fuctifino posted:

I don't believe in ghosts, at least in the conventional sense... but I have an unexplained 'thing' on a 35mm photo in my possession from 2005

It's from a roll of film that a filmmaker friend and a hired photographer took over the space of an hour to set up location shots at the boathouse at Radford Lake for the eventual shoot. All of the photos are normal apart from this frame:



Zoom



Enhance.



He said nobody could have walked into the shot without him or the photographer noticing. I even went to the location myself to try to work out a logical explanation, and there isn't one.

He got really spooked by this picture, and it took a lot of persuasion to stop him burning the prints and negatives as he had a lot of superstitious beliefs. In the end I made it a condition of me providing a film score for one of his finished short movies (which I was going to do for him free in any case).

There is a famous legend of a ghost called the 'White Lady' at the lake, and the nearest road is actually called 'White Lady Road'.



I have no explanations but it makes for a nice picture on the wall. I still have the negatives too.

e: I found an archive of the entire roll uploaded on flickr. I'm not sure if by me or someone else

https://www.flickr.com/photos/23921876@N08/sets/72157616770306444/

mossyfisk posted:

The bright "outline" is part of one of the plants in the foreground, which when combined with the pattern of stone in the background resembles a face.

Pistol_Pete posted:

*Visit the ukmt to get the lowdown on today's Budget announcements*

*The entire thread is taking part in a Scooby Doo episode instead*

Mr Phillby posted:

Shaggy inherits a mansion thats so full of ghosts that he hires a team of ghost exterminators who turn out to also be ghosts.

Comrade Fakename posted:

https://twitter.com/ClarkeMicah/status/1635699102661869569

fuctifino posted:

There are no plants that could do that in the foreground, at least none that appear in the other frames

Sanford posted:

A few pages back but worth quoting, a really good read and anyone who skipped it should give it a click instead.

OwlFancier posted:

That was actually matthew lillard in the movie "thirteen ghosts"

Jel Shaker posted:

lol so after all that, hunts budget for childcare won’t kick in until 2025

Mr Phillby posted:

Despite its well worn 'look it was old man jaspers under the mask all along' formula its actually pretty common for Scooby doo to subvert its premise and actually feature real ghosts and monsters. In fact the first feature length animated feature 'Scooby-Doo Meets the Boo Brothers' Shaggy inherits a mansion thats so full of ghosts that he hires a team of ghost exterminators who turn out to also be ghosts.

Pistol_Pete posted:

*Visit the ukmt to get the lowdown on today's Budget announcements*

*The entire thread is taking part in a Scooby Doo episode instead*

Niric posted:

Brendan Rodgers posted:
What if someone were to buy a mansion and fill it with this low frequency equipment and then rent it out as a haunted house experience? Maybe an old manor house with a suitable back story. Goon project? I'll make the discord channel.

Barry Foster posted:
quote:
proposal: i am going to make a fun zipline for kids at camp haunted house experience

reality: a goon spent tens of thousands of dollars constructing a machine an audio torture device that kills children, entirely by accident

Microplastics posted:

All ghost experiences can be explained by hallucination, either individual or group.

I guess we need to define "ghost" because much like UFO, a lot of people use that interchangeably with "vehicle driven by intelligent beings from another planet" rather than understanding its true meaning, "unexplained thing"

So, somewhat supporting your view on the matter, we're really talking about UGOs (unless the apparition levitates in which case it will become a UFO)

But if we're considering a ghost to be a being that has some degree of sentience, then that's just complete bollocks. They just don't fit into any existing knowledge of the universe.

Take evolution.

When did evolution come up with ghosts? Presumably the first protocells weren't leaving ghosts everywhere, and presumably single celled organisms aren't doing so today (otherwise the sheer volume of them would be creaking floorboards everywhere and you wouldn't even be able you see a humanoid ghost because of all the e-coli ghosts in the way). So did ghosts come along with sentient brains? Was there a primate that died and left the first ever ghost? Brains are built by genes so is there a ghost gene, and only that ghost-eligible primate left ghost-eligible descendants? The more we build a hypothesis the more bollocks it sounds because that's what it is: complete bollocks from start to finish

Don't even get me started on conservation of energy

Jaeluni Asjil posted:

Not sure when you were in your early twenties but did you hear about the Jenny Craig centre (in Newport) weird goings on back in the 90s?

