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I am a 30-year old man. I have two degrees. I have been a practicing attorney for the past four years and passed the Bar Exam in multiple jurisdictions. At no point have I ever been institutionalized, required psychiatric supervision, or been deemed to have a serious mental condition. I believe in global warming, evolution, gravity, and that dinosaur bones were not placed underground as part of a conspiracy by the Chinese. And I believe ghosts are real.
I also believe in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, psychics, demons, and a bunch of other supernatural stuff that most people would consider to be kooky. And, before I get into the experience that caused me to have these beliefs, I want to acknowledge that there is no logical reason to have these beliefs. Outside of anecdotal evidence–not just mine but so many others who have claimed to have similar experiences–there is no sound evidence to support the existence of spirits, ghouls, or monsters. Many of the famous paranormal cases, from Amityville to LaLaurie Mansion to the Winchester Mystery House, have had some rational explanation attributed to the activity reported there. You don’t have to come running to me waving stacks of papers written by smarter people than I disproving all the claimed paranormal activity at famous haunted houses. I acknowledge that the evidence debunking paranormal experiences is quite extensive and sound. But I still believe in ghosts.
In my third and fourth years in college, I lived with a couple of other guys in an old house off the main road. The neighborhood was a mix of old, run-down houses like this and newer condo/apartment complexes that got rented to students on the cheap. Our house was a shithole, but I paid $400 a month rent (god what I would kill to pay that little for rent now) and had a very spacious bedroom. But throughout my two years living in that house, I would periodically see A tall, dark figure in a wide-brimmed hat would stand at the foot of my bed. “He” would always stand there until I acknowledged “him” at which point he would glide towards the closed door and disappear into it. This would happen perhaps once a month at the most, though I did tend to sleep through the nights or come home drunk and immediately pass out, so I might have missed one or two other instances.
Yes, I know what sleep paralysis is. No, I have no photographic evidence, video recordings, or any other type of evidence to substantiate my experience. I’m not asking anyone to believe me, hell sometimes I still try to rationalize my experience. It was more than just what I saw in that room that convinced me, it was how I felt in that house.
Whenever I was alone, especially in my room, I would always have this sensation that I was not alone. Like that feeling you get when you suddenly turn around to find someone standing behind you or staring at you, even though they didn’t say anything. Just that abstract sense of a presence near you. That’s what I felt, almost every time I was alone in that house.
This is something that I only briefly discussed with my roommates, who did not corroborate my experiences but did acknowledge sometimes having the same creepy feeling. To my knowledge, there were no brutal or violent deaths in the house before we lived there. The only other aspect of my time there worth mentioning is that our house had a basement-level laundry room. It was really nothing more than a long, bricked-up hallway leading to a storage room at the end of the hall. My roommates and I jokingly called it the “body room” because if we were ever going to find a body, that was where it would be. The back wall was built on a weird angle, and freshly covered when we moved in.
If you think that’s a bit of a weak justification for this unwavering belief of mine, especially given that I’ve already acknowledged that there could be a perfectly logical explanation for everything I experienced, I understand. But that’s the thing: there could be a logical explanation, but that doesn’t mean there is.
After all, I’ve never had an MRI that confirmed that my brain was behaving consistently with sleep paralysis during these episodes. I never had any experiences like this either before or after living in that house. Sure, it’s possible that this was all a manifestation of my imagination that I had no control over, my brain tricking itself. Or, we can follow the principle of Occam’s Razor to the simplest explanation: that what I thought I saw was there and what I felt was real.
And don’t get me wrong, I don’t allow this experience or these beliefs to wildly influence how I live my life. I don’t walk around crying “ghost” every time something goes bump in the night, wear garlic to ward off vampires or have a stash of holy water just in case. I might read the occasional haunting book, watch Ghost Hunters International, or even see a lecture by a guy who claims to have met the aliens living in a secret vault under the White House (trust me, it was worth the price of admission). But it’s more of a curiosity and entertainment venture than some obsession.
