Do you believe in ghosts?
 

So...do you? And if you do...do you have a story to go with it?

I do, and I have a whole bunch of theories based on how ghosts can exist...but that isn't nearly as interesting as a good experience story.

My best one happened when I had a business trip to Golden, Colorado. I was staying for a month, so my work hooked me up with a townhouse. I had 3 other roommates. One of the guys there (I'll call him Tom) was one of the weirdest guys I've ever met. He refused to pay his rent, he constantly trashed the place, was a borderline rapist, got the cops called on us multiple times, and was generally the most annoying person I think I've ever met in my life. I describe him for a reason, as you will soon see.

Anyway, one of my first few nights there I was sleeping and having what you might call a typical dream. I can't really remember what it was about, but all of the sudden the whole tone of my dream changed. It no longer felt like a dream, it felt more like I was being held in a dream state. I was looking out the window of the room I was staying in and behind me I heard a girl struggling. I didn't look to see, but I knew she was being attacked by a man. All of the sudden, I was back in my bed and a blonde mid-teens girl in a white dress was next to me. I couldn't clearly see her face, but I knew she was attractive. She was leaning next to my ear and whispering to me. I couldn't understand the words but I knew she was begging for help. All of the sudden (still in my dream), Tom busted in, the girl panicked and I woke up. For some reason, the first thought in my head was "great, this place is haunted..." The dream left me feeling very weird the rest of the day, and I forced myself to shake it off.

So, eventually Tom not paying his rent and generally causing a lot of trouble ended up pissing off the landlord, so he got kicked out. We threw a party in celebration. We didn't know where he would go considering he didn't have a job or money, but he was so inconsiderate of what we had already done for him we didn't care anymore.

A few days later another one of my roommates (who I will call John) and I were hanging out in the living room. This guy is one of the coolest guys I've met. We are the only two people in the house, and we start hearing banging upstairs. It doesn't really bother me and for some reason, I think nothing of it. John makes a comment about it, and I mention jokingly, "haha maybe the house is haunted..." He laughs, but then he looks at me and says, "You know, I really think this place is haunted," I ask why he thinks so and he tells me how he hears voices sometimes asking for help and how everytime a girl sleeps over, she feels very uncomfortable in his room (as if someone is watching) and ends up asking to go in the living room. Then he hits me with something that just blew my mind. He told me about how on top of all this he has these dreams involving this girl...I stop him right there and ask him if this girl is blonde in a white dress asking for help. He looks at me intensely and goes..."Uhh...yeah..." At this point we trade our dreams and though the situations are different, the context remains the same. All the way down to Tom being involved in waking us up. We are both totally convinced of the haunting at this point.

So, back to the noises. The thumping sounds as if it is coming from an empty room upstairs. We never go in this room, as there is no need. John goes up to check it out, comes back down, and mentions how he saw something he didn't like. It turns out Tom had been sneaking back into the house somehow and was currently squatting in that room. As soon as we discover this, the thumping stops. It seems as if the ghost was trying to warn us of Tom. We inform the landlord who has a sheriff friend, and he tells us he will talk to Tom and if he returns to call. We also scour the house for any way he could sneak in and make sure it is securely closed off.

John and I do some research and find out there was a body of an unidentified girl in the river behind our house found in the mid 70s who was blonde and in her mid teens. She was also found to have been raped and murdered. I really feel like the ghost of this girl was trying to warn us of Tom and helped us make sure he was gone and could not cause us anymore trouble.

Well, I hope you found that interesting. Anyone else have some good stories?

Nope.

I see weird fucking images at night, but that's just I'm clinically insane. I used to get really sick when I was kid too and the pundit (a religious figure in Hinduism) had to come over often to "heal" me or whatever. Ghosts exist? Pssh, yeah right.

Yes.

http://www.millionaireplayboy.com/mp...ostbusters.jpg

I don't believe in ghosts, but if they did exist that can be of great relief.

why would that be a relief? because it would prove the existence of the soul?

