Do you believe in ghosts

[Mike Islander]

Holy men-women having proving it through ceremony forever. whether or not a person accepts it or dismisses it seems to be the issue I find with most people.
Until you see,feel or hear something that can’t be explained you will rightfully doubt it. That is normal.
I can’t prove a thing one way or the other but it has been proven to me.
I don’t claim vast knowledge in the great mystery. I am an average man at best living a simple life.
Not knowing is an easier life.
Being humbled by knowing a tiny bit can be scary and is to many who have seen but want nothing to do with it. That is ok.

You used the most important phrase, "can't be explained". Then you said something common and yet the opposite of what is really true. Instead of dismissing things that can't be exchanged, or accepting them at face value as you do, skeptical people actually research the claims. That's the big disconnect in your thinking here.

I so often hear from people who believe in paranormal things that I "just dismiss it". But it's the believer who "just dismisses" learning whether or not what happened is what they believe is happening, or whether they are being deceived or even the performer is deceiving themselves. I've studied many of the most common claims for decades. And when human bias is removed from the test, those who claim to have special powers fail miserably.

Skeptical people are overwhelmingly just rational people who actually care more about whether something is true than they do about having some special knowledge or the joy/fear they get from unexplained experiences.

 

[TxxAgg]

You used the most important phrase, "can't be explained". Then you said something common and yet the opposite of what is really true. Instead of dismissing things that can't be exchanged, or accepting them at face value as you do, skeptical people actually research the claims. That's the big disconnect in your thinking here.

I so often hear from people who believe in paranormal things that I "just dismiss it". But it's the believer who "just dismisses" learning whether or not what happened is what they believe is happening, or whether they are being deceived or even the performer is deceiving themselves. I've studied many of the most common claims for decades. And when human bias is removed from the test, those who claim to have special powers fail miserably.

Skeptical people are overwhelmingly just rational people who actually care more about whether something is true than they do about having some special knowledge or the joy/fear they get from unexplained experiences.

Man, I love that sentence!

 

[def90]

Hmmm, take a look at this story and photos that popped up a couple years back..

Leaked Pentagon Photo Seems to Capture a UFO. Is it Real This Time? - News18

The Pentagon report includes a leaked photo, an account of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena emerging from the ocean through the sky, and an admission that the object might have an extraterrestrial origin.

www.google.com

Now tell me that this supposed UFO isn't a mylar baloon?



Sure, pilots of all sorts have their stories.. they can all be explained and those explanations are almost always mundane. When get up in altitude you lose the ability to reference an object as to how large it is or how far away it is espe ially if you don't have any idea of what tbat object is. You can easily confuse a baloon that measures 12 inches across as being a larger object further away. I remeber flying in a P51 Mustang with the bubble canopy where you can see all around your head any direction you look and looking down and seeing a flock of geese below me and realizing how different that flock of geese looked from that perspective vs my lifelong perspective of seeing them from the ground. I felt like I could have reached out and touched them when they were probably much further away than they seemed.

 

[Slugz]

" Sure, pilots of all sorts have their stories.. they can all be explained and those explanations are almost always mundane"

 

[Hoh Down]

I'm a yes - I have two experiences:

1. Similar to the cat pictures earlier, I had a co-worker show me a printed 5x7 roughly 20 years ago now that definitely showed a deceased family member standing next to his daughter and son in law. No mistaking it. Really creepy.
2. The only in-person experience was quite strange. While dating my ex wife, she lived in an old apartment building. Not crappy or rundown, just older. Her cat at the time would run from things and swat at stuff near the ceiling, but nothing was there. It would also get angry and growl from time to time. I dismissed all of that as a cat acting out or whatever. However, one night I was washing my hands after using the restroom and I heard the sound of tissue being pulled from the kleenex box. You probably know the sound. Anyhow, when I looked at the tissue box, I very clearly saw the tissue going back into the box by itself. I picked up the box thinking a mouse or rat was in there, but the box was completely empty. As I left the bathroom in shock, the cat was really going ballistic chasing something all over the apartment. I told her about it, and if freaked us the F out. She moved out shortly after and I've never seen anything else since.

Not sure how to explain the above experiences, but I believe that there is a lot that we don't understand.

 

[Geewhiz]

but I believe that there is a lot that we don't understand.

Same.

