Paranormal sightings such as ghostly images of people walking through walls and disappearing right before our eyes have been witnessed by thousands of people throughout the world. Encounters like this continue to happen to people like you and me today. What is it that causes us to encounter such things? And better yet, what is this paranormal activity we so desperately want to prove exists? There are thousands upon thousands of theories out there describing what is known as paranormal activity but to save space I plan on briefly explaining only the most popular theories.

FIRST & FAVORITE:
Most encounters with the paranormal has led to the conclusion for some that what we are experiencing are visitors who were once alive but now have passed on into the afterlife, a.k.a. the Dead. The dead come back for a variety of reasons. Some come back to finish something they left undone when they were alive. Some come back to help or protect a living loved one. Others come back meerly to enjoy spending time in places they used to live. They are called 'Ghosts', 'Phantoms', 'Spectors', 'Spirits' and 'Apparitions'.

SECOND:
The next theory takes a more skeptical look at what many of us have experienced. There is a lot we don't know about how the different sections of our brain work or what they are used for. Some suggest that these anomalies we encounter such as visions of a person who used to be alive, is actually only a hallucination caused by our brains being manipulated by the magnetic fields, the food we ate, and/or other natural elements found in our environment. But what this theory cannot explain is how we can hallucinate the figure of a person who we've never seen before until the moment when we recognize that person's face in a photo and realize that they have been dead for quite some time.

THIRD:
What we are experiencing has been described as witnessing a rip in time. If time was folded one layer on top of each other, or was like an onion peel with multiple layers, than at certain moments when conditions are right, the layers of time collide and we in the present are able to witness happenings from the past. What the conditions are that allow this to happen has yet to be determined? In a sense, this a lot like time traveling without a machine, however, it tends to happen against our will or control. I wonder if it is possible to get stuck in the past during one of these time rips? This theory may explain the reason we have a lot of missing people.

FOURTH:
This theory is very similar to the one above. Taking the idea of multiple layers, but instead of the layers being 'time', these layers are different worlds, or universes, just like ours. Sometimes when conditions are right, these worlds collide and we are able to see into another dimension.

These are only a few theories that try to explain the encounters with things we can't explain. Will we ever know what paranormal activity is? The pending answer to this question is what drives us, as paranormal investigators, off of the couch and into the field.