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CarltonTroisi

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So, what do you folks think?

Seen any ghosts? :blink:

 

I know someone who claims they see a ghost, in real life, most days of the *week.* The irony is this person is a normal, high functioning person, no obvious mental health issues.

 

While I myself, have never seen a ghost... and I'm an abnormal, low-functioning person, with quite a few issues!

 

Now, let's hear your experiences with ghosts and/or the paranormal!

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I know I made up a few stories of paranormal and there were a few experiments where I participated to get people induced into hyponchodriasis. Simple stuff mostly with internet fake urban stories about Suicide Mouse and Maria Mordegard Glezgorov and things like that. Just make a good story with a strong narrative, well written prose and it will work.

All the time the only conclusion one can get to is the power of our minds. Whether you believe in supernatural stuff or not. Because it is impossible with someone who does not have any capacity for imagination. In that regard we can envy the advantages of a plain mind.

Edited by Anderson
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"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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Seen any ghosts? :blink:

Of course. Everyone sees them once in a while. Probability of seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling or even just knowing their presence is higher if you are tired, stressed or drugged. But they can and do occur in all states of mind and some meditate to increase the probability of perceiving one.

They most often disappear if you concentrate on them because then the complex neuronal network, that is your brain, autocorrects them away.

 

Funnily, when researchers play with artificial neuronal networks (ANNs) used for image recognition, they can make them see ghosts too (well, they did not try to make them literally see ghosts, because image recognition does not get trained to see ghosts and therefore can't ever cklassify something as a ghost - so they have chosen to let them see weapons instead).

 

Humans do much more processing and compare input to much more prelearned data weighted by context and consider more state than current artificial neuronal networks used for computer vision can do now.

So we rarely seee ghosts and when we do, they get autocorrect away immediately most of the time. We only perceive them consciously after multiple recalculations with fresh input data failed in a row. That makes it so uncommen to see a ghost for us.

 

Maybe, the people training ANNs for image recognition should train their ANNs to also recognize ghosts. As they will probably never see a real ghost you would at least know, that the ANN fucked up when it does see one... ;)

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So, what do you folks think?

Seen any ghosts? :blink:

 

I know someone who claims they see a ghost, in real life, most days of the *week.* The irony is this person is a normal, high functioning person, no obvious mental health issues.

 

While I myself, have never seen a ghost... and I'm an abnormal, low-functioning person, with quite a few issues!

 

Now, let's hear your experiences with ghosts and/or the paranormal!

 

Never ever seen any ghost, never ever experienced any paranormal situation that couldn't be explained by logical means and not a single person has shown me irrefutable evidence that they exist.

 

Anyone claiming to see ghosts every week is anything but a "normal, high functioning person".

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Never seen one, nor do I believe in any.

 

I genuinely do not believe in anything supernatural, aside from a very narrow amount of basic religious matters.

 

I don't think there's anything evil out there in the world, outside of the evil we create ourselves. We might be creatures of free will, but that free will is a double-edged sword. Looking at history and how often we've used legends to shoo away shameful things from the past, I'd say ghosts and monsters are, on a purely psychological level, the excuses we make for our own past evils, or for our own anxieties. There's also archaeological evidence, going as far back as the Neolithic of the Fertile Crescent, that shows people were superstitious about resettling habitation sites that already had ruins of past buildings. "Unknown ruins ? Abandoned house/fortress/etc ? Must be haunted !" is an age-old human gut reaction, a fight-or-flight response present in all humans to varying degrees.

 

Concerning natural triggers for ghosts and feelings of being haunted, look up "infrasound", "sleep paralysis" and some interesting non-fiction on how our minds can easily trick us into thinking we saw or heard something. I can guarantee you that people who want to believe they saw something spooky will see something spooky, even if they saw the same allegedly spooky thing with someone who doesn't jump to conclusions right away, and that latter person saw or heard nothing.

 

I feel the same about the whole UFO/saucer craze of decades passed (now seemingly something of a spent fad): If you're convinced UFOs are "flying saucers" or other alien spacecraft, visiting Earth (out of boredom ?), they're already IFOs, since you've identified them as something you want them to be. On a sidenote, even Ken Arnold, with whom the whole UFO craze indirectly started in the 1940s, never called them "flying saucers", nor did he claim they looked like that. With the amount of supposed alien sightings that sound like they came out of a UFO popculture manual in terms of their tropes and clichés, I think it's safe to say popculture aliens, UFOs and "alien abductions" are the work of the human mind as much as fairytale monsters were in centuries past. The abduction narrative is also something that's common to fairytales and legends, making things even more suspicious on a psychological level.

