Without looking it up in the dictionary or online: Paranormal has to do with human abilities beyond the five normal senses (vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell). The key being that they are HUMAN abilities. Supernatural has to do with abilities or powers whose origin lies BEYOND the personal human realm. In other words, they are attributed to belonging to some other source than human, such as spirits, demons, gods, etc. Often they are used interchangably, though strictly speaking they are NOT the same. <EDIT> And example would be a human moving an object by telekinesis (or psychokinesis). This is considered a PARANORMAL ability: the HUMAN is causing the object to move by using the powers of his own mind. A spirit moving an object (or a human causing a spirit to move an object) would be an example of a SUPERNATURAL ability: the human isn't doing the work of moving the object...a spirit is. A poltergeist would be a ghost who moves objects. NOTE: Personally, knowing there is a distinct difference between paranormal and supernatural, as I've defined above, I tend to discredit those who mix the terms when talking about supernatural events. If you are trying to explain supernatural events, it makes no sense to me to use terms which talk about HUMAN extra-normal abilities. People who seriously study paranormal and supernatural events should be more concise in their scientific language and descriptions, otherwise the effect is to come across as a quack.