|
Post by maggie on Mar 28, 2011 12:06:27 GMT -5
A spooked family have called in a real-life 'ghostbuster' - after claiming to have captured on video a poltergeist moving a chair across a bedroom. Lisa Manning and her children Ellie, 11, and Jaydon, six, have fled their house in terror several times because of bizarre goings-on. They include pots and pans being thrown around the kitchen, window blinds moving up and down by themselves, lights being switched on and off and drawers being opened. Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1370715/Coventry-family-paranormal-experts-capturing-ghost-home-video.html#ixzz1Hulp3PFkLook at the video - what do you think?
|
|
|
Post by talisman on Mar 28, 2011 12:30:55 GMT -5
Look at the video - what do you think? I think it would be extremely easy to make such a video. Might take as much as ten or fifteen minutes with a £60 camera and some rope. It would also be very easy to make a real-looking video if anything really was happening. But they didn't. Conclusion: Yet another hoax.
|
|
Erasmus
Moderatorz
Deep Thought Mod
"We do not take prisoners - we liberate them" - http://www.aeonbytegnosticradio.com
Posts: 2,489
|
Post by Erasmus on Mar 28, 2011 12:32:07 GMT -5
I've heard some recordings of unexplained noises at night. There is a double-knock like on wood and a couple of strange very soft whistles, one high one low, like something you'd expect David Attenborough to be saying is the call of the Goony bird a mile away. I'm told that a subsequent recording sounds like a very faint little girl saying "I want to play" but I'm curious about that since the flat is in the suburbs of Muenster and was only built in the 1970s. Before that was and American base and before that nothing. It may well be that nobody would build on it because the suburb is Kinderhaus (Children House) that used to house the city's lepers and they may well be buried there.
Why anything should turn up now is a mystery but some things can be ruled out. It's not the sound of a water system banging. There is no outside background noise. The block well-built quality housing, so it's not bad sound insulation. One thing that just could cause the rapping sound is hot wood cooling but first there needs to be some hot wood, and it usually does that more than once.
There is a much more extensive tape of something here that was subject to an exorcism. In that case, a previous occupant had hanged himself. In this case, there is no legal way to know anything about the flat's history.
|
|
|
Post by sadie on Mar 28, 2011 14:05:47 GMT -5
I have had a few unexplained things happen during my lifetime so I'm not going to say it's not possible.
I guess my only thing is.......if we get to come back in an afterlife.......I sincerely hope I get to do more fun stuff than just open doors and move chairs around.
|
|
|
Post by talisman on Mar 28, 2011 15:17:23 GMT -5
I have had a few unexplained things happen during my lifetime so I'm not going to say it's not possible. I guess my only thing is.......if we get to come back in an afterlife.......I sincerely hope I get to do more fun stuff than just open doors and move chairs around. Occam's Razor says it's just another fake. That and the fact that it was reported by the Daily Mail. ;D Practically everybody in the western world has a digital camera these days, often with video and audio capabilities, not to mention a phone with a built-in camera and sound recorder. And yet still no proof of anything paranormal to be found anywhere. William of Occam knew what he was talking about.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Mar 28, 2011 15:56:29 GMT -5
I have had a few unexplained things happen during my lifetime so I'm not going to say it's not possible. I guess my only thing is.......if we get to come back in an afterlife.......I sincerely hope I get to do more fun stuff than just open doors and move chairs around. Occam's Razor says it's just another fake. That and the fact that it was reported by the Daily Mail. ;D Practically everybody in the western world has a digital camera these days, often with video and audio capabilities, not to mention a phone with a built-in camera and sound recorder. And yet still no proof of anything paranormal to be found anywhere. William of Occam knew what he was talking about. Alas, poor William of Ockegham, fated endlessly to have his name paraded incorrectly; to have his best known quotation misquoted; and to have all manner of beliefs attributed to him. Philosophy happens to be a subject that I used to teach for a living and Occam did NOT say 'entities are not to be multiplied without necessity." What he DID say was "it is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer," which is not entirely the same thing. As for the notion that the existence or non-existence of ghosts can be either proved or disproved on the basis of Occam's Razor, it is simply a radical non sequiturThere may or may NOT be life after death or ghosts (I have had personal experiences that lead me to the reluctant conclusion that perhaps they do and perhaps there is life after death) but it CANNOT be either proved or disproved on the basis of the "multiplication of entities' argument. To assume that it DOES is literally as foolish as assuming that because every third child born into the world is Chinese that therefore any woman who has more than two children will give birth to a Chinese baby!
