Rise Up Again Like a Ghost
The Great Read
Quarantining With a Ghost? It's Scary
For those who believe they're locked down with spectral roommates, the pandemic has been less isolating than they bargained for.
Information technology started with the front end door.
Adrian Gomez lives with his partner in Los Angeles, where their starting time few days of sheltering in place for the coronavirus pandemic proved uneventful. They worked remotely, baked, took a two-mile walk each morning and refinished their porcelain kitchen sink. But then, one night, the doorknob began to rattle "vigorously," and so loud he could hear information technology from beyond the flat. Yet no one was there.
In mid-Apr, Mr. Gomez was in bed when a nearby window shade began shaking confronting the window frame so intensely — despite the fact that the window was closed, an adjacent window shade remained perfectly still, the cats were all accounted for, and no bug nor bird nor any other small creature had gotten stuck there — that Mr. Gomez thought it was an earthquake.
"I very seriously hid myself under the comforter, like you encounter in horror movies, considering it really did freak me out," he said.
Now, though neither he nor his partner noticed any unexplained activity at habitation before this, the couple tin "distinctly" brand out footsteps higher up their heads. No ane lives above them.
"I'm a fairly rational person," said Mr. Gomez, who is 26 and works in I.T. support. "I endeavour to call back, 'What are the reasonable, tangible things that could exist causing this?' But when I don't have those answers, I start to think, 'Maybe something else is going on.'"
They're not alone … mayhap in more means than one.
For those whose experience of self-isolation involves what they believe to be a ghost, their days are punctuated not just by Zoom meetings or dwelling house schooling, but past disembodied voices, shadowy figures, misbehaving electronics, invisible cats cozying upward on couches, caresses from hands that aren't at that place and fifty-fifty, in some cases — to borrow the technical parlance of "Ghostbusters" — free-floating, full-trunk vaporous apparitions.
Some of these people are frightened, of course. Others say they just appreciate the company.
There is no scientific testify for the being of ghosts, a fact that has footling bearing on our collective enthusiasm for them. According to a 2022 YouGov survey, 45 percentage of U.S. adults believe in ghosts; in 2009, the Pew Enquiry Heart establish that 18 percent of Americans believe themselves to have seen or otherwise encountered one.
Image
Before stay-at-home restrictions in New York, Patrick Hinds, 42, left Manhattan with his married man and daughter to spend six weeks at an "ambrosial" cottage in western Massachusetts that they rented on Airbnb.
1 night, Mr. Hinds woke up around 3 a.g., thirsty for a glass of h2o. He said he walked into the kitchen and saw a white man in his 50s, wearing a well-worn, World War Ii-era military uniform and cap sitting at the table.
"It seemed normal in the separate 2nd before I realized, Wait, what's happening? And equally I turned to look, he was gone," said Mr. Hinds, who is the host of the podcast "True Offense Obsessed." "It didn't experience menacing at all. Information technology almost didn't fifty-fifty occur to me to tell my husband the next morning."
If you were to have the premise that ghosts are real, it stands to reason that some tension would naturally result once their flesh-and-blood roommates start spending much, much more time at home together.
John Due east.50. Tenney, who describes himself every bit a paranormal researcher and is a onetime host of the Goggle box show "Ghost Stalkers," estimates that he received ii to 5 reports of a haunted house each calendar month in 2019. Lately, information technology's been more similar 5 to 10 in a week.
Mr. Tenney has seen something similar this before: In 1999, immediately before Y2K, he witnessed a fasten in reported ghost and poltergeist action, likewise equally U.F.O. sightings (which, in his experience, are also on the rise in this moment). "It does seem to have something to do with our heightened state of anxiety, our hyper-vigilance," he said.
Mr. Tenney has no doubtfulness that the vast majority of these cases in his inbox are "completely explainable" in nature. "When the sun comes up and the business firm starts to warm up, they're usually at work — they're not used to hearing the bricks pop and the forest expand," he said. "It'south not that the firm wasn't making those sounds. They just never had the time to observe it."
Or did they? Janie Cowan believes she'south been haunted since college. The ghost she calls Matthew (a "good, biblical name" chosen in the hopes information technology would keep him on his best behavior, explained Mrs. Cowan, who is 26) has historically made his presence known in her Nashville home through the sounds of someone running upwardly and downward the staircase at dark.
The noises are "not like a house settling, or like our cat walking effectually," said her husband, Will Cowan, a 31-twelvemonth-former auditor. "Information technology'southward very clearly out to go attention."
Effectually the aforementioned time the couple began to self-isolate in March, Mr. Cowan started to utilize their guest bathroom so that his wife, a abode health nurse who has been picking up more night shifts during the pandemic, could sleep in without the sounds of his morning routine disturbing her.
He has found that Matthew, who both spouses concur prefers Mrs. Cowan, doesn't seem to appreciate these changes. On iii separate occasions, while showering in the invitee bath, Mr. Cowan has been unexpectedly blasted with common cold water. Simply it wasn't merely a quirk of the plumbing: Every fourth dimension, he said, he reached out to discover that the hot-water nozzle had been turned off.
