I think so, thanks. Thing is, nobody in the family had ever seen anything like those Christmas prints before. Not even my shutterbug Dad.
I’d like to share my ghost stories. I haven’t really told anyone but I’ve been wanting to. I have never believed in ghosts until I went to Texas for vacation and experienced what I assume are ghosts because I can find no other explanation.
There’s this story about how a busload of kids were killed at a railroad crossing. The story isn’t very clear to me but apparently you can find the information in some local news archives. Driving through the roads around the railroad crossing the streets are named after the kids that died. The locals say that if you stop your car a little before the railroad tracks and turn it off, the kids’ ghosts will push your car up a slight hill and over the tracks. So, one night we decided to try it out. We stopped our Jeep about 15 feet from the tracks and turned the car off. After a short moment the vehicle began to move. Very slowly at first, but speeding up to a pretty fast speed until it pushed us up the little incline before the tracks and over the bumpiness of the tracks. The tracks are really old. I don’t think they’re even used anymore, there is no signal and barrier that goes up and down. We got out of the car and checked the level of the ground. There WAS a very very slight downhill before the short steeper uphill and tracks so were were naturally skeptical. We drove around and found a noticeable steeper downhill. We tried the same thing, we turned off the car and waited. The car did move, but not nearly as fast as the less steep incline near the tracks. We tried it again, but this time we stopped the car at the point where the downhill met the uphill, so it was impossible for the car to move due to gravity. The same thing happened, something pushed the Jeep and its 6 passengers over the tracks.
After we had finished our experiments we saw another vehicle attempt the same experiment. We talked to them about it. Apparently this was a well known story. These folks had a darker colored car and brought with them a ziplock bag of flour. They threw the flour all over the back of the car until there was a fine layer of white on it. They did the same experiment, and afterwards they called us over to look at the back of their car. There were about 7 or 8 sets of very small handprints on the flour. Very very strange. To add to the strangeness, I had my digital camera and was taking snapshots and short 30 second videos. All night I had been taking photos without a problem. I took shots of the handprints and my friend laughed at me. She said the shots wouldn’t come out. I didn’t believe her being a mildy experienced photographer and seeing the shots come out on the LCD after I had pressed the shutter. When we drove away, every single shot taken around the tracks were corrupted.
The next story takes place in Corpus Christi. The story goes… one night after a wedding, the bride killed herself for reasons unknown to me. This is also supposed to be available in the news archives. She killed herself by jumping off a cliff near the waters, wedding dress and all. At night, you can see her standing on the rocks near the water with her dress, looking out on the water all night. Around 3am we drove out to the cliff and walked along the top of the cliff until we saw a figure standing on a rock down below. The figure was as tall as a person and whitish grey. Us out of towners held on to each other and advanced closer, slowly. Just then, the Texans who we were hanging out with sneaked up behind us and grabbed us and shouted. We all yelled with fright and laughed afterwards. I was kind of saddened that it was all just a joke to scare us, but they insisted it was real. We walked closer and closer, staying near the top of the cliff for it was too high of a drop to climb down. No matter how close we got, the figure seemed to stay the same distance, though the image seemed to gain ‘focus’. Before, it could’ve been passed for a tall white upright rock. But now the image seemed to be moving slightly. I could make out a dress, flowing in the wind. We continued to move even closer until we were almost in front of it, from the top of a cliff. Now it appeared that the top half of the figure was turning around and looking back at us. And when it did so, the ‘face’ of it was darker than the ‘dress’, greyer. Having gone ghost hunting all night before in abadoned theatres and hotels, we had flashlights back in the Jeep so we went to get them. We walked back, but not as close this time because we were too frightened. Someone handed me a flashlight and I nervously flicked it on and shone it on the ground in front of me, I moved the spot of light slowly towards the figure, obviously hesitating. I kind’ve went around the figure with the light, thinking it out and then really quickly shone it on what would be the face of the figure. I will never forget the next image, my friends, for it scared the freakin’ CRAP out of me. I saw, we all saw, the clear image of the face of a woman who seemed to have drowned. All bloated and broken. She seemed to be holding something, in my mind it was a scythe but I can’t be too sure because I was out of there running and screaming like crazy back to the Jeep. We all got back to the Jeep and discussed what we saw. We all saw the same image, a lady with a wedding dress turning around and looking at us, angrily. We all agreed she was holding something but couldn’t identify what because after seeing the face we just ran. The next morning we went back to the rocks to see if it was just a rock and our eyes playing tricks on us. There wasn’t a light colored rock anywhere at all.
I would like to mention that for both stories no one was on any drugs or fatigued. Thoughts and comments are very welcome and I’m sorry for the freakishly long post.
We’re sharing urban legends now?
Read the quote in my post. There was a joke here but I’m too tired to think of it.
Hi. Local here. We’ve also learned to say that with a completely straight face and to not giggle. Sorry about that. Sort of.
RE: odd light streaks in christmas tree photos
You seem only 90% convinced. 
For someone else’s explanation of a very similar phenomena, go to http://randi.org and search for archive info on “orbs”. One of the links illustrates, with examples, how to produce “light creatures” using the LED on a computer.
