Schopenhauer claimed that in his last year in Berlin, he had a prophetic dream that urged him to escape the city. As he arrived in his new home in Frankfurt he supposedly had another supernatural experience, an apparition of his dead father and his mother, who was still alive. This experience led him to spend some time investigating paranormal phenomena and magic. He was quite critical of the available studies and claimed that they were mostly ignorant or fraudulent, but he did believe that there are authentic cases of such phenomena and tried to explain them through his metaphysics as manifestations of the will.