Should i lower my guard against a haunting if it's said that ghosts don't exist?

[MyriVerse]

There are no ghosts. Anywhere. Ever. So... do whatever makes you feel warm and fuzzy.

Just don't let down your guard against old white dudes in costumes.

[DanMad1977]

There are no ghosts. Anywhere. Ever. So... do whatever makes you feel warm and fuzzy.

Just don't let down your guard against old white dudes in costumes.

You mean the KKK?

[MyriVerse]

You mean the KKK?

I'm not naming names. Just any of them. There aren't enough meddling kids to save us all.

(was more of a Scooby reference than anything political)

[DanMad1977]

I'm not naming names. Just any of them. There aren't enough meddling kids to save us all.

(was more of a Scooby reference than anything political)

Ah...Scooby Do, long time ago. Fun show at the times.

[Tyrannoraptor]

There are no ghosts. Anywhere. Ever. So... do whatever makes you feel warm and fuzzy.

Just don't let down your guard against old white dudes in costumes.

Well in that case, i guess it'd be safer to play ouija boards so what do you think?

[CellarDweller]

Ouija boards - used them in the past, never again!

[Kirby101]

It's called the ideomotor effect. There is nothing supernatural about Ouija boards.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...ija-board-move

[MyriVerse]

It's called the ideomotor effect. There is nothing supernatural about Ouija boards.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...ija-board-move

Until you smear blood on it. Then all bets are off.

Only ever got gibberish out of mine.

[Kirby101]

Until you smear blood on it. Then all bets are off.

Only ever got gibberish out of mine.

Hey, just because you don't understand the spooks' language doesn't mean they aren't talking to you.

Reminds me of the silly "talking in tongues" at churches. They do it so badly, spouting a few syllables over and over. Anyone with knowledge of languages can see that it's too simplistic to be anything real.
Now Sid Ceaser and Carl Reiner, those were guys who could talk in tongues.

[MyriVerse]

I prefer to think that my house was full of ghost cats playing with or sleeping on the "keyboard."

[CellarDweller]

It's called the ideomotor effect. There is nothing supernatural about Ouija boards.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...ija-board-move

I get that everyone is entitled to their opinion, but since you weren't there for the experience, it's easy for you to discount.

My friends and I were using the Ouija board on a regular basis. We had only positive experiences.

My mother (Andi) didn't believe in it, and wanted a demonstration. I told her we should do it outdoors, and she said it was too cold, and sat down at the kitchen table, and waited.

I put the board on the table, and we both placed our hands on the planchette, and started to ask if there were good spirits who wanted to speak.

The planchette started to move erratically around the board, and then messages started to get spelled out. The same ones over and over. "I like Andi" "Andi's hot" "Want Andi" "Rape Andi". My mother accused me of moving the planchette. I asked her what that would say about my mental state, that I would spell out "rape" and my mother's name.

The planchette continued to spell out these messages, and my mother got up and left, and the board was put away without the planchette moving to 'good-bye'.

I went up to bed in the attic, and mom went to her room. My dad worked the overnight shift, and usually wasn't home until 4:00 in the morning.

I woke to a knock on my door, and I put on my sweats and opened it. There stood mom in her bathrobe, and she said to me, "Your father's home and in bed now. We need to get the board and get whatever is in our room, and make it leave."

Mom proceeded to tell me that when she went to bed, the room (which gets sun all day and tends to be hot) was ice cold. She grabbed a blanket, put it on the bed, and got in to go to sleep. After a few minutes, she felt a tug on the sheets. Thinking it was our cat, she got out, turned on the lights, and looked around. No cat. She turned out the lights and got back in bed. Another tug on the sheets. She went and got a broom, and pushed everything out from under the bed, and looked around. Nothing under the bed, no cat. Turned out the lights and got back into bed. The sheets were tugged again, hard enough that they were pulled halfway down the bed.

She turned on the light, got her rosary beads, started to pray, and said out loud that whatever was in the room was not allowed to touch her.

Dad got home, and questioned my mom as to why she was still up. She lied and said she wasn't tired, and dad got into bed. When she heard him snoring, she went and got me.

We set up the board, and as soon as we put our hands on the planchette, the messages started again. "I like Andi" "Andi's hot" "Want Andi" "Rape Andi".

the two of us said it wasn't welcome here, and it had to leave. The planchette moved to 'good-bye' and my mother laid on the couch until mid morning. When I got home from work, she said in no uncertain terms that the board was to be removed from the house.

That weekend, she went to church (she and dad attend every Sunday) and she told the priest what happened, thinking he would tell her she was crazy.

