I think this is a very good point.
I play the bagpipes. When coming home from Highland games or other pipe band-related events, I would sometimes hear the sound of a pipe band within the rumbling of the car engine or (IIRC) within the rustling of the water tap in the washroom. This is clearly an innocent mind trick and not the onset of schizophrenia, nor a haunting by the ghosts of pipers long gone, nor anything else to be worried about.
My sister claims our dad appeared in her bedroom after he’d died. She’s the youngest of the 5 of us and was very close to Dad. But she also drinks pretty heavily and has been known to indulge in recreational substances. So maybe not a ghost story after all…
That’s confirmation bias. Anyone can become president one day. Lots of people think about it. It just so happens that Lincoln became president, but what about the hundreds of thousands of kids who didn’t?
Every so often someone who claims to have premonitions will “get one right”. Someone predicts “catastrophe in the coming year”, and of course there is an earthquake somewhere. But what about their other predictions about a cruise ship exploding and a monkey uprising?
Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine had an article about dreams. They mentioned a mathematician (someone I had actually known) who was visited in a dream by a friend who had suicided 3 months before and gave him the key argument in something he had been working on. When he wrote the paper, he put the friend on as a coauthor.
Just one:
@kayaker I also feel compelled to point out, he told his wife Mary Todd that he would be president some day. In fact that was partly what her marriage to him contingent on. So he was (unusually) certain.
Also I feel compelled to mention something that I posted here long, long ago. There is a psychological phenomenon where you have a hallucination of someone dearly departed. It happens when the psychological need for the person is so great, the psyche compensates. It doesn’t mean you have a mental illness. It is just part of the grieving process.
I know when my mother lost her Aunt Lottie around 1988 or 89, she kept seeing people who looked like her. I think that is actually a more common manifestation.
Oh, and BTW I might as well point out (since someone brought up drunkenness), the guy, or at least one of the people who saw the statues dance in Statuary Hall (a guard FWIW), was reportedly drunk at the time. Most people who see alleged ghosts though are sober, and credible too, I may add. 
The appeal to the middle ground argument – that the truth is “somewhere in the middle” – is a fallacy if one side is totally batshit crazy. That applies as much to climate change denial, COVID vaccine conspiracy theories, moon landing hoax conspiracy theories, and all other such batshit craziness, as it does to belief in ghosts. I am in no way denying that science has a lot to discover, and some of it will be truly amazing. But it will be amazing in the sense that quantum physics is amazing, not in the sense of your dead uncle returning from the afterlife wearing a bedsheet and hooting like an owl.
Naturally, you grab the wrong end of the stick and proceed to beat around the bush with it.
I NEVER said the “middle ground” was something like half-ghosts or something. I specifically didn’t say it was anything specific.
It could be purely psychological, or it could be some previously unidentified natural phenomenon, or it could be outright lying. The point is, if one side says “ghosts are all real”, and the other side calls everything “batshit craziness”, well, then no one will ever solve the source of paranormal phenomenon. (and bringing in moon landing and CT nuttery is just trying to make the “batshittery” universal and therefore dismissible, when it clearly is not.)
People are still seeing ghosts, UFOs, “spirit lights”, ball lightning, etc. They not all lying. If there’s something that can explain it, even if it as mundane as a previously unidentified variation of “visual” pareidolia, well, that would be a good thing. Calling everyone who sees spirit light a nut is not.
Shouldn’t that be, “…your dead uncle returning from the afterparty wearing a bedsheet…”??
Back to the topic! More ghost stories, please!! 
Indulge me–it’s my birthday, and I’m old. Beware skeptical Dopers. When I’m gone, you may find a pan of my famous cashew fudge (made out of ectoplasm) at the foot of your bed some morning.
Ok, well not a ghost story, but kinda a little odd that my Wife and I are surprised about.
