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A 'Fortean' Subject Of Which You're 100% Convinced

gattino

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Messages
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By Fortean, in this instance, I mean "paranormal" or related phenomenon from big foot to telepathy to whatever it may be. Is there one of these topics, not accepted by mainstream science of whose objective reality/existence you are totally persuaded? If so what lead you to your personal conviction that it is so? Personal experience? The arguments of a particular writer?
 
Ghosts. I know a small number of level headed people with no interest in the subject who claim to have seen something that fits the description. Then there's the weight of historical, cross-cultural anecdote that comes out with a roughly similar phenomenon. I've also seen x1 and felt x1 something that fits the bill.
I'm inclined to think there's something going on that isn't wholly dependent on subjectivity and hoaxing. That's a long way from saying it's the spirits of the dead returning, though that is one 'explanation' of course. I've yet to see one photograph or film that convinces me of their existence however.
 
Well, I don't think I'm sticking my neck out in saying that I accept the reality of ABCs at large in the UK. No personal experience, but there are way too many stories of encounters with large cats for there not to be some truth in them, IMO, and there's no good reason why they wouldn't be able to survive here, for the most part unobserved.
 
I'd echo Culpepper's post.

I'd only add that the cultural context of ghosts fascinates me. It is often - I think rightly - said that France has nothing to compare with our rich tradition of hauntings. It can't be religion: look at the haunted realm of Catholic Ireland! Can it be - of all things - politics?

Here is a page written by an Australian teacher who taught literature in France:

A Visitor in the Land of the Enlightenment​

Part 1: Ghosts​

In my last year here I have taught a course on the Nineteenth-Century English novel at the Université de T. It is an introductory course for students studying French literature, who are supposed to master the basics of the English language but are not going to be English "specialists", so we work with extracts (something I will try to avoid hereafter). At the end of the year they will be required to do a "commentaire de texte", which corresponds more or less to the English tradition of "close reading". Most of them struggle so much with the language that their few critical ideas impress me considerably, like a beam of sunlight coming through thick cloud cover. But there are certain extracts for which these rare moments of understanding disappear altogether. Take the example of a text they analysed for homework.

In the extract the narrator recounts her fears at nightfall; she locks the door carefully, after searching the room to make sure she is alone; she goes to bed and, once she is asleep, she has a terrible nightmare; she wakes with a scream to see a dark figure at the foot of her bed, which gradually disappears through the door; she checks the door and it is still locked. The mood is one of terror, but the dark figure is described in some detail. The lamp, which had been left burning, is darkened in the dream, but still bright when the narrator wakes up to see the strange figure. The narrator herself has no doubt that she is awake, and her terror is all the more intense. You could analyse this extract in terms of mood and narrative techniques, which is what the better students did. A few students also considered that the relationship between reality and hallucination was ambiguous in the extract. But the overhelming majority pronounced that the theme of the extract was the influence of irrational fears on the human mind, and the fact that being too paranoid before going to bed would give you bad dreams.

Again, try giving them an extract from Wuthering Heights to study in class. In this extract Cathy is dying, and has a vision of herself as a future ghost and of Nelly the housekeeper as an old woman (which she is by the time she is telling the story). "Is there some truth in her vision?" I ask. "No, she is just delirious because she has a fever." What is the point of the extract? To show that she is really sick. If she imagines she is going to come back as a ghost, she must be pretty far gone.

Now you may not be familiar with the Gothic tradition in English literature, but I won't be revealing anything new and radical when I tell you that English novels sometimes involve ghosts, eerie happenings, mysterious dooms or moments of supernatural prescience. I doubt this will strike you as conceptually difficult. You may not believe in ghosts in real life, but it doesn't surprise you to encounter them in novels, and you have no trouble believing in them within that fictional framework. Well, in France, it seems that ghosts do not exist. The irrational exists: it is a medical condition, and the local pharmacy probably stocks some drugs that would help for such cases. Fevers exist, though nowadays we have aspirin. Ghosts, no; there may be some left up North in Brittany, but even there they are pretty thin on the ground, and under the sun of the South-West they evaporated long ago. When did they disappear? What killed them - Voltaire? - or did they go to the guillotine with the ancien régime?

In any case, believe me: over here, Cathy is really dead and gone.

Jennifer Yee

Source:
http://danny.oz.au/jennifer/visitor/1.ghosts.html

:)
 
If the UK and ireland, separately and collectively, have a higher preponderence of ghostly occurrences than any other country - as apparently they do - you'd have to ask what do they have in common with each other that distinguishes them from anywhere else. And surely the simplest answer is climate...geography, location, the amount of sunlight.