 

While werewolves and fairies have given way to greys and little green men in the popular imagination, ghosts are more timeless bugbears precisely because they're a lot more abstract. They could fit any period, really. (I've always grinned at the holographic "ghosts" from System Shock II.) You can fit them into any spooky or tragic narrative, tweak their generic appearance in whichever way you like. Ghosts haunting castles are passé ? Make them haunt an underground parking garage or something ! Tada !

 

There is an excellent old Slovak saying about the mind playing tricks on us: Čo sa babe chcelo, to sa babe snilo... ("What the old woman wished for, the old woman dreamt about...")

 

As a Thief and Dark Mod fan, I'm confident that whenever I hear strange things go bump in the night, it's not ghosts or monsters. It's some bloody hooded taffer sneaking around my house, blackjack and all ! :D

Edited by Petike the Taffer
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So I was living for a month in this very small and pretty empty white apartment with only one room and a toilet for a month or so.

One day I was eating a sandwich but before I could take a second bite it slipped out of my hand. I really wanted to eat it, the first bite gave me a pretty good impression so I looked for it butttttt couldn't find it!

I looked for it for a whole month in the apartment and guess what, I never got to eat it...

I don't really believe in ghosts but there is no other explanation for this, it was like 10x10cm big and I should have have easilly spotted it on the empty white floor.

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at night at my parents house you can hear the pet dog walking through the downstairs rooms, the dogs been dead for ages, the sound is the same sound it used to make when it was alive.

 

So I was living for a month in this very small and pretty empty white apartment with only one room and a toilet for a month or so.

One day I was eating a sandwich but before I could take a second bite it slipped out of my hand. I really wanted to eat it, the first bite gave me a pretty good impression so I looked for it butttttt couldn't find it!

I looked for it for a whole month in the apartment and guess what, I never got to eat it...

I don't really believe in ghosts but there is no other explanation for this, it was like 10x10cm big and I should have have easilly spotted it on the empty white floor.

 

So we have ghosts that make sounds and we have a ghost that needs to eat.

 

Do you guys stop to think how is that even possible? Do you know how sound itself is made? What is necessary for something to able to touch something? If a ghost has the ability to make sound and touch a physical item in the world, made of atoms like you and me, then he must be made of the same stuff as you and me, what prevents us from detecting it? We can detect invisible radiations like wifi and see it using special apparel, even tho it is totally invisible, goes right through you and anything around you (minus lead) and makes no sound, even after that we can detect it and see it but no one as been able to photograph or film a ghost, using visible light or any other type of electromagnetic radiation, or detector even tho by what is claimed above, they can make sound and they can pick up physical objects in the world.

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at night at my parents house you can hear the pet dog walking through the downstairs rooms, the dogs been dead for ages, the sound is the same sound it used to make when it was alive.

Sounds like positive flashbacks. Probably nothing to worry about.

 

One day I was eating a sandwich but before I could take a second bite it slipped out of my hand. I really wanted to eat it, the first bite gave me a pretty good impression so I looked for it butttttt couldn't find it!

I looked for it for a whole month in the apartment and guess what, I never got to eat it...

I don't really believe in ghosts but there is no other explanation for this, it was like 10x10cm big and I should have have easilly spotted it on the empty white floor.

Maybe, you did indeed just pick up and eat the sandwich. But you can't remember, because your neurons misfired and dropped some seconds of short term memory.

That does happen a lot. There are countless examples of witnesses remembering wrong details or even complete scenes under oath. Human memory is absurdly lossy at times.

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"All the time the only conclusion one can get to is the power of our minds. Whether you believe in supernatural stuff or not. Because it is impossible with someone who does not have any capacity for imagination. In that regard we can envy the advantages of a plain mind."

 

Actually, I have a strong capacity for imagination, some degree of belief in the supernatural, highly sensitive, etc... and have never seen a ghost. Explain that.

 

I grew up as something of an Indigo, have always "wished" to see evidence of the hyper-real... and yet I haven't seen any firsthand.

