Question: Do ghosts exist?

Iain Moal answered on 17 Jun 2010:

There has never been any good evidence that ghosts exist. There have always been anacdotes, and people wanted to believe that there is some sort of disembodied afterlife, but there is no evidence for it.

Have you ever heard of apophenia? This is when people see patterns in meaningless images. For example, people who easily see a face on the moon, or those who think they see meaningful images in the random patterns formed by clouds. A psychologist called Susan Blackmore has shown that people who are more susceptible to apophenia are much more likely to believe in ghosts. Hence, it would seems likely that people who claim to have seen ghosts have actually mistakenly seen something where there is nothing. Often, to make their stories sound more convincing, they embellish them with unseen details.

Have you ever seen ‘Most Haunted’ the TV show? They investigate ghost claims, but have been caught lying and fabricating things a number of times. They were investigated by Ofcom, the TV standards agency, who concluded that they were not doing honest journalism. However, because they never claim to be reliable news outlets, there are no laws that say that lying through your face on TV is illegal, so they get away with it!