Outside of ghosts/UFOs/religious stuff, d'you know anyone with less "mainstream" paranormal beliefs?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m tired of hearing about ghosts, UFOs and religious apparitions & signs. What about doppelgangers? Fairies (not necessarily the “nice” ones)? Omens? Psychopomps? Do you or anyone else have a belief in or irrational fear of these things?

Myself personally, no. But once when chatting idly about the old custom of sitting up with the dead, my dad mentioned one instance he’d seen and started to mutter something about odd behavior by one of the housecats – and then quickly changed the subject. :confused: I wonder what he was going to say, before he thought better of it . . .

2

Missed edit window: of course, living in Asia, a lot of people around me believe in feng shui, for example. I don’t, personally, but when your wife knows two people who died within the space of a year, both inhabiting a particular house known to have bad feng shui, it’s hard to change her mind.

3

I know a TON of people that have lots of superstitions, some bizarre enough to enter the realm of ‘paranormal’, I guess. I know a lot of Afrocentric* types and many of them believe in astrology, ancient Egyptian mysticism, telepathy, etc.

*There are lots of Afrocentric types who aren’t into woo at all, but there is a whole set of folks who identify as Afrocentric that believe all that crazy crap.

4

I know some people who ‘practice’ remote viewing.

5

I know an Indian woman, otherwise very intelligent, who believes strongly in reincarnation. Presumably, she is Hindu.

6

I think that falls under the category of religion. Many faiths believe in reincarnation, and in India it’s the norm.

7

Do Government conspiracy nuts/‘black helicopter’ people count?

I seem to encounter people at parties, usually of the younger/pot smoking variety who truly believe that the government is reading their thoughts or that at any moment the ‘black helicopters’ will come for them. My wife also used to work with a respiratory therapist who felt this way. As everyone who wears a tin foil hat knows, the Government has all kinds of excess satellites in space apparently dedicated 24/7 to learning the thoughts of random 25 year old potheads so the analysts can deduce the importance on their thoughts about “Napoleon Dynamite”. I always try to reason with these people asking if they truly believe this, and they really do. Somehow, they agree the thoughts of every random head of a major business, foreign country, and random terrorist would be more important then their own, such that they must be getting monitored too. They also acknowledge that the cost of building and launching a satellite is probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and that we are talking about lots of people being monitored here. Yet somehow, they still believe this is possible. So far though, none have accused me of being part of the plot, which seems strange, since surely I must be if I am trying to convince them they are wrong.