“Psychic phenomena” is not an organized explanation, and it also lacks falsifiability, which is a requirement of a scientific theory. The lack of falsifiability is why Intelligent Design, for instance, is not a scientific theory.
If they haven’t, then maybe your best bet for getting a good night’s sleep in a haunted house is just to leave a tape recorder running beside the bed.
Even if it’s not a hoax, my first thought would immediately jump to the house setting. I’ve never lived in a house that didn’t set almost all the time, and the noises tend to happen in the dead of night and oftentimes are loud enough to be downright spooky if you’re not of completely sound mind (i.e. half asleep). I can see where poltergeist legends come from when taking this into account. Even if you think of things moving around, if you have animals that probably explains it, and on top that there’s the possibility of a stiff breeze. Hell, I’ve seen air conditioning open a cupboard on the rare occasion. And then there’s plain ol’ forgetting you opened it.
There is some of the wackier stuff like all the plates restacking themselves after you set the table (such as A Haunting in Connecticut, the Discovery Channel documentary, not the movie), but most of the places those stories come from raise other concerns such as:
Because stressed and/or sick people never forget things
If the water in my mop bucket turned to blood my first reaction wouldn’t be “clean it up! So… when can we move in?” It would be “okay, we’re getting the first month of rent free or we’re leaving. Now. Hospital proximity be damned.”
In my experience, the most common explanation for poltergeists is that somebody left the attic door open and one of the cats got trapped up there.
I knew a woman when I was in the Boy Scouts who talked about the poltergeist in her house matter-of-factly. He had a name, she talked about the stuff he hid and revealed, the doors he opened or closed or locked or unlocked, etc. It was just something she lived with.
But if you got to know her, it was plainly obvious that she was most unorganized, scatterbrained, and forgetful person in the world. She regularly spent several minutes looking for the pen she had just been using, including asking other people if they walked off with it, which was actually still in her hand. People just nodded and smiled and lived with it.
Actually, if the “evidence” they claim actually existed, and was demonstrable, and repeatable (none of which, of course, is true), then their “theory” would be falsifiable and would be (at least a start at) an explanation. I agree totally about the ID, though. I’m not arguing for the woo, just being a bit nit-picky about the terminology of science.
They’re baaa-aack!!!
I have an adolescent in the house and, coincidentally, I hear lots of knocking sounds. Also, things break or disappear, and if found, are inexplicably found in places where no one has placed them.
However, I believe a video record of these events would trace them all directly to the adolescent in question, who would probably continue to deny any involvement. I mean, how should he know who broke the bicycle pump? Just because he was known to have fixed a flat tire quite recently?
Why do people think that houses are supposed to settle into dead silence at night? Especially older ones that likely have rodents in the crawlspaces.
Rodents are a common cause of the “pets can see ghosts” phenomena from those who like to think that pets have a special ability to see the alleged supernatural. What they are really looking at is the spot on the wall where they hear scurrying just behind. It even looks like they’re watching something walk around the room when in reality they’re just following the sound of rodents behind the wall or in the ceiling.
So Popper proposed, but that doesn’t make it a fact. Plus, his proposal is more complicated than a short description might suggest.
I’m agnostic and don’t really believe in ghosts, but I have seen activity that cannot be explained, and more than once. It happened to me directly between the ages of 12 and 16. So I don’t know–could the “excess energy” theory or whatever be true? Because it wasn’t me moving those things around–but something was.
No, I’m not. I think it is interesting to study and investigate, since it’s so bizarre, but I do not give weight to the existence of any of those phenomena until some properly collected evidence shows up. Preferably repeatable evidence of some sort.
Do not conflate interest in a subject for belief in its existence.
I was using the word “theory” in the common sense of it. That is: “the best wild assed guess we currently have”. I’m quite aware of the scientific use of it, though I thought it was obvious since none of this has been proved we would not be discussing in such terms.
To address the OP:
Here’s the thing. We’ll assume your wife is telling you the truth – that she heard knocking and banging sounds that she could not identify. And lets pretend she had set up a tape recorder and, sure enough, these very same sounds could be heard on the tape.
What, exactly, do you think that would prove? That there were some noises at night in an old house? OK. So who’s to say if they were “geniune poltergeist sounds”? There’s the rub.
The “experiment” you describe isn’t really an experiment in any scientific sense of the word. It’s recording sounds. The question is: Then what?