foreign [Music] has a ghost story if you go into a room and ask if anyone has seen a ghost two things are going to happen first somebody's gonna say I don't know man I don't really believe in that [ __ ] and then inevitably eventually one person in the room will say well there was this one time and then it's all shadow people and night hags from that point forward even people that say they don't believe in anything paranormal will eventually say they had something weird happen one time more often than not but what does it mean that this many people have seen a ghost are they real what does it mean to be real what is a ghost and if you're the kind of person that is screaming at your monitor right now about how ghosts aren't real and I'm a dumb stupid looking idiot with the birth defect known as religion brain uh I would ask that you stick around because I promise there is a part of this video that is for you and if you're worried about ghosts then maybe you'd be interested in something that keeps the ghosts from getting into your computer via your internet connection that's right today's video is brought to you by atlasvpn if you're watching a YouTube video right now let's be honest you know what a VPN is so why aren't you using one to protect your online privacy and more importantly why not start now with Atlas which is currently offering one of the best deals in the market right now with Atlas VPN you can get great online protection for just 1.83 a month with three months extra and a 30 day money back guarantee so you have nothing to lose a dollar and 83 cents is the amount of money a bug has so what are you doing get out the wallet and click on my link down in the description to support the channel and stop the spirits of your enemies from getting into your PC through the online Cloud but that is not all my friends with this VPN demons will not be able to see your online searches powerful Japanese Oni will not be able to install malware onto your system and the Goblins of Welsh folklore will help you locate the best online deals when you're buying really annoying stuff like airline tickets and you can do of this on unlimited devices with just one subscription but here's the deal I know you guys need an example if you're on this video you're into the Paranormal and you probably like scary movies let's say you want to get drunk with your friends one night and watch all seven Paranormal Activity movies in a row you finish the first movie but oh no all the other ones are region locked well guess what big guy a couple of clicks here and we're British now let's get this movie marathon on the road if you want to be able to protect your online connection from the Hat Man sniffing your data and also support this Channel please check the link down in the description and thank you atlasvpn to most people a ghost is just a dead person walking around with some kind of tick-tock filter that makes them transparent like this that's not a bad guess as to what someone means when they say a ghost in fact the oldest depictions we have of a ghost is from a Sumerian tablet from about 3 500 years ago it shows a ghost as a fully formed human figure that could be interpreted as transparent so it's reasonable to assume this type of ghost has been around for thousands of years and people have probably been claiming to see them just as long if not longer because the idea of a ghost was pretty much certainly figured out before the concept of writing of course people also claim to see shadow figures humanoid white Mists and other shapes and sizes of ghosts but the idea is always about the same it's a person's soul goofing around on Earth but this simplistic idea of a ghost just being the literal consciousness of a dead person is becoming less and less popular in paranormal circles you're always going to have your Carnival markers like Zack Baggins on shitty ghost TV shows talking about how the souls of the Damned hunt whichever bar happens to have the hottest women in Middle America but within the Intelligentsia of the Paranormal Community things are quickly getting a lot more strange and have been for a long time and there is good reason for this the entire premise doesn't really make very much sense or fit in any way with any of the commonly held cosmologies if you're a nerd who thinks too hard about this stuff the overwhelming majority of people believe that one of four things happens if you die and again this is if you're the kind of person that spends a lot of time thinking about this the first is that nothing happens this is the atheistic or materialistic view of death the second is that when you die there are multiple places that you could possibly end up depending on how good of a boy you've been the third idea of course is the all-time classic of reincarnation the final idea is the rare more philosophical idea that when you die you merge back into God or become one with some sort of primordial Consciousness that you were actually a part of the entire time there is no doubt in my mind that there are a lot of people and cultures out there that have ideas that don't fall into these four categories but I would be willing to bet a substantial amount of money that if you were to do some sort of a global survey the majority of Earth would fall into one of these four categories ghosts don't really have a place in any of these belief systems why is a ghost here instead of being in heaven or hell why is a ghost here instead of being born again in a new body why is a ghost here instead of returning to the godhead why is a ghost here if there is no soul the idea that a ghost is just a dead person walking around kind of sucks and has a lot of loopholes if you really sit down and think about it so what else is left to explain why so many damn people are seeing these freaks maybe there's something that's blocking them from moving on but that seems kind of arbitrary why would there be some sort of undefinable purgatory that makes you go ghost mode instead of moving on to the next step seems