Right away, you should know that it is the official position of Cracked.com and its parent company that we don't believe in bullshit. It's fun to think about bizarre unsolved myseries and wonder what's actually going on with the whole UFO thing, but we'll always defer to Occam's razor. A blur on a photograph is way more likely to be a weather balloon than a spaceship and a ghostly old woman wandering around an old church is far more likely to be a hallucination or, you know, an actual confused old woman.

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There's a fine line between kooky and spectral.

It says nothing about our belief in an afterlife or lack thereof. There is simply no evidence that dead people wander aimlessly around old houses, and no known scientific principle that would make it possible. But a lot of people have seen ghosts. A lot. There are certain spots and buildings where separate, unrelated witnesses have reported ghosts independently, without having talked to each other or being aware of the area being "haunted."

It appears that science has stumbled across the reason for it. It has nothing to do with the supernatural, but the answer is almost as weird.

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Mole people?

In order to understand the science we need to head back to the late 1950's. While working in his robotics laboratory Vladimir Gavreau noticed that one of his assistants was bleeding from the ears, despite the absence of rebelling robots choking him.

Puzzled, Gavreau started researching the phenomenon by holding vibrating pipes next to clueless assistants. We'll never know what excuse he used when they turned around and asked him why their ears were bleeding, but one way or another Gavreau soon realized that a vibrating pipe of the right length and girth can cause a number of unpleasant effects ranging from mild irritation to serious pain.