Why Do We See Ghosts? | Random Thursday

it's Halloween so I thought I would talk about something that always catches me a lot of health whenever I bring it up on this channel yeah let's invite some more that I used to be in a ghost hunting group like the whole thing like me and a bunch of dudes we would go into some old buildings we had EMF meters night-vision cameras and just you know tried to find proof of ghosts now a couple of things about this one this was a long time ago this is way before all those cheesy ghost hunter reality shows that came on so I was doing this before it was cool and second I actually joined the group because I was researching a screenplay idea that I had about a team of ghost hunters and then I stayed on because well it was kind of fun I became friends with these guys and we go into these old buildings these old creepy buildings they had these crazy histories to him you know it was it was really more urban exploring than it was ghost hunting this is actually how I discovered the Baker hotel in Mineral Wells which is one of the most fascinating buildings with almost fascinating histories I have ever heard and I'm obsessed with it and I desperately want to make a documentary about it someday but anyway despite all that whenever I brought out the fact that I used to do a little bit of ghost hunting all the more militant nerds out there in the comments get really super butthurt about it here I thought you were a science person but you believe in ghosts what an idiot unsubscribed here's the thing though I don't really believe in ghosts and you know why I don't really believe in ghosts because I was in the ghost hunting group for like three years and I never saw anything I have stayed nights in some of the creepiest supposedly most haunted buildings in Texas with cameras running the whole time and yeah I might have caught an orb here there I might have caught a you know a electromagnetic spike here and there but nothing that couldn't be explained away by dust or electrical interference I've never found anything that was 100% definitive proof of ghosts so I used to question if they were real I investigated it and I came to the conclusion that they probably aren't what could be more science person than that and honestly I wish I had seen something it would make my stories in that time of my life a lot more interesting so I may not be the world's biggest believer in ghosts but I do love me some ghost stories and the fact of the matter is there's a lot of them out there and being that today is Halloween I'm gonna share some of those with you this video is kind of a collaboration with some friends of mine at the haunted AF podcast this is a show where they basically have people call in and share their first-hand accounts of ghost stories and experiences that they've had and they have given some of these stories to me graciously to let me share with you so yeah I feel loved a good creepy story you might want to check them out I'll put the link down in the description and if you're one of those more militant nerds like I was talking about before and you're gonna get all triggered over this just don't just maybe skip this video okay and maybe LP LT but if you do stick around this will be a lot of fun and and yeah I'm actually going to talk a little bit about some of the theories out there so what actually causes this phenomena because the fact of the matter is sixty percent of people in the United States believe that they have seen a ghost that's according to a poll that was done last year and yeah it only had 2000 participants in it and it was done by the esteemed polling organization of Groupon but still pretty much everybody knows somebody who swears by a ghostly experience that they once had and this has been true since like the beginning of recorded history so what's going on here it was 1987 I was filming a dress rehearsal for the drama department in El Paso High School I was running one of those old camcorders up in the balcony which is where we always film the shows because you could cover the whole stage and there wasn't any chance of something blocking the shot it was dark up there and I was focusing on the viewfinder kind of in my own little world and then suddenly I felt the chill to my right side send goosebumps up my arm I thought somebody might have opened the door and let it draft in or something so I glanced around sure enough there was a guy sitting just a few seats away I didn't think much of it at first people sneaked in to watch dress rehearsals all the time but this guy was wearing really old clothes like something out of the Old West I thought that was kind of weird but then again this is the drama department maybe he was in costume or something anyway I went back to shooting after a few more minutes I looked back to the guy this time he turned toward me and kind of nodded just sort of friendly and then turned back to the stage I nodded back but then I noticed something the seat he was sitting on it wasn't down these are those old auditorium seats that stay up until you push them down to sit on them and his was still up in fact the more my eyes adjusted I realized I couldn't see his legs I couldn't really see anything from the chest down and then as soon as I realized that he just disappeared right in front of me to this day I still can't explain what I saw in that balcony it almost doesn't really even qualify as a theory because this is obviously what people think of when they think of ghosts they think of spirits of dead people and this of course is contingent on the possibility of the consciousness continuing after death which is a whole can of worms inside of a Pandora's box now obviously a lot of you out there believe that that's not true that when you die that's the end others may go by the religious conventions of heaven and hell and purgatory and the ghosts or maybe spirits that are trapped here for one reason or another or maybe there's some kind of waiting period before you move on and others may not necessarily believe in their religious notions of heaven and hell and purgatory and all that but think that consciousness might continue through you know quantum weirdness quantum entanglement and the you know super conscious fabric underlying the reality of the universe however you slice it the idea of ghosts as dead spirits interacting with us through another plane of existence is the narrative gift that just keeps on giving the storytelling possibilities are endless Beetlejuice pictures the afterlife is a bureaucratic nightmare the frighteners has a playground for pranksters and scam artists defending your life