Ghosts / Haunting Experiences

[Słash]

15 minutes ago, The Glow Inc. said:

I had sleep paralysis happen to me once. Really creepy as you genuinely sense a powerful evil presence in the room with you.

I had it once and it was wtf, it felt like someone was pressing my neck, I was not able to move or speak. It kept on happening again and again.

Like in the dream, I woke up 4 times and it kept on happening, it was like the wtf Inception. 

[Dan H.]

2 hours ago, DieselDaisy said:

What if you see one? People who see ghosts are usually not pondering some existential quasi-religious argument unless you re one of these people who are obsessed with the paranormal. Most people who see these things are usually doing mundane things. Take the ghost story I posted, The Metheringham Lass. That is simply drivers on a road being pulled over.

Things happen often that an individual may not be able to explain. But that doesn't inherently make it unexplainable. When you fill that unexplained void with thoughts of an afterlife, I think it would suggest that on some baseline level, that person clings to spirituality in some small way, as a rationalization.

I have a treatable mood disorder, and during periods of massive anxiety I would feel an external sense of dread, or presence, or all kinds of surreal and abnormal sensations and experiences.

Now, that could be unique to my condition, but it does illustrate that the human brain is entirely capable of making the unreal seem real. So doesn't it make more sense to attribute encounters of bizzare or seemingly paranormal activity to your brain, interpreting unusual circumstances incorrectly, and forcing them to make some kind of sense?

Otherwise, you would think that there would be more consistency to sightings, or reasonably convincing evidence. Something to observe, other than anecdotes.

[Dan H.]

I mean if spirits are interacting with us, then what are the logistics behind it? How and when can they show up? How much energy does it take? Why cant we measure the energy? Why is there no evidence of its interaction, surely an apparition would leave some kind of change behind, in order to materialize or interact with our universe

[Gunner55]

@Dan H. You sound just like my wife with that argument. Lol but it's entirely valid. And I don't have a logical explanation for it and never have when she's asked me that. She believes in demons but thinks the idea of spirits just chilling and hanging around after death is a bunch of shit. 

[Bumblefeet]

9 minutes ago, Dan H. said:

I mean if spirits are interacting with us, then what are the logistics behind it? How and when can they show up? How much energy does it take? Why cant we measure the energy? Why is there no evidence of its interaction, surely an apparition would leave some kind of change behind, in order to materialize or interact with our universe

I love the explanation given by the comedian Paul Mooney why there are no ghosts;

In the West you only see white ghosts, if ghosts truly existed all the black slaves surely would come back to haunt white people. 

To all those who claim to have had experiences;

You are a human being with senses and feelings and perceptions which can easily be tricked into believing you experienced something ghostly or otherworldly when in fact it's your mind playing tricks. Also a lot of believers tend to be easy pray for so called mediums and channelers of so called spirits who pray on dumb people's money. People can be fooled to believe in anything they've been indoctrinated to believe. Having an open mind for the extra-ordinary also means having an open mind that it's all tricks, psychology and misdirection.

 

[SoulMonster]

I used to believe in ghosts, though. To make a short story long: When I was a kid my family used to celebrate Midsummer's eve together with other people at this small island just outside our city. We have a really beautiful "skjærgård" just outside of the city, with an archipelago of small, lush islands full of wonderful, twisted trees that invites you to imagine cupcakes and creatures of the fantasy, fallen trunks covered in soft moss, wierd mushrooms that grow in the damp undergrowth and rocks that jut out of the earth in wierd shapes. All the families gathered at a clearing on this island and partied the summer's night away. We kids roamed around and had a great timee as kids do when the parents are slightly drunk and less supervisory. Anyway, on one of these wanderings through the island I saw this person come towards me between the dark trees. It was completely clad in white. The whoel apparition was shining white. Or so my memory today tells me. I was dead certain this must have been a ghost. The scene was just so strange, a white creature coming towards us in this eerie forest. I turned around before it came too close.

In hindsight I am sure this was just one of the revellers, probably gone for a piss or something, white some white white clothes on. But then, to the mind of a 6 year old, and there, in this ghostly forest late at night, what was just a somewhat peculiar thing undeniably became something supernatural. And that is how the human mind works.

