Are Ghosts a Global Phenomenon Beyond Mythology?

[zoobyshoe]

I have never heard of ghosts appearing in broad daylight. Do you have a cite?

I don't have a cite for you, but I have heard many anecdotal stories of "ghosts" in broad daylight. My own experience with sleep paralyis happened in broad daylight during the afternoon. This is neither here nor there because hallucinations are often so satisfying to all the senses you apply to them it wouldn't matter if you examined the pores of an hallucinations face with a magnifying glass: it still isn't there.

The only reports that make me prick up my ears so to speak, are the ones where two or more people are claimed to have seen the same thing at the same time. That stands out as something that needs further listening to.

Anyway, my experience in misidentifying an object happened in broad daylight. I saw what I was expecting to see, not the real thing.

I have had the same happen to me, and have heard other examples of this.

In the same way, sightings of ghosts and UFO only happen to people who believe them and are predisposed to see

This is actually quite false. I think the percentage of people who are firm believers before hand who then end up seeing them is very low. Most of the stories I've heard involve people who are neutral or who wouldn't have even taken a stance on them to begin with.

If you make a point of asking everyone you can, in such a way that they don't feel you're going to criticize them, you'll find out that a third to a half of the people you know will admit to having seen something, that might have been a ghost, or a UFO, but which they don't obsess about or mention to people except on special occasions. Most of these people take it in stride, keeping it in a mental box of things they don't really know how to explain, but which don't also worry them very much.

 

[wolram]

I am a very skeptical person by nature, but i have to agree with Ivan, there
are unexplainable happenings, wether they are ghostly or just unexplainable events.
When one has an, "encounter," only you can judge the reality of it, it is no
use asking others, even if they were there at the time, because even though
they have experienced the same thing their minds may interpret the event in
a different way, and no two people will tell exactly the same story.

 

[PIT2]

The trouble with this as a rule of thumb is that people can hallucinate quite calmly, without hysterics, if they, themselves aren't upset or surprised by the content of the hallucination. (Some people, even if they are surprised and upset, refuse to lose their composure.) If the person who sees and talks to Grandma isn't thrown for a loop by the experience you won't see the accompanying agitation.

Could u give me some example of how this goes about? I always have this idea that it is only schizophrenic people, or people on drugs who have vivid visual hallucinations. I have very little knowledge about how often 'regular' (meaning not mentally ill or on drugs)hallucinate and what actually brings this about. And what do these regular people see in their hallucinations?

Oh yes i do know about sleep paralysis so u can skip that one.

 

[Overdose]

...and repeat after me 'anything you see that is unexplainable or lies outside of our normal frame of reference is and always will be nothing but a hallucination'

and rest.

 

[Overdose]

perhaps we should look at society as a whole and ask ourselves how much we want to believe. perhaps no one is disproving the existence of ghosts because they don't want to end up proving it all in the end. ask yourself if and why you believe or don't believe. its easy to simply dismiss their existence, and so never have to face what we are all fundamentally a little bit fearful of. the unknown.

'but if i entertain the idea of ghosts as being anything other than tricks of the mind then i regress back to pre-enlightenment when the sun was a firey god in the sky and 2 crows brought bad fortune, i must cling onto my modern sensiblities for all theyre worth, entertaining the possiblity of ghosts is a slippery slope towards tarrot card readings and listening to the cure!

 

[zoobyshoe]

Could u give me some example of how this goes about?

Excellent question.

I always have this idea that it is only schizophrenic people, or people on drugs who have vivid visual hallucinations.

For some reason I can't explain the diagosis of "schizophrenic" is only given to people with the particular hallucination of "hearing voices". You wouldn't expect, therefore, anyone with that diagnosis to be also having vivid visual hallucinations.

If I rearrange your question to say you only had the idea that mentally ill people and people on drugs have vivid visual hallucinations, then I can answer it better.

A vivid visual hallucination does, in fact, mean the person's brain is misprocessing an internal mass of signals, and presenting them to the person's mind as if they were responses to something coming from the outside. That is what makes a hallucination a hallucination: it is generated inside the person's brain, and isn't an authentic "perception" of information from the senses.

There is every degree of this from distorting one tiny detail of a real visual experience to creating full blown alternate settings where the person seems to be surrounded by a place completely different than where he actually is.

I have very little knowledge about how often 'regular' (meaning not mentally ill or on drugs)hallucinate and what actually brings this about.

People are diagnosed as "mentally ill" not because they have a hallucinaton, or because they are subject to delusional thinking. "Mental illness" is really an artificial cutoff point, and is meant to apply to people who are losing their ability to funcion in life as a result of anything whatever going on in their mind that is troubling them. A severely depressed person who has stopped going to work, say, falls squarely into "mental illness" without having had an hallucination of any kind.

If you ask around, it turns out that almost all "regular" people have had some kind of hallucination they know about. SGTs strange pidgeon is a common sort of example: he caught the hint of something he couldn't see well, and his mind filled in all kinds of details from memory and fed those details to his visual processing center.

