Please try to remember that this is a poll on your belief in the existance of ghosts, not a debate on the subject.
If you “write” a name on a window, and even a week or a month later steam up the room, you see the writing.
No. I have had a couple of weird experiences, but no.
Did this to the Mrs several times. Knowing the propensity for long hot showers Wrote on the mirror:
[Mrs Jimmmy] WE SEE YOU (scream shook the house)
The next one about a mounth later
PLEH [YMMMIJ .SRM] TUO SU TE*L
WHich though (INHO was more elaborate and clever) led to just a “Very Funny”
but later admitted to a momentary heart race before
My experience is that it wil show once, maybe twice but if you rub it outr at the first
Ditto
Ghosts got me! I apologize for the sloppiness
INHO=MHO
but if you rub it outr at the first reshowing it will disappear for good.
No, I don’t. When we die we are gone.
Most definitely not.
As suspicious as I am of the reliability of eyewitness testimony, I am doubly moreso of an eyewitness who was in bed, half asleep, trying to get to sleep. Maybe another multiplier if the person is under stress - say having stayed up late due to a fight with their spounse? Dreams, sleepwalking, and sleeptalking are not exactly rare events. Nor is the feeling of falling while in bed, the feeling of pressure on the chest, or the jerking of limbs.
Yet folks seem convinced of the infallability of their bedtime sensory experiences…
Ghosts are for suckers. If somebody wants you to believe in one, they have their eye on your purse.
I saw lights in the sky. What were they? This is a thread I started a couple years ago. It was a lot of fun. I never really decide what they were, but I’m confident it had a natural explanation. Gosh, the gorgeous rainbow I saw outside my house last is completely natural – but it was positively surreal in the intensity of the colors and the perfectness of the double arch. If I’d never seen one before, I’d be cowering before its awesome power. 
But to answer the question … I’m in agreement with Diogenes. Everything can be explained. Individuals may not have the tools or the understanding or capability of understanding them, but that doesn’t mean it’s paranormal. The mind is a powerful thing. Studies have shown that after just a bit of sleep-depravation, people begin hallucinating alarmingly.
I don’t have an explanation for your experience, Winston (although I enjoy very much the delicious thrill it gives me). I love a good ghost story.
One day about 10 years ago I had to run down to the grocery store to buy our monthly supply of soda for work. It was about 10 am when I arrived at the store. I headed to the soda aisle and stood there before the selections. I was dead center in the middle of the aisle doing my price comparison. As I’m standing there I catch, in my peripheral vision, a person heading down the aisle from my right. I didn’t turn to look but took a step forward so they could get by me. Again, I still was not looking directly at the person but I could tell he or she was wearing all black and had longish blonde hair.
As the person passed me, he/she brushed by me, making physical contact. I was startled, as I had clearly given the person plenty of clearance to get by. I turned to my left to look at this rude person. There was no one there. I turned to my right. No one. I literally said aloud, “What-The-Hell?” I abandoned my cart and trotted to the end of the aisle, to scan for this person. Nothing. I began walking all through the store searching for someone matching my peripheral description. I wanted to ease my mind. My search yielded nothing and the store was relatively dead.
I just “knew” I saw someone, I felt them brush passed me, I felt the faint scent of someone, it wasn’t a perfume or cologne scent but a subtle freshly showered scent.
To this day I have no idea what that was about. I will probably never know.
A ghost? Doubt it.
Not enough scientific proof for me to believe in boogity boogity souls of the dead.
There is an explanation for these oddities. We just don’t always know what they are.
Perhaps we don’t have the science yet to exlain themm, perhaps we do but haven’t figured out how to utilize it. Perhaps some fields need to get together and do more research. (If only grant money grew on trees)
Psychology, electmagnetic research, quantum physics, neurology. Could be all rolled up in these.
Energy from the dead, or parallel universes overlapping with hours? Possible? Yes. Probable? No.
Need more data.
I keep my mind open, until then, I am content to just shrug and say “I just don’t know”
The only way I can answer is “I don’t know.”
I’ve been sitting here thinking about it, and seriously, that’s the only answer I can give. I just don’t know.
