Ghosts! (argh!)

[Helm]

A genuinely real ghostly encounter there, but has anyone here ever encountered one? If not do you have any belief in these things and how does it fit into yourr religious beliefs?

One thing ghosts do have going for them despite their complete lack of genuine hard evidence is that unlike say Bible miracles they do have multiple first hand eye witness accounts of the same manifestation. Though that could have something to do with mass hysteria and tricks of the mind.

[Tuor]

Well, logic tells me "No!", but I did have some sort of experience when I was younger with a friend involving a "ghost". I haven't been able to explain it to this day, and neither of us were on hallucinogens that I know of. That doesn't mean that I conclude that ghosts are real, however. I don't believe one bit. What I saw didn't make any sense, but that doesn't mean I can toss it into the "it was a ghost, omg!" pile.

[Gromovnik]

So, wanna share your experience with us?

[Gordon Freynman]

I bet you'll find most people have supernatural experiences right around the time they're going to sleep, or any other time they're extremely tired. You don't have to take drugs or have a malfunctioning brain to experience hallucinations.

[Helm]

I bet you'll find most people have supernatural experiences right around the time they're going to sleep, or any other time they're extremely tired. You don't have to take drugs or have a malfunctioning brain to experience hallucinations.

Ho would that explain people seeing the same ghost over the years in the same haunted room or whatever? Or do people just make those up for the attention?

[Gordon Freynman]

Ho would that explain people seeing the same ghost over the years in the same haunted room or whatever? Or do people just make those up for the attention?

I would suspect they're either making it up or their brain is screwing with them and they just automatically jump to the ghost conclusion.

[Tacitursa]

Ho would that explain people seeing the same ghost over the years in the same haunted room or whatever? Or do people just make those up for the attention?

That's very common, People hear about a haunted hotel or a famous female ghost that wonders room 14. People then flock to said hotel with the hopes and intentions of seeing a ghost and they do, The mind see's what it wants. They hear a noise in the night or see a shadow and there bias automatically links it with the ghost when it's just a curtain blowing in the wind and old wooden floorboards creeking.

Quite a few landlords in Britain have created there own stories and rumours about there property in order to make them more popular. If your struggling to find customers and own a pub or hotel out in the countryside just tell people someone was murdered there 200 years ago and sometimes there ghost wonders around, You'll have a truckload of customers within a year or two, even some from overseas.

[Tuor]

My friend and I were riding a four-wheeler at night down her driveway and saw someone/something that was proportionally shaped like a human running in front of us. It turned a corner in her driveway (a retardedly long driveway) and when we were able to see around the same corner, nothing was there. We assumed it was our other friend that was wandering around outside at the time trying to scare us by hiding in the woods. Here's where it gets unexplainable. Right as we turn the corner and pause for a few seconds waiting on him to pop out of the woods and scare us, he yells for us about a quarter of a mile away in the opposite direction. We freaked out, mashed the gas, and didn't go back outside for the rest of the night. Keep in mind this also took place when we were all around 14 years old.

[MaximiIian]

I don't personally believe in ghosts, I have not had any paranormal (rather than supernatural) experiences, and I think that most ghost-based experiences can be explained as hallucinations or an overactive imagination.
However, I am not going to begrudge someone who believes in ghosts and claims to have had paranormal experiences involving them. After all, I may very well be completely wrong.

[Sir Winston Churchill]

I used to be really skeptical about ghosts and spirits until I had a very real experience. Now I'm pretty convinced something is out there. What it is exactly I don't know, but something does go bump in the night.

[Elfdude]

Ghosts can be entirely explained by the fact that if you conciously think of something you'll conciously experience the emotions associated with it. When you're alone in the dark at an abandoned location it's very easy to assume the sound of settling is more than just that. It's very easy to see movement caused by wind or air as something more significant. It's very easy to misinterpret sounds. Hell there's a lot of cases of horrified people mistakenly shooting someone because they thought it was a ghost or monster or whatever.

Fear does weird things to people. Fearing nothing will create the same effects on you as fearing something. Further with electromagnetic fields surrounding us this fields are prone to create the effect in our brain of perceiving someone being there that really isn't. That feeling that there's someone else in the room (even if there's not) can easily be triggered by electromagnetic fields.

This is further complicated by environment stressors, animals, and the want of the mind to see what it's familiar with. Look at a random picture and you'll see patterns that aren't really there. Look at a random situation and you'll see patterns which aren't really there. I don't see any reason to look at ghosts any differently than alien encounters, bigfoot or the like. I have never seen a verified photo of a ghost and there's millions of dollars in prizes for anyone who can provide some. I do not see people independently verifying each other's stories I see people cooperatively creating a tale.

[Biggreenfellow]

I played Deadspace for a couple of hours, alone in a dark room with my headphone on, volume cranked way up. After that, I swore I could hear Necromorphs crawling about outside when I skulked my way to the toilet. But nay, t'was merely my imagination playing tricks on me (I never played a horror game before xD).

[Helm]

The thing about ghosts seeing as they appear here in this world they would be completely subject to and testable through science. All the scientists in question have to do is set up cameras and seonsors in all these supposed haunted places and then we would have a definitive answer for this.

[Biggreenfellow]

The thing about ghosts seeing as they appear here in this world they would be completely subject to and testable through science. All the scientists in question have to do is set up cameras and seonsors in all these supposed haunted places and then we would have a definitive answer for this.

Not per se... If the cameras fail to record ghosts it proves nothing; maybe the ghosts didn't want to be filmed. It's the same like God, really; we can't prove they don't exist, we can't prove they do exist, it's just that it's more probable that they don't.

[Helm]

Not per se... If the cameras fail to record ghosts it proves nothing; maybe the ghosts didn't want to be filmed. It's the same like God, really; we can't prove they don't exist, we can't prove they do exist, it's just that it's more probable that they don't.

True but you can demonstrate that these ghosts don't appear as often as they're claimed to appear, and if that's the case then it's fairly safe to assume that they don't really exist outside of peoples minds.

[Biggreenfellow]

Thing is, you can only eve prove that there was no ghost at the time of recording. Maybe they are awfully shy and hide from cameras. But when no reliable recording of any kind can be made, any where, any time, it does make it a bit improbable.

[Helm]

Well have it so if the guest in the haunted roomsees something they press a button and the cameras and sensors record, it can be done, I think it probably should be in he interest of science. For abandoned locations there can be 24 hour CCTV. Anythng supernatural with a physical effect can be tested and proven, if it exists. And if it doesn't exist you can at least be 99.999% sure which is good enough.

[Nefarious]

<snip>
...but has anyone here ever encountered one? If not do you have any belief in these things and how does it fit into yourr religious beliefs?

Though I've had numerous experiences with what may be described as the unexplained, I would never state they were ghosts. They are simply unexplained.
There could have been lighting anomalies, swamp gas, wind-borne dander, etc.
To attribute a name to an unknown tends to box oneself in, as it were.
I prefer to enjoy my freedom and either find a logical explanation or brush it off. Neither result impacts my day to day life.
I don't dwell on the non.

[Helm]

There are a lot of people making claims that they had experience with the supernatural, but if they was even small number of genuine claims then science could nail them down as they fall clean into the realm that science can study. It could be seen as a waste money but we're spending billions on particle accelerators and probes to Mars so I don't think a couple of million on paranormal research is out of the question, there claim being made and those claims should be taken seriously as something to investigate in depth. In terms of scientific discovery thiese things would be right up there if there were the genunie article. And if they can be demonstrated to be false beyond reasonable doubt that's still something of significance that we have learned.

[Vanoi]

I used to believe in ghosts but until we get some real evidence they are most likley not real, and it is just people's imagination.