Question about behavioral responses to the paranormal -

[LightinDarkness]

I have a question out there for all my fellow skeptics - does anyone have a problem with instinctive behavioral reactions to paranormal "activity" that you KNOW is not real? For example, a instinctive fear response because you see something in a dark room in a locked house when you are alone (in other words, you know nothing could be there and its just your imagination).

A real life example of this might be - I had the opportunity to buy a beautiful house once that was on the market really cheap because it was the scene of a murder and the ghost stories made everyone avoid it - I know such stories are imaginary and that this would have been a perfectly good house and a great deal, but couldn't bring myself to buy it and live in it.

How do you deal with this? I don't have to be shown such things are not real - I know they are not - but its almost as if I have some sort of underlying behavioral response to paranormal woo that leads me to act irrationally. Its almost like the "scary movie effect" - you know when you watch a horror movie its fiction and everyone is acting, but your heart speed can still pick up and it can still inspire feelings of fear even when you know it has no relationship to reality.

[desertgal]

I have a question out there for all my fellow skeptics - does anyone have a problem with instinctive behavioral reactions to paranormal "activity" that you KNOW is not real? For example, a instinctive fear response because you see something in a dark room in a locked house when you are alone (in other words, you know nothing could be there and its just your imagination).

A real life example of this might be - I had the opportunity to buy a beautiful house once that was on the market really cheap because it was the scene of a murder and the ghost stories made everyone avoid it - I know such stories are imaginary and that this would have been a perfectly good house and a great deal, but couldn't bring myself to buy it and live in it.

How do you deal with this? I don't have to be shown such things are not real - I know they are not - but its almost as if I have some sort of underlying behavioral response to paranormal woo that leads me to act irrationally. Its almost like the "scary movie effect" - you know when you watch a horror movie its fiction and everyone is acting, but your heart speed can still pick up and it can still inspire feelings of fear even when you know it has no relationship to reality.

I know this kind of reaction. My computer room is above the front half of our garage, there's a storage closet at one end, and, inside the closet is a small access door to a crawlspace over the back half of the garage. The door to the crawl space gives me the creeps because it reminds me of a door in a horror movie that freaked me out when I was a kid, and, since the crawlspace contains heating and air conditioning ducts and the micro water heater, there are always pings and pongs and pops coming from there. As well, the crawlspace is a creepy space-dark, shadowy, etc. If I'm working late at night, sometimes I get spooked by it. I know it's totally irrational. I know there aren't ghosts or serial killers or creepy creatures lurking in my crawlspace. But it's instinctive.

To dispel the spooked feeling...and this will probably sound really stupid...I get irreverent towards the closet door. I make obscene gestures, I stick out my tongue, I sneer at it, I hurl epithets in the general direction. I guess it could be classified as an "up yours" or rebellious response to an irrational reaction. Especially the epithets - the sound of a familiar voice, even your own, can evaporate the spookies pretty quick.

Dumb, like I said. But it does work. I always end up laughing at myself for being spooked in the first place. (To boot, it's like screaming into a pillow - a great way to relieve tension and stress. It beats picking a fight with someone - doors are impervious to insult.)

ETA: My late FIL always told the story of how, when his five kids were little, they lived in a creepy Victorian era home in Canada. The kids were always spooked by the noises that old houses make. One night, after they had let their imaginations get away from them, and he couldn't dissuade them that the noises weren't paranormal, he stood at the bottom of staircase and yelled: "All you ghosts up there-shut the hell up! There's people trying to live here!" After that, he'd do it every time the kids got spooked, and the spookies gradually faded.

I guess the key is thumbing your nose at, not the spookies, but the irrationality of the spookies.

[threejr]

There's an old amusement park with an equally old hotel adjacent to it that our family likes to visit. The hotel has always given me the creeps.

We were there yesterday, and I said to my son that though I believe in nothing paranormal, if I did, it would be easy to believe that hotel was full of ghosts.

We walked into the lobby to check it out (the place has been closed for two years, and we wanted to see what it looked like now). Suddenly, it hit me-the place reminds me of the hotel in The Shining! Seriously, I could see the blood running down the halls, and Jack Nicholson screaming "Here's Johnny!"

Don't think I could ever bring myself to stay there.

I guess even we skeptics can suffer from irrational feelings!

[SphereGuy]

Just try to picture your primitive ancestors living on a plain somewhere, or in a forest, or what have you. They were keenly aware of every ping and pong and snap and crack that they heard, it may have been a predator or a rival band of humans come to get them. Back then the unknown was probably deadly. It's in our blood, so to speak, to be wary and even scared of things. Whether it's something very real like an odd smell or something imaginary like a ghost there is something alarming you, and that alarm is very real regardless of where it came from. I would never fault anyone for being frightened of anything.

[Delscottio]

/[snip]
A real life example of this might be - I had the opportunity to buy a beautiful house once that was on the market really cheap because it was the scene of a murder and the ghost stories made everyone avoid it - I know such stories are imaginary and that this would have been a perfectly good house and a great deal, but couldn't bring myself to buy it and live in it.
[snip]


I think you could make an argument that your reaction is perfectly rational, on an evolutionary basis. Someone died therefore avoid place or you might die blah de blah.


My "sillyness" is more around coincidences / rituals and sports results :o . I can build up really really elaborate rituals before a football (soccer) match even though I know they have no baring on the result etc. Its a hard habit to get out of.

