What makes a coincidence impossible? What physical law or laws prevents them? This is your burden, not mine.
Robert the Doll:
Search for the doll on Google - it’s freaking looking.
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Molly Stark Hospital:
http://www.cantonweb.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=453&FORUM_ID=38&CAT_ID=15&Topic_Title=Molly+Stark+Hospital&Forum_Title=Looking+for+People+in+Stark+County
My mom worked there for 10 years. She cared for the mentally retarded patients (I believe on the 3rd floor). Sometimes at night workers would go into the tunnels below the hospital, which were used to treat TB patients. It’s said patients, nurses, and doctors had all died down there from TB. My mother went to the tunnels with some friends from work and my cousin and her boyfriend. They said they could hear whispering even when all them were quiet, and my cousin’s boyfriend said someone touched his shoulder when no one was there. He was kind of the violent macho type and accused both my mom and cousin of fucking with him. He later forced them to leave with him because he was too freaked out to go any further.
In addition people often saw a lady in an old white nurses uniform (they wore casual clothing there) going up and down the stairs and often on the 4th floor which was not used by staff.
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Funny moment:
I was telling my friend this completely bullshit story of how my house was haunted, while we were in my kitchen. He wasn’t buying it at all, and I was thinking to myself… if only something would happen. Suddenly the open window in my kitchen slammed shut and my friend bolted out of my house crying like a little girl. The truth is the window didn’t stay up on it’s own and needed a stick to prop it up. When I opened it I think I forgot to prop it up correctly. Anyway it was amazing timing 
One more thing:
When I was little my ‘My Buddy’ doll turned its head to look at me. I screamed at the top of my lungs. Weird thing is… his head remained turned as my mom threw it into the garbage. I didn’t even think the heads would stay turned like that.
“More plausible” could possibly be a matter of opinion and debate but yes, what you say does help. But remember that this was more than just the two dieing on the same day; there were other details as well. Unless we can find some relationship in the daughters mind linking “grandfather” and “cat” over and above linking “grandfather” to myriad other things she could have seen, it looks to go beyond the simple form of coincidence. In other words, expanding “coincidence” to debunk the anecdote given may be a little more problematical.
Maybe some of this will help as well. I think my problem with “coincidence” in this setting is more its relationship here to “debunking”. Coincidence as an explanation is fine but when offered as “proof positive”, given as an explanation of how something happened, it becomes the endless loop we saw here.
Again, I am coming at this more from the skeptics side than anything/where else. I haven’t really experienced coincidence as people seem to use the word here, I can’t replicate it, I can’t put it on paper like I can math or pick it up and hand it to you. Its “proof” is almost purely anecdotal. We have to agree to it (very loosely speaking and in a poor choice of words given this debate) as a matter of faith. So the skeptic in me equates it as another form of supernatural phenomena I can’t explain.
Having gone to the trouble of reading all six pages of the thread (so far), I have to say that ASSUMING the supernatural doesn’t/can’t exist isn’t any sort of debunking, when the question at issue is whether the supernatural exists. And I say this as someone who doesn’t believe it exists, doesn’t believe in ghosts and believes consciousness resides entirely in the corporeal brain. Proving our side of the proposition to those who believe the opposite requires more than assumptions and incredulity.
Sorry, i got busy and this thread grew quickly.
Yes, it was in the next room, I went in the room and heard it myself.
It was the kind where it made noise only when you pushed it.
I know. I was using that as a general point and didn’t want to recap the entire story.
Not really. She was thinking about his cat while he was dying. She’d already been at the hospital all day, so it’s not like it was the first thing she thought about.
I really don’t think so. People and cats die every day. If a man and a cat die in the same small town on the same day, nobody notices. If a man dies the same day as his neighbor’s cat, we say ‘huh, what a coincidence.’ If a man dies the same day as his own cat, we say “wow, how freaky!” The connection is in our heads. As for lekatt’s daughter thinking she saw the cat on the bed, she was tired, and saw something when his blanket moved.
In scientific terms, a coincidence is multiple things happening at the same time. Nothing else. It doesn’t indicate whether or not there is any other connection or cause and effect.
In non-scientific terms, a coincidence may imply a ‘mysterious’ connection between multiple things happening at the same time, but does not require such a connection.
In the process of ‘debunking’ the usage should be along the lines of ‘only a coincidence’ meaning events happening at the same time which are unrelated.
Is this really that difficult to understand or explain?
I’m psychic, and there is lots of evidence. Or else I’m really prone to coincidences.
Open to debunking.
Here are a few. When I was in college I had a friend who offered to transfer vinyl to tape (I think it was) so we could preserve our record collections and make them more portable. All we had to do was bring a tape and the record in question.
So first I took Are You Experienced, and before I got it back, Jimi Hendrix was dead. Then I took a Janis Joplin record, and before I got it back, she was dead. Then I took Led Zeppelin II at which point my friend said, no, no way, he was not doing any more of my records, not even if the artist in question was already dead. He didn’t even want to risk the Spike Jones 78s.
