Staff Reporter Linsey McCloud
Joe Nickell, a senior research fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, says there are physiological reasons for seeing ghosts. Nickell has investigated haunted houses, inns, theaters, graveyards, lighthouses, castles, old jails, and office buildings and has researched ghost stories and many other mythical creatures stories and said he found no paranormal explanation. According to Nickell "Ghosts are often results of pranks, environmental phenomenon or physiological conditions such as sleep paralysis and the hypnagogic, things you may see when trying to fall asleep, and hypnopompic, things you may see when trying to wake up, hallucinations that come with it." Dr. Priyanka Yadva, a sleep specialist, says sleep paralysis can last from a few seconds to a few minutes and is often associated with hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations which may include seeing serpents, spiders, intruders, and ghosts. People often report hauntings while they are going to sleep or in the middle of the night and they say they couldn’t move, Joe says that’s just enough evidence to diagnose it and the very simplest and also best explanation for ghosts. However that's not the only explanation of why you think you see ghosts. There is also the option of a psychotic state, drug use, sleep deprivation, or temporal lobe epilepsy. Nickell says “Someone will be doing some routine chore like polishing the furniture and they’ll be in a near-reverie or daydream state and they’ll see something out of the corner of their eye, they’ll turn and their mind will fill in the blank. They’ll see a Civil War soldier or a ‘gray lady’ and then it will promptly vanish.” Studies show that people who are tired or performing mindless tasks are more likely to experience theses visions which is a body thing, not a disembodied thing. If you would like to read more about the evidence that it's your body playing tricks on you and you're not actually seeing ghosts, visit this page.
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