Heh, I thought the recent Ghostbusters video game was supposed to be Ghostbusters 3.

Game looks awesome too.

One needs only to have experiences of drugs of the very weakest kind to know that the human brain can very easily create things which aren't there, and what we perceive of the world in many cases is very far from what actually happens. The brain will create or amplify sensations, visions or sounds if we expect it to happen, and/or if we are tense. If you sleep over in an old house that you've been hold is haunted, and you during the night hear a mouse fart in the wall, you're gonna think it's haunted too.

Yeah, Monkey's right. Ghosts are myth.

Who's to say that drug induced hallucinations aren't real? Surely, they cannot be seen or felt in the "real" world, but I find it to be nothing but simple rationalization when everyone can disregard something simply because they took a drug. No one knows what the brain is doing when we modify the way it is functioning.

A popular theory amongst scientists studying the drug feel that DMT lets your mind peak into parallel worlds. This is the reason many see gnome or lizard creatures when they take it (different worlds mean different evolutionary paths).

Ahh right! Anyone who believes in ghosts assumes anything out of the ordinary is automatically paranormal. You're getting the RATIONAL ones mixed up with people like Yvette Fielding from Most Haunted. She left the show saying "something (or someone) breathed on my ear" [inferring it was a ghost] and then was hysterical and had to leave. In post editing they found it was a moth.

All people who love country = incestuous rednecks
All people who love reggae = mindless marijuana smokers (who all have dreadlocks)
All people who love pop = annoying prepubescent girls

And so on. I've been in plenty of haunted places before and have never assumed anything to be paranormal.

Ghosts: My Experience...
 

About 4 yrs. ago I moved into an older house (originally around 1912ish). Big, 5 bedrooms, 4 up, 1 down. While watching tv in the middle of the day, my remote, lying on the table next to my recliner I was sitting in, literally FLEW off the table and back behind me, landing on the stairs about 5 ft. behind the table. Talk about fricken freakin out! Since then I've seen "ghostly" white images and also dark images, mostly in my bedroom downstairs. I don't feel threatened as I knew the people who previously owned the house. They grew up here and their parents are deceased. I knew their father as a child and he was a character. The mother I didn't know well but understood to be a nice person. Do not know who lived here before them. Have had the house for sale for 2 yrs. w/no takers so far, even though it's a neat old house w/a lot of character and a large yard in a small town. Have seen rockers rock w/no one in them, have had paper in my hand and a corner of it fluttered on its own w/no breeze or draft, among other unusual things. Have never told anyone about these occurrences for fear it would interfere w/selling the house. I don't think the "ghosts" or "spirits" want me to leave. I have never acknowledged them in any way, or shown or felt fear. I think this aggravates them! So "ghosts"? "Spirits"? Yeah...I believe. And no, no drugs.

Last semester I took a class that focused on space and a person's awareness/place in their "space" and this kind of goes along with it.

My professor was talking about driving one day. Basically, she said that there are times when you're driving and you're mind is focusing on something else. So, physically, you're driving a car, but YOU, your conscious self, isn't anywhere near that car.
And, of course, we read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (loveee) and discussed the entirely different reality that the two main characters shared in the same physical space.

I think the parallel world is kind of like that. It's not black or white. You can't just say that there are or aren't ghosts.

Yes! Exactly...driving is a perfect example. When first learning to drive, everyone is so uptight and nervous that we pay attention to absolutely everything we do. Once we are used to it, we space out and can sometimes end up forgetting an entire car trip. The most unsettling thing about it is how very important things like stopping at a stop sign or remembering to signal are easily forgettable. Next time you finish driving through a well known area, try to remember exactly how the trip went down. You won't be able to, your brain has effectively deemed driving a mundane task not worthy of the long and short term memory usage required to remember it.

Btw, I'm liking you more with each post...I hope you stick around.

[: Thanks! I think I like it here.

As for the driving thing. I live about 45 minutes of highway driving away from my college and after a visit home, I was driving back and I was 10 minutes from my apartment when I realized I hadn't been paying attention at all during the drive. Luckily, the weather and traffic conditions were pretty clear. And I'm going to have to try that, I'll probably give up after like 5 minutes, but whatever.

I am still skeptical about spirits, but my mom told me a story today which piqued my interest.

