Post your ghost stories here, and I will debunk them

[begbert2]

@InterestedObserver

Oh, MOST dreams I have don’t come true, natch. Just now and then. And actually, I DID keep a dream journal for several years, in which I would write first thing in the morning, and recorded a few which later came to pass. But the thing is, that wouldn’t be “proof” to anyone disinclined to accept precognition…hell, I could have written those passages anytime! And I don’t feel any need for “proof” that I dreamed something.

Well, I did say “at least for your own edification”, so at least *you *can be reasonably confident of when you wrote it. In my opinion this is the sort of thing you should seek proof for; it is nice and all to think you have a special ability, but it would be even better to know that you’re not having to delude yourself to maintain that belief, right?

@InterestedObserver

It’s just a weird little glitch I get sometimes, usually interesting but hardly earth-shattering. And in the one I recounted, it’s not as if I can CHANGE anything by having prior knowledge of it…hell, I usually don’t even know which are “regular” dreams and which are not until later (although, there can be a very different quality to “precognitive” dreams that sometimes tips me off.)

Fair 'nuff - presuming for a moment this is not something your memory is retroactively generating for your benefit, have you ever been in a situation where you find yourself adjusting your behavior to conform to a predictive dream? Or do you not find yourself having the opportunity to consciously effect the predicted events one way or the other? (Not that this would be proof either way of the provenance thereof; I’m just curious.)

@InterestedObserver

I think it’s possible the experience of Deja Vu could be related to precognition, in that the person experiencing it actually dreamed the event and forgot they dreamed it. Then, when they experienced it, it creates that incredibly vivid impression of memory because it IS a memory. The sensation is, for me, VERY similar to those snippets of dreams that would come true. (oh, and btw, they took/take the form of a visual “reel”, so to speak…I dream the events/dog/whatever EXACTLY as they appear later).

I think most of the time, deja vu is just a brain-fart, but man, it’s a pretty amazing one! :eek:

Yeah, I’ll just stick with the conventional explanation for deja-vu for now. And I wouldn’t think that there are two explanations for it; most likely if it’s sometimes precognitive, then it always is, and if it’s usually just a brain fart, then it probably always is. It just seems more likely to me than two separate similar things developing.

And I find myself doubting that you see things EXACTLY as they later appear - that’s the precise sort of thing that memories are unreliable at. Memories definitely have a tendency to adjust to meet expectations and to conform to one’s other beliefs, so why shouldn’t I suppose that your memories are doing this in regard to your dreams?

This is where your dream diary would come in - if you described the dreams in sufficient detail. If you wrote “dreamed: me winning lottery…dog crossing street…talking refridgerator”, then that doesn’t say much, but if you wrote “saw a short-haired brown-mottled terrier with a limp crossing the street against traffic and causing a car to have to brake suddenly”, then that could be compared with the cell-phone video you took of the event to confirm that your predictions have an accuracy beyond that explicible by random matches and confirmation bias.

@InterestedObserver

It’s always bugged me that this phenomenon is often spoken of as some vague feeling that you’ve been somewhere before, when ime, it is the very exact sensation that you have previously experienced every single detail of an experience and feel you know exactly what will happen next (and DO, in those moments).

You can’t blame us - most people who claim to be predicting things are vague as all get-out, mostly because they’re just spouting BS. I think you’d agree that even if you are really a representative of the emerging mutant population foretold by comics, it’s doubtlessly the charlatans that have shaped the public impression of such things.

@TriPolar

Are you referring to paranormal precognition, or just ‘subconcious’ precognition? I’ve precognized things, but realized I had enough information to make a guess, and may have done so without willful thought.

I am somewhat amenible to the idea of actual, bona-fide, psychic precognition - with a few caveats. First - it would obviously have a rational, scientifically explicible basis. Second and more interestingly, it could only work if the future was fixed and deterministic: otherwise there would be no future to receive signals from. In other words, InterestedObserver disproves free will!

If the future is already written out ahead of us, it would be at least theoretically possible for there to be some way to percieve it. It seems pretty unlikely for this to be something living organisms would evolve; after all it wouldn’t translate well into a useful survival skill, since one could never avoid any perils they predicted by it. Plus I wouldn’t expect it to be something only a small percentage of the species has; it would likely be all or nothing (and I’ve never experienced such a thing). And of course for all this to work it would require there to be a whole other to-date-undiscovered energy field or whatever to carry and transmit the images from the later portions of the timestream, which seems a touch unlikely.

