Paranormal Dispatch from the Perfectly Proper Paranormal Musem! July 31, 2026

--By Maddie Kosloski of the Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

Our Egyptian Magic exhibit is returning in August! We’re putting a sarcophagus on display that once belonged to an Egyptian high priest, somewhere around 664 BC to 332 BC. An amateur archaeologist named Percy Montrose dragged it out of Egypt in 1872 even though the locals told him not to take so much as a grain of sand or the gods would turn him into a mummy. He ignored them, brought it home to the States, caught a fever, and died. We’re still figuring out how much of that story to put on the sign. Come by my little paranormal museum when it opens and see if the thing gives you the creeps.

Now for the paranormal that’s been floating around this week.

1) Cops in Medellín, Colombia, filmed something odd on a 3 a.m. patrol. They spotted a dark shape moving toward them on the road—head, shoulders, long body—and zoomed in. The video’s pretty grainy. Half the people online say it’s just shadows. The other half swear it’s a ghost. The officers looked spooked, though, and that part lands with me. When the people who see the ordinary night after night get rattled, I pay attention.

2) Ghost panic! A small Yucatán town called Holactún got worked up over rumors of a figure some called a ghost and others called a witch. Enough people believed it that a group formed a posse and went looking late at night. They didn’t find anything. Social media had already turned a handful of sightings into a full local scare. I’ve watched the same thing happen here in San Benedetto more than once. One odd report, a few shared posts, and suddenly everyone’s locking up a little tighter.

3) There’s a bigger conversation happening in the paranormal world right now about how the search for answers keeps bumping into the search for clicks. Investigators used to spend weeks digging into a place’s history and ruling out normal explanations. These days a lot of people feel pressure to deliver drama in under ten minutes. Exciting titles and big reactions get the views. Quiet nights where nothing clear shows up don’t. Popularity doesn’t equal credibility, and the community needs both the people who bring new folks in and the ones who keep asking the hard questions. Integrity still has to come first.

4) Science has its own take. Researchers once built a “haunted” room by controlling electromagnetic fields and low-frequency sound. People spent fifty minutes in a dim, cool, featureless space and marked any strange feelings on a map. Plenty reported dizziness, fear, even unexpected arousal. The funny part is those feelings didn’t line up with the strong-field spots. What predicted the weird experiences better was how sensitive the person already was to unusual sensations. Expectation did more work than the equipment. I think about that study every time someone walks into our museum already sure the place is full of spirits.

5) A call for more skepticism in cryptozoology. A recent essay pointed out that a lot of modern monster belief has drifted away from trying to find an actual undiscovered animal. Plenty of the classic photos and films have been explained or exposed, yet the creatures keep going as local legends and merchandise. One writer visiting the home of Georgia’s Altamaha-ha river monster basically said, why always demand an explanation? Maybe it’s enough that the story is still out there giving people a little magic. I get it. Folklore has its own kind of pull even when the evidence stays thin.

If these kinds of stories interest you, you might like the cases I’ve pulled from my own experiences running the museum here in San Benedetto. The Perfectly Proper Paranormal Museum cozy mysteries are basically case files from the life I actually live, just with the names changed and the endings cleaned up a bit. You can find them wherever books are sold, or stop by the shop at the museum and grab one in person.

While you’re there, take a look at the UnTarot deck we carry. It’s a playful spin on the familiar cards that still manages to ask useful questions. Or just poke around the shelves for the odd little objects that never quite fit anywhere else.

Come see the Egyptian Magic exhibit when it opens! I’ll be the one trying not to sneeze on the sarcophagus.