Ghost stories!

[Goldiegirl]

What are ghosts or spirits and do you believe in them? I've been thinking about this a lot lately because of experiences I had while growing up. Here's my story, tell me what you think...

Somewhere between the ages of 6-10 I lived in a "haunted" bedroom. I don't know what else to call it. At night time all of these old people would be standing around my bed talking. They weren't ghosts, like billowy white images, or shadows, but rather black and white images that looked like they were from old photographs. I couldn't see through them, they appeared solid. They all were talking to each other. Always, the one old lady at the end of the bed would try and talk to me. It had me very scared. I would just pull the blankets up over my head and pretend they weren't there. I never felt that they would harm me. During the day, I could hear whispers. I would tell my mom and she would say that there are no such things as ghosts and we are christians and don't believe in them. Well that answer didn't work. Finally she just got tired of me complaining and switched my bedroom. That ended the nightly visits, but I could still hear the old people. My mom says she never noticed anything. She worked nights so she didn't spend a lot of time in that room.

So the other day I was talking with my brother, and we got on the subjects of death and dying and what happens to your soul. I told him of my "haunting" and he got really aggitated. He lives in that house, but doesn't use that room. A few weeks ago he had his neighbor over who brought along his little daughter. She kept going to the stairway and talking. When her dad asked her who she was talking to, she said "the old lady"! They didn't think anything of it. Now of course he does. He said he doesn't use that bedroom because he didn't like the feel of it.

I am not sure what to think. What are all of your thoughts, and have any of you experienced something like a haunting or paranormal activity?

[Arlet]

Well, i Do believe in ghosts.
I don't know why, never experienced anything except one time we tried to call ghosts.
(Long time ago)
Still I think those stories are very interesting. Most of the time scary though.:relief:

[Goldiegirl]

Did you use a ouija board to call ghosts? Did anything happen? I never tried to call anything up, spirit, ghost or anything. I was always concerned that something would show up and I wouldn't know how to make it go away!

[Derfel]

Its just fun, how harmless ghost, who are constant "guests" can scare life out of people.
As for me, i do believe in ghosts, but on the other hand, im not saying that they surely exist. Its just that no one proven their existence for sure, and vice versa. Ghosts? I had such experience as well. For a short while there was a black image standing at my bed, i haven't a clue if it was a REAL ghost, or my imagination or whatever. But it scared me so much, that every single time, even though i was around 11 I ran to my mothers bedroom.

Its a possibility that children in general are capable of noticing the supernatural, but this capability slowly fades away for most of them, those who can keep their ability are the famous indigo children. Also, many people believe that humanity in early times, was a way way more spiritual race, not only in our beliefs, but regarding our senses as well. So perhaps, it might be that people's heightened senses gradually get sucked away by our technocratic, atheistic environment... although its just my theory, the latter one that is, the first two are made by professionals :D
I personally wouldn't try to call a ghost, i don't have the need of it, so i'd rather not mess with that kinda stuff without a strong reason.

[Mars Man]

Did somebody call my name? Oh...it was you Goldiegirl chan...hee, hee, hee...

Well I would like to come busting through the bar's swinging doors, and just stand there for a short moment as the music and talking instantly stops...so that all eyes can focus on me for a second...before I stroll up to the bar and ask for a stiff one.

Now...first I'd like to ask Goldiegirl, if I may have her permission to ask for some definitions on some of the terms presented. I'd then hope to be allowed to argue some on those definitions.

The very reason being, if that word, for example, 'ghost,' is left up to each individual to define, then no one can refute any statement by that person that they believe in, have seen, or have heard, or have touched or been touched by a 'ghost.' The same would be for the word 'spirit' or 'soul.' Also, would there be any difference between these three words, and if so, what?

My own stance, at the moment, is that whatever any 'spiritual realm' may be (if there is, in fact any such dimension) in existence, it is not any part of the 'physical realm,' but may intersect in some manner so as to allow some type of energy mirrowing/borrowing/leaking. What is physical is always physical, and what is spiritual is always spiritual and the only possible overlap may be only that mirrowing/borrowing/leaking, which is a matter of energies that are affected.

There could be the scenario where what we humans see as 'spiritual' is nothing more than some function of the physical realm, which, if that were the case, would show that there would be no such thing as 'spiritual' or 'spiritual realm;' it'd all be the 'physical realm' only.

As for occurences such as Goldiegirl has brought out, where more than one brain can percieve the same firing systems of imagery, I have very little doubt that something does in fact exist. I would not be so quick to call that 'spiritual,' and would strongly argue that such images have nothing whatsoever to do with human existence other than the fact that humans interpret, or are causued to interpret the relation as such.

I hope to hear from you, Goldiegirl, on that priviledge of discussion the definitions--it'll mean a little embedding, that's why.

[Goldiegirl]

Mars Man san, I must apologize I don't have definitions per se. Only what I think, and I have an open mind so if you can add more, please do! I am confused to say the least. Here goes for definitions.

Ghosts...hmm....I always figured they were just around, like a leftover memory, and they can't interact, they aren't intelligent.

Spirits, trickier to me. I think they are intelligent energy, kind of the life spark that hasn't moved from the physical into the spiritual. They can try and make contact. But you see that could be a soul too. I think maybe a spirit could be religious in nature, maybe like an angel or on the opposite end a demon. Souls have to be from people who were once living. Feel free to help here Mars Man san!

A friend of mine who is a Jehovah's Witness told me that was I saw were demons and satanic and that I shouldn't think of them or try to find out more. He said there are no such things as ghosts and such. I didn't feel like the old people were evil and trying to harm me, but then again I never talked back to them either. I still can't go in that room. I never went in it even when my mom was in there.

[Revenant]

I've got a couple of odd experiences. The first happened at 6:45 in the morning. My bro and I were waiting outside for the basketball coach to come and let us in. It was a cold crisp morning, and the sun was still hidden behind the mountains. Then I saw a tall, slender, muscular, transparent shadow running extremely fast. He zipped down the street towards us, turned down away from us, and went around a corner. At first I wasn't sure that I actually saw that, finally I turned to my bro and asked him if he had seen anything, and he asked if I meant a dark shadow running. I only nodded, and neither of us has spoken of that since.

The other was I was upstairs sleeping in. Everyone else in the house had gone to work, so I knew I was alone. But I heard someone shuffling about downstairs, and a very faint jingling of bells. After some time I finally got up the courage to go have a look, but there was no one there, and nothing to indicate anyone had been there.

Ghosts if they exist, from a logical point of view, since we sense them through our limited senses, must be tangible, as in scientific instruments should be able to also pick up evidence of their existence. I haven't come across any scientific data that would suggest they were real, and a lot of scientific data suggests they don't exist, or that they were natural phenomena that our minds interpreted as ghosts (our minds can put together info from limited stimuli and create it's own picture of something that doesn't actually exist, as a gross example, there was the gif of a spinning woman featured on the net news recently, some people saw it turning clockwise, others counterclockwise), or that they are purely imagined (perhaps, I am slightly schizophrenic. I know I see moving transparent shapes that float across my vision that don't exist in reality. My bro is schizophrenic).

[justin]

I believe in ghosts and had more than one run in with them. Back when I was going to school in Oregon there were days when I was the only person in my dorm. I would relax by reading or playing some video games. Out of the corner of my eye I would see someone rush past my room or duck down the hall. When I went after the person or persons I would find empty air and nothing more. Voices whispered from corners, but never a speaker to be found. For awhile I thought it was my buddies playing tricks on me until they told me they had also seen and heard them as well. I still get chills thinking abou those days.

[Kinsao]

I don't believe in 'ghosts' per se; that is, what most people mean when they say 'ghost', a physical humanlike form that appears as a shadow or a light or somehow intangible yet visible. However, I do believe that events that have happened in a place can leave an 'imprint' onto the location, so it's possible for people to sense something of what has happened in a place.

As for visible ghosts, I think people are of course seeing something, but as Mars Man pointed out, would not that be part of the physical world, necessarily, if it is visible? I don't believe that they are seeing the 'spirits' of people who have died but have been unable to fully 'leave' this dimension somehow. I believe that people who have died can be sensed not far away (indeed, I have experienced this myself, and not simply from habit or wishful thinking, either), but not in physical form - they have left the physical, is my view.

I have never had the experience of seeing a ghost or anything that could be called like a ghost. Which naturally is why I do not believe in 'ghosts' as they appear in the popular imagination (if I was to see one, maybe my view would be somewhat different - but still I would be searching for a 'rational' scientific explanation for whatever I had seen! My usual response to anything that looks weird or inexplicable is "Okay, so how was that done...?").

However my aunt had an experience once, she is a very practical and down-to-earth kind of person who never gave much thought to ghosts or any such... One day she was sitting in her car at traffic lights for quite a long time, and she heard a child crying, and she began to get a very disturbed and distressed feeling and feel really upset. She looked all around to try and locate the child, but couldn't see anything nearby. Later on she learned that in the pub on that corner near where her car was stopped, the landlord many years ago had been arrested for locking up a child into a small room and starving it to death. :souka:

My father (again a very practical person who didn't actually believe in ghosts) went once into a building (to be exact, an old pumping station), and he said that he had a feeling from that place like someone had died there from an accident. (He actually said "falling into the machinery".) About 30 years later I discovered, what had previously not been made public knowledge, that when the place was built, someone had died in the building of it, from falling on a loose plank from the top of the building right down into the basement (there was a kind of 'well' all the way down). So not accurate, but a sense of the untimely death connected with the building.

My fiance had what I consider to be a similar kind of experience although without realising it. Recently we were looking for reception venues, and checked out various buildings. There was one place that he said was really horrible and he would not have it for the world! I didn't think much about this because everyone's taste is different, although the place was not so bad, not great but... whatever. (lol). Anyway, I later discover that someone died of an accident in that place, and I wonder if maybe that was the kind of thing he was sensing in the atmosphere... He is kind of superstitious so maybe sensitive to that kind of thing, but he didn't know about this, so can't have been imagining things. :souka:

[Arlet]

Did you use a ouija board to call ghosts? Did anything happen? I never tried to call anything up, spirit, ghost or anything. I was always concerned that something would show up and I wouldn't know how to make it go away!

Well, i used my necklace... (:relief: Long story...)
I was really into wicca that year, it was on my b-day party.
We asked the ghost what the names of the grandparents were of a friend of mine.
And the ghost awnsered it right.
So, all people were screaming and stuff.

About the ouija board, i want to try it once.
Maybe i can ask a few things :)

[Mars Man]

Thank you Goldiegirl ! I enjoyed reading all the other episodes which have been presented since my earlier post, and hope to go over them a little and look for connections, similarities, and unsimilarities.

I'd like to first answer to the following point made by Goldiegirl, though.


A friend of mine who is a Jehovah's Witness told me that was I saw were demons and satanic and that I shouldn't think of them or try to find out more. He said there are no such things as ghosts and such.

The Watchtower Society goes very closely by a particular, rather literal reading in the cases that context allows, of the Protestant Bible. The Society does, at least in most cases, make an attempt to pay attention to the original tongues of the biblical documents.

The earlier of the Hebrew writings (what we usually call the Old Testament) does not evidence the belief in any remaining of the consciousness after death. Other than a scene in Samuel (which could be second temple, rather than earlier) and the ideas of resurrection in Daniel, the being (human and animal) is no more at death.

The Greek writings of the first century that make up the New Testament, taken in light of the earlier Hebrew understanding, can be seen to mostly support that view too--mostly (there are some weak points there, in their arguments)

This means, then, that all such 'supernatural' events that are often attributed to 'ghosts' or 'spirits' are actually, in WT teaching, those very 'spiritual beings' which took on bodily form and married as many human women as they could get, thus making the giants, back before Noah's flood. They had been confined to the earth, in a sense of 'activity range.' These are what later came to be called 'demons.' ( we must keep in mind that that word basically had meant 'deity.')

Interestingly enough, Bible aside, this understanding of what the animal is, in all that we can know at the moment through scientific method, and natural historical studies, gives us the same understanding. It is most likely that upon death, that which makes the person work really, the brain, and all that it is, 'dissolves' back into so many atomic particles and whatnot.

Once the brain is dead, the animal is no more--no active conscious nor drive of metabolic functions. Once the physical build has fully broken up, that very build is no more--regardless of being re-used in another build, another animal.

I will go on, but will stop here for now...leaving one thought. Other than that occasional falling rock from the solar system, all the water that we have here on this planet, has fundamentally been, all the water we have ever had here on this planet. The same is true for every other element of the physical planet--including what has been used to make every living animal that has ever been here on this planet. (not off-topic, but deep embedding)

[Sarapva]

I do believe in a non-physical world where people (ghosts, spirits, etc.) live. I've never had an experience where I actually saw ghosts or spirits, but I've heard other people talk about their experiences (hearing screaming in a certain house, having things moved without anyone moving them, and my great-aunt once saw her sister after she died).

This all reminds me of the TV program "Lisa Williams: Life Among the Dead". I usually don't watch regular TV programs, but I saw this by accident recently and it's interesting. Lisa Williams is obviously British (by her accent), but lives in California and does - (can't think of the word used now). She gets in touch with people who have died and helps them communicate with the people who knew them. Sometimes it's a mother who lost a child, someone who lost a sister/brother or someone who hears and sees things in their house and they want an explanation. Has anyone else seen this program? It seems very genuine.

