Do you believe in ghosts? If so, what was your experience?

I have seen many places that had the reputation of being haunted. Like many others, these places had a very strange feel about them, sometimes bordering on very wrong sensations. But having hard evidence of ghosts was never truly made. When you consider the immaterial nature of the subject, science is having a very time get proof. But still, an old theatre at night downtown, the evil basement of a farm outside the city limits, cemetaries all have been the places to go if you want to have paranormal experiences. European castles & cities are filled with ghosts & haunted places. The seas of the world have haunted waters. Even Disney World has its ghosts...

In Doom, the flaming skull is a nice ghostly presence, but could it have better looks? What about the revenant?

...there must be a ghostbuster.wad somewhere... 

16 hours ago, ducon said:

 

No, you can’t say that you know the truth but you can say that you believe in what the truth is.

You would be able to know what the truth is when you will have proven what you say. For the moment, you just have a testimony and it’s the lowest argument in science (pyramid of scientific evidence).

Your testimony is below the lower floor of the pyramid:

You mean we can only know the truth by the scientific method and that it's always reliable?

On 9/4/2021 at 1:22 PM, Dubbag said:

thats fucking terrifying

Even though it happened several years ago it still gives me goosebumps whenever I think about it. I don't know what it was. Maybe it was my imagination, maybe my brain had a glitch, or maybe it was something genuinely spooky. I'll never know for sure.

4 hours ago, lwks said:

You mean we can only know the truth by the scientific method and that it's always reliable?

Nobody should say that he knows the truth, because the truth is a limit that can’t be reached.

Anyway, I think that the scientific method is the best way to approach it and that personal testimony is one of the worst ones.

Socrates put it well: “I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.”

As research for this thread, last night I stayed in the Most Haunted Hotel in the Fucking World, and not a thing. I was just a few doors away (Room 507) from where it all is supposed to happen, and I used the elevator on my own, just to test that theory too. Well OK, when it stopped on the 4th floor, the door seemed to take longer to close than usual, so I suppose that's proof of something.

I also stopped by America's Scariest/Creepiest Motel, in the same town. "Pics or it didn't happen"? Sure...

Parked deliberately badly. I've seen how clowns drive those little cars.

54 minutes ago, ducon said:

 

Nobody should say that he knows the truth, because the truth is a limit that can’t be reached.

Anyway, I think that the scientific method is the best way to approach it and that personal testimony is one of the worst ones.

Haha this sounds terrifyingly like a statement of truth friend. If the truth can't be reached is true then how would you know it? That's a contradiction.

8 minutes ago, Grazza said:

As research for this thread, last night I stayed in the Most Haunted Hotel in the Fucking World, and not a thing. I was just a few doors away (Room 507) from where it all is supposed to happen, and I used the elevator on my own, just to test that theory too. Well OK, when it stopped on the 4th floor, the door seemed to take longer to close than usual, so I suppose that's proof of something.

 

I also stopped by America's Scariest/Creepiest Motel, in the same town. "Pics or it didn't happen"? Sure...

Parked deliberately badly. I've seen how clowns drive those little cars.

Nice, now you can say that you visited "haunted places" and did not have any paranormal experiences.

18 minutes ago, lwks said:

Haha this sounds terrifyingly like a statement of truth friend. If the truth can't be reached is true then how would you know it? That's a contradiction.

It’s known as the Socratic paradox. Maybe the truth can be reached, but even if it can, that’s a theoretical - it doesn’t mean we ever have.

To put it a different way: it’s more honest if one admits they do not know rather than filling in the blank with assumptions, wishful thinking, etc etc. The closest thing we have to eradicating opinion and bias and such is the scientific method. Since we are humans and are fundamentally emotional creatures, “true objectivity” is only theoretical. With all this in mind, it is wisest to admit a hole in knowledge rather than to fill it in with something that doesn’t hold up to basic scrutiny.

Personally, I don’t care one way or another. I accepted years ago that human beliefs have basically no relationship to logic whatsoever, it’s pretty much entirely emotionally driven. As long as people don’t try to codify hoodoo into law, I can live with it. Just trying to clarify the point ducon is making. It’s a sound one.