I have had the same thing happen to me: I have been certain I saw something briefly only to have it change completely on closer examination. In my case it is mostly with people: I catch a glimpse of a person walking toward me on the street. They are looking directly at me, so I look away, because I don't want to stare a stranger in the eye for the whole 30 seconds it is going to take to pass them. Right before they pass I will look up at them again to see if they are still looking at me, and I suddenly realize the person is a lot older, younger, taller, shorter, heavier or thinner, than I remembered from my first glance. Sometimes, they aren't even the same sex I took them to be. I hadn't seen them anywhere near as well as I first thought, and had filled in all kinds of erroneous details about them from my immagination.

Without being anything close to "mentally ill" "regular" people can have "off" days, as a result of who knows what: an allergy they didnt realize they had, some kind of hormone shift from some novel food they ate, lack of sleep, some new stress in their lives. such that they are more prone to sustaining one of these little incidents of "filling in the details" without stopping to question it.

All of our experience is always "in the brain" to begin with. We receive stimulation from the outside through our senses, and the brain processes the stimuli and then we have "an experience". Reality is real, but our "experience" of it is limited to what our brains are capable of doing with the information. It turns out it can do a massively huge number of gloriously interesting and directly useful things. It can also, unfortunately, go awry and create fiction that looks completely real.

Ivan is quite persuaded by his argument that level-headed people who show no signs of mental illness who report these kinds of things are all we need to know about to know ghosts exist. But all I can agree to about a good source is that it only gives you confidence that 1.) they're not lying, and 2.) they are much, much less likely to be giving a mixed up, incoherent report of their experience.

Wolram, I think, has a better attitude, which is that reports from good sources are strong indications that something we haven't properly explained and don't understand is probably going on. This might, in fact, be something so extrordinary as to fall into what we now call the "paranormal".

Even, if I stipulate for the sake of argument that the paranormal exists, no individual can prove to me their "ghost" wasn't, to give a shocking alternative, a devil masquerading as a ghost to subtly tempt them into some false belief. Nor can they prove it wasn't a wood sprite masquerading as a ghost, just to mess with their heads. Nor can they prove it wasn't an angel of God taking the form of the departed one in order to give them needed advise from a source they would accept. Nor can they prove it wasn't a grey space alien masquerading as a ghost simply to experiment on human behaviour. Nor can they prove it wasn't a Japanese Ninja with the power to "cloud the brain" just out practising on random strangers. And, I could sit here all night writing more possible alternatives.

The decision to call it a "ghost": the spirit of a dead person, is cultural. In most older cultures these things were considered to be separate beings unto themselves that have always been without a physical body. The decision to call anything a "ghost" is pretty arbitrary. Most people who make that call do so in support of a belief in life after death.

So, I'd rather assume hallucination for anything I can't actually examine, because even if I stipulate that level headed people are "strong evidence" that there is something paranormal out there, those "level-headed people are hardly in a position to know if what they saw was a ghost of a dead person or a Greek Eudemon. As soon as they say "ghost" they have jumped to a conclusion, even within the paranormal framework.

 

[zoobyshoe]

...and repeat after me 'anything you see that is unexplainable or lies outside of our normal frame of reference is and always will be nothing but a hallucination'

This unfair attitude of yours arises from the fact that you, and some others here, aren't familiar enough with the kinds of things that are known to be hallucinations to be able to distinguish between what obviously falls into that category, and what doesn't.

Visual sightings of ghosts as a category, have to be dismissed, not because they can't be real, but because they can't be distinguished from hallucinations. It is like this:

If God came to me tomorrow, proved he was God, and said: "Incidently, half of all reports of ghost sighting are really ghost sightings, see if you can figure out which ones they are," I wouldn't know where to begin. How do I start to separate one story from another? Even if I have complete faith that half of them are real, from the highest authority, I have no idea how to tease the "real" ones from the hallucinations.

The method you all are using to decide which ones you believe and which ones you discard are completely idiosynchratic. So, what can I say?

 

[Overdose]

Visual sightings of ghosts as a category, have to be dismissed, not because they can't be real, but because they can't be distinguished from hallucinations. It is like this:

If God came to me tomorrow, proved he was God, and said: "Incidently, half of all reports of ghost sighting are really ghost sightings, see if you can figure out which ones they are," I wouldn't know where to begin. How do I start to separate one story from another? Even if I have complete faith that half of them are real, from the highest authority, I have no idea how to tease the "real" ones from the hallucinations.

How about starting with the ones seen by mulitple eye-witnesses? i seem to remember ivan posting up multiple police witnesses of a ghost they saw, and I am sure if you do enough digging there are plenty of other verified cases like these.
How about ghosts caught on film, which have been analysed and can't be proven to be fake?
if you do abit of basic homework you can also track down houses which have a long history of being haunted and you will find that different familys have reported seeing the same thing. In fact this happened to my brother, he bought a cottage a year ago, he has people stay with him from time to time, and 5 people in that cottage have seen the same ghost. When my brother asked round the village about the history of the house after these events he was informed that the cottage had a long history of being haunted.
total coincidence though of course, or more likely as i suspect someones placing lsd in the local water supply in order to create mass-hallucinations.