We live in rural mountains. We don’t get UPS, FedX or even the mail delivered. When we have company over, we always know they are coming because they give us heads up. They never need to knock on the door. Our house has LOTS of windows and we see anyone coming.
We have two dogs that have been with us for years. They have never heard anyone knock on the door. But If I accidentally knock on the table or wall or whatever 3 times, they go into DEFCON 1.
There is music and TV noise around here. Construction in my house too over the years. No problem.
But a standard 3 door knock (that never happens here) and all hell breaks lose with the dogs.
Drive a nail. No problem. Open and close a door, no problem.
Knock on the coffee table or wall three times, and well, get ready, the dogs will go ballistic.
I’ve had dogs my entire life, my did animal control for a few years and knows dogs.
It’s… odd.
I sense a manifestation of the strawman fallacy. 
This may or may not be technically a ghost story. Let me know if you have another explanation. It was a long night but I’ll try to keep it as short as possible without skipping any important facts.
Years ago, shortly after my Mom died I took a road trip with a guy I was dating (current husband). He had two phones, one for work and one personal. He had met my Mom twice before she died but they didn’t know each other well. On the way back from our trip we drove into a nasty ice storm. The roads were getting bad enough that we had started to discuss stopping for the night. I was nervous but he wanted to press on until we got to a bigger town. His work phone rang and he looked at it quickly and then showed it to me. He asked if it was one of my kids or something because we were from different states and the area code was the same as mine. I wasn’t sure for a second because it was familiar but not the kids, but then it hit me. It was my Mom’s number! I don’t remember what I said but he tried to answer just in time for them to hang up. Now, not only do we have to worry about the weather but I have completely lost it! I’m crying and insisting that we pull over. Obviously, this makes me sound like a crazy person…but now you know. So anyway, he’s assuring me that there’s an exit up ahead and we’ll stop. He also, (wtf!?!) called her back! Luckily for me she didn’t answer, I may have jumped out of the car or something. So we got off the highway and I’m standing in a truck stop sobbing, cause what else would I do. My boyfriend, in an effort to distract me he starts trying to figure out how it could have happened. We both double check the number with the one still saved in my phone. I confirm that the number was canceled, she had been on my phone plan. Neither of us remember giving her his number anyway, especially the work one. I had it but only ever used the personal number. So while we’re still at the truck stop I called AT&T. A very patient woman listened to my story and then asked if I could hold for a minute. When she came back she said that when a line is canceled they hold the number for a few months then make it available again. That number had been given to someone recently and they had dialed my boyfriend. That was it. According to her it had to have been a random coincidence. No way a contact list could be saved in a cloud or anything. We’re both tired and confused but find out that there’s a pretty decent hotel one exit up so we get back in the car and back on the highway. But then of course, Mom called back! Boyfriend answered immediately, I WAS NOT OK!
It was a little girl, her name was Sydney. She said that she had just gotten her own cell phone and she dialed him accidentally, she was very sorry. He told her not to worry, it’s no big deal and hung up. I’m not sure why he didn’t ask her if she had been having a seance or anything at the time…but whatever. When we got home I found her phone and double checked, she had never had either of his numbers stored. What are the odds of dialing 10 random digits and coming up with a coincidence like that? Even if it’s illogical, I personally prefer to think that she was trying to get us off the road.
I’m so glad you posted that tangiential “ghost” story with phone involvement, because it kind of segues into mine.
I’ve always been afraid of ghosts and such and mercifully I’ve never had an actual ghostly encounter. I’ve even told people, “When you die, DO NOT attempt to get in touch with me. I don’t want to find pennies, I don’t want the lights to flicker, I don’t want to feel cold drafts in the room, and I most certainly don’t want to wake up and see a transparent version of you standing at the foot of my bed.”
I’ve mentioned on this board that I had a very close friend for 10 years who died–I’ll call him Bubba. We were emotional/intellectual soulmates, and I was in love with him for years. We never became romantically involved for reasons too long and personal to go into, but we were very close and spent a lot of time together. I was with him holding his hand as he drew his last breath in June 2018.
