Ghosts... (1 Viewer)

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Just as we have to distinguish between accuracy and veracity so we must distinguish between ghosts and 'ghostly phenomenon'.

I believe that the incidents reported by members here are genuinely as reported but that does mean that the explanation is correct?

I do not believe in ghosts. There is no reason for ghosts to have clothes and hospitals and battlefields should be knee deep in them but they are not. Thousands of people die in hospitals daily, often in distress and pain sadly. Imagine how many there should be at the sites of concentration camps as opposed to suburban Victorian houses. My house dates back to at least the 18th century but is ghost free as far as I know. As was the 14th century core of another house we lived in for some years.

An article I read said that a "spirit" will mainly haunt an area it was familiar with, ie: it's home, hometown or an area where it spent a lot of time.

Geo
 
Dave, animals certainly have senses different than human, being able to hear beyond the human range both in pitch and intensity and some can see into the near infra-red. When I let the dogs out at night they sometimes run to the treeline and bark at the dark hair on their neck standing straight. I don't hear or see anything even with a flashlight. Quite simply dogs bark to warn the pack of possible danger/prey and to warn-off hostile critters. Animals have the same fight/flight reflexes as humans and have learned through millenia of natural selection: "better safe than sorry". So they warn at the slightest non-normal sensory input, the very same half-seen moving shadow/noise that would set off my alarm bells had I been aware of it. The primitive brain stem is a powerful force which has only recently been overlain by cortical thinking.
Knowing that light beams can be bent or reflected does not stop me from seeing the mirage "in front of me" or the elephant behind the slanted mirror

I have posted my own experiences on a different part of the forum.
And while I bow to science, (I love science!), and logic, (I love logic!), I still remain adamant that weird crap (as described earlier) happens at that house. This happens to this day. I stopped in to the house a couple of weeks ago, and the current renters were moving out because of the loud power tool noises and crap from the basement workshop at 3 am.
Mike, I don't know how to explain it. It seems absurd to me as well that a workman is trapped in that house to nightly, (or morningly) make noises, but there it is.
The house goes for $700 a month rental. I would gladly stay in the basement again, if given the chance just to document the weird stuff I have related to you. As I told you earlier, we went for rational and science first.
 
Two occasions. Before we got married, my wife's parents asked us to look after their house for the weekend. It was after midnight, she was in bed upstairs and I was in the basement watching T.V.. For a while I could hear, in the adjacent room, what sounded like a ball being bounced on the wall, then hitting the floor, repeating for about 10 minutes. At that point, my future wife yelled down to me to quit bouncing the ball. Now, having watched several horror movies and knowing full well what happens to the handsome young lad when he goes to investigate, I went upstairs, told my lady to get dressed and we left for my parents place, still hearing the ball bouncing downstairs. Before we left, we checked, and the doors were still locked from earlier that night. We came back the next day, went down to the room where we heard the ball bouncing, and sitting in the middle of the floor was a tennis ball. Armed with a baseball bat, the entire house was searched...nothing. The two exterior doors had locked dead bolts and all the windows were locked. The next time, we were renting her recently deceased grandfathers house(her grandmother dying about 10 years prior). Her more than slightly retarded dog refused to go in the basement, growling any time we tried to get her to come down. On several occasions, while I was in logging camp, she would go downstairs and the rocking chair would be in motion and she felt as if she were being watched. The people who bought the house later told friends of ours that strange things happened in the basement and they never felt comfortable for extended periods of time down there.

Geo
 
Better than trying to explain myself.....

From the Wiki..

The Haunted Vicarage
Borgvattnet is most renowned for its old vicarage which was built in 1876, and is reputed to be a haunted house. The first documented mentioning of ghosts in the vicarage is in a letter dated 1927 which was written by chaplain Nils Hedlund who lived in the house at the time. In the 1930s, Hedlund's successor, chaplain Rudolf Tängdén, claimed to have seen the ghost of a woman in the house, and in the 1940s the subsequent chaplain, Otto Lindgren, and his wife said they experienced paranormal activity including weird sounds and moving objects.

In 1941 a woman who visited the vicarage woke up one night in the guestroom to see that she was not alone. Three old women were sitting in a sofa staring at her in the dark room. She turned on the light and the three ghosts were still there but appeared to be more blurry.

In 1945, chaplain Erik Lindgren moved into the vicarage and he started writing down in his journal all the strange things he experienced. Lindgren had bought a rocking chair which he brought to the vicarage. However, he was never able to sit in his chair very long without being thrown out of it by an invisible force.
 
Seeing the "armed with a baseball bat" comment got me wondering...so in the event one does encounter a ghost/spirit/etc...how does one go about beating the sh!t out of it?

I mean seriously, a baseball bat wouldn't do much good, nor would my first choice: a Remington 12 ga. autoloder packed with the proper rounds to turn a bad man's head into a canoe. Swatting or shooting a ghost would be like spanking a column of smoke, I suppose...so what, a vacuum cleaner to suck the annoying apparition up or perhaps an electric fan turned up to "hurricane" mode?
 
Battlefields and hospitals are regularly claimed to be haunted. I don't try to explain what ghosts are because I don't know what ghosts are and I don't think anyone else does either, we need to accept that there are certain things that science can not explain instead of smugly believing that we know everything.
These orbs that show up on digital pictures are a good example of this. I can't believe that orbs are anything paranormal because they crop up randomly so often on my pictures. However to the best of my knowledge digital camera manufacturers have been unable to explain what causes these orbs to appear on pictures and have been unable to remove this flaw from their products, so for me this proves scientists don't know everything. There are plenty of other things scientists can't explain.
 
