Could you please post one a picture without annotations, so we can do our own ghost hunting before getting our imaginations cluttered with other people's ideas?

:)

NT: There is a link to the original. Last paragraph in section starting with "Marie Haws"

This is my favorite footage of a ghost.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfZItov1BUo

Omer M

Ebert: You should be ashamed of yourself.

I remember a day years ago, shortly after my then-husband had come to join me in Chicago. We were out strolling in the neighborhood, and he said wistfully, “I hope someday to live in a place without ghosts.” “I think we carry our ghosts with us wherever we move,” I replied. “I was talking about television reception,” he answered.

Well - that's fascinating. What's going on here is "matrixing" which is just the human brain's propensity to try in find patterns in random things like leaves, etc. (and like you say, explains the miracle of finding a picture of jesus on grilled cheese, etc. ) So you're correct, it's an optical illusion.

That said, I actually do believe in ghosts. I've had the misfortune to see them for most of my life - I've never caught one on camera though, and god knows I've tried.

20,000 hits though! we americans do love us some paranormal action!!

Thanks for linking my annotated image as one of "the best", despite my inferior graphics skiils ! I'm honored.

I think it's really just the ability to let your mind drift abstractly, kind of like seeing images in the clouds. When you're in the right frame of mind (especially when you've been told what to look for), your mind can organize the patterns of light and dark into an image.

When I was younger, I'd often scribble on a sheet of paper, then look to see what kind of image I could turn it into with a few extra lines or darkening of existing lines. This is just a similar abstract exercise. Thanks for letting me play!

I can't see a thing, but it's good to read something from you. I hope you're doing well, I notice a few movie reviews missing for some relatively anticipated movies. Can't see everything I suppose. Thanks for doing what you do, I'm glad you're enjoying nature.

It's not that I think that there's a real ghost, but I can make a face, or a shadow, or a body out of pretty much any image. It wasn't fun when I was little, because I'm a such a chicken (I will not watch horror movies, ever, though my friends do valiantly try to make me). After I watched the one of the Harry Potter movies, every time I saw a dark object, I was convinced that it was "you-know-who". Yep, I still use that name. Pathetic, I know :/ Then after watching the Lord of the Rings movies with the Ringwraith/Nazgul things I once again convinced that any dark object was one of them. Then, finally, after watching "The Kingdom of Heaven", I was convinced that everytime I saw something pale, it was the King's mask. And that wasn't even a scary movie! Lots of sleepless nights as a child. Oh and I should probably mention that I was 11-12 when I watched the Harry Potter movie, and at least 14 when I saw the Lord of the Rings movies and "Kingdom of Heaven". What can I say, I have a talent for voluntarily embarrassing myself. But somehow I still love Halloween. Must be the candy. Though me on a sugar high is probably more frightening than any of those movies.

Turn of the Screw! Must re-read.

Also, Lesser Piltdown, Pa. sounds like a good place for a broken down paranormal P.I. to set-up shop.

Turn of the Screw! Must re-read.

Also, Lesser Piltdown, Pa. sounds like a good place for a broken down paranormal P.I. to set-up shop.

Hmm. In the first (red-outlined) illusion, I definitely see a pissed-off Conan O'Brien.

Hahaa, I'm not kidding!

Hmm. In the first (red-outlined) illusion, I definitely see a pissed-off Conan O'Brien.

Hahaa, I'm not kidding!

While I certainly don't believe in the existence of ghosts nor is there any solid, testable scientific evidence for their existence, there is alternately no real testable scientific evidence to once and for all disprove their existence.

... Quite a conundrum for any of those staunch pro-supernaturalist activists and anti-supernaturalist activists.

Speaking for myself, I didn't see a ghost - just a face I could free associate in the negative space (the sky) amongst the leaves.

Next to clouds and rock formations, the organic nature of trees and plants readily accommodate such musings; the mind always looking for reason within shape and form, your brain's recognition software never turning off. It's always trying to relate what it's seeing to what it already knows, so as to speed up the process by which said brain wraps itself around an unknown.

At least that's how my mind works. It reaches for similarity, first. Then makes a list of everything the item/thing could be, for looking like it.

I saw dozens of things in Roger's picture, but I also had a weekly Newsletter to finish, chuckle, and in truth, you can spend DAYS in that shot finding stuff. :)

What interests me is that no one has mentioned the black ghost staring out from the foliage in the foreground; smile.

"To the believer, no proof is necessary, and to the skeptic, no proof is possible."

I prefer to take the stance that anything is possible, but everything is not necessarily a spirit or a ghost and immediately assuming so without sufficient and irrefutable evidence is foolish.

On the other hand, just because something can be faked does not mean everything is faked, and assuming so is equally as foolish.

There are a lot of people on both sides of the argument who make baseless assumptions, and they need to stop doing that. The human mind is trained to see the outline of faces in nothing - it's called "anthropomorphism". It's the little switch in your brain that makes it so when you look in the headlights of a car, you see eyes and a bumper for a mouth. There are not ghosts in your car.

But there are things that happen to people that are genuinely mysterious, told by people who have no reason to lie and gain nothing by doing so. I have a number of them in my family. You look in to their eyes, and there's no hoax there. No mind-altering substances to cause an unexpected hallucination. No misconstrued circumstance. Just an unexplained event. Sometimes, seen by multiple people, together, at the same time.

Just because it cannot be scientifically reproduced does not mean it did not happen, either (and personally, I think James Randi is kind of a jerk). But I think we would all do well to be as skeptical as possible, even if someone reading this classifies themselves as one of the so-called "believers".

There is an unintended (?) monster down the diagonal from top left corner in this Rembrandt.

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQolCxrzvKXVDLMha7lKUPa_WkDMq6s1E7C0RePi0AOIYVxIi8&t=1&usg=__KSF5UaYe3DbwKoQYEy87QhIYyKY=

You all can't see that? It seemed pretty obvious to me. http://i54.tinypic.com/2qvz2v9.jpg

That's interesting, because when I saw the large patch of light at the top it did start to look like a face after a while, but it wasn't facing *our* right. Looks more like the Heath Ledger Joker crossed with a child, which is stereotypically spooky.

I see a great new M. Night Shyamalan movie. Oh wait, that was a ghost.

Believing in ghosts makes people see them. I remember one time as a kid of age 14 walking with a friend at night, and we both looked down the street and at the same time saw a ghost coming our way. We ran. We both thought we saw it.

From age three to seventeen often I'd wake up and see the Devil towering in my room, or a witch leaning over with a cauldron, or monkeys, or the half-white half-black voodoo guy from Live and Let Die, and much more. One time I even woke up and saw a handgun floating in the air, and I reached out, and my hand went right through it.

I've been told that the very young and the very old often hallucinate in half light when they wake up. I hope that's true. I look forward to hallucinating like that again when I'm older. It did stop happening before I got out of High School.

My Mom took me to a sleep study once when I was about seventeen. The technician exclaimed to me the next morning, "What were you dreaming about!? You were dreaming for ten minutes before you fell asleep."

I didn't know that was uncommon before then. I was simply "thinking" about school and friends, and I was imagining it. And apparently the imagining registered as dreams.

I don't see ghosts in the picture or anywhere, Roger. But I'm glad for people that do. That kind of stuff can be fun and makes for good experiences even if it's scary at the time.

Believing in ghosts makes people see them. I remember one time as a kid of age 14 walking with a friend at night, and we both looked down the street and at the same time saw a ghost coming our way. We ran. We both thought we saw it.

From age three to seventeen often I'd wake up and see the Devil towering in my room, or a witch leaning over with a cauldron, or monkeys, or the half-white half-black voodoo guy from Live and Let Die, and much more. One time I even woke up and saw a handgun floating in the air, and I reached out, and my hand went right through it.

I've been told that the very young and the very old often hallucinate in half light when they wake up. I hope that's true. I look forward to hallucinating like that again when I'm older. It did stop happening before I got out of High School.

My Mom took me to a sleep study once when I was about seventeen. The technician exclaimed to me the next morning, "What were you dreaming about!? You were dreaming for ten minutes before you fell asleep."

I didn't know that was uncommon before then. I was simply "thinking" about school and friends, and I was imagining it. And apparently the imagining registered as dreams.

I don't see ghosts in the picture or anywhere, Roger. But I'm glad for people that do. That kind of stuff can be fun and makes for good experiences even if it's scary at the time.

(website timed out on submission. Sorry if you got this twice.)

MR. Ebert,

You've done so much to heighten this young film student's idea of cinema. I'm glad you use your skill for other good causes, too.

Wish you the best.

I see no ghosts... But, then again, I was never good at those 3D picture thingies where you were to stare at one spot and then all of a sudden see things...

All I see is a deer looking extremely guilty about eating your flowers... Did the cayenne work? Adding cayenne may have just made it more delectable... ;)

I've never seen a deer in our backyard, but we have rabbits a-plenty. They love the fresh tender snow pea shoots and blueberry bushes especially...

I thought 17 year old no-talent pop-stars wrote their memoirs, not people with vast experience and cultural impact, but I could be wrong.

There's no ghost in there, it's people seeing what they want to see, just like "Hey that cloud looks like a bunny". People see ghosts as a result of the brain being unable to identify certain experiences. Such as an unidentifiable mass will be identified as a corpse when in reality, as the person gets closer, turns out to be only garbage bags. When the brain can't identify what it experiences, it will replace it with the closest possible match in its database of anterior experiences. It's a way of not leaving holes in the experience. It's the whole "Corner of my eye" thing.

These types of photos have been increasingly popular on the net for some time as you can see in the below link. They're usually captioned with "When You See It, You'll Sh*t Bricks".

Its called "pareidolia."

I show it to my students every time one of them folds a twenty dollar bill to show the "twin towers collapsing."
Try this:
Draw two vertical lines of the same size on a post-it note. Then draw a single horizontal line at the bottom, unconnected to the two vertical lines. Ask 20 people what it is.

Then turn it over and ask 20 different people what it is.

http://www.skepdic.com/pareidol.html

That Fullerton Avenue thing is nonsense and people should get over it. If God wanted to reveal Himself to the City of Chicago, He would take the form of a resurrected Walter Payton.

He posted a link to the blog entry with the original photo. You must have missed it. Here you go.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/pages-for-twitter/all-i-see-is-a-deer-some-trees.html

Staring at your photo reminds me of my attempts to see the images hidden in those computerized, optical illusion posters as a child. Being an artist and somewhat visually inclined, I've always been disappointed that I couldn't force my brain to make the perceptual shift---maybe that hidden airplane is a life changing spectacle, if only I could see it!!! Alas, I feel the same sense of failure and frustration while looking at your photograph. Unfortunately for me, no matter of squinting and tilting my head will ever allow me to see a ghost.

