This would be powerful evidence of the carbon monoxide poisoning theory, if reports of ghosts or hauntings peak in winter or are much higher in areas with cold winters versus say the Florida Keys.
What is the carbon monoxide theory? Does it suppose that people who see ghosts are suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning?
Oops sorry, yup exactly right mild non-fatal case. Hauntings are often claimed to have physical effects as well which match up.
Some research done in Edinburgh suggest that ghost tend to be seen where people expect to see them. Edinburgh has a number of places which are said to be haunted.
What they did was to take people to creepy places. They told one group that they were haunted and the other were not told anything. Only the people who were told of the reputation said that they saw any ghosts. In fact there was no previous record of ghostly sightings at those locations.
There seems to be a dearth of ghost sightings today. Maybe they are just disappearing? And, now that everybody has a camera phone, why no more pictures?
I don’t know if this is the right thread to post this. But bear with me, for the moment. I once read, in a medical book for laymen, that people often see, basically a hallucination of their beloved relative, shortly after death. It seems the psychological need is so great to have the loved one back, your mind starts creating this (hallucination). It only becomes a mental illness, if it lingers for a long time after the event, or if it alarms the person a lot.
Also, I can speak from experience about my mother losing a very beloved aunt, my Great Aunt Lottie. For days after she passed (basically from old age and Alzheimers), my mother kept saying, “doesn’t that person look like her?”. (I know of at least one case, that I heard of when I was still a boy, of a woman saying her dead relative entered a supermarket she was shopping in. Maybe it was this same illusion?)
Anyway, to answer your question more directly, considering what I just related, people probably are more likely to see the “dead” whatever time of year people are more likely to die. My WAG then would be winter. People are more likely to die from a heart attack from shoveling snow then? Or maybe, my second guess would be, summer, when people are more active, and thus more can go wrong:confused:?
:):)
I’m surprised to see you say that: my impression is that ghost sightings are occurring at about the same rate as they ever have, and that many more of them are reported than ever, thanks to the internet and social media. The same applies to photos, which are just as common as you’d expect them to be. The quality, of course, hasn’t changed either: they’re almost all either barely discernible blobs that could be anything and prove nothing, photographic artefacts, or obvious fakes.
What’s given you the impression that there’s a dearth of sightings? I’ve seen the same comment made several times about UFOs … and that doesn’t seem to be true either, so far as I can tell.
Maybe ghosts only show up on actual film pictures, not on electronic pictures. Might this be related to their supposed ability to manipulate computers by electromagnetic stimulation to send e-mails to the living?
Back in 98 my mom had a heart failure and was kept alive on a machine without any hope of recovery. I told them to unplug the damn machine then. Later that day I “saw” my mom in the hallway in front of her bedroom door and she was in bed when she had heart failure.
It only happened once and she was smiling like she’s telling me it’s ok. She was 78 and wasn’t too well because of the rheumatoid arthritis. I have a hard time thinking that was an illusion.
We had a version of this at work recently:
The building I work at is on the site of the old Bedlam hospital, where the mentally ill were treated appallingly for many years. In the basement there are a series of secure rooms. They are, essentially, thick-walled, strong-doored cells barely big enough to lie down in with minimal ventilation.
New arrivals in the building get given the tour. Not surprisingly, everyone jumps to the conclusion that these strong rooms were the actual cells used to imprison the unfortunate denizens. Cue one woman suddenly stopping, shrieking and claiming that she was psychic, and could hear the ghosts in the cells weeping. She fled for the daylight.
Note that this is merely the *site *of the old hospital - it was demolished in 1775. The current building was built at the turn of the 20th century. In order to meet the needs of the financial businesses that leased offices there, strongrooms were built in the basement to hold valuables and documents. They didn’t need to be big, but they needed to be secure. The only people who ever went into those “cells” were businessmen who had papers or property to store. But she didn’t hear ghosts saying “the returns on this quarter have been quite satisfactory”. Oh no.
Did you believe it was a disembodied spirit?
Don’t really know. She was at the hospital where I pulled the plug yet I saw her at home later that day. It lasted a few seconds but long enough to see her smiling.
Ghost reports fluctuate with tourist seasons.
Who do I send my ghost report to?
USGS – The United States Ghost Service.
Not the Ghost Guard?