Considering that the human mind evolved to find patterns and make meaning, it’s no surprise to me that it does so in circumstances where there isn’t an apparent, ready explanation. I’ve experienced it myself, in the creepy basement of a school building - cold spots, feeling I was being watched or not alone, seeing movement where there shouldn’t be any.
It makes for great stories, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and I haven’t seen any.
No.
I knew a lady in the Scouts who was absolutely convinced she had a poltergiest in her house. They named it. She claimed it would steal things and return them later, move things around, make noises, etc. When something went missing, she would talk to it, ask for the item back, and then go look again, and it would be back.
However, I noticed that she was the most scatterbrained person I’d ever met. She was forgetful to the point of absurdity, and completely failed to notice things right in front of her. She once asked me for her pen back, and when I said I didn’t have it she insisted I must have it because she couldn’t find it and she looked everywhere. It sitting on the table in front of her. She didn’t have a poltergeist, she just had herself. But don’t tell her that. I think she might have done it partly as a way to make herself feel special.
I’ve actually met lots of people who think like this. They think it must have been ghosts or something, because they can’t think of another explanation. If you try to offer another explanation, especially one is sounds right, they tend to get mad at you. They insist it was a ghost, and that there was no other explanation. It’s odd how deeply beliefs like that can be held.
I was once having an intense row with a girlfriend in the flat we shared, when an empty plastic 2 litre cider bottle, which I knew had been on a ledge in the kitchen, came flying past the bedroom door where we were, landing about 15 ft along the corridor from where it had been.
There were no windows open, no possibility of strong draughts( or drafts, you now what I mean.), and no rational explanation for what happened…but it certainly stopped our arguing.
And it’s certainly made me less than positive that there is no such things as paranormal events!
Nobody else did, but I smelled what you stepped in.
No.
Ghosts?
Nonsense.
Intuition? As more than subconscious reasoning or guesswork? Maybe.
No, I’d say yes.
Some yes, others no.
This is a hard subject for me, because I’m a really strong atheist and skeptic, but I personally know and talk to a ghost. It’s not like, “Sometimes I’m in the dark cellar and I hear a creak and feel a breeze!” – I have long conversations with him, he’s hugged and kissed me on dozens and dozens of occasions (it’s like being wrapped in a damp, cold wind or having a popsicle pressed to your lips) and we’ve been friends for 8 years, since my junior year of college. I can’t objectively document my experience of talking to him, so I don’t expect other people to accept it as evidence or proof, but I do talk to him, he does talk back, and I have seen him and felt him around me on at least a weekly basis for 8 years. (Most of the time, he’s with me every day, but he does go away sometimes, and comes back and tells me about his adventures around the world, and the movies he goes to.)
So, in general I don’t believe in the paranormal. And I don’t “believe” in my ghost friend either – any more than I “believe” in grass, or pie, or my Mom. I know they exist, and I know he does, too.
The new Monk Plus models will do all of that for you in a fraction of the time it takes to do it yourself, and with their new asynchronous error checking CAN-bus multiplexing communication protocols, separate on-board illogic coprocessor, and MonkOS Rel. 5.4, it is capable of holding 2[sup]12[/sup] discrete and contradictory ideas without data buffering, loss of performance, or system overload. Plus, they come in a variety of colors, have a scratch resistant transparent polycarbonate and brushed aluminum carry case, are equipped with an 8 megapixel camera with built-in image anti-aliasing, and have a three year limited warranty with ninety days free service and support.
Or you can do it the old fashioned way. Hey, it that your horse and buggy parked out there?
Stranger
In my own “weird” experiences, the history of the place seems to make little difference.