Later that night, or earlier, and as a sidenote, I got whacked in the head by an oak trunk that swung as a pendulum between two large trees with a bunch of kids riding it as a horse. I happened to run a bit too close to it as it swung back and it hit my straight in the head making me topple to the ground. I got a pretty massive black eye, but otherwise no damage. Unless this brain injury was part in making my hallucinate about ghosts later...

8 hours ago, DieselDaisy said:

If you have seen it, you have seen it thus it is empirically extent based on the premise that if your sensory perception picks up something then that thing is extent.

But that premise is very flawed. Humans imagine stuff all the time. Our brain is not at all as perfect as you would have it. And some brains even less so.

[Słash]

25 minutes ago, Dan H. said:

I mean if spirits are interacting with us, then what are the logistics behind it? How and when can they show up? How much energy does it take? Why cant we measure the energy? Why is there no evidence of its interaction, surely an apparition would leave some kind of change behind, in order to materialize or interact with our universe

How do you explain the death of Elisa Lam?

Like ok she was bipolar and maybe had mental problems and saw hallucinations in that elevator, but how she got inside the water tank, the police said it was literally impossible to open up the water tank by herself. 

[PappyTron]

7 minutes ago, Slash787 said:

How do you explain the death of Elisa Lam?

Like ok she was bipolar and maybe had mental problems and saw hallucinations in that elevator, but how she got inside the water tank, the police said it was literally impossible to open up the water tank by herself. 

What is more likely, that a woman trapped herself in a water tank by some, as yet, unexplained but natural means, or that mischievous spirits visited her and then locked her in the water tank using their ghostly powers?

[Słash]

2 minutes ago, PappyTron said:

What is more likely, that a woman trapped herself in a water tank by some, as yet, unexplained but natural means, or that mischievous spirits visited her and then locked her in the water tank using their ghostly powers?

I honestly don't know man, anything can happen now days. 

[Dan H.]

17 minutes ago, Slash787 said:

How do you explain the death of Elisa Lam?

Like ok she was bipolar and maybe had mental problems and saw hallucinations in that elevator, but how she got inside the water tank, the police said it was literally impossible to open up the water tank by herself. 

I have no idea to be honest.

But that doesn't mean that: Unknown = spiritual belief system.

[Słash]

6 minutes ago, Dan H. said:

I have no idea to be honest.

But that doesn't mean that: Unknown = spiritual belief system.

True and there could be an another way for it to happen.

But Im just saying that there are things out there, like I have not experienced it or seen it like DD or Gunner55.

But if you tell me to sleep in some haunted room in a haunted hotel, then I will freak out, maybe its in my mind or something.

[SoulMonster]

10 minutes ago, Slash787 said:

How do you explain the death of Elisa Lam?

Just because we don't have an explanation for something doesn't mean there isn't a completely logical non-supernatural explanation and that we should embrace a supernatural explanation.

There will always be examples of peculiar stories that seem supernatural due to us not having the full understanding of what went down, due to people remembering events wrong, due to our brains' tendency to twist perceptions and memories, due to extremely implausible -- yet absolutely natural -- events that make us think it must have been something outerworldly. With a trillion events taking place every day across the world you would expect some of them to resemble something supernatural just because of all this. It is simple probability theory. With so many eyes looking, so many ears listening, and so many brains frantically interpretating the senses, there will always be events that to some people appear to be supernatural and where we lack the crucial evidence that clearly make it a natural thing that only appeared supernatural. What would be strange was that if such stories didn't pop up again and again; if many people every day didn't mistakingly mistook something completely natural as being supernatural.

What it all boils down to is that IF supernatural events actually did happen, and did affect the material world, then we would be able to observe and document this properly, and not just through "ghost stories", personal anecdotes and suspecious evidence. Even if they were exceedingly rare there is a fair chance that some time, some place, some humans would be able to document it properly. After all, we have been able to document so many other phenomena that affects the natural world, even if they are super-rare, and in this process contributed to our understanding of the natural world. The fleeting are rare are documented all the time. Hell, we even have verified the existence of Higgs Boson particle! And if anything in the natural world come across as supernatural it is such things!

