Did I really experience 'Paranormal Activity'? [Archive]

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Bob from NJ

4th November 2009, 09:05 AM

Pure Argent

4th November 2009, 09:17 AM

Well, what exactly did you experience? I haven't seen the movie.

bluesjnr

4th November 2009, 09:29 AM

Like PA says a bit more background would help. The fact that you question your experience would suggest that you (deep down) know that there is a more rational explanation. This forum is full of people who will help you deconstruct.

Looking forward to hearing more.

uruk

4th November 2009, 12:34 PM

Paranormal activity was about as scary and exciting as the blair witch project. Ok slightly more exciting and scary. And considerably less nausia inducing due to motion sickness. Thankfully the director put the camera on a tripod for most of the movie.

IIRC, the "activity" up untill the Ouiji board scene consisted of thumping, voices, and a swinging chandelier. Am I correct so far Bob from NJ?

Edited to add: I think there was also a door moving and a case of sleepwalking.

The Shrike

4th November 2009, 01:20 PM

IIRC, the "activity" up untill the Ouiji board scene . . .

I remember playing with a ouija board back in the '70s. It told us its name was "Bob" and gave an exact date when my sister's friend was going to die (sometime in the late '80s). When you're 10 years old, things like this can be disconcerting. Otherwise, not so much.

Sister's friend has so far outlived the ouija board prediction by about 20 years.

uruk

4th November 2009, 01:42 PM

Kel

4th November 2009, 02:08 PM

I also played with a ouiji board too. There were some legends down where i live that said that you cannot throw away a ouiji board. The board would always reappear in your house the following day.

I threw away my ouiji board 30 years ago and it has never shown up since.

My ouiji board also had a tendancy to misspell the same words I did. Spooky

My maternal grandmother owned a Ouija board and used it for questions about her life every day. After she died, her oldest daughter (my aunt) took the board and put it away in a box and shoved it in the back of a closet.

When I was about 14 or 15, I found it at my aunt's place and brought it home. My mom was horrified that I would bring it into our house, and asked me never to use it. I painted it black with red drips and painted over the letters with glow-in-the-dark nail polish to make it look extra freaky.

I still have the board and the planchette kicking around somewhere, and I have never thrown it away just because I like the painting I did over the original game board :)

IceSage

4th November 2009, 02:38 PM

Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

4th November 2009, 05:46 PM

Thankfully the director put the camera on a tripod for most of the movie.
Oh thank the Lord in Heaven!

~~ Paul

LostCatSoda

4th November 2009, 06:28 PM

Well Bob, give us an example in detail. See how we can work the angles and possibilities.

I used to be a heavy believer in the paranormal and that movie REALLY creeped me out. Brought back all those nights as a kid terrified that something was lurking in the bedroom. But that's sorta the fun of the film: it brought back all those primal emotions. So I can feel you on that front. Nothing wrong with being skeptical and getting a good scare from a film. Right?

In fact until the film really gets physical, all those little things like creaking floorboards, swinging doors, and thumps in the dark were the PERFECT example of how we can assign an Entity to otherwise easily explainable phenomenon.

whatthebutlersaw

5th November 2009, 07:37 AM

My ouiji board also had a tendancy to misspell the same words I did. Spooky

I am sorely tempted to nominate this for pith.

ETA:

The Ouija board isn't really used in Sweden, but we have a similar game called "Spirit in the glass" (yes, I realize that is wide open to drinks related double entendres) that we used to work ourselves up to a panic with. It was kind of a home made Ouija board and used in the same manner, with the added mobility of heating the air in the glass with a candle before commencing.

It tended to make claims that always seemed to be the exact same as the opinions of the most dominant girl in our group. She would divide people into "spiritborn" and not "spiritborn" and she let the glass attribute this epitet in accordance with whom she wanted to exclude. (That would be me. I wonder why.)

My then bff was very taken with this girl, not least because she/the glass claimed that bff was "extremely" spiritually gifted and encouraged her to pursue this talent. It wasn't long until my friend brought iching, runes, chrystals and tarot decks to school. I had a knack for cold reading, and continually performed better with "readings", but despite this I was not allowed to touch her chrystals, because I was not spiritborn and would contaminate them. (I was however interested in geology. Did you know that new agers are plenty cheaper on semi precious stones than specialist hobby stores?)

Now, the point of this interminable preamble: my friend had a nervous breakdown/psychotic episode/histrionic fit and became absolutely convinced that she was under spiritual attack from "entities". I am afraid, I kind of indulged her in that I let her use me as an "anchor". She had a rather LovecraftianRPGish view of the world, and my total mundanity apparently grounded her and made her safe. (While at the same time reminding me how utterly uninteresting and mundane I was) So I would sit in the nurse's office and hold her hand while her parents took off from work to take her home. In the end she had a real breakdown and was excused from school for almost a month. For a long time, she attributed anything and everything to this - the attacks tended to come when there was too much attention paid to me (we were both engaged in a pursuit where I was more talented) or just generally too little attention paid to her - but to this day, I do not think she did that consciously. I.e I don't think she thought to herself "I'll show you attention, break out the demons!" - I think she believed herself under attack. I was far to involved - we had one of those teenagy symbiotic, slightly unhinged frennemyships - to challenge her on it, or request she snap out of it.

The attacks stopped coming when she developed a crush on a very pragmatic, budding Phd in Non-Organic Chemistry. At her first attack around him, she claimed that "they" were coming he physically sat her down on a chair, stared her in the eyes and said: "No, they're not."

And that was that. "They" never came back. That probably only works with someone who is idolizing you, though. (They never did get it together though, soon afterwards he got engaged to a Biomedical phd student. )

Now, when I am tired or have idiotically given myself an insulinspike, my vision gets funky. I will sometimes see movement where there is none - like a swinging ceiling lamp, or the shadow of an inanimate object. I often misplace things and find them in rooms where I have no memory of even having spent time. Certain lamps in my house dim and light up without anyone touching the switches and we have no dimmer.

If I was stressed out, looking for reason in life, fearing for my sanity or feeling under preassure - I might just be tempted to think I have a poltergeist. Or I accept, as the granddaughter of an electrician, that my landlord was in a hurry to get his newly aquired property on the market and let the wiring sort itself out, that my eyes play tricks on me, that my house is old and occasionally settles and that my short term memory, especially in regard to familiar actions, is going the way of the dodo.

I am going to assume that you are honest, and that your pain is real, and I want to reassure you that really freaky occurences have really mundane explanations.

Be more specific, and people will help you break it down.

Blondin

5th November 2009, 09:05 AM

When I start seeing shadowy figures in my peripheral vision it usually means it's time to clean my glasses.

P.J. Denyer

5th November 2009, 10:15 AM

We had an interesting couple of weeks earlier this month, we started getting very load knocking noises in the walls, after that stopped we had a wierd rattling noise that I traced to the toaster (!). The knocking was I am sure, the result of a sudden temperature drop in our area at that time, we keep the heating off most of the time and I blame contraction in the building due to cold. The rattling I never did get to the bottom of, I thought we might have had a field mouse got in as we live in the country, but it happened when I was close enough to establish this wasn't the case and the traps that I laid just in case came up empty. It's stopped now and I treat it as an interesting mystery, subject to rational explaination but unless it happens again I doubt I'll ever know.

