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The impulse to explain things before even verifying that they ever happened is strange to me. It's skipping a step. I know that most don't want to believe that people can be bad actors, but even if you assume they are not, you can't just take second hand testimony as evidence that something exists. Jumping to find possible explanations for things like apparitions, phantom voices or photographs of impossible things is a false start when it hasn't been established for certain that any of those things have ever happened.

 Luciferian wrote:
The impulse to explain things before even verifying that they ever happened is strange to me. It's skipping a step. I know that most don't want to believe that people can be bad actors, but even if you assume they are not, you can't just take second hand testimony as evidence that something exists. Jumping to find possible explanations for things like apparitions, phantom voices or photographs of impossible things is a false start when it hasn't been established for certain that any of those things have ever happened.

There's an interesting thing I noticed about the study I linked last page (the one about sensing the presence of a person who isn't there).

There are apparently a lot of studies into that topic, particularly where it concerns hikers and woodsman. They cite quite a few of them.

I think the issue isn't that a step is being skipped, but that people are working backwards from a conclusion when science is supposed to work forward a guess. In the case of actual studies on the topic, no one seems to have started with why do people experience ghostly phenomena. They start with what can cause people to hear things that don't appear to be there. Why is someone sure that there's another person near them when there isn't.

It's actually kind of silly when you think about it. Tackling the whole concept of ghost sightings and hauntings as a singular phenomena to be examined is an impossible task. How do you test for it? It's far simpler to break it down. Look at the pieces before the whole picture. Don't assume a house of cards. Build a model and test it every step of the way.

That's science.

There are a lot of studies on the psychological side that I think compellingly point to hauntings and ghost sightings by witnesses, when not hoaxes, are generally in the mind. The brain interpreting information wrongly, or environmental forces that normally mean nothing to use effecting our perceptions under the right conditions.

Which is probably why no one talks about it, because it's easily the most mundane of mundane explanations.

 Luciferian wrote:
The impulse to explain things before even verifying that they ever happened is strange to me. It's skipping a step. I know that most don't want to believe that people can be bad actors, but even if you assume they are not, you can't just take second hand testimony as evidence that something exists. Jumping to find possible explanations for things like apparitions, phantom voices or photographs of impossible things is a false start when it hasn't been established for certain that any of those things have ever happened.

Dear Lord.

Yes. There is likely no such thing as ghosts. People's testimony is unreliable. Everything is subjective. Empiricism is inherently flawed; and we only know two things:- viz; that we and one other mind exist in the world (in a given moment), and both minds occupy a universe with some commonality of existence. Nihilism triumphs.

Moving on from that, it can be fun to engage in speculative thought exercises around what could be potential (and at least nominally plausible) explanations for unexplained phenomena beyond 'They dun imagined it'. Otherwise the thread kind of just has the above statements posted, ends there, and doesn't constitute much of a discussion.

 Ketara wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:

Obvious answer? "Temporal glitches" only exist in fiction like Star Trek.
Real answer? Your mother had a bad dream.

I'm not entirely sure I'd trust the word of someone claiming my mother 'dreamt' taking a photograph in broad daylight with her best friend (who cross corroborates the story).

Regardless, I'm not asserting that 'temporal anomalies' ARE the cause of this sort of thing. Merely that if there is any basis in reality to 'ghost stories', that's the sort of thing I would expect to be behind it. Time and space are very strange things. Half of what we see in the night sky no longer exists, but you can look at and photograph it nonetheless. Current science certainly has a very rudimentary understanding of the field, and it's the logical place for further discoveries to be made.

I think many spiritualists would be severely disappointed however, if ghosts turned out to be something as mundane as the briefest glimpse of the past. It would excite a lot of historians, but put an end to many divine miracles, psychic mediums, and so on.

I think ghosts are more mundane that random temporal anomalies.

What happened to the photo?

I wonder whether any of these ghost photos could be explained by film manufacturers pre-exposing film to things to mess with people. The grey line mentioned earlier could just be a defect.

 LordofHats wrote:

There are a lot of studies on the psychological side that I think compellingly point to hauntings and ghost sightings by witnesses, when not hoaxes, are generally in the mind. The brain interpreting information wrongly, or environmental forces that normally mean nothing to use effecting our perceptions under the right conditions.

Which is probably why no one talks about it, because it's easily the most mundane of mundane explanations.

I'll be honest, it's probably the most talked about theory behind this sort of thing. You can't get three feet on the internet around a ghost story without somebody dropping in to say things along those lines. As the two threads in OT prove quite nicely.

Heck, I was one of them if you look back in the other thread.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Pink Horror wrote:

I think ghosts are more mundane that random temporal anomalies.

If there's one thing scientific paradigms prove; it's that something is always impossible until somebody does it/records it/sticks together a regular hypothesis about it. And often, it takes place in that order. At which point, it becomes ordinary, mundane, and commonplace.