Alternative medicine has been rejected by the understanding that there are only two types of medicines: those medicines that work and those that don't work. As soon as an "alternative medicine" is documented to work it automatically seizes to be "alternative" and instead is incorporated into the corpus of conventional medicine. It's thee same with the supernatural. There are only two things of phenomena: those that affect the natural world and those that don't. And those that do affect the natural world are automatically part of this world and hence not supernatural by nature. It becomes part of our understanding of the material world and measured and scrutinized. Like Higgs Boson and other weirdos from quantum mechanics. The supernatural are those phenomena that consistently fail to demonstrate to actually be real. The superntural comprise those events that repeatedly fail at demonstrating to actually exist. Those that again and again turn out to be nothing but imaginations, misinterpretations of natural phenomena, and the effects of drugs and awry biochemistry.

[Gunner55]

Elisa Lam's story is something else. Lots of great arguments for something logical and explainable scenarios but it all doesn't add up completely. 

[DieselDaisy]

11 hours ago, Dan H. said:

When you fill that unexplained void with thoughts of an afterlife, I think it would suggest that on some baseline level, that person clings to spirituality in some small way, as a rationalization.

Nobody does that though unless you take these things seriously. In fact ghosts are virtually a complete fringe topic in religion. It is virtually impossible to encompass ghosts within the tradition of the religious afterlife, in say Christian eschatology or Buddhist reincarnation.

Most people see a ghost, shit their pants and then possess an interesting scary anecdote for the rest of their life. It is that simple for just about everyone who has had an experience that I know.

[PappyTron]

1 hour ago, DieselDaisy said:

Nobody does that though unless you take these things seriously. In fact ghosts are virtually a complete fringe topic in religion. It is virtually impossible to encompass ghosts within the tradition of the religious afterlife, in say Christian eschatology or Buddhist reincarnation.

Most people see a ghost, shit their pants and then possess an interesting scary anecdote for the rest of their life. It is that simple for just about everyone who has had an experience that I know.

[Słash]

A ghost story from Hong Kong

 

I was fortunate enough to go visit Hong Kong twice in a row. My first time being with my family in 1994, and then by myself in 1995.

My story happened in July 1995 after going out with some friends, and was on the way back to my uncle's flat. I am not too familiar with Hong Kong, so please forgive me if I said Central, and its not.

This involved the section from the Ice House location all the way to Conduit Rd. I remember it was late at night, it was about 2am. I was all by myself, no one else was on the escalator as I could notice. I had a strange feeling as being watched. Then I saw the video cameras. It was strange. At first I thought someone was walking up the escalator fast to get somewhere quick, as it was coming below from all the way down where I began my journey up on the escalator. It was not a running pattern of sound, but a fast walking pace sound coming up towards you. It made some kind of metallic thunk sound each time it was coming towards me. I felt a cold wind and the metallic thunk sound coming closer, but the same rate of speed. 

I decided to stop and listen at a level platform, and peered down. Normally if you peered down from this point you can see all the way down clearly of 3 sections of the escalator of where the noise was coming from. Nothing was there, but the noise of the metallic thunk sound stopped, as if whatever was making that noise knew I was looking at it. As I left the level landing I continued up the escalator, and the metallic thunk started up the escalators again in a more hurried pace as if it was trying to catch up to me. I decided to quicken my pace as well as I started to walk up the escalator instead of letting it carry me. Until this point there was no one on the escalator, neither going up or down. I noticed on the other side the escalator was turned off, non moving. Each time I passed by a security camera I stopped for a few seconds and I waved for help as I was starting to get scared.

But no one came to my rescue. Nothing at all. As the sound was getting closer, it made me run up the escalator now. And I realized that I was breaking the rule of not running. But yet passing the security camera and thinking seeing me do this they would come stop me from running. But nothing still. The sound was getting louder and closer, and I envisioned some kind of invisible horrible thing one section behind me. I did not dare to look back, and kept running at full tilt by now, up the escalators, and starting to skip over each step, concentrating carefully and not wanting to trip on one. As I got to the top of the escalator section I quickly turned and continued to run full tilt. As I turned my head and looked at the escalator, I saw two red eyes, and nothing else. I quickly remembered that there was a cafe that opened late and I quickly ducked in there. The staff were the only ones there just eating.