like a stretch that sometimes when you die the [ __ ] Wi-Fi for the afterlife is out so you need to wait so following this what are some of the theories that people have tried to come up with to explain the phenomena of the ghost over the years at the end of the day this kind of video is about having fun so let's start with some of the more wacky ghost explanations and work our way down to the grounded ones [Music] foreign World there is a phenomenon known as the time slip imagine this you're walking around downtown Seattle you go down an Alleyway to take a shortcut and when you come out of the alleyway it's 1920. you don't know what happened you start to panic you run into a bathroom and when you come out it's 2023 again that is the archetypal time slip there are many stories on the internet and also many books that talk about the allegedly true events where somebody accidentally whoopsied through time this isn't a video about time travel so we're not really going to get into the details but if this is possible then you have to ask yourself what if time doesn't really move the way that we think it does in One Direction what if time is everywhere all at once what if sometimes one part of time rubs up against another part of time and for a short period those two times are now closer together then maybe one of them is a little little bit more visible from the other if you really want to lose your mind hearing about this sort of thing the vertical plane is a great book or if you're illiterate the podcast astonishing Legends has a great series on this book these types of pseudophysics ideas are very popular in the Paranormal community so naturally someone eventually asked the question what if that guy in a cowboy hat everyone is seeing in the haunted hotel is actually a real guy and a cowboy hat somewhere in the timeline maybe you aren't seeing a dead person at all maybe the Kaleidoscope of time is lining up in just the perfect way for you to see into the past for two seconds but of course then you'd have to ask why is it only people we see and how come it's always a guy and a cowboy hat and not a guy in a Nirvana shirt or a guy in big dumbass New Year's 2400 glasses how come when I'm walking around out in the woods I never see a time slip where there are a bunch of ghost trees maybe it's just extremely rare but more likely this is just a fun thought experiment and doesn't really work very well as an explanation at least not for ghosts let's get into a less obscure theory that actually used to be very popular not very long ago it's called Stone tape Theory foreign [Music] tape theory is the idea that if a place has a powerful enough energy like for example a civil war Battleground where an enormous amount of emotional trauma is focused into a relatively small area that emotional trauma can somehow be recorded into the physical Rock of the location and perpetually played back like a recording some Stones were said to be more receptive to this than others which would explain why some areas are more haunted than others eventually this was expanded into the idea that any material could hold this recorded information and play it back fall down the stairs and die like an [ __ ] good news the stairs caught that on camera and now every family that moves in after you is going to hear you roll down a staircase every couple of months this Theory really came into popularity around the same time that audio recordings were really starting to pick up and capture the Public's imagination so you can kind of get their inspiration behind it like if a vinyl record can be shaped in a way that vibrates a needle and creates complex music out of nothing then maybe other stuff can do the same thing finally The Logical endpoint of these types of ideas is something called Place memory which essentially made the argument that the psychic energy caused by trauma can be recorded into an area metaphysically and is stored in some kind of a psychic database that can later be accessed this type of theory solves a lot of problems at the time slip Theory doesn't first of all with this model we can explain why all the ghosts we see are from the past in order for an event to be recorded it needs to actually happen first it also explains why hauntings seemed to be so specific to certain types of areas like hospitals old asylums prisons Battlegrounds and houses where murders have happened this also helps slot the idea of the ghost into people's World Views much easier if this theory is correct then it's not a ghost sitting around here instead of moving on to an afterlife it's that a non-living recording of a ghost has been imbued into the surrounding area maybe this could also explain the phenomena of a haunted object if a spooky painting has bad vibes from a murder it witnessed maybe that bringing that painting into your house will bring the murder Vibes into your home and replay them over and over in a new location this idea is pretty good and is at least pseudo-scientifically sensible but it is also fall not a favor a little bit and if you ask me why I would say that it's probably a little bit too physical and a little bit too literal profound human suffering has been happening for 200 000 years shouldn't there be more hauntings shouldn't we be seeing ghosts all the time instead of only once or twice in an entire lifetime also we kind of understand a little bit better now how physical recorded media works and it just doesn't make sense that psychic grooves in your floor can remember your grandma remember the basics of this Theory though especially the part about Place memory because this Theory does have some components that will get carried into the more philosophical theories later at this point maybe it would be better if we looked at this from a completely fresh angle what if we're going about this all wrong what if the reason it's so hard to come up with a theory as to why human souls are still wandering around is because they actually aren't human at all what if there's something else [Music] [Music] listen up [ __ ] it's time for a lightning round you got Shadow People you got the FAE you got poltergeists you got aliens you got trickster gods and of course you've got everyone's favorite is this a demon demon demon demon could this be a demonic entity mocking the Holy Trinity David the idea that ghosts are not human at all but are instead a completely different type of being is a very old one and it fixes all those logistical problems that keep coming up the logistical problems in fact aren't even real because the entire thing is a sham perpetuated by Spirit pranksters up to no good and the glass falls off the counter it's not your dead Aunt she's with God these are demons and they're coming to get you or maybe it's fairies and elves and you need to make some kind of an offering to get rid of them maybe it's a Jin trying to trick you into walking out into the desert really depends on how your culture operates and how your religion is structured this is a fun idea that can definitely and absolutely has been deeply explored but could it really be the case that every lady in white that is ever seen by somebody was a demon or an alien like just intuitively does this checkout what did the FAE have to gain from looking like your uncle in your bedroom a week after he died seems like not a very productive thing for an interdimensional being to do it seems like there is something a little bit more human to the idea of a ghost or a haunting they look like humans they are witnessed by humans and they are experienced subjectively by humans there are just too many elements of humanity here for this to not be a primarily human-driven phenomenon and before we really get into the meat of this video let's take another break and give the Skeptics the debunkers the Reddit atheists and the 19 year old stem undergrad students they're due [Music] [Music] there are many scientific explanations for what people are seeing and hearing when they see or hear a ghost obviously the easiest solution is that everyone is full of [ __ ] all the pictures are fake all the videos are fake and all the stories are lies but I think to an honest skeptic this is way too cynical of a take it's very clear if you talk to Witnesses or listen to Witnesses they do very much believe that they saw what they are telling you they saw your random co-workers with ghost stories don't really have very much to gain from lying about a ghost experience you barely even get attention from stories like this they're mostly just considered mundane and boring a lot like telling people about your dreams so how do we explain this scientifically but without the assumption that every single person who's ever seen something weird is a liar while there are different wings of this problem that are covered by the psychologists and the physical scientists psychologists offer up stuff like the crisis Apparition which is a sort of grief response that typically manifests with people seeing dead family members hanging around shortly after they died or having grief dreams where they are visited by dead friends or family members or even girlfriends after a bad breakup this obviously doesn't explain why people see totally strange figures in totally strange areas like the local haunted orphanage or whatever but it does seem to suggest that the brain can create very convincing images under certain circumstances The More Physical explanations to explaining ghost sightings are dominated by The Big Three paradolia High environmental electromagnetic fields and infrasound let's go over all of these real quick because all three of them are extremely simple and I can promise you that you are going to run up against all three if you spend a lot of time talking to cynical people in the Paranormal field is defined as a psychological phenomenon that makes people perceive patterns in random stimuli have you ever seen a picture of a chair with a face on it or one of those posts about how the mother Mary showed up in a oil spill in a parking lot that's all pareidolia it's why you see shapes in the clouds so imagine this you and your friends are 16. you live in small town America one Friday night you decide to all get hyped up and go on a ghost hunt at the local abandoned farm that you have all heard is haunted it's dark you can't see for [ __ ] because every single one of you made the mistake of assuming that the flashlight on a phone actually works and then you see a semi-transparent human figure dart back into the tree line everyone screams and Sprints back to the car and now you all have a ghost story that you will remember for the rest of your lives except you didn't actually see a human figure you saw a bunch of Shadows that looked weird and your brain immediately put those Shadows together into the shape of a human being running because that would be a pretty important pattern to recognize in the dark you had already been primed beforehand to believe that there would be a ghost out here in your heightened emotional state your dumb monkey brain saw the shape it was scared of seeing and all of your friends saw the same thing because in evolutionary terms your brains are basically carbon copies this would be the archetypal case of peridolia in action let's move on to high environmental electromagnetic fields which is definitely the worst sounding one but is also not very difficult to understand your brain is an electrical system that's how it functions it's sensitive to electromagnetic fields this is not new information there are plenty of studies on this let's say you just moved into a new house it's an old house and you've always had bad vibes in the basement it feels bad down there you always feel like something is watching you sometimes you feel a little bit nauseous and over time you come to think that it might be haunted well the thing about an old house is the wiring is bad and the thing about a basement is that's where a lot of huge appliances like your washer and dryer get plugged into the wall running a bunch of electricity through