In all seriousness though, sniff around long enough and you'll find it much harder to maintain your stance all these instances are hallucinations than to entertain the possiblity that they might be something else. The idea that all ghosts fall neatly into some kind of documented 'hallucination episode' is utterally false, they don't atall, and if you want to ignore the evidence and information that says otherwise youre playing the oldest game out there of believing what you want to believe because it happens to suit you best regardless of the facts.
Likewise saying ...well we should just say 'i don't know' because we can't be sure what's happening, is just a contrived way to avoid dealing with something when you know its going to take a lot time and ridicule to come to a conclusion that best fits the evidence.
Better to to come to a conclusion that doesn't quite fit the facts or accounts for many occurrences but which will nicely allow us to address the issue without really addressing it atall ... 'hallucinations!' its the greatest answer ever for difficult subjects that are in danger of mocking our sensibilities and raising question which we rather were not raised.

 

[PIT2]

Without being anything close to "mentally ill" "regular" people can have "off" days, as a result of who knows what: an allergy they didnt realize they had, some kind of hormone shift from some novel food they ate, lack of sleep, some new stress in their lives. such that they are more prone to sustaining one of these little incidents of "filling in the details" without stopping to question it.

Certainly, everyone can make some incorrect assumptions and experience optical illusions, but there is a difference between that and the "full blown" hallucinations. At least, that's what i think. Take ur and SGTs experiences for example. Now I am guessing that neither of u have a disease that caused this optical illusion, and that the lack of such a disease is also what prevents u both from experiencing a full blown hallucination of an alternate reality.

Ivan is quite persuaded by his argument that level-headed people who show no signs of mental illness who report these kinds of things are all we need to know about to know ghosts exist. But all I can agree to about a good source is that it only gives you confidence that 1.) they're not lying, and 2.) they are much, much less likely to be giving a mixed up, incoherent report of their experience.

Wolram, I think, has a better attitude, which is that reports from good sources are strong indications that something we haven't properly explained and don't understand is probably going on. This might, in fact, be something so extrordinary as to fall into what we now call the "paranormal".

I don't know whether ur correct about whether this is what Ivan believes, but either way, i think there is something lacking in both Wolram and Ivans ideas.

In Ivans case, i obviously disagree that it is "all we need to know...".
In Wolrams case, "something we don't understand is going on" is just too vague and neutral for me. It baciscly boils down to "i don't know".

So, I'd rather assume hallucination for anything I can't actually examine, because even if I stipulate that level headed people are "strong evidence" that there is something paranormal out there, those "level-headed people are hardly in a position to know if what they saw was a ghost of a dead person or a Greek Eudemon. As soon as they say "ghost" they have jumped to a conclusion, even within the paranormal framework.

Sometimes one simply doesn't know what the heck it was. But in other cases, such as witnessing an aparition of a dead familymember, of course one would think it is actually a dead familymember. The reason one would think this is the same as the same reason u think u see a car, when u see a 4-wheeled machine driving by with the word 'mitsubishi' on it.

 

[zoobyshoe]

How about starting with the ones seen by mulitple eye-witnesses? i seem to remember ivan posting up multiple police witnesses of a ghost they saw, and I am sure if you do enough digging there are plenty of other verified cases like these.

I said this already:

The only reports that make me prick up my ears so to speak, are the ones where two or more people are claimed to have seen the same thing at the same time. That stands out as something that needs further listening to.

That was from post #36.

How about ghosts caught on film, which have been analysed and can't be proven to be fake?

I haven't heard of any. I saw a show where a film that had been declared "authentic" by one analyst was then easily reproduced as a fake by another.

In fact this happened to my brother, he bought a cottage a year ago, he has people stay with him from time to time, and 5 people in that cottage have seen the same ghost.

This, then, would be an excellent one to investigate. Five different people all reporting the same apparition at the same place is about as good as I've ever heard.

total coincidence though of course, or more likely as i suspect someones placing lsd in the local water supply in order to create mass-hallucinations.

Did all five people see the ghost in the same room of the cottage? Has your brother seen it? What does it look like?

In all seriousness though, sniff around long enough and you'll find it much harder to maintain your stance all these instances are hallucinations

Whooops! Someone can't read!

What I am trying to explain is that over the internet, here at Skepticism and Debunking, there is no way to distinguish a report of an hallucination from a report that may be a real ghost, because they sound the same.
In person, on a specific case, someone might be able to pin things down much more solidly.

The idea that all ghosts fall neatly into some kind of documented 'hallucination episode' is utterally false, they don't atall,

You don't get what I'm saying at all, I think.

and if you want to ignore the evidence and information that says otherwise youre playing the oldest game out there of believing what you want to believe because it happens to suit you best regardless of the facts.

