There are have been times when grief is very common and the belief in ghosts and spirits increases. After the huge number of mens deaths during WW1 there was a generation of women who were mourning the loss of their husbands, sons and lovers.
There was a corresponding rise in Spirtualist churches, mediums and seances. Many of the fraudulent.
The interest in ghosts and the spirit world can be a result of the major social traumas like this.
Pareidolia can explain an incredibly large number of cases of seeing a person when there’s no one there.
Humans are just strongly wired to see faces in inanimate objects, shadows, wisps of fog or smoke, etc. (Remember houses of old were a lot smokier than modern houses.)
The best “ghost story” I’ve heard is from someone waking up during the night to see a clown exercising in their bedroom. The clown looked right at them and smiled. Incredibly creepy. Oh, and that was one of the first times that person had ever taken Ambien. Guess what drug can cause hallucinations?
It doesn’t take much of a mental glitch to cause stuff like this even among normal people.
If I asked you to prove that you are not Bill Clinton, you couldn’t do it?
The ill-conceived aphorism you can’t prove a negative is similar to absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, both are widely misunderstood and misapplied.
Proving a negative can be easy. It’s often just a matter of resources. It’s easy to prove that there is no elephant in my living room. It’s a little more difficult to prove that there is no elephant anywhere in a 1000 acre plot of land, but it can certainly be done with a systematic search.
It can be almost impossible to prove a universal negative, that there is no elephant anywhere within some huge unsearchable space. Similarly, a vague negative where the hypothesis is unclear is a trick to shift the burden of proof. See Russells’s Teapot. If someone can’t clearly specify what they mean by “ghost”, then of course it’s difficult to rule out all possible interpretations of the word, you end up with a meaningless unfalsifiable claim. People can keep moving the goalposts, eventually ending up with invisible undetectable ghosts that are indistinguishable from ghosts that don’t exist.
As I noted above, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence when the hypothesis predicts that we should expect to see evidence yet we see none. Per the xkcd comic, most human in the First World beings now carry a camera around with them 24 hours a day, yet we have no photographic evidence of ghosts.
Really? Cite?
Look, I am pretty skeptical when it comes to Ghosts, since just about all the evidence can fit on the head of a pin.
But I have been in on two “Haunted house sit ins” as the designated Skeptic, and I can say creepy things do happen. Nothing I would call proofs of ghosts, but odd noises, weird lights, and having your hair stand on end.
Perhap some sort of "psychic energy residual ", but altho there is nothing solid , I am not gonna say that they are all 100% bullshit. Unless of course it’s one of those ghost shows on cable TV- they are all 100% bullshit.
Even you don’t know?
When scientists say this they are referring to specific existence claims. Otherwise negatives can be proved or disproved all the time when certain criteria are met. Use a descriptive term and limit the search area. E.g., proving Item A is or is not in a shoebox would be very simple. Not so, if the term wasn’t descriptive, or if the search included having to look in the entire universe.
I don’t know about ghosts, but I do know that there is more to some phenomenon than simply self delusion. People can pick up on and project things in a far more interesting way than we normally think of. The basic thing people get wrong is in thinking being able to identify potential causitive factors is the same thing as eliminating all other potential factors, or as dismissing the event itself. Just putting a particular label on things doesn’t automatically make them not real, objective, and powerful.
Not dead people. Maybe memories of dead people.
I think everyone here makes great points.
The only thing I’d add is to go back to OP’s original post:
Can you give some examples of the ghost stories you find “rather striking”? I still love reading about these things and I’ve found in that in every single ghost or supernatural story I’ve ever looked at in any detail the reality is never what is reported in popular media.
When you read more detail from unbiased sources (i.e.: sources that aren’t trying to sell you a book, or get you watch their TV show or movie or Youtube video) you find out the “supernatural” part of the story was often debunked (e.g.: Enfield poltergeist) or proven later to have never happened (e.g.: Amityville Horror, Bell Witch), but that’s excluded from the “supernatural” pop media version of the story.
I’ve also found this to be true of every story about “Ancient aliens” & UFOs. The way they’re told, you walk away saying, “OMG, there is no other possible conclusion than aliens.” Then if you look into the story beyond the skewed view the TV programs provide, you realize that in every single case it’s very explainable without alien involvement.
Back to my challenge to the OP - What are the “striking stories” you mention?
Sleep paralysis is a real thing that may explain some ghost sightings, as well as “alien abductions” and “demonic possessions”:
As for ghost hunters…I shot a ghost hunt once. I quickly discovered that keying my walkie talkie would goose their instruments. Whenever things got slow I’d give some instructions to the crew…
It’s kind of pathetic that ghosts are now reduced to cold spots and “electrical anomalies.” If these really were caused by ghosts, I’d be like, you ghosts are pathetic, please cool my beer and charge my phone.