Do you believe in ghosts?

[SaintMalachi]

I am in kinda a grey area on one hand I do on another I don't.

 

[outhouse]

Im not sure.

Theres houses nearby and my friend in grade school said that one of three was haunted by a dog like bad spirit.


5 years later my best friend at the time said the area was haunted, he lived down the street a field over and his whole family described a guy in flannel with a beard .

these two never knew each other.

years later I lived in the house next door

A girl who did not know these storys came running out of the kitchen and said she saw a ghost outside and he was old and had a beard.

many people lived in the haunted house but none stayed to long and most said there was a spooky feeling there. one family I knew and the girl was freaked out about it and wanted out NOW and she had only been there a few weeks. She also decribed a rough looking older guy.

Once when it was not occupied i took a girl over for fun and to drink some beer stay the night and build a fire in the firplace. Ok so I got the fire going and went next door to get the beer and left the girl there. The house was 50' away from the one where the cold beer was at. i went back and there the girl was rolling on the ground screaming and crying uncontrollably hysterical is a better word. I pinned her down and held her shoulders and made her stop screaming and told her it was alright. She cried and sobbed for a hour, thought we were going to have to slap here. She described that i had ran through it and stopped the attack. She stated it was like a tore up dog but small human sized with arms and two finger hands. She said it held her down and she could feel it forcing here down. i think she had mental health issues but she decribed a simular story I had heard 15 years before.


Whats weird here is I grew up in the area, its out in the country and kind of isolated. Not one person ive stated knew what I did. This was not common knowledge about town.

So back to the start, Do I believe in ghost. I dont think so, i dont know.

I live in a house older then a hundred years now and theres a walk under basement thats kind of outdoorsy lol its not a sealed basement. there is a sink down there and in it on one side is a piece of tombstone, it was there when i moved in and I never thought nothing of it. A few months after i moved in I started hearing pipes rattleing at night and bumps and almost like doors slamming. I yelled out OK OK ill go and bury the tombstone piece, one night in bed. the noises stopped for like two weeks. It was skunks lol they get under there and mate and make a heck of a racket lol For a couple weeks there I was really thinking I may have to call the ghost busters so i could get some sleep lol. They come back almost yearly so now I know

the peice of tombstone [a broken cross] is still in the sink after 14 years i havnt touched it.

 

[Kai'a]

I do, for I've had encounters with spirits & ghosts of various types since I was a kid.

I just tend to take 'ghost stories' with a grain of salt, and it colors my understanding of whole this 'ghost' phenomena. I also always look first for some sort of physical and psychological explanations for things, than first seeing 'ghosts' behind everything. Which imo wouldn't be healthy. So yes, I believe in ghosts, but not to extreme / it doesn't effect my life with paranoia of them.

 

[Twig pentagram]

Reality is mysterious.

 

[Rainbow Mage]

I do believe yes. I think sometimes ghosts are undergoing a type of punishment for the salvation of their souls. This is a concept not foreign to Buddhism, that ghosts do exist.

 

[Dezzie]

I believe it is a possibility. When I was a kid, I used to hear and see things. I remember seeing this large black shadow walk into my bedroom in the middle of the night. I was so scared for years. I had a bunk bed and a ton of stuffed animals. I'd line up all the animals along the crack of my bed (under the railing) so I couldn't see under it. I was always afraid something was watching me. Kids have a big imagination, but they tell more stories of imaginary friends that they can actually see!

 

[St Giordano Bruno]

I should think not, and I would find reincarnation to be far more plausible because I believe the soul is a phenomena which occurred naturally and not though some supernatural agent such as God. And if it happed naturally such as a natural personal it can happen again like everything else in nature. I do know that I have living at least one those natural lives. As for a supernatural life such as a ghost? I have no evidence that I have even lived one of those or anyone else for that matter apart from a plethora of flimsy anecdotes, so I just take the default position that such phenomena do not exist; until someone comes up with hard evidence of their existence.

 

[Pegg]

i do not believe in ghosts, no. Mankind return to dust when they die...their body was their soul while it was alive. When it is dead, it is no longer conscious.

But I do believe in spirits (ie good and bad angels) and what people actually have encounters with are the bad angels who rebelled. They trick mankind into believing the lie that we live on after death as ghosts. So if you think you've been contacted by a dead relative or you've seen one, what you've actually seen is a rebellious spirit (demon) impersonating your relative.

