Post your ghost stories here, and I will debunk them

[kopek]

I’m not good at setting quotes clearly here to continue thoughts. so my apologies for this being sloppy.

I wrote: In other words, expanding “coincidence” to debunk the anecdote given may be a little more problematical.

To which Marley wrote:

@Marley23

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.

Or the blanket moved because of the ghost/cat she saw walking around on it?

To paraphrase Tripolar slightly, I tend to look more to/for the scientific side of coincidence. My mailman and I meet (true story) in the lobby of a motel a thousand miles from home or a man dies the same day as his cat. That isn’t “wow - how freaky” so much as an exercise in mathematical probability. Given the time, some paper, and the will to do so, I can set the debunking of that being supernatural to paper and hand it to you. It is possible that like the “birthday trick” (going x number of people and finding two with the same birthday) I could even duplicate the event.

But as lekatt’s daughter cannot prove herself I still contend that disproving her is equally impossible. Unless we want to fall back on the mantra of “it defies all the laws of physics” or its variation “it defies all the laws of the physical universe”. And that is a pretty weak approach because we seem to keep finding that the laws of physics (and the universe) may not be as “carved in stone” as we would wish.

I am far from an Ancient but since I cleared college it looks like things can indeed exceed the speed of light (just not us), Black Holes can exist, and it is possible to create machines microscopic in nature. All of those clearly defied the laws of physics as Drs Janus and Neumann (sic?) taught them. So “ghosts”? Well, I don’t know that they exist and as I have said before I don’t really know if I think they exist. Maybe the words “subatomic phenomena not yet recognized” should be substituted for “ghost”. But so far this thread hasn’t provided the debunking promised. We have at least fought ignorance though so I’ll give the OP a 50% for a midterm grade and wait to see how the finals come out.

[lekatt]

@Hampshire

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?

I didn’t come to any conclusion, people who have near death experiences are shown all the information about how the universe was made and how everything works. All questions are answered. When you come back into the physical it is impossible to remember everything you learned. That is one thing I remembered. Believe it or not, matters not to me.

[Leaffan]

I once had a dream that Bob Hope died. Then he did die. Twenty-some years later. Freaked me the hell out.

[Marley23]

@kopek

But as lekatt’s daughter cannot prove herself I still contend that disproving her is equally impossible.

I’ve made that point several times. Given the two explanations, I favor the the theory that the blanket moved and a very tired person thought she saw something. It’s much simpler than speculating that some part of the dead cat magically appeared in some place the cat had never been at the time the cat’s owner was dying, which the cat also knew about. That story requires us to either throw up our hands and say “it’s a mystery!” or explain several things that are impossible in the world as we know it.

[Astral_Rejection]

Here’s my story. No debunking needed, I know exactly what happened.

When I was 12, I was staying in a hotel out of town with my parents. That night, I fell asleep, but I was awoken again by huge blinding lights. I couldn’t move - some force was holding me still. I couldn’t even open my eyelids, my head was locked in place, and my arms were equally held captive.

I was overpowered by the sense of something in the room with me. More accurately, several somethings. I could tell they were all around the bed, lined up, staring down at me. Were they aliens? That would explain the bright light, and how they got in the room, and how they were holding me completely motionless. Panicked, I tried my hardest to move, but I couldn’t. The feeling of them watching me got stronger. They were getting close. Reaching out for me.

And then they were gone, and suddenly I could move again.

Freaky, right? Turns out, not so much. I suffer from Sleep Paralysis, which is characterized by hallucinations and a sense of paranoia and dread. Your body wakes up during sleep paralysis fits, but still thinks it’s sleeping. As a result, your brain is sending out chemicals that keep your muscles from moving so you don’t hurt yourself while dreaming. It’s terrifying while it happens, but it passes quickly.

Sometimes I wonder how many “alien abduction” stories can be explained away by sleep paralysis? I’m rare - I get them about once a month - but I’ve heard before (no idea if it’s true) that everybody will have at least one incident of sleep paralysis sometime in their life. I did some research the day after that first sleep paralysis encounter and figured out what happened, but how many people have never even heard of it?

[nilum]

@Astral_Rejection

Here’s my story. No debunking needed, I know exactly what happened.

When I was 12, I was staying in a hotel out of town with my parents. That night, I fell asleep, but I was awoken again by huge blinding lights. I couldn’t move - some force was holding me still. I couldn’t even open my eyelids, my head was locked in place, and my arms were equally held captive.

I was overpowered by the sense of something in the room with me. More accurately, several somethings. I could tell they were all around the bed, lined up, staring down at me. Were they aliens? That would explain the bright light, and how they got in the room, and how they were holding me completely motionless. Panicked, I tried my hardest to move, but I couldn’t. The feeling of them watching me got stronger. They were getting close. Reaching out for me.