On the literary front ...

Coincidentally, I'm teaching an American lit class at our local correctional facility, and this week we're looking at Henry James' "The Jolly Corner," my favorite of his ghost stories. It illustrates Satchel Paige's sage advice: "Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you."

Of course, the best ghost story in English (Asian lit/movies have the best of the best) is Oliver Onions' "The Beckoning Fair One." The sound of a woman brushing her hair has never been scarier.

Best ghost quote: "There's only one thing I is afeerd of, an that is ghosks, cos I canna unnerstans em." --Popeye

p.s. When I was a little kid, I loved Casper--but the older I got, the more he creeped me out. Good theme song, though; rhymes "meet ya" with "creature": http://video.sbrforum.com/video-1838-theme-song-casper-the-friendly-ghost.html

Makes me think of the sculptor/art historian Sidney Geist's work on Cezanne (Interpreting Cezanne), where he found cryptic images in Cezanne's paintings that uncovered hidden meanings.

Your comment about not being able to "unsee" a pattern once the brain has locked on to it reminds me of the FedEx logo. Once someone pointed out to me the forward-pointing arrow between the "E" and "x" (obviously put there very deliberately to denote speed) I've never been able to NOT see it.

If you have not seen the movie Photographing Fairies, I think you will find it relevant. I caught by accident this week on the BBC while staying in Brussels. I would not say it is a cinematic masterpiece, but the acting is pretty good (Ben Kingsley even has a role) and the story is entertaining.

I have always loved a good ghost story (although there are so few), but have never been certain whether or not I believe in ghosts.

That said, in certain places in the world in which I have travelled, I have felt the presence of past lives. A late night stroll over the bridges of Venice or an early morning walk down a medieval market lane in the Loire conjure images, sights and sounds of footsteps of the past.

Nowhere was this sense so hightened as when I visited the parkland around Albert Speer's amphitheatre in Nurenberg. I could hear the cheers, feel the vibration of footfalls on the ground -- the atmosphere was palpable.

While I don't truly believe these feelings are the result of being in the presence of actual spirits of the past, I do believe our world is filled with their echoes. I know, of course, that they are echoes of my own knowledge and perceptions, but they are no less real and we all, in fact, would benefit by feeling the history of our surroundings. After all, our own footsteps will leave their own echoes. What then do we want those who follow to hear and feel?

probably is Jesus, doncha think...lol

While this is a huge problem that many of us that are active in the paranormal field wrestle with incessantly, all too often the knee jerk reactionary recitation of terms like pariodelia, matrixing apophenia, pixelation, simulacrum and anthropomorphizingseems are invoked ad nauseum as the default explanation for any and all images that defy common camera errors...

Some will accept NO evidence regardless of how compelling for reasons ranging from denial, a conflicting belief system, competition or myopia...

A friend of mine once photo-shopped a real human face into a photo with an abundance of background flora and as predicted; the skeptical self proclaimed "experts" at the site where he posted it claimed it was just another case of matrixing/pariodelia ...

One thing you will seldom find is objective skepticism within the paranormal community as it is inundated with personal agendas and self promotion,jealousy and petty vendettas (imho) ..

Mr Halfhand

Anyone remember that book THE BIBLE CODE? The text of the Bible was chopped & channeled to find all kinds of predictions of disasters, assassinations, etc. in acrostic array. I think it became a best-seller.

Anyone remember Nostradamus? He could have written an astrology column. You can read almost anything into his predictions.

Anyone remember WORLDS IN COLLISION? No? Good.

The ghost is in your mind. You see what you want to.

What a spoilsport.

--jwarner - [... Quite a conundrum for any of those staunch pro-supernaturalist activists and anti-supernaturalist activists.]

No conundrum here.

There is no experimental process that can prove a negative position. I can't prove that fairies don't exist, because fairy advocates would simply change the rules of the physical universe to allow for fairies.

I have a full-size, feathered, blue Tyrannosaurus in my pocket. Prove me wrong.

There is also nothing that you can see that fits the definition of "supernatural". If there were, you wouldn't be able to detect it, as you exist only in the natural, physical world.

Any time you are able to sense a phenomenon, it can only be a natural event. The only way to claim a supernatural sighting is to again, change the rules.

This is pareidolia, like the man in the moon. And "There is no such thing as a ghost," thank you!

Dear Roger,
There are no photographs of ghosts. You know that. I know that. However, I shall tell you of my own supernatural experience.

I was about 15/16. My family went to our grandmother's house for our holidays. Being short of beds, I always sleep on the leather couch. My cousin was visiting. She is a superstitious sort, so I jokingly and loudly exclaimed in the sitting room (where I sleep) "If there are any ghosts here, show yourselves", for which my cousin reprimanded me. Anyway, a few nights later, I was lying in the near-dark on the couch in the sitting room. My grandmother has a mantelpiece in the sitting room, over which is various small souvenirs, a brass display-only tea set, a wooden clock, and one of those hotel bells that you ring by hitting its top with your palm.

About one o'clock, I heard a ringing. It was coming from the mantelpiece. It was the hotel bell, ringing without anyone touching it. At first I thought it was a nearby phone, which had a "loudspeaker" of sorts, with a similar sounding "loud" noise in addition to the quieter normal ringing of the phone. But the ringing was definitely coming from the hotel bell, the "normal" phone ring not going, and the ringing being a different tone to the "loud" tone of the phone. In addition, the ringing wasn't at even intervals, as the phone's ringing would be. I was scared, and I did the only thing I could do: cried out for my mother, who was sleeping in another room. She was asleep, and didn't hear me. The ringing stopped soon after this, having gone about a dozen times I would say.

I milled over every explanation, even theorising a moth or spider could have been pressing the bell, but none satisfied me. My grandad had died about five years prior, so it could have been him, but I don'tbelive he ha anything to do with that.

I truly believe the most likely explanation is that humans have long hidden psychic powers, which somehow occassionally come out, especially around puberty. You often hear of teenagers being involved with ghosts, especially poltergeists, but that's just a mad theory.

Pictures/videos of ghosts are always manipulated or misinterpreted pictures of something else, or camera glitches. To prove this, I found a random picture on Wikipedia of a Chilean mountain called Ojos del Salado and highlighted pieces I felt looked like faces. I completely chose the mountain at random, and the results are quite perplexing. As far as I know, there is absolutely no connection between this mountain and the supernatural, and I got the original from Wikipedia.

Here is the link, on Twitpic: http://twitpic.com/2mgflw

I hope your re-tweet the link to this picture so we can clear up this silly mess.

Reply to: From age three to seventeen often I'd wake up and see the Devil towering in my room, or a witch leaning over with a cauldron, or monkeys, or the half-white half-black voodoo guy from Live and Let Die, and much more

They've done some experiments with glasses that distort vision.

It takes a few weeks for the brain to figure out the flaw in the visual system, and interpret the images correctly.

Infants have a powerful reason to take a "face" and decide if it's happy or aggressive.

That's what "seeing faces in photos" is.... our brains actively trying to fit certain patterns into a "happy face" or an "angry face".... because we WANT to see our parents who love and feed us.

I'm sure you've seen those weird Wisconsin and weird Illinois books out there. I'd reccomend picking one or both of them up. They make for great road trips and if nothing else interesting slices of history.

Three-year-olds are just about my favorite people. There have been times I've sought out a toddler for a far more fascinating tete-a-tete than politely jiggling a glass of unwanted wine and enduring a droning about religion, sex, politics and money with some grownup.

I have a memory in mind. At a party a few years ago there was a 3 year old, a genuine Dravidian princess. We spent the whole party putting together and taking apart a Dora the Explorer puzzle. Every minute of it was a lot more fun, and more adventure, than the grownup litany described above.

I remember being three. Not knowing how to talk didn't feel strange, nor would it to any three year old, despite parents' ambitious concerns toward getting them up to speed on religion, sex, politics and money. I learned to see objects the words described. Say the dog's name and I'd see the dog; whether it was "really" there or not didn't occur to me. Solid objects could move in place, and things would appear and disappear.

My mom once said "Dad and the boys are bringing in the new kitchen!"

What I saw were father and brothers wheeling in a perfectly set kitchen: fridge, stove, cupboards, floor, walls and windows, all complete, all at once. I didn't connect it with those big boxes I got to play in afterward. What I saw was real to me.

When I was a dad, one day my brother Victor and his wife Karen came for a visit. I introduced them to my two-something son. Here's Aunt Karen, this is Uncle Victor! Then the little pooper and I took a walk. As with every 2-year-old, he was in the "what's this?" stage.

He squatted down on the sidewalk. "What's this," he asked. "That's an ant," I said. He thought a moment, looked at a small beetle nearby and said "then that's Uncle Victor?"

That's how the eventual seeming measurable, weighable rock-solidity of grownup perception is learned. If there weren't great possible leeway in how we perceive, we wouldn't have movies. We wouldn't even have cute li'l toddler drawings. We wouldn't even be as interesting as religion, sex, politics and money.

Some people aren't afraid to loosen up their perceptivity and see things others don't. Often, they are called "artists." Coincidentally, artists are often called "crazy." Thus it is with seeing ghosts. But that doesn't excuse a lot of "real" things -- such as religion, sex, politics and money -- from being much crazier.

I grew up in an area fairly famous for its ghosts. They were in the local papers now and then. Never got to see one, myself, and I'm still sorry I didn't get the opportunity to sleep in a room where anyone else who'd slept there said they'd awakened with a pair of hands around their necks, trying to strangle them.

I did spend a night in Lake George listening to a man upstairs pacing, pacing, pacing, all night long. He sounded awfully worried.

The next morning my host asked me how I slept. Fine, I said, except for the man pacing around upstairs. He said there wasn't any upstairs. He wanted me to sleep in that room to see what happened. The last time he'd slept there, he watched a set of beads hanging on a lamp snap apart and drop one by one to the floor and roll across the room. Then a candle on the dresser floated across the room and landed on his nightstand.

Well, how interesting. I guessed people don't necessarily experience the same things at different levels of perception. I suspicion that this is why Science, proclaimed as gospel fact in one period, turns out to be bunkum in the next.