|
|
Erasmus
Moderatorz
Deep Thought Mod
"We do not take prisoners - we liberate them" - http://www.aeonbytegnosticradio.com
Posts: 2,489
|
Post by Erasmus on Mar 28, 2011 16:42:48 GMT -5
The worst misuse I know of Occam's Razor (however he said it) is to equate it with the simplest answer being the most likely. That only really applies to relatively simple mechanical occurrences. In a lot of other cases, it actually violates the principle because the simplest answer is often provided by introducing extraneous cause. The usual one is that a series of events are so unlikely that they must point to a conspiracy. Sometimes it is just because two or three events are such an unlikely coincidence that they can cause eve nless likely results in a combination that statistically are even less likely.
Example: chances of being hit by a bus = x%, chances of a bus being stolen = y%, chances of being run over on a pedestrian crossing = z%, therefore chances of being hit by a stolen bus on a pedestrian crossing - (x.y.z)/1,000,000, so if that happened to somebody then the bus was probably hijacked in order to get them. Only it doesn't because it ignores the nature and abilities of bus thieves.
|
|
|
Post by fretslider on Mar 28, 2011 16:53:30 GMT -5
The worst misuse I know of Occam's Razor (however he said it) is to equate it with the simplest answer being the most likely. That only really applies to relatively simple mechanical occurrences. In a lot of other cases, it actually violates the principle because the simplest answer is often provided by introducing extraneous cause. The usual one is that a series of events are so unlikely that they must point to a conspiracy. Sometimes it is just because two or three events are such an unlikely coincidence that they can cause eve nless likely results in a combination that statistically are even less likely. Example: chances of being hit by a bus = x%, chances of a bus being stolen = y%, chances of being run over on a pedestrian crossing = z%, therefore chances of being hit by a stolen bus on a pedestrian crossing - (x.y.z)/1,000,000, so if that happened to somebody then the bus was probably hijacked in order to get them. Only it doesn't because it ignores the nature and abilities of bus thieves. Can you explain the divisor? By what function was it arrived at?
|
|
Erasmus
Moderatorz
Deep Thought Mod
"We do not take prisoners - we liberate them" - http://www.aeonbytegnosticradio.com
Posts: 2,489
|
Post by Erasmus on Mar 28, 2011 18:49:11 GMT -5
(a.b.c)/100.100.100 Ellie - aged 11. The power of virgins is traditional. Psychic researchers claim that poltergeist activity is very often associated with pubescent girls and often disturbed girls. The straightforward explanation is that they cannot control their developing sexual-psychic energy yet and it causes psychokinetic effects taken to be the work of a 'spirit'. Maybe there are times when Ellie would love to throw things across the room but is too nice a girl to do so - so they 'throw themselves' when she's not in control, just like strangling the boss in a satisfying dream. Carl Jung claimed that he once produced one of his own: during a ferocious argument where he wanted to do things to Freud better suited to angry little boys than distinguished psychologists, a book-case cracked down the back and he felt all the tension leave him. A less comforting view is that the energy allows a presence to manifest and work its mischief. Whatever these things are, psychic phenomena are nearly always marked by energy drain: sudden chills, electrical failure, even dimming candles. There are the beginnings of a scientific framework for interacting universes and probability worlds. Unfortunately, all we have to deal with them traditionally are jargon of the Middle Ages which may or may not mean what it appears to say literally and the post-Victorian revival attempting to fit them into quaint theories of physics. We do knot know whether to think in terms of quasi-physical alternate universes or Platonic-Qabbalistic levels of manifestation from abstract potential to physical, or some combination of both. Though science started off inclusive, it came to reject everything it could not kick and usually to interpret jargon at face value because it did not know the codes. Isaac Newton was one of the last to understand alchemy and it seems that he took it more as a literal proto-chemistry than the