I love ghost stories. I plan on ghost hunting with a friend of mine after I get out of the states, there's a few good places in Ohio and even if you never see anything, there's something awesome about purposefully going to a place that's haunted and looking for this stuff.

I'd love to get that cabinet.

Such nonsense. In fact I just got back from picking up the ms. pacman cabinet and it's totally normal. OMG! NO!!! Help!!!!........

I hate being home alone at night, it's creepy. :-(

...get out of the army and back to the states*.

GHOST STOLE MY WORDS.

I've heard too many stories, and experienced too much weirdness on my own to not believe in ghosts.

I don't expect anyone to believe my story, but apparently my sister was possessed for a short while. It's a long long story but I witnessed dozens of weird occurrences with her. 10 times out of 10 when someone tells me a ghost story even I don't believe it, and I don't expect people to believe me. I tell the story, but don't try to convince anyone of it's veracity. The only saving "grace" is the fact that most of my friends also witnessed a couple of episodes themselves (she was dating one of my buddies) therefore they end up vouching for the story.

This was like 15 years ago. We don't even talk about it anymore.

the one thing i find wierd and spooky about ghosts is that so many people are convinced they exist... they're like the embodiment of our insecurity - when all is quiet and there's very little going on to notice, why is it our minds trick us into thinking there's some malevolent force taunting us, cursing us and causing general mischief...
that's what is creepy about ghosts, so few people can be really at peace given the chance.

I don't believe in ghosts.
Simply put, there's no scientific proof of it. It's all hear-say and the rumor mill.

If I ever hear a story of somebody actually accurately, and consistently being able to detect spirits, and in a way that is quantifiable measurable, then I'll believe it.

Part of my problem is that all ghosts also fall into stereotypes of ghosts. If you hear a ghost story, ten bucks says it'll be a woman. Another ten says it'll be either a very young or very young woman. I'll lose a couple of those bets, but I'll still come out ahead at least 4:1.

My wife believes in ghosts; I don't. I do enjoy a good ghost story, though, especially since I can then use them to scare the poopies out of her. Thanks, I now have a few good ones from here!

I hope there's such a thing as ghosts. They would be the only conclusive evidence I can think of that an afterlife or something of the sort exists. / Agnosticism

I've always been open to the thought of ghosts, but I never have seen anything firsthand. And thus, I just say meh.

I'd have no problem staying in a "haunted house" (and actually, I'd hope I would see something irrefutable)

I dont belive in ghosts, and any ghost story i hear has a racional explanation, why i dont belive any ghost story?, the area where i live was the battlefield of one of the most blodiest battles in mexican independence war, more than 7500 people died in one day, and ive been living here 23 years and i havent here any extrange sound or any other stuff...

@Kirbytheslayer: In-Kirby XMB: true, but there's some psychological basis to 'belief' in ghosts, and the experiences people have when they think they're seeing/hearing/feeling ghosts.
i think that the sheer amount of charlatans out there who are quite happy to claim some supernatural power/connection and profit from that causes confusion - giving people something to latch onto.

@Revenge_of_Nekojin:
remember, DO NOT CROSS THE STREAMS

I'm with you Kirbytheslayer. I don't need scientific proof though, just a real life experience, which I personally got, over two weeks, at home with my sister. It would take me one hour to tell you everything I experienced, and saw. And at the end of it, if you said, I still don't believe in ghosts, I wouldn't even disagree with you, because I'm the same way. As a matter of fact, I'm still skeptical about other ghost stories I hear, even more so now, because they don't have the detail I do.

At the end of the day, if you don't experience it, it's just too damn hard to believe. Just a funny factoid, the Whaley House in our hometown is the first house in the US to be deemed "haunted" and #1 haunted house according to Travel Channel. Funny stuff.

think that is kreepy?

[www.thesun.co.uk]

watch the video, it looks like a grunt

My aunt is convinced my (deceased) grandfather attends family events in the form of a cardinal.

There's no such thing as ghost.

Now demons, on the other hand ....