However, while we’re clearly well into the realm of the improbable, none of this is actually impossible, the way souls and POE-defying gods are, so I’m still cool with it - more as interesting speculative fiction than anything else, but I’ll allow that it could, maybe possibly, be occuring in real life as well. Even though I don’t myself believe it is. (No offense, Observer.)

[lekatt]

@Fear_Itself

lekatt is just making it up as he goes along, and sometimes he forgets what he said. From two of his posts in the same thread last year:He either thinks nobody is watching, or he thinks mutually exclusive events are perfectly consistent. My money is on the former.

I tried real hard to find some connection between the quotes and the link you offered, but could find no connection at all. The quotes stand as I posted them.
Perhaps you could show me what you mean.

[lekatt]

@VinylTurnip

If there were a counter for the number of times you have misrepresented the term “theory” as it relates to science, it would have rolled over several times by now. Considering the vast number of times you have been corrected on this point, it is painfully clear that it is willful misrepresentation on your part.

I don’t generally support censorship and think that you actually serve a good purpose on the board, as an example of the depths to which ignorance can sink if left unchallenged— but if this were my board (or I had any sway) you’d have been banned after the first hundred times you decided to repeat this lie.

I don’t need to be told what the word theory means, related to anything. If science wants to change the definition of words to suit itself, I am not interested.

[Unauthorized_Cinnamon]

@begbert2

. . .
Having accumulated the account of the events, we list the possibilities.

1. You spontaneously died in your sleep, your spirit went a-wandering, your spirit was sent back, and the spontaneous damage that killed you was magically repaired.
2. You slept and had a dream.

Then we assess the likelihood of each possibility.

1. Highly irregular and improbable, by statistics alone.
2. Extremely probable; everybody sleeps and dreams.

Then we draw a conclusion:
Conclusion: The more probable outcome is more probable

[emphasis added] . . .

You realize what you’ve done, don’t you? You’ve invented LOLgic.

Anyway, while I think **Dio **is taking a very silly tack on this (“it wasn’t a ghost because ghosts don’t exist”), I do think that many people interpret mundane events as paranormal, because they don’t realize there is an alternative explanation. I love reading Joe Nickell’s work on this stuff, because he is quite rational, but he doesn’t treat people like idiots. He is quite empathetic and respectful, while investigating and finding perfectly normal explanations.

One group of mental foibles that’s really hard to separate out in these stories is selective memory, confirmation bias (including the inability to notice possible mundane explanations when one is disposed to ascribe an event to supernatural agency), “the van is always at the corner,” the vastly underestimated ability to create false memories (read the bit about Piaget - it’s cool!), and the tendency we have to fill in the blanks, whether for the explanation we favor or for alleged psychics.

Two stories I like:

There was a certain room that everyone at this company disliked. People complained of feeling unwell, having a lurking sense of foreboding, and even seeing apparitions out of the corners of their eyes when they spent time there. Vic was an engineer with the firm, and one night he was working in this room alone. He started feeling a sense of depression that seemed to be coming from an external source, not natural. Being of scientific bent, he checked every mundane source he could think of, looking for gas leaks and so forth. Nothing. Then there was a chill in the air, as he saw a figure appear in his peripheral vision, and come toward him. He was completely terrified. When he looked at the figure, it disappeared. At that point he left for home!

Turns out it was alow-frequency sound wave from a broken exhaust fan- low frequency standing waves are known to cause emotional and visual anomolies.
This one is from Joe Nickell, as far as I can remember from reading it in a magazine:

A family was having trouble with a “haunting.” Weird stuff was happening in the garage at times - IIRC, it was items being moved around when no one was there. They had a pool table in the basement, and at night you could sometimes hear a ghostly billiards game occurring. Then there was the time they were getting ready to cook, but had to go out, leaving a pan with butter in it on the (turned off) stove. They returned to find the pan sitting in the middle of the floor, with the butter still in it.

Turns out the teenage son knew his mother was jumpy and believed the house was haunted, and admitted he had done the stuff in the garage to freak her out. Also, the house was near a highway, and when big trucks went by, the vibrations would make the racked billiard balls jostle each other. It was soft enough that it was only noticed at night, when other sounds were absent. The vibrations also caused the pan to slide off the stovetop, and IIRC Joe experimented to demonstrate that a pan jiggled off like that could easily skitter, right side up, into the middle of the floor.