Yeah, poor Arthur Conan Doyle. But religion, sex, politics, money AND science are all conjoined by the overzealousness of some to "prove" them. We could use a Big Charity Benefit Concert to promote a cure for literal-mindedness.

I wonder if the Cottingley Fairy Photographs inspired "I'm Still Here." After all, believing in ghosts is about as silly as a veteran film critic believing Joaquin Phoenix wants to be a rapper.

We know that many people want to believe in life after death. And many want to believe that their mother's love for them is more than mere chemistry, and that it's forever.

And I'm thinking, without any reasoning I can point to, that it's impossible that any scientist or mathematician could ever prove that these hopes are in vain.

Jesus on your toast? I've gotta walk away.

This is an example of sensor blooming. The small sensors in consumer cameras (like point-and-shoots)don't handle high contrast well-in this case, the white sky and the dark leaves. The light parts of the photo get blown out, resulting in the "ghostly" looking areas. So the explanation lies not in the world of the paranormal, but in the science of technology.

I saw a ghost on a tortilla once. It went down perfectly with my beans. Delish!

Roger, see this one:

While reading The Quiet American, I took a glimpse at the wall. The painting wasn't good so the light reflected the face of Karl Marx. I swear, I saw his eyes, nose, mouth and beard; it was scarily immaculate. Perhaps because the somehow socialistic ideas of Fowler evoked him (smiling). So I guess whoever took that picture of the deer is related, in images of a life juxtaposed, to whatever appeared to be ghosts.

There are no ghosts. My mind tells me that constantly. Now foget about Shyamalan, but do you have any hidden thought about that Karl Marx Incident?

When we moved into our house I got overexcited and tore a lot of wallpaper, intending it to motivate me to decorate all of the rooms in our house. Our bedroom has yet to be decorated. The other day, my two year old (who, incidentally, is significantly younger than the tears in the wallpaper) pointed at the wall and said "Elephant!" Sure enough, there in the torn wallpaper hanging off the wall is a slightly elongated elephant head.

Ebert: "There is no such thing as a ghost."

There you go again, Mr. Ebert. Your latest averment will now release yet another torrent of derogatory comments from livid naysayers who will execrate you for your stolid, unimaginative skepticism. Will you never learn to stop tampering with Pandora's box? Good gosh-a-mighty! ^-^ ^-^

I, too, could not discern any spectral images in the above photographs. Optical illusions are in the eye of the beholder as well. Nature is obviously applying its own version of Rorschach's ink blot test.

If cayenne pepper proved ineffective in dissuading the deer from sampling your flowers, perhaps you can obtain vials of fox or bear urine.

As Quick Draw McGraw would say, "Hold on therah!"
Sam L.'s photograph seems to show a manifestation of the Blair Witch. Totally phantasmagoric, man!

Well, we humans are pattern-seeking animals. This is the kind of thing we do. Remember those people who claimed to see the face of Satan in the smoke from the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001? And Glenn Beck said the V formation of geese at the start of his rally was a sign from God: "God's flyover." I guess we see what we want to see...

"I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do I do I do believe in spooks..."

Heh, sorry Roger, couldn't resist. :)

In Michigan writing my memoirs,

ummmmmmm; i think you buried the lead roger

I live up the hill from the Washington State Capitol Building, where there's an entire room of "picture marble." If you take the tour, they encourage you to find images in the marble. Finding pictures in the clouds (except around here most days, where the picture is "a slab of grey") is a fine childhood tradition. If you stare at most things long enough, you can start seeing pictures in them. Does this mean the textured ceiling in my bedroom is haunted?

The Face on Mars is just a pile of rocks, too. Some people can't apply universals to themselves when observing how humans act, can they?

Hi Roger, this all reminds me of Mary Roach's book "Spook" which is very funny and well-researched. I recommend it, along with her book "Bonk".
For what it's worth, I see no ghost.

This may sound crazy, but I think I see the image of a stag in your photo. He's not easy to decipher -- try looking just beneath the giant, disembodied phantom head. I think I can even make out his antlers.

Roger: You've not seen a ghost but the Monster From The Id from Forbidden Planet!

A fun blog, as usual, but Roger, a haiku has 5-7-5 syllables, not 7-5-7. A brain glitch, I'm sure. I once had an otherwise bright friend who thought a haiku was just three terse lines of any syllable count.

How about this?

A doe walks trembling,
Its fawns following boldly,
Eating my flowers.

Ebert: Too many syllables.

I love ghost stories. In my opinion the subtler the ghost incidents the scarier. Nowadays writers go over the top. A ghost screaming and yelling at you is not nearly as scary as a figure standing next to a tree outside your window in complete utter silence.

As much as I like Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw", the best ghost stories ever written were by J. S. LeFanu also from the same era.

My two favorite ghost stories books:

The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories: http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Book-Victorian-Ghost-Stories/dp/0192804472/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283981106&sr=1-1

and

Ghost Stories of J.S. LeFanu: http://www.amazon.com/Best-Ghost-Stories-J-LeFanu/dp/0486204154/ref=pd_sim_b_4

As for movies, I like "The Others" and "The Innocents" from 1960. To this day the following scenes from the latter scare me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmwJ-IB6ceY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDYtZUj2sMk&feature=related

In Egypt, the Virgin Mary is believed to appear on top of a specific church in a specific day. What fascinates me about this tale is the fact that when the Virgin Mary appeared it wasn't witnessed by one or two individuals but hundreds of thousands stood there crying and pointing at the apparition.

There's footage of the event here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKHaNMTRF1o&feature=related

For decades the apparition never appeared. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians would stand below the church every year only to be dissapointed. That's until last year, everyone was talking about the re-appearance and thousands flocked of Muslims and Christians alike flocked to see her. All of them are convinced they did see her.

The 2009 footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApotAaKxH7M&feature=related

All I see is a bright light though. As for pictures of ghosts, they used to impress me but unfortunately the photoshop era triggered the death of their validity.

I do see a face behind the deer. However, after spending all of 3 seconds looking at it, I conclude that it is merely an optical illusion created by the bark of the tree for the side of the face, leaves for the hair and the eyes and plain, old-fashioned light to fill in the rest.

After enlarging it and looking in the circle I see what they are talking about. I also see that it is the sunlight and shadows in the leaves and part of a branch. It also looks like my dad. He is alive.

The article title ('I totally see lots of ghosts') made me think it was some kind of parody of The Sixth Sense with a more modern and "typical" pre-teen in the Haley Joel Osment role.

Everything is believeable, if you choose to believe. People create their own reality, to EVERY extent. (see: politics, religion et al)

If you want faeries and ghosts to be real, you will see them. If you don't, you won't. You know how "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder?" Well, so is Reality.

I believe B P Odom is pronouncing trembling as trem-bling, rather than trem-ba-ling.

James :)

Well, I might as well respond here, since you brought this up. Now you are writing your memoirs? Didn't you say in that Esquire article earlier this year that even though many people asked you to write your autobiography you didn't want to because you didn't want to repeat yourself in telling stuff you'd told many times before? What made you change your mind, might I ask? Just wondering. Can't wait to read it, by the way. I'm sure it will be a fascinating read, since I love to hear stuff about your life. Some of it amazes me, like the whole thing about clowns and your not liking them. How you as a kid would know that clowns weren't clowns but people made up in a weird way you'd rather not know anything about is beyond me since I've never heard of another kid who ever thought that way! And yes, I'm paraphrasing your review of Shakes the Clown, if what I said sounded familiar. Now, as to ghosts, maybe people don't want to just dismiss them because it is like God or speaking ill of the dead-not believing or saying something bad will make the ghosts haunt us. I try not to buy into that superstitious nonsense myself.

Ok. Curious, I tried, on your first tweet, to see the ghosts - I, too, have that child within me. LOVE to be scared (as long as I know nothing can REALLY happen to me). Nothing. But, I was drawn in by the pure, natural beauty of the scene. PEOPLE! Please look at the scene that has been so generously shared. SEE each of these. Sheltering trees. . . luscious greeeeeeen leaves. . . precious glimpses of sky. . . plush ivy (or poison ivy?) carpet. . . the friendly ground. But mostly the live being, a deer living his day. His alertness, unique shape, magnificent suede coat. Just looking, I wish I could be on this earth forever. Will this be here forever? Look, people, and think. Forget the goddamn ghosts. Life is real.

To B P Odom: As long as you are being picky on this rather casual site, Roger's was 7-5-6. . . you miscount, or don't know how to pronounce impatiens.

Eh not sure I completely agree with the comment "There is no such thing as a ghost".. Most "supernatural" sightings are such subjective experiences its hard to say things just don't exist. I mean if you see something then it exists to you don't it..I think its better to say I have never seen anything like a ghost but who knows, I certainly don't know everything nor do I believe science can always explain, at least at this point, such personal experiences (relgion, supernatural, so on)and nor should it try to. They may well be products of your own mind but then so much of what makes up our individual realities are..

Susan S., I've narrowed it down to either your choice, Jesus, or Harold Stassen.

Pareidolia = name of a band in a new book by Carolyn Parkhurst, The Nobodies Album - good read, better than an earlier book by Parkhurst, The Dogs of Babel, which started out promisingly but descended into what I called crazy town. Nobodies was much better.

No ghosts in photos for me - ghosts out of the corner of my eye - husband's grandmother in our old home - we both would see her in the hallway, on separate occasions, but she never stepped foot in the place when she was alive. I have a new grandson who will coo and laugh at something but there is nothing there - I figure it's my mother who died in 1992.

We do have a Bev Doolittle in the house but what fun is it if it's purposely built into the art?

What you saw was a Windigo. Comes from the root word Algonkian meaning 'evil spirt' and 'cannibal.' They are from the land of the Cree and Ojibwa. If you become possessed, there's no turning back. Windigos wil scream paralyzing their victims. Apparently, you're OK because you lived to tell about it. They are more aggressive during the winter than the summer so that's why it probably ignored you. Earliest sightings of the species have been reported by Jesuit missionaries in the 1600s so you are not alone witnessing them!

I once saw a ghost.
It asked me for a breath mint.
I happened to have a breath mint and tried to give it to the ghost.

Slipped right through his fingers.

Eerie...

For other pleasantly stupid things, visit:

iamyourblog.blogspot.com

Some will accept NO evidence regardless of how compelling for reasons ranging from denial, a conflicting belief system, competition or myopia...

James Randi has a million dollars waiting to be given out to the owners of that "evidence"... once it's been tested and verified.

That second part is always the problem for the believer, isn't it?

I got stoned once and did this.

