However, the house I grew up in was haunted. The dog would back up into the romm growling at… …nothing (he was otherwise sane.) Cold spots occured with some regularity. I would be in a room and feel absolutely certain somebody else was there. Sometimes I’d hear and feel their breathing, or somebody brushing up against me when nobody was there. Sometimes you could clearly hear somebody walking around upstairs when you were home alone.
Having grown up in the house I didn’t think too much of it.
I once woke up in the middle of the night when I was home from college. I was paralyzed, could barely breathe, and a dwarf in a top hat was sitting on my chest laughing at me (I’m sure the fact that I spent the night out drinking had nothing to do with this particular incident.)
Anyway, the house that I live in now is even older than the one I grew up in. It dates back to the mid 1700s. In the seven years that I’ve lived here, I have not experienced a single incident that was even suspicious. In the other house they would occur once or twice a week. I offer this last bit up to show that I’m not a kook (or at least not anymore.)
All I’ve offered is heresay, but is their any credible evidence for that haunting occurs? Alternate explanations?
Haunted? Well, I don’t know. Let me pose an example that I have been discussing with some friends recently. Let’s say you and I are in a room. There is a book on the floor, and right before our eyes it rises off of the floor and rests neatly on the shelf. I say, “Ah ha! There ARE ghosts, I have seen evidence with my own two eyes!” You reply, “No, this just proves the power of the human mind. I have been thinking about putting that book away all week, and the combined power of my thoughts must have just made the book put itself away. Telekenesis!”
Now, neither of us buy the other’s explination, and we each leave believing something different about the universe. In essence, we are living in different universes. (here is where it gets maybe a little strange). Because without perception we have no knowlegde of the universe, it could be assumed that the universe is a manifestation and creation of perception. In that case, where our perceptions diverge, so do our universes. In my universe ghosts exist, and in yours telekenesis is possible. These are two compatible universes, and as long as nothing comes along to refute either of our beliefs, we are both right. Also, if neither of us were there to witness the phenomenon of the book raising, we would still be living in the same universe (if a tree falls…)
Ghosts, spirits, entities… yes. I don’t have any scientific proof, but I lived in a townhouse in WashDC
where some crazy things happened.
a. I often had feelings of something or someone watching.
It wasn’t evil or tranquilizing - just there.
b. A dream which three people had the same night; each
person had their own perspective on the dream. My roommate
dreamt that a woman with long blonde hair came into her room to “check her out”; my sister was downstairs in the basement and heard someone walking on the ground floor when she decided that she just had to go back to bed and not see who was upstairs; I [the blonde] looked in on my roommate, then I heard my “sister” downstairs; at the foot of the stair case I decided that I had to go back to bed and not see who was walking around because it wasn’t my sister. Each of us started the morning’s conversation with “I had the weirdest dream”.
c. A Burmese friend of mine said something that was totally out of context to our dinner conversation: Don’t worry it will not hurt you; it doesn’t know the difference between good and evil yet.
d. Another room mate told me about her experiences in the
field [she was living in a remote village in the far east]
when she was cursed by this old woman. She went into this
long story about what happened as a result of this curse and how her family’s “counselor” had given her an amulet for protection when she went to the US to finish her PhD. Parting words: don’t worry it can’t cross over water. She
told me that she stopped wearing the amulet, had started feeling a familar sense that something was in the house watching all of us. We decided that we had to put away a pair of Chinese Devil Dogs [I was taking care of my friend the landlord’s property as well as the house].
Cut to the chase: I started having horrendous nightmares
about the house and this “whateveritwas” thing that wanted
to get out. My room mate was beginning to feel dread that
the curse was coming back. About six months later, we both declared that we wanted to move out. She left, I packed the
stuff out. My friend never moved back into the townhouse.
My nightmares subsided and then would flare up from time to time again. They finally stopped when I moved across the Atlantic Ocean. My Burmese friend said good thing you moved.
Group hysteria? I don’t know, but all of us were professionals, trained in the “scientific method”, with graduate degrees… I felt a frisson as I read your post
for I haven’t thought about this experience for many, many
years. Outwardly I would scoff at the idea, but inwardly
I am saying yes there is something.
What Scylla wrote is your classic sleep paralysis scenario. When sleeping your body likes to shut off motor control so you don’t punch yourself in the face as hard as you can or whatever. Add hypnogogic imagery and you’ve got some really scary “I’m paralyzed and being tortured” succubus-type things.
This is probably what happened to you, but theres tons of well documented paranormal happenings that mainstream scientific understanding likes to ignore or ridicule. Theres lots of rational people who are smart enough to realize the limitations of today’s science of materialism and know that the next breakthrough will account for these ‘weird’ events.
I’ve always wanted to write a story about someone living in the future in a much more progressed society trying to explain to a child how people in the past (our present) held such ignorant beliefs. He’d really mess it up not really understanding people of the past the same way we can’t really understand what fueled witch-hunts or keeping slaves, its just too foriegn.
