kolobian- instead of repeating the same statement (you want to blame it on a ghost) why don't you provide the logical explanation that I am apparently missing. I made excuses for many months before I concluded ghosts. I tried to find logical explanations. So....provide me with the logical explanation.
You have experienced something that you can't explain, it does not follow that since you or someone else can't explain it that it is supernatural. I would also stay away from the logical explanation because it could have logically been an extra dimensional shadow, or a ghost or it could be in your head.
I would argue to you that it might not matter what it was.
I already reminded you that you're employing the Argument from Ignorance to bolster your claim that ghosts were responsible for your subjective experiences.
It's no different than saying "well how do YOU explain the origin of the universe? It must be a glow-in-the-dark primate called jesus!"
The point I'm making is that since you want it to be ghosts because you've made an emotional investment in the idea that ghosts exist you've chosen to preclude ALL OTHER possibilities, whether we currently understand the causation or not.
I'm just not sure why you don't say "it COULD be ghosts." Instead you're saying "it IS ghosts" which is silly since you have no evidence.
And I am saying that I have examined the logical explanations.
The saying goes shit or get off the pot.
How does a water spigot get turned on full blast when no one but myself was by it?
I am all ears for your alternative explanation. In the lack of alternative explanations I am fine with a ghost. Why shouldn't ghosts exist? Because you said so? That holds no water.
You can't argue with logic against a conclusion that wasn't reached through logic, but I'll try.
(drumroll please) WATER PRESSURE!
Even the dudes on ghosthunters are plumbers. That's why your claim that you have looked into the logical explanations is suspect.
Just google "faucet turns on for no reason" and you'll get as many hits from plumbers talking about water pressure, fixtures, loose thing-a-ma-jigs, etc. as you will magical thinkers believing that dead people have nothing better to do than turn on faucets for no reason.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/07/2011 03:11PM by kolobian.
1) The valve inside the faucet could have worn out and the water pressure finally blew it open.
2) Water pressure could have been "off"...no pressure, water outage, etc. Faucet could have been left in "on" position. When water pressure is restored, water flows through the open faucet.
3) You could have left the water running without realizing it....been occupied with other thoughts, distracted for a moment, etc. When you snap back to the present, you find the water running, but are sure you turned it off when you really didn't.
4) You could have turned off the water, gotten distracted and turn it back on without realizing it. When you snap back you see it running, but don't remember turning it on, only off.
I'm sure there are more possibilities, I just rattled these off as quick as I could think of them.
I think other posters are questioning whether you truely checked "all" possibilities in coming to your ghost conclusion....or just a few obvious possiblities that can't be true (someone was hiding in the room and turn it on when I wasn't looking), then made the leap to ghost's.
If it couldn't have been someone hiding, why can it be a ghost?
I've been and engineer for over 20 years and I do a lot of root cause analysis and problem solving....it's one of my strengths. There is always a rational explaination to physical events. And if one can't be found, assuming a supernatural cause is the least honest way to go. Why not chalk it up to an experience that you can't explain? The "it wasn't this...so it has to be that" is a silly arguement.
It's your choice to believe what you want, and I'm not trying to discount your experience...I didn't have it. Just trying to offer some alternative causes and get you thinking about it.
Just because we can't measure a ghost doesn't automatically mean that it doesn't exist, the same goes with god. It is illogical to say that since we cannot measure a ghost than it doesn't exists. Instead of taking that route you explore what might have caused a water spigot to turn on without you turning it on. Kolobian has proposed one method. It could be that it wasn't closed all the way and the pressure pushed it open, it wouldn't be the first time.
Kolobian has labeled this idea that ghosts turned on the water, the Argument from Ignorance, lets rephrase that as an appeal to the supernatural.
Drum roll. You obviously are not a person who fixes things. Or you would not suggest something so lacking in intelligence.
"water pressure" can not force a the screw of the handle of a water spigot. Then all the water spigots in the world would just turn on. Water faucets drip when the rubber gasket gets old, but water faucets do not turn on by themselves. It is a mechanical action of screwing and unscrewing. Take apart an outdoor house spigot and then take to a plumber about "water pressure" making it turn on and see what answer you get.
There just needs to be a failure in the mechanism that closes the spigot. That could be mechanical, or maybe the one who closed it last just didn't close it all the way.
Nate Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > There just needs to be a failure in the mechanism > that closes the spigot. That could be mechanical, > or maybe the one who closed it last just didn't > close it all the way.
Are you a pumber? Just wondering. Because you don't understand how a faucet works.
outdoor spigots (most of them actually) work on the same principle of a screw. You screw down the handle which opens the pathway for the water.
I was the last one who used the spigot. I turned away and it came on full blast. It was not a leaking gasket that allowed a dribble of water. It went from OFF to FULL ON.
Go take apart a water spigot, talk to a plumber, and then get back to me, because you have no idea of how mechanical things work.
That doesn't make what I said above wrong. Water pressure is quite a bit more powerful than you are giving it credit for. Of course it can unscrew opening/closing mechanism of a water spigot.