symbolic proto-psychology/psionics that Jung saw in it in light of similar Eastern and ancient writings unknown in Newton's time. We are in a position very similar to that of early scientific medicine's rejection of traditional remedies because they could find no scientific basis for them, before discovering support for some through different routes and observing that others (like hypnotism and acupuncture) work for some things even though the mechanism is not entirely clear and they are no more 100% effective for everything than antibiotics. We could be worse: we could have taken a route that since the Middle Ages assumed all disease the work of demons or divine punishment, they simply did not exist and were to be explained as functions of the body - which the symptoms of course are. We would have a backward medicine seeking to cure disease by treating symptoms alone - which can work by allowing the patient time to fight it off (more symptoms anyway come from fighting off than are produced by the infection itself). Until 60 years ago this was the only treatment for pulmonary TB and still is necessary for cholera. That is in effect our approach to psychic phenomena: acceptance or rejection largely by taking the language of the Middle Ages literally. It's unlikely that there is only one explanation for everything. It may not even be possible to distinguish whether it's possible to create an entity or whether what appears to be a creation offers a form of host to something. However, mental loops and schizoid sub-personalities analogous to computer virus (or bugs) are known well enough, so is the phenomenon of writers feeling that their creations develop a mind of their own that won't allow deviant behaviour right up to the Witch's Familiar attested in Tibet (I used to have that book) to Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World where honesty impels him in the course of debunking most psychic phenomena to recount the fake Ouija Board 'spirit' which developed a life of its own. A psychological experiment had been set up (Cambridge I think, but I don't know whether England or Massachussets) with an English Elizabethan 'spirit' sketched out for a Ouija board. After a while, the board started to give answers beyond those set up for it and the investigators were delighted to see this as their subjects' subconscious at play (of course the subjects thought it was a real Ouija board test). They were a lot less comfortable when the board gave details nobody could have known and these checked out against the specific background they had given it. In the end they closed it. A real 'spirit' took over? Subconscious informational telepathic time travel? Similar applies to the former life hypnotic regressions that were popular around 1970 (I was away the day our coven did one). I had original floppy disks, the kind you stick on an LP to play of people recalling their former lives and deaths. A couple of women (Manchester University and in California) tried the mass production approach of regressing whole classes and requiring answers to fairly neutral questions. In most cases, there's no way to tell whether the results are just basic expectation. After all, 99% of the world were peasants and they didn't see or change much over centuries. But a few came up with stuff that nobody present knew or expected. Were they remembering a past life? Had they forgotten something they'd learnt? Were they tapping into a mind that did know the period? Were they mediums channelling something? (And if so, what?) Were they connecting to the past? Were they being played with by 'demons'? Were they accessing what Theosophy calls the Akashic Record of all experience forever imprinted on some other level of abstraction? Any of those answers could be true and all could be possible without one excluding another. I think that as long as we can't distinguish between possible parallel universes and levels of manifestation from pre-Energy through the various levels of physical existence to the Matter we can kick, the only handle we have on psychic phenomena is written in Latin - and bad Latin at that!
|
|
Jessiealan
xr
Member of the Month, October 2013
Posts: 8,726
|
Post by Jessiealan on Mar 28, 2011 20:05:17 GMT -5
As Talisman has said, it IS the Daily Mail and often that publication is like a tabloid. If this is anything to take seriously, it will turn up elsewhere in the media.
