Supernatural or Other Easily Explainable Phenomena?

[Huntn]

Since the Sylvia Browne thread is pretty active... lol.

We, my wife and I were recently on a trip to Tuscany and had two interesting things happen while there. In the hotel, we went to bed with the lights out, but I woke up in the about 1am to find both of the lights in the room turned on. My wife had not turned them on.

Later, my wife was futzing with a tie (two strings) on a blouse she was wearing where the tie has had a knot in it for the last year or so. She was verbally complaining about this knot. It was pulled so tight she could not even get her fingers on individual strings. She finally gave up, went over and sat on the bed to watch some TV as I was still getting ready so we could head out for the day. She stood up and looked in the mirror and the knot was gone and the two strings were hanging untied.

My wife is also frequently bothered by a feeling of cob webs around her face. I've looked that up and it seems some believe this is a spirit trying to get your attention, but I don't know what to make of it. I'm sure there could be some other physiological/physical reason for this, like real cob webs.

I'm not messing around with you all.

 

[kavika411]

I have had one glitch-in-the-Matrix moment that comes to mind. A few years ago, I was sitting at my desk at work. Behind me there was a large window sill with only one thing on it, like a little bowl or something. I was holding a pen and put it down on the window sill and turned my back to it for a second. I looked back, and it was gone. Seriously. Gone. I even laughed to myself that I knew it was supposed to be there and studied the window sill for a moment. I shrugged, and turned back to my desk. A moment after that I looked at it was there again.

I don't know if it was God, a ghost, Morpheus or Keebler elves. Don't really care. Just thought it was funny and weird.

I did have an odd thing happen, at least inside my own brain, this past Sunday. I went to a convenience store and then to my sister's house. At my sister's house I realized my wallet wasn't in my back pocket. I thought through my morning. I remembered, vividly, walking into the convenience store and sticking my right hand in my pocket and finding two one dollar bills (from wearing the pants the day before). Wanting to keep my bills together, I pulled out my wallet, and put them in there.

So, after spending time with my sister, I drove back to the convenience store to see if I'd left it on the counter. I retraced my steps, talked to the people, but nothing. Drove home. In my house I kept thinking about it. I stuck my right hand in my pocket again. There were the two one dollar bills. I then walked back to the bathroom and found my wallet where I'd left it the night before.

What I realized was that when I was originally at the convenience store, I'd reached for my wallet but having not found it, I put the cash back in the pocket. I did all of this in a rush so I wasn't really thinking about it.

The point of that very boring story was that my mind fully manufactured a memory of something that never happened - putting cash in my wallet while walking into the convenience store.

Again, I don't know what to chalk it up to. Probably most simply explained as Sunday morning a hangover.

 

[iStudentUK]

You seem determined to find the extraordinary in quite mundane events.

1) Light bulb

Maybe it had a dodgy connection and the power was on all the time. I had a light a couple if weeks ago would go on and off with the vibrations of me walking past. I switched the bulb and it's fine.

Or maybe you got up to go to the toilet or whatever and couldn't remember that happening because you weren't properly awake. This occurs with me from time to time.

2) Knot

Maybe your wife was on the verge of undoing it when she gave up. Alternatively I know a few knots that will only undo of pulled in specific ways, which can be useful.

3) Cobweb feelings

They could be actual cobwebs. Or an allergic reaction to something creating a tingling sensation. Humans have quite sensitive skin, and we tend to notice even very small things (various theories include being able to brush poisonous insects away quickly, or for intimacy), so maybe there was something there but it's easily brushed off.

 

[Feed Me]

I once saw a ghost. He told me never to speak of the encounter, lest he take my soul for th

 

[kavika411]

3) Cobweb feelings

They could be actual cobwebs.

I know you weren't being sarcastic, but there is something unintentionally hysterical about this.

 

[Don't panic]

both phenomena can be easily explained

 

[Macman45]

The truth is out there:

 

[iJohnHenry]

You seem determined to find the extraordinary in quite mundane events.

1) Light bulb.

What type of "hotel" was this?

Perhaps the light turns back on in an hour, when your time's up?

 

[Huntn]

You seem determined to find the extraordinary in quite mundane events.

1) Light bulb

Maybe it had a dodgy connection and the power was on all the time. I had a light a couple if weeks ago would go on and off with the vibrations of me walking past. I switched the bulb and it's fine.

Or maybe you got up to go to the toilet or whatever and couldn't remember that happening because you weren't properly awake. This occurs with me from time to time.

