Do You Believe In Ghosts?

I tried searching for it on YouTube but can't find it unfortunately. It was a very long time ago when I saw it, at least 10 years ago, I can't even remember the name of the show. I don't even know what to search for... I put in stuff like "black mass caught on tape" or "black ghostly mass" and all I get is the Black Mass movie trailer.

What I remember is that it was a particular room that was being haunted, a couple was staying there and it got so bad that they hired some guy to investigate it. The investigator went into a room and brought a camera in to try and document evidence and that's when it appeared. Dang... I really wish I could find it!

I actually wasn't talking about that, i thought that was just an example of the various examples of "proof" that you basically said have been dismissed without examination. Do you have any other examples?

Good question!

I think the term "proof" is often confused with "evidence."

There's a lot of "evidence" for a lot of things. A nineteen inch long, ten inch wide footprint in the woods of the Pacific Northwest is evidence. But evidence of what?
It could be evidence of an undiscovered, 900 lb., 9 foot tall, bipedal primate... or it could be evidence that Granpa Ray made himself a pair of wood shoes shaped like feet and wore them while stomping through the woods because he thought it would be funny.

Nothing to add about ghost, I just want to see my Halloween avatar in lights. It looks kind of ghostly, no?

I'm reporting you for going off-topic!

(Oops - forgot we're not on the Soapbox anymore!)

Cool avatar - I'm trying to come up with an Orson / Halloween pun, but nothings coming.

Well... Yeah I pretty much agree. It is more evidence than proof. The thing is though is that it's impossible for evidence to become proof unless it gets analyzed seriously and see whether or not it really is authentic or not.

I do believe that the flying brick was genuine. I must've seen that over 100 times and there doesn't seem to be any way that it could have been faked.

The problem with paranormal research (compared to other scientific research such as astronomy) is it's difficult to come up with a starting point. What I mean is, we know there's a whole universe beyond the atmosphere of Earth so we already know a lot about it - through centuries of studies and empirical evidence we know about planets and stars and galaxies. We know some physics and a lot about the natural forces of the universe. So we know there's an infinite amount of exploring to be done to learn more about all the things in that infinite realm.

But with paranormal stuff we don't really know where to begin because there's no observable structure, patterns, physics or predictable cause and effect.
With stars and planets - they're already overhead (relatively), they're already there, we KNOW this is true, we just have to find them and watch what they do.

But when a book flies off a shelf, what made that happen?
Was it a ghost, a demon, a possessed inanimate object, an unconscious telekinetic event, an ectoplasmic convergence, an inter-dimensional disruption, the results of an alien invisible ray gun, a family of Sasquatch moving through the area, a witch's curse, Scientology, the moving of the Holy Spirit, a simple act of gravity because the floor is not plum, an atmospheric pressure anomaly, a seismic disturbance, a mouse? A psychic telling you it was the ghost of a murdered person that's talking to them is a bit different than Galileo looking through his telescope over the course of months and charting the movements of shadows on a planet.

Yeah I do see your point—then again though—if some actual research were to be done, we wouldn't be so in the dark about a lot of the phenomena. Whether it be paranormal or not.

True story - in my former apartment I had this little closet in my bedroom. It was just a shelf closet and I kept my various toiletries and medications in there.

One night I opened the door to the closet and suddenly pill bottles began flying off the shelf. I'm not talking falling - they were flying at me as if propelled.
As my heart seemed to stop, I thought, "Okay, this is it. My first true undeniable paranormal experience - and not just something weird or mysterious but a full blown, class 1, poltergeist kinetic manifestation!"
It seemed I was literally under attack by the inanimate objects on my shelf that were being hurled at me.

As I was preparing to faint, scream, run or wet myself, a tiny dark "thing" came bolting from the back of the shelf. This particular shelf was a good 3 or 4 feet from the ground and the little "thing" zipped right off the shelf, flew through the air about 3 feet horizontally and landed on the carpet... and, without missing a step, continued to bolt across the room until it came to a wall and stopped long enough for me to get a look at it.

It was a mouse.

When I had first opened the closet door he was behind all the bottles and must have panicked. He must have been in a frenzy looking for an escape route. His frenetic energy and flailing legs pushed the bottles he was behind and forced the ones in the front to come flying off the shelf - I'm still amazed at the energy of his kicks to make those bottles go flying (of course they were light weight prescription bottles). Then, after he'd knocked enough stuff out of his way and saw a clearing, he bolted into the light and straight out of the closet to fly right past me!

Talk about a startle response! (Mine, not his!)
I spent the next few days patching holes in the back of the closet and trying to mouse-proof the apartment. The poor little "poltergeist" mouse ended up in a trap a couple days later.

Most important forms of Science are underfunded as is, i'm not sure how millions of dollars being poured into something with the highest piece of evidence (according to you) is a "flying brick video" on a show that has to by law specify itself as an Entertainment show, is going to help anything.

Billions of dollars have been poured into much more pointless stuff.

But yeah, I know I say I want that to happen, but I know it's never going to. I'm fine though with people just deciding for themselves, believe if you want to or don't.

Religion doesn't come into them for me, but I do like to think there's something other than the material world.

I haven't had an experience with ghosts but it's interesting how many people have that I've met. When she was young my mum and a friend opened a door and saw a leg disappearing up the stairs; a nextdoor neighbour saw a man in a top hat in Victorian clothing; and a colleague of mine once saw a hand at the foot of his bed. I think there are others but I can't remember the details.

No, I feel like if ghosts existed, we'd have some type of empirical evidence. After all, it's not as if claims of being haunted are exactly uncommon.

I haven't been following this thread, but this part of the original post peeked my interest. Since I am a Christian I kind of wanted to give my perspective. First of all there is a very clear difference between a "ghost" and a person rising from the dead. The people who rose from the dead in the Bible all had their physical bodies. Other times when people are summoned, like when Saul summons the prophet Samuel, it's not a ghost in the same sense. The Bible doesn't specify because it's not important to that story, but it is Samuel in at least some spirit sense. Maybe you could call that a ghost, but since the passage doesn't specify you really can't assume. That is probably the closest it gets though. So in that sense sure, a dead person can be summoned. But that's different from ghosts haunting houses or being among us.

Personally I think that there could be some truth to some of the ghost stories, or people talking to spirits and whatnot, and maybe things like Ouija boards. But I think that most of the time it is not the ghost of a dead person that is being interacted with, but a demon. I think demons can impersonate the dead, access all kinds of knowledge and information regarding the dead and the living, and in that way they trick people into thinking they are the dead person. But most of the time I think it's just superstition. Old houses with creaky floor boards, maybe a mouse in the walls or a rusty pipe.

I'm kind of weird with this. I'm an atheist, and on a broader level, I also don't believe in anything spiritual or supernatural (including any kind of spiritual healing, psychics, etc.). That includes ghosts. In theory, no, I don't believe in ghosts.

And yet, if you were to ask me to spend a night in a haunted asylum or house . . .