The Atlantic has an article on why people believe in ghosts. I haven't read it. I did read a short excerpt on the political site Hot Air, which included this tidbit:
It turns out that a significant amount of people report having personally experienced paranormal activity. In a study published in 2011, 28.5 percent of undergraduate students surveyed at a southern university reported having had a paranormal experience. In a 2006 Reader’s Digest poll, 20 percent of respondents (21 percent of women and 16 percent of men) reported that they had seen a ghost at some time in their lives.
After reading the excerpt, I looked through the comments on Hot Air. It's a conservative site with a somewhat cynical attitude, and I figured most of the comments would be scathingly skeptical. Some were. But other people were surprisingly open about their own experiences and opinions.
My Mom said she saw a see-through ghost moving its mouth in the corner of a bathroom a week after a women had been murdered in same bathroom.
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I don’t know about supernatural “ghosts,” but I do believe in concepts like a poltergeist, essentially a mysterious spirit-like entity capable of causing physical disturbances. Though I suppose that’s technically a “ghost.”
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Same based on personal experience. Two or three times a week, my son, my wife, or I hear furniture move in one room when no one is upstairs. I’ve even experienced it once when I was upstairs. It was a little surprising, but it wasn’t scary.
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I’ve never experienced anything paranormal but I’ve heard so many stories from tons of different people that I definitely think that ghosts could be real.
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One of my best friends who’s a paramedic told me a story of seeing a ghost on a call to a nursing home, with witnesses. With the details he gave me, he was either trying to pull my leg, or he undoubtedly saw a ghost, and I know him well enough to know he wasn’t joking around.
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I actually work at a nursing home which is where I’ve heard a lot of stories, some extremely bizarre and from people I know aren’t trying to BS me.
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So my wife and I were busy working and around 3:00 am she felt “an old man” watching her while she was sanding in a walk-in closet. My wife is NOT superstitious, is not prone to that kind of talk or thinking. She didn’t even think about it really … it was a small feeling and she blew it off.
The next morning she asked the landlord if the place was haunted. The landlord replied “why do you ask?” My wife related the story and the landlord told her how everyone who has lived in the place has actually SEEN an old man standing in the hallways in the middle of the night. He only appears from the waist up.
So fast-forward about a month and I am laying in bed and my wife is down the hall taking a bath. I have the lights off and I was reading my iPhone. It was pretty quiet and I was about to go to sleep when the light switch (the old protruding kind) literally flicked on right in front of me. At first I couldn’t believe what I had just seen. I thought my wife had walked down the hall and somehow flicked the light on.. which is impossible because the floors creak with every single step. But I called out to her “why did you turn on the lights?” She yelled back “what?”
Yeah … i was running out of there pretty quick.
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I believe in ghosts; if you take the time to separate fact from sensationalism, there are too many stories of unexplained phenomena (many from committed skeptics and rational-minded folks) to ignore.
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I don’t believe in ghosts as depicted in entertainment, and reality v shows.
However I did grow up in a house with a ghost/presence. Since my parents accepted him as the eccentric unseen uncle of the family, it was no big deal.
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My family moved in an old house and we came home after eating out one night a few days after moving in and heard somebody moving furniture around upstairs. Me and my dad ran up expecting a burglar and nothing was moved or bothered. We lived there a couple of years and it became a common thing as well as hearing somebody walking around and going up and down the stairs. We never saw anything but found out later from the person who owned the house that a lot of people had claimed to see things in there.
There is some pushback against the usual motley crew of know-it-all scoffers.
People who would tell me to discount the detailed story of my good friend, who is as levelheaded as anyone I’ve ever met, because they insist ghosts don’t/can’t exist really are fools who deserve to be mocked.
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It’s funny how so many around here always line up to deny something exists …
I have seen a ghost. They absolutely exist.
I saw a man walking around a warehouse (that all of us working there had heard about) at a job where I used to work overnights. That part was closed after 6pm. So, no one was ever over there in that part at night.
Two other people saw it with me. He was about 100 feet away from us, facing the other way as we had always been told. We never saw his face. He was supposedly a man that used to work there years ago and died there on the job one day.
It was awesome.
There are even some attempts to get a handle on the problem from a philsophical or scientific standpoint.
That depends on what a “ghost” is and since we have no idea what consciousness and “life” are, there are many options all of which are 100% conjecture.
For instance, a visible “ghost” might be the projection of one person’s thoughts into another’s mind, causing the second person to receive stimuli that cannot be distinguished from actual vision.
If those thoughts are passed from mind to mind, then perhaps it would be possible to “see” things that happened generations ago, perhaps with the scope and clarity of the thoughts reducing with each transmission.
In these scenarios the person apparently seen in ghostly form need not still be alive in any corporeal or spiritual sense — even assuming that the person ever actually lived.
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The term ‘ghost’ is far too broad a term to cover everything from low level audio of past events to moving hot/cold spots to interactive but limited duration/location intelligent response to the high end and rare fully interactive but still relatively limited geographically and temporally intelligent response or active intelligence presence. Each of these begs for separate categories and research as they may not be actual, related events or may sit on a continuum of events with hard break points either in physical geography or some ability of substrates to record physical phenomena …
Overall, I was impressed with the number of people who a) said they had experienced these phenomena firsthand, or b) had heard about such things from sources they trusted, or c) had looked into the evidence in a serious way. I was also impressed that these folks were not deterred by the inevitable ridicule, guffaws about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, accusations of gullibility and mental instability, and other standard "skeptical" responses.
The popular attitude on this subject does seem to be changing. There is less of a taboo about discussing it, and knee-jerk skeptical dismissals don't seem to have the impact they once had. Maybe this is why militant skeptics are getting a little desperate, as witness their dogged attempts to purge Wikipedia of any facts or opinions favorable to parapsychology.