#TOTW Ghosts – do they exist?

Okay, so I know they don’t but…

My wife is normally very normal and not prone to believing such guff but she is convinced we have a ghost as she has heard footsteps around the house several times during the night.

At the weekend not only did she hear such noises but one of our daughters heard it too so my wife got up to investigate but our other daughter was fast asleep (I have previously suggested it might be someone sleepwalking) as was the dog and there was no sign of anything amiss.

The house is detached so no chance of noises travelling from an adjoining property. The only other explanation I have is birds on the roof or in the loft (we have had starlings in the past but these noises are different according to my wife). Or rats – but I can’t see any sign of them and I know how noisy they can be so I am sure I’d have heard them too.

So – is it time for an exorcist?

No, maybe a psychiatrist rather than exorcists!

Squirrels probably.

No idea,

My wife and rest of my family believe in ghosts (brother,mother, dad, aunt/uncles etc.) – all claim to have seen them with a verity of stories. I have no stories and I’m not so sure.

My mother and brother (when we were kids) had a similar experience in our family home. My mum being religious, had the house blessed by local vicar and they didn’t experience any thing again in the house.

I once woke up to my radio going full blast down stairs and the light on.
There’s no way I would have gone to bed leaving them both on.
My friend lived there before I did and him and his girlfriend both assumed the other was leaving the flower pot on the stairs….it wasn’t.

Plumbing banging? Ours can make clunks and thumps sometimes which I take to be due to copper pipework flexing and contracting as it heats and cools. I reckon the brain, half-asleep, can hear an unexpected noise and helpfully convert that into “footsteps” or “murderer sharpening wicked blade”.

That or we have ghosts too, IDK.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00049t9

No idea

FTFY

No. Next.

I don’t beleive they exist.

Any weird experience I’ve ever had I’ve found a logical explanation for it and it has turned out to NOT be a ghost :o)

My wife and her family are believers and I regularly tell them they’re wrong – which ALWAYS goes down well!!

My mother and brother (when we were kids) had a similar experience in our family home. My mum being religious, had the house blessed by local vicar and they didn’t experience any thing again in the house.

this doesn’t prove that ghosts are real, but it is a nice proof of the power of the placebo effect 😃

OP – Why does your wife think would ghosts choose to walk around your house in the middle of the night?

My 7 year old asked the same question this morning. Spooky or what?!

Had an interesting chat with a tenant of a supposedly haunted house a few years back.

He was adamant he didn’t believe in ghosts, but could recount several incidents of “ghostly” figures and noises that regularly appeared and he couldn’t explain away – the house at a rural crossroads, and supposedly the site of murders and highwaymen.

So maybe no such thing as ghosts but we have imaginations that like to fill in blanks.

As nonbeliever, I really enjoyed uncanny on BBC sounds. It didn’t make me believe in ghosts, but the accounts are compelling. Not sure if it’s a good idea for the op to listen to it though…

My sister to this day insists she saw a ghost in an old farm house we lived in when when she was about 4 years old. By pure coincidence this was after my dad found some ancient lace clothing in the attic and an elderly neighbour told us it was haunted.

Plumbing banging?

Not that either – it makes a bloody racket when it is on (so know the noises well) so we have it set so heating doesn’t come on until we are up anyway.

OP – Why does your wife think would ghosts choose to walk around your house in the middle of the night?

We have had this discussion. It hasn’t convinced her that she is wrong though.

The human mind with it’s power of imagination is a wonderful and terrifying thing.
“The number you are thinking about is 87“

Plumbing banging? Ours can make clunks and thumps sometimes which I take to be due to copper pipework flexing and contracting as it heats and cools

And of course t he whole house will do this, especially at times of year when there is a temperature difference between day and night.

My kids keep telling me about the rats in the attic – it’s seagulls on the roof, but they sound so loud that I can understand why my kids think they are rats.

Any weird experience I’ve ever had I’ve found a logical explanation for it and it has turned out to NOT be a ghost :o)

I’ve had a few weird experiences where there was no logical explanation. It doesn’t mean ghosts exist, just that sometimes weird things happen. Or that I wasn’t paying much attention to the world. 😀

Why does no one ever see ghost ants?
We’d be INUNDATED with the buggers if they were real (ghosts that is. Ants ARE real,tbh)

DrP

I’ve never heard of a ghost in an intensive care unit. Pretty sure if anywhere was haunted they would be!

OP, your wife heard footsteps but the dog didn’t?
Skeptical.

Check your lawn for sausages?

If ghosts existed, somewhere like the City Of London, which for the best part of 2000 years had a significant density of people living horrible lives and dying terrible deaths, would be absolutely teeming with them. Every tourist photo of the Tower Of London or St Paul’s would include an image of a headless horseman, plague victim or drowned child.

But, no, they’re always ‘found’ in some farmhouse or pub in the arse-end of nowhere, and use their supernatural powers to move flowerpots in the middle of the night.

We have had this discussion. It hasn’t convinced her that she is wrong though.

Not just ghosts, by the sound of it 🤣

I had a small radio that I didn’t use. It wasn’t plugged in and had no batteries. Straight after my grandma had died, in the middle of the night, the radio emitted 5 to 10 seconds of very loud white noise. Both my Girlfriend and myself heard it. I cannot explain it.

I come from a scientific and engineering background so like fact and explanations, but I keep an open mind when it comes to the paranormal.

