its mainly prior suggestion, followed by the brain filling in gaps of unknowns with that suggestion.

So we’re all just energy right? Like, literally.

And do y’all remember those clay pots that recorded voices from hundreds of years ago accidentally while the potter was making some grooves? The ones where scientists could play the clay pots like a record?

I think ghosts might be energy recordings in a place. They’re not thinking or feeling. They don’t have agency. It’s just energy recordings left behind.

I dunno, just a thought I’ve been noodling for a while.

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.

Religion-fuelled psychosis in already mentally unstable religious people.

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.

No, they don’t exist. Brains are freaking weird and make up shit almost as often as LLMs do.

I was looking for a clip from an audio book I listened to a long time ago but search engines suck these days so I’ll try to explain it from memory.

Imagine two of our ancestors in the jungle. They hear a rustling in the bushes or see some movement in the trees. One ancestor’s brain recognizes the shape of a leopard and flees. The other ancestor assumes it’s just the wind or a trick of the light.

If the first ancestor was right, the second ancestor may have been attacked by the predator and not survived that moment. If the second ancestor was right, barring extreme circumstances, both are likely to have survived that moment. Type 1 errors (false positives, the sign of predator is perceived when one isn’t there) are less detrimental to survival than type 2 errors (false negatives, the sign of a predator is not recognized when one is there).

Humans are extremely accomplished pattern recognition machines. As a creature that evolved and had to survive in dangerous environments, it has been a benefit to error on the side of false positives when perceiving threats and making split second, life or death decisions.

pareidolia

This has also led us to presume agency, that we perceive a being like a predator or another person, as that would again be beneficial to presume incorrectly than incorrectly not perceive.

Many paranormal experiences are perceived as dangers or at least trigger a similar fear response. We’re recognizing patterns that may or may not be there and, as we have evolved to be better safe than sorry, we attribute that recognition to mean there is something, likely a being of some sort, causing that pattern.

This even extends to the random occurrences of everyday life. Coincidences become good luck or act of a benevolent or malevolent spirit or God. Someone keeps having bad things happen to them? Someone must have curses them. Someone is in a hurry, needs to stop by the shop to get a gift or something, and just as they drive by a car leaves a parking spot right at the front of the store - God be praised, he’s looking to for me today!

If ghosts were real, they would already have been studied and commodified in some way.

Lies, hysteria and confusion, in that order.

I’ve experienced multiple paranormal events in my life that I, or my family, were never able to explain. However I don’t think they were “ghosts” in a sense that they are spirits of the dead walking around my house. My best guess is that paranormal activity is just a phenomenon that occurs when thin spots in the space/time fabric show up and cause multiple realties to exist in the same spot simultaneously. So what you are seeing is other people, or even yourself, in another reality or time. Then similar to a bad TV signal you sometimes get a crystal clear picture with sound, and other times it’s all broken up and you have to interpret it through the static.

How do these things spots show up? No clue. But in a universe where black holes, and other similar things, are possible it is a lot more believable to me than ghosts or demons being the culprit.

No, there’s lots of reason people can experience things that aren’t there. It’s extremely common in fact. Full hallucinations aren’t even a sign of mental illness on their own, many people experience them. And then there’s stuff like mind altering substances, random events that your mind associates with a non-existent pattern (like the constellations), and other phenomena. None of which requires anything supernatural to be happening.

But I get it. Ghosts are kinda fun. Sometimes I like to pretend.

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.

Thinking about it, I think I’ve got two different kinds or tiers of ‘belief’. There’s science and realism and shit in the main, serious tier. Core beliefs, I guess. Then there’s the magical, fun tier. I like a little magic and see no harm in it (as long as that magic doesn’t have anything to do with in and out crowds and finger pointing and judgement). This tier is for ghosts and the metaphysical and tarot and old gods etc. Stuff that I don’t necessarily believe believe but find enriching anyway. I haven’t nurtured this tier for a long time myself though.

That said. I’ve definitely had one or two weird experiences in life, although also more when I was younger and more open to it. So I’m not going to rule it out. But I’m also just as open to there always being some ‘real’ explanation.

I know somebody who used to assist an exorcist for the Catholic Church. This person is very close to me. They have told me stories that are undeniably supernatural.

I also had a coworker, a very honest and good man. He and his wife witnessed a hairbrush fly across their room and hit a wall after she voiced that she thought their home was haunted. That hairbrush is why they sold that house.

Both sources described incidents with multiple witnesses that defied physical explanations. I trust both sources.

From what I can tell, the location matters. Certain elements and rituals can trigger responses. Other than that, I don’t know anything.

Ghosts are just the result of Chuck Norris killing people faster than the universe can process it.