Stockton, only after authentication by the Public Records Office of Great Britain.
I would just like to point out that just becuase there is a cite about something doesn’t mean its true. Here are some examples of what I’m talking about.
Jeez I get so tiered of people asking for cites all the time. Like thats proof positive or something.
Lenny,
You might be thinking of this. Although it’s not the 1600s and I can’t see anything that marks it as more authentic than any other such story, it’s a pretty well-known report (I remember reading about it in a couple of “Stranger Than Fiction”-type books as a young dukeling) that contains the “battle in the sky” element. It seems to about clairvoyance, not ghosts.
Oops! I just realized I put the same cite up ther twice. But you get my point.
Cite?
Seriously, I do get your point. But a cite is at least a way of backing up your claims, assuming the cite comes from a reliable source. It’s just a way of showing that your claim hasn’t just been plucked from the air.
Aww. This is silly. Of course I can’t prove the non-existence of something. What are you expecting? I should provide a list of people who don’t believe in ghosts? And that would prove what? I can only say that the existence of ghosts in not controversial. There’s no controversy at all. Some people believe they exist. Other people do not. This is not a controversy. Likewise, angels do not exist. It’s not arrogant to say that. It’s folly to suggest that they do. You are entitled to believe what you want, but that doesn’t make every belief equivalent in its validity. I’ll go a step further, since I’ve obviously rattled an interesting cage of nutcases. Not only do ghosts and angels not exist, neither do UFO’s (as visitors from outer space) exist. And, in fact, sorry to report - God doesn’t exist either, except as an organizing and satisfying belief. What you choose to accept as proof of existence, I simply do not accept as proof. You can no more prove that these things exist than I can prove to you that they don’t. Unfortunately, in the realm of assertions and logic, the burden of “proof” does, indeed, fall on those who claim that something DOES exist. In the absence of such proof, those things simply do not exist. I understand how that seems to people who DO believe these things and who do accept various phenomena as evidence. But that’s not proof of their existence. It’s just proof that you accept these observations as evidence for your specious claims.
Uh, CC? I have to disagree. It is arrogant to simply dismiss those things as not existing because you do not accept the proof. Now, if you said “I don’t know, because I don’t believe that they exist,” it would be different, but no, you decided to completely eschew their opinions in favour of our own.
You claim that absence of proof is proof of absence, but I must also disagree on that point. There are several things (black holes, for example) that, while it is commonly accepted that they do exist, there is no concrete proof that they do in fact exist (unless they’ve observed one since I last heard).
CC, your argument lacks weight because it is dealing only with the opinion of one person, you. And I didn’t see anyone here taking a firm stand on the existence of ghosts, so why act as though you are on some sort of intellectual high ground? You aren’t. You are simply one more opinion. An opinion which has been offered up without any sort of pursuasion. Instead, you attempt to embarrass the other posters to this thread by calling them nutcases and their reasoning specious. Didn’t work, rather, it makes your argument look foolish.
Also, it doesn’t the address the OP. LennyG is asking for info on a specific story. I don’t see anything in the OP asking for proof or non proof of ghosts, angels, or UFOs. As DDG pointed out, just because a story may be “official,” doesn’t mean it’s true. I am interested in this story and I don’t believe in ghosts. But, I refuse to have a closed mind or a deaf ear. Hopefully, someone will be along to give us details in answer to the OP.
So, if you have nothing more to offer other than semantic drivel and criticism, then sit down.
Look, the problem here is not one of simply accepting anyone’s claim as possible. Every claim, every assertion has to have some sort of support for it or it dies from lack of evidence. In this case, people are claiming that certain things exist, and they have no proof of these things. It is patently obvious, for example, that there are no skyscrapers floating in the air 1000 feet above downtown Cleveland. If I say that they don’t exist, I’m not obligated to prove it. It’s a ridiculous claim on the face of it. It’s not just another point of view - equivalent to any other point of view. It’s without any evidential support. It is simply not true. And if someone were to claim it was true, the burden of proof would be on the claimant. In the same way, those folks who claim that ghosts and angels exist are obligated to provide something in the line of evidence that could be accepted by any reasonable people. In the absence of that evidence, the claims are hollow. I admit that my own bias against those who believe these claims seeped into my post, for which I will apologize, since I was trying to be logical, and my emotion contaminated my post. However, I’ll stand by my position that these beliefs are without merit until someone is able to substantiate them. Those of us who do not share these beliefs are under no obligation to prove that the beliefs are unfounded. They remain patently false until someone proves otherwise.
[Darth Vader voice]
Apology accepted
[/Darth Vader voice]
CC, yes, belief systems are open to debate, and I feel credulity should always be addressed. If one feels up to the task.
But, there is still no answer to the OP. It wasn’t asking about the existence of ghosts. It was asking: Does this story exist? What are the details of this story?
MY aplogies to TWDuke.
It appears that while I was arguing, HE found an answer to the OP. Or one that fits, anyways…
:smack:
I realize you apologised, but I still find it incredibly arrogant and rude to call those of us who believe in angels “nut cases”. I suppose those of us who celebrate christmas for it’s “true” meaning are idiots as well?
