In light of this new news article, I decided to bring up a stale debate


Ghost caught on tape June 4 2009

Quote

EXTRAORDINARY CCTV footage has captured what could be the ghost of a small child darting across a busy shopping centre.

The floating phantom figure appears in the bottom right of the screen after a male shopper exits a room to the top left.

It makes its way across the busy concourse and seems to head for the same door the man has just passed through.

The 36-second tape was taken in a shopping mall in Chile, South America, and surfaced on the internet today.

It is alleged the image is the ghost of a small local boy.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25591712-401,00.html


Now, I honestly do believe, and have some "ghost stories" of my own..

I believe
But I do not want to debate on this
I just thought I would put my opinion across

There's no proof of the thing.

I've got ghost stories. Real ghost stories. Ones that I've spun out of whole cloth through people telling me their stories. Ones that I'm certain are bad dreams, or the product of overactive imaginations.

If ghosts were real, there'd be some way of detecting them that didn't involve BS psychics or relying on humanity's built-in pattern recognition capabilities.

I watch these guys....

http://www.scifi.com/ghosthunters/

They use a lot of tech stuff .

That's a fly, or other small insect, on the camera lens.  Look at the way it meanders.

Also note the "shadow double" under it that'd be consistent with the shadow created by refraction through a lens, which you'd see if something was on it.

James Randi Speaks: Can't Fool Me!

Randi says it better than I do.

LtStorm (06:37pm Fri, Jun  5, 2009)

That's a fly, or other small insect, on the camera lens.  Look at the way it meanders.

Also note the "shadow double" under it that'd be consistent with the shadow created by refraction through a lens, which you'd see if something was on it.

Yeah today I've heard it being called a bug shadow, and someone said something about it being sunlight or dust too...

Will watch your vid in a later Andre!

Okay I wanna see his book...

I deeply believe in afterlife and ghosts although I'm a bit sceptical about most stories of people who met a ghost because great amount of them is made up for commercial purposes.

Would you believe my stories?

I believe that spirits are all around us.  Since my sister passed away, I have definitely felt her presence on numerous occasions.  Sometimes I will ask her to hug me when I'm sad and I get chills right after. I could be wrong about this but it just feels like someone is there.

I have done some research on things called "orbs".  In one of the books that I read there were instructions on how to capture an orb on camera.  I went out onto my back porch at night, followed the instructions and lo and behold I captured a picture of an orb.  I think these are the energies of the spirits.

I believe in ghosts. Most people won't believe until they see one for themselves, or witness something impossible.

I'm never entirely sure what I believe, but the only thing that I believe is the fact that there much be something else after we die. I know that our bodies are gone, but I don't believe that everything inside us can ever truly vanish. There are a lot of things in this world that people don't understand, and this means that we can never really rule anything out as such.

I have had a couple of experiences which have made me feel as though somebody has been guiding me; things that have happened that I couldn't explain any other way, and that is one of reasons that I believe what I do now.

One of the sad things about life is the fact that the main question is "what happens when we die" but yet nobody is able to tell us, because once you find out it's too late.

I do think that believing in ghosts and spirits can be very comforting for those people who choose to believe, because it means that they feel as though their loved ones are still with them. That's great, and I am often envious of those who have such deep rooted beliefs.

Yes, I do believe ghosts and spirits do exist. It's because people cannot see them doesn't mean they don't exist in this world. I think people have to seek to believe, which I think it's true until I saw your Youtube video. I sometimes wonder what will happen if I see one myself, which the only reason you see them because one that you have special powers. Second, there's something about you that the ghosts or spirits need help from you or something. I would say memory is one of the reasons that brings ghosts or spirits to reach close to our world.