[Goldiegirl]

I've watched both Lisa Williams and John Edwards (Crossing Over), they seem sincere and truthful. I really like Ghost Hunters on the Sci Fi channel. They take a scientific approach to studying paranormal activity. Many times, people hear things that are pipes banging, or the furnace and the shadows are caused by car lights through windows. So they don't call many places "haunted". They go into the different types of hauntings, like shadow people, residual hauntings, poltergeists, full bodied apparitions, EVP's (electronic voice phenomenons) etc.

[Mars Man]

And then continuing with the terms. . .

It is most obvious that the common idea behind the word 'ghost,' is that it is a person, an individual who had existed in our physical world, yet who now exists, pretty much as they were in the physical realm, in the spiritual realm. The 'ghost' is, in most cases, the very person.

This definition is most obviously incorrect and untrue. There are simply too many things going against the common 'ghosts' reporting that we hear of. Has anyone ever seen, heard report of, or imagined a 'ghost' with missing or unusable limbs, naked, blind, mentally challenged, ill, seemingly intent on being friendly in a normal humanly manner, or as an infant? How many 'ghost' animals have been reported? What about 'ghost' dinosaurs? Neanderthal or homo erectus? Has anyone ever caught sight of a 'ghost' spider, fly, worm or tree or flower...for that matter?

That is something to think about. What would the point be in a group of people standing around talking, one old lady (and why old?) trying to talk to anyone? What would be the point of a person running quickly down a street and then turning a corner and running off? What would be the point of someone following another into a restaurant, sitting down at the table across from that person, then soon getting up and going into the bathroom, never to come out again--the customer asking the waitress puzzledly why she had brought put two glasses of water on the table. What is the point?

What first comes to my mind, is that firstly, there are much more likely no such things as ghosts; because the complete 100% being (human, animal, insect, plant, bacteria, virus, etc.) goes into something else at the end of the life cycle. All the material on the earth is recycled into new material.

Then, all such observations, as pointed out in some above posts, are with our brains. We do not need to have the motion of waves through the air to hear a sound. All we need is to have that particular area of the cortex stimulated. REM is a good time to go through such experiences.

All observations are relative to our knowledge at a fairly present state. Life has been very, very abundant of the earth over the last several million years--as far as can be discerned--and yet we never have observations of beings that we have no concept of. . . and when these may occur, we tend to put them in the area of extraterrestrial beings, such as 'Grays' and 'Smen,' rather than our common definition of 'ghosts.'

Therefore, as argued for on this thread (http://www.jref.com/forum/showthread.php?t=30191&page=2), since the brain along with consciousness and awareness is totally disseminated (for all practical purposes) and due to the far greater likelihood of consciousness and mental awarness being a direct and immediate function of neurons and physical chemicals, it is clear that when a person dies, that person no longer exists as a whole individual.

This will also bring to moot, the general idea of 'soul,' as well, because 'soul' can best be described as the being itself. Therefore when your pet goldfish dies, leave it in the water threre, and you will be able to see for yourself what happens to the soul--pardon my grotesqueness here, but to make the point clear--it dissolves into the water, may be taken up by the plants in the water, partially digested by other fish then excremented back into to water to be taken up and recycled by other life forms. (or on a macro scale, settle to the bottom of the body of water, becoming a part of a shale rock formation.

I argue that we can say that there is no such thing as a 'ghost' as usually thought of then. That does not eliminate the observations, it simply means they have other root causes/sources. In the same stoke, we can say that there is nothing other than a possible impersonal energy of sort, and information particles that are left over from the brains of all animals when they die--and these are scattered about and often are taken up and reused by other life forms. Therefore, no 'soul' separates from the body of any human when that human dies, which maintains the fully aware and conscious state of that individual at the time of death.

[Sarapva]

I have to disagree with you, Mars Man, although I can understand your argument and have heard the scientific and logical reasons many times for not believing in what we can't see and hear physically. But there are too many instances of people who have had these experiences for it to all be explained as a physical phenomenon. In this modern world we live in we don't often want to think that there are a lot of things going on we don't understand or that seem illogical. But things always seem illogical until we do understand them. It's "safer" in a way to believe that everything is physical, because then we don't have to admit that there is a whole world of things we don't understand.

Even the old philosophers believed in an afterlife. Here's an excerpt from Plato's "Phaedo", with Socrates talking to Simmias:

Socrates: Is there or is there not an absolute justice?

Simmias: Assuredly there is.

Socrates: And an absolute beauty and absolute good?

Simmias: Of course.

Socrates: But did you ever behold any of them with your eyes?

Simmias: Certainly not.

Socrates: Or did you ever reach them with any other bodily sense? - and I speak not of these alone, but of absolute greatness, and health, and strength, and of the essence or true nature of everything. Has the reality of them ever been perceived by you through the bodily organs?

[Chi65]

Sorry for interruption, I have read a few posts here with great interest and would like to say a lot to the theme, but am too tired right now (and too busy the last days).
But I found something interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW0B1sipLBI
as one of many more theremin-videos around, as you may see.
This is also called a ghost-instrument, you will surely find out, why.

Enjoy the interlude!

[Goldiegirl]

What happens to our energy or spark when we die. Does it just stop. I know our cells die, and we are recycled back into the earth...ashes to ashes. But we are energy as well. I understand what Sarapva is saying. I was just watching the movie Santa Clause ( I love Christmas movies) and the little boy in trying to get people to believe in Santa asks his step father if he has ever seen a million dollars..answer...no, and the boy points out that a million dollars does exist even if you haven't seen it. That's the point with these odd happenings. Just because you haven't experienced something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. As for people not seeing animals, my friend Gin swears, she sees her beloved black German Shepherd looking in her window that has been dead for close to 30 years. Perhaps people do see dinosaurs or bugs, maybe they are called crazy? I don't know what I saw. All I know is that I saw people, and an old lady was trying to talk to me. It seems too odd for it to just be coincidence, that another little girl sees and old lady in my old house and she is talking to her as well. I know the story of the angels who had sex on earth and their children were giants....well....the problem is there is more than one religion. So saying these visions are satanic or demonic just doesn't answer the question for me. i don't believe the bible told a true happening of events but rather in many instances is a parable, but I think that is another thread.

[Mars Man]

A quicky here, and then I will get back. I fully understand the points made by both Sarapva san and Goldiegirl, and yet cannot help but feel that a secure grasp of what I have written has somehow been missed a little. I will get back to that soon enough...I too, have been a little tied up these days, even when coming on line--as those of us who do help in moderating do have some 'work' to do, from time to time.

I will explain ...surely by tomorrow night Japan time...if not earlier. It might be to good to recheck what I have written here, along with posts of mine on the other thread dealing with 'spirits' 'soul' and so on, as well as my points regarding the Bible. This will help, I reason, in pinpointing my position. THEN....I hope to hear some data supporting other arguments too. Let's discuss this carefully and fully !!

[Fel1city]

So long as you are comfortable in your beliefs then that's fine: it's when the "ram down the throat" issues occur I have problems. No one religion is better/more correct etc than any other: so many cultural issues are caught up in religion it is the culture/personal behaviours that is important.

PS LOVE that Avatar!!

[Chi65]

What I was trying to say with the ghost instrument is, that this a form that can be measured, but:
Some koreans are on the track now (remember, still a lot of shamanism over there, plus special voice-trainings, that have their origin in shamanism, thus are believed and traditionally experienced to effect something within and around you)
They play with the poles of that system in a whole big room now! That is, their movement dictates the voices, not as long known dancers "interpret" sounds etc., but vice versa. There have been many other artists working on making movements heard and music visible via movements, but mostly very humble compaired to this.
Just an information in between.

Because:
I am a synaestete and know from my dancings, that after a while, I often "feel" something close to solid/manifest, even becoming colourfull and leaving tactile feelings etc. when I am dancing. I can concentrate on this and even play with this "invisible", form it. It is mostly first kind of flux, but can become quite clearly "almost" as if something is there. sometimes i play with it with others. What about pantomime, for example?
That is not so uncommon, by the way.

Now I wish to come to come to a creative process, or even "the" creative process".
You get an inspiration(spirit!), a vision, an urge, a dream (many artists say clearly, that they HAVE to make this and that, without knowing, why, also filmers, Zhang Yimou is one of them, and I had some amazing experiences with him, but maybe on another occasion more).
Now imagine a certain relatively easy process:
An idea, that becomes more and more clear, then slowly manifests, then fades away, becomes invisible again (for example memories of something, talks about something, that may not even exist any more, but have once). But it leaves unremovable traces in your brain, you can call it up again for further use any time, it has become timeless on this level. And an artist would maybe start another piece of creation from memory, from where it "touched" you. The same way again, first just a vague idea, then some scetches maybe, then a sculpture or drawing, or piece of music etc., and it starts all over again. A bit like chinese whispers.
For quick changes, you already know the renga people in Japan. . .(who work with this principle)? Its somewhere in the forum, I have seen. They are also quite famous already an (Aichi expo and other places of similar level)
So, something is "in the air", but also was in the air before and is after.
Even if no intrument can measure the before or after, it definitely was/is there.
Ghosts, exactly.
I have often painted such "ghosts", they are my friends.:-)
I have for example seen one from the corner of my eye (like a big black bird fluttering in the corner of one room, ravensize), and went checking the whole surrounding, more than sceptical, nothing, but as soon as I was on the same place as before, it was there again. . .and only when a certain piece of music was played. This explained itself later, not rational, but that "ghost" manifested later, to exactly that very same piece of music, and even closer to me than before. A human, said to be a raven by indians, another african singer, who came into focus via the receiver of the piece of music. (The receiver did not know about that bird-experience in his house then, but I told him afterwards, he also got the "vibes" thus!). He was as surprised by a real provable series of coincidences coming with this. I just wrote it all down, as often.
It turned out to be a kind of message from a dead african singer(he died much too early and young, a tragic story), whom we both loved very much, thus he left traces in both of us, that led to a pleasant meeting and further friendship. That dead musician practically has brought us together for something (which again is a new chapter). . .People ARE that sensitive. . .
Something similar happened to me many times. This is only one example.
I could write a ghoststories book myself, hehe.

Thus its a pity, that you, Goldiegirl could not get the message from that old lady. She left her "traces" to whatnot. . .and thats for you to find out, still.

Don't worry, I am not crazy, my father was a scientist, I have discussed such things many times and have my ideas about it.

Great thread!:wave:

[Mars Man]

I appreciate the posts, people. Nice! Having read through your post twice, and as carefully as I could, Chi65 san, I think I have caught a glimpse of the understanding you wish to present. (and thanks for the theremin link...my friend here in Japan plays one--his local performance was very nice...but I think many couldn't quite appreciate the music so much)

Again, in keeping the definition for the word 'ghost' to be: A person or animal which has--by all other known means and processes--died, and yet is in the exact state of mind and body in another, non-physical make-up.

It cannot be denied that this is THE single, most widely used definition, and so I hope that those partaking in the discussion will keep this is mind when using the word.

The state of 'seeing'

I would firstly like to point out that our only source of perception and interpretation is without any doubt whatsoever, the brain. This is true for all animated animals...even those like the sea-snail that loses its brain upon becoming fixed. The obvious purpose for the brain is to move, and thus survive.

Light comes in photons, as a wave or as a particle. Even as a wave, it disturbs, sets into action, moves other particles--just as sound is the disturbance of particles due to a wave of whatever frequency. By means of the rods and cones within the eye, signals are created from the photon bombardment.

Yet light also, is a measured thing. The common human eye catches light within the range of 400-700 nanometers on the electromagnetic spectrum. That spectrum, as thus far known, goes from less that a nanometer of wavelength to 10 meters of wavelength--that of AM radio. Of course, therefore, we can't see AM radio waves...what would life be like if we could? Wow...

All the recieved waves by the 'net' on the retina excite a chemical/electric 'dance' (as it were) to the thalamas, and then on to the visual cortex, which then also sets off a spasm of firings which 'interpret' the signals recieved. All the while, feedback from other processing nodes and systems are interconnecting to 'recognize' and 'patternize' the signal block.

The end result is that what we see, is, in the final analysis, what the brain makes of the signals it recieves. . .nothing more, nothing less. To this degree, and in this manner of speaking, what we see is called 'the internal reality.' It is real, only, it is a natural and existing part of the universe that is only in our brains...and not external.

Of all the case studies there have been, even the few which I have come across in my studies, we have all kinds of things which show this--from tasting color, to seeing the outside world in a snapshot format, (no motion detectable) to 'seeing' sound and feelings. (as in the blind-from-birth man who could fairly representatively draw and paint things that he'd never ever seen.)

Therefore, we could well imagine the situation in which a person 'sees' stimuli recieved via a different receptor than just the eyes. In such a case, as has been shown in some studies and brain proding, there need not be any 'external,' visually perceivble object. It is also most evidently the case that simply electromagnetic waves within the visual range passing through the brain does not stimulate the neurons such as to cause the systems to fire. Thus (and this is a little foreshadowing here) you cannot simply recieve nor have perception created by raw energy or particle excitement.

This will be an embedded process, as I had said before, so please bear with me. I WILL touch on all points and objections raised so far...and will do so in detail...over time. (of which I really, really wish I had much more) [and I want to keep my posts kind of short, and as readable as possible]

[Goldiegirl]

Ghost, I suppose most people would assume that it means someone/thing who was once alive in the physical sense here on earth. Grey aliens, are from space, but could be another dimension here on earth too and not from space. I read a book that said the past, present and future are all happening at the same time. Well what if the "layers" of time get mixed up. Like disc's, they don't have enough room on them to store an entire movie usually so they are double layered, sometimes the laser reads the wrong layer. What if that is what we see as the strange phenomena we call ghosts or spirits or paranormal activity etc?

