Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Fun with Polls a Halloween poll

In honor of the holiday at hand, I was wondering where all of you weigh in on the subject that began it all. Do you believe in ghosts or spirits? Why or why not?

I never believed in ghosts as a child and young adult. I was raised by an accountant - our world was largely black & white, with little room for gray. If you couldn't see it, it wasn't there. But as I have gotten older, I have learned that not everything under the sun is dictated by logic, and I have been in some situations that were just.... weird. Not to mention that I am now also a person of faith, and there is plenty of precendent for spirits in the Bible.

In short, my logical upbringing is still at war with my adult experience and beliefs. I am still on the fence, but I am leaning towards yes.

By the way, I grew up next to a graveyard and I still love to visit them. But in all the hours I have spent in them, I have never felt any odd presence. My dad always said it wasn't the dead folks we had to worry about!

I'm generally accused of thinking too logically for my own good (my friends say I reason like a computer... geee, that would explain why I studied programming, wouldn't it. LOL!) but I do believe that there are things that just plain cannot be explained by science, so yes, I'd have to say that I believe in ghosts and spirits. (Not all being "evil", obviously.)

About graveyards - when I was in Paris, we visited the Père-Lachaise cemetary and I have to admit that I got chills several times while I was there. I'm not sure it had to do with spirits, though, but rather being in the final resting place of people like Balzac and Molière, Chopin and Bizet and Jim Morrison, of course. It's not so much the thought that the place might be haunted by their spirits, but rather the history of the place and its inoccupants that gave me goose-bumps.

I know exactly what you mean. There is a railway car in the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. that was used to transport people to concentration camps. Walking through it gave me chills.

Until I was about twenty I thought ghost stories were nothing but the creepy tales my camp counselors made up to scare me witless (and generally succeeded in that regard).

Then I moved into this wonderful old apartment. It was awesome! Wood floors, high ceilings, one of those old claw-footed tubs that you could get lost in. I still miss that apartment actually. But, shortly after I moved in, weird things started to happen. There were very high cabinets in the kitchen. I had to stand on the countertop on tiptoe to reach the top ones. Those cabinets were so high that I never used them, it was too much trouble to get to them. I lived there alone so it was weird to me the first couple of times I woke up in the morning and found them all open. I gamely hoisted myself onto the counter and closed them all - tight - only to find them all open again in a week or two.

Okay, maybe it was just the hinges I told myself.

An old roommate came to stay with me and she spent the night on my couch. The next morning she asked me what the heck I was doing all night because she kept seeing someone go walking through the living room and into the kitchen. I dismissed that, too.

I never felt creeped out, in fact it seemed kind of funny to me. So one morning as I was climbing up onto the counters, yet again, I laughed and said out loud, "Is this really the best you can do?"

When I came home that night my deck chairs had all been moved from my inaccessible third floor balcony and into my bed room. I put them back outside, left the apartment (locking the door) and walked down to the corner market. I was gone maybe twenty minutes and in that time my deck chairs had been stacked neatly in the center of my bedroom again.

So I put them outside and the next morning all my high cabinets were open again. This time I left them open. After about a day, they closed themselves. <g> Then a few days would pass and they'd be open. Sometimes I'd come home to find the deck chairs inside again. It was almost like a game. I honestly wondered if it was a neighbor, but there was no way for them to get inside my locked apartment. (And that would be one messed up and scary neighbor if they had nothing better to do than to watch/listen for when I wasn't home just so they could go rearrange my deck chairs.) I even had the deck chairs move themselves inside once while I was in the bathroom (two minutes, tops).

The house my husband grew up in is haunted, but their ghost isn't nearly as nice as my apartment poltergeist. My in-laws ghost is creepy. One night, shortly after we were married, I was upstairs in bed and everyone else was downstairs. I'd heard his family tell the stories, but I didn't really believe them (even after my apartment experiences). So I'm lying there and I hear someone walking in the hall towards the room I'm in (floorboards creaking). I saw the door open, but no one came in. Except I could *feel* someone there.

Thoroughly freaked out, I pulled the covers over my head and started silently willing my husband to come to bed. Now. Come to bed NOW. The entire time I could still feel someone right there. Finally I sucked it up and RAN down the stairs and into the living room.

Another night we all sat in the living room, knowing full well there was no one upstairs and yet all six of us could hear the thumping and banging sounds overhead. It sounded like someone was moving furniture up there. No one wanted to go check. Finally, Mark, his brother and I went upstairs. The noises continued right up until Mark pushed the door open and we found... nothing. Not a single box or piece of furniture in the room had moved. It was weird.

