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My Ghost Story

AlaskaBushPilot said:
Inspection, obviously. He's an inspector.

The floor is probably a sleeper system. (For soundproofing.) You get more floorboard deflection over a wider area.
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The room was not hat wide. think of a building with a long hallway and rooms on either side. The locker room was directly over the hallway below.
 
Alferd_Packer said:
I am not making the story up.

My memory of the incident was is quite clear, there was a distinct and drawn out period where the sounds continued after I stopped, long enough for me to turn around and look behind me while they were still happening.
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It was late at night, it was a large space, you were alone. But were you? At the back of your mind you were scared as you ventured into this unkown dark space late at night, no-one else around. You were hypervigilant. The creaking floorboards still creaking 6-7 seconds later, creeped you out!

S C R E A M !

How do you think horror film writers write their scripts? This age old spooky feeling.

All you needed was thunder and lightning and banging doors.

And Ted your ThunderBuddy to hold your hand.
 
I also have to point out, that I suffer from hearing loss and I was not wearing a hearing aid.

It was quite loud to me. so it must have been quite loud in reality.
 
I'd have probably reacted the exact same way you did under the circumstances. And just like you, I'd be telling myself that it was probably some structural anomaly. The next thing I'd probably do is go back to that room (OK, I'd probably drag someone else along for support) and see if I could repeat and further investigate the phenomenon. Because really, there would be no downside. Either I'd be able to prove to my satisfaction that there's a mundane explanation, or I'd find real evidence that consciousness may survive death. Either explanation should be comforting on one level or another.
 
AlaskaBushPilot said:
The story, on the other hand, does not comport with that claim.

A "extreme" skeptic repeats an experiment under the same conditions as opposed to running away. There wouldn't be the slightest thought about spooks.

It would be a pretty casual "oh, that's interesting - let's do it again" affair.
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Like the lion said in "The Wizrd of Oz". "I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks".
 
tsig said:
You made up the story either out of whole cloth or are enhancing a memory.
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I'm going with "B".

He most certainly made up the part about being so scared of structural failure he had to run away and then conceal that major safety issue from the client.

He really put himself in a bind with that embellishment, and evading the point since I made it is the only alternative to admitting it wasn't such a big deal when it happened.

From Alfred Packer
The room was not hat wide. think of a building with a long hallway and rooms on either side. The locker room was directly over the hallway below.
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lol. "Longer" area and "wider" area mean exactly the same thing in this context - meaning the boards will depress more as compared with a floor directly laid on subfloor. It has nothing to do with size or dimension of the room. It has to do with the span, which is zero when laid on subfloor and something positive when laid on a joist designed to create a dead air space for soundproofing.

The result is what you just claimed as the most logical answer.

So why didn't you report to the client that you were worried about structural failure if it really was true that you were worried about structural failure?

Or would you like to confess that you weren't worried about structural failure and only used that as the excuse with us as to why you needed getting out in a hurry...
 
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Alferd_Packer said:
I am not making the story up.

My memory of the incident was is quite clear, there was a distinct and drawn out period where the sounds continued after I stopped, long enough for me to turn around and look behind me while they were still happening.
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When faced by anecdote of an unexplained happening such as yours most skeptics will say that either you are making it up, or you have a faulty memory, or you have had a hallucination.

Your story is similar to a friend who lived with her family in a haunted house. The previous owner had been killed by a deranged worker with a spade. The ghost was seen by most of the family walking around in broad daylight.

When the friend walked down the passage there were occasions that she heard footsteps behind her. She would stop and the footsteps would continue for a few more steps before stopping.

Explanations.

A brain malfunction if there is no such things as ghosts.

If ghosts do exist then it seems the spirits linger on for a while and have a small amount of capability to interact with matter. It is an effort for the ghost, and they have to rest.

Spirits or ghosts decay and fade away with time, and they lack intelligence since they are a ghostly copy of the living organism. Souls are the entities that may or may not have an afterlife.

I do not know whether to believe you or not. There are many frauds out there, and there are many cases where the human brain does deceive itself.

Some of these things do repeat (not for me though). Perhaps if you went back?
 
AlaskaBushPilot said:
The story, on the other hand, does not comport with that claim.

A "extreme" skeptic repeats an experiment under the same conditions as opposed to running away. There wouldn't be the slightest thought about spooks.

It would be a pretty casual "oh, that's interesting - let's do it again" affair.
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Cut him some slack. Even skeptics can let their primitive brain get the best of them and get creeped out.
 
PartSkeptic said:
When faced by anecdote of an unexplained happening such as yours most skeptics will say that either you are making it up, or you have a faulty memory, or you have had a hallucination.
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I think most sceptics would usually say that there is almost certainly a mundane explanation which was not immediately obvious, and about which (in the absence of more information) we can only speculate.
 
FramerDave said:
Cut him some slack. Even skeptics can let their primitive brain get the best of them and get creeped out.
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I respectfully decline your straw man.

Because he chose to embellish with "extreme" skeptic. So it would be a straw man to say that I am not cutting the skeptic slack when the person claims to be the superman of skeptics.

Instead, I am doing what a proper skeptic would do: paying attention. The fact he embellished in the very first sentence is important evidence.

A second embellishment was saying he feared so much about structural failure that he had to rush out and not inform the person paying him to inspect for that very thing. Randi taught us to pay careful attention to the misdirection a magician uses, not the illusion he is conjuring up.

It is a no-brainer that a person who embellishes this much also exaggerated how long the creaking went on.
 
FramerDave said:
Cut him some slack. Even skeptics can let their primitive brain get the best of them and get creeped out.
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and that's the thing, I suspect..it's a deeply hidden part if us, that we choose to think no long exists, till it does....
 
Daylightstar said:
Hmm, I suspect that would depress the non corporeal consciousness, not the floor boards :p
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I think it goes without saying the non corporeal consciousness is already depressed and was hoping the floorboards would cheer it up a bit with an equally sad tale of being walked all over through it's entire existence, but all the floorboards did was groan.
 
How about..... Walking across this admittedly creaky and perhaps-unsound bit of walkway, some of the boards creaked, and some were compressed..."catching" for just a few seconds and then releasing (with accompanying creak...) after the individual had passed. Might sound quite convincing.
 
Mike! said:
I think it goes without saying the non corporeal consciousness is already depressed ...
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Very good point.

Mike! said:
... and was hoping the floorboards would cheer it up a bit ...
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Sounds quite reasonable.

Mike! said:
... with an equally sad tale of being walked all over through it's entire existence, but all the floorboards did was groan.
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I would groan too if some non corporeal consciousness would walk all over me.

Perhaps an important detail is whether the stalking non corporeal consciousness used to be a male or a female?
 
Mike! said:
I think it goes without saying the non corporeal consciousness is already depressed and was hoping the floorboards would cheer it up a bit with an equally sad tale of being walked all over through it's entire existence, but all the floorboards did was groan.
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Floorboards especially get depressed when treated like doormats.
 
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