Everything that has been described here falls into an area that some acquaintances of mine have done a good job of studying. What they found was that if you thought there was a ghost (haunting, spirit, whatever), you were more likely to notice “weird” things and attribute them to the ghost. They have studied this in numerous situations and done interesting statistical analysis on it. I know they’ve published in a few stats journals and parapsychology journals, but don’t have the info for most of them handy. I know one appeared in Perceptual and Motor Skills (or the Journal of…) and was about a look at a decidedly unhaunted house. Alas, I don’t have a better reference.
That one basically went like this. They had some students at a new dorm (not built on Indian burial grounds, nobody murdered there, etc.) keep track of any “weird” occurrences. When they started paying attention, the students found many of them. For example, an African tribal mask that was kept on a shelf kept falling off and landing in weird places. Considering the object (oooh, mystical) and that it kept falling, it seemed rather spooky.
These guys (Rense Lange and Jim Houran) have a book on hauntings coming out this year, and detail their findings in a chapter therein.
Friend of mine went to work selling washroom stuff at a place in Leeds, my hometown , in the UK.
The place itself is very near to an old part of town called the Corn Exchange and there are a lot of underground workings due to old railways and redundant river drainage in that area.
He says he has been followed by a little girl in a blueish dress but the clothes are not what he would describe as Victorian and he can’t put an age to it.
Several previous employees without any prompting (I was there on one occasion)have described their time working there including virtually the same description.I met one lad who had worked in the building when it was a cycle shop and he turned white when I talked to him about it. He’d not mentioned this to anyone previously but it was apparently the reason he moved his business out.
Further to all this my friend would keep on describing a room that he had seen but not physically been in nor even knew where it was.When some surveyors came round they found a bricked up doorway in the 2nd level cellar which led down to yet another cellar and ,yes, it was as described by my friend. What was oddish about this room was that it was not like your usual cellar-no dry walling etc- in fact it was as if it had been used as living accomodation at some time in the past.
I have never noticed anything about the place except for the fact that it seems perpetually run down no matter how much it has been tarted up.
Let’s admit right now that the OP is not a verifiable issue, at least here. Rather, it’s an invitation for ghost stories.
As an experiment, I tried making myself believe that something was in the apartment with me, late on a stormy night when I was home alone. I sat on the couch with most of the lights out, and told myself that I sensed a presence of some kind. After repeating this thought a few times, I started feeling really weird, and if I didn’t know that I’d done it to myself, I’d have sworn by the sensation that there was a supernatural presence with me.
I reversed it at that point, telling myself that I was alone, and that nothing else was there. A few more minutes of this, and I felt fine.
Another fun experiment in creeping yourself out is to whisper your name several times at night when you’re alone in bed. It feels like someone else is saying it, right in your ear.
All this proved to me was that people are extremely suggestible.
Personally, I think that people do have experiences that they attribute to ghosts, but that are instead due to unfamiliar perceptual effects.
I recall watching a program on Discovery Channel (?) where people were left alone in a darkened room and subjected to oscillating magnetic fields. They reported a wide range of unusual feelings, depending on the frequency, intensity, etc. of the fields, and these feelings were reproducible when the same conditions were applied to other people. These induced feelings included such things as the feeling that someone was in the room with you, the feeling of deja vu, etc.
In addition, another program talked about ‘Earth Lights’, which seem to be luminous electromagnetic phenomena caused by piezoelectric strains in the earth.
Also, it is widely reported by ‘ghost hunters’ carrying magnetic field meters that ghosts are associated with wildly varying magnetic fields.
So, my opinion is that when people enter a region where there are strong, varying magnetic fields due to pizoelectric effects, they experience magnetically induced uneasiness, a feeling that someone else is nearby, and possibly ‘Earth Lights’. Combine that with human suggestibility and a touch of cultural baggage (ie superstition) and you have a ghost.
I can believe it. I’m probably the least likely person in the world to “believe in” ghosts, but if I see a scary movie, read a scary book, or what have you and then am up alone, well, it gets creepy!
Yeah, ghost stories are cool. I’m more interested in debating the alternate possibilities though.
Obviously suggestibility has a lot to do with it, as anybody knows who’s told a ghost story to some young kids.
The idea that if you are in a house that is presumed “haunted” and a picture falls down you say “well there’s that ghost again” while In an unhaunted house you say “I better fix that nail.” makes good sense.
Can anybody else confirm magnetic fluctuation coinciding with feelings of creepiness and unease?
Of course there are ghosts. I used to get them all the time on channel 44 in Berkeley. We must’ve been living too close to a big building that reflected the transmitter’s signals back to our antenna a fraction of an instant after we received the main signal, so everything looked like it had a faint secondary image of itself off slightly to the right. I think it has to do with the way analog video signal is heterodyned in the NTSC standard.