There are lots of stories in his family about "the man in black" but I won't bore you. Those are the only two I have personal knowledge of - not that I think my in-laws are given to wild stories. Especially his mom, who called upstairs once because she could hear voices and asked "Are you guys up there?" (thinking it was Mark and his brother) and someone yelled back, "Yeah, we're up here." Except they *weren't*. No one was upstairs. She was beside herself later when they came home and she realized no one was upstairs at the time. When I go to visit them now, I *never* stay upstairs. <g>

So, yeah, I believe there are many things out there that can't be easily explained.

Woa! Sue, that's freaky! You gave me the chills for good now. I love it, though. I love to be scared - I used to invent these insane stories when I was a kid and scare myself completely out of my mind. *lol*

I blame my dad for some of the ones that would scare me the most. he used to sing opera and had had a role in an opera which is named Faust (though this name no longer brings bad memories, thanks to you!) and he'd gotten a very unusual gift for his performance: a statue of Mephisto. *extremely* scary, especially to an 8 year old kid with an overactive imagination... he kept it in the basement and I used to imagine that if I was left down there alone with it, it might start moving and bite. In fact, just thinking about it now, I feel the need to look around and check if I'm alone. For years I thought the statue would come alive in the middle of the night and kidnap me... and then one day, my kid brother who was playing dodge-ball in the basement (!) broke the statue and I started sleeping at night again.

I've never been in the presence of a "real" ghost, though. At least, not that I know of.

Wow, Sue. I'm hiding under my covers tonight! You sound like a page out of Poltergeist. (those chairs weren't stacked upside down, were they?) How long did you live in this apt?

Officially, I don't believe in ghost stories. I'd like to think, though, that the ghosts and I have an understanding. You leave me alone, I leave you alone. :p

Jen

I've never believed in those kinds of things, my brother believes he saw one once, but mind you he was in a bar going to the loo so I wonder whether he was sober enough to really comprehend what was going on. I've always felt that I had to see it for myself to believe it even if Chinese tradition has a festival known as The Hungry Ghosts and I'm too 'Aussie' to really take all that Chinese culture stuff in and Australians don't really celebrate Halloween to begin with so this whole idea of ghosts and ghouls just doesn't interest me.

Well, I definitely believe. The house I grew up in had a ghost. I don't know if was male or female, but it delighted in scaring me. It was not at all unusual for me to see the rocking chair rock by itself. Once I started playing the piano, it decided it would, too. Freaky. I always felt like this ghost was not the particularly nice kind. If I had to walk through the room it inhabited, and it was at night, I was always creeped out. Until I became a nurse, I thought all this was just the wild imaginations of a kid.

The house I live in now also has a sometime ghost. We usually just have to remind 'Mr. Brown' that his daughter doesn't live here anymore, and he goes away.

You wouldn't believe the ghost stories that nurses can tell you about - especially the ones that have worked a lot of midnight shifts. One hospital I worked at had this particular room that you could hear a 'person' in when the room was empty. It only happened when the room was empty. I don't know how many people would go in the room and flip on the light to see what was going on. No one was ever there.

Another hospital I worked in had a guy that haunted the intensive care unit. (Wouldn't you know that's where I worked.) New nurses would always dismiss it as the older nurses just trying to yank their chains - until the first time they had a patient tell them about the big black man standing in the corner.

I have seen many people die, and I can tell you that if you are there at just the right minute, you can see the spirit rise up out of the body. Kid you not. I've seen it in on more than one occasion. How's that one for you, Lisa?

Wow, Sue. Sounds like you had quite a trickster.

Spooky, guys. I'm agnostic about ghosts, but I believe in God, and that logically leads to believing in angels and demons, and opens the door to other supernatural stuff. I've heard a ton of cool miracle stories.

Actually, in the Bible there's a story about how King Saul (way Old Testament) visited a witch and had her call up the ghost of the prophet Samuel. Samuel showed up. He wasn't best pleased about it, either...

So I know there's some sources of power out there that we can't see -- and that some of it is dangerous, so it should definitely all be treated with caution.

PJ

I've never - knowingly - seen a ghost, but I remain open-minded about them.

When I was a child, my mother worked in a theatre during the day. It was a terrific playground for me and my brother during the summer holidays - it had previously been a line of three farm estate workers' cottages, a couple of centuries old, which had been knocked together.