Time and space are weird things. Certainly, I can't think of anything else that could plausibly explain 'ghosts' being real in some way without breaking every current law of physics known to man.

What happened to the photo?

She gave it to a friend who was big on paranormal stuff. He said he was going to get it published and change the world or something, and she never saw it again. Never took much of an interest either. My mother's a rather down to earth woman. As far as she's concerned, if that stuff exists, sure, if not, whatever. Meanwhile, she'll be off doing her own thing.

 Ketara wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

There are a lot of studies on the psychological side that I think compellingly point to hauntings and ghost sightings by witnesses, when not hoaxes, are generally in the mind. The brain interpreting information wrongly, or environmental forces that normally mean nothing to use effecting our perceptions under the right conditions.

Which is probably why no one talks about it, because it's easily the most mundane of mundane explanations.

I'll be honest, it's probably the most talked about theory behind this sort of thing. You can't get three feet on the internet around a ghost story without somebody dropping in to say things along those lines. As the two threads in OT prove quite nicely.

Heck, I was one of them if you look back in the other thread.

I guess what I mean is that no one really seems to want an extended convo about it. You know. Except for psychologists and the like who live and breath that stuff. In both threads where it's come up it's not gotten nearly as much attention as the more exotic ideas.

I mean let's face it. Ghosts being visions to the past caused by space-time anomalies sounds so much cooler than the brain crossing some neurons for a few minutes. The guy who studied infrasound explanations did it because a fan in the building he worked happened to produce the right sound wave. Who want's a horror story that ends with "and it was the fan all along!"

There's a distinct lack of romance XD

 LordofHats wrote:

I guess what I mean is that no one really seems to want an extended convo about it. You know. Except for psychologists and the like who live and breath that stuff. In both threads where it's come up it's not gotten nearly as much attention as the more exotic ideas.

Probably because there's not much you can say about it beyond the schpiel I just caveated about empirical experience. You do one post of that (or read someone else doing it), and that's sort of it. Unless you're a working psychologist with a research budget to burn, there's not a lot else to say or do on the topic. I mean:-

'He imagined it'.
'Yep, totally imagined it'.
'I reckon it was that thing where you see faces in things'.
'Yep, probably'.
'....wanna get lunch?'

Not the most stimulating conversation to have.

In all seriousness, if it turned out to be a space/time thing, it wouldn't really be that cool or interesting either once it was figured out. It would be like how you look up at dead stars at night. Mildly fun to think about for two minutes (ten if you're stoned), then onto other stuff.

Whoa whoa whoa. I am not saying that empiricism is worthless or everything is subjective. Quite the opposite. That which can be established through empirical data is the only type of information that can be said to have value when trying to find the "truth" of objective reality outside the confines of the subjective human mind. That human experience is subjective and fallible is precisely why science only seeks to deal with what is measurable and can be verified and repeated. It's why forensic evidence carries a greater weight than testimony in court.

It may be "fun" to engage in speculative thought, but it is not an effective way of finding what is true. LordofHats has presented a scientifically grounded explanation for why people experience these things, which may not be a "fun" explanation, but is more likely to be a "true" explanation compared to speculative exercises involving spacial anomalies or hitherto unknown properties of minerals.

Nihilism is the opposite of what I'm advocating. It's saying that empiricism has no value, and everyone's subjective experience is equally valid, so we may as well not engage with truth or any efforts to maintain objectivity, because those things don't exist. It's saying that someone who "dun imagined" something may as well have literally experienced it in a phenomenological sense. It's building an epistemology based on feelings and impressions rather than any kind of objective criteria.

I'll admit that I always liked the magnetic tape theory.

Luciferian, that is not what nihilism is. It's a belief that life is meaningless and limited to our time on this planet.

I don't imagine Nihilist would be remotely bothered by ghosts, beyond thinking, eh that was weird... but so is life. And then moving on to something else.

I think you might be looking for subjectivism, or its even more radical counterpart solipsism- which says the Matrix has you, and nothing that happens can be proven wrong, because everything we experience is filtered through our senses. As you said, it's really quite pointless.

Empirical evidence is the only way to add information to the natural world- because that is what science deals in. Right now, ghosts are not. If empirical evidence can prove or reveal their existence, then they will become a scientific fact.

Humans, however, are not creatures of fact. Many believe all sorts of things that have no basis in logic or science, and so ghosts and ghosts stories will always exist.

There's also the issue of reproducibility.

There are numerous phenomena studied by scientists that do not meet scientific requirements to call their existence 'fact' (astrophysics crawls with this) because confirmation by a second telescope was impossible, etc.

One of the biggest issues is there is very little field work done with ghosts due to the stigma attached to research in this field.

