Lies, hysteria and confusion, in that order.

If ghosts were real, they would already have been studied and commodified in some way.

No. It would be neat, but there is no evidence for it. I say this as someone who used to believe and made a website in ~2001 about haunted locations, our visits to some, etc.

As for what people see, it really depends. Pareidolia is a thing, so humans, I think, often see things not exactly as they are, especially if it’s something in the vision for a very brief amount of time.

Religion-fuelled psychosis in already mentally unstable religious people.

Once you learn what all the weird sounds are that you hear at night other people’s ghost stories all start to make a lot more sense.

Every single personal story about ghosts I’ve heard can be explained with science.

I’m open to being wrong about it as I am with most things, but scientifically there doesn’t appear to be any water held up in that one.

its mainly prior suggestion, followed by the brain filling in gaps of unknowns with that suggestion.

I want to believe in ghosts, because of the broader implication that there is something beyond this life, but I have not seen any credible evidence of ghosts. As for people’s ghostly experiences, I think that the vast majority of it is obvious bullshit that people invent to make their lives seem more interesting than they really are.

I’ve been to lots of allegedly haunted places; graveyards, houses, prisons, asylums, castles, battlefields, etc, and never once saw or experienced anything ghostly or even ghost adjacent. Without fail, there has always been at least one believer who told me that I need to believe in ghosts in order to see them, which is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. They also seem to believe, for reasons that escape me, that ghosts speak and understand modern English, regardless of what era or region the ghosts are supposed to be from. I just can’t wrap my head around the logic that once you die, you magically know all languages, past and future.

If someone tells me they’ve seen a ghost, I’ll take them at their word. I won’t call them a liar, because maybe they did see something, and “ghost” is just the best explanation they have. But in order for me to believe it, I need more than eyewitness testimony, and in this digital age of easily accessible high quality special effects, a shaky low resolution out-of-focus 5 second video of “orbs” just won’t cut it.

I hate sounding like such a downer, because I know a lot of people truly believe in ghosts, but the paranormal community is just so full of hucksters and suckers that it’s exhausting to sift through all the blatantly fake crap in search of some truly compelling evidence.

So we’re all just energy right? Like, literally.

And do y’all remember those clay pots that recorded voices from hundreds of years ago accidentally while the potter was making some grooves? The ones where scientists could play the clay pots like a record?

I think ghosts might be energy recordings in a place. They’re not thinking or feeling. They don’t have agency. It’s just energy recordings left behind.

I dunno, just a thought I’ve been noodling for a while.

I know somebody who used to assist an exorcist for the Catholic Church. This person is very close to me. They have told me stories that are undeniably supernatural.

I also had a coworker, a very honest and good man. He and his wife witnessed a hairbrush fly across their room and hit a wall after she voiced that she thought their home was haunted. That hairbrush is why they sold that house.

Both sources described incidents with multiple witnesses that defied physical explanations. I trust both sources.

From what I can tell, the location matters. Certain elements and rituals can trigger responses. Other than that, I don’t know anything.

Dimensions bleeding into other dimensions.

As a little kid I thought our house was haunted numerous times because of hearing weird noises and whatnot that I couldn’t identify at night and just not having the life experience to account for it. Not once have I experienced anything like that since I was teenaged and up. I think adults experiencing things like that just never grew all the way out of that stage.

Too many drugs

I think ghosts, if anything, might just be people who are extremely sensitive to changes in the natural electromagnetic field seeing things. Such sensitivities have been known to cause visual or aural hallucinations, and many “haunted” locations do have uncommon magnetic field anomalies. Similar to how sightings of various entities more than likely stem from hallucinations caused by sleep paralysis.

There is also just paradolia in general; seeing faces in random noise, or hearing voices in random noise. This is basically what EVPs and “ghosts” in photographs are.

Ive had multiple experiences, so yes I 100% do. We used to sit at our living room and hear footsteps coming down the stairs but never anyone there. Then one time I saw a little girl in pink run from the stairs to the laundry room. Nobody was there and our kid was upstairs sleeping. Wife saw it too.

No, they don’t exist. Brains are freaking weird and make up shit almost as often as LLMs do.