Joe Shlabotnik
Banned
Mash said:Perhaps it was some trick by the people who ran the place or perhaps humans are wired similarly enough that the right environment will induce the same mental imagery in people. It would be more of a miracle that it was a dead person lingering around than for the event to have had a rational explanation so I don't personally believe it was a "ghost" in the sense most people mean by the term. It still fucked me up though.
I think most, if not all, experiences can be chalked up to conditioned expectance. If you had never heard of the notion of a ghost the likelihood that you'd interpret phenomena as dead people is very unlikely, but because we're brought up with the idea it seems more plausible for some reason. It's like these people going ghost hunting round derelict buildings and old spooky buildings; if you were to go "rat hunting" you'd interpret things falling off shelves and shit as rodents. Obviously not as cool but hey, I like to live relentlessly in the real world.
I tip my cap to you, good sir.
Though I 100% agree with Mash, here's my weird story--not necessarily "paranormal" but absolutely fucking bizarre.
When my brother was in college in the '80s he dubbed U2's Rattle And Hum onto cassette, and then filled the remainder of side two with random U2 songs. In the middle of listening to those extra songs after he was finished, the sound seemed to cut out almost entirely--in fact you could hear "Desire" from side one faintly bleeding through, backwards. And then, out of nowhere and LOUD, this man's voice starts mumbling and moaning, mostly indecipherable although at one point it does clearly whisper "I love the song Desiiiiiiire". Fuck it's giving me the creeps just remembering it. This goes on for minutes before stopping, and the side two mix comes back on.
I heard it myself many times, he brought it home from college. Eventually his shitty Sony player ate a chunk of it, although there was still some of the recording left after he tried to salvage it. Not sure if he still has it, I haven't heard it in many years. No rational explanation for it makes sense to me.