Do Ghosts Exist?

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I do believe there is a lot out there past the material, though I will agree that most accounts are shaky for the simple reason that people tend to get amped up over things that can in fact easily be explained. I knew a girl who said something about believing that 3:00 PM was God's specific time, 3:00 AM was the Devil's (it sounds like some urban legend crap that someone made up just to make themselves sound interesting), she said that she woke up and heard a zombie groan - I'm pretty sure it was a motorcycle passing by.

I know a lot of people who, wanted to be convinced, have gone to so-called haunted sites with friends who were ghost hunters, just to watch them run around scaring each other and not feel a thing themselves. I had a friend also who swore that she had a ghost upstairs, that they couldn't get any good amount of sleep up there, a friend verified that the woke up periodically through the night frozen in fear - I went up and slept in the room that was supposedly the epicenter (wanting to know if I'd see or feel something) - never had a better night of sleep . As for our friend, she said that things would move, she said that she was talking to her mom downstairs about a ghost, her mom said that there was no ghost, all of a sudden the tv turned off without anyone near the remote or button - that doesn't sound like a ghost at all, that sounds like a 'poltergeist' which, from what I keep hearing, the human mind is powerful, people can, to an extent, do things that they don't know or believe that they can do (and even if they did believe they couldn't even begin to figure out how to harness or control, activate/deactivate it - thus its extremely fluky) - thus she's likely been scaring herself all these years (her, her sister, maybe both).

Look at it this way though - this is something to maybe worry about if you're a materialist who doesn't want to be one and is still looking for proof that there is something in existence outside of the material; IMO for that there are better and more easily substantiated places to look.

As much as I enjoy the Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures shows, they do tend to really sensationalize things so I wouldn't take it too seriously. They have (and do) make mistakes from time to time during their investigations. If I were them, I'd spend a heck of lot more time that just one night if it seemed there was something to it. I've often been disappointed that they usually don't check things out again in the daytime to search for possible explanations.

I think a spiritual world does exist. I've encountered a few things to at least open the possibility to me, but still, I am very critical of any supposed evidence that comes my way. Bumps, knocks, orbs, garbled barely audible voices are to me, often not enough to really prove anything as there are lots of natural explanation for such things. Doesn't help matters that most investigations happen in old places where random creaks and dust are very common. Listening to white noise on amplified recorders can easily lead one to think all sorts of things are audible and don't forget as well that the human brain is wired is automatically detect faces in anything so when somebody thinks they saw a face somewhere, it really was probably nothing and just in their head.
That said though, there are some things that aren't quite as easily explainable and even somewhat consistent from one paranormal event to another. Apparitions are usually pretty solid if one is lucky enough to come across one. Double exposure on film is a lot rarer these days with modern cameras and impossible on digital unless someone intentionally alters the RAW after the fact. Cold spots are also something that is bit consistent in such places. There might be natural explanations, but such as open windows or air vents but I've noticed it occurs where those explanations have been covered. Regardless, something is changing the physical state of the environments in those situations. Where is the thermal energy disappearing to? I don't know, but it's enough to think something is happening there.

I think the spirit world has something to do energy and higher dimensions overall. It's just not well understood yet. Matter and energy are interchangeable and just different forms of the same thing. Of course organisms are made of matter, but in this universe, I can't rule out the possibility of creatures existing as energy on a higher dimensional plane. If that is case, it would make sense that we usually can't interact or observe such things to our liking since we lack the physical capability to interact with something on a higher dimensional plane. Like we exist in a 3 dimensional world. If we came across a 2 dimensional creature, we could easily see it from our 3d perspective and interact with it, but the 2d creature wouldn't be able to see us since we can stand outside it's 2d range of vision, nor would it be able to interact with us since that would require it to have 3d motion which doesn't exist for it. What would that 2d creature think of us trying to interact with it?
However loopholes do exist though, and while it may not possible to interact directly with something on a higher dimensional plane, it is still possible to show it's existence by observing it's effect on things we can interact with. Black holes for instance, cannot be seen since they'll simply absorb whatever medium you use to try and detect it so it'll appear invisible, but you can detect it's effect on surrounding light to show it exists. I would imagine a higher dimension creature should have some capability to interact with our plane of existence, though it would most certainly appear mysterious and unexplainable.
I don't really know what happens when people die. Do they have a soul that continues to exist in this higher dimension? Or are these creatures something entirely different that are just mimicking us in some odd way to communicate?
But, it's just kind of my theory.

Take care at the seance anyway. No one knows for sure what exactly happens, whether it really be spirits being summoned, or some kind of drug in the air or what not. Better to err on the side of caution anyway so try not to offer any invitations to whatever is happening.

Well, as someone who has seen their fair share of ghosts, and things that go bump in the night, all I can say is that I'm grateful for anti psychotics. I think the vast majority of what people see, hear, sense, imagine in their environments are hallucinations. I've had a very few occasions where I've "seen" or "heard" something, and other people also witnessed it. For the most part though, it was just me being ill... and the atmosphere of unthinking credulity kept me from getting help for years, because people were more able to believe I was seeing ghosts than that I was mentally ill. In other words, the credulity of society in general is damaging to people's mental health. And all these ghost hunter shows are simply enabling the deception.

Perhaps there's something to a minute fraction of what people perceive... but in my experience, there's always a rational explanation.

Feel free to add me to that list

From a Christian perspective, I can't say that I believe in "ghosts" as defined by wandering human souls who have died and somehow maintained a hold on this world. The Bible seems to indicated that mediums have successfully conjured up the dead, and various passages in the OT and the NT seem to indicate that angels and demons do inhabit the world.

