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Q: Do you believe in ghosts?
In Yulin for the holidays visiting my wife's family, or as she puts it 'going to see the village people' (there's me got all excited for nothing, brought my cowboy hat an'all, pff, what a jip) and the mother in-law tells me not to take my son to see the trains pass because the spot we watch them from is right by a hill that's covered in graves, or tombs, or whatever they're called, you know the ones, tucked into the side of hills looking like homes for hobbits. She's worried the ghosts that inhabit these places will follow us home.....so.....this got me questioning this whole thing about ghosts again. It's something we've all wondered about at some time or another. Do ghosts exist? I've leant towards believing they do for some time, though I try to exercise a healthy scepticism, or at least to keep the question open. As a young man I had a number of bizarre experiences of this nature, one of which was sitting in bed, not intoxicated in any way I hasten to add, and seeing a young girl run screaming across the room only to vanish once she reached the window, at which point the whole thing replayed itself in front of me as if it were on a loop. This is proof of nothing of course, I even remember worrying at the time that I was losing my mind. Still, an interest in the subject has left me unable to completely dismiss the suggestion as nonsense. Anyway, my question, or rather my sub-question (I'm also interested to hear responses to the question of whether ghosts exist in general) is, if ghosts are real, are they really gonna hang out in graveyards? I rather think that if I found myself floating around as a disembodied spirit, the last place I'd want to be would be a miserable old graveyard. There's a girls college just five minutes away, a huge amusement park in the next town, they're showing Star Wars in the local cinema, jeez, there must be a thousand things to do other than hiding out in a cemetery. I know this is similar to Shining Brow's recent question about the soul by the way, but from another perspective that allows for spooky stories about things going bump in the night and dead people dressed in linen rattling chains and stuff, so.....if you've got any of those as well, do fire away.
Not really but a more pertinent question might be "Do YOU believe in paragraphs"? 
mArtiAn:
I 'do' believe in paragraphs, unfortunately this expensive phone ignores my every command to place one. It is annoying.
The fact that there is no credible scientific evidence of ghosts...
mArtiAn:
There's no scientific evidence of God or the soul either but plenty of intelligent people believe in those. Isn't it scientific to ask questions or does science only work with that which has already been answered?
Shining_brow:
"Lack of evidence is not proof against".
It annoys me when psudeo-scientists (ie, any who make a categorical judgement on the way things are because 'science' hasn't found it) say such things - completely ignoring the history of science itself.
X-rays, gamma rays, delta waves, atoms, nuclei, qasars, ... hell, even other planets.. these weren't known about for.... how long have humans been around? When did 'science' say they were real?
Guess what? Other universes don't exist either! Neither does the mind. And, for that matter - neither does 'love'.
I think, 
'ghosts' must stay in graveyards, 'cause their bones, hair and teeth are there .....by me 'deductive reasoning' this PM.
I do believe they may exists. But I never had some real experience with ghosts. I tried to catch them on camera on some scary or common places, but nothing yet 
No. Why is it that the kind of people who claim to have seen a ghost are always the hardcore believers? I mean believers before they saw it.
A skeptic (i.e. sane person) sees something unusual, and logically finds an plausible explanation. A believer (i.e. loopy Liz) sees something unusual and instantly jumps to ghost.
mArtiAn:
Well I saw someone run screaming through my bedroom, what was I supposed to think? I wasn't asleep, wasn't on drugs, the room was empty except for me, so.....either I saw something or I experienced some sort of temporary insanity.
estern:
There's lots of potential explanations ranging from mold to low sound levels, just google it. My personal favorite is that you were actually sleeping and it was a dream. When i was about 10, I dreamt that we were going on a family holiday to Disney world. I was totally convinced it was real and spent the few weeks highly excited. When I found out it wasn't true it was quite a let down.
mArtiAn:
Yeh, this happened when I was about 28. I was wide awake and scared shitless. What does mold do, act as a hallucinogen?
