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So here are my thoughts in response to yours. This is just my 2 cents and you can take it or leave it. Have you ever tried to have your own experience? You mentioned that you read stories, watch videos, visit websites, and look at pictures to try and find evidence of the paranormal. This is all fine and good, but these are other people's experiences. I guess you would have to ask yourself, at what point would you accept someone else's experience as truth or proof of the paranormal?

When we analyze, ponder, or humor the experiences of others in these areas the scrutiny is high. There is almost always room for doubt. Take this video for example. In it, a Qi Gong master demonstrates some amazing abilities that he attributes to 'Chi' or life force. These scientists can only measure what they know, and what is physical. At one point one of the scientists says "As a scientist I can't measure 'Chi'. It's not measurable. It is not anything that I can quantify." Think about this problem. How can science prove the paranormal when it cannot even measure or quantify it? The scientific method has it's limits. When it comes to the paranormal you can only indirectly measure. You can observe influences, but you cannot directly measure the force or power behind the influence, if that makes sense...

There are ways of having a safe and personal first-hand experience with something paranormal. If you've read my posts on here before I like to reference Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) and Past Life Regressions (PLRs). The International Remote Viewing Association website has tons of peer reviewed scientific articles and papers on the subject of Remote Viewing. What better way demonstrate that consciousness is non-local? The cool thing is that you can learn Remote Viewing for yourself if you are willing to commit the time. Money isn't really an issue since there are free courses on youtube and cheap books on Amazon to teach it. I have some bad news for you though. Remote Viewing has been public knowledge since it was declassified back in 1995 and the world still has not woken up or changed. It doesn't have to stay that way though. The trick is to not worry about what others think or believe. Work on what YOU think and believe and you can change the world, one mind at a time. People still say Remote Viewing is fake or a scam or cold war propaganda. They can believe whatever helps them sleep at night. Meanwhile I am learning how to do it and am having success. It is harder than it looks, so it will take time and dedication, but you should have enough success with your first real attempt that it will show you something is truly possible with it.

Past Life Regressions are the same way. You can find a hypnotherapist trained and certified to perform a regression session in your area and have your own experience if you so desire. They will usually have an audio recorder or let you bring your own so you can keep the whole experience for playback later. I found myself wondering and doubting on the subject after reading some books on PLRs. There was no substitute for having my own personal experience so I would know what it was like to sit in the chair and have that vivid experience. Is it all fantasy or is it a meaningful memory that truly fits you and your personal circumstances in life? You can decide for yourself, but not until you go through with it and have the experience. Otherwise it is just an academic exercise.

Skepticism is healthy so don't lose that. Always ask questions and do your own thinking. Skepticism is only healthy until the point where you close your mind to new information. At that point even the truth cannot get in. Some people are so open minded that they will believe anything. You need to find balance between the two, and it can be difficult at times. Stay the course, and stay thirsty for not just knowledge but experience. It is by far the best teacher! :) Thanks for reading.

I applaud your skepticism! I do take issue with a few statements:

>My younger brother (19), however, is a hardcore skeptic. He claims to have seen a cup levitate and move in front of him in the bathroom one night, and [...] I know that he is definitely not the type of person to do any investigating whatsoever and will just automatically assume that it was a ghost.

Your brother is not a skeptic.

>I always ridicule him for his insane belief.

That's not very nice.

>As an atheist, I can't help but look down upon people who hold religious beliefs because it all seems so absurd to me.

That doesn't help foster communication. I think you might benefit greatly from this half-hour talk from "bad astronomer" Phil Plait. The general idea behind the talk is: when have you ever changed your beliefs just because someone told you that they were stupid? Instead of helping your case, you are hurting it. You'll only cause them to reinforce their beliefs, even if your confirmed evidence directly disproves their beliefs.

>me being the logical person I am, I choose the side of "you're crazy and you imagined it", while he takes the "it was definitely a ghost" side.

You two should work on your communication, because this approach is going to go nowhere.

>It took my brother a little longer to come around to the fact that there is no god.

It is not a fact that there is no god.

>I consider myself atheist while I consider him to be agnostic.

It's a common misconception, but that's not how it works.

If you found confirmation bias [edit: interesting] (and all of the other names we have for the ways our brains will innately fool us), I'd highly recommend that you read Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark. I would suggest that you read it first, in private. Then I would suggest lending it to your brother to read, and asking him to recommend that you read a book of his recommendation. Afterwards, talk about your thoughts together.

Don't be mean to him, or dismissive. Sometimes, critical thinking has to be taught, or self-learned after experience. It's not a slight on my aunt's intelligence, for instance, that she believes that some forms of homeopathy is effective. I could tell her all day that we know that homeopathy doesn't work. I could give her thousands of pages of scientific journals explaining, in great and meticulous detail, why this is the case. She would likely dismiss "mainstream science," though, because it isn't supporting her worldview and/or belief system. That doesn't mean my aunt is a moron. It means, more than anything else, that she doesn't understand what a useful standard of evidence is in order to determine truths about our world.

