For the longest time, I’ve heard it said that children and animals are more perceptive to paranormal activity than adults.
There are innumerable stories from parents who have witnessed their children playing with “imaginary friends” who seemed remarkably real, or recalling descriptions of deceased family members they’ve never met that were eerily accurate. Perhaps something’s going on there, perhaps not.
One possibility I’ve stumbled upon is that a child’s ability to see spirits is directly linked to the development of the human eye. Over time, this ability fades, like with hearing or eyesight in general, but at a young age children are able to visually perceive something adults cannot. I can’t say why this is, at the moment, but perhaps I’ll look into it in a future post.
Anyway, here’s a very short anecdote I came across while investigating the matter, which I found pretty interesting. It was posted about a year ago on Reddit’s r/Paranormal by user MechaJohnWayne.
One night, his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter seemed to be acting restless in her crib. She was “maybe a little frightened,” he wrote, so he picked her up and took her into his room. At that point, she’d woken up quite a bit, and seemed calmer. But her eyes lingered at something he could not see.
“She was looking wondrously at the foot of our bed saying ‘look at the lights, the sparkles….’ Kind of playfully she kept mentioning “the lights”. Then she said “daddy, who’s that man?” Pointing directly at the foot of our bed.”
Not much else happened that night, and they went to sleep. However, according to MechaJohnWayne, the apartment may have been primed for a supernatural encounter — the previous owners of the apartment, an elderly couple, had passed away in it only a few months earlier.
Spooky.
There are other such stories in that thread, so check it out if you’re curious.
As a side note, I remember a long time ago, when I was a kid, an old legend that said you could see ghosts if you looked through the ring of a skeleton key. I even tried it once, but no dice. Perhaps some people are just more likely to see ghosts than others.
