Last night I took a couple of teenagers on a ghost hunting expedition in the Latin quarter of Tampa — Ybor City. It was an interesting history lesson, but I didn’t see anything from The Other Side.
As children (11 and 12, or so) my sister and I once thought we saw a ghost in a relative’s reputedly haunted house. We were sitting on a bed in an upstairs room playing crazy eights, and both of us thought we saw a translucent, glowing woman in a floor-length dress glide past the open door out of the corner of our eyes. Scared the bejesus out of us.
I’m not a believer. I think my sister and I fell victim to the power of suggestion. Do you believe in ghosts? Ever had a supernatural experience?
Please feel free to discuss whatever.
Suffern ACE
I do not believe in ghosts. Although they freak me out when I think they are near.
geg6
Not a believer in ANYTHING supernatural, not ghosts or gods. But my mom was and swore that her parents visited her after they died. Since it always happened at night while in bed and it always woke her up, I was just as convinced she was dreaming. But it comforted her, much as her Catholicism did, so I didn’t try too hard to convince her that she was delusional about these things.
JPL
Would it be an understatement to say last Saturday was a very bad day? If there were ghosts, Stuck would be haunting us.
raven
Ain’t no haint gonna scare me off!
Mustang Bobby
I’m not a total skeptic on the matter, probably owing to the fact that the human mind seems incapable of accepting the idea of its own mortality: when the light goes out, it’s out.
On the other hand, today is the eleventh anniversary of the passing of my beloved dog Sam, and not a day goes by that I don’t think of him, and even though I’ve moved twice since he died, there are times when I am sure that he’s still around in some form. All those clumps of grey/black hair in the bedroom can’t be all mine.
Omnes Omnibus
So it seems that the Detroit bankruptcy might be unconstitutional.
bill d
There are no such things as ghosts, they are obviously just ancient aliens coming back to check on us. I love The History Channel.
donnah
I don’t believe in ghosts or supernatural phenomena. I have an aunt who swears her house is haunted and invited “ghost busters” to come and check it out. She’s barely getting by financially, but she finds money to consult psychics and ghost hunters. *eyeroll*
I like scary movies and read horror fiction, but it’s all fiction as far as I’m concerned.
JPL
@Mustang Bobby: He certainly was a cutie. Miss Moxie is ailing and I’m not ready to let her go. There will be other dogs but we always remember those that shared their lives with us.
c u n d gulag
I ain’t sayin’ there is, and I ain’t sayin’ there ain’t.
If I say there is, and they ain’t, I stand to lose nothing.
Bit if I say there ain’t, and they is, I might jus’ be in a peck o’ trouble that I don’t want.
Mustang Bobby
@JPL: Thanks. Best wishes and thoughts for you and Miss Moxie.
geg6
By the way, been to Ybor City and enjoyed myself immensely there. Had some great food at a little place there, can’t remember the name. One of the few places on the Gulf Coast that I liked. I’m not much of a Florida fan, but if I’m going there, I prefer the Atlantic coast and just the area from West Palm and points south. It doesn’t FEEL like Florida or the South there. More like the Caribbean than Florida.
Halcyan
I don’t believe in ghosts if that means being able to see them. I certainly believe in spirits, and I do not believe spirits are contained by physical form. I think we have “earth suits” and when they wear out, we “move on”. Perhaps not to another physical form. Perhaps it is that denial Mustang Bobby speaks of.
quannlace
Praying today this heatwave in the NE will finally break. Last two days hitting 100. Ugh.
Patty Krebs
Yes! It was in the late ’40s, in Webster Groves, MO. My brother was about twelve and I fourteen, our parents were in Mexico, and my brother and I were having dinner together, silently, as we didn’t have much to say to each other at that time.
My mother had arranged for a very thorough spring cleaning that required rolling up the carpet in my room. Suddenly, we heard heavy footsteps on the bare floor there. They started in the middle of the room, continued to the hall door and stopped. My brother and I stared at each other, eyes wide. We both sprang up. I went to the hall door but was afraid to go any farther. the only thing within reach was a big beer stein on a corner shelf. My brother had gone farther and when back in the breakfast room he was holding a handgun. “Oh, Pat!” he exclaimed in great disgust looking at the weaponized beer stein. Then we put down our weapons, ran to a neighbor’s and called the police, who found nothing.
A friend had much the same experience in an old mansion in the West End of St. Louis. I believe unexplained footsteps like these are a fairly common phenomenon.
gelfling545
I don’t believe in ghosts but but have seen what could be called ghosts, I guess. Memory or stray energy, etc. Also, I could imagine that since it takes 9 months for us to come into the world it might take some time to leave it as well. I saw my best-beloved cat several times after his death, always in passing. Could be a memory imprint but it was comforting none the less. My sister in law swears that she has seen my brother since his death and, as it comforts her, I will not argue that she did not. I hope she did. I have heard my father’s voice at some difficult times since he died and, again, I’d say it’s memory but I won’t dispute with anyone who chooses to think otherwise for I have no proof that my opinion is correct.
raven
@quannlace: It’s never been cooler this time of year in Georgia that I can recall.
PaulW
I never saw a ghost but when I was eight one very dark night in my bed I awoke to a baby crying. It was loud and echoed down the long hallway of my house leading into the living room, it was coming from the foyer area, or the front door. I dared not get up to go examine: the crying was mournful, angry, unsettling. And I got the horrifying feeling that noone else at home – not my parents, not my brothers, not our poor dog Fella – was awake hearing these bone-chilling cries.
When I finally told my mom about that night, maybe twenty years later, she just patted my hand and said “that was just some dumb cat in heat.”
quannlace
@raven:
I know. Whimsical to see these past few days that New Jersey’s been hotter than Florida.
Svensker
@PaulW:
Great story.
Cassidy
I’m more inclined to believe in the supernatural than the divine.
Citizen_X
@raven: @quannlace: I’ve been asking my Boston friends if they’ve been enjoying the Houston weather, ’cause it’s the same in both places!
c u n d gulag
@quannlace:
I went to our local farm yesterday in Upstate NY, to pick-up some corn (YUM!!!), and the 85 year-old owner was there.
I asked him if he ever remembered it being this hot, this long, and this early, and he shook his head, and said, “No. Maybe mid-August a few times, but never in July.”
It’s supposed to end today, with some serious thunderstorms.
I don’t care, as long as it ends.
Or, rather, I should say, with no tornado’s – but that’s something we almost never USED to get around here.
I’m sick of sitting, doing nothing, and still schvitzing like Patrick Ewing in the 4th Quarter – even though I’ve got a fan pointed to my chubby head and body.
The last few mornings, it’s already over 80 by 6am.
I expected weather like this when I lived in Fayetteville, NC, but never in NY.
OY!!!
the Conster
I believe in ghosts. Why not? Why wouldn’t there be? In fact, I have two pictures on my iPhone of a light orb in my living room that I took last January, unbeknownst to me until I looked at the pictures. One shows the orb very clearly as a perfectly shaped orb, and the next picture shows it moving as an elongated, very clearly defined perfectly shaped cylinder of thick mist. I took the second picture because when I saw the orb in the first picture I thought it was a reflection of something, so I stood in the exact same place about two minutes later, changing nothing in the room or the lighting. Nothing was perceivable to me in either instance – just the camera saw it. This happened the same day that I instinctively moved my favorite picture of my recently deceased mother to a much more prominent position in the room creating a little altar for her on the mantle. That was just the beginning of things that happened over the next month, when she basically took up residence in my living room. Which was very weird.
quannlace
Oh, I got fooled like that and i was a lot older than you. One night I would have swore there was a baby crying right outside our front door. That year we had a lot of feral cats hanging about, and yup, that was one of them. Their cries go right through you.
frank walker
@c u n d gulag: Pascal’s wager?
