Seeing dead people?

[Dead Voodoo Doll]

Anyone have experience with anything like this? Stories to tell?

I was feeding my daughter dinner last night (she's two) and she turns her head to the wall and giggles then says "Hi PopPop, I see you." Clear as day, then she went back to mostly hard-to-understand sentences.

Now, that's what I called my grandfather, who died over 25 years ago. To my knowledge she's never seen a picture of him nor heard his name spoken. We live a long way away from my family and I can't think of anyone speaking his name or of him to her whenever we go out of town to visit family. I asked my wife what she heard and she said she heard it too.

[Twinblades713]

My little sister who is 4 now, fought through Cancer when she was 1-3. She claimed to see angels all the time, and would talk to them and they'd tel her stories before she went to sleep. She also used to talk to my dead great grandma whom I had never even met. She described her perfectly to my mother, who DID know and the apparel was exactly what she used to wear. She stopped seeing her angels when she finally beat Cancer and had been in remission for several months.

[The-Nameless]

My father has a video cassette of me as a child of maybe 2.5/3 and I was clearly carrying on a detailed conversation about how hard it is to get good help to run my motel. I also was mentioning how i had not seen Greta in a long time. I was far to young to be able to read a script, or memorize anything. It was not from movies because my father watfched Nova, Explorer, and Star Trek TNG. I still get creeps while watching it.

[kaboomer]

When I was little, my mom, sister, and I lived in a studio apartment. We all slept in the living room. My mom slept on the "big couch;" my sister slept on a smaller couch, and I slept in an over-sized chair.

One night, I awoke briefly and a so a bright, evanescent, humanoid blur leaning over my mom. Nothing was clear except colors. Black at the top, like hair, a torso of blue, and brown legs and arms. I blinked, and the figure was gone. I went back to bed.

The next morning, my mom went on talking about how she had a very vivid dream about her mother coming to visit her. I asked if she was wearing a blue dress, and my mom responded that she was. It was her favorite blue dress.

Weird.

[Mali]

I had this dream once about a really sexy girl. When I woke up she wasn't there...

[Twinblades713]

I had this dream once about a really sexy girl. When I woke up she wasn't there...

Cause she was with me.

[Kyzarius]

If you are really interested in the here after, and interactions taken in a usually objective (not smeared with religeous undertones) then would reccomend researching EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon).

Some of the findings are quite intriguing and though I am sure there is a bit of hoax to what some people claim you do find a significant amount of data that supports the concept that we exist in some manner or another after we die.

You can also find, if your inclined, several good articles regarding near-death experiences that can really put a chill in your spine. I personally find these things as hopeful bits of evidence that perhaps we do exist as a form of energy beyond current scientific measure after our brains shut down.

I always found the "do you believe" mentality that surrounds things like this a falacy. Since in the end, we all really have no choice in what happens haha.

[Dlysier]

i saw a ufo in wisconsin....

[Imoutgoodbye]

No ghost stories, but far too often I have known what's going to happen seconds before it happens and often have vivid dreams of future events. (No, I refuse to put names to either of these events. It's freakin' creepy!)

[Pali]

*giggle*

[Aulian]

No ghost stories' date=' but far too often I have known what's going to happen seconds before it happens and often have vivid dreams of future events. (No, I refuse to put names to either of these events. It's freakin' creepy!)[/quote']

Predicting you're going to die in a PK is hardly seeing the future Valek, its pretty much a certainty.

[The-Nameless]

Don't worry Valek. Aulian is making fun of you to deflect attention from his baaaaaad dreams

[Ali_gmud]

After I reading Kyzarius' post I was hoping to scroll down and see a comment from Pali was a response or was going to wait for one, I then scroll down and get nothing but giggles, man.

My friend had a mountian of Ghost stories about a old farm he grew up on. He told them soo causually because the occurance of seeing ghosts apparently to him was as common as seeing a plane in the sky.

[Pali]

I thought a giggle was all that the posts here merited. Sorry to disappoint, Ali.

If you want to know why I don't find stories like these convincing... there was an event in 1917 where tens of thousands of people reported seeing the Sun dancing in the sky. Do I think that the Sun actually did such a thing? No. My reasoning? Because as unlikely as it seems that so many people would share an hallucination or some other kind of misinterpretation of events, it is even more unlikely that the Sun actually did dance around the sky and the rest of the world simply failed to notice.

Anecdotes do not impress me. Incredible claims require incredible evidence to support them, and human testimony is nowhere near sufficient.

[Imoutgoodbye]

Anecdotes do not impress me. Incredible claims require incredible evidence to support them, and human testimony is nowhere near sufficient.

Oooooh. If Pali can't solve it with an equation, it must not be real.

[jibber]

Scientifically if the problem couldn't be solved of course, and with current scientific advances if you can't scientifically explain an occurrence it's obbvvvioussllyyy not true and a lie.

(the above is just a smart-arse comment, of course, and isn't what i believe!)

[Pali]

When all your opposition can do is attempt to mock and straw man you rather than counter your arguments... you have won the argument.

[Imoutgoodbye]

When all your opposition can do is attempt to mock and straw man you rather than counter your arguments... you have won the argument.

Or perhaps science is just not there yet. I'll use the bumblebee as my example. For the longest time, physics could not explain how the bumblebee could fly. Then one day someone said, "There has to be some sort of difference between static propulsion and dynamic propulsion." And they figured it out.

The world used to be flat.