is the great grand jury in the sky and ghosts well you can bang a dead guy through Whoopi Goldberg in each of these and countless other scenarios there's an element of unfinished business you know of trying to right wrongs and make sense of your life and looking back over the choices that you've made often these stories are about letting go letting go of fear letting go of obligations letting go of loved ones letting go of this world essentially before you cross over to the other plane of existence and reconnect all over again there's always a theme of isolation in these stories of being disconnected from what you think matters before realizing that what you think matters doesn't really matter and that by only letting go can you be free narrative Li it can help explain why ghosts are trapped in certain locations and obviously it takes away the sting of knowing that we have death waiting for us in the future of our own mortality and ultimately the real experiences people have aside you have to ask the question does our belief in ghosts in the afterlife in general just stem from that ever-present fear of our own mortality is this what gets us up in the morning and allows us to go on and live our lives I'll just let that hang in the air for now my mom was diagnosed with MS and as her symptoms progressed I moved into our apartment to take care of her over the year she became bedridden and I had to do everything for her she would call my name and I'd come help her even just to grab something that was just out of reach anyway years went by and the disease took its toll on her and eventually she died right there in that bed I moved out and tried to go on with my life eventually got married and bought a new home we hired a painter to help redo the kitchen and one day we got to talking I told him how we just moved into this house and I mentioned that I used to live at that apartment complex he knew exactly which complex I was talking about because his company paints the apartments there when people move out I told him which apartment was mine and when I moved out and he said yeah I painted that apartment we had to laugh about it like what are the odds right then he remembered something you know it was the weirdest thing he said I was working there one day and I swear heard no woman calling out from the bedroom said the name Kevin I could hear it clear as day my breath honey my throat and I almost dropped my paintbrush it took him a second to connect the dots he looked at me too weirded out to even speak I told him about my mom how she died in that room he was so freaked out he had to take a smoke break this was a popular idea back in the day when I was doing the ghost hunting thing and the basic idea is that ghosts aren't necessarily spirits of dead people walking around and interacting with us but it's more like a movie being played back in other words strong emotions can kind of become imprinted on a location and then later on somebody else can pick up that imprint under the right conditions this became known as the stone tape theory so you know a man or a woman buys a house maybe spends a lot of time fixing it up they really love this house they have a lot of you know wonderful memories in this house they kind of leave a mental imprint there of their emotions and then later on somebody else buys this house and they move in and they're able to sort of pick up on that mental imprint the brain might pick that up as just sort of a presence of somebody else being there or it might actually manifest it as a person standing on the other side of the room in your mind's eye or some scarier traumatic experience happen there then somebody might have a more frightening encounter this of course relies on the possibility that a mental imprint can actually be done on a location which we have absolutely no proof of but this isn't too far away from what the global consciousness project was working on basically the idea that human emotions can affect patterns and random number generators so while this is far from proven there are definitely researchers out there that are looking into the possibility that our minds can affect matter and that maybe we could perceive electromagnetic stimuli that don't come from our normal five senses extrasensory perception you might say my family moved into a home in Bedford and it came with one of those ring doorbells installed which I thought was cool but it quickly became a pain in the butt because it kept sending me alerts every night that there was somebody at the door at 3:00 a.m. but then when I checked the camera there was never anyone there obviously it kind of freaked me out the first few times it happened after a while I figured it must just be a glitch and I learned to ignore it anyway I found myself in a conversation with a friend who also had a ring doorbell and I asked him if he had the same problem he said no and asked me to pull out the last video it recorded I played it and my friend noticed an orb floating past the camera after it came on I thought it was probably just dust but then he noticed there was a sound that it recorded I played it back and he was right it sounded like someone talking I realized that never actually listened to the videos before I turned up the volume and listened to it the sound was rough but the voice seemed to say I'll kill you okay now we're getting in a much more likely scenario which is just quite simply ghosts or hallucinations some reason people get really upset whenever you suggest that maybe they're having a hallucination or something it's almost like there's a stigma behind it like mental illness or something like that but the fact of the matter is we hallucinate all the time you could argue that our very conscious experience as a hallucination created by our brain and guided by sensory information well you don't think your brain could conjure up fully realized people that are indistinguishable from the real thing it happens every night when you dream now I've made the argument before that our brains are just hardwired to create a conscious experience and in lieu of any sensory information it just makes stuff up and that's basically what dreaming is there's an effect known as pareidolia where our minds see faces and images in random patterns because it's just evolved that way we are social animals when you're a hammer everything is a nail when you're a brain everything is a face it's like the google deepmind videos where analyzes footage and inserts images of faces and animals and objects into places where its algorithms determined that it looks slightly like a dog's face or a bird or a lizard