Have you ever seen a ghost? Supernatural phenomena and weirdly inexplicable events from your own life...

THE END!!!!

GHOUL, n. A demon addicted to the reprehensible habit of devouring the dead. The existence of ghouls has been disputed by that class of controversialists who are more concerned to deprive the world of comforting beliefs than to give it anything good in their place. In 1640 Father Secchi saw one in a cemetery near Florence and frightened it away with the sign of the cross. He describes it as gifted with many heads an an uncommon allowance of limbs, and he saw it in more than one place at a time. The good man was coming away from dinner at the time and explains that if he had not been "heavy with eating" he would have seized the demon at all hazards. Atholston relates that a ghoul was caught by some sturdy peasants in a churchyard at Sudbury and ducked in a horsepond. (He appears to think that so distinguished a criminal should have been ducked in a tank of rosewater.) The water turned at once to blood "and so contynues unto ys daye." The pond has since been bled with a ditch. As late as the beginning of the fourteenth century a ghoul was cornered in the crypt of the cathedral at Amiens and the whole population surrounded the place. Twenty armed men with a priest at their head, bearing a crucifix, entered and captured the ghoul, which, thinking to escape by the stratagem, had transformed itself to the semblance of a well known citizen, but was nevertheless hanged, drawn and quartered in the midst of hideous popular orgies. The citizen whose shape the demon had assumed was so affected by the sinister occurrence that he never again showed himself in Amiens and his fate remains a mystery.

inevitable conclusion: mark sinker haunts lauren's apartment.

A year to the day later, this friend was driving to his house outside of Rockton. He had to drive across a flat expanse of cornfields, punctuated by stop signs and trees. It was about an eight mile drive, I've done it myself many times. Anyway, this particular night that he was driving was very foggy. It was around midnight. As he drove he saw a girl staggering along the side of the road. He slowed down to see if she was all right, and the girl turned around and apparently just stared at him right through the brights. IT WAS THE GIRL WHO HAD BEEN MURDERED!

My friend shouted out in horror, but the scream was not his own but rather A GIRL'S SHRIEK. He sped off home and didn't leave for about a week, apparently.

well the Boo Radley house's lawn did get mysteriously cut, that's true.

Apparently, I'm lauren's ghost.

it's ok, van.

Every word of this is true.

Okay so when I was around 12 or so I took confirmation classes at my church every friday night. One winter Friday I went to confirmation class; the week before I had been sick with strep throat and had missed class, so I hadn't realized that this friday we were leaving class an hour early. I didn't really think about it until after the session had ended and I realized that I'd have to try and call my mom and get her to pick me up early or just wait around for her to show up. I decided on the latter and sat in the stairwell, which faced two huge glass doors, which looked onto the parking lot. It was the perfect spot to escape the cold winter weather outside and still look out for my mom's arrival.

Now, after my fellow classmates had vacated this joint was EMPTY man.. and dark, too! The only lights provided were the lights in the parking lot, so I was essentially sitting in the dark.. and no one else was in the church, and had I gone outside I would not be able to get back in. (Just trying to give you an idea of the atmosphere). So I sat and waited, in the creepy darkness. And after a while, I discovered I had to pee... bad. I thought I could wait it out, but then it became obvious I needed to go upstairs to the bathroom. Now, the bathroom in this church was kind of strange as you had to walk down a narrow corridor and then there was another corridor to the left, and then there was the door to the ladies restroom. It was completely pitch black down these two corridors and when I pushed through to the bathroom, it too was dark so I switched on the light.

I have this habit of checking my appearance in a bathroom mirror before I do anything else, so I went to the row of sinks and glanced at my reflection. But before I could turn around to enter one of the stalls, I saw a woman exit one of the stalls behind me (in the mirror). It was an old woman, and she stared at me, and I stared back, and I said "I"m sorry" and I ran out the door. I was pretty spooked, but I wasn't totally freaked out until I was walking back downstairs to my previous waiting spot and I realized that the woman had been sitting in the DARK, the PITCH BLACK and I thought there was no way she had been real.....

I ended up waiting outside for my mother to pick me up, despite the cold.

This story still gives me the shivers!

There's the Sleeper video thing, but I was young and needed the cider.

I am being silly, sir.

plz no linking to the thread where I talk about how original and amusing Nigerian spam can be...

oh man i'm SO glad this didn't go where it could have gone

NA: just wear a scary mask while you are doing it 'k?

oh man i'm SO glad this didn't go where it could have gone

-- amateur!st (amateur!s...), July 27th, 2004.

Eaaaasy.

Having lived there for two years, I assure you he does not.

I've been meaning to turn my innner Henry James toward a longer, and fictionalized, version of this story for some time now but I keep getting distracted with more colorful screenplays and haven't exactly put pen to paper (electron to pixel?) nor thought about this much the facts of this story since its happening. If it's raw, under or overwritten, or otherwise unreadable I apologize, but I feel that this is one of those mini-tales that I have to present with a lot of backstory lest its creepiness will be lost. Granted, ILE is probably the worst forum to post a creepy real-life story, but I'm waiting for my rice to cook and can't wrest the TV off roommate's Trading Spaces. So -

I grew up in a Massachusetts town whose name - quickly pronounced - is a second-rate homophone for 'rectum' and whose population during my childhood was endearingly small. The town has a long and gloried town-history, the apogee of which is a fierce firefight during the latter part of King Philip's war. During the late '80s I was exposed to a certain apolitic and anti-patriotic glee at facts of this specific battle: Wrenth4m had been roundly routed by the Indians 100 years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I suspect that the facts of this incident were trumpeted during the national bicentennial a few years before my birth with a 'can't keep us down!' spirit, but by the time of my education the liberal Catholic backlash had transmuted it into a 'serves them settlers right' attitude.

