(Not actually my house, but my grandmother's house; she lived next door and babysat me when I was tiny and then I moved in there as a teen, etc.) Lots of weird things went down there with stunning frequency, enough that a lot of things that would flip out my friends never really phased me since I grew up with it.
I'd apparently noped the house long enough that it happened. (I woke up after the 'this was different' with finger bruises on my wrists, the ward ripped off my door and physically broken, and aching like I'd been stretched on the rack. It was not fun.) I would have been real happy convincing myself that one was a dream or something else, but nope; I kinda count myself lucky it only ever happened the once, really. Was definitely a different thing than the medical stuff people describe as the body is trying to shake off REM sleep.
@surreality said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:
I think we're both likely to agree: that's not how you science.
The thing though is, science isn't the way to go because it is, well, science. I mean I can see an argument being plausible in that we might be trying to measure things by the wrong metric. For example trying to use IQ tests based on western arithmetics to tribal people who're not even using numbers is useless as such tests are biased enough in their methodology to produce the wrong result, incorrectly showing perfectly intelligent people who think differently to be less intelligent.
The scientific method is simply the best yardstick we happen to have until a better one comes along. It did serve us well by elevating say, medicine from arbitrary observations jumping to conclusions ('he offended the Gods last week so they sent disease upon him!') into structured, peer-reviewed experiments and a constantly refined hypothesis until new practical approaches became available ('take two pills a day and come see me in a week').
What I mean to say is, I don't want to be a non-believer. That's infertile, it's ironically the opposite of what a scientist should do. Sometimes we have to begin with absurd assumptions completely contrary to our method of thinking to challenge an existing paradigm - there should be no holy cows. A good positive mind enters situations with a neutral mind and works things out from as blank a mental slate as possible else it really is no better than what the witch doctors of old ever did. And sometimes ego gets in the way of even brilliant people, insulting and belittling others engaged in the conversation for having different views than the norm.
So let's say - for the sake of argument - a poltergeist isn't part of a reliable phenomenon. Let's say it can only happen under vague circumstances, when specific combinations of factors are in place and not on demand. In that case it's not the same kind of experiment one can reproduce in a clean lab like we could do with more traditional experiments, and so the methodology itself would need to be altered to account for this anomaly; however it must still be subject to some sort of objective criteria anyway so we can eliminate or add parameters to examine how they interact with what's happening, have measurable results and be observable under machinery of some sort - it might be high definition cameras or carbon paper but there must be something to rely on at least at first.
And more than anything? More than anything this process must be subject to scrutiny and refinement. That's not a new thing! Scientists challenge each other constantly, not because they oppose new findings but because that's how we improve them. We attack notions until they hold up and then we celebrate them - and the attacker doesn't 'lose' credibility for playing that part but, rather, their contributions are arguably as important as the initial research.
By which I mean to say; there is no room, zero room in any of this for defensiveness and emotional indignation. If Newton had posted his papers followed by "... and fuck you guys if you don't believe me!" things would be different these days. 