i don't believe in ghosts (never seen 'em)

i have however had two sightings of UFOs

once at night with this cornucopia of about 16 lights hovering quite near the Earth

the second time with this silver needle-like object just floating in the sky

people tells me they're experimental aircraft, but I don't believe them

Brilliant post and I agree 100% :)

edit :

Why not? The US Air Force has been flying around with their secret aircrafts long before they were made known to the public and I'm sure other nations have done the same, so it generally seems like a possible plausible explanation for those kind of sightings.

i'd rather hold on to my beliefs

At least you're honest about it. That's far more tolerable than someone deluded enough to try and prove their position with ignorance. I can live with people saying "well that's just what I believe" and having no evidence to support it. But it's harder to live with people that try to argue on those same grounds.

Good on you, Duce.
You have saved many a kilobyte of server space.

Those were ghosts.

The restaurant I work in is haunted. There's been a number of instances that can only be explained that way.
First was a few months ago, we were closing up shop when we heard something shuffling around upstairs (nobody was up there), and then BANG! It sounded like somebody dropped a huge box full of shit.
Then I was upstairs looking for the key to the safe. Not able to find it in the dark, I started out of the office when the closet door that I had just been standing at sprang open.
And just tonight when I was leaving, I could hear what clearly sounded like somebody tapping on the window from inside. And I was the last person out.

Why a box of shhit?

In bed at the early hours of the morning I always hear faint noises in my kitchen and roof & stuff, and assume it is the cat. But I only just realised last night that my cat is dead (died in early March) and could not be making the noises. I can't believe I didn't realise this for so many weeks. I suppose having a cat for so many years you just disregard things.

Drop bears.

We live in an apartment complex and we get strange noises all the time. Sometimes it's the pipes, sometimes it's neighbours moving around, sometimes it's probably just the wind coming into the house as we prefer to have windows open and also keep a fan on while we sleep.

My point is things moving, falling down, making noises .. doesn't require either people or ghosts to happen.

Yes. But some of the noises people hear don't really adhere to those. Although a lot of the noises I hear in my house can be.

when i hear any weird noise, i sorta figure it's emanating from my brain as i'm schizophrenic

I think that, when filtered through the superstitious psyche of man, a sound that initially came in as a mouse or rat rummaging around may be interpreted as the sound of f.ex footsteps. And I think that happens more easily than many are aware of.

I've never seen a ghost, but I've seen a Slender Man looking figure in a picture I took, and he's not even real.

The most ghostly thing that's happened to me: I was lying in bed trying to sleep, and my bed shifted exactly as if someone had stood up from sitting on it. It was weird.

If anyone remembers, I posted a thread like this back when I first joined and the discussions here mirror almost exactly what happened in mine. A couple more years have been put between now and my "incident", so I've had more time to let the memory haze over and now I'm more able to pass it off as perhaps my "superstitious psyche".

Anyway, I've also since started grad school and have thus been required to use a much more analytical mind. While it has made me more critical of the things that are going on around me, I still don't want to lose the open mind I was proud to have before. I feel the major discoveries in science happen because of big thinkers and not because of people who are incredibly concerned with every minute detail conforming to a theory. I feel coming off as a little "eccentric" to other academics is an asset rather than a flaw. Still, before I dedicate anything to fact or a personal belief, I make sure I have evidence that is at least personally convincing to myself.

My question to you is...what would it take for YOU to believe in supernatural phenomena? At the very least, what would it take for you to admit the possibility? I only ask because I feel we are both at relatively similar levels in our career paths and I run into all sorts of people in this field...the rigid see it to believe it types and the open minded types. I feel like I know where you fall (at least to me), so I'd like to know what you need to be convinced.

When I hear noises in my house I know it's not mice, I've had mice in my house before and they weren't very loud or anything. It was more of a faint sound.

I already admit the possibility. Anything is possible, but in order for me to become a true believer .. Scientific coverage and documentation. If we can physically experience the supernatural - if it really exists outside our own minds, then we can test the supernatural and figure out how it works and perhaps why.

I don't believe in ghosts. I also wouldn't say I particularly disbelieve either. I just haven't ever had an experience that required me to put much thought into it. I would say the paranormal could be described as an interest of mine but I have never been interested enough to pick it apart and force myself to make a decision and take a side.

I do, however, think that our opinions can be heavily influenced by our state of mind. We can make more of something than is necessarily and tell ourselves that we thought we saw or heard is real. Also, do you WANT to believe in ghosts? if you do then you are far, far more likely to do this.

Just the other week at work I was one of the last out of the office. I hung around for a little longer than I wanted to cause there was only one person left at this point, this girl who didn't want to be alone cause the office creeps her out when shes alone. I couldnt wait around any longer and so I left and she said she was gonna get ready to leave too. I saw her the next day and she told me that she went into the kitchen and as she did, out of the relative silence there was a loud, high-pitched screaming. She said she grabbed all of her stuff and actually fled the building.