My general opinion about the supernatural, be it ghosts or gods or anything else, is simple:

• Either it can interact with us, and therefore we can interact with it, and that makes it not supernatural but natural;
• Or it can't interact with us, and we can't interact with it, and that makes them irrelevant.

Note that by interaction I mean in a broad sense, notably observation is interaction. Looking at distant galaxies through a telescope counts as an interaction.

Only the ghost of Ben Kenobi, and possible Anakin if he can be redeemed.

It was very cold at the time, and I had a sudden urge to travel to the dank swamps of Dagobah.

44 minutes ago, ducon said:

 

Nobody should say that he knows the truth, because the truth is a limit that can’t be reached

Anyway, I think that the scientific method is the best way to approach it and that personal testimony is one of the worst one.

I agree. While i have had some odd experiences as detailed above, i freely admit they objectively prove nothing. But at the same time I think some really hard-core skeptics should ease off a bit and be a bit more accepting that whatever did happen it was real to that person. Offer some alternative explanations sure but be respectful about it. Not saying you have been disrespectful ducon i should clarify. Just talking more generally. 

7 hours ago, lwks said:

You mean we can only know the truth by the scientific method and that it's always reliable?

Mostly, yes.

Something considered true can be proofen by many and can be replicated.

When a scientific Method proofs something wrong, it brings us closer to the Truth with every Step.

So much that it becomes nearly impossible to find something wrong about it.

It is more that you find Additions to that, for example, a physical Law.

A Ghost Story can't be proofen by others and can't be replicated.

Every serious Atempt to collect Data leads into nothing.

So your only Source is the Person or Group telling the Story.

And thah leads into human Behaviour.

Human Minds are brutally simple, we want to explain everything and if we can't, we connect it to the next Thing we have learned.

We see for example Faces in Bushes and other Textures.

Thats why we came up with Thunder Gods sitting on top of Mountains.

Our early Ancestors conected Clouds to high Mountains.

The unbelievable Force of Storms and Thunders had to come from a God sitting on the Mountain, since the Clounds came from there.

Edit:

When Humans panick, they spread their Fear and Thinking fastly into their Flock (is this the Right Word?)

2 hours ago, Grazza said:

Well OK, when it stopped on the 4th floor, the door seemed to take longer to close than usual, so I suppose that's proof of something.

Yes. Either it's haunted by the ghost of a trolling dickhead or the owners need to up their maintenance game.

42 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

 

I agree. While i have had some odd experiences as detailed above, i freely admit they objectively prove nothing. But at the same time I think some really hard-core skeptics should ease off a bit and be a bit more accepting that whatever did happen it was real to that person. Offer some alternative explanations sure but be respectful about it. Not saying you have been disrespectful ducon i should clarify. Just talking more generally. 

A skeptic accepts what the guy feels of course (he said he saw something), but he does not accept the guy’s conclusions (he saw a ghost).

Alternative conclusions are somewhat like alternative facts to me, ie, often dubious.

No, I don't believe in them.
When I was a kid I thought they were a combination of a demon and a spirit, now I think they're fictional.

2 hours ago, Doomkid said:

It’s known as the Socratic paradox. Maybe the truth can be reached, but even if it can, that’s a theoretical - it doesn’t mean we ever have.

 

To put it a different way: it’s more honest if one admits they do not know rather than filling in the blank with assumptions, wishful thinking, etc etc. The closest thing we have to eradicating opinion and bias and such is the scientific method. Since we are humans and are fundamentally emotional creatures, “true objectivity” is only theoretical. With all this in mind, it is wisest to admit a hole in knowledge rather than to fill it in with something that doesn’t hold up to basic scrutiny.

 

Personally, I don’t care one way or another. I accepted years ago that human beliefs have basically no relationship to logic whatsoever, it’s pretty much entirely emotionally driven. As long as people don’t try to codify hoodoo into law, I can live with it. Just trying to clarify the point ducon is making. It’s a sound one.

