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Psychokinetic event-give me some plausible explanations

... if the chess piece is one of those with a flat smooth bottom and not very heavy, a drop of water or a wet smear could result in this. I have seen glass and plates move of their own accord at the dinner table many times.

This was suggested early on, along with a similar thing cause by vibration. This was accepted as a plausible explanation by the OP, fits the reported facts, and doesn't require any "woo".

However, some people seem to be upset because the OP isn't accepting their preferred non-paranormal answer, and disregarding this one. Two pages because the OP won't accept a specific skeptical answer.

Go figure :rolleyes:
 
... if the chess piece is one of those with a flat smooth bottom and not very heavy, a drop of water or a wet smear could result in this. I have seen glass and plates move of their own accord at the dinner table many times.

Yup. If you go to Newton Circle in Perth, Western Australia, you'll find that all the soup bowls are possessed!
 
Superb.

Years ago in a thread by Kittynh (I apologise if I've got that slightly wrong) I was presented with the inspiration for my favourite cartoon character, Monkey Ghost (I occasionally post pictures of him in the hopes that someone here will fall in love and employ me to draw silly things for a living rather than all this engineering and science I'm saddled with).

Now there's Ghost Cow. Not sure that's a character on its own, but there's definitely something there. How else would one get the ingredients for a ghost-milk-shake?


On a less self-indulgent note;

Son of Rea, welcome! Makes a change to see someone who really is looking for a sensible answer. I've haunted these fora for years and you are a rare beast. The quick and short replies of some of our fellows here can sometimes make me cringe, but please forgive us. We see a lot of nut-jobs here, many of whom think they'll be clever and try the old bait-and-switch on us; pretending to look for answers so that they can spin their own Amazing Story, with no actual desire to find any more rational explanation than "woooooooooo! Ghooooosts!".
 
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Gratuitous full frontal Monkity

Hmmm...couldn't get Ghost Cow into a state that I liked. Here, completely gratuitously and OT (for which I can only apologise), is what happened instead.

picture.php
 
Faulty memory isn't just the most likely explanation for paranormal events. It's the most likely explanation for ALL events. Even real events are likely to be remembered with poor accuracy. This isn't just something made up for the sake of being negative about paranormal claims.


What he said! Our memories are poor, and highly prone to bending to fit our biases and expectations. Heck, our perceptions are highly prone to our biases and expectations, even if the person is questioned right at/after the time of the event. And -- this important -- this does not mean anyone is LYING. Misremembering or misperceiving is not a form of deceit, anymore than starting to walk down the wrong parking alley and then moving over one when you see your car is a little further down is "evasive action."

Read up a little on the subject of memory, perception, and recollection and you'll recognize there's a reason why hearsay is not evidence, and eyewitness testimony is suspect. Your sister tells you she remembers something happening; that doesn't mean that it happened the way she is relating. And that doesn't mean she is lying, either.

Having said all that, I wanted to contribute one more common source of moving objects: When a young person is concentrating hard, they are often bobbing their foot on the floor (jiggling their leg) while thinking. If the person is also touching the table with their ribcage or leaning down on their elbows to study the board--common for chess players--the vibration is transferred to the table without them even realizing they are doing it. Let alone the other person realizing it.

But as discussed above, trying to explain or dissect in detail based on an old memory is not all that fruitful.

-- MK
 
The first thing that occurred to me - because this kind of thing has happened to me - is that your sister dreamed the event. She may well have played chess with your brother, but it's possible that one night after, she replayed the game in a dream and, as happens in dreams, a weird event happened. Over time, the dream and the memory of the actual game merged. It's also possible she didn't actually play him at chess at all, but dreamed it from scratch; I think that's less likely.

As I say, I have a couple of memories I thought were real, but which I found out could not have happened the unusual way I remember them. Confusing the real event with something I later dreamed seems to be the simplest explanation.


Wow! I love this explanation for weird memories. It simply hadn't occurred to me, but I bet we do mix up dreams and memories, especially from long ago.

Thanks! I learned something new. Again. I love this place :)
 
This was suggested early on, along with a similar thing cause by vibration. This was accepted as a plausible explanation by the OP, fits the reported facts, and doesn't require any "woo".

However, some people seem to be upset because the OP isn't accepting their preferred non-paranormal answer, and disregarding this one. Two pages because the OP won't accept a specific skeptical answer.

Go figure :rolleyes:

Two pages of rants is kind of subdued for this forum.Some of the posters have the compulsion to cast aspersions on the OP and his sister.
 
Son of Rea:

Don't take it quite so hard. I suspect a lot of people are posting the way they are due to history.

ABout 90% of the times someone comes in with a "story" asking for a "rational explanation" and claiming the be a skeptic/rational/reasonable, it turns out to be a "just-so" story. As possible explanations are offerred, suddenly a new detail is remembered to explain why that can't be the answer. After a few pages of this cat-and-mouse, it turns out the OP (an abbreviation that can be used for Opening Post or Original Poster) runs an online blog promoting theories of ghosts sightings as the recorded holographic images of dead relatives in the quantum substrate who were probed by aliens inside the hollow earth (or some other such drivel).

So it is easy to get a bit cynical here :)

Lack of hope = Cynical

Hope = Dreams = ideas? = Money.

