Oh, shit. I'm going to be typing a while here.
The quotes I'm picking aren't to pick on the posters making them. They're just perfect examples of the point I think is important to make.
@Cupcake said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:
That is an awesome story, true or not.
Here's the thing: that statement, like a lot of other things, is potentially dangerous shorthand for a more complex reality. (I picked that one because it's the shortest, most succinct example.)
The story can be true without the implied conclusion.
The difference between the story and the implied conclusion being true is very different, and it's a difference that can, has, and will continue to have a damaging impact on people's lives.
The events are what they are.
The implied conclusion there is that the spirits of the babies on the steps were crying from beyond the grave until such time as they were given a proper burial.
That can be a false conclusion without calling the actual observed events or 'the story' into question in any way. For instance, if the implied conclusion was, instead, that cats were in fact gathering on that concrete area and wailing, and when the concrete area was destroyed, the cats found somewhere else to do their thing, would you question the 'the story' part, or the implied conclusion?
Probably neither, but as you call the veracity of the observed events into question based on the conclusion, you're walking a dangerous line. The conclusion is what needs to be called into question -- not the events themselves.
Pretty much any event can be explained. Maybe not now, but more on that in a moment.
As @Chime mentions, we once thought the mentally ill were possessed by demons and would torture them rather than offer treatment. We know mental illness exists, now, and thus it isn't the observable phenomena that is 'untrue', it's the conclusion that has been drawn to explain it.
Substantial harm can come from this in the same way that believing in every wild theory that comes down the pike can cause substantial harm.
Further, when you call the events themselves rather than the implied conclusion 'untrue', you're automatically putting someone on the defensive and essentially calling them a liar, and that is a challenge to their credibility right out of the gate.
It's essentially the opposite of the actual scientific method: 'I don't like the conclusion, so the events probably never occurred'. That's not how the scientific method works, and a lot of people go there pretty fast, often without ever realizing they're doing so.
My favorite example of this comes from a relatively quirky case study. There's a doctor up in Canada, if I recall correctly, who has been doing studies on the effects of electromagnetic fields on the brain. His last name is Persinger, he's likely easy enough to google if you're curious.
What's interesting is this: what @Arkandel mentions about known conditions causing certain experiences is something he's been able to reproduce in a lab. (Though, boo, man! Sleep paralysis is hagging and the incubus lore, shadow figures and sensed presences are what went down in this lab setting. 
) He was able to, by manipulating the electromagnetic field around a test subject, cause them to 'sense someone in the room' when no one was there, and reproduce other, similar, commonly reported 'paranormal phenomena', just by manipulating these magnetic frequencies.
And so, there was a woman. She kept sensing a presence in her room. She couldn't sleep. She kept feeling like someone was hovering around her bed at night, and it was freaking her right out. She was experiencing genuine, actual, discomfort over these events.
She had, of course, endless people telling her it could not be a ghost or creepy actual presence in her room, and therefore, she was nuts, so the events themselves could not be occurring.
That is not helpful, and people were happy to completely dismiss her problem as this because it's a commonly accepted potential conclusion. (It just wasn't the correct one.)
She had people telling her, no doubt, there was a ghost in her room wishing her ill or similar.
Also spectacularly not helpful.
Then, gods only know how, somebody thought to ask this guy to come in with his kit to check out the room and see if, hey, maybe something in the room was putting off that odd frequency range that makes a lot of people's brains think there's someone looming over them ominously.
The alarm clock right where 'the ominous figure' would have been standing was.
They replaced the alarm clock, and her very real problem went away. Thus, it isn't always a case of 'we have a commonly accepted conclusion' and 'we have a fringe theory conclusion' and suddenly you can only choose between those two things as if the answer must be there.
To me, this is the critical difference between dismissing experiences based on assumed conclusions, and testing those experiences to find out what is actually going on.
(There's a lot more interesting stuff about that study, mainly that different people respond differently to certain things in terms of sensitivity to the stimuli which is really quite fascinating, but that's another giant blurt for after today's slate of RL work gets a round of time. Alas, clove break over. :/)
@TNP said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:
No. With a qualifier. I acknowledge that there's still lots of things we don't know yet and that today's 'paranormal' could be tomorrow's science. However, I've yet to see or experience anything that leads me to believe that such things do in fact exist, explained or not. I could be wrong but the burden of proof is on the one making such claims. This does, of course, apply fully to religion as well.
This, to me, is clearer on where I think people's brains need to be on this, provided it's, again, not the experience itself, divorced from a conclusion, that's being called into question, but the conclusion as 'the claim'.
It's the difference between:
"I saw something weird in the hallway that looked like a person!"
which could have any number of explanations, and:
"I saw the ghost of my grandmother in the hallway!"
too, in terms of how those experiences are being related. Which is also incredibly important; people generally aren't necessarily good at examining the basics like this, though, especially when encountering something that's unusual or somehow frightening to them.
Just like the experience can't be thrown out because you don't like the conclusion, you can't build the conclusion into the experience itself.
Personally, I grew up around a lot of weird, weird shit going on more or less all the time. I don't pretend I know what it is. I would love to find out, some day, though I doubt I will in any greater sense. A lot of the 'common conclusions' are, frankly, comforting as hell! (The ancient-of-days username was surreality_vortex, as in, 'weirdness magnet totally doesn't even cut it'. There's a reason for that. 
)
I actually love the ghost hunting shows! ...for plot ideas, though. There's nothing trustable there, really, as 'evidence' of anything. Some of the 'if you have black mold in your house it can fuck with you in the following ways' or 'you should really check for mice if you hear scratching in the walls first before freaking out' kinds of things are, I think, helpful, especially for people exceptionally prone to blame 'the ghosts' for things like black mold that can do them very real and preventable harm, or have the potential to be helpful. Sadly, a lot of that has gone the way of the dodo in favor of sensationalist (sketchy-as-fuck) bullshit.
I think I'm sitting over in @Thenomain's corner again, though I can't be sure!
