A ghost post

The Atlantic has an article on why people believe in ghosts. I haven't read it. I did read a short excerpt on the political site Hot Air, which included this tidbit:

It turns out that a significant amount of people report having personally experienced paranormal activity. In a study published in 2011, 28.5 percent of undergraduate students surveyed at a southern university reported having had a paranormal experience. In a 2006 Reader’s Digest poll, 20 percent of respondents (21 percent of women and 16 percent of men) reported that they had seen a ghost at some time in their lives.

After reading the excerpt, I looked through the comments on Hot Air. It's a conservative site with a somewhat cynical attitude, and I figured most of the comments would be scathingly skeptical. Some were. But other people were surprisingly open about their own experiences and opinions.

My Mom said she saw a see-through ghost moving its mouth in the corner of a bathroom a week after a women had been murdered in same bathroom.

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I don’t know about supernatural “ghosts,” but I do believe in concepts like a poltergeist, essentially a mysterious spirit-like entity capable of causing physical disturbances. Though I suppose that’s technically a “ghost.”

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Same based on personal experience. Two or three times a week, my son, my wife, or I hear furniture move in one room when no one is upstairs. I’ve even experienced it once when I was upstairs. It was a little surprising, but it wasn’t scary.

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I’ve never experienced anything paranormal but I’ve heard so many stories from tons of different people that I definitely think that ghosts could be real.

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One of my best friends who’s a paramedic told me a story of seeing a ghost on a call to a nursing home, with witnesses. With the details he gave me, he was either trying to pull my leg, or he undoubtedly saw a ghost, and I know him well enough to know he wasn’t joking around.

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I actually work at a nursing home which is where I’ve heard a lot of stories, some extremely bizarre and from people I know aren’t trying to BS me.

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So my wife and I were busy working and around 3:00 am she felt “an old man” watching her while she was sanding in a walk-in closet. My wife is NOT superstitious, is not prone to that kind of talk or thinking. She didn’t even think about it really ... it was a small feeling and she blew it off.

The next morning she asked the landlord if the place was haunted. The landlord replied “why do you ask?” My wife related the story and the landlord told her how everyone who has lived in the place has actually SEEN an old man standing in the hallways in the middle of the night. He only appears from the waist up.

So fast-forward about a month and I am laying in bed and my wife is down the hall taking a bath. I have the lights off and I was reading my iPhone. It was pretty quiet and I was about to go to sleep when the light switch (the old protruding kind) literally flicked on right in front of me. At first I couldn’t believe what I had just seen. I thought my wife had walked down the hall and somehow flicked the light on.. which is impossible because the floors creak with every single step. But I called out to her “why did you turn on the lights?” She yelled back “what?”

Yeah … i was running out of there pretty quick.

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I believe in ghosts; if you take the time to separate fact from sensationalism, there are too many stories of unexplained phenomena (many from committed skeptics and rational-minded folks) to ignore.

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I don’t believe in ghosts as depicted in entertainment, and reality v shows.

However I did grow up in a house with a ghost/presence. Since my parents accepted him as the eccentric unseen uncle of the family, it was no big deal.

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My family moved in an old house and we came home after eating out one night a few days after moving in and heard somebody moving furniture around upstairs. Me and my dad ran up expecting a burglar and nothing was moved or bothered. We lived there a couple of years and it became a common thing as well as hearing somebody walking around and going up and down the stairs. We never saw anything but found out later from the person who owned the house that a lot of people had claimed to see things in there.

There is some pushback against the usual motley crew of know-it-all scoffers.

People who would tell me to discount the detailed story of my good friend, who is as levelheaded as anyone I’ve ever met, because they insist ghosts don’t/can’t exist really are fools who deserve to be mocked.

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It’s funny how so many around here always line up to deny something exists ...

I have seen a ghost. They absolutely exist.

I saw a man walking around a warehouse (that all of us working there had heard about) at a job where I used to work overnights. That part was closed after 6pm. So, no one was ever over there in that part at night.

Two other people saw it with me. He was about 100 feet away from us, facing the other way as we had always been told. We never saw his face. He was supposedly a man that used to work there years ago and died there on the job one day.

It was awesome.

There are even some attempts to get a handle on the problem from a philsophical or scientific standpoint.

That depends on what a “ghost” is and since we have no idea what consciousness and “life” are, there are many options all of which are 100% conjecture.

