Do you believe in ghosts and the paranormal?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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[QUOTE=jbstarr10]
She absolutely has the right to privacy. And yes, I am judgemental about people who are willing to share their earth-shattering experiences on the internet but won’t conduct a simple test (that can be done privately) to verify it.

Nobody here has demanded she go on TV and do this in front of the world.

If you post in ‘Great Debates’ on ‘The Straight Dope’ about these kinds of things - do you really expect it NOT to be challenged?
[/QUOTE]
tommndebb has pretty much stated my view, so I won’t repeat it.

But how on earth would your proposed test performed in private verify anything?

And if you are judgmental about people who share experiences and then decide to not act on your instructions, you .. I don’t know. That’s just a bizarre expectation.

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[QUOTE=meenie7]
Until recently, I was actually engaged (unfortunately, she broke it off for reasons she would not explain) to a woman
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:confused:

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[QUOTE=Rilchiam]
:confused:
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I’m bisexual. I live in Connecticut where there are civil unions, so we were engaged and planning one. :slight_smile:

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Ah, I see.

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First, my answer to the question: No I don’t believe in ghosts or the paranormal. I’m not the least bit convinced by a single argument or anecdote I’ve heard yet. However, my dad who doesn’t believe in such things either and has no reason to lie, has one anecdote that he shares whenever ghosts are mentioned.

A few years ago, one of his close friends, lets call him Mr Sad, took sick leave from their mutual place of work for a week. At the end of the week he came back looking totally fucked and still sick as hell. After work he invited my dad out for a few drinks (which was unusual because my dad didn’t drink) and there he related this ridiculous story of how one week ago, his deceased father came to him in a dream and told him “the numbers” (yea its another one of those stories). Well the dream was so vivid that Mr. Sad immediately woke up Mrs. Sad, told her what happened, and went and bought a ticket, dutifully filled in the numbers and went to sleep. Well the deceased dad appears, again, to tell Mr. Sad that he had one number wrong on accident and to hurry up and go get another ticket. Mr. Sad wakes up again, sits there for a second, decides ‘fuck it’ and goes back to sleep. You can guess what the winning numbers were (and yes, Mr. Sad did keep his original ticket as proof). Mr and Mrs Sad were too sick to function and got no sleep for several days.

Take it for what it is, a ‘friend of a friend’ kind of story, just thought I’d share.

266

[QUOTE=diggleblop]
I don’t know how a person can’t believe in ghosts. There are too many people with too many first hand accounts for there not to be. Surly all these thousands of people aren’t lying or hallucinating.
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They are lying or hallucinating. And don’t call me surly.

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[QUOTE=Vinyl Turnip]
They are lying or hallucinating. And don’t call me surly.
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Yeah! That’s me!

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Hey! It’s not you, it’s me!

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Vinyl Turnip, Surly Chick and Don’t Call Me Shirley have just given me the best laugh I’ve had all day. Maybe all week. :smiley: Thank you all.

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I believe. My brother died in my bedroom and I swear when I was younger I seen a shadow of a small boy walking across my room. When my grandfather died my grandma thought she could hear him calling her name and when she looked up she seen a bright light at the window and it suddenly just disappeared.

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[QUOTE=diggleblop]
I don’t know how a person can’t believe in ghosts. There are too many people with too many first hand accounts for there not to be.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t even know where to start with this one. You can’t be serious.

[QUOTE=diggleblop]
Surly all these thousands of people aren’t lying or hallucinating.
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Why wouldn’t they be? There’s other alternatives, too:

  1. They saw something they couldn’t explain, because they didn’t have all the circumstantial data.
  2. Something completely rational happened, but they’re an idiot. (i.e. They heard a noise, and concluded it was a ghost, rather than a creaky house)
  3. They don’t know how to or don’t have the skills to interpret so called “evidence” (i.e. The so called orbs in photographs, really being out-of-focus dust particles lit by the camera’s flash).
  4. They conflate coincidence with a paranormal event.

There’s probably more ways to take a perfectly normal experience, and exaggerate it to absurd conclusions.

The problem is, a lot of people see what they want to believe. Our senses and our logic is highly prone to leading to false conclusions. Why do you think it is scientists have learned to hold double-blind experiments?

[QUOTE=diggleblop]
My dad is a very sane, no nonsense type of guy and he told me a story of a house he lived in where ice cold hands would touch you in the middle of the night, footsteps upstairs when everyone was downstairs, doors closing, dishes flying across the room for no reason or explanation. He even had the cops out a few times because there was so much ruckus going on upstairs, only to find nobody there.
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That’s a nice story. Any evidence he wasn’t jerking your chain, or was susceptible to any of the reasons I gave above (other than he’s a “no-nonsense” guy)?

[QUOTE=diggleblop]
When I watch “A Haunting” on Discovery channel, I can tell these people are NOT lying or delusional. These people actually experienced something that scared the shit out of them, scared them so bad that they would throw away thousands of dollars they paid for a house just to get the hell out of there.
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Uh huh. Well, people are stupid. I won’t disagree that most of them may have been scared out of their gourd, but probably for the wrong reasons. Anyway, we all know that television would never broadcast anything that wasn’t 100% on the up-and-up.

