ghosts and other spooky things

[jfalkon]

Sooner or later I wind up asking people I know if they believe in ghosts usualy with interesting results. I have seen some weird things in my life but don't know what to make of them. Does anyone have any opinions on the subject?...or good camp fire stories?

[Graeme]

While I don't believe that ghosts and similar things exist, I'm open to be convinced otherwise. Yes, there are a lot of unexplained things out there, but that is sometimes because of a lack of information. Some things are unknown because we don't have enough facts -- not because of something supernatural or extraterrestrial.

[Krista]

Lol.. I have to tell myself there is no such thing as ghosts.

 

 

Actually, I'm not big on anything spiritual either. Watching those ghost hunter shows on television where people go into, "haunted" buildings and get their little instruments reacting doesn't help the theory I have of nothing being real such as ghosts.. lol.

 

As for the monsters or ape type people, even gigantic snakes reaching 40 feet long is a little far fetched for me to believe. I am a see it to believe it kind of person.. and I hope I never run into any of those things I don't think is real.. haha... because I doubt I could handle it.

 

 

Krista

[Luc]

I most definitely believe in ghosts. I believe they are the spirits or energy of a being that is left behind when the body dies and I do believe they can interact with the living when they want or need to.

 

I have a story that supports this. And don't laugh--because I know some of you will--it involves a cat.

 

I had two kittens, Mike and Tom, and both of them had Feline Leukemia, which at the time was always fatal. Tom started showing signs of the disease first. He and I were very close. He was MY cat and would sleep with me and follow me around. Mike was my cat also, but Tom was special. When he started to get sick, I took him to the vets and discovered that he had Feline Leukemia. That meant his littermate had it also since it is extremely contagious. It affects the body much like AIDS.

 

I had a choice. I could have him put down right then and there, or, as the vet said, I could

[Caipirinha]

Ha, I love this topic.

 

I think the best way to sum up the paranormal activity in Watertown is to say this: I have friends who have gone off to colleges in Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, even as far away as North Carolina and upon introducing themselves they were greeted with rounds of "Ooooh, you mean the haunted town? Tell us some of the stories!" It may just be random coincedence because there are people in Watertown itself who have never so much as heard the local ghost stories, never mind believe in them. But at some point you do have to wonder exactly what kind of reputation our town has if people you've never met in North Carolina have not only heard of us, but could tell you some of the more famous, reportedly haunted, landmarks. Having lived my entire life in a town known for it's local ghost storeies, I will admit I do believe in ghosts. Maybe too much some times.

 

I started collecting ghosts stories long before my senior year of highschool, but during my senior year I had the opportunity to put them to good use. When I was in high school one of the requirements for passing senior english was doing a project called your "Senior Presentation." It was an oral report with only one requirement; it had to be 12 minutes long. Aside from that it was fair game. So naturally having been fascinated by ghost stories for some time I decided to present a collection of the most famous and most obscure ghost stories revolving around our town.

 

Come time to present, I had a collection of stories, including maps of locations, photographs of houses, and even digital recordings, but nothing could have prepared me for the after effects my presentation had. The salutatoriun of our graduating class stopped me in the middle of my presentation because she had experienced first hand what I had been describing. She was shaking violently and crying. She told her side of the sotry which matched mine perfectly. At that point even our teacher who had been my most skeptical audience member started believing. By the next morning the stories from my presentation had spread through the high school like wildfire. So much so that my teacher took me aside as I walking class the next day and told me that in 30 years of teaching she had seen probably around 500 presentations more well put together, more researched, more documented, but never had she seen a single presentation that was as talked about as mine was. It was probably the proudest moment of my highschool career.

 

Anyway, I could literally babble about this topic for hours, but I'll stop now before you slip into a coma.

 

I guess my overly long winded point is that yes I do believe in ghosts.

[Razor]

No such thing. Period.

 

It's nice to think about, though.

[AFriendlyFace]

I guess I'll give the answer I always give: "I don't know". And I don't exactly mean that I don't know if there are ghosts (although I suppose that's also sort of what I mean), what I mostly mean is that I don't know if I believe in them (a difficult distinction to grasp I know).

 

I'm completely conflicted on this subject.

 

There's an extremely rational, skeptical side of me that would say OF COURSE NOT, without thinking twice and it's this same side that's always internally shocked when someone says they do.

 

However, there's an equally strong spiritual, open-minded side. A side that couldn't care less about rationality or reason or proof. A side that thinks it's ridiculous to ever be closed-minded about such a possibility. It's this side that usually causes me to listen with an open-mind when someone says they do believe.

 

There's a side that wants to believe in ghosts, and a side that doesn't want to believe.

 

A side that would definitely not be afraid if they existed, and a side that definitely would.

 

**big shrug**

 

I just don't know.