2) Knot

Maybe your wife was on the verge of undoing it when she gave up. Alternatively I know a few knots that will only undo of pulled in specific ways, which can be useful.

3) Cobweb feelings

They could be actual cobwebs. Or an allergic reaction to something creating a tingling sensation. Humans have quite sensitive skin, and we tend to notice even very small things (various theories include being able to brush poisonous insects away quickly, or for intimacy), so maybe there was something there but it's easily brushed off.

This hotel in Florence had a slot by the door to place your room card. When it is in, some items in the room is powered, but it seemed to have no effect on the tv or the lights by the bed. In other words, they always have power regardless if the card is in the slot or not. I can't explain that. I turned off the lights and went back to bed. We were there 5 nights. It only happened one night. I woke up about 1am.

The cob web feeling on your face has physical reasons this could be occurring, so it's not too suspicious imo.

This is the most suspicious. My wife was really taken back by the knot. As far as I'm concerned it is undetermined. It was tied tight, it was not a bow where you can pull it through. I don't see it just falling apart on it's own. She verbally complained and the next thing she knew it had untied itself without her help. Tightly tied knots just don't fall apart.

 

[Peterkro]

Italian room service is of the highest order often and quiet.Plus lay off the drugs.

 

[Huntn]

What type of "hotel" was this?

Perhaps the light turns back on in an hour, when your time's up?

Hehe, but alas not that kind... I found a review on line from someone who thought the hotel was "slightly haunted".

Italian room service is of the highest order often and quiet.Plus lay off the drugs.

Next time, we'll leave the weed at home. I just did not think it was hallucinatory.

 

[iStudentUK]

This is the most suspicious. My wife was really taken back by the the knot. As far as I'm concerned it is undetermined. It was tied tight, it was not a bow where you can pull it through. I don't see it just falling apart on it's own. She verbally complained and the next thing she knew it had untied itself without her help. Tightly tied knots just don't fall apart.

I agree this one is the hardest to explain, because it has the least detail. It will likely never be 'determined' as we don't know what the knot was etc. However, we shouldn't go leaping to some crazy supernatural explanation for what is an eye-brow raising moment at most (that's a unit on the official scale of weirdness). Like I said, your wife could have loosened it before giving up, and there are far more interesting and complex knots than bows that require specific techniques to undo.

You seem to want to jump to an extraordinary explanation without giving serious consideration to ordinary ones, ask yourself what a scientist in a lab would say if you produced this 'evidence' to them?

 

[EricNau]

Even if these events are unexplainable, neither is evidence of the supernatural. It's actually a logical fallacy called the Argument from Ignorance (or more specifically the Argument from Personal Incredulity). Just because you don't have an explanation doesn't mean there isn't one... You may never know what it is, but it probably exists nonetheless. Maybe the hotel has faulty wiring; maybe your wife's knot wasn't as complicated as she thought. Frankly, it doesn't matter what the actual explanation is. What matters is that explanations exist, and nearly all of them are more plausible than invoking the supernatural.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as Carl Sagan said. You can't (or at least shouldn't) believe in something so extraordinary as the supernatural because your wife doesn't know how a knot became untied (no offense). It's not as if 'natural explanation' and 'supernatural explanation' are currently on equal footing and we're just looking for one last bit of evidence to tip the balance. No, ALL of the evidence is currently resting on the 'natural' side and the 'supernatural' side is completely void. Even if you did put 'knot untied spontaneously' on the 'supernatural' side (not that you should), the balance wouldn't budge.

 

[Zombie Acorn]

I once saw a ghost. He told me never to speak of the encounter, lest he take my soul for th

^ lol

 

[Huntn]

I agree this one is the hardest to explain, because it has the least detail. It will likely never be 'determined' as we don't know what the knot was etc. However, we shouldn't go leaping to some crazy supernatural explanation for what is an eye-brow raising moment at most (that's a unit on the official scale of weirdness). Like I said, your wife could have loosened it before giving up, and there are far more interesting and complex knots than bows that require specific techniques to undo.

You seem to want to jump to an extraordinary explanation without giving serious consideration to ordinary ones, ask yourself what a scientist in a lab would say if you produced this 'evidence' to them?