The dressing room was reputed to be haunted - although I never discovered who the ghost was supposed to be. But I do know that visiting actors used to complain that the place would suddenly turn icy cold, no matter how high the heating was turned up and many were superstitious about using it. They'd also complain about items they'd left lying being moved to other locations or disappearing entirely.

The theatre cat absolutely, no way, no how, would not step over the threshold. If you picked him up and tried to carry him over, he'd go stiff as a board, swell up, hiss and spit and claw till you let him down.

But I can't say I ever felt or saw anything myself. Not that I actually spent enough time in there to find out. My brother and I used to dare each other to step through the door <G>, but I recall that mostly we tended to have an unspoken agreement to stay out of there.

LabRat

Well, Germany is not exactly the land of leprechauns and witches. We have a lot of castles but I don't recall one of them to be dark and standing in high moor.
From what I've seen England and Ireland are more the countries where I would settle if I was a ghost.

So maybe this explains that I don't believe in ghosts. There aren't any around to convince me. But I can provide you with a strange story none- the-less. My mother and me were sitting in the living room. We have an oven there where we can make fire and there is a pane of glass in front of the fire. It was summer and there was absolutely no need for fire. And then, without us touching anything and without a storm outside, the glass broke: out of the blue.

That was really strange. So maybe there are ghosts around????

My beliefs are similar to Pam's, with one exception. I don't believe in ghosts. Spirit(ual) beings yes, but ghosts, no.

Hebrews 9:27 states that it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this is the judgment.

Once you die you are gone from this plane and await God's eternal judgement on whether you go up or down. There are no hold backs.

And, to further cement the opionion that I need shrink, I believe that all 'hauntings' are simple demonic spirits trying to confuse and prey upon the ignorant.

What better tactic for Satan to use than to get the living to believe that the dead may get 'stuck' down here. What a simple ploy to make God look bad or at least a bad planner.

James

So does the fact that I thought it was amusing and tried to find rational explanations elevate me above being simply "ignorant"?

Honestly, if it hadn't happened to me I wouldn't believe in it at all.

Sue (who prefers "gullible" over "ignorant" any day)

I find this actually a wee bit scarier. I was taught this from childhood, which is why I find that scarier. There's all sorts of religious work out there about curses and that sort of thing that one can't easily shake themselves out of--stuff that attracts bad things (tm). I read something about someone buying some voodoo thing and feeling strange presences in his/her room, the bed dipping and no one being there. That sort of thing, and the experiences just getting progressively worse.

That's why I can't watch possession movies.

But there are a lot of scientific explanations out there. So I don't look badly to science. For instance, I've heard that people have had experiences of waking up and feeling pressed down or unable to move--before this was associated with the supernatural and it tends to be an actual physical condition of some sort that isn't that uncommon. *shrug*

No. Like Pam, I believe in angels and demons - being a Christian - but ghosts? Leprechauns? Vampires? No. Definitely not.

Though they make for fun fiction stories and movies

See ya,
AnnaBtG.

I don't believe in ghosts, spirits, God, Satan, angels, demons or any other kind of supernatural beings. It takes hard facts and science to convince me that something exists.

I don't exactly know what I believe when it comes to ghosts.

But then, I'm not entirely sure I believe that any of you really exist either. I know that I exist (based on the 'I think therefore I am' principle). But as for the rest of you... maybe you're just a bunch of electrons living in my computer

ML

I don’t really know what I believe. I’m not religious and I’m 99.9% sure I don’t believe in a god. I think it isn’t 100% b/c I can’t make my mind up about anything!

I don’t like being put in any one certain group about any concept so I just really don’t make up my mind. I don’t believe in ghosts and what-not I guess, but the romantic part of me yearns for there to be weird stuff wandering this plane in which we live. I love to read about it, watch TV shows and documentaries. I’d love to study it. Gee, study something I don’t believe in. I love to study the history of religion (archaeology, social aspects and so on).

I often look to logic and the sciences to help me through my explanations for everything (or I get lazy and don‘t bother to think), but my imagination does run away with me! Sometimes there are just situations were I cannot find a logical situation and just verbally groan.

Wheee! I'm an electron in ML's computer!

I don't have any experience with ghosts or supernatural happenings myself, but family members of mine have reported various things like that. I can't immediately dismiss the stories they tell; I can't immediately assume that something didn't happen just because I can't explain it. There are plenty of things I can't explain

So I don't have a definitive opinion as to whether or not ghosts exist or not, but I certainly think there are things in the world that we can't explain. It almost strikes me as arrogant to think we can explain everything! We learn new things and explore new phenomena everyday; it seems entirely possible to me that this is just something else we don't fully understand yet.