She works at a nursing home, which is believed to be haunted. There's supposed to be by some accounts "A little Indian (Native American) girl" and by some accounts a little Native American boy. It's believed that the little boy/girl is seen only when a resident is about to pass away...which really isn't that often; most pass away after being sent to hospice.

So, there'd been no sightings of this little...I'll just say boy for simplicity at this point...boy for a while. My mom had heard the stories about him, but she had never seen or heard anything to suggest they were anything but stories.

A month or so ago, my mother answered a call light from one of the residents, and she could hear screaming in the hallway. She quickly ran to see what was going on, and one of the other nurses was sitting in the hallway screaming and sobbing inconsolably. When my mom checked on the resident and finally got the other nurse talking, she said that she'd seen, "The grim reaper". She said it was awful and it looked like a man, but it was evil, and it was the grim reaper. My mom was like, "Okay..." and the nurse just clocked out and went home. She quit that day, after having worked there for four years. The next night, the resident in that room passed away.

Some of the other nurses who had been there for a while told my mom that they'd never heard anyone talking about the grim reaper, but they had heard about "the man in the black coat" from some of the residents, although none of the nurses had ever seen him.

Last night, my mom was on call lights again, and one of the residents hit their call light, and she once again heard screaming. My mom ran down the hall to see what was up, and the resident said, "GET THAT MAN OUT OF MY ROOM!"

My mom was confused, and looked around where she was standing in the doorway and said, "There is no man."

The resident said, "Yes, there is. There's a man in a black coat, and I want him OUT."

My mom looked around, and with that description, she was kind of freaking out. Then the woman said, "Wait, take a step over," which my mother did, then the resident looked directly to her right and said, "Well, there's a little Indian boy right there beside you. He's with the black coat man."

My mother is terrified to go back to work for the night shift now. Additionally, her resident has passed away.

Just a weird story.

I'm pretty sure I've felt the precense of a deceased uncle of mine.
I can't tell you how, but I'm sure he was there.

And I've been in a church a couple of years ago.
I was listening to a choir, holding on to a railing.
All of a sudden I felt someone touch my hands and pull them.
I looked at my hands and didn't see a thing.
It happened again, and again.
I let go of the railing and felt a push in my back while I was dragged outside by my shoulders. I told my parents I would be outside and ran away, very quickly.
Not going back into a church again because of that.

My mom was riding her bike one day at exactly the same spot where I often felt the precense of that uncle.
She doesn't know that.
She had the feeling as if someone was pulling her bike so she would go slower. She didn't see anyone, but as soon as she wanted to go faster, she felt something holding her back. Days later we found out she had problems with her hart and had to take it really very easy.
She's fine now by the way :).

I also know things I can't know about that deceased uncle.
I know he has been threatened by people because of money issues, I know what his house looked like.
I have never been there. There are not pictures.

So yeah, I'm pretty convinced there's more than we know.
And I guess (and hope) that the ghosts, spirits of deceased people are all still here.
Seems like a fun idea. Loads of space for everyone :D

Oh c'mon, really? Ghosts? It shocks me to read through this thread and see how many of you actually lend the existence of ghosts some credibility...

That is awesome! I've actually had some weird stuff happen here at my house. The other night the TV came on in the middle of the night and it was LOUD. And then I found out that when my stepdad and his friend were in the basement, they heard footsteps up in the house when they were the only ones here. Stuff gets knocked over quite a bit which is always fun. Most recent was the iron off of the living room table.

EDIT: In reference to ThePhanastasio

So you've read the thread...have you actually paid attention to the stories people are posting? Whether you believe or not, people obviously have unexplainable things happen to them. This is the thing that pisses me off most about people who don't believe in them. There is no explanation offered, just a "Wow, you are stupid" kind of response. Way to have an open mind.

I don't really want to go into the visible spectrum again. Souls and spirituality aren't the only explanations for these things, but something is happening.

Exactly.

No you haven't.

You're a scientist. You should know that if "something is happening" we should be able to test it in some manner and acquire some kind of evidence for whatever "it" is. I mean, c'mon, we live in an age where most people in advanced societies carry in their pocket a device that captures both picture and video, but unshockingly, have yet to see any sort of conclusive evidence for ANYTHING supernatural. I'm sorry but anecdotal scare stories simply do not cut it.

