hubby says he has seen a ghost five times so far.

[lowresidue]

Hubby has taken our dog to a local wood, and lets the dog go for a run.
He goes at different times and different days.
He came home and told me that he has seen the same woman ghost five separate times so far. Tonight with bonnet wearing woman made him jump when she popped up in front of him. When he said 'you made me jump', she smiled nodded and walked away from him.

He was quite serious but I asked why he thought she was a dead/ ghost? He said because she is wearing a long coat and a bonnet type hat.
AIBU to suggest that this woman isn't dead, isn't a ghost and is an odd lady with a strange fashion sense?
He is quite firm she is a ghost, and walks along the path but not on it though the trees.

personally I am glad we are going on holiday soon my hubby really needs it asap.
Then again AIBU?

Hate the word "salivates"!

Littledid

It's probably fruitless to try and come up with a comprehensive "system" to explain "ghosts".

Some people have reported shapes, mists, shadows, prophetic dreams, voices... No one's saying "All ghosts conform to this rule."

@AlleyCat1 and @StorminaBcup no it was on the A35 puddletown to Dorchester, part of the portway roman road

*I am very careful to judge people with their experiences as everything doesn't necessarily have a logical explanation

But too often people feel that if there currently isn't a logical explanation that it has to be supernatural. Not that we just don't have it yet. So far everything we thought was woo that' we now understand has turned out to be physics/biology/chemistry etc such as electric/stars/epilepsy and so on. (To be fair even Jesus thought epilepsy was demon possession!)

It reminds me of the god of the gaps. And it seems to be what is happening here. That the area that the supernatural inhabits is becoming smaller and smaller.*

Exactly what I was trying to say when you started on about unicorns and pixies!!! 😕

BertrandRussell You have a really snotty, dismissive, superior tone about you.

You dismiss 'ghosts' as impossible. You refuse to offer any possible explanation by saying you weren't present. Yet you have never been present for any of the times anyone says they believe they have seen something they thought was a ghost but feel you can dismiss them all.

I would prefer to find a rational explanation for what happened. DH and I can rule some things out that are often possibilities:
Not sleep paralysis- we were wide awake and active
Not expecting something spooky and looking for it - just washing up in a very nice, comfortable place
Not believers- we don't believe in ghosts and had not been discussing anything like that
There was no curtain to 'billow' at that window as it looked out onto a private walled garden
No mirror in the room
No tv in the cottage
No portraits on the walls that might have reflected
Not a hoax- we were the only people staying on the whole estate- the owners had gone back to England for a month. We had 25 acres to ourselves. I suppose a possibility is someone from the village 3 miles away played a trick on is but I can not think how or why they could have done so.

We have wondered could it have been something else which we then saw as a person- pareidolia- but we can not think that is the case as it was so clear and it was 'walking' across the room and wearing an outfit that we could see. There was nothing 'ghostly' about it/her. Not pale or translucent or wearing old fashioned clothes. She looked solid and real and normal, as if she was just walking across to the bedroom/bathroom. We thought she was real- that was our immediate reaction.

I remember DH saying 'Where did she go?' when we turned round and me saying 'There' and pointing to the bedroom/bathroom corridor. He went straight and looked and I followed him and stood at the door. It just felt really odd because why would someone walk into a cottage and past the people staying there into a bedroom? If she had that would be weird in itself

When there was no one there we questioned each other about what we had each seen. We both said a woman, described her hair, approximate age, height, what she was doing, where we thought she was behind us, what we could see she was wearing. So perhaps that could be seen as collusion in terms of sharing info which we then both thought we remembered. I recall DH saying 'It was like she did not see us' and me feeling scared by that. DH tried to be Mr Practical 'It must have been the light', 'Maybe a bird flew past the window' but he was scared.

DH went into the walled garden to see if there were any tall plants which might have caused an effect in the window- there weren't. There were 3 stone steps down into the garden from the kitchen and I could barely see the top of his head in the window so we ruled out someone actually walking in the garden- if they had climbed the 8ft walls to get in. What we saw was behind us, not infront of us.

Just bizarre. We have had no other experiences we haven't been able to explain which is also why it makes me uncomfortable.

The point is that every single time a ghost sighting has been properly investigated, it has turned out to have a rational explanation. There has never been one that remains unexplained. And the explanations I gave are the usual ones. There are others of course. And nobody who wasn't there can say what's happening at any individual incident. But there will be a rational explanation. Because there always is. I'm sorry if you think that's snotty or dismissive. But it's just how it is.

If a skeptic wanted to be truly accurate about what they were saying, then instead of saying "there are no such things as ghosts or the supernatural."
They would have to say "to the best of my knowledge, there are no..."

In science we cannot make unconditional statements without acknowledging the limits of the knowledge/evidence known either by the person or the broader scientific community.
It is considered impossible for one individual to have reviewed every last scrap of evidence and information on a topic, thus its bad science and inaccurate to state or imply otherwise.

To make a statement without the qualifier "to the best of my knowledge" (or similar) claims user omniscience, in which case the person is either 1. a liar, 2. a supernatural being with powers of omniscient or 3. a deity.
The last two rather undermine a skeptics point of view though!

Sorry about typos etc, typing whilst on hold with some truly atrocious music. Will definitely be coming back to haunt whoever picked that

Please @lowresidue do tell us if there's an update! I'm dying to know if your hubby is able to photograph Bonnet Lady (or introduce you to her)

It’s so interesting - genuinely, that’s not a euphemism - that people can feel offended by people questioning the reality behind claims of the reality of ghosts.