There is no evidence for me to look at. There is only: a lot of eyewitness accounts. A mass of eyewitness accounts doesn't prove ghosts, or the Loch Ness Monster, or Bigfoot. I am very fond of Bigfoot. There are quite a few reports where more than one witness saw him at the same time. However, that doesn't prove his existence, and I'm not going to get irritated with anyone who thinks Bigfoot is bunk, even though I am impressed by the number and quality of the reports. The fact remains, I can't produce a Bigfoot to prove he exists, so I can't get too upset with the people who flat out say there is no such thing. What do I have for them but stories?

'hallucinations!' its the greatest answer ever for difficult subjects that are in danger of mocking our sensibilities and raising question which we rather were not raised.

I am not afraid of my sensibilities being mocked or of having questions raised. I started out believing in EVERYTHING! Ghosts, ET, Nessie, Bigfoot, OBEs, Perpetual Motion, you name it. Little by little as I looked into each one I started to find things out that erroded my ability to take them seriously anymore. There just comes a point where you have to face the facts as they are. Well, maybe you don't, but I do. The main fact to face is that if you can't prove something to other people then you have to ease up on the subject. Lake monsters are mostly probably sturgeon and weird optical effects, and ghosts are mostly probably hallucinations.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Certainly, everyone can make some incorrect assumptions and experience optical illusions, but there is a difference between that and the "full blown" hallucinations.

The bulk of non-mentally ill hallucinations I have heard of were the result of fatigue. When you are over-tired from lack of sleep, travel, or over exerting yourself, then "full-blown" hallucinations can result without your being mentally ill.

If I heard of someone calmly sitting and talking to their dead Gramma, then I would wonder first, if that person had actually gotten any sleep in the preceeding nights. Then I might wonder if they had a thyroid condition starting up on them. In the complete lack of mental illness or seizures, then there would have to be some physical thing out of whack to account for the hallucination. If the person were checked out by a doctor and declared free of all health problems, then I would be much more inclined to say "paranormal".

My main point was that you can hallucinate without becoming the least bit agitated, if the content of the hallucination doesn't bother you. You may even stay composed even if it does bother you. My friend who saw the giant white rabbit in a vacant lot, just pulled his car over calmly and said to his passenger "You better drive." He didn't go brezerk or crash. He was aware it was an hallucination: he hadn't slept in four days.

But in other cases, such as witnessing an aparition of a dead familymember, of course one would think it is actually a dead familymember. The reason one would think this is the same as the same reason u think u see a car, when u see a 4-wheeled machine driving by with the word 'mitsubishi' on it.

Mark Twain said: "Common sense is being able to look around you to see the world is flat."

 

[Math Is Hard]

My friend who saw the giant white rabbit in a vacant lot, just pulled his car over calmly and said to his passenger "You better drive." He didn't go brezerk or crash. He was aware it was an hallucination: he hadn't slept in four days.

That's no hallucination. It's called a Pooka.

 

[zoobyshoe]

That's no hallucination. It's called a Pooka.

I tried to tell him: "You should have made friends with it and invited it home"

 

[No-where-man]

I don't have a cite for you, but I have heard many anecdotal stories of "ghosts" in broad daylight. My own experience with sleep paralyis happened in broad daylight during the afternoon. This is neither here nor there because hallucinations are often so satisfying to all the senses you apply to them it wouldn't matter if you examined the pores of an hallucinations face with a magnifying glass: it still isn't there.

The only reports that make me prick up my ears so to speak, are the ones where two or more people are claimed to have seen the same thing at the same time. That stands out as something that needs further listening to.

I have had the same happen to me, and have heard other examples of this.

This is actually quite false. I think the percentage of people who are firm believers before hand who then end up seeing them is very low. Most of the stories I've heard involve people who are neutral or who wouldn't have even taken a stance on them to begin with.

If you make a point of asking everyone you can, in such a way that they don't feel you're going to criticize them, you'll find out that a third to a half of the people you know will admit to having seen something, that might have been a ghost, or a UFO, but which they don't obsess about or mention to people except on special occasions. Most of these people take it in stride, keeping it in a mental box of things they don't really know how to explain, but which don't also worry them very much.

No,you're wrong!
95% is of natural cause,others are auto-suggestion after they saw something that is made of natural cause.
Psychologists have made an very interesting experiment.They asked one group of people to go into the house that was cursed(but of course it wasn't cursed at all,but SCIENTISTS SAID TO THIS FIRST GROUP OF PEOPLE that house IS CURSED).This first group of people believed to scientists and saw ghosts and felt them all over and inside the supposedly cursed house-it's a funny thing that scientists have detected various magnetic fields in that moment connected with people's brains,since brain's activity of each of the men and women was active when they started to "see" ghosts.The other,second group saw nothing,since scinetists didn't tell them that it was supposedly cursed-YOU SEE,PEOPLE MAKE THEIR OWN GHOSTS!
I can't believe you're still debating this crap.