Image
Madison Colina, 24, is riding out the pandemic with her boyfriend in her apartment in Florence, Italy. Ms. Hill, a writer and teacher originally from Charlotte, Due north.C., had always had her suspicions near her dwelling house, particularly the bathroom. At that place was the sense that someone was watching her, doors slamming, towels inexplicably on the flooring.
A few weeks into quarantine, she woke upwardly to find something on her nightstand that did non belong there. It was a camera lens, one she'd brought from the United States but lost when she moved in. She had long given up on ever finding it. But hither information technology was.
Since and then, other pocket-size objects, including a set of keys, have moved to strange new places inside her apartment. The reappearance of the camera lens in particular struck her every bit a "mischievous," playful gesture — perhaps fifty-fifty a thoughtful suggestion that this could be the perfect fourth dimension for Ms. Hill, who majored in picture in college, to pick her old hobby back up.
Paradigm
Kerry Dunlap shares a one-bedroom apartment in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens with his girlfriend, Alexandra Cohl. Mr. Dunlap, a 31-yr-onetime instructor, rapper and concert promoter, believes he first met their resident ghost last summer.
He saw her in the bathroom, in the heart of the dark: wearing greenish scrubs, standing an arm's length away from him. She appeared to be glowing. The woman vanished when he turned on the low-cal. Mr. Dunlap knew that one of the friends the couple is subleasing from had spotted a ghost in the apartment; both agreed they'd seen an older Asian woman of small stature.
Mr. Dunlap and Ms. Cohl, a 27-year-old writer and editor, used to find themselves in a routine late-night tug of state of war over the also-small comforter they shared. Several weeks ago, Mr. Dunlap woke late at night to the awareness of what he assumed was Ms. Cohl adjusting the blanket at his feet to spread it evenly across the bed. When the movement stopped and he didn't feel his girlfriend climb into bed abreast him, he called out to her. She didn't respond.
Then she came dorsum in from the bathroom.
"Information technology was so weird, dude," Mr. Dunlap said. "It was so weird." But the incident left him and Ms. Cohl with a lingering positive impression: like whoever — or whatever — information technology was had been trying to brand the couple feel more comfortable, or to mediate a potential conflict between them before information technology happened.
Kurt Grey, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Colina, studies how nosotros perceive and treat the minds of other entities, including animals, machines and the expressionless. Times of great unease or malaise, when there is an increased bulldoze to find meaning in chaos, can lend themselves to perceived hauntings, he said — not to mention that disease itself shares certain psychological parallels with a "malevolent spirit," creeping invisibly upon its unsuspecting victims.
This miracle could also be a side effect of the loneliness of our fourth dimension. "In quarantine, y'all are physically confined and too psychologically confined. Your world narrows," Mr. Gray said. "Yous're trapped at home, you're needing human contact — information technology's comforting to think that at that place'due south a supernatural amanuensis here with y'all."
For Danielle, a 39-year-sometime lawyer, isolation predates this pandemic. (The Times agreed to not use her last name, to protect her professional reputation.) She has been recovering at her home in Richmond, British Columbia, since contracting an unrelated serious affliction over the wintertime.
She starting time experienced strange activity in February, she said, when she kept walking into her guest bedroom to find a particular lamp turned on, although she had no retentivity of leaving it that manner. This happened once more, and again, and again, until, on a whim, she said aloud, "Don't plough that dorsum on."
The side by side time she entered the room, she institute the ceiling lite — which she never, always switches on — blazing. On more than than i occasion, she has heard the voices of a man and a woman having a conversation she couldn't quite make out.
More recently, she was sewing face up masks in the same bedroom. She had exactly enough fabric left to brand one more than mask, but when she briefly turned abroad from the ironing board where she'd just pressed the double cotton gauze, the two remaining pieces disappeared.
"It was gone," Danielle said. "Like, in a twenty-second period, gone. I went and checked the garbage pail, nothing. Checked the recycling, null. My fabric stash, nothing. I tore the house autonomously looking for these two pieces of material, and they accept never come back."
Danielle describes herself as a highly social person, someone whose friends and family had worried about how she'd fare cooped up all past herself. "This kind of feels similar someone popping by to cheer me up, or keep tabs, or brand sure that I'thousand not feeling alone," she said.
If the thought of a paranormal identity tin can provide someone "a little flake of social sustenance" to assistance them suffer their solitude, Mr. Greyness said, then nifty. At least, as long as the ghost isn't advising its hauntees to "become into emergency rooms without a mask and French osculation everybody," he said.
Are you troubled by strange noises in the centre of the night? Do you experience feelings of dread in your basement or cranium? "Don't panic," said Mr. Tenney, the "Ghost Stalkers" host. Have careful notes on what y'all discover. Y'all may soon find a rational explanation for your fears. What if that strange noise at two:50 p.thou. every weekday is just the UPS truck clattering by?
But Mr. Tenney also offers this: One could argue that the ghost puttering around in your kitchen is not only there, simply that she'due south always been there. Perchance you lot're what's inverse. Or maybe you're listening more closely in the greater quiet all around us. "Possibly nosotros're just now starting to notice that the world is a little bit weirder than we gave information technology credit for," he said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/style/haunted-house-ghost-quarantine.html
0 Response to "Rise Up Again Like a Ghost"
Post a Comment