 

 

I most definitely believe in ghosts. I believe they are the spirits or energy of a being that is left behind when the body dies and I do believe they can interact with the living when they want or need to.

 

I have a story that supports this. And don't laugh--because I know some of you will--it involves a cat.

 

I had two kittens, Mike and Tom, and both of them had Feline Leukemia, which at the time was always fatal. Tom started showing signs of the disease first. He and I were very close. He was MY cat and would sleep with me and follow me around. Mike was my cat also, but Tom was special. When he started to get sick, I took him to the vets and discovered that he had Feline Leukemia. That meant his littermate had it also since it is extremely contagious. It affects the body much like AIDS.

 

I had a choice. I could have him put down right then and there, or, as the vet said, I could

[JamesSavik]

I am a right brained guy for whom logic, reason and empirical evidence are what I look for in making a conclusion.

 

After studying string theory and its many dimensions, quantum mechanics/the uncertainty principle and theories concerning the multi verse, I am of the opinion that we are, in our understanding, like amoeba contemplating the space shuttle.

 

While the body of knowledge that humanity has amassed is respectable, we don't know nearly as much as we think that we do.

[Morganx]

I

[Menzoberranzen]

I don't believe in ghosts, the divine or anything 'supernatural.' I won't say you couldn't convince me otherwise, but it'd have to be a damn good proof for me to entertain the notion.

[SonoLuminus]

I believe in...something. I'm not sure if I believe in actual spirits on earth, but I think there are many layers to existence, and sometimes there can be a glitch that causes an event to be played back, like seeing a movie clip. It's more like a photographic imprint than an actual presence. I also think that strong emotions and powerful events can leave a sort of psychic residue on a place, and that's why certain buildings can have a negative (or sometimes positive) vibe.

[Razor]

I've thought about that idea before, that events/people leave a certain something behind in a place which gives it that feeling. However, since people can often feel completely different about a place, I disregard that as a weird little psychological thing.

 

Any fans of my first serial would be interested in knowing that Ms. Mary Lou Clark informed me that I'm psychic. Of course, for twenty bucks she damn well better make me feel special.

[GaryKelly]

Remove human imagination and you remove the origin of ghosts and other spirits. In other words... go figure.

[Thirdeye]

I was always open minded but never could really say I believed or not. My Mom and her side of the family claims that my moms grand mom, aunt, two uncles and cousin lived in a haunted house. I always liked the story, but as I said wasn't so sure. After living in my last house in Mississippi I now believe.

 

When me an Jacob first moved in there some small stuff started right away. Mostly noise, doors moving, stuff you can right off as nothing. Then one night something weird happen, Jacob was looking for lime juice in the fridge we knew we had. He couldn't find it an I went to the store and after a few hours we forgot about, that was until a month later when we open the microwave(which we used many times in that month) and there is the old bottle of lime juice sitting in there. Of course me and him thought it was the other pulling a joke.

The next crazy thing happen a few days later, Jacob was going to school. so I walked him through our kitchen to the front door and said our goodbyes, i then walked back through the Kitchen into our bed room and started to load my computer. I then head a strange noise in the kitchen and got up to see what it was. What I found was every single cabinet door open with old plastic shopping bags flying out of the top cabinet. I was alittle freaked, and became even more freaked when the next night from my bed I saw a white shadow move in my living room. I also became a little upset when Jacob didn't really seem to believe me, even though he said he did.

That was until about three weeks later as we were getting into bed, we heard two loud knocks on our bathroom door(which was about two feet from our bed) and the door opened and then slammed shut. That seem to convince him that I wasn't just trying to scare him.

 

I later told my moms family that I now believed them about their Grand moms house, which is a even freaker story

[jfalkon]

Interesting comments.... I guess everyone has a slightly different definition of what ghosts are. I usualy think of the term ghost as a catch all for things that don't make much sense. For example, the door bell in my home rings by itself with no aparent cause. No one wants to take it apart and check what is wrong with it. We joke that it must be ghosts. I have had a few truly strange experiences and I call them ghost stories. I can speculate as to what the cause was but sometimes its just fun to tell the stories.

 

One of the freakier things happend to me at school. I was taking a semseter of hard classes. The worst was a mathematical physics with programing class. There were no prerequisits listed and I was advised to sign up so I did. I didn't own or have any experience with the software so I was stuck using the schools computers usualy into the early hours of the morning. The computers were in a small closet of a room in the back of a lab. (One of the proffessors left a key for us in a secret location.)

 

One night I was in the computer coset with a cup of coffee, as usual. I had not bothered to turn on the light in the lab. I knew the lay out by then. At about 4:30 in the morning I decided to do out for a break. I left my well lit closet and closed the door behind me. Then I turned arround to look at the dark lab. I imediately saw three balls of light flying around the room. It looked like they were somehow interacting with each other. I stood and stared. At first I though something was wrong with the lights but the balls were not following the light fixtures. Then I thought that maybe someone was outside by the window with a flashligh but no one was there. Then one by one the lights disapeared.

