Have you ever felt an instant connection to someone you’ve met for the first time? Have you ever been homesick for a place you’ve never been, or known more than you should have about a place you have visited for the first time? You may be experiencing memories from a past life.

Reincarnation, or being born again into a new body after one has died, is a notion that has been around for thousands of years. Most Eastern Religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism, believe in reincarnation, and always have.

In a world where most everything can be explained scientifically, the journey into the afterlife is probably the single greatest mystery of the human race. We have both our doubts and beliefs, but sometimes even a strong belief system is not enough to comfort us when we have experienced the loss of a loved one.

In July of 1947 an event occurred just outside of Roswell, New Mexico, that changed forever our views regarding the possibility of contact with extraterrestrial beings. An unidentified space craft crashed on Foster Ranch, just 75 miles north of the town of Roswell.

With this event there came a flurry of interest in UFOs. Hollywood took this interest and brought it to the level of obsession in the early 1950s when it released sci-fi movies like “It Came From Outer Space,” “The Day The Earth Stood Still” and “War of the Worlds.”

There have since been thousands of reported UFO sightings, and even people claiming to have been abducted by these visitors from space.

We’ve all felt it; that little chill that creeps up on us when we have to take the garbage out, late at night, all alone. Our mind plays tricks on us, doesn’t it? But sometimes we can’t shake it. It feels like someone is watching us! Someone with a black cape, and sharp fangs and an aversion to garlic….

Okay, maybe I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. But we all seen the movies; we know vampires love to stalk their prey on dark nights in lonely places.

“Don’t be afraid of the dark? Are you kidding me? Of course you should be afraid of the dark, you know what’s out there!” Dean Winchester – Monster Hunter in Supernatural

I don’t know about you, but I am definitely a fan of the new show “Supernatural.” And as someone with an interest in folklore and the occult, I was particularly fascinated with the concept for this show; two brothers hunting monsters and demons. Sure, they hunted some of the typical stuff, like vampires, but was the show based on actual folklore, or just the imagination of creative writers?

There has been much interest in the paranormal over the last hundred years, and with the arrival of such reality TV shows as “Ghost Hunters,” “A Haunting,” “Scariest Places on Earth,” and “Most Haunted”, ghost hunting has become a national pastime.

But are the spirits of the dead more hype and the product of an overactive imagination than fact?

It happened many years ago… I was having an out of body experience one morning when I came face to face with a demonic looking woman. I started to back up, scared out of my mind, when a small voice inside me said “face her.” So, I put my hands on my hips, cocked my head to one side and said “Well?” She morphed into a coyote, then laughed at me and trotted off.

I had just come face to face with a trickster.

One morning I was sitting comfortably at my computer enjoying a nice hot cup of coffee. I was feeling rather inspired, so my attention was pretty much 100 percent on the topic of my article. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed someone walk through my living room, but as I looked up they disappeared. I laughed as I happened to be typing an article on ghostly encounters, and figured it was just my overactive imagination playing tricks on me. But as I once more became engrossed in my article, I noticed the shape again. I looked up as it disappeared into my laundry room. After a thorough inspection of my laundry room, I decided that it must be a ghost, and I demanded that it leave at once!