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Collective apparitions: evidence life after death?
- Thread starter Andyman409
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I Ratant
Penultimate Amazing
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I'd think there's problems with it.
Ghosts can walk through walls and rattle chains, I've heard.
How can something insubstantial enough to get through walls pick up a chain at all?
How could it walk upstairs from ground level?
Why would it stay at ground level, and not sink into the ground?
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Collective apparitions... the Miracle at Fatima. 10s of thousands of people witnessed that.
No one not there saw anything unusual.
Peer pressure accounts for many such sightings... "She saw it, I'm at least as holy as she is, I saw it too" when the researchers come around.
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Andyman409
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I actually read about that case w while ago. It was mentioned in this CSICOP article. There is also a book written on it called "The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guard*ians" by David Clarke. It looks like it was an urban legend
Anyways, I'm reading some papers from Chris French and Wiseman, and find them quite useful. However, I still would like to know what the deal is with the contradictory apparition stats.
Andyman409
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This article has contains a good example of what I mean. Just hit CTRL + F and type in "case study #4".
According to the case, a couple both saw the same apparition multiple times. I dont know whether they were lying or not, but I have yet to see an analysis of it. I'll have to mention it in the poltergiest thread I plan to make.
pakeha
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How do you distunguish between the collective apparitions I've mentioned and those of ghosts?
PixyMisa
Persnickety Insect
Reports of that kind would be a lot more interesting if (a) any of the things claimed were remotely possible, or (b) there was any supporting evidence.
Since they're not, and there isn't, there's not much we can say about it.
It's very simple: Where's the evidence? Until they present us with evidence to support their stories, that's all we have - stories.
Sometimes, if there stories are specific enough - date, time, place, direction - we can work out what was going on, we can say, specifically, that those strange lights were a string of floating lanterns, because other people saw the same thing and investigated.
People see and hear strange stuff all the time; it's just that they mostly either take a closer look or simply shrug it off rather than creating implausible stories about it. What was that weird echoing clatter in the middle of the night? Could have been goblins! Or it could have been that the baby bath, stood on end in the bathroom to dry, had tipped over around 2AM.
Since goblins don't exist, and the baby bath was lying upside down on the bathroom floor in the morning, we went with the latter explanation.
SusanB-M1
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Someone else* has almost certainly answered this, but I'm responding on my way through reading:
The only way people can know about what others have, apparently, seen is by hearing or reading what they have to say about it. If they have 'seen' the same thing, then whatever they interpreted it as at first wil probably be mentally adjusted to fit with others' perceptions.
ETA*I see that most of the posters have!
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In terms of the OP - oh dear. This is well known to anyone with a rudimentary background in psychology and the terms you need to search under are "Social Contagion"
Anyone here remember what happened in the "War of the Worlds" radio play from the 1930s? What people reported 'seeing' because they were not aware it was a play?
Case closed.
Contagion is an interesting phenomenon and more research should be done on the group dynamics that faciliate and inhibit it - its fascinating stuff, but has been around as an idea for decades.
Shame the paranormalists don't read.....
The fact some people are not aware of this research does not mean it does not exist or does not explain some experiences.
PS - people NEVER report exactly the same experience - and so we do not need an explanation for an effect that does not occur. We only need explanations for thematically similar experiences, or even difference experiences in similar locations (clearly psychological effects here). Therefore in some sense, the OP is a loaded question, forcing a conclusion that has been shown to exist.
Anyone here remember what happened in the "War of the Worlds" radio play from the 1930s? What people reported 'seeing' because they were not aware it was a play?
Case closed.
Contagion is an interesting phenomenon and more research should be done on the group dynamics that faciliate and inhibit it - its fascinating stuff, but has been around as an idea for decades.
Shame the paranormalists don't read.....
The fact some people are not aware of this research does not mean it does not exist or does not explain some experiences.PS - people NEVER report exactly the same experience - and so we do not need an explanation for an effect that does not occur. We only need explanations for thematically similar experiences, or even difference experiences in similar locations (clearly psychological effects here). Therefore in some sense, the OP is a loaded question, forcing a conclusion that has been shown to exist.
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Sledge
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That may not be the best example to use.
Andyman409
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It's very hard to. The only difference that immediatly comes to mind is the level of investigation. The case you gave me was thoroughly investigated and found a fraud. The one (s) I have lack that level of investigation. Now, I dont think we can analyse all cases, but maybe a particular sample.
Reproducable evidence is awesome. It removes doubt, and allows us to understand things in a whole new way. Apparitions lack this evidence. However, it doesn't mean we cant know anything about them. Some parapsychologists will use polls to determine what kinds of people have what kinds of experiences, and use the data to come to interesting conclusions. For example, one claimed that there are more crisis apapritions than chance would allow (although I hear the stats he used were dubious). I haven't read much in response to these kinds of claims (although wisemans survey seemed to undermine them, which I mentioned earlier).
