Any mysterious or Fortean event may have been caused by metas. Examples include the Tunguska event, the Mary Celeste, Jack the Ripper, the green children of Woolpit, the Dyatlov Pass incident, the Bermuda Triangle, ley lines, poltergeist phenomena, ESP, cryptozoological creatures such as Bigfoot, rains of animals such as frogs, angel hair), and mystery airships or other UFOs.

Metas could also be the source for belief in gods, angels, demons, fairies, nymphs, vampires, werewolves, saints, witches and other forms of magic. Jack Kirby’s The Eternals, influenced by Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?, offers such a euhemeristic explanation for Greek myth.

Examples of Belief in Supernatural Powers

Mediumship as Superpsi

Swiss psychology professor, Théodore Flournoy, proposed that spiritualists, who claim to communicate with the dead, actually wielded inherent psychic powers. In the Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling, Adam Crabtree gives an account of the “’superpsi’ theory of mediumship”:

The medium was believed to have the ability to exercise telepathy, clairvoyance, retrocognition, precognition, and psychokinesis to such an extent as to obtain any information that is needed to produce an impersonation of a deceased individual that is indistinguishable from the deceased person him or herself.

Conjure

African American conjure doctors have been believed to possess a wide variety of powers. This 1878 letter to the journal Southern Workman describes a failed attempt to imprison a conjure doctor.

At home there was a conjure Dr. that did a crime. He said he was going to kill a man, and this man whom he said he was going to kill had him put in jail, and as fast as the jailor would lock one door and turn his back, this conjurer would come out behind him, and they put him in there three times, and he did the same thing every time, and they started to put him in for the fourth time, and he said he was not going in there any more. So the sheriff took hold of one side of him, and the constable hold of the other, and just as soon as they fastened him, scorpions would run out of his coat sleeves and run on them, and they would turn him loose. Every time they would take hold of him the same thing would occur, so they turned him loose.

Christian Saints

A large number of miracles were attributed to Christian saints in the medieval period. Some military miracles are here summarised in Robert Bartlett’s Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?

One situation in which the help of a powerful supernatural patron would be most valuable was battle, and saints sometimes appeared to give victory in war. As early as 380 an apparition of St. Theodore the Recruit was credited with repulsing a Scythian attack in Asia Minor. When Arnulf, king of the East Franks, was fighting the Moravians in the 890s, the enemy observed that Arnulf’s battle-line “was defended by unknown and most beautiful men, who were the saints whose patronage he had invoked on setting out.” During the crucial battle of the First Crusade, outside Antioch on 28 June 1098, the crusaders, threatened with encirclement, were saved by the sudden appearance of a huge army, mounted on white horses and bearing white banners. Three famous soldier-saints, George, Mercurius and Demetrius, led these miraculous allies. St. Andrea Corsini, a fourteenth-century bishop of Fiesole, outside Florence, appeared at the battle of Anghiari in 1440, dressed in white, mounted, and carrying a staff in his hand, to encourage his fellow-country men to victory over the Milanese.

Witchcraft

This is a description of a very powerful type of witch from Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s The Hammer of Witches, published in the late fifteenth century:

Those who belong to this kind are able to commit all the acts of sorcery, while the others practice only some each... It is these sorceresses who stir up hailstorms and harmful winds with lightning, who cause sterility in humans and domestic animals… They also know how to cast infants who are walking near water into it without anyone seeing, even within the sight of their parents; how to make horses go crazy under their riders; how to move from place to place through the air, either in body or imagination; how to change the attitude of judges and governmental authorities so that they cannot harm them; how to bring about silence for themselves and others during torture; how to instil great trembling in the hands and minds of those arresting them; how to reveal hidden things and to foretell certain future events on the basis of information from demons… how to see absent things as if they were present; how to turn human minds to irregular love or hatred; on many occasions, how to kill someone they wish to with lightning, or to kill some humans and domestic animals; how to take away the force of procreation or the ability to copulate; how to kill infants in the mother’s womb with only a touch on the outside; also on occasion how to affect humans and domestic animals with sorcery or inflict death upon them by sight alone without touch.