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Electronic Influences By Ghosts Perhaps

How would emotions leave a trace? There is no mechanism to send them, or material to record them, let alone play them back to certain people under particular conditions.

Nicely put, Sharon. I like reading your posts.

However, let's entertain the notion that emotions are not internally created but are internal manifestations of external signals. We haven't yet been able to record or measure their transferral but I would argue that most of us have had our emotions and state of mind affected by unmeasurable external stimuli (oppressive feelings in a certain place, unexplained sudden panic or horror, a feeling of being watched, a sudden spring in your step etc). What if certain emotions are the effect but we haven't pinpointed the cause?
 
This is a very appealing idea to many people. It shows up so often.

How would emotions leave a trace? There is no mechanism to send them, or material to record them, let alone play them back to certain people under particular conditions.

That's a tough one, the phrase "you could cut the atmosphere with a knife", springs to mind. Yes, there are lots of other sensory stimulation going on, body language, etc, but there is also a real sense of something not being right that does not involve visual clues.

Also, most of us have felt sadness or a sense of foreboding about a place, some of those places can be quite mundane - again not giving us a visual clue which allows our brain to fill in the gaps.

The visual of an old graveyard, old forgotten gravestones lead to the thought "how sad all these forgotten people" that leads to sad feelings. - job done.

Yet a modern built house with contemporary furnishings can also provoke feelings not congruent with how it looks. How many people report that some places just "never felt right"? Those places are not all Scooby Doo haunted houses.

What about places outside that just don't feel right as well. A patch of a field that produces Panic-like feelings?

There is something going on that suggests it's more than just the individual's personality type. Is it infrasound responsible? Electro-magnetic fields? Dead spirits?

I totally agree with you about modern ghost hunters armed with electronic thermometers, EMF readers, ghost boxes, etc extrapolating all sorts of supernatural "evidence" from their readings.
 
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My youngest and husband have been looking to buy a house and have looked at a great many over recent months.
Now they have put in an offer on one and she says it just somehow felt right when they walked in although it had more things to be fixed than other ones.
 
There are very many environmental and aesthetic factors that can result in personal feelings about a place. I would disagree that we need to invoke paranormal or supernatural forces or alternative explanations for emotions to explain being uncomfortable in oppressive, closed-in or just plain awful places. Consider how obvious it is that people feel awe at being in inspiring places. As for locations that have an existing atmosphere colored by past or present uses - cemeteries, churches, battlefields, etc. - it is a given that people experience what they anticipate they will experience. Some places just LOOK haunted based on the normalization of the "haunted" aesthetic. There certainly are locations with a strong "sense of place".

I would agree that human reactions are a mix of the external and internal. That doesn't, however, seem to support an argument for ghostly "energy". It's too massive of a leap to say that emotions embed themselves in an "ether" and are retrieved when there are too many other mundane reasons, the most obvious of which is that people naturally react to their surroundings. I'm recalling Lethbridge, here, who I found too dreamy and unconvincing.
 
There are very many environmental and aesthetic factors that can result in personal feelings about a place. I would disagree that we need to invoke paranormal or supernatural forces or alternative explanations for emotions to explain being uncomfortable in oppressive, closed-in or just plain awful places. Consider how obvious it is that people feel awe at being in inspiring places. As for locations that have an existing atmosphere colored by past or present uses - cemeteries, churches, battlefields, etc. - it is a given that people experience what they anticipate they will experience. Some places just LOOK haunted based on the normalization of the "haunted" aesthetic. There certainly are locations with a strong "sense of place".

I would agree that human reactions are a mix of the external and internal. That doesn't, however, seem to support an argument for ghostly "energy". It's too massive of a leap to say that emotions embed themselves in an "ether" and are retrieved when there are too many other mundane reasons, the most obvious of which is that people naturally react to their surroundings. I'm recalling Lethbridge, here, who I found too dreamy and unconvincing.


I never suggested we invoke any of those things you mention as being paranormal - Yes I'm interested in mundane places provoking strong emotional responses in people where there shouldn't be strong emotional responses.

Re: famous places - people are charged up before visiting a place because of anticipation - that's normal.

I'm talking about completely normal places that feel wrong.

The point of my post was that graveyards will create a feeling. Normal housing shouldn't. But the mundane can create experiences that would be classed as paranormal.