Does money exist? Well, then so does dreams and miracles. Ergo, vica vi. So on and so forth.
 
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Wow! I love this explanation for weird memories. It simply hadn't occurred to me, but I bet we do mix up dreams and memories, especially from long ago.

Thanks! I learned something new. Again. I love this place :)

The opposite also happens. All during my childhood and into my twenties, I had a recurring dream where I was down in some kind of pit with soft sandy sides. I couldn't climb out. There was a single root sticking out of the side, which I kept trying to cling to. There was a little girl who looked sadly into the pit and then wandered away.

One time when I was home from college, my mother and I got to discussing dreams, and I told her about this dream. She said, "But that really happened!" Apparently we had just moved to a new house and I was playing out back with a little friend at about 4-5 years old when I fell into a shallow sand pit. I couldn't get out and the friend failed to tell anyone. I was found within 15 minutes or so, no big deal. But it created this ongoing dream with no memory of the actual event.

I never had the dream again after that discussion. Just goes to show how dreams and memories get mixed.
 
The opposite also happens. ...
One time when I was home from college, my mother and I got to discussing dreams, and I told her about this dream. She said, "But that really happened!"
...
I never had the dream again after that discussion. Just goes to show how dreams and memories get mixed.

Yes; I also had this happen - a dream of crawling along the windowsill in my parents' bedroom, seeing curtains with a pattern of bright red roses and, outside, the bright green leaves of the tree outside - an extremely vivid dream. By the content of the dream, I would have been less than a year old. I had discounted its reality because one generally doesn't have memories before language is established, the windowsill would be too narrow, and I wouldn't be allowed to crawl along it anyway.

Many years later, I mentioned it to my mother when we were discussing early experiences, and she told me it was probably authentic, or assembled from partial memories, because she had let me crawl on the windowsill at an early age, and the details (curtains & tree) were right. We went upstairs to her bedroom, and the windowsill was twice as wide as I'd expected. I think I may have revived some very early memory impressions in a later dream and turned it into a describable experience.
 
Here's an explanation:

A few days earlier your Mum and Dad were playing chess at around lunch time. They finished the game, packed up and headed to the kitchen to make a cheese sandwich. Your Dad put the chess set on the kitchen counter and set about making the sandwich. It was a bit warm, so he took off his jumper. As he pulled it over his head, it snagged on the knife he was holding to cut the cheese. Annoyed, he pulls some thread out the jumper, flicks it away and puts the jumper on top of the chess set. Your Mum comes in, sees the jumper, and picks it up. She scolds your Dad then puts it down again. She didn't know the chess set was underneath the jumper, so she pushed the lot to one side, then sat down at the counter to eat her sandwich. Doing so left the chess set precariously close to the edge. They ate their sandwiches then left the room. On the way out your Mum picks up the jumper so as to fix it, leaving the chess set perilously close to the edge.

A few hours later, when everyone is asleep, a mouse climbed the counter to get the cheese crumbs. The thread your father previously flicked away tangles around its front and rear left paws. Panicked, it runs around in circles until it happens upon your chess box. Running at speed, and without due care to its surroundings, it knocks the set off the counter and onto the floor. Still panicking, the mouse carries on running and falls onto the floor, on top of the chess pieces. It falls on to the Queen, inadvertently wrapping a small amount of thread around the piece. The mouse then scurries into a small hole.

Several years earlier, a jumper maker was making a jumper when he fell asleep on the job. He was tired, he'd been up all night partaking in his hobby. He liked to make paper mache owls. He was good at it. He'd cover them with real feathers, but it didn't really satisfy his appetite. He wanted his owls to be more life like! One day, he had the idea to fill the owl with iron filings. He did this hoping that if he held a magnet to the feathers they would ruffle, and it would look *********** awesome. He spent all night doing it, and got iron filings everywhere! It didn't work. So he went to work, dejected, with no sleep and no shower. As he fell asleep over the jumper he was making, his head dropped into the jumper making machine. He died instantly, unfulfilled, but also passed a lot of iron filings from his hair into the machine.

Blah, blah, blah. Your Dad bought a jumper from that machine. It wasn't haunted by the jumper maker, but it did have a lot of tiny flecks of iron in it. Almost every thread had some on it, including the thread that was now wrapped around your sister's Queen.

Unbeknownst to your sister, the very same day she played chess with your brother, the neighbour had built a very powerful electromagnet. He turned it on briefly, but it pulled his glasses straight from his face. He turned off the machine (just after the Queen moved for the first time). He looked around for his glasses, but he couldn't find them. Great idea! He thought. If I turn it on again, the glasses will fly to the magnet! Problem solved! So he turned it back on. The glasses did indeed fly to the machine, but he was in between the two objects. The glasses struck him in the heel, causing him to fall forwards onto his magnet. He pushed it to the right, causing everything that was being magnetised to also lurch right with it. This was only very briefly though, as the magnet fell to the floor and broke. He died too, somehow.

There you go. Easy. The point, of course, is that there are infinite unknown possibilities that could cause movement. Only one is telekinesis. And that's most unlikely of all of them.
 
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Totally implausible story. Substitute peanut butter for the cheese and it might work, though.
 

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