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How do we explain ghosts?

Good morning AmyW.
AmyW said:
Good afternoon and thank you for the welcome :-) will these books help me to debunk the whole spirituality :-) I do hope so
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Not sure about that. They may help you understand why you and others do get caught up in that kind of mystical thinking and to realize you are not alone in your new journey to free yourself from that and try to live your life in a real world as free from superstitious thinking as best as you can being a human.
Spirituality and Spiritualism are different things. I think I've seen others explain that to you.
 
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Bikewer said:
I remember an article from an old Skeptical Inquirer issue years ago.

Groups of people were to spend the night in an old inn or some-such... If the group was told beforehand that the place was haunted, inevitably someone would report some sort of “phenomena”.
However, if the next group was not so informed... No ghosts.

We have a building on campus that’s long been felt to be haunted, and one of our officers absolutely refused to go in there at night.....
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I went on a guided tour of Bern last month and the local guide told us about a house which had remained uninhabited for years because it was haunted, everyone who stayed the night died, yada yada. She then asked if any of us would be prepared to stay the night in it, and of course I said "absolutely". She seemed genuinely astonished.
 
Bikewer said:
I remember an article from an old Skeptical Inquirer issue years ago.

Groups of people were to spend the night in an old inn or some-such... If the group was told beforehand that the place was haunted, inevitably someone would report some sort of “phenomena”.
However, if the next group was not so informed... No ghosts.

We have a building on campus that’s long been felt to be haunted, and one of our officers absolutely refused to go in there at night.....
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My wife drug me on a Ghost Tour in Williamsburg VA a few years back. Now to be fair this particular tour (Think it was run by the local Ripley's Museum) presented itself really, really tongue in cheek, more of "Local weird history" tour with occasional references to local ghost legends that never really presented them as true, but we still had on person seeing "orbs" and "stuff moving in that window over there!" the entire tour.
 
arthwollipot said:
I find your lack of curiosity... disturbing.
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It's not lack of curiosity. It's boredom.

There is a well-known family of explanations for most sightings, on a case by case basis. It's also well-known that some people will dismiss such sightings anyway, and other people will cling to them in the face of any and every explanation offered. And it's well known that some reported sightings will not include enough information to justify an explanation anyway.

So no, I'm not curious about this or that specific case. I'm sure it has a mundane explanation. It may or may not have enough info to determine what that explanation is. Either way, you may or may not accept that explanation. Who cares? If you care, great. Whatever it is you think ghosts are, I hope it works out for you. From where I sit, the topic's been done to death. If you want to awaken my curiosity about ghost sightings, sight me a ghost that actually does something.

Not, "something happened and I attribute it to ghosts." An actual observable, predictable, repeatable natural phenomenon.
 
Lets say a shadow figure moves across a scene and is caught on CCTV.

Various exspurts in the occult will have various ideas, all will be sure the video is real and not altered.

The ghost expert sees a ghost, dark is evil and light is benevolent.
Demon experts see a demon of course, darker is to be feared. Light to white might be an angel.
The UFO guy sees interdimentional shadow travellers. The come with unknown intentions and tend to appear where nothing of any interests is occurring. we have no power to detect their imminent arrival or do anything once they arrive, can't trap them or communicate.

On some of the videos I can see a moth bouncing off the camera especially if the area seems to have had recent rain. Smaller moths are harder toprove as the camera doesn't focus on them at all.


How can one video have so many folks positively identifying it? Whom is closest to a mundane repeatable solution to what it might have been?

Carlos Trejo bought an old revolution era mansion in Mexico and lived there as he wrote a best seller book on 200 years of ghosts and such hanging about . Then he made tv specials of him and his crew capturing them on video.

Two years later a disgruntled assistant revealed it was pretty much everything one learns about ghosts from watching old Scooby Doo cartoons. Everything was staged and carefully prepared to be filmed on cue.

Out of the limelight after this his daughter appears on the show Extranormal one season as an investigator and he uses celebrity status to help investigate hauntings for folks who pay the fee. Not all were convinced he is a fraud.

The old mansion is available for you to stay a night or two for you and some intrepid friends to investigate ghosts yourself. He even helps you look in the right places.
 
AmyW said:
I am wondering about ghosts and how rational minded people claim to see them. When my mum was a child she claimed to see three shadows, she awoke from a strange noise coming from the window and then three spirits appeared and one pointed at her. How do we explain when people claim to see ghosts?
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I have had something similar to this happen to me twice. It was quite unnerving the first time to see some apparition over me while I couldn't move. It is very uncomfortable because you can feel like you can't breathe. It occured during a time I describe as being like I was dreaming I was dreaming and saw several "things" right beside me in my dorm room. It was disturbing and it was very tempting to start searching for some meaning in it, but I had to get to on in my studies, so I shook it off and grabbed my books.

