Buzzfeed: 14 Former Skeptics Who Turned Into Paranormal Believers After A Freaky Experience

It’s also interesting how many people have experienced such things yet still double down rejecting/dismissing the reality of them. If we are alone, and often sometimes even in company, the terror of witnessing something inexplicable might be easier to assign to a brain glitch or imagination. It’s a tidy way of continuing on as normal.
Me?
I just take it all in my stride :chuckle:……..
Weird presence or time slip in the morning, trip to Tesco in the afternoon…
 
Paul_Exeter said:
Don't expect names or other corroborating details but it is an interesting read all the same:

"14 Former Skeptics Who Turned Into Paranormal Believers After A Freaky Experience"​


https://www.buzzfeed.com/crystalro/skeptics-share-paranormal-experiences
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What a great link! Thanks.

I have had only a few paranormal experiences. These were enough, after several years of serious review, consideration, and frantically looking for normal explanations, for me to accept that reality is weirder than I can imagine. Frantic, for me, because to accept them is to accept that my life is much less in my control than I thought or wanted. The paranormal is difficult for control-freaks.

Even a single experience, which cannot be accounted for by some normal explanation, is enough. The single white crow, as William James (I think) offers as the argument.

EnolaGaia (Blessed be his name!) now knows. I envy him.
 
Endlessly Amazed said:
The paranormal is difficult for control-freaks.
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Very true. Over the decades I’ve known people who’ll relate something very strange that happened to them and then tie themselves into complete knots trying to explain that it wasn’t.
In the end, the explanation they come up with sounds even more whacky and unlikely than if they just shrugged and said ‘I think I might have seen a ghost.’ (for instance). Each time I’ve wanted to say exasperatedly, ‘Why don’t you just say you might have seen/experienced/heard something that you can’t explain? I happens to lots of people. You weren’t hurt, nothing really happened, so why not just accept it for now and move on?’
Of course I don’t say that (being quite polite) but I do think it. Any time anything like that’s happened to me yes I do spend some time going through possible explanations but if nothing is obvious I just shrug and move on. I don’t have the time to get obsessed over proving or disproving things so they get mentally filed away as: ‘That was a bit odd.’
 
"We were standing by one of those old touch lamps and I said I wished I knew if she was still with us. Light came on (we didn't touch it!). We laughed and I said, 'It was probably a short.' Then the light dimmed. We looked at each other and I said somewhat jokingly like, 'Beth is that you?' The light went NUTS going low, medium, high, and off over and over. I said, 'Please stop!' It stopped! I unplugged the lamp (never to be plugged in again)"

It's a horror story. And just like that Beth was left unable to communicate, for eternity. :(
 
kamalktk said:
"We were standing by one of those old touch lamps and I said I wished I knew if she was still with us. Light came on (we didn't touch it!). We laughed and I said, 'It was probably a short.' Then the light dimmed. We looked at each other and I said somewhat jokingly like, 'Beth is that you?' The light went NUTS going low, medium, high, and off over and over. I said, 'Please stop!' It stopped! I unplugged the lamp (never to be plugged in again)"

It's a horror story. And just like that Beth was left unable to communicate, for eternity. :(
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Or maybe it was 'Beth'... something posing as Beth...
 
Funeral homes probably have quite a few interesting stories to tell.
I worked for a roofing / siding company for several years, and from time to time a funeral home would call for repairs.
I asked a few of them if they ever had any strange experiences, after all they are dealing with the dead.
Only one man told me that he had been in business for years, nothing odd had ever happened. But one day he was in his office, no doors or windows were open, and a breeze passed by his desk, coming from nowhere. Freaked him out.
 
Endlessly Amazed said:
The paranormal is difficult for control-freaks.
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What a good thread. Lots of really good observations, but EA hit the nail on the proverbial head with that remark above. I think most people like to think they are in control of their lives (at least in a small immediate way) and the intrusion of anything they can't readily explain away to themselves gets filed under 'huh, that was odd... never mind'.

I'm interested in the paranormal because I don't like to put things in that drawer of my filing cabinet. I keep my socks in there instead. But I have heard many people describe to me the strange thing that happened to them once, but who just don't seem to be bothered at all that they can't explain it rationally. It is literally 'just one of those things' to them. But I always want to shout "just one of WHAT things, exactly??" I guess I'm the weird one.
 
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The lamp business reminds me of those 'friendship lamps' where you can signal from one home to another across any distance via wifi.
Or madgjicke or summat, I dunno.

*Googles*
Oh yeah, it's an app.
 
