that Settings interface to see whether there was any scheduled switch in temperature that could explain the anomaly described above. There was not. Below is what I saw when looking at the schedule for today (Thursday):

Postscript: On February 4 I had the 186th dream I have had about my later father since I started recording my dreams. I  dreamed that I was living in some high apartment tower, and that my late father was on the other side of my apartment's window, like some window washer working outside the window. The dream seemed to symbolize an idea of my late father being on the Other Side of an afterlife, while also suggesting the idea of lofty heights associated with an afterlife location. But at the same time the dream has a "nearby, just past the barrier" idea. It was the latest of more than 500 dreams I have had that suggested the idea of life after death, all of which are described in my frequently updated post here. 

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. 

Baffling "Back"

 A few minutes ago I was watching the HBO Max TV series "Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch" (in the middle of an episode) when something odd happened. The TV mysteriously reverted to the startup screen you get when you first are pondering whether to watch the show. This is exactly what would have happened if someone had pressed the "Back" button on my TV remote. But the remote was an arm's length away from me, untouched. 

I can speculate about a metaphysical symbolism in this odd event. The strange "Back" event may symbolism a future return to some previous locale of the soul. Under the theory of the nonearthly pre-existence of the soul, discussed here, we all started out in some spiritual realm of existence that is our true home, a locale to which we will one day go back. 

The "Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch" series is a weird affair -- kind of an odd marriage between the "buried treasure hunt reality TV" genre and the "paranormal investigation reality TV" genre. 

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. 

Bright Orb Just After the Anomaly

 Photo date November 18, 2025. Photographer  Mark Mahin. 

We see below a bright orb I photographed in the first photo I took after noticing yet another example of a rubber band anomaly I have seen well over 20 previous times. When the anomaly occurs, I will suddenly notice a rubber band on the floor of my living quarters with me having no explanation as to how the rubber band got there (I always immediately clean up all small objects from the floor as soon as I see them). In this case the anomaly occurred after 5:00 PM EST, with the rubber band being in a very noticeable position only a meter in front of where I had sat for most of the day, without previously noticing such a rubber band.  The windows were all closed, ruling out any "gust of wind" explanation. 

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Postscript: A few minutes after I published the text above, while alone in the room mentioned above, I noticed another rubber band on the floor, the appearance of which I cannot account for. It is shown below (the black cord is one leading from my PlayStation machine to its controller resting on the machine about a foot above the floor).  After finding the first rubber band, I had carefully looked around to see whether there were any others, and noticed nothing in the spot shown below.  My experience here is similar to that reported in my post here, although that post describes something more dramatic, involving three rubber bands rather than just two.  We have here today in the span of a few minutes the sighting of two different rubber bands on the floor, neither of which I can explain, both in very noticeable positions, both involving  a kind of "I should have seen that if it had been there for more than a few minutes" situation. Very strange. 

An interesting speculation is that some mysterious power or invisible presence capable of moving matter may prefer to produce manifestations involving small, lightweight objects, because those objects are more easily moved. 

Post-postscript: On four of the next five days there was another similar "hard-to-explain rubber band on the floor" anomaly, each involving a single rubber band, all near the area shown above, all not far from my TV set. I have now seen an anomaly like this more than 25 times. 

A Strange Event

 I just saw something very odd. A few minutes ago I was alone in a room, with the TV showing a Netflix series.  There were 5 minutes left in one of the episodes, and I was cleaning my sink, more than a meter away from the TV remote. Suddenly my TV freezes on an image of someone pulling out a book from a shelf. Then, very oddly, Netflix simply vanishes, and my TV changes to showing an "LG Channels" screen I get in the morning before I ever choose to watch Netflix. This "LG Channels" is a variety of channels a little like cable TV.

This is not how Netflix behaves.  There could be some button on the TV remote that might produce such a change in what I see on my TV, but no one was touching the TV remote, which was on the sofa away from me, securely resting in a particular spot. 

