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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.
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
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?
Right...and then discovering the intruder is other than human leads us to the quandryI think he was implying that their might be a physical intruder in the house.
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.