Have you ever seen a ghost?

[BCBG]

Serious question - have you ever seen a ghost? If so, why are you certain about what you saw? Could it have been a natural phenomenon? I ask because something I saw is preying on my mind. I was driving through a village on the East Sussex border one afternoon last year, thinking of God knows what, radio on, when all of a sudden the car filled with the smell of fuel (which makes me feel ill ). I then realised a plane was flying very low left to right across the road, so low that I thought it would crash. I couldn't see any markings on the plane but I remember the shape very clearly. I don't remember whether or not there was any noise, but I was so shocked I brought the car to a standstill and looked back across the road. I realised that to my right the land fell away very sharply, so it would have been possible for a plane to fly over me and then clear the trees heading off over the valley (i think) except that I couldn't see any plane. I honestly stood there and listened for an impact. I could still smell this incredible odour of aviation fuel (like when you are crossing the tarmac sometimes on a small airport and the wind catches you, only much stronger). Never thought about ghosts before, but I still wonder what exactly I saw that day.

Yes,quite possibly TTWK.

I don't really think one way or the other,because it doesn't worry me.

(But the cd did come on again about half an hour later without the tv flitting about.....)

I'd be happy to think he DS was sleepwalking, but in the time frame it isn't possible, he couldn't have got back to bed without us hearing or seeing him when I moved to the door.

Also when I was a child I was alone in the house, in the loo at the top of the stairs. My parents had both gone out. I heard footsteps on the tile hall floor downstairs to into the front room. They sounded exactly like my dads footsteps in his work shoes on the hard tile floor, but I knew as it was the weekend my dad was wearing soft shoes. I stayed in the loo waiting for whoever it was to go away until my mum came home, then told her someone was in the front room. They weren't. My mum explained it away by saying my dad must have come home and gone out again, but no one came out of the front room while I was in the loo.

There has to be a logical explanation, as I was sure I didn't imagine it. One day a quantum physicist might be able to explain it to me.

Really? You waited for him to come in, he didn't . You called for him to come in and waited while he didn't. You got up to go to open the door. How long did all that take? And how long is your corridor?

Second one- your dad coming back? Burglar?

It is debate you seek TTWK, perhaps you should adopt a less antagonistic tone and stick to what is written by posters on the thread. Of course working out the difference between fact and opinion might also help, as would keeping your sexist views to yourself.

Angie, these bloody toddlers can move like greased lightning when they want to!

Of course working out the difference between fact and opinion might also help,

Damn, another irony metre has snapped its needle!

I just came here for ghost stories

The coridoor was reasonably long. It was quite normal for DS to come to us in the night. I could try and explain the time it took, but you'll have to take my word for it...DS didn't run back to bed, jump under the duvet and sleep with calm breathing in the time it took me to go to the bedroom door. You'll just have to take my word for it.

When I was a child I did indeed think it was a burglar...which is why I stayed in the loo and locked the door...but where did the burglar go? Why didn't I hear my dad come out of the front room and go away again if it was him? He later came home and said he hadn't come back. And the footsteps were exactly like those of my dad in his work shoes.

I've gone over and over both cases and conclude I heard something that had already happened, and was being repeated. Or maybe it was just my imagination and I'm a loon

My guess is this does happen occasionally, and one day scientists will be able to explain it to us. I also think there are many occasions people think they experience ghosts, and it's something quite different. Like the time the garage door started shaking. I thought someone was trying to break in. Then I heard DDs bed shaking violently on her wooden floor. I was in the room below and I thought DD had got out of bed and was shaking her bed, then realised there was no way she could shake it that hard as she was tiny at the time. Momentarily I thought the house was taken over by a poltergeist . I ran upstairs and asked DH who was asleep in bed what the hell that was...he sleepily explained it was an earthquake. So I can see how some people end up thinking what they experience is a ghost because I too can jump to crazy assumptions.

Never seen a ghost but just had to post to say how much I properly love threads like this. I look forward to them appearing and when I see one that has accumulated a few hundred posts I really look forward to settling down for a good read.

I love the inevitable debate (being a total sceptic myself) but admit it does get a bit annoying when it devolves into the 'believers' moaning about the 'non-believers' being rude, which it does every time. Yes, some people are rude but can't people just ignore it or report posts that break the talk guidelines? Dwelling on it only causes the discussion to go further off track.