 

[dpdub]

Saw one as a teenager, no other way to describe what I saw. Thought for sure it was smoke rising from a chimney until it started moving horizontally and looked at me.

 

[49ereric]

You used the most important phrase, "can't be explained". Then you said something common and yet the opposite of what is really true. Instead of dismissing things that can't be exchanged, or accepting them at face value as you do, skeptical people actually research the claims. That's the big disconnect in your thinking here.

I so often hear from people who believe in paranormal things that I "just dismiss it". But it's the believer who "just dismisses" learning whether or not what happened is what they believe is happening, or whether they are being deceived or even the performer is deceiving themselves. I've studied many of the most common claims for decades. And when human bias is removed from the test, those who claim to have special powers fail miserably.

Skeptical people are overwhelmingly just rational people who actually care more about whether something is true than they do about having some special knowledge or the joy/fear they get from unexplained experiences.

It all about context.
Can’t be explained by science. Whoever determined it must be explained by science? Not the native holy people for sure.
I will never understand why people think it should be proved to all in a certain way or by science when it was never that way.
The proof is for you and you alone. which is why the proof is different for all.
I understand your doubt and l that is ok.

 

[Yarak]

I do not believe in disembodied people (ghosts) walking around trying to scare people
I know there are spirits as in Angelic and Demonic

 

[scrobler]

yeah i do

 

[adam_p]

I believe in ghost the same as I believe in Bigfoot and black mountain lions.

 

[scott85]

Yes. See my story in backcountry story thread and then there is photo.

 

[sasquatch]

Sleep paralysis - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Sleep paralysis often occurs in people with sleep apnea or other sleep disorders, I’ve gone through it a few periods in my life, it’s probably been at least ten years since my last episode. Basically you are in that in between wake and sleep mode and you are lucid dreaming. I’ve had it where I think there is a person or a dark mass in the room and I cannot move my body or speak or scream. Then at some point after what seems like an eternity you wake up and there is nothing there.

I am Plagued with this. I’ve read up and found one way to break yourself out of it. Curl your toes. For some reason that’s the only body part you can still move lol


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

 

[NY16ga]

I've never seen anything particularly freaky or interesting but I could be convinced that there's something to some of these experiences people have had. Honestly, I just like the local lore that comes with it though so I tend to like ghost stories. Since I don't think there's any directly related to hunting on this thread, I'll share one...

I grew up hunting in central Florida in the 1990s. My dad was a member of a very old hunting lease on one of the big historic cattle ranches in the middle of the state that's been in the same family for quite a few generations. The camp had been established somewhere around the turn of the 20th century and there's just a lot of history around that area so lots of old school Florida cracker stories about ghosts ("haints", actually). Our camp was pretty far back, about 9 miles from any paved roads and in a big hickory hammock on the edge of a swamp. One of my favorites happened during the opener of turkey season one year when I was a kid. My dad and his buddies were all up at camp the night before the opener drinking in the big cook shed in the middle of camp. Usually they'd be hanging out around the fire pit but it had rained and was still pretty wet outside so they didn't make a fire. After awhile they all go to their separate trailers and popup campers and go to bed around 10pm.

One of the guys wakes up around 3am and goes outside to relieve himself. From his trailer you can just barely see around the cook shed to the fire pit and he sees there's a fire going, which is surprising this late at night since everyone is most likely heading out to the turkey woods in just another hour or two. He leans over to try to get a better looks and sees someone standing there, a tall lanky guy wearing a vest and an old school hat with a long bill, the kind you might see on the cover of an old fishing magazine. He says something like "Hey, kinda late for a fire, isn't it?". The guy glances his way but doesn't respond. He doesn't recognize the guy but figures maybe one of the members brought a buddy and they came in late or something like that. He's half drunk half asleep so doesn't give it a second thought and goes back to bed.

The next day everyone hunts all morning, then they come back to camp for lunch and are catching up. He's looking around camp and doesn't see that there's any new vehicles or people, same 8 or 10 guys that were all hanging out the night before. They're all talking about it...this is weird, maybe some stranger was there? Did anything get stolen? My dad remembered that his dog woke him up right at 3am too, growling and all worked up but refused to go outside the trailer when my dad tried to let him out. Then they notice there's ash in the fire pit but no footprints around it and now people start talking about haints (which, to be fair, was a frequent topic of conversation at this camp). At this point it's time to go to the most trusted source for this sort of thing, an old member of the camp who was in his 80s and whose father had been one of the founding members of the camp.