exposed wires some might say this causes a high electromagnetic field in the room that is affecting your body and making you paranoid and nauseous and maybe in your paranoia you also see a face in the corner of the room one time because of our old friend peridolia the basic breakdown of this is that in theory maybe bad wiring in a spooky house can give you bad vibes and maybe possibly mild hallucinations finally the last one is infrasound infrasound is a sound frequency that is very very low way too low to hear usually when people say infrasound they mean below 20 Hertz to understand why infrasound does what it allegedly does you need to understand resonant frequency everything has a resonant frequency this isn't some hippie [ __ ] about vibrations or whatever this is an actual thing with a scientific formula a pendulum moves at its natural resonance frequency for example parts of the human body also have resonant frequencies and what a surprise they're all way under 20 Hertz infrasound can be generated by a lot of things Machinery like fans and air ducts can cause it but it's also very common in nature and can be generated by moving water or wind scientists have theorized that some of the feelings of dread and paranoia that are commonly in haunted locations are a result of infrasound rattling the human body around in ways that make us uncomfortable but not in a way where we can actually tell what's going on hello editing Jacob here making an appearance uh 20 minutes into this video I actually forgot to kind of tie these threads together in the script the reason that the infrasound is rattling your body around is because it matches the resonance frequency of the human body which sort of makes you vibrate in a weird way uh I'll explain more about that as the video continues it's also theorized that infrasound can vibrate your eyeballs in a way that makes mild hallucinations possible similar to paradolia there are a lot of interesting angles to this first of all it would explain why so many old buildings with old terrible ventilation and big machinery happen to be haunted all the time it would also explain why there are so many hauntings that are right by water although it's also important to point out that humans just like to live by water so this statistic has always been kind of stupid so now that we have a basic idea of how all three of these things work it's important to point out some of the flaws with these three explanations because they are far from perfect first paradolia certainly happens and is a great explanation for the simpler forms of Ghost Encounters but eventually you'll come across something that is a little bit too high level for this to work seeing a vaguely human-shaped figure in a dark long hallway is one thing but there are multiple stories of multiple people seeing highly detailed apparitions with facial features and specific types of clothing sometimes even in well-lit rooms this seems to suggest something a little bit more complex than the thing that makes it look like so that a dog is smiling or that a cloud is a duck next the high electromagnetic field theory is completely and totally unproven and is borderline pseudoscience the idea comes from the work of Michael Persinger who we will talk about a little bit more later but persons are proved that electromagnetic fields can affect the brain if they are really really specifically directed he's the guy that invented the god helmet a device you put on your head to stimulate your brain with emfs no evidence at all at all the environmental emfs from a spooky basement can be high enough or direct enough to make you feel much of anything at all infrasound is in my opinion one of the more bulletproof explanations for a lot of paranormal stuff it has been scientifically verified as a thing that can happen the only problems that I see here are one infrasound seems to be so common in nature it feels like we would expect to have these experiences a little bit more often and two not all haunted locations have man-made Machinery that could be moving around generating frequencies and three similar to paradolia I'm not really convinced that the mild hallucinations caused by infrasound can explain every single complex sighting ever reported that being said I think infrasound and paradolia are responsible for what I like to call the science ghost a ghost sighting that is absolutely subjectively real and definitely looks and sounds like a ghost but is scientifically explainable by Material Science I'm going to talk a lot more about the subjectivity of this later and how that ties into the philosophical question of what is a ghost but before we do that we need to get one last Theory out of the way the big boy aggregor Theory [Music] foreign you've probably never seen the word aggregor before but you've almost for sure seen the word tulpa atulpa is a concept that originates from Tibet and despite what the internet will tell you it has little to nothing to do with My Little Pony it's the idea that a physically independent thing can be created by someone's thought that if you are disciplined enough and you think hard enough and project your thoughts in the correct way your thoughts can literally become physically real think of it kind of like the Golem from Jewish folklore but instead of it being a guy you build out of clay it's a guy you build out of thoughts a thought form a tulpa is what happens when one person thinks so hard their thoughts become real but an egregor is what happens when multiple people think so hard their thoughts become real there is a local haunted area in a small town that small town has thousands of people that believe the stories they believe the man and the cowboy hat is in the bar they all have a friend of a friend that has seen him could it be possible that if enough people believe in something hard enough that thing might start to become real in some small ephemeral way right now one of the leading proponents in this theory is Greg Newkirk Greg knew Kirk is one half of Greg