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Charles Ford posted:I've never thought much of this argument, since phone cameras (even ones that proclaim how amazing they are, like Apple) have tiny lenses, which make them cheaper and easier to manufacture but reduce the available amount of light and try and make up for the physical shortcomings in software. An extreme example of that is the moon shenanigans Samsung recently got caught doing, and the cheaper the phone the less likely it is to do it, but if you try taking a photo of anything on a $100 Chinese Android phone everything already looks like some Roswell UFO photo already with the grain and the blur. I don't think the quality of the camera matters nearly as much as the fact millions more people are carrying *any* kind of camera on them than previously would have, but I get your point
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Mar 15, 2023 20:22
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Like it wouldn't matter if 99.9% of paranormal photos are total dogshit if there are hundreds of thousands more photos that are actually being taken
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Mar 15, 2023 20:27
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also big fancy cameras are easily available to people who hunt ghosts “professionally” and yet they can’t seem to come up with anything either 
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Mar 15, 2023 20:29
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Err there's a pretty clear picture of a ghost posted in this very thread just a page or two back. And by a very clear headed individual.
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Mar 15, 2023 20:35
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That was Poirot. I can see his moustache
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Mar 15, 2023 20:37
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NotJustANumber99 posted:Err there's a pretty clear picture of a ghost posted in this very thread just a page or two back. And by a very clear headed individual. That was clearly a sundowning Joe Biden lumbering through the woods
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Mar 15, 2023 20:40
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Everyone knows the last ghost died over 200 years ago
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Mar 15, 2023 20:47
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What happened to everyone believing in fairies?
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Mar 15, 2023 20:49
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Chubby Henparty posted:The pub was the Gregorian in Bermondsey about 20 years back, which had its own ghost stories relating to the apparent plague pit next store. People say they heard and smelt things but I think that was dodgy plumbing. We actually had Ghostwatch? film some segments there because it's a fine old spooky Georgian building and I suspect I failed to charge them thousands for the privilege. Years back, I used to occasionally DJ at a goth night in one of the vaults that was part of the apparently most haunted pub in Scotland. Ghost walk tours got taken through parts of the vaults there earlier in the evening tho, so sometimes when we were setting up ahead of time, the venue staff would turn all the lights off, lock us into that bit of the vaults (big heavy metal doors too, so extremely secure I guess from marauding spectres) and tell us to stay really quiet as people on a ghost tour went down a nearby corridor. Maybe we were the ghosts people thought they heard, idk. It was spooky as hell though, being locked in and sitting in pitch darkness in an underground vault with a cold, damp miasma about it all. It was definitely an unsettling atmosphere, even without anything actually happening.
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Mar 15, 2023 20:53
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NotJustANumber99 posted:Are ghosts subject to gravity? gently caress gravity, are they subject to electro magnetism that all the ghost hunters say they are? If so, are they bound to this earth, as going into space could mean getting blasted away away by the poo poo that atmosphere protects us from.
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Mar 15, 2023 20:54
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Mega Comrade posted:What happened to everyone believing in fairies? I once saw a webpage about The Cottingley Fairies. It went into great detail, specifically about things like how from the strange hands one of the girls seemed to have in one picture and other such oddness was proof that they were in fact aliens. I don't recall if the site had an explanation as to why aliens would take a bunch of photos of themselves with fake fairies and distribute them, and sadly archive.org never recorded the site either.
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Mar 15, 2023 20:58
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Fairies are real, don't make them angry. They'll sour your cows milk and steal your baby.
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Mar 15, 2023 21:11
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The fair folk went extinct in 1975 because we destroyed most of their natural habitats.
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Mar 15, 2023 21:13
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More ghost stories please. 
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Mar 15, 2023 21:17
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Mega Comrade posted:What happened to everyone believing in fairies? A friend of mine once got into a conversation in a beer garden with a guy who deeply believed in fairies. It ended with him shouting "Read the Mabinogion! Read the Mabinogion!" at me and my friends.
