Supernatural Mysteries

[LordOfT...@aol.com]

Supernatural Mysteries

---

Posted on Monday, May 07, 2007 (CDT) by Thoth

---

The supernatural world is one that seems to have existed alongside our own world since the dawn of time, yet despite our awareness of the phenomena associated with it, there is still much to be understood.

The natural world offers us examples of multitude of unexplained occurrences, encompassing subjects such as ghost activity, sightings of bizarre creatures and the development of abilities that defy rational explanation, that warrant serious investigation.

As such, this wealth of unexplained phenomena has encouraged many researchers to consider the possibility that forces beyond our current understanding can and do affect and interact with our world.

Interestingly, the influence of this strange and uncharted realm of existence is not confined to mediums, mystics and clairvoyants; people with well developed psychic abilities. Occasionally, ordinary, even sceptical people are confronted with situations that make us question the nature and reality of our own world.

Doppelgangers and Bilocation

Tales of Doppelgangers are far from new; in fact they have bewildered and often frightened people across many cultures for thousands of years. These tales date back at least as far as ancient Egypt, where it was believed that on occasion a person’s etheric double could leave a sleeping person and roam free.

The classic doppelganger manifestation seems to be a darker instance of bilocation. Whereas bilocation tends to be the result of a deliberate projection of the self; an art practiced by Tibetan Lama and Indian Yogi, doppelganger manifestations seem to be different in that the person is often sleeping or unconscious and thus not consciously in control of the splitting of their etheric twin from their physical self. Doppelgangers also tend to be more associated with ill omens and death. It was said, for example, that England’s Queen Elizabeth saw her own doppelganger laid out on her bed shortly before her own death.

Interestingly some of the best documented examples of doppelgangers involve creative people, such as the English poet Shelly, French author Guy de Maupassant and John Donne, the 16th century English poet who encountered his wife’s doppelganger as she gave birth to his stillborn child. Deeply religious people such as St. Anthony and St. Alphonsus also seem to be more prone to involvement with these events. Perhaps the most famous example is that of Padre Pio. Born in Italy in 1887, Padre Pio was a peasant priest who has become famous as a worker of miracles, a clairvoyant and stigmatic and a master of the art of being in two places at the same time, particularly when a dying person needed reassurance.

In 1917, General Luigi Cadorna was contemplating suicide after Italy’s humiliating defeat at the hands of the Germans. As he held his service revolver to his head and prepared to pull the trigger, a Capuchin monk appeared from nowhere and admonished him for being so stupid. It was years later that Cadorna met Padre Pio and recognised him as the monk that had saved his life that night; yet Padre Pio had remained in his monastery in Foggia throughout World War I.

In 1942, Padre Pio repeated this amazing feat by summoning the Archbishop of Montevideo to the bedside of Monsignor Damiani, a priest who had met Padre Pio in the 1920’s and who had been so impressed by him that he had vowed that when his time came to die, he would do so in Padre Pio’s presence. When the archbishop got to his bedside, Damiani had already died, but he had left a handwritten note that simply said ‘Padre Pio came’. It was not until two years later that the Archbishop met Padre Pio himself and recognised him as the monk that had summoned him that night.

A slightly less well known example of bilocation was that of Emilie Sagée, a 32-year-old French school teacher whose double would appear and disappear in full view of her students. Emilie’s double was actually able to appear next to her in the classroom as well as appearing in other parts of the school. Emilie seemed to be aware of her strange ability and admitted that it was good for ensuring her students’ undivided attention - although she doesn't seem to have had conscious control over the situation.

Perhaps the most astonishing example of Emilie’s unusual ability took place in full view of over forty students on a summer day in 1846. As the girls sat in the school hall for a needlework class, Emilie could be seen gardening in the schools grounds. When the class teacher left the room Emilie’s motionless doppelganger appeared in her chair - while the real Emilie could still be seen in the garden. Two of the girls became curious and approached the doppelganger and tried to touch it, but felt an odd resistance in the air surrounding it. The apparition faded away after one girl succeeded in passing through it, causing it to slowly fade into nothing.