The facts, nonetheless remain these: In 1675 Sassomon, a Wampanoag 'priest,' reported to the settlers that his people were masterminding a raid on some of the weaker settlements, including the one in Wrenth4m. Immediately on making these assertions Sassomom was murdered, and three Wampanoags were charged. They were swiftly sentenced, tried, and hanged by the settlers. Twelve days later group of Pokanat warriors began raiding colonial establishments, the settlers responded etc. etc. etc. and suddenly King Philip's War was in full swing. During the following winter Wrenth4m was attacked and the battle repelled from the 'Isiah Grey House,' whose walls and door were, supposedly, the strongest.

A number of bloodly deaths were, perhaps fictionally, attributed to the battle for the Grey House and it remains to this day an historical and gruesome residence. The lane on which it stood made a wide loop around the street where I'd lived my entire life. When I was in fifth grade both streets were rural (ca. 1991 there were 6 houses on mine ... ca. 2004: 17). The whole side of town was notable for subscribing to an Edith Wharton winter aesthetic: a single ashen grey coloring sky, trees, ground, architecture, road-salted automobiles, people. The inarguable character of my street (Oxb0w Dr.) was dour, moldy, has-been and stereotypically New England cold. One of my great releases (the parents refused to buy my sister and I TV) was bike-riding, and I'd often take spins around the lane where the Isiah Grey house stood. It was big, brown, a smaller version of Hawthorne's seven-gables, and overgrown. It was (and is) impossible to drive by without shivering. The owner, as far as I knew, did nothing but drive about town in a gigantic blue van. He had a handle-bar moustache, hair the color of a rat, and often wore top-hat and tails to the market.

On the first day of fifth grade I was surprised to find this man was my teacher - and he even more surprised (and irritated) to learn that one of his students lived a half-mile away from him. I was a bright student, bookish, and didn't have much contact with him until until the middle of the year. His name - David Isiah Grey - and his apperance are pretty good at indicating his appearance. He was extremely involved in civil war reenactment, and I believe he'd condescend to revolutionary war on occasion. Each morning he'd come in and give us his 'report from the house.' These 'reports from the house' brief notes re. the daily hauntings at his residence. The basic format was this: Mr. Grey would make some modification, repair, improvement to the layout of the house and the spooks would get mad. An example: Mr. Grey purchased a microwave oven, after having held out for a long time because he feared phantasmagoric consequence. He put it in, invited his friend Bernie the Mechanic (still known as Bernie Mech!) to dinner and opened a bottle of wine. The following three things happened: (1) the wine bottle exploded (2) two revolutionary-era pie plates flew off their shelves and smashed into the opposite wall (3) the Bernie Mech. and Mr. David Grey high-tailed it out of the house.

It would've been easy to dismiss these stories as mendacious if it weren't for the size of the town. Everybody knew everybody, everybody knew everything. Bernie the Mechanic - a deeply Catholic man - would swear by this story if asked. Ditto Neal Marc0tte, the painter who broke his arm after being startled by a woman in "old fashioned white ruffles" from the ladder on which he was standing to paint Mr. Grey's attic windowsill. I remember my father standing in the living room after hiring Mr. Marc0tte and exacting a promise from him not to tell me the stories about Mr. Grey's house. Thankfully my father didn't know I was in the music room, and tat Mr. Marc0tte wasn' t a very good listener.

Perhaps because of his intrinsic weirdness, Mr. Grey's wife and son left him in the house. The son, when older, told me that his father was as scary at home as he was in the classroom, and for informal wardrobe wore reproductions of his colonial relatives' apparel. Grey became more and more lonely, so the story goes, and turned his passion fully to teaching. He began cleaning the house - mowing the lawn, patching paint, all sorts of things. To all appearances he was doing well, but a later student told me that his puttering was unhinged and unpredictable. Now, having taught in the Wrenth4m scools for a long time, Grey stood to make a tidy pocket on retirement. He did this the summer after I'd moved from Wrenth4m full time, after my 9th grade year. To celebrate, Mr. Grey bought himself (and installed, on his own) a little blue above-ground pool in which he was found, floating dead and swollen on an inner tube two days later.

Mr. Grey had choked on his gum and simultaneously snapped his neck. From the way he was positioned, head thrust back and eyes fixed upward, it appeared he'd died facing the attic window where Neal Marc0tte had broken his arm after being startled by the ghostly woman in white. I returned for the funeral - and as his death was tragic, morbid, and unexpected, it was a big affair. Mr. Grey's corpse was paraded through the center of town in an open-casket drawn by four black horses, and his wife and son sat attired in Victorian mourning garb.

When I was 10 my grandmother died. Three months later we went abroad, and at the airport I found a strip of Super 8 film in my pocket, that depicted said grandmother waving goodbye to someone at an airport. The clothing in question had been washed several times previously, and there was definitely nothing in the pockets.

This is sleep paralysis (I asume you quoted this from somewhere Gear?).

Theres a thread on sleep paralasys here somewhere, Ive had it myself, its fuckin' horrible and goes a long way to explaining many visitations in bed, succubi, aliens and the like.

Sleep Paralysis - Plain Weird or REALLY WEIRD!?

On the wall beside our bed I saw an image of an older woman, just sitting, as if in a painting. I was half awake, perhaps half asleep, and there was no light, whatsoever, in the room. Nevertheless, there she was. I can not remember how long this situation lasted, but it was for more than a few minutes.

There was no feeling of fear on my part and I did manage to go back to sleep without any further thought.

This occurred on a friday and I remember getting a call later that day from the bank saying that the mortgage had been approved. Hey, all was well and good.

After the closing, we had dinner with the sellers, a husband and wife. His mother had died the year before and it was on her estate's behalf they had sold the house to us.