Which i always felt was a bit short sighted, as while there are many explanations as to what has been happening for centuries, there's very little work done to prove these hypothesis.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
One of the biggest issues is there is very little field work done with ghosts due to the stigma attached to research in this field.

Which i always felt was a bit short sighted, as while there are many explanations as to what has been happening for centuries, there's very little work done to prove these hypothesis.

That's actually not totally correct. As LordofHats pointed out. There is a lot of study on fields related to ''haunting'' in psychology. They have found numerous explanation for many phenomenon linked to haunting a bit in the same way, the same science (plus psychiatry and medecine) explored the phenomenon of ''possession''.

epronovost wrote:

That's actually not totally correct. As LordofHats pointed out. There is a lot of study on fields related to ''haunting'' in psychology. They have found numerous explanation for many phenomenon linked to haunting a bit in the same way, the same science (plus psychiatry and medecine) explored the phenomenon of ''possession''.

Yes, but rather than go do actual field work, most of these are done in the lab. While they are interesting, they don't actually prove or disprove anything. It runs on the simple conceit that, again, there's no such thing as ghosts, so it must be in their heads.

It's like in archeology, it doesn't matter what you do in the lab if you never go on site.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
Yes, but rather than go do actual field work, most of these are done in the lab. While they are interesting, they don't actually prove or disprove anything. It runs on the simple conceit that, again, there's no such thing as ghosts, so it must be in their heads.

I'd propose you're simply presenting a reverse of that conceit, that there is something at the location and no study can be valid if it doesn't happen on location.

Arguably, the results speak for themselves.

For over 100 years ghostly phenomena have completely defied the idea that just going to a location can produce anything. Nearly all video and photo evidence is a one off that fails to be reproduced (except when someone reproduces the image to reveal it as a fraud). Most verbal accounts are difficult to approach from a testable perspective. Arguably, the locations themselves hold no value. Just look at the other thread. People experience this stuff literally everywhere. That haunted locations exist seems to have more to do with marketing. I actually see little relation to this and archeology. Archeology is explicitly dependent on field work and is a field that grew and started with amateur academics and tourists going to locations, finding things, and working out the methods to handle that professionally. The same is true of ghost hunting, except that looking for ghosts out there has woefully failed to produce results. Studies and tests in controlled environments have not.

I think it's hard to judge research negatively for following results.

The only common denominator in purported hauntings is that the witnesses are people. It would seem to have something to do with us — how our brains work, how our culture works, how our language works — rather than a certain place, time period, etc.

 Manchu wrote:
The only common denominator in purported hauntings is that the witnesses are people. It would seem to have something to do with us — how our brains work, how our culture works, how our language works — rather than a certain place, time period, etc.

I want to know how any of that picked up a 65 pound cast iron fireplace insert and dragged it 10 feet in front of five witnesses.

I've seen all sorts of gak, and much of it can be explained by the theories you suggest. But that insert has baffled me to this day. Nothing else metal in the room moved, and we tore the walls, ceiling, and floor up looking for anything that could have been used to move it. No electro-magnets, no nothing.

Did you already post that story ITT or in the other thread? I’d like to read the whole thing.

 Manchu wrote:
Did you already post that story ITT or in the other thread? I’d like to read the whole thing.

I think I have told it before here someplace, but God knows.

This was a farm near Mercer PA about 1995. The farmer was having trouble getting the Amish to work for him because the place had developed a bad reputation after several amishmen had been hospitalized by 'something' assailing them with pots pans, throwing them off roofs, the usual poltergeist BS.

So we go out, he says that all the activity is out in his barn. So we did some research, nothing really horrific had happened there we could find, so we looked over the site, and someone had broken up a signature stone for the foundation of the barn but that was about it. So we put up some trail cameras, with regular film cameras, and stood around a while, since they said you could hear kids playing in the barn at night. (There were no kids for five miles, we checked) So we go in, and we're all sitting around the living room, talking, big, ornate Victorian fireplace, with the summer insert leaning up against the wall. Now, I dunno if you've ever seen one of these things, but it's a massive chunk of Victorian ironmongery. All of the sudden, this thing up and is drug, not lifted, but sits upright, and is dragged across the floor to the middle of the room, and then falls over.

Everyone could see everyone else. If you'd have done it with string or something similar, the way it had moved you'd have had to have pulleys on the ceiling. Two of us sat there and got his permission to tear the walls out (since he was going to do that anyway, hence his need for amishmen) while everyone else went and got prybars. If there was a technological or human agency, we'd have found it.


Honestly, we went out figuring nothing was there. And, we never did get anything in the barn. It was creepy, don't get me wrong, and some of us did hear some things in it, but nothing that was what might be termed proof.

Thanks for re-posting. So I take it you were a member of a paranormal research group?

 Manchu wrote:
Thanks for re-posting. So I take it you were a member of a paranormal research group?