“Why does no one ever see ghost ants?”

Or dinosaur ghosts? They should be easy to see and they were around a lot longer than we will ever be.

I’ve never heard of a ghost in an intensive care unit. Pretty sure if anywhere was haunted they would be!

IF there were ghosts, my theory is that they’d haunt places that they were familiar with, not places that they barely knew. But, if you were haunting for a reason – revenge or whatever – you’d surely follow the person who you were trying to haunt, not get stuck in a particular place and randomly bother strangers.

Not that I’ve thought about this much. From similar, late night, semi-drunk ponderings, do all vampires originate in a Christian background? Do lycanthropes prefer being wolves? Why not lycanthrope otters?

Define ‘ghost’
I’ve heard things. Seen things. I’d like to think of my mind as ‘open, but not credulous’.

Suffice to say, I choose not to be on the fence, I instead choose both:

– ‘There are more things on Heaven and Earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’

– ‘There are more things dreamt of in your philosophy, than on Heaven and Earth’

Here’s my favourite tale of an old skeptic having his mind turned by a rumpled bedsheet slipping off a neighbouring bed. Or was it pushed? 👻

Read by the late great Michael Hordern. ( He also played the old professor in a short film of the same name. It too is wonderful, IMO)

I’d like to write a ‘book-end’ tale, about a fanciful fellow who instead by the light of the midday sun has his trembling credulousness rudely awakened by a life-altering mundanity.

Pretty obvious to me that we are all living in a simulation. A ghost is just a symptom of when Zuckerberg decides to inhabit your avatar for a bit.

I had a small radio that I didn’t use. It wasn’t plugged in and had no batteries. Straight after my grandma had died, in the middle of the night, the radio emitted 5 to 10 seconds of very loud white noise. Both my Girlfriend and myself heard it. I cannot explain it.

This is an interesting one, for me. (I mentioned weird things happening above). I’ve had VERY odd things happen when people close to me have died. Both my sister and I had strange things happening when our mother died, which we talked about later. It’s easy to put it down to grief or coincidence, but that’s not always a good explanation. I’ve never ascribed it to being haunted, or ghosts, just ‘weird stuff’.

Pretty obvious to me that we are all living in a simulation.

Statistically, we probably are.

Any weird experience I’ve ever had I’ve found a logical explanation for it and it has turned out to NOT be a ghost :o)

There’s a very pervasive human desire to want explanations for things. It’s how we got religion (which, as it turned out, wasn’t a very good explanation anyway) and why we have ghosts, UFOs and so forth.

“I can’t explain something therefore [supernatural]” is something of a leap. My old Sky box / amp / TV kept turning themselves on in the middle of the night, loud enough to wake me up. This was, of course, a poltergeist. I finally exorcised the demon by unplugging the Sky box for 30 seconds and powering it back up, clearing whatever glitch was causing it to come out of standby and wake up the other kit via HDMI-CEC.

It’s OK sometimes to not understand things.

Whilst feeding my baby son one evening, a felt a cold breeze around my legs and the baby started giggling like someone was ticking him. He was gazing at something in front of him. I told my wife about it who told me not to be daft.
Next morning, my mum rang to tell me that my Grandfather has passed away the evening before.
I asked if it was around 7.30pm and she asked how did I know that ?
I like to think he had come to say goodbye ( he hadn’t met the baby, as we were in hospital with him for 7 weeks when he was born due to complications and we had not long been at home).

Ghostsbolloxworld >>>>>>>

I don’t believe in ghosts, but have had a few strange experiences in the family:

– Both my brother and I at separate times when we were kids believed that we saw the same ‘boy’ in our house.  We had never discussed this before someone was talking about ghosts and we recounted similar stories.  I now put it down to the overactive imagination of children waking up in the middle of the night.

– Back when I was living at home I was upstairs with my then GF, no-one else in the house. Loud (and to add to the freakishness) church type music started playing downstairs (radio was constantly tuned to R4).  Radio in the kitchen had turned on (my parents never listened to loud music), old style radio, so plugged in but uses a click down on button/manual tuner/no alarm or any other fancy gubbins.

– Staying in a rental cottage, allegedly haunted.  Bro and his wife in a loft room.  In middle of the night they were woken by a knock on the room door, which then slammed open.  No windows open or obvious draft.  No-one else up in the middle of the night.  Sure there’s a good explanation but they were a bit freaked out by it.

Why is it that an ephemeral “being” which can pass through walls has such a heavy footfall?

Staying in a rental cottage, allegedly haunted.

Mechanical doping in the haunted cottage industry is widespread.

“Why does no one ever see ghost ants?”

Or dinosaur ghosts?

Ah, this is because they don’t have souls, you see.

– ‘There are more things on Heaven and Earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’

– ‘There are more things dreamt of in your philosophy, than on Heaven and Earth’

Pick two.

Cross out “heaven and Earth” and write “universe” and you might have a point.

Sure there’s a good explanation but they were a bit freaked out by it.

Cross out “heaven and Earth” and write “universe” and you might have a point.

Sensible as that may be, I can’t yet bring myself to so disrespect Shakespeare’s turn of phrase (neither that of Michael Hordern for that matter!)

And anyway, who says that ‘universe’ is all that exists. And what is ‘existence’?

(Save that topic for a late night with a clear day the other side of it!)