What struck me about it (and the reason I mention it) was the similarity between this and the claimed 'oppression' stage of a demonic possession, as detailed most popularly in 'The Exorcist'. Had this happened a few years back while I still believed such things I would have been convinced there was something in my house and, no doubt, attributed every other random occurance in my life at the time to the same melevolent entity. I can easily see how this could easily develope into a feeling of persecution and depression with no cause other than a few strange noises and culturally induced paranoia.

Or Satan was in my house but left cos he was insulted about being refered to as thermal contraction! :D

Bob from NJ

8th November 2009, 12:54 AM

All my experiences could be explained by somnambulance, or people messing with my stuff and then lying about it, or panic attacks, or extremely bad memory.

I need to dredge up my notes from those days to be really accurate. One of the most common things, important items would disappear no matter how carefully I put them away. Things would disappear never to be seen again- often from taped-up boxes, especially when I was packing to move.

Back in my 20s I had a good almost photographic memory. For example, my garage was a mess, filled with all my Grandparent's stuff after they passed away, and all of our stuff- yet I often amazed my friends cause I could find ANY ITEM in the garage in the time it took to physically reach it, just from memory. I was like this with all my papers and items in the house too; what appeared as 'disorder' to others made sense to me, I knew where everything was from memory, from my own instinctive 'filing system'.

I lived with my older brother, we inherited the house when I was 17. Both born-again Christians who believed lying was a sin, and my brother took this notion to its Nth degree of absurdity, which is why I dismissed the easy explanation that he was lying to me, it was out of character for him at the time. No diabetes, no health problems, no panic attacks till I was almost 30.
We were terrible housekeepers, of course. But every time I cleaned one room, nothing from that room would vanish, but something important I kept IN ANOTHER ROOM would disappear. Even from drawers in my bedroom, from which I had exiled my brother and anyone else. (I was serious about keeping people out; I had a girlfriend for over 2 years who never once saw the inside of my room) This was the most common occurence- tailor made to demoralize me, it seemed.

While we were moving things got much worse; my girlfriend at the time and I had boxes and other heavy objects seemingly launch themselves at us several times. Once the papers were signed and the house no longer mine, it got really bad. We both experienced a feeling of malevolence towards us. I remember us both looking up the stairs together and seeing nothing, but perceiving something, like pure hate formed out of the everyday shadows.

I live in NJ, there are no earthquakes and seldom if ever any tremors. I was healthy, in the best physical shape I've ever been in.

I didn't set out to believe this stuff, but it forced itself on me. I HAD to accept it as real, after so many things happened over so many years.

I've had writing disappear from the pages I wrote it on, as recently as this year. This is a common occurence, happens every few months at least. I'll write a phone number on a page of my Planner; someone will SEE ME write it down, along with other notes. Yet days or weeks later when I need the info, that part of the page is blank, not even indentations from a pen remain on the paper.

All trivial things (except the boxes launching at us) and it sounds pretty weak, but it all adds up to a world of malevolence intended to drive me to despair. The ramifications are unbearable. If indeed there are invisible forces manipulating objects and events, then human life is hopeless. What I seek here is some ammo, fuel for dis-belief. Yes it's all easily dismissed as forgetfulness or wishful thinking or whatever, but the emotional and mental scars from it are very real. I desparately don't want to live in that awful world; I want to live in confidence that reality is simply reality, that there is no deliberate malevolence behind the real world.

I've mentioned only the things that happened inside the home; plenty of crap has occurred while driving and elsewhere.

I'm fully prepared to accept the possibility that I had (probably still have) a mental illness worse than garden-variety depression. If you think I do, please spell it out in detail. I do NOT appreciate smug, snappy dismissals from know-it-alls.

Miss_Kitt

8th November 2009, 02:03 AM

Bob from NJ :

Even people with very good memories lose things. It is a reality of how humans manage memory that we tend to remember the uncommon and forget the common; that we tend to remember things in ways that fit our emotional/psychological contexts. People who think they have 'psychic abilities' where they 'always predict' discover that if someone actually documents their guesses or predictions--before the fact, and compare them to following events--they are wrong far more often than they realize. Eyewitnesses report contradictory versions of events, not because one of them is lying, but because they each remember it differently.

So my immediate reaction to your story is to say that you misplaced things and/or misremembered where you put them occasionally, and your memory of not doing that until this period of time began is non-factual. Also, the more stressed a person is, the more likely they are to misplace things;to forget what they have or haven't seen or done; and to focus on the negative, not the positive. That is, if you found 14 things where you expected them to be after cleaning a room but the 15th was somewhere else, you don't recall the 14 correct retrievals.

I have had any number of boxes fall on me when I was moving, but I credit those to either the load in the box slowly shifting until it reached a tipping point; or, something under the box (directly or lower in the stack) shifting; or my cat bumped it; or, the vibration of my passing near it set it off. I've also had the washing machine going into spin cycle make things fall over; and of course, if you're close to a street, a large truck going by can set off a mild vibration.

These are not dismissals of your concerns, but rather, suggestions of mundane explanations that--due to the emotional context of the time--you may not have noticed. It's sort of the inverse of how pretty the world is when you've just fallen in love: we have thousands of things we could choose to focus on at any given second, but we have to narrow our conscious attention to only a few.

The copious absense of documented 'paranormal' entities despite more than a century of looking for them gives me considerable assurance in telling you that you need not worry about a world full of spiteful incorporeal beings. Ultimately, physics and thermodynamics will out! There is no room in the world for ghosts, except in our imaginations.

Imagination is a wonderful thing, but the flipside of wonder is horror.

I hope your world becomes sunnier and more calm as you learn reasons to believe you are not in a demon-haunted world!

Regards, MK

Pure Argent

8th November 2009, 07:40 AM

All my experiences could be explained by somnambulance, or people messing with my stuff and then lying about it, or panic attacks, or extremely bad memory.

Well, there you go then. :)

Occam's Razor, remember? No matter what the occurrence was, it's more likely for it to have been one of the mundane explanations above than a paranormal one. Without any direct evidence as to it being paranormal, there isn't any reason to believe so. The movie just scared you, is all.

ExMinister

8th November 2009, 07:57 AM

Hi Bob,

I would be interested in hearing about the experiences you had outside the home, too.

My thoughts as I read your experience:

First, the misplaced items could be explained by being maybe a little less organized than you might have thought you were. That would be a logical explanation, regardless of how good your memory seemed to be for finding things within the disorganization, and it doesn't require lying on the part of your brother who you perceived as very honest. It's also possible that your brother was messing with you, though only you would know how likely that really is. You could always ask him.

The emotional response you and your girlfriend shared as you perceived the "hate-filled" part of the house COULD reasonably be explained by how you were actually feeling at the time, which was, it sounds like, already a little spooked. Similarly, I would mistrust emotional reactions I had surrounding the sale of the house or anything else back then since all of that COULD also be explained pretty rationally as a response to being already a little bit conditioned by then to see this as paranormal and malevolent.

I don't know about the boxes or other items launching themselves at you. Assuming you are remembering that correctly (you did say it might help you to find your notes from that time), I would tend to consider earth movement/trucks going by/boxes filled crookedly, that sort of thing. Failing that, I am not sure what could cause it. Some questions I might ask: Did this happen to you or your girlfriend together or separately? Was she prone to imagination/exagerration? Might she have been playing a trick on you?

