I don’t care if it was my dead grandmother offering me a plate of cookies, or a blood thirsty demon, they would both scare the hell out of me. Why? Because according to my world view neither is possible. To see either would mean one of two things, A. Everything I believe in is false, or B. I’m suffering from severe psychiatric problems. Neither would be pleasant.
But I don’t lay in bed worrying about ghosts , because I don’t believe in them. That’s all the more reason why it would shake me up so bad if I ever saw one. Flying pink elephants would have the same effect.
People are frightened by things that don’t fit into their understanding of the world. Adapting your world view to make a better fit when something new comes along is not a bad thing, but why shape it around something that I have no evidence or personal experience of? Testimony of others? HA!!!
A relevant quote from Shakespeare describing why one should be afeared of ghosts – they can fool you, lead you into danger, and make you insane.
Oh, and WalkingDeadTacoGuy, you seem like a nice enough guy and all, but if you persist in offering those kinds of “observations,” you’re going to have a really rough time on these boards. Just a friendly heads-up.
You may choose to believe we are living in some kind terrarium or Matrix style construct or even as the fantasy of a giant deranged mongoose. The fact that I think the world exists is proof enough for me that it does, in fact, exist.
The difference between faith and logic is that logic (by definition) DOES usually add up. The difference between religeon and science is that in science, things are observable and reproducable. And when they aren’t, it’s usually because we don’t have all the information. The laws of the universe are never wrong. Our interpretation of them may be.
For example, if you said “prove to me trees exist”. I could go outside, cut down a tree, and say here.
If you say, “well, that’s easy. I can see a tree. Prove to me Hydrogen exists”. Well, that’s a little harder because you can’t see, touch or smell Hydrogen. However, I can go on and on about periodic tables and elements and molecular weights and so on. I can produce some hydrogen from tap water for you. And I can show you the how the physical properties of this gas we call Hydrogen are always the same, blah, blah, blah. Does it take a certain leap of faith. Sure. but we can ALWAYS reproduce the results.
As for ghosts and spirits, how come after 1,000’s of years, we still don’t really have proof that ghosts exist? I’m not saying that means they don’t. Scientists don’t have hard evidence we can travel faster than light, however many believe we can.
All I’m saying is that if ghosts or spirits or God exists, they probably have some kind of physical “rules” they must follow, just like the rest of the universe.
I think Taco Guy’s point might be a little more subtle than that. Your senses tell you that you’re touching a tree, viewing a tree, and even smelling a tree, but how is that different from last night’s bad dream, where you were touching, viewing and smelling a 50-foot incarnation of John Wayne in a body stocking dancing the lambada? At the time, you were convinced that it was real, too.
For that matter, how do you know that “you” aren’t really just a brain in a fluid-filled jar, being fed sensory input by some “evil genius”? Or the people around you aren’t simply shadows on the wall of a cave?
Maybe we get freaked out by ghosts because deep down we sense that they’re real, living outside the illusion, and we’re not.
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After thinking about it . . . nah.
Probably because the have been conditioned to through movies and television. The house my wife and I rented when we first got married was inhabited by a ghost, we are firmly convinced, and a helpful one at that. On several occasions, she (I believed it to be a woman) found things we were looking for and would place them on the bed in the guest room. I tried occasionally, over the course of that year, to get her to reveal herself but she never obliged. I was disappointed.
I just saw the movie “Ghost Story” last week and had the same question. All I could come up with was the obvious intangible-super-villain stuff, for example:[li]
[li]Taunting you, until you charged at it, only to find that it was standing in front of and obscuring a stairway or a cliff.[/li]
[li]Sneaking up invisibly behind you while you’re using power tools and yelling “BOO!”. Popping up from the back seat when you’re driving on a narrow winding road and yelling “BOO!”. Etc.[/li]
[li]There’s a classic story by Fredric Brown called Martians, Go Home! about intangible Martians who show up and can’t do anything to us but heckle. It starts to drive us nuts (it also puts a crimp in most people’s love lives, when little green guys are providing a running, sarcastic commentary on your…technique). Ghosts could do that.[/li]
[li]I suppose that if the ghost is capable of following you, the ghost could kill you by not letting you get any sleep. (you CAN die from lack of sleep, right?)[/li]
[li]The ghost could follow you into an airport and, standing invisibly behind you, yell “I’ve got a bomb!”. Imagine what an imaginative ghost could do to your personal, social and business life using this technique.[/li]
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Outside of that sort of thing, I don’t see much that ghosts could do.