[LightinDarkness]

Thanks for the responses. Good to see Im not the only one who does this even though I know I am reacting to the imaginary. It does seem to be almost hard wired. I think part of it is culture too - I grew up in a household that embraced the woo and ascribed things that could be naturally explained to paranormal forces. Part of it seems to be evolutionary, and I think part of it could be cultural.

[dlorde]

We have a whole range of primitive responses like this effectively hard-wired in the hind-brain. They are there because they helped our ancestors survive - e.g. it looks like it's better to respond immediately with heightened alertness and a little fear or anxiety to what could be potential dangers than it is to wait for higher-level evaluations of the potential threat. These basic responses are often strong enough to override our higher-level evaluations, however we try to rationalise them.

Similarly, while it's clearly an advantage to model the behaviour of other creatures so we can predict how they may respond to events, this modelling isn't restricted to things with predictable behaviours, and it gets applied to all kinds of stochastic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic) and chaotic events. Perhaps there is an advantage to minimising distracting anxieties about the uncontrollable and/or unpredictable by behaving as if they are always controllable and/or predictable. Hence superstitious behaviours and anthropomorphism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphic) - and although rational thought and rational enquiry allow us to distinguish what is controllable and predictable from what is not, the persistence of superstition and anthropomorphism is a clear indication of our less sophisticated heritage and the importance of the concepts of predictability and control in our journey here.

[Ysidro]

I don't like mirrors when I'm not actively using them. Not since a nightmare I had as a child (one of those "reflection does something different than me" dreams). I even keep a closet door in my living room open because there's a full length mirror attached and I can't figure out how to take it off without busting everything. And that's not a fear of busting the mirror, that's a fear of my landlady!

Irrational? Sure. There's probably some ingrained reaction based on movement and "wrongness" that's coming out there. Frankly, I don't care to try to get over it. It's easier just to avoid large mirrors in living spaces.

[JWideman]

While inside, say in a loud, authoritative voice:
"Hey, ghosts! You're being evicted, get the (insert swear word of choice) out!"

[Zontini]

A real life example of this might be - I had the opportunity to buy a beautiful house once that was on the market really cheap because it was the scene of a murder and the ghost stories made everyone avoid it - I know such stories are imaginary and that this would have been a perfectly good house and a great deal, but couldn't bring myself to buy it and live in it.

Nothing wrong or paranormal with that.

You simply don't want to live in a perpetual murder scene. Especially if you got curious and found out the killer spread bits of body parts across every surface of the place.

You'd never be able to make a cheese sandwich in the kitchen ever again...

[MysteryMammal]

When our computers were set up in a spare bedroom in the back of the house, I'd get up to investigate every noise I heard at night. From that room, I could see neither door into the house. Where they are set up now, I don't even notice noises. I can easily turn my head to see either the front door or the back door. This more or less had to do with a fear that people might either try to steal stuff out of our yard again, or possibly break into the house.

Strangely enough, the computers are in a room that somewhat recently suffered a fire in the dead of the night. Had I not been awake at the time, it's possible that the only way I'd be communicating with you is from the "other side" (insert spooky music.)

As for irrational fears: I get jumpy in dark houses at night. When I'm out in the woods, at night, I don't get jumpy or fearful. I'd rather have it the other way around.

[blutoski]

I have a question out there for all my fellow skeptics - does anyone have a problem with instinctive behavioral reactions to paranormal "activity" that you KNOW is not real? For example, a instinctive fear response because you see something in a dark room in a locked house when you are alone (in other words, you know nothing could be there and its just your imagination).

A real life example of this might be - I had the opportunity to buy a beautiful house once that was on the market really cheap because it was the scene of a murder and the ghost stories made everyone avoid it - I know such stories are imaginary and that this would have been a perfectly good house and a great deal, but couldn't bring myself to buy it and live in it.

How do you deal with this? I don't have to be shown such things are not real - I know they are not - but its almost as if I have some sort of underlying behavioral response to paranormal woo that leads me to act irrationally. Its almost like the "scary movie effect" - you know when you watch a horror movie its fiction and everyone is acting, but your heart speed can still pick up and it can still inspire feelings of fear even when you know it has no relationship to reality.

I'm not sure it's a 'problem' though: you're not the only person who knows.

A tainted house is a bargain for the buyer, but not for the seller. Eventually, you're going to be the seller, and the next buyer will ask you to take a hit on price 'because of the murder thing.'

By the same token, I'm always a bit confused about people who interpret the sweater experiment as irrational behavior. There's a serious social hit to the guy casually walking around in The Death Shirt.

Inverse: a friend of mine paid a great deal of money for a prop handled by Jessica Alba in Dark Angel, even though a physically identical prop was available for less.



Just as an extreme example: my cat passed away last September and I decided to bury her remains instead of eating them - even though cat meat is probably pretty nutritious and could be tasty (she was fat and laid back: mmm... tender).

Not wanting to live in the Death House is just part of being human and living with other people.

[LightningStrike]

The body can tell if a situation is not right as your body did Lightindarkness when you refused to buy the house.

Generally we dismiss the body as being intelligent but it is completely intelligent far more intelligent than the rational mind. The rational mind looks for reasons when the body just walks away.

I would not ask anyone to believe in spooks. I have had things appearing at the bedside and so do not doubt their existence.