[QUOTE=diggleblop]
Nah, they exist. And for those who don’t think so, open your mind a little. What’s funny is more scientists believe in black holes than ghosts or aliens, yet there is not one single picture of a black hole. How many ghost pictures are there? Thousands. You say there is more evidence for black holes? I don’t think so, go spend a few nights in the house that was featured in “A Haunting in Connecticut” then get back to me.
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I’d gladly spend a night in any “haunted” building. Please.

And a photograph is not the only kind of evidence that’s allowable when supporting a theory. There’s all kinds of indirect evidence pointing to the existence of a black hole. All you have with ghost stories are people’s fallible accounts.

Also, my mind is incredibly open. I’ll show you how much – Since there’s thousands, if not millions, of photographic evidence of paranormal activity all over the net, why don’t you point me to what you think is the most convincing, and I’ll will concede that you have something if it holds up to reasonable scrutiny.

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[QUOTE=meenie7]
He respects my privacy when I have dates or intimate moments with others
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A 18 yo who can turn invisible and respect your privacy when you have hot sex with your lesbian girlfriend?
You’re really deluded. :smiley:

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[QUOTE=cmyk]

  1. They don’t know how to or don’t have the skills to interpret so called “evidence” (i.e. The so called orbs in photographs, really being out-of-focus dust particles lit by the camera’s flash).
    [/QUOTE]

:stuck_out_tongue:

We went to Mammoth Cave last weekend and took a few pictures Deep in the Bowels of the Earth. Man, the GHOSTS they’ve got down there! Every single picture was poppin’ with those big round ghostie orbs.

I mean, really. Take a picture in a place like a dry dusty cave where people have been tromping through on tours all day and it’s ridiculously obvious that ghostly orbs are nothing more than illuminated dust motes.

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Sorry to be double-posting.

meenie, I ask you this in the spirit (ha!) of Bufftabby’s post … are you an Anne Rice fan? I ask this because there are elements in your story which remind me of the Mayfair Witches books.

Truly, I find your story fun and interesting but like many here, I don’t believe in the truth of it for an instant. But as I said, in the spirit of Bufftabby’s friendly, concerned post … I just ask you if you might be overly susceptible to fictional influences, which have created this notion called Marcus that you have.

And more to the actual OP of this thread … my opinion is that the brain is a vastly complex organ that over and over again fools us. How many times would we swear we’d read one word, only to find later that it was another? That we heard a voice that turned out to be the wind? These are cliched examples, but surely most of us has read enough of documented cases of the unreliability of eye-witnesses, for example, to know that frequently enough, what we think we know often turns out to not be the case.

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[QUOTE=Ellen Cherry]
Sorry to be double-posting.

meenie, I ask you this in the spirit (ha!) of Bufftabby’s post … are you an Anne Rice fan? I ask this because there are elements in your story which remind me of the Mayfair Witches books.
[/QUOTE]

If so it could be worse. She could be a John Grisham fan and have to spend her days talking to disembodied young Southern lawyers way over their head in a criminal case involving conspiracy from high up.

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[QUOTE=Ellen Cherry]

meenie, I ask you this in the spirit (ha!) of Bufftabby’s post … are you an Anne Rice fan? I ask this because there are elements in your story which remind me of the Mayfair Witches books.

[/QUOTE]

I used to be a big Anne Rice fan, until her books started to stink. I read The Witching Hour but never got through Lasher or any other books she might have written about the witches. I was more into the vampire books, though, in my tragic teen angst phase. :slight_smile:

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[QUOTE=meenie7]
I used to be a big Anne Rice fan, until her books started to stink.
[/QUOTE]

Will this is something we can all agree on about the supernatural: by her last several novels about omnisexual Eurotrash vampires Anne Rice bit and sucked like Lestat at Mardi Gras.

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[QUOTE=Sampiro]
Will this is something we can all agree on about the supernatural: by her last several novels about omnisexual Eurotrash vampires Anne Rice bit and sucked like Lestat at Mardi Gras.
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Agreed 1000x. The earlier books were melodramatic and gothtastic et al., but they were fun for me, at least as a teenager. (I particularly like The Tale of The Body Thief, and it’s the only one I still get a strong urge to reread now.) But starting with Memnoch the Devil, she never again wrote anything I would use for anything but a doorstop.

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At the risk of being jumped on, yes, I believe. Most of what I’ve experienced are “residual hauntings” where you see/hear echoes of the past, not seeming to interact with the present. But the last house we lived in had been the home of a doctor who had passed away in it, and pretty much every night I would hear footsteps coming up to the second floor where the bedrooms were, pausing at each bedroom, and fading away. Just before we left that house, I was in the kitchen cooking dinner, and turned to see a older gentleman in the doorway, dressed in '40’s clothing, complete with a hat like you see in old movies. He was thin, with a tired, lined face. I wasn’t asleep, I wasn’t thinking about ghosts, and he wasn’t somebody I knew. He held out his hand, and I said, “What do you want?” and he vanished. I never saw him again. But I was a child who saw people/things that others didn’t from a very young age, and learned young to keep such things to myself, as you were considered a weirdo. Perhaps some of us are more sensitive to such things, just as some have perfect pitch, or can paint masterpieces, or are superb athletes.

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[QUOTE=schnuckiputzi]
Perhaps some of us are more sensitive to such things, just as some have perfect pitch, or can paint masterpieces, or are superb athletes.
[/QUOTE]

Perhaps some of us are more prone to fantasize, ignorant of what’s possible, less critical of what they don’t understand, and want to believe even the unlikely.

Will you at least concede that those are possible explanations?