MP
Several Thanksgivings ago, my wife and I stayed at the Rittenhouse Inn, an old Victorian mansion in Bayfield, WI. It was relatively late, and I was dozing while my wife was in bed beside me reading. I was suddenly awakened by a voice just on the other side of our door. It sounded like the voice of a old frail woman, not quite all there, and it sounded as if it were coming from somewhere else – some weird phase shift or something – and we both clearly heard her say “It’s time to open the presents.”
Since we both heard it, I got up and opened the door and there was no one in the hallway. I ain’t saying I believe, but I still can’t explain what that was. The interesting thing was it didn’t frighten us, but rather struck us as both eerie and sad.
RSA
@PaulW:
Excellent punchline.
Singular
I don’t believe in anything “supernatural”… but if the universe is all just memory, and nothing is lost, who knows? If echoes or whatever have a consciousness though, then God-who-doesn’t-exist can doubly fuck off :)
Cassidy
I do owned an old hotel I would so play various recordings at night of baby’s crying, the slight off key music box, etc.
Cassidy
If I owned a hotel….stupid autocorrect. And the crying little girl. Always have to have the crying little girl.
RSA
@c u n d gulag:
Here in Raleigh, over the past month or so, it’s been hot but not that hot; it doesn’t hit 80 until 10am or so. But something else is different this year as well—it’s been raining a lot. I checked the Web site of a local TV station and found that since mid-April we’ve had double the historical average rainfall (from 10 inches in the past to over 19 inches this year). Thanks, global climate change, perhaps.
AliceBlue
About six years ago, my aunt died of a heart attack in my mom’s house. I’ve never felt anything like a “presence” in the house until one night last fall, when I was spending the night there. I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep. I kept tossing and turning and then I heard four very measured steps coming down the hall toward my bedroom. Thinking it was my mother, I called out–no answer. About fifteen seconds later I heard them again. I even heard the loose board squeak–one, two, three (squeak) four). This happened five or six times. I never heard the steps in the room; they always stopped at the door. By this time, I had the covers pulled over my head. I didn’t get back to sleep until the room started to lighten up. Was it my aunt’s ghost? I don’t know. But I’m definitely open to the possibility.
Amir Khalid
My dad, who believed in the afterlife like any devout Muslim, regarded the very idea of ghosts with derision. Me, I reckon they’re not out there in the world, they’re in our perception of it. Our senses, from whose inputs we assemble our picture of the world, make up an imperfect instrument that can be misled by our own, often subconscious, expectations and beliefs and even emotions. And when the imperfection in the instrument makes us think we’ve seen (or heard, or felt the touch of) some dead person, that’s a ghost.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Have you seen Mackelmore’s video/heard the song “Same Love”?
It’s well worth watching. It’s a pro-gay marriage rap song. And yeah, I doubt most people here would rush out and put him on your playlists, but the message in the song and video is pretty good.
raven
Helen Thomas died.
Mike in NC
@Citizen_X: Heat index today here in Boston of 105. Took the ferry to P-Town yesterday to try to get some relief out on the water.
c u n d gulag
@RSA:
I can’t remember the year – maybe, ’05 or ’06?
In Fayetteville, we set the record for days over 90 in late July or very early August – and then proceeded to have virtually every day be over 90 until mid-October.
THAT, was the most miserable summer of my entire life.
I hate heat!!!
And especially, humidity!!!!!
Like I said, I sweat more than pretty much anyone else.
As a matter of fact, I could probably sweat, shoveling snow naked – 30 years ago, I might have gotten some appreciative looks.
Now, people would retch, urp, and dial 911.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Amir Khalid: I always describe it this way: Our brains are pattern matchers. When we see something out of the corner of our eye, we try to interpret it with what we know. So, a shadow, or even the movement of light across our eye, can be interpreted as a person, who becomes a ghost.
c u n d gulag
@raven:
OH NO!!!
One of the last real journalists, and one of the last ones with any balls – and I mean that in the best way possible.
AHH onna Droid
@geg6: salem to alexandria to charleston to savannah to st augustine to key west to bermuda and points south and west, all were part of thr same sea connected culture for centuries. White New England houses were originally pastel. Mass households had Afro-Caribbean slaves and West African magic bundles were unearthed on the colonial streets of Annapolis.
New York and Boston too but they outgrew it, hard to find traces… Boston was a port of commerce so the Caribbean bound whalers fishermen etc were based in Hingham or Salem, a ways up or down the coast.
St Aug was a village and is small to this day.
greennotGreen
When I was a kid, we traveled to my grandparents’ home to be there as my great aunt was dying. That night I dreamed about her. She was trying to get down a little hole in the ground, but it was kind of tight, so I had to help her which I did. The dream woke me up; it was about 3:00 a.m. In the morning, I learned she had died – at 3:00 a.m.
I have met all of my now-departed beloved grandparents in dreams shortly after they died in a sort of farewell appearance, and it gave me comfort. (Interestingly, now that I think about it, I never met the one grandfather I wasn’t particularly fond of.) When I met my cousin who was killed in an auto accident, however, it was a nightmare. He kept trying to run me down with a car. I woke up with a terrible neck ache. Sometime later I found out that the cause of his death was a broken neck.
I don’t know that I can assign any great “supernatural” meaning to these events. They happened.
rdldot
@c u n d gulag: My feelings exactly. Also feel that way about God. May not exist, but just in case, I try not to piss him off.
AHH onna Droid
I would recommend a library trip to read old issues of Skeptical Inquirer for anyone truly fascinated with the paranormal and/or classic Victorian parlor tricks (seances, kirlian photography, orbs). Ufos too.
This guy Nickell also did great research on weeping statues and other pious put-ons, paraedoilia.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Mike in NC:
I’m going to Provincetown in mid-September. Any must-see/must-do recommendations? Restaurants, etc.?
raven
@c u n d gulag: I guess she had a little problem with Zion.
raven
@Steeplejack (tablet): Lot of fishing boats running out of there!
NotMax
“Believing” in spooks is like believing in a flat Earth.
About “believing” in something which does not exist, the best which can be said is that it is a mistaken belief.
In reality it’s not belief, it is wishful thinking.
Rosalita
Hey, I’m open to it. I’ve never seen any ghosts but I know there have been signposts along the way of my life.
And yeah, already 83 here in CT. Seriously tired of this oppressive heat. Cats at the shelter are beyond pissed they haven’t been let out in the enclosure for a week, I don’t blame them but crankiness in numbers makes it an interesting open house shift.
currants
@quannlace: With you on that one. I turn into a total whiner when it gets like this with no break even at night to cool off.
Saw this post about the North Shore (MA) last week re: one of the earlier heatwaves this summer, and thought–YES.
Wally Curtis
My sister died in late 2002. A couple of months later I drove to Kentucky to visit her at the cemetery. As I was leaving the cemetery I looked at my cell phone and her address book entry was on the display.
I often wonder if it was more than my phone rolling around randomly pressing the keys on the keypad.