and Dana Newkirk the two people that in my opinion are doing some of the best paranormal research philosophy and preservation in the entire field right now Greg is three things he's smart he's on at least some level an occultist and he is self-described as being half in half out when it comes to Paranormal belief this means that really getting down to what part of what he is saying is tongue-in-cheek and what part of what he is saying is meant literally can be difficult and you really need to sort of interpret it a lot with your big brain Greg takes a lot of inspiration from Michael Persinger when it comes to his aggregor ideas and has shouted out this lecture specifically which I highly recommend everyone watch Persinger believed in a sort of collective unconscious that was linked to the Earth's magnetic field he believed this magnetic field could be tapped into and that was how psychics remote viewers and mediums were able to do what they could do it wasn't that they were talking to the dead or doing astral projection it was that they were plugging into a sort of cloud of information that existed around us all the time and that with practice anyone could perform one of these tricks Greg's aggregor Theory kind of runs along these same lines often in his talk he will talk about how early in his career he investigated areas where nothing happened but then years later after those haunted locations had become famous he would reinvestigate them in the Paranormal Activity would be all over the place if enough people believe in something then in some way it becomes real Michael Persinger believed that a stored cloud of Consciousness was somewhere and Greg believes that maybe that same Collective Consciousness can manifest things into reality in some capacity now if you are really really smart you are probably noticing a lot of similarities between this idea of aggregor's and the previous idea of the science ghost because in reality they are essentially the exact same thing and this is why it's so difficult to pin down how much of what Greg is saying is literal and how much of what he is saying is a philosophical interpretation and if you're lost don't worry I'm about to explain let's go all the way back to that hypothetical scenario from earlier when I was talking about peridolia the one where you and your friends see the shadow person in the abandoned form in this scenario you and all of your friends had heard the place was haunted the entire town knows that it's haunted maybe even half the state thinks that it's haunted if it's a famous enough location you went into this expecting it to be haunted and when you saw the ghost you did not experience it as a trick of the light caused by pareidolia you experienced it as a ghost it is filed in your brain as a ghost and no amount of science nerd [ __ ] is going to convince you that you did not see a ghost even if someone had told you ahead of time what paradolia was you still would have had the same experience and you certainly aren't going to listen to any [ __ ] about infrasound bouncing off a tree at the right angle and giving you a vision in a way the collective thought about this local area literally generated this experience even if if as a scientific explanation you were hyped up and you saw exactly what you believed the collective thoughts of the community enabled this ghost sighting in no small part without the expectation of a spirit the spirit is much less likely to manifest on the other hand if something like egregor theory is actually correct and the shadow person actually is the result of a collective unconscious bringing the idea into reality in a literal sense the outcome is exactly identical everyone still walks away from that experience with the subjective reality of having seen a ghost this is why it's so difficult to pin down any of this because where do you even start what comes first if you're a hard-line scientist you will say that the physicalist interpretation explains ghosts but even if that's the case aren't they still kind of scary how do we even determine the difference between a scientific theory and a spiritual theory if both outcomes are exactly the same this is what a ghost is a ghost is a subjective experience it exists in your mind it's not something that can ever be proven scientifically as anything other than an artifact of your Consciousness if you believe you saw a ghost you saw a ghost and that is an experience that you can never be talked down from I believe this is true with all of the Paranormal and this intensely subjective nature is what makes it so hard to study and so unapproachable by Material Science a place like a civil war Battleground or an old mental Asylum is absolutely haunted it's haunted by its history and that history has a way of crawling into the human mind and making itself real Craig knew Kirk famously says you are a ghost machine and I think this is true we are all ghost machines and I think we will be creating and experiencing ghosts for as long as we exist on this planet and just like most phenomena of the human brain it might be something we never fully understand if you want to see more videos like this one consider subscribing you can also join my active Discord Community with a link down below I also stream from time to time and I should be streaming much more frequently now that I have a semi-decent streaming setup that can finally utilize a face cam and all of that nonsense slowly but surely I want to try and get a little bit more serious about streaming and this is step one if you want to support the channel more directly I have a patreon here where for as little as two dollars a month you can get access to exclusive podcast content the free episodes of my podcast inherently optimistic are also available everywhere podcasts are but I'm not on Spotify yet I'm working on that and finally you should follow me on Twitter so that you don't miss any important updates thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video [Music] thank you thank you