The old expression, "consider the source", comes to mind.
|
|
|
Post by mouse on Mar 29, 2011 3:27:27 GMT -5
there are many unexplained things in this world...to think we know all the answers is a bit daft....so never say impossible because todays impossibles often become tomorrows realities
|
|
|
Post by talisman on Mar 29, 2011 4:14:07 GMT -5
Occam's Razor says it's just another fake. That and the fact that it was reported by the Daily Mail. ;D Practically everybody in the western world has a digital camera these days, often with video and audio capabilities, not to mention a phone with a built-in camera and sound recorder. And yet still no proof of anything paranormal to be found anywhere. William of Occam knew what he was talking about. Alas, poor William of Ockegham, fated endlessly to have his name paraded incorrectly; to have his best known quotation misquoted; and to have all manner of beliefs attributed to him. Philosophy happens to be a subject that I used to teach for a living and Occam did NOT say 'entities are not to be multiplied without necessity." What he DID say was "it is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer," which is not entirely the same thing. As for the notion that the existence or non-existence of ghosts can be either proved or disproved on the basis of Occam's Razor, it is simply a radical non sequiturThere may or may NOT be life after death or ghosts (I have had personal experiences that lead me to the reluctant conclusion that perhaps they do and perhaps there is life after death) but it CANNOT be either proved or disproved on the basis of the "multiplication of entities' argument. To assume that it DOES is literally as foolish as assuming that because every third child born into the world is Chinese that therefore any woman who has more than two children will give birth to a Chinese baby! For a teacher of philosophy, Mike, you seem to have a strange inability to analyse what people have said. For example, I never said that Occam's Razor* proves or disproves anything. Neither does my rope-trick hypothesis. But Occam says it's the rope. And you have a habit of bringing irrelevant items into the discussion. This time it's "life after death or ghosts". We were talking about a video clip showing moving household objects. ________________ * "The simplest explanation is likely to be the correct one", in the divine afflatus of the Volksmond. Do you want to contradict that?
|
|
|
Post by talisman on Mar 29, 2011 4:50:46 GMT -5
The worst misuse I know of Occam's Razor (however he said it) is to equate it with the simplest answer being the most likely. That only really applies to relatively simple mechanical occurrences. In a lot of other cases, it actually violates the principle because the simplest answer is often provided by introducing extraneous cause. The usual one is that a series of events are so unlikely that they must point to a conspiracy. Sometimes it is just because two or three events are such an unlikely coincidence that they can cause eve nless likely results in a combination that statistically are even less likely. Example: chances of being hit by a bus = x%, chances of a bus being stolen = y%, chances of being run over on a pedestrian crossing = z%, therefore chances of being hit by a stolen bus on a pedestrian crossing - (x.y.z)/1,000,000, so if that happened to somebody then the bus was probably hijacked in order to get them. Only it doesn't because it ignores the nature and abilities of bus thieves. Are you saying that there are people who would say that Occam's Razor says that murder is the simplest explanation for that? Funny old world.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Mar 29, 2011 9:09:26 GMT -5
Alas, poor William of Ockegham, fated endlessly to have his name paraded incorrectly; to have his best known quotation misquoted; and to have all manner of beliefs attributed to him. Philosophy happens to be a subject that I used to teach for a living and Occam did NOT say 'entities are not to be multiplied without necessity." What he DID say was "it is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer," which is not entirely the same thing. As for the notion that the existence or non-existence of ghosts can be either proved or disproved on the basis of Occam's Razor, it is simply a radical non sequiturThere may or may NOT be life after death or ghosts (I have had personal experiences that lead me to the reluctant conclusion that perhaps they do and perhaps there is life after death) but it CANNOT be either proved or disproved on the basis of the "multiplication of entities' argument. To assume that it DOES is literally as foolish as assuming that because every third child born into the world is Chinese that therefore any woman who has more than two children will give birth to a Chinese baby! For a teacher of philosophy, Mike, you seem to have