Do you have a way to test dark matter? Science knows it's there, but we have no way to test it. You are assuming that because we don't currently have a way to test this, we never will. That's not true at all.

I think people are quick to dismiss the fact that we only have 5 senses. There are animals with other senses that we don't have. We are left with only the senses that are important for survival. We experience such a small percentage of reality that it becomes poor science to exclude the possibility of the mind impacting the world in a detectable way. I think that's fairly scientific reasoning. That's my hypothesis. We may not currently have the tools to test it, but who is to say we won't eventually?

Now this is off topic, but I have to say it. People have this idea that scientists have to restrict themselves to nothing but currently accepted ideas. None of the greatest discoveries have been made that way. Thinking small is fine for making inches of progress each year, but it takes some truly outrageous ideas to make the big finds. I only mention this because it's really sad to see future scientists restrict themselves. Think creatively and use science as a guide. I'm not saying all scientists should believe in ghosts, but I am saying all scientists should admit the possibility they exist until it is proven that they don't.

I don't think this is a fair comparison. First of all, science doesn't "know" dark matter/energy is there: they hypothesize that it exists based on observations of the universe. Second, they ARE testing for dark matter (LHC as one example), but these tests remain inconclusive as of yet.

Yes, I saw you mention this earlier in the thread. There's no evidence that God exists, there's no evidence that fairies exist, there's no evidence that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists, and there's no evidence that ghosts exist. There is literally an infinite number of imaginary things that COULD exist beyond our realm of perception/detection. It's logical enough to say that things that don't make sense and that there's no evidence for probably don't exist. You don't need empirical evidence for that.

See above

I'm more apt to attribute "ghostly" experiences to a physiological component of our own makeup and resulting reactions of perceptions, but I certainly can't rule out the possibility of something more existing outside of our personal perceptions.
If I were to be as objective as possible, I would say that there exists more evidence of human fallacy in regards to perception and experience, than evidence of something outside that limitation. The fact that there are many humans with psychological disorders whose perceptual reality is much, much more different than those of us without them, does more than hint at the power of our own minds in dictating what we think we know, even if we haven't given it a name and institutionalized it. But in the end, we're still limited by a system whose very nature is, at all times, susceptible to error. As a result, we're more often left with obscurities we believe in, rather than are truly able to prove without reliance on that system.

I think it's totally fine if one person believes in something another doesn't. All that does is make a stronger case for the fact that we're pretty much all at the mercy of what our own perceptions dictate, and that it's mostly completely independent of any sort of objective standard that we can rely on, due to the fact that anything we rely on uses the same faulty system.

Believe what you want. That's the only answer here.

And I'm hypothesizing ghosts exist. Is it because we are calling them ghosts? I can come up with something more scientific if that helps.

Yeah, I thought I remembered mentioning it sometime before. I think you are being unfair now. The whole point of what I was saying is that there actually ARE observable phenomena (seen by more than one person) and at some point when we have a better understanding of what makes up those phenomena, we CAN test it. I'm not just pulling something out of my ass and saying try to prove it doesn't exist. There is an actual basis for my claims.

Anyway, it all boils down to what Freebase said. I just think the nonbelievers can cut the believers some slack.

YES PLEASE. There's varying levels I think. You have the ones who believe in things like psychics (which I absolutely don't) and almost seem desperate to pin any one thing that's even slightly unusual on a ghost. On the other hand, there's people me. I'm not one to call "orbs" (a.k.a. dust or flies) on pictures the manifestation of spirits. Just as I'm not one to pin a distant creak of a floorboard on a man who once lived in the home that it occurred in. His name was James. He's a very happy spirit.

But you are relying on anecdotal evidence. I have no independent access to any of these events or phenomena, and just because they don't have an explanation doesn't mean that they are ghosts.

I have a fundamental issue with your stating that these phenomena ARE observable, only to, in the very same sentence, state that they actually aren't. Like I said earlier, there are an infinite number of things that might exist and might be observable at some point in the future. Or not. You can believe whatever you want, but you shouldn't expect anyone else to believe in the same things you do if you only provide anecdotes to support your beliefs; and you certainly shouldn't go around attacking the skeptics for being reasonably and logically skeptical.

Why? When have believers ever cut nonbelievers slack?