Basically, why do some people feel so ill at ease in certain non-spooky places?

That was my point.
 
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Normal housing shouldn't.

Hmm. I've walked into plenty of potential housing situation that most people might think were completely normal and thought "Hell, no" and was out of there. People have diverse preferences. Some people (me, for instance) just get creeped out by ugly wallpaper or the general layout, maybe even the smell of a place or circumstances for being there. I'd wonder if those occasions where people feel ill at ease in non-spooky places have really mundane explanations or are just based on personal idiosyncrasies. I'd have to be convinced that "feeling weird" is something to be explained at all. Sure, places feel spooky sometimes, but if pressed, we might be able to explain why without inserting a questionable factor like infrasound, EMF, or spirits.

Cultural factors allow us to give our preferences some creative reasons for being. For example, I'm thinking of psychics who report being ultra sensitive to mundane places and concoct an elaborate past history and spirits or demons hanging out - they have been known to just make stuff up. My view on this is that people are imaginative and that serves to explain most unaccountable weird feelings.
 
Hmm. I've walked into plenty of potential housing situation that most people might think were completely normal and thought "Hell, no" and was out of there. People have diverse preferences. Some people (me, for instance) just get creeped out by ugly wallpaper or the general layout, maybe even the smell of a place or circumstances for being there. I'd wonder if those occasions where people feel ill at ease in non-spooky places have really mundane explanations or are just based on personal idiosyncrasies. I'd have to be convinced that "feeling weird" is something to be explained at all. Sure, places feel spooky sometimes, but if pressed, we might be able to explain why without inserting a questionable factor like infrasound, EMF, or spirits.

Cultural factors allow us to give our preferences some creative reasons for being. For example, I'm thinking of psychics who report being ultra sensitive to mundane places and concoct an elaborate past history and spirits or demons hanging out - they have been known to just make stuff up. My view on this is that people are imaginative and that serves to explain most unaccountable weird feelings.
Couldn't disagree with any of the above Sharon .. and I am a paranormal investigator in a team so I should be offended apparently but I'm more interested in the circular Fortean approach as well, there's three of us using 3 loads of equipment (that gets used wantonly with most teams) so we can check back to prove we were just imagining it.

If two pieces of equipment correlate live and we were lucky enough to record that, then we think about looking deeper into it. I take hand written basic notes like " 12.32 possible female heard?" We should probably be harsher on ourselves and keep it to a strict three out of three rule to completely prove ghosts are all bullshit and fanciful thinking under conditions but if we did that, we'd be ignoring the possibility that ghosts might be real.
 
This is a very appealing idea to many people. It shows up so often.

How would emotions leave a trace? There is no mechanism to send them, or material to record them, let alone play them back to certain people under particular conditions.

But if we can feel emotion from other people in an empathetic way (crying when someone else is crying, feeling pain for those in pain etc), then why couldn't that emotion imprint itself somehow on a situation in a physical way? So someone suffering extreme high emotion in a location could - in a kind of 'stone tape' way - force emotion into the surroundings, to be picked up at a later date/time by someone with the correct 'receptive' equipment.

We have no idea how any of this works. Any suggestions could be as likely as any other.
 
It is just a personal opinion but it feels like we cannot measure how much water is in a jug because we have a tape measure. The tape measure is accurate so the water is unmeasurable.

Perhaps there is more to our universe than can be measured, because we do not even know that it exists, never mind work out how to measure it. The physical sciences, for me personally, feel like a poor tool when specifically used in such circumstances.
 
But if we can feel emotion from other people in an empathetic way (crying when someone else is crying, feeling pain for those in pain etc), then why couldn't that emotion imprint itself somehow on a situation in a physical way? So someone suffering extreme high emotion in a location could - in a kind of 'stone tape' way - force emotion into the surroundings, to be picked up at a later date/time by someone with the correct 'receptive' equipment.

We have no idea how any of this works. Any suggestions could be as likely as any other.

