Strange Noises and Smells - Paranormal or Easily Explained?

Have you ever seen a light turn off and on when no one was touching the switch? Maybe you've heard strange noises and can't figure out what they were coming from. Over the past 12 years there have been some strange occurrences in the house that I grew up in. Could these happenings have been paranormal, or can they easily be explained?

These strange happenings began when I was in my teens, still living in my parents house. At night when I laid down to go to sleep, I had a touch lamp on my bed stand. I would have it on while I read to help myself get sleepy, and then when I was done reading I would turn it off. On this particular touch lamp, it had three light phases and all you would have to do to turn the lamp on was touch the base with your finger. Quite often after I would turn the light off and close my eyes, the light would come on by itself and go through all three phases very quickly, and then go off again. When this would happen it would startle me, but I just believed there was something wrong with the wiring. I took the lamp with me when I moved out for college, then to two separate apartments. Never again did it ever come on by itself.

Now, I never would have considered it strange if other strange things had not begun to happen in the house after I moved out. My mother and father had another child the year before I left for college, and a lot of the happenings seemed centered around him. These are accounts of what happened told to me by my mother.

At night my mother would have the baby monitor turned on to listen for my brother if he started crying. There were several times that they would hear sounds coming through it or something that sounded like people whispering. This can be easily explained I'm sure, since many baby monitors have different frequencies and sometimes you can pick up the same frequency of another persons baby monitor. But seeing as how my parents closest neighbors were five acres away on both sides of their house, it might be a little harder to pick these frequencies up.