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?

I'm a bit late to the party but this is what happened 30 years ago in Majorca.
Dh, Ds then a baby, myself and my niece who was then about 10, staying in an old, typical Spanish Majorcan house on the outskirts of the village.
The two cleaners arrived on scooters and as we were not ready to leave the house we went to drink tea, on the balcony, overlooking an harbour.

I glanced through the French Windows and saw a very old lady dusting the big fireplace, I mentioned to my husband that she looked very old to be a cleaner and he looked and said that it was probably one of the girls Grandmas helping out. We watched her for a while, her grey hair was in a low bun, she was dressed in a long black dress and had what I can only describe as a white, lace hanky on her head, with one corner coming down over her forehead.
I wanted more tea and looked in and saw that the floors had been mopped and the girls were chatting and mopping down a corridor near the front door. There was a bedroom off the main living room and as I passed I looked in and the old lady was smoothing the sheets on the bed.

The next time the cleaners arrived, after they'd been cleaning about 15mins my Dh asked one of them if their Grandma was not helping today. She looked confused and was shaking her head and he thought that she hadn't understood, so left it. She went running to the other cleaner and the next minute, the door slammed with buckets left and beds not made and the scooters took off.
We both thought, what the hecks going on, Dh said that there must have been an emergency or something. Anyway, I sorted the beds out and quickly tidied round.

Suddenly there's knocking on the door and the Spanish Rep had turned up, we thought to apologise for the disruption earlier but she said that the cleaners had come to the office and said that they wouldn't clean the house any more because of something Dh had said.
So Dh said that he didn't want to get the cleaners in trouble but one of their Grans had been helping them to clean and he'd only asked if she wasn't helping today.
The Rep was wide eyed and asked us what the woman looked like and we described the old lady. She just said, my God it's the Doctors wife, we just wondered what she was going on about.
She said that the house was the village Doctors house, he had died maybe 20 years ago but his wife lived there many years on her own and refused to move out and live with any relatives.

She had died the year before at eighty-odd and her children, who were all Doctors living here there and everywhere decided to rent the house out so that they could have holidays there.
The Rep questioned us if we were playing a practical joke on her, or if we knew who had owned the house but we assured her we knew nothing about it and had not spoken to anyone local apart from in Restaurants to order food.
She said that she didn't know what to say but she didn't think she would find any cleaners for us until we went home and we'd have to manage.

She also said that she would have no cleaners before the next people arrived and made us feel quite guilty.
Weird but true!

That's very interesting BuffyBee. I clean houses and only one has ever given me the 'creeps'. It was an old cottage (over 300 years old) and it used to annoy me as bits I had cleaned would get dirty again within seconds of me cleaning.
Little dusty spots with black flecks all over the counters. I thought it was just insects as there were cracks in the walls in the kitchen.
If a ghost was trying to scare me, it had no chance.
I've been on ghost hunts and nothing freaks me out. In the meantime other 'ghost hunters' are screaming and jumping around and literally crying in fear.
I wish I could see a ghost, I'd love it!

I apologise

Well, I guess that's ok then

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!

There's many reason why someone might think they've seen a ghost. Yes, some people exaggerate and lie but this is the case wether someone is talking about ghosts or how much they earn. But there are many reasons why they might erroneously interpret a natural phenomena as supernatural.

To suggest someone didn't see a ghost isn't to call them a liar. It's merely using Occam's razor of probability.

Ok, quick google- the population of early hominids if Africa (as an example) is estimated to have varied from 10,000 to 100,000, with an average of 50,000 at any one time.
Current population of Africa is 1,216,000,000.
This may help explain why there are less sightings of ghosts of early hominids/ cavemen: there were way, way, less of them!

Bertrand- can you link to some of the investigations that have proven the cause of “ghost sightings” please? I’ve seen lots that haven’t found anything and have hypothesised potential causes of experiences, but none that definitively prove these hypotheses (obviously these would be very difficult to prove, especially when the investigation takes place at a different time to the sighting). Thanks

Yeah. And add to that there were about 10 million in the uk in 1801. And 62 million by 2011 which explains why most ghosts seen are in 70's clothing and not that of the 19th century like bonnets and such.