Hauntings of whatever kind normally involve creaking and groaning, shadows and appartions or whatever. And just as for some reason we assume the vast majority of spooky things happen at night - a "thing" which doesn't objectively exist but is just a reflection of the amount of direct sunlight on a particular part of the earth - then the fact that a greater number happen in these islands might be down to a similar thing: atmospheric conditions either fooling the senses...or expanding them.
 
France does have a tradition of ghosts, there's the well known Lion D'Or case of the man in the cage and, more prosaically, a friend of mine has a cottage in central France which neighbours onto a property that was a gite. He told me that although the place was let for one or two weeks at a time, visitors rarely stayed more than a night or two. A spook was the reason. He said that his uncle had let it for a week long drinking party with a bunch of builders but even they couldn't stick it out. The chap who told me is not a believer in the supernatural but admitted it was all very rum, whatever it was.

There are D-day ghosts and I was reading of a haunting in a French house on this site recently though I agree the interpretation of ghost rather than shunning and oddness is more anglo-saxon. There's more to it that tricks of the light and climate I would suggest.
 
I'm not going to be committing myself '100%' to anything, but I am fairly convinced that 'Telepathy' exists, even though it may only occur under certain emotional conditions and be very hard to replicate. It may also obey rules that we simply do not yet understand and of which we are really only dimly aware. An ape troop trait and throw back to the days before we had spoken language.

On a related note, I also reckon that under certain conditions, 'Poltergeist' like, effects can occur, without the need for young girls to surreptitiously throw their shoes about the room, or tying pieces of thin thread around door knobs. Although, adolescents may be one possible focus for such activity. Once again, strong emotions may be an important factor.

In the case of 'Earthlights', another Fortean subject I'm more, or less, convinced by, more and more scientific evidence is coming in, these days, about their relationship to seismic and atmospheric electrical activity.
 
San Antonio has a very different climate than Ireland or Great Britain (Stage 1 Water Rationing, any day now), but we have all the "ghosts" you could ask for and then some. If there's a building downtown that isn't haunted I've never heard of it, and I've worked in two buildings that had multiple haunts. I've never seen a reliable, systematic statistical analysis of hauntings, and would have to examine the methodology closely before I accepted one more than provisionally. A perception of more frequent hauntings in one place than in another need not match up to the reality, as it's as likely to depend on cultural factors as anything else.

I do not commit to any particular interpretation of Fortean phenomena. Weird things happen, some are subjective, some are objective, and some involve a natural occurance for which our perceptions are not prepared - good luck sorting out which is which! I call it all "fairies" and treasure up the stories, because that's really what I care about.
 
JamesWhitehead said:
I'd echo Culpepper's post.
Me too.

And as Peripart says, ABCs in the UK.

But the difference between ghosts and ABCs, to my way of thinking, is that ghosts are still paranormal (we have no agreed theory on what they are), whereas ABCs are just (biggish) cats!

I also love UFOs. I swing wildly between thinking they're just misperceptions or hoaxes, and thinking they're something 'otherworldly' (although not necessarily ET). Some cases are just too weird to be easily dismissed.
 
Of the less credible phenomena I have a soft spot for Black Dogs - without any good reason. The mix of archetype, folklore, fiend/friend and explosive habits are irresistible. Whatever they were, the ABCs seem to have scared them all away.
 
Ouija boards

When I was a teenager many years ago, using a home made oujia board totally on my own , I was asking daft questions about boyfriends, and the board spelled out "Do not vex me"!!

I was much shaken , and apologised proffusely!
I am ABSOLUTELY sure that those words did not come from my own subconscious!

(If anyone remembers, I did post this on a "ouija board" thread some years ago when I went under the name of "MsT")
 
rynner said:
JamesWhitehead said:
I'd echo Culpepper's post.
Me too.

And me - almost to the letter. The level-headed witness thing - I'm afraid that if someone starts a story with words to the effect that they've always been a bit psychic or that kind of thing happens to them all the time then I tend to switch right off* but I know too many people who have had maybe one experience which, to paraphrase M R James, they cannot either explain away or fit into the scheme of their ordinary life, and who never really try to make any capital out of it - it's simply something that happened. Those are the people who have convinced me that something is going on - although what it actually is I have no idea.

For what it's worth the most convincing encounter I've had was so utterly mundane, so totally lacking in drama, that it's simply too tedious for anyone to have bothered making it up and I think it's that lack of conforming to type that convinced me that something outside my usual frame of reference did actually happen. I’ve had stranger, more saleable, experiences but they’ve always had the potential to be explained away by other factors - this was totally without fireworks, and yet completely inexplicable.