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Mar 15, 2023 21:35
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Jippa posted:More ghost stories please. Ah gently caress it I'll post the rest of the story I heard at the hotel. TW; suicide. So, my friend worked (actually still works) at the hotel for over 20 years, handling VIP clients and acting as a duty manager. One day he gets a call from room 1215, saying they can hear something going on in the room above theirs (like most hotels, no 13th floor), they heard glass breaking and there's blood running down their windows. Know it will seem like there's a lot of details here, but he was representing the hotel at the time so he was apparently kept very informed of all actions as he needed to make sure no other guests got involved in any way. So my friend goes outside, and he can see the guy in room 1415. He learned after the fact that the dude was a fairly typical story from the mid-2000s: investment banker from one of Scandinavian countries, got caught up in partying, made some stupid trades, lost a ton of money, decided to end it all before anyone found out. So he rented the hotel room (he lived nearby), did a bunch of coke, drank all the booze in the minibar. Stripped naked, smashed out the main window with a chair. Sat down on the window frame with all the smashed glass, which cut up his legs and caused the blood to start trickling down the outside walls onto the window of the room below. At this point it had been a couple hours, so someone called the police, and they were there outside trying to figure out wtf to do. Talking to him through a megaphone, but he was just sitting there and things were at a standstill. They got hold of his girlfriend & I guess asked her to come down & talk to him. I don't know if she was on the ground or went up with them, but I understand the plan was: while she was talking to him, they would break the door down, as apparently the natural reaction would be to fall back into the room in surprise. So, the girlfriend was talking to him, begging him not to do it, the cops broke the door down: and in surprise he fell forward, not backward. Fell 14 (well, 13 I guess) floors to the pavement below & his death. I doubt know how much of that is embellished over the years, but I have found newspaper articles about the incident online, and have spoken to enough long-term employees who were working that day to know that at least the general "man broke out window and fell naked to his death" story is true. And that's what people claim they or their kids have seen, a shadow of a man, falling out of the window when they first enter the room. I never saw the shadow myself, but either there were a lot of guests over the years who were in on the joke, or some shade of the man was left behind.
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Mar 15, 2023 21:51
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Danger - Octopus! posted:It was spooky as hell though, being locked in and sitting in pitch darkness in an underground vault with a cold, damp miasma about it all. It was definitely an unsettling atmosphere, even without anything actually happening. Miftan posted:The fair folk went extinct in 1975 because we destroyed most of their natural habitats. e: ^^ A friend of mine once had a band named after a tale of a tale of an alleged incident close enough (but which can't be the same) that it almost tempts me to believe in the primordial myth idea behind hauntings, if there were primordial hotels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE911RqjhbA
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Mar 15, 2023 22:04
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So wrt to workplace ghosts, I used to be head of security at Coutts bank in the west end with responsibility for sites from Westminster to the eastern edge of the city of London. As such I had a few reports of weird stuff cross my desk. - A senior banker in the vaults of Coutts 188 Fleet Street (now closed iirc) called in in a panic to report that while in said vaults they had encountered a man in a 1940s suit and gas mask, who had ducked behind a set of shelves and disappeared. Said vaults had been used for shelter during the blitz, and I /believe/ (though never bothered to confirm) the building got hit. - The RBS campus at 250 Bishopsgate had been built on the site of both a Roman cemetery and a plague pit. The security office at said site was in a sub-basement and had one hell of an atmosphere to it- guards did not like being there at night, and people would report seeing fleeting glimpses of people and weird sounds during night shifts when the buildings were almost entirely empty. - Coutts 440 The Strand (where I was based) had several areas with a weird reputation in spite of being reasonably new. On the top floor are three flats and a boardroom/dining area for use by top level staff and visiting royalty, super high net worth types, that sort of thing. The board room had a weird atmosphere, and in summer 2010 I had an electrician working there walk off site and refuse to return- he was up a ladder in the boardroom working on the lights, and reported footsteps circling around the bottom of his ladder and that his tools kept being moved around. One thing I literally only found out a few weeks ago was that before my time the same area was apparently so badly haunted that an exorcism was carried out in the mid 90s.