As far as disappearing phone numbers, if I were in your position trying to get to the bottom of something like this, I would no longer write anything down on a page of a planner where there is even the slightest chance that it IS in there somewhere, on a page other than the one you THINK you wrote it down on. I would start writing things down on the back of, say, ONE business card or some other place that I had full control of and always putting it back in the exact same place in my wallet. Now, if you write things down on this ONE surface and it disappears, OK I would have to then grant you that that's very weird. But that might be something to try as an experiment.

I guess what I'm suggesting is to go through each experience, back away from it emotionally a bit, and ask yourself if you've REALLY considered all alternative explanations. Sometimes it takes an outsider to suggest them. Otherwise, the experiences can snowball - once you begin to accept paranormal explanations for one experience, it then gets easier to accept something paranormal for further experiences, more so than it would be if you just take them individually.

Again, I'd be interested in hearing your other experiences surrounding this.

It seems unlikely to me that you have a mental illness based on what you've written so far, though of course that would be impossible for someone on an internet forum to know. It seems to me more likely that you just got caught up in looking for paranormal explanations where none might be necessary, after a series of events had happened that seemed bizarre to you at the time.

I agree it would be depressing and disempowering to see the world as at the mercy of malevolent forces, but I don't think you're anywhere near having to accept that explanation yet.

Bob from NJ

9th November 2009, 12:05 PM

Thanks Kitt, Argent, and ExMinister.

As far as disappearing phone numbers, if I were in your position trying to get to the bottom of something like this, I would no longer write anything down on a page of a planner where there is even the slightest chance that it IS in there somewhere, on a page other than the one you THINK you wrote it down on. I would start writing things down on the back of, say, ONE business card or some other place that I had full control of and always putting it back in the exact same place in my wallet. Now, if you write things down on this ONE surface and it disappears, OK I would have to then grant you that that's very weird. But that might be something to try as an experiment.

.

This is an enormously good idea. I've done something 'crazy' like that myself- I tie easily-lost items (remote controls, scissors, nail clippers) together with string. Since I tied the DVD and TV remotes together, neither has been missing longer than a few seconds for over 2 years.
It hit me how tool boxes are designed to be 'gremlin-proof' ie form fitted spaces for every tool, socket, ratchet etc so apparently everyone has this problem, but they don't seriously attribute it to poltergeists like I used to.

I'm coming out of my superstitions in recent years. Here's the hard part- I have a great vested interest in these superstitions, I invested a great deal of my life in fundamentalist Religion and it's hard to admit I was wrong. It means over 13 years of my life were a mistake. I sincerely devoted my life to this particular icon of Christ and the views that go with it, such as omni-present demons oppressing the world.

The movie I saw dredged up my archaic world-view of those days, forced me to confront it. I'd 'shelved' those experiences, locked them away and ignored who I used to be. But that earlier person is still inside me, still a 'player' in my life and thoughts. This is the poison of Fundamentalism- I was so convinced that I had all the Answers to the Great Questions; so convinced I tried to proselytize others.

Read "Pilgrim's Progress" if you want a true study in my sort of paranoia; everyone and everything in this world is just a satanic 'trick' to lead the believer astray. In this way of thinking it makes perfect sense that Dinosaur bones could have been planted by Satan to deceive us, or that Scientists are simply an evil occult priesthood who make up everything they 'learn' just to lead believers astray. Your mind re-shapes itself, becomes like your brain's "anti-virus" fighting against everything in the world and every thought in your head. You become absolutely paranoid and don't even know it. Friends and relatives become quasi-posessed enemies out to ensnare you into sin and doom your soul to Hell.

So that part of me still can't trust anything. As far as that side of me knows, none of the members of this Forum are real; it's all just Satan's Imp sitting on the other end of this website typing out lies and deception on his satanic laptop. This would make a good cartoon, it's laughable- of course I don't believe you're all just 'Imps', I'm trying to illustrate the deep levels of paranoia I embraced for the best years of my life.

How do I let go? How do I face the embarassment of having been so wrong for so long? How do I overcome the nagging fear that I'm just a typical lost reprobate, a former-believer who CAN'T come back to Christ, and that I'm just embracing Deception?

Pure Argent

9th November 2009, 12:17 PM

So that part of me still can't trust anything. As far as that side of me knows, none of the members of this Forum are real; it's all just Satan's Imp sitting on the other end of this website typing out lies and deception on his satanic laptop. This would make a good cartoon, it's laughable- of course I don't believe you're all just 'Imps', I'm trying to illustrate the deep levels of paranoia I embraced for the best years of my life.

You're sure I'm not Satan? 'Cause that's news to me. If I'm not Satan, what the hell were all those damned souls doing burning on my front lawn?

How do I let go? How do I face the embarassment of having been so wrong for so long? How do I overcome the nagging fear that I'm just a typical lost reprobate, a former-believer who CAN'T come back to Christ, and that I'm just embracing Deception?

Well, really, there isn't any way to do it easily. You just have to suck it up and admit that you were wrong for a long, long time, but you want to do better now.

Olowkow

9th November 2009, 12:23 PM

.....
How do I let go? How do I face the embarassment of having been so wrong for so long? How do I overcome the nagging fear that I'm just a typical lost reprobate, a former-believer who CAN'T come back to Christ, and that I'm just embracing Deception?

You have come to the right place. Plenty of kindred spirits (as it were) on JREF. You might want to try Atheist Experience, you can find episodes on You Tube. The host, Matt Dillahunty was a fundamentalist, now atheist. Very bright guy. They have helped a lot of folks out of this situation, and you'll find that you are not alone.

Also, look for the good in people you meet. This goes a long way towards seeing the good in yourself.

bookitty

9th November 2009, 12:38 PM

Thanks Kitt, Argent, and ExMinister.

This is an enormously good idea. I've done something 'crazy' like that myself- I tie easily-lost items (remote controls, scissors, nail clippers) together with string. Since I tied the DVD and TV remotes together, neither has been missing longer than a few seconds for over 2 years.
It hit me how tool boxes are designed to be 'gremlin-proof' ie form fitted spaces for every tool, socket, ratchet etc so apparently everyone has this problem, but they don't seriously attribute it to poltergeists like I used to.

I'm coming out of my superstitions in recent years. Here's the hard part- I have a great vested interest in these superstitions, I invested a great deal of my life in fundamentalist Religion and it's hard to admit I was wrong. It means over 13 years of my life were a mistake. I sincerely devoted my life to this particular icon of Christ and the views that go with it, such as omni-present demons oppressing the world.

The movie I saw dredged up my archaic world-view of those days, forced me to confront it. I'd 'shelved' those experiences, locked them away and ignored who I used to be. But that earlier person is still inside me, still a 'player' in my life and thoughts. This is the poison of Fundamentalism- I was so convinced that I had all the Answers to the Great Questions; so convinced I tried to proselytize others.

Read "Pilgrim's Progress" if you want a true study in my sort of paranoia; everyone and everything in this world is just a satanic 'trick' to lead the believer astray. In this way of thinking it makes perfect sense that Dinosaur bones could have been planted by Satan to deceive us, or that Scientists are simply an evil occult priesthood who make up everything they 'learn' just to lead believers astray. Your mind re-shapes itself, becomes like your brain's "anti-virus" fighting against everything in the world and every thought in your head. You become absolutely paranoid and don't even know it. Friends and relatives become quasi-posessed enemies out to ensnare you into sin and doom your soul to Hell.