I know that there will never be agreement in most cases but the discussion is so interesting (when it hasn't been derailed by hurt feelings). It often boils down to someone claiming to want an explanation but then insisting that the way they interpret and remember their experience is the only correct way.

AngieBolen I wonder if you could have been mistaken about how much time had elapsed? Seems much more likely than some hitherto undiscovered time-slip phenomena.

AngieBolen, isn't the most obvious explanation for the 'footsteps' you heard as a child that you heard something real at the time, misconstrued it and got frightened, as would be natural for a child, and over time this has 'hardened' into a ghost story in your mind? The 'oh, it can't be my father because it's the weekend and he is wearing soft shoes, not work boots' thing sounds less like something a frightened child would think at the time than something an adult might have said later in an attempt to reassure or a retrospective thought ...?

I honestly think that about 95% of 'woo' stories on Mn are down to something that unnerved a child and was subsequently misremembered or unconsciously exaggerated or rearranged for effect over years, often decades. So many involve the poster as a child, or a suggestible teenager with a group of friends and an ouija board and group auto-suggestion. Others happen in the dark is when the person is half-asleep. Others happened to 'a friend of my mother's'.

And there have been some on Mn where the poster has outright rejected an obvious non-supernatural explanation, like the poster who saw an 'apparition' of ghostly horses in fog on Oxford St, and refused to believe it was just one of the cavalry regiments who regularly exercise along there in the early mornings.

And don't forget the way you remember it now will be massively distorted from the initial event. Each time to you go over it in your mind, you are just remembering your most recent memory of the event - it's like a game of telephone/chinese whispers. However much it may feel like it, your mind isn't time travelling back to that day and remembering the experience.

Alan
You're suggesting you know more about time than me and the generally accepted science.

No, that's not what I meant at all. Perhaps I didn't explain it properly, but I'm not saying that's my scientific hypothesis to explain "ghosts". I'm saying we don't understand enough about time/space-time itself to rule out, really, any possibilities about whether it might be possible for an observer at one point in space-time to observe events at other points.

Of course we should always bear in mind that any "scientific fact" should be accompanied by the caveat "...as we currently understand it." New understandings are constantly arising and things that were taught as fact in schools less than a hundred years ago are being overturned by new discoveries.

I haven't seen a ghost and TBH I don't really believe in them, but we have heard 'footsteps' from time to time walking up the wooden stairs in our very old 17th century house.

The people lived here before us and who converted it (an old water mill) to a house used to hear it too. We have had quite a long conversation about it and all agreed we had no idea what the noise is but it definitely exists as we have all heard it.

When I first moved in I used to think it was my ex coming in and offer 'it' a cup of tea - but there was never anyone there. My young DC also used to ask me why they heard people in the house when there weren't any.

Although I am curious as to what it might be it doesn't bother me, I just see it as part of the charm of our lovely old house.

Lovely old houses always have creaks and funny noises. Our natural evolutionarily beneficial pattern recognition systems turn them into footsteps or something else we recognise.

Angie, seriously. Which is more likely? You took a bit longer than you thought to get to the door, or there was a rift in the space time continuum in your upstairs corridor?

This is my point. We have a noise in our house. Its quite specific, it sounds like footsteps, it only goes up the stairs. It doesn't happen that often but a number of us have independently observed it. Its quite charming, although I wouldn't go as far as to say it is haunted.

We used to have a squeaky door that sounded to all mothers and some fathers like a baby calling "mama". One day I got rid of it with WD40- then very much wished I hadn't- it was part of our house!

Angie, seriously. Which is more likely? You took a bit longer than you thought to get to the door, or there was a rift in the space time continuum in your upstairs corridor?

The latter. You had to be there. DH is just by it and is still scratching his head over it, as honestly there wasn't time for DS to get back into bed.

There is one more explanation. The house had three floors, the stairs to the top floor went up from outside our bedroom. Maybe someone came along the landing, and then went to the top floor silently.

You see, I am open to explanations.....but none are quite plausible enough.

I agree the footsteps I heard when I was a child were a long time ago and I was alone so no one to check with what other explanations there is, so there could be a simple explanation.