[lekatt]

@begbert2

So you’re of the opinion that it is literally impossible for any human anywhere to be mistaken about the causes or details of anything they personally experience?

Once I heard a car backfiring, but for a split-second thought it was a gunshot. Was it possible for me to have been wrong? If not, did the gun physically change into a backfiring car when I changed my mind?

Or is it just you and those who say things that affirm your opinions of the world that are infallible?

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.

[lekatt]

@in_hiding

Personal experience is worthless. It’s unreliable, it’s biased as hell towards the experiencing persons world view, it has been shown over and over again to be wrong. It’s also very convincing and very persuasive. It’s what makes this discussions so tedious.

I have the distinct memory of flying down the stairs of my parent’s house as a kid. I went to get something to drink in the kitchen. My room was in the second floor, the kitchen was in the first floor. I went to the stairs, and gently glided down to ground level. I didn’t dream this, it’s very real memory.

Of course it’s not true. I probably did dream this, of just imagined it. But my memory of it is very real. I also heared a monster in my room once. Probably a auditory hallucination, I don’t know. I saw aliens, UFOs, all sorts of things. But I realize that my perception of the world is flawed. And unless extraordinary perceptions can be tested and are proven to be real, some bug in my pattern recognition is far more likely that anything supernatural. Without some rigorous testing protocol, anecdotes are just stories.

You have to realize that your understanding of the world might be wrong. Your perception is not perfect, your memory is not perfect, you pattern recognition is not perfect. I strongly think that the vast majority of the experiences in this thread is a strong human pattern recognition combined with some coincidences - and if you consider what 6 billion people do and feel and think every day, some of this coincidences aren’t as unlikely anymore.

If your personal experiences are that bad, hire someone to take care of you to keep you from running into a telephone pole.

Mine are just fine.

[Kent_Clark]

I’d really like to have this debunked, because it has always weirded the hell out of me.

My wife and I were having dinner with my parents. At one point during dinner, my father gasped, shuddered and said that he suddenly had a vision of someone else sitting with us at the table, and then just as quickly disappearing. Neither my mother, my wife nor I had felt even the slightest disruption of the Force, but my father was quite upset. A few minutes later, he received a call that his father had just died.

My father was a rationalist. He did not believe in God, or an afterlife, and he sure as hell did not believe in ESP or psychic visions. Plus, he and his father were not particularly close, and his father, although very old, had not shown any signs of being ready to die. Still, he experienced what he experienced, and I was there to witness it firsthand.

I, for one, would welcome a rational explanation that doesn’t depend on ESP or ghosts.

[Unauthorized_Cinnamon]

@kunilou

I’d really like to have this debunked, because it has always weirded the hell out of me.

My wife and I were having dinner with my parents. At one point during dinner, my father gasped, shuddered and said that he suddenly had a vision of someone else sitting with us at the table, and then just as quickly disappearing. Neither my mother, my wife nor I had felt even the slightest disruption of the Force, but my father was quite upset. A few minutes later, he received a call that his father had just died.

My father was a rationalist. He did not believe in God, or an afterlife, and he sure as hell did not believe in ESP or psychic visions. Plus, he and his father were not particularly close, and his father, although very old, had not shown any signs of being ready to die. Still, he experienced what he experienced, and I was there to witness it firsthand.

I, for one, would welcome a rational explanation that doesn’t depend on ESP or ghosts.

Your dad probably saw movement out of the corner of his eye where no one should be, due to artifacts from wearing spectacles, a hair or thread in his close field of vision, or something equally normal. It can be startling and make you jump, giving you an adrenaline rush. Coincidentally (i.e., it happened to happen at the same time, but with no connecting reason), he soon received the call. Due to the emotional responses of the startle and the call so close together, he remembers them being connected with each other, and everyone (who of course is remembering this through the filter of knowing about the call) remembers his startle as “terror.”

Edit: you note that his dad hadn’t shown any signs of impending death, as though to explain away any interpretation of your dad’s “vision” of him as due to thinking about his dad and death, spirits, etc. But note that the vision didn’t have anything to do with his father. It wasn’t in the shape of his father, and no one associated the figure, whatever it was, with him, until the phone call came. This is exactly the kind of mental foible I was talking about above. Once everyone knew Granddad was dead, the previously unnamed figure came to be identified as him - but not before the call.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

Yeah, he didn’t say he saw his father. he said he saw “somebody.” He then artificially correlated that with the call about his father, even though there was no connection.