So that part of me still can't trust anything. As far as that side of me knows, none of the members of this Forum are real; it's all just Satan's Imp sitting on the other end of this website typing out lies and deception on his satanic laptop. This would make a good cartoon, it's laughable- of course I don't believe you're all just 'Imps', I'm trying to illustrate the deep levels of paranoia I embraced for the best years of my life.

How do I let go? How do I face the embarassment of having been so wrong for so long? How do I overcome the nagging fear that I'm just a typical lost reprobate, a former-believer who CAN'T come back to Christ, and that I'm just embracing Deception?

I completely empathize with this although I am coming at it from another angle. Simply put my childhood (Mother's BPD and her complete faith in all things woo, plus my own vivid imagination, love of reading and some standard horrific abuse) left me unable to judge reality. The phantoms in my head took on such significance that they were visual. My fears manifested as entities, ghosts, and dark areas. In addition to that, I firmly believed in every possible variety of woo & new-age thought. You had God, I had "The Universe."

Since these were so real to me, I discussed them at length for most of my adulthood. Then I got sane and had to retract these discussions. Doing so among my friends and peers was easy. They didn't really believe it and were generally relieved that I had shut up about it.

The hardest part was looking back and realizing that I had been inches away from true insanity for years. Worse, now I had no belief system at all and at least the insanity offered a way to define the world. Sometimes I wonder if it was all some tweak of the chemicals in my brain, an extra drop here or there and I'd been in a tin-foil helmet screaming about lizard people.

Now I am on a quest for reality. It doesn't offer the same entertaining drama. There are very few heart-pounding moments. I no longer see myself as tapped into some grand mystery, the one who knows secrets beyond the realm of mortal ken and all that. There is little reward to my ego other than a few ah ha! moments and the knowledge that strangers no longer roll their eyes as I walk away. But I'm also free of nightmares, panic attacks and days of being too overwhelmed to get out of bed.

LostCatSoda

9th November 2009, 05:56 PM

Thanks Kitt, Argent, and ExMinister.
I'm coming out of my superstitions in recent years. Here's the hard part- I have a great vested interest in these superstitions, I invested a great deal of my life in fundamentalist Religion and it's hard to admit I was wrong. It means over 13 years of my life were a mistake. I sincerely devoted my life to this particular icon of Christ and the views that go with it, such as omni-present demons oppressing the world.

The movie I saw dredged up my archaic world-view of those days, forced me to confront it. I'd 'shelved' those experiences, locked them away and ignored who I used to be. But that earlier person is still inside me, still a 'player' in my life and thoughts. This is the poison of Fundamentalism- I was so convinced that I had all the Answers to the Great Questions; so convinced I tried to proselytize others.

I spent the good part of my youth absolutely convinced in the Christian god. I totally get how you might feel "vested" in all the time and effort you put into believing things. But if you're really ready to accept a new reality, a skeptical and baggage free viewpoint of the world, then directly assessing those experiences should be a revelatory experience. I would think trying to bottle up all those years will only leave a kernel of panic in your mind that is a timebomb. i.e. You'll be always thinking in the back of your mind "but what if it WAS all really true." I've done it. I still do it from time to time and have to reason myself out. .... in fact some of my early feelings while on the road to atheism were of guilt. Like god was going to get mad at me for not believing.

Anecdote: confronted with mormonism as a youth, being a staunch baptist myself, was a crisis of faith that had me all screwed up. One night while camping I took the book of mormon up on this rocky hilltop, opened it, placed it on the ground in front of me, and prayed for a sign if it was all true. (!!!) It just so happens it was a very blustery night.... Sure enough the book eventually slapped shut face down. I was in awe of what just happened..... And now I laugh sentimentally at myself. Instead of trying to forget that experience I look at it as a great example of my quest to find What's Real and Stop Believing in the Vague and Unhealthy.

To me it sounds like you need to deal with those years of Fundamentalist teachings before you can directly stop fretting over ghosts. For me my religion was directly responsible for my belief in the supernatural. But rest assured, having things "disappear" from a drawer or "feeling" that there was something at top of the stairs is exactly ZERO proof of anything. I can still give myself the heebee-jeebies and there's nothing wrong about that. I'll turn on all the lights for about an hour before I chuckle at myself and get over it.

Soapy Sam

10th November 2009, 10:01 AM

Bob, you sound like a very sane person who was raised on a diet of hogwash when you were young and impressionable, that has taken you decades to dump.

But you are doing it. You're winning and you know it. But you're jumpy as hell that you might somehow, still, in defiance of all experience and sense, be wrong.

You're not wrong.
You're right.
Randi is right.
There ARE NO PARANORMAL EVENTS. Just people and imagination.
Now you have to live with being right.
It's fun, believe me. Now, let's look at your specifics-

All my experiences could be explained by somnambulance, or people messing with my stuff and then lying about it, or panic attacks, or extremely bad memory.

I need to dredge up my notes from those days to be really accurate.
Dat's ma boy! The man takes notes! You lose 'em of course. So do we all, Bob. So do we all.

One of the most common things, important items would disappear no matter how carefully I put them away. Things would disappear never to be seen again- often from taped-up boxes, especially when I was packing to move.

My mother always blamed this on "Borrowers" (6 inch high people who live under the floor, from a series of childrens' books. It crops up a lot in claims of hauntings. Invariably, people are less methodical and rather sloppier than they think. Inattention is a killer here- I remember once fixing something in the kitchen and putting down my screwdriver. A second later , it was gone. Showed up on the bathroom windowsill. It's possible the Laws of Physics that run the Universe were suspended to move my screwdriver into the loo, but on balance, I reckon I went for a pee and forgot I left it there.

Back in my 20s I had a good almost photographic memory. For example, my garage was a mess, filled with all my Grandparent's stuff after they passed away, and all of our stuff- yet I often amazed my friends cause I could find ANY ITEM in the garage in the time it took to physically reach it, just from memory. I was like this with all my papers and items in the house too; what appeared as 'disorder' to others made sense to me, I knew where everything was from memory, from my own instinctive 'filing system'.

I'm sure you could. 99% of the time. So when you did get it wrong you were shocked. Me? I just lost this keyboard. (It's wifi). I must have carried it into the kitchen when I went for coffee. If I believed in poltergeists I'd have been out of this place thirty years ago.

I lived with my older brother, we inherited the house when I was 17. Both born-again Christians who believed lying was a sin, and my brother took this notion to its Nth degree of absurdity, which is why I dismissed the easy explanation that he was lying to me, it was out of character for him at the time. No diabetes, no health problems, no panic attacks till I was almost 30.
Either he occasionally moved your stuff, or your girlfriend did, or you did. There exist no other possibilities- as you know very well.

We were terrible housekeepers, of course. But every time I cleaned one room, nothing from that room would vanish, but something important I kept IN ANOTHER ROOM would disappear. Even from drawers in my bedroom, from which I had exiled my brother and anyone else. (I was serious about keeping people out; I had a girlfriend for over 2 years who never once saw the inside of my room) This was the most common occurence- tailor made to demoralize me, it seemed.