Was the blanket moved? If not, possibly a sleep start or other type of sleep-related hallucination. If so, practical joke on the part of the other person. Never fail to take into account the fact that other people might be lying, either the “ghost”-seeing person or the “fully asleep” person in the other room.
And no, I don’t believe in ghosts. Or elves, or hobgoblins, or Christmas hobgoblins. Show me physical evidence of ghosts collected in a laboratory free from any outside interference or interpretation. I think that people just don’t like to admit that their minds are fallible because only crazy people have hallucinations and only babies are afraid of the dark. So they invent something else to rationalize it.
I’m a total skeptic but I worked in a house that was haunted for a couple of years. To this day I cannot reconcile the two states, so I don’t really talk about it much.
Even ignoring the auditory and quick visual stuff as total hallucinations (of which there were quite a few), I watched a physical object move by itself. It happened slowly enough that I just stared at it in absolute horror. I have no scientific explanation for that to this day.
But I’m still skeptical because I’m more comfortable with that, I guess.
Honestly, I think “person with invisibility device” is about 8 million times more likely than “ghost”. Although there are a lot of things I think are more likely than a person with an invisibility device.
If anyone disagrees with the statement, “a prankster with an invisibility device is more likely to exist than a ghost”, then you and I don’t even have a starting point for a discussion like this.
I don’t have a “ghost story” of my own, so I’ll tell you my best friend’s: BF and her husband live in a very large house. More than 3,500 sq. feet would be my guess. At the time this incident took place, there was about a half foot of snow on the ground. The master bedroom was almost directly above the study. She and her husband were in bed. No one else in the house. Friend started hearing furniture moving around in the study, like someone was pulling or pushing the desk across the floor, she says. Followed by the sounds of the rest of the furniture moving. After hearing the first sound, she woke her husband, who heard it, too. Convinced there was a burglar in the house, they called the cops from the bedroom telephone. Because we live in a very small city, the cops arrived quickly. By the time the cops got there, friend and husband were up, in robes, whatever, but hadn’t left the bedroom, not wanting to attract the attention of the intruder(s). The cops found no one in the house and no footprints in the snow leading to any of the house’s entrances.
My friend believes in ghosts, her husband does not. But he doesn’t know what to make of this experience. Neither do I. I wouldn’t say I “believe in ghosts”, but I do believe there’s more in this universe than can presently be explained.
So was the furniture actually moved, norinew?
Nope. They were just convinced, from the sounds, that the furniture was being moved. 
Racoons sound human. shudder I once was certain that a woman was being dismembered outside my window, from the sound of the screams. Years later I actually saw some racoons fighting and they made the very same sound.
Makes your blood run cold, it does.
Re: old houses. I have lived in dozens of houses of varying ages. The most “haunted” one (ie the one with the most creepy noises, taps going on and off on their own, electronic devices behaving strangely, the house never ever felt empty even when it was) was the newest, a postwar row house. We moved from there to a really old (well, old for Canada), somewhat historic place that we knew had been occupied by historical assholes, and never a peep.
Nope. I was absolutely terrified of ghosts when I was kid from this damned book that a friend loaned me in 1st grade that was pseudo-scientific enough to convince me that they were real. At some point my brain took over and I outgrew such nonsense. I have had a few odd experiences but was always able to discover the source. There was a squirrel once that had me mighty close to believing.
No, I don’t. And I’ll confess that graveyards creep me out but it’s more the idea that we conserve our dead bodies like some kind of symbol or something - my head fits better around cremation!
I also will say that I have had a few odd things happen to me as well but I am completely convinced they all have a natural explanation. Like someone else said, I would believe in many things - even supernatural things - before ghosts in particular. The whole idea seems nonsense to me. Why, if people are staying beyond death, are they resorting to poltergeist tricks? Anyway, it’s moot, as I’m quite sure people can’t stay beyond death.
Nope, not at all.
As some folks have suggested already, even if a ghost story actually happened as reported by the observer, what’s to say that it wasn’t aliens, God, a person in a cloaking device from the future, magic, or whatever?
For me, once you accept something that operates outside of scientific scrutiny as fact, then there’s no reason to assume that the cause happens to be whatever it is you believe in, be it ghosts, or whatever.