Help me debunk this "paranormal" situations

eleanor said:
My mom and her sister are the ones who I have contact with everyday so we talked about it more often. But another 3, also my mom's sisters, confirm this version. Well, no, it's not that they like telling these kind of things, they just told me what happened and I argue with them that it wasn't paranormal. But I'm not entirely convinced myself. And a few members experienced it at the same time and they all remember it the same way. It's not that they heard that their friend's cousin's boyfriend saw something, it's my closest family so I don't think they added sth to the story.
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See this is the memory thing happening. They have told each other and other people these things many times, and their stories have become correlated, so each absolutely remembers it in the same way. But I absolutely guarantee that it did not happen the way they remember it. Because memory doesn't work the way most people think it does.
 
Even if the memories aren't shared, when we tell them we tend to make stories out of them, and the stories become the memories.

When I was little, we did a lot of traveling and saw many interesting things, living in France for a year, and although I was very young I remembered a lot of the experience, and greatly enjoyed recollecting it, since it was quite exciting to be touring in Europe not long after WWII. But at some point a few years later, when I was something around 8 or 10, I recall suddenly realizing that once I'd remembered something once, I was ever after remembering the stories. It was a flash of insight that has stayed with me and helped me, I think, to remain skeptical. We can try to stay honest and true and accurate, but there's no getting around the fact that we risk losing detail and adding our own ideas to a memory every time it's replicated. We cannot remember every moment of our lives. We pick out things that seem to have the most meaning for us. The very act of deciding what to remember and how to tell it is selective.
 
The great philosopher and unnatural scientist Pratchett summed it up well in renaming us Pan Narrans, the story telling ape.
 
@ eleanor

I will tell you a ghost story:

One day when the family were gathered after the death of the patriarch he appeared before all of them.


"Hello" he said "Here I am come to talk with you and tell you things are just fine in the world beyond death."

"Wow" said a grandson "Hello granddad and great to see you."

"Hi Pop" said a daughter "You look great and much younger than you were alive."

"That's the way things are in this world" said the ghost. "You are in your prime."*

And so on and so on. .........


Now have you ever heard a story a story like that Eleanor?

No, of course not. All we get are stories of fleeting glimpses, doors shutting, things falling, whiffs of perfume, and so on. So why is that so?

The ghosts seem to have the ability to make noise and scent, move objects, and give fleeting glimpses, but not a full blown presentation. Don't you wonder about this perhaps?


* Curtesy of Scorpion from another thread who has a boundless knowledge of such things.
 
Thinking about family ghost stories always reminds me of a game I played as a child. It was called Telegraph. Several kids sat in a circle. The leader whispered a secret to the person on the left, and each person was to repeat in a whisper the same secret around the circle.

Finally, the last person was to stand up and repeat the secret. It was never the way it had started. It had been embellished, changed, more dramatic. And I believe that this is similar to family ghost stories as they are told again and again.
 
wasapi said:
Thinking about family ghost stories always reminds me of a game I played as a child. It was called Telegraph. Several kids sat in a circle. The leader whispered a secret to the person on the left, and each person was to repeat in a whisper the same secret around the circle.

Finally, the last person was to stand up and repeat the secret. It was never the way it had started. It had been embellished, changed, more dramatic. And I believe that this is similar to family ghost stories as they are told again and again.
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Exactly. This happens to your own memories too. They're told and retold over and over in your mind until your own personal mind-game of Telegraph happens.
 
wasapi said:
Thinking about family ghost stories always reminds me of a game I played as a child. It was called Telegraph. Several kids sat in a circle. The leader whispered a secret to the person on the left, and each person was to repeat in a whisper the same secret around the circle.

Finally, the last person was to stand up and repeat the secret. It was never the way it had started. It had been embellished, changed, more dramatic. And I believe that this is similar to family ghost stories as they are told again and again.
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Geez, you must be ancient. By the time I was a kid we called it "telephone."
 
Fish story.

Well, an eel story actually. When I was in high school I was fishing in a lake in northern Maine one fine summer day. I hooked a big one! It took a bit to get it into the boat and to my astonishment, it wasn't a fish but an eel. I didn't know about the life cycles of eels then so was mighty surprised. Well, I took it back to our cabin and cleaned (not easy!) and cooked it. In the following years I would often tell my eel story and to this day have a memory of it being about five feet long. But about ten years ago I was going through some old photographs and found one my dad had taken of me holding the eel. Well, you know the end of the story. The eel was about 18 inches at most.
 
I have many personal ghost stories. But the fact that I experienced them first-hand doesn't make them real, or proof. It means things happened which I either perceived wrong or simply do not understand. This look a long time to except, but today I am aware that there are things I don't understand and thus the true explanation is out of my intellectual grasp.

And remembering things wrong is common, a fact I'm reminded of ever time I have to re-watch security camera footage where details are different than the ones in my head.
 
Post 1: Here's a strange thing I found that I'm trying to debunk.

Post 5: Yes, but it's really, really strange.

Post 10: I don't think your explanations fit.

Post 20: How dare you insult my god!
 
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