The Haunted Mirror

In the comments to the Proctor and Gamble post, I got an interesting question from a reader. Seeing as it was off-topic for the P&G thread, I figured I would go ahead and answer it as best I could in a new posting.

OZWizard writes:

What is "alive" or "living" in the mirror in my entry hall?

It seems harmless and somewhat oblivious to me. It also seems to be some sort of guardian. It wouldn't move from its place and seemed un-distracted as if set in place or held in place. I asked silently if it was from God but there was no response.

I noticed it during the stress of the holidays and during an "altered state" after I had several nights without sleep and without my glasses ( I have astigmatism.)

I seemed to move out and back into the mirror as if held there. I was very tall, as tall as the mirror plus above the floor, so between six and seven feet tall. It was birdlike or angelic with huge birdlike wings. The wings seemed to move independently and rose and lowered to cover its face which changed back and forth several times from humanoid, to bird, to lion to other unknown creature constantly. The wings rose over its shoulders to cover its face and seemed to help hide it back into the mirror and to hide its face when it appeared to notice me watch it. The wings seemed alive in themselves and reflexive rather than controlled (sort of like a blinking eyelid).

This "creature" could be a number of different things. However, the first thing you should do is spend some time looking at the mirror, studying it from different vantage points in the entry hall, and so forth. You want to be absolutely sure this is not some kind of optical effect that has nothing to do with anything spiritual. If it is some sort of trick of the light, you should be able to see it again if you observe it under the exact same conditions.

Also note that lack of sleep can induce hallucinations. I know of several professors from astronomy classes that I took when I was younger who swore up and down that they saw all sorts of bizarre things when they had stayed up for a few nights in a row watching the stars. If you only see it when you're running seriously short on sleep, something like that is probably the real answer.

One more thing to watch out for is old, unshielded electrical wiring, like the knob and tube wiring in some older homes. Some experts have suggested that older electrical wiring could create electromagnetic fields that affect the human brain. I've heard of a number of cases where people were troubled by a haunting but then upgraded all of the electrical wiring in the troubled part of the house. With the new wiring in place and properly grounded, the unusual phenomena disappeared.

Finally, if there is a window anywhere in the entry hall, watch out for cars on the street and see if moving your hand in front of the window affects the image when you see it again. I had a friend of mine once tell me that he thought a certain cemetary was haunted because when walking along the sidewalk nearby at night you could see random flashes of light from around the headstones. I checked it out, and sure enough, the flashes appeared. However, after careful investigation I realized that the flashes were actually just a property of the very long, straight road that ran along the cemetary. Right when a car turned onto the road more than half a mile away, there would be a brief flash when light from the headlights caught the granite on some of the headstones. The granite shifted the color of the light and the cars were too far away to be heard until well after the flash.

I felt no fear watching it move back and forth from within the wall or mirror. It seemed to be guarding something. There were small fairy-looking or miniature elf like creatures seeming to be "allowed to pass" by i the "mirror" creature". Some of the fairies watched me oblivious also. The "winged creature" appeared to "communicate" with the fairy creatures in a friendly way but it ignored me watching the entire scene.

I pass the mirror and wall several times a day on the way in or out my door or up the stairs. I have tries to acknowledge it being there but I have not tried to observe it deliberately again.

What is this creature?

Once you've eliminated the likely mundane explanations, there are a number of paranormal things that this could be - however, I want to stress that a mundane explanation is the culprit at least nine times out of ten. Make sure that before you decide this is something paranormal you rule out everything else. I can't stress this enough, because genuine paranormal haunting-type cases are very rare.

Here are some questions that would help me out. Go ahead and answer them in the comments to this post. First off, how old is the mirror? Did it come with the house? Is it an antique? Or is it just a fairly normal mirror that you bought at a department store or something? Second of all, how old is your house? Have you experienced any other haunting-like phenomena in any are of the house besides the mirror? Knowing all of those things will give me a lot more information about this phenomenon.

If I was told that this was definitely a paranormal entity, my best guess would either be a ghost of some sort that died in the vicinity of the mirror or in your house, or possibly some kind of telesma or artificial spirit constructed by a magician and linked into the mirror. In the former case it might be guarding the entry hall, and in the latter case it might be guarding the mirror itself. If you link a telesma into an object, when the object breaks the telesma usually "dies" unless it is linked to some specific portion of the object that remains unbroken.

I hope this helps. I'll look forward to your answers.