Do You Believe In Ghosts?

[onlyabloke]

Do you believe in Ghosts?
Do you believe in the Paranormal?
Do you believe in the Supernatural?

Bonus: Do you believe in Aliens?

I like to ask these questions to people (usually people I'm posted with at work) just to see what their answers and experiences are. Some people say yes, some say no, but I always get interesting stories and perspectives.

So, I ask you lot these questions!

 

[jeshikat]

No
No
No

If you mean little green men in flying saucers abducting cows, making crop circles, and experimenting on people, then no. If you mean just the possibility of intelligent life somewhere out there in the vast expanse of the universe, then sure.

 

[onlyabloke]

No
No
No

If you mean little green men in flying saucers abducting cows, making crop circles, and experimenting on people, then no. If you mean just the possibility of intelligent life somewhere out there in the vast expanse of the universe, then sure.

Okay, so why no to ghosts/paranormal but yes to aliens (beings from space)?

 

[jeshikat]

To be clear, I'm accepting of the idea that, considering how many galaxies/stars/planets are out there that life, and even intelligent life, existing somewhere out there isn't that far-fetched.

But I think it's extremely unlikely we'll ever come into contact with aliens (or they'll come into contact with us) even if they do exist.

 

[onlyabloke]

To be clear, I'm accepting of the idea that, considering how many galaxies/stars/planets are out there that life, and even intelligent life, existing somewhere out there isn't that far-fetched.

But I think it's extremely unlikely we'll ever come into contact with aliens (or they'll come into contact with us) even if they do exist.

lol Can't say I'd blame them either. With how messed up or world is, I wouldn't want to get involved with us either. I'm pretty sure there's something out there somewhere though, considering how many "earth-like" planets they've found lately.

I'm also a big believer in ghosts, spirits and other paranormals as well though.

 

[jeshikat]

lol Can't say I'd blame them either. With how messed up or world is, I wouldn't want to get involved with us either

Well, I was more thinking that space is big and FTL travel remains the domain of sci-fi according to our current understanding of physics

I'm also a big believer in ghosts, spirits and other paranormals as well though.

And that's cool. Obviously I disagree but I also think it's silly to get into arguments with people or look down on them about stuff like that.

 

[onlyabloke]

Well, I was more thinking that space is big and FTL travel remains the domain of sci-fi according to our current understanding of physics
And that's cool. Obviously I disagree but I also think it's silly to get into arguments with people or look down on them about stuff like that.

Agreed. I've had too many experiences to deny it though. I used to not believe in them for the longest time. My two years in Japan changed that quick lmao

 

[Phuncz]

I don't believe in the pop-culture versions of the topic's questions, but I do believe there is much we haven't, or never will be able to, seen that goes beyond the human-perceivable universe. We have yet to look beyond space-time, with topics like (infinite) parallel universes, quantum entanglement (touched upon in Interstellar), even our brain is very much a huge variable in what we might be able to perceive.

Who knows what we as a community have experienced as ghosts or unexplainable phenomenon are not other lifeforms we can't identify or even consistently observe ? Without a microscope, we would have never seen a bacteria or virii. Without a telescope, we would have never understood many aspects of our universe. So who knows what dwells in the dimensions we have unable to perceive ?

#startrek #xfiles #iwanttobelieve

 

[confusis]

Yes
Yes
Yes.

That is all.

 

[onlyabloke]

For those that do believe - here's a story of mine. If you don't believe, that's okay. Just think of it as a scary story lol

I never believed in ghosts until I moved to Japan. Now I'm a firm believer. I did not make anything up, and everything I've written is all true to my experience. I've done my best to recall little details but some have escaped me haha.

These stories will probably be released on my Memories of Tokyo blog as specials later in the future. For now I share them here with you.

Misawa Dormitory, Personal Encounter I
In the middle of 2011 I was blessed with the opportunity to live in the amazing country of Japan, courtesy of the United States Air Force. While there, aside from the many amazing views, people, and places, I also had some life changing supernatural experiences. Before I moved to Japan, I never really believed in "ghosts", but I never really denied them either. Now I can most certainly say I believe in them.

Our dorm rooms in Japan were set up much like studio apartments. If you walk in through the entry, to the left is a bathroom with it’s own door, a sink/cabinet combination which is in the hallway. Directly across from that are two closets. If you walk further into the room you come into the open living area. Standing in the doorframe, about fifteen feet in front is a wide window, and usually the desks and dressers supplied under that. To the immediate left is the kitchenette area and across from that, filling most of the living space, was my bed. And thus, the scene is set.

