ghosts: is it stupid to fear them?

http://www.filemagazine.com/galleries/archives/images/taiwan.jpg

Stupid Taiwanese refuse to live in these awesome PODS because they're scared of ghosts. Thankfully, they're too scared to even demolish them.

can you imagine fucking a ghost? i just wanna wrap one up in my sheets and cum all over each other. oh! i'd give it to her!

line of the year.

Thought this would be Ramzi revive.

Those buildings look fucking cool.

We should move to Taiwan and squat them.

I wld live in all this ghost PODS.

http://www.beartist.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/GhostEatsItAll-Cover.jpg

This is great!

Can kind of sort of see why peeps no want to live there no mo:

http://i25.tinypic.com/sy8014.png
http://i29.tinypic.com/t4uyk8.png
http://i26.tinypic.com/xmr7k1.png

http://i26.tinypic.com/21b6cl3.png
http://i32.tinypic.com/2a0driq.png
http://i29.tinypic.com/207l4qu.png

http://i30.tinypic.com/2im57vs.png

Maybe that's just me, tho.

no way, those pods look awesome!!

yeah, i love 'em. can see how even in pristine condition there would be a weird munchkin holiday camp vibe - still, would totally live there.

Amazing pictures.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v417/albaalba/ilx/21b6cl3.png

lol!

http://i29.tinypic.com/rk32w7.jpg

(i like yr happy ghost better alba)

Oh my gosh, Alba!

Ghosts are adorable!

It's stupid to fear them!

It's stupid not to want to hug their happy little faces!

Ghost is haunting me with twee.

no i'm definitely of the "ghosts are fuckin scary" school of thought.

serious fearz as child:
http://www.castleofspirits.com/Australianghosthunters/monk.jpg

oh dear, GIS for ghost monk/nun just before bedtime = bad idea.

oh god i just quickly scrolled up and thought the wave in alba's pic, crashing over the wall and reflected in the ground, was a huge white apparation menacingly waving its arm :/

:)

moving to san-zhr pod village immediately, plz fwd my mail

Ledge i remember that pic from a arthur c clarke program when i was younger, it was a whole show about ghost pics. i can't remember how old i was, but i do remember shitting it big time going to bed for the next few weeks :(

those pods are adorable! too bad they're in such bad condition. they could be like a little futuristic community with picnic potlucks.

I remember that photo as well ledge, My grandparents spare bedroom had curtains with a design that reminded me of the phantom monk's eyes, and I was terrified to sleep there in case I looked up at the curtains and he was standing there.

He doesn't look so frightening now though.

I'm obsessed with ghosts and the paranormal. One of the things I love to do when I'm in the US is go visit creepy civil war-era cemeteries in the evening and take photos, hoping to catch something. I watch all those cheesyass ghost hunting shows, Ghost Hunters (favorite for lyfe), the hysterical Most Haunted, any old crap special that comes on cable promising proof of the paranormal.

Thing is, I never believed that any of that stuff was for real for the first 26 years of my life. Then I had an experience at an aboriginal sacred site when I was taking some kids on a camping trip that changed my mind somewhat.

It seems to have shook something loose, so to speak, since I've had weird, weird stuff happen since.

ghosts are tyte

When I lived at home I had a really bad habit of reading ghost stories in bed before going to sleep. It was torturous how it kept me awake, but such a thrill that I kept doing it for years, and by the time I left for college sometimes the mere memories of imagined ghosts kept me up at night. The effects were very place-specific, though, nowhere else I've been has ever spooked me and the effect has even worn off in my old room when I visit home. I'm kind of sad about this, honestly. So yeah, ghosts are fun.

I'd live in teh pod village, totally.

Our house / building is apparently haunted by a ghost in red trousers. He's called Roger. We've seen / felt no evidence of anything. Apart from Bob's occasional stares into nothingness and habit of suddenly running round the flat like a mad thing. But that's just kitten behaviour.

oh yes I will join the ilxors living in pod village.

Ghosts are only scary if accompanied by eerie music score

Ostrichs ain't afraid of no ghosts...
http://www.panoramio.com/photos/original/119921.jpg

Then I had an experience at an aboriginal sacred site when I was taking some kids on a camping trip that changed my mind somewhat.