Amir Khalid
@raven:
Her “Jews out of Palestine!” thing always struck me as simplistic.
raven
@Amir Khalid: Yea, that was it.
geg6
If you like the ghost stuff, two places are good fun to visit: Savannah and the old WV Penitentiary. Savannah has a blast with it, in much the same way New Orleans does. The penitentiary is a truly eerie place. Wonder if Cole has ever taken the tour there? I’m not often scared by supposedly haunted places, but that old prison is truly scary.
ruemara
I’m not sure if I have the capacity for belief in anything, anymore. However, my theory on ghosts is that they may be the equivalent of a tape recording of the electromagnetic signals sent out by an organism on some as yet unknown sensitive areas of the planet.
I’ve been open to mystery, wonder and the unknown, but all I see is misery and sham. And cats. lots of cats.
raven
@geg6: Midnight in The Garden and SCAD really brought Savannah back from the dead. The tours got going in earnest after the movie. We even found a trolly tour that took dogs!
raven
Acausal relationships with meaning girls and boys.
NotMax
@AHH onna Droid
Also too, James Randi, who for decades has been debunking such tripe, quackery and fraudulence, and whose site and Doubtful News squibs are worth a look.
Amir Khalid
Speaking of skeptics and believers, Anderson and Duchovny have said they’d be up for a third X-Files movie if Fox wants to make one. I’d be keen to see it too, but I don’t know how the world would respond to seeing Mulder and Scully saving the world as an old married (-ish) couple again.
Cassidy
@NotMax: The Monster Talk podcast is fun. It deals in cryptozoology.
CaseyL
If ghosts existed, we’d be overrun with them.
Billions of humans have died – not to mention the uncountable numbers of self-aware non-humans that have died – and no matter what theory of “ghosts” one subscribes to, if any of them were correct, we’d be seeing ghosts everywhere we went.
Ghost sightings are like ideas of an afterlife: wishful thinking, with no verifiable evidence to support.
I wish that weren’t so. I don’t like the idea that I, or we, or the ones we love, entirely cease to exist when we die. But none of the theories of how a continued presence occurs make any sense – to me, anyway.
debbie
I believe I saw my father shortly after he died. I woke up in the middle of the night and at the foot of my bed was a somewhat-human shape that was darker than the darkness of my bedroom. It was more of an energy than a specter, and it seemed to vibrate slightly but very intensely. The shape reached out to touch my foot and, afraid, I pulled the covers over my head.
The author Reynolds Price speaks of this kind of visitation (or whatever) in his novel “The Source of Light.” More or less, a spirit will pass by each person it has loved before moving on to wherever spirits move on to.
My father died before I could get home. We were close and he had more faith in me than my mother. I never got around to thanking him for that, and I’ve never gotten over feeling badly about that.
I don’t know what this was, but I do know I was awake. This was no dream.
getsmartin
Years ago a friend bought a 150 year old house in a town that had a “most haunted” reputation. When my GF and I visited for a weekend my friend, over a late night scotch or three, told me about their “resident” ghost. When he concluded his stories of the nature of their “encounters” in their new abode, I couldn’t help chuckling and telling him “good one – even for you!”. His reaction at my reaction angry and at that point I realized he was serious. Mind you, this guy is a scientist, so I couldn’t have imagined him actually believing in the supernatural.
Not too long afterward I took a trip over to England and during my travels around the Island I stopped in Oxford. I made fast friends with a few locals in a nearby pub where the late night conversation meandered towards supernatural experiences. Several in the group had rather incredible tales and it was apparent to me they “believed”.
My take has always been that I’ll believe if and when I “experience” – and I’m not holding my breath.
Mustang Bobby
Talk of the afterlife reminds me of a story about W.C. Fields. When he was in the hospital with his final illness, a friend stopped by to visit and found him reading the bible. The friend said, “Bill, I thought you were an atheist. What are you doing reading that?”
Fields replied, “Checking for loopholes.”
Scott S.
Not a believer in the supernatural. I spent years desperately wishing I could see something weird, and never seeing anything even a little unusual. Plus all those years watching Scooby-Doo and reading Three Investigators novels made me realize you should always check for someone wearing a mask or running a projector… :)
Mike in NC
@Steeplejack (tablet): Lots of artisans, crafts, galleries, antiques, etc. on Commercial Street. We asked a local shopkeeper for a good place for seafood lunch and he said they were all very good. Intense heat resulted in ‘brown outs’ throughout the afternoon.
Keith
@raven: Let’s see how nasty right-wingers get on the day of. I like keeping a scorecard so I can say incredibly offensive and obscene things when Rush Limbaugh finally dies of a massive Breitbart.
A Ghost To Most
@Amir Khalid: @Belafon (formerly anonevent):
This. Our brains scramble the inputs sometimes, trying to make sense of them. Once, as my wife and I were entering a mall through the double doors, a woman was exiting, carefully and lovingly pushing an empty wheelchair. I held the door for her, she said thank you, and we entered. Once inside, my wife said something about the horribly crippled child in the chair. I was shocked; my mind, apparently unable to comprehend, had simply presented me with an image of an empty chair.
Suffern ACE is a Basset Hound
@Amir Khalid:if it happens, you know that some nitwit will cast the Sprouse twins as their sword yielding, mystery solving sons. I think they need to let sleeping franchises sleep.
Va Highlander
My wife and I live in a large old house and used to rent rooms upstairs. Our last tenant was in jail, for a few weeks, and we agreed to hold his room for him. One night I was sitting at the foot of the staircase, reading and smoking a cigarette, with my back to the living room where my wife lay reading on the sofa. What I heard, loud and distinct, was a man’s footsteps walking from directly overhead down the long hallway to the master bedroom, as if someone had just been looking down at me over the railing, above. I turned and found that my wife had heard it as well.
We both assumed the obvious, that there was someone up there, with the most likely explanation being that our tenant had given someone his key. While my wife sat at the foot of the stairs, I took a flash light and the master key ring and searched each upstairs room in turn, locking it behind me as I finished. It wasn’t until my final search, and I had returned downstairs, that we were more-or-less forced to consider other possibilities. Still one of the damnedest things I’ve experienced.
SuperHrefna
@Steeplejack (tablet): I was just there last week! Best high end restaurant is Edwige. Best low end restaurant is Karoo Kafe. We decided the best ice cream this year is P Town Scoops.
piratedan
@Omnes Omnibus: follow the money…. with R’s, when it ain’t about vaginas or the right to even be here, it always comes back to money, or in this case, pension funds.
the Conster
I used to be in the “no way, no how, stupid human mind tricks” camp. Not any more. With so many energy frequencies and the knowledge that energy is continually in flux it’s parochial and arrogant – IOW typically human – to insist that we humans now have complete apperception of the universe, and that it consists only of what our little temporal, spatial, sensory limited human mind has been able to perceive on its own or with the technology that those little brains have created, with the caveat that skepticism is always a good idea.
SIA
@Amir Khalid: Yes! Middle aged Scully and Moulder would be fun. (Or Scuzzy and Moldy as Mr SIA calls ’em)
@Wally Curtis: Interesting! I’ve had too many people i know experience strange events like that to doubt there isn’t such phenomena.
SIA
@the Conster: What you said.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@c u n d gulag: Indeed. A stenographer Helen Thomas was not. She had a good long run.
