MOSS (NORWAY) (TIP): Like many Europeans, Marianne Haaland Bogdanoff, a travel agency manager in this southern Norwegian town, does not go to church, except maybe at Christmas, and is doubtful about the existence of God. But when “weird things” — inexplicable computer breakdowns, strange smells and noises and complaints from staff members of constant headaches —started happening at the ground-floor travel office, she slowly began to put aside her deep scepticism about life beyond the here and now. After computer experts, electricians and a plumber all failed to find the cause of her office’s troubles, she finally got help from a clairvoyant who claimed powers to communicate with the dead. The headaches and other problems all vanished.

“I don’t know what she did,” Bogdanoff said. “It was very strange,” she added, recalling how the clairvoyant “cleansed” her travel office of a ghostlike presence neither she nor her staff had seen but whose existence they had all felt and come to fear.