I used to live about 7 miles away from Andersonville, Georgia. For the benefit of non U.S. Dopers or Americans who aren’t much into history, Andersonville is a teeny tiny crossroads (literally had a population of 9 in 1860) that’s famous for one thing only: in the Civil War it was a hell-on-earth prison camp where 35,000 Union soldiers captured by the Confederacy were confined without shelter or blankets into a 25 acre hillside stockade where the only water source (initially) was a stream that had sewage from the guards at the source and from the men of the camp all the way to the bottom of the hill. About 13,000 men died there in the course of a year and it’s amazing the number was that small; thousands more looked like Auschwitz survivors when they were released (you could see every bone)- again, it was hell on Earth, and there are row after row after row of marked and UNKNOWN graves. If anywhere was haunted, you’d think this place would be.
It’s such a peaceful pine forested hillside I used to go there on off days to play with my dog and relax. You get absolutely no sense of horror whatever- except in the museum, but since the museum’s for PoWs of all wars you’re as likely to be horrified by the re-creations of the Hanoi Hilton or the Bataan death march photos.
OTOH, I’ve been in a couple of completely innocent seeming places in my life where I had such a “sense” of being near something just malevolent and intelligent that I had to leave. The experiences are hard to explain: I am completely familiar with a panic attack and what one feels like, and this wasn’t that- this was a feeling of threat- perhaps a Dementor was loose. 
But… whatever it was, it went away when I got out of the place. It wasn’t a smell, it wasn’t a gas-leak, it wasn’t claustrophobia or an aversion to some color but a sensed “DANGER” that was as real seeming as if I’d stumbled into a room filled with rattlesnakes. (You’ve no idea how reassuring it was when somebody said of one of these places “I can’t go there… there’s something that just… creeps me out…” and we looked at each other and said “YES! OVER THERE BY THE CORNER NEAR THE STAIRCASE… YESSSS!”)
I’d tell more but I’d be thought less mentally balanced than I am already, but I will say I can’t prove and I don’t expect anybody to believe some of the experiences I’ve had, and positions reversed I probably wouldn’t believe them of you. But… I am sane and reasonably intelligent and I believe they happened, that there is an “unknown” je ne sais quoi out there (and again, I don’t believe in psychics or crystals or anything like and I think Shirley MacLaine is a self absorbed nut and Oprah Chopra books are most useful for wobbly table legs, and I think whatever it is has a natural explanation and logic to it, but- tis, imo, there).
I’m also guessing that there are several Dopers who’ve read this and have had experiences that they’re too embarrassed to share. I’ve known no shortage of people over the years who were perfectly sane and rational and often even skeptics by nature but who would, in confidence and when they knew you wouldn’t laugh at them or argue them out of it, tell you about “a certain experience” they had once that they did not believe was caused by an optical illusion or a house settling or whatever. Weird stuff.
No, but ghosts are the one paranormalish thing that it wouldn’t completely shock me if someone managed to prove that they existed.
I’ll tell you what I definitely believe…I believe that John Edward and Sylvia Browne belong in prison.
What I think’s incredible about them is this:
A couple of years ago it actually made news when a Washington D.C. law firm began to charge $1,000 per hour for the services of its senior partners. This made them the most expensive law firm in the country in terms of billing. Needless to say, these lawyers are not fresh out of County Unaccredited Law School but the top guys at their craft with years of education and many years of practice and held in sufficiently high regard that they can get $1K per hour for what they do, and if it turns out they’re sheisters (sp?) a client of course has recourse.
John Edward, James Van Praagh and Sylvia Browne all charge more than this (usually around $750 for a half hour session) and this with absolutely no professional certification or ethical overseer of any kind and even without guaranteeing results (rest assured if I pay a lawyer $1000 per hour he’s going to answer my question as thoroughly as possible and if he doesn’t I’ll go to the American bar association).
A part of me says “Well, the more fool they” to people stupid enough to pay this, while another part remembers a lot of these people are acting out of grief. I’m surprised they haven’t been sued a lot more. (They could always trade calls to the dead for legal services I suppose- 2 hours for every 3 hours of the nation’s most expensive legal consultation.)
Out of curiosity, what convinced you that the presence you’re experiencing is a ghost (which by most definitions means the disembodied spirit of someone who died), rather than some other explanation? Was this someone you knew in life, or a stranger?