I explained to her that the extractor fan in the kitchen is broken and often, if it has been powered down for a long time, makes a loud, schreeching sound when its first turned on and, as she switched the light on, she turned it on. I reported it.

Had she not been alone she wouldnt have been alarmed. She wouldnt have been frightened and she wouldnt have described it as a "screaming". She might also have been more aware of the fact that the bloody thing stopped making noise when she turned the light back off again as she fled the office in hysterics.

Great story, mojo :) And a very good example of how different people interpret stuff.

I have never seen a a ghost, a specter or phantom and I spend a lot of time in Cemeteries.

Why is that?

he works there, I think

See, this reminds me of another thing that annoys me.
I understand that it's mostly a cultural phenomenon that connects creepy, death-history places with ghosts, but what I don't understand is why people seem to have hardly any affinity for placing as much credence to a belief in ghosts on busy city streets, new and sharp looking buildings, open fields, ditches, and any other non-creepy place where any tragedies or deaths have occurred.
If ghosts were the result of people dying with unfinished business, violent deaths, injustices, tragedy or frequency, then ghostly occurrences should be happening absolutely everywhere, all the time.
So, the next argument would be "Well, it has to have a history of such a thing". Why? Are we saying that there's simply a chance that, say--for an arbitrary statistic--1 out of every 100 horrible tragedies produces a haunting? That would have to be the statement, seeing as how a single horrible tragedy on its own doesn't produce a haunting every time. So if that's the statement, then the reasoning either has to say "yea, it's just a roll of the dice" (which is a pretty flimsy foundation), or has to keep reaching further to rely on some other cause to validate it, using some nonsense like "well, there was more quartz rock in the ground beneath the place where this tragedy happened, and the memory of the event was imprinted"...

I realize that all represents a particular sect of such believers, but the willingness to believe in the concept, regardless of assumed explanation--or lack thereof--is still based on hypothesis and nothing more. While it can be said that a skeptic is relying on nothing more than hypothesis when discounting either a culturally influential belief in ghosts or a belief that "sounds" more scientific, the most objective factor remains that skepticism itself should rely on whichever explanation has the most actual evidence. (We use physics and neuroscience for this sort of thing.)
And that is just not something that happens with a culture that assumes a spooky building or place with a dark history is supportive evidence.

Oh man, that reminds me of a story. When I was around 10 years old I thought I had a personal relationship with a "ghost" and my cousin and I ended up breaking in to an abandoned building in my hometown to "investigate" the ghosts death, hoping to set her soul free or something cliche like that. We broke a window to get in and everything. I had an overactive imagination and watched too much tv. :laughing:

Good point and something I've thought about myself. Most civilized places have seen a fair share of death, although some more than others, and you'd think places like Rwanda f.ex where tragedies have occurred in relatively recent times would be teeming with ghosts.

As as you also write, it is strange how a ghost may haunt the house or the barn, but not the outdoors between them and not the surrounding fields. Are ghosts strictly an indoors phenomenon?

no i have never seen ghosts.

i thought i saw a "toyol" once, though

a toyol is a sort of child demon kept by Malay witches to help punters harass their enemies

Did you looks at its tits or something?

it's usually a boy demon

and if you're curious, no, no genitals

if you meant anybody putting a toyol on me, no, just looking at somebody's tits is not enough to warrant such a reaction

:yeah:

i heard what sounded like cats in my walls this one time.

When I smoke at my friends house I need to walk past loads of trees like woods and that freaks me out. Freaks me out when I'm sober too right enough, just not as much.

That'd freak me out too. I can't even imagine having to walk past a load of woods in the dark stoned. Imagine having the balls to walk through the trees deep into the wood in the middle of the night on your own, haha.

when I got stoned in Cardiff (which was usually quite often), i walk through a park from where the stash was (a friend's pad) to my house

i sometimes sleep there

I like to eat mushrooms and wonder around in the woods. But I'm not a hippie. I swear.

x2.

I remember eating mushrooms on my college campus where we had these huge trees all throughout the quad and we climbed up in them until we saw these huge spiders all around us. My friend was so scared she jumped like 15 feet off a branch. Turns out it was just the drugs :laughing:

Well, my light randomly turned on one night. Does that count? And of course, one of my favorite movies is Ghost in the Shell...

I've had intense dissociative episodes, and part of what happens is I see these dark, evil specters and it terrifies me, but I don't believe in ghosts.

Yeah I've experienced a similar sort of thing when under extreme stress. Rather disturbing but definitely a projection of inner turmoil rather than anything supernatural.

i see things in the corner of my eyes when i'm extremely stressed

Which is not a ghost movie.