Excuse me but there is a ghost on my boat.

There are two groups of people. One who beleive in the spiritual world and one who beleives that only science can explain it. In between is a group of scientist trying to reconcile the two by keeping an open mind and investigating things.

Sadly, what they have discovered so far is what is this "strange" thing that is happening is believable to the first group but not not acceptable to the other. Believers will stick to their faith and non-believers will always remain a skeptic.

 

The "spooks" from the 'other' side are like Hollywood casting directors, they call you, you don't call them. Hence Randi keeps his million bucks. Apparently they don't like people making free money !

 

This is person(s) departed who was/were very near and dear to you, imo. You say you were "attacked" but obviously no harm done, I found a website somewhere that listed the common manifestations, and I have to say I was startled by the parallels to my own experiences. There seems to be a sameness that is universal. Go figure.

 

And herein lies the answer....

Even if irrevocable photographic proof is taken and submitted by the Pope himself, the prejudged de-bunkers will make it out as a hoax because they already have their minds made up and would not be keen to loose face either admitting defeat.
IOW, the prize money offered will never be claimed, proof or no proof. Fact.

 

Rubbish.

Every newspaper would carry front page banners like:
"US yacht designer Eric Sponberg wins Nobel Prize of Physics for irrefutable
proof that ghosts exists"

This is big stuff, WynandD. Eric claims he can reproduce photos of light
blobs, and ghosts appear whenever there are paying customers.
That's New Physics, possible cures for diseases and maybe new ways to
travel to other dimensions. The American Association for the Advancement of
Science should get involved. It doesn't seem possible that all AAAS members
could be part of the same grand conspiracy.

 

I won't beleive the Pope Ratzinger (or whatever his name is now) either. That is religion.

But I will consider a story/phenomenom/occurence by asking people in the know. Experts who have devoted their life in the pursuit of knowledge about these things.

While I am firmly grounded in the scientific world, My mind is open to other things that manifest itself beyond the scientific explanation.

 

There are thousands of photos of unexplained phenomena. Rename the tour "unexplained phenomena tour" to make Leo happy.
I'm not telling Leo if I encounter a mermaid now

 

I'm very happy, thanks
The Sponberg Ghost Recorder is going to be famous. Nobel prizes, $millions,
the adulation of thousands of formerly skeptical scientists.
I bet that that the Uni of Michigan will even open a new "Eric Sponberg
Department of Ghost Studies". That should
help push them up from the 17th best Uni in the world. Watch out MIT!

I can even see you appearing in a novel by Sponberg and Ryan:
50 Shades of Grey Ghost.

 

Ya have to get out and have fun sometimes.
I don't take ghost stories very seriously. All the same, some of the best campfire stories are ones where the whole plot isn't known. Can you imagine how exciting it would have been to see an aurora in the sky before anyone knew what caused it?

 

Leo, try this for size and explain how a whole family can be loony. This is a true event which I was present and dont talk about it really, but for the sake of interest here it is.

My step grandfather (never new my real one - died before I manifested in life) was a really cruel man and I wont go into specifics. He had a stiff knee and one leg a bit shorter and walked with a cane and limp dragging a foot.
All he had was the few belongings he shared with my gran which she had when they married and a little old Datsun Bluebird he bought which we called the white elephant since he worshiped it. He loved that car more than my granny if I dare say so. At the time they stayed in a rented 8 room farm dwelling out of town (1973) in one of those typical SA farm houses with raised wooden floors with front door into passage with rooms both sides ending in the kitchen then out of backdoor. No electricity and candles and oil lamps were the order of the day.

This old bugger got the cancer (cannot recall which type) but he was well overdue to pass on, laid in his hospital bed rotting and stinking of the cancer, but refuse to let go and all he had on his mind was that damn Datsun car. If one gets near him, it was the Datsun, Datsun...what will happen to it etc.
On a Saturday morning he passed on and his last words were, OK you guessed right, the car- rumours he was help on to prevent his rotting suffering by laying him flat to drown so to speak - and we took my grandma back to the farm and decided to spend the weekend with her.

During the afternoon my stepdad came rushing out of the house and his purple birthmark (covering some of his eye/check) greyish and he pale as snow. He said Willem Coetzee (deceased) is around and we must go. My granny, a god fearing women laughed at him and needless to say we stayed.