No wait... 🤔

Are most ghosts seen in bonnets? Or just this one? Not sure figures have been collected for this...

The logic behind the mentioning of cavemen was the propensity for ghosts to be olde worlde in their clothing.

Again it's about the propensity. Not that there are no claims of shellsuited ghosts.

A quick skim through this thread doesn’t bear out the idea that supposed ghosts are all in 19thC rather than 20thC clothing.

@headinhands I’m still not sure where you get the idea that there’s a propensity of 19th century ghosts though? This isn’t something there’re statistics for!

My guess is because the mental picture that leaps to mind when you hear ‘ghost’ is often ‘Victorian clothes, looking sad and spectral’, thanks to Victorian ghost-story-mania. It’s not the kind of ghost most common in threads of anecdotes like this, though, so why people are continuing to insist that these sort of ghosts are predominantly Victorian-looking is a bit puzzling.

To suggest someone didn't see a ghost isn't to call them a liar. It's merely using Occam's razor of probability.*

Not quite the point, or application, but if it works for you...

I'm not taking my data from this thread. The trend is in media and culture. It's probably down to people thinking ghosts are more likely to haunt older buildings and therefore the ghosts are of the same time. I don't know why, I said earlier down I'm not sure why a Victorian man/woman is the 'poster ghost'.

It's probably wise to point out the even if the ghosts were spread out statistically correctly in terms of deaths in that year it wouldn't say anything about the truth behind the claim.

Yes, I think as @53rdway suggested, there is a preponsity in literature and pop culture for ghosts to be portrayed as being from that era, but this doesn’t seem to tally with reported sightings, which seem to span ages and eras.

My dad who is very straight laced and aalways the logical one told me of a time when he was touring in Canterbury they had been out in town and were walking down an alleyway and one of his colleagues let a yelp out and legged it. They stopped shocked thinking there was a threat (ex military) and seen literally just a pair of what he described as cavalry type boots walking along the road but appeared sunk in by a few inches and then walking through a garage door. He couldn't explain it.
My FIL also very level headed works at an old grain mill. (Very old with the old water wheel etc.) He pulled up in the lorry one night with a Colleague to find the grain store on fire. They run up to it panicking thinking people might have been in it. They couldn't get near with flames etc and stood back. His colleague said God there's someone walking out. He said he seen a strange shaped figure almost too big to be human walking down some steps out of the flames. FIL told him he was mad. They were walking back towards the lorry waiting on help to arrive and he said he then seen a bizarre looking figure running toward their lorry and appeared to get into it. They followed straight down thinking it must be the same person and it was an arson type thing. There was no one at the lorry at all. Not a sinner. Cab was still locked and so were doors. He can't explain it either.
I still sit on the fence with stuff but have had a few weird things happen to me also but no direct sitings.
My eldest got in a right tissy one evening about 7pm. I had just bathed the baby and my eldest was in the babies room waiting on us. She came running down asking where daddy had went. I said sure he is drill at work. She said no he is home. I thought i must not have heard him come in. He wasn't there. I told her this again and she started to get cross and cry and say mummy he is he was just talking to me!! And said she was in the baby room and he shouted in hello to her and they had some type on conversation that I can't remember.
At that very moment our cat went ape shit hissing and all and bombed down our stairs like a bat out of hell. Coincidence maybe.
Around same time I woke up to someone I thought breaking into the house. I lay in bed in absolute panic listening to the side door banging and rattling and then the sound of footsteps jumping down off utility room bench and scuffing on the floor and more noise. At this point I shot out of bed as I I knew they were in the house and woke hubby up. He heard the noise too and we went downstairs (crazy I know)
The noises stopped and plucked up the courage to finally go into utility room and cat was sleeping peacefully and no sign of anything untoward.
I had been telling him about weird stuff and he laughed it off. We were sitting in the living room and there was such a loud bang. The type to make the living room light shake. It was so loud like a very heavy metal pole sliding down a wall and hitting the floor. Ran upstairs to the spare bedroom and there was nothing had fallen etc. Noise couldn't be explained. Even checked attic out and nothing.
Lastly we had a really really bad leak. Water cascading in torrents from the attic through both ceilings etc. I went up to attic seen where leak was coming from (cold water tank) turned off water and rang a plumber. He found the problem straight away but said in his 40 year's he has absolutely no idea how it happened. A small plastic fitting that screws the cold water main pipe to cold water tank and came off. It wasn't broken. It was unscrewed off but to get at it was impossible without removing another pipe and it had to be unscrewed off. He said they're designed to never come off and he said only way this happened is if someone had been up and unscrewed it by removing this other part first. He asked if we had any work done up there etc and said we need to go back to them as they've mucked up. No one had been near the attic let along working round cold water tank.
Id love to know how that happened.