The trauma from the stones affected my vision.

After the 20 lashings, I regained my vision.

[rim shot?]

No, I actually really did get stoned and pointed out a face that looked like the devil (that's what I'd like to see, probably).

I've also done acid about 15 times (can you tell from some of my comments?).

On acid your mind is constantly struggling to produce an image, so, for instance, while looking at the blinds in the corner of my eye, in a matter of seconds, I thought I saw my blinds physically transform a car in a sketched cartoon-style (made from the blinds) and drive off in the corner of my eye (I'll get back to that in a second; not the car) and then when I fully turned to looked at the blinds (this is the kind of thing that happens in a matter of seconds) the blind squares were just kind of popping in and out all AROUND the spot I was looking at, at random.

I noticed that there is a small circle where I could clearly see that wasn't all moving around. I think we see the world inside this tiny little circle. Everything outside that little circle is unconsciously processed perhaps; but it should at any rate be obvious about the circle because if you try to read a page of a book while staring at one letter, you won't be able read anything.

I read that for people with mental disorders certain psychedelic drugs have a healing effect (under controlled conditions with shaman or doctor) as they see that the world doesn't always have to be that way, and I think those drugs should probably the natural kind like mushrooms rather than LSD because LSD usually has a kind of uncomfortable feeling because of some cheap chemical that was used in the making and the ones that don't are the ones that considered to be the ones that won't give you a "bad trip"; just about all of them are the ones that could give you a "bad trip" which I think comes from feeling uncomfortable...in the brain. It sounds funny, "I feel uncomfortable in the brain", which turns into "I think I'm about to die."

So, don't do it, kids, or anyone else; there's some cheap, bad chemicals in it that will make you feel so uncomfortable you will think you are going to die. It's like "The Matrix", there a feeling of discomfort in the brain, and then it transfers over to your body, but I think it's all in your head. Maybe.

When I commented that "I see it", I saw exactly what Marie Haws outlined. Exactly.

I'll have to look for the others.

Well, your original entry asked us to help you find a face-like or ghost-like image in the photo. So, yes, I think most of us responded just to help you see the hidden image, not to suggest that we believed it was a ghost.

Ebert: True. I was just sayin'...

Of course, the prevailing theme of this blog begs the question: "Who[m] you gonna call?"

And if THEY aren't available, perhaps the meddling kids and their Great Dane from the Mystery Machine are:

Roh no, Raggy, Rosts!

I finished "The turn of the screw" just the other day. I shouldn't have read the blurb which informed me it was the most "hopelessly evil story we have encountered", since I spent most of the book waiting for something hopelessly (?) evil to happen. I did enjoy it, much greater clarity and simplicity than your average James. Intriguing thinking of "The Wings of the Dove" as a ghost story.

A paragraph from my unfinished (unfinishable?) novel. It's a little...well, you'll see:

"The clear moonshine made the white of her skin luminous and oddly statuesque. Her nipples were discoloured and pale and her pubic region smooth from waxing. He thought how beautiful ghosts must be and could not understand why they were so feared. She was his houri, a heavenly reward, long desired and finally consummated. Her sex was slightly more flushed than the rest of her body and so reminiscent of a wild strawberry. With her inhuman beauty it was the only part of her that seemed to belong to this world."

And also note Anne Sexton's "Ghosts".

http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/20227-Anne-Sexton-Ghosts

"Some ghosts are children.
Not angels, but ghosts;
curling like pink tea cups
on any pillow, or kicking,
showing their innocent bottoms, wailing
for Lucifer."

I have to respectfully ask Marvin how many reports of "full-size, feathered, blue Tyrannosauruses" stream in every day like those of ghosts?...

A friend and his recent-at-the-time girlfriend watched The Descent. A few days later they were talking about it, and she said how it was awful and laughable. I replied, "Are you serious?". "I can't take any horror movie seriously." "Oh." "Not when you have experienced the real thing." ...

I then got to hear how she is a member of one of the town's paranormal societies.

They have yet to find anything.

I'm waiting to hear she hates Raging Bull because she once punched a pillow.

In summary, The Descent is a great movie.

Reminds me of a quote from Rorschach from the comic of The Watchmen (They cut his nihilistic rantings out of the movie, even the director's cut, interestingly enough. Cut it out even after changing hardly anything else.)

"Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long."

While I'm not a big believer in the implied transcendent mechanisms in film and video that can apparently capture ghosts in photographs, I believe it's arrogant to assert the existence or non-existence of something with which one simply has had no personal experience. While unable to fully shake all doubt, I know too many people (some even in my family, including my mother) who have had unexplainable encounters with the immaterial.

My girlfriend's cousin, who won Teacher of the Year, has been married for years and has a perfectly sane head on her shoulders, doesn't particularly like to discuss her consistent ability to see dead people because, of course, snickering Western minds jump to the schizophrenic conclusion. But her visions (usually of late family members, some of whom she didn't know) have been verified in appearance by other relatives who knew them. Given what I've discussed with people like her, I believe it unfair to lump them in with notions of elves and unicorns.

I am not a religious person, but I do have a mind that permits room for the possibility of extraordinary facets of reality we simply don't have much contact with or faculty for.

nope. i looked it over pretty well. i got nothing. random leaves can form a face, yeah, so what?

i don't believe in ghosts, but i love ghost stories. when i hear those who emphatically tell ghost stories, i always say, "i believe that YOU believe that story. but i'm just not buying it."

it's a tough one. while i really WANT to believe in ghosts, definitive proof would probably scare the shit out of me. then i'll think people are all around me. i have a close friend who tells fabulous stories about talking to "ghosts" in other people's houses. they tell things that, apparently, nobody else could possibly know.

that's great, but...nah.

Every single person that thought there was a ghost in that picture should watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypTAxLTU24c&feature=related

I thought I saw a ghost once.

But it didn't take long to doubt my senses. Every little thing affects them you see. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. Turns out it was just a bit of undigested beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There was much more of gravy than of grave about that experience.

Haiku...

Autumn Doe trembles,
Hungry Fawns follow mother,
Impatiens bloom!

Reading this reminded me of the philosophy of ghost hunters. They say it is not necessary to prove that there is a white crow, it is enough to prove that not all crows are black.

In other words, in order to prove that ghosts exist, it is not actually necessary to prove that ghosts exist, simply that it is not impossible for them to exist. This rationale has always really bugged me (especially since the ghost hunters I've known are so immensely proud of themselves for coming up with it) because if we were to follow this to its logical conclusion we could theoretically "prove" anything. I say gravity doesn't exist because it is theoretically possible that there is some place in the universe that has no gravity.

On another note, one of the things I enjoyed about living in Hawaii (where I went to college) was the overwhelming prevalence of ghost stories out there. At times it seems like every building, street corner, phone booth and vending machine on the islands is haunted by something, and the plethora of cultures lends itself to a wonderful variety of ghosts. My favorite (because it's definitely the most terrifying) are the reports of a ghost in the women's bathroom at Kahala Mall (on Oahu, a few miles from Waikiki). Every once in a while a woman will go in and report seeing a woman brushing her long black hair in front of the mirror, the strands covering her face. All of the witnesses report that when they tried to talk to the woman (as they all thought there was something not quite right about her) she would brush her hair back to reveal she had no face, then disappear.

Sweet dreams, my friends.

Its easy to say that ghosts do not exist or that the supernatural is all a bunch of hooey. I thought the same for a long while and then I saw what I can only describe as a ghost. It may have been something else, it may be scientifically explainable, but what I and a friend saw was something very strange. So, this leaves me with a wonderful mystery and unable to fully accept the scientific materialistic world completely.

People who see ghosts are engaging in the same mental pattern as conspiracy theorists: they have a faulty mechahnism for determining which is the most reasonable theory.

Given two possibilities:
1) Incompetent government.
2) Brilliant evil government which successfully implements a vast conspiracy involving thousands of people and unimaginably air-tight information security.

The conspiracy theorist chooses the latter; it actually seems more reasonable to him. Similarly, given two possibilities:
1) Unknown optical or weather phenomenon or classified government aircraft
2) Aliens successfully developed the stupendous technology necessary to travel hundreds of trillions of miles in manned spacecraft but were simultaneously so primitive that they had to drop to low atmospheric altitude to observe us (apparently, they lack the technology found in US surveillance satellites).

The UFOlogist thinks the latter is more reasonable. And finally, given two possibilities:
1) An odd optical phenomenon
2) A ghost, which has moved beyond our plane of existence yet continues to physically interact with electromagnetic radiation, hence being visible (but never appears in any controlled environment).

The ghost believer finds the latter explanation to be more reasonable.

In all three cases, the latter explanation requires extra terms to be invented to make it feasible, and Occam's Razor tells us that this is not preferable. But a lot of people don't like Occam's Razor.

That's no ghost, Roger.

That's a Predator in thermoptic camouflage!

Please, be careful.

I too echo the request to include the unaltered photo first. It's one thing to include it in a link, but upon viewing the linked image, I immediately saw the 3/4 angle face marked in Marie Haws' submission, and, as you said, could not unsee it. I wonder if that would have been the case if I had first encountered it unbiased.

Also, I think the syllables in B P Odom's poem are correct. Perhaps you are reading "trembling" as three syllables? That said, I don't think we ought to be too strict about the form. Haiku of course is a Japanese art, a language which is very different from our own. Should we be translating the form or the content? Generally speaking, English can say more in 17 syllables than Japanese can, so many poets consider 3-5-3 to be a better equivalent. On the other hand, English is much more bound by word order, so 11 syllables is perhaps too restrictive for other reasons. So, in the end, I am happy to agree with Odom's "otherwise bright" friend that any three terse, poignant lines counts as a haiku. Actually, the other thing I'm told about haiku is that it properly ought to refer to the cyclical nature of life. Otherwise it's a "senryu."

Dan O'Brien, a horror writer I used to read in grade school, once wrote in a foreword or afterword his response to the question "Do you believe in ghosts". I think his response is accurate enough for us all.

To paraphrase: "In the middle of the day, when the sun shines and I walk down a busy street, I laugh at the notion of ghosts. But when I'm alone in a creaky old house at night, and the lights are dim and it is thundering outside, I feel much, much different."

I kind of hate that I'm saying this, but 4chan plays with this idea all the time when posting images. Responses generally consist of:

"FFFUUUUUUUUUUU-

CAN'T UNSEE!"

All I see is a guerilla campaign for "The Buck Stops Here: Blair Witch 3" Let us hope it does.