Even if these events are unexplainable, neither is evidence of the supernatural. It's actually a logical fallacy called the Argument from Ignorance (or more specifically the Argument from Personal Incredulity). Just because you don't have an explanation doesn't mean there isn't one... You may never know what it is, but it probably exists nonetheless. Maybe the hotel has faulty wiring; maybe your wife's knot wasn't as complicated as she thought. Frankly, it doesn't matter what the actual explanation is. What matters is that explanations exist, and nearly all of them are more plausible than invoking the supernatural.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as Carl Sagan said. You can't (or at least shouldn't) believe in something so extraordinary as the supernatural because your wife doesn't know how a knot became untied (no offense). It's not as if 'natural explanation' and 'supernatural explanation' are currently on equal footing and we're just looking for one last bit of evidence to tip the balance. No, ALL of the evidence is currently resting on the 'natural' side and the 'supernatural' side is completely void. Even if you did put 'knot untied spontaneously' on the 'supernatural' side (not that you should), the balance wouldn't budge.

You guys are absolutely right. That's one of the reasons I titled the thread as I did. I've thought about the knot, just don't see a "normal" explanation for what happened. That does not mean there is not one.

 

[geekgirl]

I was staying at a very old cabin once with a scout group. Right after I said "There are no such things as ghosts" (in response to the kids trying to scare each other), the light bulb behind me turned off and then on. It would repeatedly do so when I was talking, pretty much the whole evening, to the point that the kids were just dying laughing. We checked to make sure the bulb was screwed in properly. We thought maybe there was something in the vibrations of my voice that caused the filament to react. I went to bed skeptical.

The next morning, around 6, I was just waking up when I heard loud, measured footsteps coming up the stairs, booted footsteps. I heard them walk across the floor to the fireplace, and suddenly my son sat straight up in bed and yelled. No one was there. Everyone was sleeping in one room, and everyone was still in their sleeping bag. He said he saw a white figure, naked, walk across the room, and stop by his bed. I didn't see anything, just heard the steps. He heard the steps, woke up, and saw the figure, and yelled loud enough to wake everyone. Luckily, we were planning on leaving that day, so we all laughed it off, and had a good story to tell.

The next year, when we came back, I went in first, and "explained" that we had much younger kids with us this time, and maybe he could save the ghostly antics for the older kids. The only problem we had that time was one of the assistant scoutmasters falling through ice into knee-deep water, but that's another story...

 

[Huntn]

Thread Revival

I had a strange dream last night, and it seemed like it went on forever. A friend was demonstrating telekinesis (also known as psychokinesis) and in my dream, I remembered I used to do that and so spent the rest of the dream practising it, trying to lift two things at once, and I did eventually. During the dream, I had that nagging feeling debating whether it was real or a dream.

Well, I already acknowledged it was a dream, but this morning I googled "learning telekinesis" and there are quite a few links and videos. The most unconvincing was a guy who swiftly moved his hand up and down over a piece of tin foil and made it flop around, claiming that once you got good the pumping of the hand would no longer be needed, ha!

Anyway, I thought I'd ask, can anyone move objects with their minds of seen someone do it? Real or fraud?

I was staying at a very old cabin once with a scout group. Right after I said "There are no such things as ghosts" (in response to the kids trying to scare each other), the light bulb behind me turned off and then on. It would repeatedly do so when I was talking, pretty much the whole evening, to the point that the kids were just dying laughing. We checked to make sure the bulb was screwed in properly. We thought maybe there was something in the vibrations of my voice that caused the filament to react. I went to bed skeptical.

The next morning, around 6, I was just waking up when I heard loud, measured footsteps coming up the stairs, booted footsteps. I heard them walk across the floor to the fireplace, and suddenly my son sat straight up in bed and yelled. No one was there. Everyone was sleeping in one room, and everyone was still in their sleeping bag. He said he saw a white figure, naked, walk across the room, and stop by his bed. I didn't see anything, just heard the steps. He heard the steps, woke up, and saw the figure, and yelled loud enough to wake everyone. Luckily, we were planning on leaving that day, so we all laughed it off, and had a good story to tell.

The next year, when we came back, I went in first, and "explained" that we had much younger kids with us this time, and maybe he could save the ghostly antics for the older kids. The only problem we had that time was one of the assistant scoutmasters falling through ice into knee-deep water, but that's another story...

I don't know if you are still visiting the forum, but I'm sorry I did not reply 5 years ago. I had a Scoutmaster fall through the ice as we were clearing shrubs growing up through the ice on a pond to help a farmer out , whose land we were camping on. I have never seen a ghost, but always wanted to, but not in my house. When I traveled a lot for work , I stayed the in several hotels that were reportedly haunted, but never say a thing.

