Ghosts....?

[martin wilson]

It is part of our cultural DNA I'm sure,from when I was a kid sitting round a fire with my mates, we would tell ghost stories and then we would have to walk the younger ones home,three doors away! because they were too scared to go on their own.
What bugged me about the old church is that sometimes ex staff would pop in to say hello, and guaranteed within 5 minutes they would be remembering something strange happening to them.
Next door used to be a pub,now its a dance academy and the site of apparent poltergiest activity some years back!
Never saw/heard a thing.
All the best.

[Wolf Vanderlinden]

Hi Robert.

I think this is the problem with your elephant analogy. Anyone who denied the existence of elephants would have to embrace a conspiracy theory so gigantic that it would make JTR or moon landing conspiracists look positively sane. Most people who are not mentally ill know that even if they have never seen an elephant in the flesh, they can do so by going to a zoo or India or Africa. There is a method to prove the existence of elephants and the method is, go and look.

Yes, but you miss the point that there is a method to prove the existence of ghosts and the method is, go and look. I don’t necessarily mean find a supposedly haunted building and do a full investigation, although that would be the scientific thing to do, but the evidence is out there and easily accessible.

Richard Palmisano, a Canadian paranormal investigator, has pointed out that almost our whole judicial system is based on evidence supplied by witnesses and other sources. People are jailed, sometimes for long periods of time (also hanged at one time), based on the testimony of witnesses. Two or more witnesses who tell the same story adds weight and corroboration to that story. Throw in a police phone tap or evidence caught on a hidden microphone and it’s almost a slam dunk. Throw in a security camera video which documents events and guilt can be proved almost beyond a shadow of a doubt.

However, when it comes to something like the paranormal these very same witnesses, along with audio and video evidence, are simply dismissed out of hand. That doesn’t debunk them or disprove them or make them disappear altogether, it just means that the intellectually lazy, or obdurate, don’t have to provide any real explanations to support their beliefs or disbeliefs. The truth is out there (along with a mountain of evidence dating back thousands of years) and it’s out there for anyone and everyone to see.

Wolf.

[Robert]

Hi Wolf

Yes, I see what you mean.

I think video and audio ghost evidence is in a different category from eyewitness ghost evidence because it is, as it were, demonstrably objective. There really is an image or a sound, and the question is one of interpretation.

But with eyewitness evidence, the sceptic will ask was there really something there? A video camera or audio recorder can't imagine something, but a human can. A human can imagine something, or alternatively see something but misinterpret the cause - and we cannot examine the experience because it's gone (unless it was recorded on film, which places it in a different category as before). I suppose that there are not enough people for whom ghosts are an everyday part of their lives. Some people have never seen one. Others may have seen one once, but perhaps it happened when they were alone, and they afterwards wonder whether they have made a mistake. If enough people had seen enough ghosts, I think attitudes would change.

The problem is partly that the sceptics won't believe in the sixth sense or whatever it is that allows people to see ghosts (you spoke of some people being more attuned than others, or acting as magnets). The sceptics stick rigidly to their five senses. But the extra factor is that there seems no way of using this sixth sense to make predictions. For example, suppose someone claimed to have a sixth sense in that he had the power of precognition. If such a person successfully predicted 900 consecutive spins of a scientifically-tested roulette wheel, I think even the most hardened sceptic would throw in the towel. But we don't seem to get that with ghost-seers. Ghosts don't appear at regular intervals, their appearance and disappearance seem to be quite random. And ghosts don't seem to give us information either.

I can imagine evidence which would convince me. For example, if I visited a spiritualist and I made the appointment under a false name (so that the spiritualist couldn't investigate me via the BMD registers), and if I had never met the spiritualist before, then if that spiritualist relayed a message from a deceased relative containing personal, accurate, non-vague info that only I knew, then I would believe that the spiritualist was indeed in touch with the other side. The only alternative would be that the spiritualist was telepathic and reading my mind.

I am somewhere in the middle on this ghost argument.

[Beowulf]

When my sister Peiggi died, about 5 years ago, I went to my mothers the day after. Of course we were crying on that most heartfelt day, and as I was leaving I stood by the front door and heard a whirring noise. I looked up to see the living room clock hands going round and round like mad.

It did this for 15 min, then stopped exactly on the correct time of day.

That clock runs on only a double A battery, and it is an 'atomic' clock given to Peiggi from a friend she had in England, (Birmingham). We felt at the time it was my sister letting us know she was okay. My last words to her were 'come back as a ghost'.

The clock did it only one other time, when my mother had the funeral home ladies over to plan the funeral. They were speechless and uneasy.

Well, my nephew, my sisters son, is a bit of a rake, and been through a few little adventures of which he has come out the worse for wear, so to speak, and for a bit of time ended up needing a home. My mother took him in and he is trying to improve his life.

