Paranormal Experiences That Still Can't Be Explained

The paranormal. The unexplained. The ghostly. The ghastly. The things that haunt us as we lie awake in our beds at night. Most can easily be explained away—a sudden mental breakdown, someone drunk, Venus. An explosion, debris, some catastrophe that we can hold and touch. But others ... others aren't that simple.

The Miracle of the Sun is also known as Fatima's Miracle, for the town where it happened. During the early 1900s, a large group of people waited, staring into the sky, for a vision to appear. It was so recent we have actual photos of the crowds waiting, staring into the sky.

Three children had been playing in the fields and claimed to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary. She came to them again and again, making predictions, including the end of the first World War. On the day of what she said would be her last appearance, thousands came. But she again appeared only to the children, before revealing her miracle to the collected group.

The Sun began to dance. Lights shone out of it, burning in the sky. It flew toward Earth, it flew around. Some say they saw absolutely nothing, but others said the Sun was a burning mystery in the sky.

The weirdest part is that it's not like everyone was expecting the Sun to dance around. They were hoping to see Mary herself, and then a whole lot of them were treated to this other wacko vision. We suppose it's always possible, though, that Fatima was the site of the first mass use of LSD.

One day, out of the woods, two children walked into the English town of Woolpit. This was back in the 1200s, so children mysteriously appearing wasn't as odd back then—due to, you know, parents having a much higher rate of death because of diseases and the whole living-in-the-1200s thing. But these two children were unique.

They spoke a single language that none of the English had heard before. They only ate raw beans. They wore strange clothes. Oh, and both of them were freaking green. (Was that because of the beans?)

Someone took them in, with the boy dying while the girl survived because girls rule and boys die of illnesses far too often. The little girl learned English and told of her life underground, where "everything was green and it was always twilight." Now, if you've never heard stories of fairies before, that's about as good a description of them as any.

The girl didn't disappear. She grew up, got married, and lived her life, never seeing the place she had come from again. They say you can never go back home, but in her case it was very literal. There are a few different sources for this story—all from the time—and no explanation aside from, "maybe it was poison? and confusion? Look, we dunno. The kids were green, maybe the Hulk did it. It was the 1200s."

The Overtoun Bridge in Scotland is the saddest place to be. It the sight of countless suicides ... by puppies. Dozens of dogs have thrown themselves from this great height, and no one knows why.

Despite the absurdity of a dog-suicide bridge, it's as real as the grave and as common as sin for dogs to jump off there. If the dogs don't die after the first jump, they go back up and try again. Scientists try to discover the truth behind the "Bridge of Death" but come up empty-handed, with nothing but tears.

There's no explanations of a scientific sort, but there's one that's pretty horrifying. In 1994, a man threw his son off the bridge to his death, claiming the child was the antichrist. Does the antichrist just want ghost dogs as friends? That's the only guess we got. Of course, the dogs had been jumping off for over 30 years before the baby Satan flew to his doom, so even the weirdest explanation doesn't stand up.

Prisoners don't always have the best life—especially not those locked in solitary confinement. But don't worry, at least there's Prisoner's Cinema. And it's not experienced solely by prisoners: if you meditate or are an astronaut or played Dungeons and Dragons a lot as a kid, you can experience it too. All you need to do is be alone for a long, long time. Then the visions begin.

Did you ever see 2001: A Space Odyssey? It's kind of like that film's famous trippy sequence. (Wanna talk truly unexplained paranormal events? Let's get into the work of Stanley Kubrick.) The visions are a light show that people see, with their eyes open or closed. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.

Why are all of us receiving the exact same, specific vision? Is something waiting for us to be calm and quiet and still and only then reaching out to speak? Probably not, but who knows?

You know how you can tell when something is going to be of a horrifyingly alien nature? When it's described as a "blob." C'mon, has anything other than a jellyfish—which we all know are really aliens in disguise—been described as a blob? Aside from your mom, of course.