And then they were gone, and suddenly I could move again.

Freaky, right? Turns out, not so much. I suffer from Sleep Paralysis, which is characterized by hallucinations and a sense of paranoia and dread. Your body wakes up during sleep paralysis fits, but still thinks it’s sleeping. As a result, your brain is sending out chemicals that keep your muscles from moving so you don’t hurt yourself while dreaming. It’s terrifying while it happens, but it passes quickly.

Sometimes I wonder how many “alien abduction” stories can be explained away by sleep paralysis? I’m rare - I get them about once a month - but I’ve heard before (no idea if it’s true) that everybody will have at least one incident of sleep paralysis sometime in their life. I did some research the day after that first sleep paralysis encounter and figured out what happened, but how many people have never even heard of it?

I also have had a similar experience. Not being able to move and not being able to wake myself from bad dreams.

When I was much younger I would often wake from a dream and still see parts of the dream in my normal vision. I would also have a hard time ‘returning to reality’ after dreams. My mother would find me talking about spaceships and dinosaurs (things I often dreamed about) as if they were real things. “When does the spaceship leave, Mom.”

I also had hallucinations while awake, such as the ‘My Buddy’ doll incident in the first post.

My latest episode happened after a seizure. I woke to see an extremely tall, black figure in my room as I opened my eyes. It was so tall, what appeared to be his head was cramped up against my ceiling, eerily looking down at me.

Even now thinking about it gives me the creeps, but I know it was just a hallucination.

I won’t mention the number of drug-related hallucinations I’ve had, though. Maybe a separate thread

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Fear_Itself

There is no evidence that it does.

So you believe that absence of evidence is evidence of absence?

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

You have to define your terms first. What the hell does “disembodied essence” mean? Where does this “essence” reside in the body and what is it made of?

I don’t know, people have been asking for the physical location of the soul for ages and they haven’t had any luck either?

We know that consciousness cannot continue to exist when the brain is dead because we know for a fact (as certainly as we know aerodynamics) that consciousness is caused be the brain and is dependent on it and is part of it.

So you think we know as much about how the human brain as we do about aerospace engineering? I have 8 doctors in my family and they all claim that we know a little something about the human body and precious little about the human brain. We make all sorts of assumptions based on our observations but when we try to apply what we think we know, the theories do not prove to be very robust.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Astral_Rejection

Here’s my story. No debunking needed, I know exactly what happened… I suffer from Sleep Paralysis, which is characterized by hallucinations and a sense of paranoia and dread.

@nilum

I also have had a similar experience. Not being able to move and not being able to wake myself from bad dreams.

It may not be common in the states but it is common enough in other countries that they have a common phrase to describe it (kinda like we have the phrase deja vu). It happens to me every few years but it happens to my wife much more frequently.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@Hilarity_N.Suze

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.

There’s really nothing here that rises above the level of unremarkable coincidence. Some of it doesn’t even rise that high. You wrote about Susan Lucci and then she won an Emmy? Not that amazing. Hendrix and Joplin died close together? Also not that amzing. Even the fact that both died after you taped their albums isn’t amazing since they had basically the same fan base. Really it just amounts to you being a fan of both of them.

Doorbells ringing early in the morning always bring the police to mind, and that, in turn, brings a possible arrest to mind.

I was going to go through this post point by point, but honestly, there’s really nothing in it. It’s all just mild coincidence and confirmation bias.

[Marley23]

@Damuri_Ajashi

So you believe that absence of evidence is evidence of absence?

Eh. I think he stated fact: there’s no evidence of intelligent life anywhere else. That doesn’t mean intelligent life doesn’t exist anywhere else, just that we can’t see any evidence in the few places we are able to observe. According to some, it’s very likely that it exists on other planets just because there are so many other worlds. I think there’s a decent chance they are right, but that’s not based on direct evidence of intelligent life.

I don’t know, people have been asking for the physical location of the soul for ages and they haven’t had any luck either?

Because that also doesn’t exist.

So you think we know as much about how the human brain as we do about aerospace engineering? I have 8 doctors in my family and they all claim that we know a little something about the human body and precious little about the human brain.

What kind of doctors?

@Damuri_Ajashi

It may not be common in the states but it is common enough in other countries that they have a common phrase to describe it (kinda like we have the phrase deja vu).

I think the French would like to have a word with you about this.

[Sitnam]

@lekatt

The mods won’t allow the posting and discussion of near death experience research on this board.

What? Why?

[Marley23]

@Sitnam

What? Why?

Discussion of NDEs has always been allowed here, although I’m trying to keep the usual debate from breaking out in this thread. lekatt has been asked to stop using a collection of anecdotes (mostly from his blog) as a cite and insisting this is scientific research. See this post.

[Fear_Itself]

@Damuri_Ajashi

So you believe that absence of evidence is evidence of absence?