One elderly lady screamed and pointed at the two red eyes. A man grabbed the idol of "Guan Yu" and held it towards the door, and the red eyes disappeared. Until this day it haunts me and am scared to use the escalator alone. I later found out that this part of the mountain had a lot of landslides that have killed many.

[Len Cnut]

5 hours ago, PappyTron said:

You crack me up sometimes

[Dan H.]

7 hours ago, DieselDaisy said:

Nobody does that though unless you take these things seriously. In fact ghosts are virtually a complete fringe topic in religion. It is virtually impossible to encompass ghosts within the tradition of the religious afterlife, in say Christian eschatology or Buddhist reincarnation.

Most people see a ghost, shit their pants and then possess an interesting scary anecdote for the rest of their life. It is that simple for just about everyone who has had an experience that I know.

Ghosts, afterlife, religion, they all come from the same internal human fear/ fascination.

I think we're just dancing around semantics now. I'm talking about people who BELIEVE in ghosts. Not people who may have had a 'supernatural' experience, as you say in your example

Edited August 10, 2016 by Dan H.

[Len Cnut]

Peter Tosh reported once being possessed by an evil spirit whilst in bed.  It paralysed him with fear, to where he was stricken, unable to move.  He managed to muster up the energy to shout 'MOVE YUH BUMBOCLAAT!!'...at which point the spirits dispersed, thus instilling in him the belief that the word 'bumboclaat' had supernatural powers.  

That sounds like i made it up, doesnt it?

[DieselDaisy]

2 hours ago, Dan H. said:

Ghosts, afterlife, religion, they all come from the same internal human fear/ fascination.

I think we're just dancing around semantics now. I'm talking about people who BELIEVE in ghosts. Not people who may have had a 'supernatural' experience, as you say in your example

Well we are discussing different things. You seem to be discussing spiritualism.

If you merely witness a ghost - as I have on two occasions - you believe there is something there but in a rather unspecific vague way then carry on with the rest of your life; the experience merely gets reduced to an interesting anecdote: ''yeh, I saw a grey lady - nearly shit myself''. Then there is spiritualism which is entirely different.

[PappyTron]

4 hours ago, Len B'stard said:

You crack me up sometimes

Sometimes? SOMETIMES???!!!!

Cheeky bastard!

[Gordon Comstock]

I wouldn't necessarily say I believe in "ghosts" but I'm fascinated by the concept of other/multi-dimensional beings and what the human brain perceives vs. what's actually around us in the universe.

I've never seen a ghost but I'll share the closest (and only) thing I've experienced that's similar. Some backstory: I grew up in a small town and there were lots of wooded areas around, and some friends and I knew where a couple abandoned houses were. There was one that 2 of my friends lived by that was an unfinished house, they owner had died while building it (he fell through the roof). It was a simple A-frame style house, the peak was quite high but it wasn't overly wide.
One day me and the 2 friends that lived by it were wandering around, we walked through the basement (just concrete that had been covered in spraypaint over the years, some of which I may have added...) and then were just hanging out in front of what would have been the front door. As I said, it was unfinished, so you could see through the house from front to back and of course, through some of the roof. There's absolutely nothing in there, but all three of us heard a sudden, very loud crash. About as loud as if someone had fallen from the roof. And I know sure as shit I wasn't the only one that heard it because my friends had bolted before I'd even turned to them

[The Real McCoy]

On 8/9/2016 at 3:09 PM, The Glow Inc. said:

I had sleep paralysis happen to me once. Really creepy as you genuinely sense a powerful evil presence in the room with you.

Happened to me once. It took all of my strength to turn my head, and I swear that I saw two hooded and cloaked figures standing over my bed starting at me.

[acidcock27]

i bought  a oujia board 2 months ago , i invited demons into my home every night for 5 days straight and nothing happened.

[PappyTron]

2 hours ago, The Real McCoy said:

Happened to me once. It took all of my strength to turn my head, and I swear that I saw two hooded and cloaked figures standing over my bed starting at me.

It's been so long since McCoy has had sex that his penis is haunted.