I'm open to the existence of ghosts. It seems reasonable to me that they could and do exist. My grandmother saw my grandfather when she was ill in the hospital. I don't think it was the medication or her imagination. I do believe that some spirits get trapped, especially when they have horrible deaths, or that they might come back to guide people forward or provide comfort. I don't normally watch television shows or movies about them, but I happened to be in between shows the other night, and while I was doing something else, this show came on, so I watched it. I believe it was actually the final in the series, so I might not watch the others, because they discussed them in the episode I watched, but it was certainly interesting subject matter.
My husband said he saw ghosts and always told me of a story when he was a young man how a ghost saved his life. I would just roll my eyes. He also saw things when he was dying or in the hospital but those I chalk up to the heavy duty meds. I've never seen one. I even told my husband when he was dying if he could he better come back and haunt me, just to prove to me that something exists. I've been waiting 12 years. I'm sure I'll see him on my death bed though and wether a hallucination or not, it would be comforting.
Roma Downey did a great series years back, think it was called 'miracles' Would love to see them again, can't find them
No, I don't. The Bible is clear on this subject: "For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not anything, neither have they anymore a reward. for the memory of them are forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished..." (Eccl. 9: 5-6).
I do. I've never seen one or had an experience either. I don't like the thoughts of ghosts though. I would wish people's spirits would move on. I don't read the bible. I think the above quote could be open to multiple interpretations.
@Kitty Carmel - Spirits do move on Kitty Repetitive sightings are just like a video replay of an event/memory - not a spirit at all
I would hope so. I've sometimes wondered at places where these were a large amount of deaths at one time, that those people all dying together, didn't stay around. They went on.
Yes, I believe, I have experienced ghostly apparitions and strange incidents in more than one place. However, what I have and always will question is whether or not these ghostly spirits have the ability to travel, say if/when we move from home to another whether or not those spirits can move with us - Anyone?
I believe in ghosts and have had many things happen that have convinced me . Sitting on the sofa one night with a friend and the sliding glass door opened all the way and then closed again. When I worked for a company doing shipping, two other ladies worked with me, we all were touched on the arm or shoulder and had our hair stroked. The radios in the area would turn on when unplugged,parts would be pushed off the edge of the tables. It got so the other girls wouldn't work by themselves. I do believe and I plan on becoming one. I do not believe that they will hurt you though.
I have never seen a ghost, but I have had creepy experiences. Back in the early 1990's, we lived in Baton Rouge LA and one night I was alone in the house since my husband was out of town. Around 9 p.m. I decided to take my bath, so I locked the bedroom door and entered the master bath. The master bath was accessible only through the bedroom, and for some reason the light switches to the bath were on the outside of the bathroom door on the bedroom wall. I locked myself in the bathroom, ran my bath water and got into the tub. Suddenly the bathroom light went off and I was sitting in a tub of bath water in the dark. When I say I was terrified, I am not exaggerating. I sat there clutching a plastic Bic razor (my only "weapon") until the water was cold, straining to hear any sound outside the bathroom door. Suddenly the light came on and still no sound from the bedroom. I finally got up the nerve to get out of the bath, dry off and open the door. Of course I was all alone in the bedroom and the door to the hallway was still locked. The electric clocks on each side of the bed were not blinking so there had not been a power outage. I had other creepy experiences in that house, but that night scared me the most.
I haven't seen any ghost but I do believe in spirits of persons passed. I have had a few visits from my mother and one of my daughter-in-law which I shared in another post. Now that I'm thinking about this I realize there is/was a difference between them. My mother's visits were of moving things and my DIL was of physical form that of a butterfly. I had found this trellis at Goodwill and had taken great pains putting it together and decorating it just to hang my favorite windchime. I love windchimes but they have to sound pleasing to my ears. On this night the snow turned to rain and that's when it all happened as I sat at my computer where I can see my backyard. The trellis is directly in front of the window. As you can see the windchime is at the front of the trellis. It was moved to the center by my Mom's spirit as if to say to me 'It looks better here, Evonne.' That's what she called me 'Evonne.' I didn't see it happen but I heard it as it was happening. I had secured the windchime so tight because of the high winds that we get here and I didn't want to just hang it by the hook on the trellis. The rubbing sound was so loud it scared me so that I was afraid to look out the window. When I did I couldn't believe what I saw. There was no wind blowing that hard to move that windchime to the center of the trellis. After mustering up the nerve I went outside and checked the security of the windchime and it was just as hard for me to move it back where I had it that I left it alone. As I stood there with a racing heart a warmth came over me and I thought, 'That was Mom. She knows how much I love windchimes.' I may have shared this experience before but I have no shame in sharing it again. It is common here that if you see a cardinal in your surroundings that someone who has died has come to visit you. I used to hold that close to my heart until most of my aunts and uncles began to pass away. I didn't see many cardinals then and when I did see one 'Who was it?' or 'Who did I want it to be?' So now seeing a cardinal doesn't having that warm and fuzzy feeling any more. I do enjoy seeing them just the same.