 

It was probably my tired eyes playing tricks on me but you never know. It is rumored that the lab was once used for cadaver disection.

 

At the time when this happend I didn't care if they were ghosts, halucinations, or something else. I was to concerned about my grades. Later that week I realized that it made a good story so I have been telling it ever since.

[Rigel]

The first ghost I met was at my New England prep school. I was in the chapel meditating using yogic techniques when there was a sudden crack at the door, and I saw a white figure in front of me, perhaps inside the door and perhaps through the window panes in the door--non-corporeality makes precise location hard to pinpoint sometimes. I stopped meditating and told myself it was just my overactive imagination--but that didn't explain why my hand was still trembling and my heart was still pounding. After that experience, I made sure that any future states of altered consciousness would be achieved without the use of chemicals in case I needed to return to reality FAST, which is probably why I never got into drugs.

 

My second ghost was a good friend I used to sing with in chorus; often we were the only two first tenors, and for years we coordinated our breathing, which is about as intimate a nonsexual relationship as you can get. It was Halloween night--yeah it sounds too corny to be true, but sometimes reality happens on the wrong night. I was fast asleep in my bed and felt someone sitting on the edge, the weight depressing the bed down near my left leg. The weight stayed there for a while. I stirred, and no one was there. I don't have pets; there was no physical reason for me to have sensed what I felt. I looked at the clock and went back to sleep. It was a week later that I received a phone call from another friend informing me that my good friend and fellow first-tenor had been off studying in Russia and decided to show his Russian friends what Halloween was all about, and they went drinking, and my friend was killed in an automobile accident Halloween night. I calculated the time differences, and realized that I had been awakened by my friend's spirit coming to say goodbye.

 

So it was a Halloween night about a decade after that when my brother-in-law came home to his house for the last time. He was an artist who lived in a deconsecrated church, and the altar was his studio and the choir-loft was his bedroom. He died while at a symposium out of the country, and he was cremated and his ashes shipped home. The canister arrived on the afternoon of October 31st. My sweetie and I were staying in his bed in the loft for the funeral and mourning period. (Brother-in-law's wife stayed in her studio next door as usual, and brother-in-law's boyfriend in the other apartment--its probably too complicated to explain all the details of a bisexual family.) We set the container of his ashes on a pedestal on the altar, his workplace, and my sweetie and I spend a long part of the evening visiting with her brother's ashes and having a sing-around like the old times, making sure he knew he was welcome home. After all, a recently deceased man returning to his home in a deconsecrated church on Halloween evening is a classic recipe for a ghost visitation if ever there was one, but he let us sleep peacefully that night, because we knew how to treat a spirit.

 

I grew up in Connecticut, and Ed and Lorraine Warren (http://www.warrens.net/) have thoroughly documented many local ghosts in my old haunts, but I don't have personal experiences with those spirits. Caipirinha is probably familiar with their books as resources for his senior talk, and they've no doubt documented the famous ghost of my prep school (not the one I met), but we'll leave that for another Dark Entry.

 

--Rigel

[Caipirinha]

Remove human imagination and you remove the origin of ghosts and other spirits. In other words... go figure.

 

I kind of disagree with you on this one.

 

My friend Deena's house has a random ghost in it. From her living room you can the see the stairs across the hall way. Down the hallways is the kitchen. When you're sitting in her Living room every so often you will see a dark spot coming down the stairs very very slowly. As soon as it hits the bottom the stairs it takes off at lightning speed for the kitchen and then it disappears.

 

How is that story relevant to what you said? Like this. Her dog Maggie sees it. Sees it, points is (she's a beagle), and even growls at it. So once again I took the long way around to get at my point that maggie clearly don't have a human imagination and yet she can still see it. She quite possibly has no imagination at all, she just sees what she sees, ghosts and all. It also ties in with the theory that animals are more preceptive to the paranormal than humans are. I mean I can say from personal experience, it is a little bit creepy when you are standing in a room and all 3 of your cats, your dog, and one of your birds are following something that is moving along the walls of the room when there is clearly nothing in the room.

 

That's just my two cents.

[GaryKelly]

I mean I can say from personal experience, it is a little bit creepy when you are standing in a room and all 3 of your cats, your dog, and one of your birds are following something that is moving along the walls of the room when there is clearly nothing in the room.

 

That's just my two cents.

 

Ah! It's 'something' but is it a ghost? My old umbrella refused to collapse any more, so I left it on the verandah, opened. My dog Kelly barked at it. I rest my case. :pickaxe:

[MMandM]

If I saw a transparent person, I would not know how to interpret the phenomenon. But I would certainly not jump to the conclusion that it was a ghost. I would investigate, to arrive at an interpretation that was not inconsistent with my naturalistic worldview. An actual, verified, ghost would force me to reconsider the very foundations of my view of the world. Maybe I should. But a transparent being would only constitute a challenge. It would not tell me that it was necessarily a "ghost." Similarly, a flying object that I cannot identify is not automatically an alien ship from outer space. It's just an object that I cannot at this time identify.

