Ghosts and Phantoms

Dammit, how do they work!? I always had the theory that they are simply memories of people and things that refuse to be forgotten and require the local legends in order to survive. If no one knows about them they simply don't exist. Which is how I believe phantoms are created: They're memories of things that never existed in the first place. Well that's my theory anyway.

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They don't.

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More importantly, they can't.

edited 19th Jan '11 1:03:40 PM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

Although I know for a fact that ghosts exist (seeing is believing after all) I don't have a clue as to the hows and whys. I suppose that someone will work it out eventually but I'm not overly concerned about it.

"Seeing is believing?" ...Really?

edited 19th Jan '11 1:31:57 PM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

• glares* You know what I meant. Anyway, it wasn't on TV or anything, I saw a ghost dog walk right across the landing.

Your eyes play tricks on you. Don't trust them.

Either that, or a fundamental section of physics is broken. What seems more likely?

edited 19th Jan '11 1:52:37 PM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

It's one thing to say things like Gods and Spirits most likely don't exist due to Occam's Razor and it's most reasonable to not believe in them since not evidence is provided.

It's an entirely different thing to say it's an impossibility. Which is very unreasonable. There are plenty of hypotheses one could make for the existence of Spirits of Gods. Whether it's Rational to believe in them is where Atheists come in and say it's not. It's very possible that this universe runs on a Supercomputer and was created by a being who essentially has Omnipotent power over this realm. And there are plenty of waves and other matter sprawling throughout the universe that we have yet to understand and could essentially be configured and has been configured in a way that would create a "ghost". There's just no evidence yet that someone in the Multiverse created ours or the like, not yet.

Genkidama for Japan, even if you don't have money, you can help![1]

Well, I was assuming the OP meant the "semi-transparent figure that can walk through walls" version of ghosts, which are impossible unless we got electromagnetic fundamentally wrong somewhere.

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

1) There was nothing that would've caused an hallucination and if I was going to imagine a ghost it wouldn't have been something like a dog.

2) I didn't realise that it was a ghost when I first saw it, at first I thought it was our (then living) dog but I went downstairs a moment later and Borgie was in his usual position at my mum's feet. The dog I saw was going away from the stairs and there's no way it could have gone back down without me noticing, plus when I asked I was told that Borgie hadn't left the room (incidently, him going upstairs on his own would've been out of character for him since his apparent mission in life was to stay as close to my mum as he could).

3)It wasn't a vague, see-through image, it was solid, black and distinctly dog-shaped. As I said above, I thought it was Borgie at first.

4)I'm not the only one who's seen the ghost dog, my dad, who's one of the least suggestible men on the planet, saw it as well. Neither of us knew about the other's sighting until years later when it came up in conversation but both of us saw what sounds like the same dog in more or less the same place (the only difference was that he saw it coming out the bathroom and going towards the stairs while I saw it going in the opposite direction).

5) Regarding physics, the rules are changing all the time and some of the most recent developments are brain breakingly weird. Odds are that anything is possible on that front. Anyway, why would a perfectly solid looking ghost dog who didn't walk through anything break the laws of physics?

edited 19th Jan '11 3:47:15 PM by Weaver

I am forced to conclude that your pet dog is very sneaky.

edited 19th Jan '11 4:20:35 PM by silver2195

Currently taking a break from the site. See my user page for more information.

Last year I woke up to a red haired spirit woman standing on me. She disappeared in wispy smoke after startling me half to death.

I believe what I experienced is called sleep paralysis. Very interesting subject.

I don't believe in the paranormal either, by the way.

"Without a fairy, you're not even a real man!" ~ Mido from Ocarina of Time

The only thing consistent between your two experiences is that you both "saw" the same thing. Neither occured in the same place, nor is there evidence it was at the same time.

It could have been a dream for all you know, you both had similar dreams. Or suffered an optical illusion due to lighting/etc.

It's not a very compelling story.

edited 19th Jan '11 4:54:52 PM by CommandoDude

My other signature is a Gundam.

If Gods and ghosts and stuff exist, why should they have to conform to the laws of reality? It's like that old "if God is all-powerful, could he create a rock so big that even he couldn't lift it?" fallacy. Yes, he could. Then he'd lift it.

edited 19th Jan '11 5:01:06 PM by SoberIrishman

Why is everyone talking about gods? I'm more interested in phantoms and ghosts, not deities.