Absolutely. In fact, I am currently living in a non-vital co-inhabited house (my personal term for it so that know one thinks I’m crazy! ;))
Anyway, we have at least 5 here, and I’ve seen 1 somewhere else (everyone in my family has seen my grandfather’s ghost in his home.) Here we have 4 friendly ghosts (two in victorian era clothing, the other two in early 20th century clothing) and 1 not so friendly ghost-a big ball of cold would be a good way to describe it. It actually looks like an ugly swirl of color; very unappealing to the eye. The first time I saw it (when I was about 7 yrs. old or so.) it scared the living bejeezus out of me and sent me flying into my parent’s bedroom (who both thought I was crazy, just like you do now.) But then one night, papà bumped into it. Crazy was I no more.
So, to answer your question: damn straight they exist!
So, considering that neuroscience is well on the road to showing relatively conclusively that conciousness is simply the result of the activity of the brain, where does the conciousness behind these “ghosts” come from?
Thanks for the link Willie. Maybe this tectonic plate pressure thing creating magnetic interference in the brain explains why everybody in Southern California is such a fruitcake.
Thank you, Groundskeeper Willie, for your link on the effects of magnetic fields. I’ve been told (though not investigated myself to see if it’s true) that there is a great deal of study going on regarding the effects of electromagnetic fields on the human body and brain. A link being proven between EM fields and ghosts would not suprise me.
/hijack
I think the effects of EM fields needs research. There seem sto be a lot of the stuff put in place (ie, high-power electrical wire) with the base assumtion that it isn’t going to affect anyone. Maybe true, maybe not.
/end hijack
You would have been unable to convince me that ghosts were a n effect of EM fields as a kid, however. I lived in a “haunted” house as a kid. We had no stories as to why it would be haunted, but strange things happened, so… I distinctly remember seeing a glass fall off a shelf and then swerve in midair to avoid hitting my sister at the sink. Now I wonder if that was what I really saw or if it was just what I wanted to see. After all, having an original “I saw it myself” story was cool as a kid…
You betcha’ I believe. I have pictures, and I am always looking for more. If anybody can direct me to a site that has good ghost pictures and not just energy balls let me know. I also enjoy a great story.
There is at least one in my house now. We will all be downstairs and we can hear someone walking around upstairs. I have been up late at nite remodeling and doing some intricate painting on the back bedroom door and one nite I heard someone sigh behind me. At 3am I decided it was time to put my paint brush down and go to bed.
I think it is my husbands’ grandmother. Our children are the fourth generation to live in the house. My 2 year old walks around talking and giggling to “air”. I have a picture of the kids standing by the side of the house, and in the reflextion of the window you can see a woman standing behind them. She is not really there, you can see through her.
My other picture is of my son when he was about 8 months old in my grandmothers back yard. Her house was one of the first built in her area in the 50’s, so the housing isn’t old, and the families are the origianals. Anyway along the fenceline you can see a little girl in black and white. Then another shadow form just slightly lower, but not her shadow. There are no young children in the area, and he was the only child in the back yard at that time.
My father is a photographer, so I know about lighting and shadows and tried to dismiss it and couldn’t. Neither could he when I showed it to him. I am trying to get him to give me one of his camera’s so I can go out and investigate in depth on my own. Lot’s of nice old buildings in my area!
I have a few of energy balls and such, but my favorite is the one taken five years ago with my daughter and myself outside right after a snow storm. My husband saw it and said whatever that is snow and then I asked him if he had ever seen snow fall up. Tons of little balls of light with tails underneith. Almost like shooting stars going up!
Anybody who wants to see these pics let me know and I will scan them and send them out. And also once again if anyone comes across a good ghost site let me know.
Kricket, by any chance, is the picture you have of the little girl against the fence anywhere on the web? I saw a picture that sounds similar to this (it’s been a really long time since I saw it so it may be completely different) and I just wondered. I, too, love sites that have actual pictures (I’m not that crazy about orbs) and sometimes I will do searches. Have you tried going to Google and searching for “ghost pictures”? There are some okay sites on there.
In addition to my comment regarding neuroscience, above: If these “ghosts” are moving objects around, they are doing work. If work is being done, energy is being changed from one form to another. If the “ghosts” are initiating this work, they must have measurable energy and/or mass, or all the laws of physics are being violated. Even if you posit that the “ghosts” themselves are not bound by the physical laws, objects in “our world” are bound by them, and if they’re going to interact with them, they have to be as well. So why can’t we measure their energy or mass?
The same goes if they are appearing in photographs–that means they are reflecting photons into a camera lens and onto film (or, at the very least, radiating heat). So, they must have measurable mass and/or energy of some kind.
Alas, none of the True Believers will address these kinds of questions which would begin leading towards answers, and instead will exchange neato stories about how cool ghosts are. :rolleyes: