If you need urgent support, call 999 or go to your nearest A&E. To contact our Crisis Messenger (open 24/7) text THEMIX to 85258.
Options
Essential support for under 25s
Essential support for under 25s
Take a look around and enjoy reading the discussions. If you'd like to join in, it's really easy to register and then you'll be able to post. If you'd like to learn what this place is all about, head here.
Comments
I'd probably say no, at least for scientific evidence. Science is never 100% proved, every scholar will admit there's always some possibility to be wrong. Heck, we could be in the matrix for all we know.
But to try to get an accurate definition or answer, normally something has to be repeatable and/or documentable. Otherwise there is simply too much scope for error / speculative guessing which renders the actual conclusions fairly iffy.
Example: gravity. We can hold an object above the ground and drop it 100 times, and each time it will fall to the ground. We can record it falling, and show that it is falling not due to any other external factors. Even to this day we don't understand gravity completely (or even kind of), but we can say with confidence that it does occur on objects in x environment.
There are other ways round it - for example in social studies they found that employees won't work as hard as they can without incentive because then there will be pressure on them to repeat that performance. They can't really do tests on employees to measure their productivity (since measuring them makes them work harder, lol), it's simply observed and recorded, and the ideology behind it put forward. Mind you, even this kind of 'science' is considered iffy by those who are doing things where it is easier to perform lab experiments.
So with ghosts, I would never believe any proof of them existing, unless it was very rigorous, they had found ghosts, had repeated sightings of them with media rather than just people apparently hearing them, etc. Even then there is plenty of scope for error - what if the recording equipment was malfunctioning?
So atm, there is really little 'evidence' of ghosts existing - but as I said in my first post that doesn't mean people can't believe in it
Old lady wearing a grey dress that moved from right to left across a room in a bar I worked at. I asked if it was an old lady she described the rest as I had seen it. Not science but she would have needed to be psychic to know what I was thinking...but then thats another argument!
So you both saw something, which you can't explain. And so the typical reaction here is to start filling in the gaps yourself, and claiming to know things that you cannot know (i.e. the soul of dead people, can walk through them, etc - the collective "you" btw, not you in particular). It's kind of a no win situation. Even if we did prove that the thing you saw existed, the fact that so much bullshit about ghosts has been made up by humans, it would be in no way related to ghosts as we know them in popular mythology, and therefore would for all intents and purposes, not be ghosts. If you get what I mean. The more is made up, the less likely it is that if anything is discovered, it will match what you claim to believe. Which is why the god that is currently believed in bears almost no resemblence to the god people believed in in the past, because most of the things attributed to him have since been discovered to be caused by something else.
I'll just give you something to ponder. When two people both go to an abbey, and see a ghost of a monk, what is the most likely explination? That the soul of a dead monk carries on hanging around in the abandoned abbey creating a ghost? Or that the power of suggestion in both cases is identical, and therefore a vision that someone might have would be exactly the same? I wonder how many of the houses in which a particular person's ghost appears actually have a picture of that person on the wall, for example?
All very logical and I agree with most of what you're saying but this is why I used a personal experience and not anecdotal evidence. I know as fact what i saw and if this wasn't confirmed by the other witness would happily believe a rational explanation for it. What cannot be explained is how the other person was to accurately know what I knew if you get my drift.
I keep an open mind as I'm sure there are things out there that can't be explained by science, well not yet anyway.
Interesting (I usually hear ghosts stories which are from a mates mums uncles friend etc!).
What did she look like, and why did you think she was a ghost? (ie did she just appear and disappear, did she float though a wall etc...)
genuinely interested.
You descirbing a personal experience is an anecedotal account of what happened to you. Otherwise it would be myth/legend etc etc
Actually, it was left to right, my bad. It was a cellar bar and behind the bar was a long preparation area with alcoves going off its side (imagine looking down on a crucifix shape). These alcoves were storage areas for bottled drinks, snacks etc
The figure would be wearing a long grey dress and appeared to be an old lady with white hair and would move out of one alcove, cross the prep area and enter the opposite alcove, that was it really. I actually thought someone had sneaked past us and was trying to nick drinks so legged it back to find nothing there. tbh I would have kept my mouth shut if I hadn't seen someone else on another occasion react the same way to what she thought was also a drinks snatcher and then tell the same experience. There were other incidents that happened to other staff members but I didn't witness those.
I should have explained better. For you its anecdotal for me as a personal experience its evidence. Whereas I am absolutely prepared to debate someone elses experience I cannot debate my own as I know what I happened to me. Others like yourself can be sceptical or choose to believe, although I do not fully understand or can explain what happened it was clear to me visually and I cannot share your position.