For instance, a visible “ghost” might be the projection of one person’s thoughts into another’s mind, causing the second person to receive stimuli that cannot be distinguished from actual vision.

If those thoughts are passed from mind to mind, then perhaps it would be possible to “see” things that happened generations ago, perhaps with the scope and clarity of the thoughts reducing with each transmission.

In these scenarios the person apparently seen in ghostly form need not still be alive in any corporeal or spiritual sense — even assuming that the person ever actually lived.

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The term ‘ghost’ is far too broad a term to cover everything from low level audio of past events to moving hot/cold spots to interactive but limited duration/location intelligent response to the high end and rare fully interactive but still relatively limited geographically and temporally intelligent response or active intelligence presence. Each of these begs for separate categories and research as they may not be actual, related events or may sit on a continuum of events with hard break points either in physical geography or some ability of substrates to record physical phenomena ...

Overall, I was impressed with the number of people who a) said they had experienced these phenomena firsthand, or b) had heard about such things from sources they trusted, or c) had looked into the evidence in a serious way. I was also impressed that these folks were not deterred by the inevitable ridicule, guffaws about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, accusations of gullibility and mental instability, and other standard "skeptical" responses.

The popular attitude on this subject does seem to be changing. There is less of a taboo about discussing it, and knee-jerk skeptical dismissals don't seem to have the impact they once had. Maybe this is why militant skeptics are getting a little desperate, as witness their dogged attempts to purge Wikipedia of any facts or opinions favorable to parapsychology.

Comments

[Allen]

"Maybe this is why militant skeptics are getting a little desperate, as witness their dogged attempts to purge Wikipedia of any facts or opinions favorable to parapsychology."

After reading the article on Guerrill Skepticism, in addition to being saddened by the disinformation campaign of these misguided souls (yes I did use the word "souls,") I was reminded of Orwell's 1984, where the state has an entire department dedicated to rewriting history called The Ministry of Truth. These people are both misguided and kind of sad. Imagine having nothing better to do but spend time spreading disinformation. In the article they try to carefully distinguish between what they do and ordinary vandalism. I'm afraid the difference, if there is one, is minimal.

[Rabbitdawg]

The popular attitude on this subject does seem to be changing. There is less of a taboo about discussing it, and knee-jerk skeptical dismissals don't seem to have the impact they once had. - M.P.

I feel confident that this attitude will grow and develop over time, and we can credit the the internet and e-publishing for making it happen.

Balanced, objective discussion of the paranormal is still slightly hard to find, but it's out there if you look for it. Right now, most of the overall online conversation is dominated by breathlessly credulous New Ager's and cynical skeptics, but there is a small but growing bubble of sanity breaking through.

Robert McLuhan has been reporting in his Paranormalia blog that The Society for Psychical Research is developing a Wikipedia-like website. I keep noticing thoughtful, well-written long form iconoclastic articles by younger (post baby boom) mainstream scientists and journalists popping up with increasing frequency. Respectful scholarly critiques of religious literature is becoming more accessible to everyday people.
A mushrooming, yet uncoordinated movement is afoot.

There will always be a struggle to cut through the cacophony of horse-squeeze laid out by the credulous, fanatically religious, and pseudo-skeptical, but those with discerning ears will hear, and I'm sure their ranks will grow in numbers and influence.
After all, people know what they've experienced, and sooner or later they will seek the comfort and support of community.

[no one]

It must be very frustrating to be a Guardian of Officially Approved Reality (TM).

No matter how hard you try, the damn trickster keeps showing up and getting the people off message.

[Stephen Baumgart]

You should also read the comments to the Atlantic article. I like this one from "Carl":

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Hahahahaha. There's no mystery? Let's take it for granted that there is no God and the Big Bang is the sole material cause of the universe. Why was there a Big Bang? Why are these the laws of physics and not other laws? Do we humans discover mathematics or invent it? What is "consciousness," and under what circumstances does it arise? Is morality "real" in any important sense or just an evolutionary adaptation, or is it real and hence evolutionarily adaptive? …

Seriously, the mysteries don't go away if you just give up on superstition. It's fine to be against superstition, but to argue that there's no mystery is just blinding oneself to the world.
"

[Matt Rouge]

Michael,

Excellent post!

