Welcome to Gaia! ::


Demon Hunter Sasuke881
when i wuz younger i always feared friday the 13th and thought that monsters would come and get me sweatdrop but now i think that some superstitions make no sense to me at times

All part of growing up, I guess. xp

4,050 Points
  • Person of Interest 200
  • Team Jacob 100
  • Gaian 50
Telor II
Demon Hunter Sasuke881
when i wuz younger i always feared friday the 13th and thought that monsters would come and get me sweatdrop but now i think that some superstitions make no sense to me at times

All part of growing up, I guess. xp

i guess ur right and im over superstitions like that but it's kinda funny to see w2ut happens to people who believe in them xp

Romantic Lunatic

6,300 Points
  • Somebody Likes You 100
  • Signature Look 250
  • V-Day 2011 Event 100
like legends and myths..superstitions are based on some facts or truth. And if you have to believe what you have to see, you better be an atheist stressed stressed stressed stressed

Snuggly Buddy

29,150 Points
  • Conversationalist 100
  • Mark Twain 100
  • Conventioneer 300
Telor II
David2074
Telor II
Love_and_rockets6
Telor II

Absolutely. If someone thinks there's a ghost in their house they're wrong.

no there not cuz i sleep over at my friends house all the time and a ghost lives in there dining room i saw it early one morning when i went to go get aa glass of water standing on the table

An amusing anecdote but you're wrong. It wasn't a ghost because there are no ghosts.

Plenty of people who claim to "know" about ghosts and be experts would say that you're full of s**t because ghosts can't manifest physically. Others would claim that you have some sort of special gift or some other horseshit.
This lack of consistency is common of superstition. The ground rules can't be agreed upon because there are none.

If there were really ghosts then there would always be ghosts, including when someone attempts to observe them for study. One would be able to find some way to record their activities or discern their nature. One cannot because there are no ghosts.

There are a number of explanations for why you think you saw a ghost, including hallucinogens, psychosis and infrasound. Also you might be making it up, but I'm not going to make that allegation.


You sound closed minded so probably nothing anyone says to you will change that. Still, I'll share a short version of a situation with you. And I'll preface this by saying I'm a SKEPTIC. I'm the sort of person that wants to see the proof and tries to find a logical explanation.

Our family farm has two houses. One of them, an old style white box farm house, appears to be haunted. The house sits far back from the road in a field, a long ways from any other houses or buildings or radio stations or anything like that.
I first heard the voices in this house back in the 70's. At first I thought someone was outside the window talking but there wasn't anyone there.
Over the decades the house was rented out to various tenants. We never told the tenants anything about any alleged ghost because, hey, you come off sounding kind of crazy.
Over the years most tenants would hear
1. Conversations coming from downstairs front bedroom.
2. The sound of someone making dinner in the kitchen.
A few tenants also heard footsteps upstairs and one reported some movement stuff like blinds going up and down.
Not every tenant heard these but most did. One tenant was so freaked she moved out but most tolerated it. What I find interesting is that even though we would not tell them anything about it, when they got around to telling us, over the years the stories from different people who did not know each other were consistent.

Does this prove it to you? No, probably not. But we found it pretty interesting. For damn sure the sounds of conversations and the nightly sound of someone working in the kitchen were not air disturbances or distant thunder or some other crap like that. I tried to think of a 'logical' explanation but at some point Occam's razor comes into play.

In general I do not believe in superstitions themselves but some superstitions have a basis in fact. I can't think of a real example so I make one up to make my point. You should not drink water tainted with sewage or you may get sick form the e-coli. Now, in olden times they might not have known what e-coli was but they may have observed the cause / effect from drinking tainted water. So someone makes up a superstition about evil fairies and stagnant water or some crap like that. So the actual superstition is bogus but the caution it provides (don't drink the bad water) might be legitimate. Many superstitions sprang up from man's attempt to explain something he could not explain. But yeah, a lot of superstitions are just bunk through and through in my opinion.

http://ghosts.monstrous.com/infrasound.htm
Not saying that's definitely it, just something to consider.

Quote:
[Occam's Razor] is a principle urging one to select among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions and thereby offers the simplest explanation of the effect.

I don't think that claiming that humans have an intangible part of them called a soul that sometimes persists after physical death and somehow possesses the ability to affect the world despite being non-corporeal and is unable to be reliably measured, tested or recorded is the simplest explanation making the fewest assumptions.