It seems to have shook something loose, so to speak, since I've had weird, weird stuff happen since.

Can you go into detail, this sounds amazing.

yes, will you?

Thirded.

ok, x-posted from MY LIVEJOURNAL.

The first time I came face to face with something I couldn't explain was four years ago, during a Year 9 camp I took my students on. The last night of the camp we were camped on a hillside by the Mitchell River, some 50 metres away along a path from the Den of Nargun and Dead Cock Den. Having physically exerted themselves all day and having probably not done the best job washing their hands, the kids were mostly either falling asleep on their feet or vigorously shitting their guts out.

I made sure that all the kids were in their tents and drifting off to sleep by 10pm. Before sending them on their way I exhorted them not to make any noise, lest i make them do something horrible like sleep outside my tent or do all the washing up the next day. The kids complied - they were utterly spent, counting the minutes until they could have hot showers and Xbox 360s again. I retired to my tent and fell asleep within 30 seconds.

I woke in the middle of the night to laughing. Looking at my watch, I was extremely pissed off to find that it was 3am. Strapping my head torch on, I burst out of my tent and stormed around the campsite, looking for the culprits. There were no telltale torchlights emanating from tents. What's more, all I could hear from the tents was heavy snoring.

I paused, scratched my head and almost screamed like a girl as more laughter came from the bush to the south. Now that i was awake I realised that the laughter really wasn't like that you'd expect from my bunch of 14 year olds. It was a younger laugh, girls, three or four of them. I wasn't aware of any other campers in the area, but I tramped over towards them, yelling things about 'You're bugging our school group, clear off!" but I found nothing when I got there.

I was perplexed. I could hear nothing in the bush but the wind. If there were some kids playing games, they'd be crashing through the undergrowth, making a hell of a racket. Cushy city living does not make for masterful Ninjas.

I stood there in the chill for about five minutes, swinging the beam of my headtorch one way, my maglite the other, desperately hoping to pick up someone hiding beneath a bush. I was writing a dressdown worthy of R. Lee Ermey in my head.

No dice.

Casting a final glance around the campsite, I decided to head back to my tent. I was almost at the entrance flap when I turned towards the path leading down into Dead Cock Den. Those clicking on the Wikipedia link will have read that it was an initiation area for young girls of the Gurnai people.

A sudden blast of freezing, icy wind and with it, the laughing, much louder.

i practically tore my way into my tent and burrowed myself into my sleeping bag. I lay awake for hours. I heard the laughing a few more times, but I have drifted off, because I was woken at eight by some students wanting permission to start a campfire.

Now, it could have been kids having a laugh, but they certainly weren't mine. And we were in a fairly remote area. You'd have to drive in about 10km into the park and then hike 45 minutes to our campsite. Even if someone went to all that trouble, it doesn't explain the incredibly chilly wind.

I kept the story to myself until the next year, when I brought it up in a long, late night conversation with one of the extreme outdoor bro types who helped run the camps. He was very quick to agree that the area had some strange stuff going on. It was a relief not to be told that I was a complete loony.

I cannot stress how chilling that blast of wind was and how creepy the laughing was.

yeah, the laughing, not so much 'we are evil dead children who are going to eat your whitefella souls', more 'we are all of six years old, playing games and chasing each other and oh what fun we are having at 3am in the goddamn morning'

i would have been petrified.

Me too. Its an awesome story. Is there no chance at all it were animals?

No way. This was laughing, no mistaking it.

I mean, this had the rhythm of *unseen/unheard action* laughter in response *unseen/unheard action* even more raucous, kiddy laughter.

Bonkers. Cool story.

why are child ghosts especially creepy? (or do you think they're not?)

I guess just cos children dying is sad, so the creepiness has an added tinge of sadness, to accentuate the creepy?

kids can move faster! if a 100-yo old man ghost came up to me, i'd just push him over lol stupid old coot LOL

i guess i thought it was creepy because i'm hearing kids play at 3am and more importantly because i'd hiked through the two sacred sites at the top of the account and felt some verrrry bad juju.

what kind of initiation did this site involve, out of curiosity?

Thanks for posting. Is the strange stuff that has happened since similar?

(x post)

Yeah, I'd like to know about more recent 'strange stuff'.

