Polterheist
What’s dumber? Robbing a house, or getting caught because a ghost wouldn’t let you leave?
I’m guessing it’s that second part. Even dumber, when the family returned to their home, they found the would-be robber suffering dehydration (more on that on The Star Online). Or maybe he was already on the brink of it when he robbed the house, which is why he thought it was haunted. Beats me.
Of course, we hear ghost stories all the time. As I (and lots of others, of course) have long been saying, there is no credible evidence of ghosts. None. Zip. Like with UFOs, if you want to convince me of this, I want real evidence. Not a blurry photo, or video of a spider crawling on a surveillance camera. Evidence.
Of course, it would also help if people like David Klinghoffer didn’t apologize for belief in the supernatural. His opinion piece in the L.A. Times has some good points, but is way too credulous of the possibility of the paranormal. He dismissed brain-related effects explaining the belief in paranormal as too much like "just-so stories", and being unfalsifiable. Mr Klinghoffer, if you read this: there have been tests that show this effect to occur. Magnetic effects to the temporal lobe can induce all sorts of paranormal-like feelings. While this is not a sufficient explanation, it certainly is far more than a just-so story.
Anyway, I know stories like the one about the goofball burglar will continue on forever. As a rational person, I know that we will never be an entirely rational species. My hope is that we can minimize our irrationality… especially when it comes to our voters, our politicians, our editors, our writers, and anyone else in positions of power or the ability to communicate.
Tip o’ the ectoplasmic residue to Massimo Pigliucci.
Phil,
Going along with what you’ve said about our inability to be entirely rational:
I’ve got a friend who’s an atheist on the basis of skepticism, but who believes in telepathic dreams and ghosts. That’s always struck me as a strange combination. But then, I’ve known Christians who believe that the world is 6,000 years old, but who are skeptical about the paranormal, demonic possession and the New Age movement.
I’ve seen a “ghost”.
Bear with me and this rather lengthy tale.
Let me begin by saying I am an atheist, have no belief in the supernatural whatsoever am am convinced the dead are gone for good and have no continuance anywhere, including my own mother who died last April.
That said, I will never forget a night in August 1976 when a friend and I were out driving in the countryside. Upfront I want to admit we were smoking pot (it was ’76 for chrissake) BUT I NEVER EVER hallucinated on any drugs I ever took recreationally, not even Acid – NEVER.
I was behind the wheel as we drove alongside a cornfield on the left, platte houses on the right. From the direction of the houses loomed a hunched figure of a man in what looked like a trenchcoat. From off the figure poured smoke or vapour as he moved across the road in our headlights, toward the cornfield as we drove by. It made the hair on my head stand.
At the stop sign at the bottom of the hill we gasped to each other: “What the hell was that?” A care drove up behind us and two other kids jumped out running up to our car frantic saying “What was that? A bear?!” (This was southern Ohio – no bears). When the four of us drove back to the spot where the figure had entered the cornfield we could find no break in the high stalks anywhere.
Several years later, my friend’s sister was working at a local newspaper and came across a local story surrounding a 19th-century decapitation of a local miller along that road where his alleged ghost had been been sighted occasionally ever since.
Now, to acknowledge how the mind re-interprets phenomena, my friend today is convinced the figure we saw was headless. I’m convinced this is a result of later finding out the actual murder was one of decapitation since I merely recall a figure hunched deeply in the coat but would not have thought “headless”.
This experience fits nowhere in my scientific/skeptical worldview, yet it has always “haunted” me because three other people also witnessed something strange that night similar to my own experience. Of course, it could have been somebody who knew the legend playing pepretrating a hoax. But it was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen: the smoking figure, no break in the corn, my fellow witnesses, etc.
Is hoax or an elaborate prank the answer then? I would really appreciate being completely finally disabused of the vestigial conviction that I saw something uncanny that night. I’m the opposite of a believer: I want to be convinced of trickery, deception, shared hallucination, etc. I always abide by the dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and grant there is no extraordinary evidence here just the feeling that something very strange happened that night that I cannot explain and that has nagged me for years.
Thoughts?
“This experience fits nowhere in my scientific/skeptical worldview..”
Perhaps your scientific/skeptical worldview requires expansion.
1. Nothing about what you, your car mate, and the people in the car behind you saw was ‘paranormal’ in nature as described. You report seeing a man crossing the road. Men, roads, and the behavior are all common.
2. There is nothing unusual about a damp coat emitting steam or vapor, especially in the cool of the evening in August in Ohio.
3. That a man was reported decapitated one hundred or more years ago along that road sets you up for a correlation error. Do you have any idea how many people have died on or near that piece of real estate over the past 12-14,000 years? Why decide you saw the ghost of that particular dead man? The man you saw wasn’t headless, nor did he offer any other reason to connect him to any particular ‘ghost’.
4. “….yet it has always “haunted” me because three other people also witnessed something strange that night similar to my own experience.”
It’s only ‘strange’ because you’ve convinced yourself it was somnething strange. I see nothing strange about it whatsoever. You have abandoned an objective review to fulfill the ghost story.
5. “no break in the corn..”
Do you think just maybe a man can walk amid corn without knocj=king it down? I know I can and do just that. Do you think maybe the farmer who owns the corn might want to avoid knocking it down?
6. “Is hoax or an elaborate prank the answer then?”
False dichotomy. You are pitching the idea it was either a hoax or a ghost. It was very likely neither. It was very likely what it appeared to be, a man crossing the road.
7. “I’m the opposite of a believer: I want to be convinced of trickery, deception, shared hallucination, etc.”
