Interestingly all of the world's major religions agree on the existence of ghosts, they're mentioned numerous times across various religious texts. The disciples for example famously fear Jesus when they encounter him walking towards them on water in the middle of a storm, asking if he's a ghost. Whether you believe the events of the bible happened or not, what is clear is that the authors themselves believed in ghosts, and in fact a belief in ghosts is found throughout every major culture, dating back to the dawn of history itself.
The problem with ghosts is those ghost shows or people who tell ghost stories. Those ghost shows are bullshit.
There's so many stories. Is it because people are just scared and their senses are on heightened alert and they see things that aren't really there, that could be it. Because when its dark out and you're tired. First of all, you might be half asleep anyway. But you hear things, you get scared, your senses get really heightened and maybe you might see something thats not even really there. It's just your own brain, your paranoia fucking with you. Because its always happening at night under low-light conditions. It's always weird things that are fleeting and then they're gone. It's always in the dark, it's never at the beach. The general cause for many phenomenon is that the brain is misinterpreting these events. Our brains have evolved to seek patterns and as a consequence we see patterns where there are none. If someone senses something unusual it may lead them to conclude something supernatural has happened because they aren't familiar with it. We know what a radio is and how it works but to our ancestors voices coming from a box would be a supernatural event because they're not aware of the natural explanation.
The nonmaterial embodiment, or essence or organism that's seen as a specter, wraith or apparition has been scientifically proven to be a sheer myth. In other words, there's no such thing as a ghost. Watch Myth Busters, watch Penn & Teller: Bullshit, subscribe to Skeptic Magazine and Skeptical Inquirer and read any scientific book and watch that so-called "evidence" for ghosts just disappear. They've done tests where they tell one group a theater that's under construction that its is haunted and the other group they don't them anything and the first group reports hauntings and the second doesn't. Just the suggestiveness of the human psyche. Combined with our natural predilection for seeing human body parts and our brain striving to apply speech to noises.
en.wikipedia.org
When people talk about "scientific proof of ghosts" they usually site the first law of thermodynamics: matter cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only change forms. So the total amount of energy and matter in the universe always remains constant. So when we die is it possible that our energy manifests as ghosts? Well not if we're gonna stay consistent. Energy is transferred into the environment meaning that human energy transfers like all other organisms energy into other life forms and plants that absorb it. There are other inconsistencies here, too. Ghosts can walk through walls and yet they can also slam doors and move stuff around. Ghost hunters monitor the temperature of the room because it gets cold in a ghost's presence. And yet if ghosts were indeed a type of energy it would be impossible for them to cool the room down. Only if ghosts were made of matter could they then absorb the heat from the room and cool it down. But if ghosts were made of matter then they would be physically observable.
Today modern science has given us many explanations for phenomenon we traditionally considered to be ghosts. Dancing lights which humans believed for millennia where spirits or playful sprites have been shown to be a rare phenomenon known as ball lightning. Mental illness and even mass psychological delusions, along with our hardwired and extremely powerful pattern recognition talents have explained away a great deal of ghostly sightings. Just recently, the discovery of the effects of extremely low frequency sound waves on the human body helped explain a great deal of ghost phenomenon. Infrasound. Rare (in nature) low frequency sound that causes restlessness, hallucinations, chills, and other side effects, over exposure. Those sound waves are too low for the human ear to perceive, but some scientists believe we've been evolutionarily hardwired to recognize their physiological effects on our bodies and associate these sound waves with extreme danger. That's because many predators, such as roaring tigers, can let loose with ultra-low frequency sound waves. Researching the idea that ELF waves were responsible for much of our belief in ghosts, scientists discovered many pieces of modern equipment causing ELF waves. Things such as air conditioning units and industrial fans, when fitted improperly, could cause ELF waves, and it just so happened that many of these units were discovered in traditionally haunted locations.
Physicist: I don't know on ghosts, although some things called ghosts are persistent energy patterns (a bit like whirlpools in reality). What we call reality is based on seemingly-random events. However systems with seemingly-random events can have larger non-random patterns. For example, water molecules bounce around seemingly randomly off each other in a large body of water, yet the ocean can have currents and waves that are far from random and these patterns can persist. The best non-dismissive explanation for ghosts that I know is that they are persistent patterns in reality, similar to a whirlpool and a stream that periodically forms in the same place. These examples are a subset of persistent patterns in reality. Any sort (of energy) that can interact with the human. for example, an oddly-shaped tree can suggest things that repel or attract particular types of people, or a room can reflect sound in a peculiar way, or have strange drafts... I think that what we mean by "ghosts" are mostly psychological, but that can be triggered by some real phenomenon. We don't necessarily refer to the energy itself as a ghost. Any sort of energy that can be perceived (patterns of shade, the outline of a big tree, clouds, wind and other air currents, probably magnetic fields, sounds, etc.) can trigger the human brain to come up with explanations for that which is perceived, and a ghost is one of the way that people explain what they perceive.
I think there is a logical explanation for ghosts. I think it's something that we don't understand yet. I have ideas. The problem is real serious scientists don't seem to want to investigate which is a shame because I think it could be interesting. The only thing that I've come up with that makes any sense in my head, is that oftentimes places where people see ghosts have high electronic readings and shit like that. It's possible that there's magnetic fields in the earth that we don't understand and that maybe they fuck with our heads (The Earth's natural magnetic field resonance might be able to mess with your mind, and the sun's magnetic field or its influence on the solar wind and CMEs can change that magnetic field, so it might be possible... Power-lines certainly give off magnetic fields. Earthquakes seem to affect the Earth's magnetic field. Vortices of charged particles would give off magnetic fields. The other planets exert nothing significant as far as electric or magnetic influence on earth),
and we see things. And if you're on a battlefield maybe you see soldiers because you expect to see soldiers. But I don't know, thats my guess.
Personally I don't believe that ghosts are dead people floating around. There's far too many experiences that have been shared for me to believe it's not true. I've seen something that people consider a "paranormal activity" at Gettysburg I saw the floating orbs over the battlefield. These things I'm quite certain that they're not human souls wandering around because that would require us to have souls and I don't see any proof of that. The human consciousness cannot exist without the body. You are inexorably linked to your brain and vice versa. So unless we could prove that somehow human beings could exist outside of the body or at least consciousness then we could get onto the issue of ghosts as actual beings. I think it's more likely that ghosts are the result of some sort of magnetic wave or some shit that we do not understand yet that emanates from the earth or the sun or the moon or whatever and that fucks with our brain in a way that we don't understand yet.
I know some people who have told some pretty... entertaining, I'm not sure how convincing, ghost stories of their own experiences. So a part of me really, really wants to believe in them. But the fact of the matter is, I don't. Its kind of a nice thought to think that there is an afterlife and a spirit world but I have never experienced any ghosts. Yet. So whats the final word on my belief, well, I certainly, certainly think that there are things in this world that we cannot fully understand or do not yet fully understand. All sorts of strange things happen all the time to all sorts of different people. I mean people I personally know have had these weird things happen. Is this proof of ghosts? No. Is it evidence? Sure, I think that ghosts is as good of an explanation as any. And it is certainly a valid possibility.