I imagine that you are absolutely correct about the origins of a lot of superstitions. It's not the fact that people think that breaking mirrors and drinking tainted water is bad that's absurd, it's the fact that they think it's luck that makes it bad that makes it absurd.
Every attempt I've seen to measure luck shows results in line with random chance.


The infrasound article is interesting but not applicable to this situation. I was aware of the gist of what the article had but some of those experiments were different than other things I've read. In a sort of related note - they have also found they can use different frequencies to clear a dance floor. Like if they play a certain frequency a lot more people decide they have to go to the bathroom and stuff. It's been too long - I don't remember the frequencies / effects but it was interesting.

Anyway, there is nothing around to cause infrasound. It happens on calm days (no wind). The structure of the house is a basic box. It does not have forced air heat. There is no fancy electronics or any other gear in the house to generate infrasound. The nearest buildings (other houses) are about an 1/8th mile away across an open field and through woods. There are no major structures, high power lines etc. for miles. The lay of the land is largely flat.

AND, the sounds myself and the various tenants heard were not the same as those described in the infrasound tests. For one thing they were clearly audible. For another they were not accompanied by any of the other symptoms - pressure on chest, feeling of dread etc. At least not for me. And apparently not for some other tenants who just lived with the sounds. Multiple people have told me the sounds of someone moving about the kitchen, cooking on the stove, going to the sink etc were very clear.

I do believe in souls and I stand by the Occam's Razor comment.
I find it interesting you do not believe in anything you can't see or measure even though many things science now accepts as measurable 'fact' (including your infrasound) were not measurable or visible many years ago.
David2074
The infrasound article is interesting but not applicable to this situation. I was aware of the gist of what the article had but some of those experiments were different than other things I've read. In a sort of related note - they have also found they can use different frequencies to clear a dance floor. Like if they play a certain frequency a lot more people decide they have to go to the bathroom and stuff. It's been too long - I don't remember the frequencies / effects but it was interesting.

Anyway, there is nothing around to cause infrasound. It happens on calm days (no wind). The structure of the house is a basic box. It does not have forced air heat. There is no fancy electronics or any other gear in the house to generate infrasound. The nearest buildings (other houses) are about an 1/8th mile away across an open field and through woods. There are no major structures, high power lines etc. for miles. The lay of the land is largely flat.

AND, the sounds myself and the various tenants heard were not the same as those described in the infrasound tests. For one thing they were clearly audible. For another they were not accompanied by any of the other symptoms - pressure on chest, feeling of dread etc. At least not for me. And apparently not for some other tenants who just lived with the sounds. Multiple people have told me the sounds of someone moving about the kitchen, cooking on the stove, going to the sink etc were very clear.

I do believe in souls and I stand by the Occam's Razor comment.
I find it interesting you do not believe in anything you can't see or measure even though many things science now accepts as measurable 'fact' (including your infrasound) were not measurable or visible many years ago.

You shouldn't stand by your Occam's Razor comment because you are clearly assuming too much. Clearly.
If we as a culture hadn't grown up hearing ghost stories the concept would not even occur to us with the knowledge that we have access to in modern times. It would be a ridiculous thing to try and convince someone of if they hadn't ever heard of ghosts. There's this whole series of logical leaps you need to make to arrive at ghosts and they're all extremely far-fetched.

I'm not going to start believing in ghosts because maybe one day we'll be able to detect them. That doesn't make any sense.

Anyway, in response to your whole story, anecdotal evidence is simply not very good evidence. You seem like a smart guy so I'm pretty sure that you know that already.
So no, I'm not going to be convinced by your haunted house story. Not because I'm closed-minded, but because you haven't given me a compelling reason to believe something that requires that I ignore a good chunk of what is commonly accepted as possible and replace it with a bunch of things that are commonly accepted as not possible.
Sorry.
luckyluve2100
like legends and myths..superstitions are based on some facts or truth. And if you have to believe what you have to see, you better be an atheist stressed stressed stressed stressed

What lovely oversimplification.
In what way are superstitions based on fact?

I believe in things I can't see. I believe that you exist and that you wrote this post, for example.

Quick Reply

Submit
Manage Your Items
Other Stuff
Get GCash
Offers
Get Items
More Items
Where Everyone Hangs Out
Other Community Areas
Virtual Spaces
Fun Stuff
Gaia's Games
Mini-Games
Play with GCash
Play with Platinum