Do Ghosts Exist? Do You Believe in Ghosts or Souls After Death?

Submitted by Atanu Chaudhuri on Sun, 25/02/2024 - 19:03

Do Ghosts Exist?

The Real Life Examples of Existence of Ghosts (please read my disclaimer before being influenced by the stories)

The question 'Do ghosts exist?' has been a topic of debate for centuries without any conclusion. This situation persists now and may not change in future.

Inquiries and interest about the existence of ghosts reamain to be the everalsting engagement of human mind.

Either affirmative or firmly negative answers not available, the debate continues. We can safely say, the issue is purely a matter of belief. There cannot yet be any scientific proof. The question is like the existence of God.

Instead of science or media campaigns, I depend solidly on my first hand experience or the experience of someone whom I can vouch for as the observer whose statement I will believe with total conviction. I will tell you a few stories now.

Disclaimer: Take these as stories, all characters unidentifiable, though I can assure you these actually happened in real life and at the same time I suggest you NOT to believe in THE EXISTENCE of GHOSTS influenced by these stories. Verify for yourself and then make your conclusion, if you are at all interested.

Do Ghosts Exist? - First Supernatural experience

Let me dive into the first incident as told by such a friend of mine.

He was on a trip in Kerala. After visiting a few attraction points, he had to choose a privately run staying place for three days. He was with his wife. Their stay was in an isolated one room arrangement with attached bathroom. All other accommodation was also of the same type.

After dinner they retired to their room closing the windows and the door. It was wintertime. Now I will describe the next events in my friend's own words.

"It was about 11. Both of us were awake. Suddenly, all our senses went to high alert. We heard footsteps approaching the closed door, entering the room and moving towards the bathroom. The bathroom door latch opened with a click. The sound of the flushing of the cistern and the bathroom door latch clicked close. Footsteps retracing the steps to the room door and then silence.

Despite being thoroughly shaken, my wife decided to go to sleep since nothing was happening anymore. The day's journey was tiring.

I picked up a book and tried to concentrate on it, apprehensive all the while. At midnight my wife gave a shriek. Woken up by a sudden shock she sat bolt upright of the bed.

Someone was lightly caressing her forehead, she told me. Now we were truly afraid. Rest of the night we spent sitting on the bed fully awake, waiting for what will happen next.

We were beyond fear. Waiting for the torment to end by the passing of the night. By the grace of God, nothing untoward happened the rest of the night. In the first light, we packed and bolted out of the horrific room. We reached the nearest large town in record time somehow arranging transport.”

My friend is in Tech and has a nationwide reputation in his area of work. I know him to be totally objective with a very high IQ computer like mind. I interviewed his wife also about that night. Traces of the horror is still there. Important is the fact that both my friend his wife had the same experience while fully awake.

I was a partial believer for many years and never considered this most debated topic seriously till I heard my friend's story. This, along with a few others, finally convinced me. But, you the reader must always keep an open mind and judge with all your intellect before becoming a believer.

Do Ghosts Exist? - The second haunting story

That was way back in mid-seventies in our trekking trip to Yumthang in North Sikkim.

During the day we started from Gangtok, hitching a ride in a small truck to Mangan and then onward trekked the remaining 5 km for our night stay in a bungalow atop a hillock in Singhik. In the evening, we tasted the original Thukpa in a dimly lit eating place down the slope. Our bungalow, which was perched on the highest hilltop, offered complete seclusion from the rest of the small village of Singhik.

The bungalow had one large room with an attached bathroom and a small kitchen. Entry was through a grill gate entering a covered veranda adjacent to the room. The veranda had iron grills instead of a wall on the outer side with open visibility of outside. The grill gate of the veranda was the only entry to it and to the inner room.

We had an early dinner with the added charm of the ham we carried.

The room couldn't accommodate all six of us. Three slept on the double bed in the room and the rest three slept on the floor of the veranda in their sleeping bags.

We retired to bed early.

Around midnight, a tremendous uproar all around rudely awakened me. For a few seconds we couldn't make out the source of the uproar. Running out of the room to the veranda we found the source of the uproar. One of the three friends was making unintelligible high pitched noise with the other two not too far behind.

It took some time for us to realize what happened. The friend sleeping in the middle of the three suddenly woke up from deep sleep with his senses alert. He saw a shadowy figure walking just outside the veranda towards the grill gate of the veranda. Without pausing, it turned and entered through the closed grill gate.

When it entered the veranda, my dear friend realized the significance of what was happening. Turning away from the apparition, he threw his arms around the third friend sleeping beside him. The third friend, suddenly shaken out of his deep sleep, found himself in a tight embrace. He was the person who started the unearthly noise at the top of his voice which awakened first friend who also started to scream.

