Does anyone here believe in ghosts?

[user1464187087]

As per the title, does anyone believe in ghosts?
I have had a couple of things happen in my life that were very strange. Has anyone else?
And it makes a nice change from talking about Bonnie Blue. 😀

No.

My experience terrified me. I often heard steps on the stairs as a teenager but said i was imagining things. I said a female walked into my parents room. Their door was closed.
Told them years later what i saw expecting them to say dont be so silly. They didn't they just went white ......

For those who asked; this is a leprechaun. Utterly terrifying.

I don't believe in ghosts, as in "dead humans hanging around", but I do think that we don't fully understand our world and that things existing in other dimensions that we can't fully perceive may sometimes have an effect on our world and cause things we can't fully explain.

I used to live in a lovely old building, a huge mansion that had been broken up into several huge flats. Massive rooms, high ceilings, set back from the road with a private car park and garden. The rent was insanely cheap for how nice the flats were. I loved that flat and lived there for 5 years.

I also had depression during that time, and frequently had nightmares about someone trying to break in. The same dream every time, I'd be trying to close my front door with someone else on the other side pushing bag against me and banging on it. If I managed to "close it" the door would swing through the frame like it was double hinged and then I'd have to swap to pulling it closed. I'd get stuck for hours swapping between pulling and pushing desperately trying to get the door in the frame long enough to turn the locks.

After a couple of years my depression got worse, I started hearing voices and hallucinating, and ended up under outpatient psych care. My mental health got worse, and so did my physical health, and I started to need a wheelchair to get around. Since my flat had a few stairs leading up to the bathroom and bedrooms (built on a steep hill) I decided to move.

The dreams stopped immediately. So did the voices and hallucinations, and within 6 months of moving I was off my antidepressants and antipsychotics and discharged from my psych team not much longer after that.

I've never had any mental health issues since then and it's been well over a decade. I only moved a couple of streets away to a step free (much smaller and darker and more expensive) flat so it's not like I had the benefit of getting away to a new area and a new daily life.

I've refused to set foot in that old building since. The owners struggled to retain tenants and ended up selling it to the NHS to use as an assisted living facility. I'd be very interested to see the patient notes for people in that place and see if anyone else had similar issues.

I’m open minded. Not seen anything myself but I think there may be something between life and death

A former colleague told me he had seen a ghost of a young girl in his apartment. I didn’t really know what to say, he wasn’t somebody to mess around and he was being totally serious. The apartment had been built over an old train line and there had been a crash and fire, he said the girl was burnt and she walked through the apartment

I bought an old rectory (I wasn't bothered by the church yard as I had been a chorister) and the first night something woke me.
Three months of no sleep and waking at the same time was sending me nutty.
I went to the village fayre and the first local to meet me asked if I'd seen 'him' yet? It turns out many people had seen a male ghost and tradesmen wouldn't work on the house.
By the Christmas I was beside myself and tried to get some answers from the neighbours. It was a well known story. I had two medical people stay at the house who wouldn't stay again. In desperation and 6 months pregnant I called in a medium. She gave me a full report.
Turns out my family was related to a previous Rector. I had no idea. I called in the Roman Catholic priest who didn't think I was nuts and it settled down until we left. I couldn't sell for love nor money for years. The family I sold to have been there for twenty years and have written about it. I wouldn't step foot in there if you paid me.

I'm on the fence about it. I haven't had an experience myself and wouldn't want to but I suppose I'm naturally sceptical.

We are relying on anecdote and no other evidence. I don't think people are making up their experiences but we have no proof of ghosts and definte proof that people can hallucinate, rewrite their memories unintentionally, experience paredolia, be affected by infrasound etc etc. Having said that the number of people that say they have had an experience means something is going on, even if "ghosts" are created by our own brains. There is a lot we don't know about us and about the universe.

I suppose part of my skepticism comes from not wanting to believe. I think it would be unbearably sad to think some souls were permanently stuck even with examples on this thread saying they don't belong here or a burnt child walking through a building forevermore. Why do so many ghosts follow traditional archetypes e.g. the victorian child, the roman soldier, the old man smoking and not the caveman ghost, the 1960s hippie etc?

That said, Uncanny is my favourite podcast and I find the TV programmes they have done genuinely scary. I love their open minded discussion and the fact that so many people have felt comfortable to share their experiences.

But the most fascinating thing about this thread has been the number of people that don't know what a leprechaun is!

@Secretsquirrel2what settled down? You haven’t given much detail as to what was going on.

That’s a US marketing campaign.

The footsteps, the door handles moving.
People seeing something on the stairs.
In 1982 they pulled a skeleton out of the wall when doing renovations.
It still scares me so I don't talk about it IRL.

It’s a representation of a leprechaun, no better or worse than any other given that leprechauns are completely fictitious.

You can't leave us hanging like that! What happened???

I once had a guy introduced to me after an ayahuascha ceremony (in Ireland) like this- "This is Henry. He channels the chief leprechaun of Ireland"
The funny thing was that, because he had been making such weird distorted faces and sort of cavorting about about during the ceremony, my first thought when being told this was "Aha, that makes sense".

Yes, I believe in life after death and I don't know it's true form..

I love threads like these and hearing all the spooky stories!

Of course leprechauns are fictitious in the sense that folklore is fictitious. But no, that’s considerably ‘worse’ than, say, engravings from 19thc folklore studies which depict leprechauns as generic gnomes/brownies/goblins, because it taps into a whole hard-drinking Irish stereotype, and generally into traditional anti-Irish prejudice. Leprechauns in folklore are just small, solitary fairies, often associated with shoemaking and minor pranks. They don’t have red chinstrap beards, get into fights, or have large beers as an accessory. They don’t appear in slasher films.

Yes, but not the demonic evil kind beloved of horror films and tv shows.

There's been several times when I've been in the presence of one. It freaked me out a bit the first time, but not because I ever felt threatened. On one occasion it was more scared of me than I was of it.

I've never actually 'seen' one, just been aware of their prsence, but I know three totally unconnected people who have. A family friend saw a woman in his old house, a chap at work who saw a man in the reception area, and my dd who one day at the age of about 5 came out with 'Mr Nobody has gone'. When I asked what she meant, she described the man who often sat at the top of our stairs all the time but wasn't there any more.

Imagining a tiny man in a green suit in the dock 😂 🍀

OK, noted. But they don’t haunt people in their university bedrooms or get arrested by the police either!

Tell me you’re completely ignorant of anti-Irish prejudice without telling me you’re completely ignorant of anti-Irish prejudice. Well done.

@GameOfJones I was an ordinary sceptic too. You don't believe in all that nonsense until it happens to you.

The way I look at it is that even top physicists don't know how many dimensions there are. And one of the basic laws of physics is that energy cannot be destroyed, it changes from one form to another.

Yeah I have to say I really dislike the whole ´leprechauns’ image of Ireland that is marketed to tourists even by Irish people themselves. Those Paddywagon buses 🙄. Leprechauns, also known as the little people, as a PP has noted are a type of Irish fairy along with banshees and the pooka. They’re not ghosts so unlikely to be haunting you or be up in the crown court.