CC: Bottom line: you don’t know for sure that these things don’t exist, so why state a logical statement such as yours, with no logic to back it up? = assumption.
can’t disprove negative???.. exactly my point.
facts are king, assumptions are useless.
This thread is in GQ and belongs in GQ. It is a factual question about what (if anything) the Public Records Office of Great Britain has to say about ghosts.
This is not a debate about the existence of ghosts, let alone angels. If you want to engage in debate on those subjects, you are free to go to the Great Debates forum. This is a topic where concrete evidence pro or con is scanty and reasonable people can disagree. That is precisely what GD is for. Keep it out of GQ.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
Being a Gemini, I don’t really believe in anything, but also being Leo I insist on believing that we all go to the spirit world when we die. There are many reports of mediums who have contacted this spirit world, the best being Mrs. Piper. Also, you should watch television and see how James Prague and John Edward and also that Sylvia Browne are constantly talking to the dead relatives of audience members who have passed away. I heard this ghost story where this woman bought a house and she heard music playing on the piano downstairs and went and looked and there was this lady playing the piano. She approached her but she faded away. She would also see this woman walking through the rooms now and then. The neighbors all said yes there used to be a lady living here that played the piano. But I would actuallyl like to raise the issue of why do some people like those who write in a magazine called something like the Skeptical Inquirer go out of their way to angrily and contemptuously disprove what they already think is absurd? Why not let people have their fantasies and so on, although I do admit that I’m sick of all the angel stuff on tv and the dumb vampire series…
Actually, I did not give you guys the whole story. There is this book I’ve been reading about bizzare stuff that has happened in history. I decided to check the straight dope to see how truthful this book was( I don’t believe everything I read ;o) ) Most of the stuff said in there were true and I found them explained on the Straight Dope site. However the one about the Battle of the Ghosts were not included in the Straight Dope site. Therefore I said to myself, either the book lied or nobody else have decided to post something on it. Here is the full story.
The story starts of when famers from Banbury to Kineton in Warwickshire, saw and heard what an action replay of the Battle of Edgehill which had been fought three months earlier in October 1642. This battle in the sky went on for two hours and then faded.
The next night a a magistrate and a clerghyman also witnessed another replay of the battle. King Charles I sent six officers to investigate these strange happenings. These officers witnessed the batte on two succesive nights. Some of the officers who were at the Battle of Edgehill, recognise the similarity and thus said that the battle in the sky was that of the Battle of Edgehill.
So here’s the full story as far as I know it. Since all of the content of the book except this story have been found and proven true on the straight dope site, I hope you understand why I think that this story is true.
p.s. Sorry for bad grammar and spelling…English is not my first language. I’m more fluent in Creole and French
What kind of “proof” are you talking about?
It is silly to put ghosts and black holes in the same category. Black holes are theoretical end results of solving rigorous mathematical models, this cannot be said about ghosts. Nothing scientific about them, let alone rigorous.
The Vatican? They have no more authority to authenticate the existence of the paranormal than any other organization, and in fact I would say less so because they have a vested interest in it being true.
Officially, The Straight Dope is that there are no such things as ghosts.
There really was a Battle of Edgehill.
http://www.hornton.org.uk/Encyclopaedia.html
There really is a ghost story surrounding the Battle of Edgehill.
http://www.banburytoday.co.uk/custom_pages/CustomPage.asp?Page=392
But after that, we’re down to speculation and possibilities.
It’s possible that back in the 17th century, some local Warwickshire people, still rocked by the recent tragic battle, really did see a “sky event” in late January 1643 that they chose to interpret as a “battle”. One obvious possibility that comes to mind would be something like the aurora borealis, much further south and much brighter than it had ever been before.
Here’s a map of UK counties. Warwickshire is just above the red words “The Cotswolds”, on the left, kind of in the center of the country. The city of Birmingham is in Warwickshire.
As you can see from Table 1, “Frequency of aurorae and percentage cloud free conditions for various locations in the UK”, the frequency for Birmingham (from 1962 to 1989 at least), was a maximum of 23 aurora events for one year, and a minimum of 1, whereas the maximum number of aurora events for a place like Lerwick, which is in the Shetland Islands and is even further north than Scotland, was 164, and a minimum of 44 for one year.
Also, the sky in Birmingham was only 35% cloud-free sky for that time period, whereas Lerwick had 24%. (The consensus of the website is that if you want really good aurora viewing, you have to go all the way north to Scotland.)
http://www.baa-aurora.fsnet.co.uk/visibility.htm
So most of the time you can’t see the aurora borealis in Warwickshire, and the few times you can, it’s cloudy, and doesn’t put on much of a display. However, the cold clear air of late January would be a good time to see a really tremendous display.
So it’s possible that soldiers sent by the losing side to observe the phenomenon (the Royalists were to eventually lose the Civil War), only a few months after a heartbreaker of a battle, chose to agree with the locals that yes, whatever that was up in the sky must be some kind of ghostly emanation from the recent disaster. It lent a kind of status to their battle, “As though the heavens themselves looked down in horror…” etc.