Mom, I hear voices in my room!

It was the time that my six years old daughter had started to experience fears at night. The light on, the door open, the jump to my bed in the middle of the night, and the look of terror for every single noise or shadow before going to sleep, pushed me to take some action in the matter. The argument that it was only her imagination had been long time obsolete, so I decided to listen carefully for every single detail that was provoking her any fear and tried to calm her down finding every logical explanation.

She told me that after going to sleep, she could see me from her bedroom when I was working in my computer on my desk on the living room. And a couple of time she could see a shadow approaching to me like peeking what I was doing. She told me that sometimes she could hear voices of people talking or laughing in her room, and finally what scared her most was a toy starting by itself in the middle of the night. I have to confess that I got some spooky feeling after listening to her, that of course I didn’t revealed.
So I started with the shadow in the living room. Nothing happened the first two nights while I waited till my daughter had gone to sleep and until I had gotten tired enough to go to sleep myself. But the third night it was a hot summer one and the window of the living room was wide open. And it happened that the traffic's lights reflection on the window‘s glass, created sometimes a freaking moving shadows that with a good gestalt you could perfectly shape as human.

Mom, I hear voices in my room! – alerted my daughter already on her bed one night, and when I came into her room, I could hear a faint last whispering. I stayed with her in the room wondering, and then a laugh. We live in a fourth floor but anyway I went to the window and I could see right down a couple getting into a car in the driveway. Surrounding by the high walls of the building around the driveway the acoustic effect of the talking and chatting on the street reverberated up along the walls with a phantom magnified eco inside my daughter's room.

The toy was the easy one, it actually belonged to my son, a race track toy from Cars (see picture). When I looked closer to it I found a very sensitive button under the car's platform. It wasn’t difficult to me to understand that with the most subtle vibration from the floor, the platform could move and it movement could push down the button and activate a male voice announcing the start of the race.  Turning it off resolved the problem.

My daughter listened later all my logical explanations of every event with great relieve and as simple as that she started to sleep with no fears or light on after that.

And it was in this moment when the idea of the project born. Could every single paranormal experience have its own logical explanation? Could be possible that the paranormal doesn't even exist and it is just tricks of our perceptions and imagination?

Still something that was bothering me: the toy. Without confessing my intrigue to my daughter, I waited till I was alone at home; I turned the toy on and I started to experiment with it. I put the toy in different places, walked by, jumped around, and I did everything possible you can imagine to make it start by itself without touching it… nothing happened. Thinking that may be the toy finally had been broken I walked away when the host, announcing the starting of the race, made fun of me.

Are you a skeptic or a believer?

by Viviana Gomez - January 16, 2012