Shining_brow:
A) yes, some moulds can produce hallucinogenic affects.
b) this does NOT disprove the existence of ghosts.
What estern is trying to say (in a rather patronising "I know better than you" way) is that science does not (yet) accept that subjective evidence counts as much as individuals want. He then makes a fallacious argument - because his idea of 'believers' is such that somebody must believe before experiencing something. Unfortunately for him, this is not the actual case. It's similar to the ignorant argument that only those low-brows will believe in UFOs - even though there are hundreds of documented cases by trained, intelligent (and potentially sceptical) people - such as military personnel, air traffic controllers, pilots, etc.
Won't it be hilarious if, in some (hopefully not too distant future) 'ghosts' are proven to exist, but so too are the energies we put out - which influence whether a ghost is able to manifest - the more sceptical you are, the less likely a ghost can manifest.
Btw - estern - you're not a sceptic.- you are a believer. You already 'believe' ghosts don't exist. A real sceptic would say 'well, I haven't found sufficient evidence to convince me - but I'll willing to be convinced if such evidence can be found".
coineineagh:
maybe some moulds made in China might be toxic enough to cause hallucination. or do you mean molds?
estern:
@shining_brow
Firstly I accept your criticism about the tone of my post. Yesterday was not a good day and I was unnecessarily patronizing. However I think my point is valid. I can't explain what happened to Martian, maybe no one can, but that doesn't make it a ghost.
Through out all of human history we have invented answers for things that we can't explain. The best example of this I can think of is religion. When we didn't know where we or the earth came from, we invented religion to explain it. But we do now know where we came from, religion is no longer required to explain it.
I firmly believe ghosts are in this same category. Maybe we can't give a scientific explanation right now, but one day we will. NZteacher's wonderful list down bellow absolutely hit the nail on the head. There is no reason for an educated person from a developed country to believe in these things. To my mind ghosts, souls and religion are all totally absurd relics of centuries ago. We no longer need them to explain the things that happen in our life.
mArtiAn:
I agree with you estern, science can be applied to most areas in which parapsychology and mysticism have tried to explain the unknown, but not everything. I do lean towards a belief in the supernatural but that is not the same as blind faith, it just happens that my personal experience has nudged me in the direction of such faith as supernatural belief. One such experience was having a sudden desire to visit the home of my birth, a place I'd not visited in over 7 years at the time. Two weeks after having this strong urge to visit and go inside my old home I left London and went to a festival about 50 miles away and while staggering drunkenly by myself through the crowds of some 250,000 people met a girl. We hit it off, spent the day together, then went to meet her friends. One of them lived in my old area so I asked her which road. Turned out she'd moved to London a year before and was living in the road where I was born. I asked her what number but I already knew her answer. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt. Out of the 130 odd houses in that street she lived in the one in which I was born. Now you can call this coincidence and my premonition of which house she lived in a lucky guess. The odds would be fantastic but coincidence it may be. All I know is that those three occurrences: my sudden desire to visit that house, the inexplicable meeting of someone who had only recently moved there, and the certain knowledge that of all the houses in that street this girl lived in the one in which I was born felt like more. Of course I may be fooling myself but experiences such as this, of which I've had many, force me to ask such questions as the one in the title to this post. A good friend of mine in London has a sister who used to see soldiers sitting and milling around her house as a child. Some time later her parents discovered from an elderly neighbor that their home was something of a halfway house during the war, used by soldiers injured in battle who were recovering in readiness to return to war. At the end of the day it comes down to one thing: having 'an' answer does not equate to having 'the' answer. There is no harm in exercising an awareness of the fact that in the great scheme of things we simply do - not - know.
Shining_brow:
@estern - thanks for the apology. Not aimed at you, but many think like you and would express such things even on good days! (some of the stuff written about 'conspiracy theorists' by those who choose to believe in a mainstream propaganda, for example - we've had a couple of threads that are quite clearly ad hominems, rather than actually responding to the issues presented.
