People who believe in ghosts

[Sheandhercat]

MIL came back from a trip to Edinburgh and told us of a “really spooky” thing that happened that MUST have been a ghost because there’s no other explanation. She was walking in a field, no other people around, and she got a whiff of strong rose perfume. That’s it. She said that plus another occasion where her cat was looking at something on the wall when there wasn’t anything there have her convinced that ghosts are real.

I try not to engage in these conversations with my opinion really because people can believe in whatever they want to and it’s pointless getting into a debate about it, because if someone’s already made up their mind it’s hard to convince them otherwise. But she asked me if I’d ever had anything happen and I said no I don’t believe in ghosts. This lead to a conversation where she just kept saying “well go on then, give me one possible explanation for the perfume if it’s not a ghost!” And I was giving explanations that she just wouldn’t accept. How does someone think it’s impossible that someone was around wearing perfume and the wind was just wafting the smell over, but it’s perfectly plausible and OBVIOUS that perfume has transcended into the afterlife and a ghost is the only possible option?!

even if there was no possible explanation I could think of, I still wouldn’t jump to “it must be a ghost” I’d just accept that I don’t know the answer. I don’t understand why it HAS to be a ghost when it just makes no sense. I’m just curious, how many people actually believe in ghosts and why?

Please tell!

Is that all you've got? Pretty thin.

And is the opposite true? You're just insistant on NOT beliveing? It's two sides of the same coin.

I believe. 20 odd years ago I was in bed and it was dark. They was a darkish shape on the bed than I was aware of but I assumed it was the position my husband was sleeping in. I was in between being asleep and awake. A few hours later I woke up and realised my husband was lying flat so it was something else. It then started to move towards me and I screamed and it disappeared. It terrified me and I was shaken. Only my husband knew and didn’t believe me. About a week later our vicar turned up. Used to come around a lot as we were heavily uninvolved in the church. I wasn’t home but my husband was. My husband said nothing but the vicar independently said that he could feel a ‘bad presence’ in the house. When my husband told me I freaked out. The vicar and a few others came over to pray and there’s been nothing since. I was not a believer but know what I saw.

I 'believe in' ghosts because I've seen one so it would be foolish not to believe in what I had seen. I also had another uncanny experience that may or may not have been a ghost, but it still both disturbs me and brings me great joy. There are more things in heaven and earth etc. We keep making discoveries about the physical world that confound us, and change our perspective. Quantum Physics is unbelievably weird. What makes us think we know all there is to know?

It’s always the die hard non believers who believe their beliefs are irrevocably the right ones.

it’s always atheists who insist that people who aren’t atheists must be a bit dim.

no one can possibly know for certain

My husband and I have completely different views on ghosts and the paranormal—I’m a believer, he isn't. But as adults, we give each other room to hold our own beliefs. That's why it's so frustrating when sceptics treat believers with condescension. Mocking someone just because they view the world differently isn't clever; it's just plain disrespectful.

Your choice of 'a' reality is very interesting.

Bereavement and life events can shift a person's view of reality.

This is why I absolutely love the Uncanny crew. Kiaran always acknowledges that an experience can be frightening even if there's a rational explanation for it. He's never contemptuous of fright. That's how I try to be. I look for rational explanations to help reduce the fear not mock someone for it.

I actually think ghosts are a residual energy, like an imprint of some kind but not something that could be communicated with.

people have reported seeing Catherine Howard running down the long gallery at Hampton Court, and I believe they have seen her. But she’s not actually there, it’s just the energy that remains

I lived in a house where there was a recurrent 'sighting'.

Multiple people saw it in the same place. Family members, visitors, even completely unrelated people - tradespeople for example said they had seen it with no prior knowledge of the situation.

None of us were scared or told the story - we were just used to it - so no attention seeking there at all. It didn't matter to us if we believed or not as we all knew what we'd seen.

We eventually moved house when we were downsizing. A year or so later I met the woman who had lived in the house before us and told her we'd moved on. She said, 'Well at least you won't have to put up with - in the dining room any more'.

Whether ghosts/whatever are real or whatever I don't really know or care, but it was all bloody hard to explain.

I believe in ghosts and have had a few experiences. I also think that one day there will be a scientific explanation for paranormal events.

I find it irritating that some people are so sure believers are nut jobs. Once upon a time the accepted view was that rainbows were a message from god and that earth was the centre of the universe. People were punished horribly for thinking otherwise. Thankfully there were enough open minded people to persevere and our knowledge grew. Some people are arrogant enough to believe that we know it all now. I think that’s ridiculous.

My mum lived in a house like that when she was dating my dad. Neighbours, tradesmen etc. She found that multiple exorcisms had been commissioned on the house through the 20th century in local parish records.