You wrote for the Star Telegram Brian? I live in Dallas myself and have visited all the supposed haunts. I've also made roadtrips to several nationally noted places such as the Bartonsville Asylum near Peoria. I've never seen anything either, although that never took the fun out of it.

Like most of the rest of the guys on here I'm a very skeptical person who needs to see it to believe it. But I also figure that if I'm not looking, I'll never get the chance to see anything.

@EnragedTemplar: A blowgun with curare poison and you dont have anything to worry, or even better a shotgun and bye bye gnome...

There's a great (ok, an OK) book by Mary Roach titled "Spook" that delves into ghosts and spirits and such. It was a follow-up on the much better (ok, slightly better) "Stiff" which tackled death, dying and the after-life. Pretty interesting reading if you're keen on such subjects.

@Kirbytheslayer: In-Kirby XMB:

Appeal to Ignorance
Alias:

* Argument from Ignorance
* Argumentum ad Ignorantiam

Type: Informal Fallacy

There is no evidence for p.
Therefore, not p.

@EnragedTemplar: That was funny as hell!

me and some friends did some ghost hunting at an abandoned hospital in san francisco...the sounds we thought were ghosts ended up being the police creeping up on us to arrest us for trespassing. o_o

I personally don't belive in ghosts for pretty much the same reason as Kirby. I'd like to belive but I'd have to see it to belive it. Another hard to belive but intriguing thing we have here in Newfoundland is fairies but these aren't you're average Tinkerbell pansy ass fairies these fairies are manly bearded fairies badass gnomes more or less, apparently they steal children and turn them into fairies if you travel into the forest alone and break a bunch of rules: like dont wear green and dont join the fairy circle and other things like that and if you are captured but escape when you return you will still be the same age but years could have passed and other messed up things like that. Like I said hard to belive but intresting nonetheless.

My mother-in-law claims she can see ghosts. I think she's full of shit.

@jaeohen: Lol the abandoned hospital in SF, popular place apparently. Couple blood stains, some cans rolling around, nothing much tho. Try going to that lake in Golden Gate Park, with the statue of the woman with teh kids... spooky stuff at night O_O

All I can say is "respect the dead". Seriously.

Please stop posting ghost stories. It's having detrimental consequences- in particular, to me.

For example, I came very close to an emergency forced underwear change after my own Wellington boot was knocked over by my bedroom door as I opened it to walk in.

Now that my heart rate has paced itself once again, I can't stop asking myself this one question: Why is there a Wellington boot anywhere near my door anyway?

I'd like to throw my two cents in, if I may:

I never believed in ghosts either, until about ten years ago. I dated a girl who had graduated from Syracuse and moved back home with her family (Williams Twp, PA--look it up, it's known for it's creepyness) and she and her family swore up and down they had a ghost in the house. Over the next two years, I saw a man standing in the garage late at night, another night I woke up at 4am to find the man standing beside the bed looking at me, and one night after dinner while I was washing some dishes, I saw an arm reach around me and turn the faucet off. When I spun around, there was no one there. My favorite story, however, happened one Saturday morning. My GF was taking a shower upstairs and I was downstairs reading the paper when I heard her scream for me. I ran upstairs and opened the door and written on the fog in the mirror was the alphabet from A to Z, perfectly spaced so it fit from one end to the other. She said she saw a hand ruffling the shower curtain and thought it was me so she peeked her head out and saw the letters. Shortly after that we did some research on their property and discovered there was a schoolhouse there in the late 1800s/early 1900s.

True story.

@Tzero7: That's imported Scottish and Irish folklore; you know, the Europeans who settled there and became Newfies?

We have a local ghost, actually we have a lot of local weird stuff. Crop circles and the likes too.

This is probably the main legend of the area where I live.

[www.roadghosts.com]

Ghosts are probably fun to believe in because to believe in ghosts is to believe in the afterlife. I guess for many people the desire to believe they'll survive death and reunite with family is so great that they're willing to cast off critical thought and reasoning.

It's quite impossible to find anything haunted in my area.
Seems like the ghosts are too scared to get here.

@Kirbytheslayer: In-Kirby XMB

But do you believe in evolution? You sound like the factual type.

