Lies, hysteria and confusion, in that order.
No. It would be neat, but there is no evidence for it. I say this as someone who used to believe and made a website in ~2001 about haunted locations, our visits to some, etc.
As for what people see, it really depends. Pareidolia is a thing, so humans, I think, often see things not exactly as they are, especially if it’s something in the vision for a very brief amount of time.
Once you learn what all the weird sounds are that you hear at night other people’s ghost stories all start to make a lot more sense.
Every single personal story about ghosts I’ve heard can be explained with science.
I’m open to being wrong about it as I am with most things, but scientifically there doesn’t appear to be any water held up in that one.
its mainly prior suggestion, followed by the brain filling in gaps of unknowns with that suggestion.
I want to believe in ghosts, because of the broader implication that there is something beyond this life, but I have not seen any credible evidence of ghosts. As for people’s ghostly experiences, I think that the vast majority of it is obvious bullshit that people invent to make their lives seem more interesting than they really are.
I’ve been to lots of allegedly haunted places; graveyards, houses, prisons, asylums, castles, battlefields, etc, and never once saw or experienced anything ghostly or even ghost adjacent. Without fail, there has always been at least one believer who told me that I need to believe in ghosts in order to see them, which is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. They also seem to believe, for reasons that escape me, that ghosts speak and understand modern English, regardless of what era or region the ghosts are supposed to be from. I just can’t wrap my head around the logic that once you die, you magically know all languages, past and future.
If someone tells me they’ve seen a ghost, I’ll take them at their word. I won’t call them a liar, because maybe they did see something, and “ghost” is just the best explanation they have. But in order for me to believe it, I need more than eyewitness testimony, and in this digital age of easily accessible high quality special effects, a shaky low resolution out-of-focus 5 second video of “orbs” just won’t cut it.
I hate sounding like such a downer, because I know a lot of people truly believe in ghosts, but the paranormal community is just so full of hucksters and suckers that it’s exhausting to sift through all the blatantly fake crap in search of some truly compelling evidence.