*And yes, I’m possibly wrong to do so – I mean if there are such things as ghosts and people see those ghosts then maybe some people see more than others - but I mistrust the overeagerness of some people in this area as it seems to me they’re often simply trying to promote their own ‘specialness’.
 
Well I'm convinced that UFOs exist, in that people see flying objects which they can't identify (of course, most of them subsequently are identified and, of those which aren't, whether any are piloted by beings from other worlds is another matter entirely...).

I'm sure that there must be some as-yet undiscovered animals lurking among the various reported ABCs, lake/sea monsters and wild men, also strange artifacts like the Voynich manuscript and crystal skulls undoubtedly do exist, it's just that nobody's got to the bottom of them yet ;)
 
WhistlingJack said:
also strange artifacts like the Voynich manuscript and crystal skulls undoubtedly do exist, it's just that nobody's got to the bottom of them yet ;)

Well, not really - crystal skulls appear to be 19th and 20th c. manufactured items and the Voynich ms. looks like a hoax in that it uses an artificial generated series of symbols to appear like a language.
In both cases, they're probably "strange artifacts" because the people who were selling them wanted them to be strange.
 
colpepper1 said:
Of the less credible phenomena I have a soft spot for Black Dogs - without any good reason. The mix of archetype, folklore, fiend/friend and explosive habits are irresistible. Whatever they were, the ABCs seem to have scared them all away.

I've often thought that, at least in certain cases, they might be one and the same and that all that's changed is our frame of reference.
 
markbellis said:
WhistlingJack said:
also strange artifacts like the Voynich manuscript and crystal skulls undoubtedly do exist, it's just that nobody's got to the bottom of them yet ;)

Well, not really - crystal skulls appear to be 19th and 20th c. manufactured items and the Voynich ms. looks like a hoax in that it uses an artificial generated series of symbols to appear like a language.
In both cases, they're probably "strange artifacts" because the people who were selling them wanted them to be strange.

Yes, but if Fortean artefacts do turn out to be faked, then the mystery shifts to the subject of who faked them and why.
 
Spookdaddy said:
colpepper1 said:
Of the less credible phenomena I have a soft spot for Black Dogs - without any good reason. The mix of archetype, folklore, fiend/friend and explosive habits are irresistible. Whatever they were, the ABCs seem to have scared them all away.

I've often thought that, at least in certain cases, they might be one and the same and that all that's changed is our frame of reference.

I've heard that theory. Even so, it's fair to assume country folk who may not have seen a large felid up close might be sufficiently familiar with dogs and domestic cats to tell the difference. Modern ABCs tend to skulk away with a certain amount of staring and/or hissing rather than accompany the lone traveller down country lanes and giving of dangerous incendiary reports and vanishing pantomime style.

If we're in the guessing business I'd say Black Dogs were some kind of genius loci with an unknown agenda, perhaps boundary pomps conjoured by ancient shamen that have worn themselves out over the years. They may also be of fairie morphology, whatever that means. Then again they may be scary nonsense put around by uneducated peasants to keep people Orf Their Laand!
 
colpepper1 said:
Spookdaddy said:
I've often thought that, at least in certain cases, they might be one and the same and that all that's changed is our frame of reference.

I've heard that theory. Even so, it's fair to assume country folk who may not have seen a large felid up close might be sufficiently familiar with dogs and domestic cats to tell the difference.

I didn't quite mean it that way - and I would emphasise the 'in certain cases' bit because I'm fairly convinced that there are, or have been, flesh and blood ABC's wandering the British countryside. What I'm thinking is what if, in certain cases, the phenomenon is neither a dog or a cat but that it is interpreted as each depending on the frame of reference of the witness - so what to your 21st century witness IS as a large cat, to your 18th century witness WAS a large dog. Neither is confusing a dog with a cat but what they may be doing is interpreting something else entirely as a dog or a cat - if you see what I mean??! This, of course, wouldn't exclude the genius loci theory (there was a good thread on that lot some time way back). One of the things that has always fascinated me about hauntings, and other paranormal phenomena, is their changing fashions, and I suppose that thinking about this is what made me wonder if maybe its not the ghosts that change, but us.
 
Yes, I see what you mean. I'm with you on the big cat idea too. There probably are some running wild but it beggars belief that of all the ones seen, none are ever run to ground or cornered and evade tracker dogs and animal experts. Merrily Harper suggests they aren't flesh and blood (for long, anyhow) and I'm with her on that. Especially when adult Lions are seen!
 