 

[No-where-man]

What makes them credible? What are the credentials for a ghost investigator? How do you gauge their level of bias? What is their bias, and why?



That's certainly true. I just saw a bird fly past the window but I could never prove it. As for honest delusions, which obviously explains some situations, to assume that someone was delusional, with absolutely no evidence to support this assumption, is not skepticism, it's wild guessing. Its playing doctor. Its bad science. If someone has a history of delusions and mental problems, then it may be a reasonable to assume that they were having problems. But how many "debunkers" are qualified to speak to person's mental health? Doesn't this assertion of delusions made with no proof at all make the debunkers a bunch pseudoscientist, or quacks? Can they provide any other diagnoses, or do bebunkers only study delusional behavior, in debunker school?



Ockams razor has nothing to do with it. This applies in the absence of direct claims by otherwise reliable observers. It applies when unnecessarily complex solutions exist along with a simpler one. Ockams razor assumes all things to otherwise be equal, but this does not mean that we can ignore or cherry pick the evidence in order to make them equal. But this is what the skeptics and debunkers do in order to support their own position. They pick the easiest targets for debunking and falsely present them as representative examples. Not to mention that Ockams razor is not a principle of science but rather a rule of thumb. It is not a definitive means by which we can discern truth from fallacies and fiction.

If you saw a bird flying thru the window everyone could believe you that since birds exist,ghosts don't exist.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Psychologists have made an very interesting experiment...
...YOU SEE,PEOPLE MAKE THEIR OWN GHOSTS!

Whats even more interesting is how some people mentally rewrite other people's posts, thinking they said something they didn't actually say.

You're right that people "make their own ghosts" but my point was that they don't have to be firm believers at all to be prey to this kind of suggestion. It works just as well on anyone who is merely neutral about the subject.

 

[No-where-man]

Whats even more interesting is how some people mentally rewrite other people's posts, thinking they said something they didn't actually say.

Your right that people "make their own ghosts" but my point was that they don't have to be firm believers at all to be prey to this kind of suggestion. It works just as well on anyone who is merely neutral about the subject.

Of course,that's true,but that can also happen if you infected subconsciosness,so basically you're not aware of it,but you think you saw something.That's where subconsciousness comes to the action.

 

[No-where-man]

Cooooooollllll.

 

[No-where-man]

Whats even more interesting is how some people mentally rewrite other people's posts, thinking they said something they didn't actually say.

Your right that people "make their own ghosts" but my point was that they don't have to be firm believers at all to be prey to this kind of suggestion. It works just as well on anyone who is merely neutral about the subject.

I rewrote my own post,I think that's not the crime.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Of course,that's true,but that can also happen if you infected subconsciosness,so basically you're not aware of it,but you think you saw something.That's where subconsciousness comes to the action.

Your grammar and syntax are very awkward. Is English a second language for you?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

If you saw a bird flying thru the window everyone could believe you that since birds exist,ghosts don't exist.

That's just your opinion.

What do you mean when you say ghost?

 

[No-where-man]

Your grammar and syntax are very awkward. Is English a second language for you?

Actually,it's the third,I'm still learning.

 

[No-where-man]

That's just your opinion.

What do you mean when you say ghost?

I mean on something that shows up like a very blurry picture once in the while.

 

[Curious3141]

That's just your opinion.

What do you mean when you say ghost?

Actually, Ivan, it's up to a believer to define a "ghost". So far, there is no clear definition. Ghosts seem to be a broad collection of poorly reproducible subjective sensory phenomena that may comprise visual, auditory, tactile, thermal and on occasion, even olfactory and gustatory facets. Some of these sensory perceptions are accompanied by strong emotional responses, though it is unclear whether the emotional responses are primary (intrinsic to the phenomenon) or secondary (a subject's reaction to the apparent stimulus). Occasionally, objective phenomena such as movement of inanimate objects and physical changes in the surroundings have been noted, though the reliability of these accounts is doubtful.

All the above things could pertain equally well to UFOs and Nessie sightings. The phenomena are only called "ghosts" when there is an (again, subjective and ill-founded) association of the perceptions with the idea of a dead being (person or animal).

So you see, "believers" should get their act together and define their terms accurately before any serious investigation can take place. Doing this is not the job of a skeptic, who has no reason to assume it is a bona fide phenomenon in the first place. I don't consider running around haunted houses with EM sensors, PK meters, Geiger counters or pendula to be anything approaching a serious scientific investigation. Before such a thing can take place, the phenomenon must be unambiguously defined (a job for the believers) then it can be looked for scientifically.