That’s where the safe money is bet. Otherwise, I would have to allow for the existence of all sorts of fantastic phenomena that have never been substantiated. My belief system allows me to change my beliefs when confronted with new information. Does yours?

[LouisB]

A very close friend of mine drowned; he was in Texas and I was in California at the time. He drowned in a local creek that we all used for a swimming pool and it was necessary to drag the creek with hooks in order to recover the body. His funeral was held in his hometown and not in mine before I returned to Texas, therefore I did not see the body. Nor did anyone I knew as his hometown was quite a drive from mine. In fact, I did not know he was dead and buried before I returned to Texas.

I clearly saw him standing at the foot of my bed two days later. His cheek was torn from the grappling hook that caught him. His mother, a few weeks later, told me where the hook caught him; what I saw matched her description exactly.

I’m sure of what I saw but what it was, I don’t know.

EDIT: The swimming party consisted of his family; none of my friends were present.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

Dream and/or edited memory.

[lekatt]

@Marley23

Discussion of NDEs has always been allowed here, although I’m trying to keep the usual debate from breaking out in this thread. lekatt has been asked to stop using a collection of anecdotes (mostly from his blog) as a cite and insisting this is scientific research. See this post.

My blog is a collection of articles about NDE research, that is where I store them. I did not write them. They are not anecdotes. When the research clearly shows consciousness lives after the death of the brain and body, that is when the threads were locked, or I was told to quit posting. Again I did not do the research, I merely discuss it. Simple case of if you don’t like the message, kill the messager.

The only link of mine you showed in your links, was Dr. Bruce Grayson, talking about his research to the United Nations.

[Astral_Rejection]

Another interesting thing I’ve read (and I can’t for the life of me remember where) was that unshielded electrical wiring (often found in old houses) caused vision impairment and a sense of foreboding or dread. I remember the writer of the article saying that these effects could explain why people feel “odd” in certain areas of a supposedly haunted house, or why they claim to see things at the edges of their vision, and so on. Anybody know the straight dope on this? Since I can’t remember the cite, I’m hoping someone will either back me up on this or explain why I’m wrong.

Edit: My user name is just a silly pun I thought up, but I have to admit it’s awfully apt for this thread.

[Little_Nemo]

Sorry, Dio, I had to make a choice between believing you or Melinda Gordon. And her breasts made a persuasive argument.

[Estilicon]

@begbert2

Believing in God is exactly like believing in Thor or Zeus. You have your god that you believe in due to having been taught to and seeing things that you think God did, and they have their gods they believe in due to having been taught to and seeing things that they thought Thor and Zeus did. There is literally no difference between the two of you, except that your god makes less sense than theirs.

I find fault to this argument. We can all agree that if God (or gods) truly exist then we, mortals as we are, can only have an imperfect knowledge about he (or them).
That being the case the belief in Zeus and Allah are not mutually contradictory. Both believe in a supernatural being, they differ in the details.
“The people of the book”, all agree that they believe in the same God.

[Hilarity_N.Suze]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

There’s really nothing here that rises above the level of unremarkable coincidence.

Well, I don’t know.

My son’s name: very common
His wife’s name: much less common
Fact that he has a daughter: common enough
His job, marketing: common enough
Hobbies: Rock climbing, very common in Colorado. Flying lessons, not so common, but not uncommon
Suburb he lived in: Well, lots of people live there
All these things together: Kind of amazing

The fact that all these things matched exactly, from a character I created, to a son I had not seen since I gave him up more than 30 years before in a different state? Oh, and who happened to turn up in my life right then? I don’t really see that as UNremarkable coincidence, and he even thought it was kind of a remarkable coincidence that we were now both living in the same state, to begin with, and the rest of it even more remarkable. If anything like this had ever happened to you, I’ll bet you would think it was amazing, too.

It’s true that not everything matched. My son did not look anything like the character (looked in my mind when I wrote him), and he didn’t work for a hospital.

On the other hand:

Originally posted by Jung (I think)
A German mother who photographed her infant son in 1914 left the film to be developed at a store in Strasbourg. In those days some film plates were sold individually. World War I broke out and unable to return to Strasbourg, the woman gave up the picture for lost. Two years later she bought a film plate in Frankfurt, over 100 miles away, to take a picture of her newborn daughter. When developed the film turned out to be a double exposure, with the picture of her daughter superimposed on the earlier picture of her son. Through some incredible twist of fate, her original film, never developed, had been mislabeled as unused, and had eventually been resold to her.

This is a famous example of a coincidence, and reading I’ve always thought, Hmm, which is more likely? The woman forgets to drop off the plate, and years later uses it again? Or she does drop it off, it miraculously moves from Strasbourg to Frankfurt, and gets sold, not to anyone else, but to her. But there are coincidences, to be sure.