I’m open minded skeptical, but it does make me giggle that “old” indicates “haunted” to many people from young countries. Though still a minority, a lot of us in “old Europe” live in “old” accommodation. The house I’m posting from now is 1860s, I’ve also lived in a 1846 house in the Jewish ghetto of Dublin, built by Russian emigrees after a pogrom, and my late grandfather’s house was built out of the beams of a shipwreck in 1740. In none of them did I experience anything odd. Apart from that, do carry on. 
Too many strange things have happened to me not to.
Oddly enough they don’t seem to believe much in me…
At a home I lived in that was very haunted I had a ghost that never let me keep the oven on for more than an hour. I had gone to work with it on and she never let me forget it. She turned lights out for me, locked doors behind me and once she even found my keys.
It’s not very productive to ask people to explain events that they have no way of verifying or examining. There isn’t enough data in your story to offer an explanation but blowing right past natural explanations to invisible, magic hoodoos is just a little silly, don’t you think?
Seriously, what physical theory of this event are you proposing? A “ghost” did it? Fine WTF is a “ghost?” What is it made of? How does it physically move blankets through the air?
Are you sure it wasn’t an elf or a hobgoblin?
[QUOTE=Greywolf73]
Seconding the request for more details. 
Posted above 
Oh, yes, please share!
I don’t know-I’m pretty skeptical of the supernatural, except for some very vague, general religious beliefs (there’s probably something there), but as far ghosts-I can’t help but think, yeah, maybe.
Maybe it’s just wishful thinking-I LOVE ghost stories. Even when I think the person telling them is full of shit-I love hearing the stories. I watch all those cheesy, “Haunted” specials on TV, especially the “Haunted History” types about famous historical persons. The only thing I don’t like is when they try to investigate with so-called paranormal researchers with electronic equipment and whatnot-that takes all the fun of out of it.
There’s just nothing in the world like a good ghost story. I’d love to live in a haunted house.
I don’t think the blanket went up…I think he went down; as in rolled off the bed and landed face-first in the blanket.
To answer the OP- No.
If there were such things, wouldn’t there be BILLIONS of dead people around and around ALL the time. Like in the shower or toilet with you, or in bed or watching during sex or driving in the car or crossing the street. Were the hell are they all and were do they go when the sun comes up. And why can’t one communicate some piece of info that is in no other way obtainable? Like " I buried a box with my name inscribed under the spot were that big oak tree is growing" or something verifiable. Any previously-unknown-information would do. And why do ancient shaman speak in 20th century English but cannot speak a word in their native tongue.
Perspiring minds want to know!
No. I never did, but after I started having frequent migraine auras and occasional hypnogogic hallucinations, it became apparent to me first-hand that that your brain can do a lot of really fucked-up things. Certain types of migraine auras I get “morph” into whatever it is that I’m thinking of.
I went through a supernatural phase in high school during which I devoted countless hours to books and TV shows on bigfoot, UFOs, crop circles, ghosts, psychics, etc. I’ve been a hardcore skeptic/atheist since college, and I believe three experiences are responsible for my current mindset.
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I saw the movie Contact, which inspired me to read the Carl Sagan novel upon which the movie was based, which led me to develop an interest in Sagan’s writing, which lead me to read Demon Haunted World, Sagan’s treatise on the philosophy of skepticism and the scientific method. I was an instant convert.
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I took a mind altering substance in college which caused full-blown visual and auditory hallucinations that seemed 100% real. Before this, I was not remotely aware of the level of perceptual trickery that a human brain is capable of producing. Suddently, “a trick of the mind” began to seem like a very plausible explanation for many “paranormal” phenomena.
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I dated a girl who firmly believed that her house was haunted. The evidence: doors would mysteriously slam shut at all hours of the night. One time, when I was spending the evening at her place, we both heard a loud slam coming from a bedroom. “See,” she said, “I told you there’s a ghost here!”. I insisted on investigating the phenomenon, and quickly discovered that the heating system was causing a significant air pressure differential between the bedroom and hallway, which would cause the door to be sucked shut every time the heater turned on. After I demonstrated this to the girlfriend, she kind of shrugged it off an said, “Well, other weird stuff happens too.” The moral: some people really want to believe certain things, and no amount of evidence will change their minds.
When I was 14 I saw a ghost. It was very realistic and not at all frightening.
I used to sleep with the bedroom door open and my room was accross the hall from the bathroom. I was laying in bed, in the dark when I noticed my mother go into the bathroom. A few minutes later I thought I saw her come into my room and look at my brother in his bed. As she left the room I called out goodnight to her. She turned around to look at me and then just vanished into thin air.
A couple of minutes later I heard the toilet flush and my mother came out of the bathroom.
This was very, very real to me at the time and like I said not at all frightening. It is only recently, 30 years after the event that I now wonder if I was hallucinating.