Sadly Emilie’s strange ability unnerved many of her employers and resulted in her dismissal from several jobs.

Supernatural creatures

There is a large body of evidence that suggests that creatures that are most definitely not of our world sometimes seem to get trapped here. There is much debate as to whether this may be the result of inter-dimensional travel, parallel universes, time slips or are a manifestation of the collective consciousness. Whether these beings have arrived in our world intentionally or by accident remains a mystery but the fact that creatures that are not of this world can sometimes end up trapped in it could explain some of the strange sightings from London’s Highgate Vampire to the Mothman and Spring Heeled Jack.

The Mothman

The Mothman phenomenon is of course one of the best modern examples of a supernatural creature that has been sighted over a lengthy period of time. During a thirteen month period, there were multiple sightings of a heavily built 'winged humanoid', described as being between six and seven feet tall with brown or grey coloured torso and red glowing eyes, around the small town of Point Pleasant on the banks of the Ohio River. Although it was known to chase cars on occasion, the creature tended not to attack people directly, but its unearthly appearance, sheer size and loud screech meant that those who saw it were naturally concerned for their safety.

Many witnesses also reported being filled with in an inexplicable foreboding and the creature seemed to be able to mesmerise people with its hypnotic stare. Sightings of the Mothman ended suddenly in 1967 but only with the catastrophic collapse of the Silver Bridge into the Ohio River, a tragedy that many believe was triggered by the creature. The mothman wasn’t the first supernatural creature to cause fear and widespread disruption, nor was his stay the longest; that honour goes to England's ‘Spring-healed Jack’.

Spring-heeled Jack

Spring-heeled Jack was a ‘devil eyed’ flame breathing humanoid type creature, said to be able to fly through the air in massive leaps. Over a 67 year period from 1838 to 1904, Jack terrorised the people of England by carrying out random attacks on both men and women alike. He was described by one of his first victims as wearing a kind of helmet and a tight fitting white oilskin costume and having long claws and breathing blue and white flames.

Despite having been spotted all over England, this description remained remarkably consistent. As Jack’s rampage continued, women had their clothes torn from their bodies and were scratched and terrorised, while men were taunted, slapped, scratched and thrown to the ground. Jack successfully evaded several traps set by the army and simply laughed and disappeared when the townsfolk of Lincoln shot at him. The last sighting of spring-heeled Jack was in Liverpool in 1904 where he started a panic by leaping from the cobbled streets to the rooftops repeatedly, as if playing a disruptive game. When a group of men tried to corner him, he simply vanished into the darkness and was never seen again.

The superhuman qualities that Jack was said to exhibit have led many observers to speculate that whatever Jack was, he had to have been something that came from beyond our dimension, certainly there is little by way of earthly suspects that would explain his 67 years of mayhem.

Ghosts and Spirits

Like doppelgangers and bilocation, tales of ghosts and spirits visiting and communicating with the living also date back to ancient Egypt; it is by no means a recent phenomenon only attributed to the modern world. There are several different forms of ghosts and just as many theories concerning what they might be.

One type of apparition is often attributed to something called ‘stone tape theory’, which offers an explanation for ghost sightings that follow established patterns. The best known examples are the spectral coaches that can sometimes be seen thundering along an old road or the Roman soldier that at times can be seen guarding an old town gate. According to the theory, these are specific historical events that are replayed like a holographic video. In some cases, it is not just individual ghosts that have been witnessed, but entire armies.

A Spectral Army

In 1953, a young plumber named Harry Martindale was working in an old house in the ancient English city of York when he was amazed to see a legion of Roman soldiers, some on foot and others on horseback emerging from a cellar wall. The apparition was so real that a sound, almost like a blaring trumpet accompanied the disembodied soldiers. Martindale was able to describe their clothes in amazing detail, telling of their plumbed helmets and short sword which they carried on their right-hand side. One peculiar aspect of the sighting was that the soldiers and horses were only visible from their knees upward. It was later realised that the reason for this was due to the cellar only reaching so far down towards the original Roman Road.

