Ghost stories

[Fake Messiah]

Well, it's that spooky month yet upon us. Surprisingly, while reading Patrick Stewart's new autobiography, I came upon a ghost story about his haunted house in LA that prompted me to open this topic. I mean, do other people have ghost stories?

Stewart's story was that he came back home one evening and could smell something roasting in the kitchen. Yet the stove was not even turned on, and the oven was cold and empty.

Then his son was alone one evening and the books suddenly flew across the room, as if thrown with great force. The incident scared him so badly that he left the house and returned only when he knew Patrick would soon be home. He would never again spend a night in the house alone.

Stewart also heard noises: the sound of voices coming from an empty room; and the sound of footsteps on the stairs when nobody was using them.

This prompted him to move away and rent the house and then the new tenants, a family, who then called him and described experiences similar to his. Their daughter even saw a shadowy male figure standing in the hall, just at the foot of the stairs.

But the house got exorcised one night as the mom of the family was trying to take a nap: she got so sick of the disembodied voices and footfalls on the stairs that she screamed, "Whoever you are, fuck off and leave us in peace!" The disturbances stopped at that very moment and were gone forever.

[AkiraTheViking]

Wow this sounds made up as fuck. The kitchen thing could be a neughbour was cooking and wind send the sent in his house direction. If the kid isn't lieing he knocked down the bookcase and said it was a ghost to save face. Everthing else, made up.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Things that go PLONK in the night.

[GrandizerII]

Some reasons why we have to suspicious of stories that contain such remarkable and unfamiliar occurrences, such as so-called ghost stories:

• Some people will just blatantly make up things just for attention and validation
  
• People subconsciously exaggerate details in their recalls of these fascinating events, confirming what they already believe
  
• People misremember certain details. Multiple studies in psychology lend support to this.
  
• People aren't paying attention to all relevant details. Again, studies in psychology back this up.
  
• People misattribute observed events to things or entities that often weren't physically observed by them anyway.
  
• Sometimes, people express reports in a manner that they themselves experienced these first hand when in reality they're just reporting what someone else had experienced
  

Does this mean ghosts cannot be true at all? No, but we have plenty of reasons to be suspicious of accounts that claim ghosts were seen/experienced.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The prior requirements for ghostly actions are sufficient for dismissal unless robust evidence is available for any kind of serious investigation.

[Fake Messiah]

I know that Stewart's ghost story is shakey fakey but I opened this topic to hear if other people have heard similar ghost stories.

[Mister Agenda]

When I was a kid I was in bed and thought I heard my mom coming up the steps, my room didn't have a door, just a gate to keep my baby sister out, and I heard it open. Then she came over to my bed. I had in mind to scare her and was pretending to be asleep. When her cold hand touched my shoulder I opened my eyes to say 'boo!' and no one was there. I spent the next hour or two with my head under my covers.

I was sure it was a ghost then, but I'm not sure what was really going on now. The touch was light and brief, maybe a moth landed on my shoulder for a second or two. Maybe Mom did come up the stairs and opened the gate, but just peeked in, instead of coming all the way over to my bed to check on me; and was extra quiet closing the gate and going back down the stairs (it was only a few stairs).

[zebo-the-fat]

Many years ago I had a weird girlfriend who lived in a tower block. She told me she could hear a "ghost clock" ticking. (she didn't have a ticking clock in the place) I told her she was imagining it... then late one night, everything was quiet... I heard a clock ticking! I looked around and traced the sound to one corner of the room... under a wall vent... turns out the clock was in the room above and the sound passing through the ventilation system like a speaking tube!

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

The closest thing I have to a ghost story:

My house in Belfast was a refurbished blacksmith shop, about 200 years old. About a year after I moved in, there was a period of several weeks where I would hear a voice distinctly say, ‘It needs to be put back.’ It didn’t happen every day, and I heard it at different times.

To this day, I have no idea what it was.

Boru

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I shared a three story house (1890s boom mansion) with a couple of lunatics when I was in the Navy. I kept hearing a moaning sound once in a while. Turned out to be voice tube from the third floor to the kitchen. Elderly lady yelled down it when she needed something from the maid. When I figured that out it was fully time to fuck with my buds.