 

A paradox, if ever there was one, right?

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at night at my parents house you can hear the pet dog walking through the downstairs rooms, the dogs been dead for ages, the sound is the same sound it used to make when it was alive.

 

For the doubters, I would point you to this. Presuming honesty, this is a solid proof right here. Yes, anecdotal, but anecdotal evidence should not always be waved off...

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I feel the same about the whole UFO/saucer craze of decades passed (now seemingly something of a spent fad): If you're convinced UFOs are "flying saucers" or other alien spacecraft, visiting Earth (out of boredom ?), they're already IFOs, since you've identified them as something you want them to be. On a sidenote, even Ken Arnold, with whom the whole UFO craze indirectly started in the 1940s, never called them "flying saucers", nor did he claim they looked like that. With the amount of supposed alien sightings that sound like they came out of a UFO popculture manual in terms of their tropes and clichés, I think it's safe to say popculture aliens, UFOs and "alien abductions" are the work of the human mind as much as fairytale monsters were in centuries past. The abduction narrative is also something that's common to fairytales and legends, making things even more suspicious on a psychological level.

 

I assure you that UFOs are no spent fad, mate. We can't know that they're extraterrestrial, as yet... but there are legitimate unexplained cases. Not "advanced" earthly vehicles... we don't have secret aircraft that defy physics. Not meteors or asteroids, not comets. Real, legitimate phenomena that defies explanation.

 

Could be extraterrestrial, could be inter-dimensional... as if you can claim to know better?

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"All the time the only conclusion one can get to is the power of our minds. Whether you believe in supernatural stuff or not. Because it is impossible with someone who does not have any capacity for imagination. In that regard we can envy the advantages of a plain mind."

 

Actually, I have a strong capacity for imagination, some degree of belief in the supernatural, highly sensitive, etc... and have never seen a ghost. Explain that.

 

I grew up as something of an Indigo, have always "wished" to see evidence of the hyper-real... and yet I haven't seen any firsthand.

 

A paradox, if ever there was one, right?

 

Were you often in situations of severe deprivation (24 hours, 48 hours) of sleep at dusk/night/early morning (up until 4 to 5 A.M.)? These are perfect conditions.

 

Scientifically proven that the human mind alters facts a lot more under insufficient lightning. Therefore people in dark clothes, not fully visible faces can be said to be ghosts.

 

Another scientifically proven thing is that brains of women are worse at spatial orientation. Under certain conditions they too, can be emotionally engaged in a situation and have a hard time to separate truth from imagination. At the same time the capacity of women to better recognize human faces may play in this as well. Under certain circumstances something can trigger them to believe that face is similar to someone they know and so on and so forth. But again it depends on the person and all that. Circumstances et cetera.

Men on the other hand have a harder time recognizing people and they are worse at social occasions.

Edited by Anderson
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"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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I don't believe in ghosts, because, there are a lot of people who died who would love to get back at people who are still alive for one reason or another. Probably millions of them at this point, given how long humans have existed.

 

Anyway, the fact that we don't constantly read about people being killed by ghosts strongly indicates that the bloodthirsty people who have already died are in fact powerless to interact with the living.

 

As for aliens, I do believe they exist, but I don't believe they visit earth or that the government is hiding them from us. They're not that great at hiding things, look at all the stuff we know about today that we weren't supposed to find out about! And the idea that they could keep aliens a secret this long just seems hard to swallow.

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As for aliens, I do believe they exist, but I don't believe they visit earth or that the government is hiding them from us. They're not that great at hiding things, look at all the stuff we know about today that we weren't supposed to find out about! And the idea that they could keep aliens a secret this long just seems hard to swallow.

 

They're probably on their own little peculiar planet(s) somewhere, the more advanced of them no doubt also speculating about their place in the universe and whether other civilisations might have a body plan like them. :) They might be out there, they might not. Flying all those light years to Earth, only to abduct us for... ehem... kinky experiments... is not a sound exploration/conquest/colonisation strategy. :P Neither is it evolutionarily plausible they'd look anything like us. The course of ape evolution and human evolution has been a very, very particular development, and with relatively few analogues of any sort. That makes bipedal aliens with four limbs and a head highly unlikely.

 

On a less jokey note, this guy's website features some really alien alien species that he came up with in his free time.

