INTRO:

Have you ever had the feeling like you’re being watched? The wives’ tale explanation is that it’s a primal instinctive feeling that is beyond rational sense. If you feel you’re being watched, it’s likely that you are. However, a doctor in the late 1800s named Edward B. Titchener decided that he’d run a series of experiments to see if this can be quantified. It gets a little complicated when you introduce ideas of consciousness through introspection and other attributes of parapsychology. The long and short of the experiment was that it had no success. The subjects couldn’t tell in a controlled experiment whether they were and were not being watched without their knowledge.

The idea seemed to really stick with people over the next 100+ years who were just so sure that maybe there are different methods of testing this instinct. In 1913 a study resulted in a 50.2% accuracy by John E. Coover. Then in 1983, a closed-circuit television method had a higher confirmation of 74% success rate. This however was highly criticized by the scientific community as having what they call a “result bias”. So from just flat out receiving a negative or at the best inconclusive result, it doesn’t seem very promising, does it?

It’s a little discouraging to know that when science took a stab at this wonderment of human phenomenon that everyone has experienced at least once in our lives… they almost found nothing? And yet after all this time, we experience it so widely as humans, that scientists in parapsychology are just so sure there’s some mental explanation to be laid out and explored.

As I’ve said in a previous episode to quote Arthur B Clark. “Magic is just science that we don’t understand yet.”

So who knows if one day we’ll have a bridged connection to what this feeling of being watched is, and more importantly… when to trust it. 

I’m Tasha Wheelhouse, and this is Copper Shock.

The below story was submitted and adapted for storytelling from Lucas in Cedar City Utah.

BODY:

I’ve been to Bear Lake a lot of times with my family. We have a massive cabin that we use for family reunions about once a year.  This was a familiar and wonderful place to me. What happened in 2014 soured a lot of my experience, and I don’t like going there as much as I used too, even if I’m ok now. I’ll let you guys know upfront, this story gets a little on the religious side. Some people don’t like their supernatural stories mixing with faith. But that’s what some of this is. 

It was the first week of September. All of my friends and I would head off to separate colleges around the state when the weekend was over. Since it was the fall, my parents didn’t mind as much if my friends and I took over the cabin for a weekend trip. The only catch being we had to do general cleaning before we left. 

Bear Lake is beautiful. Even though we didn’t have a speed boat with us, we could still splash around on the beach, have bonfires at night, and generally hang out with one another. On our last night there, I was on the top deck that overlooks the water. The cabin is settled in between a lot of other houses around us, but we’ve got the best view for sure. Bear Lake is a massive stretch of water, that sits inside a bowl of green rolling hills. The hills are pocked all over with big cabins just like my family cabin.

It was night time and pretty late. I don’t remember the exact time, but Cambri (A girl I had a crush on at the time) had just come out to sit next to me and look over the moonlit waterfront. I started to talk to her more and realized, this may be one of the last times I’d actually get to tell her how I felt.