My sister lived with my mother and so did my nephew, Josh. Now that he is living there the clock for the first time in 5 years is doing it again today. Of course we are wondering if it is my sister acknowledging her prodigal son, but maybe it is only some weird natural phenomenon. However, for you all to see, I'm giving you a pass to my FB page to see it.

Btw, there is another atomic clock in the house, working normally.

https://www.facebook.com/barbara.barber.5#!/barbara.barber.5

[Robert]

Hi Beowulf

Very interesting story. I couldn't see the page as it's temporarily unavailable.

[Beowulf]

Hi Beowulf

Very interesting story. I couldn't see the page as it's temporarily unavailable.

I bet you have to be a FB member to get on. Darn. Having my nephew send it via email and hopefully I can put it on here.

[Beowulf]

I bet you have to be a FB member to get on. Darn. Having my nephew send it via email and hopefully I can put it on here.

Can't figure out how to do this but anyone here who goes on FB and looks me up will see it.

On another point, a friend of mine in Pennsylvania and I speak on the phone often. Ghosts are an occasional subject because they are interesting.

She moved into a house in March last year with her sister. Two weeks ago her sister went into the kitchen, went back out to get something and right back in. All the cabinets were wide open, far as could be. Even the high up ones. The house is from the early 1900s.

Her sister was a disbeliever in ghosts. Not anymore but is pretty frightened. My friend can't talk on the phone about it to me if she is in the room, she is so afraid to bring it up or hear about it for fear.

My friend a few days ago had the same experience, was the only one home. Normally, she has always found ghost stories very interesting, has had a experiences herself at another house she lived in years ago.

But this one is also frightening her. I can understand that. It's pretty obvious it's real and there is no explaination for it at all.

[Robert]

Is the kitchen on a slope or anything like that?

[Beowulf]

Is the kitchen on a slope or anything like that?

No. Those same cabinets stay closed all the time, just like anyone's kitchen. They just three times opened in a heartbeat, evidently, as on three separate occasions the two girls had gone in and out of the kitchen, like all of us do, in a short time, when getting something and coming right back.

The house is about 1910 or so and some of the cabinets are way up by the ceiling. No way to reach these without a little step, all doors open as wide as the hinges allow, all at the same time, being viewed closed only a min or so before.

That would scare me too.

[Beowulf]

Is the kitchen on a slope or anything like that?

Also, there are cabinets on both sides of the room.

[Robert]

Very strange!

[Beowulf]

Would like to point out, although it's only been a couple of weeks since my friend's last experience with the kitchen cabinets flying open on their own, (which happened 4 times in only about a week and a half) the phenomena has not repeated itself.

Her son was in a head on collision only a couple of days ago. He was not injured badly, whiplash, but his car was totalled, other driver's was totalled and he was sent to the hospital. Unknown what those injuries are at present.

We are wondering if the opening of the cabinets are some sort of attempt from the other side to warn her of the coming accident. Her husband died a couple of years ago. It is his son.

Of course there is no way to know, really.

[kensei]

Some of us may recall this very thing happening in the movie "The Sixth Sense." The mother leaves the kitchen, comes back a couple of seconds later and every cabinet is open, while the "I see dead people" boy is sitting there at the breakfast table with a paranoid look on his face. After a freaked-out pause she asks "Were you looking for something baby?" even though there's no way he could have opened them all so fast.

"Pop tarts," he lies.

[Beowulf]

Some of us may recall this very thing happening in the movie "The Sixth Sense." The mother leaves the kitchen, comes back a couple of seconds later and every cabinet is open, while the "I see dead people" boy is sitting there at the breakfast table with a paranoid look on his face. After a freaked-out pause she asks "Were you looking for something baby?" even though there's no way he could have opened them all so fast.

"Pop tarts," he lies.

Oh, it totally reminded me of that movie. In my friends kitchen, the drawers were not pulled out though.

If I ever saw that I think I'd pass out.

It is a very well known ghost phenomenon, however. One of the other ones is the sound of crashing crockery.

I heard that at my mother's house, which seems to be always having things go on. I lived there about 15 years ago for a few years. Sitting in the living room with my mother's friend we heard what sounded like a hutch tip over and spill the entire contents of china, back end of the house where my mother's room is. We ran back to my mothers bedroom where we heard the sound thinking a cat knocked over something (of course that sound is incompatible to what we heard) and for three days looked everywhere for even a broken cup. Not finding anything by the third day I thought to myself, 'you've been looking for three days, and not found so much as a bit of broken china' and suddenly realized what I heard had no explaination.

If you want to experience a haunted house, go to my moms, something is always going on there, lol. Have no idea why, it is only a home from the 50s, has no 'feeling' in it at all.

[Beowulf]

I saw this on You Tube. Extremely well done. Ghosts of Roman soldiers, starting in York:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7WwB58wq08