I remembered the apparition and casually mentioned it to them, something I can't imagine doing with strangers, but the man immediately asked "what did she look like?" I described her as best that I could and his response was that that could have been his mother, the former owner of said house. BTW, she had been a teacher and expired at the ripe age of 94 and had been the town librarian for many years.

I guess they told their kids of my experience and they concurred that she must have appeared to me to give her blessing on the new ownership. Anyway, they mailed us a letter telling us so. Included with their letter was a photo of his mother and, it was, in fact who I had seen on the bedroom wall.

My wife and I have lived full-time here for about 20 years now and I swear so has the lady who is the subject here. Things get moved. I'll place an item on a table and it will fall almost immediately from its perch. I can only conclude that the old lady, known as Mrs. Butterfield, must have had a playfulness about her.

I have not seen her since, but have visited her grave 3 or 4 times. Also, there was another lady who expired, before we bought, in our living room, due to exhaustion from walking up the hill that we now live on. Perhaps she's the poltergeist of or lives, I can't figger these things. I dunno, but we have no real complaints. Actually, it's been a great home, and in recent years helped to establish the town library into a new setting. Fate or what?

While we were on tour in Norwich, we stayed at this guy's house. Everyone was getting really drunk and really stoned out in the summer house in the back. I left cause I didn't want to get stoned, (before anyone says, oh, it was the pot) and went and sat in the tour van for a bit. I saw a Grey Lady float across the lawn, (not along the path at all) walked through a wall, and actually walked diagonally through the van while I was sitting in it.

I told the guy who owned the house, the next morning. He was very interested, said that the site had been occupied since Roman times - when I showed him where I saw the ghost walk, he said "that's funny, we moved the path when we built the summer house. There were old roman paving stones underneath the lawn where you saw the Grey Lady walk."

The other story is a bit spookier; my parents' house was haunted. Several people saw and heard some pretty stange things. The family who lived there before us, one of their sons was killed in a bicycling accident at the top of the hill - the weirdness was especially concentrated in the bedroom that had been his. But I don't really want to get into details.

What I'm saying is, you've all had these experiences, and I don't want to take them away from you, but I hope you know that there are alternative explanations for them. Hell, I've seen "things" too, especially as a kid, but I don't believe they were caused by supernatural forces. The human mind is a weird and illogical thing, and that in itself is quite fascinating, when you think about it; there's no need to bring supernatural phenomena into the picture.

I've also had it where I swear I have shelves over my bed, but that's not quite as creepy.

Kate - can't you tell the story?

Summary:
Painting of happy smiling girl looking at vase of red roses.
Take polaroid of painting and the photo reveals a frowning girl looking down at a tiny old-fashioned Scottish soldier where the vase used to be.
Turns out the painting is of an ancestor on our Scottish side whose husband to be was killed in combat.

It was a Weast

I get really cross when people misinterpret (willfully or otherwise) photographic "evidence" of hauntings.

A few months back, Joe and his friend M@rk did this performance/demonstration at the Royal Society, using a bunch of antiquated Victorian scientific and medical equipment. I took photos of this event, and when I downloaded the photos onto a disc, it turned out that one of the machines had a mirror on the inside of its lid, where you could quite plainly see the throat and chest of a woman.

M@rk immediately went to the F0rte@n T1mes, and tried to flog the photograph (without even asking my permission) as evidence of a haunting, and saying that it must have been some woman killed by the machine, or some such rot. I completely blew my top on that one, and not just because it was my photo he was nicking.

I recognised the person in the mirror as being the woman who had been sitting next to me at the performance (someone from the arts council that had sponsored the event, in fact) - those mirrors were catching my flashes as I was photographing due to the angle of the lids and the angle of the seats, so I wasn't surprised that I caught a reflection in there.

That's the kind of thing that *really* pisses me off. A ten second conversation with the photographer would have explained it away, but the person willfully chose to accept the most spooky, occult explanation - especially since there would have been material gain involved, if the F0rte@n T1mes had published the photo.

You hate fun.

Witness this, for example:

http://www.forteantimes.com/gallery/images/seamonster.jpg

Why, because we might not yet have an explanation that fits our current model of the universe?

Suspension of disbelief, d00d. These stories are really great and creepy and having you burst in all rational like ruins the mood. But it's all good.

x-post

Well, for example, if ghosts really do the all the shit people claim they do, they would have to have this sort of "ghost energy" they can tap on, and it'd have to be a form of energy not known to science. Also, the very existence of ghosts would suggest a form of matter that isn't solid matter, gas, liquid or plasm. These two things already would be in such a contradiction with modern physics that it'd have to be completely revised. And as for your computer, it works according to the laws of physics. Now imagine we could, for example, use the "ghost energy" ourselves. That'd change a whole lot about electronics, transportation etc.

(x-post)

-- Tuomas (tuomas.alh...)

But that's the thing, science is just that, a model, a map. A self-correcting map, sure. But science can only measure something that is observable (or extrapolate from something observable). Things such as say, parallel universes or ghosts might not be easily or directly testable but that doesn't mean they don't exist. To confuse the map with the territory is rather presumptuous I'd say.

Of course the reverse is also true, just because it's possible something exists doesn't mean it actaully does. But my point is, when it comes to things that can't be tested, how can you know for certain?

Who's to say ghosts AREN'T composed of some form of "ghost energy"? Who the hell knows? Scientists revise their theories all the time when new data comes in that challenges old interpretations. I don't necessarily believe in ghosts (I've never encountered one or anything like that), but I wouldn't assume that just because ghosts or something seem inexplicable by are current understanding of physics, doesn't mean they can't in principle be explained one day.

What a concept! I love it!

But science can only measure something that is observable (or extrapolate from something observable).