So they share all of this with the old timer including the description of this mysterious figure by the fire and ask him what he thinks, it it could be a haint. He immediately says, "Oh yeah, that's old Dr. Floyd (or something, I forget the actual name). He died years ago, always wore that damned hat, he never missed the opener of turkey season."

 

[Mike Islander]

It all about context.
Can’t be explained by science. Whoever determined it must be explained by science? Not the native holy people for sure.
I will never understand why people think it should be proved to all in a certain way or by science when it was never that way.
The proof is for you and you alone. which is why the proof is different for all.
I understand your doubt and l that is ok.

If you can't explain it by science, you can't explain it. "Science" is just the collection of tools that have proved, above all others, to be the most reliable method of understanding the world, of debunking myths, of absolutely verifying truths.

People like me don't need "proof". But we do need enough evidence to understand and be reasonably convinced of what is true. Proof "for you alone" is great, but as you say, that is only for you. As soon as you utter the phrase "Holy men-women having proving it through ceremony forever," it's no longer just about you. You are asking others to accept something that you believe. And to do that you have to offer more than "It's proof for me", which literally equals "I believe it.". That's not enough to accept anything as true, except for mundane things like "I like vanilla better than chocolate."

But we're not talking about the mundane. We're talking about people claiming to be able to contact spirits, predict the future, read minds, move things with their minds, etc. And all of those can be easily be tested. And when tested, they fail with monotonous regularity, and without exception.

 

[bgipson]

If you can't explain it by science, you can't explain it. "Science" is just the collection of tools that have proved, above all others, to be the most reliable method of understanding the world, of debunking myths, of absolutely verifying truths.

People like me don't need "proof". But we do need enough evidence to understand and be reasonably convinced of what is true. Proof "for you alone" is great, but as you say, that is only for you. As soon as you utter the phrase "Holy men-women having proving it through ceremony forever," it's no longer just about you. You are asking others to accept something that you believe. And to do that you have to offer more than "It's proof for me", which literally equals "I believe it.". That's not enough to accept anything as true, except for mundane things like "I like vanilla better than chocolate."

But we're not talking about the mundane. We're talking about people claiming to be able to contact spirits, predict the future, read minds, move things with their minds, etc. And all of those can be easily be tested. And when tested, they fail with monotonous regularity, and without exception.

Science isn't the be all, end all of proof is his point. For example, I'll ask you a simple scientific question; is light a particle or a wave?

 

[gelton]

 

[49ereric]

If you can't explain it by science, you can't explain it. "Science" is just the collection of tools that have proved, above all others, to be the most reliable method of understanding the world, of debunking myths, of absolutely verifying truths.

People like me don't need "proof". But we do need enough evidence to understand and be reasonably convinced of what is true. Proof "for you alone" is great, but as you say, that is only for you. As soon as you utter the phrase "Holy men-women having proving it through ceremony forever," it's no longer just about you. You are asking others to accept something that you believe. And to do that you have to offer more than "It's proof for me", which literally equals "I believe it.". That's not enough to accept anything as true, except for mundane things like "I like vanilla better than chocolate."

But we're not talking about the mundane. We're talking about people claiming to be able to contact spirits, predict the future, read minds, move things with their minds, etc. And all of those can be easily be tested. And when tested, they fail with monotonous regularity, and without exception.

I did not ask anyone to believe what I said. I made a statement.
you should stop using selectively picked words or phrases from my statements to push your agenda. makes you look bad.

 

[moochy28]

Don't believe in ghosts myself, never experienced anything like that.

 

[jayhawk]

I'm an 80% believer. I've never seen anything myself, but I know many scientists, engineers, and religious people that attest to seeing and experiencing things that just don't add up "scientifically". Skepticism is good, but it doesn't make sense to just say "Well if science can't explain it, then it can't be explained." This is using science as religion, a source of truth. Which is fine if that's your thing, but let's call it what it is.

For me, it's not crazy to admit that there are/may be supernatural realms out there that interact with ours at some points. The fact is, no one believed in aliens until about 100yrs ago, but people have experienced supernatural encounters with other beings for thousands of years. Even up until today. The latter seems plausible to me if we're comparing the two.