Other Paranormal Phenomena

Some reports fit no neat category: curses that are said to follow a place or an object, “time slips” in which witnesses believe they have glimpsed the past, energy “vortexes”, forests and hills with a reputation for strange experiences, and places where every kind of phenomenon is reported at once. The most famous time slip is the 1901 experience of two Oxford academics, Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, who believed they had seen Marie Antoinette’s Versailles and published their account in 1911 as An Adventure.

Curses are among the most enduring of these stories. The “curse of Tutankhamun” was born in the press after Lord Carnarvon died in 1923, a few months after the tomb was opened; in 2002 a study in the BMJ compared the lifespans of 25 Westerners exposed to the tomb with others in Egypt at the time and found no significant difference. Romania’s Hoia-Baciu Forest and Sedona’s vortexes in Arizona attract visitors hoping for unusual sensations.

Explanations range from coincidence and selective memory to suggestion, unfamiliar surroundings and simple misunderstanding – Versailles in 1901 was full of people and pageantry. We set out each claim, its sources and the most likely explanations.