I think when I was a kid I wanted to be "the kind of person who can see ghosts" and stuff, sensitive and a bit otherworldly, but as I've got older I've just got more and more logical, and seen no evidence for ghosts / god / whatever, so that I dismiss it outright from possibility.

Also, I used to get ABSOLUTELY FUCKING SHIT-SCARED of things like this when I was a kid, so my extreme logical dismissal is part coping mechanism.

It was primarily a site for the initiation of girls into 'secret women's business'. there was a creature, half woman/half rock who would tear intruders apart, called the Nargun.

The stuff since has been limited to figures glimpsed from a distance, some stuff moving about and some lights flitting through the woods near my girlfriend's place in the backwoods of Georgia.

Also,

2) one weirdly hot october afternoon when i was ten, i got totally creeped out being home alone. like: convinced i felt a presence. weather outside was a super-low pressure system, remaindered by a hurricane, and it was kind of sirocco-y. leaves blustering, birds all gone, trees winter-balding: a total heather prynn vibe. sky was New England slate, and I was afraid to get off the couch to turn on the lights. as it grew darker – moving into the kind of crepuscular granularity that made it look like the world was is received through a static-fuzzed television receptor - i was convinced i felt a presence. and, accordingly, a strange tune sorta oozed into my brain. it sounded like a simplified melody from holst or berlioz, measure and a half long and implacable. i kept replaying it, obsessing about it, until a few minutes later, at precisely the moment I was humming it, an F# brashly sounded from the (untended) piano in the other room. at first i thought it was my imagination, but the note é stata sostenuta for a good 5-10 seconds to tell me it wasn't just a trick of imagination. i screamed, grabbed the dog, ran outside, and sat there for at least an hour until my parents came home.

Elucidate on "some stuff moving around" please...

..and one night in Port Angeles, WA that featured lights, sounds and all manner of things within an apartment, but I'll keep that one for me, since it had some significance to my better half and it really is her story to tell.

it's odd that even though i'm 100% disbelief of ghosts, I'd still be a little freaked out hearing noises of unknown sources and would, just-ever-so-slightly, think the worst. Or maybe the fear of it being a psycotic killer.

it's like spiders, i have no problem with them. Can pick them up anytime in my hand. But that first instinct of seeing one scurrying across my living room floor it's like AAARGH SHIT A HUGE SPIDER RUN FOR THE HILLS!

the "ghosts / god / whatever" category reminds me of something c.s. lewis wrote...raising the question that if you accept that god exists, doesn't that mean you have to open your mind to ghosts, ghouls, fairies, banshees, and all kinds of other creepy supernatural beings? his answer was no, accepting the existence of the supernatural doesn't have to be unlimited, because if you believe in the christian god you can believe that he created the world according to the christian understanding of its order (not sure what exactly he meant by this, but basically, no poltergeists in the bible). that struck me as interesting because i don't tend to think of god and ghosts as part of the same system, but it would make sense to put them together.

just a random side note. whoa, and a super xpost.

OTM, Ste. Totally.

Maria; interesting idea. I don't see them as linked usually, but I did just link them, clearly.

Ooh, mostly indoors, stuff like... Cait, my missus is exceptionally anally retentive about where she puts her glasses - in one particular spot on her bedside table. Our story begins with her taking them off as she went to sleep one night. It's important to remember that I saw her do this. The next day she's leaving for work and she can't find her glasses. She can't see anything without her glasses so she flips out and tears the place apart. We spend two hours looking for them before she gives up and wears a manky old pair of contacts.

I clear the place while she's gone. The floor is shining, the coffee table has nothing on it, I feel pretty pleased. Cait comes home and sees me with my feet up, tapping away at my Macbook. She chirps out 'Oh you found them!'. I'm like 'whut'. She's like 'You found my glasses'. I'm like 'Nuh uh'. So she picks them up off the coffee table I've just cleaned.

This is after I've found them lodged in the toothpaste glass and in desk drawers a few times too.

We think we've got a resident ghost now. We call him Charlie. The movement could be due to our kitten, Zelda, but she's way to small and let's face it, too uncoordinated to drop Cait's specs in the places we've found them.

Maybe one of you sleepwalks!

Bob does like nicking my specs a lot, and will push ANYTHING off bedside tables / coffee tables / arms of sofas etc...