This isn't a good point, because, as this thread proves, there are thousands or millions of observations of ghosts. The question is, why are ghosts observable only to certain people and in certain situations?

I read somewhere that there's a law that says, that if during an online discussion someone mentions Hitler, the discussion is over. We should have our own ILX law: when a serious thread turns into sex jokes, it is lost.

Over the years, I have decried the misuse of the term "skeptic" when used to refer to all critics of anomaly claims. Alas, the label has been thus misapplied by both proponents and critics of the paranormal. Sometimes users of the term have distinguished between so-called "soft" versus "hard" skeptics, and I in part revived the term "zetetic" because of the term's misuse. But I now think the problems created go beyond mere terminology and matters need to be set right. Since "skepticism" properly refers to doubt rather than denial -- nonbelief rather than belief -- critics who take the negative rather than an agnostic position but still call themselves "skeptics" are actually pseudo-skeptics and have, I believed, gained a false advantage by usurping that label.

In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. He asserts that the claimant has not borne the burden of proof and that science must continue to build its cognitive map of reality without incorporating the extraordinary claim as a new "fact." Since the true skeptic does not assert a claim, he has no burden to prove anything. He just goes on using the established theories of "conventional science" as usual. But if a critic asserts that there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis -- saying, for instance, that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact -- he is making a claim and therefore also has to bear a burden of proof. Sometimes, such negative claims by critics are also quite extraordinary -- for example, that a UFO was actually a giant plasma, or that someone in a psi experiment was cued via an abnormal ability to hear a high pitch others with normal ears would fail to notice. In such cases the negative claimant also may have to bear a heavier burden of proof than might normally be expected.

Critics who assert negative claims, but who mistakenly call themselves "skeptics," often act as though they have no burden of proof placed on them at all, though such a stance would be appropriate only for the agnostic or true skeptic. A result of this is that many critics seem to feel it is only necessary to present a case for their counter-claims based upon plausibility rather than empirical evidence. Thus, if a subject in a psi experiment can be shown to have had an opportunity to cheat, many critics seem to assume not merely that he probably did cheat, but that he must have, regardless of what may be the complete absence of evidence that he did so cheat and sometimes even ignoring evidence of the subject's past reputation for honesty. Similarly, improper randomization procedures are sometimes assumed to be the cause of a subject's high psi scores even though all that has been established is the possibility of such an artifact having been the real cause. Of course, the evidential weight of the experiment is greatly reduced when we discover an opening in the design that would allow an artifact to confound the results. Discovering an opportunity for error should make such experiments less evidential and usually unconvincing. It usually disproves the claim that the experiment was "air tight" against error, but it does not disprove the anomaly claim.

Showing evidence is unconvincing is not grounds for completely dismissing it. If a critic asserts that the result was due to artifact X, that critic then has the burden of proof to demonstrate that artifact X can and probably did produce such results under such circumstances. Admittedly, in some cases the appeal to mere plausibility that an artifact produced the result may be so great that nearly all would accept the argument; for example, when we learn that someone known to have cheated in the past had an opportunity to cheat in this instance, we might reasonably conclude he probably cheated this time, too. But in far too many instances, the critic who makes a merely plausible argument for an artifact closes the door on future research when proper science demands that his hypothesis of an artifact should also be tested. Alas, most critics seem happy to sit in their armchairs producing post hoc counter-explanations. Whichever side ends up with the true story, science best progresses through laboratory investigations.

On the other hand, proponents of an anomaly claim who recognize the above fallacy may go too far in the other direction. Some argue, like Lombroso when he defended the mediumship of Palladino, that the presence of wigs does not deny the existence of real hair. All of us must remember science can tell us what is empirically unlikely but not what is empirically impossible. Evidence in science is always a matter of degree and is seldom if ever absolutely conclusive. Some proponents of anomaly claims, like some critics, seen unwilling to consider evidence in probabilistic terms, clinging to any slim loose end as though the critic must disprove all evidence ever put forward for a particular claim. Both critics and proponents need to learn to think of adjudication in science as more like that found in the law courts, imperfect and with varying degrees of proof and evidence. Absolute truth, like absolute justice, is seldom obtainable. We can only do our best to approximate them.

Marcello Truzzi is a professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University. This article is reprinted, at the author's suggestion, from the Zetetic Scholar, #12-13, 1987. In his view this criticism of pseudo-skepticism claiming the authority of science, but actually impeding science, is as relevant as ever.

Also, it would cause so many to admit that they're dead (sorry) wrong. Tuomas' latter posts on this thread amply demonstrate just how dogmatic modern "science" will remain when tied to sensory empiricism, as much of it's identity is integral to maintaining a certain illusion of self-contained congruence and some sort of ideal mathematical/systemic harmony (which never existed anyway). The hegemony must not be (visibly) threatened, and absence of fulfilling standards that are _impossible_ to meet under the correct definitions-in-use (as in all "evidence" being routinely discounted by those in power when anything can be dismissed under the limitless canopy of "imagination" and it's-alll-in-your-head-dear condescension). The lack of anyone claiming monetary reward (the only 'rational' motivation!) is a fitting example of how the worth of recognizing materialism is the final proof of one's sanity these days...

Befitting, as matter speeded up into a higher vibrational rate = the prana necessary to reflect the light that makes a "ghost" visible to one who can see that aspect of the astral/etheric plane, and saying that no one else may necessarily "see" that specific reflection is redundant (as you're not using your regular sight anyway, again there never can be any acceptable "proof" to start with, under the current definitions.) Everyone's soul has the potentiality to manifest into a "ghost," as it's nothing but a composite of the subtle/ astral mental body, the manomayakosha or "sheath of mind" and the etheric body, thepranamayakosha - "sheath made of prana."

