Poltergeists!

It was a long process, not just waking up one day to reject it. Occasionally I'd have an epiphany were I'd realize one aspect of this is just a load of rubbish, and eventually the house of cards came crashing down. Christianity only kept me for as long as it did out of habit and fear, but I couldn't abide the idea there was no 'magic' so I went looking for it.Eventually I came to the conclusion that the wonder and awe and majesty of reality as we know it, is more than enough magic for one person to experience. The experience is real, but the explanation is probably made up. Sam Harris, sceptic extraordinaire has a soft spot for Buddhism for some reason.

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Let me see . . . so presumably I could still go on "ghost hunts." My mindset in the past has always been excitement, and a desire to experience something. Then disappointment when it didn't happen.

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Well, see, there's your problem with easily fooling yourself right there. You had a desire to "experience" something, and not a desire to understand. You wanted to feel the thrill, the adrenaline rush more than you wanted to know what was really going on.This is certainly to be understood, since all humans like to have exciting things happen to us, but is a momentary thrill really worth being so credulous?

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I could still go as a skeptic though, is that what people here are saying? Change my mindset. Not expect anything unusual to happen, and do my best to find a normal explanation for anything that happens. If I really do experience something extraordinary, and get evidence for it, then it would be a pleasant surprise.

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Sure.

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But surely going on the ghost hunt in the first place involves some element of hopefulness, otherwise why go?

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Because you will probably still get the heebee jeebies, and that's really fun. I certainly have a wonderful emotionally exciting time when I go see a good thriller at the cinema, or when I go to an elaborate haunted house arounf Halloween time, but that doesn't mean that I think the events on screen or the people in the masks and makeup are real.

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Or, if I decide there's no good evidence that ghosts or poltergeists exist, I might just lose interest altogether because that evidence is so hard to get. I'm not sure if I want to dismiss that source of fascination from my life. It's hard, but I keep thinking and I'm open to what is being said here.

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Again, I will ask you to consider why it is that you would want to maintain a false belief. What do you gain? Are you willing to believe something untrue simply, it appears, because you like how it makes you feel?

I'm happy that I can go on my next ghost hunt with my skeptic hat on. I will definitely try to do that. However, you said: No one has proved my belief in the existence of poltergeists to be true. That does not by default make it false. It just means it hasn't been proved.My husband's sister was visiting yesterday and I asked her about her own experiences. She said that there was at least one occasion when all three occupants of the house were sat here in the living room when the milk bottle event happened again. I think that dismisses ideas here of a split personality, unless all three of them had that problem.She also says she was sitting in the dining room one day, looked up, and saw a glass sliding from one side of the kitchen counter to the other. She compared it to a bartender sliding a drink down the bar to a customer. Her thoughts at the time were simply, "Well that shouldn't be happening." She says she has no idea what caused it and does not make any assumptions. It could have been some kind of kinetic energy, or a tilted surface. She honestly doesn't know. I have been using that same kitchen counter for 13 years and have never seen anything slide, or change its position, on it. It is flat.She's a professor of geology and is quite logical and skeptical in her thinking. I am convinced now that something interesting did happen. These are serious, straightforward accounts of events from people I know to be reliable and truthful. I have no doubt that most others here would say that any anecdote whatsoever can never count as evidence. I don't think I'm going to budge on that point; despite the dangers of believing false anecdotes, I think that sometimes truthful and reliable ones can be found, believed, and acted on (i.e. as the spur of an investigation).

Allow me to repeat, you once again have backwards the relationship of evidence versus the existence of phenomena. The reality of a phenomenon is not established by the absence of evidence against it, but by the presence of evidence for it.The human mind is capable of concocting all manner of imaginary phenomena, from dragons to elves to X-Men. These phenomena are not considered real until proven not real. Rather, their existence is considered unsupported by any evidence, up until actual evidence comes to light.And so it must also be with poltergeist.The problem with all these anecdotal stories is that as soon as you bring in the cameras and monitoring equipment, the phenomena go away. Ghosts and poltereist is another area dominated by flim-flam and quackery.--Percy

I'm not saying that the absence of proof is proof in itself.Are you saying that something is considered false until it is proved true? Wouldn't it be more open-minded, but still logical, to say that it is unproved and therefore we don't know? I've chosen to go a step beyond that and say that what I've been told by my family convinces me. It would have been handy if my sister-in-law had had a camera sitting next to her when the glass moved, and had the presence of mind to think of using it. Unfortunately, the events are now 30 years in the past.I completely agree with you that the human mind is capable of being fooled. And that people are capable of fooling each other. And I honestly appreciate the lessons in skepticism I've had here because I'm going to try to apply more of it to my life. However, I flat-out refuse to dismiss all anecdotes. Anecdotes can be valuable. Maybe I am stepping into a minefield once I decide that I am open to this kind of evidence, but that's a risk I'm willing to take in order to pursue the truth in my own way. It may not be scientific, but I don't believe that hardline skepticism is appropriate in each and every aspect of my life.