@raven: Indeed she did, but well, someone maybe had to point out that there are two views of that whole issue. In my youth I thought it was much simpler than it in fact is, of course. Her view was the vastly oversimplified version from the “non-traditional” – in the US – angle.
gelfling545
@rdldot: The thing about God for me is that I think something like that could exist. Lots of things people don’t understand exist though, if there is a creative force, I don’t think humans can understand it & saying what we might want is what it wants or that it wants us to do this or not do that is absurd. If it exits it is on its own terms, not ours. Best to just do our best for the humans weknow exist.
maya
When I first arrived in SF, 1972, stayed at a residence club, which was a good deal for newcomers – you could pay by the week or month with two meals included every day. Beat having to find an apartment and security deposits, long leases and all that if you weren’t sure you were going to stay.
Anyway, one of the other residents there was a young woman all the guys liked and quite often she had small parties in her room. 4 or 5 people. It was a small room. On one of those occasions while sitting on the floor and she was sitting on the sofa above I kept noticing someone sitting right next to her out of the corner of my eye but when I focused my complete attention on her there wasn’t anybody sitting next to her. She was alone on the sofa.
This happened several times and finally I told her what I kept seeing but didn’t appear to be there. She just giggled and said, “Oh, that’s my little friend.” She never did explain what she meant by that but she did believe in some sort of supernatural intersession and conducted personal rituals for those who wanted to learn more. Never charged money either, just for friends. A few years later she died of a brain aneurism.
My brief brush with the other-natural.
Amir Khalid
@Suffern ACE is a Basset Hound:
In the TV show, Mulder and Scully had only one son (born after a year-long pregnancy, this being The X-Files), and it’s strongly implied that that one pregnancy was something of a fluke for Scully. Plus, the Sprouse boys are about a decade too old to play William Mulder.
MomSense
@the Conster:
I am not a theist and used to reject the whole idea of supernatural phenomena but have since had too many experiences to be so dismissive. There are many things we human beings don’t know or understand about our vast universe.
I try to be open minded about art, people, ideas, politics, most things really so I will just stay open minded and simultaneously skeptical about the yet unknown wonders of our universe.
Emma
I was visiting a friend’s family home for the first time. It’s an old home, full of odd noises, but I grew up in one, so I wasn’t bothered by it. As I was falling asleep, I heard someone clearly singing We Shall Gather At The River. The next day, at breakfast, I mentioned it to my friend and her mother. It turned out to be her grandmother’s favorite hymn. I was sleeping in her old room.
I have had similar experiences, all audio, never video. I am still an agnostic about it, since I know how much the mind can trick you. But I don’t discount them and I don’t walk around being condescendingly superior to believers. I don’t know. Neither does anyone else.
Jewish Steel
Once, this creepy little kid told me, “I see dead people.” But then, as it turned out…
Keith
I don’t believe in ghosts, but a co-worker showed me a pic this week a relative took where someone was looking in a mirror, and there was an unknown face in the mirror. It was freaky. He said the people who were there won’t go back to where the photo was taken.
Linnaeus
I’m pretty much a materialist – I don’t believe in the existence of ghosts, spirits, divine beings, etc. Matter and energy is what’s here.
Burnspbesq
@Omnes Omnibus:
Or not. IIRC, Article 1 gives Congress the power to create a uniform system of bankruptcy law, and it remains to be seen whether (and if so, to what extent) a state can impinge on that authority. This will be a law school exam question for decades to come. More popcorn?
Higgs Boson's Mate
@the Conster:
That would be me as well. When I was in my mid-twenties, some friends and I were sitting on the bank of Branciforte Creek up there in Santa Cruz, CA. There was a full moon and it provided enough light to read a newspaper. All five of us saw a man walking down the other bank of the creek toward us. Nothing unusual in that. The creek was a beautiful place to hike as long as you were careful of the poison oak. Anyway, the man simply vanished in mid-step when he was about thirty yards away from us. After a chorus of “What the…?” we all grabbed our flashlights and hustled over to spot where he’d disappeared because we thought that he must have fallen into a hole or that the creek bank had subsided under him. Nothing. There was no thick cover nearby, just the poison oak and some low growing blackberry brambles. We had all seen him come around a bend in the creek about a hundred yards upstream and we’d laughed at the time because one of us wondered aloud if he had any smoking dope. We all saw him become not-there as well.
I still don’t believe in ghosts, per se. I do believe that some people are very uncomfortable with phenomena that are currently inexplicable to the point that, for them, all paranormal events are misperceptions and all UFOs are swamp gas.
ranchandsyrup
Early morning blawg whoring: on willfully misinterpreting lyrics and grieving: http://ranchandsyrup.com/2013/07/20/old-man-look-at-my-life-im-a-lot-like-you-were/
the Conster
@MomSense:
Exactly – I think belief in a deity is the biggest obstacle to being open to certain phenomena. The Buddhist notion of the void as being the infinite ocean of still potentiality from which all forms arise and return to has the most appeal to me intellectually, but is beyond apprehension, which is enough to convince me to keep my mind open to all possibilities. Even with all of our fancy measuring instruments, we know jack shit about the world around us and how everything is interconnected.
dan
BOOO!
hehe just wanted to scare someone as they scrolled down.
Linnaeus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Not sure this is going to amount to much for a couple of reasons: 1) the state constitution may conflict with federal bankruptcy law and 2) the state of Michigan’s higher courts (Court of Appeals & Supreme Court) are stacked with conservatives. They’ll do what Snyder wants.
Mnemosyne
I tend to believe that the energy of living beings (people and sometimes animals) does not completely vanish when they die, but I really don’t know what that translates into, whether it’s an actual, conscious “ghost” or just a leftover, insensate marker.
Stir of Echoes, one of my favorite ghost stories, was on TV the other night. It got drowned out by the massive success of The Sixth Sense and some slight similarities in the plots of the two films, but it’s a nice, low-key movie. It posits that only certain people can see/sense ghosts, which makes sense to me.
Think of it this way: if most people were red/green colorblind, would we think that people who claimed they could see these other colors they called “red” and “green” were crazy?
SuperHrefna
@Steeplejack (tablet): I was just there last week! The best high end restaurant there is Edwige ( after my meal there i left planning out how to use the tastes id had to perk up my own cooking, really inpiring fare) the best low-end placeis Karoo Kafe ( I live for their pakoras). The bet ice cream we had this year was ptown scoops, though the chocolate peanutbutter from the purple feather was pretty damn good.
SuperHrefna
@SuperHrefna: FYWP. You told me this hadn’t posted earlier when I was on my phone, so I had another go when I was back home.
Seriously, have a great time in ptown! I go most summers for a couple days to visit family. The best t shirts are from D flax, ( i love their octopus and squid ones best! ) and my fave shop all around is Womencrafts, which always has amazing pottery by women from all over the country.
FlipYrWhig
@maya: A party, in 1972, in San Francisco? And you’re wondering why you saw something that seemed to be a bit outside of sober human experience? ;P
FlipYrWhig
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: I think a huge proportion of UFOs are DoD research projects and prototypes.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Linnaeus:
I am certain of only four things resulting from a successful Detroit bankruptcy filing:
1) It will not result in any improvement for Detroit.
2) Union pensioners will get fucked, hard.
3) A handful of wealthy, connected people will acquire valuable assets for pennies on the dollar.
4) The Democrats will get the blame.
It’s bad enough that so few jobs now offer defined benefit retirement plans. What’s worse is that the conservative/business axis is working so hard and so successfully to disestablish those few plans that still exist.
Villago Delenda Est
@Burnspbesq:
The judge’s point was that it was unconstitutional under the Michigan state constitution, not the federal one.
