(September 10, 2021 at 8:02 am)Foxaire Wrote: Had a coworker who believed in that ghost nonsense.
If a call light went off in a room that was empty, to her it was a ghost instead of the faulty wiring it actually was. If something near her fell to the floor, it just had to be a ghost instead of physics and gravity. She was constantly taking pictures with her phone and asking us if we saw the same weird shadows she did.
I used to be really into it about 4 or 5 years ago. Played with a Ouija board in a graveyard, played solo hide and seek at 3 a.m., took pictures anytime I felt a "spooky" feeling. I used to watch videos and compilations of ghost encounters too. Then you learn about emotional priming, the ideomotor effect, how lighting affects lenses and cameras, and that a good chunk of spooky content online is faked or put out there as an ARG or party game/story for edgy teenage sleepovers. -__-
I feel embarrassed that I used to think that stuff was real but at least I can genuinely say that I attempted those things with a believer mindset. I never had an experience of anything that couldn't be explained by my primed fear response or gravity or an old house doing what old creaky houses do.
Once I started learning more about the early cameras and the obscura, it kinda blows your mind to realize light behaves in strange and cool ways. We don't have explanations for everything ever, but the stuff science does know really makes the world and its natural rules and behaviors so much cooler than I realized. I took so much for granted and had a very boxed in definition of science. So, when people talk about seeing things, I wonder how educated they are, if they were like me, pre-learning some of this stuff.