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Mar 15, 2023 22:16
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I was staying in a hotel for work a few years back, and the room they assigned me was off the main building in some old farmers cottages. Maybe it was a dream but I'm sure I woke up in the night and could hear the shower in the bathroom running it was pretty freaky so I ignored it and tried to get to sleep, assuring myself that it was probably just the bathroom in the room next door. Mentioned it to reception staff the morning after, and they were like "oh yeah that bit of the building is haunted, there's always weird stuff getting reported by guests".
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Mar 15, 2023 22:25
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Pages of entertaining stories, but nobody's answered the most important question: was bessantj successful in getting off with Newport Velma?
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Mar 15, 2023 22:27
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Camrath posted:So wrt to workplace ghosts, I used to be head of security at Coutts bank in the west end with responsibility for sites from Westminster to the eastern edge of the city of London. As such I had a few reports of weird stuff cross my desk. lol you were head of security at some big bank and every time someone reported something you just go don't worry mate its a ghost?
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Mar 15, 2023 22:27
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NotJustANumber99 posted:lol you were head of security at some big bank and every time someone reported something you just go don't worry mate its a ghost? No, every time someone reported something going ‘I think I’ve seen a ghost’ I’d go ‘Yeah, probably. It happens. I’ll have some men check the place to make sure though’. If you want to know about weird poo poo /anywhere/, ask the site security team- especially the night shift.
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Mar 15, 2023 22:36
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ok men, your mission is to capture and subdue the ghost
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Mar 15, 2023 22:38
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Danger - Octopus! posted:Years back, I used to occasionally DJ at a goth night in one of the vaults that was part of the apparently most haunted pub in Scotland. Ghost walk tours got taken through parts of the vaults there earlier in the evening tho, so sometimes when we were setting up ahead of time, the venue staff would turn all the lights off, lock us into that bit of the vaults (big heavy metal doors too, so extremely secure I guess from marauding spectres) and tell us to stay really quiet as people on a ghost tour went down a nearby corridor. Maybe we were the ghosts people thought they heard, idk. I used to go to that place all the time when I was a student. Nothing if not atmospheric. Walls thick with sweat an aw.
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Mar 15, 2023 22:50
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I’d say I’m a pretty skeptical guy but a few things like ghosts, if they got proved true I’d not be totally surprised
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Mar 15, 2023 22:56
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Pablo Bluth posted:I thought you'd enjoy this example of High Quality Policing A lot of this mirrors my own experience with policing after being caught up in a dragnet around IP-breaching set-top boxes to which I was only a minor contributor. It took over 4 years for the police to present their case to the NI Prosecution Service, and about 6 months more for it to go through the court system and ultimately get dismissed. 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 Maybe the ghost bigfoots flying around in their UFOs don't want to be observed. So much of our science is based on observing and recording measurable evidence to confirm our theories. And that's great - it's served us well in so many aspects of modern technological advancement. But stuff like photons behaving like either waves or particles depending on whether they're being observed or not (I'm probably getting this completely wrong) seems to suggest that reality as our ape brains understand it starts to get weird once we go outside the observable universe our senses have evolved to understand. Or on the macro scale we live in a universe where 85% of all matter is supposedly dark matter. No, you can't see the dark matter. It's standing out of frame enjoying existence alongside regular matter. Maybe ghosts just get accidentally observed but are trying to avoid detection because they don't want to get deported to Rwanda.
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Mar 15, 2023 23:00
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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 If ghosts were real and capable of doing active work the DWP would have been sanctioning them by now.
