That’s funny - I look at it exactly opposite from you - I consider all things equally possible (just not yet).
YES! That’s what bugs me about discussions like these. People will tie themselves up in knots trying to explain away things when a simple “I don’t know” will suffice.
Houdini certainly would have.
I don’t believe, although I always wanted to.
Sorry, lots to say about this. Some thoughts:
ok, so we live a physical world. I keep reading in this thread the rather patronizing and dismissive statements by the “non-believers”. In that vein, I don’t know anybody who would walk into a dark room and just throw a blanket on someone at random. Perhaps I don’t get out enough. Does that mean I think that ghosts are for real and here among us? No-it means I don’t have an explanation for what happened. I am content to leave it a question mark in my mind.
OK- you think that there is no paranormal explanation for things. People hear things or have auditory hallucinations or tinnitus or their eyes play tricks on them.
I’ll buy most of that. I agree, for about 95% of it. But there is a small percentage that defies those easy explanations. I’m with Sherlock Holmes on this one. There are some things that cannot be explained.
I saw what I think was a ghost, but it may have been a vision or some kind. I have no neurological disorders and I have normal vision (or did at the time of this-now I wear reading glasses).
I had gone downtown to identify my sister’s body (she died in her apt alone except for her two dogs and wasn’t found for two days). She was taken to the morgue and my husband took the dogs home. I was alone, trying to clean up dog poop and clutter(my sister was no housekeeper). It was very quiet in the apt. I was tired, but finishing up for the next day by putting some stuff on the DR table when I rounded the corner of her kitchen breakfast bar and saw a figure all in white. It was NOT my sister–if it had been, I would have chalked it up to grieving and not given it a thought.
I never saw the figure’s face. But I saw, as well as I see my pants now, a pair of white jeans (my sister didn’t wear white jeans, none of us do or did), rumpled at the knees a bit, but straight legged (when’s the last time you saw straight legged jeans? This was 2004–they were not in style then, either). I distinctly remember the edging of the hem. Cannot recall any shoes, but no feet, either. The pants were definetly occupied–there were no clothes in her DR. The figure was slim.There was also a white Oxford cloth shirt (my sister didn’t wear Oxford cloth either-neither do I). I looked up to where the face would have been and the vision vanished.
Now, call it a brain fart, nystagmus, a mind overcome with a great loss conjuring up crap- call it whatever the hell you want to–you none of you know (anymore than I do) just what that was. Just as I cannot “prove” it was there–you cannot prove that it never existed.
Some of you need to open your minds a bit and realize that there is more out there to know and things we don’t even suspect or can even imagine.
I think of the whole world of bacteria and microscopic organisms–not able to be seen by the naked eye, yet so powerful and important to all living things. Who is to say that there are not more types of energy, or existances than we know of? Those bacteria killed off millions before they were well understood and we still struggle to understand the microscopic world. Scientists say stuff like, “the mechanism is poorly understood.” for stuff like viral contagions and syndromes–why not with this stuff?
I hear folks calling for concrete, measurable data, but you can’t quantify love or happiness or a soul-we don’t ask that of people day to day. Why do these type of experiences need to be measurable? What can we learn from these phenomona? Those are the real questions, to my mind. Some may interpret these events in a threatening way, others may feel they are loving. Why? Psychology or cultural values or something else? Why do some experience white figures while others have objects move? If the brain is that powerful, we need to find ways to explore this aspect of it.
What if the phenomona is only experential and not measurable? How does science deal with that? We have words to describe the taste of chocolate chip cookies, we know exactly how the taste buds work, we know what ingredients comprise the cookies, and the science and chemistry that takes them from raw ingredients to what we call choc chip cookies. But can any of us truly KNOW what a choc chip cookie is like for someone else? No, not really. We use words, and images and expressions and gestures to describe it, and since those things are similiar to all, we say we “know” all about choc chip cookies. But I don’t “know” what CCC mean to you or how you “know” them, any more than you do for me. Maybe I’m not making sense, but it seems to me that just describing physicalities is incredibly limiting, especially when it comes to ephemeral things.
There is alot of room for charlatans in this area and they are there for sure. I just read Mary Roach’s Spook --and excellent book on this subject. At the end, she says she has gone from “no way” to “I don’t know”. What is wrong with “I dont’ know?” We none of us “know”.
IMO, I see this paranormal field as being like medicine back in the 1700s-maybe even the 1600s. Lots of nonsense, silliness, and unneccessary suffering from ignorance and prejudice.
It’s not about science vs faith, IMO. It’s about truly asking questions about our existence–and that is not just a faith based question.
Nothing that interesting, sadly! It was a creepy-looking crooked old mansion, a big corner house in the Old part of town. Honestly, you’d look at it and picture thunderclouds and bats and blood seeping out of the walls. (In fact this is what inspired us to live there in the first place!) It was built in the early 1800s (which for Toronto is old) and inhabited by an early Canadian cabinet minister who was not known for his kindness.
The landlords let it rot. It was such a nice place. No ghosts at all, but too bad about the mice, and the drafts, and the bugs, and the ceiling falling in, and the tenants getting carbon monoxide poisoning, and so on … not that I’m still bitter, or anything!
