• NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!

    Subscribe to The Paracast Newsletter!

Ghosts and hauntings- riddle me this :


taueret

Paranormal Novice
I've been thinking about this a lot and I bet I'm not the only one to ponder it!

I love a good ghost story, and tales of mediums and others who claim to be able to communicate with "the other side"... But I just can't imagine any kind of reality or other dimension or whatever where dead humans have to stick around and rap on tables, or convey cryptic messages to the living. It sounds scarier to me than winking out of existence!! The idea of being aware of and so close to loved ones but unable to do more than be intermittently spooky makes me feel so sad.

The type of hauntings that seem like a hologram or echo or energetic remnant, or by entities that were never human seem entirely plausible... But "life after death" as a ghostly table tapper sounds scarier to me than almost any other fate. Thankfully it doesn't make sense to me so it's only a sad thing to think about, not something I believe will happen to me or anyone.

Has anyone else ever thought along these lines? Anything to add /dispute/ discuss?




Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I love ghost stories, too. However, I do not believe in an eternal soul. Identity seems like a shifty substance even in the living. To me it makes more sense that strong karmic tendencies like love, fear, anger or other unresolved emotions sometimes hang around or even seek rebirth to get a new opportunity to resolve themselves. The sublime parts of a person return to the sublime. This is just a matter of belief, but I find it a manageable belief. We really don't know, so why not have a manageable belief?
 
Agreed! It just makes me sad to think of the dead bumping around trying to let us know they're there. Really depressing!!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I love ghost stories, too. However, I do not believe in an eternal soul. Identity seems like a shifty substance even in the living. To me it makes more sense that strong karmic tendencies like love, fear, anger or other unresolved emotions sometimes hang around or even seek rebirth to get a new opportunity to resolve themselves. The sublime parts of a person return to the sublime. This is just a matter of belief, but I find it a manageable belief. We really don't know, so why not have a manageable belief?
My question is this... you speak of karma and rebirth. To me that means each person is a spark of God, an eternal soul. You can always investigate your soul. There is no reason to have a 'manageable belief.'
 
The type of hauntings that seem like a hologram or echo or energetic remnant, or by entities that were never human seem entirely plausible...

The recent film, The Conjuring 2, is a Hollywood-ized fright fest that was supposedly inspired by the Enfield poltergeist, in London. So, having no knowledge of that case, I started looking around and found a few UK TV specials on it, along with a fairly recent three part docu-drama, and some fairly recent interviews of the woman Janet Hodgson who was the 11 year old girl and center of attention during the episode. In her recent interviews she still maintains that something unnatural was happening that she is still cannot explain to this day. I don't think she got rich from her experience either.

In any case, it seems that the SPR member that began to investigate the case, Maurice Grosse, had lost his daughter, Janet, in motorcycle accident a year earlier, and he then became interested in trying to discover evidence for "life on the other side." So, it would seem that the interpretation of the case was driven to the idea of spirits of the dead by the investigators who already held that belief, or wanted to believe it. I don't think Janet actually ever said that she was convinced that some spirit of a deceased person was the cause of her experiences, though I may have missed that.

The case is weighed down with charges of fabrication by the kids. Perhaps so. The fairly recent docu-drama I saw was based on the memoirs of Guy Lyon Playfair, a "believer", who participated along with Grosse in the on-site case investigation. Playfair was involved in the production of the docu-drama as an advisor. Near the end of the drama Janet is hospitialized and her doctor was about to order electro-shock "therapy" to the brain, in hopes of "curing" her problem. It was at that stage Janet's alarmed mother told them it was all a hoax, and that she did not need electro-shock therapy. But the docu-drama made clear that things had happened that even the mother had no explanation for. So, the hint is that the mother did not want her daughter electro-shocked, and was willing to admit fraud to keep her from that. Perhaps other readers have more info on the case. Like so many things paranormal, the case is sketchy. The bottom line to me was that evidently the kids were set upon by some force. They actually may have played along with the force at times, thus appearing to be the source of strange phenomena, rather than just being kids who jointly participated in it. But as far as I can tell, they never claimed that it was spirits of deceased humans. That came from others.

I am no longer a materialist and I think reality does consist of more than what is thought of as "physical." I do think that there is an aspect of human survival after death, but I do not think dead human spirits are wandering around knocking on walls. On the other hand, everyone knows there are many cultural traditions of non-human entities that are described in terms of spirit. Maybe there is something to it. As a result of various experiences, I think there is.

In my early teen years, on a number of occasions while trying to sleep, and far into the dead of night, I would hear a loud "ting" in the middle of the room, as though someone had flicked a wine glass. It always frightened me. I'd search around the room during the day, trying to find a natural source, but I never found one. It still might have been natural. But as I total up my experiences in that house I am inclined to say it was something beyond-natural, that it was done by sentient entities who were never human, and that they did it specifically to frighten me. That's my non-empirical, non-repeatable, non-scientific impression. YMMV.
 
Intresting thread had dream of dead relative and the next day a owl appeared on the fence where I was sitting in the garden stared at me for awhile then flew away. Wonderful creatures and historical toward Druid ancestory.
 
Ya, I have no problem with the never-human... But my disembodied consciousness persisting after physical death, geez I hope not!!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Back
Top