The Flaw in all "True" Ghost Stories

There are many kinds of spirits, and different ways they appear to different people. There are human entities, and non-human entities. I have seen shadow apparitions, as tall as 8-9 ft., and as short as three (3) feet. Most of the time, you can't see them, but you can feel them.
Mostly children see them and it is dismissed as imagination, because they are not yet conditioned to believe that they don't exist.
Some people believe, and some don't. It is believed that spirits draw power from a host, and feed off of fear and turmoil-the ability to manifest varies on the amount of energy they can feed off of.
Human entities will to a degree resemble a person, and non human entities either a shadow, or mist, and possibly smoke.
I am not a professional in this field. i am 46 years old, and four generations of my family has had a strong "sensitive" in each generation.
When spirits are present, the draw of energy they remove from a room is extraordinary. I have had to have my house cleansed twice. I would not wish it on anybody.

There are many different 'things' that people lump under the term 'ghost', and as such there are many different explanations which could be attributed to them. But the classic ghost is usually something which though incorporeal is recognizably human and seems to constantly be reliving a certain event in their life which was particularly emotional or traumatic.

I myself do not see these as spirits, but rather more an 'imprint' left behind by the living conscious mind of a person which has somehow survived long after that person has passed on. This is why they do things such as walk through walls, or seemingly float, or appear cut off at the knees etc. Because when that 'impression' was formed there never used to be a wall there, or the was once a floor or the ground level has changed. These ghost do not appear to be acting under freewill at all but rather just continually relive one particular event.

Whether the spirit of the person who created the ghost is actually trapped within that 'impression' i really wouldn't know but people more knowledgeable about the subject than I seem to think it does. As for things such as poltergeists or black shapes etc I would definitely lump these into some other category such as an over-active psychically charged mind, or a malevolent spirit, or who knows what...

Well, I think you tend to see "ghosts" as people/dogs/whatever because the thing itself isn't really there at all. It's calling images out of your memory, maybe the closest echo you know of what it once was. But everyone that "sees a ghost" tends to describe it a bit differently even though they all "saw it". What you see is an icon, sort of. Not a replay of the thing as it originally was - unless you actually knew that person/animal in real life.

Because...I think that it's a real phenomenon, but not a supernatural one. I think it's not strongly conserved as an ability anymore, at least for people, and that it doesn't serve the purpose it once did, and will eventually breed out.

What in hell, Tom, are you talking about, you say.

Well, I think it's a dying remnant of a once useful biological function. A thing that animals still do but we do not, at least not nearly as well.

Consider. If Thag gets killed at the big bend near the water hole by a sabertooth that lives near by, it would be a useful biological function, one that could be selected for in an evolutionary sense, if Thag's last will and testament was a succinct encoding of a warning - I got et here. Watch yer back. That ought to hit at the lowest level of emotional response. And what is that? Smell.

Let's say that you, under stress, or in the moment of death, or any number of similar things that might be about to imminently lead to death, emit a pheromone tag that is fairly persistent, marking the place and manner of your demise. Future people coming to that spot, might, if the wind was right and your mental state receptive, pick up on that cue and "see a ghost"- perceive some sort of vague and misty warning conjured up from other memories and pitched obliquely at the conscious.

You have a lot of receptors in your nose that tie directly to the seats of memory and emotion - the hippocampus and limbic system. These receptors do not encode for scent. Your nose has the ability to detect complex airborne molecules and forward that info as tags to your memory and emotion without filtering. No one really knows what that's for. Some of them obviously encode for sexual pheromones. But the majority of nasal receptors still exist and work for...something. If triggered you don't smell anything - many of them cause reactions too subtle to easily notice. The Army pranked around with this because a lot of them induce fear and unease, and as far as I know gave it up a few years back. But what if those receptors are for a pheromone that isn't "wow you're hot" but "Help, I'm being eaten"?

What are some of the features that tend to induce hauntings? Sad lives cut short, surprise or violent death, long torments, battlefields. Generally some emotionally wound up state culminating in death. And either mass death, if it's in the open like a battlefield, or in cemeteries where they are piled up, or generally if it's a single person haunting it's inside. Inside the scent concentrates. Outside, you need more dead people in an area.

I think that ghosts are the lingering remains of a once-useful warning system that involves emission of a long duration airborne tag in sweat or urine that marks the spot where someone died a violent death (how many ghosts are generated by happy lives with a calm death?). That tag is picked up as a neutral scent by the pheromone system, the recipient may, upon detecting it, generate limbic system emotions of unease, fear, dread and simultaneously the hippocampal connections may cause memory retrieval of something close to the original event. The purpose would have been to warn you away from areas where death occurred in a nasty way, and the more deaths in that area, the more likely the system will trigger. Thus are cemeteries "scary", battlefields too, especially at night when the air is heavy, humid and still, just right for conveying the death pheromone tag.

Some people are better at smelling it and are "sensitives".

It would be interesting if there were some way to reliably trigger the sensation (bottled ghost!) or to conduct a study where you could plug the noses of half the volunteers to see if that was it.

Originally posted by TheStev
reply to post by ldyserenity

 

Could you explain further? All objects that are 'seen' appear to be physical. Either your stepdaughter touched the entity (therefore her sense of it being 'solid' was beyond sight) or the entity moved something giving the impression of solidity.

Otherwise there is nothing to say for certain that it was anything other than a non-transparent apparition. Just because you can't see straight through to the other side of an apparition doesn't mean that it has a tangible, physical form.

It touched her. and she ran out of the house. Was not a living person because she sat outside and nobody ever came out of the house, besides it was a child ghost and it was a time at night where in a city like Philadelphia there would be no kids running around alone.

reply to post by Wandering Scribe


I was thinking along these lines,too.There are two sets of consciousness in the equation:the observer and the observed.Perception is a very subjective thing and I don't think there's any one answer because there are vastly innumerable circumstances that exist in any "encounter" or manifestation,which would all influence what was projected and what was seen/perceived.I and my family have had numerous encounters with ghosts and they are all different,ranging from a wisp of energy or orb type to 100% realistic and solid enough to be touched and have form as any living person.

reply to post by amrith777


That has always been my opinion. I never cared whether other people accepted it or not. The spiritual world is highly subjective. We see in it what we're raised to see. Not anything near what it actually probably is. Afterall, an atheist will never have an experience, if they don't believe it is possible. While believers can have experiences everyday if their subconscious tells them to.

~ Wandering Scribe