I personally believe that the Bible contains everything that God wants us to know about the metaphysical. If these things exist, God obviously didn't think they were important enough to warrant a direct mention. We do see evidence of spirits, magic, and (in one instance) ghosts in the Bible, so belief in these things is not, fundamentally, incompatible with the Christian faith.
That said (and hopefully the above doesn't introduce too much of the dreaded theological wrangling), I think that much of modern science really falls into the trap of assuming that just because our current understanding of the universe doesn't provide an explanation for a thing, it must not really exist. Specifically, I suspect that some of the magic, ghost sightings, and spiritual manifestations which have been reported or discussed were, in some sense of the word, real.
As an example, ESR claims to have
channeled the god Pan, and I have no reason to doubt his account. But I think that the one wildcard--and Eric acknowledges this in his own account--is that our minds are capricious and mysterious things. For example, our ability to remember events works less like a video recorder and more like a court stenographer. Unfortunately, for most of us it's as if this stenographer were both drunk and high most of the time, because the things we remember are often no more than vague approximations. If you don't believe this, ask an older married couple to describe an important event, such as their first date, their first road trip, or (if you're feeling particularly discordian) their first fight. I'm always amused when I try this with my parents, because they will run into events where one is
positive that it happened one way, and the other is
positive it happened some other, contradictory way.
This is because our memory of events is constructed by us telling stories to ourselves. Though we might like to think that these stories are factual accounts, a lot of times our cultural biases, our emotional state, and our own desires color these accounts. Memory is also subject to the "copy of a copy" problem, in that as the actual event grows more distant, the inaccuracies in the story we tell ourself tend to compound. "I thought I saw movement out of the corner of my eye" becomes "I thought I saw someone out of the corner of my eye", which can then become "I thought I saw a pale blue figure out of the corner of my eye".
There also seems to be evidence that what we believe affects not only our perception of external stimuli but also our perception of ourselves. The placebo effect is one well-documented example, and it also has a counterpart called the nocebo effect, in which the patient's perceptions either cause an inert substance to have a harmful effect or cause a helpful substance to have either no effect or a harmful effect. The Skeptic's Dictionary
article on the nocebo effect contains some interesting stories.
(I think a lot of the time these beliefs can be subconscious. For instance, if you asked a random person 200 years ago if he thought witchcraft was real, he might say "no". But then if you told him that a witch had cast a curse on him which would cause him to develop a fever, it's entirely possible that our estimable subject would indeed develop a fever. Telling the same thing to a modern person may have no effect, but if you tell her that living close to a cell tower can cause a fever due to microwave radiation and then remind her that she lives less than a mile from the nearest cell tower, she may in fact begin feeling feverish--and more suggestible people may actually convince themselves that they need to move because of their proximity to the tower. I have no evidence to support these claims, unfortunately...part of me wants to find the nearest cell tower and gullible neighbor, but the rest of me is lazy.)
Perhaps the most useful thing I learned in the one sociology class I took was a theorem proposed by William Thomas, which states essentially that if I define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences. In other words, it doesn't matter if something is
actually real; if I believe it to be real, I will act as though it is. This property is exploited (knowingly or unknowingly) by con men, psychics, religious leaders, crackpots, nutjobs, and at some time in our lives probably every single one of us.
In any case, all this long ramble is saying is that I find the interesting paranormal activity to exist not external to us but in our minds--not in the sense that we're imagining it all, but in the sense that our own minds seem to hold the power we want to see around us.