Had his father been ill for a while? Was his death unexpected? The stress of dealing with a dying parent or loved one can spin people out into some weird states of mind.

[TriPolar]

@kunilou

I’d really like to have this debunked, because it has always weirded the hell out of me.

My wife and I were having dinner with my parents. At one point during dinner, my father gasped, shuddered and said that he suddenly had a vision of someone else sitting with us at the table, and then just as quickly disappearing. Neither my mother, my wife nor I had felt even the slightest disruption of the Force, but my father was quite upset. A few minutes later, he received a call that his father had just died.

My father was a rationalist. He did not believe in God, or an afterlife, and he sure as hell did not believe in ESP or psychic visions. Plus, he and his father were not particularly close, and his father, although very old, had not shown any signs of being ready to die. Still, he experienced what he experienced, and I was there to witness it firsthand.

I, for one, would welcome a rational explanation that doesn’t depend on ESP or ghosts.

This is not debunking, but your father may have been reminded of a time past having dinner with his parents. You don’t mention your father connecting his ‘vision’ with his own father’s death before the phone call, so that could be ‘only a coincidence’. You may not have considered the possiblity of your grandfather’s passing imminent, but your father was older, and may have ‘subconciously’ realized the growing inevitability of his death. This could have been the cause of an emotional effect, that seems eerie because of the coincidental death.
The problem here is that we can’t reproduce the circumstances and perform tests. Your father may have witnessed the only verifiable instance of an actual ghost, but we have no way to find that out now. But there have been so many cases where a ghost story has been debunked that it’s hard to lend credence to individual anecdotes.
I’m wondering if you find the idea of a ‘mere coincidence’ to be disconcerting. These things don’t bother me that much, but some people seem driven to find an explanation for coincidences. You have to factor in the personal significance involved here as well. You could be experiencing seemingly less probable coincidences all the time without noticing them.

[tomndebb]

[ Moderator Note: ]

@lekatt

I don’t need to be told what the word theory means, related to anything. If science wants to change the definition of words to suit itself, I am not interested.

Actually, all language develops pretty much on its own, with specific disciplines borrowing words or creating neologisms for the purpose of having a consistent method of communication that everyone in the discipline or the community can understand. You do it with a number of words that you employ in the NDE-promoting community.

When you wander into a thread in which people are using a specific word in its appropriate context for the discipline being discussed and you deliberately use the same word with a different meaning and then deny the meaning in which it is being used by others, you are attempting to destroy the communication of that group. That is pretty much one good definition of trolling.

Now, I do not believe that you set out to misuse or distort the meaning of the word “theory” for the purpose of trolling, but it is pretty clear that you are aware that you are deliberately using the word in a way that no other participant in these conversations would use it. You are also aware that when you abuse the meaning of the word, in context, you know that it will provoke a fight. Given that understanding, you will now stop using the word in the manner that you have been.

If you wish to open a separate thread to discuss how the word “theory” should be employed in certain contexts, go ahead. If you keep interrupting threads that discuss scientific theory by using the word in a different manner to get a rise out of other posters, you will be Warned for trolling.

[ /Moderating ]

[Fear_Itself]

@lekatt

I tried real hard to find some connection between the quotes and the link you offered, but could find no connection at all. The quotes stand as I posted them.
Perhaps you could show me what you mean.

@lekatt

In the spirit world events happen simultaneously. So there is no past, future, time, and space, and no calendar.

@lekatt

Now even the smartest spirit will not give you the lottery numbers because the numbers are not known until drawn.

If everything happens at the same time in the spirit world, the numbers have always been drawn, and the spirits have always known what they are. If statement #1 is true, then statement #2 cannot also be true. These statements are mutually exclusive. Admit it, you screwed up.

[BigBertha]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

Were you the one with the toy vaccuum cleaner? You posted that it was “explained” (though you didn’t say how) so I thought that was the end of it.
You were unclear about whether you had been able to verify that it was definitely the toy. You said you heard it from another room and from the same room, but not whether you’d picked up the toy while the noise was going on pon and confirmed it for sure as the source. Suggestion can be powerful. Our brains interpret sights and sounds in ways that make sense to it.