>I don't believe in ghosts. Please tell me some experiences, give insight and opinions. Try to help me understand.

I've made similar posts searching for similar truths, like:

• Addressing The Most Common Paranormal Claims
  
• Considering how easy it is to fake photo/video/audio footage, can they still be accepted as forms of paranormal evidence?
  
• Carl Sagan said "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." - What are your thoughts on this?
  
  From my own observations, what it really seems to come down to is a combination of: the person's standards of evidence, their relationship with their pre-existing beliefs, their upbringing, and a near-complete misunderstanding of what science is and how science works. I see examples of these four issues every day on /r/Paranormal, as well as /r/UFOs, which I've also probed for truths:
  
  
• Why attribute ancient structures and complex crop circles to extraterrestrials?
  
• My thoughts on Ancient Aliens (TV), Erich von Däniken, and Zecharia Sitchin. What are yours?
  
• UFO experience from one of your resident subscribing skeptics
  
  The bottom line is: there is no proof of ghosts like what you are looking for. The best thing we have, so far, isn't from a digital photograph or an EVP. We've got neuroscience. We're getting better and better at watching the brain work. We can watch brain activity related to our consciousness happen, and we can do it all the time, every time. We've also noticed that once a human body is dead, there is no activity related to our consciousness or anything else occurring within our brains. So, based on the evidence so far, consciousness seems to die with the body. This, more than anything else, speaks to the existence of ghosts, if the belief is, in fact, that ghosts are the souls/consciousness/manifestation of dead people.
  
  But that says nothing about the experience a person goes through when they believe that they've seen a ghost. The experience is real, even if self-deception is involved. That includes your brother. I wish you the very best of luck. Try to be more tolerant of him!

Great captures! EVPs continue to amaze me while the rest of the stuff people capture become less so.

When you post, don't put what you think it's saying. Once you tell people what to listen for, people will hear exactly that. Have them PM you their interpretations. You'll get a better idea if most people are hearing what you are hearing. Just a tip, nothing more. :)

I am sure that some of the stuff people capture are random noises mistaken for voices maybe even cell phones, radio, natural explanations, etc. But other times it is quite unmistakable. It's a voice, much like your 'Run away' one. Those just blow my mind. I still don't fully believe that they are from people who have died. To accept that claim, requires a whole lot of extraordinary evidence to back it up.

This is great book about EVPs: EVP and New Dimensions by Alexander MacRae.

Keep recording and posting!

I wouldn't be able to do the topic much justice through a reddit post, but I'll reccomend you some great books on the topic

The encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology

The Dictionary of Demons: Names of the damned

The Vengeful Djinn: Unveiling the Hidden Agenda of Genies

The book of Yokai: Mysterious creatures of Japanese folklore

That oughta be a good start, because believe me the topic is as interesting as it is detailed.

> Around Halloween, it would turn on by itself and play this strange medley of growling, children singing, piano music, etc. It was usually at full volume and would turn off on its own. One time I was able to ask, “Alexa, what’s playing right now?” And the response was that it was “Creepy Halloween Sounds.”

Could be a software "easter egg" (a secret feature put in a piece of software just to amuse people), or an app such as this one (I don't have one of these devices so cannot test if the sounds in this app match what you describe), or even just an ordinary sound file playing. Highly unlikely that this is anything paranormal as the sounds described are very cliche.

> I theorized that maybe a neighbor was playing these sounds at their house nearby (on their porch, or for a Halloween party, etc) and that ours somehow picked up the signal.

This is not technically possible with devices of this kind. This kind of thing used to happen with analog radios, two-way radios, wireless microphones or headphones, and so on. Digital systems such as modern cellphones and WiFi and bluetooth devices cannot "interfere" like this.

> The very last incident was a bit different. My grandma passed away around that time. A couple of days after her passing, the Echo turned on (when I was alone) and started playing “Mandy,” by Boston. I had never heard that song before and had never played it on the Echo. My grandma was the only one who called me Mandy.

That could've been your grandmother, if the paranormal is real. These devices are very sensitive and don't require a loud voice, just a clear one (Google Now on an Android phone can actually be triggered with an electrical signal corresponding to a sound volume that would normally be inaudible, if you give it the right signal), so I imagine that it would be quite easy for spirits to talk to the device (similar to an EVP recorder).

Then if you haven't yet, I suggest reading this and this. The titles are corny, but these turned out to be much more concise and informative descriptions of the spirit world than I expected before reading them. The author claims the information is derived from hypnotic regressions performed on thousands of clients. The value of this information is that it's consistent across hypnotic sessions with people from different cultural and religious backgrounds, and has been reproduced by other hypnotherapists, with clients from different cultures who never knew about these books.