As a fellow atheist and skeptic, if I were experiencing the same events—knowing that they conflicted with my beliefs and worldview—I would be intensely driven to determine whether what I was experiencing was “real” or hallucinated. If the ghost is truly an external presence, are you provided with information during these conversations that you wouldn’t otherwise know? Some verifiable information from the afterlife, or even something as mundane as describing the details of one of the movies he’s seen (which you haven’t), which you could then easily verify?
Your comments imply that you find comfort in these visits, so you may not feel the same urgency to explain them, but I know that I wouldn’t be able to rest until I did. (So ghosts, if you are out there: call first before dropping in.)
Wise words I wish I could project to the æther.
Ghosts seem unlikely. If it’s possible for something as complex as intelligence to be manifested incorporeally, you’d think that natural selection would have done more with the principle by now.
Even if ghosts are just some sort of freaked-out time hiccup or something, there really ought to be more evidence of them. They are observable phenomena after all, and people find them really interesting. It seems like such a huge pile of eyewitness information should be a real aid toward understanding and predicting the phenomenon.
It worked that way for comets. For thousands of years comets were these incomprehensible random messages from the gods. Then somebody got the idea to examine them systematically, and lo and behold they’re eminently predictable. The guy on PBS will even tell you when to go outside and look for one.
Yet ghosts are just the opposite-- their manifestations are most impressive when they are at their least verifiable. The most impressive ghost stories are those that happened to the friend of a friend, or in decades-old folkloric accounts. The Headless Baron walks the battlements every full moon, leaving a trail of steaming blood. The ghost of Illinois Central 42 appears, spectral whistle a-screaming, along the very stretch of track where it derailed 20 years ago this very day.
Look any closer, and it all starts to come apart. Okay, it turns out that ghosts can be photographed! That’s something! Except the photos have always looked suspiciously identical to ordinary double exposure effects. I’m pretty sure that ghosts were not generally described as semi-transparent or glowing prior to their representation in stage illusion and spirit photography.
Nowadays everybody has cameras built into their pocket phones, and yet somehow modern paranormal researchers are forced to chase after minute variations in temperature and imperceptible magnetic fields in their search for evidence. Nobody ever told a ghost story featuring a scary magnetic field! Where’s the Headless Baron? Where’s the blood?
I think that ghosts are an interpretation of a particular category of human experience, and as such will continue to occur as long as humans have those experiences. They’re sort of analogous to the fovea of the eye, in a way. Most people assume that they have a seamless and uninterrupted field of vision. Is this really a mischaracterization of one’s perception? It’s easily demonstrated that this is not objectively true, but only by examining one’s vision carefully.
For thousands of years, nobody realized that every human being has a huge blind spot in their field of vision. And even after this was discovered, people who know about it don’t actually experience it subjectively. We don’t suddenly find ourselves troubled by this missing expanse of visual field on a daily basis.
Similarly, ghosts are a perceptual phenomenon that are probably experienced by everyone. It’s just that the experience itself is not truly objective. “Oh, I thought I saw someone over there in the moonlight for a second,” says the person who does not believe in ghosts; or “I could have sworn I heard someone speaking.” If you’re actively expecting your dead family members to appear, though, it’s a different story: you DID see them, you DID hear them, that’s what you’re going to tell others, and pretty soon everyone knows about the Headless Baron.
I’ve seen this effect in my own family. My mom is surrounded by ghosts. She even has a photo of one, which she can look at and identify easily as the robed spirit of my grandmother. To me it looks suspiciously like an out-of-focus streak of bird poop on a window.
She also saw the ghost of my brother soon after he died. That wasn’t how she first described it, though. At first, very shortly after the funeral, she was startled into a fit of crying by a “shadow” passing by the window. Some weeks later, she was certain that it was my brother who had looked in at her. Later still, she was confidently able to describe details like his expression, his clothing, and the fact that he was wearing his favorite hat.