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the missing ghosts are probably underground, as in dust falls and becomes soil after a while this builds up until the previous ground is several feet below the current ground, which remains me someone I knew at school, his dad claimed to have seen a bunch of roman soldiers (as in roman soldiers from 2000 years ago), walking along in formation, only thing was this happened 9 feet underground and their feet were in the ground, but apparently they were in full colour, not grey whispy ghosts. they walk out of a wall, across the ground, well at bit in the ground, then walked into another wall.

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Well, a "solution" for ghost overpopulation would be reincarnation. After a couple of years/decades/centuries of heaven/purgatory/hell all souls are reused.

 

I am not convinced that ghosts exist, but it is definitely possible that there is more than we can perceive even with current technology. Maybe ghosts consist of a form of energy we are simply not yet able to detect (mind, it was only about a century agot that x-rays were discovered). Maybe they have a way of interacting with matter that we also cannot perceive. Staying with the radiation example: it interacts with matter (e.g. microwave heating up food, x-rays blackening photo films etc.), so why should it not be able to change the state of matter to the "spectral" form the ghost has itself. Of course, this is as easy to prove/disprove as the existence of God, so it will always be pure speculation.

Unfortunately, the scientific approach does not help against the feeling of being followed after watching a horror movie...

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I saw a ghost when I was a kid. One night as I was falling asleep I looked out into the hall and saw a woman, wearing old-fashioned robes up over her head like a nun, watching me. I pulled the covers over my head and eventually fell asleep. In the morning, I saw an ironing board leaning against the wall. If my parents had moved the ironing board before I woke up, I'd still be telling stories of the ghostly nun.

 

It's interesting that ghosts always tend to appear in circumstances where it's easy to make mistakes, like when it's dark, people are tired or half asleep, or already primed to label something as ghostly. And the stories almost always rely on faulty human memory, getting more impressive and mysterious with each retelling.

 

Meanwhile, when sharp, clear video and audio recordings are made, there is never anything captured that can't be explained by pareidolia (oversensitive pattern recognition).

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In my wife's family home multiple people have experienced 'paranormal' encounters. There were footsteps in their pub (that's connected to their home), which three or four people heard. My wife's dad and my wife both had some spirit sit on or stand next to the bed and a friend of the family (who's sensitive to these kind of encounters) felt someone touch and move her leg when she was lying in her bed (it wasn't me :P). I've never experienced anything, even though I've lived there for about four years, but I do believe in these kind of things. Not really in the whole demon thing, but spirits/ghosts yes.

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Well, a "solution" for ghost overpopulation would be reincarnation. After a couple of years/decades/centuries of heaven/purgatory/hell all souls are reused.

 

 

 

Fun fact: in Hinduism people get reincarnated and in Buddhism people get reborn.

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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Once I found myself alone in a friends place with a derelict building attached next door. I heard noises coming from next door and stupidly went in to investigate only to witness a ghost phenomenon happening at the end of an old hall. It looked like a strange green glow and a warping effect of the whole hallway. My nerves went crazy and I started feeling a I'm being followed feeling, had to keep looking over my shoulder. I got the hell out of there and locked myself in a room armed with a camera until other people returned. I found out from them later that a person had died in the bathroom at the end of that hall many years ago.

 

I like to watch ghost investigation shows such as paranormal lockdown, ghost hunters. Places like Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, black monk house, monroe house, pennhurst asylum are some scary places and are some really great inspirations for creepy locations.

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My family is full of people who claim to see ghosts, aliens, and other stuff. I truly believe they are not lying, but I don't think they actually saw ghosts, aliens etc. They are all highly impressionable.

 

One particular story involves my mother and my uncles (they were very young) and my grandmother. My grandmother is very cool headed. They were all together when they saw the flying saucer. They all agree on the story, except my grandmother always goes quiet and changes the subject or goes to another room. I think she doesn't have the heart to tell them that is not how she remembers the story.

 

I never saw anything. My friend lived in a 'haunted' house, a super old and pretty awesome house. We played RPG there all night several times and everyone had a story about a different sight they had, or weird flute music they heard. Every paranormal activity seems to dissipate whenever I'm around.

 

It seems these experiences are highly selective of who gets to experience them. Or you need to be a little impressionable to see them.

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