Ghostly experiences thread

Banbh

You DO know that Danny Boy and the Derry Air are one and the same tune?

kylith

I know now, but I didn't then. In fact, I found out because of that incident!

Dr. Loon

kylith wrote: »

I've had a couple of experiences which I struggle to explain. Maybe someone here can shed some light.

I don't see what's unusual about the keyboard story?! Same song! Even if it wasn't, the more likely explanation than a musical ghost, is a fault in the keyboard. It's an electronic product. Electronics are prone to failure and other funny hiccups. Power surge, power short, whatever.... all more likely than a ghost.

If you're in doubt, then think of probabilities. Which is more probable? Electronic fault or ghost? Which is factually known to occur?

As for the smell, you probably just thought you smelt it. I've been around quite a few dead bodies in my time I'm sad to say, and I don't know the smell you refer to. Chemicals, incense and - horrible though it may seem -faeces, are usually the smells around dead bodies. Can you describe it? Could it have been a particular perfume or chemical the undertakers used? Could that particular perfume or chemical also have been present in the school? Was food cooking in both places? Formaldehyde? I'm not sure what they use but it's more probable. Young, emotional, and taking into account our memories really are quite terrible, I'd put it down to a false memory too - as the more probable option.

Additionally, there are some smells that are very similar to others. A particular non-alcoholic beer I drink smells like high grade marijuana upon opening the bottle. Another obvious one is cheeses and smelly feet.

Anyway, probabilities. Or delusion. Your choice.

Calibos

Posted this on one of the regional forums in a Ghost story thread but it suits here too:

After my grand parents had both passed away our family bought my fathers siblings share of the house and we moved in and renovated the house the following year. I sleep directly over the spot my grandmother was found dead. I slept soundly from Night One. After the second time I heard a weird sound within the walls 2 years later (this year) I had reasoned out what it was. The fireplaces at the back of the house were blocked off and the Chimney stacks within the walls were filled in with rubble by the builders/renovators to stabilise the gable wall. The vibration from the dart line 100 yards away was causing the looser smaller elements of the rubble used to fill the chimney stacks to cascade down the stack. Another weird sound I reasoned out to be the branches of a tree rubbing the metal corrugated roof of a building behind us when the wind is from a particular direction. The tapping I often here is when water flowing through a particular pipe causes thermal expansion in the pipe and it makes a friction tapping kind of sound where the pipe runs through a joist. The apparition of Jesus in the back yard was the reflection in the back door window of a towel hanging on the chair beside me superimposed over something hanging on the side of the shed out in the yard and my brains pattern recognition centre guessing wrong for an instant.

Whats the difference between me and all the people who see/hear ghosts???

As a sceptic, I worked from the basis that these incidents where something mundane but they were an interesting puzzle for me to stimulate my brain. No fear or jumpiness clouding my judgement. No preconceived notions of the supernatural. No running off to tell someone about what I had heard or seen before I had given it any rational thought. I heard the noises and said to myself I wonder what that could be. I thought it through and came up with hypothosis and then in the following minutes or hours and in some of the cases days and weeks, tested those hypothosis or had to wait for them to happen again and figure out what conditions were common to both instances.

My hypothosis about the noise in the wall was as I described at the beginning. It was confirmed the third time it happened. The second time I noted the sound of some locomotives being moved at the train station during the wee hours. When I heard the sound and locmotives the third time I knew I had the complete explanation.

The tapping during the night was confirmed the second time when I investigated and say that someone had left a hot water tap dripping. Enough to cause thermal expansion in the pipe going through the pipe.

The Jesus apparition stopped me in my tracks. Rather than running of screaming, Instead I stopped instantly, knew I wasn't seeing what I thought I was seeing, studied it until the illusion collapsed and realised what I was seeing. I was then able to make the apparition of The white robed Jesus appear and disappear at will, much like the candle stick illusion (One instant its two faces looking at each other, the next instant its the candlestick) The cause is the part of the brain that has evolved to play it safe when it recieves insufficient sensory input. Your eyes sees movement in the bushes beside the pliestocene camp fire. If your brain makes a guess that its a sabretooth tiger and draws such on your visual cortex, well if it actually is a sabretooth, you just jumped out of the way in time and someone else got caught and eaten. If the brain guessed wrong and it was just a bush branch blowing in the wind, well you just laughed to yourself. UG, me just thought I saw sabretooth Hurhur . ie. The result of guessing wrong about the sabretooh 9 time out of 10 is an adrenaline burst and a chuckle to ones self. The result of the brain waiting for more sensory input all the time so it can guess correctly 100% of the time that its a branch is that those 9 times the branch moves you don't get your shot of adrenaline and a chuckle but that one time when it really was a sabretooth means.....you're dead cause your brain took too long to work out what the movement in the bushes was!!

