Just as people immediately think of aliens when they hear the word UFO, people immediately think of the wandering souls of deceased people when they hear about paranormal activity. Ignorant of the fact that there are countless other possible explanations regarding this phenomenon.
Usually, when someone experiences something within the paranormal spectrum, they will not directly see an entity. It’s much more common that there is indirect contact. Typically, this is in the form of hearing sounds or voices. It’s also reported that objects will move by themselves, or there are other weird experiences where people feel something is messing with their surroundings.
Someone will rarely perceive an entity in complete form, though. When this does happen, it’s typically a black shadow in the corner of your eye or an unexplainable ball of energy. It’s extremely rare for people to see complete humanoid entities, although it can happen.
There are probably different explanations for all the different experiences people report, even though one tends to lump everything together under a single theory.
So what different theories are there that can explain all these different experiences that people call paranormal?
Paranormal activity triggered by trauma
Some paranormal experiences might find their origins not outside but inside. Poltergeist activity, which is well documented through the years, might be induced unconsciously by the victim or a close relative they live with.
Poltergeist activities often bind around one person; the person is in a difficult phase of life and might suffer from trauma. We know that the human mind is capable of marvelous things, and perhaps these activities result from uncontrolled (negative) energy that comes out when someone is mentally stuck.
A rift in space and or time
Many sightings of beings might not have to do anything with the spiritual realm. There might be an error in our highly complex space/time dimension, causing parallel universes (predicted by quantum theory) to overlap with our perceivable universe. This overlapping might result in seeing a glimpse of another human being from another reality in the form of a vague shadow or light.
What we do notice (besides random sightings) is that a lot of activity is in places where something terrible has happened. Think about wars, plagues, or some very emotional experiences people had. It seems that a violent or highly emotional event might be stored in a certain way and can later replay itself through space and time in some form.
Science has no clear explanation of how this might work. Still, it seems that our consciousness might be much more powerful than we realize and can create something extraordinary in our space/time dimension that people might witness even decades after it occurred.
Exotic rocks or materials
There’s also a more down-to-earth theory. This theory claims that certain rocks or materials can generate paranormal activity, making it look like an event will repeat itself and be perceived as a vague echo of sounds and sometimes even glimpses of images.
These rocks and materials might be able to store images and sound, almost like a recorder. For example, the famous hotel where Stephen King got his inspiration for The Shining is built on certain rocks that are known to be near places where people report paranormal activity. A lot of unexplainable weird activity has been observed in that hotel.
Unknown life forms
We might be dealing with unknown life forms. We know from people who take mind-bending drugs like DMT or Ayahuasca, that there’s a good chance that there’s a non-perceivable reality full of beings living in another dimensional plane. Usually, it would be impossible to perceive this plane because our brain is not tuned in. We can tune our brains when we take these mind-bending substances or when we master some advanced form of meditation.
These beings are hard to comprehend by our normal human brain, but they seem intelligent if you believe all those psychonauts. According to some theories, these beings might be able to break through temporarily. They can communicate with humans, which we perceive as shadowy beings, balls of energy, or other paranormal activity.
Spirits of a deceased human being
Some paranormal experiences might originate from a deceased person stuck between dimensions/realities. We learned so much about human consciousness in the last decades that it’s not weird to conclude that the human soul might be more than just a neurological reaction in the brain.
There is some significant research on Near-Death Experiences, where it seems that our consciousness can somehow live outside our human body. There are also fringe theories about quantum mechanics and consciousness in general. Let’s mix them op, and it might just be the case that human consciousness is being able to communicate after physical death, at least in some form.