To the OP: I am agnostic when it comes to ghosts. I won’t rule anything out until I get some solid evidence either way, and/or until I encounter a compelling reason to make up my mind. The new house I mentioned in my previous post was haunted by Gus, a benevolent ghost who kept us company and frightened away some miscreant friends of ours on one occasion. He regularly turned on lights and taps and rang the doorbell when nobody was there, shattered a few glasses and light bulbs, and it felt like there was always someone home even when there wasn’t. The house never felt empty.
I like to believe in him, and it wasn’t hurting anyone for me to do so, so I don’t see any reason to seek boring old structural explanations for the stuff we saw.
No.
I figured this thread needed a little levity. 
Here’s a specific thing (out of a good deal of things) that show why I don’t think ghosts exist.
I was about 17 when I started college. I had early courses and I stayed up late as a great many other students did too. But a couple times I woke up to find that my alarm had not gone off and I was late. Afterwards I’d be very careful to set it but still every now and then I’d wake up to find it hadn’t gone off and was in fact turned off. Even when I was alone in a locked room at night.
Then I realized that it was me. My alarm had gone off and a lazy and irresponsible part of my brain got my body up, walked across the room several feet to my alarm, turned it off then got back in bed. And it failed to make any memories of that so when I finally woke up I was completely baffled. In the past few years I’ve learned here on the dope that it’s quite common for people to do things while still asleep and not remember them in the morning, and fairly complicated things too at that. Or be both partly asleep and partly aware of the world around you like often happened to my grandmother as she made it to 90.
In other words: you were sleepwalking.
[Official Moderator Warning]You have been told twice in this thread to take your debate elsewhere-this is a poll. In other words: you have used up all your chances.[/Official Moderator Warning]
I think that’s what he meant.
Direct reply to the original question:
Do you believe in Ghosts?
Nope. Nor in gods, demons, the Easter Bunny, or Father Christmas, except insofar as we humans take these abstract concepts and make them manifest through our actions.
I’ve had some deucedly strange things happen to me from time to time, and I’m not slow to whisper them over a campfire on a dark night, but I don’t doubt that there is a perfectly natural explanation for each of them. I don’t necessarily have to know what that explanation is, or if my explanation is the right one. There may simply not be enough reliable data for that.
All I ask for is deniable plausibility. 
Now hold on a sec: that wasn’t debating.
I don’t believe in ghosts… But I know they’re there. 
Intellectually, you gotta shake your head sadly and say “no freakin’ way”, but sometimes weird things happen and you realize that elk don’t generally act like that, or Sprite bottles aren’t inclined to these behaviours and you (sorry, “I”) gotta admit that I can’t find a rational explanation. (You don’t gotta do anything)
I’ve no problem with faeries in the garden, as long as they don’t mess with my sprinkler system, and I almost caught a couch gnome hiding my remote.
There is no way I’ll ever convince anyone, especially a skeptic, so why bother? No skin off my nose if they think I’m nutz. Wouldn’t be the first time, and anyone that’d change the way they view the world based on one of my stories needs help worse than I do.
I think he meant, “In other words,” literally. He wasn’t baiting or anything. Fern Forest’s whole story was meant to illustrate why he doesn’t believe in ghosts.
On one hand, maybe I misunderstood when I thought that you were being sarcastic. On the other hand, however, how many times do you have to give your opinion in this poll?
You think correctly.
I’ve ceased giving my opinion. What, only those who are giving opinions can post now?
I’m sure many of you will laugh at me, but I do.
My mom and her sister were sitting in our kitchen a few days after my grandfather’s funeral. My aunt suddenly stopped talking and stared out into the hallway. When my mom looked at the hallway she saw my grandfather standing at the top of the basement stairs, staring at them. Mom says that he remained there for several seconds before fading away.
There are other incidents that I’ve seen myself. A white, hazy figure going into my brother’s room when I was home by myself. A woman in a long dress who disappeared while walking along the side of the road. These weren’t just bumps in the night or tricks of light or “what else could it have been?” situations – I saw these people.
So, yeah. I believe.
Not to beat a dead horse (OK, I’m beating a dead horse), but how could:
“I did something during the night I had no memory of.”
“You mean you were sleepwalking.”
be sarcastic?
ladybug, because other people have posited that ghost experiences are overwhelmingly at night - were these at night?
I had a weird experience that didn’t occur at night.
A few years ago, back when I lived on my dad’s farm, we were baling hay. I was driving the tractor while my dad took the bales out of the baler and stacked them on the hay rack. It was around noonish. We were stopped, there was a problem with the baler and my dad was fixing it. I was sitting in the cab of the tractor rocking out to the Beatles, when I glanced up towards a full hay rack that was sitting just beyond the section of field we were working in, in the next section over that we had finished earlier.
I saw a man standing there, hands on his hips, wearing dark blue overalls and a white shirt, white hair, balding on top, looking up at the hay and sort of smiling. I turned back to yell at my dad through the window to see if he knew who that guy was, but he didn’t hear me, it was too loud. I turned to face the front again, and the man was gone. I turned away for only a few seconds. We were in the middle of a huge, wide open, flat field, there was no where he could have gone, the forest was too far away for him to have gotten there while my back was turned. We left soon after, and I looked at the other side of the full hay rack as we passed, and there was nobody there. So, unless he somehow burrowed into a full rack of tightly packed, heavy hay bales without leaving any signs of having done that, there was no where for him to have gone.
I’m not saying, “oooh, ghost,” but I can’t explain it. I was completely awake, it was noon, it was a clear and sunny day, I was not under the influence of any substances, and I have no history of hallucinations.