Cases like this provide excellent examples of stone tape theory as one of the key features of the theory is that the image is replayed like a video, the location and the movement of the apparition never varies. If the movie screen is partially obscured, then certain aspects of the image (the soldiers’ feet) simply cannot be seen even though they are ‘there’.

More commonly, ghostly apparitions can be attributed to those that have retained their connection to loved ones and can maintain an open channel to the people with whom a close bond existed during life, which is how the Egyptians tended to view ghosts. Perhaps the most interesting kind of ghosts are the ones that are anchored permanently to the earth plane for some reason, and which can interact with people in the physical world in an intelligent, often playful manner.

Pete, the playful Ghost

Perhaps the best example of these so called ‘intelligent’ ghosts is a ghost from Cardiff, Wales who is affectionately known as ‘Pete’. The only person who has actually seen Pete describes him as being the ghost of a young boy of around nine years of age who judging from his clothes, seems to have grown up in the 1930’s. Pete took up residence in a lawnmower workshop in the early nineties and has made his presence known almost daily since then although he has only been seen once or twice.

What makes Pete different to most ghosts is that Pete not only displays intelligence, but playfully interacts with the people involved in the workshop as if he were part of the family. His tricks include making coins appear from nowhere on a regular basis, as ‘gifts’ for people and playfully throwing rubber carburettor plugs at his new found family members when they least expect it. They in return would chat to Pete and leave him toys to entertain him; his favourite being a rubric cube, which he would apparently play with, often changing the top three colours of each side to a sequence of Blue, Orange, Yellow, which his adopted family seemed to think was intended to spell out ‘boy’.

Small stones were not uncommon in the lawnmower workshop and Pete was known to enjoy throwing them if the opportunity arose. If one of the engineers gently threw a stone they had retrieved from a mower into the corner of the workshop, one was invariably thrown back to him. One day, the man in question threw a stone and as usual Pete playfully threw one back.

The next time, the man pretended to throw one but didn’t and still a stone came back, but when the man repeated his dummy throw a second time, no stone was returned, somehow Pete had ‘learned’ that some of the throws were trick throws. Likewise, if Pete was being a bit of a pest the men would gently reprimand him as if he were a real child and Pete would obligingly ‘behave’ while they worked. Over the years, Pete has become something of a local legend in Cardiff, in many respects he seems to be the playful little boy from the past, that simply came to stay.

Time Slips

Is it possible to temporarily find yourself transported back in time? According to some witnesses, it is. One of the most famous cases involves two English women who were holidaying in Puys, a seaside village near the port of Dieppe in Normandy, France. Just before dawn on August 4th 1951, they were woken by the sound of gunfire. This developed into the sound of men’s cries, mortar fire and the sound of aircraft bombing raids.

During the three hours that followed, the bemused women sat and listened to what can only be described as a battle that had become trapped in time. Other people in the area heard nothing unusual at all, but the two women were adamant that a huge battle had occurred. As they began to recount what they had heard, it became obvious that somehow they had relived the disastrous attack by the Allies that had occurred on August 19th 1942.

A Road to the Past

The Dieppe case is not an isolated one. In Liverpool, England, several different witnesses over a period of sixty years have reported unexplained phenomena occurring in one particular street; Bold Street. Under certain conditions, the street seems to temporarily transport certain people back in time. Witnesses who have experienced the phenomenon report how the whole street seemed enshrouded in an eerie silence, with lighting conditions changing to something similar to that of a solar eclipse. Other witnesses add that despite it being a busy time of day, the traffic and number of people out suddenly became much lighter than expected, as though some were simply ‘missing’.

One man reported how when going to pick up his wife, he suddenly noticed that a shoe shop had suddenly closed, he then became aware that everyone looked a little different, they were dressed in fashions and vehicles dating back around 15 years earlier – to the 1980’s. Other shops seemed to have reverted back to their earlier locations on the opposite side of the street.

