Sign 4: Objects Moving or Disappearing
A door creaks open on its own. A book falls from a shelf with no one near it. Your car keys, which you always leave in a bowl by the door, are suddenly gone, only to reappear a week later inside a kitchen cabinet. These phenomena range from the subtly perplexing to the overtly dramatic.
Paranormal investigators often categorize these events into two types. The first is the “Disappearing Object Phenomenon” (DOP), sometimes called “the borrower effect.” This involves small, everyday items vanishing from a known location and reappearing elsewhere, often in a strange or illogical place. It is a common and frustrating experience for many people, whether they believe in ghosts or not.
The second, more dramatic category, is the movement of objects. This can be as subtle as a picture frame found slightly askew or as alarming as a chair sliding across the floor. In its most extreme form, this is known as poltergeist activity, from the German words for “noisy ghost.” Historically, poltergeist cases often involve objects being thrown, furniture being overturned, and a general sense of physical chaos, frequently centered around a specific person in the household, often an adolescent.
From an investigator’s perspective, capturing an object moving on its own is a significant event. Stationary cameras are set up for hours or days, hoping to record a door swinging shut or an object falling. This is considered hard evidence, something that can be reviewed and analyzed repeatedly.
However, the list of potential rational causes is long. For disappearing objects, the most common culprit is simply human error. We misplace things, we are forgetful, and our memory of where we put something can be unreliable. In a busy household, another person may have moved the item without telling you. The brain also engages in something called inattentional blindness, where we fail to see something that is in plain sight because our focus is elsewhere.
For moving objects, environmental factors are often at play. A house settling can cause doors to swing or latch improperly. Vibrations from heavy traffic outside, construction, or even a running washing machine in another room can be enough to cause an object perched precariously on a shelf to fall. A subtle, unnoticeable slope in the floor can cause a rolling chair to move over time. Static electricity can also cause very light objects, like a piece of paper, to move.
While the idea of a spirit moving a physical object is a cornerstone of how to know if you have a ghost in your house, the principle of Occam’s razor—that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one—suggests that mundane causes should be exhaustively ruled out first. The line between a simple annoyance and a sign of paranormal activity often lies in our willingness to look for a worldly cause.