You can't just leave it there, it's a paradox, it must be solved. When he says "I know that I know nothing" it doesn't really mean that the amount of things he knows is literally zero, you can figure out the vague meaning, but when affirming truth claims like "you can't know truth" you can't avoid logical inconsistencies. His point is not a sound one, X cannot be not X, it's a basic law of logic. Even if it were true, by admiting this kind of thinking at the very least one loses the ground on which to stand on to make truth claims about the scientific method and whatnot.

52 minutes ago, Azuris said:

 

Mostly, yes.

 

This doesn't make sense, there's no such a thing as "only mostly know", what do you mean?

I worked for a ghost tour business in Saint Augustine, FL for a little over a year. SA is the oldest city in America and is widely known for its "haunted" locations. Locations so haunted that tour guides resort to made up or dramatized stories to fool tourists and foreigners into believing everything they say and giving them just enough intrigue to keep listening and coming back for more.

PROTIP: Any lighthouse or abandoned castle will look creepy at 1:00AM.

To answer the question, I don't know, but I've become desensitized to it all.

https://www.advantour.com/uzbekistan/legends/tamerlane-curse.htm

When I was a kid I've believed this. As many other people. At present time it doesn't make big sense for me, because for starting a war there are a lot of events must be happened earlier, not only opening the cursed tomb of the Asian God of War.

Nah, never had any experience. And still I am fascinated reading about ghosts or UFOs or other weird things. But never had something to convince me.

I like some healthy skepticism, I don't like the "must debunk" kind of skepticism.

So my best approach is to read stories for amusement and think it like that: These are things people did experience. But is what they experienced what is really there?

And that means, their reality of their experience could be from mundane things like hoaxes or hallucinations to something really strange that is elusive and we can't detect.

Two things come in my mind when I read all that stuff. The approach of John Keel and Jacques Vallee, where they view the UFO phenomena not as extraterrestrial, but as a part of a greater phenomenon that manifested in different ways at different times. They've seen similarities between ancient myths and modern aliens or UFOs, between elves and fairies and dragons and religious apparitions. It could be either that people project whatever was in the culture without anything being there really, OR there is something there that affects the perception of people, even presents itself as the thing people expect to see at every era.

At the same time, I was reading a book called The Bicameral Mind. It's just a brain/consciousness evolution theory, that discusses the possibility of most people in BC times living in a state of having daily hallucinations (which they saw as messages from gods on how to act on a daily basis). According to this book, this through evolution has mostly dissapeared, but there are few people who can have hallucinations rarely. It talks of a study, of something like 10% of people, without schizophrenia or anything, that in rare occasions (like in extreme stress) could have very vivid hallucinations. That blew my mind (and I need to see if there is more research into this, as the book was in the 70s), it means that a small percentage of people, can rarely have vivid audiovisual hallucinations (without even being sick). So a healthy person you trust can say "I saw it! I saw it with my own eyes very clearly and I wasn't dreaming or under the influence".

My thought is, that can happen. A very credible witness can describe a vivid vision of a UFO landing 5 meters from him, describe the metallic details of the craft, entities coming out, talking to him, telling him they are from that star system, etc, etc. That can happen, the witness really believes it, he saw it clearly, no medical history of anything, very trustworthy, yet it could be this remnant of the bicameral mind rarely still affecting few people. That also explains why the stories of people where not photographic evidence were taken is so close contact where they can see details of the encounter, while the actual photos are always very far away lights that could be anything. Because the first could be in the minds of people who genuinely have the experience but what they experience might possibly not have been there in a physical form to even take a photographic proof of it. Unless it is in the mind of people, yet something in the environment does affect the mind of people.

1 hour ago, Azuris said:

Something considered true can be proofen by many and can be replicated.

When a scientific Method proofs something wrong, it brings us closer to the Truth with every Step.

So much that it becomes nearly impossible to find something wrong about it.

It is more that you find Additions to that, for example, a physical Law.

