Call me crazy...

[SnakeCharmer]

But I want to start ghost hunting.  Looks like an absolute blast, and there's no shortage of (supposedly) haunted areas here in the South, especially between Mobile and New Orleans.

If anybody else has any interest in the supernatural, post here with experiences!

[WayAbvPar]

We had a discussion about paranormal stuff a few months back. I just can't buy into ghost hunting- every show I watch is just people freaking themselves out over easily explainable 'phenomena'. Doesn't mean it still doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of my neck, but I can't get the logical part of my brain to buy into it.

Of course, if you got 'good' at ghost hunting, you could probably find a way to make a few bucks at it. People love to believe.

[Sky]

Hey, maybe you can be the first to scientifically prove ghosts exist! 

[Morfiend]

No fucking way would you get me doing that shit. EVER. I hate creepy ghost shit almost as much as I hate creepy little kids. Fuck that. No way.

[SnakeCharmer]

We had a discussion about paranormal stuff a few months back. I just can't buy into ghost hunting- every show I watch is just people freaking themselves out over easily explainable 'phenomena'. Doesn't mean it still doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of my neck, but I can't get the logical part of my brain to buy into it.

See, that's the thing.  Part of me says it's all hocus pocus bullshit.  Then the other part of me has seen enough crazy shit (sober) in person to toss that logical/rational part of my brain out the window.

Of course, if you got 'good' at ghost hunting, you could probably find a way to make a few bucks at it. People love to believe.

Eh, I dunno.  It'd be a hobby.  I'd rather stay away from houses, and focus more on outdoors stuff - Indian burial grounds, Civil War sites, that sort of thing.

Hey, maybe you can be the first to scientifically prove ghosts exist! 

Nonbeliever :P

So, you absolutely believe they DON'T exist?  Is this a religous thing?  Or just a gut thing?

[Evildrider]

I don't believe in all that junk.  I was raised in a superstitious Catholic family too.

It's just one of those things, if they really existed and were around as much as some say.  There would be more real proof that they were there.

I'd agree that there is some kind of alien life out there first, then any of the supernatural. 

[Venkman]

I believe it's all possible, proof or otherwise, mostly because what we don't know about How Things Work(tm) is many orders of magnitude beyond what we think we know. So basically, I believe in everything, except in how anyone interprets it :)

[stray]

I believe they're there... and completely pointless too! People get scared of ghosts, but it seems like they can never do shit to anyone.

[Pennilenko]

You're Crazy, OP.

[Signe]

[Roac]

If anybody else has any interest in the supernatural, post here with experiences!

I've interest, but not because I believe in it.  I just think stalking around dark old houses or civil war battlegrounds is kinda creepy-fun.  Go out, play like a kid, swap ghost stories, then drink a few beers and laugh about it afterward.  Playing with FLIR and the like would tickle the geek in me too.

[Furiously]

Dr. Peter Venkman: As a friend, I have to tell ya you've finally gone around the bend on this ghost business. You guys have been running your ass off, meetin' and greetin' every schizo in the five boroughs who says he has a paranormal experience. What have you seen?
Dr Ray Stantz: Of course you forget, Peter. I was present at an undersea, unexplained mass sponge migration.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Ray, the sponges migrated about a foot-and-a-half.

[SnakeCharmer]

I just think stalking around dark old houses or civil war battlegrounds is kinda creepy-fun.  Go out, play like a kid, swap ghost stories, then drink a few beers and laugh about it afterward.

That's pretty much it.  Heading up the delta with some camping gear (and a gun or three) with some buddies and hiking around the burial grounds and such and camping overnight, or staying all night in some (supposedly) old haunted house.

Playing with FLIR and the like would tickle the geek in me too.

I was snooping around at some of the websites people have up, and saw the FLIR stuff mentioned.  Out of curiosity, I start pricing different equipment.  NVGs?  Pretty manageable.  Couple hundred bucks for a set.  IR goggles?  EIGHTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS.

Jumpin' Jebus on a pogostick!

Anyway, a friend used to have a house that was most definately haunted.  Whenever the kids would walk in the room, the TV would automatically turn to Cartoon Network or Nickelodian.  Lights would turn on without anyone hitting the switch.  The freakiest thing I ever saw was a red crescent moon shaped thing, very bright and neon looking, come down the hallway and pass by me.  I saw all of the above happen with my own eyes on several occasions.

But yea

[Samwise]

That's pretty much it.  Heading up the delta with some camping gear (and a gun or three) with some buddies

Bringing guns seems risky... isn't that how the ghosts get you?  By playing mind tricks until you turn on each other?