I'm really not sure if they do exist. It's a case really of 'if i can see it, then i'll believe it'. But when you hear all these ghost stories and see these magnificent photos taken of supposed ghosts then it all seems very believable. It all seems pretty strange if ghosts can exist.

being a scientist i always try to apply some kind of rational explanation. the human mind is too powerful and uses too much energy to not have an impact in the unseen world. i say unseen simply because we only have 5 senses and we only have those because it was evolutionarily advantageous. there are animals with different senses than us. it doesn't have to be fantasy...you just have to look at a bigger picture.

At least it would prove the existence of some kind of life after death. Plus I'll be able to haunt the ghost whisperer.

I used to have such a big problem with ghosts when I was around 13 to the point where it basically controlled my life.

I had always had problems with ghosts before then and when I was in maybe 4th grade went to therapy because of them. I can remember it starting in 2nd grade where I had a nightmare. In the dream I was at my cousins house and there was a big family party. My Dad had to step outside into the night to take a phone call and I decided to go out with him for whatever reason. He went in and left me out there and from the darkness this figure emerged. It was a lady without a face in a brown dress. I can remember waking up immediately in a cold sweat and running into my parents room.
I began to see that lady whom I saw in that dream in other places along with seeing more ghosts. There had always been about 3 that were reoccurring in my old house.

When I moved to the current house I live in when I was 13 it all kind of came back to me. The house is about 50 years old and has 12 acres. Having 12 acres where I live is pretty rare. Anyway when I got here I started to see a new set of ghosts which freaked me out to the point where I would refuse to be left home alone and needed someone close by in the house at all times.

I went to therapy once again but it wasn't only for the ghosts this time, I had really bad anxiety problems and I've come to the conclusion that both times when I had problems with the ghosts it was due to my anxieties because now that my anxieties are fully conquered I don't see any.

But I believe in ghosts. I'm not sure how much those situations influenced my opinion but from further reading I came to the conclusion. Usually when I try to explain my opinion on it in tends to not make any sense so I'm not sure how far I want to get into it. It always sounds better in my head.

I would explain it myself but due to the fact that when I do explain my feelings on this matter it tends to sound really far fetched.

I really want to make it known that I don't base my opinions off of this youtube video, I don't agree with everything he is saying. I could go into great detail about his book but I just think the easiest way for me to explain is to just show this.



I was kind of reluctant to post in this thread, and post the video, because I think I'm going to take some heat because people may think I completely base my theories off of a youtube video but that is not the case at all. I just want to make it clear.

If ghosts do exist I agree that it would be a big relief and I also think that it kind of makes sense that ghosts exist.

I've always thought about there being more to the world as we see it. I remember being told by one of my teachers in class when i was young that 'most ghosts are invisible, in fact they're probably walking around the classroom right now'. This makes me think how can people see some ghosts but not see other ghosts. I've also read stories about ghosts being captured in photos, when supposedly there was nothing there. It's something to do with camera lenses being able to pick up more light than the naked human eye.

There's definitely more to the world than we currently know. That much is obvious. But there is also more to ourselves than we currently know, and I think people should keep that in mind before claiming an occurrence is based in reality or not.
Believe what you want in the mean-time though.
We all have that right. I'd just hope that if people are open minded enough to believe in a supernatural realm, they'd also be open minded enough to believe that it could be explained naturally in the future.

I'm not really sure if I believe in ghosts, especially ghosts in the traditional sense, but I have certainly had a bunch of seemingly supernatural things happen to me in my life, who seen odd things which cannot be explained. I'm sure there is SOME explanation for them but I'll never know.

don't feel apprehensive about posting that kind of stuff...i love to hear about it. in fact, i have done a lot of thinking on the topic myself.

i think people who experience more "ghostly encounters" are people who are either born receptive to it or people who have experienced anxiety or a very stressful time. i don't know why, but maybe experiencing something so emotionally deep causes some subconscious expansion of perception. for example, the roommate i talked about had no experiences until he got back from iraq...now he has them all the time.

have you ever done any reading on near death experiences? it is highly enlightening, and has shaped a lot of what i think happens when we die. i personally believe in reincarnation simply due to the fact that there has been a lot of politically suppressed research on the subject showing overwhelming evidence in support of it.