This discussion came up in our creative writing class one day.  The teacher is an absolute pragmatist and does not believe.  I have often question my own beliefs on the subject.  I believe that their is an unexplainable animate force around all of us.  When we pass on what happens to us?  Some people report coming back from near death experience, but to me near death experience is not death.  I believe that I have witnessed the presence of a ghost once as a child and at other times I believe that I have heard unexplained talking in the next room of my house.  The voices of children playing games.  So far there is not an absolutely verifiable technology that can discern the presence of ghosts and with the photo editing tools today it is easy to manipulate film to create documentation.  I have watched some ghost hunters and find some of their research to make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.  The human brain is powerful and guided by perception.  I think that if one believes in ghost that one is more likely to see them.  So, as I told my teacher, I only believe in ghosts when there are people around to make noise and scare them away.  When I am alone in my house at night and I hear voices or see figures in the dark I find it much more beneficial to envision them as psychic projections of my adventurous mind.

This is very interesting to see people chatting about this and I'm glad we are. So many people are skeptical and I can see why because I was that way for years too. I would hear stories and see documentaries or whatever on tv and think "do people really believe this stuff?" but to be honest I was so out of touch with my spiritual self. I think it is true that that we can't prove many things but it is fair to say people who believe in their spirit guides or angels actually do experience more enriching lives and I think that's because they are connected with this universal energy.
Is it specifically a "ghost" or a "spirit" I don't know but it definitely comes from a source of energy that the person experiencing it has tapped into and to me that part is undeniable, regardless of what name you want to give it.
They key is to be open minded and at least make an informed decision, and as always your opinion is your own. Namaste <3

Cool video! Doesn't look like a bug to me. Not sure what it is...whether it's a ghost of a child or some other sort of spirit being. Does look like, whatever it is, it is trying to get someone's attention.

I believe in spirits and ghosts because I have dealt with them plenty throughout my life. Spirits tend to be sentient and are often called "intelligent hauntings" when they are about. I refer to "residual hauntings" as ghosts because they are the ghost of an event that tends to get replayed over and over like a recording because of the amount of energy expended to create the ghost.

Frankly, I find James Randi to be a dick. He delights in being a rude and surly asshole to anyone who doesn't see things his way,  People like him are incapable of believing in anything...even if it literally picked him up and shook him around by his shriveled, old balls. 

They might not meet the given value of "existence", in the way that anecdotal evidence joins hands with empirical evidence to create an objective way of handling the presence of ghosts.

That is, "ghost lore" isn't consistent enough for me to say that they exist empirically. Does salt keep them away or not? Do you need to be "sensitive" to see them, or is nobody immune to poltergeist activity? How much of the physical identity do they get to keep--memories, language, gender, clothing--and how?

I don't know myself, so I'm suspicious of anybody who behaves as if they do.


My favorite way of it being done was in the musical version of The Secret Garden, where they make more obvious something that's only very subtle in the books, which is Archibald Craven's grief for his deceased wife. In the musical, there is literally an actress/singer playing Lily Craven, walking around and singing ghostly high notes, and in some productions there's a whole chorus of ghosts.

In this one scene where Mary Lennox meets her Uncle Archibald, after a plague of cholera had devastated her town and left only herself alive, of course she's quite curious about dead people. "I don't know anything about ghosts. Is my father a ghost now? Does everybody who dies become a ghost?"

And Archibald answers, "They only become a ghost if someone alive is still holding onto them." (A one-off line in the book, if I recall correctly--that's extra weighed in stage versions that cast an entire chorus of ghosts hanging around all the time.)

This might not fit in with a lot of haunted house stories where everybody's forgotten why so-and-so in the ghost story would be bothering people, but that ghost is granted some agency, and some empirical reality: that sort of ghost isn't going to disappear if everybody stopped believing. It will chew up non-believers and spit them out, is the supposition, and then ghosts will be proven real, and quantum physicists will figure out the how's, and our civilization will be running on psionics instead of mechanics/technology by 2020.

But I prefer this sort of ambiguous is-it-or-isn't-it just in somebody's head (or heart). Even if it's "just" in a grieving widow's head, that widow lives within their own perspective their entire life at least, and I think it would be dreadfully lacking in compassion to insist that they keep their grief to themselves, in whatever form it would take whether a memory or a ghost, just because there's no empirical evidence. In relating to people with such experiences, I believe that's entering a particular level or space that one must adjust to: creating a safe space for the subjective experience, and the language of "symbols" basically. It's personal, first; then interpersonal, maybe.