That's an amazing story, Mikey.

Those pod houses are awesome, it's so sad to see them all derelict and trashed like that.

I already know these stories of Mikey and Caits (and I love them!) and I in no way want to undermine them, but I do find it interesting the way our own brains can play tricks on us.

Once, I awoke from half-sleep to find a large black cat, sitting on the desk in my room opposite my bed, staring me down with glowing green eyes, its tail swishing aggresively. I sat up startled, knowing it wasn't my cat and I'm on a 2nd floor and theres no way a cat got in my window, and wtf wtf... and then realised the eyes were the lights on my modem.

But for a few very long minutes, it was totally a large black cat.

Aye, I think, and my brain at every turn has to emphasise to me that I think, that our brains do have an amazing capacity to deceive us.

Trayce, I have had so many frights like that! Especially with little spots of light, from electronics or through cracks in doors and window shades.

Yeah! I'm fascinated by what our brain can trick us into.

Sleep paralysis comes to mind here, which I've riffed on on this borad many a time I know.

the laughing, not so much 'we are evil dead children who are going to eat your whitefella souls'

You wait till the movie version.

Oh, I get that too, the mistaking lights for the spirits of the deeeeead. My cellphone does it to me horribly. I'm pretty skeptical about these things and will try and discount stuff like that as naughty cat, but we were utterly stumped by this.

Zelda knocks the glasses onto the floor, but since she's teething she's having trouble carrying anything. The specs were really nicely folded right next to her Macbook Pro (which I forgot to add, was the only other thing on the table).

I usually put a sweater or piece of thick paper or something over my cell phone or computer if it has a blinking light on, just to avoid middle of the night shocks.

on another internet forum, this woman was talking about how she was reading some TRUE LIFE SPOOKY GHOST STORY when she realised that the story happened in her town, in her area, in her street, AND IN HER VERY HOUSE.

Then nothing happened.

That would be iiiiincredible.

sleep paralysis is *the* most scaryiest mind fuck I've ever been succombed to, and is worth mentioning on this thread as sometimes you can think it's a ghost like entity hijacking your mind and somehow making you unable to move and turn around and witness the utter HORROR of what's going on no less than three fucking feet away behind your back. How you wish you could just move one muscle, just let me turn my head to see you pleeeeeeease, oh god the feeling is dreadful.

I get that all the time, if I sleep on my back. I've never thought of it in ghostly terms, but it is horrible and v. scary.

Ghosts, as they are usually conceived, incorporate a paradox.

If they are physical (which would include all forms of energy) they would be required to obey the laws of physics. If they are not physical, then the laws of physics would forbid a ghost from affecting any physical entity, such as, for example, your eyes, ears, or brain.

Until something turns up to resolve this paradox, the best explanantion for them would be to deem them a byproduct of our minds.

If they were other than imaginative figments, some enterprising physicist would have discovered how to harness them for nearly limitless energy. Imagine ghosts in hamster wheels turning generators, or souls being consumed for the tiny puff of heat they provide a boiler. Ectoplasmic tendrils leashing hundreds of faint shadows to lighter than air craft, with just occasional blasts of the pain-ray to keep them fleeing upwards.

Some interesting experiments on ghosts in just that manner:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euWOP895q9I

so there i was, walking back from the spot with some friends, when this jaunty fellow drifted out of an alley on a silent gust of wind and stopped about a dozen feet in front of us. it was about 1 am in the morning. we looked down the alley but there was nobody there. as we got our cellphones out to take photos, the wind picked him up and he came bumping into us. so we took him home with us as a sort of mascot.

http://flic.kr/p/8sGZZz

now i am beginning to regret the decision. what if he is haunted?

whoops

here he is

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4122/4896725839_ebdc7cdc95_z.jpg

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

He has a strange growth on his left foot...

I love the idea that balloon could be haunted.

I'm always trying to get my friends to pay me to spend the night in a haunted house, but they're too cheap.

There's got to be some haunted places that are free to spend the night in. I once camped at Edge Hill (in the UK) hoping to be woken by the sights and sounds of battle. But I was 350 years too late.

The balloon seems to have been looking for sounds by the look of those drawers.

so this lady who can't really afford to house herself has nonetheless quit her local authority tenancy with us because her and her kid are being haunted, seeing spirits, there's poltergeist activity, etc.