I do also agree with you - many times there are other, better explanations that science can be quite happy with. But - that doesn't rule out that there is more that science knows nothing about (yet). Bumps in the night are much less likely to be ghosts, and much more likely to be changes in temperature having various effects (as well as having heightened hearing to compensate for lowered sight perception). AND there is so much superstition (not surprising when the 'learned' people amongst us decide to debunk and ridicule, rather than find out and explain).
And, FTR, I think there's nothing 'super'-natural about ghosts, aliens, etc.. in fact, it's all very natural!
Did you look over NZT's list? Aliens and global warming deniers.... along with the other things listed. Firstly - chances of there being aliens - about 100%. Chances of them having had a working scientific civilisation longer than ours? Probalby quite high. Long enough to have developed inter-stellar travel at useful speeds? Hard to say - it really depends on physics (not technology). Chances then of them having come to Earth - within our recent past (ie, last couple of thousand years, when humans were interesting enough to observe).. again, hard to calculate. If they have the technology to do inter-stellar travel, then one may also presume they have the technology to drop of a few monitoring stations to keep them updated on this slowly-developing species, such that when they reached a certain level of technological advancement, it might be a good idea to come back and re-assess the position to take with them (of course, this presumes alien species that think in a way we might consider 'rational' and with similar ideals as humans (rather than bacteria or sharks)). Statistically, what I'm describing isn't all that far-fetched! In fact, it only takes a couple of the first to be true for the rest to logically follow - and those first couple are, again statistically, pretty high! And there are other possibilities. But, the first is only 'are there other species that have evolved longer than ours?" is the basic.
As for the global-warming deniers NZT mentions - funny! While few in their right minds would deny it, most 'in their right minds' don't think it really matters! Certainly not when it affects their hip pocket.
God.... we should leave that one alone. What is more relevant - a god that makes house calls and personal friendships - but only to those who actually 'believe' in 'him'.
Big Foot - personally, I think the only questionable thing about Big Foot and Yeti's is whether the could have remained hidden for so long - not that they could possibly still exist. But then again - there are tribes in the Amazon that have remained hidden for that long! What is a 'Yeti' - why not a neanderthal that has managed to not get wiped out? which may mean - if it managed to not get wiped out - like an Amazonian tribe - maybe it's because it was so well secured??? (just thinking logically of possibilities here...)
Santa Claus is real (well, was). We have history! The Easter Bunny never was (although Eostre, the goddess of Spring and Fertility may have been - did she take the form of a bunny??)
Basically - there is no GOOD reason to not believe in such things - other than 'we haven't found it yet' - which isn't actually a good reason!
Not really but a more pertinent question might be "Do YOU believe in paragraphs"?
mArtiAn:
I 'do' believe in paragraphs, unfortunately this expensive phone ignores my every command to place one. It is annoying.
diverdude1:
cannot seem to resize anymore... is that going to be the norm now on echina?
Yes.
Although, 'what' a ghost actually is is a very different question.
Do I think they would hang out at a graveyard? It wouldn't make a lot of sense to me! I don't think that the connection to the body (if a ghost is, in fact, the spirit of that dead body) would be so strong as to hang around for the next 5 years or so till it decomposes to nothing.. or the next few hundred while the bones break down.