I believe ghost and spirits are real. I  believe that they exist. I have experienced paranormal stuff. I remember in elementary school my friends and I would hide in the bathrooms during lunch so we could do Bloody Mary. I know it probably wasn't  her who visited us but I know it was another ghost or spirit. There always seem to be some paranormal stuff going on around me.

bunnyboo (09:23pm Wed, Jun 18, 2014)

I believe ghost and spirits are real. I  believe that they exist. I have experienced paranormal stuff. I remember in elementary school my friends and I would hide in the bathrooms during lunch so we could do Bloody Mary. I know it probably wasn't  her who visited us but I know it was another ghost or spirit. There always seem to be some paranormal stuff going on around me.

Yep. Being there, doing that. Pretty much been that way my whole life. I never did the Bloody Mary thing, I kinda always figured I didn't need any thing else  hanging around because I usually had enough going on anyway. 

Mostly the things I saw would be those weird shadow creatures...those things that I would see sometimes in only certain sorts of places. Over the years I realize that they seem to be drawn to places that have a lot of despair, anger, violence...stuff like that. I believe they feed on negative emotions.

I have seen what I thought were solid people, but turned out they were spirits. One was a small boy of around 5 to 7 years of age with very light, blond hair wearing a blue and white, horizontally striped tee shirt, red shorts, short, white socks and plain sneakers. One second he was there, solid as anything....next second just gone.

Where we live now there is a male figure that I have seen walking back and forth on the little gravel drive we live on. Sometimes he is heading towards the creek behind us, sometimes away from the creek towards the main road. Of course, I dare say that the main road and the lane we live on were not here when this person was walking through here. This was at one time one big plot of land that belonged to a farmer whose descendants have sold off tracts of the land over the years. I dare say the figure of the person I see from time to time once fished in the creek and farmed the land.  I have no idea if it is actually the spirit or one of those "imprints", like a recording, that is there because of the energy and love that went into the land.

The Spirit world is all around us. Energy doesn't die. We are Energy/Spirit beings with a body. It wears out. Energy leaves and goes where ever it goes after that. Sometimes we see a loved one who has left their body, sometimes we don't. 

There are some things that seem to be things that are not of this world but not spirits either. Just because some things are called myths or legends...well, doesn't mean they aren't real. There are reasons why humanity has always had a deeply rooted fear of the dark...there ARE things in the dark that aren't there in the daylight.

I'm technically an agnostic, so yes I do believe that they exist. However it's one of those things where you either believe it or you don't, and often times people don't believe it until they have seen it with their own eyes.

I mean, I'd like to believe that there's an afterlife and that I can still come back to Earth after I die. While it is true that a lot of TV shows nowadays blow this whole ghost things up to where it's so fake it's ridiculous, I'd like to believe that ghosts and hauntings do exist.

We are only human, after all, and there are still a lot of things that are unknown to us.

I've seen no evidence to support either side of whether or not they exist. I'd feel foolish to attempt to form an opinion.

It would be cool though if it turned out they were real.

I don't want to debate but I do believe

I have never seen a ghost, or even anything that i thought might be one. The closest that i have come was driving down the road with a car that was right behind me one minute , and the next minute, I glanced into the rear view mirror and the car was totally GONE !   There were no intersecting streets, and no place that the car could have turned off.
I was actually glad that it was gone. For some reason, I had a really bad feeling about that car, and I was on a lonely road, no other traffic; and I was praying that the car would just go away. Amazingly..... it did ! !

Now, my mother might have actually seen a ghost, or some sort of changing spirit. She told me about being at a church for a Christian ministry dinner, and there were three Catholic nuns there, and they were on the speakers list. As she looked  at the nuns; she said that one of the faces turned into a death-head skull instead of a face.
Mom said she just sat there and stared, and then the face turned back into the benign nun again.  She had no idea what it meant, and she said that no one else mentioned it; so she thought that she must have been the only one to witness the transformation.
My mother was a very down-to-earth person, and not given to seeing things like this; so when she told me about it, i was sure that she actually saw it happen just as she said it did.

