In one of his past lives, Dr. Paul DeBell believes, he was a caveman. The gray-haired Cornell-trained psychiatrist has a gentle, serious manner, and his appearance, together with the generic shrink décor of his office – leather couch, granite-topped coffee table – makes this pronouncement seem particularly jarring.

In that earlier incarnation, "I was going along, going along, going along, and I got eaten," said Dr. DeBell, who has a private practice on the Upper East Side where he specializes in hypnotizing those hoping to retrieve memories of past lives. Dr. DeBell likes to reflect on how previous lives can alter one's sense of self. He, for example, is more than a psychiatrist in 21st-century Manhattan; he believes he is an eternal soul who also inhabited the body of a Tibetan monk and a conscientious German who refused to betray his Jewish neighbors in the Holocaust.

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Queendom.com released their Paranormal Beliefs test after collecting data from over 20,000 people from all walks of life. They uncovered gender, age, ethnic and other differences in views of the supernatural.

Their Paranormal Beliefs Test assessed a number of beliefs, including the afterlife, the concepts of fate and karma, and aliens. Although superstitions are no longer as prominent as they used to be – the two most prevalent superstitions were the belief that thinking negative thoughts can make something bad happen (24%), and that "jinxing" something can cause you to lose it (24%) – there are many paranormal aspects that people strongly supported.

The afterlife, religion, and karma were the most widespread beliefs, followed by the belief in fate and psychic phenomenon. Superstitions brought up the rear, while folklore/myths/legends, witchcraft, telekinesis, and existence of UFOs and aliens fell somewhere in the middle on people's belief system. Interestingly, women believed much more strongly in paranormal phenomenon than men did, particularly in terms of the idea of karma (average score for women 71, 57 for men). The only exception was that of aliens and UFOs, where men outscored women 52 to 49.

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The first time Lisa O'Brien knew something bizarre was happening was when she found her 4-year-old daughter Jacie having a conversation in an empty room.

"I'd say, 'Jacie, who are you talking to?' 'My dad! Talking to daddy,'" O'Brien recalled. "She would tell me she could see him."

Jacie's father had recently died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. O'Brien said she tried to gently probe Jacie, who revealed that her daddy had been telling her "knock, knock" jokes. Jacie also could recite the names of her father's co-workers, who had all died in the attack — many of whom her mother said she had never met.

"I showed her a picture and said, 'Do you know who these guys are?', and she said, 'Mommy, those are the boys,'" said O'Brien, who was in awe of her daughter's connection with her deceased dad. "I was jealous…because she got to see them and I didn't."

The O'Briens are just two of many people coming forward in what may be the strangest aftermath of 9/11. For most, the attack on the World Trade Center remains a national and emotional scar, but for some relatives left behind it has also been a step into a spiritual world they say they never could have imagined.

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CHIP Coffey was on his riding mower in the yard of his Atlanta-area home a couple of years ago when he came around the side of the house and saw his mother standing there, grinning at him.

Although he'd been praying for that moment for years, his initial reaction wasn't exactly joy.

"My first thought was, 'I've just had a freakin' stroke,'" Coffey, 55, recalled during a phone interview. "But I reached up and felt my mouth and it wasn't drooping. And it wasn't hot enough for me to have had a heat stroke… Read the rest of this article

The story of the "death" of the 20th-century philosopher, Alfred Jules (A. J.) Ayer, is becoming legendary.

When the renowned atheist choked on a piece of salmon in 1988 in a British hospital, he went into cardiac arrest and technically died for four minutes.

As a leader of the dominant analytic school of philosophy, Ayer had been accused of "neutralizing" Western academic philosophers; encouraging them to focus on pure logic and avoid applying their big minds to the actual art of living. And dying.

But Ayer's near-death experience changed all that. After he was resuscitated in hospital, Ayer wrote a piece in the Telegraph newspaper describing wondrous images he had while "dead" — of a beckoning red light and the collapse of space and time. Read the rest of this article