Snyder and his operative are trying to fuck over all the pensioners in order to pay the banksters.
the Conster
OT sort of – the Whitey Bulger trial has been ridiculously entertaining if you liked The Sopranos and The Departed. F-bombs thrown in the courtroom every day. Whitey better hope there aren’t vengeful ghosts. When Asst. US Attorney asked Stephen “the rifleman” Flemmi, “What was the nature of your relationship?” with Whitey Bulger, he responded “strictly criminal”.
A guy who has waited 30 years to testify against Whitey was told by prosecutors on Tuesday he wouldn’t be testifying against Whitey, and on Wednesday he was found dead in a place where he wasn’t killed. Dennis Lehane couldn’t make this shit up.
Linnaeus
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
I really have conflicting feelings about the Detroit bankruptcy. On one hand, it’s hard for me to envision an alternative. Yes, I know theoretically there is one, but I just couldn’t see all of the creditors agreeing to it.
On the other hand, I also (like you) suspect that the bankruptcy will not produce the turnaround for the city that we’re being told it will. The wrong people will be most hurt by it (luckily not my family, almost all of whom still live in the Detroit area), the wrong people will be blamed for it (already happening as we speak) and I can definitely see it being the beginning of a neofeudalist pilot project.
Villago Delenda Est
@Linnaeus:
Furthermore, absolutely the wrong people will benefit from it…our entrenched parasite overclass.
greennotGreen
On being dismissive of others’ experiences:
Several years ago I visited a chapel on the Louisiana bayou with a friend. The proprietor of the chapel claimed that a miracle had occurred when someone took a Polaroid of the outside of the chapel and the figure of the virgin that was inside at the altar appeared in front of the outer doors. My friend and I both thought, “double exposure,” but we were polite and said nothing. A few years later, I was thinking about the incident and realized, maybe a “miracle” had occurred; maybe the fact that the double exposure had been that particular pair of images was the miracle! Who am I to say? Something happened that was of meaning to some people.
You know those secret message lenses that are pieces of red plastic you can hold over scribbles so that only the part not written in red is revealed? Maybe our universe is filled with scribbly noise, and only some people have the proper lenses to see the message. This does not mean that I believe everyone – or actually much of anyone – who says God speaks for them. It just means I am not going to dismiss other people’s reported experiences out of hand.
Jebediah
That was just Mr. Bumbling Bad Guy with a sheet, some string, and a flashlight – and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!
dan
I see from Repubs a lot of “Detroit is bankrupt! Ha ha!” WTF is that about?
Linnaeus
@greennotGreen:
I don’t necessarily dismiss other peoples’ experiences in of themselves. I just may not agree with their explanation of that experience. But there’s a way to do that without being a jerk.
MrSnrub
I don’t believe, but had something unexplained in our house. The previous owner died in the house and we bought from the estate. We had keys to the house, we were in the house the night before closing. We locked everything up and shut off all the lights. When we got to the house the next morning, all of the lights were on, and the door was wide open. At that point, the estate lawyer had the only other set of keys and swore that he hadn’t been over.
Linnaeus
@dan:
They see Detroit’s problems as proof of the failure of liberals and Democrats. So they revel in it.
Jay C
@Mnemosyne:
What you said: Me, I’m mainly agnostic about ghosts and/or other paranormal phenomena – but I figure that it’s just me: I have little/no sensitivity to these things, whereas I do believe that there are people who DO. Mrs. Jay and I once stayed (on Halloween, no less) at an old inn in upstate NY, and she swore that she had seen shadows of people “going upstairs” – in a hallway where there were no stairs. Of course, we found an old picture of the inn, and – yep – there had once been a stairway in that hall, which had been removed in a remodeling decades ago. Me: I saw nothing (as usual)…
Bruuuuce
On a whole other topic, Happy Landing Day! To quote the transcript:
“1969-07-20 20:17:40 UTC
Armstrong (on-board): Engine arm is off.
(Pause) Houston, Tranquility Base here.
The Eagle has landed.”
When do we get our serious manned space program back, to go to the Moon or to Mars, or to build something more than the (useful, but tiny) ISS, perhaps at the Lagrange points?
trollhattan
The San Diego chapter of Loserville checks in. Revel in the butthurt.
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/07/20/5581714/san-diego-county-clerk-seeks-end.html#storylink=cpy
Who says there are no ghosts?
sweaver
I’m in the “many things are true” camp, and refuse to come down hard on any side. Having said that, my husband was in a small b&b in Houston with his then-wife, and he woke up in the middle of the night to find a classic ghostly form leaning over him. It was a middle-aged woman in a period dress of the late 1800s. He said her features were distinguishable and if he had to describe the look on her face, it was one of curiosity. She was there for about 3 or 4 seconds, then faded. He said he wasn’t scared, more like weirded out. But eventually fell back asleep. His wife woke up the next morning and related the identical experience as him, except with hers this woman wasn’t leaning over as far and was a little bit further away from the bed. They found out from the owner that this ‘thing’ had been seen by many people staying in that b&b.
For what it’s worth, my husband doesn’t believe in ghosts, and never has. He can’t explain what that was about, nor how his wife also had the same experience, but he’s pretty sure it’s explainable. I dunno.
Chris
My grandfather swore to God that something (“God,” he thought it was) supernatural once gave him… some kind of precognitive heads-up about a communist ambush in Vietnam that saved a good amount of his men’s lives, including his own (would’ve been a no-survivors ambush otherwise, I think). Take that as you will.
My stance on the entire supernatural, including God, is pretty much agnostic at this point. I don’t dismiss the idea, I kind of hope it’s true, but I have no evidence to suggest that it is.
Anya
I wish the ghosts of Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X will visit and beat to a pulp all the assholes who are whitesplaining the Zimmerman trial or justifying the racial profiling of Trayvonne Martin, starting with, Kathleen Parker, David Sirota, Richard Cohen and John Aravosis to name a few.
ranchandsyrup
@trollhattan: they’re gonna have to put a tent over san diego because it is a fucking circus.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Villago Delenda Est:
Hey, turn that frown upside down! The right kind of people will derive substantial benefits. The wrong kind of people (beaners, boogies, Democrats) will be shat upon for generations. Now that’s a
finalfree market solution that the privileged can appreciate.bemused
Recently my husband’s co-worker said an 85 year old aunt in a distant state died but that she had had a “good” death. When my husband asked what he meant by a “good” death, this is the story he was told from family members with the aunt when she died.
From diagnosis to death happened quickly. The aunt went to the doctor complaining of bad stomach pains. Exploratory surgery showed cancer too advanced for any treatment. The family was in the process of arranging hospice care when they were called that their aunt was near death. They gathered at her hospital bed where she was not responsive and the priest had given her last rites. She flatlined. Suddenly she opened her eyes and proceeded to talk. She named off the people she saw who had already passed and said “even the pets are here”. Then she said she had said too much and died. Everyone was stunned and the priest was praying furiously.
becca
Ghosts are just occasional glitches in the Matrix. Same with déjà vu. Corrupted data, is all.
gogol's wife
@c u n d gulag:
Is this the backwoods version of Pascal’s wager? Wikipedia: “Pascal’s Wager is an argument in apologetic philosophy which was devised by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, Blaise Pascal. It posits that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or does not exist. Given the possibility that God actually does exist and assuming the infinite gain or loss associated with belief in God or with unbelief, a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.).”