That may or may not be a real ghost, but I'm pretty sure that I see some ectoplasm in the leaves behind the rear legs of the dear. Perhaps we should call some professionals to look into this. But,...WHO YA GONNA CALL?

I didn't see a ghost when I first saw it in the ebert club, and I don't see one now.
When I was very young I watched Darby O'Gill and the Little People and that banshee scared the crap out of me. It still gave me the creeps when I saw the movie again three years ago. Shiver.
I do believe in ghosts though. My friend John's mom lost her beloved sheltie Bergie. I was always on very good terms with Bergie, and one summer night I got an odd happy feeling of excitement while I was playing cards with John on his kitchen table. Out of the corner of my eye for an instant I saw Bergie looking very proud and pleased with herself. She was kind of misty, and it made her look lovely. She was gone in an instant and just as I was about to shrug the experience off, something bumped and rubbed against my shins in an insistent manner.Subtle it wasn't. Bergie always did that when she was alive and wanted her ears scratched.
I saw and felt no more of Bergey that night but a few nights later my flip flops, which I had taken off and left by my feet somehow were down the hall when I looked for them. Bergie loved to play with flip flops.
I just wanted to share this experience with you Roger, and my fellow readers, and you can laugh if you want but I am feeling honored and have a sense of awe about the experiences even right now describing them. Bergie you were a good dog!

I have seen many ghosts in the American Government... and if you look closely, you will notice that Casper is there

Where's Werner Herzog when you need him? I bet he'd have something interesting to say about this.

"Ze spectre looming above ze antlers personify humanity's desperate efforts to escape the inevitable truth of oblivion. Symbolic of all which our species will suffer, and all which ze stag shall never endure."

Everyone believes in ghosts
Just not every time
I reckon that is nature

I just watched part of a British TV show called "Ghosts of the Underground" which had a bunch of London Transport workers claim they've seen ghosts in various parts of the Underground after it shuts down for the night.
What a crock of shit that is!
Apparently, people see things when they "hear" certain subsonic sounds that our ears can't process, according to one man who brought audio equipment into the tunnels to record that.
I had to turn it off after that because people who believe in this are just nuts!

I dont believe in ghosts but when I saw that face I did get a little chill :) Thanks Roger that was fun!

Memoirs! Is this why we haven't seen many reviews from you lately? I could really have used a friendly warning about the disappointing "Machete."

Isn't a Haiku 5-7-5 Yours is 18 syllables and not laid out in the 5 7 5 pattern. I understand that Japanese don't count syllables per se, but everything I have read indicates that in Japanese Haikus may have fewer than 17 syllables if anything do to the way they count sound elements.

I am question mark challenged. Feel free to correct my last post with an appropriate "?" if I forgot and placed an "."

How about this bone-chilling video document?

http://tinyurl.com/ykvxzpp

Living in Minnesota, I have had a lot of deer encounters. The best deterrent for deer and other pests that munch on the garden, I have found, is the visiting coyote. Keeps noisy neighbor dogs quiet too. Maybe, a ghost of Wile E. Coyote would help. The only spectral fears I ever had was after watching classic Twilight Zone episodes.

Huh? With respect, I don't understand your response to my suggested (albeit admittedly mundane) haiku. It has 17 syllables, arranged in 5-7-5 format, as required. Yours had 19 syllables, arranged in 7-5-7 format. Am I missing something? The only thing I can think is that you take "trembling" to have three syllables. While it can be pronounced "trem-bel-ing" it can also be pronounced "trem-bling," at least according to my dictionary. The latter pronunciation makes the syllable count correct.

Great read.

Roger, any word on whether you will be reviewing Machete?

In addition to Joy's comments about CMOS/CCD sensor blooming artifacts, and other remarks about pareidolia... our brains are hardwired to be pattern recognition machines. Our brains assemble visual and auditory information and find patterns so well, the fastest supercomputers can't match our ability to recognize as many patterns as we so immediately can identify.

Wikipedia informs us, regarding the phenomenon of pareidolia, that Sagan hypothesized that human face recognition is especially hardwired. The ability was naturally selected for because it has an obvious survival advantage. Studies in 2009 identify the ability as a precognitive process that occurs instinctively in the ventral fusiform cortex within milliseconds, before the observer consciously thinks about it.

The question might arise, from those who like to poke holes in evolutionary theory, whether they are religious or otherwise superstitious: Why would this be beneficial if it's not a real human face?

Well, of course once cognition kicks in, we DO recognize it's not a real human. Evolution, unlike Intelligent Design, doesn't have predeterminate functions. The advantage of recognizing patterns didn't arise out of a consciously guided need to recognize humans. Not every organism that could see what we see would tell apart one object from another. There are separate adaptations that give us, and other predatory mammals a distinct advantage in discerning whole objects from lines, shapes and colors. This permanence, which develops in infancy, can help us recognize a whole object even when partially concealed by, say, a picket fence. Other sensory information, e.g. hearing, touch, then fills in the gaps.

It just so happens that that precognitive ability to assemble patterns gives us a bit of lead time in getting to the conscious conclusion a second or two later. In the wild, that can be the difference between being a successful predator and being lunch.

I enjoyed this commentary very much. It reminds me more than a bit of Orson Welles' F For Fake.

For some interesting information about Doyle and Houdini (some fascinating, some flat out bizarre), I recommend William Kalush and Larry Sloman's well researched book The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero. Using letters sent between Doyle and his fellow Spiritualists, the authors speculate that they were involved in a conspiracy against the magician. A fair bit of stretching is involved, but a very informative book nonetheless.

One time I saw a ghost and then talked to it and then it took me away to GOD'S LAND and I saw God and Buddha and we played hide and seek and somehow Allah got caught up in it and then Jesus got mad at us and sent me home :(

Hey Tom,

I like what you wrote above. My earliest memory is wanting to read. It was a menu over a cash register. I recall asking my parents what a random set of letters spelled. Reading to me was the best thing my parents ever did. I started liking ghost stories from early on, but I abandoned them as I lost people I cared about.

Life was much easier when we had all the answers we thought we needed, huh?

I don't see a ghost there, but you may be very interested to read Leslie Kean's new book on UFO's. Unlike your "ghost", there is a surprising amount of completely convincing physical evidence and witnesses to attest to the reality of UFO's.

Are they gay ghosts as that comic book cover ghost?

You mean like the picture of Les Diaboliques?
Without the plot twist, of course... or is it?

Here's a good one:

http://j.mp/atSO3c

Yes, it's ALL the product of the "collective unconscious."

Bet you didn't know that the "unconscious" was officially created by a symposium of psychologists in Holland in 1912. Only one shrink protested. I don't know why there aren't a lot of conspiracy theories about that.

Yas, yas, people "see what they want to see." But here is an instance where not seeing what one doesn't want to see was legitimized by committee.

Oh! Oh! Wait! I just realized what's in those photos! Those are the stag's thought balloons! I'd say he doesn't like humans very much.

I hunt ghosts for fun. I am part of a group who attempts to find scientific (or normal) explanations for phenomena which people believe is paranormal. The face in your picture is the result of Matrixing. What that is, is the mind's need to find patterns amongst the chaos. Being humans, our minds are particularly susceptible to finding faces. Anyone who, as a child, has stared at their bedroom ceiling and found faces, is doing what was done in your photo.

That's not, of course, to say that there are things out there that have no explanation...yet. But the face in your picture is an explained phenomenon.

Ghosts are a culture's explanation of unexplained phenomena, thus science is our culture's form of ghosts. (Sorry, just discovered Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and can't keep it out of my head!)

Dear Roger,

That rocking chair youtube clip nearly gave me a heart attack! I'm still shaky. Have you seen this ghost prank? Pretty funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHS0JNMYC3E&feature=player_embedded

We are pattern seeking mammals. Our brains will construct patterns, especially faces, out of all sorts of things. It's called pareidolia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

Ebert: Does being good at Boggle mean you have pareidolia?

I just don't accept the statement above that "anything is possible". I see all kinds of things in cartoons, e.g. that if you told me actually happened to you, I would just say "No it didn't".

Like running off a cliff, looking down while standing in mid-air, realizing it's a long way down, and running back to the ground of the cliff. Not possible.

I have never ~seen~ a ghost, but when I was attending Southern Illinois University, I was a bouncer/janitor at Gatsby's, which is on the lower level (Garden apartment level) of a two floor building.

Well, it was 3 AM on a weeknight, and I was cleaning up the place, all alone, the doors locked, and no one in the offices upstairs. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw something in the Pool Room, so I walked over there, trusty mop in hand just in case. I saw nothing, but when I turned to go back to mopping, I froze because 10 or 15 feet away from where I had been standing, one of the VERY heavy light fixtures above one of the booths was swaying, and not just a little bit. It was like someone had taken two hands and pushed it. But, and trust me I checked, the entire place was empty.

So, I have not seen a ghost, but I have had an inexplicable experience. I've heard other people, completely trustworthy individuals, say they've seen them, in their own homes. So, do I believe in Ghosts? I'll split the difference and say "No, but I'm afraid of them."

I checked all the locks aout of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw something in the p

I have to agree with that. Like the same way you can see all kinds of shapes in the clouds. The human brain is programmed to see faces and anything that remotely resembles them we are drawn to. I can even see a cow in the mold stain on my bathroom wall. It keeps me company. I call her Bessie.

I hate to sound act like the smart-ass but, after all, Millie's abilities in this subject are in the public domain (Esquire).
What did she see?

Hey Dave,

I have an odd memory about reading. Must've been four. One of my brothers got a run-o-meter from a Wheaties ad that told you how fast you were running. While he was away at school I snuck it out of his room and put it on, went out into the street and ran. I looked at the meter and to this day I swear it said "You are not running fast enough to operate this device." It seemed that after I learned to read, I remembered it photographically. Or... dot dot dot.

I don't get this "the mind has a need to see patterns" stuff. When I'm in the mood I'll see critters and such in the clouds and when not in the mood, I don't. So where's the "need"? Maybe the researchers have a need to say something that sounds important.

A ghost is a supernatural form representing a once-living creature. What your stepdaughter sees in the original photo is simply an arrangement of leaves that looks like a face--not a ghost. Sure, I see it; it looks a lot like a face. But an arrangement of leaves is not a ghost.

@ Omer M. Mozaffar on September 8, 2010 1:35 AM

Okay, seriously, that link almost made me shit my pants.

@ Marie Haws on September 8, 2010 2:43 AM

I mentioned the black ghost in the original post, if you mean the dark image to the left of the deer. :-)

And yes, I still must read "The Turn of the Screw."

Much of this is discussed at length in Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark." It is a treatise with real-world examples, some of which are not unlike many of the examples above, of what happens to the intellect of society when science, reasoning, logic, and critical thinking are de-emphasized or underemphasized; we allow ourselves to live in a world haunted by demons of all sorts, a world of darkness. This scholarly work is presented as a most entertaining read and is well worth your time.

Those of us "of a certain age"* who ever spent time in a doctor or dentist waiting room will surely remember "Highlights" Magazine and Hidden Pictures. Funny how if you are SUPPOSED to find 12 things hidden in a picture (that are really there), it's a challenge. When they aren't really there, and you still see them, it's a ghost. Or maybe a miracle.

* yeah, I know, it is still published, but I never see kids reading it - they are glued to their cell phone. As I got older, I discoverd "Punch" and that was all she wrote for Tommy Timbertoes.

Mike Robinson speaks truth:

I believe it's arrogant to assert the existence or non-existence of something with which one simply has had no personal experience.

I'm surprised there aren't more entries here with personal ghost stories. I could add some more, but I've heard better than mine for sure. I'd like to see that hand beckoning the couple in bed to come out into the hallway, for instance. What a chill.

People see in the fashions they're trained from infancy in various ways to see, tho', as I said, there's lots of leeway, especially for those not addicted to various superstitions of "Science" as it wobbles. The superstitious myth of the capital "S" variety is that nothing exists that can't be weighed or measured, and that all such phenomenon has basically random origins. So stay tuned for more scutching around in medulla oblongatas for a database of "thoughts," or some such facsimile that'll make salable copy just as spooky as any ghost story, if not far more literal-minded.

Practically the first thing an infant mind learns is to recognize faces. This is why people can see faces in blotches on Mars, or heck, in this - :)

It's two dots and a curved line, turned on it's side even, but people recognize it as a face. It's just our infantile programming.

I never believed in ghosts, even as a kid, but I still believe in Santa, so go figure.

Roger, take a look at the photo of the ghost boy from the Amiteyville house and tell me it's not the creepiest picture ever. Or did you give the movie a bad review?

http://www.ghoststudy.com/monthly/oct04/amityville.htm

Don't you realize what you've done? First the video game people, now scores and scores of Ghosthunters will be writing you, protesting angrily! You should never speak anything rational again, or you'll have the hounds on you!

Why would a ghost be a giant floating head anyway? Why would the head be wandering the woods? What's its fascinating with deer? What's your fascinating with deer? Is the ghost head a quasi-physical projection of your inner deer-fascination? Why would deer-fascination be a giant floating head? A Möbius strip of pure puzzlement, that photo.
Cheers!

I've seen ghosts so I know they exist. I also don't think that ghosts can be captured accidentally on film... although your photo of the deer is quite beautiful, there are probably no ghosts there. When you see an unusual being like a ghost there is no guesswork, you KNOW you saw it. If you imagine a ghost in a picture, you're just hoping you will have that experience someday.

And ever since I was a kid, my big brother always wondered why ghosts in movies wore clothes. I mean, seriously, does a ghost really need clothes?

The bathroom door in my childhood home had a wood knot that distinctly resembled the alien from Alien, and another in the exact likeness of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That was my favorite wood knot ever.

I don't know what this has to do with ghosts.

The ghost in the wind that blows through my life will follow me wherever I go.I'll never be free of these chains inside buried deep down in my soul-Lucinda Williams

Simple analogy -- it's like seeing images in clouds

Ghost or no ghost, it is a beautiful photograph all the same!

"I believe it's arrogant to assert the existence or non-existence of something with which one simply has had no personal experience."

Nonsense. It's not arrogant to use one's brain to evaluate available evidence. I've had no personal experience of Antarctica, but I assert that it exists, because of the overwhelming, unambiguous evidence for its existence. That kind of evidence has never been presented for ghosts, in spite of centuries of belief.

If there was scientific evidence of ghosts, then what would that mean? That would mean ghosts are a part of science and therefore not supernatural as anything that is a part of science is natural.

Stephen Hawking said it best. Science can never be destroyed and will always win. Science wants you to question any occurence. Even if every scientific theory was proven false, you could still not destroy science as scientists would merely adjust their knowledge for this.

Speaking of James Randi, in theory he would never have to give up his check because anything that could be proven using the scientific method is a part of science and therefore not supernatural. A person coming back to life may in fact prove the existance of an afterlife and the supernatural in the basic sense of the word. However, to a scientist that is a natural occurence which demands study as does any other occurence.

Skepticism is always healthy.

My second favorite first line from a book comes from "The confessions of Nipper Moonie". It is sort of a poem in its own right.

-On the morning of August 15, 1962, the day his father passed away, Nipper Mooney was stolen by the fairies.

I don't see ghosts! That is just ridiculous! But if you count the number of prongs on the deer's horns and add that to the number of crossed branches that don't touch any of the leaves, including the three on the top left that are nearly touching but not quite then subtract the seven sprigs of foliage you get the number 560. Divide that by the number of photos taken, multiply it by a factor of 2 where x = 3 - you get 666. Actually 667, but it's close enough! Also, since America's got Talent has taken a Drag act to mainstream America, it truly is the coming of Last Days!

Mr. Ebert, I understand the inability to see ghosts, yet their existence is proven every election season here on the south side as all of my deceased relatives come back to St. Gall's and vote.

Makes for a tough family reunion though. We always have leftovers, since most of the folks aren't hungry....

In addition to visiting Chicago on our Collette bus tour, my mother and I visited the Door County Peninsula in Wisconsin (which is of course the pointed land spur jutting into Lake Michigan). The area's claim to fame is its boast that it sports more lighthouses than almost any other American coastal county. On the peninsula, we visited the Door County Maritime Museum. Of course, part of their exhibit highlights the myriad lighthouses. What is interesting, however, is that practically every Door County peninsula lighthouse seems to recount a spectral tale of disembodied sea captains, housewives, or even cats haunting the premises. Given the lonely solitude of lighthouses, particularly on stormy nights, it's easily to rationalize the profusion of lighthouse ghost stories as merely tormenting illusions.

if there are not ghosts, it is so interesting why humans of every shape and color have forever seen ghosts, or rather a necessity to compose a human resemblance out of chaotic perception. Are we constantly looking for other people in the fabric of our perceptions?

"You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into."

Gather round, fawns, and hearken to my tale...

Seventeen years ago, on this very site, a beautiful doe was grazing in these very woods, waiting for her favorite buck to arrive. She heard a crashing in the woods, and lifted her head to see him...but a hideous monster appeared, standing on two legs. Behind it, she saw her buck approaching. The monster pointed a long limp at him. Blam! It issues a hideous noise, and the buck fell dead. The monster took the buck away into the woods. The doe, stunned and guilt, was frozen in place, and never moved again, until she died in that spot, all alone...

Now, every summer, when the sun shines through the leaves on this exact spot, you can see that deer, still grazing this hill, hoping for her buck to appear...

So there is a ghost in the picture. And in clear focus, too.

I was sitting in the bed one morning, working on the computer and waiting for everyone else to wake up when my youngest son walked in.

Me: Morning.
Son: Hi, Daddy.
Me: What you doing this morning?
Son: I woke up because I saw a blue light in the hall.
Me: Oh. Did you think it was a GHOST? When I was your age I thought everything was a ghost, and I would have been hiding under my blankets.
Son: Well... No. I used to think everything strange that happened was a ghost, but now I'm a skeptical type.
Me: And what does "skeptical" mean?
Son: It means I could believe in ghosts, but only if there was strong evidence.

This was from a six years old. And I thought at the time, good luck with the next twelve years of Catholic school, kid!

My wife occasionally sees ghosts. So she is either sensitive to these things or she is nuts. Since I have to live with her, I choose the former.

Ebert: Does being good at Boggle mean you have pareidolia?

Fortunately the brain is equally capable of recognizing patterns that actually are there. Letters are abstract symbols whose various combinations always yield consistent meanings. As long as adjacent cubes form the sequence G-H-O-S-T in compliance with the rules of Boggle, the word GHOST inarguably exists there. Anyone claiming to see LEAVES or ANTLER in the same sequence of letters is demonstrably wrong. Your photo is more like a box of Tangram tiles dumped onto the table, randomly forming an image that might be a ghost, or a tree, or anything else, depending on how the individual viewer's brain happens to process it.

Of course, the letters themselves do need to be shaped within certain guidelines in order to prevent subjective interpretation. My favorite cautionary example:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffcarlson/127632129/#/photos/jeffcarlson/127632129/lightbox/

I think it is the tortured soul of Nicolas Cage's artistic integrity, which, after the filming of Ghost Rider, was doomed to forever roam the earth as an etheral burning skull.

But I could be wrong.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/health/psychology/13face.html

What would go into a Ghost Pot?

Can anyone explain the pitch-black figure phenomenon that I used to experience as a kid in my old apartment? Can anyone explain how my sister would see the same thing despite me never telling her about it? And why don't they ever stand still enough for a good look so you're not left with the lingering doubt in your mind?!

Skepticism just leads to its natural outcome, alcoholism...

"Waaa, there's nothing outside of science!"

I'm endlessly asked about the ghosts allegedly to be seen in "The Wizard of Oz"

The "ghost" in Wizard of Oz? Thanks to the miracle of Blu-ray, we can now clearly spot the African crowned crane. :)

I just heard about the new show, Mr. Ebert, and look forward to seeing you on the balcony again.

The Turn of the Screw? How about A Christmas Carol?

Tom Dark, 10:43 AM 08 Sept - he CAN be succinct! But, wait, he has his morning coffee and later... Karl Heinz comment, excellent! Snowblood, well said. Oliver Sudden, great nom de plume, kid! "http://tinyurl" etc; talk about see what we think we see - I'm thinkin' what IS a 'tin yurl.' took me a moment - and it proved the point! see / think / believe, each to his own. Love you, Dear Ebert, though i never get ANY work done on journal days!!! Take care, all. Maybe later, great ghost stories and some premonitions as well. . . so fascinating, life, if we just open up and pay attention to it! Cassandra

I do believe in ghosts, though I've never seen one (and don't want to. Are you listening, ghosts? LEAVE ME ALONE! I don't care if you're a long-lost relative come back to tell me where the family fortune is hidden. It wouldn't do me any good anyway because I'd blow the whole thing on therapy. Why? BECAUSE I SAW A DAMN GHOST!).

