You just couldn’t resist. 
Last night I heard the unmistakable cacophonous howling of a multitude of coyotes. The neighborhood dogs (including Pluto, who perked up his ears, or at least as far as a spaniel can do that) heard it too and responded.
This happens every few weeks or so around here, but we’ve never seen any coyotes.
Ghost coyotes from the 1870s? You can’t prove it isn’t so.
Maybe the invisible playmates of your neighborhood dogs that lie buried behind the house?
Fascinating!
True, there are three grave markers for deceased canines (belonging to previous owners) out by the barn…
The plot thickens…
I will answer from the perspective of an atheist who had some religious faith from the ages of 12 to 27. I don’t believe that there are any gods and I am skeptical about anything that would be deemed supernatural. Many things that used to be given a supernatural explanation are now known to work through entirely scientific means. There are things about which I wish to keep an open mind, but…okay, let’s get to the point:
I have experienced auditory hallucinations and the first time it happened, it freaked me out. It was shortly before I turned 18. At that time, I was suffering from a form of religion-induced OCD (I suffered from this during most of the time I was religious, and it’s something I won’t elaborate on publicly). I was lying in bed, about to fall asleep, and I thought I heard someone calling my name. Although nothing else happened, I wondered if it wasn’t God calling me and started scanning my thoughts, trying to figure out if I would hear him say anything else, and frightened what he would say to me. This took maybe a few days, but I figured out that it was probably just my mind playing tricks on me. Since then, I have had this happen from me from time to time, and I don’t give it any significance; I know it’s just in my head and when it happens, I will typically be about to go to bed/sleep.
Once it happened that I was lying in bed and I saw a little turquoise fish beside my head, just for a moment.
I have also seen pareidolia. Once as a pre-teen or a teenager, I was in my room on a cloudy day and there was not much light coming in. I was swinging around a stick or something. Behind my bed, I saw what looked like a small sheepdog. I made an effort not to hit it with the stick. I then saw that it was no dog, but only a black garbage bag. This was perhaps the most dramatic pareidolion I have experienced, but when I do, it’s often some kind of animal.
Do I believe ghosts could be real? I’m sure that a very large number of sightings can be attributed to pareidolia, the power of suggestion, poor interpretation of what you’ve seen, hallucinations, dreams, other tricks played on/played by the mind, or alcohol, narcotics, etc. It’s symptomatic that these things often happen at night. On the other hand, I want to keep an open mind and I won’t presume that not all alleged experiences with ghosts can be explained away through these means. Some of the stories you hear, from people who don’t necessarily have any reason to lie (including some told above) are really food for thought. When I hear or read them, I prefer to simply say that I can’t explain them rather than speculate what brought them about.
We have, I think, no empirical evidence that people or animals have a soul that after death lives on in incorporeal form. However, I am willing to accept the hypothetical possibility that something of that nature persists after death. The question is, in what form? Is a soul/ghost really a being that lives on in a sentient form outside its body? Or is it perhaps just an energetic imprint that remains for some reason? I should say that I have experienced seeming telepathy multiple times and, while this may all be coincidences, the instances are uncanny and I wouldn’t exclude the possibility that telepathy is a real phenomenon, though I would maintain a healthy skepticism, both about that and about “ghosts”. I have read an interesting theory which attributes ghost sightings to “telepathic hallucinations”. This could be absolute hokum, but it’s worth looking into.
I have never seen anything like a ghost. However, when I was in Rome with my parents at 18, my mother had an uneasy sensation three nights in a row around 2AM. She later told me that on the first night she felt an unpleasant presence there; the next night, she saw a cloud enter the room and in it appeared someone who looked at her evilly; she jumped into my father’s bed; the third night she felt the presence coming in, but then it went away. When she first told it to me, she told it like it was a true ghost sighting; however, she later amended this to say she thought she had been hallucinating. My mother is an emotionally unstable person and at the time, she was taking the heat in Italy (we went in August) very badly.
She also told me a story that her grandfather was once working somewhere and he had a dream in which a woman appeared and IIRC told him that she would blind him or kill him or something. The other people there told him a woman had once used that bed who had committed suicide and the means used was IIRC similar to what the woman in the dream had threatened him with.
I don’t actively “believe” in ghosts/the afterlife, but am willing to entertain the hypothetical possibility that “something” remains after death that we can’t explain at present. However, I maintain a high degree of skepticism. A lot of ghost sightings can be explained through rational means.
Then he must have fallen asleep by the door within a few minutes because…I gave him provocation. I gave him provocation…all…night…long.
Just kidding… I was 16…it was a few minutes and then off to sleep.
Aside (I can’t resist): I don’t believe there is anything such as “super” natural. Everything is “natural”-- there’s just stuff we don’t understand yet, and someday we may. Or maybe we won’t. I’m fine either way.