On the night train from Moscow to Leningrad, my mother (dead for 9 years at that point) kept appearing in my dreams and telling me not to go. The next night I was in a car accident (fatal for someone in the other car) and was in the hospital for two days.
trollhattan
@ranchandsyrup:
If you can score the concessionaire license for the beer stand, you’ll be set!
Loserville Colorado Chapter has checked in as well.
http://wonkette.com/523162/gun-fondlers-just-want-equal-time-at-aurora-victims-ceremony-to-remember-the-poor-confiscated-guns#more-523162
Way to live down to our expectations, folks.
WereBear
Yes. Yes. Right in Ybor City.
The buildings there are very old, and a friend of mine hired on at a ginormous gay bar with multiple rooms, bars, dining areas, dance floors. He told me it was haunted, but would say no more until I visited.
I picked out the exact places he had experienced. Kitchen freezer area, main bar, corner of the smallest dance floor; and nothing in the fern bar.
I’ll never forget the way the aluminum surface of one of the big freezers had a perpetual heat shimmer in front of him. Even though there wasn’t any heat, and none of the other doors showed that.
The third floor was where they sent the newbies, and he wouldn’t take me there. He said hands would touch you; very freaky.
The main bar chandelier would sway dramatically… and then stop dead.
And that’s just one of the places I’ve experienced. I do believe you need a certain sensitivity. I’ve visited places with very strong feelings, and the people there shrug that nothing’s ever happened, and they’ve lived there for years.
Chris
@Amir Khalid:
What infuriates me about that is that the converse view, “Arabs out of Israel/Palestine,” is absolutely mainstream in our political process. We’ve had senior Republicans come right out and say “yeah, the Palestinians should all just go fuck off and build a country somewhere else in the Arab world, cause, you know, don’t they know they’re inconveniencing the Jews by being where they are?” Nobody gives a fuck that they’re basically calling for ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
Anya
@dan: The same reason there was a lot of “Chicago lost the bid to host 2014! Ha ha!” It’s their psychopathic way of sticking it to the blacks!
raven
Damn, running a 100 ft roto rooter down a 4 inch drain pipe one inch at a time is a bitch!
Uncle Ebeneezer
Ghosts are fun to believe in, but no, and no.
One of the most glaring flaws of the human brain is the tendency to repeatedly attribute supernatural causes to things we can’t explain. I mean we have done it with countless phenomena which we eventually learned and verified as being totally natural at later dates. So there will always be something we can’t yet explain, but that doesn’t make a supernatural conclusion any more likely to be true than all of those other times we made the same mistake before. In fact, it pretty strongly suggests we would be just make the same error yet again.
As far as energy goes, I’ve never understood this concept. We already have a fairly good accounting of the energy involved in matter on a human level. Physics, chemistry and biology can tell you what happens when the body decomposes, cells break down, heat is dispersed etc. The energy that is associated with supernatural phenomenon: what kind of energy is it? Where does it come from? Why is it beyond our perception when it’s supposed source is alive, but then becomes perceptible after death? Once I start thinking about questions like these, considering the faulty nature of our perception, our susceptibility to suggestion and hallucination, and looking more deeply into the accounts of evidence, the whole thing moves more and more into the camp of mind-trickery.
I’ve recently lost a loved one, and my memories of her haunt me some nights. Memories are strong. In a very real sense, the people who matter to us DO live on with us. But they live with us in our minds. When I hear a certain song it reminds me of my mom. Even if it was one she never liked or heard or lyrically has anything to do with her. Some stimuli just prompt our minds to go to certain places. If I see some whisp of unexplainable light, there’s a very high probability that it will also make me think of my Mom. But it is no more connected to her as the afore-mentioned song.
That said, I still love ghost stories, hauntings etc. The confabulations of our minds provide great entertainment!
cckids
@Cassidy:
Personally, the half-heard whispering/laughing children would be much, much creepier (a la Blair Witch)
Mike E
@raven: If this doesn’t perfectly encapsulate Our Modern Age, then nothing can.
the Conster
@Uncle Ebeneezer:
Humans have been arrogant about their understanding of the world since they got that spark to catch fire on a regular basis. All the science and measuring instruments in the world still hasn’t found love, or mind, yet they certainly exist.
Pogonip
@CaseyL: If ants exist, we’d be overrun.
Just because you’re not seeing something doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Jockey Full of Malbec
At 15-16 years old, we used to hang out in a local cemetery (not to vandalize or anything, was just the most quiet/dark place to hang you could find in that part of the city).
I distinctly heard the quiet, muffled sound of a baby crying. I was the only one who heard it, but a couple friends followed me as I tried to follow the sound. It stopped when we got too close, but we looked at the closest grave in the direction I had heard, and it the gravestone was “Anna. 1897-1898” (or something along those lines, this was a long time ago).
In my late 20s, I had an apt in Brookline where I was hag-attacked a few times in the middle of the night. The worst of it, I remember abruptly waking up, actually being LIFTED and pushed back up against the wall behind the bed (no headboard), and I distinctly “heard” (in my head, not my ears) a hissing female voice saying “I’ve got you now, you little bitch.”. A witchy friend explained to me how to smudge, so I did that, even if only as a trick to convince myself to sleep in that room. Plus I got in the habit of burning certain incenses before sleep. Never happened again.
My current house was built in 1890, and I’ve always heard noises, but assumed it was others in the house. But now that I’ve lived here alone for nearly 3 months, I still hear footsteps (or motion in general) upstairs at night when I’m downstairs, and I still hear footsteps downstairs at night while I’m upstairs. This when both cats are in the room with me. No interactions, though.
None of this makes any logical sense, whatsoever, of course. Given what we already know about the brain, and the mind, the conventional notion of an afterlife is utterly impossible.
But… things happen.
Pogonip
We live near a couple of old folks’ homes. One sunny day I was driving down the service road and saw an elderly black lady in a patio dress walking along the side of the road. She vanished–abruptly, like a light switching off, not like Captain Kirk fading and sparkling when he beams up. I figured she must be a ghost as living people don’t normally vanish when you are looking right at them.
Skeptical Inquirer would come up with some ridiculously convoluted explanation for this rather than applying Occam’s Razor as I did. That’s why I stopped reading it. Don’t like the magazine on the other extreme, Fate, either. I wish there were some genuinely open-minded publication about these little mysteries.
Botsplainer
I’ve run into bunches of things – saw a spoon jump off a table in a haunted restaurant I worked at, heard voices at an empty office while working late, and moving furniture at a haunted resort, all of which were consistent with other stories from the same places. Got some weird photos, too.
Cassidy
@cckids: Anything involving kids is creepy. every time I watch a horror movie and there is some form of the creepy kid, I think “fuck it, I’m out”.
J R in WV
@geg6:
We went to the Grave Creek Mound and museum once, across the street from the old Moundsville prison, empty lo these many years. The prison is stone, a huge area surrounded by a 20 foot high stone wall, aged to nearly a black color.
The mound was a little strange, imagining the age of it, and our total lack of knowledge of the culture and beliefs of those who built it with so much effort and sweat.
But the abandoned (not really, now it’s a tourist attraction(?) and training location) prison, which I had before been interested in visiting, was very off-putting. I lost all interest in touring the place. Too much… something. Vibes? It seemed very strange, though.
And the little town felt odd. The prison had to be the biggest employer in town, and at the museum we learned that the whole town was filled up with flattened Indian mounds. The one mound that’s left is huge, but there were literally dozens of them (at least, maybe hundreds), walls and corridors and surrounded courtyards built of stone and clay and dirt… nearly all gone, but for pioneer-era maps.