The Hebrides blob is a carcass that washed ashore in Scotland in 1990. No one knows what it is, and no one knows what creature it could have come from. More interestingly, it happened so recently that there's a color photograph of it, making it a bit more believable that your average Bigfoot. Thankfully, it's the only specimen of its kind we've ever seen wash up, so the rest are hopefully at the very bottom of the sea.

In the 1800s, a small ship washed up on the surface off Japan. Inside the hollow ship—which looked exactly like modern depictions of UFOs—was a young woman who could not speak Japanese and carried with her a small box that no one else was allowed to open. Eventually, she returned to the sea.

This story is described in three different books composed shortly after it happened, and all of them describe the appearance of the woman in the exact same way. The unknown vessel was covered in writing, which has been recorded and is considered similar to other mysterious writing, believed to be alien. The woman of unknown origin had hair unlike any seen in Japan before, and all sources refer to that box she did not let go of.

We guess first contact happened about 300 years ago, and as with most things, the Japanese did it first. So, when are these beautiful women coming back to abduct all of us?

In South Asia, in late October, every year on the Mekong river, small fireballs rise from the river and shoot out into the sky, burning red until they fade away. The number varies from in the tens to the thousands but it happens consistently, to the point that the Naga Fireballs are revered.

So what's the explanation? Some people think swamp gas, but that doesn't quite explain the regularity. Plus, there's no proof because locals refuse to let scientists examine the area. See, the locals believe it's a dragon at the bottom of the river.

Our best guess? It's old man Smithers scaring off scientists from discovering his underground drug business. Now all we need to do is wait for four meddling kids and a dog to show up, and those Naga Fireballs will be history.

There's a place in Texas—go there if you like—where at night, you can see lights in the desert. Ghost lights trail off into the distance, like souls going to hell or to heaven. Some have believed them to be passing cars, driving behind tree lines in the distance, their lights shining out between the bark and shining with firm consistency. However, if you look, you can find that these lights have been around since long before man ever had a mind to create highways like that. The Marfa lights have been around since before even Texas was brought to life.

The lights are playful sometimes. Other times, they're aloof, and still other times, they almost seem kind. But the lights seem living and move to and fro. They're lights in the darkness, unexplained and unknown.

There was a space battle in the stars, a long, long time ago. No, not that long ago. Just in the 1600s, about forty years after Shakespeare died.

One day in April, a bunch of fishermen saw ships battling each other in the sky. Afterward, one of them hovered above the others. Shortly after it all ended, the fishermen became horribly sick.

This all makes it seem a bit less terrifying than it was, so here is the full description of what happened, according to a book written shortly thereafter:

"After a while out of the sky came a flat round form, like a plate, looking like the big hat of a man ... Its color was that of the darkening moon, and it hovered right over the Church of St. Nicolai. There it remained stationary until the evening. The fishermen, worried to death, didn't want to look further at the spectacle and buried their faces in their hands. On the following days, they fell sick with trembling all over and pain in head and limbs. Many scholarly people thought a lot about that."

Scientists examined the case, and their best guess was "maybe birds? I don't know, did they hallucinate it?"

Good job, science. No wonder we haven't made it to Mars yet.

James Dean was one of the most famous, successful, and handsome actors who ever lived. Until he died. It was a car accident, very tragic, but we all have to go some day, and aren't car accidents some of the most mundane untimely deaths? Normally, yes, but it seems that wasn't the case here.

Because James Dean wasn't the last to die in this car. The car, nicknamed "the Little Bastard" by James Dean, has been involved in countless accidents. Even before Dean died in it, Obi-Wan Kenobi himself—Alec Guinness—said the car was sinister and if Dean got in it, "you will be found dead in it by this time next week." Guess how many days later Dean was found dead? If you guessed seven, congrats, you win a kupie doll.

Since killing Dean, the car's parts went into two other cars involved in fatal accidents. Thieves tried to steal the remaining car and lost an arm in the process. The garage that stored the car burned down, and when the car was put in an exhibition in a high school, it slipped off its pedestal and hit a student.

The car has kept maiming and killing its owners, because once you get a taste for blood, you never go back.