I could go on and on, but the point is sometimes not everything is ready to be explained. And I'm not mocking you or trying to set the scarecrow on fire. I'm trying to get your little dog.

[Volgathras]

I cannot claim to have any evidence to promote claims such as these (though I may believe in supernatural occurrences myself). However, nor can I disprove any. The sheer number of individuals who have reported experienced situations like this lend to the possibility that it is true.

Of course, conversely you can claim that the absence of evidence means that it's not true, or that you can 'withhold judgment' until more convincing evidence comes to light. This, of course, is false because withholding judgment is just a way to say you don't believe without committing yourself to a straight answer.

The thing about either side you take, is that the mind has an amazing capacity to create/alter/remove things to fit it's purposes and preconceptions. Belief and disbelief both have the power to alter your reality.

Now, personally I do believe in situations like this. Scientifically, it is an accepted fact that energy does not simply vanish, but changes. What's to say it doesn't 'change' in some fashion we haven't recorded or seen that can be proved empirically? Science has been and continues to be debunked in it's claims time and again. This is not to say I don't place my faith and trust in science, only that it isn't infalible.

In reality, there are too many unknowns and too many instances of incorrect assumptions out there for anyone to claim the truth in one chosen paradigm. It comes down to faith - and arguing faith is an exercise in futility.

[Pali]

Or perhaps science is just not there yet.

Perhaps, perhaps not. However, this is not a point in your favor - it just means "we don't know exactly what caused this". Just because one does not know the cause of an experience or phenomenon does not license one to input a supernatural cause as an explanation - in a large part because claiming "magic" isn't even an explanation at all.

I cannot claim to have any evidence to promote claims such as these (though I may believe in supernatural occurrences myself). However' date=' nor can I disprove any. The sheer number of individuals who have reported experienced situations like this lend to the possibility that it is true.[/quote']

I cannot disprove them either, nor can anyone for the vast majority of supernatural claims - which is the precise problem I have with accepting them (edit: specifically, the problem here isn't that nobody has succeeded in disproving them, it's that they are untestable by their very nature). If you cannot test an idea to see if it makes sense, then how can you know that it does? I do not rule out the possibility, I just do not find the concept convincing on an even trivial level, nor do I think it helps to understand what is actually happening.

Scientifically, it is an accepted fact that energy does not simply vanish, but changes.

Yes. When we die, the electrical and thermal energy in our brains and bodies disperses as heat (the chemicals tend to be consumed by other organisms). If you're referring to some other kind of energy that our bodies supposedly have, you need to establish that there IS some other kind of energy that our bodies have first. No one has ever done this.

Science has been and continues to be debunked in it's claims time and again.

Quite true (EDIT: true in a trivial sense at least - the main theories of most scientific fields [evolution, quantum mechanics, relativity, atomic theory, germ theory, Big Bang, plate tectonics, etc.] have been refined in the details, but the central concepts have been pretty solidly established for some time). However, you fail to note two relevant details. First, it is always more science that does this correcting, which is the entire point of the scientific method and peer review process - to catch and correct for these human errors over time. Second, in the entire history of the world, natural and physical explanations have steadily replaced supernatural ones in regards to how the universe functions, forcing magical thinking into smaller and smaller boxes. Never once has the reverse happened.

There is a common misconception that scientific theories should be taken as statements of "this is how things are". That is not the case. They should be taken as "this is how we can better understand things". They are not meant to be perfect pictures, and they likely never will be - but this does not mean that faith should be defaulted to in areas of scientific uncertainty or ignorance. I am not advocating faith in anything - I am advocating skepticism and demanding solid evidence before an idea is accepted.

[Imoutgoodbye]

Nope, not magic, Pali. Never magic.

However, I decline to argue further since I cannot "win" and you did. The points, chips, and whatever other markers you wish to have are yours, sir.

[Pali]

Call it what you will. I have yet to find any supernatural claims distinguishable at their basic levels from just claiming "magic stuff happens".

The point is not to win. The point is to test our ideas and change our minds when those ideas fail to pass muster.

[Ali_gmud]

Without trying to brown nose to much, Pali is the man. Made some very excellent points.

[Kyzarius]

You never know what is undiscovered till you discover it.

A working battery powered microwave 1000 years ago would of gotten you hung for having the devil in a box.

who knows what is currently defined as paranormal or impossible will be common place in the next 1000 years?

I mean hell, we used to feed goat piss to our kids to cure the croup.

The problem with the current topic and any real analysis is the lack of uninfluenced data to support it. There is always a mystical or religeous (religeon is mystical imo) undertone that lends great doubt and skepticism to what people report in the eyes of more critically thinking people.

[Pali]

You never know what is undiscovered till you discover it.

Again, while this is certainly true, it is also a fairly meaningless tautology that does not support believing in any supernatural claims - it only means "we don't know everything yet", not that we should be so carelessly open minded that we believe anything. I am not trying to argue anything as absolute truth - I am arguing in favor of beliefs justified by objectively verifiable evidence and rational inquiry, which in our state of perpetually imperfect and incomplete knowledge will sometimes give us the wrong answer... but it is the only epistemology that will self-correct over time as we learn more.

I do find interesting your use of the microwave getting people executed for devilry concept, though... particularly as, in a modern and scientifically literate society, we would no longer execute someone for using technology that we don't understand as we would recognize it as technology and try to learn from it... but in a highly religious and scientifically ignorant society they would have attached a supernatural meaning to it and stopped questioning things right there. One method of thinking involves questioning and withholding judgment, the other jumping to conclusions based on the flimsiest reasoning.