If people could come back from the dead, they would all be doing it. Constantly. Ghosts would be like termites, we’d have them underfoot all the time and would have exorcists on our speed-dial.
For one thing, if my grandmother could have come back from the dead, she’d have been nagging at me and giving me insane advice since she died in 1986.
How do you know that?
I’m not proposing anything. Here’s the situation:
One room, almost completely dark. On the floor of this room is…
One 3 pound blanket, woven of unknown fabric.
One bed, about 7’ from the bedroom door.
One half-asleep person, unable to reach reach blanket without sitting up or getting off the bed.
One light fixture hanging from the ceiling, the switch for which is next to the person’s bed.
In the next room, a person who is completely asleep. This second person has severe night blindness.
On two separate occations, the half-asleep person gets hit in the face with the three pound blanket. The person’s head never leaves the pillow and the hands never leave the bed. The light is never turned on. The only other person in the home cannot see in almost complete darkness and has no flashlight handy.
There’s a natural explanation for everything? What’s the natural explanation for a three pound blanket getting from the floor to a bed, much less hitting the bed’s occupant in the face, without anyone picking it up?
While I don’t exactly believe in ghosts, this is what happened to me. About a year ago, around 3am, I was woken up by what sounded like three women wailing loudly on the street outside my house. Really loudly. My dogs were barking. I got up and turned on lights (lots of lights), looked around, out at the street, etc. I was a little freaked, but trying to talk myself out of it. The wailing went on for maybe 5 minutes with varying intensity. No other houses on my street had lights on. No other dogs were barking ( and dogs were always barking in that neighborhood.) My husband was working nights at this point, and I was freaked out enough to call him at work. It was definitely not a siren; it was a really irregular sound and very human. Really strange. I never saw anything.
Anyway, my completely unsubstantiated theory of ghosts and other unexplainables is that our consciousness, or soul, or whatever you want to call it exists in multiple dimensions while we are alive. This consciousness ceases to exist in our dimension after we are physically dead, but continues to exist elsewhere. I think these dimensions can overlap under certain conditions (don’t ask what they are.) Anyway, rip me apart. I can take it.
Could it have been cats? Sometimes they make sounds that sound eerily human. But usually they sound more like babies crying than women wailing.
Like the man says, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m scared to death of em. 
Do I believe the spirits of the dearly departed walk among us? Eh, no. Though if it were true, then no wonder ghosts have such a nasty reputation. I get stuck haunting some dude’s basement in Fresno, nobody in that house is getting a good night’s sleep.
That said…weird stuff happens. I’ve never encountered anything like what some of y’all have described (talk about things that make you go :eek: , Winston ), but I’ve heard incidents from family members, in particular my father. During one of his tours in Germany (this would have been sometime in the late 70s) he got stuck living in an old Wehrmacht barracks while waiting for on-post housing to come through. From his room off the squad bay, next to the building’s only staircase and door, he would routinely hear sounds of people moving both out in the bay and on the second floor.
So take it with a chunk of salt if you want; a secondhand account of something that happened near 30 years ago is hardly conclusive. Enough to make me at least wonder, though.
Define ghost, but probably, my answer is “no”.
There are phenomena that aren’t explained, but that says precisely zip. It doesn’t mean they aren’t explainable.
Those of you saying not everything has a scientific explanation, what kind of explanation do the things you’re thinking of have, exactly?
No, it was different than cats, but I know what you mean. Coyotes can also sound really creepy and human, but again, different.
Nope, but they still scare me.
I related a bit about the ghost that haunted me when I was a kid in Winston’s other thread. I think the explanation was more then just an active immagination though. We lived on a volcano and occasionally clouds of various gasses would waft over us. In Hawaii static electricity is very weak but one night when I was a kid I woke my mother up screaming about something and she ran in to comfort me and patted my back and the sparks started flying. Weird gasses. So I blame them for the ghost of the man. And my dog who visited me shortly after he died too. They gave my mother weird visions too.
And I do not wish they existed. No way. Not at all.
Tonight … I sleep completely under the covers. Good night.
I grew up in a house which my parents bought cheaply because it had been the site of a locally notorious murder-suicide. It was also very old, with old chimneys, cracks in the walls, ways that outside animals could make their way inside…
And I never experienced anything that was not easily explainable.
If any house would be haunted, my childhood home would, and it definitely wasn’t.
But when I would tell the story to other girls at slumber parties, and then creak the floorboards or encourage them to stare out into the dark orchard, they sometimes left convinced that it was haunted.
From that, I deduced that the hauntedness exists in the minds of those who want to experience it.
[Princess bride ON] I do not think this phrase means what you think it means! [Princess bride OFF]
If evidence shows ghosts exist, then scientists will believe in them and construct a scientific explanation.
Therefore everything there is evidence for gets a scientific explanation.
What you mean is that you believe in things for which there is no evidence. That’s faith.