Heaters and pipes, for instance, can make popping sounds. Hearing a heater fire up could sound like one of those popcorn vaccum cleaner toys.

Alternatively, there could have been something going on mechanically with the toy. That’s not unusual or extraordinary. I’d have to know something specifically about the mechanics to give a specific answer, though.

I do know that a lot of toys these days are programmed to turn on automatically at given intervals to try to stimulate kids to play with them. More than one of my kids’ toys has scared the shit out of me in the middle of the night.

Yeah, it was definitely the toy. No, it couldn’t have been anything else, it was a weird sound.
I touched it, but it wasn’t noising by then.
It was not meant to turn on by itself, only movement, so I jumped hard next to it, thinking there must be some logical explaination for it.
That should be everyones first thought.
Its unexplained to me, but long ago, so no biggie.

[Czarcasm]

@BigBertha

Yeah, it was definitely the toy. No, it couldn’t have been anything else, it was a weird sound.
I touched it, but it wasn’t noising by then.
It was not meant to turn on by itself, only movement, so I jumped hard next to it, thinking there must be some logical explaination for it.
That should be everyones first thought.
Its unexplained to me, but long ago, so no biggie.

Was your house pet free?
Was your house rodent free? Pets will play at night, as will wild rodents.

[Meatros]

@lekatt

You need to read my post again, I did not close the door on everything.

Is there anyone on this message board who can verify your experiences?

Otherwise,

The answer is obvious, nothing coming from you or anyone that wasn’t there would change anything.

Indicates that no amount of evidence or reason will change your mind.

[Meatros]

@Fear_Itself

If everything happens at the same time in the spirit world, the numbers have always been drawn, and the spirits have always known what they are. If statement #1 is true, then statement #2 cannot also be true. These statements are mutually exclusive. Admit it, you screwed up.

That’s how I read it too - I’m puzzled how Lekatt doesn’t see it.

It’s an obvious screw up, the question is, will he concede it?

[lekatt]

@tomndebb

[ Moderator Note: ]

Actually, all language develops pretty much on its own, with specific disciplines borrowing words or creating neologisms for the purpose of having a consistent method of communication that everyone in the discipline or the community can understand. You do it with a number of words that you employ in the NDE-promoting community.

When you wander into a thread in which people are using a specific word in its appropriate context for the discipline being discussed and you deliberately use the same word with a different meaning and then deny the meaning in which it is being used by others, you are attempting to destroy the communication of that group. That is pretty much one good definition of trolling.

Now, I do not believe that you set out to misuse or distort the meaning of the word “theory” for the purpose of trolling, but it is pretty clear that you are aware that you are deliberately using the word in a way that no other participant in these conversations would use it. You are also aware that when you abuse the meaning of the word, in context, you know that it will provoke a fight. Given that understanding, you will now stop using the word in the manner that you have been.

If you wish to open a separate thread to discuss how the word “theory” should be employed in certain contexts, go ahead. If you keep interrupting threads that discuss scientific theory by using the word in a different manner to get a rise out of other posters, you will be Warned for trolling.

[ /Moderating ]

Hi Tom, where were you when Drew Kit was being insulted and personally attacked by your mod friends. They ran him off the board. Is your appearance and your threats supposed to run me off the board. OK, your don’t need your lame excuse I will quit the thread so you and your friends can go back to bashing things you know nothing about.

[Marley23]

Drew Kit was not run off the board, lekatt. And if you want to talk about that issue, post about it in ATMB. There have been some productive discussions in this thread and I’m not interested in letting it get clogged up with whining. Any further posts about moderating within this thread will lead to warnings. If you have a complaint, go to ATMB.

[Unauthorized_Cinnamon]

@BigBertha

Yeah, it was definitely the toy. No, it couldn’t have been anything else, it was a weird sound.
I touched it, but it wasn’t noising by then.
It was not meant to turn on by itself, only movement, so I jumped hard next to it, thinking there must be some logical explaination for it.
That should be everyones first thought.
Its unexplained to me, but long ago, so no biggie.

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.)

[Shot_From_Guns]

@Czarcasm

You may think you are winning, but you are only playing with yourself.

That works on *at least *two levels.

@TriPolar

Sometimes you have declare victory and leave.

Or just punch people in the teeth until they stop being so damned stupid. Unfortunately, that’s a little bit hard to do over the internet.