There may be valid scientific explanations for all of these things but it doesn’t really make them any less creepy. I hope I’m never on the receiving end of one.
I believe that living beings have a measurable energy, and I’m unsure what happens to that energy upon death. I can buy that a person standing by at the moment of death could feel that energy dissipate.
That being said, I don’t believe that that energy will ever re-corporealize and be able to knock on a door or make scary noises.
it turns into maggots?
I formed an instant cartoon image in my head of this! 
I had a friend who swore a ghost turned her TV on every night at 3am. She made an appointment for a “spirit medium” (:dubious:) to come over; fortunately, she didn’t have to fork over any money to a charlatan because her husband found the problem – the TV timer was set to turn on at 3am every night.
There is a theory that high electric/electronic activity can cause perception of paranormal activity by interfering with brain electricity (maybe somebody more science-y can bunk or de-bunk this).
Joe Nickell, my fave de-bunk guy, (he’s with The Skeptical Inquirer) wrote a very funny piece that examines why ghosts don’t come back naked: did the dead’s clothes also die and become spectral?
Something that happened to me 30 years ago:
I was driving up Provo Canyon (Utah) to go skiing at Sundance. The roads were icy and dangerous and I was driving alone. The roads were narrow and very twisty.
As I approached a blind curve, I heard a loud voice say “pull off all the way on the shoulder and stop - NOW!!!” So I did. A few seconds later a semi-truck pulling a trailer came around sideways through the curve, tipped over, and went into the creek on the other side of the road. I would have been killed if I had not pulled off the road on the sheltered side. The driver and his wife were injured; one of his ears was torn off (yuck!)*
So, I was saved by the command of a spectral being . . . or, I knew the roads really well as both a car driver and a passenger in my dad’s own tractor-trailer; dad was a really good trucker and had a lot of stories about rigs taking the curves too fast, especially in bad weather, and causing all kinds of calamity.
For a long time I cherished the idea of having had an angel riding with me that day, but in the end it was my subconscious performing a lightning-fast prediction of what could happen on the dangerous curve, what I knew about accidents occurring in the Canyon, and calculating the best option. Afterward, my conscious brain overlaid the commanding voice as a means of explaining why I was spared death that day.
*There’s probably a mummified ear near the creek - I hunted for it before the rescue squad got there, no dice.
Of course this event wasn’t evidence of a ghost, or residual energy, or anything, but I’ve never seen it happen anywhere else at any time. … My wife’s grandmother died and after her interment, we gathered at a hall for a post funeral lunch, as is expected. While a waitress was carrying a tray of drinks above her head through a crowd to our table, one of the glasses exploded and showered glass and whiskey sours all over several people.
Yes, that does happen. the fact that it happened in conjunction with Grandma Stella’s funeral lunch and not at any of the times over the last 50 years when we were out at dinner or lunch…that is what makes it a bit creepy.
In the small North Carolina college I attended for the first part of my university education, one of the common pastime for bored students on a Saturday night was to go to see the “ghost light”, along an abandoned railroad right-of-way just over the border in South Carolina. It was about an hour and a half drive from campus. (There wasn’t a lot to do in rural southeastern North Carolina.)
The one time I went gave me a real insight into how ghost stories arise. First, we took a fairly busy state highway down into South Carolina. We turned off onto a small, two-lane county road, and from there, onto another. This is in the area around Bishopville, SC, a very rural part of the state; not much along the roads but cotton fields and the occasional house.
From there we turned onto a private hunting road, a dirt track which wound through several acres of trees. Lastly, we got out and walked another half-mile along the right-of-way, which ran through trees, scrub, and if memory serves, a swamp.
Finally we got to a break in the road bed, where a culvert had collapsed, and we could go no farther. And sure enough, we saw the ghost light - a bright red shining beacon that was exactly the color of a car’s tailight.
Credulous people swore that there were no other highways around, but this was before the age of Google Maps, so I was certain even then that a car was exactly what we were seeing. But the whole process of leaving the bright lights of such civilization as Bishopville, SC provided, to drive deep into the dark woods, and finally leaving the car to walk out on foot, excited and unnerved us enough to prime us to see something spooky.
I suspect a lot of paranormal activity comes from the expectation, conscious or not, of encountering it.