I think you are misunderstanding me. Anyway, I'm not attacking you. It sounded like you were completely baffled as to how anyone can think these things might exist in your original post and being a logical person, I got defensive. I don't believe anything until I feel like I've seen enough proof for myself. I see what you are saying, though...there is nothing I can point to that would be completely unbiased. This is definitely the kind of thing where you just have to have your own experience.

I hope you can see there is a difference, though, between believing unicorns exist and humans trying to figure out what happens to our consciousness after we die and the effect that has on our surroundings. There is no denying consciousness exists and that it creates a lot of energy. That's definitely fact. That's also something to extrapolate on.

I guess no one cuts anyone slack. There needs to be more slack in the world. This **** is stressful.

I'll be happy to cut believers some slack just soon as they stop telling me I'm evil for not automatically accepting folklore as irrefutable fact.

You just don't have an open mind. Be more open minded.

:laughing:

Janszoon...you are awesome. Just wanted you to know that.

Sometimes I wonder if you were beaten with a bible as a child though. You give off very strong anti-religious vibes. (And if you were beaten with a bible as a child...well, I apologize for the comment. :\ )

I understand where you're coming from (I think), but I tend to agree with duga here, about everyone cutting each other some slack, so sometimes I find your vehement opposition a bit disturbing.

Has every religious/superstitious/traditional person you've met been a closed-minded nit?

Honestly I'm just wondering, as this hasn't been my experience.

I don't get what it is about the polar extremes. As if I really think you're evil? As if my believing has anything to do with folklore? And as if I think any unexplainable event is an irrefutable fact? Not exactly.

I can identify with this post, as I was, most definitely, beaten with a bible growing up. Sometimes, almost literally... if you consider a thick leather belt with the word "jesus" engraved on it as the word of god. For a long time I simply hated religion because I was forced to choke on it, but after a while I let that go and just began to realize that the real harm was in the mindset that needed to force itself onto another person.
I'm still learning how to be open minded and not view my own ego as an absolute truth, and it's hard as hell, but I feel better and better about it because I'm learning a lot from people where I may not have been capable of otherwise. While I still contain some fundamental convictions, I'm getting better at allowing them to be challenged and I believe that's necessary if I'm to have any kind of faith in the solidity of my own beliefs.

Are you a nonbeliever?

I'm unclear on why you seem to think that my comment was directed specifically at you.

I'm...undecided?? If I'm honest the truth is I just don't care enough about it to decide either way.

But, I was raised in an extremely religious family and community. So I have met my fair share of extremists...the people I'm assuming you have beef with here. Just seems like I've met enough people who were willing to live and let live despite their religious views too...enough to balance it out anyway.

I ramble though. The short answer to your question is...I don't know.

I know it wasn't, but since I am a believer it kind of is directed towards me.

Though for the most part I don't like being associated with believers. Once I say I am, it's almost as if I then must communicate with spirits in my spare time using one of my many Ouija boards. And, of course, am completely devoid of any logic.

The reason I ask is that I've generally found the people who can't understand why someone might be annoyed by religion are people who've never experienced being nonreligious in a religious society.

Has every religious person I've ever met been some horrible person? No, of course not. One of the most important people in my life, my grandmother, was quite religious. My wife is also pretty religious. I myself, at one time, was even considering going to divinity school to become a minister. But none of that particularly enables me to ignore the fact that the overwhelming majority of my fellow Americans take huge dumps on nonbelievers on a very regular basis.

Wait a minute.. you were talking about believing in ghosts right? Jesus. I hope you weren't talking about religion. Because I definitely am not that kind of believer.

And this is somewhat relevant, but I've found that religious people tend to not believe in ghosts because there really can't be in an between. You die, and then go to heaven or hell.

I'm not religious, but I think that ghosts and paranormal phenomena is more plausible. I'm kind of iffy on it, but I've had some weirdness personally that I've never been able to quite explain away.

I guess I don't really see the difference.

It sounds like you're talking specifically about Christians, not religious people in general. But even if you restrict the discussion to just them I think you'd find plenty who believe in ghosts, not to mentioned the fact that all of them believe in the holy ghost.

Religion is based off of books and stories from thousands of years ago. To experience something unexplained, you can do so firsthand. I don't see how religion and the unexplained are related. On top of that is worship and prayer. And a myriad of other things. Like holidays. And church dinners.

Oh, and the belief in one specific holy.. guy. Who died. Who I guess is supposed to be VERY important.