One night, somewhere towards the end of 2011, I woke up around 11PM to see a woman standing in the hallway doorframe (which I should remind you is plainly visible from my bed). This woman wore a long white dress, or gown, that went all the way down to her ankles. The sleeves stopped just short of her wrists, her hair was long and black and swept to the side. Her facial features weren’t clearly visible, but the she felt young.

At this point I was trying to figure out if I was still asleep and dreaming, or if I was actually awake and really seeing this in front of me in my room. It must’ve only been a few seconds in reality, but it felt like minutes to me. I brushed off the possibility of it being a ghost, rationalizing that maybe I left the door unlocked. I thought perhaps one of my friends misjudged thinking I was awake or perhaps there was an emergency. I sat up in my bed and said “Hey, what’s up?” This was the point in which she departed. She vanished from that space as if she was never there at all.

So now I’m sitting straight up in bed, staring at an empty doorframe wondering what the hell just happened. I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking but I did end up laying back down, putting my back against the wall, turning my TV on and eventually drifting off to finish the night in a restless sleep.

This concludes my first encounter. ​

 

[iFreilicht]

Do you believe in Ghosts?
Do you believe in the Paranormal?
Do you believe in the Supernatural?

In neither of them. Ghosts and every other paranormal thing probably doesn't exist because it simply violates the laws of physics. I am a strong believer that every kind of supernatural occurence or magic that we ever see has some sort of scientific explanation, even if we haven't found one yet. You wouldn't believe what kind of stuff your brain believes that never actually happend. Tiny memories can change over time so much that they completely differ from the actual past, you may see this when people reaching their 50s are arguing over how certain situations in their school days happened. And there are a lot of strange things that can happen to you in your sleep, including lucid dreaming, sleep walking and sleep paralysis to varying degrees, and your brain reacts very strongly to sounds while you sleep.

I think the best explanation for stuff like that is our brain. We still have little idea how it actually works, and it is one of the only things that we can't simulate. So many things have been cracked by now, you can simulate two universes crashing into each other on your PC, virtually fold protein chains to cure diseases, know changes in weather days in advance. We have an extremely solid understanding of pretty much every aspect of our universe. But our brain remains a mystery, and maybe that's for the better.

At least philosophically you could argue that the brain right now is one of the few places where something non-explainable can actually happen.

Aliens are too probable to exist not to believe in, at least if aliens just means life in another solar system. But I think we won't ever meet any of them. We only think aliens exist because the universe is so damn huge. But because of that, reaching any planet where life is at least somewhat likely to exist would take forever. Not to say that intelligent life is a whole different story. Even on our own planet, the pure existence of us is a chain of very lucky coincidences. If dinosaurs lived longer, first hominids might've never evolved before Pangea broke apart into the continents that exist today, which could've completely prevented the modern human to evolve in the first place. And even then, think about how people would live today if humans never got to Europe and Asia. Maybe native Americans would be the only humans on this planet, and would still live in harmony with nature, and it could stay like that until the next asteroid hit and reset Earth.

We ourselves will come close to being what we imagined as aliens in the past, so I think it's reasonable to believe that aliens exist, even if we can't prove it.

 

[Phuncz]

In neither of them. Ghosts and every other paranormal thing probably doesn't exist because it simply violates the laws of physics.

While I believe the brain is indeed responsible for many people's stories, we can never exclude ghosts as not being some kind of lifeform, projection or hologram of a lifeform. It might even be lifeform that interacts with our brains to communicate in forms of aparitions.

The laws of physics might not even apply. We mostly look at lifeforms as creatures we can see, hear, smell and touch, but there might also be lifeforms that don't have any physical form or one that we can perceive. It could very well be that we, what defines us as a human, often referenced as our "spirit", might be a life-form on it's own that inhabits a soulless body when it's born. And maybe spirits don't roam the earth all ghostey, but they might exist on another plane of existance that we can't see. Or this is all hoopla and what you see is what you get.

But let's not forget the earth was flat once and the sun revolved around us. Disease was god's doing and not nature's (up for debate but a whole other topic) and stars were the stuff of the gods too.

 

[iFreilicht]

The laws of physics might not even apply. We mostly look at lifeforms as creatures we can see, hear, smell and touch, but there might also be lifeforms that don't have any physical form or one that we can perceive. It could very well be that we, what defines us as a human, often referenced as our "spirit", might be a life-form on it's own that inhabits a soulless body when it's born. And maybe spirits don't roam the earth all ghostey, but they might exist on another plane of existance that we can't see. Or this is all hoopla and what you see is what you get.