Sounds reasonable to me, based on this sketched-out reasoning: Given that true things are finite, but there's a potentially infinite number of false things, the odds are very high that a given proposition for which no evidence in support exists is false.As my good buddy said once, it's the easiest thing in the world to come up with wrong ideas. I don't think it settles the debate on anything, but it's a good maxim, and it supports those who come to the conclusion that things without any evidence that support them are, in all likelihood, false, especially if they're just the product of imagination. Imagination all by itself almost never gets anything right. No, you've chosen to go a step beyond that and say "it's unproved, therefore I believe it." If you think that there's any logic that supports that, I'd like to see it, I guess.

I didn't say you were, and the word proof (or any related words) doesn't appear anywhere in my post. In science nothing is proven true. Science is tentative. You're unfamiliarity with the language of science led you to fail to recognize that, except for your inclusion of yet another reference to the word proof, that's essentially what I said: Oh, okay, in that case I'm convinced. No one's asking you to dismiss all anecdotes. The criticisms concern reaching conclusions unjustified by the quality of the evidence, and when we were talking medical issues, it concerned reaching conclusions not only unjustified by the quality of the anecdotal evidence, but even contradicted by very high quality evidence.In other words, anecdote is poor quality evidence that shouldn't be considered sufficient for reaching reliable conclusions.Scientific methods are the best approach available by far for learning about the real world. Nothing else even comes close. You seem to be bouncing from thread to thread trying to find a case where anecdote trumps scientific method. Ain't gonna happen.--Percy

OK, that's clear. And you would prefer me to say "evidence" rather than "proof." I understand that too. Dismissing all anecdotes is what a lot of people here seem to do. They seem to want me to do it too. Well maybe I shouldn't say "all." We were talking earlier about being told the grass needs cutting because it's long, and believing it because it isn't far-fetched.By the way, in the other thread I found evidence from clinical studies in peer-reviewed journals, once I understood what people wanted. Then I was told that that didn't matter either because the bulk of evidence is against me anyway. You say that others were presenting very high quality evidence. I question your definition of high quality if that includes Quackwatch. I could honestly go and refute MBG's posts about vitamin C now but as I said, that thread was sapping huge amounts of time and energy for no good reason. I came here because this subject is a bit of fun. By no means do I think I'm going to convince anyone here that poltergeists exist, and I have no clinical studies to cite. Which actually begs the question of what I'm doing here as well . . . That's clear enough in my discussions here. You don't really know me. If someone you were very close to, told you that they'd experienced the poltergeist events that my husband has told me about, maybe you would be a little more willing to listen. Maybe not. I believe that my husband is telling the truth about the milk bottles, and my sister-in-law about the glass. Based on my relationship with them, I choose to believe what they are saying, and I cannot see how these events can be explained apart from attributing them to a poltergeist.I'm wondering, do other people who are not hardline skeptics, like creationists, get followed from thread to thread and told these things over and over as well? It's extraordinary. A consensus or truce must be reached at some point or you would have no long-term creationist members here, yes?

Interesting choice of words. You "choose" to believe but you "cannot" see. I suspect that you "choose" not to see. That's kinda like asking, "Do firefighters go around putting out fires everywhere?"Pretty much, yeah. If nobody puts out the fires, some poor innocent bystander (a.k.a. "lurker") might get burned.

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“Faith moves mountains, but only knowledge moves them to the right place” -- Joseph Goebbels
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I have a very close uncle who dowses. You know, finds water with the sticks. (He uses fruit woods that he keeps soaked in water, in a barrel.)Apparently he's good at it. He gets paid a great deal of money to locate water on people's property, and it's not like he does this in Minnesota, where the water table is usually pretty close to the surface; he does this in the mountains of New Mexico, which are fairly arid.He has quite the local reputation for success. I don't for a second believe that he's actually dowsing, although I know he believes that he is; he's clearly using geologic cues, instinctively, to find the places where subsurface water is most likely to flow in the mountains.Water dowsing never holds up under investigation. They never, ever find the buried caches of water, even though they claim they can. They're never any better at finding natural groundwater than the geologists who are simply finding clues in the ley of the land. Wet sticks has nothing to do with it, but I don't call him a liar to his face, of course. Because he's not lying. He's just wrong. Objectively, that's the obvious explanation. The fact that he's my uncle, and a great guy, isn't a reason to ignore the ample evidence that shows that dowsing isn't any better at finding water than the scientific methods. (I think the fact that he charges a lot less than a PhD geologist explains some of his successful reputation. When the expensive guy is wrong, you swear he's a charlatan. When the cheap guy gets it wrong, you're just like "oh, well, no biggie; must have been a disturbance in the Force or something.)

