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Des fantômes en Floride ? Rencontre avec Yvonne Hillis, qui connaît bien les esprits qui peuplent sa région... CD audio ou téléchargement MP3 (sur abonnement)
6. Before stay-at-home restrictions in New York, Patrick Hinds, 42, left Manhattan with his husband and daughter to spend six weeks at an “adorable” cottage in western Massachusetts that they rented on Airbnb. One night, Hinds woke up around 3 a.m., thirsty for a glass of water. He said he walked into the kitchen and saw a white man in his 50s, wearing a well-worn, World War II-era military uniform and cap sitting at the table. “It seemed normal in the split second before I realized, wait, what’s happening? And as I turned to look, he was gone,” said Hinds, who is host of the podcast “True Crime Obsessed.” “It didn’t feel menacing at all. It almost didn’t even occur to me to tell my husband the next morning.”
7. John E.L. Tenney, who describes himself as a paranormal researcher and is a former host of the TV show “Ghost Stalkers,” estimates that he received two to five reports of a haunted house each month in 2019. Lately, it’s been more like five to 10 in a week. “It does seem to have something to do with our heightened state of anxiety, our hypervigilance,” he said. Tenney has no doubt that the vast majority of these cases in his inbox are “completely explainable” in nature. “When the sun comes up and the house starts to warm up, they’re usually at work; they’re not used to hearing the bricks pop and the wood expand,” he said. “It’s not that the house wasn’t making those sounds. They just never had the time to notice it.”
WHO REALLY ARE THESE GHOSTS? 8. Madison Hill, 24, is riding out the pandemic with her boyfriend in her apartment in Florence, Italy. Hill, a writer and teacher originally from Charlotte, North Carolina, had always had her suspicions about her home, particularly the bathroom. There was the sense that someone was watching her, doors slamming, towels inexplicably on the floor. A few weeks into quarantine, she woke up to find something on her nightstand that did not belong there. It was a camera lens, one she’d brought from the United States but lost when she moved in. She had long given up on ever finding it. But here it was. Since then, other small objects, including a set of keys, have moved to strange new places inside her apartment.
9. This phenomenon could also be a side effect of the loneliness of our time. “In quarantine, you are physically confined and also psychologically confined. Your world narrows,” said Kurt Gray, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“You’re trapped at home, you’re needing human contact; it’s comforting to think that there’s a supernatural agent here with you.”
10. But Tenney also offers this: One could argue that the ghost puttering around in your kitchen is not only there but has always been there. Maybe you’re what’s changed. Or maybe you’re listening more closely in the greater quiet all around us. “Perhaps we’re just now starting to notice that the world is a little bit weirder than we gave it credit for,” he said.