I watched a fascinating account of a haunting of a family in Georgia shortly after trick or treating was over. The stories that are considered true are always the eeriest, much better than Halloween movie versions with the special effects.

So what do you think? Are there really ghosts?

Do you have a "true" (as in documented) ghost story to share?

I'll share later...

Put me down firmly in the "no" category.

I have seen similar polls elsewhere, and it seems that at least half of people believe in ghosts. This puzzles me, because the notion of ghosts seems to fit in neither with a non-religious philosophy, nor with mainstream religious philosophies.

May I ask those who believe in ghosts how that belief fits in with your personal philosophy?

Yes, I believe in them. There were a lot of old houses in Italy, and some people I consider to be very reputable told me things that chilled me. There were even two families that lived in a townhouse with an empty apartment in between theirs. They (supposedly) 'shared' a ghost.

There were several spooky stories, but a couple that were particularly chilling. One family left their house after a final incident. The man (a pilot) always wanted to keep the shower curtains open, and asked the wife and kids to keep it that way. One morning, he went back into the bathroom right after leaving and the curtains were closed.
He yelled to his wife,"Did you close the curtains?" She was downstairs. The kids were both sleeping in their rooms. He opened the curtains again, left the room. Came back and they were again closed. He opened them, shut the door, opened it, and they were closed and his Airforce pin, which had been resting on the bathroom counter, now securing the curtains together.

Edited to add: Sorry, Victoria, I don't analyse it that way. I simply believe many who have told me those things. Some were close personal friends who never concocted an outlandish story before, and certainly didn't seem prone to prevaricate. Also, other family members living in those houses had similar experiences.

Victoria,

Yep, I believe in "ghosts," but I refer to them as "spirits." Here's how this belief fits into my philosophy:

First off, we sense reality in very limited ways. Consider how animals see, hear and smell. They sense things far beyond our capabilities or imaginations. Caught a report on cats that revealed why most are not interested in TV. Their sight processing capability is far faster than humans', so all they see is a bunch of lines--no images. Some of the slower cats see something and might show interest in TV.

But that's not all. We use instrumentation to increase our sensing capabilities, but how can we design an instrument if we have no notion of a reality beyond our ken? In other words, we can propose something like "dark matter" in the Universe, but we have no concept of what it might be like. That makes it pretty hard to study let alone to bring up proof of dark matter's existence. We just theorize because the Universe needs more mass than what we've so far discovered.

Therefore, something like spirits could exist, but we have no means of proving this existence other than our own sensations, feelings, imaginations, and in effect, our own subjective interpretations of experience.

Now, have I ever met a spirit? Oh sure, lots of them, but they've always been within physical bodies. What about disembodied spirits?

Well, to tell the truth, I have. At least I think I have. Sure felt real, anyway. Could have been an illusion. But then all of existence is an illusion, according to some.

As far as that goes, guess we will all eventually find out. Meanwhile, what was that impression that just came in? Where did it come from? Was it a premonition, a warning or encouraging promise? Was that a spirit whispering in my ear, comforting me during hard times?

Why not. Even physics turns spooky as we dig deeper into the way things work.

I believe in spirits/ghosts because these folks "talk" to me. I've learned to listen. Just as with people, some are tricksters and ought to be avoided. Others seem to not know they are spirits, while a few are really very cool.

A brief story: We lost a cat recently. I could have sworn the cat came into the house, actually brushing against my leg. But he couldn't have. He was dead.

Or could he have? Was it just my imagination? Why would I have imagined that before knowing the fact of his death? It was just the routine morning thing that he always did.

Anyway, that sort of thing happens all the time now. Maybe I'm simply off the deep end? I don't know. As with so much of "reality," I just accept it.

I would have to say I don't know. I have seen no CONCLUSIVE evidence for or against there being ghosts. this fits very well into my personal philosophy, as an agnostic. (I'm an agnostic-dualist pantheist ( ) meaning I don't know if there is a god or not, but if there is it is an all encompassing energy force made of two equal, yet opposite, parts; yin and yang, good and evil, up and down, love and hate and what have you.) I think it is highly probable we don't know about everything there is to reality. I think that what we preceive is only a small part of the universe. there is so much I think we DON'T know about, so it is certainly possible there are ghosts or spirits without bodies, and eve a plane on which the exist, a spirit world.

as for my experience with spirits/ghost:

I have heard people singing while in the "honor seat" of a sweat lodge, (right in front of the stones) a woman, maybe two. there were only a few more people in there (my mom, my "aunt" two men and one woman my aunt knew.) the voices did not sound like any one in there. (higher voices, singing in an indian language) according to my "aunt" (who was a lakota spiritual leader (can't remember the actual term) there were two native american spirits behind me, (which is about where I sensed them) that were singing.

I have also seen a figure dart across the mirror in my room, while I was sober. I have also felt presences in the room with me.

Of course there are really ghosts. They are you and I,
without our physical shells....