Yes they have, and I never disagreed with them. I am unsure of how far to push the explaination only because I am unsure of the nature of most collective experiences. I was reading from The Science Of Ghosts website (from CSICOP member Wiseman) and found that most cases there were chronically unimpressive.
In terms of the OP - oh dear. This is well known to anyone with a rudimentary background in psychology and the terms you need to search under are "Social Contagion"
Anyone here remember what happened in the "War of the Worlds" radio play from the 1930s? What people reported 'seeing' because they were not aware it was a play?
Case closed.
Contagion is an interesting phenomenon and more research should be done on the group dynamics that faciliate and inhibit it - its fascinating stuff, but has been around as an idea for decades.
Shame the paranormalists don't read.....
PS - people NEVER report exactly the same experience - and so we do not need an explanation for an effect that does not occur. We only need explanations for thematically similar experiences, or even difference experiences in similar locations (clearly psychological effects here). Therefore in some sense, the OP is a loaded question, forcing a conclusion that has been shown to exist.
I like where your going! Even paranormalists take notice to the fact that witnesses rarely agree on what they saw. I also found it interesting how many cases involved abstract shapes, lights and white humanoid figures. It seems like very few collective experiences actually involve identifiable features- and when they do, they look like pareidolia to me (ex the figure stands still).
There are crazier claims, but they tend to be attached to poltergeists. I opened a new thread on poltergeists if anyone is interested.
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PixyMisa
Persnickety Insect
Right. It means we know they're not real.
Real things leave traces. Even if we don't know how to reproduce them on demand, there's something to show that they happened.
Apparitions? Nothing. Just stories.
Conclusion: Just stories.
PixyMisa
Persnickety Insect
Oh, and don't forget that this is a two-pronged fork.
Complete lack of evidence is one part.
Complete physical impossibility is the other.
For apparitions and poltergeists to exist as claimed would require the laws of physics to be other than they are, which would mean your computer would not work, and you would be unable to post to this forum.
Put this to the parapsychologist, listen to his response, then look up the phrase "special pleading".
Complete lack of evidence is one part.
Complete physical impossibility is the other.
For apparitions and poltergeists to exist as claimed would require the laws of physics to be other than they are, which would mean your computer would not work, and you would be unable to post to this forum.
Put this to the parapsychologist, listen to his response, then look up the phrase "special pleading".
Andyman409
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I'd imagine the stories ARE what is left behind to show that they happened. Of course, it isn't good evidence- but it IS evidence. How do we explain the stories (hallucintions, illusions, etc) is another story
And yes, we can know things with certainty about these experiences. We can poll people and find trends in the research. Wiseman found that most of them occur at night. This heavily implies sleep related hallucinations as the cause. We also know that most believers are on the younger side. This is probably since ghost related TV shows are aimed to their generation. These are examples of things we can know about apparitions through the sciences and social sciences.
Being a materialist like you, I dont think these ghost thingies can exist either.
pakeha
Penultimate Amazing
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Hi, Andyman.
I didn't mean just the Angel of Mons, I mean the collective apparitions of the BVM, too.
We're talking about hundreds, thousands of stories and real faith spanning thousands of years.
Some things don't change.
And that's the point in common with the collective apparitions I've mentioned.
They are just stories.
PixyMisa
Persnickety Insect
Doesn't work. The only things that only leave stories behind are... Stories. If anything unusual really happened, there'd be something to indicate that, at least some of the time.
Instead, nothing.
It's not a question of thinking they can't exist, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt they can't exist.
If there were any evidence that they existed nonetheless, that would be interesting. But all we have is stories.
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
A bunch of posts from a couple of hours ago seem to have disappeared from this thread. 
A bunch of posts from a couple of hours ago seem to have disappeared from this thread.
Are you sure you're not thinking of his remarkably similar Poltergeist thread?
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
See, there's always a rational explanation.
Hellbound
Merchant of Doom
In a few threads on this board, I've posted my own personal "ghost story"...which would have been one of these collective apparitions if I'd been a bit less brave/curious.
Ah, here it was:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-188619.html
or
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=781947 for a non-archive version.
I like this story because it points out that just because we can't think up a plausible explanation for one of these things, that's more likely to be a failure of our imagination rather than an indication of an otherworldly precense
Ah, here it was:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-188619.html
or
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=781947 for a non-archive version.
I like this story because it points out that just because we can't think up a plausible explanation for one of these things, that's more likely to be a failure of our imagination rather than an indication of an otherworldly precense