CharmerKamelion said:
What a good thread. Lots of really good observations, but EA hit the nail on the proverbial head with that remark above. I think most people like to think they are in control of their lives (at least in a small immediate way) and the intrusion of anything they can't readily explain away to themselves gets filed under 'huh, that was odd... never mind'.

I'm interested in the paranormal because I don't like to put things in that drawer of my filing cabinet. I keep my socks in there instead. But I have heard many people describe to me the strange thing that happened to them once, but who just don't seem to be bothered at all that they can't explain it rationally. It is literally 'just one of those things' to them. But I always want to shout "just one of WHAT things, exactly??" I guess I'm the weird one.
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I've posted on here before about the experience of a work colleague and how it lead him to becoming a born-again Christian. A father of several children, he and his family moved into a new local housing authority house. It was a nice enough property but nothing out of the ordinary. However, they immediately noticed that a certain upstairs bedroom felt very "wrong'', that the dog refused to even go up the stairs and that the children wouldn't sleep in there. He described the room as "cold and dark" even if the lights were on and windows open and that it seemed to harbour something "evil".

He turned to his local church who explained that there was good and evil in our world and that an evil spirit was residing in the room, a blessing as held and it took him and his partner on a journey into evangelical Christianity. That, to my mind, was his was of rationalising and controlling the situation and he doesn't need to explain what the "evil" was because the church and bible do the for him.
 
None of these people are "skeptics" in the strong sense of the headline or in the "S"keptical sense of deliberately practicing critical thinking. There is a ploy called "avowal of prior skepticism" (coined by Lamont, 2016) that is extremely common when people tell about their paranormal stories. "I used to be skeptical until X happened to me!". It's a way of framing the experience by suggesting the teller is a reasonable person who is not prone to flights of fancy. That's what this headline is meant to do.
 
Sharon Hill said:
None of these people are "skeptics" in the strong sense of the headline or in the "S"keptical sense of deliberately practicing critical thinking. There is a ploy called "avowal of prior skepticism" (coined by Lamont, 2016) that is extremely common when people tell about their paranormal stories. "I used to be skeptical until X happened to me!". It's a way of framing the experience by suggesting the teller is a reasonable person who is not prone to flights of fancy. That's what this headline is meant to do.
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Yes, indeed. Interesting point. Personally, I would never say I was 'a skeptic' about anyone's reported experience, but I try to approach every case (including my own odd experiences) with as rational an attitude as possible.

I was brought up as a Catholic, with all the baggage that comes with it, and I suppose most religions imply that there is something mysterious or "other" going on that we can't readily see. The first oddness I can recall in my life happened when I was about 8 - hearing the sounds of heavy footsteps and opening and closing doors downstairs when everyone was in bed - and it was undoubtedly that one isolated instance of weirdness that started off an interest that has led me to be in here. But that old cliche about "nothing being inexplicable, merely unexplained" is always in my mind. There are explanations to these things. We just aren't up to speed yet. It's arrogant to assume we already understand the way everything works. Perhaps we will in time.
 
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In matter Fortean I always find it's best to keep a skeptical mindset, it's a very deep rabbit hole to fall in if you don't, I see it in some Facebook groups there are some quite vivid imaginations about, and it can drive you round the bend if you are careful
 
Robbrent said:
In matter Fortean I always find it's best to keep a skeptical mindset, it's a very deep rabbit hole to fall in if you don't, I see it in some Facebook groups there are some quite vivid imaginations about, and it can drive you round the bend if you are careful
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It's almost as though humans are mad and/or stupid.
 
Sharon Hill said:
...There is a ploy called "avowal of prior skepticism" (coined by Lamont, 2016) that is extremely common when people tell about their paranormal stories. "I used to be skeptical until X happened to me!". It's a way of framing the experience by suggesting the teller is a reasonable person who is not prone to flights of fancy. That's what this headline is meant to do.
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I'd not heard of the phrase before, but the 'avowal of prior scepticism' is a much better definition of something I've always thought of as a form of the 'appeal to authority' - in this case the 'authority' being one's own (alleged) prior scepticism.

I freely admit that I've always preferred the 'nothing like this has ever happened to me before' type stories (and deeply mistrust the 'I've always been a bit psychic' ones).

But the...

'Do you believe in ghosts?'

'No.'

...type exchange at the opening of any interview with an alleged witness to such events seems to have become a bit of a requirement. (I really like his stuff, and its head and shoulders above most of the competition - but Danny Robins is, I seem to recall, somewhat keen on this new cliché.)
 
It's always interesting just how much people can change. I rarely make predicitons about my own future opinions on much - maybe tomorrow I'll hold completely opposite opinions to what I now hold :)

Sometimes sceptics become believers, sometimes believers become sceptics, and everything inbetween.
 
