In honor of “spooky season,” I want to veer away from the firm scientific footing of this platform for a moment into the unsubstantiated and inexplicable. Paranormal phenomena in nature have been described for centuries, just sporadically enough to elude mainstream acceptance. But they’ve always intrigued me nonetheless, at least in the realm of interesting fiction or fantasy. Like most warm-blooded scientists, I was thoroughly skeptical of paranormal stories, blaming the limits of human observation and intrinsic bias for missing a hidden scientific explanation. Then I witnessed a few implausible events where paranormal explanations suddenly seemed more realistic, events that still provoke my imagination when I think about those nights.
First, while I was volunteering in Joplin, Missouri, I drove outside of town on several occasions to watch for a mysterious phenomenon known as the Spook Light. I had dismissed many of the stories from locals who had seen the Spook Light – many of the tales seemed dramatized, like the guy who was watching with beers in both hands as the glowing orb approached and burned a char mark into the hood of his brand-new 1968 Mustang. But then, on the third night, I glimpsed it: a faint yellow-orange light, clearly not a streetlight or car beam, materialized on the horizon to the west and floated back and forth along a distant treeline. I returned to the same dark road during my next spring break, this time with a carful of friends, and we may have had an even better view. Looking south toward a farmhouse, the same disembodied light materialized and meandered back and forth for about half an hour, hovering a few feet above the dry grass. We watched in wonder, but it was impossible to see what was producing the light or what had extinguished it after the phenomenon had run its course.
A few months later, I was back at Rice University when I had a much closer encounter with something unexplained. I was taking a 5-hour take-home exam in an empty classroom in Keck Hall, the old chemistry building, and I had to take a bathroom break at around 11 pm. When I walked under the domed ceiling of the foyer, I heard a whooshing sound in my ear and paused in my tracks. Looking up into the dome, I retraced my steps and heard the same whooshing sound. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as I walked under a third time; this time the whooshing sound was accompanied by a pressure pop in my right ear. Suddenly very nervous, I called out but found that I was alone in the old building. After simmering down in the bathroom, I steeled myself to walk back across the foyer one final time en route to the classroom. As I passed under the dome, the weight of a child, about 50 pounds but not solid, was imparted onto my shoulders. I flinched downward then ran back to the room, distracted from my exam and everything else for the rest of the evening.
I actively avoided haunted places for a few years, feeling spooked and even a little crazy as I was unable to corroborate my peculiar late-night experience with anyone else. And ghosts avoided me, at least until I made a trip to Bisbee, Arizona, an old mining town with a fraught history. Many of the hotels and Airbnbs advertise being haunted by some tortured spirit or another, so I didn’t pay much mind when booking a room at the Oliver House. It was dark as I made my way up the steep hill to the front veranda around 9 pm, where a blacklight illuminated some patio furniture that was covered in a layer of leaves and dust. I rang the doorbell and waited: no answer. I knocked several times on the wooden door: no answer. I dialed the old boarding house’s telephone number: no answer, just an infinite series of rings. I walked around the rear of the building where a single light was on in what looked like a kitchen – inside, the pale figure of a young woman with a platinum blonde bob appeared to be walking, pausing intermittently. I rapped on the window to get her attention, but the figure continued pacing, her eyes locked forward as she walked in a triangular pattern, around and around. I watched, petrified, for several moments, but the figure was undisturbed, almost gliding as she continued to move in that same triangle. I finally was able to collect myself and ran back to the car, changing my reservation for the Copper Queen Hotel (also allegedly haunted, but no further encounters for us). I stayed awake for several hours, restless with frightful excitement as I replayed the moments in my head, remembering in detail exactly what I had observed.
With each paranormal encounter, there was always a sliver of doubt, a plausible deniability. I was never close enough to the Spook Light to see its composition – my friend Reed saw the same view from the back seat and concluded it must be “some guy holding a flashlight,” though I find it equally implausible that someone would work so hard to create such a grand illusion. No one else has reported a ghost encounter in that old building at Rice, and technically, I didn’t see anything either. Perhaps the whooshing sound was an echo from my loose clothing, and the weight was a reflex from feeling terrified in the moment? Seeing that apparition in the Bisbee hotel was bizarre, and my friend Gold saw it too! But we went to that hotel’s café the next morning, and the barista had similar narrow facial features (though completely different hair and gait), a pretty uncanny coincidence. To this day, I don’t know exactly what I witnessed in any of the three instances, grasping at straws for a scientific explanation but finding more overlap with the unsubstantiated and often fanciful descriptions from paranormal lore. And that’s fine with me, as long as any future encounters with such mysteries are also benign. Anyways, happy Halloween!
Worldly Observations 