[Sarapva]

That's an interesting thought, Goldiegirl! There are so many things in life that are not physical - feelings, thoughts and concepts (the "law" is not a physical thing, and yet most of us abide by it). I know that feelings and thoughts have been explained scientifically as originating in the brain, but I just don't believe it's all physical. I also need to research some more arguments for this.

I look forward, Mars Man, to your explanations of all this.

Thanks, Chi65, for the theremin link. I listened to it - I've never seen anything like that before! It does show a link between the physical and non-physical.

[made of stone]

I do think I've seen a few ghosts, (I was absolutely certain at the time, twice, and so were the friends I was with, but after the event it's pretty easy (natural??) to try to explain what happened away as something else: once the two day - old goose bumps go down, of course ;)

I've had a few inexplicable events recently - seemingly from recently-departed loved-ones 'guiding' me in different ways. All have been positive, quite incredible things,.

I appreciate the scientific approach - I am myself the most deeply critical and deeply analytical person - but I challenge anyone to convince me now that these things will be explained by science in the next thousand years (if our planet lasts that long!!)

mos xxx

[Chi65]

Ghost, I suppose most people would assume that it means someone/thing who was once alive in the physical sense here on earth. Grey aliens, are from space, but could be another dimension here on earth too and not from space. I read a book that said the past, present and future are all happening at the same time. Well what if the "layers" of time get mixed up. Like disc's, they don't have enough room on them to store an entire movie usually so they are double layered, sometimes the laser reads the wrong layer. What if that is what we see as the strange phenomena we call ghosts or spirits or paranormal activity etc?

Goldie, that is also one of my points, because the traditional asian understanding has often been one beyond time, and thus the modern idea of the multiverses is not an unfamiliar one.
The point is, that the layers constantly interact, not just mix up, in fact forwards and backwards, like your memory and your future-ideas simultaneously in a way.
Go to watch some images under Google and multivers, to get an idea.
Even if I tried to explain just the one way above, but you can see it as much curved, if you like (Einstein is near!).
Funny enough, that by trying to understand "dark matter"(in contrary to white, "real" , thus material, substancial matter), scientists come to a similar understanding, but have not yet made the obvious link between this.
(I am also on a scientist forum, where this is a theme, but without ghosts, hehe)
I once made an according little animation-film with a japanese friend's(he was a project manager for Sony at that time and was as interested thus connected) friend, some years ago. He had absolutely no problem to get my point and even played further with this image to my surprise. This never happened in any western country, where I tried for years to explain this.
I am with you in this.
Which book is it, that you just read?

Sorry, Mars man, but she really hits an important point!
I will nevertheless read your posts with great interest, but the full understanding cannot be made without her idea. She is up to something good.

That's an interesting thought, Goldiegirl! There are so many things in life that are not physical - feelings, thoughts and concepts (the "law" is not a physical thing, and yet most of us abide by it). I know that feelings and thoughts have been explained scientifically as originating in the brain, but I just don't believe it's all physical. I also need to research some more arguments for this.
I look forward, Mars Man, to your explanations of all this.
Thanks, Chi65, for the theremin link. I listened to it - I've never seen anything like that before! It does show a link between the physical and non-physical.

You got my point for posting this, Sarapva

I am sure, that it also has to do with the reception of a non-physical phenomenom. Only, WHAT?
We may have to wait for some further korean experiments in art maybe, they are also up to something.
But it rings a strong bell.

[Goldiegirl]

Chi65, great posts. I think the book was titled "Parallel Universe" or something like that. I bought it in Japan, because I needed something to read in English. I left it there when i was done! I have to admit some parts were hard to really grasp. It was a very scientific book, but I found it fascinating. Space travel by bending space like folding a piece of paper...all of those types of theories. That's why I think there has to be something more of paranormal activity. That's also why I find straight religious type answers lacking. There are still some christian religions that believe the earth is flat because the Bible talks of the "four corners" of the world. Back to "ghosts", I would like to put a digital recorder in that bedroom and see if it would pick anything up.

[Chi65]

This one from amazon?
From Fred Alan Wolf?(must check that guy. . .)
http://www.amazon.com/Parallel-Universes-Fred-Alan-Wolf/dp/0671696017
apart from that, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_universe
Irritating variety maybe, but there you have the themes for the idea.
Sorry, its very late here, I must go into my own dreamtime now ;-)
See you later.
And happy experimenting!

[Goldiegirl]

Good Night! I believe that's the book, the cover is different, but I read the reviews and it sure sounds like what I read. It is a tough read, but very interesting once you can "wrap" your head around the greatness and vastness of possibilities that are out there.....

[Mars Man]

Again...I'm sorry for this quicky...I had come on tonight with things prepared, and ended up...until now, doing some moderating work.

I read a book that said the past, present and future are all happening at the same time.

Alas...if I could only throw so many other activities aside and spend more time here. YES...Goldiegirl, you beat me to it. That is one of the points and angles of argument I have lined up. It is somewhat possible that our silly brains are giving us an illusion of what is simply entropy, as a time 'flow.' In that scenario, there is only present...as at the end of the movie 2001.

Jumping ahead of myself, now, what that would tend to support more than anything else, is that there are no such things as ghosts--as our definition goes, you see. More tomorrow, I promise. I hope all who are interested do follow along and discuss this in the detail required. I've read all posts up to now (since my last one) and will respond later. I am sorry, for this 'touch and go'-like posting style. MM

[Sarapva]

I am sure, that it also has to do with the reception of a non-physical phenomenom. Only, WHAT?

This reminds me of something I heard about years ago on a talk radio program. People were saying that they had seen or built an "N machine", which was a generator that got electricity from somewhere, but didn't need any gas or other fuel once it got started because it fueled itself from the electricity. They said some of these were being used in third world countries. It used a kind of magnet, I think. They said it proved there was a 4th dimension because this is where the electricity came from. Electricity is something we can't see with our eyes but can surely kill us physically! (Though I guess sometimes you can see it as lightning or sparks).

[Chi65]

Magnetism is another keyword in this, right. . .
but it would be able to be measured.

I suggest to make experiments with the brain, insofar, as there are things on the go, that can measure the movements and places in the brain, when something is happening, when and where and how you are kind of touched, when a synnie for example feels or tastes colour or the like. They did this lately and it can also be reversed then, as if some have a kind of translater in the head. It often comes out like shortcuts, Eselsbrücke, as we say in Germany, with own and much faster rules. A kind of brain hypers, as I often say. This way one can maybe also "see" what others can't, but yet is there. it would also be interesting, if more than just one person could independantly perceive this "more than this" in about the same way, which would already proove, that in fact something IS there, be it just a kind of magnetism, that creates an image.
By the way, the neurologist Ramachandran is in no way opposed to this, he in fact thinks, that we are not on the way back, but into further developement of the brain's capacities and possibilities and thus especially watches also artists, and particularly the synaesthetes with interest. And we try for long to explain, how and what we perceive!!
Even a very sceptical scientist forum finally picked up on this after all and stopped making silly remarks, as usual. They now add whatever they find to this theme, Bingo! (and thanks to Rama, as we call him, because he is highly respected in scientist circles)

Just to remember, some animals have a different kind of perception, and thus see things, that we (so far) can't and vice versa. Which already prooves, that in fact there can well be much more.

And if you then go into the idea of all of us being interlinked, maybe also via such a hyper. . . we may even "know" by kind of inner TV, whats happening on the other side of this planet. As for me, I did have clear according experiences, even while being with other people, who then looked at me a bit strangely, particularly, when this did not happen only once. . .and I even painted it, before the according message came via radio/TV etc., proving, that in fact at that very time, while I simply had the "urge" to do this in that given time. . .etc. etc.
Now, whats this urge of many artists?. . .painting "ghosts" in a way, to be correct.

Maybe it is more in the field of a kind of radio waves even and then translated into the known? And some have very fine "ears"?

[SushiShin]

People when i read your posts here you remind me of a scary movie i still don't wanna see by myself:

着信アリ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Missed_Call

[Chi65]

COWARD!
:shiver:
:D
never mind. . .hug
And something for fun and to guess:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjLAhnrS3ZI

[Uncle Frank]

It seems like after 57 years on this earth, if there are ghosts, I would have seen one. Between friends, family, and my patients, several hundred people close to me have died. It seems if ghosts exisited , one of them would have contacted me? I've worked in some really old building with interesting histories, but never had any ghostly encounters. I feel open minded about Ghosts, aliens, etc. , but never had a chance to see one yet.

Uncle Frank

:okashii:

[Chi65]

To be correct, I only saw one clearly as such so far, apart from the multiple ones on my papers, hehe.
But my idea of "Ghosts" is pretty wide.
The one of a dead beloved friend keeps on circling around, and always very pleasantly.
Its like what Yoko Ono says about John Lennon, I know exactly what she means and enjoy it immensely.
Since I only have friendly ones,
I came to like the idea.

Maybe you don't read enough japanese ghost stories, Uncle Frank? There are plenty around!

Since I never fear that terrain, I never get frightening ones (they may try, but it does not work on me, and they give up sooner or later)
Ghosts are projections of your inner visions/relations in the end. Question is, how do you get these visions, what calls you to this place and what exactly translates them how?

The japanese filmers have many answers and suggestions for long already...

Happy dreams, Uncle Frank!

:snore:

[Mars Man]

In looking over some of the points which have come up in the conversation and discussion so far, I can see that the lean has gone much more towards agreement with my argument (post #14, second paragraph, first sentence) that the 'urban legend' definition of the word ghost is invalid. Thus in all likelihood, there is no such thing as a ghost--again, by that definition.

Now, some seemingly, based on positions taken in the presentations of their arguments, forgot my statement in my #14, last par, viz--That does not eliminate the observations, it simply means they have other root causes/sources. I have not been arguing that what the brains of those who have recorded experiences, have in their brains, was a non-reality. (in some cases--which I say here, because some surely are...just as the person on LSD and the likes can actually see and retain memory of things which can easily be shown to have not be external realities.)

I will now introduce my pet word: phantasma. This Greek word is what I will ascribe to the referent of what those who have 'seen', 'heard', 'felt', and yes, even 'smelled,' of what otherwise the mind refused to attach to the 'real world experiences it had', have experienced.

In kind of short-cutting and concluding on my earlier post regarding what seeing is, I'm sure you all will be pretty much aware of, and acknowledge that the other senses fall into the same operational pattern through their various inroads into the brain.

Now, there is a two-fold argument within this presentation. One is the matter of what the brain is and how it works, and how there can be an 'internal reality' which is not an 'external reality,' and just how it can understood that this is so. Another is that all this is physical--as far as is properly and testably known at the moment--and is the individual human.

What happen when the corpus callosum is cut? You basically end up with two brains within the one person. What happens when, for example, you inhibit the LIM-kinase1 nuceotide on a certain gene? You get a person who has very little spatial sense. What happens when a part of the brain is removed in order to prevent habitual epileptic seizures? You get a person who only lives in the present moment...all memory retention after surgery was lost. The person will never be able to recall the person he had met just 2 minutes before.

This all (including what other case studies could be presented here) quite conclusively points to the function of consciousness, on all levels, as being a physical state. This physical state is not perpetual, is a single organization, and will eventual be destroyed--from this presently organized condition. For this reason, this point is one of the stronger ones for the argument that what we have seen, heard, etc.--and of course I have known of more than just what you folks have presented here--are phantasma. There is no such thing as a ghost. (and now work beckons again...)

[ArmandV]

A girl and I used an ouija board one time and made contact with a poltergeist that followed her family when they moved to another county.

Before that, I used to work at a convalescent hospital and I saw an empty dessert cup (face down) move by itself on a dry metal counter.

"I saw what I saw when I saw it!" - Lou Costello in "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein."

[MadamePapillon]

Even though I didn't understand most of what you were saying in your previous posts because all you were getting really scientific, I did get the basic gist and that's that you don't think ghosts exist.

I'm going to have to disagree.

Not because of any scientific reason, this is based entirely on my own experience. Somehow in 21 years I've managed to experience a sh*tload of unexplainable stuff. Keep in mind that I don't go seeking this out, I'm not prone to chanting by candlelight and trying to summon up my dead uncle or anything. This is just what happened.

Ok. First and only time I ever saw a ghost. It was near Halloween and so being a teenager me and my brother and his friend decided to go trolling around the loacl graveyards, reading the graves and whatnot. First grave was a burial gravesite, didn't see any ghosts but for some reason all of us smelt this godawful stench at the same time and took off running out of there, no words were spoken, we weren't even in the same place but for some reason the second we smelled it all three of us hit the pavement hard at the same time and didn't stop until we were well down the street.

Yup, that was freaky. But, being teenagers we laughed it off and went on our way to the cremation burial site about a 10 minute walk down. So we were there, reading the grave markers for about five minutes. I just happened to look up for a split second and saw a man crouching over one of the graves, looking down at it. He looked up at me, I blinked, and he was gone. So I ran, all of us at the same time ran and to this day I've never gone back into a graveyard at night, let alone a Halloween night. And I always found it strange because it looked like a 'sterotypical' ghost, gray/white, transparent, but strangely solid. And his clothes weren't exactly 'recent' either.