I'm 100% certain that ball lightning is real. I read last year that scientists had created some in the lab, but of course they can't agree if it actually is ball lightning or not. Still, at least they're trying! What causes it and whether or not it has any of the "abilities" that some claim it does I'm less sure about. Ball lightning is probably my default explanation for all sorts of things. UFO? Ghost? Anomalies in the time/space continuum? Obviously ball lightning!

I agree that ABCs are probably real too.

Spring Heeled Jack is one that I would love to be real, although since it's quite late at night I'm going to try not to think about it or I may have nightmares.
 
I believe quite a few mad things*, having experienced lots of weird phenomena and heard accounts of more from people I trust.

In the long run, it's easier to accept that certain things happen which we can't explain, rather than drive ourselves crazy trying to account for everything.

We don't hear everything that goes on. Some odd things that happen are very personal and won't be widely shared: no need to prove a thing to the world at large. ;)

What we read on here only scratches the surface of human weirdness. Thank goodness. :D

* For starters, there's life after/before death, ball lightning, polt-type phenomena and possibly telepathy.
 
I would have thought that ball lightning is accepted, even if the physics of them seems weird - ie how does a naturally occurring ball of plasma retain its shape for so long.

I've seen what I would describe as a UFO (but others might not) but I didn't assume it was other worldly, just the military playing with artificially produced plasma balls. I'm open to the possibility that non-terrestrials might be responsible for some sightings but there's precious little reliable and confirmable evidence.

I'm prepared to accept the possibility of ABCs actually being BIG cats (ie non-native ones) but I'm puzzled why there are so few sightings of them if they're that common.

Can't see how ghosts or polts work, but have heard credible stories involving them.

Conspiracies - well they are part of politics, but not all conspiracy theories have a valid empirical basis. But I suspect there's a lot going on we don't hear about ;)

Crop circles -terrestrially and human produced landscape art - the only mystery is why people think there's a mystery.
 
I beleive 100% in fortelling the future.

I follow the method of recording dreams in J W Dunne's "An Experiement with Time" and have had aboout 20 dreams in my lifetime which all came true.

Various friends who I have told about this method consistently report success.
 
gattino said:
If the UK and ireland, separately and collectively, have a higher preponderence of ghostly occurrences than any other country - as apparently they do - you'd have to ask what do they have in common with each other that distinguishes them from anywhere else. And surely the simplest answer is climate...geography, location, the amount of sunlight.

For my money it's the relative nearness of all the British Isles to the sea.
 
I accept the existence of ghosts and while they may not automatically prove Survival they certainly point in that direction.

Poltergeists, also, although I'm not convinced they have much relevance to ghosts, as such.

As for ball lightning and related plasma discharges the question is no longer as to whether they exist but rather whether they occasionally display signs of rudimentary intelligence.

And the same question may also be asked concerning corpse candles, fools' fire, will o' the wisps and so on, even though we understand how they are generated.
 
I think ghosts exist, but I don't think they're actual people, more echos or traces, and some hauntings are more to to with the enviroment and people's perception of it.

Aliens, fairies, angels, demons and your old style pagan gods, I think are all parts of the same phenomenom and it's our interpretation of it that changes over time, where I stand on it's objective reality varies with the weather.

Crop circles are more to do with practical jokers in green wellies than little green men...

ABCs probably exist, but there's lot of them that are misperceived standard moggies...
 
My mother described a terrifying night hag ordeal she had long before the term was in popular use so I'm predisposed to believe in them. Curiously, she also saw ball lightning kill a horse when she was a child. She called it a round, rolling thunderbolt. For years I thought her description of the weather leading up to it was fanciful until I read a local weather book that described 'the week the sky went green' over the exact area she lived.
 
Mal_Adjusted said:
Conspiracies - well they are part of politics, but not all conspiracy theories have a valid empirical basis. But I suspect there's a lot going on we don't hear about ;)
No need to just 'suspect' - look at all the stuff that's finally published after Thirty Years....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Year_Rule

(I wish I was likely to be alive in thirty years time, to see what the current government was really up to! :twisted: )
 
Timble2 said:
I think ghosts exist, but I don't think they're actual people, more echos or traces, and some hauntings are more to to with the enviroment and people's perception of it.

I suspect that any dichotomy between the "Survivalist" and "stone tape" theories of ghosts may be more apparent than real and due to our lack of understanding of Time itself.

Aliens, fairies, angels, demons and your old style pagan gods, I think are all parts of the same phenomenom and it's our interpretation of it that changes over time....

I like that.

....where I stand on it's objective reality varies with the weather.

Got you. I don't believe any of this stuff on second Tuesdays.
 
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