Out of YSU's anthropology department. I was basically filling in for my mother who had a broken shoulder, so I would not call myself a 'member' but more like 'the gofer'.

BaronIveagh wrote:
It's like in archeology, it doesn't matter what you do in the lab if you never go on site.

Just dropping by to say that, as a working archaeologist, I think the people currently doing the most interesting work (or at least doing the stuff with the most potential for future research) never have any need to be on site. Some of them do anyway, because your university generally expects you to have an active excavation or ground survey, but they don't need to. So not a great analogy, I don't think.

Thinking about fieldwork in psychology and the paranormal - I'm not sure what more fieldwork you can actually do. People already carry out work in specific locations associated with transcendental/paranormal/religious/etc experience. Most of these things, however, are experienced in unpredictable locations so I'm not sure how you would go and do that. I totally stumped as to how you'd write a funding proposal for it!

nfe wrote:

Thinking about fieldwork in psychology and the paranormal - I'm not sure what more fieldwork you can actually do. People already carry out work in specific locations associated with transcendental/paranormal/religious/etc experience. Most of these things, however, are experienced in unpredictable locations so I'm not sure how you would go and do that. I totally stumped as to how you'd write a funding proposal for it!

More to the point, even if you could figure out how, it would never get approved. Ties into what I posted a few posts back about how 'everyone dismisses, but none of us have actually bothered to go and check ourselves'.

So here's an interesting tangent. What sorts of experiments could we design to begin investigating for evidence of any form of 'ghost' activity?

I suppose cameras at 'most haunted spots' with neutral postdocs checking the footage frame by frame over a period of weeks would be the most obvious place to start. It would be so bloody labour intensive though, that you'd need some serious funding.

 Ketara wrote:

So here's an interesting tangent. What sorts of experiments could we design to begin investigating for evidence of any form of 'ghost' activity?

I suppose cameras at 'most haunted spots' with neutral postdocs checking the footage frame by frame over a period of weeks would be the most obvious place to start. It would be so bloody labour intensive though, that you'd need some serious funding.

An experiment I always dreamed was to seal the Rhodes Farm at GBerg and let cameras run for a month.

So the fire place insert incident occurred in front of a group of state university researchers? Surely there was some follow up?

 Manchu wrote:
So the fire place insert incident occurred in front of a group of state university researchers? Surely there was some follow up?

If there was I wasn't involved. I went off to Doctor White's coke furnace dig next. Man could drink a gallon of beer in a sitting, so was interesting, but not exciting. Beat dealing with Dr Fry.

I don't really think that "ghosts" as we know the phenomenon are real, any more than spiritual possession is real.

However, I find it an interesting mental exercise pondering that there might indeed be some sort of supernatural facet to life that is currently beyond our ability to accurately describe or quantify. It's entirely possible that such "supernatural" qualities could be explained by science that we do not possess.

I mean, there's a helluva lot of strange occurrences out there that are impossible to explain. For example, how is it possible that certain types of mental trauma can give people attributes that are not explainable through normal means. English-speaking person is in a car wreck and goes into a coma. Upon rising from coma, either speaks in a completely different accent (sometimes even described as perfect by native speakers of that accent) or even in a different language which they have no prior level of learning in. Apart from the fact that accents can be imitated, having a working knowledge of another language? That's just.....weird.

 BaronIveagh wrote:
If there was I wasn't involved.

And you never followed up on this?

I mean, here we have something really anamolous witnessed by several credible bystanders in the course of university funded research — and nothing came of it? Your mother never mentioned anything more about it? Did you ever inquire?

 Manchu wrote:
And you never followed up on this?

I mean, here we have something really anamolous witnessed by several credible bystanders in the course of university funded research — and nothing came of it? Your mother never mentioned anything more about it? Did you ever inquire?

I don't think it went anywhere. I stopped there once and asked, and was told that in 2004 they had talked about a follow up, but then Gary Fry was enmeshed in scandal and given the choice of resign or be fired by the board, following his convictions, and John White retired, then died shortly thereafter.

You mentioned this was out of the anthropology department. What was the specific nature of the field research into this site? Were either of those professors actually looking for ghosts?

 Manchu wrote:
You mentioned this was out of the anthropology department. What was the specific nature of the field research into this site? Were either of those professors actually looking for ghosts?

The farm sat on a site that had been producing artifacts ranging from Clovis to the War of 1812.. So, potentially we're talking 11,000 years of continual habitation. Aerial photographs suggested there may have been a village site in one of the western fields. The Farmhouse itself sat on the foundations of a war of 1812 era tavern, where Perry's men had camped directly opposite the farmhouse on their way to Erie. I suspect that it was a case of 'Sure we can look into it if you just give us permission to dig'. I was told that Penn State had also been inquiring after the site but couldn't get permission.

They never did dig though, so...