Another lady reported how in the 1980’s, she had experienced being transported back to the street as it was thirty years earlier, in the 1950’s. The lady in question even had a conversation with a gentleman who sat on the same bench as her while she ate her sandwiches, but it dawned on her that he too was dressed in 1950’s clothing. On another occasion, another witness recounted noticing that a derelict church seemed to be in use – despite the fact that it has been all but destroyed during the war. It was only after, that he realised that what he had seen was the church as it was in the 1930s.

Unexplained Aerial Phenomena

As mysterious aerial anomalies go, there is little to compete with the legendary war time phenomena known to the pilots who saw them as Foo Fighters.

Foo Fighters were variously described as ‘balls of fire’ and ‘glowing’ orange, red or white spheres that tailed the wartime aircraft in the skies above Europe and Japan for miles, but never interfered with them. Contemporary witnesses of the time from both the German Luftwaffe and the Allied forces assumed that these strange light balls were secret weapons developed by the enemy. Pilots on both sides who tried to shake off these strange glowing balls of light quickly found that any evasive manoeuvres they took were matched by the balls of light; likewise it was impossible for pilots to outrun them. It was only after the war that they realised that neither side were responsible for them, this created a deeper mystery, if they weren’t man made, what were they?

The Allies were so concerned that the Germans had developed a new weapon far beyond their own technical abilities, that they placed a news blackout on the story for several years. It was not until 1945 near the end of the war when the story finally hit the headlines. Time magazine journalists learned of the seemingly intelligent balls of light and ran a story on the strange phenomenon that quickly captured the public’s interest. According to the article:

"If it was not a hoax or an optical illusion, it was certainly the most puzzling secret weapon that Allied fighters have yet encountered. Last week U.S. night fighter pilots based in France told a strange story of balls of fire which for more than a month have been following their planes at night over Germany. No one seemed to know what, if anything, the fireballs were supposed to accomplish. Pilots, guessing it was a new psychological weapon, named it the 'foo-fighter' ... Their descriptions of the apparition varied, but they agree that the mysterious flares stuck close to their planes and appeared to follow them at high speed for miles. One pilot said that a foo-fighter, appearing as red balls off his wing tips, stuck with him until he dove at 360 miles an hour [580 km/h]; then the balls zoomed up into the sky."

Despite the initial fears, foo fighters were never reported to have harmed any flight crew or to have taken any aggressive action at all; they simply followed, observed and finally left.

Lacking any credible explanation as to what these balls of light could be, the military decided they might be an unusual electrical phenomena related to either ball lightening or St Elmo’s fire. The number of photographs that had been taken combined with an overwhelming number of witness statements meant that it was impossible to put the sightings down to imagination. No conclusive explanation has ever been found and the phenomenon remains unexplained to this day. Many researchers, acutely aware of the ‘intelligence’ that these balls of fire seem to display tend to view the phenomenon as either inter-dimensional or extraterrestrial; in any event, it seems that there is little to tie them to the natural world.

Conclusion

There are a variety of explanations that might go someway towards helping us understand what might be behind these strange events. Certainly, the idea that our universe is a multi-dimensional one is something that quantum physics has toyed with for many years. Perhaps an occasional overlap or rift between dimensions might account for how strange creatures such as the Mothman and Spring-heeled Jack, that look as real as you and I, but are capable of superhuman feats and are clearly not from this dimension, are able to interact with our world.

There also exists the possibility that within our particular dimension. there are multiple layers of reality ranging from the physical here and now to a series of ethereal worlds occupied not only by ghosts and spirits, but perhaps much more. What if time itself were somehow enfolded in these ethereal layers of reality? In the right conditions, bridges between these worlds might allow us to access our own past or even future.

Perhaps keeping an open mind is the most important step to opening the door to the unexplained. Is all that stops us from starting to understand the supernatural world, our own doubt?

---

© ThothWeb - http://www.thothweb.com

All images copyright © by their respective photographers. This article is copyrighted.

---

See what's free at AOL.com.