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why?
Y'all, what causes a haunting isn't fully known, but it very obviously (to anyone that pays attention to these things) involves a combination of factors.
Typically, more than one factor needs to be involved:
Someone dies violently.
Someone dies that lived a shitty love and is afraid of final judgment.
Someone died with unfinished, urgent or important business.
A location where someone did a lot of work that they used to identify themselves.
Replay hauntings seem to be placed where someone experienced a prolonged stressful situation in that location. That be be someone haunting a place that died elsewhere.
Places where both mental health issues and stress were left to simmer for years.
Someone fucked around with a oiuja/spirit board a lot in a place.
Water or stone, especially both, plus a prolonged stress factor.
Some hauntings seen to only manifest when certain people are in the space. Especially poltergeists.
There's no one way to get a haunting. Much of it depends on severe emotional states. Otherwise it would be a repeatable process. But, like it or not, it does seem to be something that humanity has experienced since we learned how to error down what was going on.
Given how many people have died, seeing a ghost should be a common occurrence if they're real.... The fact that it isn't is proof that they're not.
Ghost lore typically involves some aspect of the deceased becoming ghosts only if they have unfinished business in the mortal realm.
Or only appearing under specific circumstances.
Of course, looking at it pragmatically, the purpose of that lore is to function as a plausible explanation for why ghosts are 'rare' despite the number of dead people.
Wouldn’t almost everyone have unfinished business?
Yeah but it would have to be 'major' unfinished business like a massive grudge or a mournful love lost or whatever.
Something where given the choice "hey dude you wanna go chill in the afterlife, or spend the rest of eternity haunting the earth as a spirit?" the choice is to stay.
If ghosts are like fossils, we would only have a handful over the whole world, so it really depends on the ghostification process
Just pointing out, this is a logical fallacy is all.
To put it in a non-ghost perspective:
"Given how many people have walked, seeing a gold medal Olympic gymnast should be a common occurrence if they're real... The fact that they aren't is proof that they're not"
Basically the amount of something isn't evidence of the lack of something, it's only evidence of possible rarity.
Your argument is a logical fallacy and could be easily countered by the same fallacy with "Given how many people over time and history have said they have had a paranormal experience, they must be real"
This entire argument is nonsensical.
Why are we equating walking with gymnastics, for one? It doesn’t take years of training to die, you can do it the moment you’re born.
Even if we want to move the goalpost for ghosts from “died” to “extreme trauma” or “unfinished business” you can’t tell me there aren’t thousands of people who die in those exact states every day.
Sure, we can’t “prove” ghosts don’t exist, just like we cant prove I don’t watch you sleep at night. But with such an extreme lack of evidence, it makes it much more likely that ghosts do not exist.
That was the point. A logical fallacy is nonsensical - I used a more hyperbolic example to highlight the fallacy.
Many humans very long ago saw the sun moving and therefore logically concluded it orbited the earth. Hence the logic in logical fallacy. They're fallacies that are rooted in logical thinking.
In this case, the logic of "many people have died" yet "ghosts are rare", therefore "ghosts don't exist" is what's flawed, because it assumes we know exactly what ghosts are - as a phenomena.
The reality is ghosts - and the paranormal - has had some scientific explanations in the past hundred years. Infrasonic hallucinations for one thing, as discovered by Vic Tandy. Then there's the better known sleep paralysis, and the lesser known as still studied hypnogogic hallucinations. And on top of that, there's things still unexplained, though hypothesis have been made but not properly tested, like will-o'-the-wisps.
So, already in some sense, some "ghosts" do exist, just not as intelligent, independent spectres necessarily but as hallucinations. Yet, even the definition of "ghost" varies, changing what can be described as existing or not. Many religions consider anything if the sort demonic instead for example.
And lastly, there's the rare phenomenon that is random and simply unexplainable, that's unreproducible in a lab to test for. I myself have seen such things, and despite being a huge skeptic who is science forward and works in STEM fields, cannot explain past a label as "paranormal". If anything, it's these experiences that have led me to my interest in science and trying to find explanations for things. Most people don't even know of Hypnogogia. Most creepy night time sightings can be explained by that though.
I have yet to know what can explain my cousin rising up in air multiple feet/meters from her hospital bed while she was allegedly possessed. Along as witnesses my aunt, another two cousins, and a poor terrified nurse, ruling out my own mind somehow hallucinating this.
But perhaps with time something will be discovered. Discovery isn't made by deciding not to investigate, let alone using a logical fallacy.
Shut up, bot
Are that many people dying at restaurants?
Maybe not at the restaurant but you show me a well established (so in business for 20+ years), that isnt corporate (meaning employs skilled chefs and line cooks), in any downdown metropolitan centre of any size and i guarantee you they have had half a dozen overdoses on average and 3 overdoses at absolute minimum. Again 20 year minimum tho, idk why but those are the ones most likely to give the best employee wages at the cost of working 90hrs a week which adds to the coke followed by heroin cycle Anthony Bourdain was so famous for kicking... till he didnt...
I feel like it's gotta be one of the lower ranked places of people dying right?
Anyone displaying any signs of serious illness is gonna get sent straight to a hospital, surely. I don't imagine a restaurant owner is gonna dilly dally for business, health and liability reasons.
Or is this something I'm too European to understand? Do people die in American restaurants a lot?
Like I know it's much more likely to get food poisoning over there, but that's not insta-killing people... Do people turn down ambulances a lot?
Maybe haunted by lobsters?
I think OP might have meant like, chicken ghosts, or something, but those die in the factories that sell them, which are, for al intents and proposes, already haunted in our own world.
I would say its a common occurrence. My grandfather passed away leaving a pizza shop earlier this year. Back when I was a kid and my parents took me to church, I remember always going to IHOP, Bob Evans, or Perkins after for breakfast (don't worry, my family weren't the type to go for breakfast/brunch to yell at teenage wait staff after church) and I distinctly remember 4 occasions where a fellow diner passed away or had a serious health issue hit them while eating. Bob Evans was the one I remember most. Everything there is very high in sodium and they encourage you to add more. Fun fact: about 2/3 of Americans living with high blood pressure don't know they have it. We live with far too much stress and far too much sodium.
How haunted is "fuck?"
Most houses in the US and almost all houses in other countries too.
That's my big gripe with american ghost hunting series, they have no perspective. "This house is almost 100 YEARS old, someone actually died here, so now it's HAUNTED!!!", and I'm here in a european farmhouse from the 1700s like, "so shouldn't I be hearing all this same bullshit?"
We will very likely see some random dinosaur roaming around instead of just human, and ghost will give us extinction flashback instead of just murder scene.

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