A ghost is captured

[Kuciwalker]

According to one movie (I forget the name, it was sort of a kid movie, with the ghost called Calvin or something), it was people with "unfinished business"

EDIT: it was Casper

[vee4473]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov


I am an atheist. My argument with Thorn was about his wildly inaccurate assumptions as to why atheists don't believe in ghosts.

But as to the camera--when has a camera ever shown definitive proof of a ghost? Take this artile. Nothing in that photo is proof of a ghost--it may be suggestive to one to some people, but all I see is a figure opening a door. Considering the noted problems with a non-corpreal being actually opening a door, I'm inclined to believe that's a living person in the photograph.

Camera photos can lie. Besides the obvious of intentional hoaxes, there's a matter of coincidental images. A smudgy shape in a photograph will look like a spectre to some, but until someone can prove to me it isn't a flaw of the photo, trick of light, etc., I don't feel inclined to dismiss the laws of science and physics as we know them and give creedence to superstition. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Actually, I was at first skeptical of this photo, not that there wasn't a person reaching for the door, but whether it was a costumed worker or tourist.
That is why earlier i asked if anyone knew when the pic was taken.

Because if it was taken late at night, my eyebrows would go up farther, since unless the guards are total incompetents, they should know who is walking the grounds in the dead of night...so to speak.

Even during the day, you would think the guards or at least the "keepers" of the place would know if there was a tour with costumed guides going on at that location at that time...etc..

so, i did indeed wonder about all of this type of stuff.

And since this isn't the typical "smudge on a photo ghost" the camera isn't lying...it is indeed a person.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by vee4473
Because if it was taken late at night, my eyebrows would go up farther, since unless the guards are total incompetents, they should know who is walking the grounds in the dead of night...so to speak.

Even during the day, you would think the guards or at least the "keepers" of the place would know if there was a tour with costumed guides going on at that location at that time...etc..

But I see this as more proving my point. If someone had snuck into the place at night and did this to play a nice little prank, the guards aren't just going to look foolish--they will look incompetent and like failures in their job. So it's certainly in their best interest to stick to a story that there's no way there was anybody there without them knowing and that it MUST be a ghost, because they're good guards, they are, and nobody could sneak past them, nosirree bob!

I'd certainly rather having people, especially my supervisors, thinking there was a ghost creating mischief rather than there perhaps being some inadequateness in my job performance.

[vee4473]

true, but how about other cameras and guardposts around the place? I don't know how well guarded the place is, but if it is, the "thing" only appearing on one camera and not one guard seeing it is odd....come on Boris...just admit it..


please?

so i can go to bed?

[Boris Godunov]

Sorry, I tend to live by Occam's Razor in this regard. The simplest answer to this is that whatever is in that photo is a result of human doings, not supernatural ones. I'm not willing to overturn the laws of physics and science based on a hazy photograph and a few spooked guards.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
I wouldn't be surprized if we find Bigfood and the Loch Ness monster one day.

Bigfood? Wow, sounds yummy indeed!

On a different note, several teams went through Loch Ness with sonars with a fine tooth comb and found nothing.

Originally posted by OzzyKP
But ghosts exists. One day there will be proof of it than can satisfy even the most skeptical people here.

People have been looking for ghosts for thousands of years and there's no one shard of evidence that ghosts exist. Sorry.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
I rest my case. Despite the fact that nobody was attacking anyone here, you come in and start firing off ad hominems and bitter attacks.

Why did you bother to discuss this with EvC/Thorn, who believes that a Nazi ghost entered his bf's body when the latter touched a Nazi battleflag?

[BustaMike]

This thing is stupid. I can very very easily make a similar picture in a couple minutes using photoshop. Or I could dress up in a goofy costume and have someone take a fuzzy picture of it and POOF, there's a ghost.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov

Just because someone decides they want to BS their way through to a doctorate degree in something doesn't mean they're studying something that's real. We have entire philosophy departments as proof of this.

And you can go **** yourself too, you superficial singing cowboy.

The fact that scientists think they are studying something real is just evidence of their utter failure to appreciate the nuances of Dummettian anti-realism and it's implications for linguistic competence. If they had realised said implications they would have understood that the verificationism or one of its variants offers the most plausible method of establishing scientific discourse as the only properly meaningful medium for making empirical claims, and moreover that warranted assertability is a more scientifically useful concept than the hoary old realist bugbear "truth".

[Urban Ranger]

* A tumbleweed rolls by, in a hurried sort of fashion*

[Ned]

Fox News had the full film sequence. It show the figure appear, grab the door handles and close the doors.

The film is not on Fox's site. But it would be interesting if someone would find a link.

According to one tourist who was there at the time, they saw a ghost in the castle. (I now suspect that maybe a "tourist" may be the culprit.)

[OzzyKP]

Another perspective is thinking of ghosts as afterimages of people from the past. Not real things you can talk to and interact with, but an afterimage. A space-time distortion. I dunno.

Note this is not a theory, its just a unsupported conjecture. I do not know the true nature of ghosts, nor do I claim to. I am not a scientist. Though I have seen enough to make me believe.

[Urban Ranger]

OTOH, I have seen enough to make me leap from skeptical to extremely skeptical.

For example, there are a few local locales that were supposedly haunted. There is this place where the IJA executed people during WWII and there's this other place where it's a mass grave. These places were supposedly haunted with lots and lots of ghosts. Well, what happened was they built buildings on top of them, and nobody in these buildings have ever seen any ghosts. If somebody did, we know - this place is staggeringly superstitous, with both Chinese and Western superstitions all mixed in this whole big ridiculous mess.

There was another incident that some self-proclaimed "psychic" said he saw a "ghost claw" in a TV commercial where there was a bunch of kids play. Rumours then started about how these kids died one after another in mysterious circumstances. Lo and behold, somebody managed to locate all of them to decisively refute this bunkum.

There's a local scientist who is very good at debunking this sort of thing. I saw him on TV doing his stuff - excellent work.

[Kuciwalker]

UR, have you read Michael Shermer's Skeptic column in Scientific American? It's wonderful for that kind of stuff.

[Agathon]

Isn't it possible that someone could reasonably believe they'd seen a ghost? That being so, even if they were fooled into believing it.

I mean, I don't believe in them, but I can imagine chemically induced situations where someone might believe they'd seen one.