This reminded me: I work as a medical interpreter, and one group of people that on the whole believes in the paranormal is nurses. They deal with life and death on a daily basis, and they see all kinds of things happen. You can find ghost stories (real ones) online by nurses and other medical professionals. They will also insist that a lot more accidents and problems happen when the moon is full.

Japan is a country where the paranormal is largely treated as real and believable on TV and elsewhere. There was never strong Christianity there; consequently, there was never a strong atheistic pushback against "belief." Thus, believing in the paranormal has never been politically incorrect. That said, most people do not have a strong vision of "how it all works." They tend to reside anywhere from mild atheism to mild "there's something out there." Of course, there is a strong minority of people who take spirituality seriously and have beliefs that match up with what people express here pretty well (they integrate Shinto, Buddhism, and the phenomena we discuss, since of course they experience them too).

The skeptics would probably like to believe that we "believers" are constantly hallucinating all manner of apparitions, but I have not seen that to be the case. I have heard a ghost once, seen a ghost once (it may have been the same ghost; it was in my mom's house, which I feel was quite haunted until I cleared it; but the occasions were separate), and perhaps saw a shadow person once (well, twice in short succession on the same night).

[Roger Knights]

Maybe this is why militant skeptics are getting a little desperate, . . . .

Craig Weiler's Sept. 2 e-mail contains this:

It's not good news for JREF. They've been bleeding donations for a number of years, going from $1.56 million in 2011 to $887.5K in 2013. They appear to be consolidating with their administrative offices, which can only mean that the reduction in funding is really hurting them.

[Art]

One of my favorite ghost stories takes place in England where this guy was lying in a bed in an Inn and he saw these Roman soldiers all marching past him. Intent on going somewhere they ignore him completely. What is interesting is he sees the soldiers from like the knees up like they are marching on a road that existed a foot or two below the floor he is on. So, supposedly there was a Roman road there some time in the distant past and the soldiers are like some kind of holographic echo embedded in film that gives rise to our reality.

[James Oeming]

Great phrase, Michael:

"...the usual motley crew of know-it-all scoffers."

[Kathleen]

Art, you bring up an interesting point - are ghosts some kind of holographic echo as you say, perhaps something imprinted in the fields that I think we all exist in, and not something that we can interact with? Or are they real conscious identities that can interact with us? My own experience is that they're conscious identities. I've only a few experiences, but one of my favorites was when I was having dinner in old building dating back to the 1800s. Someone seemed to whisper in my ear, "Thank you for coming!" It was a happy, light voice, that of a young woman, who genuinely seemed happy that I was there. But, as with many people still, I still feel uncomfortable relating my few experiences. It's good to know others are becoming more comfortable relating they're experiences.

Maybe some apparitions are echos and others are conscious beings. As an example of the field experience, I once visited Paris, and wound up in the plaza where so many people were executed during the French Revolution. I had no idea I was at this place - a lot of these places begin to look the same after awhile. But I had such a cold, horrible feeling when I was there, I'll never forget it. It was only later that I learned that I learned what had taken place there.

[Paul]

There's a very good interview with a man who was doing some work in a cellar in York. He witnessed Roman Soldiers. It was in an episode of Ghost Hunters, a documentary shown in the UK in which people talked about their experiences and even included an interview with "Captain Bob" who recounted an conversation with a fellow-pilot at Glasgow airport, and subsequently found out that the friend had died some time earlier after a short illness.

The guy in the cellar seemed very rational to me and genuinely scared by the experience. He even provided information on their uniforms which experts initially rejected as incorrect but later agreed it was in fact right. Very curious.

[Juan]

The common people have various problems about ghosts.

1 The term "ghost" is loaded and presupposes an answer to what are the anomalous phenomena, but most people are unaware of the existence of apparitions, a term that does not presuppose the nature of anomalous phenomena, observed in the history to the point that the question is not whether the apparitions exist, but what are the apparitions.

2 There are reasons to consider that there are different types of apparitions with different natures. Once discarded hallucinations and misinterpreted perceptions, most recurring apparitions in one place do not interact with witnesses, suggesting they are residues of the past. On the contrary, there are a few cases of apparitions that interact, provide new information for witnesses and have the appearance of deceased humans, suggesting they are sentient beings who identify with deceased human beings and presented a body other than the biological. Then there are the apparitions of crisis and apparitions of living as the reciprocal apparitions, pointing to the presence of the second body separate biological body in life.