As for a ghost following someone home - why? And, even if it did - so what?? What's it going to do? If it is a spirit of a person buried in the cemetery, then it's most likely going to be some old granny who karked it in their 80's or 90's. Which means - not (hopefully) something incredibly malevolent.
mArtiAn - you said you experienced a ghost. Although it freaked you out, was it malevolent? Obviously not. So.... what to do about it? an interesting point of psychology - if the girl suicided, It's because she didn't think there was any other way out of her situation - perhaps she still doesn't, and was trying to keep getting out of it the only way she could think of...???
mArtiAn:
I don't know 'what' it was, I just know it was loud and short and it screamed. Interesting thing is this stuff happened to me over a period of about two years. In the end I just said to myself "This is bollocks" and it all stopped. It seemed to me that a belief in the paranormal was an invitation to experience it but I didn't want to invest a belief in what I was experiencing for fear that it was all in my mind. Telling myself "This is all bollocks" was my way of choosing not to believe in something that I kind of did. It was like flicking a switch, and after that it stopped completely. Beforehand though I had all sorts of bizarre shit happen. Heard chanting, saw people walking down the street who vanished in a double-take, all kinds of daft shit. Might have been fantasy, I'll never know.
Didn't some uber-nerd say something about how energy could not be destroyed? I don't know what that is supposed to mean though,,, do our physical bodies harbor some sort of 'energy'?,,, is it supposed to continue to exist after our understood life-forces cease? Is it supposed to take on some kind of new form? Is that where we get the whole 'Life after Death' thing?
diverdude1:
“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”
The MIL calls me 'gweilo' so I must believe in ghosts since I believe that I am real. Or I'm wrong.
mArtiAn:
She calls you that? Woah, that's not good, I've never heard 'anyone' call me that, she must hate you, dude.
iWolf:
I don't think it is malicious and i get on alright with the old bat. She's just an uncivilized village twonk so I really couldn't care less what she calls me.
some superstitions suggest that only children and people open to things like ghosts and magic, can actually percieve them. If so, developing mental faculties can be assumed to lower your perceptive ability. Even disregarding the obvious parallel with one's susceptibility to suggestion, it would seem that ghosts are a thing to be avoided. Nobody has ever claimed to have gotten rich from secret insider trading knowledge a ghost whispered to them.
if what is said about ghosts were true, they seem to loiter aimlessly in secluded places and manifest to people outside office hours. Their presence is not of any concern to me. If theyhad physical form, i'd try not to bump into them.
No ghosts.
They are on the same shelf as bigfoot, aliens, God, homeopathy, TCM, chiropractic, anti-vax, chemtrails, 911 conspiracy, moon landing conspiracy, global warming denial, the Easter Bunny, Santa, the list goes on.
Obviously many people in China believe in nonsense such as ghosts but they are the product of a poor education system of a developing country where superstition and hocus pocus still stalk the land unabated by science and reason.
If you believe in this stuff and have come from a developed country then you really have no excuse.
mArtiAn:
Well it's in the same area as this question of the soul isn't it? If such a thing exists beyond death of the body is it unrealistic to experience perception of it? Or does dead mean dead? Maybe, in which case this grain of sand existence that sits amidst an ocean of infinite time reaching out before our birth and beyond our death is not a thing to waste, huh? Can't agree with you about aliens and 9/11 by the way. The list of credible witnesses to ufo activity includes astronauts, presidents, generals, pretty much anyone that the term 'credible' could be called on to describe, plus of course there are numerous instances in which ufo activity on radar has been intelligent in nature and has suggested technology far in advance of current human capability, all of which leaves the subject very much outside the realm of the absurd. As for 9/11 I'm still waiting for someone to present an alternative hypothesis to that suggesting the use of explosives. NIST (the organization charged with finding an explanation) admit they have none for the complete collapse of 1 and 2 and they refuse to share the one they have for 7.
Shining_brow:
What I find unbelievable about the list you've supplied is the "global warming denial" - given that that's exactly the stance that most governments and business are taking!
I think you don't think all that rationally about some of these things...
Yes
there is plenty of evidence on this site of 'ghosts' :
Some of the 'post and run' variety.
Some try to pose as foreign women with their retarded 'questions' and comments (obviously male by their lack of understanding of how women think)
Some just post their butt hurt at how they are down-voted all the time.
Some are clearly part of ECC to 'boost' hits.
Keeping it classy ECC, as it has been for the last year.