Sad that you lost your parents when you were so young. You still had a garage full of your grandparents' stuff , too. And born again Christianity. What a mess. I'm not going to spout psychological nonsense about guilt , but I wonder if you believed your family were still around in some sense "watching you"? When rooms were tidy, you didnt lose stuff. You lost stuff in untidy rooms. Uhuh. (I'm grinning, Bob. You should be, too.)

While we were moving things got much worse; my girlfriend at the time and I had boxes and other heavy objects seemingly launch themselves at us several times. Once the papers were signed and the house no longer mine, it got really bad. We both experienced a feeling of malevolence towards us. I remember us both looking up the stairs together and seeing nothing, but perceiving something, like pure hate formed out of the everyday shadows.
Who is the "we" here? You and your girlfriend, or you, your brother and your girlfriend?
You were emotional about leaving your family home? Nothing unusual there. It sounds like you and your GF just triggered each other off at the stair. Houses always feel strange when you move- the acoustics are different, the lighting, familiar becomes strange. Fear starts as a subconscious niggle. It can be damned contagious. I've watched a whole group of ghosthunters scare each other silly. It's amusing for the onlooker, but not funny at all for them. The spooks ain't real: The fear is.
I dunno what caused the boxes to fly. Damn sure it wasn't spooks though. If spooks could shift loads, we wouldn't need forklifts or power stations. Thermodynamics says the universe is too cheap.

I live in NJ, there are no earthquakes and seldom if ever any tremors. I was healthy, in the best physical shape I've ever been in.
FYI-http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/new_jersey/history.php

You're right in general -though few people would mistake an earthquake for a poltergeist. Usually when stuff tips it has been badly stacked and it's the physical presence of people nearby that supplies the last bit of vibration needed to tip it. A large object (or a stack of magazines) in a poorly packed box slides or rolls, causing a domino effect and flipping the box several feet. If you are feeling tense to start with, that can be scary.

I didn't set out to believe this stuff, but it forced itself on me. I HAD to accept it as real, after so many things happened over so many years.
Interesting way to put it. I suspect your background led you to accept each small event as adding to the likelihood of some paranormal common cause. Mine would simply make me laugh and shake my head, taking each as unrelated and amusing. I had, I think, a healthier mental start than you did. (Which is why I'm impressed by your resilience).
I've had writing disappear from the pages I wrote it on, as recently as this year. This is a common occurence, happens every few months at least. I'll write a phone number on a page of my Planner; someone will SEE ME write it down, along with other notes. Yet days or weeks later when I need the info, that part of the page is blank, not even indentations from a pen remain on the paper.

This is wrong- and again you know it.You just haven't figured HOW. I can't tell you- but if this was me, I'd be unsurprised at losing such data, because I do so constantly. It never enters my head that this is anything other than my own inefficiency.
Can I suggest you number the pages andleave no gaps? (A simple vertical line at the end of each page leaving no whitespace untouched. If you find a gap, you have a case to answer. I bet you don't. (But if you do, you have a million bucks coming, so remember your friends, eh?
If you happen to have a scanner or digital camera, copy each page when done. Compare with the original at the end of the year. Want to bet they're the same?
I truly think this is a memory issue. (Incidentally, would you prefer to find you do have some neurological condition to having these events really prove paranormal? If the answer is "Yes", then I think you're as sane as they come. My answer would be "yes", too. Better a misfiring brain than a demon-haunted world.

All trivial things (except the boxes launching at us) and it sounds pretty weak, but it all adds up to a world of malevolence intended to drive me to despair. The ramifications are unbearable. If indeed there are invisible forces manipulating objects and events, then human life is hopeless.
Not sure why that would be, but it's moot anyway, because there are none. (Except the New World Order , obviously. And the Freemasons. And the Flying Spaghetti Monster).
I worry about the disparity between your realisation that these events are trivial, and your comment that they "add up to a world of malevolence". I don't know about mental illness, but here I think you reveal a streak of profound insecurity that may date from your childhood or some long ago cause.
This stuff does not add up to anything, except possibly something within yourself- maybe a tendency to short term memory failure, to imagine you actually did something you in fact only planned to do- I dunno. Something psychological. Maybe you just worry too much. You see patterns and causes in random events. That may hinge on borderline schizophrenia- it seems to be something everyone has to some degree. We all see men in the moon. (Well, to be honest, I don't but I have no visual imagination. I hear songs in rivers. I know. I know.)

What I seek here is some ammo, fuel for dis-belief. Yes it's all easily dismissed as forgetfulness or wishful thinking or whatever, but the emotional and mental scars from it are very real.
Oh, aye. We're all alone in the dark. The fear of spooks in scary places is real, even if the spooks ain't. That's just being human, brother. Read this site as much as you can. Read Randi's commentaries. Read the stuff about hypnopompic and hypnagogic dreams. Read up on selection bias
Cultivate a healthy scepticism. Learn to laugh at your own superstition. Self-mockery is a grand thing. I would practise it myself, had I a single fault deserving of it. Seriously - this is your nature. Learn to accept it, while ignoring it. It's like having a wall eye or a club foot. Just a bloody nuisance you cope with.

I desparately don't want to live in that awful world; I want to live in confidence that reality is simply reality, that there is no deliberate malevolence behind the real world.
Nor would any thinking person- as I never tire of pointing out to those believers who accuse me of failure of imagination. Imagine (I tell them) a world where paranormal events are real, not the stuff of movies; where demons and bogles stalk the night and the IRS use psychic powers to check your tax return... I'll pay the price of reality, thanks- entropy and gravity and age and (best of all) death- when the chemistry stops and the consciousness does too, because conscious minds are electrochemistry at its incredible best and when we stop, we're gone, just like a snuffed candle. I find that apt. Fitting.
How things should be.
How they are.

I've mentioned only the things that happened inside the home; plenty of crap has occurred while driving and elsewhere.

I'm fully prepared to accept the possibility that I had (probably still have) a mental illness worse than garden-variety depression. If you think I do, please spell it out in detail. I do NOT appreciate smug, snappy dismissals from know-it-alls.
I hope you will get none. I think you had religion. I'd be curious to know more about your upbringing and your parents, but that's me playing amateur shrink. None of my business.
Do remember though that most regulars here are further along the path you are on than you have yet reached. Having concluded that paranormal stories are the result of inaccurate records and memory , inattention to detail ,pure imagination and yes-often mental illness, they will be dismissive of things you yourself accept as trivial, but in which you personaly have considerable emotional investment. Don't take it personally. There's a lot of love on this board, but it can be rough love.
You must make up your mind - and only you can do so. Either there are fairies in the garden and bogles in the attic, or there are not. I have sought them for decades and found never a trace,- but along the way I have learned many fascinating things about how our minds lie to us. Most folk here think like me , more or less. You halfway do, but you have not quite dumped the dross. Yet.

You will though. Stick around.

Bob from NJ

10th November 2009, 11:41 AM

The hardest part was looking back and realizing that I had been inches away from true insanity for years. Worse, now I had no belief system at all and at least the insanity offered a way to define the world. ...
... I no longer see myself as tapped into some grand mystery, the one who knows secrets beyond the realm of mortal ken and all that.... .

Thanks Agent, Olowkow, Bookitty, LostCatSoda, and SoapySam (any relation to Sailor Sam?)