A question: They say animals can sense when there are disturbances in the area, which includes, I'm assuming, a ghostly presence (just ask the dog in POLTERGEIST). Why doesn't the deer in the picture sense anything? It seems to be going about it's usual business.

To daisymom: You are correct about the pronunciation of "impatiens," as my wife observed to me after I posted. Nevertheless, Roger's syllable count was wrong according to 5-7-5, which as you know was my main point. Indeed, 7-5-6 is arguably even less a proper haiku because the syllable counts of the first and third lines are different, so your correction of my mistake supports rather than undercuts my observation that Roger's poem was not a haiku. Thank you for helping. Parenthetically, we may note that Roger, whom you are ostensibly defending with your nitpicking of my alleged nitpicking (tu quoque), also evidently did not know the correct pronunciation of "impatiens."

However, I was not being unduly "picky" on a casual site. Let's set aside the question of whether being correct can be termed "picky." Who is the judge of when a mistake rises to the level at which it should be corrected, you? Roger put the poem up, not I; Roger called it a haiku, not I. That makes the issue fair game, IMHO. Furthermore, Roger writes with a precision few of us can aspire to, and I thought it might be fun to chide him gently about a rare lapse. It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, as you might have noticed had you applied a hermeneutics of charity to what I wrote. And BTW, I am happy to be corrected--by my wife and by you--on the proper pronunciation of "impatiens." It is not, as I have said, "picky" to be correct, and we should not have to apologize for having elevated standards.

With respect to those who have taken an opportunity to discuss how the haiku form comes over into English, I agree that some sort of modification (e.g., 3-5-3) might be useful at times. However, I cannot agree that just any three spare lines counts. The haiku is a disciplined form; adhering to it is the point. One does not write a poem with six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet, all stanzas having the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern, but *without* all six words appearing in the closing three-line envoi and call it a sestina. The discipline is the thing: otherwise just admit you are writing free verse. The purpose of poetic forms is precisely to impose a discipline within which the creative process expresses itself freely.

My apologies, as this is totally off topic, but will you be attending TIFF this year?

dear tom, the comment was NOT meant to be 'dark.' forgot to include the ;.) love you, dear lost brother.
cassandra

I also don't believe in ghosts. Ghosts, gods, God, or any supernatural beings at all. Once you start reading about modern cutting-edge neurobiology, you often see the rational truth: faith is belief with facts.

Therefore, it's a lie.

This isn't a big thing for me anymore. I understand humanity far better than I ever did when I believed the fairy tales.

"Why People Believe Strange Things" by Michael Shermer is the book I'd encourage anyone with questions to read. It delves into how cognitive reasoning and dissonance work, biologically speaking, and why people believe such insane, often non-existent things.

I didn't mean for this to be a rant. Sorry. But I'm with Roger. There are no ghosts. Human cognitive pattern matching (i.e. creating arbitrary "meaning" out of things that surround us) gives the continually fed suggestion that ghosts exist power. Even if they don't.

It's kind of wild.

Thanks, Roger.

Speaking of returning from the dead... congratulations on the return of At the Movies! I'm thrilled. I can't remember the last time the Huffington Post gave me goosebumps.

As long as we are trying to be precise--not to say a little self-righteous-- about the rules of haiku, here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on the subject that explains why the whole number-of-syllables thing is a red herring anyway:

Haiku (俳句 haikai verse?) listen (help·info), plural haiku, is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 moras (or on), in three phrases of 5, 7, and 5 moras respectively.[1] Although haiku are often stated to have 17 syllables,[2] this is inaccurate as syllables and moras are not the same.

In contrast to English verse typically characterized by meter, Japanese verse counts sound units (moras), known as "on". Traditional haiku consist of 17 on, in three phrases of 5, 7, and 5 on respectively.
Although the word "on" is often translated as "syllable", in fact one on is counted for a short syllable, an additional one for an elongated vowel, diphthong, or doubled consonant, and one more for an "n" at the end of a syllable. Thus, the word "haibun", though counted as two syllables in English, is counted as four on in Japanese (ha-i-bu-n). This is illustrated by the Issa haiku below, which contains 17 on but only 15 syllables. In addition, some sounds, such as "kyo" (きょ) can be perceived as two syllables in English but as a single on in Japanese. A word that illustrates both these issues is "Tokyo", which is perceived as having three syllables in English (To-ky-o) but four moras in Japanese (To-o-kyo-o).
The word onji (音字; "sound symbol") is sometimes used in referring to Japanese sound units in English[5] although this word is no longer current in Japanese.[6] In Japanese, each on corresponds to a kana character (or sometimes digraph) and hence ji (or "character") is also sometimes used[6] as the count unit.
In 1973, the Haiku Society of America noted that the then norm for writers of haiku in English was to use seventeen syllables but they also noted a trend towards shorter haiku.[7] This trend is borne out by the Winter 2010 edition of Frogpond, which contains haiku with an average of 10.5 syllables, varying from six at the shortest to 15 at the longest.
Some translators of Japanese poetry have noted that about twelve syllables in English approximates the duration of seventeen Japanese on.

Maybe the ghostly world is just like high school. No ghosts have ever wanted to visit me. I wonder if ghosts have cliques, and I'm just not cool enough to bother haunting. I'm sure they're off floating around the houses of former head cheerleaders and star football players. Sis-BOO-bah!

I am not religious in the church-going sense. I believe in evolution and am a fan of all of science. However, it is my belief that the people closed of to the possibilities of things that are beyond the grasp of the human consciousness are just as shallow in their intellect as the ultra-religious they deride. If there is an omnipotent God and he doesn't want definitive proof to be accessible, isn't our current scenario ideal? Our interpretations of the collections and masses of atoms and molecules, always being on the verge of discovery but always an asymptotic journey. This seems to be the ideal construct for such a being.

I do read Ebert's column, but I don't understand why he cannot write anything without being smugly condescending to anyone with a differing point of view. Then I start reading online descriptions of people who have met him in person. Almost without exception, they present him as a pretty rotten human being. One of the sweetest women i know met him in chicago years ago and just wanted to say hi. She said she ended up crying because he was so short and nasty(she is very sensitive, Im sure he was just being rude).

I guess my point is that one argument against God is that someone like Ebert can be so miserable to so many and still be rewarded in life.

I find it hard to believe that people missed the wonder of seeing a deer and the sharing of the beautiful moment, and instead focused on the supposed presence of ghosts.

Thank you Mr. Ebert for sharing the moment.

As for ghosts, I wonder if sometimes the sighting of ghosts wasn't caused by floaters and other visionary problems, but in this case, I think the sighting of ghosts in the photo is failure to appreciate reality and the successful usage of an overactive imagination.

First, great post as always Roger. Now, for those of you who believe in ghosts you also likely believe in the Christian/monotheistic idea of a soul. To believe that beneath our physical bodies is a duplicate, incorporeal self that has all the same features and mental capacities as our physical self, and that it continues on eternally after all the essential components that make our bodies function have ceased, is no different than believing in magic, leprechauns, fairies or any other absurdity that so many adult (even very educated ones) continue to believe.

Sam Harris compared this idea to an irrational belief that inside each of our cars is a perfect, brand new one just waiting to get out after it has been physically totaled. You might say, "well, a car is not a living thing." True. And yet so many believers in the afterlife and the supernatural feel that the soul is a privilege exclusive and unique to human beings alone. I must protest! What about the rest of the animal kingdom?

Yes, deer are lovely creatures, Billy, but they don't have souls, they are just animals. You are a perfect expression of God's divinity. Ever heard something like that? How utterly solipsistic and self-adulatory of us. Despite all the various species of creatures roaming this planet, only we humans (who have, over millions of years, EVOLVED to have a brain, consciousness, and conscience) have an eternal self floating around somewhere inside of us. The risibility of such a notion goes without saying. Also, when has anyone seen the spirit of a dead deer, or dog, or cat, or one of the innumerable ants killed by human feet each day? No one, I guess. But great grandpa is still crepin' around the old house, eh?

It is often said that those who have Near Death Experiences see their deceased loved ones (among other phantasmagoric things). We know that the fusiform face area is that part of our brain's visual system that permits us to recognize faces and their distinctions.

If you believe in ghosts, souls, spirits, or whatever appellation you prefer, these entities must magically have the ability given to us by this physical area of our brain! If you died for a while and went to Heaven and saw the faces of your dead relatives, then your incorporeal self, having no basis in physical reality, must somehow still have a mechanism for discerning faces.

I know, I know. God is behind it. Your eternal soul doesn't need the fusiform face area. Sounds great, but the reason people likely see these things is because, though they may be described as clinically dead, their brains are still capable of conjuring these faces from memory. We always talk about all the people who HAVE had these experiences (which, as I said, are likely due to still having brain function). But what about the many, many millions who may have been clinically dead, were revived, and, alas, have nothing to report? Those who went on to the "unknown country" and returned only able to describe the sheer lack of consciousness, like their deepest of deep sleeps?

We don't hear from them because roads paved in gold, joyous reunions with the deceased, and seeing a bright light give us hope that the self (ego?) shall never perish, and that we will commingle with those whom we liked and loved in this world. Would that it were so. Of course, I could certainly be wrong, I'll admit. I can only believe in what a critical look around this world shows me. The dogmatically faithful, however, will never admit the possibility they could be wrong, no matter the mountain of growing evidence in this world that would seem to severely lower the likelihood of the existence of the next.

Some have been saying that science is stubborn and intransigent, unwilling to embrace the supernatural. Well, yes and no. If science were able to prove through constant testing, observation, and data that ghosts existed, or, for that matter, that the world is only 6,000 years old, or that dinosaurs coexisted alongside of men, then science WOULD HAVE TO CHANGE. That is how science works.

If, for example, the theory of evolution could be conclusively debunked, and clearly demonstrated to have no validity over and over again, science MUST change accordingly, making way for the new facts. But that won't be happening anytime soon. Particularly if one wants to prove the existence of ghosts, because strange anomalies appearing in photographs, the flickering of lights, the occasional "cold spot," the perceived sounds of footsteps or voices, will, I'm afraid to say, just not do for scientific evidence. Now, ask a devout spiritualist or superstition-monger if they will change their beliefs due to the OVERWHELMING evidence against their positions. Likely they won't.