Ghosts, maybe. We didn’t hang around much after dark, that’s for sure.
quannlace
Or that faint, incoherent babbling in “The Haunting.”
Damn, still one of the best scary movies.
‘Whatever walked there….walked alone.’
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Uncle Ebeneezer:
We explain phenomena or ignore them within the limits of our understanding. Although we know that thought is a matter of neurons rubbing together we still don’t know how original thought happens nor can we yet explain why, because the neurons-rubbing-together is the same for each of us why that process results in only one Da Vinci, only one Einstein, only one of you and only one of me as far as our thoughts.
Once I start thinking about questions like these, considering the faulty nature of our perception, our susceptibility to suggestion and hallucination, and looking more deeply into the accounts of evidence, the whole thing moves more and more into the camp of mind-trickery.
Your arguments remind me of the way some of our distant ancestors explained the movements of the moon and stars by concluding that they were attached to immense glass bowls. That was their firm belief based on the work of their best thinkers.
gogol's wife
@Cassidy:
I take it Village of the Damned is not your favorite film (creepy demonic blue-eyed kids).
Yatsuno
There are more things in Heav’n and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy Horatio.
the Conster
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Do we really even truly understand the nature of light? Why can it behave like particles and waves at the same time? Light energy is the great mystery which we may never unlock while in human form, perhaps by definition.
Bob In Portland
Not a ghost-believer. Saw a group of UFOs over the Jersey Shore in the early 1960s. A bunch of lights that moved very fast, stopped, then moved very fast in the other direction. That’s about it.
Bob In Portland
@gogol’s wife: Yikes. I remember seeing that one as a kid. Very scary, especially at the height of the Cold War.
gelfling545
@bemused: A A woman friend older than myself had been married and widowed. Later in life she became engaged but her fiance died before the wedding took place. At her death after being unresponsive for quite a time she remarked to her daughter “Look, Joe (the fiance) has come to get me. I thought it would be your father.” and then she died.
Jockey Full of Malbec
@the Conster:
Moving at the speed of light as they do, photons do not experience time (this was part of Einstein’s great thought experiment). If they had consciousness, they wouldn’t experience any time passing between the time of their creation, and the time of their ending (usually by getting absorbed by some atom in its path… like the atoms in your retina, for instance).
If you were a photon created at the instant of the Big Bang, and somehow made it to be the last photon ever absorbed after the ‘age of matter’ ends some trillions of years from now… all that span of time, the entire history of the physical Universe, was literally just a single, timeless instant to you.
Cassidy
@gogol’s wife: Nope. Kids and horror movies never ends well.
gelfling545
@Botsplainer: My elder daughter once had an apartment with what we called “the haunted bathroom” if you went in and closed the door, as most people are likely to do of course, things would get thrown at you – brushed & combs, bars of soap, rolls of tissue, etc. Oddly enough they found that if they took the cat into the bathroom with them there was no disturbance. Giant, invisible mice, I say.
J R in WV
@Bob In Portland:
UFOs, now, that’s a little different, maybe.
Was in the USN on a support ship, sub-tropical island location in the US. Late one evening (10-11 pm) a friend and I got back to the ship from the EM club, we drank a bit but were neither of us drunk. We went up to the helo pad on the stern of the ship, got some life jackets out of the locker and laid down to watch the sky.
Full moon, clear sky, beautiful evening. Suddenly Dave says ‘Holy Shit!!” and I look at his direction in the sky and there are three glowing shapes flying north very fast. They’re shaped like stylized doves in a triangular formation, and shimmer with light like a fluorescent tube showing a little of the arc inside.
We both jump up to watch the triangle of lighted objects pass over northward. They moved very fast, and were totally silent. And them they vanished, just like they popped into view overhead.
We were both young men, 19 or 20, and it scared the crap out of both of us. We went way below in the ship, with lots of steel between us and the sky, immediately. The next day Dave wouldn’t talk about it – acted like nothing had happened, total denial.
But we saw something, something totally inexplicable. 1970-71 – probably ’71 but not sure. No real research facilities anywhere nearby, either. Pre-stealth stuff too.
the Conster
@Jockey Full of Malbec:
Far out.
Given trying to wrap my head around that (which is impossible by definition without massive amounts of LSD and maybe even not then), imagining such a thing as light energy taking forms we call spirits or ghosts or the spectral remains of more solid organic carbon based forms of energy which were energized by light while “alive” is not all that fantastic. Universal consciousness (for lack of a better word) is beyond comprehension or imagination, so how can one assert such certainty about what is or isn’t possible?
Pogonip
@J R in WV: In the ’60’s my father had troops on night maneuvers in the Mojave and they were treated to quite a light show from what were, literally, UNIDENTIFIED flying objects. No one could figure out what they were. He took statements from all the men, wrote an incident report, turned it in, and never heard a thing back. To this day he doesn’t know if it was U F Os or secret US aircraft.
StringOnAStick
I was at a seminar recently, and one attendant was an MD who was a member of a heart-lung transplant team. He commented that he and his team mates have noted that sometimes the transplant recipient takes on characteristics or personality traits of the donor. Of course, the recipients never knew the donors given the organs we’re talking about transplanting here.
The seminar was about an East Indian way of knowledge called Vedanta. The fellow giving the seminar responded to the MD’s comments that he suspected it had something to do with the donor having some karma left to ‘burn off’, and that a year or so would probably see the end of that person-to-person (spirit-to-spirit?) interaction. Unfortunately the MD hadn’t followed patients for more than a year on this topic; it really isn’t something a doc can note in the chart without raising eyebrows. None of his fellow MD’s wanted to talk about it outside the OR or with non-team members since it isn’t exactly an AMA-approved topic.
I gotta go with The Conster’s comments above. I’ve felt the weight of death squashing my sense of life for most of my life, and taking in the understanding that we are souls who happen to have bodies, not bodies that happen to have souls has brought me a lot of peace and contentment since I started meditating on that idea.
rk
I have a friend whose mother is a palmist/face reader. She read the palm/face of the brother of a mutual friend and told him not to go near the water. Two yrs later he died by drowning. She has also told numerous negative things to others apparently all of which come true (her rate for positive stuff is around 50%). I discussed it with my friend once and was told that she has some kind of “sense” which allows her to do this. I don’t know what to make of it, and I can’t come up with any rational explanation. she does not take any money for these readings, nor has she ever made it into a business so it’s not like she is out swindling people. I use to be a skeptic, but there are too many people throughout history and currently who have experienced the supernatural. I am willing to believe that 99.9% of these phenomenon have scientific, rational explanations. But even if one or two are true then that means the supernatural does exist (just may be not in a way that we can readily perceive it).
Betty Cracker
@WereBear: Was it called El Goya?
the Conster
@StringOnAStick:
I think if humans were able to create life from inert organic matter – actually create and animate a sentient being capable of living on its own, I’d be first in line to deny the existence of anything not known by humans to be supernatural. Until that time, there’s a force at work that is beyond us and that is actually the point of everything that ever existed, which we don’t understand, and actually may not be capable of understanding. Maybe the boddhisatvas like Avalokiteshvara get it, but the rest of us are wallowing in the lower frequencies of that animating force. Sadly.
PaulW
@RSA:
I gots more where that came from…
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Wow, this thread is still alive?
You want ghost stories, I got ’em.
We’ve missed the best time for telling my best stories. They really should be told when they happened: the anniversary of the Battle off Gettysburg.