I can imagine how this hard-to-explain event might have a strange symbolic meaning. The spooky event happening when there were five minutes left in the show might symbolize a "five left" motif, referring to time left in my mortal life,  which could mean five days left or five weeks left or five months left or five years left.  The selection of a book on the TV screen when the TV show froze could symbolize an appointment, such as an appointment with death. In English "book" has a double meaning, meaning both a printed volume, and "to schedule something," as in the phrase "he booked a hotel for April 3." The switching from the world of Netflix to the very different world of LG Channels might symbolize going from one world to a very different world, as a soul might do when departing from this  earthly realm. 

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.)

Paranormal Portent?

Portent (noun): a sign or warning that something, especially something momentous or calamitous, is likely to happen.

Before I had my current smartphone, I had an old-fashioned cell phone, and I used to get an issue of "phantom dialing," in which some random number might be called. The phenomenon can be explained by random presses of the keys of the cell phone, caused by random contacts of the elevated key buttons with my clothes. But I've used an Apple smartphone for many months, and never seemed to get (prior to this week) any such issue of unexpected activity on the phone, even though for many months I have carried my smartphone in my pocket during a daily walk. Part of the reason is that my smartphone locks me out after a short interval, throwing up a login screen requiring a password before accepting inputs. 

But yesterday very oddly after returning from my walk while carrying my smartphone, I was very surprised to see on my smartphone the screen below, which I had not knowingly summoned. It is an "Alarms" screen I can never recall seeing before on the smartphone. 

Searching for how to reach this screen, I see that it requires special activity from my smartphone startup screen. To reach the screen above, you have to open a Clock app, one I can never recall previously using.  I do not have that app on my smartphone startup screen.  So for someone from my smartphone to accidentally get the Alarm screen above, he would have to first press a small slot at the bottom of my phone, and then press a small Clock icon (a combination of events that would be extremely improbable to occur by accident). And since the default tab on this Clock app is the World Clock tab and not the Alarms tab, it would seem to require an additional click in just the right place, to get the Alarms screen from the Clock app. And it seems that no accident would allow that, as my phone's login screen would block such presses from occurring accidentally. 

Given the great improbability of accidentally reaching the screen shown above while having no intention of doing so, I must therefore consider a spooky possibility: that the hard-to-explain appearance of the Alarms screen that I saw was a kind of paranormal omen, harbinger or portent, a vague warning that presages some future event that is a cause for alarm. On the same day this happened, I had a dream about a very alarming event that might happen in the future. I won't mention what that event was, to avoid alarming the reader. 

Postscript: This morning I had another dream that may have been a warning of a future calamity. The dream was vivid.  High up in some tall tower, I could see far away three raging fires, and huge columns of black smoke rising up from these distant fires. Then in the dream there was a huge shower of rocks that I could see from the tower windows, rocks falling upon the building I was in and the surrounding area, rocks falling from the sky. 

Post-postscript: On the 17th (a few days after publishing this post) the Alarm screen anomaly recurred. This time I did not notice it after a walk. A few minutes after viewing a text from someone on my phone, while in my home, I was surprised again to see the Alarms screen shown as above (I having made no conscious attempt to access the Clock app producing the screen). On this phone there is no feature automatically causing an app you previously accessed to be more readily accessible. For the Alarms screen to have shown up on this day, there again would have had to have occurred (within a very short time, maybe two minutes) some two accidental touches of the phone which both would have an improbability of about 1 in 100, there being about 1 chance in 10,000 of their combined occurrence.  

An Orb With Two Letters

 Photo date: October 10, 2025. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below a mysterious orb I photographed indoors. The background is a black TV screen which had only the message "To turn the screen back on, press any button except for the power button." Strangely the orb seems to have both the letter L and the letter S. 

A few minutes before taking this photo of my TV screen, I saw an object mysteriously fall from the ledge in front of the TV, at a moment when I was about two meters away. The windows of the room were closed,  and no fan was running. The object that fell was symbolically meaningful, in a way I won't explain at this time.