 

[SGT]

Actually, Ivan, it's up to a believer to define a "ghost". So far, there is no clear definition. Ghosts seem to be a broad collection of poorly reproducible subjective sensory phenomena that may comprise visual, auditory, tactile, thermal and on occasion, even olfactory and gustatory facets. Some of these sensory perceptions are accompanied by strong emotional responses, though it is unclear whether the emotional responses are primary (intrinsic to the phenomenon) or secondary (a subject's reaction to the apparent stimulus). Occasionally, objective phenomena such as movement of inanimate objects and physical changes in the surroundings have been noted, though the reliability of these accounts is doubtful.

All the above things could pertain equally well to UFOs and Nessie sightings. The phenomena are only called "ghosts" when there is an (again, subjective and ill-founded) association of the perceptions with the idea of a dead being (person or animal).

So you see, "believers" should get their act together and define their terms accurately before any serious investigation can take place. Doing this is not the job of a skeptic, who has no reason to assume it is a bona fide phenomenon in the first place. I don't consider running around haunted houses with EM sensors, PK meters, Geiger counters or pendula to be anything approaching a serious scientific investigation. Before such a thing can take place, the phenomenon must be unambiguously defined (a job for the believers) then it can be looked for scientifically.

Well, science tries to explain observable phenomena. Paranormal pseudoscience tries to observe unexplainable phenomena.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Well, science tries to explain observable phenomena. Paranormal pseudoscience tries to observe unexplainable phenomena.

Absolutely wrong. Pseudoscience refers to the method of investigation.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Actually, Ivan, it's up to a believer to define a "ghost".

What is a believer? Many people confuse observers with believers. A person might observes a phenomenon but not believe any particular explanation for what happened.

]though the reliability of these accounts is doubtful

Again, your opinion, nothing more.

All the above things could pertain equally well to UFOs and Nessie sightings.

In some cases this is true. But in many, not true. There are a handful of people who claim to have seen a "Nessie", and in addition to supporting evidence, millions who see UFOs. To mix in UFOs with Nessie only shows how little you know.

The phenomena are only called "ghosts" when there is an (again, subjective and ill-founded) association of the perceptions with the idea of a dead being (person or animal).

Again, your opinon and nothing more.

So you see, "believers" should get their act together and define their terms accurately before any serious investigation can take place. Doing this is not the job of a skeptic, who has no reason to assume it is a bona fide phenomenon in the first place. I don't consider running around haunted houses with EM sensors, PK meters, Geiger counters or pendula to be anything approaching a serious scientific investigation. Before such a thing can take place, the phenomenon must be unambiguously defined (a job for the believers) then it can be looked for scientifically.

So, we should explain a phenomenon before we know what it may be. In other words, publish first, then do the research. Gotcha.

 

[SGT]

Absolutely wrong. Pseudoscience refers to the method of investigation.

Exactly. Ufology, parapsychology, ghost hunting are all pseudosciences. Their method of investigation is to try to observe phenomena that are not there to be observed.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Holy cow! Your reasoning is completely circular.

You can spout off accusations all day but that doesn't make them true.

I challenge you to start another thread, and name one credible scientist who studies UFOs. If you can't, then you have only proven that you speak out of ignorance. But this thread is about ghosts and such so let's stick with that. It is your position that enthusiasts, and in some cases, scientists, who study a haunting and identitify a prozaic explanation for the claims, are doing pseudoscience? Some call this debunking. Now, if you are saying that debunkers are often crackpots, I would agree.

 

[Curious3141]

What is a believer? Many people confuse observers with believers. A person might observes a phenomenon but not believe any particular explanation for what happened.

You're the one confusing observation with (mis)identification. If I send a "ghost naive" person (meaning one who has never even been exposed to the concept of a "ghost) into a "haunted" house, and he/she experiences vague sensory phenomena, do you think that person is going to immediately identify their experience as a "ghost" ?

No, one needs to be a believer, or at least open to the idea of ghosts existing, before one makes that leap.

Again, your opinion, nothing more.

And that their testimony is credible is *your* opinion, nothing more.

In some cases this is true. But in many, not true. There are a handful of people who claim to have seen a "Nessie", and in addition to supporting evidence, millions who see UFOs. To mix in UFOs with Nessie only shows how little you know.

So you've suddenly decided to grade these phenomena by some preconceived standard of believability ? Let me remind you : to date, there has not been ONE good piece of reliable, unimpeachable physical evidence of EITHER of these things. On the contrary, numerous accounts of BOTH have been proven to be utter hoaxes, with the perpetrators themselves admitting it on many occasions.

Tell me how little I know again, and I'll tell you how much you believe without thinking.

Again, your opinon and nothing more.

The Sun rises in the east, is that also my opinion ? We could go back and forth like this all day, what does it accomplish ? Everything I write IS obviously my opinion, but I daresay it is not an uninformed or unfounded one. And it happens to be one many other rational people agree with. Are you willing to debate my opinions now ?

So, we should explain a phenomenon before we know what it may be. In other words, publish first, then do the research. Gotcha.