Not enough battery left to bore you with the details. I’ve stood in the line with Union troops watching Rebels coming across a field toward me, knowing we were all greener than the grass, the modern part of my mind wondering if I would randomly start running if the unit broke. I’ve stood in the Devil’s Den and watched my camera battery being sucked dry. I’ve seen the men waiting to ambush Iverson.
Oops, battery gone. Next rock.
tybee
@raven:
when you’re done with that, may i borrow it?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
My other big ghost story is from Spotsylvania, where I wandered through the woods in a heated argument with my husband over where the cannon had been placed, until he stomped off to the car to fetch one of his new books he’d purchased earlier in the trip. I was right. Of course, I knew I was; I could see the artillerymen setting them up.
Something seized my ankle for several minutes while I was standing in the Mule Shoe. I saw very little, if anything, and heard nothing. Just a firm, cool pressure on my ankle.
Given my other experiences, I’m a bit disappointed that nothing interesting happened at Antietam or Cold Harbor.
Mnemosyne
@Uncle Ebeneezer:
Other people’s personalities are beyond our perception when they’re alive? Because, as I understand it, that’s usually the claim — the personality somehow persists beyond the death of the body.
We understand a lot more about the brain than we did 50 or even 25 years ago, but most neuroscientists will admit we still know only a tiny fraction of what the brain does and how it works. What is synesthesia, how do you identify the people who have it, and how does it work? No one knows.
Original Lee
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: This. You’ve nailed it, and more succinctly than anybody else has so far.
peggy
I’m a retired scientist with a PhD and I have faith that matter and energy are explained by those equations I struggled with in physics class. (That’s why I became a biologist.) On the other hand I also accept that experiences happen. When my father was dying I would see his face in the Irish drunks making their way to the shelter. When my best friend, a Korean, left the country she would often appear on the street and then turn and was someone else.
This is the story of the Resurrection I find most convincing, from John:15 about Mary Magdalene.
15 He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”
16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She sees the gardener and then he turns into Jesus.
peggy
I’m a retired scientist with a PhD and I have faith that matter and energy are explained by those equations I struggled with in physics class. (That’s why I became a biologist.) On the other hand I also accept that experiences happen. When my father was dying I would see his face in the Irish drunks making their way to the shelter. When my best friend, a Korean, left the country she would often appear on the street and then turn and was someone else.
This is the story of the Resurrection I find most convincing, from John:15 about Mary Magdalene.
15 He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”
16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She sees the gardener and then he turns into Jesus.
The Tim Channel
No proof of ghosts or Martians yet, but plenty of proof of self deception borne by the near universal fear of death. There’s no evidence of material existence after death. There’s also no evidence for something like 99 percent of the the “known” universe given the vagaries of dark energy and dark matter necessary for the equations of physics to balance everything out. The visions of “god” experienced by people are without exception, the “god” they were brought up to believe in.
Since otherwise seemingly inert pure energy (Big Bang) seems predisposed to condensation into matter and then life, there are doubtless many mysteries still to be figured out, leaving all kinds of “wiggle room” for psychobabble and pseudoscience. We haven’t really figured out the “how” (science) of creation yet, but that doesn’t stop people from constantly trying to fill in the “why” (religion-philosophy). Lawrence Krauss has put together a cogent theory of how everything comes from nothing, leaving only the exact meaning of “nothing” up for consideration, but at the end of the day his conclusion is that there’s a lot going on in “nothing” that makes “nothing” unstable. Turns out “nothing” desperately wants to morph into “something” and if you have enough ‘nothing” and enough time to wait, you eventually end up with everything. On the other hand, it kinda looks like everything eventually returns to nothing in one form or another. There definitely seems to be some sort of cycle for energy, time, space and matter that must be somehow inherently encoded in the “pure” energy released by the Big Bang. What we define as life “evolved” not from a single cell, but from pure energy itself if you follow the trail far enough. That’s a lot more exotic than Darwinian evolution because we totally understand the science behind evolving life. We got squat on how the energy “evolves” past the periodic table of elements into little Johnny slinging his peas off the table at dinner.
There’s a reason for everything even if there isn’t a purpose.
Enjoy.
The Tim Channel
No proof of ghosts or Martians yet, but plenty of proof of self deception borne by the near universal fear of death. There’s no evidence of material existence after death. There’s also no evidence for something like 99 percent of the the “known” universe given the vagaries of dark energy and dark matter necessary for the equations of physics to balance everything out. The visions of “god” experienced by people are without exception, the “god” they were brought up to believe in.
Since otherwise seemingly inert pure energy (Big Bang) seems predisposed to condensation into matter and then life, there are doubtless many mysteries still to be figured out, leaving all kinds of “wiggle room” for psychobabble and pseudoscience. We haven’t really figured out the “how” (science) of creation yet, but that doesn’t stop people from constantly trying to fill in the “why” (religion-philosophy). Lawrence Krauss has put together a cogent theory of how everything comes from nothing, leaving only the exact meaning of “nothing” up for consideration, but at the end of the day his conclusion is that there’s a lot going on in “nothing” that makes “nothing” unstable. Turns out “nothing” desperately wants to morph into “something” and if you have enough ‘nothing” and enough time to wait, you eventually end up with everything. On the other hand, it kinda looks like everything eventually returns to nothing in one form or another. There definitely seems to be some sort of cycle for energy, time, space and matter that must be somehow inherently encoded in the “pure” energy released by the Big Bang. What we define as life “evolved” not from a single cell, but from pure energy itself if you follow the trail far enough. That’s a lot more exotic than Darwinian evolution because we totally understand the science behind evolving life. We got squat on how the energy “evolves” past the periodic table of elements into little Johnny slinging his peas off the table at dinner.
There’s a reason for everything even if there isn’t a purpose.
Enjoy.
the Conster
@The Tim Channel:
The description of the “nothing” you give is remarkably similar to the Buddhist void – sunyata – the undifferentiation out of which all apparent entities, distinctions, and dualities arise (and to which it returns). Nagarjuna beat Krauss by 1800 years though.
Uncle Ebeneezer
I believe in the supernatural because there’s so much that we can’t explain. Take the rising of the sun for example…
I believe in the supernatural because there’s so much that we can’t explain. Take lightning for example…
I believe in the supernatural because there’s so much that we can’t explain. Take gravity for example…
Repeat almost ad infinitum for every major mystery that was later figured out. So my question is why would anyone think that this time would be different?
Also, it’s not like we have unexplainable experiences day in and day out. Let’s assume that everyone experiences something so mysterious and unexplainable in their life that it can only lead to the presumption of the existence of the supernatural. How many of these events do most people experience? One? A couple? How long do they last? A few seconds? An hour? I don’t know about you but when I’m driving or walking around going about my day, I’m almost in awe by how much we have figured out. The motion of the cars, the reflection of the light, the biology of the plants, etc. etc. If each person experiences a couple supernatural events of fairly short duration in the course of their entire life, it seems to me that the ratio of unexplained to explained observations is almost infinitesimally small. And that the various biases, hallucinations and errors that we can see and even induce in experiments, are the more likely culprit.
Yes, there are tons of things we don’t understand. There probably always will be. There may be limitations to what the human brain is capable of understanding. But that still doesn’t address the question of why so many people believe that our inability to understand something suggests the existence of the supernatural. On what evidence is that positive correlation based? And how do you square that with the fact that we can show in experiments that humans will often mistakenly attribute supernatural causation to things that were naturally caused by the experimenters?