I think science has proved many times over that ghosts exist. You can induce people to see ghosts using a range of methods including but not limited to pharmaceutical, electromagnetic, behavioural and suggestion based.

Its been shown that if you image the parts of the brain that respond to visual stimuli they light up showing that a ghost is being seen, when there is nothing actually there....in the same way, you can actually hear what the voices heard by people hearing voices are saying, if you tape a microphone to their throat....and you can hear the noise people who are experiencing tinnitus hear if you amplify it up enough.

Ghosts are entirely real in the same way that thoughts and emotions are real. They are generated by the brain and can be proven to be so.

When I look at the collections of atoms and energy in front of me right now, I don't see matter/atoms/energy/light, I see a computer screen. The same massive processing power that enables me to effortlessly extract meaning from the overload of data being thrown at my senses from moment to moment, will sometimes generate aberrations, just like sometimes even google misunderstands what you were actually looking for when you typed 'goat sex determination' in the search bar.....

So yes, I have seen the odd ghost in my time. I even had an alien abduction type experience in my teens. But when I weigh up the two competing theories, 1. that dead people somehow persist in an altered form that defies all scientific observation or measurement, and 2. that you can see and hear things that aren't really there due to the way in which the brain has been scientifically measured and observed to work, I'm pretty clear there is more evidence for 2 than for 1.

Well the ghost that lived in my old house certainly wasnt Victorian.He wore what my grandad would have wore.Trousers,shirt waistcoat.And sometimes a coat and hat.He wasnt a very nice ghost and he literally ran us out of that house.

*Low frequency sounds (infrasound) can make people think they have had supernatural experiences, as they vibrate your eyeballs so you see things that aren't there, and make you feel anxious and fearful even though you can't consciously hear anything.

So perhaps there is some kind of resonance or machinery nearby*

Like an electricity substation that emits a low hum, for example? Interesting.

I had the exact same experience as a pp: was beginning to wake from sleep when a fuzzy dark figure crossed the room, and this vision was accompanied by a profound sensation of fear and dread, as if something very evil was there. The fear took a while to subside, but I put it down to some sort of nightmare which had lasted into the waking state. If other people have had the same sensation and vision exactly then it might be a thing, a bit like that sensation of falling you sometimes get before waking with a jolt.

Perhaps everyone has "supernatural" experiences, but we all frame it differently, according to whether we believe in that sort of thing, or not.

@Agusterella what you describe is an hypnopompic hallucination.

Thanks @Ididnthearanything, I've had a lot of that sort of thing over the years but didn't realise there was a term for it. Quite interesting and reassuring to google it.

I think if I ever hallucinated sounds or visions while fully awake I'd be terrified and convinced something genuinely uncanny was afoot!!

I had a hypnopompic hallucination once and it was a terrifying experience. It felt like there was an evil presence in the room.

I don't think that we are currently able to explain all of the events that people understand as ghostly. But we probably will in the future.

He wasnt a very nice ghost and he literally ran us out of that house.

What did he do to literally run you out of the house?

@M3lon

What happened when you were abducted by aliens?