Nearly Half Of Americans Believe In Ghosts

By on February 9, 2013 in News 17

Well, this seems more reasonable than belief in the tenets of mainstream religion. The Huffington Post reports:

A HuffPost/YouGov poll shows that 45 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, or that the spirits of dead people can come back in certain places and situations.

The idea of ghosts as evidence of life after death goes back to ancient Egypt, where it was commonly believed that death was merely a transition to some mysterious netherworld of another existence. While skeptics deny the existence of ghosts, claiming there’s no real evidence, polls have shown the public strongly disagrees.

“There are still many hardcore scientists who regard it as superstition and a residual fear of our past,” said paranormal author Brad Steiger. “I put ghosts in what I call a psychic residue category. In environments where human drama has taken place — a murder, suffering — that emotional energy is somehow impressed in the environment.”

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  • lazy_friend

    Nearly all ghost don’t believe in americans.

  • Phillipede

    I have had multiple experiences with the paranormal over the years. I used to clean a doctors office in a small town that used to be a hospital back in the early 1900′s. I had several experiences with what I consider to be ghosts. I always cleaned late at night when there was nobody around and on several occasions I heard footsteps up and down the hallway and when I looked mere seconds later there was no one around.

    I also have a niece who is schizophrenic and she occasionally comes for a visit. After she leaves strange, unexplained things almost always occur. Like, an old radio that hadn’t been used in years came on and there were several instances of lights coming on in the kitchen late at night.

    I’ve also lived in at least two houses that all of the inhabitants therein swore up and down the place was haunted. Reports included things like loaves of bread flying off a shelf, doors slamming late at night, and a multitude of strange noises. In one of the houses it was confirmed that someone had died there.

    In short, I am a firm believer in ghosts, although ghost doesn’t really seem to be the right word for it. I like Steiger’s label of psychic residue and I’ve mostly maintained that I think it’s left over psychic energy too.

    • Ittabena

      I worked in a bar mall sort of thing that had once been owned by the mob. Nude bowling, basement bars, real creepy place but that was cool because it was also a very old pool hall. We used to go upstairs at closing each night to make sure the lights were off and every once in a while you would hear a couple few bars of music play, except there was no way to make music. No radio, jukebox, musical instruments, nothing.

      Sometimes when we were sitting around counting our tills – 7 bars going on a weekend night – we would hear someone roll a bowling ball down a lane and hit the pins. The bowling alley upstairs had been removed nearly a decade before. However one fellow had died up there of a heart attack during the nude bowling. We always figured…

      The building has since been sold and renovated for offices and I no longer live in that city, but I have always wondered if the office workers ever hear anything.

  • bobbiethejean

    “While skeptics deny the existence of ghosts, claiming there’s no real evidence, polls have shown the public strongly disagrees.”

    This statement is silly. it implies that consensus is equal to evidence and it is not. A lot of people believe in Scientology and we KNOW that is not true. A lot of people believe in a lot of things but that doesn’t make those things true. Conversely, a lot of people DON’T believe in things we know are true like evolution and the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun.

    • http://twitter.com/RayButlers Ray Butlers

      I’m fascinated by the people who rated this post “down”. Why?

      • bobbiethejean

        No frigging clue. I didn’t say anything offensive- I didn’t even run my “skeptic routine” this time. All I said was belief in something =/= evidence. That’s a fact and an utterly inoffensive one at that. Geesh.

  • VaudeVillain
  • Christopher Linklater

    While the reality of ghosts is questionable, haunting experiences are very real indeed. EMF effects on the brain and infrasound withstanding, there are very real experiences haunting people. Instead of mocking, or blindly believing, I would love to see real scientific study into this fascinating phenomenon.

    • http://twitter.com/RayButlers Ray Butlers

      I agree that there’s such thing as haunting, but it’s in the imagination. There’s been plenty of scientific study, all of which concluded that there’s no such thing as a ghost.

  • Christopher Linklater

    Scientists who dismiss ghostly experiences as superstitious nonsense need to look at the fact that we still do not understand what consciousness is and how it works.

    • http://twitter.com/RayButlers Ray Butlers

      All we need is evidence.

    • Calypso_1

      That is an astounding demonstration of false equivalency.

      • Christopher Linklater

        No, actually it is not. Had I said “ghosts” rather than “ghostly experiences”, your observation would have been valid.

        • Calypso_1

          I believe you are correct. My apologies.

  • http://twitter.com/Zordabo ZordaboM

    it goes back to “ancient egypt”? Not vague at all

  • Dontknow5678

    Maybe doesn’t exist but something happened in a house where I lived when was a child, in the kitchen cutlery, pans and other things used to fly without anybody touching them or shadows in the house. Was a weird place and don’t need to read statitstics for to know if happened or not.

  • Kathryn dos Remedios

    ghost are 100% real at first I was skeptical about the super natural. Then I went camping at a former TB hospital. one night my friends and i sat in a room with a Ouija board and an uncracked glow stick. after a few hours of messing around we wanted to put the ghost to the test. We asked a ghost to crack the uncracked glow stick as one girl held her palms out flat. We heard a loud 3 cracks and got so freaked out, but then we found that the glow stick was perfectly cracked. Now I know ghosts are real.