Do You Believe In Ghosts?! - Page 2

I believe in James Randi

I am firmly agnostic on this point.
That said, I sometimes joke about my poltergeist - which may or may not just be me being scatterbrained, I honestly don't know. Things sometimes disappear for a while and reappear in places where I know, positively, that I have already looked for them and could not possibly have missed them if they were there. My ex, who lived with me for several years, was well aware of the phenomenon too.

I don't believe in ghosts. What I believe in is that humans are the ones who are capable of causing real harm.

I have more hope of spirits than actual belief in them. I am a philosopher, although not the kind you would ever read about in a book, or a study of gifted minds. To me logic wins and spirits take the back seat to what IS and not what could be. I prefer to hold and open mind to the possibility, but I have many doubts...

Thought this was pretty interesting!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...s-mediums.html

Pretty much, more British people believe in the Supernatural than in God.

Interesting results for the poll on this thread: exactly 50%-50%.

I keep an open mind & I've experienced some unexplained phenomenon. However, I think its important to keep in mind that when something is "unexplained" we shouldn't immediately jump to one of the pop-culture explanations for activity, i.e. "ghosts" & "extra-terrestrials". Our brains are wired to make sense of things & peculiar activity without an apparent cause is often incorporated into our neurological model of the world by interpreting it through our expectations. If the phenomenon described here took place several centuries ago it would be interpreted based upon common folk beliefs specific to that culture. Our progenitors may have interpreted it as pixies or hobgoblins, demons or djinn, the displeasure of the household god, the work of a malevolent "witch" & a plethora of other "mythical" entities.

"Unexplained" means precisely that. As I said in the preceding we're hard-wired to make sense of our sensory input so we unwittingly apply a filter to the experience discarding those aspects that don't conform to the pattern-recognition algorithm & retaining those details that fit the mold. Humans are notoriously subjective in their perception.

I can agree with that! I do believe in ghosts, but I'd much quicker assume whatever I experienced was unusual or unexplained than immediately thinking it was a ghost.

I don't believe. Never have.

When I was growing up in Mexico me, my brothers, and my mom lived in an old house that belonged to my great grandparents that were long gone by that time. One night my mom had to go pee or whatever else lol and Since we lived in such An old house there was no plumbing to have a bathroom in the house so we had to use an outhouse that was located at very end of our backyard. Well, that night, while my mom was in the outhouse doing her businnes, I was standing at the door crying uncontrollable asking for her. I think I was four then. Then, out of nowhere I heard an old man say to me,"dont worry shell be back".WTf. So when I turned to see who the man was he was gone. I think it was my great grandpa. Since then I believe there has to be spirits or ghosts.

We don't know a great deal about how the brain functions, true. Yet during the course of normal, daily activity, we use a great deal of brain matter.

That language determines thought and perception, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, is no longer commonly accepted.

Do I believe in ghosts? But of course not.

Ghosts,

Hmm, I believe in energy and matter. I believe the universe is very big and we are very small. I believe that there are things so complex that our simple little minds cannot comprehend them without the need for a 'supernatural'.

"The truth is out there", we just might not like it or understand it.

why do i never come across ghosts in a pub or a concert...why does it have to be in a secluded upper floor of a spooky mansion ..and if someone played white zombie right then..then whoa! lol

im not the novel reading types..but anything to do with ghosts and hauntings fascinates me. i read into it a lot. so, do i believe they exist... one side of me says no, they dont. it;s just our mind playing tricks on us based on the surroundings. i would presume it's our subconcious which reacts in a certain way to get us more alert and in the process, any activity such as door opening or sound of music gets really highlighted, to the extent, even a reflection can throw a fit..

the other side of me says, yes, they do exist. why do i say so...? well, the fear of the unknown really. i have never come across any visions or sound per se.... but one of my first cousins mansion was kinda spooky. i mean it was a beautiful vintage house with 8 bedrooms in the groud floor and 5 on top.. it was vast estate overlooking the creek and surrounded by dense forest, if one looks further, you could almost see the sea.. now the thing is, none of us was allowed to go to the first floor...and this was when we were 15 or so.. one evening, i decided to go and check it out.. i was this half chicken - half dare devil sorts.. time: evening, i slowly made my way through the wooden stairs, it took some time to reach on top as it was steep and it had far more number of steps than i expected, i finally reached on top and the palce was mute dark, with a long verandah overlooking the creek, there was no moolight, pitch dark with just a tad bit of reflection .. i moved closer to one bedroom, door was too huge for me ot manage, but some how i pushed in, took a few, small steps inside..looking at the shadow of huge furnitures and the bed in center kinded shook me up... i sorta felt a very strong echo of energy then, could be my adrenaline, cud be the rush, dunno, but i was certain i wast alone there and that if i stayed for a minute longer, that force would swallow me in. the errieness and the smell was just too gothic ! but, when i think of it now, i still challenge myself with a question. and the question is, would i sleep overnight in that room today... and the answer is..

bottomline, i think it;s more to do with each one of us' capacity in terms of handling emptiness and the fear of the unknown lurking in dark... for eg. even if you are a assured that the room is empty, the moment it goes pitch dark, sooner or later, we will panic.

I think we associate haunted places with scary old buildings because that's just where we think SHOULD be haunted. But innocuous places and spooky places are about equal in possibility.

Probably.


But who would rather live a suburban soap opera life with an innocuous picket fence background rather than live a gothic novel riding a nightmare-black steed at the gallop to rescue the girl trapped in a haunted castle?

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"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."
~ Catherine in Wuthering Heights

*sigh*

Mario

I rather fear of some people

I do believe, one time my sister in law went to visit us at the apartment that my wife and I used to live in, and when she went in she just said "Hi" and "I see you are in good company" and I was sitting at the kitchen table by myself, but I didn't put much importance until later when she was leaving she told me that she was kinda freaked out because when she came in she saw that a male figure was standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders...
And the other big experience was when I was single and was living in this apartment that all of a sudden became haunted by this female ghost that for a week scared the s#1t out of me, i felt that it was a female, I don't know why but I did, and every single night for a week was the same, she was scratching the walls and sitting on my bed, i turned to one side and she was scratching the oppsite side, and then turned to the other side, and she was scratching the opposite side again and the sitting on my bed by my feet... my back then girlfriend went to my apartment one of those nights and she just refused to stay saying that it was really cold and she was feeling really weird just being there, and it was without me telling her anything about the incidents. I read that putting water in a crystal clear bowl kinda makes them go away and I put several around the house and think that it worked because a couple days later she was gone. So I can say I believe...