Sounds like a ghost car to me!! SUPER creepy, man I would have driven home on more of an edge than when the car was there ha ha. Expecting it to fly out at me!

Eery on the nuns! Did any die or something later?

I think that what we call ghosts might in some cases , be some kind of phenomenon from an alternate universe.  People have had a lot of strange things happen that there seems to be no explanation for. I read one website that delves into this kind of thing. it is actually a prepper-kind of website; but people send in letters of weird things that happen to them . Things like keys  disappearing, and then turning up in an exact same spot, but on the upstairs floor of the house, and other people followed by disappearing cars, like I was.
One time, the car keys did turn up missing, and my husband and myself looked all over for them. they were the keys to his Jeep, and usually, he left the keys in the ignition, since we lived way out in the foothills of Mt. St. Helens .
After about two days of searching everywhere, I saw the keys as I was going out to the barn to feed the horses.   They were hanging on a little nail about halfway up the side of the garage, way out of our reach !
We had to use a ladder to get the keys down, so to this day I have no idea how or why they were up there ? ?

I do believe!! I have no stories of my own, but my father does, as well as a few other close friends and relatives. There are some things that just don't seem to have an explanation...

I think that we have no soul or spirit and that when we die, we become just empty husks filled with nutrients that is broken down. I believe that the nutrients become part of the greater ecological system in the area that we decomposed or of which our remains or ashes are deposited.

That is what I believe. It is not as nice as the belief in spirits and afterlifes and souls and heaven and all of that, but you believe what you believe.

Most of my writing revolves around topics of a spiritual nature, the existence and why they exist. I used to live in Salem, MA where there is an abundance of supernatural activity, in fact most of New England.

Spirits, rather than ghosts are souls that have not moved onto the next stage of their journey. Either through unfinished business or they don't understand what has happened. This happens mainly to children, hence there are more child 'ghosts' who need a guide to help them move on and explain what has happened. This is where mediums and psychics can help, by communicating with them.

I have seen, felt and heard spirits. Sometimes I am okay with it and other times I prefer not to see or hear.
I lived in a house in Salem with multiple spirits and the dogs would bark at thin air. I knew they could see what others could not. Even in my room, the previous tenant saw his phone fly across the room as he talked to the landlady. I guess in Salem, these things are expected.

I have never seen anything that i thought was a ghost, but a friend of mine told me that once she saw what she thought was a ghost at her house. She said it was an older man, and was kind of off to the side, so she wasn't actually looking at him face-on. When she asked him what he was doing there and what he wanted, she said he just disappeared, and she never saw him again.
Her house was not an old one with a long history, so it is unlikely that anyone died there; but you never know about something like that.
So many people have reported seeing what they thought must be a ghost, that I do think there is something to the claim; but what exactly is causing the visions, I am not sure.  If it not someone that we recognize, then it would even be possible that we are seeing into an alternate universe of some kind.
I try to be very openminded about things that i don't understand, such as ghosts.

Bunny (04:02pm Fri, Jun  5, 2009)

In light of this new news article, I decided to bring up a stale debate


Ghost caught on tape June 4 2009

Quote

EXTRAORDINARY CCTV footage has captured what could be the ghost of a small child darting across a busy shopping centre.

The floating phantom figure appears in the bottom right of the screen after a male shopper exits a room to the top left.

It makes its way across the busy concourse and seems to head for the same door the man has just passed through.

The 36-second tape was taken in a shopping mall in Chile, South America, and surfaced on the internet today.

It is alleged the image is the ghost of a small local boy.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25591712-401,00.html


Now, I honestly do believe, and have some "ghost stories" of my own..

I do believe that another dimension other than the physical dimension exists. So, I believe in the existence of ghosts. Reliable friends who would not lie to me tell me about it.

Yes, I believe in them. There are ghosts and spirits that mean us harm and those who just want to be ignored. Why do I believe them? Because I can see them.

"I see dead people!" LOL.

