Inspired by this thread: Have you ever had a visitation or sign from a deceased person? (After they were deceased, that is.) - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board
So any avowed atheists ever see dead people walking around, ghosts etc?
Do you know what an Atheist is?
Someone who doesn’t believe in gods. Other sorts of mystical nonsense can still be believed in without losing the atheist classification.
And to answer the OP, no, nor do I believe such is possible. I’m a materialist/physicalist (whichever term you want to use) as well as an atheist; there’s no evidence for spirits or magic or anything like that.
I’m an agnostic. A friend who is a medium says she saw the ghost of my grandmother while she was at my house.
Yes. I once saw a unicorn in my garden, too.
The story I told about my daughter seeing my mom in the other thread? My daughter is an atheist. At the time she was a child so she wasn’t really anything. My mom was an atheist too by the way!
I’ve never seen anything. No ghosts, aliens or flying bananas. Not the winged kind anyway.
Not me (I’ve never seen a ghost–I think they’re afraid of me) but one guy I knew was an outspoken and avowed atheist who swore that once when he was on a job site a ghost kept stealing his tools and moving them to other parts of the building. (Yeah, I know, more likely it was his co-workers funning with him.)
Not really. I had an odd experience recently, though:
My girlfriend and I were at a local park a few weeks ago. She started asking me questions about my mom, who passed away before the GF and I met. So we were talking about Mom, whom I miss terribly, and I got a bit misty, etc.
Now, my mom loved butterflies. She loved seeing them, but she really loved the notion of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, especially toward the end when she was very sick and was undergoing some hideously unpleasant (and ultimately unsuccessful) medical procedures that were intended to make her well again.
So we were talking about Mom, and as I was describing her love of butterflies, out of nowhere a butterfly flew over and landed on my arm. In fact, it stayed on my arm for twenty minutes or more, even as I got up and was walking around and doing stuff. Finally, after we’d gotten in the car and were preparing to leave (with the car’s windows open), the butterfly turned to face me, dipped its head as though saying goodbye, and then flew off.
It was a moving experience. The timing, just as we were discussing Mom’s love of butterflies, made it seem like more than mere coincidence, and moreover this was the first time in my entire life (I’m almost 40) that a butterfly had landed on me at all, let alone hanging around for twenty minutes.
I’m a pretty hardcore atheist, and I’m well aware that this is not evidence of anything supernatural. You may think the story sounds a bit silly. I know for certain that if someone else posted this story, I’d think it sounded a bit silly.
On the other hand, I do try to be willing to adapt my beliefs based on my experiences, and there’s a part of my brain that, after an experience like that, says, “Good grief, what’s it going to take to convince me?”
Still not convinced, but that definitely got my attention.
Nope.
Strictly speaking, perhaps, but in my experience on this board an Atheist is almost always a skeptic too.
The atheist answer: No.
The agnostic answer: If I have ever had such a visitation or sign, I’m totally lacking in the appropriate sensory organ to perceive it.
I don’t quite qualify as an atheist by this board’s standards, and I have never had this experience. However, an avowed atheist well known to me has experienced a couple of hauntings.
Figure that one out.
I have a little gift, but I have never experienced an overt visitation.
When I was young, I did witness some-one else have a visitation.
No.
Because they don’t exist.
He or she is mistaken, gullible or lying.
That was easy. 
My friend is a very rational person who is simply uninterested in supernatural phenomena or religion. He is an atheist but he has seen:
a toddler in an old-fashioned sailor outfit waddle down the hallway, he was was in one of the rooms and he saw it through the doorway. He thought maybe his aunt had come with her son (even though her son didn’t look like this kid really). He followed it into the room where he thought it went and there was no toddler. None in the house, in fact. A few weeks later, they found and old photo of his grandfather that he’d never seen before. It was the same toddler with the same curly brown hair and wearing the same sailor outfit. My friend was just 5 or 6 at the time.
Another time, at work, he was down in the storage room and saw someone walk by. He assumed it was one of the coworkers and shouted out a joke to him to no response. He turned and saw that it wasn’t that person at all, and the person walked around the corner through a closed door. It wasn’t the co-worker and it couldn’t have been anyone at the building at the time (it was near closing time and there were about 6 people in the building total). There was a murder-suicide committed in the building, so the ghost-believing folks might point to that.
He told me the stories, and I asked him if he believed in ghosts then. He said no. He won’t say he saw a ghost either, but he will say he saw a person walk into a closed door and disappear. I asked him if it made him rethink his belief in ghosts and he said he had no thoughts on the matter to begin with.
Yes, do you?
Well, apparently I don’t.
But in my mind, if someone doesn’t believe in a God, then they don’t believe in an afterlife, and therefore they wouldn’t accept any implication of a visitation from the dead.
People can believe in a god or gods without believing in an afterlife, or in an afterlife and no gods. There’s no intrinsic connection between the two.
No.
And I find the question bordering on the preposterous.
My grandfather’s favorite basketball team won the NCAA championship the year he died. That’s about as close as I’ve come to experiencing a visitation.