Can multiple people hallucinate the same thing at the same time ?

[LazaB]

There aren't thousands of people with similar stories, that's the irony of mass delusion and private familial mythologies.  There are thousands of people with one story about there being similar stories.

Actually all you have to do is go to any ghost YouTube video ( as i have been doing today because i want an answer to this ) and read the comments , there are literally thousands of stories of people personally seeing ghosts when they were alone or with other people.
I personally think that it is a type of a psychological delusion that we don't fully understand yet , but i am interested in other people's explanations.

[arewethereyet]

The explanation is that there are people that will buy into just about everything.

Just because there's a video on the Internet means not a damn thing.

[The Grand Nudger]

Reassertions of significantly false beliefs do not make them more true - whether that's a mound of ghost stories or your insistence just here that these ghost stories are in any meaningful way similar in detail or apprehension.

One of the weird ticks of human behavior is that we intuitively assign more credibility to things that people claim to have witnessed, and more so when many people make a similar or the same claim. Now, we know that people can be wrong individually, and wrong together, and we understand that this is a fallacious argument at it's very source with respect to making truth claims. We're aware of the apparent relationship between acute uniformity of given testimonies and duplicity or collaboration - but still.... This is probably why personal testimony is a huge factor in superstitious beliefs and religions.

[arewethereyet]

There are hours of shows on TV about ghosts and hauntings. There are also hours of programming claiming to prove that Bigfoot exists and that ancient aliens built the pyramids. Doesn't make it true, just suckers in the easily fooled.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'll give a fun example from my own experience, and that of my family. My kids are convinced. Absolutely convinced, that they saw Santa Claus. Now, we might think that the older ones know better, right? In a sense, they do, they think they saw -me- tricking them.

Here's the kicker. They didn't. I created this belief in them years ago..by reversing an insistence from them that they saw santa onto themselves, and reinforcing it at every opportunity when they expressed doubt. "But you all saw it, you told me you saw it, and I believed you!". It was my then 3/4 year old son who made the initial claim, and only him, and it was that he heard the hooves on the roof. The event they now all remember, though with varying recollections of the event, simply never happened.

I don't think we need to describe any new psychological conditions to explain this. It's called being human (and, also, a bit of a dick, for my part).

[LazaB]

One more thing i think about when people tell me that their dead relatives visited them in some way is the case of John Wayne Gacy , he had close to 30 bodies of the people he killed buried underneath his living room and he never saw any ghosts , he even said " the dead won't bother you , it's the living you have to look out for ".

[Jehanne]

One possibility is a group of individuals who have individualistic experiences, which, over time, are aggregated into a collective experience.

[Jehanne]

I'll give a fun example from my own experience, and that of my family. My kids are convinced. Absolutely convinced, that they saw Santa Claus. Now, we might think that the older ones know better, right? In a sense, they do, they think they saw -me- tricking them.

Here's the kicker. They didn't. I created this belief in them years ago..by reversing an insistence from them that they saw santa onto themselves, and reinforcing it at every opportunity when they expressed doubt. "But you all saw it, you told me you saw it, and I believed you!". It was my then 3/4 year old son who made the initial claim, and only him, and it was that he heard the hooves on the roof. The event they now all remember, though with varying recollections of the event, simply never happened.

I don't think we need to describe any new psychological conditions to explain this. It's called being human (and, also, a bit of a dick, for my part).

The experience you describe, I believe, led to Mormonism.

[Brian37]

One more thing i think about when people tell me that their dead relatives visited them in some way is the case of John Wayne Gacy , he had close to 30 bodies of the people he killed buried underneath his living room and he never saw any ghosts , he even said " the dead won't bother you , it's the living you have to look out for ".

I am an atheist. When I was a kid, 3 separate times I thought I saw my relatives standing at the end of my bed. First time was my dead adoptive grandmother. Then another time my dead adoptive father. Then another time my very live adoptive mother. All three of those events felt very real and scared the shit out of me. Those "experiences" were spooky and haunted me for years. 

But I know now what was going on in reality. My dream state was concocting images in my head, and my eyes were open so I was projecting those images in front of me, it was a hallucination or what is commonly called "sleep paralysis". It can feel really real, but the truth is that it is not. Ultimately it is your brain doing that to you. It can happen for lots of reasons, trauma, PTSD, depression. Even power of suggestion from watching spooky movies, or being told by others they've seen ghosts or talk to their loved ones. But it is not real one bit. 

People can also have these hallucinations even when wide awake for the same reasons, PTSD, trauma, mental illness, depression, side effects from legal drugs, side effects from illegal drugs, even urinary tract infections can spread throughout the body and reach the brain and really screw up your perception of reality. 

Point is once again, there are far more simple and natural explanations such as health, mental heath, and social input, or a combo of those things that can lead to a very false perception. There is no such thing as the super natural.

[Brian37]

I know about mass hallucinations but that still doesn't explain how can 2-3-4 people see the same thing down to the details in one room , i think that cloud shape and miracle of the sun is easier to explain because not all witnesses saw the same thing , so it's easier to say that they were all wrong , but how the hell can multiple people see the same details on the person who is not even there ?
I am sorry if i am boring you with this but i always tell people how these stories are bullshit so it bothers me that i can't explain this

No, you are not boring anyone. I would only advice you not to believe everything people claim even in groups. Most of the world's population believed the earth was flat, and unfortunately there are still idiots today that still do. 

There are swarms of Muslims who do a pilgrimage to either Mecca and walk around a giant box praying to Allah while doing so. Sometimes the crowed gets so frenzied it starts a stampede and people get trampled to death. So what is so awesome in that giant box? Nothing, some idiot eons ago convinced other Muslims that the stone was found by Abraham. But secular historians, while they cant say for sure what kind of stone it is, because of access restrictions, most certainly would say the stone has absolutely no divine power or meaning, but merely something Muslims like believing. It is as stupid a belief as the Shroud Of Turin Christians stupidly think was the burial cloth of the Jesus character. 

Religious relics in antiquity were notoriously and often fraudulent so the seller could either gain followers or con people out of their money or possessions. It is no different a con than when the Catholic Church sold "indulgences", basically a get out of jail forgiveness card if you tithed. 

Real and objective historians and archeologists do not sell the findings as making a god or gods real, and are not apologists. Theologians however, will point to all sorts of monuments, writings, and dug up antiquities as proof their God/god/s deity is real. That is not objective, that is a sales pitch.  

If the claimed observations of the societies of antiquity were always true because we find evidence of those claims, then the Egyptian gods and goddesses are real, the Roman gods/goddess are real.  Queen Maya, the mother of Buddha, who was told by the divine world, she would give birth to a boy who would bring wisdom to the world, that too would also be true. 

But in reality, nobody believes all God/god deity claims are all equally true all at the same time. I've heard more liberal theists pawn it off as "That is just God speaking to humans in different languages." <----- Nonsense. It is human ignorance and the unwillingness to find real answers. It is easier for most humans to buy a simplistic nonsense answer to comfort themselves than to seek real answers.