No, seriously. I can see them. I haven't encountered a malevolent spirit yet though, so that is fortunate. However, a ghost that looks like a child haunts my brother's house. Whenever I sleep there, he wakes me up. He doesn't mean any harm though. He just jumps and runs around the bed and pulls my blanket. At first, I was really spooked, but I learned to ignore it. As long as he doesn't harm me, I have no beef against him.

Simply YES.

The Bible Says,

Ephesians 6:12

12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

I absolutely can't debate this because although I have not physically seen a ghost I do believe that they are real and I have felt it's presence.
My husband and I went away for a weekend and stayed in a hotel room. During the night the toilet door opened, the television turned on and the phone light went on. We felt like we were being harrased by something and wanted to check out. After half an hour of this it died down and the room was calm again. We did check out the following day and cut our holiday short because of the eerie feeling we both got.

One of my sisters friends went through a similar situation except it was happening in her house. Her friend was afraid to tell people what she thought it was because she thought people would think she was crazy. Being a Christian my sister knew exactly what was going on.  The people that lived in the house before her practiced witchcraft.

JESUS is real and unfortunately so is the Devil, but Jesus defeated satan on the cross which is great news. Christ can protect you from the devil if you allow him.

Hey HAF, my stuff goes missing like that quite often. I have a set place where I put my things and it's very unnerving to go to that place, find them gone, only to return later and find them there. It's exactly like your hook story - my stuff goes on the kitchen bench, on the corner edge. There's nothing near or touching them so it's clear to see if they're there or not.

Bunny, it is not just us who have these issues. There is a webpage that  I really enjoy reading, called Urbansurvival.com .    He talks about some things I don't know  much about, like ham radios and the stcok market; but he also has a part called "the world of Woo-Woo" or something similar to that. People write in and tell him about their strange experiences, like keys dissappearing and turning up right in plain sight, or where you know they should have been.....but weren't.
Some of the stories are downright interesting !
Whether they mean we have spirits or ghosts, I really don't know; but I  think that they are definitely a part of whatever it is that causes these things to happen.    Maybe we time travel or something. maybe it is the aliens that we can't decide of they are really here or not, either.

     
     But, in any case, it is something that is beyond our understanding.....or someone !

That reminds me of this book about little gnome sized people who moves so fast we couldn't see them. They would move things around on us ha ha.

Bunny (12:49am Thu, Nov 20, 2014)

Hey HAF, my stuff goes missing like that quite often. I have a set place where I put my things and it's very unnerving to go to that place, find them gone, only to return later and find them there. It's exactly like your hook story - my stuff goes on the kitchen bench, on the corner edge. There's nothing near or touching them so it's clear to see if they're there or not.

This could be a case of mischievous elves or fairies as they (as legend has it) tend to do these things and like to watch the reactions from the side for their amusement.

When my external rubbish bin went missing, I held elves responsible because it wasn't a fancy bin and I searched the whole road and it was gone. The neighbors still had theirs and only mine had gone, how do you explain that?

Alvin (04:05pm Sun, Nov 30, 2014)

When my external rubbish bin went missing, I held elves responsible because it wasn't a fancy bin and I searched the whole road and it was gone. The neighbors still had theirs and only mine had gone, how do you explain that?

One mans trash....another mans treasure

Did they bring it back? At least mine brought my stuff back! LOL

These things freak me out completely because I have felt it before myself. I never really believed in it until we went on holiday and stayed in a hotel room that kept us up all night! So are ghosts real, yes they are!!!

I also watch Ghosthunters and find it very entertaining! Please don't spoil the fun by analyzing it and destroying the myth. For just a little while, we like getting caught up in it.

There are many strange happenings and a lot of evidence that life on another dimension does exist. We can dispute all we like, that does not make it untrue.

I do believe we are Spirits which can never die. When our bodies die we will move to another place. Having had some experiences with these 'myths', I have formed very strong opinions from what I know.

I do not care to share these, but prefer to leave everyone to their own opinions. Not every strange experience can be explained away.

Some of us love these stories and even enjoy being a little scared!



Later...

Don't be afraid to share your experiences Oracle May, many of us already have in this thread so I'd say it's a safe space for it .