He told her "Tell your son and his friends they have no business bothering those on the other side." He offered to come over and bless the house, and mom accepted.

My mother can recount the events of that evening today, and it happened over 30 years ago.

[Kirby101]

What you describe is the ideomotor effect. I deal with science and facts, not opinions.
I get you had a personal experience that seemed supernatural. I have read dozens of similar occurrences, all explainable without the supernatural.
But belief is a hard thing to overcome.

[Starter Set]

It's called the ideomotor effect. There is nothing supernatural about Ouija boards.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...ija-board-move

I don't take seriously articles where important words are bold as if the readers were too dumb to read the damn thing entirely.

And it's so fancy to call it an effect. The "journalists" from the BBC must have picked that up on wiki.

Bu those group experiences with the supernatural can be explained by psychology. People often underestimate the power of suggestion and yes, there is such a thing as group hysteria.

It doesn't mean that all the persons present at that moment are crazy, just that under the right circumstances people can start to act irrationally. Everyone. You, me, your uncle James from Canada, the Pope.

There is this case, the toxic woman or whatever. Look it up, it's pretty much a 101 case for that. And Ouija boards can start a minor version of a situation like that, where people, all in good faith, are going to think things are happening when in fact there is nothing happening or/and they are the cause of it.

Each person fueling the anxiety and irrationality of the other by it's own.

[Kirby101]

I don't think people who believe in this are crazy. Just not well informed or thinking critically.

[Powerboy]

I don't take seriously articles where important words are bold as if the readers were too dumb to read the damn thing entirely.

And it's so fancy to call it an effect. The "journalists" from the BBC must have picked that up on wiki.

Bu those group experiences with the supernatural can be explained by psychology. People often underestimate the power of suggestion and yes, there is such a thing as group hysteria.

It doesn't mean that all the persons present at that moment are crazy, just that under the right circumstances people can start to act irrationally. Everyone. You, me, your uncle James from Canada, the Pope.

There is this case, the toxic woman or whatever. Look it up, it's pretty much a 101 case for that. And Ouija boards can start a minor version of a situation like that, where people, all in good faith, are going to think things are happening when in fact there is nothing happening or/and they are the cause of it.

Each person fueling the anxiety and irrationality of the other by it's own.

I remember some friends of mine across the street who claimed their house was haunted. When I walked in, the first thing they said was, "You feel it now, don't you?"
Me: "Feel what?"
One of them: "The presence of the ghosts".
Me (Sticking thumb in air): "Nope".
One of them: "Wow! You are the most psychically dead person I've ever met".
Me: "And tell me, how much time did you guys sit around telling each other ghost stories before you "felt the vibes?"
One of them: "Oh, maybe an hour or so. But that has nothing to do with it."

I used to play around with runes and Tarot cards. But I realized very quickly both I and other people had an amazing ability to draw the conclusions we wanted to draw and see that the card or rune drawn was the most significant rune or card that could possibly be drawn on that particular question no matter what rune or card was drawn.

What's described with the Ouija board is a very common experience.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q...tail&FORM=VIRE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...ature=emb_logo

I like the first video in particular because it's short and to the point and it offers a clear way to prove or falsify the claim that a Ouija board is a supernatural phenomenon.

But I grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian culture. I know very well how immune to evidence people are when it comes to maintaining their beliefs. If people want to believe that Ouija boards, Tarot cards and so on really work, fine. When they start demanding equal time in Science classes and "Teach the controversy", then I'll have a problem with it.

Edit: When I was 21, I went to see a Hypnotist act in college. I was much too shy and introverted to get up on the stage when he called for volunteers but I sat in the front row.

Now, this hypnotist stated several times that hypnotism is suggestion, that the person being hypnotized is doing it to himself through belief that it will work. But then he started into this thing of saying how the room was really getting hot and I felt the room getting really hot. I started sweating a bit.

Then I said to myself, "Oh come on. You know you're just doing this to yourself, just as he said. You're just psyching yourself into this. Knock it off."

The feeling of it being hot stopped instantly once I realized that. But sitting there, watching people revert to childhood or be unable to lift their arm because they believed they could not was quite the experience and really taught me things about the power of suggestion and auto-suggestion.

The hypnotist even mentioned that many of us would go home and try hypnotism on our friends or get them to try it on us. And it won't work. It won't work because we know them and don't believe they are a skilled professional who can hypnotize them. It works when he does it because we believe he is a skilled professional who can do this because, again he emphasized, we are really doing it to ourselves.