Do ghosts or spirits really exist or is it our imagination?
Bye
Zeeshan
Care to spend the evening in my home? That might firm your answer.
Whammo, when ya comin over for the tour? 
–Tim
All of the scientific evidence currently points to imagination.
My family swears there’s a ghost at our summer cabin in Kentucky. Guests who don’t KNOW it’s the “ghost room” sleep fine in it. Guests who’ve heard us tell stories about it amazingly come up with hauntings of their own.
I’ve never seen or heard it myself. So I chalk it up to an overactive imagination. Or intoxication. 
However, I’m not a total skeptic. I do believe in an after-life and the notion of the soul leaving the body after death. So I’m willing to admit there is a possibility of ghosts and spirits, but I’m definitely not convinced they go around rattling chains and moaning.
well what about tormented souls haunting houses before they go up to heaven or hell?
Anyone has any stories to share?
Bye
Zeeshan
I do not “believe in ghosts” in the classic phrase. I certainly do not put any faith or trust in them, and I have strong doubts about whether deceased humans have any capacity or interest in hanging around their old, uh, haunts.
However, the following is as objective an account as I can work up of an occurrence that leads me to wonder what the causes of the events described might be.
In the spring of 1991, my wife and I took in, as informal foster parents, three boys who were estranged from their families: a neighbor’s youngest son, his same-age cousin, and the cousin’s best friend. All three were to some degree emotionally disturbed at the time, which had a lot to do with the estrangements. On a particular evening and the following morning that summer, the following happened:
A friend of all three boys was visiting and planning to spend the night. The neighbor’s son had gone to the home of his girlfriend’s enfeebled grandmother, since the girlfriend was staying there to help provide care, and he was spending the night. The other two boys, their friend, my wife, and I were in our living room hanging out and shooting the bull. Among the stuff lying around was a remote-control truck for which the remote had been lost and which had no batteries in it. During the evening, the truck started up and moved across the floor for a few feet. None of us thought anything of it, assuming someone else had found the remote and put batteries in it. As it turned out, nobody had.
We all turned in. The next morning, all three boys staying there reported, separately, having “seen a ghost.” The descriptions tallied, a man about my height and in late middle age, wearing a short trench coat and a broad-brimmed hat. The apparition, their stories said when put together, walked through two bedrooms and out through a wall. Nobody had seen a face. The descriptions not only tallied with each other, explicable by collusion to start a “ghost story” but matched my father, nine years dead at that point, whom none of them except the neighbor boy (who was not there) had met or seen pictures of, including describing his customary bad-weather wear. My wife, the neighbor boy, and I checked out the stories separately before the three had had a chance to talk with each other after the incident.
I still don’t know what to make of these. First evidence would indicate a poltergeist phenomenon, about which I’m skeptical in itself, for the toy truck, and, unreasonable as it sounds, I would have to suggest that my dead father did walk that night – possibly in an effort to scare the boys away, which would fit with his misanthropic pre-death attitude.
I welcome more logical explanations. In fact, I really want them.
Polycarp:
Well, the truck is easy. It might have been a victim of “frequency bleed.” Somebody transmitting on a CB or another electrical device that emits radio waves might have had some signal bleed over onto the frequency that controls the truck. THis is quite common, and why they ask you to turn your CB off as you enter a blasting zone.
The man in a trench coat and broad brimmed hat is a common archetype for a boogeyman, and also a figure that is easily picked out of shadows by an active imagination.
If one of the childrens sees a shadow that looks like a man in the trenchcoat and gets scared, it won’t be very long before the other children see it too.
Hope that helps
A couple of thoughts:
- Maybe it was you. Are you known for being a somnambulist? (OK, OK, but it’s possible, right?
- Nobody saw a face, but all agree he was in late middle age? How exactly was that determination made with nothing but height and clothing cues?
- Are a trenchcoat and broad-brimmed hat particularly unique items of clothing? I hardly think so. Given that description, it could’ve been the Quaker Oats guy.
- How many leading questions did you ask of the three boys in eliciting their stories?
- It’s entirely possible, as you mention, that they colluded to make up the story, gave their description based partly on cues provided by you and your wife, and you backfit their description of some extremely generic details to an image in your head of someone in your life who you missed.
As far as the truck, maybe a capacitor discharge? Also, is it possible that the “spooky” (my word, not yours) truck incident prompted the boys to make up the ghost story in collusion? If they were, as you say, estranged from their families, such stories are a wonderful way to get attention.
Hey polycarp i think it was a ghost.At least there should be someone who believes in ghosts in a thread about ghosts.
You see it might have been a ghost,but like other ghost stories people try to explain it in other ways e.g lets see
probability #1,
capacitor discharge?That would account for batteries and then a remote control?well stray charges.No way whats the probability of both happening at once.