Why do people frequently feel fear when subject to these ghostly phenomena? Even if there were ghosts there should be no reason to feel fear. It is eminently logical to feel fear if confronted by a live intruder but not a dead one.

I am quite satisfied it is the brain noting something unidentifiable reacting as if it is night in the wild and all you have is a pointy stick. Fear breeds alertness and fast and aggressive reactions which is exactly what you want in order not to being eaten. it is telling how often these incidents occur at night (with honourable exceptions).

Do not misunderstand me. I am sure these reports are sincere, but mistaken. I recall one example of cupboard doors opening at night that was traced to a factory across the road that automatically cleaned it's pipes at the same time each night. That caused a hydraulic hammering transmitted by sympathetic resonance to the water pipes that ran across the road and vibrated the cupboard doors loose. A simple piece of rubber flooring jammed between the factory's pipes and the water ones stopped the phenomenon. The reportee had sincerely reported that, when they shone a torch on the cupboards at night, they could briefly see a ghostly hand on the cupboard doors. It is another reminder that the brain does not report what it sees. It receives data, interprets it and gives us the processed version, not the raw data. Hence we can have optical illusions and impersonators.

Try a simple test. There are some links to reported incidents on other past threads on the forum. Try reading some posts very late at night after rereading this thread. Notice the anxiety responses as you read (hence the good old fashioned ghost stories told late at night). Now read some more but in the afternoon after a good lunch. Not so scary after all are they? It makes sense. In safe daylight the brain can see there are no threats to hand. At night the (primitive) you is not so sure.
 
Seeing the "armed with a baseball bat" comment got me wondering...so in the event one does encounter a ghost/spirit/etc...how does one go about beating the sh!t out of it?

I mean seriously, a baseball bat wouldn't do much good, nor would my first choice: a Remington 12 ga. autoloder packed with the proper rounds to turn a bad man's head into a canoe. Swatting or shooting a ghost would be like spanking a column of smoke, I suppose...so what, a vacuum cleaner to suck the annoying apparition up or perhaps an electric fan turned up to "hurricane" mode?

I think he was implying that their might be a physical intruder in the house.
 
Matt, in addition to the bat, for corporeal intruders, you need one of these
 

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Battlefields and hospitals are regularly claimed to be haunted. I don't try to explain what ghosts are because I don't know what ghosts are and I don't think anyone else does either, we need to accept that there are certain things that science can not explain instead of smugly believing that we know everything.
These orbs that show up on digital pictures are a good example of this. I can't believe that orbs are anything paranormal because they crop up randomly so often on my pictures. However to the best of my knowledge digital camera manufacturers have been unable to explain what causes these orbs to appear on pictures and have been unable to remove this flaw from their products, so for me this proves scientists don't know everything. There are plenty of other things scientists can't explain.

Speaking as one who is firmly planted in the science camp:
I do not think that I know, or can know for that matter, all the ins and outs of the universe, BUT, present-day scientific principles/laws are not opinions nor are they anecdotal stories of what my third aunts second cousin twice removed once saw. They are precepts that have been tested over and over and challenged over and over and have never been shown to be in error. So beyond a shadow of doubt I strongly discount the existence of Ghosts/demons/appraitions/haunted houses/speaking to the dead/ect. That does not mean that I do not admit to a non-zero finite probability of their existence. Much as there is a similiar probability of fliping a coin and getting 1000 heads in a row. The random motion of air molecules could put them all in one corner of the room leaving me in a pure vacuum, could happen.
No scientist has ever claimed to know everything, in fact, quite to the contrary, the more I have learned in my life the more I realize how little I know. But once again what I do know I really KNOW and as such, the burden of proof rests upon those who wish to try to overturn the laws of science.
So you may very well have a pill that turns water into gasoline but I'm going to say "Horse Hocky" until you prove it.
I've personally been on those battlefields and hospitals and watched close friends and enemies die and nary one ghost in all that time.
So if you've got some type of valid proof you can earn a cool 2.2 million dollars from several groups that offer standing rewards for any such proof, some dating from the days of Houdini. Your beliefs are yours and you are welcome to them as for me, sorry, you're gonna have-ta OPEN the poke befur I'm goona belief theres a pig init!
 
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Like Mike, I'm firmly in the science camp. But I came to realise that reality doesn't exist. What is real or not is not one thing and can be different for everyone. It is in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. My mother, although a firm unbeliever felt the embrace of my father a few weeks ago. It was very real she said, so real that she turned on the light, half expecting him to be there. My father died in 2006. Maybe he was there or not, who knows. For her at that moment he was there in her reality.
 
Marcel, most exactly sir, perfectly stated, reality is unique for each and everyone of us. We both may look at a fire truck and say "It's red" but neither of us knows what the other is perceiving. And as for your mother how very very wonderful for her I truely wish she has that "ghost" twice a day. What would you give for the same sensation?
"Am I a man dreaming I'm a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I'm a man"
 
Mikewint, we are not going to agree on this one, I hope we can agree on that much. Like I said earlier, there is absolutely no harm in not believing in ghosts it is just a matter of opinion whether they exist or not, but lets face it we will find both out the truth eventually and if I'm right I then I will enjoy telling you I told you so, but in the mean time I am happy to wait for that small pleasure to arrive. The paranormal is not something that I am passionate about, for me it is only an interesting topic of conversation.
 
Is not one's reality how we perceive our lives?

[Somebody flag that as a quote of profound wisdom. It came directly from my beer, I swear.]

Mike's reality is cold and somber. At least that is how I perceive it. :toothy5: Oh and Meat's penis is small. Remember he said it was a shower, not a grower! [But that is another storyline of which he continues to steal]. :lol:
 

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