I managed a manufacturing facility in Western NY, one with an old coal bunker and boiler in the basement. The guys sometimes went there to smoke next to the converted-to-gas boiler. Around 1980, we created a lunch room where they could smoke, one with an electronic smoke zapper, so the old boiler room was pretty much abandoned except for the routine of going down weekly to check the condensate quality, see that all the safety equipment was functioning properly, etc. By 1990, my good friend, Ed, a boiler expert, died and it fell to me to make that weekly trip down the long stairs, through the bunker, to the boiler…It was creepy, there was a drainage pump that kicked on every so often, hanging lights that swung a little when the boiler kicked on or off; and some things seen out of the corner of my eye…
I never will be over Ed;
I glimpsed him once in the boiler room.
A gray-dim shimmery shadow being
look’d at straight, unseen.
Missed him a lot, so I went there a lot.
We talked about the team.
Michael’s boy and Elmer’s back
Bob’s cancer, Ron and Rhonda’s wedding…
My plant was making money, more
than any like us had before.
Yet, the frowning pinstripes
coughed and typed me,
“That’s not the buzzword now.
We’re sorry, but you’ve got to see,
You’ll never fit our new profile,
Our Long-Term Strategy.”
Came thirty years, the plant was sold.
The sign pulled off, the boiler cold.
The last thing done, went down again
to let him know.
“It seems there’s nothing left to try…
Ed, I think , I’ve done all that I could.”
The cobwebs fluttered, I nearly felt,
I almost heard,
“You know, we always thought you would.”
And then we said, “Good-Bye”.
Sorry, I must have left my list of specific incidents in another jacket pocket.
[QUOTE=crucible]
Yes, that does happen. the fact that it happened in conjunction with Grandma Stella’s funeral lunch and not at any of the times over the last 50 years when we were out at dinner or lunch…that is what makes it a bit creepy.
[/QUOTE]
When I was a little girl my Grandma had this book Mysteries of the Unexplained I used to read over and over again (it’s in my possession now, she was going to get rid of it and the nostalgia was too strong.) There was total woo stuff in there, like spontaneous combustion, but reading through it as an adult it was interesting to see reports of things that have now been scientifically confirmed, like ball lightning, things that have a good scientific explanation, like the Dolotov Pass incident, as well as just random-ass coincidences that I’m sure actually did happen, like people sitting down on a bench and finding out they had the same first, middle, and last names as well as the same birthdays, or people randomly being struck by meteors. Sometimes weird stuff just happens. There’s a certain sort of person that reads more into that kind of thing than others.
You seem like you have an interesting brain. That is a compliment.
You seem like you have an interesting brain. That is a compliment.
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Nice thing to see, first thing on a foggy Sunday morning. thanks.
That’s funny, because I sometimes get the exact same thing… except for me, it’s always the voice of someone very familiar to me, like my mother or sister, or occasionally (while I was in grad school) my thesis advisor.
As to the original question of whether ghosts exist, it depends on how you define “ghosts”. You could make an argument that ghosts are a real, documented phenomenon, but one which exists entirely in the minds of the living observers. Just because a phenomenon exists only in the mind, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Relevant poll:
Poll: Have you ever had a spiritual, paranormal or religious experience?
Two thirds of dopers who took the poll have never seen a ghost.
That’s got to be wrong for any meaningful definition of “exist”.
Does love exist? Or hate? How about democracy, or fear, or all those other things (see we call them things) that exist only in our mind? Even if ghosts exist as you may be thinking the word should be used they may not exist materially depending on the definition of ‘ghost’. Yes Virginia, there are ghosts.
By that definition everything “exists”…and thus, you have rendered the word useless.
And by your application of that definition it has made everything useless. There is a rock in my backyard which exists materially, but has far less meaning than the ghosts in people’s minds that drive them to act. Do you never recall those who are no longer with us? Those thoughts can be called ghosts. There is a difference between saying ghosts are real because they are physical manifestations of people who have died and that ghosts are real because they inhabit our thoughts. The former may be wrong but it doesn’t disqualify the latter.
Read the OP. By any stretch of the imagination can you take the question posed to mean “Does the idea of ghosts occupy our thoughts?”, or "“Do the ghosts of people’s memories occupy our thoughts?”?
Good lord you have my sympathy. I only had it happen once when I was a child and it was one of the scariest moments of my life. I was taught to believe that there was a constant spiritual war on earth between angels and demons so when a demon showed up in my room one night, I had no reason to believe that it was anything other than a demon in my room, pinning me to the bed. I believed this well into adulthood until I’d rejected my religious beliefs and heard about sleep paralysis. That you still have to deal with these must seriously suck!
Thoughts are not things.