Good point Bookity; That's another aspect of Fundamentalism, and of my personality. You gain an insider's pass to a 'secret' hidden world, you gain a dimension of reality that none of these normal dolts can see. In magic and fiction that's a recurring theme; Clive Barker has his 'Quiddity' and other parallel realms that only a select few mortals can perceive; even Harry Potter has a secret parallel world that sets his kind up above the 'Muggles'

(I'm NOT a Potter fan, but various friends age 26-42 have explained it to me)

It's part of my personality or my personality type. In music I sought out the obscure, I enjoyed whole realms of music that the 'mainstream' had no inkling existed and THAT was like a 'secret world' too. Look how many movie buffs seek out the most obscure outre films as rare prizes, that no one else has ever heard of.

As far as belief system, you DO have a belief system founded on evidence and Reason instead of superstition and folklore; it just doesn't have all the answers... yet. I like what Dr Feinman said that he doesn't mind not knowing something, he's at peace with that. If I can drop this awful religious-dogma mindset I can be at peace with unknowns as well.
Heck, I've made peace with mortality, I can make peace with Unknowns; doesn't bother me one bit if this life is IT, if death is THE END, even if there is a God. Cause there's enough in this span of years; enough problems in this world, enough wonders and meaning in this short life even though it's just a blip on the Universe's calendar. There doesn't need to be a second supernatural world to give this existence meaning, there doesn't need to be an afterlife for right and wrong to be valid concepts.

Bob from NJ

10th November 2009, 11:49 AM

You must make up your mind - and only you can do so. Either there are fairies in the garden and bogles in the attic, or there are not. I have sought them for decades and found never a trace,- but along the way I have learned many fascinating things about how our minds lie to us. Most folk here think like me , more or less. You halfway do, but you have not quite dumped the dross. Yet.

You will though. Stick around.

(No one's ever called me sane before)

I think that's what I need, more understanding of how our minds lie to us. It's how 'Shadow People' were quickly debunked for me. "The truth shall set you free" takes on a new meaning.
I always accepted my mind and memory as accurate, infallible. Nowadays (since a concussion) I no longer trust my memory, I know it's a damaged tool so I have to laugh at myself every day for forgetting things. I understand better how vision and perception work, how sight is not a reliable witness. The more I understand the better able I'll be to perceive the world rationally and bury my superstitions.

Fiona

10th November 2009, 11:52 AM

I find that accepting things wink in and out of existence at irregular intervals helps. It isn't true, but it does mean I do not worry when I cannot find something :)

ExMinister

10th November 2009, 03:09 PM

How We Know What Isn't So by Gilovich might help with regard to your last post. It's on my list of books to read, too.

Well, you had 13 years, I had 20 - At least you didn't become a minister for a New Age church, the details of which give embarassing a whole new dimension.

I recommend reading and more reading. Inundate yourself with rational thought. Read ex-fundamentalists like Dan Parker and Bart Ehrman. You don't even have to become an atheist, unless you so choose. There are plenty of people here who believe in God AND embrace critical thinking and rationality.

The way I see it is this: I had 20 years of being wrong. I was lucky enough to find this forum, and from here I went on to read everything I could get my hands on about skepticism and critical thinking and anything else purely rational I could find. I decided to do everything possible to prevent myself from being susceptible to the same kind of nonsense a second time around. The more you research, the more you discover mundane explanations behind the seemingly paranormal, the easier it will be to leave the superstitious thinking behind.

Maia

10th November 2009, 04:35 PM

(No one's ever called me sane before)

I think that's what I need, more understanding of how our minds lie to us. It's how 'Shadow People' were quickly debunked for me. "The truth shall set you free" takes on a new meaning.
I always accepted my mind and memory as accurate, infallible. Nowadays (since a concussion) I no longer trust my memory, I know it's a damaged tool so I have to laugh at myself every day for forgetting things. I understand better how vision and perception work, how sight is not a reliable witness. The more I understand the better able I'll be to perceive the world rationally and bury my superstitions.

Hi Bob-- please take this for what it's worth, but I'm a health care professional and I work with people who have Alzheimer's disease, various dementias, and post-TBI status on a daily basis. A mild to moderate traumatic brain injury (which is a much more accurate term than "concussion") can completely explain every single one of the symptoms you described. I see much more severe versions of these symptoms every day in my clients. I obviously have no way of knowing your specific situation, but this is one possibility that you may want to think about and perhaps discuss with a neurologist.

Baby Nemesis

11th November 2009, 12:13 PM

:shocked:

It means over 13 years of my life were a mistake.

Well, far be it from me to claim I know what I'm talking about, ... but it won't be entirely wasted if you find out all you can about natural phenomena that can cause the things you attributed to demons and spread the word to others affected who might be relieved to know the information, because your motivation will have been what happened to you before, so you can say good came out of it. And if you end up helping other people in that predicament and they get emotional relief from learning about natural causes of things that were scaring them because they thought they were supernatural, and it means their lives are free from a lot of the anxiety they would have experienced otherwise, then you might end up doing a lot of good so you might think what happened to you was worthwhile after all because of what came out of it.

I found some interesting articles in Google today about things some people think must be supernatural or extraterrestrial but which have natural explanations. They mostly don't relate directly to what you say you experienced, but most of them give natural explanations for things that could really scare people and make them think supernatural things were happening to them, so they might interest you and be useful for you to let others know about:

Alien abduction (http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/journalism/ns94.html)
The waking nightmare of sleep paralysis (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/oct/02/sleep-paralysis)
Sleep Paralysis (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A6092471)
Experiencing God - The Neurology of the Spiritual Experience (http://www.bidstrup.com/mystic.htm)

Cuddles

12th November 2009, 08:56 AM

How do I let go? How do I face the embarassment of having been so wrong for so long?

The important thing to remember is that there is not actually anything embarrassing about being wrong. Every single person in the entire world is constantly making all kinds of mistakes. Admitting to mistakes is not a bad thing, it's a statement that you realise you're not perfect and are willing to learn.

Sure, some people seem to see admitting error as a bad thing. This is especially true among politicians. But the most important phrase anyone can ever say is "I was wrong.". You face the fact of young wrongness by trying to work out why you were wrong and making sure you don't do it again.

P.J. Denyer

12th November 2009, 09:39 AM

How do I face the embarassment of having been so wrong for so long?

Try and assuage it with the pride in being able to change your mind when you are? To err is human, accepting when you're wrong takes courage.

Welcome to the real world, it sucks. You'll love it! :D

Bob from NJ

12th November 2009, 10:26 AM

I find that accepting things wink in and out of existence at irregular intervals helps. It isn't true, but it does mean I do not worry when I cannot find something :)

I HAVE TO DOCUMENT THIS!!!!

Did my first 'test' today. Here's what happened; my place has these stupid 'jalissy' windows which you open with stupid metal cranks that are always falling off. One fell off right in fron of me today, slipped out of my hand...and disappeared before my eyes, without making a sound. It was like the spirit world asserted itself again, snatched something boldly from right in front of me.

I explored a bit and found only two possible places where it could have landed without a sharp 'clank';
1) the waste basket which I searched thoroughly to no avail (and I mean THOROUGHLY. Ugh)
2) There's a hole where the water supply line comes through, a few sizes bigger than the pipe. The gap is filled in with steel wool (this place has had a succession of amateur not-so-handymen including myself) It COULD HAVE missed the pipes and hit the steel wool and thus not made a sound.
I searched the hole with a mirror and flashlight.