The man in the description was your Dad 'cos they all saw this.It is very easy to make up a story but they didn’t do the normal stuff,like explaining what the ghost said or anything like that.Any noises etc.A kid making up stories especially 3 would not leave blanks due to thge sheer prospect of creating a fab ghost story especially to get attention.So there you have it.
CONCLUSION:
From all the evidence i conclude that this was a ghost.Yay our first ghost story checked out.
Any more stories?
Please don’t criticise my proof.I have gone through a detailed analysis and came up with these results after elaborate experiments,the details of which i cannot disclose due to security reasons.I mean how do i know that none of the posters here is a ghost?
Bye
Zeeshan
My kids have remote control car. If left in the on position and with the remote control turned off and sitting on the shelf, it (the car) very frequently will move an inch or two on the shelf. Most of the time it does so while I am passing right by it. Perhaps I’m posessed. More likely than not it’s a result of some radio frequency waves bouncing off me and activating the car for a split second. To my great relief it never budges at all once I turn it off. 
so far i have met 5 people who have told me they have had experiences with ghosts. none of these people knew any of the others. the 1st was in '71 at college. a freshman told me his family lived in a haunted house and his entire family had seen a broom move across the room. he had seen windows open and close by themselves. a woman has told me she talked to a dead grandmother she never met and a mortician says his funeral parlor is haunted by a little girl and an old man. is everybody lying of deluded?
i currently consider the reincarnation paradigm the most likely way the universe works. decarnate humans can sometimes make contact with the so called, physical plane. but this usually means they have an emotional fixation on the physical and refuse to proceed with their “normal” existence.
if you’re interested in some strange reading try:
OLD SOULS by Tom Shroder (c)1999
supposedly documented cases of children with memories of past lives so recent that people can be found who knew the deceased.
Dal Timgar
Ghosts are real. If they’re not, then the active imagination has the ability to project itself into the physical world. In our house we have an open living room, to dining room, to kitchen door. Late at night, when alone in the house, all three of my roommates and I have caught glimpses of someone who passes by the kitchen door while we sit in the living room. I know this isn’t something someone spooked saw and planted in the others’ heads either. It came up when we were all eating together once, and it was one of those “no way, you’ve seen that too?” revelations. Our ghost is a nice ghost, though, he keeps it down and never makes any noise.
I have a friend who lives a few blocks from me. They recently moved into her house. She said a lot of weird shit started happening. Footsteps in the attic, doors opening and closing by themselves, etc etc. So, she did some research and found out that a girl named Dixie was murdered by her fiance and hid in the wall in her bedroom (Edgar Allan Poe anybody?) Well, now they live in peace with the ghost. She watches TV with them, shares a room with my friend Heather, she responds in some way when you call to her. She opens and closes the doors for them. It’s very freaky.
Zeeshan says:
I’m not a ghost. I’m a Turing Test.
Of course ghosts exist.
I get them every time I use an aerial antenna on my TV.
Zeeshan: If you have a detailed proof that ghosts exist and are unwilling to consider alternate explanations for events, why did you pose your OP as a question? It seems to me that asking a question for which you intend to ignore several of the answers beforehand is, well, rather trollish.
haha tracer.We don’t mean those ghosts.
hey pepperlandgirl,did u see the girl?Is she a babe or something.Maybe she’s a babeghost.How can you know that she really watches Tv with them?Have u seen Tv with her?whats her fave actor/actress?I need this info to prove this case as the research continues.
Bye
Zeeshan
Hi pldennison,
Nope not trollish.I think you didn’t get the joke.Well i was just trying to first prove something since everybody was dissproving it and then since i knew that my proof was so ridiculous that i would get an onslought of criticism that i blocked it with one small sentence.Smart huh ;)Anyway it turned the board to a dual argument and not just criticism.I was only kidding man,didn’t you the joke?
Bye
Zeeshan
Not sure if the above is meant to be a euphemism for “psychotic” or mania or hypermania.
What I do know, is that many young children, psychics, manics and autistics (for some reason that the rest of the world lacks) are capable of seeing more of reality than the rest of us think we see. There have also been many instances where peoples’ clocks would suddenly go haywire, or else stop working, upon the death of a deceased.
If anyone here is interested (which I strongly doubt) the phenomenon of “psychosis” is explained a bit toward the end of the book “Child of Eternity” by Rocha, an autistic who communicates via facilitated communication. Her communications are very disjointed and unconventional, therefore I doubt too many people have the patience to plow through it. I still take alot of the book with a grain of salt, especially considering the fact that she made predictions which, of course, never came to pass.
BUT that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in the unexplainable. I’ve had too many personal encounters at seperate times with either manics, or young children, or autistics, or personal synchronistic occurrences for me to just illogically explain them away. There’s such a thing as carrying left-brained factualism to the point of ad nauseum.
I was a ghost in a past life.