Have you ever entered a building, or perhaps driven through a town, where you felt inexplicably weird? Maybe you suddenly felt a sense of oppressiveness, or just really uncomfortable, like you couldn’t wait to leave. Perhaps you had a negative feeling sweep through you from out of nowhere.
I have had that happen on many occasions, especially during my travels. One instance in particular stands out in my memory, which was when I was visiting the British Museum in London, in 2007.
I had enjoyed walking around the museum and seeing the exhibits. However, when I got to the section which had some Ancient Egyptian mummies, I started to feel sick. It was like the room was closing in on me, I felt a bit faint, and the energy in there was so heavy and suffocating. I felt like I was not wanted in the room and so I exited that exhibit. When I did, I started feeling normal again.
There are some supernatural explanations and some natural explanations for places feeling so weird. In this article, I’m going to cover some of them.
Let’s have a look at the most common reasons for weird vibes in places:
Earthbound spirits
Earthbound spirits are ghosts — the mental and emotional bodies of deceased people who haven’t fully crossed over into the light. They can attach to places and they can also attach to peoples’ auras, but it’s most common for them to attach to places. Many places have earthbound spirits attached, however when there is a high number of them attached to one building, house or place, that’s when things can start to feel weird. So, this is one common reason why places can feel odd.
Signs that you have an earthbound spirit attached to your home are that you hear things when there is no-one there. I often used to hear heavy breathing and whispering in my grandparents’ house when I was the only one in the house. Another family member later told me that she had heard the same sounds in the same places in the house as me.
Some earthbound spirits have been dead long enough to amass enough energy to move objects and mess with electronics (these are poltergeists). One reader of my blog wrote to me, telling me about hearing a large bang and then going into the room where the noise came from, to find a heavy piece of furniture moved to the other side of the room. No one else in the house to move it, and no intruders.
These are the things that can happen when you have a poltergeist spirit in the house.
Walking into a place where there are loads of earthbound spirits can feel quite weird. I often describe it as being like walking through a city alone, and the sun is shining and you’re in a nice neighbourhood, and then suddenly you realise you’ve ventured into a not-so-nice part of town, where things are in disrepair and the streets are dirty and filled with some dodgy-looking characters.
Earthbound spirits are not necessarily malevolent but they are low-vibrational. They’re generally unhappy and stuck, and so that’s why their energy feels a bit funky and weird. They can also sometimes be perceived as a bit scary and threatening, especially by children.
If you think you have earthbound spirits in your home, you may be interested in my Energy Clearing for Spaces course. This online course teaches you to clear earthbound spirits (amongst other things) from your home.
Past Life Connections
Something else that can have us experiencing odd (but not necessarily negative) feelings in a place is the past life connection we have to an area or town. Some souls have had hundreds of past lives in a variety of places, and so it makes sense that sometimes we may come across a place that we’ve known well in the past. I remember when I was visiting the US, on this particular trip I only got to Western Massachusetts and San Francisco, but when I was flying over Wyoming I felt very emotional and had a cry. I desperately wanted to be on the ground and was filled with nostalgia and longing for the place. I knew nothing about Wyoming and had never wanted to go there before, but being close to it triggered something in me. I have had multiple lifetimes as a Native American, and when I asked Spirit about this experience, I was told one of my lives was in Wyoming.
Let’s have a look at another explanation for supernatural experiences, this one is a natural explanation that not many people know about:
Infrasound
According to Dictionary.com, infrasound is “Sound whose wave frequency is too low (under 15-20 hertz) to be heard by humans. Some animals, such as elephants and whales, emit calls at infrasound frequencies.”
Infrasound is generated by earthquakes, thunder, jet streams, very large waterfalls, wind, volcanoes and ocean waves. It’s also generated by wind turbines.
There is a documented phenomenon of animals fleeing the scene of a future tsunami or earthquake before it occurs. It is thought that the animals are picking up on the infrasound that such an event may generate before it happens.
Infrasound may also explain some instances of paranormal phenomena, for example during thunderstorms. It can make people feel cold, faint, dizzy and nauseous. It can also inspire fear and awe in people, and give them a vague sense that something supernatural is occurring.
Let’s have a look at another explanation for a place having a weird energy, this time a supernatural explanation:
Residual Hauntings
We usually associate the word ‘haunting’ with ghosts, but there is a type of haunting that doesn’t actually involve a spirit, and that’s the residual haunting.
A residual haunting is an echo left by a traumatic event or lived experience. The negative experience gets imprinted on the fabric of the building or the land, and it haunts that place. There is actually no spirit associated with the haunting, it’s simply an echo, but it can appear exactly the same as an earthbound spirit.
A telltale sign of a residual haunting is when you see what looks like a spirit doing the same thing over and over, without awareness of its surroundings or that you’re there.
Not so long ago I did a property clearing for someone in the US, who had 3 residual hauntings in her home. Spirit told me they were all caused by suffering from a series of mental health crises which occured for a woman who used to live in the house. The energy of the residual hauntings was (1) acute distress, (2) suicidal behaviours and (3) self-harm.
After she received my report and clearing, the client who owned the house told me that a woman with dementia lived in the property long term before my client and her family moved in. I didn’t associate self-harm and suicide with dementia but a bit of research told me that dementia patients do sometimes self harm and/or commit suicide.
A person who becomes aware of such residual hauntings may see a woman in confusion or distress, and believe it is a ghost. It isn’t necessarily though; instead it can sometimes just be an echo of a past experience imprinted onto a place. Residual hauntings can also be experienced by the new occupant as the energy that underlies the haunting. So a place haunted by a traumatic event (aka a residual haunting) will usually feel dark and heavy, and this can account for some of the weird atmosphere or feeling that can be found in some places.
I also teach people how to clear residual hauntings in my Energy Clearing for Spaces course.
Emotional Residues
Another type of negative energy that can cause bad vibes in places are the energy of negative emotions left behind by past events (aka emotional residues). This type of energy can be left behind by unhappy people.
These emotional residues can lend a very heavy atmosphere to a place until they are cleared.
I remember when I was travelling through Scotland I felt a lot of negative emotional residues concentrated in various places. One notable place was Glencoe. I didn’t know the history of this place when I went there, but I felt the atmosphere there was very heavy and sad. When I did a bit of Googling on the area, I found the Massacre of Glencoe happened in 1692, where men were murdered and homes and farms were burned to the ground. Some of the women and children died of exposure.
The energy of all this suffering can be perceived in the place if you are sensitive enough to pick up on it.
Now let’s have a look at some common natural explanations for what people consider to be paranormal activity:
Various natural explanations
Don’t assume that knocking or banging in your walls or floorboards is paranormal activity if it happens during the day when the sun comes up or is out. When the sun comes up and a house begins to warm up, the wood in the frame of the house can expand, and and cause banging and knocking noises. Bricks can also pop and cause the same sort of noise. So that’s one possible explanation for noises like that if they happen during the day.
If you have subsidence, it can cause furniture to fall over and pictures to fall off walls.
If you’re dissociated, you can move objects and forget that you did it. Dissociation can happen when we are stressed, and we ‘zone out’ as a defence mechanism. It can look like forgetfulness or daydreaming. An example is when you are in the shower and you can’t remember if you just washed your hair or not, so you end up washing it twice. Or you can’t remember if you took your medication for the day because when you did it, you were mildly dissociated. Or if you’re out driving and you find yourself at your destination but you have no memory of getting there.
Severe dissociation is associated with trauma, but it is normal to experience mild dissociation. And when we do experience more than mild dissociation, we can lose whole chunks of time, and find objects in odd places, thinking that we didn’t move them ourselves when we did.
I am mentioning the natural explanations not because I don’t believe in the supernatural ones, but because I also like reality. And in reality, some odd experiences have natural explanations.
But some have supernatural explanations. I know this to be true because I myself have had some extremely odd experiences. Like the time I was sleeping over at a friend’s house when I was younger, and kept getting awakened by the spirit of a short, bald man with glasses who was angry I was in the house and wanted me to leave. When I told my friend’s father (who was interested in paranormal stuff) about this in the morning, and described the man, he knew exactly who the highly territorial spirit was and what he looked like. He was the most recent occupant of the house, before my friend’s family moved in and I wasn’t the first person he had bothered at night.
As for those Egyptian mummies in the British Museum I mentioned at the beginning of this article? I believe that the souls of the dead, and/or the spirits who protected their resting place were unhappy about the bodies being moved because there was some serious dark energy in that exhibit. It is possible that the Ancient Egyptians put spiritual protection in place for the burial site and the disturbance created some consequences on the energetic level. The spiritual protection couldn’t stop the plundering of the graves but they could make people feel uncomfortable about it.
Have you had any weird experiences in your home or in certain places? If so, what do you attribute such experiences to? Please share in the comments, I would love to hear your story.
I don’t normally feel the energies of ghosts. I worked in a hospital for three years without feeling any, though others swore there were ghosts around. I did, though, feel very strongly a ghost presence one time while I was in Nice, France with a friend. The ghost or presence was in our hotel room. It was very frightening. I didn’t see it, I just felt it.
More recently, I suddenly began feeling very sad about whales. I felt that something had happened, and I had a dream and wrote a poem in which I wrote that ‘someone is curating the whale graveyard.’ I didn’t know what that meant. Then I found out some blue whales had become beached and died off the coast of Nova Scotia. The school of whales was apparently very upset about this, they were hovering around the area and I believe there was concern for them. A big blue whale carcass meanwhile had washed up on the beach. I believe I was picking up on the whales’ grief for their family member.
Eventually, after arguing about what would happen to the carcass, a team from a museum in Toronto came and collected the bones, to preserve and show at an exhibit.
I felt strongly that the whales would have preferred for the body to be released back into the sea.
Wow that’s so interesting about the Egyptian exhibit in the British Museum. I have also always felt rather uncomfortable whenever I went there too. Just the sense that something doesn’t feel quite right.
Thanks for this awesome article and for sharing your experiences. I, too, rather frequently experience bizarre situations, as feeling my own energy being swiftly drained, feeling anxious or nauseous, etc., depressed when visiting certain people and areas, homes, places; negative energy. I analogize these feelings (recently, after having read some “Harry Potter” books), as what or how poor Harry Potter must’ve been feeling or experiencing whenever those Dementors got close! My remedy is beer though, rather than chocolate…seems to work somewhat though for now. Thanks again! I feel much better already knowing I’m probably not as nuts as some probably suspect!
I’m so glad that you shared the blurb about the mummy room in the British Museum! Word for word, this is exactly what happened to me in 1994 when I visited the exhibit as a 13 year old. When I saw your email in my inbox today, describing the event, I was initially confused, because I thought I had written it.
In 2014, my husband and I were visiting the Phnom Penh genocide museum in Cambodia where hundreds of thousands people have been massacred during the khmer rouge regime. It is a depressing place where you can sense the atrocities committed on the people (personal belongings (bloodstained clothes, slippers ) still found on site. I couldn’t stop my tears for hours. Back at the hotel that night, I was still disturbed and was trying to get some sleep when suddenly we heard a big bang coming from the bathroom. We ran there and saw a big window pane had crashed to pieces and I understood.
Again in 2018 I was visiting the British museum with my son where I felt weird, I could sense the negative energy of all the dead people over there especially of Winston Churchill at this particular moment. I felt so sick that we had to leave .
An odd experience I have never understood occured multiple times during my childhood and teenage years.
I am not the only one who reported this in my family.
I would pass a family member (various ones at times) in the hallway, or see them in a room doing something, which is normal, and I would greet them. Upon leaving (with the family member still there) I would reach another room, go outside, or go into an adjacent camper we had connected via a porch, and there would be the same family member! This creeped me out, because there was NO WAY in either space or time, that they could have attained that location and been absorbed in doing something else.
There seemed to be something wrong with time itself on that property, or maybe one family member was not the real version?
I still have no answer for this. My family still owns and lives there (some of them), and I haven’t experienced this in years, perhaps because I only visit these days.
For many years I had a panic attack as we neared Norsewood (NZ). My paternal grandfather’s family were from Denmark (Vikings?) and I identify strongly with this side of my ancestry. The main road drives through Norsewood although the town isn’t visible on either side. One day the car broke down just as we began to drive through and I recall barely being able to breathe I was so panicked. Yet now, I look forward to stopping there. We make a point of driving in for coffee and I really feel ‘at home’ there. I often wonder what happened that caused the shift in my feelings because it’s the only town in NZ I have any sense of attachment for that I have no connection with in terms of friends or known family.
The other comment I’d like to make is this…I pick up residual feelings of sadness and misery and need to learn to deal with this better. The hardest part of this involves animals. I struggle desperately when visiting homes or places that display dead animals and their horns, hides etc. this isn’t simply because I don’t understand why people think they are amazing for causing the death of a creature simply for its beauty. Somehow I pick up on the fear and trauma of the death and am overwhelmed with the sensations.
Yes, to the British Museum, and practically any exhibit with mummies or human remains. I’ve always been super uncomfortable, yet super fascinated by such exhibits–like I can’t get out soon enough, but I want to see it so bad too. It’s really a disturbing feeling. There was a traveling exhibit in the US a while back featuring human bodies about “the human body” and I found it reallllly hard to look at them, like their spirits were mad their bodies were used for exhibition.
My sensitivities for energy have always been there, but escalated with my Saturn return a couple years back.
One experience that comes to mind is when I was on a 9/11 tour with my family in downtown NYC right after this “escalation”. We went into a chapel cemetery, which at first feel mostly felt sad but calm. As soon as the guide got on his microphone while in the cemetery, it felt like a horde of angry cats from the spirits there, rearing up all around me due to the disturbance. Inside the chapel (which had been used as a sanctuary for firefighters and those found in the wake of the 9/11 tower destruction), the energy felt soooo heavy that it felt had to focus. It felt like I was wandering around but not really absorbing anything because there was so much there, very thick and very stagnant. I later left a review to the touring company to not have their guides use their projection equipment in the cemetery. Don’t know if they took that advice or not, either way, I don’t think the spirits like it.
Love this kind of discussion… Thanks for opening it up!
I definitely get these feelings and notice it when the back of my head feels ‘dizzy.’ This happens to me every time I go to a bar which is housed in what used to be a Masonic temple. Even walking past this building brings on the dizzy feeling, but the feeling is worst on the side path leading to the basement bar. I wonder what happened in this place….
I had a similar feeling at the British War Museum in South London. I felt uneasy the whole time I was there but got particularly panicked near the exhibit related to the air raids.
There’s also an obscure place called Fonthill castle and the Mercer museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. When I was on a school field trip, I felt extremely uneasy when I got to the top floor of the museum where there was a preserved hearse and buggy. I thought at the time that I was being a silly, afraid kid. I had to leave right away. When I went back as an adult, I was determined to see the top floor. When I got to the top of the stairs in front of the hearse, the same thing happened. I couldn’t stay even though I kept telling myself that there was nothing to fear.
It’s happened to me in other places, too. I’m glad to know that I’m not the only who experiences this.
Twice in my life I have had this very strong sensation, which felt like my skin turned suddenly and very strongly “electric” (pins and needles, or skin crawling sound tame expressions compared to this). This then led to nausea and I nearly threw up. First time this happened was when I was on a bus trip in Estonia and we drove by a huge prison complex. Those days Estonian prisons were very Soviet-like, true hells on earth. I remember it took around 30 minutes until I felt semi-normal again (i.e. we had driven far enough). The second time my skin turned completely and strongly electric was in my home town in Finland. I accidentally walked onto a street, which had close to a hundred motorcyclists, most of whom seemed to belong to biker gangs (e.g. Bandidos). From that previous prison experience in Estonia, I interpreted that some of those motorcyclists must have committed seriously evil acts and my skin is an evil sensor.