 

[LizKat]

^ lol

Me too, that one really got to me.

Perhaps because it's 2am and i usually retire four hours ago.

I think the knot one's pretty cool. A helpful ghost. Accept it, enjoy! G'night all.

EDIT: didn't even notice it was a revival while I posting this but good choice there @Huntn I'll be back; I love the idea of friendly ghosts and also "mind over matter" although I'm a little skeptical...

 

[blackfox]

Ha! Interesting thread I originally overlooked...my contribution: Many years ago I went to University at Evergreen State College. Ted Bundy nabbed one of his victims from there decades prior. As a coincidence, I lived below the dorm/apartment the victim once lived in and knew the occupants there well - as college living goes. The stuff I saw go on in that place was seriously weird. Faucets going from off to full-blast randomly (with no-one in the vicinity), and I actually saw dishware float across the kitchen. Full disclosure: I smoked a lot of weed in those days...yet, I know what I saw. There is no amount of weed that can do that. I've tried to figure it out over the decades, but sometimes things are just unexplainable. Oddly comforting and disconcerting at the same time...

 

[Huntn]

Ha! Interesting thread I originally overlooked...my contribution: Many years ago I went to University at Evergreen State College. Ted Bundy nabbed one of his victims from there decades prior. As a coincidence, I lived below the dorm/apartment the victim once lived in and knew the occupants there well - as college living goes. The stuff I saw go on in that place was seriously weird. Faucets going from off to full-blast randomly (with no-one in the vicinity), and I actually saw dishware float across the kitchen. Full disclosure: I smoked a lot of weed in those days...yet, I know what I saw. There is no amount of weed that can do that. I've tried to figure it out over the decades, but sometimes things are just unexplainable. Oddly comforting and disconcerting at the same time...

Thanks for recollection. I'd say your experience points towards the supernatural, especially floating dishes.

 

[LizKat]

Thread Revival

Regarding that knot your wife was trying to untie in the earlier part of the thread...

Funny how you revived this thread at about the same time in the wee hours that someone had emailed me a link to a piece that's written in layman's terms but addresses use of algebraic topology to analyze brain structure and function.... and algebraic topology's categories include, yes... knot theory....

Now knot theory itself deals with mathematical versions of knots that are a little different from the ones we use to secure one thing to another, not least in that the ends of the mathematical ones are permanently joined.

Still, I sure got a kick out of the conjunction in my late evening of your thread revival and a link that relates to "knot theory" popping into my mailbox. (a complete coincidence,,,, ROFL)

Anyway that piece I was mailed a link to was pretty interesting. By the time one reads it and grasps the implications of an eleven-dimensional, transient structure that a human brain may construct in order to address some task set before it, one could begin to see how that knot on your wife's blouse may have got around to undoing itself even as she figured she was giving up on it and turning to something else. Maybe as the "sandcastles" of that particular structure her brain built to solve the problem began to dissolve, parts of it were still guiding her to finish the task, even as she consciously turned to doing something else. There sure seems a lot left to discover...

Brain Architecture: Scientists Discover 11 Dimensional Structures That Could Help Us Understand How the Brain Works
​

"It is as if the brain reacts to a stimulus by building then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, starting with rods (1D), then planks (2D), then cubes (3D), and then more complex geometries with 4D, 5D, etc. The progression of activity through the brain resembles a multi-dimensional sandcastle that materializes out of the sand and then disintegrates," he said.

Henry Markham, director of Blue Brain Project, said the findings could help explain why the brain is so hard to understand. "The mathematics usually applied to study networks cannot detect the high-dimensional structures and spaces that we now see clearly,” he said.

"We found a world that we had never imagined. There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions."​

 

[Stefan johansson]

If you experience " supernatural" things,you should probably stop drinking or using drugs.

 

[LizKat]

If you experience " supernatural" things,you should probably stop drinking or using drugs.

It would doubtless help control the rational analysis of such issues.

Still there are phenomena we do not understand about our own brains yet, never mind subatomic states and afaik we're really only just now getting to be able to use quantum computing to look at some of that in novel ways.

 

[Stefan johansson]

It would doubtless help control the rational analysis of such issues.

Still there are phenomena we do not understand about our own brains yet, never mind subatomic states and afaik we're really only just now getting to be able to use quantum computing to look at some of that in novel ways.

Of course there are things left to explain,that's how scientists earn their living.

 

[LizKat]

Of course there are things left to explain,that's how scientists earn their living.

And how we came to have the interwebz after algore invented them...