As October dawns upon us, thoughts of ghosts, smells of pumpkins and the eerie rustling of falling leaves begin to surround us.

Mysterious happenings and stories of phantom hitchhikers who disappear from moving cars elevate among the populace during this time of year. As Halloween approaches, shadows become a little darker, noises become slightly more unnerving and black cats crossing in front of you gives you a bit more pause than normal.

I was talking with some friends not long ago and the topic of unexplained things came up. By unexplained, I mean misplaced items that seems to reappear of their own accord, hearing noises without explanation and catching a glimpse of something from the corner of your eye and then seeing nothing when your full attention is turned upon it. As we all sat talking, four of the six of us told some pretty hair-raising tales of odd occurrences that we were hard pressed to put logical explanations to.

In August of this year, I moved into a new apartment. I unpacked the boxes, put things away and after a while, made a new home for myself. Two weeks after moving in, I misplaced my keys. After looking around for the better part of ten minutes, I came to the conclusion that they just weren’t here. This was ludicrous to me for I’d driven home and let myself into the house. As I was returning from another room where I was continuing my search, I saw my missing keys – on the very table they’d been missing from that initiated this search.

I live alone, my door was locked and how they were gone one moment and reappeared merely eleven to twelve minutes later was a mystery of Scooby-Doo proportions!

Now before you all chuck me out for being a bit of a nutter (Brit-slang, here!), I have to say that I didn’t immediately chalk this happening up to beasties coming from the static-filled screen of my TV just to hide my keys but I do have to say it was a bit unnerving for me.

Think about the things in our everyday world that truly don’t have explanations that come in neat packages. What about those shadows we see out of the corners of our eye, the prickling of the hairs on the backs of our necks and what about all those stories about haunted dormitories turned office buildings?

Where do all of these things come from? As October comes upon us, does some sort of mass hysteria descend, as well? Are we so anxious to get “into the spirit of Halloween” that we imagine all these things to scare ourselves or is there really a side of our lives that we’re just not all that educated about? There are scientists that say that there are a myriad of dimensions that coexist with our own; could it be that some of those dimensions overlap our own? The Bible speaks of demons and the like, some Chinese writings speak of the “spirits of the departed” and some Native American cultures believe strongly in the idea that the spirit and the body are separate entities.

I wonder why it is that we are so fascinated by ghosts, spirits and other aspects of the paranormal. In preparing this column, I asked a few fellow students if they believed in such things and the answers ran the gamut. “Oh, yeah!” said a Dyersburg native enthusiastically while a Martin resident said, “That’s all Harry Potter nonsense” with a wave of his head and a smile that said I was insane for asking such a question. Whether you believe in such things or not, the very pondering of these things is something that increases during this time of the year. We think of Halloween and thoughts of things creepy and scary come to mind – and maybe, just maybe, that’s what stimulates us to see what isn’t there, hear what we can’t possibly have heard, and imagine all sorts of things we wouldn’t otherwise imagine.

Or maybe…there truly ARE things we can’t “quantify, qualify or easily reference”. The next time you and a gathering of friends are just sitting around doing nothing – bring up the topic of strange events that have happened and see what the responses might be like. You may not solve the mysteries of those strange events but at the very least, the stories can be very entertaining and quite interesting in most cases.

Now…has anyone seen my keys? (Cue the spooky music!)