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Mar 15, 2023 23:09
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Jippa posted:More ghost stories please. pineapple hill in yorkshire (oop t'ward normanton way) had a really great pub on it (not much else other than the view) that did a grand meal, and being from wakefield area originally I happened to eat and drink there myself a few times and each time it ended up notably foggy and desolate feeling at night Anyways, so the story goes, a lady dressed in grey (some versions have her clutching a swaddled, sick baby) will flag a passing car in a state of clear distress and desperately beg a lift either to the top of the hill at the pub, or headed down into the next town, as if her very life depended on it The concerned motorist picks them up and starts driving, but as soon as they are going, the woman vanishes entirely. Both my parents had second and thirdhand tales of this and the pub had records of that tale going back before cars and into horse and cart days up on the wall- legend was that she was a murder victim or a suicide stemming from a broken heart- also that not picking her up would bring one to a terrible fate- anyways, that's the story of the grey lady of pineapple hill
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Mar 15, 2023 23:09
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Camrath posted:
Its no longer a bank. It's now an open plan office, that poor ghost. Forever trapped in the most depressing place created by man.
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Mar 15, 2023 23:15
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Clyde Radcliffe posted:A lot of this mirrors my own experience with policing after being caught up in a dragnet around IP-breaching set-top boxes to which I was only a minor contributor. It took over 4 years for the police to present their case to the NI Prosecution Service, and about 6 months more for it to go through the court system and ultimately get dismissed. "Observation" in the context of "wavefunction collapse" has absolutely nothing to do with you as a human observing things with your eyes, observation in that context is just measurement. When you measure the air pressure in your tyre, you let some air out, or when you measure the temperature of chicken with a thermometer, you take some of the heat out of it, meaning you changed the result through measuring it. Scientists didn't trick particles into thinking nobody was watching them. Brendan Rodgers fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Mar 15, 2023 |
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Mar 15, 2023 23:15
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kecske posted:ok men, your mission is to capture and subdue the ghost "poo poo Soap, that was Casper! You shot a fackin friendly ghost! You shot a kid!"
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Mar 15, 2023 23:22
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I'm very much of the view that ghosts etc. aren't 'real' as in literal apparitions/manifestations of the dead, but are a genuine phenomenon resulting from quirks and habits of human psychology and biology, whether that's anthropomorphisation, pareidolia, drugs, infrasound, our lizard brain peripheral vision, our marvellous ability to construct compelling stories from fragments of actual memories and so on. Ghosts are 'real' in as much as hallucinations and dreams are real. All that said, I have had two 'ghostly' experiences, both in the company of another person who saw the same thing. First was when I was about 10, it was a summer half term and I'd spent the day in town with my grandmother. We'd ended up at a picturesque English Heritage site after lunch - Titchfield Abbey in Hampshire if you want to google it. It's not a staffed site or anything- you just walk in and mooch around, and mid-week it was completely deserted...or so it seemed. As we walked up the drive, my g/mother gestured to the other side of the site and said "Look BFish - monks!" And indeed, there amidst some thigh-high ruined walls about 50 metres away were about a dozen stereotypical monks - brown robes, heads covered by the cowls, hands together in the big sleeves. They were still until about 10 seconds after we spotted them, and then, as one, they all turned to their right and glided silently into the main ruin building. "Oh, they gave me such a fright when they moved," my grandmother said "I thought they were models". The 'ghostly' part is that we never saw or heard any sign of these monks in the rest of the time we were in or around the buildings, despite there being no obvious place or means for them to go. This place isn't Hampton Court - it's not big enough and doesn't have enough cover for a dozen or so people to move about unseen and unheard...but neither is it an open field where these monks were never out of our sight. If they were reenactors or LARPers they were utterly silent and had no other people with them, no means of transport, no bags or boxes and did whatever they were doing with speed and a special forces-like focus and discipline. But, notably, neither of us thought it weird at the time - in the car later we both assumed they were reenactors. It was years later that something jogged the memory and I thought that was weird. Did some research and the monks at that abbey back in the day didn't even wear brown robe -  whether they were ghosts or reenactors they were Getting It Wrong. The second one is less explicable. My mum did dance lessons on an evening a week and if she'd picked my sister and me up from school she'd take us with her. It was in the nearest market town, in the Working Men's Institute, which