Do ghosts exist?

[Triggaaar]

I know people who aren't nuts or prone to telling lies who've seen ghosts.

No you don't. You know people who have said/believe they have seen ghosts.

 

[Wilko]

No you don't. You know people who have said/believe they have seen ghosts.

Exactly.

 

[Surrey_Albion]

Where the ghosts of all the bacon butties,hamburgers ect that have been eaten over the years or the ghosts of the Billions of dinosaurs?? The reason there's no proof of ghosts is because they don't exist, no life after death,heaven or god in my opinion so therefore no ģhosts either

 

[Triggaaar]

Where the ghosts of all the bacon butties,hamburgers ect that have been eaten over the years or the ghosts of the Billions of dinosaurs??

Quite. Billions and billions of past creatures, but no ghosts.

The reason there's no proof of ghosts is because they don't exist

Indeed. Yet so many still think they do.

 

[Bigtomfu]

I've had an "experience" though, went to pluckly with some mates about 10 years back to camp in the woods. I saw something I've struggled to reason with myself with, I dunno what it was, but the juries still out for me on ghosts. The kid in me would love to see something concrete.

Pluckley - the most haunted village in England?

What did you see and why wasn't your experience concrete enough for you?


My Nan claimed to be psychic - with a hit rate of maybe 1 in 13 which basically made Obika/Best/Barn Door etc look positively prolific - but I'd still say she had something in her prognostications.

 

[MattBackHome]

I love the idea of ghost prawns. Floating around the ether unable to get to the other side until they finish their prawn business.

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[Goldstone1976]

I love the idea of ghost prawns. Floating around the ether unable to get to the other side until they finish their prawn business.

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My main motivation for voting for the mantis shrimp in WHC the year it won was in the hope that winning would allow it to safely and permanently pass to the other side. I hope the little chap made it ok.

 

[Raleigh Chopper]

Of course they exist, they are everywhere, has nobody seen Most Haunted.
It's been on for years now and each episode usually turns up a ghost or two.
The fact that the cameras have never actually shown one yet is just unlucky but there has been a lot of orbs, moaning, keys rattling, doors slamming and people suddenly going cold.
What more evidence do you need.

 

[Me and my Monkey]

Where the ghosts of all the bacon butties,hamburgers ect that have been eaten over the years or the ghosts of the Billions of dinosaurs?? The reason there's no proof of ghosts is because they don't exist, no life after death,heaven or god in my opinion so therefore no ģhosts either

Bacon butty ghosts?! I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.

 

[Me and my Monkey]

Thats the one! The things you do as a college student eh. We were sitting around one Friday night and decided on a whim to drive up there and camp. The place is tiny, we drove through it twice before we realised that the little strip of road with the pub WAS Pluckey. This was before GPS and the internet mind.

We were driving through it for a third time and looking for the screaming woods, where we were planning on camping and were approaching the crossroads, supposedly this is roughly where the ghost of the highwayman kicks about. It was really foggy and had got dark by the time we arrived there, so the atmosphere was doing it's job and we had Godspeed on the stereo just to amp it up a bit. They're the dudes that were in the 28 days later soundtrack, if you've seen that, it's creepy music. The driver asks me to change the CD because it was freaking him out and I was sitting in the passenger seat, with all the CDs in the footwell. Just as I leaned over to pick some up, I thought I saw something move into the road in the fog. It was still like fog, but definitely denser, like.. it actually had a vague form or bulk, but It was in my peripheral so I didn't really see it with any detail. Anyway in the next second I had sort of dismissed it as fog and was already putting it out of my mind, when the driver slams his brakes on. As soon as he hit the breaks it occured to me that he must have seen something too. This all happens in the space of 1-2 seconds though, from me leaning over to the CDs, seeing something, dismissing it and then the brakes slamming on. I looked up but nothing was in the road and turned to the driver, we both just stared at each other for a second and then the guy in the back who was pretty stoned at this point leaned forward and asked what was up. We both just said 'nothing' and slowly drove on, parked up and went to camp. Neither of us spoke about it so I have no idea what he saw, but I've no idea what I saw either. I always figure it was nothing, just fog, but, I dunno. I know what fog is and I've never seen fog that has that sort of specific density in what I saw as at least a loose form. Can't bring myself to say "I saw a ghost" still, but it was weird whatever it was, even if it was tricks of the mind.

The rest of the night was pretty uneventful, lots of freaking each other out. We stopped in the pub which was tiny and had the classic old tankards hangiing above the bar along with one patron who probably never moved from his spot at the bar. The village itself is nothing, blink and you'll miss it. The screaming woods are pretty creepy, thin tall trees and quite sparsely planted, so your vision is right in that middle ground where you can see quite far, but theres always little obstructions everywhere. Nothing eventful happened for the rest of the night though and by about 2am we'd all settled around the fire and calmed down and were probably a bit too stoned to care. Quite fun though. I heard a podcast recently that talked about it and they were saying that most weekends there are tours and ghost hunts there now. I'm glad we went before any of that. They also mentioned the fog though and said it's almost always foggy there, I don't think there's anything suspect in that really, but what I saw in the fog has stuck with me until now. I'm quite rational and would consider myself a skeptic I guess, but that was weird.

Lovely tale of teenage shenanigans, but you'd probably be the first to admit you'd all got yourselves completely spooked out before the fog incident (except for stoned guy). The spookiest part of that tale for me was the unmoving bar man. One of the Undead for sure.

 

[Motogull]

On the other hand I used to work with someone who actually lived in the Tower of London (her dad was the in-house doctor for the Beefeaters). She said in all the time she lived there she had never experienced anything unusual.

Yup. I've got a slightly open mind but ultimately I think its bollocks. I had a feeling the fella I was speaking to was a bit of a story teller, but gave him the benefit of the doubt.