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I guess because, like ghosts, they're something that loads of people believe in, but it's impossible to prove that they exist/don't exist.

edited 19th Jan '11 5:42:17 PM by SoberIrishman

I'm a skeptic, but a few years back, I joined a ghost-hunter club, and learned a bit about the "theory" that most of these people seem to believe in. The basic idea is that ghosts are some sort of emotional imprint on a place- someone who died in that location has left behind a kind of copy of a part of their personality- which can manifest to others as an image of that person doing something typically associated with them. These moving emotionally laden images require some type of "energy" to manifest, and this energy is a combination of the intense passion the person was feeling when they died, and the emotional sensitivity of the people who later on happen to be in that place. The mechanical details of how all this might be reconciled with contemporary physics, if it can be, are completely beyond me. Most of the ghost hunters I knew simply assumed, without knowing too much about it, that contemporary physics is in fact, at least partly wrong.

@Weaver: Your dad and you saw a similar image at nearly the same location? Where were the both of you when it happened? I'm a sceptic, sorry, but it's still an interesting subject, and there is actually quite a bit of mainstream research about it. If I remember correctly, these experiences are actually sometimes reproducable in certain locations with certain environmental conditions. Have to look it up though, it's been a while. Could have been something about infra or ultra soundwaves messing with the brain. But I'm not sure.

@snailbait: Had those too, twice in my life. Nothing I'd like to experience again, but it's still fascinating, though.

edited 20th Jan '11 2:59:48 AM by kurushio

Ghost don exits.

I've got new mythological machinery, and very handsome supernatural scenery. Goodfae: a mafia web serial

Personally, I'd say seeing a ghost isn't enough to prove their existence - after all, there are many other reasons for seeing something strange, as others have pointed out. But if a series of well-designed psychological studies provide data best explained by the existence of ghosts, I'll accept it.

After all, the idea that each part of your brain does its own separate function used to be something only phrenologists believed (and they were rightly considered quacks) but now is a widely accepted theory with a lot of empirical support.

Incidently, the laws of physics cannot be broken, because they are defined by what is possible. We've seen things happen that used to be considered impossible, such as an electron jumping from one spot to another without being anywhere in between, and the reaction from physicists has been to scratch their heads, do more studies and then amend their description of the laws of physics. If God exists and can do things impossible for anyone else, then we'd add a caveat saying that different rules apply to God.

If I'm asking for advice on a story idea, don't tell me it can't be done.

Flatly stating that ghosts can't exist is a faith-based statement, not science. Real scientists will tell you that nothing is absolutely certain. That's how science works. Newtonian physics explained almost everything, with a few minor exceptions. Einstein managed to explain some of the exceptions, but he realized there was more to uncover.

I've never actually seen anything paranormal, and I'm as skeptical as the next person. I hear "true-life" ghost stories and see that, in most cases, the "sighting" can be chalked up to human fallibility, optical aberrations, swamp gas, whatever. But not all cases. I believe (and this is another faith-based statement) there are dynamics in this universe we do not yet understand. We are still creating and refining the equipment we use to amplify our perception. Most of all, I freely admit, I want there to be something more to death as I understand it, a transition rather than an ending.

Under World. It rocks!

He wasn't. He wasn't that big a dog but he made as much noise as a baby elephant going down the stairs and that was when he didn't crash into the radiator on the half-landing. Plus as I said before, him going upstairs on his own would've been out of character since he was my mum's furry brown shadow for his whole life (we even nicknamed him stalker-dog).

@kuroshio: I was in my room and my dad was in his. The ghost-dog was on the landing both times, just going in different directions. My dad also claims to have seen a couple of other ghosts, including a woman with gray hair in a bun who was wearing a dark dress with a white collar who was also seen by my sister, and a little blonde girl in a blue velvet dress. The girl was a particuarly odd case since apparently my mum walked right past her without seeing her. Then again, my mum has never seen a single ghost while me, dad, and my siblings have. Personally I'm starting to wonder if genetics may be involved. There's also the question of where all the ghosts are coming from since our house isn't that old (it was built in the 1930's), as far as we know only one person has died in it (the husband of the lady my parents bought the house from), and before it was built there was nothing there but farmland. The ghost dog is easier to explain, when I was little we had a black lab named Skipper who was put down in the dining room when I was about three or four, and the ghost dog was appropriately Labrador-shaped.

Go ahead and make that a statement of fact. Science is a tool of discovery with no end in sight, not a sword to strike down the supernatural! like so many people seem to be so eager to think. You can often tell the science-fanatics from the scientists when they say "we know".

edited 20th Jan '11 12:35:44 PM by Pykrete

I've heard many alleged ghost sightings, but not one contained observations that would have been sufficient to locate the hypothesis that they were any sort of shade or remnant of formerly living beings had the observers not already had that cached concept.

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

Well, if the apparition displayed knowledge of verifiable information that the person seeing it wouldn't have known at the time but the dead person would have, that would probably serve to "locate the hypothesis".

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