(Had to mount an all-out search for the flashlight; it wasn't where I remembered putting it, which my mind wants to interpret as another 'attack' So I mounted an all-out search and found it close to the spot where I'd put it. So I got a secondary de-bunking out of this mess)

I couldn't find the crank anywhere in the steel-wool hole. It vanished.

OK, what would a rational man do? I'm no longer prepared to accept the 'mischevous malevolent Imp' explanation for these things.

So I tried to re-create the event. Pulled an identical crank off another window and determined that if it could fall into the hole WITHOUT A SOUND, missing the two metal pipes within the first 100 tries, that would prove it was within the realm of possibility.

It happened on the second try.

It made a dull muffled thud, not a bright clank from metal-on-metal. I searched for it with a flashlight, but it's gone. The first one could very well have made a muffled thud, since I was moving clumsily at the same instant and my own sound likely drowned it out.

I'd successfully re-created the event, within reasonable parameters! De-bunked that sucker* to my satisfaction!
(*colorful expletives replaced with the word 'sucker')

So I'm out two window-cranks (which cost a couple dollars each) and I've gotta replace the steel wool cause it's soft and rusty- small price to pay for a healthy mindset. I'd never have thought to try and "re-create" such an event were it not for this forum and podcasts, like Skeptic's Guide and Skeptoid.

Olowkow

12th November 2009, 10:40 AM

...
So I'm out two window-cranks (which cost a couple dollars each) and I've gotta replace the steel wool cause it's soft and rusty- small price to pay for a healthy mindset. I'd never have thought to try and "re-create" such an event were it not for this forum and podcasts, like Skeptic's Guide and Skeptoid.

The upside is you now have two new cranks, and didn't have to add to the landfill!

I lost a very important spring from a very expensive device while disassembling it once. Sproinnnnnggg! Ok, this was very serious. No way to replace it, and the device will never work again without it. I looked everywhere. Long story short, I found it in my shirt pocket the next day.

Bob from NJ

12th November 2009, 10:59 AM

[QUOTE=Baby Nemesis;5300610]:shocked:

I found some interesting articles in Google today about things some people think must be supernatural or extraterrestrial but which have natural explanations. They mostly don't relate directly to what you say you experienced, but most of them give natural explanations for things that could really scare people and make them think supernatural things were happening to them, so they might interest you and be useful for you to let others know about:

QUOTE]

(the Quote didn't work right for some reason, sorry)

Hoo Boy... if the 'Persinger Helmet' is for real, this could really screw up the world. Think of the possibilities for mis-use; recruiting fanatical followers, recruiting terrorists, convincing someone to worship you, converting people to a religion.... This is potentially awful, unless I manage to write a Sci-Fi best seller out of the idea...

It calls into question the transcendent experience, even the 'tune in and drop out' LSD experience...

Blackwell

12th November 2009, 11:27 AM

It's a rare day when this forum applauds new cranks! :)

Welcome to the forum, Bob, and congrats to your new-found dedication to critical thinking.

bookitty

12th November 2009, 11:47 AM

Bob, I am a little jealous. Your experiment sounds like fun. Was there perhaps a small, reserved victory dance?

I did a similar thing to test my own confirmation bias. As a bookdealer, I have thousands of books in my house. It seemed that I only needed to touch a book or even read the title for it to sell. So I started a loose count of the number of books I touched, noticed or otherwise became aware of in a day. It was roughly 200. The number of books that would be magically sold? About one a week. So it was about one in a 1500. Darn good odds. Not magical at all.

Which also explained why purposely touching the expensive ones didn't lead to instant wealth.

Baby Nemesis

12th November 2009, 11:51 AM

Hoo Boy... if the 'Persinger Helmet' is for real, this could really screw up the world. Think of the possibilities for mis-use; recruiting fanatical followers, recruiting terrorists, convincing someone to worship you, converting people to a religion.... This is potentially awful, unless I manage to write a Sci-Fi best seller out of the idea...

It calls into question the transcendent experience, even the 'tune in and drop out' LSD experience...

Does it? Blimey! I had a feeling I should have known better than to butt into this thread! :big:

Surely with brainwashing you have to actually not know it's happening for it to work?

Na, all it's basically trying to show is that feelings and hallucinations can be stimulated by things misfiring in the brain, rather than outside things that might sometimes be attributed to supernatural forces. It's supposed to reassure people who were scared of what had happened to them. There are far cheaper ways of brainwashing people into religions and terrorist organisations than trying to get hold of one of these things and persuading someone to put it on so they can direct electro-magnetic fields into their brains. Psychologists have known the brain can generate feelings and hallucinations for years. In fact, 100 years ago, doctors would give some people frontal lobotomies if they thought they were agressive and there was something psychologically wrong with them, and it would stop them being aggressive - just cutting a chunk of their brain out. It would also stop them experiencing much of anything else, but the problem was fixed from some people's point of view anyway. Then they realised it was a bit of a cruel thing to do and stopped doing it. But still, they've known feelings and behaviour can be changed by manipulating bits of the brain for ages.

That stuff in the article about false memories is far more likely to be of interest to anyone wanting to brainwash others. But that's why it's important to spread information about the ways in which false memories can be generated so people know to avoid falling for that kind of thing. Here's an article about them, for example. (http://www.skepdic.com/falsememory.html) Knowledge is power. The more people who know about the dangers, the less people who are likely to fall prey to them.

There's another interesting article about how people can think they're experiencing the presence of God when they're meditating, when they're really experiencing a reduction of activity in parts of their brains. (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro01/web3/Farrenkopf.html) But that doesn't necessarily mean God doesn't exist and couldn't generate feelings. It just means what's happening is perfectly natural a lot of the time.

The last article I linked to before explained more about how people can sense presences that aren't really there, when parts of their brain temporarily go out of sinch with each other. That kind of stuff could reassure people who think they've sensed evil presences.

Olowkow

12th November 2009, 04:11 PM

It's a rare day when this forum applauds new cranks! :)

....

True, but the old ones had a screw loose.:)

Bob from NJ

13th November 2009, 09:49 PM

True, but the old ones had a screw loose.:)

It did have a screw loose, literally- I found the errant screw on the floor this morning! :D

Skeptic Ginger

13th November 2009, 10:21 PM

kritter

15th November 2009, 08:22 AM

What ever you believe about the subject matter, the movie was brilliant and well done!

I Ratant

15th November 2009, 09:10 AM

Soapy Sam

16th November 2009, 09:40 AM

Excellent job on the crank Bob!
(Also pretty funny. I recall doing the same myself with a small screw, only to lose two more in the attempt. The original turned up in the washing machine filter- must have hung on my shirt somewhere.)

Of course you don't need to do this sort of thing every time something vanishes. Once your default mindset shifts from "Spooky" to "Bloody annoying" you will just let stuff like this go. (And then step on the missing object in the dark , in your bare feet.
This is not personal haunting, it's just Sod's Law of Universal Bloodymindedness.):D

Soapy Sam

16th November 2009, 09:47 AM

Bob, if stuff "launched itself" at you, why is it we only see that crap in the movies? If such activities actually occurred, why is it only by individuals telling us so that we hear of such things? I'm not buying that one at all, sorry. For the number of people who claim poltergeist activity (Sylvia Brown comes to mind) there should be no trouble whatsoever documenting that stuff. And yet.... you either see faked garbage or you see it in the movies. It's bull! sorry, but that is a fact.