I like that explanation. While it requires "lifeform" to be something much more broad than what you'd normally call a living thing, it's certainly solving a few problems without contradicting anything we have found out so far.

 

[EdZ]

As our instruments become more exquisitely sensitive to signals well below what human senses can perceive, and we perform more and more rigorous trails, and continue to detect no evidence for spirits/ghosts/incorporeal lifeforms/etc, the likelihood of them actually existing is vanishingly small. If such things do exist in a manner that has no influence on measurable reality, then for all intents and purposes they do not exist in any meaningful way. Unlike, for example, Dark Matter or Dark Energy, which while not directly detectable have measurable effects on things we CAN detect.

In terms of life outside of Earth, I think there's a good chance we will discover at least microbial life on another planet or body in the solar system. Most likely something that split off evolutionarily from the same origins as life on Earth; either via a direct descendant that was flung off of Earth through an impact event, or through a common external source (Panspermia), through the former is more likely. Completely independent chemical development is possible, but Carbon compounds sit in the sweet spot of large numbers of possible complex molecules with relatively low energies required to form and break them (but not too low as to be unstable) that chemistries based on other compounds are going to have much narrower niches within which they could evolve, and thus less likely to evolve.
For intelligent extrasolar life, or objects created by extrasolar intelligence, we're most likely to see a flyby probe (probably indistinguishable from an extrasolar comet or asteroid) or a braking probe (will probably resemble a Kreutz Sundiving comet), as all signs point to practical superluminal travel not being possible. If extrasolar intelligences exist, at ranges an in timeframes that allow for us to detect them, we'll probably know about it through observations of them at a distance, either through their influence on their host star, or on their planet, depending on distance and our detection capabilities.

 

[iFreilicht]

extrasolar intelligence sexist

Alternative Metal Bandname right there.

 

[EdZ]

Ah, the curse of the migrating plural.

 

[onlyabloke]

Other two stories I've managed to write out. Very bottom is the main one that still gets me to this day. I haven't got around to writing it as nice and neat and eloquently as the rest of the ones I've posted but I wrote out a real quick summary of what happened.

Misawa Air Base, Ghosts at the Park
I don’t know when this story takes place, and I don’t know the Security Forces members who witnessed it. This is a story that has been passed around the base and the Security Forces Squadron, and has become well enough known that it was actually put in the Air Force Times (or one of those news papers).

Here’s how it was told to me.

During the night shift, a Security Forces member in charge of an Entry Control Point (Alpha 1) was taking a look through his cameras surrounding his area. While doing this, he noticed from one of his cameras that he could see the park in the distance. Naturally, with it being the middle of the night, he decided to zoom in on the park just to make sure there was nobody doing anything stupid. This is when he noticed two human shapes in the park. Seeing this, he dispatches a unit (Alpha 2) to investigate.

“Alpha 2 from Alpha 1, I have eyes on two people at the park, can you make contact with them and send them home?”
“Copy, we’re en route.”

Within a few minutes, Alpha 1 notices the patrol arrive on scene and stop just short of the people he sees on the camera. Thinking all is well, Alpha 1 continues on his camera checks. A few minutes later, the radio goes off.

“Alpha 1, Alpha 2. We’re at the park, we have negative contact. I think they left.”

Alpha 1 goes back to the camera to verify what he’s hearing on the radio, and at this point he starts to get nervous.

“Alpha 2, I copy, you don’t have anyone there?”
“Affirm, there’s no one here.”
“Roger….call me.”

Alpha 2 calls Alpha 1′s phone.

“It’s Alpha 2, what’s up?”
“You don’t see them?”
“See who?”
“The people? That are right in front of you?”
“Dude, there’s no one here.”
“I can see two people on my camera, standing directly in front of you. If you can’t see them….I’d leave…NOW.”

Alpha 2 didn’t argue with that, immediately left and met up at Alpha 1′s post. This story still gets passed around the base today and lives on as one of the many ghosts stories Misawa has in it’s history.​

-------------------------

Misawa Dormitory, Personal Encounter II & III
My second encounter I still kind of question to this day. I don’t know if it was my eyes playing tricks on me or if it actually happened. It wasn’t an apparition or a ghost that I saw. It was my hat.

A few days after I saw the woman in Ghost Tales #1, I woke up around the same time and saw what appeared to be one of my hats floating in the doorframe. I wasn’t clearly able to make out which hat it was but I remember the general shape of it. Not being in the mood to deal with it, I once again put my back against the wall, pulled the blanket over my head and went back to sleep.