a strange inability to analyse what people have said. For example, I never said that Occam's Razor* proves or disproves anything. Neither does my rope-trick hypothesis. But Occam says it's the rope. And you have a habit of bringing irrelevant items into the discussion. This time it's "life after death or ghosts". We were talking about a video clip showing moving household objects. ________________ * "The simplest explanation is likely to be the correct one", in the divine afflatus of the Volksmond. Do you want to contradict that?It is hardly irrelevant in a thread supposedly about filmed evidence of ghosts to bring in the question of life after death. If ghosts exist they clearly represent evidence for survival and so in that respect they are clearly entirely relevant to the discussion. If you wish to discuss poltergeist activity (which is what you are speaking of in your final paragraph) I am happy to do so. I entirely agree that the question of poltergeists (again, activity of which I have personal experience) is NOT necessarily the same as the putative activities of ghosts. One could (putting my devil's advocate hat on again) even argue that the hypothesis of ghosts WAS a simpler and more economical explanation than the elaborate conspiracy theories which so many soi-disant sceptics put forward to avoid having to modify their theories (prejudices? preconceived ideas?) Reality is stranger than we imagine and probably stranger than we even CAN imagine. Neither blind and gullible belief nor dogmatic and blinkered disbelief are any kind of useful guide towards our dim attempts to grope towards some approximation of whatever the truth MAY be.
|
|
Erasmus
Moderatorz
Deep Thought Mod
"We do not take prisoners - we liberate them" - http://www.aeonbytegnosticradio.com
Posts: 2,489
|
Post by Erasmus on Mar 29, 2011 10:03:41 GMT -5
Even the connection between ghosts and an afterlife is not clear. It works on the assumption of a single soul's survival after death. Plato distinguished between immortal Spirit and mortal Soul. In his scheme the Soul is more the personality, which collects experience and emotion through life which then affect the Spirit but are not remembered into the next life (he believed the Spirit reincarnated). The Soul usually dissipates after death somewhat faster than the body does but exceptional circumstances may cause it to hang about as a ghost or possibly end up in a netherworld.
Theosophical and spiritualist ideas about the Astral Body are somewhat similar. They make better sense when compared to the modern tendency to use spatial terms for non-spatial things - such as Cyberspace is not a 'space' at all. So the Astral Body is the Emotional space distinct from the Physical, Cognitive and Intentional space. There are three more but they are above conscious awareness.
Ancient Egyptians believed in nine 'bodies', the best known being the Ka and Ba that correspond roughly to Plato's Soul and Spirit. The Heart does its own thing after death as well (which is where I assume the wandering Sacred Heart of Jesus came from)
All of which means that even if a ghost is created from a once-living person, it is not necessarily 'them'. It could be sort of recording of emotional trauma, it could be a part of the psyche particularly attached to the place, it could be something 'spun off' that then develops an existence of its own. In all cases, it need not be malevolent but in order to keep goig - certainly to manifest in physical terms - it's going to need an energy supply, so in a sense it can't avoid being vampiristic.
From the way ghosts are usually reported, they do not sound like people hanging about. They vary from just the sense of a presence to a very few that seem capable of explaining their presence, but are very set in routine like a program. And that's what I think most of them are, some aspect of personality attached to the place, with a very limited repertoire associated.
Ghosts also seem to wear out. The very few well-defined ones more than a couple of centuries old have usually had a lot of interaction from soon after their death, so they've had a constant energy feed. Really old ghosts seem more like psychic impressions. Often they involve whole armies and battles. These could easily be as much because enough have believed there should be something that they have created something - in Tibetan theory constant belief can eventually empower the existence of a Tulpa as much as deliberate creation. Bosworth Field is supposed to have effects and so does another where Roman force came off worse. One of the early Quakers had a vision of blood on entering some small town where it was probably unknown at the time there had been a Roman massacre. Then again - maybe it wasn't unknown!
That all suggests that not all hauntings can be treated alike and they are not necessarily as simple as just a restless soul.
|
|