DarkHyth post=18.68690.637099 said:
I am a scientist, and believe there is a proper explanation for everything. Ghosts are nonsense.
They don't necessarily have to be a spiritual phenomena, though. It could be that they are explainable by science, we just haven't learnt enough about the world yet to understand them.
I believe, as you do, that there is a proper explanation for everything. However, I have also encountered 'ghosts'. In my family home, we would hear footsteps on the stairs at night (not expanding wood, as you are wanting to say, or creaking floorboards, but solid obvious footsteps). The strangest thing about them was that they came not from the direction of our staircase, but from the location of the old staircase in the house, the new one's mirror opposite.
In addition to this, when in bed, my sister once woke to find a young boy sitting on the end of her bed. She called out to my mother, saying that there was a boy in her room. Mum said she had been dreaming, but she insisted that she had been awake and seen this. She was so adamant, we all believed her.
We looked into the history of our house, asked after previous residents, and discovered that when the previous owners had moved the staircase, they had found a toy-cupboard underneath, unused for ages. We looked into things further, and discovered that a boy who had lived in the house (the toys were his) had died in tragic circumstances. While playing in the village church-yard, he had tripped and fallen on a grave-spike, later dying from his injuries.
It is my belief that something of this boy remains in our house. We have never felt threatened or alarmed by the presence. I do not know anything further than that.
A friend of mine, who lived in an old farmhouse in Derbyshire, had her own ghost encounter. When in a downstairs room, she smelt the strong odour of pipe-smoke, fresh as if someone was smoking in the room. She looked in surrounding rooms, and even outside, but the odour faded as she left a certain corner of the room. After looking outside, she returned to the room, but found no trace of the smell. This happened several times before she finally decided to look into it. It turned out that a long-term previous resident, Fred, had spent his evenings by the fire in that room, smoking his pipe. He had died in the house, and subsequent residents had reported the strong smell of pipe-smoke in that room sometimes, and the fact that it never lingered. I myself smelt the odour once, when I was staying in that room, and asked her about it, which is how I heard about these incidents.
Over the years, I have met many people have mentioned similar stories to me, strange occurrences that seem to link to past events they were unaware of. After two encounters of my own, I tend to be inclined to believe them.