Nate and Kolobian have explained the situation quite well but may I add my two cents. You have not explored ALL the logical explanations because that would occupy all your waking hours for the rest of your life.
You may well have explored or examined a great number of possibilities and come up short. I'll grant you that as I think you are an honest person who would not try to deceive us.
But what ought one to do when confronted with a situation, circumstance or event for which there is no discernable explanation? The answer is simple - agnosticism. What I mean by that is, rather than resorting to some supernatural explanation which likely has no basis in reality, merely state that you don't know. You don't know what turned the water on. You don't know what went bump in the night. You don't know what the shadow was you saw in the hallway. In other words, plead ignorance. In a case like this, it's no crime.
Religion (theism) is the trap people fall into when trying to force supernatural explanations into unexplanable (but probably natural) events. Just because you don't know the cause of this or that is no reason to attribute it to some supernatural source.
nebularry Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Nate and Kolobian have explained the situation > quite well but may I add my two cents.
Actually they didn't. Logic and the application of knowledge of plumbing shows that they didn't explain squat.
One response was that they had a faucet that was so easy that the cat could turn it on AND in combination with high pressure the person suggests that it COULD turn on. Just at theory.
The original person did not state that faucet was easy to turn on. Or that they had high pressure.
My experence was with a an ouside spigot that required force to turn it on and off. It never did that again to me, and there was no genearl annoucnemnet that it was a broken faucet.
Are you are so desperate to justify your statment that you don't even look at the evidence with any logical thought?
Drum roll.
And I am still looking for the logical answer for the unscrewed light bulbs. Plus the other stories of people who saw/experienced things.
But, you have stated that ghosts don't exist and you know everything there is to know about the universe (plus plumbing, donch ya know) so that is that. Give it up.
So far you've resorted to two straw arguments in defense of your claims:
1. You said that I asserted that ghosts don't exist (please show me where I said that)
2. You said that I asserted water pressure caused the faucet to turn on (please show me where I said that)
Regarding your asserting that ghosts are the explanation to your experiences, I simply asked why you were precluding ALL OTHER possible explanations in favor of ghosts when it could just as easily be alien practical jokers from zenebel gannoobi, or a glitch in the matrix, or any of an infinite number of possible explanations that EQUALLY valid to your ghosts claims.
Regarding the water pressure possibly turning on the faucet, I was responding to your request for a logical explanation for what you experienced, which I did, and if you'd bother to read my posts you'd see that I even linked to two plumbers stating that it is possible for water pressure to turn on a faucet.
If you're reduced to misrepresenting someone in order to give credit to your claims I'd say you're too attached and you need to take a step back for a moment. That's just my opinion, though. I make no claims.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/07/2011 04:29PM by kolobian.
It is true that a lot of paranormal experiences are easily debunked. It seems people truly want to believe so bad sometimes that they don't want to even think that there may be an alternate, reasonable explanation.
On the other hand, I definitely do believe there are things going on in this world which cannot be explained. I have had many strange things happen to me throughout my life and therefore, I do believe in supernatural occurances. I'm not sure whether these can be explained as ghosts, but I don't think there is anything wrong with having a belief in ghosts or in the supernatural.
Probably the strangest thing that has ever happened to me, which cannot be explained by a hallucination or anything of that sort, imo, happened to me when I was about 8 years old. We lived in a house where my parents found ouiji boards under the house and it had always had kind of a spooky feeling to it. I had a lot of weird experiences while I lived there but always passed them off. One night I woke up to the sound of two girls in the hallway outside my bedroom door whispering and giggling. I continued laying down in my bed listening, wondering who these girls were and what they were doing in our house. I'm not sure how long I was laying there listening when they entered my bedroom door, crouched down and giggling. They made their way to the foot of my bed. One of the girls grabbed my one ankle and the other girl grabbed my other ankle and with force, pulled me right off my bed. They continued to giggle and while still crouched over, ran out of my bedroom and disappeared.
That was the only experience I had where I saw, heard and was physically touched by something that by all my reasonable explanations, could not have been there. It is just my opinion and since I was the one who experienced it and there were no witnesses, I can understand if people are reluctant to believe my story. Just thought I'd share it considering the topic! Thanks!
kolobian will tell you that it was the water pressue, lol!
That is pretty freaky. Were you afraid at night after that? Did your other family members experience anything weird.
I actually blocked out the experience with the water faucet. I didn't go back and tell everyone that a ghost did it. It was so bizarre that I literally did not think about it. It was a break with reality and I liked reality.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/07/2011 04:37PM by Susan I/S.
That incident was more confusing than anything else. I asked my mother the next day if there had been anybody else in the house in the middle of the night and she looked confused and told me there hadn't. I told her what happened and she didn't say anything. After growing up and having discussions with my parents, they told me their own experiences and that's when I found out about the ouiji boards they had found after moving in. Also, after we had moved out, my parents tried renting the house out and after less than a month, the tenant moved out because she claimed the house was haunted as well.
