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How do we explain ghosts?

Darat said:
Depends who was making them, how they were walking, what footwear they had on, the floor surface and so on.

I'm afraid you seem to be doing the equivalent of being in the New Forest and hearing the sounds of hooves and saying "that's a zebra".
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No I was in my house and on hearing the sound of foot steps in the hall I said that's someone in the house, but I saw no one.
 
Nessie said:
No I was in my house and on hearing the sound of foot steps in the hall I said that's someone in the house, but I saw no one.
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Or you heard something and as we do as humans your brain tried to make sense of the stimulus and came up with "footsteps".

But you do not know it was footsteps, indeed you have to know it was not footsteps because there was no one there. Footsteps are made when a foot hits the ground or another surface causing vibrations some of which fall within the range humans' ears and brains can detect and process.
 
AmyW said:
Amazing, so after years of research you conclude that there is yet evidence to conclude ghosts exist.
I guess I do have questions, such as mediums and ghosts, if ghosts exist then maybe psychics claims are real and the afterlife does exist. This is where my thought processes lead to.
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And this thinking has been the root of the problem going all the way back to the 19th Century and has clouded everything.

First we have to prove the phenomenon exists independently from human interaction. This is a tall order because ghosties don't seen to register on any equipment. But let's say we get lucky and we can prove the phenomenon on our JeeWhiz-Super Widget. Great, now we have a starting point to conduct studies, and construct experiments. That's going to be an ongoing project that might take decades before we would have a definitive definition of what the phenomenon is or is not.

As I continue to state: the most common ghost seen and or heard is that of a still living person. This should automatically rule out the afterlife.
 
The human senses "are" a kind of equipment.

If there is really something to see, then it shouldn't matter if the emitted light is absorbed by an eye or a camera.
If there is something to hear, both an ear and a microphone will pick it up.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
The human senses "are" a kind of equipment.

If there is really something to see, then it shouldn't matter if the emitted light is absorbed by an eye or a camera.
If there is something to hear, both an ear and a microphone will pick it up.
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Those facts take the fun and mystery out of things.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
The human senses "are" a kind of equipment.

If there is really something to see, then it shouldn't matter if the emitted light is absorbed by an eye or a camera.
If there is something to hear, both an ear and a microphone will pick it up.
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Yup.

Today we have full-spectrum cameras that work from IR to UV. They've had microphones that can record any and every sound frequency for years.
 
Nessie said:
No I was in my house and on hearing the sound of foot steps in the hall I said that's someone in the house, but I saw no one.
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There are too many well-known problems with human perception, human memory, and uncorroborated testimony for your anecdote to be supportive of any claim about ghosts.
 
Nessie said:
If someone walked through your house, would not recognise what foot steps sound like?
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Nope. I clomp, the cat clicks, the kids glide silently. My fridge sounds like the cat pawing at the window to get in, the immersion sounds like a stranger wandering around, silence sounds exactly like my kids. I am the only "clomper".

My previous abode was a house built in 1872. Boy was that full of inexplicable sounds.

Where does that get us?
 
Axxman300 said:
Yup.

Today we have full-spectrum cameras that work from IR to UV. They've had microphones that can record any and every sound frequency for years.
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Yet the fools on staff of the program Extranormal will use cheap motion detectors and a magnetic field detector only combined with their super refined skills.

They find ghosts-demons-interdimentional travelers everywhere.
 
Darat said:
Or you heard something and as we do as humans your brain tried to make sense of the stimulus and came up with "footsteps".

But you do not know it was footsteps, indeed you have to know it was not footsteps because there was no one there. Footsteps are made when a foot hits the ground or another surface causing vibrations some of which fall within the range humans' ears and brains can detect and process.
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What could cause something to sound exactly like footsteps, at about 01.00, to go down a hallway and do it only once in the 4 years I lived in that house?
 
abaddon said:
Nope. I clomp, the cat clicks, the kids glide silently. My fridge sounds like the cat pawing at the window to get in, the immersion sounds like a stranger wandering around, silence sounds exactly like my kids. I am the only "clomper".

My previous abode was a house built in 1872. Boy was that full of inexplicable sounds.

Where does that get us?
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What do you think could cause a clomping sound, that sounds just like you are walking through your house, but it is not you and no one else is there?
 
Nessie said:
What could cause something to sound exactly like footsteps, at about 01.00, to go down a hallway and do it only once in the 4 years I lived in that house?
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The problem is that we have no way of determining if it sounded exactly like footsteps.

We have no way of determining if any actual noise was made at the time. We have no way of determining that what you heard did actually sound like footsteps, instead of sounding ambiguous and being interpreted as footsteps by your mind in that moment.

We have no way of determining whether it sounded nothing like footsteps at the time, but over the years of re-telling and re-remembering the re-told story, the narrative has evolved to "sounded exactly like footsteps."