I am a parapsychologist. I have been on Unsolved Mysteries and have done more magazine/radio/newspaper interviews than I can count. I’m also finishing up an EdS in community counseling (have my MA already) and focus specifically on grief counseling. I may be able to offer a bit of insight here. =)
First off, I have been having experiences since I was 4. They still freak me out. I relate it to something said during (of all things) the movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy gets cramps when around vampires… she reacts to the “unnaturalness” of them. My theory is that there are two parts of your brain… the SAT part and the fear part. No matter what, the fear part always wins out. You can stand there in the midst of a sighting, cataloguing details (“The spectre appears translucent with a minimal degree of white glow around it…”), but in the end you realize this ISN’T NORMAL and the urge to run screaming takes over. You simply react to the “unnaturalness” of the situation. Whether because it doesn’t gel with your belief system or because you have an innate fear of the bad things that the dead coming back portends, you’re still going to freak out. It’s been 24 years for me, and I still can’t get used to it. Of course, that might have more to do with the fact that more than once I’ve been unable to tell the difference between who’s real and who’s not. Someone disappearing during a conversation or walking right through you is very disconcerting.
Incidentally, there have been no documented cases in the acceptable literature of a ghost hurting someone. People hurting themselves, yes. Running into things while running away, giving themselves heart attacks and strokes, but not actually being hurt by the non-corporeal entity. It just doesn’t work that way.
Oh, and one other thing. Poltergeists aren’t ghosts. Forget everything you learned during the movie. We don’t even call them poltergeists anymore. But that’s for another thread.
I gotta rephrase my earlier post, because I’m not sure if I made my point correctly. I think there are several, traditional reasons for fearing ghosts:
–A person who comes back as a ghost is someone who was unable to “go on” to the next plane (Heaven in Christianity, reincarnation, and so on). This usually indicates that the individual was not very nice in his/her life, so we fear them.
–Ghosts are also seen as creatures controlled by an evil entity, and seek to harm us. I guess this heads into demon territory.
As I mentioned earlier, some cultures view ghosts as products of violent or dishonorable deaths. For example, in Vietnamese folklore, women who died childless were condemned to come back as ghosts and haunt their fertile sisters. They were often blamed for miscarriages or crib death.
I think the reason we have lost the fear of ghosts today is due primarily to the media. After years of Casper the Friendly Ghost, or “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir”, ghosts traditional roles have been trivialized.
I’m not afraid of ghosts, I’m afraid of my fellow man. I’ve never heard of a ghost driving a truck stocked with fertilizer and fuel oil up to a Federal office building and killing nearly 200 people. I’ve also never heard of a ghost killing people in the name of God, hating me because of my race, trying to convince me that their economic system is the correct one, that they had to destroy a village in order to save it, that trees cause pollution, or that my teeth really could be whiter. Ghosts - I don’t have anything to fear from them. Its the living that are the scary ones.
Do you claim any of this makes you an expert on ghosts?
Have you got any physical evidence of any of these experiences?
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘acceptable literature’, but surely there are no documented cases of ghosts.
I don’t mean to offend, but if you make dramatic claims such as ‘ghosts have walked through you’, then it would be good to have some supporting physical evidence.
Nope. But here’s what probably does: my two year study on sociological and psychological effects of belief in the paranormal; my six month study comparing the psychical sensitivity of animals to humans; my one year study on societal and familial upbringing’s role in paranormal belief; my multi-discipline BA degree in Psychology/Sociology/Anthropology/Parapsychology; my intensive training at the Rhine Research Center; my journal articles; my MA degree in Psychology with a focus on death and dying, religious rites, and belief systems; my additional years of schooling for my EdS which also focus on these topics; my book on possession and exorcism that will likely be published in the next year; my 10 years of field work… Oh, and the fact that a good number of people in a position to know think I’m as close to being an expert as there is. But I didn’t want to waste time in my original post for all that.
I have some pictures. Probably not anything that would convince the Amusing Randi, but I don’t feel the need to please him. That’s not why I do this.
Acceptable literature: Journal of Parapsychology. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. Journal of the Society for Psychichal Research. Thanatos. The Archives of Scientists’ Transcendent Experiences. Journal of Scientific Explorations. European Journal of Parapsychology. To name a few. And yes, there are documented cases of hauntings as well as thoroughly documented cases of poltergeists.