This concludes my second encounter.

My third encounter happened in 2012, I’m thinking it was sometime between February and May. I believe this to be my most visible encounter with this woman. Are you familiar with “The Witching Hour”? To the best of my knowledge, it’s between the hours of 2AM and 3AM, supposedly twelve hours opposite of when Christ was crucified and when paranormal activity is most active. I don’t know why this is, but that’s what I know it to be.

Anyway, I woke up late into this supposed Witching Hour laying on my side and facing the living area of my dorm room. Once again, in the doorframe I see the girl standing there. This time though, she didn’t stay there. She began to walk at a very slow pace into my room. I remember my eyes following from the doorframe to the window, watching her every move as she came to a stop shy of the nightstand.

She turned to face me, and even though she was so close to me, I still could not see her face. She stood there for what must have been just a few seconds, once again feeling like minutes…until she broke the stillness. She suddenly tilted her head at me, like something you’d see a dog do, like she couldn’t understand why I was laying there. And for me, that was it. I couldn’t take it anymore, I couldn’t stay still any longer.

I shot for my phone sitting above my head, and in one swift motion I turned it on aiming the light from the display at her like I just found the greatest weapon in the world. And just as I hoped, she dissipated as the light touched her.

This concludes my third encounter. ​

-----------------

The biggest encounter I had occurred after having a weird dream. I woke up on my stomach in sleep paralysis - I know I was awake because I could see everything in my room, I could feel the fan on my face and my blankets, I could see my computer and hear the music I had playing from it. Then suddenly I sank into the bed like someone was sitting on my back. Immediately after I started feeling heavy punches on my back, enough that I was actually shaking in my bed. I forced myself awake and the weight off of me and there was nobody in my room. I ran and turned the light on and cleared out the rest of my living quarters to find no one there.

The next couple of days was spent talking to people about it. "It was just a dream" "go see the chaplain" "get your room blessed". After about three or four days I had started leaning towards the "its just a dream" rational. I was getting dressed a few days later when I happened to catch a glance of my back in the mirror - covered in fist sized bruises in the spots I was hit.

After that I put the bible out with a certain verse highlighted, as well as the temple lion-dogs you see in front of asian temples to ward off evil spirits. After that I never saw the ghost again, but she'd make herself known by throwing shit around my room. I went through my duty bag one day and took my helmet out and put it on the floor next to the bag. I was woken up in the middle of the night to my helmet being thrown across the room and landing on the floor next to my head. Statues that were also on shelves mysteriously slipped off although there were no quakes, nothing else on the shelf fell off and it wasn't anywhere near the edge.​

A lot of residents on the base had similar stories - seeing people standing over water, "the invisible man" in the towers, the ghost child at the park, the housing ghosts, the haunted Japanese HQ built over an old burial ground that not even the Japanese would go in after dark. All kinds of stories came from the base.

 

[napalmTree]

After reading the stories mentioned here, it might be too late, but I felt like adding on this -

I've lived in remote village/town in forest which was locally known for it's history with Britisher's. There were many stories revolving them especially due to the difference in culture. For example, the very fact that the dead were buried is quite a shock to those who practice cremation therefore, almost all stories were related to some secret/unknown graves.

I personally never had experienced such but one of my friends actually did.
Incident -
It was around the beginning of the winter vacation so almost no one was staying in dormitory besides him. Late night, he was suddenly woke up by the sound of rattling/thrashing. It was because of all windows being simultaneously rattled from outside. He was not able to see anyone/thing outside as the windows were tight shut because of winter and it was a blackout due to outage. After a minute the rattling stopped altogether. Nevertheless he didn't tried to open one of the windows to confirm. Apparently there are stories of a Britisher's suicide and the grave location being somewhere in the estate.

I've no idea how much it will affect my way of seeing life for when it does happen with me.

Aliens, I believe strongly on the possibility of it's existence. may not be intelligent or maybe too intelligent for us to acknowledge. And, it sounds stupid but most of my curiosity and belief was triggered by History Channel's Ancient Aliens.

 

[tinyitx]

I am a Christian and so I believe in God and what His Bible says about the spiritual realm.

And, of course, I believe in the resurrection of the dead. Now, the funny thing is, seeing this necroposting (after 4 years), I also believe in the resurrection of a dead post.?

 

[Revenant]

Do I believe in the supernatural? No.

Do I believe in aliens? I believe that it is highly unlikely that life solely developed on our world when there are billions of billions of other worlds out there.