The thing!

I reached over to a table while looking the other way. As I turned to look at my hand I jerked it away in horror!  There was a black ‘thing’, several centimetres across, moving rapidly towards my hand across the table. The ‘thing’ vanished almost immediately. So what was it?

Before answering that, consider this. Supposing I’d experienced a series of odd incidents in the same place over a period of weeks. I might well see the ‘thing’ as further evidence of a haunting.  But as it as just a one-off incident I might be more likely to consider natural explanations first. It demonstrates the importance of context when it comes to experiencing something unexpected and strange.

If I’d recently moved into a new home I met well experience a series of unexpected phenomena. This is the ‘new house effect’. It happens because we are not used to the normal sounds, sights and smells of an unfamiliar place and can sometimes interpret them as signs of a haunting. It is amazing how many hauntings are reported when people first move into a new home, even though previous occupants noticed nothing out of the ordinary.

So what was the thing? First, some context. It was early morning and the summer sun was streaming in through a window sharply illuminating the table. The ‘thing’ was in a pool of sunlight.  I quickly realised it was the shadow of a butterfly passing outside the window. I looked out of the window but was not quick enough to see it. However, there had been lots of butterflies around the window in previous days especially when it was sunny.