Yeah, we do know quite a bit on how empathy/sympathy works. We get a cue - visual or audio. And we respond in kind (or not). We can't detect emotion without some cue as it is not waves through the air or a measurable emission. Psychics or empaths claim they can detect emotions by extrasensory means but this has not been objectively established as accepted. Here is my Stone Tape piece link from 2017 in case people want more on this. https://sharonahill.com/2017/05/11/the-stone-tape-theory-of-hauntings-a-geological-perspective/
 
Yeah, we do know quite a bit on how empathy/sympathy works. We get a cue - visual or audio. And we respond in kind (or not). We can't detect emotion without some cue as it is not waves through the air or a measurable emission. Psychics or empaths claim they can detect emotions by extrasensory means but this has not been objectively established as accepted. Here is my Stone Tape piece link from 2017 in case people want more on this. https://sharonahill.com/2017/05/11/the-stone-tape-theory-of-hauntings-a-geological-perspective/

Yes, we do know a lot about empathy via visual or audio cues. My job is to read those cues. I also do cool experiments (especially on Somatic empathy) in my job.

But the scientific community knows nothing about reciprocal emotions without visual/audio cues because it does not study it. You state that we cannot detect emotion without visual/audio cues. I disagree. We have on this board, examples of people experiencing immense sadness when loved ones on the other side of the world are experiencing tragedy. Or people "feeling something is wrong" when a loved one dies unexpectedly with no prior ill health. Or a twin suffering pain or anxiety when their sibling is injured miles away. Totally unscientific, unmeasurable and impossible to study under clinical conditions yet a recurring situation based on the amount of anecdotal evidence.

I'm not sure what to make of it all. I asked earlier Sharon, that you entertain the notion that not all emotions are internally created. We do not need to prove/disprove the hypothesis - we can just discuss it as an intellectual excercise. I enjoy your level headed approach yet you seen steadfast in the "I'm right" camp and unable to postulate a different hypothesis. I would be very interested to hear your postulatations. Release your imagination and tell me...what if...?
 
I asked earlier Sharon, that you entertain the notion that not all emotions are internally created. We do not need to prove/disprove the hypothesis - we can just discuss it as an intellectual excercise. I enjoy your level headed approach yet you seen steadfast in the "I'm right" camp and unable to postulate a different hypothesis. I would be very interested to hear your postulatations. Release your imagination and tell me...what if...?

Maybe I’m short on imagination but it makes no sense to me to consider that emotions are not created by the brain. Life works just fine without alternative speculation. That was my whole point - We don’t need to invoke something more than what we know to explain why people react strangely to places. Find a problem and then hypothesize about options for causes instead of imagining a thing and imposing it on an outcome. That there could be perception beyond our established senses is a separate issue. I have no specific thoughts to share about that. Sorry that you don’t care for my analytical mindset. It’s not a bad thing, actually. I rather like it; serves me well and is sorely needed in a world when people probably rely a bit too much on emotion and what feels right.

Edit: maybe the idea of qualia is appropriate to invoke here. Also, I am perhaps not clear what an external source of emotion is referring to.
 
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Maybe I’m short on imagination but it makes no sense to me to consider that emotions are not created by the brain. Life works just fine without alternative speculation. That was my whole point - We don’t need to invoke something more than what we know to explain why people react strangely to places. Find a problem and then hypothesize about options for causes instead of imagining a thing and imposing it on an outcome. That there could be perception beyond our established senses is a separate issue. I have no specific thoughts to share about that. Sorry that you don’t care for my analytical mindset. It’s not a bad thing, actually. I rather like it; serves me well and is sorely needed in a world when people probably rely a bit too much on emotion and what feels right.

Edit: maybe the idea of qualia is appropriate to invoke here. Also, I am perhaps not clear what an external source of emotion is referring to.

I enjoy your analytical mindset and I do care for it, as I posted eralier. I like reading your posts. I too am very analytical. I also enjoy, from time to time, wildly speculating purely for the creative excercise of it. I was just hoping that you would join in just for fun.

I agree with you that emotions are created in the brain and not just floating about in the ether. When it comes to places, I agree that we are influenced heavily by our surroundings, sights, smells, auditory cues and prior knowledge. I find it stimulating however to ponder that maybe a person could feel an emotion without physical stimuli. A sudden "knowing" that something is wrong and the resulting sadness for example.
 
I just revisited the Mythbusters' Halloween special.
Their experiment using infrasound was inconclusive - only 2/10 of the subjects chose the cabin with the concealed infrasound generator as the "haunted" one, but Jamie (the most rational one) did admit to feelings of anxiety when subjecting himself to infrasound for a couple of minutes.
Their investigation into the "smell of fear" - comparing normal sweat with sweat secreted under stressful/frightening conditions, was declared to be "plausible".
 