I think I may have told this story before, so if it's a repeat I apologize. One of my best friend's husband contracted a muscle-wasting disease when he was in his 40's. He grew weaker and lost a lot of physical control, and eventually became wheelchair bound. This was especially difficult for Kenneth, as he had loved to dance and had been a very active guy. Sitting out on the patio one evening, he was watching hummingbirds at the feeder. He remarked to Brenda, "When I die I want to come back as a hummingbird. Just look how strong those little bodies are." A few months later, he died. After his funeral when all the mourners had gone, his wife and children decided to ride back out to the cemetery for some private goodbyes. It was nearly dusk, and as they stood at the grave site a hummingbird suddenly flew up and hovered over them. The tiny bird "buzzed" the family, then flew away. Brenda told me that she knew very well that the hummingbird was NOT Kenneth, but she felt it was a sign that he was OK wherever he had moved onto in the afterlife. Some coincidences are too striking to be ignored.
I was going to post a poll about this question but, since I see that we have a thread, I think I'll leave it at that. However, since it's been a few years since this thread was last visited, and we have a bunch of members who weren't around then, I'll pop it to the top. When asked the question about whether I believe in ghosts, I tend to be skeptical. Possibly, it's a matter of interpretation. Could it be that experiences that are interpreted as being evidence of a ghost are actually caused by something else? As with UFOs and Bigfoot, it seems clear to me that a lot of people are simply making this stuff up, others are delusional, and others are the unwilling victims of a hoax. However, there are those who are otherwise sane, yet have truly experienced something that they have interpreted as being a ghost. I trust that people have truly experienced things that they have no other answers for, other than that they are a ghost. As a Christian, I believe that life does not end with our death, but it's not entirely clear to me just what will happen to us after we die. Reasonable Christians disagree as to just what it is that we can expect. However, if ghosts are real, I'm not sure how they would figure into it. If ghosts represent some portion of a person's consciousness that has remained after death, I don't know what that means. Do people get to decide whether to remain here as ghosts rather than moving on to heaven or to hell? Could ghosts be people who are relegated to the place that Catholics know as purgatory? Or could they be something else entirely, such as demons, djinn, or something else? I have had a couple of experiences that could be defined as being ghostly. I don't necessarily define them as such, but neither do I have answers. One came in a flash and then it was gone, never to return. Shortly after moving to the house that I have now been in for twenty years, I walked into a room - the room where I have my office now, as a matter of fact, and saw the image of a woman in clothes that looked like they might have been from the 1920s or 1930s. She was standing in the room looking as if I had startled her. I saw her fairly clearly, clear enough that I thought it was a real person, but she was gone in an instant. The town has no records of my house because it was here before the town was formed in the early 1900s. It was a three-unit apartment building when we bought it, but I don't know what it was before that. Some people have told me that it was a boarding house for people who had been hired to build the paper mill, and that would make some sense. The house across the street from me clearly was, as it has dozens of rooms, and some parts of the house are cut off from other parts of the house. Ours isn't so clear. From the way that it was set up, it seems more likely that it was built as a single-family home, and later split into three apartment units. The part of the house that we use as a library has a different foundation than the rest of the house, and it seems reasonable to me to believe that this was originally built as a porch or a deck, later enclosed and split into two bedrooms. The wall between the library and the rest of the house is an exterior wall, and the door joining the two is an exterior door. In the crawlspace, I found several jars of canned vegetables that had clearly been there for many decades or even as long as a century, and I can't see someone who is renting a unit in a three-unit apartment building canning stuff and putting it down in the crawlspace, so I think that was done before it was split into apartments. I haven't been able to find anything about anyone dying in this house. A drunk kid fell out of an upstairs window and died in the hospital later, about ten years before we bought the place, I am told, but I haven't found anything about a middle-aged woman dying here. Then again, those records probably wouldn't exist. Anyhow, I am not convinced that what I saw was a ghost. What it was, I don't know, but it has never returned. The other experience is one that I have told elsewhere in the forum. In my story about taking in a feral cat, the cat I was talking about was Bird. We took her in just before we left Texas, and she moved here with us. She lived in this house for more than fifteen years before we temporarily rented a place up north, to be nearer the camp while I was working on it, and my wife had a job up north. Bird went out one day, and didn't come back. She would not have run away so I suspect she was taken by a fox or a coyote. She was in her 20s, but very healthy for her age. Since we still had the house here in Millinocket, I would drive back every now and then and spend the night here, making sure things were okay here, and so on. Sometime after we lost Bird, I drove back to Millinocket one night. I was here in my office, downstairs, on the computer as I am now. Michelle was still up north, so I was alone here. I heard something falling down the stairs. Since I was alone here, that was strange so I went to check. A cat toy was on the landing at the bottom of the stairs. I am nearly positive that it wasn't there before because I had swept the landing, since I had tracked snow into the house. Oh well, I was confused by it, but I didn't go immediately to thinking that a ghost had left it there. Maybe it was at the top of the stairs and something vibrated the house, causing it to fall. I didn't know. I went upstairs to look around, but nothing was awry. I got back on my computer and about fifteen minutes later, I heard something falling down the stairs again. Another cat toy, and not one that I had seen when I had gone upstairs. At that point, things seemed a little creepy. Since Bird wasn't very well-liked by the other cats, given that she had been taken into the house, while the others were born into my family, none of the other cats would play with her. She claimed all the cat toys and, while I played with her whenever I could, she occupied herself by playing with the cat toys. One of her favorite games was dropping a toy down the stairs, then chasing it to the bottom, then carrying it back up to do it all over again. While Bird was here, the sounds that I heard from my office were not at all unusual, since she was always dropping toys down the stairs, particularly balls and stuff that would roll well. But Bird wasn't here. Was this her ghost? I don't know.