Facetious, but wrong. I am asking for a rigorous definition of the phenomenon, not for some vague airy-fairy notion of spirits or temperature changes or "things that go bump in the night". I am asking for a single thing or an unchangeable set of things that characterises a ghost. Serious investigators can then use the tools available to them : humans - if they need human beings, so be it, they can take a (truly) random blinded sample of volunteers for an unspecified experiment in psychology, if it comes to that - or instrumentation to study the phenomena. If they find no evidence of it after a proper investigation, so be it. They can keep looking if it possesses them (no pun intended) to do so. If they find something, I'll pay attention and we'll be able to study the phenomena in greater depth.

Only then will publication, and peer review follow, with (hopefully) other credible investigators launching their own studies to examine reproducibility of the phenomena.

If you don't follow the cautious, rigorous path of real science, you descend into pseudoscience.

 

[zoobyshoe]

All the above things could pertain equally well to UFOs and Nessie sightings. The phenomena are only called "ghosts" when there is an (again, subjective and ill-founded) association of the perceptions with the idea of a dead being (person or animal).

Again, your opinion, nothing more

Actually, I spent some time making this same point, and don't think you can maintain it is merely an opinion. The fact is, that people do jump to the explanation of this kind of experience as being "ghost"; the disembodied spirit of a dead person. That is an assumption they make based exclusively on the fact it is traditional to refer to phantom apparitions of human figures as "ghosts" instead of, say, time travelers from the past, or trickster spirits posing as humans.

Even if you firmly believe there is something paranormal about these apparitions, there is actually no airtight reason to assume they are the spirits of dead people, yet everyone who believes automatically assumes this.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

You're the one confusing observation with (mis)identification. If I send a "ghost naive" person (meaning one who has never even been exposed to the concept of a "ghost) into a "haunted" house, and he/she experiences vague sensory phenomena, do you think that person is going to immediately identify their experience as a "ghost" ?

No, I would expect them to report what happens as in any case.

No, one needs to be a believer, or at least open to the idea of ghosts existing, before one makes that leap.

This depends entirely on the situation. You are assuming that nothing dramatic or irrefutable is ever observed. Sure, if you cherry pick your examples to include only the howling wind and creaking floorboards, then of course the result will be as you designed the question to imply.

And that their testimony is credible is *your* opinion, nothing more.

I didn't say that any particular case is credible, but you are pulling out of thin air the conclusion that all cases are not credible, which is your opinion, but that can't be used as a logical basis to support your position. Also, I have made no claims of proof, so your comparison also fails.

So you've suddenly decided to grade these phenomena by some preconceived standard of believability ?

Show me where I said that. I said that we have orders of magnitude more evidence for a phenomenon commonly referred to as UFOs, than we do a so called Nessie.

Let me remind you : to date, there has not been ONE good piece of reliable, unimpeachable physical evidence of EITHER of these things.

Gee, do you think?

On the contrary, numerous accounts of BOTH have been proven to be utter hoaxes, with the perpetrators themselves admitting it on many occasions.

There have been numerous hoaxes in physics as well, so should we throw away all of the books? Again, this can't be used to support your position. It only proves that there are hoaxes. That's all.

The Sun rises in the east, is that also my opinion ? We could go back and forth like this all day, what does it accomplish ?

Nothing until you make a valid point. We can prove what you just stated. The sun rises in the East. But this is a different situation all together. It is known fact and not just an opinon.

Everything I write IS obviously my opinion, but I daresay it is not an uninformed or unfounded one. And it happens to be one many other rational people agree with. Are you willing to debate my opinions now ?

Opinions are fine as long as you know the difference between opinions and fact. Also, all people, including rational people, are wrong about many things. There are also very rational people who believe in ghosts, so does this prove that ghosts exist?

Facetious, but wrong. I am asking for a rigorous definition of the phenomenon, not for some vague airy-fairy notion of spirits or temperature changes or "things that go bump in the night".

Fine. then go get one be happy with it. I don't have a definition or conclusion about any of this. There is only the observed phenomenon

If you don't follow the cautious, rigorous path of real science, you descend into pseudoscience.

The correct approach is to gather evidence and deduce or infer a hypothesis based on that evidence. Instead, you want to jump to conclusions about a proper explanation, which is bad science.

 

[SGT]

I challenge you to start another thread, and name one credible scientist who studies UFOs.

I don't know any.

If you can't, then you have only proven that you speak out of ignorance. But this thread is about ghosts and such so let's stick with that. It is your position that enthusiasts, and in some cases, scientists, who study a haunting and identitify a prozaic explanation for the claims, are doing pseudoscience? Some call this debunking. Now, if you are saying that debunkers are often crackpots, I would agree.

Can you name one credible scientist who studies ghosts?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Actually, I spent some time making this same point, and don't think you can maintain it is merely an opinion. The fact is, that people do jump to the explanation of this kind of experience as being "ghost"; the disembodied spirit of a dead person. That is an assumption they make based exclusively on the fact it is traditional to refer to phantom apparitions of human figures as "ghosts" instead of, say, time travelers from the past, or trickster spirits posing as humans.

