Did you ever wonder at all those folks on shows about hoarding? You could hardly have missed them.

If perchance you have: There are people who almost inexplicably collect everything and keep everything — often including rotten food and other garbage — they’ve ever had in the house, to the point of burying themselves and sometimes loved ones and pets in it. Experts are called to clean such filthy places out, along with psychologists and other counselors. Every sizeable city deals with this.

That word “inexplicable”: perhaps it comes into play because at the root is not just some kind of psychological quirk or outright illness but the invisible, “inexplicable” presence, at least in certain cases, of spirits.

In Ogden, Utah, a hoarder named Shannon was so scared of demons she hired a wizard to get rid of them. “I believe the devil is after me,” she told an interviewer. “So many dark things. We have furniture, we have clothes, we have toys, personal collections, and we have demons.”

Although her children also witnessed phenomena, was it just a traumatic brain injury she’d had?

There is such a thing as straightforwardly psychotic people. That can be an explanation. Many people are simply mentally ill.

But tell that to the police quoted in an online book called True Ghost Stories Of First Responders (Eve S. Evans and R. Harrell).

In one case, two cops were responding to a call reporting someone screaming in a neighborhood house.

When they pulled up to the address, it was an eyesore. “Walking up to the front door, I could already detect the smell coming from inside the house through an open window,” recalled one of the officers.

When they knocked, a man on the other side of the door told them he was fine and to go away. They insisted on entry and when the fellow opened the door, they saw ashtrays were overflowing with butts everywhere, the stench unbearable. Other rooms were worse.

“Sir, was it your screaming that your neighbors heard a little while ago, or was there someone else here?” asked the cop.

“He starts looking back and forth in the room, almost like he is trying to see if someone else is there, then he starts to speak, but it doesn’t feel like he is talking to us anymore but rather himself,” recalled the officer. The man kept mumbling, “Always someone there, always watching, always following, never alone.”

“The guy just took a hard right into Crazyville,” said the officer, who asked, “Sir, who’s here with you? Are they here now?”

His voice came out as a whisper. “Always here.”

“I know that I can’t just leave this guy here,” said the policeman. “He is obviously a danger to himself; we have the ability to put a 24-hour hold on him in a psychiatric unit if we feel it is necessary. In this case, I think it is. I reach up and hit the button on the radio and inform dispatch that we’re going to be taking the man from the home for evaluation.

“I reach out to take his arm when suddenly he is yanked back from behind. It looks as if someone has a hold of his hair,  yet I can’t see anyone there. He screams out in pain and is thrown to the floor in a heap. I don’t know what I’m seeing right now. At first, I think he is trying to do whatever he can to keep from being taken.

“He begins to look down at his chest and rip at his shirt. It doesn’t take much for the stained piece of wan cloth to give way, and I see four long scratches on his chest. In places, they are trickling blood. If they had been there before, we would have noticed the red stains on his shirt; these just happened right as we stood there.”

An unknown force whipped the man’s head back and forth. “I witness this going on only a few feet in front of me,” said the policeman.

And so it is. Inexplicable — except as a spiritual event.

Someone can certainly hoard things out of the aforementioned curiosities of human nature.

But often, in our world, when things are especially bizarre, it’s because there is a bizarre (and sometimes dangerous) spiritual explanation.

[resources: The Spirits Around Us]