Ah, all you need then is a sonic screwdriver. I'm sure I have one lying around here somewhere... maybe in the sock drawer? >.>

Also I see my apartment poltergeist has relatives. c:
Just ignore it, OP. It's trying to get a rise out of you. Just yell at it to shut up whenever it starts getting out of line; 's'what I do.
Pff.
Poltergeists.
Needy attention [censored]s, every last one of 'em. ?_?

Oooooo.
What if it was slender-man?

Hm, it sounds like it's the ghost of an internet troll.

I try to keep a somewhat open mind about ghosts. I've heard a lot of things in my house over the years. I live in an old farmhouse and it creeks and is quite loud when I'm in solitude. I've heard many different things from footsteps to talking.

Get some tan before looking at yourself in the mirror naked.

Problem solved!


Call me.

The forum went down, I hit back on my browser and it posted again... lame.

Well to make this a useful post,

I haven't hear footsteps in a long time.

I can settle this pretty easily. You didn't see a ghost because they aren't real.

But yes, I have experienced things like this and I brush them off as tricks of the mind caused by delusional states when waking up from sleep. It's just what happens. The brain is a very dynamic, fragile thing, and it functions abnormally sometimes.

You people are horrible, I can't do a single thing without one of you making a thread out of it can I? Seriously, I was just having some fun and tapping on the guys door.....

lolghost. I happen to wake up and hallucinate every couple of months. I was scared the first few times, but it's all right now. I just laugh it off now. No such thing as ghosts, just my [censored] up brain, and ours.

I was once walking home from work in the snow and I was walking across some fields following footprints when all of a sudden there where gone nothing going forward and neither right or left.................................

Then you froze to death and your wife and kid escaped amiright?

It can be the pipes banging that make that noise, when we had a power cut once, I shut my door, and there was this "BANG BANG BANG" on what sounded like my bedroom door, but when I opened it there was nobody there, but it could have been anything.



:laugh:

I know of no incident where a dalek has been successfully killed by a sonic screwdriver.



No, I was here the whole time.

Somone probably heard who putting your bike back, and was tapping to see if anyome was in there.

Doesn't sound concrete enough to jump to the "ghost" conclusion, but I am very skeptical when it comes to their possible existence. I don't immediately dismiss them as it seems the vast majority of the members on here do, but I also won't be convinced they exist until I have a very vivid experience. And trust me, I almost never hallucinate while I'm awake, so anything I see out of the ordinary would get taken into great consideration (unless it's a trick of the eyes. I get that crap a lot).

Anyway, I wouldn't worry. Doors open by themselves all the time, and my current house creaks so loud sometimes that some people would swear that there's some kind of demon spirit lurking around. Just shrug it off as something odd but probably very natural.

Cool story, though. The weirdest thing that's ever happened to me is seeing a shadow off on the wall to my left back at the old house. My bathroom door was open and casting light, and I saw what seemed to be a human shadow pass by it coming towards me. I expected my dad to come around the corner (he was the only one there besides me) and nothing happened. I went downstairs to find him sleeping on the rocking chair. Even more strange, my sister claims to have seen a human shadow pass by a wall downstairs as well. So yeah. Do I think it's a ghost? Nah, I just saw a shadow. It was very peculiar, though.

If we assume that it is a ghost... So what?

"OH GOD THE DOOR IS OPENING!"

Not scary.

Maybe it was a small rodent of some sort and since it was so dark you couldn't see it? Also once you hear the first noise and it scares you, your mind might be prone to making more of the noises because you'll believe they'll happen.

I'm a skeptic and am not inclined to hold any superstitious beliefs. But an experience me and my family had made me question me own views toward 'ghosts'.

My mum used to live in a house with my brother. Both they and everyone who visited said they felt uneasy when on the upstairs floor, especially in my brother's bedroom. I felt it too. Even as an advlt I felt extremely uncomfortable when up there, it was like an oppressive feeling and I couldn't wait to get downstairs again. My brother eventually moved into the spare room because he couldn't take how being in his bedroom made him feel, he said he always felt like there was someone else there.

One day my mum was vacuuming his room when she suddenly felt like there was someone standing behind her. She turned around fully expecting to see someone there only to feel a hand on her shoulder. There was no-one there.

Now, I don't know what could make people feel like that. All I know is I did and others felt it too. My mother actually moved house after that incident and they've not experienced anything like it since. I don't really know what would explain any of that so I leave my mind open on the issue.

Now, you clearly tried applying the logic of Sherlock Holmes to the situation, but failed miserably at it.

Now, his principle wasn't that if he immediately couldn't explain something, he could make up a crazy story about it. His point was that if you discarded all the impossible options, then the possible would invariably have to be true, regardless of how improbable it was.

What you did was quite the opposite; you immediately discarded all the possible explanations, and jumped straight to the impossible, because you think it would have been more probable had it in fact been possible, which it isn't.

It is quite a common phenomenon; when some people observe something that they cannot immediately explain, they resort to the notion that it is something that not a single scientific theory in the entire world could possibly explain, even though there is any number of scientific explanations which could apply.