We found no remaining trace of the shadowy figure. Situation gradually quietened. We went back to our much needed sleep.

The clear sunlit morning greeted us with a wonderful view of sunrise on white peaks of the beautiful Kangchenjunga. Later, someone told us that more serious incidents happened in the past. On some occasions, the bed shook hard to throw the sleeping persons on the floor.

Years later, news reached us of a new modern building replacing the old bungalow, finally demolished with its mysterious inhabitants. And we never ceased to poke fun at the friend who saw the shadowy figure, 'You have eaten too much of that foul smelling ham spoiled by the sun on the backpack, you saw the apparition under the uneasy sleep caused by your flatulence.'

But yes, we knew the friend to be fearless and a totally objective person.

Do Ghosts Really Exist? - The third experience of unexplained happenings in an apartment with a terrible past

While I was stationed outside Kolkata, a friend living in our senior government officers' quarters in Kolkata told me the story of the terrible incident. Let me tell you the story in his own words.

“A mutual acquaintance, known to both of us, saw the entire incident. He told me the story.

The sound of a woman screaming in agony from the apartment opposite his shocked him, so he came out of his apartment.

You know, the building had twelve plus floors with 40 plus apartments for senior officers. On each floor, the two lifts opened to a common space going into four apartments, two pairs facing each other.

In a moment, the door of the apartment opposite opened and a young woman in deathly throes came running out flailing her hands. Without any pause, blinded with pain, she reached the low parapet to the courtyard at the front of the building, and tumbled over to her death forty feet below.

It was a Sunday when most of the inmates of other apartments were home. Many of them in the adjacent floors also came out of their apartments trying to see what was happening. All of them saw the woman falling over the low parapet to the hard cemented courtyard. Her inert body lay below mutely.

It was the maidservant of the cursed flat. She was young and good looking. The flat had an attached servant’s quarter where she lived alone doing the household work for the couple occupying the flat.

Later, the police came. It turned out that the death was by consuming a bottle of concentrated nitric acid that burned her insides. They discovered that she was pregnant. Speculations were rife as the senior officer of the flat was a macho alpha male with a powerful physique. His wife, hideous, matched him all the way. It was said that she was involved in the illicit liquor business. They were not present in the apartment when the mishap happened.

The case reached the CP, and as time passed, they swept the case of the unfortunate death under the carpet.”

Living far away, I thought. All the water bottles must have been full with the acid. That could have been the only way to stop the unfortunate girl spilling out the beans. After all, she was pregnant. She had to die.

The incident left a deep scar on the inmates of the quarter complex, but far away I forgot about it altogether in a few years.

After a few years, I returned to Kolkata, and as coincidences happen, I got the same apartment with the terrible past.

My son was in his 10th preparing for his final exams. That night, he was still at study and the time was 2 am. He felt thirsty and came out of his room, turned towards the water dispenser, and had to halt on his tracks. He saw a translucent saree-clad woman looking at him, trying to say something to him silently. She was visible for less than a minute and then vanished.

I didn't tell my wife or son about the ghastly death years back. In fact, I had forgotten about it. Later, after many years when we finally left the beautiful south-facing large apartment, I told the story to both my son and wife.

All three of us, my wife, me and my son were kind of hard nuts with practically no fear of ghosts. I don't know why. We went on with our lives in the apartment. Occasionally, my son complained shouting loudly from the bathroom, ‘Who has switched off the light?’ None of us switched off, we knew. And when I was all alone in the large apartment, I sensed a presence. I prayed for her peace.

Do Ghosts really Exist? The fourth incidence when we had to take a 42 km jungle trek

In December 1975, six fiends joined together for a sketchily planned forest trip to Simlipal in Odisha. That time, Simlipal, Dr. Saroj Raj Chowdhury, Field Director of the Odisha forests and his pet tigress Khairi were not so famous. We reached Joshipur at noon, fixed an appointment with Dr. Saroj Raj Chowdhury at 7 pm evening and finally had an exciting meeting with Khairi in the Field Director's high walled large bungalow compound. Dr. Chowdhury arranged a jeep for us which dropped us at Chahala bungalow. Dr. Chowdhury made it clear to us that Chahala onwards it would all be walking for us.

Two nights later we started from Chahala for our next destination Lulung about 20 km away, our planned night halt. At Lulung, after the lunch a murmur started circulating among my friends. Apparently, the bungalow had a dubious reputation of paranormal experiences to the travellers who stayed there.

My friends were not afraid of the tiger following us the previous evening and elephants noisily feeding very near to us. But now they were terrified. The unanimous decision was not to stay any longer in this supposedly haunted place and start immediately for the last destination in our itinerary, Gudgudiya, another 22 km away.