[Krista]

Well, I was talking to my grandmother the other day and I like listening to her growing up and she said that one day one of my aunts was crying and when she had went to see what was the matter she left the room returning to the living room area and saw, "a ghost" she said. It was a small child standing in the corner of the living room right beside her favorite rocking chair.. lol. It struck me as odd for her to bring it up, but she said she had a nightmare and decided to talk to me about it and other scary things.

 

So that is her ghost story. She believes in ghosts and fussed at me when I told her that I didn't.. lol.

 

 

Krista

[Andy]

Ah! It's 'something' but is it a ghost? My old umbrella refused to collapse any more, so I left it on the verandah, opened. My dog Kelly barked at it. I rest my case. :pickaxe:

 

Yes but that was an umbrella, a real physical object and a single dog. When there are multiple animals all seeming to see the same (or similar) thing, which you cannot see, It raises questions. Then again, you have to look at definitions of ghosts. Maybe it wasn't a disembodied person, maybe it was a non-bodied personality, an ethereal alien. a Demon. or a... um.. pesudodragon.

 

Do I beleive in ghosts?

 

Do they believe in me?

 

Does it matter? if they exist my belief (or lack there of) will have little to no impact upon them (depending on world view... remember you all exist in my imagination)

[ashessnow]

My two cents: I do not believe in ghosts or high level deities or whatever. But, with my step-mother being from the deep south and being around that culture and seeing some really strange things, I will say that sometimes, there really are some weird things that happen that can't be explained.

[Razor]

In the South, you get some deliciously strange happenings. Even I'll admit I'm not quite sure about some things, but the atheist in me says "ZOMGZ NOES!!!!!! FAKE!"

 

The giant house my Memaw owned in Columbia, MS on the corner opposite the post office seemed to be just a bit strange. My sister and I had the exact same dream about a monster that was almost frankensteiny, but fast, following us through the house. If someone else was in the room, we were okay. If we were alone, he could get ot us. He was always just outside the door, smiling wide, waiting for us to be left alone.

 

The attic was very strange. Things liked to move that shouldn't move.

 

Um, the back bedroom was creepy as f**K. Very creepy. No one wanted to be in it alone.

 

The house on Park Avenue was said to be haunted. My mother swears that a drunken party boy at the house was cussing and yelling about how he didn't believe it was haunted, and went into a room by himself. They heard a thud and a scream, and drunken party boy was flat on his ass against the wall with the stop sign they'd stolen earlier that night embedded in the wall by his head.

 

What else, what else... let's see... oh, in that big house by the post office, supposedly my uncle Steve walked into a bathroom with no windows or other doors, and came out of my aunt Nicki's room.

 

Okay, that about sums up my hauntedness. I attribute it all to psychological shit like the ability of a person to accept something as true because it's suggested to them in a vulnerable state. ~shrugs~ You should all read Poppy Z. Brite books, before she went soft. New Orleans is a very, very nice place.

[Caipirinha]

I would like to take a minute to make something clear on my stance on this topic. I've been re-reading my posts and I think that I may have misrepresented myself in a way.

 

I think I've made it overly clear that I do believe in ghosts. I think I have also made it pretty clear that I am willing to debate the topic until the horse dies. Then debate the topic until the dead horse dies again. Then debate the topic (which is now dead horse^2) into the ground. And then debate the topic until the squared dead horse's ghost dies.

 

I think what I have not made clear is that I do realize that fighting a battle with evidence that is not tangible is an uphill battle. For every point that I make there is a counter point, and the beautiful thing (or insane, depending on how you look at it) is that both of our points are completely rational, to us. You may think that believing in ghosts is not rational and frankly I am okay with that because I believe that mathematics is not rational (You can't square a dead horses ;-) ).

 

So I guess how I really feel about ghosts and spirits and paranormal anomalies is sort of the same way I feel about faith and religion; believing when you have every reason not to.

 

Yes I am irrational. Yes I believe in ghosts. Yes I will fight with you about. No I don't expect to win or even change your ming. And really the only thing that matters is that yes in spite of all of that I respect your opinion on the topic because either of us can be right. Now on with the ghost stories and debating. If nothing else we'll get a good story out of it. :-)

[Ieshwar]

Hello,

 

I do believe in supernatural a bit but I don't think 'ghosts and other sppoky things' would be the proper trem to be used. Science hasn't been able to answer some questions and there must be some other 'dimension' or 'force' to account for these things.

 

Just my thoughts.

 

Ieshwar