But what if the ghost is intelligent? It’s not just some simple physical event that you can predict and record, instead it’s actively defying your attempts to record it. It knows when it’s safe to expose itself to you without being recorded. If that were the case, then treating the ghost as a simple physical experiment would be doomed to fail every time. 

2 hours ago, lwks said:

You can't just leave it there, it's a paradox, it must be solved. When he says "I know that I know nothing" it doesn't really mean that the amount of things he knows is literally zero, you can figure out the vague meaning, but when affirming truth claims like "you can't know truth" you can't avoid logical inconsistencies. His point is not a sound one, X cannot be not X, it's a basic law of logic. Even if it were true, by admitting this kind of thinking at the very least one loses the ground on which to stand on to make truth claims about the scientific method and whatnot.

Many paradoxes are just word games.

Some of them (Zeno’s paradoxes) for example, are no real paradoxes. If you just read them, you might understand that movement is impossible but that’s not what says Zeno: he just says that actual infinity is impossible. But now, modern mathematics deal with a lot of infinities (thanks to Peano and such guys).

Oops, what’s Hero’s paradox? One of them is about Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles and the tortoise race together. According to the paradox, Achilles will never overtake the tortoise.

Some other paradoxes are real games with language, for example the paradoxes about logic and meta-logic (for example the smallest interesting integer number).

Here, you are playing with language: you say that language describes exactly the reality (when you say that there is a logical inconsistency) and when logical rules apply to common language. No, the common language (and even philosophy) is not exactly describing reality. Mathematics describes nothing, just rules and games with them (even if they are extremely powerful to describe reality but, of course, with approximations).

1 hour ago, RDETalus said:

But what if the ghost is intelligent? It’s not just some simple physical event that you can predict and record, instead it’s actively defying your attempts to record it. It knows when it’s safe to expose itself to you without being recorded. If that were the case, then treating the ghost as a simple physical experiment would be doomed to fail every time. 

Yup, but can we say that it exists? No.

Not really. Wild dogs at 2 am is more terrifying.

7 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Socrates put it well: “I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.”

Ah, good ol' Socrates. He always made some good points, too.

7 hours ago, Grazza said:

I also stopped by America's Scariest/Creepiest Motel, in the same town. "Pics or it didn't happen"? Sure...

Parked deliberately badly. I've seen how clowns drive those little cars.

Good Lord

Now I see why some people find clowns frightening (and rightfully so).

3 hours ago, Optimus said:

Nah, never had any experience. And still I am fascinated reading about ghosts or UFOs or other weird things. But never had something to convince me.

I like some healthy skepticism, I don't like the "must debunk" kind of skepticism.

So my best approach is to read stories for amusement and think it like that: These are things people did experience. But is what they experienced what is really there?

And that means, their reality of their experience could be from mundane things like hoaxes or hallucinations to something really strange that is elusive and we can't detect.

 

Two things come in my mind when I read all that stuff. The approach of John Keel and Jacques Vallee, where they view the UFO phenomena not as extraterrestrial, but as a part of a greater phenomenon that manifested in different ways at different times. They've seen similarities between ancient myths and modern aliens or UFOs, between elves and fairies and dragons and religious apparitions. It could be either that people project whatever was in the culture without anything being there really, OR there is something there that affects the perception of people, even presents itself as the thing people expect to see at every era.

 

At the same time, I was reading a book called The Bicameral Mind. It's just a brain/consciousness evolution theory, that discusses the possibility of most people in BC times living in a state of having daily hallucinations (which they saw as messages from gods on how to act on a daily basis). According to this book, this through evolution has mostly dissapeared, but there are few people who can have hallucinations rarely. It talks of a study, of something like 10% of people, without schizophrenia or anything, that in rare occasions (like in extreme stress) could have very vivid hallucinations. That blew my mind (and I need to see if there is more research into this, as the book was in the 70s), it means that a small percentage of people, can rarely have vivid audiovisual hallucinations (without even being sick). So a healthy person you trust can say "I saw it! I saw it with my own eyes very clearly and I wasn't dreaming or under the influence".