Instead of asking about ghosts, first we should questions ourselves: are we real and do we exist? Ghosts may or may not exist as much as we do, in a relative Reality, yet one that's ...oh shit this going into philosophy now so post ends here.

We came up with about 900 different things it could be and realized, as we did so, that whatever it was was no longer just a banging noise, but had become something more like a lot of voices mumbling together. She tiptoed over to the window of the backside of the house (I was sitting in the middle of the floor trying not to wet my pants in fright) and confirmed that the bulkhead doors - the only way into the cellar from outside - were locked, so whatever it was wasn't her nephew playing tricks on us.

About then, the voices started to shout (it sounded a lot like a kind of lynch mob) and bang on the walls of the stairway leading up from the cellar - and we figured we'd been there long enough, so grabbed her car keys and shot out of the house to her sister's (who thought we were crazy).

I guess it doesn't sound as creepy written down, but it scared the hell out of both of us at the time.

We need more stories on this thread.

I've been trying to have a supernatural experience, but to no avail.

Cheer me with ghostly tales!

I just mainlined a bunch of DVRed episodes of Ghost Hunters. Anyone seen that? It's hilarious. Bunch of plumbers and jocks with high tech equipment setting out to "disprove hauntings" (while this is their stated goal, it's really obvious that they are actually setting out to *prove* hauntings).

Anyway, I've never had the slightest experience, but I do love ghost stories. And silly TV shows about "real hauntings".

Not ghosts, exactly, but one of those psychic competition shows on cable was actually pretty convincing to me. In a "blind" test they brought some self-proclaimed psychics into the hotel room where Janis Joplin died, and at least two of them were able to pinpoint the exact spot where she died, as well as relevant details to her life and the circumstances of her death.

I'm not willing to cast all of my stakes towards Sylvia Browne, et al, (and Browne was not on that show FWIW), as a result of seeing that, but I do believe that, at least, in places where traumatic things occur, there may be a psychic imprint of some sort, which certain people may be especially sensitive to...

I'm sure the life and death of the famous singer songwriter Janis Joplin was completely private and in no way publicly available information.

i love ghost hunters!

i love ghosties... why do you think im goth?!

I'm sure the life and death of the famous singer songwriter Janis Joplin was completely private and in no way publicly available information.

No, what I mean is, they brought them into a hotel room, while they were blindfolded, and they weren't given any information whatsoever about what had happened there or who it had happened to

I watched some ghost show program last night, and in it they are trying to get EVPs to happen as usual. There's this room where a little girl supposedly died and tourists have left her dolls and toys in a pile. So ghost hunters dueds take about ten dolls and BURN them hoping to invoke her ir so she'll say something! They employed another technique where they ran around in the dark taking photos at random, trying to catch the ghosts off guard, sneak up on them and scare them.

I really hate those shows because the people are so grating and they bring out my insanely cranky inner James "the amazing" Randi. And isn't there anything sillier than a person going like, "Pfff, that's just some static, not an EVP?" when it is damn obvious to everyone else watching and the rebuffing just makes them look like a boor? Because I'm that boor when I don't watch myself.

I did like a letter I got from my aunt, though. She said she'd bought her daughter a Creative Zen and said, "She says it can be used to record EVPs. I just don't want her to do it in our house because if she found ghosts, I couldn't live here anymore!"

What is a "Creative Zen"

yes, I'm too lazy to google

fun fact about my ghost: it hated astral weeks.

OMG this fun fact is a WINNER

Dell, it is like an iPod, an MP3 player with recording abilities.

ok, thanks.

Is cereal spokesghost Booberry underage? Er, just wondering on behalf of a friend.

I think he is either really stoned or developmentally delayed.

http://susanlprince.truepath.com/booberry.jpg

hahha

fetal alcohol syndrome

anybody know where i can buy boo berry?

Every Wal-Mart I've been to always has it, for $1.98.

this isn't much of a ghost story, but in ≈2012 I was walking around the 'recent burials' section of a cemetery near my workplace, stopping here and there to read the headstones and make a mental catalog of the trinkets left on people's graves. one of the headstones stood out because there was a brass locket bolted to the center of the stone (kind of like this but with the hinge on the side). when I opened it I saw a ceramic color photo of an old couple posing with their young grandchild. the names and dates on the stone were something along the lines of

JOHN SMITH 1938 - 2009
JANE SMITH 1940 -

uh, RIP John. I left the Smith(s) alone and moved on to the next stone. once I had circumnavigated the entire cemetery, I decided to revisit their stone so I could open the cute little locket again. I walked back up to the Smiths' grave and it was exactly as I remembered it, except...wtf, there was no locket and no photo, just the names and the dates without any ornamentation. it was a good-sized photo, so it's not like somebody could have pried it off the stone without leaving a sizable mark (and I'm pretty sure there was nobody else in the cemetery at the time). even though I was absolutely certain that this was the same stone I'd visited earlier, I checked out a bunch of other stones and the vicinity, and none of them had locket-style memorial photos.

I left the cemetery and haven't been back there since because (1) it's a boring cemetery and (2) I didn't want to 'ruin the mystique'. the obvious explanation is that I had a brain fart and confused one headstone with another, but it didn't seem that way at the time. it's not often that I encounter irrational/~supernatural~ phenomena in everyday life, so as mundane as it seems in retrospect, it was really quite a jarring experience for me.

*in the vicinity

I wonder if luna's story is true, lol

mandee's story is super-creepy!

the old-lady-in-the-bathroom-stall one.

Years ago my aunt, her aunt, and mom were watching TV in the living room. There was no one else in the house. My aunt spotted a young woman walking slowly down the hall, as if she were lost; she even glanced with curiosity into the living room.

Blinking, my aunt looks around the living room. Her aunt touches her arm.