I don’t think this is very unusual. Ghosts are supposed to be the spirits of the dead. We’re most vulnerable when people we know have died. Strong emotions-- grief, fear, anticipation-- all contribute to reinforce such perceptions.
I don’t even want to start in on the Ouija board. Two people have their hands on the damn thing, and it’s supposed to be a miracle of supernature when it moves. If it spelled out messages without anyone touching it, that would be something else again.
Who ya gonna call? * Parker Brothers!*
Anyone have experience with ghosts?
Yes. Intercourse.
Intercourse!?! With a GHOST?
Oh…nevermind, I thought he said goats.
‘Fairy tales! Ghosts and goblins!’
I confess to having manipulated Ouija boards a few times over the years (and it gave me a lot of perspective into how important credo consolans can be to the desperate). An interesting thing about them is that the lighter you touch the planchette the easier it is to make it go where you want it to and yet the more “real” it looks to the other person (“his fingers were barely on the thing!”). The only practical use I’ve ever had for one came when my mother was ICU where she’d had a tracheotomy and also couldn’t write but was able to use it to “talk” to us a bit (before getting frustrated and knocking it off the bed).
This comment is not directed at anybody in this thread but is a general observation: one thing that’s surprising to me here in the Bible Belt is how much skepticism there is of ghosts and hauntings and psychic phenomena of any kind… by devout Christians. True, you have the occasional nutjob- the kind who thinks Harry Potter was written by Aleister Crowley or the “DARK SIDED!!!” psycho on the “trading spouses” (or whatever) reality show and thus they not only believe in haints and hobgoblins of all kind but can find one in the frozen food aisle (there was a recent furor over the teaching of origami in one homeschooling group here because two of the mothers found it occultish and belittling of America), but these are a smaller minority than most people realize (they just happen to be very loud and unphotogenically photogenic). The garden variety “goes to church on Sunday/devout believers in God and Jesus/but aren’t above taking a drink or getting a little raucous at a football game from time to time” are far more common. It’s strange to me that they discount as easily (and sometimes sneeringly) as they do the existence of the “paranormal” (or whatever you want to call it) when their religion is based on things that dwarf any ghost story ever told (i.e. The Others takes far less suspension of disbelief than The Greatest Story Ever Told, yet the latter they regard as true).
He’s a stranger in that I never knew him when he was alive. He’s been dead for a very long time (since 1818, he says.) He knew and liked one of my ancestors, though, which is why he wanted to talk to me in the first place. He’s given me details about his life (full name, where he lived, etc.) which I want to verify but haven’t been able to via the internet. I want to delve into dusty papers someday to try and figure it out.
He has told me about movies that I hadn’t seen and then I’ve verified it through Wikipedia/IMDB/whatever. Usually, though, he doesn’t like to spoil the movies for me. 
I worry a lot whether he’s real. If I’ve had a sustained intense hallucination like this for 8 years, something is very, very wrong with me and that’s scary. But, you’re right, he does comfort me…and it makes me happy that he’s not so lonely anymore. Most people can’t hear him and he spent a very long time with no one to talk to. Now he has someone to tell about his world travels, and I have someone to hug me when I’m sad.
In my earlier remarks about ghosts as subjective phenomena, I forgot to include my own little illustrative paranormal experience, which was actually somewhat similar to Mom’s. One afternoon when I was about 15, I was sitting at the desk in my room, doing homework and eating a cheese sandwich. At one point I glanced up and noticed our cat Tippy sitting outside the door in the hall, watching intently for any crumbs to drop, as he always did whenever I was snacking. There was nothing at all abnormal about this scene, so I went back to studying; and it was several seconds before I remembered that the cat had been dead for about a week. I recall feeling a weird moment of uncertainty-- maybe Mom found a cat that looked just like our old cat, and decided to bring it home as a surprise? That was one of the most vivid instances of “seeing things” that I have ever experienced.
Obviously it couldn’t really have been the cat’s ghost, since cats have no souls. Tippy didn’t, anyway.