Before the second time I had learned about sleep paralysis. Once the experience was over and I was fully awake and the discomfort wore off, I found it to be pretty neet.

It turns out that I am not that special to be visited by ghosts. Only that I share common experiences with my fellow humans. I find the commonality of experince to be more satisfying than the artificial specialness that I was tempted to conjure up.
 
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8enotto said:
Lets say a shadow figure moves across a scene and is caught on CCTV.

Various exspurts in the occult will have various ideas, all will be sure the video is real and not altered.

The ghost expert sees a ghost, dark is evil and light is benevolent.
Demon experts see a demon of course, darker is to be feared. Light to white might be an angel.
The UFO guy sees interdimentional shadow travellers. The come with unknown intentions and tend to appear where nothing of any interests is occurring. we have no power to detect their imminent arrival or do anything once they arrive, can't trap them or communicate.

On some of the videos I can see a moth bouncing off the camera especially if the area seems to have had recent rain. Smaller moths are harder toprove as the camera doesn't focus on them at all.
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Few years back a video made the rounds, showing a supposed ghost at Disneyland. CCTV footage showed a blurry, shadowy figure walking a very deliberate path along a walkway, passing through a closed gate, and continuing off screen.

The solution was piss easy. In the old days when CCTVs used video cassette, the tapes were reused. The image was a ghost image (no pun) of a maintenance worker or janitor or some other after hours employee walking along the path and through the gate (which was open in their footage). He was recorded on the tape just walking along a path through an open gate, but that was recorded over with new footage where the gate was closed and there was no one on the path, leading to "the ghost."

And the this low quality SD CCTV footage was copied, filmed off a TV screen, digitized, converted a half dozen different video formats from the looks of it, and uploaded to Youtube.
 
AmyW said:
Good afternoon and thank you for the welcome :-) will these books help me to debunk the whole spirituality :-) I do hope so
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Please, do not think that you will have any effect on those who believe. That is a Sisyphean task. Only worry about your self and be open to helping those who would like your help.
 
kellyb said:
I woke up once as a kid with some troll/smurf/gnome like little fellow on the floor beside my bed.

As soon as I was struck by the weirdness of it, I had the thought "I have to still be a little bit asleep. That can't be real" and...poof! It disappeared.
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I was once lying in bed and saw a little troll/smurf/gnome like little fellow dancing on the bookshelves in my bedroom.

I've experienced hypnopompic/hypnagogic weirdness (including sleep paralysis) enough to know what it was and not let it weird me out.
 
kellyb said:
1) well, not I'm just super-curious about what that "also" thing was.
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I was cleaning the lines in a cool room in a pub cellar late one night when I clearly saw an old man in overalls walk past the door. I was sufficently sure of what I'd seen I ran out to find out why there was a stranger in there and how they'd got in without me seeing & there was no one there. The only way out were the stairs which I had a full view of the whole time and would have meant coming back past me.

kellyb said:
2) Yeah, believing in such things at the time is key. I "saw ghosts" when I believed in them, too, and would not be surprised if my memories were embellished over the years in my re-remembering of them (while I still believed.)
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Absolutely, there was an old man who worked in pub until his death, the regulars had/did tell me about him, but that's all they told me. In the telling I convinced myself that they'd also told me he wore overalls & that they told me after I saw it (I never mentioned it to any of them BTW), I couldn't now say when they told me but I'd guess it was before but even if it was after I don't think it really makes a lot of difference.

As I've mentioned I tend to see 'people' when I'm really, really tired. And I was really, really tired. I was stressed, this was nearly three decades ago and thinking of that place still makes me feel on the verge of a panic attack, getting out of there made me voluntarily homeless (I was live in) but I left anyway. I put it down to a corner of the eye hallucination caused by tiredness, my stressed brain filling in the immediate details and false memories generated by belief then taking care of everything else. So I kind of can explain it, but not in the way as, say when the perfect simulcrum of a person in a hoodie looking at their phone resolves into a number of unconnected items in the right position and with colour differences washed out by streetlighting as you approach at night.

Once I gave up the emotional attachment to the story, a good ghost story makes you the center of attention, I was able to debunk myself quite quickly.
 
AmyW said:
Do you think our brains can malfunction at times/hallucinate if we are stressed etc? Like others have said when we really believe in something we start to see them. Personally I've never seen a ghost
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Undoubtedly, see my story above.
 
abaddon said:
Nope, they were right there in that location. No refelections involved. One camera and two kids. No other apparatus involved.

Except for a tripod. That is a huge hint.
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I don't see how a tripod makes a difference.

I'm stumped!

Will you explain it?
 
Wow, can our brains really hallucinate like that and actually see things that aren't there?
 
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