There was another incident a couple years later in that same hosue where I woke up to a very tall man standing at the foot of my bed. I sat up and had a 20 or so minute conversation with him. I was never creeped out or scared of him. He told me he was dead and was asking me questions. He also told me that he loved me and then he said goodbye and walked out of my bedroom. After describing him to mother, she thought it was my grandfather who had died while my mom was pregnant with me. I always expected him to come back at another point in time in my life, but I have never seen him again.
I've had a lot of very strange experiences in my life, like I said. The supernatural doesn't freak me out and some experiences are easier to pass off as nothing than others. It has just given me a bigger interest in these things in an effort to understand it better. Very interesting stuff!
30 years ago i experienced 3 events that were so terrifying that to this day the people in the room with me don't want to talk about it. I don't really care what IT was, i just never want to see IT again! there were 4 other people who experienced these same events. It always happened with the same people present, and in the same apartment. After we moved none of us ever saw or felt anything like that again. When we have talked about it, it is very clear we all saw felt and heard the same things. With the exception of one person who appeared to become possessed. He never remembered anything. it was like he went into blackout. He had been home from his mission for about 3 weeks when this happened to him. scared the shiz out of him. We have no explanations. we weren't trying to conjure up anything. it just happpened unexpectedly out of the blue.
It is hard to explain this house. I have never seen others like this but they are common in the Sunset District of SF. They are built around a small 8'? open air atrium. Living room in the front, kitchen to the back, dining room on one side and a hall on the other. There is a door to the hall. You go down the hall from the living room and there is a door to the downstairs, then a bathroom. You turn a corner and there are two bedrooms. In this house there was a built in booth that backed up to the atrium window. The hall and the dining room both had glass French doors.
I was sitting in the booth, saw my boyfriends grandmother go past the window in the hall then go past the door to the kitchen. Now mind you, this house was old and made a LOT of noise. The doors made a lot of noise. His grandmother was in her 90s and when I didn't hear her bedroom door I was concerned and went and looked. No one there? Door to the living room was closed? I went in the living room and his grandmother was still there with his parents watching TV. I went back in the kitchen and told bf what I had seen and he said that was his grandmother's sister who had originally owned the house. His grandmother inherited it from her. And that they often saw her and her husband. And being sisters, the two women looked very alike, even more so as they got older. And he said this in a very matter of fact way. Went and told his parents and grandmother and they also treated it as no big thing. They all had seen them often. The husband would often be in the mirrors when the guys were shaving. Or so they told me. I don't know. But I do KNOW what I SAW. And I saw her twice, once through the window and then crossing the doorway.
There is an interesting show on Biography, Celebrity Ghost Stories. Who knows how much of that is true but it is a surprise to see who thinks they have seen ghosts. Some are rather unlikely.
To ascribe the faucet to ghosts is irrational. You might just as well ascribe it to goblins, gremlins, squirrels, falling space junk, unicorns, sasquatch, yeti, chupacabra, wind gusts, angels, the Virgin Mary, I don't know, pick your poison.
Why ghosts? Why anything supernatural? You don't know and neither do we. We cannot explain it and we're content with that. That's science, brother.
nebularry Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > To ascribe the faucet to ghosts is irrational. You > might just as well ascribe it to goblins, > gremlins, squirrels, falling space junk, unicorns, > sasquatch, yeti, chupacabra, wind gusts, angels, > the Virgin Mary, I don't know, pick your poison. > > Why ghosts? Why anything supernatural? You don't > know and neither do we. We cannot explain it and > we're content with that. That's science, brother.
Fine you want to say it is somthing for which there is no logical explanation. I call that something a ghost. Why? Because there is a long history with many people who have experienced similair things.
But you don't want to call it a ghost because you don't like the term. Fine.
I am acutally a very logical person, that is why I attributed the unsrewed light bulbs to the fact that there was period vibration in the building. Except that they theory does not hold up when I really thought about it.
I am more than happy to explain things logically. But in the absence of logical explanations, ghosts are a logical explanation.
A ghost did it could be a perfectly logical explanation given a certain set of parameters. Gravity, water pressure, it's in your head are also perfectly logical with other parameters.
Faulty logic is to say that since I don't know what did it, it was a ghost. If the sun goes up and down each day the sun must rotate around the earth is better logic than a ghost did it.
I've seen some rather odd things in my life too. Could they have been ghosts? Maybe. Could they have been my imagination? Maybe. Could they have been something that I just don't understand? Most definitely. Do I care? Not really. But it was really cool.
nothing about my experience felt,or looked super or natural. but it sure wasn't normal. once you have that kind of experience you can't just un-know it happened because someone else can't believe what happened to you. I have no idea what IT was. but trust me you would not be interested in trying to re-create it just so you could find out. ,
mia Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > nothing about my experience felt,or looked super > or natural. but it sure wasn't normal. once you > have that kind of experience you can't just > un-know it happened because someone else can't > believe what happened to you. I have no idea what > IT was. but trust me you would not be interested > in trying to re-create it just so you could find > out. ,