Rogue1 posted:
Damn.. Looks like I contributed to this thread something on topic afterall.
Good. Let's have a read, shall we?
posted:I lived half a country away from my family.
Isn't it rather interesting how all ghost stories start this way?
posted:One night I dreamt of my grandmother, she was a young woman in the dream with long hair (I had only ever seen her with short) and she was happy to see me, sat and talked to me about several things that were going on in my life and hugged me extremely tight before she left.
The next afternoon my mother called and informed me she had passed away that morning. My brother also had a very similar dream of her the night before. In it she was also a younger woman with long hair. My mother confirmed that my grandmother hadn't had long hair since she was in her late twenty's. He and I always felt she came to us in the dreams to tell us good-bye.
I am not convinced. Here's why:
Dreams more often than not evoke negative emotion. Anxiety is the most common, followed closely by abandonment, anger, and fear. These dreamstate emotions are compounded by real-life stress. You were far from home with a loved-one close to death. It is not unusual, then, to dream of your grandmother, and the same would go for your brother.
Then, there is the issue of memory. We oftentimes will remember emotion felt during a dream much longer and better than we do the details of our dreams. The mind tries to fill in the gaps, to make a memory of the dream. No doubt you don't recall the dream exactly as it happened, nor does your brother.
I'm not saying you're lying. We all do this, to a very large degree, especially in stressful situations. Memory is easily altered and manipulated by others, and easily confounded by factors present during encoding. This why many psychologists have spoken out against the reliability of eyewitness testimony.
While you no doubt disagree, the story fails to exclude these as possible explanations, and therefore fails to "prove" telepathic communication categorically.
posted:I lived in a house where there was some issue with the guest bedroom. It had formerly been a child's room of some previous occupant and no amount of painting could keep the red marker on the back wall of the room from seeping through to look pink.
What type of paint did you use? Oil-based? Latex-based? Clay-based?
What sheen did you use? Gloss? Semi-Gloss? Eggshell? Flat?
Did you prime first? If so, what kind of primer did you use?
Painting over stains isn't a simple matter. The paint you choose must be able to adhere to the stain as well as the material behind it. If you chose the wrong paint/primer combination - and there are many - then the stains would certainly continue to show, no matter how many times you went over it.
posted:We kept the door closed to the room mostly. One because the dogs would stand in the doorway of it, when it was open and incessantly bark at nothing.
This isn't helpful, either. Unless you can speak the language of dogs, then you cannot be sure precisely what was holding their attention. Dogs can see only in black and white, and their senses of sound and smell are far superior to our own. Whatever they were barking at may very well have been invisible to you, yet completely natural.
My cats will sometimes stand beneath the vent in my bathroom and meow at the ceiling. That doesn't mean my HVAC system is haunted.
posted:And two, there were times when it was open that at some point the door would just slam, echoing all the way down the hall and rattling glass and things on shelves.
Can you rule out negative pressurization?
In my college dormitory, the air pressure inside the building could be come so intensely negative the air currents inside would slam heavy fire doors closed.
Again, not ghosts. Simple physics.
posted:
We learned several years later from a cop friend that the house used to belong to a police officer and his family. One day when he was out, his 9 year old son and his son's best friend snuck into the closet in the father's room, with the hidden key and pulled his gun case off the shelf. They took the gun back to the boys room (my guest room) and in playing around, the friend shot the son in the face and killed him. Turns out it was not permanent marker seeping through the paint at all.
Did you have the stains tested by a medical professional? If not, then I would contest you don't actually
know the stains were blood.
Dried blood, incidentally, is not red, but black.
Both stories raise more questions than they answer. By no means would I consider either "proof" of the supernatural.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2012 09:29PM by Riktor.