If true, this may be the closest we've come to a scientific understanding of the spiritual context of our world.

If I can make a gaming comparison, we're all in this game together, but instead of taking the game as-is and playing it the way most people should, you're trying to meet the game masters and figure out how the game works. Maybe that's your path in life, but for most people, life is to be played for how it is, it needs to be taken seriously and people need to be immersed in it, not constantly trying to chat up tech support when they aren't having an issue.

Like in a game, frustration, lack of success, or repeated failure aren't issues over which to contact tech support. The conditions the game imposes on you are the game working as intended. Games are about facing adversity...

Brand? Believe it or not the one called Ghost Meter $25. (See link) Worked the best for me. It has light and sound. The k2 is ok but had some kinks. And the more complex was just that.
Recorders vary. The best is Tascam Dr recorders.
But regular works just fine.



https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000ZH7G1E/ref=mp_s_a_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1503930134&sr=8-7&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=emf+meter&dpPl=1&dpID=41xP%2ByPv9VL&ref=plSrch

The great thing about living in an age post inquisition is the church no longer has a monopoly on spiritual matters. When something like an eternal afterlife doesn't sit well, you can look into other ideas and see how they resonate. Check out a book called Journey of Souls. In it, a hypnotist does regression of clients to the in between life place, which are consistent amongst his cases and of people's reported out of body experiences. Also this organization provides a lot of compelling evidence for reincarnation http://www.iisis.net . Also, this guy has done a ton of astral travel and has very fascinating views on non ordinary reality http://www.astralpulse.com/frankkepple.html . Ultimately, you can do your own inner vision work and meditation and see what works for you, not what some outside person or institution tells you is or is not the truth in matters spiritual.

If you're really interested in souls and spirit guides, I'd suggest a book entitled Journey of Souls by Michael Newton. It was suggested to me a couple months ago on reddit. Really good book.
http://www.amazon.com/Journey-Souls-Studies-Between-Lives/dp/1567184855/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

As r/Jack_Shid said, there are just too many ways to create video/audio/images to trust anything online.

However, there are a few books that opened me up to a much broader view of existence, that I can recommend:

Will Storr Vs the Supernatural by Will Storr -

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0061132195/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1457993127&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=will+storr+vs+the+supernatural&dpPl=1&dpID=51GD2%2B3MgfL&ref=plSrch

A great look into ghosts. Some of it is funny, some of it is cringey, but there are quite a few moments that give you pause. A great read.

Fringeology by Steve Volk -

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0061857726/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1457993301&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=fringeology&dpPl=1&dpID=41%2BFB2uuB6L&ref=plSrch

A journalist investigates the paranormal as a whole and finds some suprising things. Changed the way I looked at quite a few things, especially when it comes to what drives people to believe the things that they do.

Spoiler: "Logical" people are just as open to bias, ignoring evidence, and being zealots as anyone else.

Hey, this sounds like an interesting proposition. I would highly recommend a book called Fringe-ology by Steve Volk. It's by a pretty well established journalist (published in Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, lots of others-- not some TV ghost hunter or anything like that). He goes out and uses ordinary journalistic methods to present and discuss paranormal events; not to find answers, but to show that there are things going on that science can't yet explain. He also discusses paranormal research and discusses how professional paranormal researchers are often extremely strict about controlling and duplicating their experiments because of the high level of ridicule, stigma, and scrutiny that comes with their field.

I remember in one chapter Volk writes about some of the telepathy/ESP experiments carried out by the US during the cold war (what that movie 'Men Who Stare at Goats' was loosely based on). Basically a lot of studies found results that showed people would be able to get telepathic questions 'right,' a good deal higher than they would if they were were just guessing answers at random. Apparently it wasn't nearly reliable enough for the military however, and the whole 'psy-ops' project was scrapped. I think that would be an interesting place to start doing research though.


*edit with more info:

Here is wikipedia's rundown on Project Stargate, with several anecdotal 'claimed successes' with ESP.


Some of the findings were analyzed by a statistician and University of CA professor named Jessica Utts. I'm having some trouble digging her paper up but she basically concluded that the statistics pointed to something going on beyond random chance.

A good start would be this book, although it's not the real reason why I think this way. In fact, I think there are quite a few holes in the theory.

The truth is most likely that we, as human beings, have a set worldview that filters everything. That makes everything make sense. For normal people (people that don't have a lifelong history of so called 'paranormal' events) this worldview or OS shell can be perturbed from time to time enough for something like this to happen.

This 'shell' is cultural baggage, personal memory and cognitive typing, but mainly it's all those things that we learn to be true. "This is how the world works." type of stuff.