When I was eight years old, a good friend of my mother's
passed away. He happened to have been an opera singer.

About a week after he died my mom and I were driving
in our car, listening to a rock station. Out of the blue,
an opera solo was heard from our car radio, several seconds
later it went back to the rock music we were listening to.

A couple of months later, in the middle of the night,
my mom was roused from her sleep by the sound of
a baby crying. She said, after the fact, she somehow
knew, it was her friend, being born again....

I do believe in ghosts, or spirits if you will.

I have sensed presences in the house where I grew up, which was built before 1910 and is the oldest house on the block. One school night as I was drifting off to sleep, I was suddenly very awake and aware of someone (without a form of any sort) watching me. The fear caused me to go downstairs and tell Dad, who said it was my spirit guide. I don't know who it was, but it was startling.

My old bedroom has an attic behind it. The kitchen had been added on to the basic structure and this attic was above it. There was a window at the end of it opposite the door. As it wasn't insulated, we played with our toys in the room when the weather wasn't too hot or too cold. But we kept the door to it bolted shut otherwise.

I would frequently have nightmares about someone or something trying to come through it, and I would climb into bed with Mom or she would sleep with me until I wasn't afraid anymore.

Around 1969 or 1970 I drew and painted on the wall against the attic a Pegasus rearing up on its hind legs and pawing the air, with a crescent moon and stars. It made my room a little more cool, I thought.

About four years ago, my brother saw an old man and his wife standing outside the house taking pictures of it. He asked them what they were doing, and the man said that he and his brother grew up in the house, and that he would like to go inside if it was okay. He said that his brother was born in the house. My brother agreed to let him in so he could look around.

As he and his wife were climbing the carved wooden staircase, he was reminiscing about his brother and how they used to think that a horse was trying to break down the door that led from (my) bedroom to the attic room at night. When the man got to the top of the stairs and looked into the room, his face blanched and he gasped. My brother thought that he might be having a heart attack. The man managed to say, "When was THAT painted?" gesturing to my rearing Pegasus mural. My brother explained that I had done it when I was a teenager. The man snapped a few pictures of my artwork and said that he just HAD to have his brother come and look at it...

There was the time when Mom and Dad went on their Saturday grocery shopping trip and left my brother and me in the house, and the toilet flushed itself. It scared us. We were downstairs and alone. I grabbed two big kitchen knives and yelled, "Whoever you are, we're coming up there!" sounding braver than I felt. My brother was protecting my back, so to speak. After a moment, we went upstairs. There was nobody there.

There have been times when I have heard, or rather felt, a disembodied voice telling me to go into the house or not to go into a place, and I have always obeyed it. It might be my guardian angel, I don't know.

These aren't all of the experiences I have had with presences. I do not consider myself psychic, just somebody who gets a word or feels a presence infrequently.

I do believe there are realms we cannot see, and presences that are here for good, for evil, and for reasons that are purely their own. It's easy to accept.

I believe in ghosts - though not in the sense that I think this was aimed at.
Tebaki (ghosts), or spirits with no host, are part of my religious belief - they are, in a sense, "Ronin" nature-spirits. However, the concept is very similar to the concept of Ghosts.... so yes. I believe.

I don't know. A lot of people who seem to be quite sane have had experiences that suggest they might exist. But with the absense of anything happening to me personally.. I just don't know.

To my personal belief system, the supernatural should never really reveal itself, because it would violate what I see as an essential element in faith, which is doubt.

No. I believe that the vast majority of ghost sitings and "experiences" can be explained by mundane science. Witness:

Infrasound article
Another infrasound link

The response has been postulated to be related to the use of infrasound by large predators - tigers emit bursts of infrasound as part of their roar, which is thought to help them catch prey by confusing and disorienting them, so it isn't unreasonable to think that predators on early humans did similar things and that a response of fear is an evolved reaction to the possibility of being eaten by a ruddy great sabretoothed cat.

Human eyeballs are all almost exactly the same size and resonate, like a tuning fork, at around the 19Hz frequency thought to be most strongly associated with "ghosts". A resonating eyeball is thought to cause spontaneous nerve impulses from the retina that are interpreted by the brain as indistinct shapes that move away when you look at them. Faces are particularly common - we know that humans are more-or-less hard-wired to recognise faces in otherwise random patterns (clouds, flames, patterns of shadows on Mars, etc), so it should be no surprise people see identifiable faces on the "ghosts.

Such a phenomenon could even explain why people think they "see" a particular "ghost" in a particular place. The specific aircurrents that create the infrasound will be caused by the specifics of the place - the position of walls, windows, doorways, etc. And, maybe a particular pattern of infrasound that makes eyeballs resonate in a particular way creates particular images in the brain, relating to a particular shape - an old woman, or a group of Roman soldiers.