Anyways, I'm not done. Everything else happened while I was living in America. There was something not right in that house and I spent three years hiding under my covers at night and watching my back. It wasn't just me, all my friends who ever spent the night, without prompting from me in any way, told me in the morning they couldn't sleep in my room because it felt like something was in there.
It was about two years into living in the house that I was sitting on my bed one day doing my homework and an ornamental cup that I kept on my TV somehow managed to fling itself off of my TV and onto my bed, right in front of me. My window wasn't open, I had no fan in my room, no vents, nothing. The cup just flew off my TV. About a month after that I was watching a movie in my bedroom with my brother, my parent had left and there was nobody in the house, and for some reason I looked at the space between my bedroom door and the floor and a shadow passed underneath the door, like someone was walking past. Keep in mind NOBODY was in the house, no dogs, no cats, not nothing.

Those were just the ones that stood out most in my mind. Not two weeks after I graduated I booked it out of there and moved back to Canada, haven't had any strange encounters since.

But I stick to my two rules, stay away from the occult, known haunted houses and stay far away from graveyards near Halloween. It's served me well. But that's my experience, take it how you will. :-)

[Mars Man]

But if we were to think it through carefully--and I would tend to think that it would be good to try to run through what has been said so far, not only by myself, but others too--I'm still betting that in all likelihood you have not seen any ghosts (make sure you understand the definition being used) at all, but have seen phantasma, perhaps.

Of course an object moving slightly on a metal counter, even if the counter were dry, could find another explanation...since I have experienced such before too, and upon investigation found moisture the culprit. Even so, without any other visible explanation, that--or especially a physical object flying suddenly across the room--would not make a ghost. (again, as defined above)

One more reason for that I will now go into.
the problem is there is more than one religion. So saying these visions are satanic or demonic just doesn't answer the question for me. i don't believe the bible told a true happening of events but rather in many instances is a parable, but I think that is another thread.

Here we also find one source for the 'ghost' idea, namely religious belief-systems. I fully agree with Goldiegirl, and others who have investigated it well and have reached the decision that the Bible, for one, is most likely not true history nor science in practically all non-human-related history. (and even then, is somewhat stretched in some places)

However, just as that is true, it is also found to be true that religious belief-systems which came before or separate from the Abrahamic systems, which brought us the concept that there is no death of the person or animal, but rather a passing into another world, are largel untrue representations--and eventually led to the Christian 'heaven' and 'hell' idea being possible. Also the concept of reincarnation runs along such lines.

I have found no arguments yet which could pursuade the neutral third party that there is more advantage in believing the even older human-created religious belief-systems, all the while not believing the later ones at all...or by trying to merge them.

Even the great philosophers of Greece, since such have been presented, had very little knowledge about some rather basic functions of nature that we today know. The ancients were surely more in touch with nature in a lot of ways that we have lost with our modernity, but knowledge has been passed down, can be, and has been tested, and has been found wanting in a number of places. One of those is the make up of the body and brain, and what they really are. (even Descartes was wrong.)

It is far more likely, if not extremely most likely that the death of the brain is the death of the person in absolute terms, exactly as the destruction of the mass is the release of energy--leaving the mass no longer existent.

Therefore ghosts are not people who are dead but are living. Ghosts are phantasma. Goldiegirl had brought up the question of our 'energy.' I will next go into that...and please do keep in mind, that this is embedding within the overall presentation being made. I have not yet come so close to the areas of agreement with you girls, and the occasional guy who are at the table with us.

[Chi65]

Well, as for ghosts, that may be so after all,
but... I experienced other still unexplained things, like unconsciously influencing events from distance with very material and kind of provable results maybe? I showed them to someone, a Japanese, in fact, and he said, well, it has maybe not come from outside, but from within the "map".

OK, here is the story:
It was the papermodel (I call it timemodel)plus detailed description and designs for what was later done as an animation, via the same person's friend. . .It furtherhin was in regular Din A 4 plasticsheets (about 4) for maps. Nothing special. But a piece of concept work for the artschool, to show them, what I was up to.
I remember, having left it in a red cardboard map on my working table, when leaving for Switzerland (for some holidays). You have to know, that it was far from the two windows and there was no sun shining in ever, because it was north side and leading to another nowhere shining housewall with no windows there. Fourth floor and back of the house, actually. Thus absolutely no reflection or whatsoever from outside possible, nor in the room, the light was out and nothing else around on that place but other papers and the switched of lamp sideways.
When I was in Switzerland, I happened to carry a little alike papermodel with me, in the pocket of my trousers, because I wanted to keep it in mind and see, if I get an idea to make it bigger than this, as an artwork, maybe.
However, I one day sat in front of a little pond in the garden of our rural house and watched the water, then threw two stones into the water, because I was interested in watching the interference lines of the waves, when they meet in the middle.
It for sure was a very meditative state too, relaxed and concentrated, it was about fullmoon.

However, when I came back home, I was very surprised.
Because the red map has been kind of burnt in the meantime, in fact, it showed two dark regular rings right on top of the map, in the middle/center of the red cardboard, about the size of my pocket model and the according design inside. It looked, as if something very hot has been standing on it (no cup with coffee or the like could do, and the rings were smaller than any cup I had, nor anything as hot of that size), slightly overlapping in the middle, and very exact.
But that was not all, when I opened the map, every plastic sheet was melted together with the other one, all the way through, but only in the according ringed places, and the papers themselves were also brownish there all the way through. I still have all this, although carefully separated by pages. By the way, no holes in the paper later, not even any melted plastic on them, all fine to be read separately, as before, only the plasics got according holes from separations.
Perfectly designed burn, but from what??
No one else had a key to my room, and it surely was not me, who did this when there.

Well, as said, my japanese friend smiled with the above comment. No one was "excited", we just saw it and agreed, that it was "unusual" and left it there.

Now, that was not a ghost, but what kind of energy, please??

[Mars Man]

That was a very nice story. In a way, it kind of reminded me of some of Jung's stories. This type of phenomenon lies within the sphere of the paranormal. It is an area which pure science seldom dares, unfortunately, I'd say, to venture into.

Yes, I would (as of course you would know) argree that this event would have nothing to do with that urban mythological ghost--which most likely does not exist--but nevertheless, would not be explainable (as is) in usual terms.

I still (as I have mentioned earlier on this thread) think there can be a part of the physcial universe which we simply do not know of yet, can not measure yet, and so is ascribed to the paranormal or supernatural, when, all along, it is actually as physcial as neutrinos or a neutron's outside and inside negative charge sandwiching a positive charge's making a neutral charge--so to speak.

As I am still embedding within the overall presentation I intend to make, I would like to come back to this again !! Thanks for sharing this very fascinating story with us !!

[Chi65]

Sure, go on as you like! Its very interesting, what you write, and I will have more to say to all that. I just felt to show some of my reasons for being interested in that theme (and maybe someone has an idea or according link?), since many have such experiences, but are too shy to show them.
It may nevertheless illustrate one or another point/view and encourage for further (hopefully serious) research.
I love questions and riddles, puzzles etc. and trying to find according answers, whichever way.
I also like fantasy, but not a hysterical blurred view on "paranormal" etc., which often is simply a not yet known, right. We are on the same boat in this, I suppose.

;-)

[Sarapva]

... exactly as the destruction of the mass is the release of energy--leaving the mass no longer existent.

A "release of energy" is what many think of as death - the spirit or essence of a person leaving the physical behind. This is also what could be defined as a "ghost".

[ArmandV]

A "release of energy" is what many think of as death - the spirit or essence of a person leaving the physical behind. This is also what could be defined as a "ghost".

Maybe this is what is referred to as losing "X" amount of grams at the moment of death?

[Chi65]

Guess why some trad. easterners often talk about dying without dying. . .
There can be something experienced that "releases" without (permanently) leaving the body behind. Satori is such a state, for example, a certain bliss, aha:143: etc.
(sex is only one way of many to this, if you are lucky, or know how, that is ;-))
Some buddhists have a kind of "shortcut" for trying (goma), can even be compaired with a certain sauna-experience.
It is at least far from being unknown, or really killing, at best your ego and you may then experience a kind of strong safety-net too, if you know, how to "ride your car", so to say.
But fear. . .is nothing but being uninformed and thus untrained in the end maybe. . .

A certain japanese friend once told me in another matter, that also fits here:
once you have been there, you will always find it again.

[SushiShin]

This happens if you let japanese girls around my age :blush: (and older :p) see a j-horror movie:
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=AOYqpavGMFU

[Chi65]

:crab:

Great!
I still have a tear in my right eye's corner from laughing!
(thats one of those things, that remind me on films from Sabu, or some korean filmers. . .I love them, hehe!):clap:

[MadamePapillon]

I have not yet come so close to the areas of agreement with you girls, and the occasional guy who are at the table with us.

There seems to be something to what you just said actually. Most of the people that tell of seeing ghosts or spirits are female. Men see them to but less frequently and they are more likely to try and ignore or explain away the unexplainable.

When it comes to the supernatural, women seem more likely to know and accept that there are things we just don't yet understand, whereas men almost always look at it with scepticism and try to find a logical, scientific explanation.

[Chi65]

I must admit, that I am also sceptical, and think, Mars Man is doing a very fine job. I have been through all that too somewhere else, and it never ends and I do follow it with growing interest, by the way.
But on the other hand I also love, what happened and those who articulate fantastic stories, and the stranger, the better (see the above mentioned ones, as for films for example).
Depends on my mood, it all has more sides to look at.
As for men, I know many, that can be even more off the carpet in this than women. They may have other ways of showing it, but if so, then very well even!
(I find scientific views as tickling as horror stories, by the way);-)

[Goldiegirl]

I still think, that some "ghosts" are from people who have died in the physical sense. My best friend told me that one evening when she was getting ready for bed her brother came into her room unexpectedly. She was quite taken aback as he lived in Arizona. He said that he needed to tell her that he was ok and not to worry. He then told her that everything we know is wrong, and then he just vanished. A little while later she received a phone call saying her brother had died instantly of a massive heart attack. Maybe that was his release of energy? She has never seen him again. She always felt comforted that he said he was ok and she didn't need to worry for him.

[Mars Man]

Nice replies there folks ! Wow...so much information coming in, and I'm still kind of behind here. I'll try to put my line of progressivily developed argument aside, for a second, and pick through it to respond temporarily to a few things here.

A "release of energy" is what many think of as death - the spirit or essence of a person leaving the physical behind. This is also what could be defined as a "ghost". #43 (bold inclusion mine)

Let's think about this for a second. First of all it is a fact that we have no other valid reason for the moment to understand anything other than our physical bodies as being a conglomerate of cellular material. Likewise, this cellular material has very well been shown to be made up of other things--chemical and break-down earthly materials. These, in turn, are atomic and sub-atomic, and in whatever ways, quantum.

In otherwords, this is physical matter. Now, as we understand at the moment, when, for example, you unbind the mass of a certain uranium material, you get a massive release of energy. Of course, that energy is what had come together to be that mass, and that energy is no less physical than that mass, but. . . does not contain the properties of that mass.

It is very clear that the physical properties of the animal and plant organisims breakdown into their micro units and circulate. What that means is that no energy is released from those micro units...they are still 'living!' Each living cell that dies, no longer functions as a cellular unit, but the atomic particles that had made that cell, are still 'living' (active).

Living forms ingest earth material via living organisms (except for that one lady who would eat a certain form of raw earth...and live on it) and are motabolized by that. This is the 'energy' that maintains cell growth and vitality--along with the vehicle, good ole H2O. In clinical death, certain cells begin to die as they need oxygen, but are deprived of it. If the blood circulation problem (as most always that is the root evil in the final analysis) is not fixed somehow, all cells begin dying. The end result of that is somatic death, the hair cells seeminly being the last to die...they can remain active for some time after somatic death has been determined.

So, if there were any kind of 'other' energy or 'essence' wrapped up within a living organism, it would have to be the same for all living organisms, from the one celled ones all the way up to even those which survive in some caves in Mexico on poisionous gases rather than oxygen. How could know that such were the case? By what means could we determine that it would be 'known to be true' to the degree that a claim of such being true could be made with certain validity?

These are questions which must be dealt with and answered satisfactorily, in order to overcome the real evidence against that position.

Maybe this is what is referred to as losing "X" amount of grams at the moment of death? #44

While I am familiar with this 'study,' I have not come to know of it through any journals, and have noticed that there seems to be a major methodological flaw in the premise as well as the 'study.' I do not think the said conclusion is valid towards any related to anything 'spirit.'

That briings us to another word that needs to be defined, however, SPIRIT.

[Mars Man]

MadamePapillion san, I must apologize as my wording was not so concretely put together so as to avoid misunderstanding--which what may have happened in your #48. My intention was to show that there is an area of agreement that I have with others here, but I have not gotten even close to that area in my presentation, yet.

And then, your observation there, once again, is one of the side points that I had hoped to come to later as well. The connectedness and higher sensory functions of the very female wired brain can catch a lot of things, and percieve a lot of things that the very male wired brain cannot. With such a fine-tuned sensory perception, coupled by more inter-brain communication, there may be some cognition possiblity there that men do not have. Such has been offered as one reason why women had been so persecuted as witches back in the old days...simply because they were finer tuned...even if that did not involve any supernatural or paranormal events.

However that said, it still does not refute, to any degree the far greater likelihood that the total of neural matter and its function is just and only that. There is no reason to think otherwise, nor evidence to assign any element of mental state and disposition to anything other than the neuropeptides, neuron membrane materials, the electric circuitry, and genetic make-up.