So something was happening in that house that gave numerous independent witnesses the heebies.

My dad has a physics degree, and not woo at all. He's considered all sorts of angles on it related to quantum entanglement. He just believes that there's science we don't know yet - which is obviously true, or we'd stop trying to discover things.

I experienced numerous difficult to explain things over a couple of years in my pre-teen years (well, everyone that lived in the house, both human and animal did).

I would quite like to be a complete non-believing sceptic but it’s made it impossible. I could not even consider watching anything like Paranormal activity, I’d never be able to be alone again.

There’s not a trace of doubt in my mind …

I absolutely agree where people talk about energy.
I believe things like trees, stone etc all take on board imprints of energy of previous people's lives, emotions etc. You rarely hear of hauntings at happy places or where there weren't many people...

There is something in my house that I can’t explain. The house is L shaped and used to be a stables for a big house with a coachman’s apartment above. One half of the L is double storey with a spiral staircase going to the upstairs of the other bit of the L. There are double doors at top of the stairs. Every morning those doors are open even though there’s no draught and the catch is firm. The doors never open by themselves during the day. Also I’ve had 2 sets of visitors who thought they heard horses neighing in the night even though there are no horses anywhere near. I had not told them the history of the house.

That’s the thing isn’t it - easy to be a sceptic until suddenly it’s not x

😂

I do believe only because when I was 16 I lived in a flat/apartment and when I was in my own would often feel like someone was watching me. I also felt an old guy in my now ex's house and told him the ghost felt lost. Turned he had passed away in that house after caring for his wife. So felt like he was looking for her. I've also had it where I heard a voice saying he going to die a week before my dad passed.
Not me but my boyfriend got a old style doll from a cat bootsale and when he brought it back to his strange noises started happening since he got rid of it the noises have stopped. So I'm some what a believer. I think its a case until you've experienced it yourself its hard to believe. I would never push that on your someone else

I think that if ghosts really existed, we'd be drowning in them. Hospitals and rest homes would be full of them, and we'd see loads more ghosts from the modern era.

I think most experiences of ghosts have rational explanations; infrasound, pareidolia, hypnogogia, and suggestibility. At the same time, some places (even just ordinary homes) do have a vibe that can feel welcoming or ominous, seemingly inexplicably. I'm sure there is an explanation, such as infrasound, but I wouldn't entirely dismiss the idea (as pp have said) that energy could somehow leave imprints. Although it does seem unlikely.

I wouldn't argue with someone who believed in ghosts in real life, though – I find the supernatural very intriguing, and I can understand why people want to believe in it.

Here goes - but I warn you, it's very 'niche'!! Bear with me because the rather complicated context is crucial.

At one time my husband (an academic) collected copies of The Cornhill Magazine - I don't know when it stopped being published - but these copies came from the 1920s. It's a literary magazine with short stories and poems. A few writers we might recognise, but many are obscure and hardly known now - I'm an English Lit grad, and I hadn't heard of the writer of this particular story.

Before we had the children he read a story called Winterwood and recommended it to me - by an obscure, forgotten writer, so not a story anyone is likely to come across. Then the magazines were stored up in the attic and totally forgotten about.

One day he was sitting in the living room with my 15 year-old daughter (who is ND and hates reading fiction, btw - she's only ever read Harry Potter and her school set books under duress!) My husband told me that suddenly, for no reason he could explain, he remembered the Winterwood story - he hadn't thought about it for 15 years or more. At that moment my daughter looked up from her laptop directly at him and said loudly 'Winterwood!'. He was stunned and asked her why she'd said it. She said 'I don't know - it just came into my head!'

He was very unsettled by this - and so was I, but I wasn't actually there.

My daughter was rather troubled as a teenager - and we did have some scary months of what might be called poltergeist activity. Honestly - we were, and in many ways still are, very sceptical people. But the events of that year when she was 15 definitely gave us a different perspective.

I don't believe in Ghosts as such but I'm open minded as to the cause of possible anomalous happenings. I am sure in years to come science will have a better grasp on what we now label as supernatural. I do enjoy a spooky story, film, podcast though. I also encounter people who seem deeply uncomfortable with any mention of the paranormal and who seem to find no fun or whimsy in any of it which I find a bit odd.

It might seem odd, but a belief in ghosts is comforting to some people. It means that even after someone dies, their “self” continues in some way. They still have agency, can still communicate. On the other hand, this also extends to notions of malevolent spirits. Hopefully, the people will never have to deal with such obnoxious and harmful phantoms. After WWI and the flu epidemic, there was a surge in belief of ghosts and the supernatural. So many, many people, especially young men, were lost. It was a way of coping.