What about ghosts anyway?

[Lance Payette]

There are no ghosts, space aliens, Bigfoot, Loch Ness monster etc.   It's just fun for some people to pass the time.  Cable TV is full of shows about all the above.  Very similar to those that believe in a JFK conspiracy.  It's more interesting to entertain such fantasies than accept the boring reality.  It's mostly harmless unless someone goes off the deep end.  My guess is that many people who purport to believe in such things actually do not.

Thank you, you are doing precisely what I described in my original post! "Ghosts" are an UNDENIABLE phenomenon. The issue is, WHAT IS that phenomenon? There are literally hundreds of thousands of credibly reported ghost experiences spanning all of human history. The best 1000 cases, with which I guarantee you are not familiar, involve multiple highly credible witnesses and/or essentially identical reports of the ghost by witnesses who neither knew each other or anything about the ghost until they saw it. Cable TV is emphatically NOT full of shows about the phenomenon. It is full of fame-seeking crackpots with tinny "ghost detectors" who would shit their knickers if they encountered the real, well-documented phenomenon. To deny the existence of ghosts as a phenomenon would call into question everything that humans report about anything.

A similar but much more recent phenomenon is the "alien abduction" phenomenon. I don't happen to believe the explanation is "aliens" who are "abducting" humans. I really have no good explanation. Nevertheless, the number of reports and the consistency of reports from around the globe, from American medical professionals to African tribesmen, cannot be dismissed as though the phenomenon simply didn't exist. Something is going that has been termed "alien abductions" because that's what many people insist has happened to them. The rational response is not "There ain't no such thing" but rather "What the hell is this phenomenon?"

WITHOUT EXCEPTION, across almost all the fields of weirdness, those who insist "There ain't no such thing" are completely uninformed about the phenomenon.

[Richard Smith]

Thank you, you are doing precisely what I described in my original post! "Ghosts" are an UNDENIABLE phenomenon. The issue is, WHAT IS that phenomenon? There are literally hundreds of thousands of credibly reported ghost experiences spanning all of human history. The best 1000 cases, with which I guarantee you are not familiar, involve multiple highly credible witnesses and/or essentially identical reports of the ghost by witnesses who neither knew each other or anything about the ghost until they saw it. Cable TV is emphatically NOT full of shows about the phenomenon. It is full of fame-seeking crackpots with tinny "ghost detectors" who would shit their knickers if they encountered the real, well-documented phenomenon. To deny the existence of ghosts as a phenomenon would call into question everything that humans report about anything.

A similar but much more recent phenomenon is the "alien abduction" phenomenon. I don't happen to believe the explanation is "aliens" who are "abducting" humans. I really have no good explanation. Nevertheless, the number of reports and the consistency of reports from around the globe, from American medical professionals to African tribesmen, cannot be dismissed as though the phenomenon simply didn't exist. Something is going that has been termed "alien abductions" because that's what many people insist has happened to them. The rational response is not "There ain't no such thing" but rather "What the hell is this phenomenon?"

WITHOUT EXCEPTION, across almost all the fields of weirdness, those who insist "There ain't no such thing" are completely uninformed about the phenomenon.

It's a lot of fun to believe in ghosts.  People are projecting a desire to be entertained, cope with boredom, tell stories, hope that there might be some type of life after death, deal with grief and loss.  Most of the fake spiritualists preyed on the grief of family members who wanted to communicate with their dead relatives.  Lots of different reasons.  For most people, they like to be scared.  That's why horror movies are a genre.  Who wants to be the guy around the campfire who says it's all nonsense?  And if ghosts are the spirits of dead people, then why do they haunt us with their clothes on?  Civil war ghosts are seen wearing uniforms etc.  A silly question but the answer might be revealing.  It's because that is the way in which the living conjure them up in their imagination or via hoaxes.