"Oh, you saw her too, eh?"

I dunno if I would call this a ghost story but it was super fucking weird and I have no rational explanation for it:

the wife and I are on vacation in Arizona. Sedona, to be exact, which is a notorious hippy-dippy tourist trap type place filled with New Age crystal shops and healing centers and publicity materials filled to the brim with references to mysterious "vortexes" of spiritual energy that permeate the area etc. We hike around during the day and it's all very pretty and cool but I am not impressed by any supernatural claims nor do we witness anything especially revelatory or unusual. Toward the evening we check into our hotel; for some reason I recall that the front-desk was being run by a one-armed man, who inquired as to whether we had been out to the "vortexes". I replied yes but that we didn't see anything particularly noteworthy.

Later on that night, after hate-watching that movie where Julia Styles learns to hip-hop dance during an insane thunderstorm that abruptly kicked up, we turn out the lights to go to sleep. Within a few minutes, I am awoken by a bright strobe-light flashing, David Lynch-style, which appears to be coming from underneath the bathroom sink. My wife stirs and sees it too. I turn the lights on, it stops. I go over and look, there's no lightbulb under the sink or anything - I can't determine where the flashing light was coming from. I think eh whatever and turn the lights off and get back into bed. Within minutes, the flashing starts again. Instead of turning the lights on, I sit up in bed and watch it for awhile, getting kind of freaked out. when I get out of bed to go over to the sink, the flashing stops. I get back in bed, it starts again. This goes on for like an hour. Every time I turn the lights on, it stops. Every time I go over to investigate, it stops. The wife and I are both super-irritated and perplexed at this point, eventually we go to sleep.

In the morning the one-armed man is not behind the desk, it's someone else. We tell them about the lights and they're like "eh must've been a ghost"

My cynical/paranoid explanation is that the hotel was rigged by the staff to fuck with the guests but idk. It was really bizarre.

otoh, my wife's family is quite superstitious (oh those eastern european catholics) and have tons of stories like this - usually involving strobing lights, glasses moving, lightbulbs breaking etc.

it kind of annoys me that i've never had any sort of supernatural encounter. literally everyone else in my family's got a story. some friends and i stayed in a supposedly haunted hotel room once and stayed up all night waiting for something spooky to happen -- nothing. hell, the building i currently work in is supposed to be haunted! (it used to be a funeral home.) i've been there late at night plenty of times -- nothing. maybe i just need to try harder.

my wife had an aunt who had diabetes pretty bad. it got to the point where she was on dialysis for hours nearly every day. this was when my wife was pregnant with our first child and she used to say that this kid was going to replace her in the world. anyway, when he was about 6 months old, we were putting him down for a nap and he started doing this strange thing where his eyes kept darting around the room, like he was following something. he also started laughing. I thought maybe there was a fly in the room but we didn't see anything. I remember my wife and I kept looking up and at each other like, "what is going on here?" it lasted like 30 seconds. half an hour later my wife got a phone call saying her aunt had died.

I never knew what to make of that and feel crazy even talking about it. but I was reminded of it on our last trip to Mexico because her grandma is still alive and in her house she has a framed photo of the boy as a baby that we sent to her aunt. apparently it was on her nightstand. I haven't really told people about this but I've recently learned that apparently a lot of people have stories like this?

The main difficulty I see with ghosts is that in order to have any effect at all on a physical level, such as creating an image on the retina or within the visual cortex (which seems necessary condition for them to be seen), they must embody some form of energy that simultaneously cannot be detected or measured by any known physical instruments or be accounted for by the standard models in physics. This makes them extremely unlikely to exist.

otoh, I hear enough weird stuff that can't be explained that I keep a small reserve of potentiality in my conclusions about how the universe works where such anomalies might be conceivable. However, I don't place any bets on ghosts stories being true.

In high school, my friend's band caught a ghost trumpet on reel-to-reel while recording a practice session. Like just a handful pf jaunty notes tootled directly into the mic while people were chatting between songs and no instruments were being played. I was there when it was recorded and played back and it was a trumpet (nb: there was no trumpet on the premises) being played clear as a bell on a brand-new reel of tape and there is no rational explanation for it that I can think of. The space (which at that point was the generally unused upper floor of a pizza place) was a music hall decades earlier. Needless to say, this encounter with the unknown freaked everyone who was there the complete fuck out.

It's only just now occurring to me to inquire whether that tape still exists. I don't know that they didn't burn the accursed thing.

This makes them extremely unlikely to exist.

There's a theory that only some people are able to perceive ghostly phenomenon, due perhaps to some enhanced sense that we don't all share, or perhaps their sense of perception is somehow boosted compared to others

Remember: it wasn't all that long ago that people thought whales were fish. I do like the Stone Tapes conjecture, that perhaps a kind of repetitive recording is being played on some yet undiscovered medium

But I've been a Fortean Times subscriber for 20+ years, I'm open to all kinds of weird goings-on

due perhaps to some enhanced sense that we don't all share

but those humans still must be detecting something that can directly affect them physically (aka 'on the material plane'), while being otherwise indetectible to sensitive instruments which are also on the 'material plane' and don't have a bias against detecting ghosts. seem like the physics of seeing ghosts or being affected by ghostly activities would still have to encompass the ordinary kinds of physical phenomenon at some stage, otherwise nothing would "happen".

ghosts and asparagus pee smell are similar phenomena then

ghostbusters pke meter except it detects whether or not you might like cilantro

but those humans still must be detecting something that can directly affect them physically (aka 'on the material plane'), 

maybe they experience it directly on the non material/psychic/conscious plane?

