1) People seeing ghosts hardly constitutes for hard evidence of the existence of ghosts. You've pushed aside more realistic explanations, such as psychological or other related physiological phenomena. To date there have been no credible evidence of ghosts from any scientific study.

2) Photos of ghosts are also not evidence of their existence. Yet again you've pushed aside the possibilities of doctoring, optical illusions or artifacts, mechanical faults and the like. You've also ignored the propensity of people to craft elaborate hoaxes for fun, fame or fortune, or all three.

Again, there hasn't been any hard evidence of the existence of ghosts in any of the scientific studies that I've read about. There are, however, several scientific theories as to why regular people sometimes see apparitions or feel uneasy/uncomfortable/the chills in certain locations, and no, there are nothing paranormal about the explanations.

For your benefit I've looked up the equipment that typical ghost hunters use. To my surprise, most of them are pretty mundane--things like audio recording devices, Geiger counters (what?), infrared/uv cameras and EMF meters. Detecting anything with these equipment does not make for evidence of ghosts.

Fact is, people tend to pick up patterns where there are none. More so when we're dealing with things that we cannot directly observe. Notice a trend in the equipment I listed? They all measure quantities that we cannot see, hear or feel with our naked senses (radiation, infrasound, electromagnetic fields). We see faces or objects in the clouds all the time, or shadows that look like something else, but we normally don't associate them with paranormal phenomena.

Imagine a world where ghosts do exist. Photography would be a much more difficult task. Think you got that shot just right? Well think again, that ghost just got in the way again. "Put your arm on your waist. Yeah just like that. That's perfect. Looking good. Now let's just chec--Ah for f***s sake it's that goddamn ghost again."

That recording of your band's newest song? Sorry, it's ruined. "That was a good you guys. Except for the talking, could you keep it down? What do you mean you weren't talki--Oh jesus it's that f***ing ghost again. Will you just get a f***ing job already."

All scientific experiments would have to include a "ghost f***ing around with our data" factor to account for deviations of measured data due to ghosts f***ing around with measurements.

I think you get my drift.

My bullshit meter is going off. Oh wait no, it's just my memory kicking in. That was a haphazardly designed experiment by a doctor, not a scientist, some hundred years back and has been thoroughly discredited. His conclusion was that the human's soul weighs 21 grams. And it wasn't a "super accurate measuring device". It was a weighing scale which I reckon would only be accurate up to, I dunno, half a gram at most? And modern research have yet to replicate his results.

Looks like you only got one point right in your post, and that is that he measured a drop in weight when one of his patients died. One out of SIX. How's that for statistical reliability? Two of his patients continued to lose weight over time (maybe they had multiple souls?), another lost some and then gained some (soul left, checked out heaven, decided he didn't like it and went back?). The results from the rest were discarded because they died while he was still calibrating the scale. So, really, there were only 4 data points. With wildly different results. Sounds like measurement errors, don't you think? It would do you good to do some research next time before regurgitating some highly decorated story based on dubious facts you read somewhere.

This post has been edited by pixelsheep: Oct 10 2009, 12:47 AM