one thing i can say for certain that happens when we die is that a ****load of dmt is released...hence the reason many people who take it for recreation feel as if they are dieing when in fact, the drug is completely safe. so safe that we experience a dmt trip every time we sleep (and why dreams are so easily mistaken for reality). how this has any relation to ghosts...well, i don't know i just thought it was interesting.

most scientists end up as very rigid thinkers. there is so much we don't know that we better stick with what we do know and chip away at science until we get to an endpoint. i do not think that way...i am so fascinated by how little we know that i tend to think anything is possible...including ghosts. i have caught a lot of **** from colleagues about this, but imo all of the great scientists in history have been big thinkers.

thanks for sharing that btw...i think most people would feel uncomfortable sharing something like that.

Or more likely, experiences that mess with your mind, you know, mess with your mind and you sometimes see things that aren't there.

i saw that one coming...but when 2 people can vouch for the same experience that argument becomes somewhat null

Not really. People's memories of events are notoriously malleable. That's why eyewitness testimony is often very unreliable.

Yeah I had a phase where I was obsessed with near death experiences and I too think that they have influenced my opinions on the afterlife a lot.

I've toyed with reincarnation before and it's definitely a fun thing to think about but I still think that when you die you don't get instantly reincarnated. I think there is some downtime, I guess, and after a period of time you get reincarnated.

But that's a new thing I've been thinking of and I don't think I have a strong enough opinion about it to try to justify it although something like that can't really be justified.

I've read numerous times that babies can see ghosts but since they are just babies they don't have the kind of thought process to understand it. Supposedly once you hit a certain age most people stop seeing these ghosts but for some the window stays open.

Another thing I've found entertaining to toy with is fate.

ah fate...i believe in fate in a very indirect way.

now...i HATE to quote a sci fi movie...but i do really like the way it was put in the matrix:
"you've already made all the choices, now you are just here to understand them."

linear time is completely a human perception, time is actually something entirely different. this implies that everything that has happened and everything that will happen is still happening right now...hence string theory in quantum physics. that means that we DO have a fate...a fate we have made all our own, but a fate nonetheless.

i agree on the "downtime" between reincarnations thing, too

Me and two other guys were walking around in an abandoned biotech building on campus(This is the URI campus). We called it the Skag Factory because we imagined heroin addicts crouched around in there and acting all like Gollum. It was a place we would vandalize.

At about 3am we were screwing around in the place. All we were on, or doing was drinking, and we drank at around midnight. I say this because the first thing people ask is, oh, you guys were high. We weren't. We were pretty sober actually.

Anyway, we were about to leave when my friend Wilson said he wanted to check out one more room. So we went in there and looked around. Suddenly we heard a noise, it sounded like somebody with a high pitched voice, and distinctly human mind you, go 'woo woo woo'

We turned around and saw a disembodied face floating there. It's head looked like the scream except there was no mouth. It just floated there and we stared at it for about four seconds. It didn't go away when we looked at it or anything. It just sort of stared back.

Suddenly Wilson just ran, and so did we. We got back to Wilson's frat house and crashed in his room, we smoked. Then in the middle of the night, Wilson kept waking up suddenly. He would scratch at his face, and do all these weird things. He would essentially throw tantrums. He would say to us 'I can't control my body, but I can control my mind'

The next day he essentially ignored us and was busy working on a piece of paper. It took him like hours. Finally he came to my other friend's room(it was me, Wilson and Ralph), and showed us it was a handmade ouija board thing. It was very detailed. The numbers went up to 250.

Outside of the building, there are tree trunks and pieces of trees that were cut down. Wilson taped the ouija thing to one of the trunks and dragged it into the abandoned building. We didn't help him, it was a foolish venture.

When he came back he said he knew the name of the ghost. Her name was Rita and she died when she was little. Supposedly, she was supposed to be a doctor.

A week later, Wilson's parents pulled him out of school. He's on a leave of absence. He certifiably lost it. I saw something which I'm pretty damn sure was a ghost, and a friend of mine who I always thought was a stable guy, was driven insane.