I have come to believe in the possibility that there is something beyond the material plane, something which may or may not be measurable with physical instruments. I mean there's still so much we don't know about the human brain, including some things that don't make sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Plus there are dozens of accounts of NDEs where somebody will hear or see something that it would be physically impossible for them to observe. Who knows maybe science will explain it all one day, for right now there's definitely some freaky things goin on

those humans still must be detecting something that can directly affect them physically (aka 'on the material plane'), while being otherwise indetectible to sensitive instruments

if you think webcams and oscilloscopes absorb and process as much or more of the universe as consciousness does you should prob be more bullish on "AI"

my friend's band caught a ghost trumpet on reel-to-reel while recording a practice session

I mean, was the tape brand new? Probably something already on there that they were recording on top of.

on frogbs' tip roger penrose and others have been going around the last few years saying that the brain is not a v fast logical computer but a different kind of machine built around "non-computational collapse of quantum superimpositions"-- controversial and what do i know obv but fun and provocative in its suggestion that the mind is freer than we think from linear time and space. which would explain a lot. lately of course we are trying to build machines around the non-computational collapse of quantum superimpositions ourselves! maybe the threads about people feeding 80s movies plots into those will be less dull. maybe they'll see ghosts.

i work in a famously haunted 1920s movie theater, sometimes late at night by myself, and i have never seen even a little bit of a ghost btw. everyone else sees one the week they're hired. it's just me, i tell them. traces of me.

My only experience with a collapse of superimpositions was when a friend who crashed at my place decided, blessedly, to leave a day early.

controversial and what do i know obv but fun and provocative in its suggestion that the mind is freer than we think from linear time and space.

well yeah anyone who's ever taken psychedelic drugs has made that observation

if you only read one james story make it "a collapse of superimpositions"

well yeah anyone who's ever taken psychedelic drugs has made that observation

sure and cf also hamlet "with such wide reason / looking before and after" but it would be interesting to actually connect this persistent vague sense that ~something's going on with us~ with the specific things we began to learn in the 20c about the fundamentally unstable/nonlinear/probabilistic nature of the "material plane" itself

(blinked and realized it's "large discourse", not wide reason-- but u know what i mean-- i must just be fleeing the word discourse)

I have the simple belief that most phenomena that are observed are the product of some combination of the physiological, the psychological, and the metaphysical.

So the ghost that you just saw could’ve been a trick of the light, or some kind of retinal anomaly. Or it could be because you took psychedelics, or you’re having a brain moment. Or it’s because there is a ghost in the room. I don’t think of these explanations as being mutually exclusive— they’re “ands” rather than “ors”.

It’s basically the same as my feeling about astrology. 1. The tendencies of starsigns are essentially universal human traits and could apply to anyone, 2. An individual who is told they are “Venus in Pisces” might start to believe the influence of this placement, and govern their behaviour as a result, 3. Astrology is real.

Allowing some level of acceptance in the metaphysical is fun and useful ime, and it need not disallow rational explanation for the observed phenomena!

Anyway I was working for a couple of weeks at the Shangri-La studio in Malibu. The clients were LA-based, and wanted to take weekends off. So, come the weekend, they fucked off back to LA and I had the full run of the place in Malibu. (I just relaxed and worked and swam a little.)

One of the clients owned a French bulldog who thought I was the fucking best. He was always coming to chill on my lap wherever I was working. Come the weekend, the dog’s owner asked me if I could dog sit for the weekend in Malibu so he could have a relaxing dog-free weekend. I loved that dog and so I agreed.

The dog was old and farty. I’d be sitting at the piano and he’d hop up on my lap while I composed. It was hot so my arms were bare. Every twenty minutes or so the dog would grunt and I’d feel a gentle gust of wind on my bare arm; the dog was farting on me.

It was Saturday night and I went down the street to the bar and had a couple of pints en seul. I went back to the studio and found my little bedroom. The dog loved to sleep with me and eagerly hopped up into bed. The place was dark except for a light on down the hallway, the door was open so the room was mostly dark, but not entirely dark.

I woke up in the middle of the night and felt a terrifying presence. There was something in the room with me.

I looked toward the hallway and could discern in my peripheral vision a figure in the corner of the room. It was unquestionably malevolent. It was slowly moving toward me.

I shifted my gaze directly toward the corner and the figure was nowhere to be seen. I looked back toward the hallway and there it was, again, this malevolent figure moving toward me, only visible when I viewed it out of my peripheral vision.

My mind raced. What could it be? The Shangri-La studio was originally owned by The Band. Levon Helm had died a few years prior, but the spirit didn’t have drummer energy. I didn’t know any of the names of the other members of the group, or whom among them were alive or dead, or which of them might have cause to haunt their former studio. But I felt rather certain that this spirit was somehow connected to The Band.

I looked toward the corner, nothing. I looked toward the hallway, the awful spirit approaching closer and closer out of the corner of my eye. I kept looking back and forth. I didn’t know what to do. I felt that if I closed my eyes and attempted to sleep, the spirit would approach and do something terrible to me.

Then the dog next to me, sleeping, sighed and let out a silent, long fart. The smell filled the room, it was extremely stinky. I saw the spirit keep its distance. I thought “there is no way this ghost is coming near me as long as this fart machine is protecting me.”

I fell back asleep next to the dog and lived to tell the tale.

