“What Mysterious Thing Happened To You That You Still Can’t Explain?” (30 Answers)

As we can see in this list, many people have experienced mysterious and unexplainable events that stuck with them.

To talk more about them, Bored Panda reached out to philosophy writer Jonny Thomson. He said that, in a way, he has experienced some unexplainable and overwhelming things himself brought on by, for example, love for his children: "There are times when I feel I love them with such intensity that the word love feels inadequate and the feeling spills into the religious. It feels overwhelming at times."

Classical music also brings this kind of feeling for Jonny: "I grew up near Canterbury and would sometimes sit [and] listen to choirs sing there. I would often cry and never know why. Inexplicable feelings pulled by inexplicable forces."

Yet, sometimes, even the most seemingly inexplicable things can be logically reasoned. Let's take a story about flickering lights from this list (that kind of reminds us of Stranger Things) -- maybe it can be written off as some electrical fault.

Jonny reiterated our idea that some things can be explained by something like a disease, electricity, or something similar, even if explaining it this way can seem kind of dull.

As an example, let's take the eerie feeling that someone is following you -- apparently, it can be caused by certain forms of epilepsy. Or, seeing invisibly moving things can be a sign of a certain region of a person's brain being damaged. 

Then, some out-of-body experiences, a sensation of a person's consciousness leaving their body, can also be explained medically. Experts say that things like stress, trauma, and conditions like epilepsy, migraines, or even cardiac arrest can be a reason for this. 

But sometimes, the logical stuff isn’t the answer that is satisfying enough. Our interviewee Jonny revealed that for the topic of unexplainable phenomena, he likes to look at theological works despite not being especially religious himself. For instance, Rudolf Otto's "The Idea of the Holy" talks about numinous experiences. "It is a kind of 'overpoweringness.' It's the feeling of being swept away by intense, unswimmable currents but not necessarily in panic. It's tremendous—a mysterious kind of power that both repels in its intensity and attracts in its appeal."

Yet, instead of religiousness, Jonny assigns it all to something more similar to aesthetic experiences and moments of profound love: "That mixture of fear and attraction is, for me, at the heart of the mystery."

When faced with the unknown, some others go for paranormal explanations. Typically, these experiences are attributed to something magical, folkloric, or simply supernatural.

To talk more about this, Bored Panda also got in touch with paranormal investigator Alexandré LeMay. They believe that: “Most hauntings are fragments of information stored in time after an event of intense energy and triggered through the right conditions. A smaller percentage of the time, it's an intelligent haunting, and that's where things get a little more complicated. We don't have all the answers, but I personally feel that when the soul passes on, small fragments of their being exist[s] outside of time and continue in these spaces we experience them.”

Speaking of hauntings, one of the most commonly discussed paranormal phenomena is ghosts and the big question: "Are they real?"

Basically, ghosts are believed to be inhabitants of the netherworld that visit our world from time to time in a variety of forms, depending on the witness. The belief about ghosts and the things they cause on earth is so common that in many societies, funerals are held for the deceased just so they won't come back in this form and haunt the living. 

Alexandré said that when it comes to beliefs about things like ghosts, people tend to bring their own beliefs and perspectives into each experience: “A catholic tends to see entities through a demonic lens, whereas a skeptic is more likely to experience nothing at all. People tend to get exactly what they expect from hauntings. It's all so energetically intertwined that someone who doesn't believe, most of the time, will not give the situation the energy it needs to manifest, in my opinion.”

Sadly (or not so sadly, depending on how you perceive ghostly presences), it was reported that science doesn’t support ghosts' existence.

There's a machine called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was built to help scientists answer fundamental open questions of physics. It has already helped them to learn about particle decay, find hints of new particles, and even reexamine the current knowledge about the Big Bang. Physicist Brian Cox believes that the LHC can help dismiss the existence of the paranormal, as even it seemingly can't find any tangible evidence for them being real.

This, in a way, proves that those who claim to see ghosts only do so because they've led themselves to believe they have. Basically, if you think paranormal activity is real, you are more inclined to believe you have witnessed it rather than look for a logical and common-sense explanation for it.

Well, that means that we need to find another explanation for the mysterious stuff on this list, as, apparently, ghosts weren’t responsible for them. Maybe sometime in the future, another kind of research will come and disprove the one we discussed. Only time will tell.

Have you ever experienced something mysterious and unexplainable? Share it with us in the comments, and upvote the experiences you find the most interesting!