After that me and Ralph would go back there and investigate. Surprisingly, in the room right next to where we saw the ghost, there was a tiny little fetus skeleton propped up, as like an example of human anatomy.

Once when we went back, we were on acid, and we didn't see anything but I posed the theory that perhaps ghosts are merely trapped spirits of people who couldn't accept death, because surely a small child couldn't conceive of death, coupled with the fact that perhaps the buildings one lives in and such absorb the memory of those who live there. And the appearance of ghosts is like a faint echo in the fabric of the universe where the memories come back up.

My second story is this: My mother's friend, Lori, she claims to know about all the supernatural stuff and she claims she can see spirits. A member of my mother's group of friends(Lori was also in that group), his name was Anthony, and his brother died in the Station Night Club fire in Rhode Island, the one with Great White. Anyway, for a couple of days after his death, his spirit kept showing up, or at least his voice or something. Finally she relented and told Anthony that she couldn't sleep, his brother had been appearing before her and talking to her, telling her that he wanted to be buried in his jeans and boots. Anthony, knowing Lori has a history with the whole spiritual thing, and looked around in his brother's house. Anthony found a box in his brother's closet where there was a paper that was a sort of will thing, and it said he would like to be buried in his jeans and boots. When Anthony asked his brother's wife about this, she had no idea.


I don't know exactly what's going on, but I do know that it's foolish to outright deny a phenomena that is so widespread and has so many eyewitnesses.

Rita died when she was little? I assume that means "young".
And she was supposedly a doctor?


I'm not going to make any kind of claims right now. I'm just going to leave those two sentences up there for posterity.


P.S.... Why does everyone run?
Do no one just stand there anymore? Have the movies totally programmed your stories?
I dunno... floating head. It's not trying to kill me yet. Probably pretty interesting since it's a floating head and all. Fear? Yea, it's a floating fucking head. But this isn't the fucking Scooby Doo show. But even then, running away, as we all should know by now, doesn't put you at any sort of meaningful distance from a ghost, yea?

Why not just stand there and watch it?
Why be afraid?
Is that what movies taught you?



Hint fucking hint.

i sometimes wonder if i would run if i saw an outright ghost in front of me. i wonder the same about if i woke up and saw an alien at the end of my bed. at this point in my life, i would like to think i'd be more intrigued than anything. are there any stories of someone actually dieing from a ghostly encounter? not to my knowledge..

Isnt GB 3 do out sometime soon?

Hey, duga,

No, I don't believe ghosts or souls exist.

I *do* know that the human brain is very capable of believing coincidence is more than that. People also sometimes believe dreams are real. More seriously, various brain "glitches" such as seizures and other neurological troubles produce hallucinations that can be emotional, auditory, and/or visual.

Since people have been hoping desperately for life after death for probably hundreds of thousands of years, ghosts to me symbolize wish fulfillment as the mind tries to fill in gaps in knowledge by imagining the existence of ghosts. I also feel the concept of ghosts symbolizes people's fear of death.

Hard to say. I certainly don't believe in after life. I believe in eternal life. That can allow for the possibility of people not making it to certain dimensions after dying, so anything is plausable.

I think anything is possible. I can't say for sure either way whether or not ghosts/paranormal exists. There are still a lot of things that we can't fully explain and I'd like to keep an open mind until then.

I do lean more towards believing they do exist but I also think that, most times, people are too quick to conclude that unexplainable experiences are paranormal.

This is exactly how I feel. If you watch the video I posted on the first page the man talks about this along with many other ways ghosts exist.

And everytime I've seen a ghost I have run. I always tell myself the next time I see one aI'll stay but I can't do it.

It sure would be a lot easier if I had someone with me.

And In regards to what was said about people having to go through a traumatic experience in there life to have their eyes opened to the supernatural that would make sense for me considering I had cancer when I was around 2. I don't remember much of it besides that my first memory consists of something that happened during that time.

Well heck yeah I believe in ghost, but they wont bother you if you leave them alone.

She was *supposed* to be a doctor. But her life was cut short. Get it?