We live in a big, wonderful, mysterious universe that we have barely explored. No one truly knows what exists on the other side of death, but there plenty of accounts from people who were clinically dead seeing loved ones or bright lights on death. Is that real, or is that how the human brain processes a person’s final moments? I don’t know, and anyone who says that they do know one way or the other is probably full of it.
A few hundred years ago, if you told people that their bodies were made up of tiny specks called “atoms” they would have thought you were crazy. A hundred years ago, if you told people that their body’s composition is determined by something called DNA they would have laughed at you. And twenty years ago if you’d have said that Pluto is not a planet, they would have rightfully called you an asshole. My point is, science’s capabilities to answer the big questions about the universe are limited. We know that the universe was created by the Big Bang, but science still cannot figure out what caused the Big Bang. That’s not to dismiss science or say to ignore the advice of the more educated, but instead to acknowledge that there are some things that science cannot tell us. At least not yet.
That’s why I don’t scoff at people who believe in God, interdimensional travel, aliens, and ghosts. It’s not just understandable to accept a crazy explanation when the logical isn’t satisfying, it’s downright logical. There are people that avoided near-death experiences and say they’ve seen the afterlife, I’ve seen a child who gave details about experiences from a past life, and seen psychics give accurate readings that were more than just cold reading techniques. Maybe those are all explainable too, but maybe those things are just unexplainable. I don’t know for sure, and I’m not so arrogant to assume that the logical explanation must be correct…or wrong for that matter.
I guess, when it all boils down to it, I feel like with experiences like mine and countless others, whichever side you take may not necessarily be wrong. We just don’t know. I don’t think it’s bad to be skeptical, to question, to require proof, and focus on the rational explanation. I respect that. But sometimes, I think it’s better to come down on the side of the coin that shows us that the world we live in has a bit more wonder, unpredictability, and mystery to it. Because living in a world where there is an afterlife, where there are unexplained occurrences caused by beings beyond our six senses of perception, where legends can be more than just stories around the campfire is more interesting to me. So yeah, I believe in ghosts, even though I think it’s perfectly logical and reasonable to not believe in them. I just think it’s a cooler–and spookier–world with them. .
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@joshetyler
@joshetyler
Spooky content SZN
Hey man I’m a grown-ass man who believes in aliens so I’m right there with ya.
What ISN’T the gov’t telling us is the real question
Believing in aliens is completely different than believing in ghosts. To think we are the only intelligent life in an expanding universe is ignorant.
There are more stars in the observable universe than grains of sands on earth, and even if half of those stars only have 1 planet, and half of those only have terrestrial planets, and half of those have the right conditions for life, that still leaves 100’s of billions of planets with the potential for life. Space is just too big and biological life lives far too short.
And what’s more is that is just the observable universe. For all we know the universe is infinite, in which case (and stay with me on this) that everything that is physically possible not only will happen but will happen an infinite number of times.
Ghosts are 1000% real. My best friends parents house is haunted. The ghost hates the youngest sister. One night they heard multiple loud crashes and every single photo of the youngest sister had fallen off the wall/desk and shattered on the ground. The rest of the photos didn’t move at all. The mom also said she saw the ghost of a little boy peeking around the corner while she was getting water in the middle of the night. ANNDDD I just got the chills.
Got a good story from my home town I will read on the pod.
Given since we are living in a simulation that there are relics or fragments of code that pass through to the UI every once in while. Makes even more sense why they would be linked to specific events, places, or people.
So, you’re Marshall from HIMYM.
I take that as a compliment, regardless if you meant it as such
I see dead people.
My apartment building used to be a moturary back in the 1950’s, found out by a neighbor and looked it up online to confirm…I’m counting down the months until my lease is up to GTFO. Ghost are real.
Not to get all religious zealot or anything, but I believe in God, and you can’t selectively believe The Bible so I feel like that proves paranormal/ghost activity. Angels, demons, things unseen, spiritual warfare, etc. So yeah. Ghosts. I’m on board.
“Ghossesses real!”
My grandma stayed around for a few months after she died, when the family spent that first Thanksgiving at her house after she passed she made her presence known. And my cousin has regular interactions with her dad who passed three years ago, he likes to flicker her lights and fiddle with her keys. Ghosts are definitely real and I’m a hard science person.