However, after everyone went to bed early, the front door slammed violently open and someone started walking down the passage, slowly with dragging limp and cane step clearly heard by all and throwing open doors as he came down the passage but one could not see him. We were in the backrooms and we just bailed out the backdoor with only the clothes we had on us - yours truly just in boxers - and drove like a bat out of hell back to town to our home.

Monday my mom sent a furniture removal company to pack and remove my granny's stuff from the house and not one of us ever stepped into or came near that house since that fateful night.

Each and everyone of us (8 in total) saw the doors flew open with force and clearly hear the distinctive drag/limp and cane tap walk similar to my late step grandfather's on the hollow wooden floors coming down that long passage....

This is not a campfire story and to this very day we as a family dont really talk about that night and to this very day my stepfather refuses to say when asked what he saw that afternoon when he came out of the house telling us to leave immediately.

Please, this was and still is a serious issue with my family and sarcasm not welcome....

 

I've never heard of anyone getting hurt as a result of these happenings. The only thing to be feared is a radical re-arrangement of a personal world view that denies the possibility that reality may be a whole lot different from what science can fathom.

 

Who knows? You might all have eaten bad mushrooms. Someone might have
been playng a sick joke on you all. I'll believe that before I believe in ghosts and pixies.
Shame that you didn't have one of those ghost recorders on hand.

 

Leo, You have made so many vitriolic assaults that I am at a bit of a loss as to which one to quote. I take the one above because it is the most offensive.

First, I work as a paid employee for a tour company in St. Augustine. I wear a colonial-style costume complete with tri-corner hat, sword, knife, shoulder bag, etc. I tell ghost stories laced with a lot of history. It's entertainment! pure and simple! We story-tellers are performers. Our guests have a good time. They take pictures and strange things show up on their cameras. They send them by email to the company and/or to me. Those that I have posted are from our guests. We have seen these on the peoples' cameras as they are taken, and the images as received are the same--they are not altered in any way. (In the one that I posted where I changed the colors in photoshop is the exception, which I noted.)

Second, I don't know how these images appear. I don't know what they are and I don't try to explain them. Everyone interprets the images in their own way. We do get a lot of skeptics on our tours. We don't change their minds. We don't try to. But they enjoy the entertainment, pure and simple.

Third, we are not the only ghost tour company in town. There are about a half a dozen different ghost tour companies. The one we work for, A Ghostly Experience, is the original one in town. St. Augustine just turned 447 years old this past Saturday (8 September), we are the oldest city in the United States, we have a lot of history, a lot of "firsts" for the US, and we seem to have a lot of ghosts. Some people say that St. Augustine is the third most haunted city in the country, after Savannah and New Orleans. I don't know about that, but the point is, a lot of people come to town specifically to see and experience our ghosts, enjoy our history, and this many tour companies would not be here if there wasn't a demand. There is nothing wrong with making money where there is a demand. It's capitalism, the economic foundation of the western world. No one is getting fooled, either. As I said, they come to be entertained, it's professional entertainment, no different than going to a restaurant and listening to the live music. That's all it is.

Fourth, in this country, we have a number of television production companies and paranormal investigators that devote themselves to looking for ghosts. A lot of them have been here and the better ones obtain documentation, video and sound of strange things going on. It is their job to document the ghosts and try to arrive at suitable explanations. That is what they wish to do. Who knows where their investigations may lead.

Fifth, belief or non-belief in ghosts in very personal, as personal as one's own religion because it touches on the belief of an afterlife, and that is directly connected to whether you have a belief in god, or heaven and hell. So whether you believe in ghosts or not is your business, and I am not trying to change anyone's mind about that. Personally, I don't believe in god or heaven or hell, but I have seen a lot of ghosts. I don't know why they appear, and probably no one will ever know how they manifest themselves until they themselves die. On the other hand, someone somewhere may eventually be able to explain it all.

Sixth and finally, if you don't believe in ghosts, then ask yourself to explain the pictures that I posted or the stories that people are reporting here. Give us rational explanations for what they are. If you can't or don't want to, fine. You have made your opinion clear. I think it is you who should finally put up or shut up.

Eric

 

Leo, refer back to post #49

 

You made the claims, you prove them. It is not up to me to examine your evidence.
Submit your evidence to the AAAS. They'll nominate you for a Nobel Prize if
you have discovered a new spirit world with all the new physics that would
flow from that. Or they might think that you are just another crackpot.