And you misplace stuff but don't believe it. Not very remarkable.

I don't see much in your account except an over active imagination and a bit too much movie going.

Of course you don't. You can't. You are entirely immunised against the sort of irrational fear that such honestly trivial events can pile up in a mind once that mind starts interpreting them as malevolent, targeted events, instead of just stuff that happens.
That's Bob's point. He's trying to acquire the level of immunisation you already have. And he's getting there with alacrity and humour.
The advantage he will then have over youself and over many of us is that he will remember how it felt to be scared of such stuff- and he will be tolerant of the irrational fears of others. People like that are the best advocates of rationalism- because they've had the disease it cures.

LarianLeQuella

16th November 2009, 02:04 PM

If anyone wants to know how horrible the human brain is at actually noticing detail, check this out: http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/observation-test/

Pure Argent

16th November 2009, 02:59 PM

That has got to be one of the coolest videos I have ever seen in my life.

Olowkow

16th November 2009, 07:01 PM

This one is pretty good too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voAntzB7EwE

shandyjan

16th November 2009, 08:29 PM

How can you face being embarrassed by believing something for so long?
I'd say better than believing something wrongly your whole life and not having time to be embarrassed :)

Bob from NJ

22nd November 2009, 12:02 AM

All week, the Hispanic name "Oachoa" has been zipping my around headbone.
This morning, in the LA Times, is an obituary for a soldier of the that name, who stepped on a mine during the week.
This coincidence thing occurs a lot, but there's no way to finger out what any of them mean at the time.

Another such coincidence; the other day I kept seeing oval "OBX" stickers on cars (kept seeing them=saw 2 of them) Never noticed one before, don't know what it stands for.

Later while waiting at a red light, the car next to me started to go when the OTHER direction's light turned green. I honked my horn; whether because of my horn or not, he stopped just in time to not get creamed. He had the day's 3rd "OBX" sticker on his car....

So these were 'warnings' that some stranger with a sticker was gonna crash? Nope. But that's a way to interpret a coincidence, and selective awareness of something.

What's the correct term for this, for noticing patterns that aren't there? Is it Synchronicity?

Baby Nemesis

22nd November 2009, 12:12 PM

I heard a good fun dramatised skeptics' ghost story on the radio a few weeks ago. I think it was originally a film called The Ghost Train. It was about a little group of people who had to stay in a station waiting room overnight because one of them had pulled the communication cord after his hat flew out the window and they got to the next station too late to catch their connection which would have been the last one of the night. It was in the days of steam trains.

The station master urged them to go to a village a few miles away to find lodgings. But they didn't fancy the walk. He kept insisting, but then they offered to pay him to go away. Before he did though, he warned them they ought to go, saying that sometimes, a phantom train would come through the station in the middle of the night, and bad things had been known to happen to people who saw it.

He said that several years earlier, there had been a swing bridge over a river near the station, and it was often open to let boats through, but had to be closed by one of the station staff before a train came so it could get across. He said one evening, there was a late train that had been especially chartered by a group of people who'd had a party. Ten minutes before it came through the station, the station master was phoned and told, and he was going to shut the bridge, when he collapsed and died. The train came and plunged into the river and almost everyone died.

The station master said the train would still come through the station sometimes at night.

A thunder storm with heavy rain started so they decided to risk waiting there overnight even so.

Some of them got a bit scared. A few creepy-seeming things happened that scared them even more. They turned out to have natural explanations afterwards. The man who'd pulled the communication cord and got them stuck there was joking around and annoying everyone, who thought he was just a stupid buffoon.

The train did come. That worried them even more.

The man who'd been joking around said he suspected it was going to come back. Someone else said that hadn't been in the story, but the man asked him to help him move the points so when the train came back, it would go into the siding next to the station rather than straight on. They moved them.

The train did come back and was forced to stop. ...

Then, it turned out that it was a real train which was smuggling arms, and the man they'd thought was an idiot was actually a policeman in disguise, who'd deliberately pulled the communication cord of the train they'd been on so they'd have to stay in the station overnight so he could catch them red-handed. He got police back-up and the smugglers were arrested.

So it turned out that the myth of the ghost train had grown up around this arms-smuggling train that came through the station at night every so often, and the smugglers had taken advantage of the train wreck years earlier to create the myth so they could drive trains through the station in the middle of the night and no one would think someone had taken a real train and must be up to no good. And it turned out that the station master had been paid by them to try and get them to go away earlier by insisting they go and then frightening them with the ghost story.

It was an entertaining play.

Pure Argent

22nd November 2009, 12:52 PM

Seems pretty convoluted, but it could be cool. I can't find any information about it online, though. Do you know where I would find it? Can you listen online?

Ron_Tomkins

22nd November 2009, 01:23 PM

Saw "Paranormal Activity" and it bothered me, badly, because I'd experienced many of those same things years ago (everything up till the 'ouija board' scene was on a par with my experiences)

Please help me here, I want to be a rational critical thinker. I don't want to believe in demons and malevolent spirits haunting the world, but what did I really experience? Did I simply cloud my experiences through the veil of a sick belief system? Was I suffering a mental illness?

The experience (about a decade ago, over a period of years) was vile and demoralizing. This movie dredged up the fact that I still believe my experiences were real, that a malevolent spirit or force inhabited my house, and perhaps followed me (things stopped for about 3 years after I moved)
I've come a long way from my Fundamentalist Christian dogma, but I need help de-bunking things like this to my satisfaction. I'm willing to accept the possibility of a mental illness or just plain old superstitious stupidity on my part.

I'm asking for advice or insight on how to reason this thing through.

Well, if you really want to develop your critical thinking skills further, then this is the rationale you should be following: You said "I need help debunking this", but what is it that you're trying to debunk? You're trying to debunk something that happened a decade ago and from which you have nothing gathered, nothing that can be studied and analyzed, that would help us falsify. Therefore, you have, for practical purposes, nothing to debunk.

Until something new happens, and until you manage to gather something from it, preferentially more than just a video clip. Until you manage to find a way to reproduce the phenomena that you're trying to explain, so that it can be witnessed, experienced and studied by other people besides you, there is nothing to debunk. Because you can't debunk anecdotes. You can't debunk other people's beliefs or convictions. The only things you can debunk are phenomena which can be reproduced and tested.

So your best bet in further advancing your critical thinking skills is to develop a sense of detachment. Let go of it. If you have absolutely nothing but your anecdote from 10 years ago, then let go. Forget it. Learn to accept that some things you may never live (in fact you won't) to see their explanation. Some things may never be explained as long as the human race exists. Forget about what happened. It's in the past and there's nothing that can be done. Let go. ;)

Baby Nemesis

22nd November 2009, 01:23 PM

I don't know about just listening, but it seems it can be downloaded here (http://www.btmon.com/Video/Movies/The_Ghost_Train-1941_Arthur_Askey-_DVDrip.avi.torrent.html), though it would be the film version not the radio version, and that might not be so good, because they increased the clowning character's role for the sake of the film because he was famous, and some think it became excessive.

Pure Argent

22nd November 2009, 01:32 PM