 

[Nepenthe]

I'm plagiarizing myself since these threads pop up quite a bit. But I have yet to see any convincing evidence when it comes to ghosts or spirits or poltergeists or spectres or revenants or _____. Any semblance of a consciousness requires the physical processes of the brain and nervous system; any vestige of a mind persisting after brain death requires a physical substrate to continue and there's nothing in neurophysics to substantiate any such thing.

Ghosts tend to visit in the middle of the night, particularly when one is in bed and asleep or falling asleep- perfect settings for a lucid dream or hypnagogic sleep to create a ghost scenario. And this raises the obvious question about ghost cliches: why do they choose to move things easily moved (like rocking chairs or open doors) by a gust of wind from a poorly insulated house or creaky floorboards or the vibrations from a settling house? Why would ghosts decide to make their presence known by such subtle and ambiguous means when if they can move a chair they should be able to send an e-mail or slap a Stick-It Note on the fridge?

And if ghosts are visible then photons must be bouncing off of something, they must have some kind of physical structure for the ghost to see or hear or feel as well as the scared observer to see, etc. An entity that is able to physically interact with the material world must be recordable or amendable to investigation (or how else would we know of their existence?). If they can influence our world- and they must if they're visible or audible- even by such slight actions as moving a rocking chair, why couldn't they create a more convincing demonstration of their wants and needs?

There's no reason to accept that ghosts are anything but the consequence of human psychology, pattern seeking brains, misperception, exaggeration, bias of belief, etc. Human senses are fallible and a cultural bias of credulity towards anomalous experiences is the more parsimonious explanation over the alternative of ghosts or anything surviving the brain and nervous system's dissolution.

 

[Madhuri]

I've become really sceptical about ghosts in the last couple of years, though believed in them growing up.
But last year I did have an interesting experience, which I tried to explain rationally, until someone else saw the same thing that I did. I'm sure I posted about it here somewhere.

Basically, I'm not sure about them.

 

[St Giordano Bruno]

Ghost wearing stuff does not ring true for me such as the ghosts of old convicts dragging chains. What make people think that an inanimate object like a chain can have an afterlife? Even just wearing clothes seems a bit silly IMHO

 

[Madhuri]

Ghost wearing stuff does not ring true for me such as the ghosts of old convicts dragging chains. What make people think that an inanimate object like a chain can have an afterlife? Even just wearing clothes seems a bit silly IMHO

I agree. But I get the idea that in the subtle realm of existence, these things are manifest from consciousness more than anything physical. If a ghost is trapped in a certain state of consciousness, then they could very well manifest these items on their subtle body.

I don't actually know, I am only speculating. The only thing I've seen that might have been a ghost was pretty far-out. I don't remember the clothing, only that there was clothing, but despite being the middle of the night, this man was illuminated with light and colour as if it were day time. I could clearly see his blue eyes and his blond hair, his fair skin. He was very handsome :yes:

I figured that I must have been dreaming with my eyes open. But then my dad's uncle visiting our home some weeks later. He didn't know about my experience. And then he mentioned seeing a tall blond and fair skinned man in our kitchen who stood staring at him for some moments before vanishing into thin air.

So I don't know. Maybe it was a ghost

 

[Ace7X]

I've seen a ghost.

 

[BucephalusBB]

As I do not believe in the soul, I cannot see what it is that aquired conciousness to become a ghost. If they are out there, they are definatelly (..as if I am sure about anything at all) not similar to humans in any way..

 

[FR33MASON]

The human psyche could be described as a complex series of logarithmic energy signals which to me could be seen as a type of "radio frequency" for lack of a better term. in theory, It could be possible that in this universe that energy signal could in whole or in part get trapped and be tuned in to by certain individuals just like a radio does for a radio signal thus creating an experience to which we refer to as a ghost.
That is just a theory though.

 

[St Giordano Bruno]

If one observes a physical person, they could argue the essence of what it is to be that person is a "soul". And some dualists define a "ghost" as the soul separating from the body in a disembodied state. Now if someone sees a "ghost" then how could a dualist explain that? Is there another duality of a ghost within a ghost? Would all those souls within souls be like an infinite number Russian Matryoshka dolls all the way in? Doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

 

[Penumbra]

No, I don't. I haven't seen enough evidence to justify belief in ghosts for me.

 

[Zeeboe]

No. And on a personal note, even if they were real, I would most likely think the living is much more scary.

 

[blackout]

I personally have never witnessed 'ghost' or 'ghostly'
or anything that resembled such a thing.

(not that that necessarily 'means' anything)

Just to say, that such a thing
has not been a part of my life experience in any way.

 

[jarofthoughts]

I consider myself an empiricist.
That should answer all questions regarding the supernatural.