If I see a bumblebee flying, I don't think to myself "Blimey, it must be magic!" just because I can't at the moment explain how it's possible. I just sort of assume that, since it is flying, it is operating within the established laws of physics, and can in fact fly. Just because I cannot personally explain it scientifically, doesn't mean that science cannot explain it.

I was walking in my brother-in-law's house a few weeks ago and one was standing in his hallway. As soon as "it' saw me it took off into one of their rooms that had no lights on.

The thing is, if everyone simply thought "Hey, if science hasn't explained anything about this, then it's impossible", then science itself wouldn't exist. Science thrives off of taking what was thought as previously impossible and studying it. Some people see something strange and form a hypothesis, then test it and test it until they can either prove it to be true, disprove it, or get a little closer to the truth.

That's why people who dismiss ghosts so quickly annoy me, because science has yet to prove or disprove anything about them. They remain something unknown and strange, so taking a skeptical mindset is the best mindset to go into them with. However, I hardly ever see that. There are those who believe they exist, those who don't (and both these groups of people are annoying), and then there are skeptics, the ones trying to figure out if what people report is actually there.

It's a very difficult thing to research, as most of the "evidence" investigators have gathered is either fake or just not convincing enough. Yet there are tons of alleged "eyewitnesses" who claim that they saw their dead grandmother walking down the hall. They could be hallucinating, there could be a purely scientific explanation for it, or their dead grandmother was really there. Skeptics are trying to figure out which of those three possibilities it is.

Just flat out denying such paranormal claims because scientists haven't laid a finger on them is being extremely closed minded. Yes, the believers are annoying, but so are the ones who dismiss the idea without giving it any consideration. Where would humanity be today if it figured "Hey, we can't really see DNA and genes, so let's just skip that and move onto something we know is there."?

It was an http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3qvmsi7Zp0&feature=related :nod:

So, you are saying that science progresses through people going "A wizard did it, now let's knock off for lunch!"?

So called "ghosts" have nothing to do with science, it's a matter of people being convinced of the existence of something, to the point where they will completely ignore any other explanations in favour of one that cannot be scientifically verified in any way whatsoever.

Science progresses by finding new scientific explanations for phenomenon that all fit together with all other explanations. Just going "Well, clearly there must be a parallel world to ours where the spirits of the deceased exist that sometimes intersect ours so that we can see the ghosts of those who have died, but only those who died in such a way as to leave some kind of work unfinished!" is crazy! It's madness!



Largely because of a major fly in the ointment; falsifiability.

In essence, for a theory to be considered scientific, it needs to be possible to prove it false, in case it actually is false. Since claims of "ghosts" never meets this criteria, they are unscientific.



No, they remain something very well known that can easily be explained with what we know about the world, there is simply no need to make up outlandish stories about them.



You clearly don't know what a skeptic is. A skeptic is someone who believes something only when it has been firmly established, it is not someone who believes something until it is proven false.

Since every single claim of anything supernatural that has ever been put to the test, scientifically, has been invariably proven to be false, I think that's quite enough to be going on with, don't you?



Isn't that a rather good reason not to believe in it?



No, skeptics look at the rational and logical explanations, and so far not a single case has ever involved anything "paranormal".

Besides, I do believe tonnes of people have reported seeing Elvis several years after his death, what do you say to that?



Funnily enough, whenever real scientists do lay a finger on them, they seem to vaporize instantly.



Oh, I do believe everything should tested.

But seeing as how the last 10.000 claims have been proven false, I'm really not holding out hope for #10.001.

should get the ghost hunters to come there and scream at every knock the cameramen make.

I've never seen a ghost, but my grandmother might've.

Don't blow my example out of proportion. And how are ghosts not scientific? Aren't people like you convinced that everything is scientific in some way or another? All you're doing with that statement is making an assumption, especially about the people. You don't know them or what they experienced was.



So, if something is hard to study, then it's just safe to assume it's not scientific? Nobody said ghosts were impossible to disprove. Hell, there are already multiple theories regarding them, lots of them focused around energy and how the environment around energy affects it.



Very well known? What, you mean the stories? I'm not talking about those. And "with what we know about the world" wouldn't exist unless science didn't study it. Same goes for any paranormal activity. Should we just let it sit because you deem it unworthy of testing or studying? I'll go inform them right now.



Where in the holy living [censored] in my argument did I say that? You keep twisting my words so you can attempt some form of an "effective" counter argument against me, and it isn't working. A skeptic is someone who will go either way depending on what's discovered, not someone who's already on one side of the fence.





Are you even being serious with me? Because I take things like this very seriously. Grow up.



So there's a cap to how much something can't be proven? When so many people report happenings, even investigators themselves, I see plenty reason to continue the research. Yeah, there's always a chance they could be hallucinating all of it or are faking it, but to assume every single case is wrong is being closed minded. But I don't think you'll be changing your mind soon, so I won't even be continuing this "discussion" of ours. There goes half an hour I'll never get back.