Admittedly, this is NOT something I feel I can know with any certainty, but I do have a "ghost story" from my own experience:

Not long after my father passed away, I started hearing someone knock on my door. It would wake me up, so I'd open the door to see why someone would knock on my door. Of course, no one was out there. Now, ever since I was a teenager I've slept with a box fan on because the noise helps me sleep. So I'd turn off the fan, thinking that maybe the wind current was rattling the door. Wouldn't have been anything unusual. So when I did try to fall asleep again, I'd hear the knock. I concluded that it didn't matter, so I turned my fan back on. After a week or so of this, it got to the point that I'd hear the knock whether I was asleep or wide awake, fan on or off. Didn't matter. This went on for maybe 6 months before it stopped.

And what is REALLY bizarre is one afternoon (I guess it would have been 15 years later) my wife was alone in that room while we were visiting my mom. Later on she told me she heard someone knocking on the door, that she thought it might have been one of the kids, but when she opened the door, no one was there. Indeed, both I and my mom could confirm that the kids had been nowhere near that door at the time.

It hasn't happened since then. But it was a very bizarre happening. We've looked at every physical possibility we could think of: air conditioning switching on/off, vibrations from external doors, fans, open/shut windows. Nothing we've done has reproduced the effect. Maybe a rattle, but we didn't hear a rattle (something I'd be used to having lived there for so long). No, this was a distinct knock, a very light knock on the door as a human being would do it. Not only that, but it was exactly like the way my father would knock on my door.

Like I said, we aren't superstitious people. We still keep a fan on in our bedroom in our own house, and we're familiar with the kinds of auditory illusions white noise can produce--like waking up in the middle of the night because we imagine one of the children screaming. We've even seem to have heard the exact same things at the same time, only to go check on the children and realize it was just our minds playing tricks on us. So yeah, we know the difference between superstition, illusion and reality. The door-knocking at my mom's house has no explanation without at least CONSIDERING the fact that it might be a ghost or some, I dunno, spiritual "echo" or imprint left after my father passed away. Your guess is as good as mine.

Just saw your post after I wrote mine. For the most part, I agree. The ghost hunter shows appear to be some kind of reality pseudo-science that doesn't really show very much, and it doesn't really encourage me to believe in ghosts any more than I do (my position being, of course, that I don't KNOW that ghosts exist or don't exist on the same level as human beings. I believe in an afterlife to which spirits belong, just not an afterlife that keeps dead spirits on Earth). But that doesn't stop me from believing that some occurrences within the range of our senses defy rational explanation at the time they happen, nor is there ever a guarantee that everything will be explained.

The argument that ignorance permits the belief in the existence of unknown phenomena is rather odd in a rational person. Ignorance should permit the acceptance that there are open possibilities on unexplained phenomena, not that there should be confirmation in ignorance of the existence of desired beliefs.

Your statement is a little unclear, particularly the way you phrase "confirmation in ignorance of the existence of desired beliefs." I think we are ALL at least a little bit guilty of confirmation bias. One person can look around at the world and say "This confirms the existence of a Creator God." Another person can look around, see exactly the same thing from exactly the same angle and say "This confirms the Big Bang."

The way you stated it sounds like "ignorance of existence" of something can be confirmed. You can't test (for lack of a better word) something you don't know about in order to confirm it. I can't, for example, tell you that the sky is blue if neither one of us even knows what a sky is.

I also don't understand your first statement: "...permits the belief in the existence of unknown phenomena..." There are plenty of things, holes in our knowledge, that we are aware of yet we lack the ability to fill in those holes. Believing in the unknown is simply acknowledging that there are things we can't yet know.

"Ghosts" and other such things seem to be spontaneously reported, and there NEVER seems to be any kind of controllable environment in which they can be observed. All we have are the reports of people who supposedly observe them. I have NO idea what it was I observed, but it WAS an interesting coincidence that it appeared within a few months after my father died. It's also extremely odd that, YEARS later my wife observed the same thing in the same room. So no, we DON'T have an explanation, it seems for the most part to have gone away on it's own, and we've ruled out other possibilities. Such things as "spirits" or "ghosts" have been offered up in the past. I don't KNOW what it was, and since what we heard has in the past been described as a klopfgeist, I have no better explanation. If anyone has a better way to reproduce the effect and can demonstrate to me what it was, I'm open to possibilities. But until then, what I described is all I have to offer.

Your statement that there are things that will never be understood is a flat subscription to the concept that the universe is permanently indecipherable, a very religious point of view which I cannot accept. To use the existence of unknowns to substantiate unvalidated beliefs is a delight in ignorance which I find repellent.

Well, it so happens there ARE some things I think will remain unexplainable, but that wasn't really the point that I was trying to make.

Permanently indecipherable? I didn't mean to imply that. It could be that my experience has some explanation for which I lack the means to discover. Oddly enough, though, it does highly resemble accounts of experiences that have been ascribed to the paranormal. I understand your aversion to religion. For me, though, I don't see a point in ruling possibilities out.

I never ruled possibilities out. I merely respect the fact that they are mere possibilities, although, to my mind, rather far fetched.

Theists do not lack the means to discover it, they refuse to use the tools that are required to gain the means to discover it.
That's because the assumption that they have, in the past made, to fill the "missing information" was inconsistent with those tools, and they cannot drop that assumption long enough to see the validity of those tools.
Heck they're still trying to justify all the things science has proven wrong about their holy books.

But those efforts at philosophical contortion is what makes theologists such an amusing intellectual circus. There is nothing funnier than the clowns.

You mean we should let them live, just to be our jesters?
They are funny, I know.. but can we actually put up with them forever?

I have no idea what you may be but forever is beyond my capability. I have no illusions as to the longevity of the human species.

Good to know i got your permission to start knocking some off.