There are all kinds of stories out there--I mean even my sister had had experiences like kind of like the one Goldigirl had had, but I never did when I stayed in that room upstairs...which I have done on a good number of nights.

Again, as I have been saying all along, that does not prove that an occurence of some type or phenomenon had not happened for my sister. What can be shown to be very being themselves of each and every living animal, however, quite certainly clenches the understanding that she had not seen a real person, and she had not seen.

As even Carl Jung, who was bigger on this than Freud, admitted that the tendency for humans to think of life after death may well be due to a symptom of the instinct of survival, the religious belief-systems applications of the idea that nobody dies was probably a comforter against the unknown.

I had prepared a lot of articles and information that easily shows the validity of the conclusion which is understood to be the best regarding the being's being the brain in its totallity; the ones on parasomnias (sleep disorders), savant autistics, prosopagnosias (face blindnesses), and memory altering procedures being the more interesting.

I will, however, give those of you who are a bit reluctant to disconnect the phantasma from the world of the living, thus having a phantasma being the very neural make-up in a non-physical state
(which is also contradictory, if it is actually seen through the eyes, because that requires light reflection, which is physical (surely by all means))
give your arguments to explain or describe just how a ghost or a spirit (as the common definition for them go when they are the synonymous) are the real, functioning brains of the being that has physically died.

I would hope to see some detail that can be validated, rather than simply stories, because you would have to explain how it can be so, and give rebuttles to objections raised.

[Sarapva]

The problem about "proving" that the non-physical exists is that it can't be proved in physical terms. But I believe, through my own reading and experiences, that there definitely is a non-physical world and that every live thing continues living after their physical body dies. I don't know how it could be explained that people who are physically alive can see people who aren't (since, as you said, Mars Man, there are no light waves to bounce off something non-physical, which is how we see with our eyes). But I've heard it said that the spirit of a person is a kind of physical thing that actually weighs something, as ArmandV mentioned, that the physical body weighs less after a person dies. Most of the books I've read about this were library books, so I don't have the names or examples with me.

But I understand the skepticism of the scientific world. When I was a teenager I decided that there was no God and that all religions in the world were wrong - that people wanted to believe in all these things because they couldn't handle life like it was, which was that this was all there is and then we die, and that's it. But in high school I read Raymond A. Moody's "Life After Life", which was a compilation of stories from people who had died for a short time and then came back to life (in the hospital or in a car accident, etc.). They had experienced lifting up out of their bodies, hearing what people were saying around their "dead" bodies, going somewhere else and seeing other people they knew who had died, seeing a light and feeling safe and warm (not scared or in danger), feeling a loving presence, getting directions from other people; and most of them didn't want to return to their bodies and leave this experience.

Since then, Raymond A. Moody has written lots of other books about the same thing. I remember thinking that so many people couldn't have the same experience if there wasn't truth to it.

[ArmandV]

Did anyone see the news this past week of a security camera at a gas station that recorded a floating blue (or green) blob? Visually, nobody could see it. But the camera did and recorded it.

I have a book that has a photo of a group of cats at a feeding dish and sitting with them was a cat who purportedly died some time before the photo was taken.

[ArmandV]

This happens if you let japanese girls around my age :blush: (and older :p) see a j-horror movie:
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=AOYqpavGMFU

That's hilarious! (Good movie, too!)

[Derfel]

I bet this is fake, and they're showing them Jacko instead of those scenes. They can't take his feminine beauty lol. (No im not gay, nor am i serious now)

[Chi65]

Well, again, other beings can also see things, that humans cannot, not just cameras.
And a synaesthete may well not need light to perceive something, that can be translated into something visual in his/her brain. . .so can many artists, women AND men, as explained before.
Thus the light argument is very relative and limited and leaves other bain functions out, that are already under observation, for good.
I can very well feel a kind of "density", also wind, magnetism or electricity, if I do not see it with my very eyes with light, so can many animals. You often have them reacting much earlier and clearer than humans, if there is "something". And its not just the smell or sound then.
Remember their reactions before an earthquake too. . .
Actually, as for spirit, we germans have no separate name for spirit and ghost, its all Geist and stands for the non normal physical in general.
Inspired thus is "begeistert", full of good spirit, so to say, inhabitet by a good ghost you could as well say.
Its a much wider explanation for ghost and spirit alike.
(Often, it only is a translation problem, and one does not see the wood because of all the trees. . .)
How are the according japanese words for this?

[Mars Man]

Thanks for your stab at that Sarapva san. It does give me a clearer picture of the position of learning that you are coming from. I would hope, however, that now you would give some further presentations.

Near Death Experiences (NDE) have been clearly shown to be urban legend as well. Again, and of course I can substantially lay out the data and evidence for this, THE key root for the 'the human and the human's favorite and known animals never die once they have been born' proposition is from religious-belief systems developed waaaaaay back in ancient times when there was absolutely NO knowledge of the brain and what it is.

The pulse of especially American society is so sad in that it is so over burdened by the eclipse of Christian fundimentalism (I mean it was practically born from the Puritan movement anyway) and pours into interpretations such as the book written by Mr. Moody. His premise has been shown to be invalid to the much larger degree. (just as that experiment to see if there were actually a 'soul' by weighing bodies before and after death was invalid--you see? they were looking for a presupposition--that makes it invalid)

There have been NDE experiences created by brain stimulation. There have been out of body experiences by subjects who without any doubt whatsoever had been created by surgically stimulated and controlled methods--they could turn on and off the experience.

Knowing how memories are laid down better will help a person understand that if a memory is laid down, it is totally a physical matter. If a person goes into a clinically dead state (recall what I have presented on this earlier, please) they are still alive and the brain is still working...although a prolonged state will cause brain cell damage to increase. (as what had happened with that lady in Florida...can't recall the name exactly so don't want to attempt spelling it here)

If a person who is without doubt alive, conscious and aware, and is able to communicate a memory which has been stored in the brain by the synaptic activity available in that same state, it is without doubt that the brain cells that hold that electro-chemical firing system (memory) in place had never died ! That means, that no physical damage had been done at all to that system, AND that the memory had been laid down in a living brain--so...that person never came close to somatic death, and thus had only been NEAR death, but did NOT die. This is the difference, and is a difference that the romance of such urban legend wishes to ignore, in order to maintain the emotional pull of the story.

But with my presentation of the brain and what it really is, I am covering not only the observer's point of mental make-up and capability, but also that of what it would mean for the clause that 'the animal doesn't die, but metamorphoses (or separates) into a non-physical state' that is said to the real person all along !! (That's the religious-belief system's ante-premise-clause...that the physical is the temporal, and the real is the spiritual that is eternal...and that has been very clearly shown to be nonsense!) �@

I'll take one point here, from the several, then, that I'd like to present. By going through these carefully and honestly, we can reason on this matter that otherwise, has been said to lack evidence for proof.

What do you remember about your physical condition during your alpha sleep stage last night? I remember nor was aware of anything, until I came out of it and into the upper region of REM sleep...and that's when the parts of the brain that lay down memory were 'turned on.' That fact, that part of the living brain is shut down, is why Jan Luedecke was accquitted of charges of sexual assault in 2005. The girl who he had had sex with woke up with him on top of her doing it, and he woke up standing in front of the mirrow in the bathroom with a condom on.

Of course those who stood as witnesses to this condition, both professionals and those who suffer sexsomnia, provided the clear evidence...even pointing out that people can drive a car in their sleep...that the person--the brain--is not in full operation, thus while there is no memory of the act, there is no deciding to act process through the prefrontal or limbric systems either.

Those of the 'ghost in the machine' camp are then left to explain why the 'ghost' is on vacation is such cases--which are, it has fairly been shown, hereditary in nature, actually, just like bi-polarism. They will fail to do so though, because the science is clearly precise enough to show that the reason a person is unconsious is simply and only because parts of the nerual equipment is shut down--which a partial similation of what happens with the death of the full volume of cells in those regions as well.

Then, next post, for clearness of readability.




�@ Please do keep in mind that all along I have not been arguing against a spiritual realm, but have been doing so for the spiritual and the physical realms as being two separate and non-exchangable realms, perhaps only crossed at times by some point of intersection in a certain dimension.

[MadamePapillon]

@ Mars Man

The thing about discussing ghosts, the afterlife, death, all of that, it's very hard to prove anything.
There are so many stories about people seeing ghosts, recording voices when there was nobody in the room, having objects move by themselves ect, all are linked to the idea of life after death. Many people seem to have accepted the idea that spirits of the dead are among us, maybe on a different plane, or a seperate frequency than our own, but it's all but impossible to prove this in a scientific way.

To have a truly solid case for this one would have to prove the existence of a soul. But how do you prove that a soul exists and that when you die it continues to live on, or maybe move on? It could be that ghosts are leftover energy from a living person. Or that we simply move on to a seperate plane of existance when we die, our flesh is left behind and our essence lives on in a different wavelength.

I find the second idea to be the most likely in a scientific way. It's just like lightwaves, under normal circumstances we can't see infrared or ultraviolet but they are still there, right beside the lightwaves we can see. Or you could compare it to the Northen Lights, normally magnetic waves are invisible to us but under certian circumstances they can become visible, it could be the same for ghosts. This could explain why they always seem to appear as gray/white and slightly transparent (yet apparently solid in their own plane), and why most sightings seem to take place in the night, when it's easier to see these sort of things.

I don't know how to explain it any better than that, I hope you get what I was trying to say. But, as I said before, it's almost impossible to prove this without first proving the existance of a soul.

EDIT: You may also want to check this out. I think it supports the idea of 'existing on a different frequency' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voice_phenomena

[Mars Man]

Then, we should consider the case of people like Tito Mukhopadhyay, a severly autistic young man who cannot stay still without losing track of himself. He became the focus of a number of studies, some of which are on-going, because, most fortunately, his mother force-taught him to write and read and understand. In order for him to 'see' himself, to keep self awarness in action, he must flap his hands.

The condition has been shown to primarily be error in building cell links for incoming information and formation abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex, temporal lobes, amygdala, and hippocampus.

The 'ghost in the machine' camp will have to show why, since this is usually a from-birth and hereditary thing that is somewhat more common in males, the ghost would not be just like this. So when the person were to die, and someone were to see his 'ghost,' it would have to not be walking upright, acting and speaking as most common humans, but would have to be sitting there or walking in such broken gate, and flapping, gazing, and moving just as he is in real life.

The 'ghost in the machine' camp will have to show how it is that brain damage can drastically change the major portion of a person's pre-damage personality and character. That's because the premise upon which that camp is based is that it is the 'spirit' or 'soul' or 'ghost' (after death) that is the person and not the physical, genetical, chemical, and thus cellular substance which is the brain (and then body). They will have to explain how a person who cannot walk due to neural damage can suddenly walk at death.

They will have to explain how, for example, a person who cannot see in one eye simply because when in early infancy an eye bandage had been placed over that eye due to a small infection, during which the lack of need for those nerve endings and neurons had caused them to redirect themselves into another system, can fully see in both eyes at death yet while that person never will have been able to see with that eye during his life.

In short, they will have to explain why the 'spirit' or 'soul[/i' is said to be non-physical, and eternal, [i]and the very person or animal (although many protestant groups will deny that animals have souls) yet can be materially altered by physical damage in the living being, OR show how such spirit or soul is a reality but does not affect nor effect the living organism as long as it is living.

Also, as far as human beings go, those that think the 'spirit' or 'soul' or 'ghost' is the real person, the very being him or herself, will have to explain why clothing is a part of the spiritual world or the being him or herself. They will have to provide for a 'ghost' for clothing items...even including eye glasses and pipes for smoking. They will have to provide a model for a non-physical being, being able to make use of physical things, create waves that produce light and sound.

All these things in the present two posts must be met, and my charge is that they can not be met. The evidences we have through the studies of genetics, neurology, evolutionary psychology and biology, religious belief-systems, anthropology, and a few more have put far more than enough evidence out on the table to clinch the understanding that we are exactly, just what we are physically, and that the after-all-cells-have-died state is exactly as the before-conception state.

And in one word on NDEs here, there are also cases where people have been in the same state, and yet have no recollection of any experiences. And there have been cases like mine--which got me interested in this field anyway. At the age of 19 I did a pretty good job at buckling out the windshield of the car I had been driving with my head--of course, the Chevy pickup I met head on helped too, I guess, with the momentum. The dream that that day became...and I remember the before portion of that day clearly...is just as solid as seeing a phantasma, and being able to understand that far more likely than not, it is only a replica of an individual or animal that is being force-formulated in the perceiver's neurological systems.

[Mars Man]

But how do you prove that a soul exists and that when you die it continues to live on, or maybe move on? . . .
But, as I said before, it's almost impossible to prove this without first proving the existance of a soul.

Thanks for that input there MadamePapillon san. I do hope you carefully, not only read over my arguments, but carefully conceptualized, then studied their bearings within the presentation and the present theme.

The answer to your challenge above has been given already. To prove that a soul exists, one must first define just what that is (done by religious-belief systems already), then rebut, in valid argumentation, the evidence that a soul does not exist; thus showing it to be incorrect.

I so often find so much contradiction in the elements of urban legend. A wavelength is without a doubt a physical reality. To assert that a cell, for example, has a wavelength involved with it is nothing new at all...of course it does, just as rock, a molecule of water vapor, or even that so extremely hard to find neutrino particle. This argument is effectually leading in circles.