 

[Seagull]

Not seen any objective proof of the existence of ghosts.

However the mind operates at many levels and humans appear to be pretty attracted toward mystical thinking. So for me "ghosts" are a convenient metaphor, an easily understood anthropocentric cultural idea that can be used to describe experience.

Having said that, at least 3 people I know well have described experiences to me that they attribute directly to ghosts or spirits. In these cases, at the very least, they seemed to have sensed unexpected and unexplained changes in energy close to them. I witnessed the effect of one of these instances, though I didn't feel it myself.

 

[Arthritic Toe]

I think it's just an impression left in the ether as it were so not real but just a sort of mist left hanging. My neighbour was driving in the Lake District once and had to slow for a regiment of Roman soldiers on the road which he assumed was one of those re-enactments. After carefully passing them he checked the rear view mirror and there was nothing at all there. He is a pretty genuine bloke so I do believe him, however, he is a Watford supporter so you never know!

There's a good variation on this one where the Roman soldiers are walking waist deep in the road, and lo-and-behold, archaeologists then discover a previously unknown Roman road 3 feet below the surface.

The thing is this... Your (excellent) story has several possible explanations, each one has a probability of being true, ranging from highly unlikely to highly likely or anything in between. How you allocate these probabilities is highly subjective of course, but as with anything in life you base it on previous experience and weight of evidence. Here's some possible explanations for the Roman soldiers:

1. They were indeed on a re-enactment, and they had got together beforehand and for a laugh, had decided to jump into the bushes when a car passed to freak out the driver.
2. Your neighbour made up the whole thing. Maybe he just lies, or has an attention-seeking disorder that you don't know about (your probability here would vary depending on how well you know him, but for me - I don't know him from Adam).
3. Your neighbour was just mistaken. They weren't Romans at all - maybe just a walking group who had gone off on a path.
4. The Roman soldiers were ghosts
5. You misheard, or misunderstood your neighbour.
6. You have made it up.
7. Something else.

For me, number 4 only has a tiny probability of being the true explanation in relation to the others.

 

[burnee54]

Ooh, nutter alert everyone, we've caught one! Could get entertaining from here.

I don't care what you say or think of me, the truth still stands.I have seen and heard things that cannot be explained or rationalised.

 

[Triggaaar]

Bacon butty ghosts?!

I assume he meant the ghost of the pig the bacon came from.

I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.

No, it got ridiculous the moment a sane human said they believed in ghosts.

 

[Triggaaar]

I don't care what you say or think of me, the truth still stands.I have seen and heard things that cannot be explained or rationalised.

You've seen and heard things that you've been unable to explain or rationalise.

 

[The Kid Frankie]

'I'm not sure, they probably don't' is my answer. There is no conclusive proof that ghosts exist, nor is there proof that they don't. In this day and age how can there be in either direction? This is a subject matter that interests me greatly.

What interests me the most, is almost everyone has their own story or someone very close to them has had an experience. I really like and agree with [MENTION=4137]Arthritic Toe[/MENTION]'s list of explanations to explain the Roman soldier story. I have a colleague at work who regularly comes up to me and shows me YouTube clips of UFO's, ghosts, Bigfoot etc, always very interesting. But in every case he accepts 100% that it is real without truly thinking about it. We then almost always argue about the credibility of the footage, and my argument is always the same - what is more likely? A faked/CGI peice of footage of a Tudor era little girl walking down a corridor in a castle - or the long deceased apparition of a little girl appearing at that exact moment for the camera? 99.9% of all of the evidence on the internet is explicable in my opinion.

That all being said - the fact that there literally millions of stories and pieces of circumstantial evidence supports the possibility of ghosts existing. No smoke without fire and all that. I have personally had at least 10-20 very strange incidents happen to me that I would expect the average person to say '**** me that was a ghost...' In each case I have come to think that there was probably a rational explanation and I am more inclined to accept the rational theory rather than the 'dead persons spirit' conclusion.

Another interesting aspect to me is that I have spoken with people I have in the highest regard who are 100% convinced what they have seen and experienced WAS a ghost and there is no other rational explanation. My late father for example was a former serviceman, about as gruff and down the line as you could be in life - said completely unashamedly said that he and at least three other squaddies witnessed the full bodied apparition of a dead army officer walk through their barracks in front of them. I suppose even then you could attribute this incident to something more rational than a 'ghost' if you consider some less controversial but still un-proven ideas like Stone Tape Theory.

Bottom line is real or not it makes for some very interesting debates, and even more interesting stories. Would love to see a thread of ghost stories to read and contribute to on here.

 

[DumLum]

I don't care what you say or think of me, the truth still stands.I have seen and heard things that cannot be explained or rationalised.

I totally understand this. People posting on here and saying we need Ashley Barnes back.

 

[Wellesley]

I don't care what you say or think of me, the truth still stands.I have seen and heard things that cannot be explained or rationalised.

That's the spirit. I've got that bloody Smoky Robinson song on my mind now.

 

[The Clamp]

One rarely hears of ghost sightings in normally places. Most take place in spooky places at night where of course you are going to be hyper vigilant and jumping at shadows.
I'm sure believers would say because that's when you "tune in" but I would think mostly it's people working themselves up into a nervous state then scaring themselves.
I do love a good ghost story though. I saw a thing on YouTube in America of these two guys creeping around some backwood farm they freaked and drove off only to hear "a banshee/witch" screaming at them from the woods. Of course, it was all baloney but I was watching it at night on my own and I got myself very scared! It's all atmosphere, if I feel like that in my home it's no surprise people think they have seen or felt something paranormal when say, walking down a country lane at night after spending the night down the boozer.