Now, none of this means that the experiences of people that have seen ghosts are not valid. Their experience would be identical to seeing an external being that matches their description. However, infrasound is a more elegant description, as it explains the phenomenon of ghosts, including the anomalies (why some people don't see them, and why they aren't always "there"), without the need to invent reasons for them to exists that do not conform to Occam's Razor (they are nature spirits, they are echoes of traumatic events, they are the souls of the departed that still have things to say or that died under tragic circumstances, etc.).

So I believe in ghosts, although I've never seen one, but I also believe that they are nothing but a simple interaction of human anatomy and environmental circumstance.

Like most matters of belief, though, I don't imagine that anyone who believes ghosts are supernatural will agree with any of this, and if they do, it'll most likely be to the extent of understanding the physical mechanism by which spirits make themselves known.

Thanks for the post, Julian. That infrasound link was extremely interesting.

I do believe in God, therefore I believe in spirits. I believe God is a spirit and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. I don't know if this is still true or not, but if matter can not be created or destroyed only transferred, then doesn't it stand to reason that when a person dies, they are only changing into some other form of matter. I honestly don't know if that theory is still true, but regardless. I believe based upon my experience. I feel that only by experiencing that realm can a person believe, because there are somethings that are too wonderful for the mind to conceive on its own.

I believe in ghosts.

Why? Because there has to be another realm that we cannot see or penatrate that supernatural beings can.

I worked for awhile with a journeyman by the name of Harold W. who was a tad eccentric. Most of his co-workers agreed that he became that way when they left him at a work site in Freeland at the end of the day, and returned to Midland without him. Rather than placing a phone call, he walked the 8 - 10 miles back to the shop, and charged the company for the overtime. So far no problem...

Then however:

He started to turn on air conditioners in the winter, turn on the heat in the summer.

He started to empty ash trays from businesses and bring in the cigarette butts to fill up ashtrays and make it inconvenient for smokers.

Someone asked him one day to move to a different locker. No one ever discovered what building he moved it to, but he physically moved his locker somewhere else in the company.

He developed a passionate dislike for his wife and family, and said that he wanted to die on the job rather than retire. He acccepted a buyout offer one year, and died the same night he retired.

Then... We would go to the department van in the morning and find the windows down in the rain, the A/C turned on in the winter, the heat turned on in the summer... and we would blame each other.

This morning I took my daughter to school. Temperatures were in the low 40's, but the A/C in the car had been set to maximum, temp. to lowest setting, and fan to maximum. There was another cigarette butt in the ashtray. (It's happened before, although none of us smoke!) I had to avoid a couple of blocks of melting ice on the road. I'm a four hour drive from Midland! All I could think was "Okay Harold..."

My mother lived and worked in Italy with a woman named Bruna. She was a practicing witch, who made a bit of money on the side selling herbs to people for various things, including a lot of abortificant herbs (very popular in the Catholic country with few birth control options).

Anyway, my mom never took me to see her when we visited because (even though she swears she doesn't believe in this stuff), the family was afraid she'd put a spell on me. She kept all of my mom's old furniture in her apartment, and refused to hand it over to anyone. My mom's brother really wanted the furniture, but there was no way to get it.

She ended up dying, and my Uncle loaded the truck with my mom's old furniture from her house. The truck wouldn't go forward. He's a mechanic and owns his own shop, and he could find nothing wrong. He had to drive in reverse until he passed the town line, and then, mysteriously, his truck was able to drive forward again. He's never had a problem with it since. Weird stuff.

Why does there have to be another realm that we cannot see or penetrate that supernatural beings can?

Is it because it is the easiest way to explain phenomena that can be intepreted as the work or supernaturl beings, without having to do any investigation into what actually causes them? They may indeed be supernatural beings, but we won't know that until we investigate, will we?

The same rationale seems to be applied to those who explain UFOs as extraterrestrial visitations - the "U" stands for "unidentified". They could be little green men, but they could equally be errors of perception, recording, or memory by the observers, with considerably more corroborative evidence. Nobody likes to think that their senses are fallible, which is why David Blaine has a career.

My cousin used to rent out half of an old civil war mansion that was once used as a hospital. There were etchings of lincoln on one wall (class cased). In any case the side of the house she lived on had been exercised by a priest (sp? right word?) whereas the other side had not. The house was written up in haunted house books. There were stories where an old man (only his upper half) and woman had been seen by people living in the house. The old woman reportedly had once brought a child a glass of milk and some cookies. I can't vouch for the validity of those stories as I did not witness them and its been some time since I read the entry in the book my cousin had on the house. In any case though, my cousin who lived in the house's sister (my other cousin) awoke one night (she had spent the night on the couch downstairs) to the sound of ballroom music and glasses clinking etc coming from the other side of the house. She said it sounded like a old time party was going on. Nobody lived in the other side of the house, it was locked up tight by the family who owned the mansion. Since, this house has been sold and has been turned into a museum of sorts where they give tours. I'll ask my cousin what the name of it is and see if I can find a website or something on it. Haunted or not? I can't really say for certain BUT it definitely was a cool house.