Even in the theory of multi-universes, as Mr. Everett had put forth (which was basically in opposition to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics) two superpositioned universes are distinct, separate realities...not things that collide and interesect. (at least as of his original thesis)

So, yes, while understanding the points you have made, I would encourage you to carefully weigh the matter of valid methodology. Having taken the definition provided by the earlier religious-belief systems of 'spirit' (as applied towards living humans) and 'soul' [both as opposed to and distinguished from plant and microbe forms which are just as much alive as a human is] and laying that down beside the definition of what all life forms are, in as far a reality as can be done, we can see that there is no match.

In that case, therefore, we can conclude that while the early Jewish religious-belief system is surprizingly more correct, others are not. We can show beyond a doubt with the evidence that we have, that our physical make-up is only that. To adequately show that to be inaccurate, one could provide a solid case for there being a continuation of the consciously active and aware, knowing and remembering human being after the cells which make up the entirety of that human being have died, and the atomic structures have all gone on into the conglomerate of atomic structure of the earth.

Again, to recap. . .to show (a much better word than 'prove,' actually) that a ghost (as it is defined herein) [or spirit to that same definition] exists within and beyond the life mechanism needed for cell existence and bondings, a person will have to show that what is known by the sciences at present, are incorrect. That is my challenge. Show that the sciences are incorrect.

ps--after checking out the links, I'll report on them.

[MadamePapillon]

The answer to your challenge above has been given already. To prove that a soul exists, one must first defined just what that is (done by religious-belief systems already), then rebut in valid argumentation the evidence that a soul does not exists is incorrect.

I don't believe that's entirely true or accurate. As of the present, there is no concrete proof or evidence to where a person could go before a room of educated people and prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a soul exists.

If you believe a soul is simply neural connections and the conscious awareness we have of ourselves and the world around us, than yes, you have proven the existence of a soul. However, in the context we are speaking in, to define a soul as something that can live on beyond the flesh, perhaps on another frequency or wavelength, as a separate and still fully conscious being...no test have yet been invented to prove this to be true or not.

The best we have is what religion says is so (and that is often suspect) and speculation. Nobody can prove with any credibility as of now that there is infact a piece of yourself that can trancend the flesh and continue living beyond our sight.

[Mars Man]

Thanks for the response. I seemed to have erred in my writing (as per quote quote given there) so will have to go back and correct that.

Your very last sentence is the key there. That was very well put, and that is perhaps the one major player here. It has been shown, you see, that no piece of yourself can transcend itself as it is in that very arrangement of atomic structure...for the most part. (in the extremely micro, this may happen as some bondings of atomic structures in the form of 'information particles' may keep their adherence.

Those of the 'ghost in the machine' then, will have to go into the room before the representitives in the fields, and adequately show their (those in the fields) work to be incorrect in the first place. It's like, they have to firstly demolish the presently standing building before being able to build a new one.

It's not a matter of trying to find evidence for their beliefs (ghost in the machine's camp) but rather a matter of presenting enough data and evidence against the findings which are now known. That is what I am saying cannot be done. And, it is for that reason, that such a belief in consciousness outside the brain is hardly a sound idea or faith at all. It is for that reason, that I am arguing against the generally-accepted-without-careful-investigation notion of 'ghosts.' (as defined in this thead)

[MadamePapillon]

It is for that reason, that I am arguing against the generally-accepted-without-careful-investigation notion of 'ghosts.' (as defined in this thead)

Well, it's pretty hard to disbelieve something you see with your own eyes. I wish you luck in seeing a ghost one day. Whether or not it's simply an echo of the past or a truely seperate, living being, it's a pretty crazy, scary experience.

Maybe there should be some investigation as to why, even when some people seem to see these specters on a regular occurance, is there still a feeling of automatic, unquestionable panic. Whether it's hiding under your covers or running from a graveyard, almost everyone seems to have a 'flee' approach to these 'ghosts'.

[Mars Man]

I think MadamePapillon san, if you were to recall your opening lines of your #38 on page 2, that if you were to go over the whole flow of my presentation so far, you would understand one point that appears to not have been properly caught.

I am not arguing that there are not occasions where people experience 'phantasma.' I am arguing that 'phantasma' are not the actual individual that they appear to be, because that's not how nature works.

People do see things. . . they can see a lot of things.

Well, it's pretty hard to disbelieve something you see with your own eyes.

However, not all things seen are necessarily through the optic nerves...a good example of that is dreams. Another good example is from experiments done by putting people in a nearly suspended automation situation (extremely little flesh nerve endings exposed to pressure--such as sitting, or laying does--no light at all (100% darkness) and no sound) where after some time they too, begin to see all kinds of things...even though there is no light...and it becomes a dream world.

I do not doubt, for example, that you, Goldiegirl, Chi65, justin, or my sister 'saw' something, yet I do know that the method of seeing is unknown, and even if it were through the regular visual means, that would mean something physical had been seen or effected (meaning that something like a halogram had been produced).

It would not mean that what the brain had interpreted or assembled was an actual, mentally active yet non-physical person, in the whole, who had physically died. It would not mean that because it is has substantially been validated that the death of the brain, is the absence of consciousness, thought, perception and memory.

This is why and how we can determine that the usually assigned definition for the English word 'ghost,' is incorrect--and here's the follow through:

If it is true that ONE) the absence of a neural nucleus, lobe, or segment that activates and controls a certain function of mental acuteness and activity results in the absence of that very acuteness and activity, and that TWO) the aggregate brain consists only of these physical nuclei, lobes, and segments, then it is true that the total absence of the aggregate of the nuclei, lobes, and segments, results in the total absence of mental acuteness and function.

[Goldiegirl]

maybe we are just arguing over the definition of "ghost". I think that perhaps, the definition isn't clear because it can't be. No one can prove or disprove what I saw. Be it a halogram, space aliens entering my brain, a gap in the time space continuum, whether my optic nerve transferred the image to my brain or not...it all is irrelevant. I saw and experienced something that is not explainable or definable. At least not with our technology today. Ghosts, spirits, fairies etc, have been a part of all human societies. Well at least from the standpoint of when written language was used. But even before that, I am sure that our ancient hunters felt that the animals they killed had spirits, and so did there dead relatives. So ghost or whatever, the definition really isn't what we're looking for here.

[Kinsao]

I must admit I haven't read all the long posts. But I am pretty sure that there are things that can stimulate the visual receptors in the brain which are not 'visually perceptible' in themselves through the eyes - thus causing people to 'see' things which other people in the same place at the same time cannot see.

In addition, I am sure there is more to the physical world than we can actually perceive usually through our senses - and that it might sometimes be possible to perceive other things (what we would normally call 'supernatural' or perhaps 'spiritual') physically that ordinarily would be imperceptible to us. Not supernatural in the traditional sense of the world, but a perfectly natural, physical occurrence impinging on the world we are able to perceive with our limited senses. (And our senses are limited, I am certain of it; for a very simple example, we cannot see even ultra-violet or infra-red, wavelengths which surely exist...)

I also believe that time is not linear, and although our brain generally 'organises' time into something that best suits our perceptions, this 'organisation' can sometimes go a bit awry, and can cause certain limited perceptions of past and future. (I personally have perceived the future at times, although most certainly not in any kind of 'crystal ball seeing' way!)

[MadamePapillon]

I think MadamePapillon san, if you were to recall your opening lines of your #38 on page 2, that if you were to go over the whole flow of my presentation so far, you would understand one point that appears to not have been properly caught.

I do apologize but I came into the convo a bit later and that's a LOT of reading to catch up on. :relief: I had trouble reading some of your posts because, I'll be honest, I didn't get a lot of what was being said. A great scientific mind I am not.

But even before that, I am sure that our ancient hunters felt that the animals they killed had spirits, and so did there dead relatives. So ghost or whatever, the definition really isn't what we're looking for here.

Well if you look at it this way: every single culture on earth tells tales of ghosts and spirits, during every single time period people have seen them, it has gone on for (probably) as long as the human race. And let's not forget that even animals appear to see them at times, even when we cannot.

So that's really all the evidence anyone needs. Though it can't be proven scientifically, it has spanned cultures (even those who have never been in contact with one another), generations, races, even species at times. So, though we don't have a definition for what a ghost truly is we're all in agreement that there is some form of 'life' going on after death.

[Goldiegirl]

It may be more than life after death as well. Maybe it is a little warp in time and we are seeing events of the past or the future. I think the word ghost is just a 'generic" term.

[MadamePapillon]

It's almost impossible not to be generic. A person could (and have) study this their whole life and not come to any definite answer.
But the only reason why I would say it's probably not that is just because if there's a warp in time going backwards than why is there no warp in time going foreward? If we're seeing the past as it happens than why don't people see ghostly futuristic images?
Also I've noticed that these 'ghosts' always seem to have lived no more than the last 300 odd years ago. Maybe there's a time limit or something otherwise why don't we see cavemen ghosts and whatnot.

[Sarapva]

I think a lot of the problem is the way we (especially in western cultures) see things in "black and white" and, as Kinsao mentioned, see time as being linear. I think it's like looking at a hologram, the pictures with squiggly lines that you have to focus differently to see.

This might be why it's hard to take a scientific approach to proving that life continues in a non-physical realm. There are different parameters to go by, not necessarily the physical ones we go by now.

[Goldiegirl]

People do claim to have grey aliens visit them at night, perhaps that is the future and not aliens current to our time. As for not seeing cavemen, people have hallucinations and see all sorts of stuff, so you never know. There are people who claim that the Loch Ness Monster is a dinosaur, the same with Champ from Lake Champlain, maybe these are "ghosts" of a dinosaur. It's a stretch, but what the heck.

[Chi65]

. . . But I am pretty sure that there are things that can stimulate the visual receptors in the brain which are not 'visually perceptible' in themselves through the eyes - thus causing people to 'see' things which other people in the same place at the same time cannot see.
In addition, I am sure there is more to the physical world than we can actually perceive usually through our senses - and that it might sometimes be possible to perceive other things (what we would normally call 'supernatural' or perhaps 'spiritual') physically that ordinarily would be imperceptible to us. Not supernatural in the traditional sense of the world, but a perfectly natural, physical occurrence impinging on the world we are able to perceive with our limited senses. (And our senses are limited, I am certain of it; for a very simple example, we cannot see even ultra-violet or infra-red, wavelengths which surely exist...)
I also believe that time is not linear, and although our brain generally 'organises' time into something that best suits our perceptions, this 'organisation' can sometimes go a bit awry, and can cause certain limited perceptions of past and future. (I personally have perceived the future at times, although most certainly not in any kind of 'crystal ball seeing' way!)

Agree completely, also because I myself had several future "visions", via paintings, as described before, and pointing towards that time model story, it is as much conscious for me for long, that time is in fact not linear, we only make it so, according to our limited perception. I had enough western friends, that told me to stop, because the simple idea made them dizzy, thus they were unable to cope with it (in contrary to eastern ones!), when I tried to explain even a curved view, as should be known since Einstein.

Also the holographic view is very helpfull, I once wanted to learn it. They had some offers in London, and some artists very successfully use it nowadays, also for theatre, and basically to show the existence of these ghosts/spirits, plus there part in normal life! Showing things, that usually others cannot see, is often enough the work of artists, for long, and everywhere. Also called "the in between", by the way, invisible relations, "vibes" etc. Many things later have been proved even scientifically (or are picked up even with pleasure by them!) on the other hand, if not directly stimulated another path to find it (even Einstein related strongly to his "dreams"). . .. And this goes on and on. . .

Different people use different tools, thats all. And some fly over it and some dig into it. And some do both.

[Chi65]

Here is are very simple examples of what holography can do:
http://www.displayhologram.co.uk/archiveabstract.html
Illuminating the Invisible
Date: 1999
Product type : Multicolour Reflection Hologram Interferogram, 2 colour black and white with blue fringes
Description: This hologram shows temperature variations generated from a heat source, in this case a light bulb filament. Only holography can show this effect, normally invisible to the naked eye, by capturing microscopic differences in the density of air. An example of Holographic Interferometry.
Size: 8”x10
Or see an interactive hologramm project:
http://www.hololab.com/
(and click on interactive hologramm there)
and see this:
http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/CirqueDuSoleil/fr/showstickets/delirium/about/about_creators.htm
especially the galerie de photos and the video
Michel Lemieux is worth watching, by the way, he was in Berlin some time ago with a three person holographic theatre, brilliant and innovative!
"ghosts" at its purest plus according messages. . .

[Mars Man]

But girls, all this talk about life continuing is based on mere ingnorance, and that, it can hardly be denied, is a fact. I am very much aware, as I have read Jung enough, that this 'myth' that the human seems to not be able to build certain elements of social bonds without, is and has been shown to be an evolving thing...as we can see with Superman, Batman, and Wonderwoman...not to mention Jack, in 24 hours.

As you so well started off into, Goldiegirl, I have been arguing against the definition of ghost as it has come down to us today through the millennium based on and stemming from pure ignorance.

MadamePapillon, with all due respect, of course--and I fully grant that each is fully entitled to an opinion, be it accurate or not--I wish to point out that your logic is flawed. This is especially evident in your #68 post above, but I will not push that, alone.