When he was in his last days, I told him what I have told people in the past about no visitations, but I said, “In your case I’ll make an exception. If you can contact me, I’d like you to. Just don’t scare me!” And he said, “Oh, I’d never scare you.” I’ll add that he was a fervent agnostic, and as much of a skeptic as the most diehard skeptics on this board–probably more so. He did not believe in an afterlife or anything remotely woo-woo. When he agreed to contact me if he could, he was in a hospice facility and, as it turned out, a month away from death.
Let’s skip back five years before his death to 2013. I had just gotten a new phone and I wanted to test out the video capability. He and I were at a restaurant, and I took an 8-second video, up close and personal, of him saying something clever. His face filled the screen–very cute.
After a couple of years, I got another new phone, and, as I had done in the past, I moved all the photo files over to it from the previous phone, which included photos from the phone before that one, too. Among all of the pictures, there was only one video–that one in the restaurant.
I’ve added hundreds of photos, mostly of my pets, over the ensuing years. The phone saves them in some way that makes no sense to me, and because there are several sets of photos from previous phones, there are lots of folders just named “photos.” My point is that I cannot readily find ANY particular photo when I want to. Many a time I’ve sat and scrolled through multiple folders only to give up looking for a particular picture. As for that one 8-second video–I had not looked at it since I filmed it in 2013 and didn’t have any idea how to find it. I won’t say I had forgotten about it, but I hadn’t thought about it in years.
Now let’s jump to May of this year. I always plug my cell phone in next to my bed at night. I don’t turn it off; I leave it on, but turn off the ringer. First thing in the morning, my routine is turn my phone face up, touch the fingerprint sensor to get to the home screen, and check the weather.
Well, one day in May of 2021, I woke up, sat up in bed, picked up my phone, turned it face up, touched the sensor, and instead of the home screen, there was Bubba’s face staring at me–that video.
I was very disoriented seeing his face unexpectedly. It made no sense. The video played and his mouth moved, but the sound was still off. I was bleary from sleep, and this didn’t make one bit of sense to me. I turned on the sound and the video played again–Bubba’s face and his voice in that restaurant saying that funny thing for 8 seconds.
Even sitting there with the phone in my hand looking at it, I couldn’t grasp what was happening. I wasn’t scared, so that’s something. Did he have something to do with it? I don’t even know what to call that event except to say it’s something that happened that I can’t explain. I had not been thinking of him a lot. The date was not particularly significant. It was one month short of three years after his death. This event is not conclusive of anything, and I’m not claiming that it is. I don’t know how to categorize it except as something inexplicable.
I do know that if someone had said to me, “Find that short video of Bubba in the restaurant,” I wouldn’t have known how to go right to it on the phone. I would have had to poke around in different folders and scroll, scroll, scroll. My point is that I didn’t find it in my sleep and leave it cued up on the screen. Anyway, the home screen always overrides anything after a while.
I can’t explain it.
Some believe that Lincoln had a premonition about his own death.
Aw, that’s the best one!
I have those all the time.
Oh, my goodness. How could I have neglected to share this earlier?
My bed shakes and vibrates, from time to time. It is almost as if there’s an earthquake. Except not earthquake was forecast or recorded. And it only happens in my bed.
I suppose there could just be some logical explanation. But if so: what?
Yeah, I noticed this as a child. I saw the movie The Exorcist. And it certainly scared the shət out of me even back then.
Does it happen right after you put a quarter in a slot?
#sorrynotsorry
It happened again. The motion-activated witch statue in my living room went off, for no apparent reason. Well, I dispute that, because I was looking up some information on ghost phenomenon on the internet.
Yes, I got it at the Dollar Tree. But it works perfectly, most of the time. It even detects me and other people when we’re several feet away. And as I said, the times it goes off seem ironic.
Go ahead, take my theory apart . I would love the debate, actually.