My dad (in his perennial quest for a diet that worked) joined that plan and there were definitely strange goings on in whatever building they occupied at the time- including photographs that when developed showed the room behind the back wall of whatever room they were taken in (and no, photographs of the behind room had NOT been taken on the same film - I am well aware sometimes that traditional photos ie not digital sometimes overlap and give strange 'ghostly' type extra legs or whatever), wiring that continually corroded, would be replaced with new and corrode again really quickly. The centre was later found to have been built over the graveyard associated with children who had died at the adjacent workhouse in the late 19th/early 20th century?

In my opinion ghostly happenings are 'unexplained as yet physics' (though as we know spooky feelings can be induced with magnetic fields, low frequency sounds etc). If the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics is in any sense real, maybe they are overlapping universes? I don't think we can entirely dismiss ghosts as a phenomenon, but I'm much more inclined to think there is a rational explanation for what people believe they have witnessed but we just don't fully understand what it is yet rather than dismiss it as entirely made up in their heads.

Slightly adjacent example: astrology dismissed by many as 'how can a big thing millions of miles away affect humans' - and then you find out big fkr in the sky Jupiter is so massive it makes the Sun wobble, there is correlation (ok not equal causation but... ) between sun's magnetic fields & heart attacks or psychotic episodes and generation of eddy currents in body cells etc. - I did discuss some of this with refs etc in the intro chapter of my PhD but didn't push the point as it's a bit 'edgy'.

The problem with any of this stuff though is that the people with the scientific skills to explore these matters are too scared to do so because it might affect their grants / funding etc*. and the people that 'truly believe' don't want scientific evidence - even if it might support them in some way - because they prefer to believe in 'magic' and having a scientific explanation would ruin it for them.


*I have a friend who was told in no uncertain terms not to pursue a line of research relating to 'zero point energy' as it would ruin her chances at an academic career for ever even though her supervisor - a senior professor well known in his field - personally thought whatever it was was quite likely. (Don't ask me the ins and outs I really can't remember, it was over 25 years ago now).

TACD posted:

Years ago I was in a field with some friends and we heard a helicopter fly very low overhead and land a short distance away. It was very loud; we could hardly hear each other speak. It was also completely invisible. So I think it’s important to remember that ghosts also come in helicopter form.

E: I realised this might come across as me aping the “identify as an attack helicopter” thing which I didn’t intend, the story is true but it was probably weird wind instead of ghosts or cloaking spy tech 🚁

Failed Imagineer posted:

UKMT Spring 2023: I’m aware of at least one phantom chicken (in Pond Square in Highgate, caused by Sir Francis Bacon making a-

grobbo posted:

Highgate is great because you've got the naked chicken ghost, and then you can stroll up to the Cemetery which has its famous vampire story / duelling warlocks writing angry blogs about each other.

But my favourite London legend is Bleeding Heart Yard and the corrupt rich lady who found herself dancing at her mansion's housewarming party with a mysterious and handsome stranger who then ripped out her heart, tossed it on the cobblestones, and whisked the rest of her away to Hell.

You just don't get that extra bite in pub ghost stories about White Ladies.

Bobby Deluxe posted:

Filing this in the brain hole labelled "I feel like I am going insane."

grobbo posted:

Highgate is great because you've got the naked chicken ghost

sinky posted:

NotJustANumber99 posted:

What do the other chicken ghosts usually wear?

The Wicked ZOGA posted:

XKCD may be for loving dorks but I think he made a pretty good point that the huge numbers of people carrying decent camera phones and still producing no solid evidence of ghosts/UFOs/Bigfoot/whatever is a strong strike against their existence

Chubby Henparty posted:

A friend and I broke into Highgate Cemetery on Saturday the 14th (we both worked the night before) to hunt for the Highgate Vampire. We stumbled about in the dark using the meagre light of our pre-smartphone screens, I think maybe we found Marx's grave and he swore he was accosted by bats but I didn't see em. Eventually we were done and headed back to the wall near the main gate that we'd first climbed over.

I pulled him back before he jumped down directly in front of a parked police van and we walked the other direction looking for another exit. Then the helicopter that we thought was way overhead put its spotlight down on us and we dove into the dirt. No idea if it spotted us or not but we jumped up and ran god knows how far to the nearest wall, scrambled over and to the nearest bus stop.

So we eventually get back to the pub we lived and worked at white as ghosts and covered in poo poo. Everyone there was like 'whoa you saw it' which was brilliant. I can also say I've been chased by the police in the lamest, nerdiest way ever.