Ladies, I would strongly suggest, if you wish to further assert that there is substantially valid evidence, evidence by which a neutral third party would surely be moved to acknowledge and accept, that the evidence that the brain, and all its meaning held in its neuronic mass as conscious self being and memory and knowledge, no longer exists after full loss of celluar activity, is false and inaccurate, that you present that evidence here, and be willing to argue against the counter-evidence to pseudoscientific information that one can also find...especially on the internet.

Yes, Goldie, the definition is important. It is important because so much of humanity has been living in a fairly tale about this long enough. The definition is important because as you and others have pointed out, something is there to study, test, and attempt to explain, and we cannot progress in our knowledge as a spieces by stubbornly refusing to advance with knowledge that has been gained through great effort and length of time simply because we are 'fond' of the old days and the old ways. As a spieces we need to move on now. We need to grow. This is very much a matter of education to our offspring and even if the connection cannot be seen, a much needed break from the chains of manmade religious belief-systems which yet, most unfortunately, bind us to ignorance and fallacy.

This is a direct and immediate challenge to challenge what the masses blindly hold on to.

[Chi65]

Sorry, I prefer other ways than just and only scientific ones now, but follow the discussions for longer on scientist forums anyhow. Its not new to me so far, and I do not wish to search for the according links, that probably only few will read.
Maybe this forum is not just a scientist one. . .and we should allow all points of view, in my opinion, however interesting the scientific posts are. They are not ignored, only I do not wish to repeat myself on a scientific level endlessly.
There is more than this, and I tried to show this.
Off to bed. . .
be well everybody!
:thankyou:
:sleep:

[Goldiegirl]

Hmmm.....I guess to each his own really. Please then tell me what I saw in my bedroom and what did the little girl see? I will say "ghost" because I have no other word for it. You could call it a paranormal experience too. But that doesn't change the fact, that no one can prove or disprove what I saw. Science can hold us back as well, you can't see the forest through the trees. Not everything acts in a predictable manner. Not everything is science. It seems sad to put everything to a number, a theory, a calculation. I would hope that we humans are more than just a chemical battery powering a brain, that I am nothing more than a process would truly be sad. What would be even more sad is to think that is how we see each other. If that's the case then why should we care about anything, we are just organic matter waiting to die and be recycled. My hope is that we are more. Ghosts, give me that hope.

[Mars Man]

Thanks for the replies and for following along. It is a good think to express, to point out, to test, disect, and carefully reason and feel out all propositions, proposals, and thesis. This is not only what we are doing here, though, more than anything else we are strengthening the overall knowledge that is the educational process. It is, in one way more than just a scientific inquiry, (and is in no means to support 'Scientism' per se...a segment of scientific thought that I personally think little of) and yet, it is, in other ways, an actual exercise in knowing...which is what science means and is !

we should allow all points of view, in my opinion, Yes, that is true as I had mentioned in the post just prior...given just below:

and I fully grant that each is fully entitled to an opinion, be it accurate or not


Hmmm.....I guess to each his own really. Yes, that is true...(see above)
Please then tell me what I saw in my bedroom and what did the little girl see? I will say "ghost" because I have no other word for it.

Why would you refuse to use the word 'phantasma? You see, Goldiegirl, the matter is much deeper than just this surface that we are touching on here in this thread, but this subject of this thread can well be seen as the key which can undo the lock on the door of further knowledge. There is so much I'd like to say, but such embedding would not be practical here. (I will PM you about that)

Ghosts, give me that hope.

In what state would you like that? In the mental state that you now are? Would you wish the same for the severe pedophile, who, as you had correctly pointed out is the way he is because of his brain state...which, as you also had correctly pointed out, will not and cannot be changed?

Would you guess that there is any reason to think there is a part of the living being which has no control over that living being whatsoever yet IS that very living being, and is only 'normal' (whatever that may be) after that being dies?

I mean, otherwise the mentally challenged being is perpetually mentally challenged for all eternity? The homosexual being is homosexual for all eternity? And not a single person has offered any attempt to explain why it would be necessary, much less possible that clothing items...a perfectly human-designed/created thing...be ghosts too? Would we eventually have to be led, in order to maintain a whole, rather a hole, in our argument, that trees and rocks and yes, even the entire solar system has or is both physical and at the same time essentially a ghost?

Science--again, not Scientism--is a branch of knowledge gathering. There are some in the field, such as there will be in any field, fielded by human beings, who prove to be negative, bias, and greedy for fame and power to the extent that they can give 'pure science' a bad name in the public's eye from time to time. (and of course those who more so oppose science--say fundamentalistic religionists in America, for one example--use that to flame the fires of distrust for those who are less in the know)

I would suggest moving on then. I have presented my case in hard terms, and well enough to be understood, at least, by those who study and carefully think it through. As it stands, I can see that no one has answered to the challenge to show that what is known about the brain, what it is, how it works, and what that all means, is wrong or inaccurate. With that, therefore, I rest my case on that matter.

The spiritual realm--I'd like to look into this more deeply now. I would tend to think that the 'spiritual realm' may be something, as others have shown agreement with, that is to whatever degree (or even totally, maybe) physical, but is unknown.

One of the areas to look at might be parapsychology. I'll get to that a bit later.

[MadamePapillon]

@ Mars Man

You have made a good case and you've laid out evidence and fact and any number of things to prove your case but the thing about disscusing matters like this is it doesn't lend itself well to cold, hard scientific logic.

How can you truly prove or disprove a phantom? You can't.

I think this is one of the few issues in which science fails miserably and those of a more scientific mind can go blue in the face trying to disprove the existance of ghosts or phantasms or whatever. It's that never-ending battle between science and faith (or belief if you will), and in the end it all boils down to one thing: it just can't be scientifically proven one way or the other. This is where faith and belief step in.

Say what you want about my logic being flawed but when you have thousands, millions of people over vast generations and cultures all coming up with the same story...science or no science there has to be something to it.

And who's to say it's not a whole slew of different things.
Echos of the past, the dead lingering, an energy imprint, things I can't even think of, but most people seem to agree that these 'ghosts' or whatever you want to call them are a form of life after death...but these are just the few, tiny glimpses we actually manage see and as we all know, often what we can see is just the tip of the iceberg.
For every ghost that's seen who's to say there isn't 1000 more in that very area we can't see. Belief, Mars Man, I saw something and thousands/millions of other people around the world have seen it to, that's enough to make anyone believe.

[Chi65]

Nothing against your points of view, Mars Man, only, we are not scientists, thus the challenge goes to the wrong adress. But I already mentioned some new paths over there in the scientist's fraction, with growing interest into what "our kind" says. So, one has to look up, what some of them (not us) say, find, and wait.
The points of artists and synaesthetes is on the table, and many don't even know yet, that they also belong to this in the way their brains works.
Belief or not, to me its not the point here, by the way. Just some parts of "belief via experience" are under observation, because they fit into recent researches and no more under malfunctions of the brain, in contrary, they become "advanced" and refined functions. I once more mention Ramchandran here, not to forget Cytovic.
Our kind does perceive former "ghosts/spirits" on another level, and its not paranormal any more, and definitely a good starting point for other views upon it to be established.
And its time now to do so.
Particularly in the process(!) of changes from material to immaterial and back, as I tried to explain via the development of a piece of art.
Amongst many of us this is for long common knowledge, and it is nice, that some scientists pick up on this finally, best way they can, but not dissappointed at all, in contrary. So, the change of view is definitely not on our side these days.

[Sarapva]

I mean, otherwise the mentally challenged being is perpetually mentally challenged for all eternity? The homosexual being is homosexual for all eternity? And not a single person has offered any attempt to explain why it would be necessary, much less possible that clothing items...a perfectly human-designed/created thing...be ghosts too?.... As it stands, I can see that no one has answered to the challenge to show that what is known about the brain, what it is, how it works, and what that all means, is wrong or inaccurate.

I don't think anyone is arguing that what is known about the brain or any other scientific knowledge is inaccurate - the argument is that science seems to barely be beginning to acknowledge any other life besides the physical. Therefore there is hardly any scientific evidence of the "soul" or "spirit". I think we may be having some misunderstanding about the definitions, Mars Man - you seem to have these terms divided into different meanings, but most of us I think are using the terms broadly to mean basically the same thing (a non-physical life). What is your definition of the "spiritual realm"?

The way I understand it, our tendencies in our physical lives don't necessarily go with us after death. Being male or female, whatever race, homosexual, heterosexual, mentally challenged, etc. is part of our physical lives, but not necessarily our spiritual ones.

Here are some excerpts from the book "Out on a Limb" by Shirley MacLaine, which I read a long time ago and has helped shape my beliefs now (Shirley MacLaine is talking to an incarnate "entity" through a channeler):

"Have we all experienced living as different sexes in order to be able to empathize with the opposite sex? .... Could that be a metaphysical explanation for homosexuality?"

"That is correct ... The sexual preference of such individuals plays an important part in the requirement for understanding that we are all basically the same .... our souls, if you will, are basically androgenous ... high spiritual understanding knows no sexuality differences because the elements of both sexes are simultaneously present. The polarities are evenly opposed. Your ancient prophets and Christ figures such as Jesus and Buddha, et cetera, were not so much celibate as they were vibrating at an even and perfectly balanced frequency."

.......
"Why is there such resistance to the study of the soul as a realistic fact? Why isn't as much time and money spent on researching the existence of the soul as there is on splitting the atom or nuclear energy?"

"Well, for one thing," he answered, "the material isn't available. The soul is not a material thing. Also the field of soul study has a tendency to have scorn and ridicule heaped upon it and professional reputations go down the tubes, so to speak, very easily." .......

"But would proof of the soul's existence radically alter the attitude of science?"

"Yes, of course.... But ... there isn't much money in that kind of research."

"You mean .... if you research the soul there is no material profit in it?"

"Quite right."

[Skullcrushergurl]

My step-grandfather just died and naturally, my grandma wanted my mother and I to spend the night.
Why did she close the door? I was in the dark. Not just any bedroom but the bedroom that my grandfather used to sleep in with my grandma! I was afraid and I could feel a presence so I tossed and turned.....when...I FELT SOMETHING TOUCH MY LEG!!!!!
Let's just say, I made a new door in that room.

[Mars Man]

Thanks, Sarapva, at your input and effort to try to reconcile a seeming gap in understanding here. Your first sentence about 'no one arguing that what is known about the brain ....is inaccurate' is, if you were to look at it very carefully, and think about it very deeply, is not quite as on the mark as it may seem at first--note...that is not to say that it is totally off.

Since I have rested my case, I will not go into that too much here, other than to explain:
What is known about the brain, and all the evidence that supports that tells us that if the brain is physically destroyed, the conscious, thought patterns, and memory contained in the particles, fatty acids, enzymes, and firing systems, will be destroyed.

By arguing that that is not the case, a person is arguing that what is known and evidences that support that, are incorrect and invalid. To argue that there is something all along which is a non-physical 'copy' of that and which all along has full operation along with that (brain function and content) and which lasts forever has absolutely no evidence for it, while what we know about the brain and the evidence for that has a very large degree of validity.

All along I have put forth my opinion (and it is very much only an opinion....however not totally without any evidence whatsoever) that there is likely a spiritual realm...only that the physical and spiritual are two different realms and at the most, only may intersect at times and points. The physical is purely and only physical, and the spiritual is purely and only spiritual.

For that reason, taking that there may be spiritual life form, it is not physical. The evidence for that other form or existence needs to be looked into more.

As for definitions, my effort is to educate away from usage of the English word 'ghost' due to a misconception that has become attached to it in the form of presupposed mental baggage. The word phantasma should take its place.

At the moment I do not know that much about all that Shirley MacLaine is arguing for or trying to teach, but from what I do know of the content, it is very much in wanting for hard evidence and explanation of the real world.

Again...presuppositions from ancient and ignorant religious belief-systems should all be discarded...regarding this subject matter.

[Chi65]

Here is something to illustrate, what artists think about it all:

http://www.4dart.com/4Dart.html/en/norman/norman_en.html

go to the trailer or fotos or youtube. . .

Its as much syn all along. I need not to know, how their brain functions, it simply does and perfectly in time ;-)

[Sarapva]

I don't have any evidence to prove that the soul exists, and I know that Shirley MacLaine's book was ridiculed. But I admire her courage in writing it anyway as a public figure, and it does provide "food for thought". Here's another example from the book, discussing reincarnation:

"The real truth being the process of each soul's progression through the ages..."

"You mean reincarnation?"

"That is correct.... That is the carrying out of Cosmic Justice toward an ultimate harmony."

"Well, would the Church deny us that truth?"

"Yes, because such a truth would make the power and the authority of the Church unnecessary. Each person, that is, each entity, becomes responsible to itself for its conduct. It does not need a church..."

And now to balance this out, an exerpt from Plato's "Phaedo":

And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body .... the release of the soul from the chains of the body ......... And this separation and release of the soul from the body is termed death ...

[Mars Man]

Thanks for that nice link with the great art there, Chi65 san. I love that choreography there !!

Thanks Sarapva san. I would pin Shirley's fault on her Christian belief-system's base. If one were to check out her history, I'd bet we'd find a very 'Christian belief-system acceptance' being at the core. For such reasons, she may occasionally refer to the 'Church' or things related to the Christian ideology.

Of course the Greek philosophers of old had absolutely no idea at all about the true make-up of life forms. If one go over their works, that would become easy to see...

Yes, I do agree in part, on the admiration for her doing that work, yet at the same time, suspect that such works sell well...better than they should, I'd tend to suspect. The prime suspect is the tendency in such a work to disallow room for testing and multiple observation. That is the deathtoll for such genre. Thanks for sharing that.

