According to spirituality and aging expert Kuepfer, people like to believe that we can control life by putting it in boxes for our own understanding. "Science has become the religion of our age—it is what we have learned to trust to explain life. But much of the wonder of our experience is beyond explanation. Spirituality allows for mystery, and for life/’God?’ to be bigger than we can get our human minds around," she said.

Kuepfer also shared her belief that, as time progresses, our spirituality may actually increase rather than decrease. "In my opinion, if humanity continues to flourish, we will be growing in the direction of greater openness to spirituality, to wonder, to possibilities beyond what we can contain and control. Spirituality invites us to seek and discover meaning and purpose in life, so I hope we won’t deprive ourselves of it any time soon.

Melisa’s thread had over 185.8k likes on Twitter, as well as nearly 16k retweets at the time of writing. Considering how much attention her post got, it’s easy to say that a lot of parents have been in situations where their kids scare them with what they had to say.

As odd as it may sound, there have been numerous attempts to scientifically prove the presence of the paranormal. For example, books like ‘Children Who Have Lived Before: Reincarnation Today’ have tried to systemically approach and verify ideas about life after death by analyzing children’s stories.

“Eminent scientists explain how many of these children's stories have been followed up to verify whether their statements have any foundation in fact. Incredibly, when subjected to scientific investigation, children's memories about their past lives can invariably be confirmed in every detail,” the book’s blurb explains. Naturally, everyone’s a bit of a skeptic. But once you widen your gaze, you start coming across things that can’t be explained by conventional logic alone.

As Live Science points out, getting solid evidence (pun very much intended) about the existence of ghosts and spirits is incredibly difficult and there are plenty of contradictory accounts between people.

Not to mention that far from every story is true: there are plenty of charlatans out there, preying on people’s grief, as well as ‘ghost hunters’ looking to make a quick buck. On the flip side, there are genuine psychics, spirit mediums, and exorcists, too, who aim to help people (even if they sometimes fail). Completely discounting their experiences would be unfair, just as accepting them word-for-word would be, too.

There are lots of small indications around us that the paranormal might be, well, normal. I’ll let you in on a little secret, dear Pandas, if you promise not to tell anyone else. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had prophetic dreams about small snippets from everyday life that later turn out to be true, just like most of my family members. And while you could try to explain déjà vu away by saying that it’s someone’s brain short-circuiting, being the nosy scientist that I am, I’ve tested my dreams, again and again, to make sure I’m not making things up.

My conclusion? Everything checks out and I’m still waiting for my letter to go study at Hogwarts. So there’s not a shadow of doubt in my mind that there’s something deeper in life that science hasn’t been able to catch up to yet. Either that or there’s something weird going on with the Weave of Time! But whether or not you believe me is completely up to you. However, I know that some of you Pandas might be in the same boat as I am! So be sure to share your own paranormal stories in the comment section below.

Scientifically, déjà vu has been associated with temporal lobe epilepsy and neurological anomalies related to electrical discharge in the brain, thus creating a strong sensation that an event has happened before. But as some of us know from firsthand experience, this doesn’t account for the fact that some of us have quite literally dreamt the scenes days, weeks, and sometimes months in advance.

Scientists have also tried to link déjà vu to mental disorders like schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, and anxiety, but found no correlation. However, there is a possible genetic link! Specifically, the LGII gene on chromosome 10 is being studied because certain forms of the gene are associated with a mild form of epilepsy.

Meanwhile, Scientific American writes how one study found that after scanning the brains of 21 participants as they experienced a lab-induced sense of déjà vu, the areas of the brain involving decision-making (rather than memory) were triggered. This suggests that déjà vu might be our mind’s way of resolving conflicts.

“They interpret this result to mean that déjà vu could instead be a result of our brains conducting some form of conflict resolution. In other words, our brain checks through our memories like a rolodex looking for any conflict between what we think we’ve experienced versus what actually happened to us.”

In the future, I’m sure that scientists will discover a lot of hidden truths about the world that we felt were real but could never prove with hard evidence. But what do you think, dear Readers? Which of these spooky stories did you enjoy reading the most? Do you have any similar tales to tell? Do you think it’s time we gave Sam and Dean Winchester from ‘Supernatural’ a call?