OK.Let's assume that, under laboratory conditions, I detect a poltergeist.I write it up.I get it published in a reputable journal.Have I refuted the 1000s of times that, under laboratory conditions, poltergeists have not been found?No.Vitamin C. Poltergeists. Doesn't matter.One example -- hell, 10 examples -- doesn't "refute" the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.That's what's known as a scientific consensus.Edited by molbiogirl, : No reason given.Edited by molbiogirl, : sp

I'm sure you've heard it said at least a few times now that science is tentative, and we don't keep saying this just because we like to say the word "tentative." Tentativity is a key quality of science. It's why nothing can ever be proven in science, because any theory can always be modified or even overturned in light of new evidence or improved insights.So the key point here is that "evidence" and "proof" are not synonyms. One will often hear it said, "There's no proof of that," but in science this will always be true, since nothing is ever proven beyond question in science.Substituting "evidence" for "proof" results in a sentence that has a much different meaning: "There's no evidence of that." Quite a big difference, and often not true.Let's say you were presented with this puzzle. There are two houses. One has real poltergeist, the other has been set up to make it appear as if it has real poltergeist. Your task: identify which house has the real poltergeist. Would you:

1. Ask everyone who has ever been in the houses what they saw.
2. Conduct a scientific investigation by gathering evidence using the latest scientific equipment, including 24 hour cameras (probably the only scientific equipment you actually need).

Here are a couple relevant but very fun TV shows worth watching:

• Penn and Teller's Bullshit! (Showtime Network)
• Mythbusters

Both these shows take a very entertaining approach to debunking popular myths, folktales, common wisdom, etc. Mythbusters is especially good because you get to see the level of effort and detail required for a really good debunking job. Your paragraph includes the implicit assumption that creationists suffer from the same fallacies as yourself, and this is very true.I said once before that I don't think the term skeptic is really an accurate label for people who understand the best methods for figuring out how the world really works and for determining what is real and what is not. I'm sure there are those in every generation who regret the mysteries lost to scientific explanations, but this process will never end because the history of progress reveals not a single thing ever established with reliable evidence as supernatural, while the opposite of the supernatural being revealed as mundane has happened millions and millions of times.You might want to check out some books by Joe Nickell, a famous paranormal investigator who has debunked many ghost tales. When you understand the many ways in which people can be fooled then you might find it easier to accept that the people who tell you stories about poltergeist are mistaken, as much as they might sincerely believe in their own stories.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Missing verb in 1st para.

Memory is a funny thing, too, Percy.When I was 11 and my brother 9, we had a dog. Charlotte.A couple of years ago, my brother and I got into an argument.He insisted Charlotte was a dalmatian.I pointed out that Charlotte was indeed black and white, but she was a setter.My brother was quite vehement ... no, she was a dalmatian.Recently, I got my stuff out of storage and found a picture of Charlotte. Setter.I e mailed the picture to my brother.He couldn't believe it. Absolutely couldn't believe it.Memory (and, therefore, some anecdotal "evidence") is notoriously faulty, Lindalou.

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and I cannot see how these events can be explained apart from attributing them to a poltergeist.

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Maybe it was psychokinesis, and your relatives, or maybe someone in another country who can also do remote viewing, moved the glass by mind power alone?Or maybe it was fairies, or elves, or gnomes, or angels, or demons, or god, or the Devil, or a secret agent from the government wearing an invisibility suit, or someone from the magical world playing tricks on Muggles.See, there are a whole bunch of explanations that I thought of that just as valid as your poltergeist explanation.

Sheesh, I'm beginning to think that this forum really isn't the place for me. I admired all the scientific knowledge when I came here and was glad to find a place with so much info that I could pass on to any creationists I spoke to. But until I started posting myself, I wasn't aware that it seems to go hand-in-hand with such hardline skepticism. Maybe I should have expected that, it is logical. It's not very pleasant to be ridiculed wherever I talk here though and I'm not enjoying it anymore.