About earthbound spirits… My mother died suddenly in her sleep 20 years ago at age 62. Within the first months of her passing my father could hear her weep and breathe loudly. We both witnessed how the hands of a big battery-run clock (a type that is synchronized with a satellite) rotated like crazy. Boy, it felt crazy to see that happen right in front of our eyes! This happened in three separate days. I thought my mom’s sudden passing was a shock to herself and she was earthbound for a while, but somehow later figured out how to get back to her heavenly home. You wrote that earthbound spirits are low-vibrational and that applied to my mother. I think (in fact I’m sure) she had narcissistic personality disorder and listening to my father, it sounded like she had suffered from depression during the last two years before her passing.
I went for a hike with my daughter in Topanga canyon in Los Angeles. I am a runner, and so this walk uphill was pretty easy for me. We were laughing and talking. Then all of a sudden, I felt dizzy, nausea hit, my head hurt, and I had to stop for a minute. My daughter asked me if I was okay. I said “something feels heavy here but I don’t know why?”. She told me several people had fallen into the canyon and died while hiking one evening. The road is narrow and has no barrier. I was picking up on the exact spot where they fell.
Being ‘sensitive’ may have saved my life! I will cross the street instead of walking past certain buildings, and that can make for a very odd walk indeed. I realized a man was stalking me when he followed my exact route – which wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. I then chose a route that took me to a busy area instead of home. I never saw him again. But so many odd things have happened in my life — with no harm because I follow my intuition — that I see such as normal for me.
I visited Pompei with a tour group about ten years ago. We were taking a tour so we enter through a maze of high walls to this ‘room’, four walls 10 X 1O feet but no roof, where the tour begins. So a group of about 15 people were pressed into this space. All of a sudden I got dizzy and it felt as if the giant granite slab I was standing on bucked up to throw me off. We were at the base of Mt. Vesuvius so my first thought was there was an earthquake, but I quickly realized nobody else felt what I felt. I got out of there as fast as I could and went back and sat all afternoon near the vendors while the rest of my group finished the tour. I was queasy all the rest of the day. I was fine as soon as we left the site to return to Rome. I still don’t know what happened. I asked the vendors if other visitors reported feeling weird. They all said no. So I wonder was this some supernatural occurrence — some energetically coded memory of the earthquake 2000 years ago, or was I reacting to some volcanic gas leak? Or some radiation leak that happens near fault lines? It’s a mystery.
Years ago we were renting a condo in Hershey, PA USA. I would walk my little Yorkie around the building perimeter. There was an early limestone home next door, the marker on the chimney said “The Fishburns 1789”. Well, I became obsessed with this home and it was empty at the time. It had been for sale for about 2 years but had no buyer. I was trying the doors hoping one would be open, but no luck. I called the realtor and then spoke to the owner. He said he would rent us the home. So we moved for absolutely no reason due to my obsession! I got the keys so I could clean prior to moving. I felt a presence watching me. I turned around twice to ask if someone was there. Once moved in the feelings subsided for a while. I began hearing noises at night. The kitchen cupboards were always hanging open. I never do this. Then one evening after going to bed but wide awake, I heard a loud growl that sounded like a large dog next to my bed! I was terrified. My Yorkie growled back! I put my head under the covers and eventually fell asleep. I will never forget that. I feel it was a demon. We searched frantically and found another home — I was so thankful.
Lots of interesting comments here – thanks for sharing, everyone 😀
It’s also interesting how many people had the same experiences about the Ancient Egyptian exhibit in the British Museum (lots of emails and DM’s about this) and yet so many thought it was just them!
I had an experience in Imperial War Museum in London. I felt strong memories or earthbound spirits which I doubt — they run away from me in one of the sections. It was not pleasant as you may guess! I cried; I am a powerful empath. Sometimes we can feel the resonance with the memories of other people that are around us as well. Awareness is the key to these places.