We have no way of determining that it only happened once in 4 years. We have no way of determining whether it actually happened a lot, but only that one time were the circumstances such that it created the impression of footsteps and stuck in your mind. We have no way of determining whether it's a sound that your house makes all the time, but it just happened to sound different when you heard it from the other direction that once. Etc.

We have no way of determining whether this happened to a friend of yours, and you're relaying it in the first person for greater impact, but misremembering some of the details your friend imparted to you. We have no way of determining whether this friend actually experienced the event in the first place. Etc.

We have no way of determining whether this incident, or any incident remotely like it, actually happened to anybody at all. We have no way of determining that this isn't a invented narrative being presented as fact, to pose a challenge to the skeptical epistemology of ghosts.

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So no. "What could cause something to sound exactly like footsteps?" is the wrong question. The right question is, "without a recording of the sound, without actually investigating possible causes of noise in that house, why on Earth would you imagine this anecdote supports the idea of ghosts?"
 
I had a 'ghost' that would rattle the cutlery in the draining rack really loudly when no-one was in the kitchen.

Turned out that the recent demolition of a cement works a field away from my house had left thousands of mice homeless and next door but one's extension work had given them an open invitation. Mice love toast crumbs and a mouse's back pushing the eject mechanism of a toaster up and down sounds like cutlery from the next room.

Oh, and the heating and cooling of nails through joists when the radiators go on and off makes "demonic oppression" type banging noises in my house.
 
theprestige said:
The problem is that we have no way of determining if it sounded exactly like footsteps.

We have no way of determining if any actual noise was made at the time. We have no way of determining that what you heard did actually sound like footsteps, instead of sounding ambiguous and being interpreted as footsteps by your mind in that moment.

We have no way of determining whether it sounded nothing like footsteps at the time, but over the years of re-telling and re-remembering the re-told story, the narrative has evolved to "sounded exactly like footsteps."

We have no way of determining that it only happened once in 4 years. We have no way of determining whether it actually happened a lot, but only that one time were the circumstances such that it created the impression of footsteps and stuck in your mind. We have no way of determining whether it's a sound that your house makes all the time, but it just happened to sound different when you heard it from the other direction that once. Etc.

We have no way of determining whether this happened to a friend of yours, and you're relaying it in the first person for greater impact, but misremembering some of the details your friend imparted to you. We have no way of determining whether this friend actually experienced the event in the first place. Etc.

We have no way of determining whether this incident, or any incident remotely like it, actually happened to anybody at all. We have no way of determining that this isn't a invented narrative being presented as fact, to pose a challenge to the skeptical epistemology of ghosts.

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So no. "What could cause something to sound exactly like footsteps?" is the wrong question. The right question is, "without a recording of the sound, without actually investigating possible causes of noise in that house, why on Earth would you imagine this anecdote supports the idea of ghosts?"
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What you have is my credible testimony that I heard footsteps and credible witness testimony needs explaining, not attempts to dismiss it as not credible.
 
P.J. Denyer said:
I had a 'ghost' that would rattle the cutlery in the draining rack really loudly when no-one was in the kitchen.

Turned out that the recent demolition of a cement works a field away from my house had left thousands of mice homeless and next door but one's extension work had given them an open invitation. Mice love toast crumbs and a mouse's back pushing the eject mechanism of a toaster up and down sounds like cutlery from the next room.

Oh, and the heating and cooling of nails through joists when the radiators go on and off makes "demonic oppression" type banging noises in my house.
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If I had an explanation like that, I would not have even bothered posting in this thread. There was no structural explanation for what I heard.
 
Nessie said:
What you have is my credible testimony that I heard footsteps and credible witness testimony needs explaining, not attempts to dismiss it as not credible.
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Begging the question. We don't actually know if your testimony is credible. We can't actually know if your testimony is credible.

Beyond that, we don't have the noise, and we don't have the house. There might be any number of mundane explanations, depending on the specific details of the noise and the house in question.

But. You can't provide those details anecdotally. Human perception and memory simply don't work that way. The fact is that you just don't provide enough detail to offer any explanation - including ghosts.

Your insistence that this inability to explain it rules out everything but ghosts goes a long way towards undermining your credibility. You want us to give you all the benefits of a reliable narrator, but you have no way to establish your reliability, and have taken an approach that calls your reliability into question.
 
Nessie said:
What you have is my credible testimony that I heard footsteps and credible witness testimony needs explaining, not attempts to dismiss it as not credible.
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I don't know if you are a credible witness, but I am willing to accept that you heard something that sounded like foot steps. It is your subsequent analysis of this mundane event that seems rather incredible, and I am inclined to think that you have missed the real cause of the sound.
 
I believe we have all had the experience of thinking we hear our name called, or thinking we may have heard someone speak, when no one was there. Couldn't the foot steps have the same source?
 
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