About 1/3 of people believe in ghosts, and I think every culture on the planet has some belief in spirits. Maybe there is something in it. Woooooooo!

Just a thought, this is the philosophy area, in case posters aren't aware and I don't mean to be patronising but philosophy is the technique used to determine what is real. With that in mind it might be more appropriate for posters who just want to hear a good ol' ghost story to post/peruse at http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/the_unexplained The Unexplained area of MN where debate isn't the norm.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/the_unexplained

Angie- the story as you first told it sounds as if quite a lot of time passed between the footsteps stopping and you opening the door- you're now saying it wasn't like that. I can understand that you prefer the supernatural explanation but ypu are tweaking the story a bit to make it fit..........

You know that thing that happens when you see a really great magic trick and you think 'holy fuck - that was actual magic...there is literally no other way the magician could have done it!'...and you talk to your mates who saw it and they all agree...there is no way it could be done! Bloody amazing.

but of course the magician could actually tell you exactly how it was done...

That - but for ghosts.

The reason we buy into magic tricks is because we want to. It's fun and we love to participate and believe in the magic...to suspend our disbelief. It is slightly less odd to do this when it comes to ghosts...because at least there isn't an actual performer involved whose job it is to trick you. But the buy in and the desire for there to be no logical explanation it the same.

When people say 'I couldn't possibly have imagined it / dreamed it / hallucinated it / been mistaken in what I saw...they are either doing the magic trick thing and buying in coz why not its fun...or they are sadly mistaken about the fallibility of the brain, eye combination.

Anybody CAN experience a one off hallucination, anybody CAN experience dream as waking and vice versa, anyone CAN have an imagined experience that slips the bounds on recall and appears to become true memory. Those things ARE possible because the human brain can do them.

To say they aren't possible is scientifically provably incorrect.

To say that these phenomenon could not possibly be responsible for any given ghost sighting is also scientifically provably incorrect.

None of this proves that ghosts don't exist, though...just that you can't rule out the above as means by which ghosts may appear to exist.

The only evidence for ghosts not existing is our total lack of evidence that they do.

BertrandRussell I don't need to tweek the story.

This is why I don't start OPs very often, because it's very difficult in a few lines to explain exactly how things are, accurately. And then things get picked to pieces.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter. Something happened, DH and I couldn't figure out what/how, because at the time there really was not logical explanation. It would be great if it was a ghost, but why would it be? As time has gone on, I might imagine there was time for DS to run back to his room without me noticing, which would explain it, so in this case over time I would find it more normal.

I don't think it was supernatural. I think there is a logical explanation, just not that DS ran back to his room. It's far more likely that someone went up the stairs, but I didn't think of that at the time as I didn't hear anyone going upstairs. The noise just stopped.

But honestly, you had to be there.

Footsteps require a physical body. It needs weight and movement to create footsteps. So a 'ghost' couldn't do that as they don't have a physical body so there has to be another explanation.

I agree with PP that challenging belief in ghosts is part of a much bigger picture of beliefs worldwide that is important.

I would never be rude and I have the utmost respect in other people's beliefs but where they are wrong it should be challenged and 'agreeing to disagree' is fine if it was just one person who has seen a 'ghost' and leaving them to that belief isn't harmful.

But the bigger picture is seen in my years working in MH with other communities. Muslim individuals for instance who think they have a 'jinn' attached to them or Jamaican migrants who believe in 'duppys'.

I can say I respect your beliefs but actually, you hearing voices or feeling that this spirit is moving things around in your house or touching you at night is a symptom of mental ill health. Because if I didn't say that, I couldn't help you get the treatment you need that can make all this go away.

And in no way am I saying that people on this thread have been mentally ill when they've seen or heard ghosts but challenging these beliefs is extremely important when the bigger picture is having a 15 year old psychotic boy be 'exorcised' including sleep deprivation, violence and terrifying shouting and wailing all around them. I have dealt with the aftermath of this and it was horrific.

And as I've said before on this thread, if someone posted a thread saying 'help me, my son is possessed' every response would say no, he isn't. There is a rational explanation, you and your family need help and support. Because we don't believe in demonic possession in the UK anymore.

But with 'ghosts', with our hundreds of years of ghost stories and ghost - hunting tv programmes we say 'well, you never know. ..'