Kinda sad but mostly o_0

she sent me a letter of explanation along with the card of the professional she had consulted, which was pink and read

*name*- beautician/ reiki master/angel healer/spiritual cleanser

weird

I know a girl who is a make-up artist/reiki master/allthoseothermadeupbullshitthings

What is it with the beautician connection? Odd.

salon selective and ghost protective

sorry

i dunno e maybe they come in a combined course that doesn't have the rigorous entry requirements demanded for hairdressing psychics

So wait, does she heal angels, or use angels to heal other people? Or to heal ghosts? The ambiguity here is really bothering me.

I feel sorry for that lady esp if she can't afford other housing. :(

btw the last time I saw the girl I mentioned she started going on about how she'd realigned her bosses energy the day earlier or something like that and I had to excuse myself mid-story because I was starting to crack up.

boss's

there were 14 separate entities in the house apparently. I nearly said that was a breach of tenancy on insurance grounds but y'know lady was upset

i think you are qualified to ask angels to heal the person paying which seems a nice job

I nearly said that was a breach of tenancy on insurance grounds but y'know lady was upset

Irl lols

Given the amount of crazy coming from her, I would have been SO tempted

well the trouble is that the waves of crazy only come off the story, what comes off the person is actually waves off terror and panic and i felt sorry for her more than anything else. Couldn't even try to talk her out of it, you don't listen to clerical staff when you're convinced you've got ghosts.

the people that interest me are the ones who see lots of ghosts but are totally matter of fact about it -- my dad had a carer who was like this, she said his house was massively haunted and they wouldn't even let her into one room but w/evs *shrug*

she was an excellent carer, funny and shrewd and sensible -- and she's not the first person to think the house is haunted, it's big and roomy and full of inexplicable noises (and haha i'm alone in it at the moment) -- the people we bought it from asked us (years later) how we were getting on with the "dark gentleman", but no one in the family was ever spooked for a moment

i just tell people that the ghosts fled to the wood when we moved in, and are nervously waiting till we leave for good -- sometimes when everyone's out they creep back in and turn the lights on and off a bit, when no one's looking

My wife is a big believer in the spirit world. Whenever she hooks up with some sort of self-identified practitioner of spiritual arts I always check to make sure that whatever they are teaching is essentially harmless.

The main acid tests are whether they are seeking money in more than very nominal amounts, or seeking any kind of power or influence over the personal lives and decisions of the people they are consulting with, and whether they are planting ideas that will have obvious harmful results, if believed and applied as true. So far, the vast majority of the amateur practitioners she has encountered meet these criteria. They are hobbyists sharing their hobby, not Svengalis seeking followers.

I've kind of come to the conclusion that a belief in ghosts or other disembodied spirits is always going to be a part of human culture, because such idea are by-products of certain innate ways that we make sense out of sensations, which are hard-wired into our brains. You can learn to override them, but you cannot rid yourself of them. It is the default tendency.

Because we're never going to "cure" people of these ideas, I have come to see the value in finding harmless rituals and explanations for managing these ideas as they arise, so that they are channeled into safe, reasssuring activity. The big danger is how easily these ideas are manipulated into harmful tools in the hands of the unscrupulous, the power-hungry, or even the sincere, but naive believer -- but that danger is never going to be defeated - only marginalized.

http://cd.pbsstatic.com/xl/37/3037/9780152163037.jpg

Favorite book abt ghosts ^^

haha yes i had a big fight with a friend a few years back, who was all "the dark is rising! all this new age superstition! astrology, aaargh!" -- he is a management consultant and i told him i didn't see how his job wasn't exactly the same thing, this did not please him

I don't think it's crazy to believe that ghosts do exist but maybe only some small % of people are sensitive to them

but hey I've never seen one *knock on wood*

I decided as a child that ghosts would hold no more dominion over me than nightmares and that only by caring about ghosts do we give them any power to do anything not to mention actually harm us. I think my decision rather quaint now but I think it's as valid, metaphysically, as any other way of looking at ghosts and I figure my life has been ghost-free because I have always been basically indifferent.