I'd seriously hope I'd have something better to do with my time once I've "passed on" than hang around you guys. No offense ;)

@B-Minus: but what makes me wonder about this is that people almost always see something 'spooky'... ie writing on the mirror, a hand on the window, the guy standing over you in bed, etc. there are far fewer 'hauntings' where the person actually witnesses a benign spirit who they knew while they were alive. why is it that unsettling, creepy things, things which show you clearly that even in your own home you're not safe, and that when you're truly vulnerable (in the shower / in bed) these things can happen...
why must it be so common to get haunting in deserted buildings? why in the dark? what does geography have to do with it?
it's scary that the human mind can invent such things... it's paranoia and refusal to accept reality.

Hmm, I wont go into details here but I used to not believe.

I do now. With absolute certainty.

I do believe there are some things that happen that can't easily be explain. So I won't go off and say if science can't prove it, it isn't real. Really does science know everything now whose to say that years from now science doesnt develop technologies that can sense things we interpret as ghost be them that or not. Whose to say there are not places that certain energies that are visible even if to a few people under ideal circumstances or even if it is a product of imagination stimulated by outside elements(more than just being spooky).

Not to say I will blindly believe every story but I will not just write off the unexplained as not real. Im sure there are millions of false cases that are imaginations running wild due to one too many ghost story etc.

im not into ghosts really, Ive never bumped in to one, I guess you could say. Though I wish to make a point. Why is it that when everyone talks of a ghost, its always about someone old and evil dying. Why can't it be a "hot looking" dirty,evil ghost.

@NINJADEATH: believe... in evolution? ok, now i know it's rather a pedantic standpoint but i'm a little worried about the american education system. (i apologise if you're not american, but you've somehow managed to pick up on one of their major issues). effectively there is some sort of problem with teaching evolution as fact, instead it's referred to as theory... the question is, if something is quite clearly there, do you really need to question it's truth?
if i stand in front of a tree and it's obviously there i don't need to 'theorise' that there's a tree... there IS a tree.
basically evolution is as true as the sky is blue, as water is wet, or as the sun shines... it's truth.
maybe you just chose those words because they were convenient, but i have to say this kind of stuff when i think there might be some doubt.

i used to shy away from theological debate, but frankly i'm getting sick and tired of people blindly dismissing the truth just because they want to.

My only experience is a very personal one. My father passed away when I was very young...around four years old. Several years later (fourth, maybe fifth grade) I woke up and needed to use the bathroom. I didn't bother turning on any lights, but I glanced up as I passed the bathroom sink and there, clear as day, was my father standing behind me.

Scared the crap out of me, so I screamed. The image in the mirror immediately vanished and the room was filled with what I can best describe as an emotional vapor...it wasn't visible either but it was clearly palpable, an almost physical message of sorrow that he had frightened me. I immediately started crying and wishing that he would come back, that it was okay, but it never happened again.

@Islandkiwi: just wondering, what do you think is the most likely explanation:
1) your father's ghost came down once, ever, and chose to stand behind you as you pee.
2) it was a trick of your mind.

when i say trick of the mind i do not mean the imagination. the imagination is active, you initiate it, to me it appears ghosts are more like dreams.

and the 'man standing over the bed' one is very common... and it's due to the brain having not (layman speak) switched off the 'dream' quite.

Also, my aunts did a séance-type thing. The medium asked if my grandfather was involved in sports, and my aunts were confused and said no. The medium was also confused, because she said she saw him making a time-out gesture. One of my aunts made a T shape with just her index fingers and asked if that might have been it. When my grandfather was outside doing yard work, he'd knock on the window to get my grandmother's attention, then make a T shape with his index fingers to tell her to make him a cup of tea.

I love ghost stories, but that's all they are... stories. Ghosts, like faith healing and such are only in the head.

@comedy:
I might agree that it was a trick of the mind, but for the sense of emotion that followed it. It was like a mist, but completely made up of a very strong emotion.

It's okay not to believe, it doesn't offend me if others are cynical about the whole ghost thing, but this was a very real experience for me.

