What do you know about ghostbusters?
Asked by
Sunny2 (
18842
)
February 1st, 2011
I have a young friend who, with her partner, is hired to rid a place of ghosts.
I asked, “How do you even start?”
“We ask if the client wants all the ghosts gone, or just, for example, Uncle Charlie? The client usually doesn’t want all the ghosts gone, just ones who are a nuisance.”
“How do you know they’re gone?”
“What ever was disturbing the client no longer happens.”
“What do you do to get rid of them?”
“We talk to them. They are usually stuck here for some reason and really would like to leave.” We tell them what the situation is and talk them into leaving.”
This confounds me no end. Has anybody else had any experience with this sort of thing?
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13 Answers
I thought that this was about the movies lol
I’m not sure, I know there are things that we can’t explain, but a lot of the stuff that I have seen people with this occupation is bull. A lot of it is mind games and fake reading if they use some sort of isntrument.
What a creative way to make money doing absolutely nothing.
Just that they’re ready to believe you.
They’ve got a smooth hustle going.
Who’s gonna tell them the ghost DIDN’T say that?
Sit back, smile, and enjoy.
How old are your ghost-buster friends?
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They are scammers.
You should follow this advice.
Ghostbusting is no more a “scam” than any other type of shamanic work. The power of placebo and nocebo is well documented, and extends far beyond simple suggestion. For example, experiments involving the use of placebo with heroin addicts shows that opiate breakdown products appear in the blood after the use of placebo; clearly it is more than just suggestion when the brain appears to be capable of manufacturing drugs to meet our expectations.
In the case of “ghosts” it is likely that regardless of whether one considers them to be imagination or not, they reside inside the mind. It is therefore inside the mind which the putative ghost hunter must venture to eliminate a ghost. Whether you consider such activity to be placebo or shamanism, it is undeniable that it works, which is what people are presumably paying for.
If I sold you an imaginary car, would you care that it was imaginary if it drove you to work every day and got reasonable gas efficiency?
@SmashTheState If it drives me to work every day it is not imaginary. If I imagine it drives me to work every day and I am really sitting at home imagining I am at work and get fired, I would want to haul your scamming ass into court but probably would be too mentally confused to successfully sue you.
@anartist Yes, that’s the point. If it works as advertised, is it really imaginary? We live in a world of representation; that is, we manufacture a series of symbols to allow us to manipulate the noumena detected by our senses, as translated through our schema of archetype and experience. If someone is capable of manipulating those symbols, it doesn’t really matter whether those symbols relate to anything which may or may not be outside of us, since we don’t work with the thing-in-itself, we work with the representative symbols.
@anartist They are in their 40’s and the partner is a trained shaman. I’ve never had experience with ghosts and tend to be a skeptic, but I’m open minded.
What @crisw said. Many are just businesspeople preying on believers.
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