I do have a very strong sense of place, though. I think I'd be more likely to believe in Lares than in Manes

I've encountered a few things over the last 30 years that were o_O enough for me to not discount the existence of ghosts and supernatural metaphysics. None were particularly dangerous, though, so I've tried to be "live and let unlive" about it.

like Wm, I've seen/experienced some things happen that are ... decidedly ghostly and OOOOooooooOOOOOOoooooish. But I (refuse to? won't? can't?) allow them as truth, so I'm kind of in an agnostic on he whole subject, primarily because I don't like the implications of my intuition.

heh... on the other hand, I'm agnostic-leaning-toward-belief. The "don't care" trumps belief/unbelief.

the christmas after my mum died, there were all kinds of silly incidents -- some sausage meat got mislaid and turned up on a chair where it totally would have been noticed, the fridge wouldn't work, various other minor annoyances, none of them inexplicable, but funnier and in character if it was my mum doing it, to remind us that christmas only went smoothly if she was in charge

so we totally started talking about it as she was doing everything, as a kind of family hommage to her mischievousness i guess -- the non-supernatural explanation was just more boring, and we missed her

Ah, nothing better than a welcome ghost

I guess I can never square with the supposition that if there are ghosts, they are watching us masturbate

Why did that just conjure up the word 'ectojism' in my depraved mind?

the people that interest me are the ones who see lots of ghosts but are totally matter of fact about it

I found out this summer one of my family friends has seen ghosts and had premonitions. When his wife was saying "my husband sees dead people" I thought oh he was a science teacher, he came across a corpse or two in his work, but no, she meant ghosts!

"he was a science teacher, he came across a corpse or two in his work" <-- ?!

re: the ghost of mark s' mum, there were a few odd things going on in my old house, and I suspect my mother thought it was my father.

Well, we dealt with frog corpses in middle school.

the sixth sense would be a trillion times better if he saw frog corpses

that is such a sweet story btw, mark.

I like this ghost: Highgate Chicken Ghost

The ghosts also have seriously spooked the proofreading on that page

The "don't care" trumps belief/unbelief.

This reads much more obnoxious than I meant it to. More "didn't incorporate into daily life" than "didn't care".

Right now I'm intermittently hearing a kind of very distant groan, I think from next door -- the walls are quite thin in places. It's like the scene in The Secret Garden where Mary Quite Contrary is repeatedly told that the crying she can hear is just the wind on the moors, and one night she pads along corridors and through doors to investigate, and it's actually a boy in enormous pain in another wing of the house, that everyone had been keeping secret. Except there's no wind here, and no moors. And I'm not going to bother investigating: this is just a house full of inexplicable noises. (There's an inaccessible cellar with a stream running through it... )

Mark, I'm afraid you're living in Gormenghast

I am grateful for ghosts in American consciousness because cartoon ghosts are hilarious

http://www.gifs-paradise.com/animated_gifs/ghosts/animated-gifs-ghosts-06.gif

Very distant Titus Groan. There is actually a bit of the roof where a horse could swim, a kind of dip between four bits of pitched roof. But it would leak away before we got the horse up there.

I don't believe in or think about ghosts and I don't get spooked easily. But early this morning whilst asleep I had the distinct sensation of being dragged out of bed by 'something'. As I reached the floor I felt this something envelop me in a hug and while trying to turn around and see just what it was I woke up and found myself on the floor, though admittedly not in the same spot that I projected myself being while I dreamt. I was still tired but disturbed enough to stay awake.

I knew there was a perfectly non-supernatural explanation for this, but I still took the time to make phone calls and confirm that all my close friends and family were still living. Then I perused the house for any other signs left by my cosmic culprit. I finally sat back down on my bed and announced to no one in particular that I was really tired and if there was some unspeakable horror that happened and I needed to bring the perpetrator to justice so your soul could depart or whatever, then I really needed more information otherwise I needed to get some sleep. After five minutes of no response, I went back to bed.

I think you had an attack of sleep paralysis.

hate hate hate sleep paralysis, went through a recurring phase during a p stressful several years ago

I had a nasty sleep paralysis moment just the other night. Woke up around 4 or so, was face down and tried to shift over to my side but there was a weight pinning my lower back and legs down. I couldn't roll over. I was scared for a second then muttered "Fuck off!" and instantly was able to move. Creepy.