etcetera and of course there are times when multiple people see the same thing could that be a hallucination maybe we are incredibly open to suggestion far more so than we want to admit I did a video a while back on the dancing plague which it was a thing where an entire town of people in Europe started dancing they felt this overwhelming compulsion to dance to the point that some people even died and most people look at that as an extreme example of the power of suggestion and ghosts could be the same thing especially if you're in a building that's supposed to be haunted or if you've recently lost a loved one your brain is primed to look for that and sometimes the mind sees what it wants to see I work for a state agency in Pennsylvania and our offices are in the former Harrisburg State Hospital and if you don't know what kind of hospital this was its original name when it was founded in the 1830s was the Pennsylvania State lunatic hospital it's very old and saw a lot of crazy stuff in its time so of course everybody says it's haunted now I've never really believed in ghosts so it didn't bother me to work there but everyone seemed to have a story about some spooky thing that happened to him or someone they know but I'd never seen anything until one day me and several co-workers were on a conference call we're at a table with the phone in the middle talking to another office over the speaker when one of my co-workers pointed at the phone cord it was rolling slowly across the table we looked at each other to see who was doing this even showing our hands to each other to prove it wasn't us we felt all around the table to see if there were any strings checked under the table nothing was doing this and then it just stopped as suddenly as it started for no reason we kind of looked at each other and wrapped up the phone call after we looked at the cord and tried to make it roll like that again even twisting up the cord and leaning the table to see if we could recreate it and we couldn't none of us in that room that day could explain what we saw but we know we all saw it I mentioned in previous videos of this channel the idea of flatland which Carl Sagan actually talked about in one of his episodes of cosmos so I attributed it to him but many of course were quick to point out that flatland is actually a book that was written by Edwin Abbott so there you go correction achieved but the basic gist of the thing is that if you lived in a totally flat 2d world and a 3d object sat down on top of that then all you would see were the lines of that exhibit that plane that the 3d object was sitting on and if that object were to pass through the plane then you would just see that line change shape as the object passed through unless you could sort of interpret plane by plane kind of slice by slice like an MRI machine the flatland example is often cited as a way to explain how difficult it is to translate a 3d object into 2d space and the same holds true for say a 40 object in 3d space you know we do our best with a tesseract to explain that but as Carl Sagan says in his episode of cosmos the the tesseract really is more of like a 4d shadow in a 3d space the point is that there are higher dimensions which many schools of thought believe that there are then an object or entity that might pass from a higher dimensional space into our space might just look like something we can't quite explain and explain dark masses orbs cold spots sound movement and perhaps from the perspective of that entity that the forty or five D space is totally normal and it's those people over there that are the weird thing and sort of similarly in this vein is the idea of time slips that ghosts are are literally people from the past that slipped through time into our current temporal framework you know through some higher dimensional property now people assume that time is a logical progression of cause and effect but maybe in those higher dimensions it's actually a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff ultimately whatever you believe about ghosts whether they exist whatever might cause them ultimately I think the most powerful thing about ghosts stories is the stories part stories are just kind of how we understand the world and we're titillated by ghost stories because we're drawn to the spooky and McCobb which is why the most viewed video on my channel by far is the one that talks about what happens when you get your head cut off but they're also the stories of people people who met sad and tragic ends who had unfinished business their morality plays and cautionary tales teaching us to live every day like it's our last because you never know there's a reason why ghost stories always end with somebody getting into heaven like there's nothing that ever really happens after that because you know heaven is supposed to be this place of never-ending happiness and bliss and it's kind of hard to create narrative conflict in a place like that but ghosts people stuck in one spot feeling disconnected unable to live their purpose unable to let go I mean who doesn't identify with that on some level time is long unimaginably long the time-lapse view of the human experience would just be billions of faces pop existence appearing and disappearing only real for a second and then it's gone we are our entire species just a temporary apparition in time in the big picture we are ghosts so happy hunting I want to say thanks again to Julianne Rebecca from the haunted AF podcast for sharing these stories with me if you love a good ghost story if you're really into this kind of thing definitely check out their podcast I'll put the link down below and let's share it what's your favorite ghost story have you ever seen a ghost yourself it's Halloween now's the time to you know share that kind of thing let's talk about it down in the comments below all right please like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here maybe check out this video because Google thinks you'll like that or any of the others on the side over here and if you enjoy them and I hope you do please subscribe I come back with videos every Monday and every Thursday all right with that you guys go out now have an eye-opening and spooky Halloween and safe be safe out there and I'll see you on Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 489,883

Keywords: answers with joe, random thursday, ghosts, halloween, ghost stories, ghost sightings, apparitions, stone tape theory, scary stories, theater ghost, ghost hunting, hallucinations

Id: BGA06OnmIWQ

Length: 18min 37sec (1117 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 31 2019