Weather | Wiltshire, UK | Twilight Shadows North Paranormal

Weather and Paranormal Activity

Weather conditions can have a dramatic effect on the accuracy and effectiveness of your ghost hunt or paranormal investigation. Or so it is claimed.

There is a popular belief among the paranormal community that certain adverse weather conditions heighten paranormal activity. I have asked this question to other paranormal teams on our Facebook Page and the answer I got was a resounding yes. I also asked our own team members if they believed this. Most do. However, I am not so sure. We have been to locations in the past that are reputed to be paranormally active during some quite impressive storms. However; we did not experience any real noticeable increase in activity. Or at least we didn’t in my opinion.

So, what is the theory behind this popular belief? After doing some research (and reading countless articles on the subject) it is belief the different types of energy generated during storms is the key, especially during electrical storms. There is also a belief that solar flares can also heighten paranormal activity.

The science bit

*In physics, the law of Conservation of Energy states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant — it is said to be conserved over time. This law means that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed from one form to another.

Assumption

The weather conditions that we experience are caused by a transfer of energy. Our delicate planet is constantly striving to keep a steady balance between the solar radiation coming from the sun, and what is bouncing back out into space. So, if the popular belief that paranormal entities use energy to manifest then a logical assumption is that fluctuations in weather conditions (i.e. fluctuations in energy) could potentially heighten the level of paranormal activity.

The most desirable storm to experience during an investigation must surely be a Thunderstorm. Thunderstorms are frequently cited for enhancing paranormal activity. Though they may make an investigation much more atmospheric and creepier, could they actually enhance paranormal activity?

The Science Bit (again)

*Thunderstorms are caused by rapidly rising and falling currents of air. The friction from this moving air creates electrical charges within a cloud. Water droplets and ice pellets fall, carrying charged electrons to the lower portion of the cloud, where a negative charge builds. A positive charge builds up near the top of a cloud.

Most of the electrical energy in a thunderstorm is dissipated within the clouds, as lightning hops between the positively and negatively charged areas. Lightning becomes dangerous, though, when it reaches for the Earth.

How lightning strikes

When the negative charge in the cloud becomes great enough, it seeks an easy path to the positively charged ground below. The current looks for a good conductor of electricity, or a tall structure anchored to the ground (such as a tree or a tall building). The negative charge sends out a feeler, called a stepped leader, which is a series of invisible steps of negative charges.

As the stepped leader nears the ground, a positive streamer reaches up for it. Only then, once this channel is made, does the visible lightning happen. A return stroke runs from the ground to the clouds in a spectacular flash.

Though the bolt appears continuous, it is actually a series of short bursts. Most lightning strikes occur in less than a half second and the bolt is usually less than 2 inches in diameter.

Thunder

The air around a lightning bolt is super heated to about 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit (five times hotter than the sun!). This sudden heating causes the air to expand faster than the speed of sound, which compresses the air and forms a shock wave; we hear it as thunder. Since the bolt is actually several short bursts strung together, multiple shock waves are created at different altitudes; this is why thunder seems to rumble -- each shock wave takes a different amount of time to reach your ear.

Thoughts

As you can imagine, there is some quite impressive energy generated during a thunderstorm. If spirits are able to utilise this energy, again, it would be a logical assumption that paranormal activity would heighten during a thunderstorm. Another popular train of thought is that electro-magnetic energy fields (EMF) are reported to be linked to paranormally active areas and can affect people sensitive to them. With regards to an electrical storm, there could also be the question that EMF fields generated during the storm could be affecting more sensitive people and causing some type of hallucination or ‘paranormal’ experience.

Team Mission

So, with a few revisits to previous locations on the cards in the team’s paranormal diary this year, one of the long term experiments we will be conducting will be to see if we can prove or disprove this theory. We will report back at the end of the year with our findings.

* Taken from Wikipedia
* Taken from LiveScience