A friend called and asked me to come.
She believed something was in her house. Something she couldn’t explain and couldn’t ignore. She needed someone who wouldn’t laugh, wouldn’t dismiss it, and wouldn’t be undone by it. So she called me.
I walked into a particular room and felt it immediately — a pressure against my chest, firm and deliberate. Not pain, exactly. More like a presence asserting itself. Like a hand on my sternum saying: get out.
I wasn’t afraid. I was concerned — and absolutely certain something was there.
That distinction matters. Fear says run. Concern says: pay attention, stand your ground, and remember whose authority you carry. I’ve thought about that moment many times since. And I’ve come to believe it’s one of the truest pictures I have of what faith actually looks like when the supernatural stops being theoretical.
The World Scripture Actually Describes
We talk about faith as though it is primarily about the invisible — as if believing in God means accepting something we cannot see and moving on. But read the Bible closely, and what you find is not an invisible world held at arm’s length. You find a world absolutely teeming with the supernatural.
Angels who appear without warning. Prophets who see what others cannot. A veil between realms so thin that a burning bush is not a miracle of fire — it’s a moment of the unseen breaking through. Elisha praying for his servant’s eyes to be opened and suddenly the hills are full of horses and chariots of fire. They were always there. The servant simply couldn’t see them.
This is the world Scripture describes. Not a world where the supernatural occasionally visits, but a world where it is always present — where we are the ones with limited vision, not limited reality.
“The unexplained doesn’t threaten my faith. It confirms it. It reminds me that I am not living in a closed world.”
When the Unexplained Finds You
People of faith sometimes feel they must choose: either dismiss an unexplained experience as imagination, or feel vaguely embarrassed that they’re paying attention to something that sounds, well, supernatural.
I’d like to gently push back on that.
Forty years in Alaska taught me to pay attention. That land is old in a way that presses in on you. There are places up there where the air changes, where a long-time resident stops mid-sentence and listens to something you can’t hear. Indigenous elders don’t find this strange. Neither did I, after long enough. The question isn’t whether something is there. The question is: whose is it?
That is the discernment Scripture calls us to. Not to deny the supernatural, but to test it. To stand in the authority we’ve been given and ask, with confidence rather than fear: what is this, and what does it want?
Fear says: don’t look. Dismiss it. Roll over and go back to sleep.
Faith says: I see you. I know who I belong to. And you have no authority here that hasn’t already been overcome.
Why the Unexplained Deepens Faith Rather Than Shaking It
I’ve heard from readers who picked up one of my Ravens Cove books during a difficult season — a season when they were wrestling with doubt, or grief, or just the relentless flatness of a life that had stopped feeling meaningful. And they say that something in the story — the reality of spiritual warfare, the sense that the battle they felt inside had a name and a shape — cracked something open.
Not because fiction is Scripture. But because sometimes we need the truth told slant before we can receive it straight.
When we acknowledge that the supernatural is real — that there is genuine darkness in the world, and genuine light, and that we are participants in a battle far larger than our daily concerns — something in the spirit wakes up. Faith stops being a set of propositions to agree with and becomes what it was always meant to be: active, alive, and necessary.
The unexplained, rightly received, does not shake faith. It calls faith forward.
Have you had an experience you couldn’t explain? One that stayed with you? I’d love to hear about it — and so would the community gathering around my podcast, Real Ghost Chatter. We’re not here to sensationalize. We’re here to listen, explore, and find the faith underneath the mystery.
And if you’re ready to step into a story where spiritual warfare is real, the darkness has a face, and faith is the only weapon that matters — the Ravens Cove Iconoclast series is waiting. Start at the beginning with Ravens Cove, or meet me at the newest chapter in The Tide Weaver. The battle is already underway.
America’s Lady of Supernatural Thrillers, Mary Ann Poll is the author of the Ravens Cove Iconoclast series — six supernatural thriller novels where faith and darkness collide across Alaska and East Texas. Her latest book, The Tide Weaver, is available now on Amazon. Visit her at https://www.maryannpoll.com/.