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ghost question

...JR

Scholar
Joined
Nov 21, 2005
Messages
82
Alright, let me set this up for everyone:

A friend of mine and I entered into a lengthy discussion about deja vu, which he considered to be evidence of psychic abilities. He then went on to say something about a study which proved we use 10% of our brain. I had to explain that such a claim makes no sense. However it seems more likely we only use 10% of our brain at a time (but even this may be wrong...someone help me out), but anyway he left all angry and ended with some ufo story and a video that happened to have been thrown away and i was left with a nother friend of mine.

I have known this guy for about 10-11 years and he's essentially a metalhead atheist not known to believe in supernatural nonsense, but he admitted that he had seen a ghost.

obviouslty i asked a few questions....were you sleeping or in bed or about to go to bed....were you stressed out, and so on. This is the story he went on to describe:

He was younger, around 15 and was home alone with his older sister and younger brother while his parents were out of town. They were all watching television when suddenly they started seeing mist and such floating around them. In total he said he saw abaout 20 ghosts that looked exactly like people (a bit misty though) and they were just walking around them, while my friend and his siblings sat on their bed. At one point he said the ghost of his dead uncle came in the room and sat down on his sisters legs, who she still recalls as feeling warm. He said they sat there in silence for a while and then the mist creatures which filled his home just vanished. He also said that he brought it up to his sister the next morning and she just said she never wants to talk about it again, and still remembers it to this day.

so now i start thinking. if it was just him i could probably explain it away as being some sort of sleep paralysis, but the fact that both he and his sister still recall the events and it left a toll on them leaves me confused.

i know there has been cases of mass hallucinations before where more than just two people see something, but in this case, what could it have been? extremely dirty vents, an older sister humoring her brother about a nightmare, yet keeping the joke going to this day (alot of work for a little prank), was it some sort of communal dream?

i just can't come up with any ideas as to how two people could see the same ghosts and have the same experience. I know if i saw a bunch of ghosts walking around me, and i looked over at my sis and she is seeing the same thing, i'm going to have a hard time dismissing it as a a hallucination.

Does anyone have a reasonable explanation as to how two people could see the same detailed "ghosts"? (they kept their younger brother's eyes closed the whole time)
 
Does anyone have a reasonable explanation as to how two people could see the same detailed "ghosts"? (they kept their younger brother's eyes closed the whole time)


Here's one explanation: Your have admitted hearsay evidence.

Your major claim is that two individuals saw the same unexplainable apparitions. But you've only spoken to one individual. One guy said he saw it and also his sister saw it. Why take that as a given? The most likely explanation is that the hearsay statements attributed to the sister are inaccurate, out of context or just completely made-up.

Call the sister, get her side of the story. And then we can start working on step two: whether your witnesses are reliable.
 
Red flags:

-home alone
-parents out of town
-watching television
-they sat in silence (1)
-kept younger brother's eyes closed
-sister adds the "uncle on her leg" as a 'convincer'
-The sister says she never wants to talk about it again, then does lot of talking about it. (2)

Sounds like a bunch of kids home alone watching a spooky TV show, the sister believes she's seeing something spooky, she influences the highly suggestible and fearful siblings, and voila....false memory implantation.

*(1) Silence? No one said anything? Even the younger brother with the sisters hand over his eyes? Yeah...riiiight. ["Hey! Take your hand off me! Quit it will ya! What's goin on? I'm tellin' mom!"]

*(2) My own sister went through a brief phase of fascination with the occult. I suspect many adolescent girls do. Once she and her friends were old enough to date boys, "the occult" was tossed by the wayside like a discarded Kleenex. :D
 
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Red flags:

-home alone
-parents out of town
-watching television
-they sat in silence (1)
-kept younger brother's eyes closed
-sister adds the "uncle on her leg" as a 'convincer'
-The sister says she never wants to talk about it again, then does lot of talking about it. (2)

Okay, CLD moved on to step two, reliability, without me. Assuming the sister will actually say what your firend reports she'll say, CLD now brings up many good reasons why she should not be believed.
 
I once had a friend who joined some fundementalist cult as a teenager. She and some other friends became so worked up during a private "bible study" they shared some vision of the angel of death superimposed over the moon. Well, no one else saw it the said vision so I put it down to some hysteria fueled folie à deux .
 
How old was the youngest brother and older sister? Looking at it skeptically, I'd say it's best attributed to a hypnogogic dream that your sister and/or brother had. It's still an incredible occurrence, but if they were both in between sleep and alertness one of them freaking out could have influenced the other. It sounds like a classis hypnogogic dream. Their reluctance to scream and run like hell is a dead giveaway that they were in an altered state and felt paralyzed. I believe that both are telling the truth and that happened to them though. It's what convinces many of being abducted by aliens (an experience not suprisingly that's limited to post-WW2 Americans recently aware of space race/alien-from-outer-space culture).