That's really all one can say about an event with this line of thinking though. We don't have a clue outside intuition and speculation what any of these types of events really mean, although personal meaning is often readily attached to them.

A handful of my own childhood experiences only happened when I was away from home with relatives, which was out of the ordinary, spur of the moment type things. I believe it's part of cognitive development to experience waking up and not immediately recognizing where you are, or how you got there, and your mind has to scramble to come up with the details. To make the world make sense again, right? That's a small example of perturbation. There are much bigger ones.


This doesn't offer any explanation as to why notable paranormal events are not entirely subjective, or in other words, why they are experienced by multiple people, and therefore not just something one could dismiss, or chalk up to 'I'm going crazy' or 'I must not be getting enough sleep' or some other thing. Those things do happen, and who knows what a fly on the wall would witness, but like I said, they usually get dismissed or at least never talked about.

This book

There's absolutely no question anymore for me. I find it impossible to believe that every single account in that book is made up or a hoax or a misperception.

I highly highly highly highly recommend reading it. One of the only books in my life I've read in 2-3 days. I just couldn't stop.

I torrented it btw. There is only like one seed but I still got it pretty quick. Actually it said zero seeds on the webpage but it still downloaded :P

I found this book many years ago. It provided many answers to questions I had regarding spirits that attached and attract to people. It's a good read and informative, writen by a psychologist.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Unquiet-Dead-Psychologist-Possession/dp/0345460871

Great book on the subject

Remote Viewing: The Complete User's Manual for Coordinate Remote Viewing https://www.amazon.com/dp/1604074361/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_y90QybYZ3249M

Astonishing Legends Podcast did a 3-part series on Skinwalker that was quite good. The book Hunt for the Skinwalker is also worth reading.

Here's one scholarly work that is well worth reading:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Trickster-Paranormal-George-Hansen/dp/1401000827

My all-time favorite is Will Storr vs the Supernatural

In my opinion, the best place to start review of the evidence for reincarnation is with Dr. Jim Tucker's Life before Life. He's got more recent books. And you'll eventually want to go to the source, his mentor Dr. Ian Stevenson's seminal research. But start with Tucker's balanced review of the evidence and arguments. Don't prejudge it with assumptions about what is "keerazzy" or what does or does not exist. Just look at the data and draw your own conclusion.

Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms: Who and What You See Before You Die

Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife

Not quite "paranormal" but Fingerprints of the Gods is a very interesting read.

Ghost Hunters by Deborah Blum is my favorite book on any paranormal subject:

http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Hunters-William-Search-Scientific/dp/0143038958

You should really read this book.

You'll find a lot of experiences resembling your friend's in here.

[Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown]
(http://www.amazon.com/Paranormal-State-Journey-into-Unknown/dp/0061767948/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330868906&sr=1-3&tag=bookforyoudm-20)

Slightly off-topic (by an entire continent), in the great book Will Storr v. the Supernatural, he talks about staying a night in an unidentified location he calls the most haunted place in England.

I'd thought he might have meant the Borley Rectory. However, (1) Borley was destroyed by fire in 1939; and (2) the experience he describes (I don't want to spoil it) doesn't comport with what I've read of Borley, anyway.

But I'd sure like to know what place that was.

I don't know if it will help but I've been reading a book called, "The Dictionary of Demons: Names of the Damned" by Michelle Belanger. Maybe you can find the "demon" that has been bothering you and maybe take some action to stop it. I hope everything works out for you.

I read a book with similar experiences, visions, trips and crowded rooms by David Kessler. You're not crazy.

Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms: Who and What You See Before You Die https://www.amazon.com/dp/140192543X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_EHp5yb6VQQT60

Haunted Wisconsin https://www.amazon.com/dp/0299285944/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_lbo6ybS4XM6BH

No problem. If you want to do some very basic investigation of what's going on, and possible causes yourself, you can buy one of these EMF meters (http://smile.amazon.com/The-Ghost-Meter-EMF-Sensor/dp/B000ZH7G1E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464891834&sr=8-1&keywords=ghost+meter). It's got a cheesy name but it's a legit EMF meter, and 1) EMF fluctuations have been correlated with hauntings, and 2) elimination of EMF fluctuations (e.g. via proper electrical grounding) have in the past been effective in eliminating haunting phenomena. This may be either due to the fact that A) EMF causes hallucinations (e.g. influences brain activity), or B) for some reason EMF fluctuations facilitate the manifestation of haunt phenomena (e.g. ghosts). It's not currently know which.

I already said I can pick up voices on my bass guitar and a malfunctioning speaker. There's nothing to it.

Alexander MacRae makes a living selling people a story about EVP, you are gullible.


Dude is not a scientist, he's a lecturer, ie, he repeats the same shit to class after class semester after semester until he was too old to catch up with the new technology. Also there is no verification of him working for NASA