Spookdaddy said:
'Do you believe in ghosts?'
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That phrase will often wring an interesting tale from a new acquaintance.
Often the answer is along the lines of 'No, but a few years ago...' and you're away. :bthumbup:

People who didn't believe in ghosts back then and who STILL don't might have the most fascinating experience to impart. :cool:
 
Spookdaddy said:
In many ways, it's a false dichotomy anyway - it's perfectly feasible to be open minded about a general proposition, while at the same time deeply sceptical about some of the data provided to support it.
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True. And one person can be skeptical in many things and entirely credulous on another issue. People aren't exactly rational, knowledgeable, or consistent IMHO. I'm certainly not, lol :)
 
escargot said:
That phrase will often wring an interesting tale from a new acquaintance.
Often the answer is along the lines of 'No, but a few years ago...' and you're away...
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Yep. I'm trying to work out if I can define a personal standpoint on this.

I think it would be something along the lines that in individual conversation, the appeal to prior scepticism can have meaning - but in presentation, when packaged for general consumption, it's just another cliché.
 
The clichéd question "do you believe in ghosts?" prompts in me the clichéd answer "it depends what you mean by 'ghosts' ". I am definitely inclined to believe in something that people can interpret as a traditional ghost (meaning they see it as the spirit of a dead person) but what it actually is may well be something else entirely. Buggered if I know what though. They could all be caused by one specific thing, or by various different things. Maybe some are objectively real and maybe some are entirely subjective to one person. So I'm prepared to believe that 'ghosts' exist, but remain to be convinced as to what exactly they are.
 
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Fanari_Lloyd said:
...Any time anything like that’s happened to me yes I do spend some time going through possible explanations but if nothing is obvious I just shrug and move on. I don’t have the time to get obsessed over proving or disproving things so they get mentally filed away as: ‘That was a bit odd.’
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This reminds me of something I posted on the Odd Experiences: As A Child Versus As An Adult, thread - which kind of became a more general discussion about assimilation versus suppression:

...rather than blocking out anomalies, many people assimilate them so readily that it it almost seems that they have been wiped.

For many years I used to tell people that I liked weird stories but that nothing particularly strange had ever happened to me - then I realised that, actually, yes it had. It's not that I'd blocked the memories in any way - just that they had become part of the library of my accumulated experience as comfortably as having mumps or canoeing in Knoydart.

And I think this is really common. In my experience some of the best (and most convincing) stories that I've ever heard have been from people who've started the conversation claiming that nothing much has ever happened to them - and with most of those people there's no sense of repression, just that the experience has been filed away along with all the others that make up our lives.
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CharmerKamelion said:
The clichéd question "do you believe in ghosts?" prompts in me the clichéd answer "it depends what you mean by 'ghosts' ". I am definitely inclined to believe in something that people can interpret as a traditional ghost (meaning they see it as the spirit of a dead person) but what it actually is may well be something else entirely. Buggered if I know what though. They could all be caused by one specific thing, or by various different things. Maybe some are objectively real and maybe some are entirely subjective to one person. So I'm prepared to believe that 'ghosts' exist, but remain to be convinced as to what exactly they are.
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This is essentially my take, I might be more pedantic and phrase it "depends what you mean by 'ghosts' and depends what mean by 'believe'."
 
Sharon Hill said:
None of these people are "skeptics" in the strong sense of the headline or in the "S"keptical sense of deliberately practicing critical thinking. There is a ploy called "avowal of prior skepticism" (coined by Lamont, 2016) that is extremely common when people tell about their paranormal stories. "I used to be skeptical until X happened to me!". It's a way of framing the experience by suggesting the teller is a reasonable person who is not prone to flights of fancy. That's what this headline is meant to do.
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I definitely noticed this in the article. The headline states that the story tellers were skeptics before a particular incident, but then several of them relay experiences that had happened to them in childhood/teen years. People generally don't understand skepticism as a practise until later.
 
brownmane said:
I definitely noticed this in the article. The headline states that the story tellers were skeptics before a particular incident, but then several of them relay experiences that had happened to them in childhood/teen years. People generally don't understand skepticism as a practise until later.
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Yes, I suppose that's true. It is hard for a kid to be 'a skeptic'. Most people don't arrive at a point of view on 'things like that' until they get a bit older and have a bit of life experience under their belt. Young kids are generally inclined to believe stuff. Having said that, even when I was very young I know I never fell for all that Santa Claus/Easter Bunny/Tooth Fairy crap - but all the presents/ chocolate eggs/sixpences under the pillow were very welcome nevertheless :wink2:
 
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