In one of the orbs links, Randi mentions 2 pix that I sent him of an identical scene – snow falling on an evergreen tree – taken seconds apart, one with flash, the other without. In example #1, the foreground snowflakes are illuminated disproportionately by the flash, so they stand out as bright dots. Instant “orbs”! In the other, the snowflakes have no special lighting, and they are barely visible.
Randi declined to post those pix on his page, citing bandwidth limitations (odd, they are only 60K each and could have been downsampled further!) but they are available here for your edification:
Here is a flash presentation (warning: 8MB) of purported ghost images. The stills are petty lame, but the movies are interesting, from a how-did-they-do-that perspective.
I am not a Mod or a Junior Mod, but I think you’re supposed to give a warning about ‘Jack-in-the-Box’ links.
Having said that, here’s a Jack-in-the-Box link. (WARNING!) (SCARY!)
I expected nothing less than complete skepticism from my fellow Dopers. I’m surprised that some of you believe in the possibility of ghosts. Personally, I think there are a lot of things out there that science has yet to explain, so ghosts, UFOs, and the Florida Skunk Ape could exist. Maybe. I try to be as skeptical as I can, because I know I have a very overactive imagination, so I try to let my right and left brains duke it out.
I would like to reiterate that dismissing every “supernatural phenomenon” as arrant nonsense is profoundly unscientific. Go ahead and explain why orbs in photographs and cold spots near air vents aren’t signs of supernatural activity, but don’t tell me that because this “orb” is just a piece of dust, ghosts don’t exist. 200 years ago if someone said they could speak to another person who was hundreds of miles away, everyone would think they were a raving lunatic. Now we have cell phones, so you don’t even have to be connected to a phone line. Perhaps in the future some new theory or technology can explain why people see and hear things that shouldn’t be there. (excluding schizophrenia of course)
With that said, here’s something that happened to my sister, perhaps you skeptics can explain it and take all the fun out of life. She was driving home late one night (not drunk, stoned, or tired) on a 5-lane road (2 lanes of traffic each way and a center turn lane with no medians) in the left lane. There was a car in the right lane that was slightly behind her, and a car behind her in the left lane. Up ahead, she sees headlights coming towards her, but first dismisses them as an optical illusion. Probably a car in one of the on-coming lanes but at a distance it looks like it’s in her lane. As they get closer she realizes it’s actually in her lane. So she’s freaking out, thinking there’s a drunk guy driving on the wrong side of the road. She can’t get over in the right lane because there’s a car there, so she swerves into the center turn lane. The car that had been driving behind her continues to drive as though there isn’t a car coming towards it, and just at the point when the two cars would have crashed, the one that’s driving the wrong way vanishes, and the other two cars keep driving like nothing happened.
So what was that?
Thank you for submitting that for our perusal. It was obviously a car travelling in another dimension… there’s the signpost up ahead…
Just don’t let them fall out.
But we aren’t the ones saying these are supernatural phenomena, just the opposite. We are saying that there is no need of this hypothesis. If there are mundane, down-to-earth explanations that make sense, why postulate the supernatural?
We’re not. We’re asking you to show some good examples of something that is difficult or impossible to produce by schoolboy tricks (I made “ghost” pictures with simple photo equipment in grade school; I’m not impressed).
Explain it? Definitively? No, we cannot. But we can offer some possibilities, and rank them as to how likely they are, so that any rational person could choose.
So you equate believing in the illogical as “fun”? You really want a ghost to exist (fun) instead of a photographic trick (not fun)? Sorry, some of us think science is a lot more fun and rewarding than unfounded, fantastical speculation (except for Science Fiction, of course ).
I don’t know, but these possiblities occur to me:[ol][li]Your sister lied[]Your sister made it up[]Your sister dreamed it or hallucinated[]YOU dreamed it[]YOU made it up, etc.[]It was an illusion (sis even suggested it was)[]It was a ghost car; a supernatural event which shows we need to seriously revise all known scientific laws to allow for this occurence[/ol]Choose the one you want, but for me, I find it easier to believe in most any from 1…6, but hard to believe in #7. Too much illogical baggage, Dude.[/li]
Just a thought – did she/you ever think to interview the car behind her? What did he see??
RE possibility #6 (illusion)
Not far from my house is another house with two lamps on pillars flanking the driveway. Coming around the corner at night, I swear the first thing that enters my head is “there is a car coming towards me,” since the lights are at just the right separation, brightness and height to simulate common headlights. The thought only lasts for a nanosecond, since I drive the road frequently and am well aware of the illusion, but my brain is probably taking the safe-survival interpretation before the logical one, and for this I am grateful. I think I’ll keep it (my brain), but I doubt if I saw a ghost. But how differently this illusion must appear to those who are unfamiliar with that particular curve!
Then our work is consistent, and thank you. Skepticism does not mean automatic disbelief, but a need for sufficient proof commeasurate with the claim. Make a wilder claim, we need more evidence. Good evidence. A real far-out claim, we need damn good evidence. Sorry, I’m sure I’d like your sister :), but her anecdote alone isn’t sufficient to throw out Newton’s Laws and rewrite the physics textbooks.