Dang. At 16, it should have been more than a few minutes. 
I’ve never seen a coyote either, but there are a ton of coyotoe-killed pets in my neighborhood. Most coyotes are very stealthy.
I might as well post this here as well.
They were interviewing Lou Rawls (the singer, not the philosopher). And it was shortly before his death. And he said he would endeavor to haunt his Hollywood home once he died. Anyone know of what became of that? Sounds almost like the Harry Houdini promise.
Speaking of Harry Houdini, I once read that his ghost was indeed seen somewhere, by an allegedly credible witness. Now that would be interesting if it happened. Because Houdini promised, if at all possible, he’d reveal himself in a séance. So could it be so 
?
That’s just what the werewolves want you to think.
The night before last, I was crossing a pitch-black living room heading toward the stairs, when an unseen woman took my arm.
It wasn’t a threatening move, but since I immediately realized that it wasn’t Mrs. J. (who was upstairs asleep), something was very wrong and I attempted to scream, prompting the scene to gradually dissolve into my lying in bed, unnerved.
When I told Mrs. J. about the dream, she asked if the mystery woman was a short brunette, which would match a previous occupant who died in the house a few years before we moved in. Unfortunately I was unable to describe her features.
Coupled with yesterday’s experience with a horde of flies at the attic window, I’m thinking of checking online reviews for local exorcists.
No. Houdini gave his wife Bess a secret message that he’d pass on after death if he was able to. Bess herself held séances every Halloween night for ten years after his death and never heard the message, and she even offered a $10,000 reward (in 1928, worth over $160,000 in today’s money) if anybody else could produce the message. No one did.
Because the existence of ghosts would be in conflict with the rules of the universe as we know them. They’d violate the laws of thermodynamics.
HOWEVER, I find ghost stories most fascinating. There’s a part of me that is still the primitive living in a cave, afraid of the wind. That part always wonders, what if this is real?
I find the psychology of ghosts fascinating. Are people really letting themselves be fooled by real-but-strange phenomenon? Are they simply lying? Or could there really be…something…to it. Some undiscovered phenomenon that can be studied, but that isn’t disembodied spirits of the dead walking amongst us.
That’s what bugs me about modern paranormal (including UFO) hunters. The believers are sure it’s all real, and the skeptics are sure none of it is. But what if it is something real but previously unidentified? If the two groups would stop talking past each other, maybe the answer could be found.
I have experience pareidolia - the air handler fan sounded exactly like a radio was left on in the other room. But there was no radio. Freaked me out until I figured the cause. But I didn’t fear ghosts-I feared schizophrenia.
But, if I am out in the country at night, and pass an abandoned farm house, I DO NOT look at it, lest I see a light inside. It’s just better that way. 
I also feel compelled to include the story of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln knew. I mean he actually somehow knew he’d be president some day, even as a little boy. How could he have known that?
And speaking of Lincoln, I would be remiss not to mention Lincoln’s ghost. During WWII he appeared in the Lincoln Bedroom (aptly named) to Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Then there is the Lincoln Ghost Train. And as long as I’m at it, I should mention Washington, DC itself is a hotbed of ghost activity (allegedly?). According to a book on ghost stories I got on a trip to DC in Summer of 1998, there are the demon cats. Cats that start out as normal felines, until they grow to panthers and attack people (!). Now who’d be imagining something like that? And then there are the statues in Statuary Hall, the Capitol, that come to life and dance every New Years Eve, to celebrate another year of the republic. (Although I have to admit. Statues, and yes dolls [many cursed dolls, according to the Travel Channel] are pretty creepy to begin win.)
Retorts ?
Beatrix wasn’t queen in WWII.
And Cat People wasn’t that great a movie.
Other than that, I’m with you.
I could tell you dozens and dozens of absolutely true stories of seeing ghostly figures of known and unknown people in my bedroom. I can see them, hear them, feel the bed depress as they sit down beside me as I lay there paralyzed, struggling to move towards them, or away from them, or to make a sound to wake up my husband so he’ll see them, too…but I’d also have to tell you that I suffer terribly from hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations along with sleep paralysis, so it’s not too much of a mystery to me.
Quoting myself from the “What do you think of Geo” thread. I know it sounds like a joke, but I swear it’s absolutely true:
In April 2000 I passed a blue Geo Metro hatchback that was waiting at a red light at the intersection of Georgia Ave and East-West Highway, and in the driver’s seat was George Burns. Glasses, suit, cigar, the whole deal, it was him. Of course, he had died a month earlier…
I suppose, realistically, it was probably a very good George Burns impersonator on their way to or from a gig. I don’t remember exactly what day of the week or time of day it was, but it was definitely daylight, and knowing my schedule at the time, most likely the afternoon. It tells much better as a ghost story. 