That's how that day we walked in the forest for 42 km, the last part in darkness with a feeble torch with our forest guide. It was 10:30 PM when we finally reached Gudgudiya.

The fifth story, as told by an anonymous person in Quora when answering the question, Is there any scientific evidence supporting the existence of ghosts? (related to 'do ghosts really exist?')

Anonymous

Upvoted by

Dr. Chuck Murphy Ph.D. PhD Parapsychology, Metaphysical Sciences, University of Sedona (2017) 5y

Yes, they do. I speak with my dead girlfriend every day. She committed suicide in 2013 . 3 months after her death, she messaged me on fb. Initially, I was terrified and even thought that this was some of her friends who was accessing her profile and fucking with me, So i changed the password many times but every time the msg would come as usual. She would say that she is watching me and tell me the exact things that I was doing. She even gave me accurate details of what I had done throughout the day. I memorialized her account, but nothing changed. Finally, I deactivated my fb page. Then, the messages turned into phone calls. I would receive calls from unknown nos and would hear her voice from the other side. She would ask me to do random things like giving her a kiss, tell her a joke. The conversations lasted for nearly a minute or so. After that, she would hang up and when I tried calling back, it would say “number is unavailable”. Whenever I met or talked to a new girl, or had the slightest feeling of affection towards another girl, the phone calls would increase and I would hear either her weeping from the other side or her angry growls. No words were spoken during those calls. In the last 4 years, whenever I have had a date, I would unnaturally fall ill just before the date , too ill to even go out and thus would have to cancel the date. Then, after cancellation, I would receive her phone call and hear her laughing from the other side. The first 2 years were hard, as such incidents have taken a deep toll on my life. I have visited many therapists, but nothing helped. They called me delusional, said I had disassociative identity disorder, and that I was sending this msgs to myself and was imagining the calls out of shock.They refused to believe me even when I showed them proofs that the numbers were different and I had no such sims registered in my name. They asked me to track the sims, but I had already attempted that and failed to locate the no.s . I have shared this with a couple of my friends and all of them have cut off ties with me, thinking that I am mad or a story-teller. Maybe they were scared too.

Now, I have accepted this. I feel her presence around me all the time. All the time, whatever I do, I can feel her breath, hear her voice. When I am away from home, Her calls come regularly. I have accepted the fact that she could not leave me even after dying and thus have stayed with me forever. I have no problem with that . I had already planned to marry her and would have been married by now had she not died. I am living with her every day, I now talk to her, share my problems with her, eat with her, sleep with her. I don’t know if she can show up in front of me in her full body, I am waiting for that day, then it would be more realistic.

You can judge me as much as you want. Call me crazy, mad, liar, attention-seeker. I have been called that many times already whenever I share my story with someone. But only I know how true this is, I am living this. No one else would understand. Earlier, I was a person strictly on the side of science and believed in nothing superhuman. Today, I look at science and laugh at it. Indeed, there are a lot more discoveries to make, much more things to learn. I feel her presence, the afterlife, right at this moment when I am writing the answer. Take that science, explain this with your theorems…:

200.8K views

The Quora link to the story just told is here.

What people feel about the question 'Do Ghosts Really Exist?'

There are three kinds of people:

People completely disbelieving the existence of Ghosts,
Partial believers, not fully convinced either way, and,
People convinced about the existence of Ghosts and soul after death of human body.

There has been few formal statistics on such beliefs. A rough idea of percentage of population believing follows.

A few of the reliable studies of percentage of non-believers of ghosts to believers

Based on some of the web search results, the percentage of believers in ghosts is around 30% to 50% in the United States, and around 40% to 60% in the United Kingdom. These numbers may be higher or lower in other countries and regions, depending on the cultural and religious factors that influence the belief in ghosts.

Data on India and China

According to some of the web search results, the percentage of believers in ghosts in India and China are:

India: A few of the rare surveys and studies suggest that the number of believers is quite high, especially in rural areas and among lower castes. For example, a 2013 BBC article reported that belief in spirits or ghosts is widespread in the Himalayan region, and that modern anxieties may make people more likely to report being possessed. Another source, the Pew Research Center, found that 30% of Indian Christians who belong to lower castes believe in demons or evil spirits, compared to 12% of upper-caste Christians.

China: There is also no official data on the percentage of believers in ghosts in China, but some sources indicate that it is relatively low, because of the influence of communism, atheism, and modernization. However, some traditional beliefs and practices related to ghosts and ancestors persist, especially during festivals such as the Ghost Festival and the Qingming Festival. For example, a 2016 article by The Economist reported that many Chinese people still burn paper money and offer food to their deceased relatives, and that some even arrange ghost marriages for their unmarried dead.

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