Genuine ghost caught on camera

[FarSideOfTheMoon]

I'm convinced

http://www.break.com/1408/sitter-cam-catches-ghost.html

[siestatime]

Truly from another world.

[bobdezon]

Im more concerned why a babysitter is wearing boxer shorts and cowboy boots when looking after children

[Fiona]

The baby "just knows" this is real

[Julia]

Im more concerned why a babysitter is wearing boxer shorts and cowboy boots when looking after children

That's nothing. You ought to see the PARENTS...

[Mulder]

Where did this idea that ghosts where sheets come from? It's completely weird! Just like the idea that they are transparent.

[bobdezon]

I think maybe its just a visual correlation between the way a sheet moves on a washing line and the literary and anecdotal descriptions of the ghosts floaty diaphanous appearance?

Or it could be the 1666 law which proclaimed all dead had to be buried in a woolen shroud and not a coffin?

Or it could be an interpretation of the clothing early actors wore on stage when representing ghosts using the peppers ghost technique?

[FarSideOfTheMoon]

Where did this idea that ghosts where sheets come from? It's completely weird! Just like the idea that they are transparent.

Scooby Doo?

[Julia]

I think maybe its just a visual correlation between the way a sheet moves on a washing line and the literary and anecdotal descriptions of the ghosts floaty diaphanous appearance?...

Or it could be an interpretation of the clothing early actors wore on stage when representing ghosts using the peppers ghost technique?

Which raises an interesting point - when were ghosts first described as transparent? The effect produced in the Pepper's Ghost illusion may have had something to do with it, and "ghostly" double exposures were being passed off as the real thing very early in the history of photography, but is the concept much older than this? I've never read any Gothic novels of the 18th and early 19th centuries - do they feature diaphanous ghosties?

I ask because I recently read a book about ghosts in the Middle Ages. If the examples cited are anything to go by ghosts were then regarded as decidly solid beings - one Yorkshire phantom physically attacked a priest's mistress and gouged out the eye of a bystander (still, we've always been a bit rough and ready oop North...)

[bobdezon]

Well I dont really know to be honest. I know the celts believed water was the gateway to the otherworld. And if you stare at your reflection in water it looks transparent-ish, you know what I mean. Maybe it stems from that, you know people from the otherworld dont appear quite so solid and move a bit.