Didn’t someone on this board once post a story about how they were in a car with a passenger and both they and the passenger clearly saw another car go right through their own car as they were driving on a highway?
Despite my extreme skepticism of the paranormal (as in, I generally dismiss paranormal claims out of hand) and despite the “I got it from the internet” nature of my knowledge of this anecdote, this story freaks me out. For some reason it “makes me wonder.” I can not explain why. I suppose I am a trusting soul.
Not to disparage Meenie7’s account, and I hope she would be willing to try something similar, but the response to this type of request is usually something like “he only talks to me about things HE wants to talk about” or “his ability to see objects in the real world is inconsistent” or “he’s very shy and wouldn’t appear if someone other than me were present,” et cetera.
Well, none of those are true in this case. The problem, as I stated above, is that I don’t want my real life family and co-workers and such to know about him. I don’t want the attention it would garner from people who would think I was crazy, or think I was being silly and childish. If you guys were to all laugh at me as one and tell me I was stupid, I would be sad but, if push came to shove, I could leave this thread or this board and never see or hear from you again. (Not that I’m going to.) Whereas, if my mom and dad thought I was crazy, that has real, inescapable consequences for me.
Hee! I think it’s very circumstantial. He talked to me at first because I am a distant relative of his lost love Anna, then kept talking to me because I could hear him.
I should tell how we met, I guess, in a thread like this. I was at college, in my dorm room, alone (I had no roommate so I was usually alone) and all of a sudden, I heard someone call out my real name. My name’s pretty common, so at first I was startled but assumed someone must be calling for their friend outside or something. Then the same voice said. “You could hear that?” I nearly jumped out of my skin at that point, and turned around to face the voice. I still couldn’t see anything there, but then this rush of cold came by me and seemed to settle around me. “Do not be afraid. I would not ever hurt you,” he said, and then we went on to talk, though I was still really freaked out, and thought I must have been dreaming, until he came back a few more times and I started to understand that it wasn’t a dream.
Randi recently changed his rules, though, right? So you have to have “a media presence” to apply for the challenge, because he’s trying to get the big people in?
Why use your family? There are plenty of organizations out there that are sympathetic to your claims and would test you and preserve your privacy. I would bet that you could even find someone near you on this board who would be happy to do it. This is an ability that would change the world, and prove to all that we survive death! I would consider it very selfish of you NOT to verify this when it would be so simple to do so. And if you were able to do it, then you could PROVE it to your family, and they would have no grounds for thinking you were crazy.
If you can demonstrate the dice rolling predictions as I described, you will have NO problems getting a media presence very quickly to qualify. In fact, Randi’s million will probabaly be chump change compared to what you could get just showing your abilities to the world.
I can only speak for myself, but for me the “proof” such as it is, is that
I know these things happened, I believe other people’s accounts of similar and extraordinary claims (while with others I believe the person believed it but the events probably were explicable by ordinary circumstances). I’m completely aware that the evidence is anecdotal and can’t be proven, and I don’t ask anybody to adjust their worldview accordingly, so I’m really not interested in proving it to anyone else’s satisfaction and rarely bring it up outside of things like this thread and the occasional conversation. If they’d not happened to me I completely accept- actually I sort of hope- I wouldn’t believe them either, but I file it in a special “can’t explain it but believe it happened” drive that I keep separate from “things to base major life decisions and actions on” drive.
This is how I feel about my experiences too. I don’t expect people to believe that I talk to Marcus, just to believe that I believe it, basically. Stuff like ghost sightings or the like is not worth getting your skeptical trunks in a knot over, since me believing that I have a friendship with a ghost, or you being really creeped out by a mysteriously slamming door, doesn’t take money out of my or anyone else’s pocket, or put anyone in harm’s way.
This is where you are simply wrong, because reading stories like yours harms me, and it harms others. My skeptical trunks lost a sister to a car accident when she was 18 (about 5 years ago). If what you say is true, some part of her survives and for some reason she has not, like your Marcus, come to me or any of our family to assure us of this. If you really have what you have, show it, and give hope to a whole bunch of people who have lost a bit of it due to tragedy.
Or keep it to yourself, and pretend like it isn’t an absolutely earth-shattering ability.
I’ve better things to do with my life than try to convince people that don’t want to be convinced about something that’s as undemonstrable as religion or self awareness. No one believes in things that don’t fit their preconceived notions of how the world works. That’s fine with me, there’s a reason I don’t talk about it on this board just like I don’t talk about gay rights or state funded abortions on conservative boards.
Whatever your personal feelings about these strange experiences Meenie, as jbstarr10 said, you owe it to the sum of human knowledge, and spiritual advancement, to at least attempt to verify what is happening to you independently. If your ghost can tell you what he has seen at the movies recently, the task with dice suggested upthread should be easy to perform
There are better things to do than PROVE there is an afterlife, or life after death if you will? I for one would LOVE to see what you are working on!
And what meenie7 is clearly demonstrable - and I provided an easy test for her to try. This is not a spooky ghost story that happened years ago - this is a ghost who went to Wall-E the other day. Don’t you even wonder a little why she isn’t out there proving this as quickly as possible, when it would be simple to do?
So…it harms you that I have a friend, because your dead sister doesn’t talk to you? Most dead people can’t talk to you…they’re no longer around, having gone whereever they go (which neither I nor Marcus know anything about.) I’m very sorry you lost your sister but she is almost certainly not around to talk to you. Also, not everyone can hear ghosts. Most people, even if they do hear them, shake it off as not being real.
I may look into getting it independently evaluated someday, if Marcus agrees, which he may not, and he has just as much right to refuse as I do.
It would be a shame if the one ghost able to provide verifiable evidence of the afterlife, potentially giving hope and comfort to millions, turned out to be a selfish dick.
Perhaps you can interest him in a guest membership; he may find the movie discussions in Cafe Society to his liking. You may have to explain the concept of spoilers, though. And providing evidence for extraordinary claims, if he’s given to debate.
That’s the thing…he doesn’t provide proof of the afterlife for most people. He is a special case. Most people just basically vanish when they’re dead, as far as he can tell. He says he’s only met a few other ghosts before and they were mostly very angry and intimidating, not someone’s kind old grandma who they’d love to talk to again. It would be scientifically significant, sure, but the comfort to millions thing is not really there.
Heh, I think the fact that I have to type for him would make it too close to being a sock puppet.