Looking at it not so skeptically though, the house my family lived in for a few years when I was a young child was supposedly haunted. Reportings of inexplicable disturbing incidents in the house came from people that had no idea of the house's past or reputation. One report I can remember was of twins that were being babysat playing on the stairs and both hearing footsteps coming up the stairs but seeing nobody, so they ran away screaming. There was a murder in the house within a decade before we moved in. I wasn't lucky enough to witness any events but other family members have stories.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnogogic_hallucination

Hypnagogic sensations are vivid dream-like experiences that occur as one is falling asleep or waking up. Accompanying sleep paralysis can cause the sensations to be more frightening. The features of these sensations generally vary by individual, but some are more common to the experience than others:

Most common

Vividness
Fear
Falling sensation
Common

Sensing a "presence" (often malevolent)
Pressure/weight on body (especially the chest).
A sensation of not being able to breathe
Impending sense of doom/death
Fairly common

Auditory sensations (often footsteps or indistinct voices, or pulsing noises). Auditory sensations which are described as noise instead of sensations of legible sounds, are often described to be similar to auditory sensations caused by Nitrous Oxide by persons who have experienced both.
Visual sensations such as lights, people or shadows walking around the room
Less common

Floating sensations (sometimes associated with out-of-body experiences)
Seamless transition into fully immersive lucid dreaming, also associated with out-of-body experiences
Tactile sensations (such as a hand touching or grabbing)
Rare

Vibration
Involuntary movements (sometimes the feeling of sliding off of the bed or even up walls).
The feeling of being pulled in different directions
 
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Well mine isn't in that list for some reason. I frequently get jolted out of that lovely snoozy part just prior to sleep by somebody apparently shouting at me about a foot away from my ear. It's irritating at times, yet great when I am thinking that I'm just never going to get to sleep, as I know it's on it's way.
 
One time when I was about 12 I was woken up by 2 soldiers in my room shouting at me with rifles drawn and a flashlight shown on my face so they looked silhouetted. I felt clearly butted by the rifle in my shoulder and the barrel was put in my mouth. They asked me who "Himalyan Hayes" was while one of them shuffled through some papers. I leaned there with my eyes open for a minute as I got my thoughts about me. When my eyes eventually started to dart around the room the figures became less defined and harder to find until I realized I couldn't see them anymore and there was a clothes hamper where one of the had been standing.

If I had seen a ghost or alien movie the day before instead of news coverage of the Bosnian war the cast of characters might have been changed and I might've believed that alien or ghost attack was to blame.
 
Hey...

You wanna hear the voices that i hear when i'm sleeping...

Lucky i know its nothing but my own mind talking bollox when im half awake / asleep...

I sleep with one ear and one eye open...

My 'Alsation X Pitbull' breaks wind and im awake...

Think yourself lucky you dont live the life i have to...

DB
 
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Well mine isn't in that list for some reason. I frequently get jolted out of that lovely snoozy part just prior to sleep by somebody apparently shouting at me about a foot away from my ear. It's irritating at times, yet great when I am thinking that I'm just never going to get to sleep, as I know it's on it's way.

I recently started occasionally hearing, while just dropping off to sleep, a shot or a loud crack, almost as if it were inside my head, which will jolt me awake. (I used to get the falling sensation, and would jolt awake from that.) The first time it happened, I thought it was a real noise, but figured I'd hear somthing else if I needed to be concerned. The next time, I thought it must be my jaw popping or something. Soon after the third time, I picked up a pamphlet on parasomnias in MIL's neurologist's office, and read a good description of what I'd been experiencing. A common parasomnia, apparently.
 
I've had it when I felt a sudden plunging or rocking sensation at the point when I was falling asleep.. Seems that this sort of stuff is pretty common, though!
 
Two more red flags from the OP's story:

-the friend considered deja vu to be evidence of psychic abilities
-the friend is not known to believe in supernatural nonsense

See the contradiction?
 
One time when I was about 12 I was woken up by 2 soldiers in my room shouting at me with rifles drawn and a flashlight shown on my face so they looked silhouetted. I felt clearly butted by the rifle in my shoulder and the barrel was put in my mouth. They asked me who "Himalyan Hayes" was while one of them shuffled through some papers. I leaned there with my eyes open for a minute as I got my thoughts about me. When my eyes eventually started to dart around the room the figures became less defined and harder to find until I realized I couldn't see them anymore and there was a clothes hamper where one of the had been standing.

If I had seen a ghost or alien movie the day before instead of news coverage of the Bosnian war the cast of characters might have been changed and I might've believed that alien or ghost attack was to blame.

Blimey I thought my SP events were freaky,but you take the biscuit,the jar the whole pantry!! ;)
 
ghost_stories_192609_v1_n3.jpg
 
Latent aaack...

Why don't you and the rest of your silly friends from LooseChange or what ever 'believer' board you're from, go back and tell everyone you lot are still being laughed at and turned up your own asses...

Bring them all here...

Especially all the ones that need the excuse of having some kind of mental health issue...or learning disability...

DB
 
Blimey I thought my SP events were freaky,but you take the biscuit,the jar the whole pantry!! ;)

Well that was the only time I had a dream/hallucination mix and I just wanted to show how messed up one's perceptions can be coming in and out of sleep and how that could explain the "mist people". What's SP?

De Bunk I'm not sure what you're babbling about.
 
Two more red flags from the OP's story:

-the friend considered deja vu to be evidence of psychic abilities
-the friend is not known to believe in supernatural nonsense

See the contradiction?

well i apperciate everyone's input, especially about the hypnogogic dreams. Also, my original post wasn't clear on some points some of you missed. This wasn't me or my sister and i was speaking with two friends.....one was talking about deja vu, psychics, and ufo, and then when he left i was with my friend who told me this story about the ghosts. And yes, I would have to hear the sis's version as well...i completely forgot abopt that, and also the younger brother as he would remember being in a weird situation like that.

once again thank you all...i'll be back with more questions at some point
 

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