[Signe]

Don't listen to Samwise.  He's trying to get you killed for a laugh.  Bringing guns, and lots of them, is a must.

[rattran]

And hard liquor. Lots of it. And plenty of ammo.

And if you don't find any ghosts, consider going into the production side.

[Sky]

Nonbeliever :P

So, you absolutely believe they DON'T exist?  Is this a religous thing?  Or just a gut thing?

Read what I said again. The more popular ghost hunting becomes, the less I believe in the possibilities of ghosts. Almost every chucklehead has some ghost story that PROVES their existence to them (though I'll admit your floating neon crescent is far more outlandish than most I've heard), but they then can't prove it to anyone else.

Entire history of human science, not one ghost. Not saying they don't exist. I'm just siding on improbable to the extent of dismissal. Like god.

[bhodi]

The easiest person to fool is ourselves; our brain is a marvelous invention that creates order from chaos. Unfortunately, there are lots of false alarms and idiosyncrasies that can be deliberately abused (optical illusions) or situations where misleading or flat out wrong conclusions are unknowingly drawn.

The fact is, our senses lie to us; we have an inherent bias that we can neither see nor feel. We compensate for it as best we can with things like the scientific method.

We can see things that aren't there and construct voices and words from the softest sounds - while in reality those visions and voices are only bugs in our cognitive software. To top it all off, there ARE still physical phenomena that is not well understood; All sorts of stuff gets blamed on or ascribed to ghosts, angels, or otherworld beings. Even if glowing, hovering orbs existed, to put dead consciousness into them is quite a leap.

The hardest thing to acknowledge is that you may have been wrong, you didn't see what you thought you saw, and that you drew the wrong conclusions from it. I don't want to turn this to religion, and, as much as the guy's a vocal asshole, Richard Dawkins described a believable phenomenon -- most religious people have a moment in their life, intensely personal, where they saw or experienced something that made it all believable and real for them.

[SnakeCharmer]

I'd dismiss it as an LSD flashback if my friends wife hadn't described it to a T when he told her (while I was standing there) that I saw "Alice".  She wasn't in the house, wasn't there when I saw it, but our descriptions matched perfectly.

[bhodi]

Well, good luck. I hope you understand how reliable eyewitness accounts are from crimes and such, especially when being interviewed by someone untrained who may have unintentionally given leading questions. Memory is a terribly, terribly, faulty thing of revisionist history, especially on 'hard to categorize' things. Brains tend to leap to conclusions and to bucket things into categories that don't quite fit.

There may have been *something* unexplained, but I would urge you to avoid categorizing it from memory and group discussion/interview.

We have a similar thread around here somewhere, if you search for supernatural I'm sure you'll find it. I think it ended up in politics, though.

[Riggswolfe]

I'd be interested but the truth is I'm a wuss. I'm also one of those wackos who knows for sure there are "ghosts". Though I'm not yet willing to say if they are spirits or some kind of "replay" of some person's life or something else entirely. What I'm sure they are not is hallucinations or bugs in the machinery of the brain.

Off of the top of my head I can name half a dozen or more people who have seen/heard/interacted with ghosts in some fashion. Two are computer scientists (a programmer and a server administrator), one is an ex-Air Force colonel, the others are family members of mine and of course me. These events range from fairly easily explained to full on talking and interacting with ghostly children in the case of the Air Force Colonel.

That said, I think most of the TV shows are about as real as any other "reality" TV.

[Yegolev]

I used to believe in cake.

[Yoru]

I had a ghost experience two nights ago in my apartment.

I was woken up from a dead sleep in the middle of the night by a loud thump. Sitting up, I saw what appeared to be the silhouette of a short man in a white shirt and dark waistcoat with tousled, shoulder-length hair at the foot of my bed. His face was too dark to see, but it was pretty clear he was staring at me. I stared at him for a full minute.

There was another loud thump, identical to the one before. It was a car going over the speed bump outside. Peering closer at the "ghost", I realized it was a spare bedsheet, a pillowcase and my bathrobe hanging off of my ironing board in just the right configuration to look like a man standing there in the dark.

Still, it was a pretty weird sensation, staring at it and thinking "Huh. A ghost. What do I do now?"

[Yegolev]

OK, see, the ghost stories I have all involve strange people walking around my house.  Once two of us saw it at the same time.  You just need a nightlight.

[WayAbvPar]

I get all sorts of weirdness in half-awake states. Eventually I wake up enough to figure out that it was a dream, but it seems incredibly real when I am in the throes.