As a devout movie geek, I enjoy a good scare--"The innocents," "The Haunting," "House on Haunted Hill," "Fall of the House of Usher" are some of my favorite chillers. But I can separate my enjoyment of horror films from the reality of the world in which we are in. I have had some creepy things happen to me in my life (I even suffer from sleep paralysis. Talk about creepy), but most of the time I realize the logical explanation after the fact. I think it is clearly possible, therefore, for all of us to reconcile the exciting feelings of fear we may get from reading some Henry James or watching Vincent Price with a rational understanding of the world around us. Voila, there's my two cents worth.

Roger, We know you like to throw the I Ching and left out some of your other personal experiences in this essay. The brain is keenly conditioned to recognize facial expressions in random patterns and inanimate objects. I put your 'deer' picture in that category. That said, you've done essays where you speculated about the weirdness of quantum physics. Eminent physicists such as Roger Penrose postulate consciousness may arise out of a quantum state. Why can't disembodied consciousness otherwise known as ghosts exist in such a reality?

People tend to live and experience a macro Newtonian world, but on a micro level everything appears to be in some form of light until observed. There is quantum entanglement where sub atomic energy packets communicate information instantaneously, no matter the distance. These are not hypothesizes, but accepted science and experimentally provable.
Considering that our 5 senses are only electrical signal interpretations of what the human brain perceives. What we now consider supernatural may only be an extension of a natural world. For instance, nobody questions why I can talk on a cellphone while I'm in my basement where there are no windows. Yet, some mysterious unseen substance called microwaves allows me to do that. 400 yrs ago, that natural world ability would earn me a spot on a burning stake.
Personal experience and untestable evidence
(photos, videos, Infrared recordings, EMF readings and unexplainable voice recordings via magnetic and digital devices)underlies something we do not yet understand.
Personally, I have experienced things that should be impossible in a Newtonian world. I can't repeat them but don't tell me they didn't happen.

Haikus are easy.
But sometimes they don't make sense.
Refrigerator.

Roger, ghosts ARE real.

Here is a picture of a ghost in a grave yard:
http://www.bluemoonghosthunters.com/super%20orb.JPG

And here you can see a fantastic photo of a ghost parade: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3294/3133577494_0ba89f6165.jpg

Case closed.

Ebert: Unpersuaded. Open again.

(Really looking forward to the new show.)

I saw a formula for a ghost.

It was "The Last Exorcism."

And it didn't even contain creepy acting; scary stuff.

As Jeffe B said above, Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine, has the most eloquent scientific explanations to such faulty recognition phenomena. Dan Dennett also has a topical TED talk: we have evolved to gain information from human faces and many neurons, in healthy people, are allocated for this express task; that is why it is harder to pick out lion faces, however deer may presumably have the opposite problem and find distinguishing deer much easier than distinguishing humans. If they became imaginative enough they too would see ghostly deer faces in the trees.

Much more controversial is Satoshi Kanazawa, and evolutionary psychologist who writes inflammatory articles with names like "Why men are more intelligent than women" for The Scientific Fundamentalist blog on the Psychology Today site. Agree with him or not, he is provocative and principled. He conflates seeing faces in trees and carpets and on toast with how men often misread women to be interested in them (and the existence of religion, and many other difficult walnuts to crack). If men take every possible hint of interest as real from a women they increase their reproductive success; if they underplay such hints, they may be more realistic and less of a jerk, yet evolutionarily more likely to miss out on possible chances of reproduction.

Seeing faces that aren't there and making unwelcomed advances both involve not being as accurate as possible, but minimizing costs of Type 1 verses Type 2 errors (false positive or false negative). Both cases are like fire detectors. It is better to have them too sensitive because failing to detect fire is far more costly than going off when there is no fire. We look for meaning in everything, and often find meaning where there is none. But on balance it has made us who we are: not accuracy maximizers, but cost minimizers. At least, according to the maddening brave new world of evolutionary psychology.

I see a face, but I'm not sure that I'd have seen it if I hadn't seen others' annotations first.

Just out of curiosity (and somewhat related, in a spoilery sort of way), are you planning to reread Infinite Jest again, Ebert?

I must confess your story about the deer grazing on the flowers kinda reminds me of a song by Nick Cave "Babe you turn me on" which suggests a metaphor for cunnilingus. I think you'd kinda like it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=153eVrWYguM

I don't know if ghosts per say are real, but the supernatural is. My workplace (which I won't mention) is a warehouse that is built on a burial ground. Late at night, when I'm by myself getting product, I hear noises through the corridor and things that are too heavy to fly off shelves do. Creepy. Someone told me that The Chicago Tribune is built on some burial site, but I take it they were joking.

I wish I lacked character, so that I might take advantage of all the gullible fools and make a lot of money.

I guess that's why I don't vote Republican.

The intriguing bit for me is how anybody can believe anything from a photo.

When I took pictures from my crappy, "barely working from day one" Minolta X31, I didn't start believing all my friends were really that blurry...

One foray into internet dating is all you need to know about how photos can lie...

Ghosts have been a common, consistent experience from the times of the ancient Greeks to today. Was every such experience a hallucination? There are many credible people who have experienced the ghost phenomena, often revealing hidden knowledge in the process. The best way to decide if ghosts are real or fantasy is to talk to people who had the experience. Are they all delusional? If we ask around, we might be surprised by the stories we’d hear by people we know.

Ok, here goes. My cousin's companion was spreading his ashes and while doing so I took a picture. When it was developped we could see a face. I haven't seen any other ghosts but the night after my Mother's burial my dog barked at an empty chair. She never did that again!

"Don't believe. Don't disbelieve. Think." - Paul Kimball, The Other Side of Truth.

Kimball has been writing his blog for years on anomalous phenomena (along with other things that may catch his attention), and his motto above, and his position, is between the two camps of true believers, which I think is a wise one to take, assuming you have any interest in the subject at all.

@Robert Newberry: that photo has been shown to be a fake.

@Dave B: orbs are a common flaw in digital cameras that some gullible people believe are evidence of ghosts, which is ridiculous: ghosts have been appearing as full or partial body apparitions for centuries - have they suddenly gotten lazy?
Here's a link to a page with a list of the most common mistaken or faked "ghost phenomena" for analog or digital cameras:

http://www.ghostresearch.org/ghostpics/

@Futurio: There are allegedly gay (and lesbian) ghosts. Best sleep on your back.

As for myself, even as an atheist, I have to believe in the possibility of the anomalous because of unexplainable things that have happened to me, e.g., a possible poltergeist in the form of little gray ball, which resembled a bee-bee, that broke my glasses when I was in sixth grade. Indoors, with none of the nearby windows damaged. "Believe It...Or Not!"

From Kentaro Mori, Best Pareidolia Ever

Also has one of my favorite ghost photos, now proved to be a fake. Bummer.

Cassandra! I've been thinking of you! And here you are!

...and that spoilsport Roger says there's no such thing as woo-woo. He is wrong. I have proof.

This isn't a ghost, but it is a preternatural creature most certainly from another world. And unlike all those other so-called actually photographs, it isn't grainy, blurry, or photoshopped. It's perfectly clear.

These alien creatures have been living right under our noses throughout human history, and it is only because of the blind mediocrity of our sorry evolutionary programming does anyone fail to recognize this fact. Being on my toes and alert to the beauties of woo-woo, I snapped it just this morning.

http://www.twitpic.com/2o33x1

I think the ghost looks like Ralph Bellamy as Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Haunted Scrotum

An excerpt from Bruce M. Hood's book Supersense:

...[F]aces are particularly important to humans. We can distinguish and remember thousands of faces, and yet the differences between individual faces can be so small. As we discussed in chapter 3, the fusiform gyrus of the brain (the area just behind your ears) is active whenever you look at faces.* However, if you are unfortunate enough to suffer damage to your fusiform gyrus, you can lose the ability to recognize individual faces. The resulting disorder, known as prosopagnosia, can even produce a loss of recognition of one's own face in the mirror♥.

All this brain machinery dedicated to faces may explain why we are hardwired to see faces when there are none, and often in the most unexpected places. Dr. J.R. Harding, a radiologist in Wales, told me about the case of a man who had an undescended right testicle♦. This condition is common and usually identified during routine screening around the time a boy reaches puberty.

When Dr. Harding examined the image of the man's descended left testicle, he nearly fell off his seat when he saw what was clearly a face [Image: http://www.impactednurse.com/?p=1674]. He wrote the case up and published a medical paper entitled "A Case of the Haunted Scrotum" for a bit of fun, which became his "least important but most celebrated contribution to radiology." In the report, Dr. Harding offered an explanation for the absence of the second undescended testicle: "If you were a right testis, would you want to share a scrotum with that?"

Facelike appearances can readily be found among natural and artificial objects. Boulders, knotted tree trunks, and Volkswagen Beetle cars can all look like they have faces. Because faces are so important, we tend to treat their appearances as auspicious. We think of such appearances as more than just coincidences. In this book Faces in the Clouds, Stewart Guthrie argues that our intuitive pattern-processing biases us toward seeing faces, which leads us to assume that hidden agents surround us♣. Building on David Hume's "We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds" observation that we encountered in the last chapter, Guthrie presents the case that our mind is predisposed to see and infer the presence of others, which explains why we are erroneous to see faces in ambiguous patterns. If you are in the woods and suddenly see what appears to be a face, it is better to assume that it is one rather than ignore it. It could be another person out to get you. Seeing faces leads to inferences of minds. Those minds may have malevolent intentions against us. Why else would they be hiding in the shadows? Such a bias could be just one of the mechanisms that support a sense of supernatural agents in the world. This probably accounts for why face apparitions are often taken as evidence of supernatural activity. For example, the online casino Goldenpalace.com bought a decade-old toasted cheese sandwich said to bear the image of the Virgin Mary for $28,000♠, and the face of Jesus has appeared on several baby ultrasound scans of pregnant women.

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Sources:

* N. Kanwisher, J. McDermott, and M. Chun, "The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for the Perception of Faces," Journal of Neuroscience 17 (1997): 4302-11. Actually, there is now some dispute whether the area is specific to faces or any special category of well-known objects. Given that faces are the most common diverse objects we encounter, this suggests that the area probably evolved primarily for faces.

♥ O. Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Pan Books, 1998).

♦ J. R. Harding, "The Case of the Haunted Scrotum," Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 89 (1996): 600.

♣ S. Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford University Press, 1993).

♠ "'Virgin Mary' Toast Fetches $28,000," BBC News, November 32, 2004, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4034787.stm. "Woman Sees Face of Jesus in Ultrasound Photo," WKYC.com, April 11, 2005, available at: http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=33157.

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