More recent: My husband believes I’m psychic because, among other things, one morning someone knocked at the door at 7 am and I woke up enough to say, “Don’t answer it, it’s the police, they’re here to arrest you!” Since he had done nothing arrest-worthy he told me I was dreaming (possible) and to go back to sleep and went down to answer the door, which he thought was his friend that he had plans to do something with.
It was the police, and they were there to arrest him.
(If you wonder, it was mistaken identity, and the result of an incredible coincidence that the cops had trouble believing, to wit: A guy with the exact same name as my husband, which is not a common name at all, moved from Wyoming to the next block, and the digits in his address were the same digits as our address–1456/1546. Fortunately, he was born on a different day, in a different year, and was a foot shorter than my husband, plus his ex-wife and the 3 kids he hadn’t been paying child support for were in Wyoming. It only took them a day and a half to sort all that out.)
Another: We were driving our old beater to the used car place to trade it in and get a new old beater. On the way I asked him, because I’d forgotten, what that car was that he’d really, really liked. He said it was a 1993 Infiniti J30, preferably the dark green one. We got to the lot, which was full of things like Hondas and Toyotas (which is what we were trading in), and there was the 93 Infiniti J30, green. Of course we had to buy it.
Still more recent: In 1996 I blazed through a first draft of a novel set in a hospital. Here are a few of the things I had to change:
Discussion of whether a blow job counted as sex, between two characters named Bill and Monica. Eliminated completely.
Two characters, discussing what kind of news would be needed to keep their hospital scandal off the front page, decided that Princess Di would have to die in a car crash (in my version, she was with RuPaul and the crash was in Aspen…but still). Had to eliminate. And this one, I had forgotten about, my agent was sending it out with this in it. I had to replace it with something pretty lame.
Mention of the actual soap star Susan Lucci, described as the one who always got nominated for Emmys and never won. I had to change this one in galleys. My editor called and said, “Guess what, she won, what do you want to do?” (I think she owes me. Lucci, not my editor.)
There were a couple of other things like that that I’ve forgotten.
So, no more references to popular culture! In what was going to be my fourth book, I had a character named Mort*, who was a rock climber, was taking flying lessons, and was the head of marketing, married to a woman named Jane*, with a 2-year-old daughter, and he was the first victim. I was ready to send this to my editor when my long-lost son, given up for adoption in another state decades before, found me and got in touch. His name was Mort* (not the name I had put on his birth certificate), his wife’s name was Jane*, they had a 2-year-old daughter, he was a rock climber, taking flying lessons, and was working in marketing, though not in a hospital.
And that wasn’t the reason I had to bag that whole book. I had to bag that whole book because in the finale the characters were chasing each other around the World Trade Center in NYC. (Scarily enough, if I hadn’t taken the time to change names and occupations of the victims, there would still have been a WTC when the ms. landed on my editor’s desk and this book might have actually gotten published. Not that it could possibly have done any worse than the one I wrote in its place.)
I realize that some of these things are not like the others, and that there are things in the air, particularly as regards popular culture. You could say, for instance, that probably since 1970 I’ve forgotten that between Janis and Jimi I took CCNY over and had it transferred to tape without incident, except, I didn’t.
*Not their real names, because they are not public figures, and nobody’s named Mort.
Interesting how **Dio **got all up in that other thread and essentially killed it, and now all the cool ghost stories are appearing in here.
Coincidence? I think not.
Haven’t read the entire thread so I don’t know if this has been responded to yet but we can artificially create near death experiences in controlled environments in centrifuges. There’s nothing supernatural about them. Sorry.
The mods won’t allow the posting and discussion of near death experience research on this board. If they did you would quickly realize your above post is totally wrong and false.
candyman-Candyman-CANDYMAN!!
Ghosts present a problem for investigators-their appearences are often random, and do not seem to bear any relation to their supposed origin (the spirits of deceased humans who died violent deaths). For example, the Gettysburg Battlefiled ought to be crawling with ghosts-yet there are no reports of same.
Why ghosts hang around uninhabited houses is a mystery…if they are unaware of humans, then it might make sense - but if they are, then why don’t they hange around where people are?
I’ll believe in ghosts when I see one.
Not mention hospitals; they should be ghost central, yet there is no haunted hospital meme.
Ghosts are earth bound spirits. For some reason they have a strong attachment to the physical. Most people go into the spiritual dimension when they die, so only a small percentage stay, and are called ghosts. Even these ghosts will at some point give up their attachment and return to the spiritual dimension.
Your source for this information is…?
I can guarantee you that, if you search hard enough, you will find ghosts.
I can make the same guarantee for unicorns, jackalopes and Lex Luthor.
Hmmmm. Well it is true that I had a bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato to eat that day. That *may *explain it…
And how did you come to this conclusion? Did you just make this up and it sounds good to you so you believe it? Or did you read it somewhere where somebody else just made it up and you decided it sounds good?