Nice start, but you seem to have avoided considering some pretty obvious facts concerning your sighting, to the point one wonders if you aren’t really hoping no one will be able to normalize your experience – the trajectory of belief and a triumph over reason.
“One wonders if you aren’t really hoping no one will be able to normalize your experience – the trajectory of belief and a triumph over reason.”
Untrue. You have given me some “normalizing” points to ponder for which I am grateful and more than willing to grant greater credence than my own “qualms”. Bear in mind that when I’ve told this story in the past almost everyone wants to give it a supernatural spin. Thus my appeal to fellow skeptics and unbelievers. I am quite sincere (and appreciative).
“Bear in mind that when I’ve told this story in the past almost everyone wants to give it a supernatural spin.”
Are you quite sure you’re a science-minded skeptic? It sounds like you were swayed by what believers in the supernatural felt about your story. Why does that require bearing in mind?
“Thus my appeal to fellow skeptics and unbelievers.”
I can only speak for myself, but I’d venture a guess that very few skeptics and unbelievers, a number I’d place somewhere in the neighborhood of none, would jump to the paranormal explanation after failing to find a natural explanation. Given the offered details, I think about 99% of them would have responded with pretty much the same points I did.
You describe yourself as scientific and a skeptic. You were entertaining the possibility of having seen a ghost because of the inability to locate a mundane explanation. How do you reconcile these two things internally?
Are you *sure* you’re science-minded and skeptical?
” I am quite sincere (and appreciative).”
You are more than welcome.
I don’t believe I said I thought I had seen an actual ghost. Nor was I setting-up my story so that the paranormal might seem a plausible explanation. I do believe I am science-minded and skeptical but the way you are describing that stance makes it sound a kind of doctrine or party affiliation rather than a way or line of thinking along which some of us are more experienced than others.
I don’t know how to make it any clearer that I don’t believe in ghosts, a (so-called) after-life, psychism, spirit-worlds, etc. The reason for my bringing this up (aside from honestly trying to square my unbelief with what the event suggested to me at the time) is that programs like the one proposed here are going to come across other skeptical people who really don’t know how to explain unusual phenomena they have encountered.
I know that you (Devil’s Advocate) mean well in dressing me down concerning my lack of intellectual rigour but this is exactly what will be encountered in the audience the skeptics program hopes to reach – regular, generally skeptical folks, not just nutcases, woo-mongers and those merely hoping to be entertained. Your calling into question my motivation in asking for help in forming a rational explanation for what I saw would, I fear, alienate a number of viewers and potential skeptics.
Nevertheless, I reiterate my appreciation for the points you raised regarding my particular story and apologize to others for holding-forth here. I will not comment further.
@Devil’s Advocate-
All right already. Let the man up, he’s had enough.
You probably mean well, and you probably are not indending this, but let’s not smack BEZ around for asking an honest question. You are most likely correct that his belief that he saw something unexplainable was wrongheaded from the start- but he has had the courage to ask a group of skeptics for their opinion. Your opinion has been given- one I think is a very likely explanation. Let’s not be smug.
We *want* people to ask these questions, not be sorry they asked.
This is an excellent reminder that no amount of rational thought is proof against the compelling feeling we get from our own experiences. I’ve been a hard-headed materialist for at least all of my adult life, but the times I’ve been willing to believe that I may have been dead wrong were always because of personal experiences.
Experiences that, like BEZ’s, were easy to explain rationally by someone who wasn’t there, but left me with an eerie feeling that felt completely unaddressed by explanations that were solely of the mundane.
Skeptics so often fail to appreciate the force of this kind of experience, resulting in rather naive comments like those of Devil’s Advocate in #5. In reality it’s quite easy to be a skeptic about other people’s experiences and still be fooled by our own. (And if you think that makes someone less of a skeptic, you might as well laugh at someone for not being born knowing how to do long division.)
I think there’s a difference when one declares he’s proficient in long division before he botches an attempt at long division.
We all have our thoughts and theories as to how to respond to stories and story-tellers like this. That mine doesn not match another’s does not make either the ‘correct’ response.
I was impressed far more by the internal inconsistencies of the story-teller than the rather pedestrian story told.
I’ve had a few strange experiences through the years, seeing things and hearing voices for a few seconds. Now I’ve read Susan Blackmore’s book “Conciousness – an introduction” I know that the brain can send a message to the wrong place, thus producing a false audible or visual experience. Who knows what else there is still undiscovered and unexplained in nature, including the human mind.
File under “interesting” and see if an explanation turns up is my response to honestly told mysterious events. Sensible, rational people do have them and don’t regard them as messages from the other side or other woo but know that they don’t understand them. “I don’t know” is a rational and logical response to many things.
SeanJJordan, of course Christian fundamentalists are “skeptical” about the paranormal (occult) and the New Age movement. They’re also “skeptical” about Islam, Hinduism, and anything else that doesn’t follow the literal interpretation of the Bible.
Oooooh a poltergeist!
Somehow, I find sock puppets more convincing than the tale of a would-be burglar being taken down by unseen forces of the paranormal. I wonder if this tale of burglar woe has dodged the typical attempt in logical explanations like most cases of the “paranormal” tend to do.
@SeanJJordan
Actually that isn’t such a strange combination. Where I live (west of the Netherlands) about 60% of the people is athiest (or can be called deist, when they say they don’t believe in God but do think there is ‘something’). But many of them still believe in things like ghosts, UFO’s or homeopathy. When you are atheist that really does not have to mean that you are a skeptic, just that you do not believe in a God or other ‘divine force’. Of course America differs from West-Europe in this because atheism isn’t that common there, so probably American atheists are more likely to also be skeptics than European atheists.