People could be susceptible to different frequencies in the same ways that they can hear/taste/see different things to different degrees. Some people can taste the bitter flavor of broccoli, others can't. Approximately 10% of people can hear stuff like the "Taos hum"; younger people can hear high frequency sounds (and they use "mosquito ringtones" when in class--those over 30 y.o. generally can't perceive sound that high pitched). So, leaving perceptible hearing aside, it makes sense to me that some people could be affected by infrasound when most others wouldn't be. And voila! you have a reason for the small percentage of people who get creeped out by unseen, unheard presences. Maybe.

As you all know, all you intellectually curious Forteans out there, hormones are released into the blood stream and excreted via sweat, and other fluids which will remain unnamed out of deference to the tender sensibilities of the readership. Since sweat and molecules of hormones are physical things that linger--they can even be collected by police and used as evidence in criminal investigations (see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0146963)--it seems more than plausible to me that smells could contribute to the creepy feelings places can cause some people.

This is not to discount those truly weird things that obstinately defy scientific explanation.
 
It is just a personal opinion but it feels like we cannot measure how much water is in a jug because we have a tape measure. The tape measure is accurate so the water is unmeasurable.

Perhaps there is more to our universe than can be measured, because we do not even know that it exists, never mind work out how to measure it. The physical sciences, for me personally, feel like a poor tool when specifically used in such circumstances.
This would be my position. Well put, Spudrick.
 
This is a very appealing idea to many people. It shows up so often.

How would emotions leave a trace? There is no mechanism to send them, or material to record them, let alone play them back to certain people under particular conditions.
I'm not sure my exact line of thinking does show up often. The "emotional tape recorder" idea does, but not the idea that people's experiences can sync across time and space, as I am suggesting.

To be able to imagine this, just remember that things like memory, feelings, imagination, daydreams, emotions, reality, personal experiences and so on are essentially abstract. They exist in a different way to our material world, along with things like love and grief and poetry, and all the things that make us human but that cannot be quantified in any scientific way.

An endocrinologist will explain emotions by way of hormones. A neurologist by way of neural pathways. A psychologist by way of the mind (whatever that is).

And so on.

Each of them, and other scientists, might seem to have a part of the puzzle that makes up how humans experience the world - how their personal reality is created, felt and understood - but somehow the parts add up to less than the sum. Humans are so much more than our hormones, or neural pathways, or thought processes.

And in the same vein, reality is so much more than the things we can see and touch.

In the spaces in-between the "known" there is a hell of a lot of room for speculation, if you allow your mind to venture there.

Or, as some wise bloke once said, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy *winks, in a friendly, not creepy, way*
 
Or, as some wise bloke once said, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy *winks, in a friendly, not creepy, way*

I get this all the time. It's a lame excuse. Sure, some people are closed-minded but use that pointy stick carefully. If the evidence doesn't exist, then find it instead of imagining endless possibilities, and telling the other person that they are narrow-minded. That's my philosophy and I'm sticking to it (until I'm swayed by a more persuasive argument).
 
I get this all the time. It's a lame excuse. Sure, some people are closed-minded but use that pointy stick carefully. If the evidence doesn't exist, then find it instead of imagining endless possibilities, and telling the other person that they are narrow-minded. That's my philosophy and I'm sticking to it (until I'm swayed by a more persuasive argument).

You get what all the time?

I wasn't making any excuses for anything, never mind lame excuses. You thought I was talking about the emotional tape recording idea, but I wasnt. So I clarified what I was saying.

I wasn't calling you narrow-minded, if that comment was aimed at me. My last sentence was a quote from Shakespeare, I wasn't specifically talking about you and your philosophy. Hamlet says it to Horatio. I assume most people know the quote because it's so famous and I only used it because it seemed an apt quote to end my post on.

Sharon, I really wasn't posting in bad faith nor even arguing with you. One of the delights of this board is that people chuck in all sorts of thoughts and ideas and it's rare anyone gets ridiculed for it. You and I clearly see the world differently, but that's the richness of life. If you really can't stand my woo woo then there is an ignore function on here, but I hope I have at least assured you that I wasn't having a go at you.
 
I get this all the time. It's a lame excuse. Sure, some people are closed-minded but use that pointy stick carefully. If the evidence doesn't exist, then find it instead of imagining endless possibilities, and telling the other person that they are narrow-minded. That's my philosophy and I'm sticking to it (until I'm swayed by a more persuasive argument).

