# Post your ghost stories here, and I will debunk them **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [June 18, 2010, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-your-ghost-stories-here-and-i-will-debunk-them/543674 "2010-06-18T14:53:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 22
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2010, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-your-ghost-stories-here-and-i-will-debunk-them/543674/421 "2010-06-22T16:34:15Z")
> [@lekatt](#): > > Ok. Can you read and write, work with numbers, can you find your way to school or work or home, can you tell the difference between a cow and a car. Those are all things you learned through personal experience. Yes, it is possible to forget something or miss spelling a word or two. However, it is through personal experience that you learning everything about the world you live in. Calling personal experience unreliable is like saying you sometimes get to work and sometimes forget where it is and end up in the next town. Etc., etc., etc. > > You either rely on your personal experiences or you hire someone to lead you around and feed you. What spectacularly stupid nonsense. I gave an example. A car backfiring, being mistaken for a gun. This is a perfectly normal and understandible mistake, and is **obviously** a middle ground between “all interpretations of personal experience are reliable” and “need to hire someone to lead you around and feed you.” Of course you can’t refute this, so you ignore the example, swap it in with a nonsensical false goalpost, with a dash of your usual relentlessly hateful left-handed insults for spice. Very unsurprising behavior from you, but somehow still disappointing every time you do it. ---
**Author:** ![MrSquishy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b9e5f3/32.png) [@MrSquishy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrSquishy)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2010, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-your-ghost-stories-here-and-i-will-debunk-them/543674/422 "2010-06-22T18:50:48Z")
> [@Unauthorized\_Cinnamon](#): > > This morning I turned on the garbage disposal, and a knife next to the sink started moving across the counter top. I could have jumped as hard as I could, and it probably wouldn’t have budged a millimeter, but a different kind of vibration made it move a LOT. In the same vein, sometimes one of our floor board will shift and crack. Afterward, you could jump on it for hours without reproducing the effect - it’s already shifted and won’t “reset” until the house warms up or whatever. > > So, the fact that you couldn’t reproduce the slight movement that triggered the toy doesn’t mean the movement wasn’t natural in origin. > > (Please note that this would in no way reduce my level of freakedoutness if I got up in the middle of the night and a random toy started making noise. In the dark. While I’m by myself. My limbic system just doesn’t give a rat’s ass about all this rationality.) The question I have is: was the toy battery-powered? I have seen some extremely strange behaviour from battery-powered toys when the batteries are nearly dead. Including making strange sounds when turned off. My son has a toy laptop that got inadvertently pushed under the bed and forgotten, and then woke us up in the middle of the night days later making strange, oscillating, high-pitched noises. You know the kind of noises that are so high-pitched and directional that you can’t locate because they disappear when you turn your head or move a few inches in either direction? If we hadn’t happened to look under the bed, or if the batteries had given up completely while we were looking for it and we had given up the search when the noise stopped, I might be here telling a ghost story right now. Imagine if the next morning we had received a phone call that my grandmother had died! ---
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2010, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-your-ghost-stories-here-and-i-will-debunk-them/543674/423 "2010-06-22T19:06:46Z")
> [@MrSquishy](#): > > The question I have is: was the toy battery-powered? I have seen some extremely strange behaviour from battery-powered toys when the batteries are nearly dead. Including making strange sounds when turned off. > > My son has a toy laptop that got inadvertently pushed under the bed and forgotten, and then woke us up in the middle of the night days later making strange, oscillating, high-pitched noises. You know the kind of noises that are so high-pitched and directional that you can’t locate because they disappear when you turn your head or move a few inches in either direction? If we hadn’t happened to look under the bed, or if the batteries had given up completely while we were looking for it and we had given up the search when the noise stopped, I might be here telling a ghost story right now. **Imagine if the next morning we had received a phone call that my grandmother had died!** And that, my friends, is the explanation for all “ghost” stories: an unexplainable event, coupled with a coincidence. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2010, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-your-ghost-stories-here-and-i-will-debunk-them/543674/424 "2010-06-22T20:13:36Z")
> [@Leaffan](#): > > And that, my friends, is the explanation for all “ghost” stories: an unexplainable event, coupled with a coincidence. Well, _unexplained_, anyway. Or maybe explained-but-the-believer-prefers-the-belief-confirming-theory-instead, on occasion. ---
**Author:** ![in\_hiding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c5a1d2/32.png) [@in\_hiding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/in_hiding)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2010, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-your-ghost-stories-here-and-i-will-debunk-them/543674/425 "2010-06-22T21:49:11Z")
> [@lekatt](#): > > If your personal experiences are that bad, hire someone to take care of you to keep you from running into a telephone pole. I am not too stupid to live™. I am just aware that _my perceptions of the world can be wrong_. When I misread something, I _remember_ the wrong word. In my memory, the word is still there, and my memory of it is **wrong**. That alone shows me that **everything** I remember has to be questioned (within reason, of course) and can be wrong, no matter how sure I am about it. Every person who dismisses this possibility and holds his personal experience as true just because she/he experienced them does not understand how this world and the human brain works. > [@](#): > > Mine are just fine. No, they are not. A lot of them are wrong, just like everybody else’s. You apparently just don’t realize how many of them are wrong. ---
**Author:** ![Sister\_Vigilante](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de0a6/32.png) [@Sister\_Vigilante](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sister_Vigilante)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2010, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-your-ghost-stories-here-and-i-will-debunk-them/543674/426 "2010-06-24T19:18:20Z")
I’m sorry Drew Kitt left, I wanted to know if his grandmother walked through walls why didn’t she fall through the floor? I have one that happened to me that I totally believed in when I heard it, until I figured it out. My aunt claims she walked in on me standing near an open window chatting with someone. When asked, I replied, pointing, “that nice man.” My aunt ran to the window but no one was there, in the yard, anywhere. She asked me to describe him and apparently I described, exactly, what her father, who had died before I was born, looked like. Possibilities: 1. I was probably about to be kidnapped and the guy ran as soon as he heard my aunt coming. 2. I was talking to an imaginary friend, or to myself. 3. I saw a picture of the father somewhere. 4. I was lying. ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-your-ghost-stories-here-and-i-will-debunk-them/543674/427 "2010-08-24T21:12:11Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > If your only point is that gjhosts have exactly the same kind of purely imaginary “existence” as hobbits, then I agree with you. That is certainly one valid interpretation of what I was saying here. ---
**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-your-ghost-stories-here-and-i-will-debunk-them/543674/428 "2010-08-24T21:21:53Z")
It took you \*over two months \*to come up with that response? ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2010, 9:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-your-ghost-stories-here-and-i-will-debunk-them/543674/429 "2010-08-24T21:31:39Z")
I had to think about it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/post-your-ghost-stories-here-and-i-will-debunk-them/543674.md?page=21)