@yashichi8bit: You can't just tease something like that without sharing your ghost story. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to hear more.

Ghosts, regardless of if you believe in them, are a pretty fascinating topic. I've been really into them since I was a little kid, though I haven't personally ever seen one. I worked as a DJ at a radio station during the weekend night shift throughout high school and I swear the station must have been haunted in some way. Things would go missing all of the time and there were always really strong scents in the air (like perfume, etc.) when nobody else was in the station with me. Creepy, yes.

I did a feature for my newspaper this past Halloween about ghosts and various haunted areas in the Cincinnati region, as well. I was all set to go on a ghost hunt with a group of supposed "hunters," when the person asking for the investigation pulled out at the last minute. My girlfriend was of course delighted that I was not going to be bringing any sort of energies home with me, but I'm still kind of sad I missed out on that opportunity. Maybe next year!

Well i can´t blame ppl for not believing, it is something that you can´t really explain to someone else, you need to experience it.
Believe me i am very down to earth kind of person, i always look for a logical explanation for everything and most "ghost" stuff you hear is absolute bs too.

Sometimes in life you witness things that make you doubt, you try to resist and deny everything with a supposed logical explanation, but its just not possible.

I have witnessed too much to remain in complete denial, i do believe there is something more, i just can´t really give a form, shape or a logical explanation.

Its not about ghosts and haunted houses, its something else, its the kind of feeling you get when you start thinking about how the universe was formed. How did the first atom appear, how did the first particle of matter appear, is it just a fact that it exists, period? weird :p

Oh, i hate all religions btw, i think they are the root of all evil and they can bring out the worst in all mankind, blindly following a book (they all have a book) that some dude wrote years ago is idiotic at best.
Imagine that the Lord of the Rings was writen 3000 years ago, we wold probably have some kind of religion believing we fought orcs and dragons, that elves lived in the forests and could do magic...

I wouldn't believe in ghosts even if I saw one... But still when I'm home alone, at night and in that killing silence, I start believing in them right away! XD Let's say I go "the Crecente Way" about ghosts...

I believe and am terrified of ghosts. I would never go "ghost hunting," don't even play survival-horror games. I guess I'm just a total bitch with relation to anything remotely frightening, real of not.

As an aside, for people interested in the paranormal and unexplained phenomenon I would recommend "Travels" by Michael Crichton...yes, "Jurassic Park" guy.

He wrote a pretty honest book about his life. The stories are about his experiences traveling the world, but the second half begins delving into the spiritual side of things. It's interesting to read about his cynical side trying to relate to unexplainable phenomena.

@Kirbytheslayer: In-Kirby XMB: Guess there is no God then. No scientific proof.

while most people won't say they believe in a spiritual aspect of reality, i think most people do

...the main reason people refuse to believe in anything other than what they can see and touch and read in their high school textbooks is simply because it's uncomfortable...

if human beings truly DO have a spiritual aspect to their being, surely it could not be something we simply evolved...does that mean a God must exist?
regardless of what you do with the concept of the soul, it still implies that we're NOT in control and that doesn't sit well with most people

why do people enjoy the idea of "God is dead"? because that means our self-important arrogance can go uncontested.

Watch "Paranormal State" on the A&E Channel. They have captured some crazy sounds and footage.

Hey Crecente, have you heard of the show Supernatural? If not, I think you'd love it. It has to do with all of these myths and ghost stories and it's not one of those looking for real ghosts and stuff type of thing but a show with an overall plot that's fake and everything. Either way, it's really cool and from what you said, it sounds like you'd love it. Check it out sometime if you have the time.

I want to believe!

That Pac Man story was freaky, but I still don't think there's any story as creepy as that Haunted Dibbik Box that was sold on eBay.
[www.dibbukbox.com]

Every fourth 360 is possessed by the devil, hence the red lights...but don't worry, Microsoft is coming up with blessed firmware to fix the problem...

one time during a supernatural/religion debate my aunt told me she knew ghosts had to exist because one time a ghost came and touched her face and spoke to her while she was in bed.

she's never said anything batshit crazy like that prior to, so it truly did creep me out a little.