The dog died a few years later. The client was kind enough to inform me of his passing, he knew how much I loved that dog.

you don't understand, Rick Danko Incubus is the name of my dog

For a debate class I had to argue against the existence of ghosts and the biggest thing for me was the difficulty of defining the darn things! It gets circular really quick.

sure and cf also hamlet "with such wide reason / looking before and after" but it would be interesting to actually connect this persistent vague sense that ~something's going on with us~ with the specific things we began to learn in the 20c about the fundamentally unstable/nonlinear/probabilistic nature of the "material plane" itself

my view has always been our consciousness relates to the totality of everything (or perhaps the "Akashic field", to borrow an Indian term) the way a two-dimensional object interacts with a three-dimensional one. certain things like drugs or dreaming or just getting older changes the angle at which we perceive that field. sometimes its subtle - I mean I sure don't *feel* like the same person I was 20 years ago - sometimes it's dramatic, where a 15 minute DMT trip feels like decades

ashes of American bands
xpost

looking forward to noping out of a ripe haunting due to dog farts in my post life thank you fgti

Here's the dog

https://www.instagram.com/p/8eKjJ3tnpm/

if you think webcams and oscilloscopes absorb and process as much or more of the universe as consciousness does

i'm glad you put an 'if' at the start of that sentence before dragging me into it

but the spirit didn’t have drummer energy.

lol

_well yeah anyone who's ever taken psychedelic drugs has made that observation_

When I was in high school, I went to a "retreat" up in Wyoming with a friend of mine and his family, who were all woo-woo types. One night, everyone sat around a big fire and started chanting "Ommmmmmm . . . ommmmmmmm . . . " Suddenly, one of the group started "channeling" some sort of "spirit." He spoke in this kind of Oscar the Grouch voice, and said all kinds of weird shit. I talked to the guy afterward, and he acted completely normal, seemingly with no memory of the experience. Looking back on it, I of course think it had to have been put on, but at the time I was completely convinced that I had heard someone from the other side.

Various children who visit/lived at our house have been convinced that our basement has ghosts for as long as I have lived here (since 2001). A while back, a woman who lived here as a teenager in the 1950's contacted us about a book she was writing, and, unprompted, mentioned how her and her sisters were sure there were ghosts, right down to the specific part of the basement.

For my part, there have been a few inexplicable loud bangs (like really loud, M80 firecracker style, with no visible source), but it's been many years since I heard one. I think we've made peace with whatever is here.

I don't know if mandela effect-style recollections count as supernatural, but I distinctly remember watching the finale of Cheers where Sam has an emotional breakdown and says, I... I... I... but watching it again, he never does this.

Ghost in the Sitcom Machine?

Paranormal experiences seem to me like the brain’s way of making sense of things we don’t yet understand. Like, imagine what is was like to experience earthquakes and thunderstorms before science had explanations. The events are mind boggling and terrifying but the mechanics of them are pretty mundane in comparison.

I used to think I knew what 'I don't believe in ghosts' meant - to the point where I think I was probably quite obnoxious and pompous about it whenever people brought it up.

Either way, I'm pretty sure I've seen a ghost. We used to go to an old Tudorbethan house on the seafront at Broadstairs, a fading town on the south coast of England where Dickens wrote *David Copperfield* and *Bleak House* (with the emphasis on bleak). We'd been at the beach and I came back to the house on my own. I was probably 10 or 11? The house was three storeys, on a cliff set back from the sea. It had a big lounge with a piano and from the piano, you could look out into the hallway onto the wide staircase leading up to the second floor. I was messing around on the piano and glanced out and up onto the staircase. There were huge vertical windows filling the whole southern wall, and I can still see, within that great basin of light, picked out in a grippable darkness and motes of dust, a figure gliding down the stairs. Moving three carpeted steps, maybe four. It's one of those moments so frozen and readily accessible in my memory that I can send out a kind of second self into the rest of the house; imagine the blank light of the conservatory, the parade of vacant rooms on the second floor; and where I can still ask myself why I wasn't scared and why I looked away and didn't engage. I guess I haven't really processed it, or am happy for it to remain unprocessed in some anterior chamber of the mind.

Two points of order: we didn't pay to go to the house - it was through a friend of my mum's, and by way of payment, the old boy that owned the house only asked for a donation to a local charity; I couldn't, and can't, play the piano.

A good buddy - who's definitely a believer in many things woo-woo - said that an older guy stopped outside his apartment (where's he's lived since the 90s) and claimed that he had lived in the same unit years ago (like in the 80s). They chatted about the building and the changes in the neighborhood for a few minutes, and then as he was departing, the stranger asked: "Do you ever see her, or hear her anymore?"

My buddy said he went pale, and said "Yeah.. yeah, we do hear her."

Apparently there been all kinds of 'manifestations' and missing objects, things falling off tables, stuff life that.. and this previous occupant seemed to confirm that it wasn't just odd happenings but the apartment had some kind of female presence

make of it what you will

was certain goon's post would end with a U87 catching a ghost trumpet dog fart

all ghost stories (true or false) are good to read, all scientific explanations/rationalisations/debunkings of ghost stories are bad to read is how i break it down to an extent

I mean, was the tape brand new? Probably something already on there that they were recording on top of.

My uncle once bought some blank CDRs and one turned out to have the video for Wyclef Jean's "Perfect Gentleman" on it, how's that for spooky?

i don't believe in ghosts and to my knowledge, have never experienced anything supernatural, but it's entirely possible that i've just learned to tune it all out lol

PSA for people visiting SEA

if you hear people playing marbles at night on your hotel ceiling, you hear nothing

if you're at top floor and you hear furnitures moving above you, you hear nothing

if you hear someone calling your name from above a tree, you hear nothing https://t.co/tOa5feQjHJ

— muta 🍒 store is open (@mutamakes) March 4, 2023

I did have an Australian colleague once who had done research in an Indonesian village who said she got a mysterious rash on her arm and would hear voices at night in the place where she was staying. medication/creams didn't help with the rash, and the voices were disruptive enough that she would often wake up in the middle of the night because she was hearing people speaking Indonesian in her ear. but both the voices and the rash went away after she told a neighbour, who gave her a copy of the Quran for protection.

I'd heard a lot of similar stories growing up, but that was the first time I'd heard one from a non-Muslim foreigner