Again. . . presuppositions from ancient and ignorant religious belief-systems should all be discarded...regarding this subject matter.

[Kinsao]

... there is likely a spiritual realm...only that the physical and spiritual are two different realms and at the most, only may intersect at times and points. The physical is purely and only physical, and the spiritual is purely and only spiritual.
For that reason, taking that there may be spiritual life form, it is not physical. The evidence for that other form or existence needs to be looked into more.


I agree with the above. I also think that there are some things which we now think of as 'spiritual' which may in the future be able to be explained physically by science, but science does not know everything yet, we are constantly learning more.

There is nothing wrong with trying to 'prove' phenomena like ghosts/phantasma by scientific methods, it is by doing such things that science/knowledge advances. That is not to say that the 'spiritual world' (or what we think of as such, regardless of what it is 'really') does not exist.

As an aside, I personally don't find the thought of 'life after death' very comforting at all; rather, it entails a big responsibility (if our lives continue, in whatever form, forever) and I would far rather think that it all finishes when we die. But somehow I just can't believe that. :(

[ArmandV]

As an aside, I personally don't find the thought of 'life after death' very comforting at all; rather, it entails a big responsibility (if our lives continue, in whatever form, forever) and I would far rather think that it all finishes when we die. But somehow I just can't believe that. :(

Only so long that a person doesn't return as a snail.

Isn't this thread gotten off-track? I was looking to hear some "true" ghost stories and all I mainly see are arguments/discussions on whether ghosts are real or not.

[Faustianideals]

I believe there is some sort of weak affinity to the supernatural and my family. Not to sound arrogant, weird, or delusional, but ever have the gates of a cemetery close on their own moments after you drive through and park your car? Some gates close automatically at dusk, but the ones at the cemetery I was at didn't. And even though the Chicago-land area is notorious for it's winds, there is no way they could have been moved by the wind due to how heavy they are.

There are a few great cemeteries in my area too, such as Resurrection Cemetery(Home to Resurrection Mary), Bachelors Grove(Chicago's mobs allegedly dumped bodies all over the cemetery), and Cal Sag Cemetery(Where the Earth has been described as "breathing", and the ghosts of Catholic monks have appeared).

While at Bachelors Grove, I've felt as though I stepped through cob webs, felt fatigued at certain spots in the cemetery, and I saw a gigantic black dog glaring at other people in the cemetery, fewer times at me than others.

[Mars Man]

Isn't this thread gotten off-track?
What are ghosts or spirits and do you believe in them?

Yes, Kinsao, I forgot to mention that. There may be a fair amount that proves to be as physical as atomic matter among other small particles.

[Sarapva]

As an aside, I personally don't find the thought of 'life after death' very comforting at all; rather, it entails a big responsibility (if our lives continue, in whatever form, forever) and I would far rather think that it all finishes when we die. But somehow I just can't believe that. :(

Yes, this is the whole theory of reincarnation - it does entail a lot of individual responsibility. I also don't find it comforting sometimes to think it could all go on after death. It's somehow more comforting to think it ends at our physical death. But I also don't believe it ends there, or that we "get away with" not having to face the consequences of our lives.

That's a good point by ArmandV - the topic of this thread is "Ghost Stories" after all.

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Although i haven't read all of this thread yet, i want to share some of the many paranormal experiences i have had.


Living at my mums house;

My mum lives in an old manor house on the farm where i was brought up in, the house is seriously ancient, we know its at least 600years old, however there is a massive amount of archeology on the farm and in the area surrounding the house, people have been living almost continuously on the site since prehistoric/pre-neolithic times.

The house is definitely haunted in my opinion, and i also believe that there are many ghosts there based on the variety of paranormal experiences i have had there.

Anyhoo, onto the ghost stories!


The first one that springs to mind is an incident that happened in the cellar in the house- when me and my bro were kids, we had a large set of mecharno(sp?) that we often used to play with. One day i decided to go down on my own into the cellar to play with the mecharno, but as i stood at the top of the steps, instead of turning on the light as i always did, instead i walked down the first few steps of the stairs and peered into the dark cellar below.
What i saw i cannot explain- i saw this bright lights, like sparklers, whizzing around the floor of the room, chasing each other at great speed in circles. For a few moments i just stood there staring dumbfounded at these things, but then my senses and i turned around quickly and without thinking i turned on the light. But when i looked back down at the cellar the light things were gone.

... ... ...

The second incident with the cellar happened some years later. I often did many chores for my mother, mostly helping her clean the house, and one day i was asked to vacuum hoover the cellar. But when i opened the cellar door, instead of turning on the light and going down into the cellar as i normally did, i stood there in the doorway for a few moments just standing there (i don't know why).
All of a sudden someone suddenly pushed me from behind- i felt two hands firmly shove my back! I almost fell down the steps but i regained my balance in the nick of time. But the scary thing was that no-one was there, the house was empty at the time...

... ... ...

A few years after that incident, again one day i was asked to do some vacuum hoovering, however this time in the attic. I have never ever liked the attic in the house, it has always freaked me out. I was quite reluctant to go up into the attic to hoover it at first, but it was a beautiful hot sunny summer day and i decided that it would be safe to go up into the attic so i went.
After vacuum hoovering the attic, i decided to check out the view of the garden from one of the windows and i stood there for a little while just standing there looking out of the window at the view. All of a sudden i felt a presence come up from me behind, this "presence" put its "arms" around my neck/shoulders from behind, almost like it was leaning on me- at first i could do nothing, but my senses soon came to me and i freaked out and ran downstairs out of the attic, leaving the vacuum hoover behind.


There have also just been a lot of other general paranormal things that have happened in the house- unexplained footsteps, smells, sounds/noises etc
I never actually saw a ghost so to speak in the house, but my brother said he did- he said when he was little he used to talk to ghosts that came into his room at night as a child (which is really freaky because i remember when i was a kid sometimes i would just hear him talking in his room, apparently to no-one), apparently they tried to control him though after a while and he didn't like it so he tried to ignore them, but apparently it took a long time for them to stop bothering him and to just leave him alone.


(continued in a mo)

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Living at The Flat;


The second place me and my fiance rented was a flat that resided on the outskirts of the town i currently live in. The flat was actually a crude small barn conversion, it was not a very large building and was a building that constantly suffered from mold and humidity problems and was very cold during the winter and boiling hot during the summer. My landlord was an antiques dealer and the bottom part of the flat were used as his store rooms for storing his antiques in.
Anyhoo, i had some terribly scary experiences in that place that freaked me out no end, that flat end up terrifying me. We i first moved in there, the place didn't feel haunted at all, but as the months and years went by, the paranormal activity and bad vibes about the place went through the roof.
At first things weren't too bad, and i have to admit i sorta brushed off the early experiences.


My brother sometimes came around to visit me at the flat, often he would spend a day or two at the flat with me since we hardly got to see each other, we took advantage of any opportunities we could spend time together as much as we could.
One day he came around to the flat and we stayed up talking to each other way into the early hours of the morning sitting on the floor smoking and drinking tea. All of a sudden while we were talking my brother suddenly stopped talking and said "did you hear that?!"- as we sat there silently for a few moments, we could hear noises like footsteps and things being dragged across the floor in my landlords antique rooms below. My brother was really concerned about the strange noises, but at the time i thought it was my landlord, as he often worked in his storerooms into the early hours of the morning, so i told my brother this.
But the next day after my brother had left, i caught up with my landlord in his storeroom and asked out of curiosity if he had been working late- as which he replied to as "no".

Now some people could say the noises were bats or some other animal, but these noises were clearly footsteps and dragging noises- not just that, but my old landlords storerooms were a very high security place, with all sorts of burglar alarms and movement sensor systems in place and huge metal sealed garage doors and huge padlocks etc; there was basically no way anything could get into those rooms when they were locked.


But things got much, much weirder.


I started having very bad nightmares and while alone in the flat, i would often get terrifying feelings of unexplainable fear that would just overtake me before slowly leaving me. This started to give me really bad insomnia.
One night while i was lying in bed, it was another sleepless night. As i lay there i heard objects been dragged and moved around in the storeroom below- all of a sudden i heard a huge smash, like a huge vase falling on the floor and smashing! I remember thinking to myself "oh...the landlord is not going to be too happy about that in the morning", and i didn't think too much about it after that as i tried to concentrate on reading a book.
But the next day, i asked my landlord if he had broken anything in his storeroom, and he replied "no". I said "are you sure nothings broken, like maybe a big vase?" and he answered "no" again- i asked him if he had even been in the storeroom that night, and while he had, he hadn't been in there in the early hours of the morning i heard the noises and crashes.


That incident in particular really started to freak me out, as such incidences started to become more common.

One night i had a terrifying dream (it may not sound scary to you, but i was gripped with fear in the dream)- in the dream i saw a huge giant hulk of a demon, who looked very similar to the Incredible Hulk, came stomping up the driveway to the flat, and in the dream i prayed for it to go away and not come any nearer, i was gripped with fear. Then the dream ended and i don't know what happened after that.

Some nights while i was lying in bed, i would see the duvet covers being pulled and/or stroked by an invisible presence at the bottom of the bed.


A few days later, i was lying in bed. I felt an over-whelming sense of fear, it is difficult to explain what it was like, but i was absolutely petrified. The bed covers were being pulled again. I knew a presence was in the room, whether it be ghost or demon or something else completely, i knew i was not alone in the room.
I hid myself under my duvet covers, absolutely petrified frozen, beads of sweat streaming off my body, this fear was beyond my control.

But i had experienced so much fear my mind all of a sudden rebelled- i said to the presence, "I know you are there, but stop toying with me, if you really are here, give me a sign"- i guess i said this because i felt like i was going mad. At this very moment something firmly pushed the bed covers above my head, like a clenched fist pushing the covers down!

This freaked me out beyond all belief. But i knew i needed courage; i did something that often calmed the ghosts down at my mums place- i prayed to the presence/demon/ghost, telling him/her/it to leave me alone and to rest in peace.
Gradually, the presence eased off, and my exhaustion overcame me and i fell asleep. That night, the discontinued hulk demon dream continued, but this time i saw the monster turn away from the flat and walk away, it was still a nerve racking dream, but it felt more peaceful.

Certainly things got a bit better after that incident, but never completely normal.

I remember one day i was checking out my landlords antiques and i noticed that he actually had a lot of random non-antique stuff like cheap used forks and knives and plates and general other household stuff. When i asked him why he had this stuff, he said he bought it at auctions that deal in selling off the possessions of people who have recently died and left no will.
I don't know if you can get haunted objects, but i believe that he did pick up some numerous haunted objects and that these were possibly responsible for the moving objects and noises in his storeroom at night and stuff.

[Half-n-Half]

Sounds creepy indeed! About you being gripped with fear in bed, I think you might have been suffering from sleep paralysis, or Hypnagogia. Most people experience one of the two at least once in their life time. I myself have had a case of sleep paralysis. I was taking a nap in a condominium while we were vacationing at Gulf Shores. My brother was messing around on his laptop and I was half asleep. My arm was crossed over my head, and I could "feel" it moving in front of me, but I did not see it moving. I had the sensation I was moving my arm but clearly it wasn't. It was definitely a strange sensation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

As for me, I haven't really had any strange "ghost stories." However, I did have one little incident. I was lying in bed, face down with my head towards the wall. Then, I heard a little girl whisper into my ear, "Michael." This greatly disturbed me because in my family of four, my mother is the only female. I looked around and no one was there. I fell asleep soon afterwards.

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Sounds creepy indeed! About you being gripped with fear in bed, I think you might have been suffering from sleep paralysis, or Hypnagogia. Most people experience one of the two at least once in their life time. I myself have had a case of sleep paralysis. I was taking a nap in a condominium while we were vacationing at Gulf Shores. My brother was messing around on his laptop and I was half asleep. My arm was crossed over my head, and I could "feel" it moving in front of me, but I did not see it moving. I had the sensation I was moving my arm but clearly it wasn't. It was definitely a strange sensation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

As for me, I haven't really had any strange "ghost stories." However, I did have one little incident. I was lying in bed, face down with my head towards the wall. Then, I heard a little girl whisper into my ear, "Michael." This greatly disturbed me because in my family of four, my mother is the only female. I looked around and no one was there. I fell asleep soon afterwards.


Hmm i wasn't actually physically paralyzed, i was just so scared that i did not want to move, the Hypnagogia sounds quite similar to what i had though with that demon thing.

I dunno if there's a possible rational explanation for the other experiences i experienced though...

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Just thought you guys might be interested in these two recent ghostly news articles;

Council pays psychic for exorcism

"the family had been left "traumatised" by the strange goings on and wanted to leave the house";

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7240405.stm?lsm

'Soldier ghost' caught on camera

"A group of amateur film-makers believe they may have proof that ghosts really do exist after one of them caught something strange on camera.";

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7029051.stm?lsm


Spooky...

I really sympathize for that family though, i do believe their story.

[Mars Man]

It's these kind of stories that make for interesting conversation...who knows what may have happened. The likelihood of ghosts, of course, is extremely low...if there is any at all, so we have no real way of getting into the know on these things.

The second link is most likely a prank...there have been some good ones, you know...but still makes for good conversation. Thanks for sharing them with us !

[Mavrek]

It is possible that the ghost may exist but I don't believe in them . I never ever have experienced or seen a ghost .