But that's partly what this site is for, Sharon. We riff off the known, imagine a bit of unknown, throw in a bit of only just discovered and form theories, ideas, deams...surely this is how new discoveries are made?
 
You get what all the time?

I wasn't making any excuses for anything, never mind lame excuses. You thought I was talking about the emotional tape recording idea, but I wasnt. So I clarified what I was saying.

I wasn't calling you narrow-minded, if that comment was aimed at me. My last sentence was a quote from Shakespeare, I wasn't specifically talking about you and your philosophy. Hamlet says it to Horatio. I assume most people know the quote because it's so famous and I only used it because it seemed an apt quote to end my post on.

Sharon, I really wasn't posting in bad faith nor even arguing with you. One of the delights of this board is that people chuck in all sorts of thoughts and ideas and it's rare anyone gets ridiculed for it. You and I clearly see the world differently, but that's the richness of life. If you really can't stand my woo woo then there is an ignore function on here, but I hope I have at least assured you that I wasn't having a go at you.

I get that quote all the time because people try to elevate their speculation to a level of evidence. You were quoting my post, so I did assume you were directing that towards me. Look, I know what this site is for. I'm no noob to this site, Forteana, and discussions on paranormal topics so I don't need an explanation about what the board is for. I'm here because I like thinking about these topics and I have a flexible materialistic worldview. And it is the best place I know of to talk about them because most other forums and social media sites ARE full of noobs or know-it-alls - believers and skeptics. I don't want to believe, I want to know (which is a pisser, because you never can know but I try to get as close as possible by thoroughly learning the subject.) I don't want to cause trouble but I'd ask that posters please don't be condescending to women in particular - I get enough mansplaining directed at me everywhere else, particular with regards to paranormal topics.

Back to your regular thread...
 
OK, Sharon, I find you unnecessary hostile and so I'm just going to put you on ignore.
 
We will never know for sure with most of the fortean stuff. It can neither be proven nor disproven.
Coming to this site with the idea that everything paranormal can be explained rationally won't work.
 
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It's what fun about this site, the shared anecdotes of weirdness, the shared conjectures, the shared wit. Sometimes the information added to a thread indicates a clear explanation, sometimes not. But the positive thing is we're sharing stuff we find weird, and we can share it here where other people find it interesting, when it might not be so easy to share with others we actually live with.

Because we're not sharing in person, it's easy to misconstrue the intended tone of a post, and it's easy to convey a tone that not intended, just by habitual semantics and word choice.
Emoticons just don't always do what we need them to to make our meaning clear. :fetish:
 
I don't want to cause trouble but I'd ask that posters please don't be condescending to women in particular - I get enough mansplaining directed at me everywhere else, particular with regards to paranormal topics.

OK, don't get your pretty little head in a tizzy about it.
 
I get that quote all the time because people try to elevate their speculation to a level of evidence. You were quoting my post, so I did assume you were directing that towards me. Look, I know what this site is for. I'm no noob to this site, Forteana, and discussions on paranormal topics so I don't need an explanation about what the board is for. I'm here because I like thinking about these topics and I have a flexible materialistic worldview. And it is the best place I know of to talk about them because most other forums and social media sites ARE full of noobs or know-it-alls - believers and skeptics. I don't want to believe, I want to know (which is a pisser, because you never can know but I try to get as close as possible by thoroughly learning the subject.) I don't want to cause trouble but I'd ask that posters please don't be condescending to women in particular - I get enough mansplaining directed at me everywhere else, particular with regards to paranormal topics.

Back to your regular thread...
Sharon, I'd like to formally invite you to join us at 30 East Drive in Pontefract on the **** and **** of August, to join us at a house some people call the most poltergeist 'violent' property in Europe .. some other people say the world apparently. I'm there to admin and film, we might not get anything but most people do .. probably just a house cooling down and making weird noises but way heavier stuff has been reported and recorded from this property. This is also the property Colin Wilson wrote about in his book on poltergeists. We won't charge you anything. Fancy it if you want to find out first hand?. (I can sort out transport for you to and from the nearest airport if you'd prefer that to a taxi) ..

Please send me a pm if you're interested .. I suppose you might be able to write an article for FT out of it.
 
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