I understand that, and nobody is being a called a liar. But it must be obvious that that ghost-belief is a way of living a life, an expression of a view of the world and the big unknowns that we are all curious about and often fearful of. It’s a belief system. It’s ultimately religious in nature.

I don’t knock that. But I do challenge claims made on the basis of it. Just as I am dubious, to say the least, about the claims of faith healers, of whatever faith.

"There are more things on heaven and earth" fits quite well here.

Okay, please add "to the best of my knowledge" to my post above.

To the best of my knowledge, no one sees buildings or dinosaurs randomly popping up on the street and vanishing again, or phantom poos in the toilet.

There has never been one that remains unexplained.

You mean except for all the ones people have mentioned? On this very thread?

How can random encounters be 'properly investigated'?

You don't engage properly with other people's ideas.

And if we can routinely mistrust the evidence of our senses, where does that leave your meticulous evidence-based world view?

“You mean except for all the ones people have mentioned? On this very thread?“

I do say “that have been properly investigated”. Does it not give you pause that every time a supernatural event is investigated it turns out not to be supernatural?

And yes, of course we should mistrust the evidence of our senses- our senses and our memories are famously crap. Tha’s why proper investigation relies on neither!

I really don't know about all these official investigations you keep citing.

All I mean is that people have loads of unexplained experiences. These aren't things that can be 'investigated'.

But even your proper investigations will require observation of data by people, using their eyes, ears and brains. You're suggesting we can't rely on our faculties. What now?

AnxiousPeg

If a person accuses you of a crime because they’ve mistakenly but honestly identified you, but you can show by, for example, airline tickets, CCTV, mobile phone records, cash withdrawals etc, that it couldn’t have been you, don’t you think the witness evidence ought to be challenged?

Just because someone thinks they saw something is not incontrovertible evidence. Particularly when what they’re saying has no other reliable basis whatsoever.

Aye, but if each ghost has lots of different manifestations, the whole place would be hoaching with them: all the billions of people who've ever died, all in lots of guises. You'd not be able to swing a cat

^^This.

*In science we cannot make unconditional statements without acknowledging the limits of the knowledge/evidence known either by the person or the broader scientific community.
It is considered impossible for one individual to have reviewed every last scrap of evidence and information on a topic, thus its bad science and inaccurate to state or imply otherwise.

To make a statement without the qualifier "to the best of my knowledge" (or similar) claims user omniscience, in which case the person is either 1. a liar, 2. a supernatural being with powers of omniscient or 3. a deity.
The last two rather undermine a skeptics point of view though!*

Well said!

I don't believe in ghosts, though I do think if such a thing exists it's possible there's more to 'energy' in a scientific sense than what we understand. I can imagine it's possible that pain and trauma could leave an imprint on a place somehow that can be sensed long into the future, but see this as scientific rather than spiritual.

Aye, but if each ghost has lots of different manifestations, the whole place would be hoaching with them: all the billions of people who've ever died, all in lots of guises. You'd not be able to swing a cat.

Why would you think that? They don't appear very often or for very long before they disappear. Perhaps they can only manafest as one image of themselves at a time. There are millions of reports of sightings etc bit the place isn't "teaming" with them just now.
The point is no one knows. People have so many theories and people have all different experiences not just sightings of ghosts. It's impossible for anyone to say they definitely do or definitely don't exist.
I am very much a believer bit believe me I wish I wasn't. I would absolutely love for someone to prove it was all bullshit so I could sleep easy in my bed at night but they can't.

I would absolutely love for someone to prove it was all bullshit so I could sleep easy in my bed at night but they can't.

Science can't prove negatives. It can't prove things don't exist. What I can say is that there is nothing that is constituted as evidence for the existence of woo.

As for sleeping well at night, it's like the original Scooby Doo, the bogey man is actual a human, the things that scare us are human, be that others or even ourselves.

Plimmy

I have not suggested any of the evidence people have cited is 'incontrovertible'. Challenging it seems fine. Confidently stating every instance is 100% untrue is not quite the same thing. In fact, your court of law thing is an interesting comparison. Not every conviction is based on 'scientific' evidence; sometimes people's experiences are believed, even when what they are saying has quite big implications for the guilt and therefore life of another.

Of course we should look for rational explanations.

But the definition of rational changes depending on our level of knowledge.

Scientists may discover that consciousness works differently from how we currently understand it. There may be ways, that can be explained by future science but not current science, in which people can share information subconsciously; that might explain the group hallucination thing, for example. Then all the people saying "it must havd been a curtain billowing" might need to accept that the rational explanation is one that previously they would have considered fanciful.

I am speculating of course, but I'm interested in why some pp think our level of knowledge will always stay the same, or that new discoveries about the nature of the world must necessarily conform to certain ideas. Ideas and theories change.

This is not remotely like believing in the sleep fairy or whatever. It's about trying to rationslise the many currently unexplained experiences of many people. But yes, it does start from a position of, on the whole, believing people when they say that, out of a lifetime of normal, unremarkable experience, they have one inexplicable experience that they can't get their head around.

Seems fairly reasonable to me.

At some point, we do have to trust our senses. Even the sceptics do that. There are countless things that we all just accept.

Yawn. All scientific truths are contingent, and potentially replaceable by evidence. Some, for example, evolution, are extremely unlikely to be replaced. But there are probably plenty that will be replaced if/as scientific knowledge expands into new areas

Of course there is a rational explanation for seeing ghosts. Potentially, the explanation could be that there really is such a thing as the disembodied spirits of dead people, if science comes up with a way of measuring such things.

It hasn't yet.

There is, however, the ghost experiment reported in the Telegraph a few years ago.

Tom
Sorry, if the discussion is boring you so much, you know what to do.

You come across as very rude.

I apologise.