 

My thought is, that can happen. A very credible witness can describe a vivid vision of a UFO landing 5 meters from him, describe the metallic details of the craft, entities coming out, talking to him, telling him they are from that star system, etc, etc. That can happen, the witness really believes it, he saw it clearly, no medical history of anything, very trustworthy, yet it could be this remnant of the bicameral mind rarely still affecting few people. That also explains why the stories of people where not photographic evidence were taken is so close contact where they can see details of the encounter, while the actual photos are always very far away lights that could be anything. Because the first could be in the minds of people who genuinely have the experience but what they experience might possibly not have been there in a physical form to even take a photographic proof of it. Unless it is in the mind of people, yet something in the environment does affect the mind of people.

I have never seen a UFO of any kind or atleast not seen anything that was sufficient to convince me that I was looking at a UFO. I have seen some weird aerial stuff, but again... not something that was able to convince me.

However, logic dictates that UFOs must be real... Pure math states that the probability of us being alone in the universe is very close to zero...

About the paranormal things, well I have experienced alot of weird, and to me, very convincing, things... thats why I have no doubt whatsoever that there is life after death and that ghosts are real.

I have .... no ... doubt ... that I KNOW... that the afterlife is real... my experiences have proven that to me beyong any doubt at all... any ... doubt ... at ... all

And please note that I have always been a very very skeptic when it comes to ghosts and other paranormal nonsense.

Boy was I wrong in a big way about it just being nonsense.

I think Ghost and stuff like that will always be ridiculed and people will always think its just nonsense or find other logical ways to explain it away... until that day where that person perhaps experiences things that can not be explained away by anything but the fact that the paranormal is real.

Same thing goes for UFOs, most do not think they are real and even ignore the math in order to maintain that illusion, until they observe a real UFO.

I kind of want to see a UFO just once, I doubt they are paranormal though.

I think UFOs are real because the math says they have to be, but I will not claim to know it for sure, since I have never seen one myself.

So sad that people are not keeping an open mind.

4 minutes ago, CBM said:

 

Same thing goes for UFOs, most do not think they are real and even ignore the math in order to maintain that illusion, until they observe a real UFO.

Well, there is a difference between believing aliens visit Earth vs. believing aliens exist on a different planet.

1 minute ago, RDETalus said:

Well, there is a difference between believing aliens visit Earth vs. believing aliens exist on a different planet.

That is true and the math does only suggest that

a) there must be life on other planets and

b) that propulsion systems that can bend spacetime can be constructed (still not possible with current tech though, the Alcubierre drive turned out to be a dead end)

but it does not say anything about actual visits, for that there are only a bunch of credible witnesses and photographic and video evidence

UFOs do exist as Unidentified Flying Objects. Anything we can't identify yet. No need to be alien.

UFOs as possible aliens visiting us? There is a good probability that there is intelligent life somewhere else sure. But we don't really know if we have ever been visited. Not concrete proof yet. And some say, there are so many stars and galaxies that gives high chance on their existence, but that also means there might be an extremely low chance they visited earth today or in the past, we are not a special place and it's just one place out of the trillions in the vastness of space.

On 9/3/2021 at 8:53 PM, Graf Zahl said:

There's no such thing as ghosts. Repeat: There's no such thing as ghosts!

 

Yes there are, yes there are, yes there are AND THEY ARE RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!!

26 minutes ago, Optimus said:

UFOs do exist as Unidentified Flying Objects. Anything we can't identify yet. No need to be alien.

UFOs as possible aliens visiting us? There is a good probability that there is intelligent life somewhere else sure. But we don't really know if we have ever been visited. Not concrete proof yet. And some say, there are so many stars and galaxies that gives high chance on their existence, but that also means there might be an extremely low chance they visited earth today or in the past, we are not a special place and it's just one place out of the trillions in the vastness of space.

true, there are some very compelling testemonies from some very trustworthy persons and some video footage that cant be explained... but the president of the united states has yet to confirm that actual aliens have and/or are visiting earth.... so yes... for the moment we can only guess and caution would tell us to dismiss that we are or have been visited by aliens.. for now

the official standing for now is that aliens have not visited earth