The brain does this all the time. I once walked out the back door and saw a big brown rat run past. Except it wasn't a rat. I happened to walk out one door looking at the ground. My mother happened to come out the other door at the same time. She happened to be wearing grey slacks that camoflaged her legs against the grey concrete. So what I was actually seeing was what looked like the disembodied brown shoes moving along the ground. The brain is subconciously thinking that shoes don't move on their own, What brown thing the size of a shoe would move across the yard like that. Why a big brown rat of course. It draws a big brown rat on my visual cortex and thats what I see/percieve.......until my gaze shifts a little, I catch the rest of my mothers body in my peripheral vision, the illusion collapses and the rat disappears and my mothers....shoes...and the rest of her appears

This happens to everyone all the time. Everyone has had those, "Jaysus, for a second there, I thought I saw a......"
The difference is that when it happens during the daylight hours one sees it for what it is. For some reason when the caveman fear of the dark creeps over us at night time, the very same people don't see that the ghost they saw/heard is the very same type of common neurological glitch that they laugh off during the day.

kylith

Dr. Loon wrote: »

I don't see what's unusual about the keyboard story?! Same song! Even if it wasn't, the more likely explanation than a musical ghost, is a fault in the keyboard. It's an electronic product. Electronics are prone to failure and other funny hiccups. Power surge, power short, whatever.... all more likely than a ghost.

If you're in doubt, then think of probabilities. Which is more probable? Electronic fault or ghost? Which is factually known to occur?

Oh, I know that it wasn't a ghost, don't worry; the keyboard developing sentience is more likely, imo. The thing is that it wasn't programmed, as far as I know, to play the song at all. The backing track would be akin to hearing just the drums for a song, the tune wouldn't be recognisable. The most probable explanations I've come up with are that either my brain eventually threw up Danny Boy as something that fit the time signature it was hearing, or that after a certain period of time the keyboard is programmed to play the song and I just haven't let it play long enough since (seriously, I used to have this thing going for hours).

Dr. Loon wrote: »

As for the smell, you probably just thought you smelt it. I've been around quite a few dead bodies in my time I'm sad to say, and I don't know the smell you refer to. Chemicals, incense and - horrible though it may seem -faeces, are usually the smells around dead bodies. Can you describe it? Could it have been a particular perfume or chemical the undertakers used? Could that particular perfume or chemical also have been present in the school? Was food cooking in both places? Formaldehyde? I'm not sure what they use but it's more probable. Young, emotional, and taking into account our memories really are quite terrible, I'd put it down to a false memory too - as the more probable option.

It wasn't the smell of embalming, chemicals, or perfume. It was the smell of a body getting ready to die and starting to shut down its organs. I can't describe it except to say I perceived it as a 'flat' smell (jesus, smells are impossible to describe). I'd know it if I smelled it again.

Dr. Loon wrote: »

Anyway, probabilities. Or delusion. Your choice.

Either or. The only reason they stick in my mind is that I haven't been able to figure out what caused those events. Like Calibos I enjoy figuring out what causes our brains to perceive things as other than they are, and my inability to explain those ones occasionally drives me nuts. They're probably false memories, but they don't feel like it, I remember how they made me feel at the time, and the thoughts I had regarding them, and I remember talking to other people about them afterward, which is a lot for my, very lazy, brain to go inventing.

Banbh

Thanks for that excellent explanation. For people who have made a commitment to reason, all phenomena are explainable. I recall when I first shed superstition in my teens how so many terrors simply faded away.

Dr. Loon

Banbh wrote: »

I recall when I first shed superstition in my teens how so many terrors simply faded away.

Indeed, the amount of irrational fears that are cast off once you commit to reason is amazing, and truly liberating.

robindch

About twenty years back, in my parents' house, I was coding around two or three in the morning during one of the good hack runs one could get into when there were no interruptions, as there never were in the days before the internet and mobiles came to the wilder and more remote parts of South Kerry. It was just my parents and I in the house and they'd gone to bed hours earlier, perhaps around ten, so there'd been dead silence since that time. I was alone in my room, leaning back in the chair, trying to figure out some bug or other when, suddenly, I felt a finger press down firmly and unambiguously on my left shoulder.

I froze, didn't turn around, and considered the options, which were that either I was hallucinating, or there was some weirdo in the room with me. Couldn't have been a weirdo, since there was no way into the room except through the bathroom window (locked open at just a few inches) or the main bedroom door or the windows which were both closed and which I could see. So I concluded it was an hallucination and that I really needed to get out more.

So I turned around and saw our cat who'd hopped in quietly through the bathroom window, and had managed to place his paw on my shoulder by quietly jumping onto the bed behind me and leaning forward to reach me, leaning backwards. It took around about twenty minutes for my heart to return to normal.

Sierra 117

Cats really would make the best assassins.