Can the weather influence paranormal activity? I’ll do my best to answer this listener question in tonight’s episode.

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Welcome to the PEEP Podcast! I’m your host Nicolle Morock, and on this Ask Me Anything episode, I’m pulling from my experience as a paranormal investigator and my knowledge of weather as a degreed meteorologist to hypothesize about the connection between weather conditions and paranormal activity.

But first, I want to let you know that I’m going to take a summer break from the podcast. If you’re a long-time listener, you know I need to do this every once in a while because life can get a little too hectic with so many creative balls in the air. Over the next several weeks, I have travel for work, family coming into town for a visit, and personal travel out of state to visit family I haven’t seen in far too long. While I can still work on my novel while traveling, podcasting is just a bit too much. And since my schedule will be too chaotic to schedule interviews, it makes sense for me to just take a brief hiatus.

Please don’t unsubscribe because I promise I’ll be back in six weeks. In fact, if you haven’t yet subscribed to this show on your favorite podcast app, hit that button now, so you’ll be the first to see when my break is over!

Now on to tonight’s topic:

This past weekend, I put out the call for questions about anything related to the podcast, and Allison had a good one for me:

I’m curious about the weather. Why is paranormal activity amped up so much after a storm? Or is it just coincidence? Does the humidity have anything to do with it?

Based on my own anecdotal experience, I’d say that’s a possibility! But instead of focusing on humidity, which is a measure of the amount of moisture in the air, I think we should focus on kinetic energy.

Depending on the type of storm, there can be a huge amount of energy released into the atmosphere. Light rain without lightning releases kinetic energy through the process of the rain falling to earth. Heavier rain releases more energy than light rain, and when you add in lightning discharges, man! You are really amping it up! [pun intended]

The math to figure out just how much energy rain adds to the atmosphere is complicated and depends on the area the storm is covering, how long it lasts, how big the drops are (the bigger they are, the more mass they have), et cetera, so it’s not something I can get into on a podcast episode because I’d like you to keep listening.

I read some papers and examples, and landed on a course page on Stanford University’s website that said “the potential energy of a cubic meter of water (1000kg) in a stratus cloud at 2000 m of elevation is about 20 MJ (mega joules), or 5.5 kWh (kilowatt-hours).”

When that water falls as rain, its potential energy becomes kinetic energy. Some energy is lost to air friction, and when the rain hits the ground, what’s left becomes other types of energy, including vibrational energy that creates the sound we hear.

According to the National Weather Service, “A typical lightning flash is about 300 million Volts and about 30,000 Amps. In comparison, household current is 120 Volts and 15 Amps.”

If ghosts, spirits, entities, or whatever you’re dealing with requires energy to manifest, you can see how anything from a mist to a severe thunderstorm full of lightning could grant quite a bit of power to the situation. So, my hypothesis is that this additional energy makes it easier for activity to happen.

It’s also possible, that the storm acts as a trigger mechanism, much like my friend who wears a vintage navy uniform when investigating the Battleship North Carolina hopes to stir things up. Or similarly, we used to investigate the ship right after a fireworks show over the river because the booms sounded like cannon fire and the ship tended to be more active. It could be that a storm played a role in whatever caused the haunting, and now, storms have a way of stirring the spirits up. Or maybe the storm creates the right atmosphere for a residual haunting – a reenactment of events that seem to play out over and over under certain conditions.

I have a couple of personal examples. The first is from the time when my former group, NSPIR, had the contract with the City of Raleigh to investigate Mordecai Historic Park. I can think of one rainy night in particular when the female ghost haunting the Andrew Johnson birthplace house on the park grounds seemed to be riled up.

We were in the house during the storm, and we were all trying to be respectful of the property by wiping our feet as soon as we entered so we didn’t track mud through the building, which is really just one room downstairs and one room upstairs. It’s hard to imagine a president of the United States had such humble beginnings, but Andrew Johnson did.

While we were doing our EVP session downstairs, we heard footsteps on the floor above us, and we knew nobody living was up there. So, we made our way upstairs when we finished that first session and did another. During that second-floor session, one of my cohorts literally saw motion while he was looking at the lower floor by focusing on the space between the floorboards under our feet. We were hearing footfalls downstairs, and he saw motion to match, as if someone were pacing .

During our time in the house, I had the distinct feeling that there was a lady who was very unhappy about having visitors with wet and muddy shoes in her home. She was ready for us to leave, and I apologized for any mess we made as we walked out the door and moved on to the next building on the property.

The second, more recent example happened this past February when my group did our final investigation of the Battleship North Carolina. It was literally a dark and rainy night. I don’t recall lightning, but it was raining quite hard at times – so much that you could hear it in the lower decks of the ship.

We paid for the privilege of having an hour to investigate the part of the ship where the torpedo hit during its service in the Pacific in World War II. It had been a long time since I’d been down in that area, and I was feeling especially sorry for the three victims that night.

During our EVP session in that area, members of our group asked questions like “what was your job?” and “what is your name?” I kept intuitively getting the word “Chandler” over and over, and it didn’t make sense. None of the victims were named Chandler, and as far as I knew, the job of chandler is a candle maker, and you don’t want open flames on a ship full of gun powder. But because the word was so persistent and insistent in my head, I finally said, “Y’all, I have to just say this out loud because I keep getting the word chandler.”

Then I let it go.

Our next EVP session was one floor above that room in the engineering shop, and I did not enjoy my time in there. There was a loud buzzing that made my head hurt, and I could hear my heart beating loudly in my right ear. It hurt the entire fifteen minutes we were in there. When we called that session, I told everyone I needed a break, so we went up to the Ward Room which is home base for investigations.

While we sat there and I tried to gather myself, drink some water, and shake that last session, I pulled out my phone and opened the dictionary.com app to look up the word “chandler.” To my surprise, there is a second definition and it’s a different job description: it’s the person on a ship who ensures everyone has the supplies they need. (If you have sailing in your background, you’ve probably been yelling that at me since I mentioned it earlier, but I had no idea.)

I was so excited to see something that did make sense, that I held up my phone for everyone in the group to see it and yelled, “Y’all, chandler!” And as I started to explain what I’d found, we all heard a voice yell two syllables from the other side of the Ward Room. To me, it sounded like “That’s it!” but that could just be my mind filling in the details after the fact. Either way, I walked quickly to the other side of the room to make sure no other living person was there. We were all accounted for, and nobody was on that side of the room.

So, of course, we all heard the voice, but because we were taking a break, not a single digital voice recorder was rolling.

<sigh>

At least we had a memorable “one last time” on our favorite ship.

Thanks to Allison for the question and thank you for listening!

If you are interested in sharing your own personal paranormal experiences, or if you have an idea for an episode topic, please reach out through the contact form at peeppodcast.com. That's P-E-E-P Podcast.com. Remember that stands for People Experiencing Everyday Paranormal.

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