Ghosts

You believe in miracles.......check.
You believe in ghosts.........check.
You don't believe in magic..XXXX.

2 out of 3 ain't bad I guess.

I guess I believe in them but I can't swear if I've ever seen anything myself. I know other people that swear to their experiences.

I remember one night at a hotel, and the tap in the bathroom was moving without anyone there.

I stood by the sink and watched it move all the way round, and water come out of it before it moved back round and stopped
Another time I was just sat there and this cold slimy thing like a snake wrapped around my kneck

Nothing was there when I looked. nothing

One-sided relationships?  I believe in those.

Before trying to address this I will remind potential readers that science doesn't claim to have all the answers but rather is constantly seeking answers and to refine current understanding with new information.

Having said that, I wouldn't even consider there being one universal answer that magically fits all alleged paranormal experiences. There's a broad range of reported sightings, sounds, feelings, et cetera, and consequently a broad range of possible explanations. As was previously addressed, people that believe in UFOs are more inclined to see UFOs, people that believe in lake monsters are more likely to witness lake monsters, and people that believe in ghosts are more likely to experience ghostly encounters. If you believe in ghosts, ghosts are more likely to be your explanation for seemingly odd experiences.

I've heard people say "I know what I saw." That isn't really accurate, though. They know what they think they saw. We don't necessarily see what we see, feel what we feel, or hear what we hear, but rather think we do. What I mean is that our brains interpret the information that comes in from our senses. As an example, I was at a science center with lots of interactive exhibits. What's nice about this is you don't have to take anyone's word for it. You can experience it for yourself and know you're being told the truth because you proved it to yourself. One exhibit dealt with hour our brain interprets what we feel with our hands. It had two metal plates next to one another with parts of both interlocking kind of like fingers of two hands coming together. You could touch one plate and feel that it was slightly warm, though not hot. The other was cool, though not cold. Both had mild temperatures, but one warm and one cool. However, if you put your hand over the part where they interlock like fingers meshed together, your brain is confused about what it's feeling since it's getting conflicting information. It interprets it as scalding hot and your natural instinct is to pull your hand away so you don't get burnt. It's not scalding hot, but your brain thinks it is. You can test for yourself that your brain was wrong, but if you didn't have the means of testing it all you would have is your experience that it was scalding hot, and that experience was wrong.

Your brain has a lot to do, and takes in a lot of information that needs rapidly processed. This means it likes shortcuts to make processing information more efficient. With visual information, for example, it pulls from what it already knows and interprets what it sees based on established data. It uses visual cues to figure out how close or far things are, where they are in relation to one another, their size, and their forms. Sometimes it guesses incorrectly. Incorrect processing is how we get optical illusions. For example, we've probably all seen images that are still but look to our brains to be in motion. This is our mind incorrectly interpreting visual data.

People's ghostly encounters are interpretations by their brains. They experience something and their brain determines what they're experiencing. This isn't always accurate, and remember that people believing in ghosts are more likely to interpret experiences as ghosts. So what specific explanations are there for different ghostly things? One could surely write a whole book on it, and obviously we aren't doing that here. Every different alleged bit of evidence to the paranormal could have its own possible answers specific to that one thing.

An example of something easily debunked are orbs.



I don't know how many ghost hunting shows or websites that I've seen have spirit orbs and bullcrap explanations for how they're supernatural. They're light coming back into the camera lens from something in the air, and not always the same thing. Any tiny thing in the air can reflect light back into the camera lens. These include water droplets, dust particles, and insects flying in the air. We see a lot more orbs in modern times because cameras have grown so much smaller, with relatively short distances between the lens and the light source from the camera. With phones in particular this distance could be less than an inch. Light hits these tiny objects in the air and comes almost straight back into the lens.

One could say that we're just guessing that this explains orbs, unless we already know what the orbs are and then still get the orbs. A late friend and I once dabbled with paranormal investigation and had a basic website for it, and I took a lot of my own orb photos, and they were all of things I already knew because I set up the shots on purpose. I flipped dust into the air and took photos, I sprayed water droplets into a dark room and took photos, and went outside at night when it was sprinkling and took photos, and I got orb photographs from all of these, exactly as expected.

This doesn't explain fifty other types of encounters; just the orb photos and videos. We need other explanations for other types of things. Something else understood by science is that we are vulnerable to infrasound. Infrasound is sound outside the range of what our ears can hear. The sound is still there and can affect us but we aren't aware that we are hearing them. Infrasounds can cause us to be uneasy, to be paranoid, to be scared, and to sense a presence that isn't really there. You could interpret that supposed presence as ghosts, angels, demons, God, or whatever, but there's really nothing present but infrasound.

Houses settle and settling can make noises. Materials expand when they get warmer and contract when they get cooler, so temperature changes can cause houses to make noises. My mother actually had a wall crack when extreme cold came in, with the rapid change in outside temperature causing such a rapid shift in her house that it visibly cracked the wall. This means odd, creepy noises don't have to be paranormal. They can be natural processes. We can also get sounds that carry from great distances, and those sounds can be distorted and sound creepy, but they don't have to come from ghosts. You could get sounds from miles away and not know the source of the sounds but the source doesn't need to be supernatural.

I'm growing tired of typing so I'll just stop here, but I was honestly just getting started.