was a big late-Victorian neo-Gothic building that was all dark polished wood, parquet floors, creaky stairs, dusty nooks and strange half-levels and dead end corridors. At this time it still had a live-in caretaker/gardner/watchman who had a bedsit flat in the roof. He was a lovely old guy (late 60s/early 70s) and if he was about he'd come and chat with us while we sat in the reading room and pretended to do homework while the plinky-plonk piano and the sound of 20 middle aged ladies learing to tap dance thumped through the fabric of the building. One time my sister and I arrived, went through the door at the back of the main hall towards the reading room and we both saw the caretaker at the top of the stairs, then walk along the sort of mezzanine landing towards his flat. We both said "Hello!" or something along those lines but he didn't answer. We didn't see or hear him the rest of the evening. On the drive home Mum told us that, very sad, but the caretaker had died in his sleep two weeks previously. Both of us were, and are, convinced we saw him as clear as any other time. Finally - an anecdote involving no ghosts whatsoever. As a teenager a bunch of us would cycle out to the disused psychiatric hospital in the summer holidays and mostly just skulk about and do some urbexing. It was a huge 19th century higgldy-piggldy pile of a building, out in the middle of nowhere and wasn't even fenced or gated off from the public road that ran through the site. The external doors were locked and boarded over but we quickly realised that loads of the sash windows had no locks so you could just lift them up from the outside. Anyway, in what must have been dozens of cumulative hours spent in and around that building - the utterly stereotypical spooky location, surely? - nothing remotely scary or ghostly happened. It didn't even feel eerie. If anything the place had a notable atmosphere of peace, serenity and safety about it. I think the poster who said that initial expectation and interpretation counts for a lot was on to something - we'd often hear birds trapped in the wards flapping and banging against the bay windows, or hear doors knocking in the wind or floorboards creaking in the sun...and we just thought "that'll be a bird; let's go and find it and let it out." The place was that unthreatening. The only 'jumpscare' moment was when suddenly all the fluorescent strip lights in the corridors came on at once with a big high-voltage electrical "POM" sound. We scurried away that time - presumably some workers were testing or maintaining some system in the engineering/power shed, which was pretty much the only bit we'd never managed to get into because it was heavily locked and secured and was audibly making "still operational machinery" noises.
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Mar 15, 2023 23:23
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NotJustANumber99 posted:Because if not they probably all blew off into space IIRC it ends with the killer of the main character becoming a ghost himself and being trapped in a cellar with nothing to do for eternity except play patience. Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Mar 15, 2023 |
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Mar 15, 2023 23:50
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Mega Comrade posted:that poor ghost. Forever trapped in the most depressing place created by man. yeh........london *gets carried out of the thread by hooting and hollering crowd*
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Mar 16, 2023 00:10
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Mega Comrade posted:What happened to everyone believing in fairies? Big fan of knockers me 
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Mar 16, 2023 00:12
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The only spectre I believe in is the one haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
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Mar 16, 2023 00:18
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https://twitter.com/WoodlandTrust/status/1636045317102501889 I'm really bummed about about this. Completely unnecessary bordering on spite. quote:"Leader Richard Bingley used powers that allowed him to bypass the usual scrutiny of fellow councillors, arguing a decision was urgent ahead of local elections and the bird nesting season" 1965917 fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Mar 16, 2023 |
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Mar 16, 2023 00:20
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I wanted to believe in ghosts but didn't really, then I saw something that was basically a ghost. I still don't really believe in them but also, maybe? On the whole I think with all the strange things that happen in life, from ghosts to UFOs to a string of coincidence or chance, just shushing it all away with 'the human brain is a feckle thing' misses out on all the strangeness that pretty much everyone experiences at some point or another. Lifes more fun with ghosts and curses and prayers so give it a go IMHO
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Mar 16, 2023 00:21
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1965917 posted:https://twitter.com/WoodlandTrust/status/1636045317102501889   It's disgusting  117 out of the 123 trees were destroyed before the injunction was issued at 1am.
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Mar 16, 2023 00:26
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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 looks like he's on the phone to the council and his bins haven't been lifted
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