You're a man who has done things like acid before, have you ever had a bad trip? Have you ever seen something in front of you totally foreign, alien, that sends a paralyzing shiver up your spine, that totally upends your beliefs(before this I didn't believe in ghosts), and gives you an absolute sense of FEAR, the raw primal essence of the most base and strongest emotion? Do you know what that feels like? Your mind is no longer in control. Animal instinct is.

Think a little bit before you accuse me of being a fucking child, with your Scooby Doo analogies.

Sorry about that. I should have mentioned that I meant that second part in a general sense, although it applies to your situation.

Yea I've had a lot of bad trips. But you don't see ghosts and monsters in bad trips. At least, I don't.
I know what fear is, and I know how I respond to it. Believe me, when you're walking around in a desert in Iraq and mortar shells are exploding around you, you run and you're afraid.
I know about fight or flight. It's a life preservation mechanism. I just wonder why people always run from something they've grown up at least knowing about, and mostly knowing that it can't/probably won't hurt you, and is like the one opportunity to really get up close and experience.

I'd kill to have saw something like that. Fear or not, I don't think I would have run away. If I did, I would hope to have stopped and went back out of sheer curiosity. But since I don't see ghosts and never will, all I can do is hope someone else mans up enough to see the experience as more than just another case of someone not being able to rationalize in the face of fear.

God damnit people when is Ghostbusters 3 coming out?

Sorry to snap at you like that, but yeah, that's why me and the friend who didn't go crazy kept going back into the building. We were both insanely curious afterwards, but we froze up in that moment and just wanted to get the **** out.

i've got another story (this one happened to my brother)

asia has been known to be incredibly haunted, with some of the most aggressive ghosts in the world. when my family first moved to singapore, we were walking around town and my brother accidentally stepped on a pile of fruit. we thought nothing of it at the time, but we later learned this was an offering for the hungry ghost festival. we have never proven that the following occurrences were caused by this, but it was the best thing we could come up with.

there was nothing very intense about my brother's haunting, but it was obvious. my brother was a metalhead and always kept his radio on that station, but would wake up with the radio on the classical station. the volume would fluctuate all the time and anytime he would have friends over they felt like someone was watching them. also, his room was freezing cold...and we lived in the tropics with the windows open (airconditioning is expensive there).

my brother resorted to changing rooms with my sister (without telling her of the supposed haunting) just to get it to stop. for a couple months, nothing happened, but then the same things started up again. the same happened after moving back to the US. now, however, he is used to it and actually tells it to stop messing with his radio...and it listens, strangely.

^ Not to disrespect, but when I read "hungry ghost festival" I nearly pissed myself laughing.
lol...

Edit:
And I think I'm putting it in my sig now.

The word "fruit" caught me by suprise I thought you were going to say "and my brother accidentally stepped on a pile of ____"

i'm honored to have contributed to your sig...and it fits perfectly

but yeah...hungry ghost festival is kind of a big deal in asia

That would make a horrible Hungry Ghost Festival. Imagine the surprise when the ghosts come out expecting fruit, perhaps all revved up for some mangos this year or even a star-fruit or two, and find a big pile of shit.

Somebody would get their ass haunted all kind of nasty.

HAHAHHAHAHHAHAHA

wow man...THAT is going in my sig

I can't say I've ever experienced anything which I'd seriously attribute to ghosts.

Though there was this time when I was playing some PS1 as a kid with my neighbour and after finishing, we turned off the TV and left the room. We returned to get some food, sat down at the table and heard these weird noises every now and again. It seriously freaked us out and we began to think it was ghost related... I grabbed a knife and did a lap of the house to check for intruders. Only later did we realise it was the Playstation drive occasionally scanning for a CD. We'd left it on despite turning the tv off. :laughing:

I've had some pretty weird experiences but couldn't say if they were surely ghosts or not. I do believe in them! I don't see how they're all that irrational. It's not like they're some evanescent creatures that haunt old, forgotten houses. It's either just repeating events due to their traumatic nature or a spirit of a dead person that are no different then we are. Once you get into demons and people getting scratched and cut, then I don't know. That stuff is craziness. Oh and I thought this was pretty interesting :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...-than-God.html