Not true; not all people. There are many ideas to explain what people observe. The souls of the departed is just one explanation; albeit a popular one. Many people who seriously look into these things do not necessarily equate any ghostly phenomenon with a spirititual explanation. In fact they are often looking for other explanations; such as electromagnetic imprinting, which I don't buy into, but as an example.

 

[Curious3141]

No, I would expect them to report what happens as in any case.



This depends entirely on the situation. You are assuming that nothing dramatic or irrefutable is ever observed. Sure, if you cherry pick your examples to include only the howling wind and creaking floorboards, then of course the result will be as you designed the question to imply.



I didn't say that any particular case is credible, but you are pulling out of thin air the conclusion that all cases are not credible, which is your opinion, but that can't be used as a logical basis to support your position. Also, I have made no claims of proof, so your comparison also fails.



Show me where I said that. I said that we have orders of magnitude more evidence for a phenomenon commonly referred to as UFOs, than we do a so called Nessie.



There have been numerous hoaxes in physics as well, so should we throw away all of the books? Again, this can't be used to support your position. It only proves that there are hoaxes. That's all.



Nothing until you make a valid point. We can prove what you just stated. The sun rises in the East. But this is a different situation all together. It is known fact and not just an opinon.



Opinions are fine as long as you know the difference between opinions and fact. Also, all people, including rational people, are wrong about many things. There are also very rational people who believe in ghosts, so does this prove that ghosts exist?



Fine. then go get one be happy with it. I don't have a definition or conclusion about any of this. There is only the observed phenomenon



The correct approach is to gather evidence and deduce or infer a hypothesis based on that evidence. Instead, you want to jump to conclusions about a proper explanation, which is bad science.

Here's a thought : instead of all this speculation, why don't you actually design a simple scientific investigation into the sensory phenomena that a random sample of people experience in a "haunted" house ?

You don't need any special instrumentation or other pseudoscientific mumbojumbo. You have been very clear that you are interested in subjective sensory phenomena, so study that. For a first study all you will need to do is to record the type of sensations your subjects are registering.

Here's the kicker : your subjects must be completely unaware they're being roped in as spirit sensors. This is blinding, of a sort (well, there is no control group, but this methodology does prevent biasing the data).

It's fairly uncomplicated to do this. All you will need to do is to get a less known "haunted" house (I'm sure you can turn one up after scouring suburbia for a bit), so that no one beyond that city has preconceived notions about its "status". Then you will need a simple ruse. Recruit out of town volunteers for a simple paid psychology experiment : something involving quiet reading or drawing, puzzle solving, or other act of concentration. No mention should be made of paranormal phenomena or ghosts. The recruitment can be done by a random phone book call up, or some other simple method. You can weed out most of the ones with current serious mental illness with a short psychiatric assessment before they're entered into the study. You can also rule out grave physical conditions to ensure somewhat healthy subjects (who're not going to die on you during the study and add to the ghost count ).

Since it has been mentioned repeatedly in this thread that ghosts do not need darkness to manifest themselves, do the study in good lighting, so as not to give the game away. Make the house/room well lit and well furnished, like a typical small office. Go through the motions like you're studying something else entirely. Have the subject be engaged in the quiet exercise while record free thoughts and sensations at regular intervals into a diary. The subject can be monitored at all times with a video cam setup. Have refreshments and snacks available to them. You can keep them in there up to two hours before they become really bored, I guess.

Make sure the subjects don't even know one another, let alone talk to one another. Bring them in one by one on different days and repeat the exercise. You also have a video record in case one of them really gets the jitters and acts strangely, cries out or bolts, that would be significant objective evidence of a strange reaction.

You now have a harvest of free thoughts and sensations. Before the study begins, you should draw up a list of what you would consider "hits". A hit may be defined as any unusual visual, auditory or tactile sensation, or any sense of unease or dread that they record in that diary during their quiet time. Since these sensations were obtained without bidding, cueing or prompting, I would consider them fair and unbiased observations. Just to be sure, I think you should draw up the criteria in a standardised list, and have blinded co-investigators read each entry in parallel and in random order to grade the hits based on their best interpretation of your criteria (it isn't a perfect system, but many eyes looking at the same data is undoubtedly better). The results can be tallied up and taken in aggregate later.

There is really no statistical analysis you can perform on this data, but you can certainly present an interesting observational study. You can also look for concordance between visual perceptions (e.g. it is significant if more than one person thought they saw the same red figure).

If you have good results from this prelim study, you can then go on to do more serious stuff. The same protocol can be repeated without of town subjects being recruited and randomly assigned (blinded) to two houses (one "normal" and the other "haunted") and the hit counts compared with a nonparametric analysis being done. You can go on to do even more creative stuff, including some well behaved schizophrenics in your group to see if their responses are any more acute than "normal" subjects.

The possibilities are extensive and you don't need expensive snake oil equipment to carry out a study like this. I have yet to read about anything like this that has been done, but I may be mistaken. Set me right if it has.