Growing up, my house was average sized, but it sat on over an acre of land, so we had a really big front and back yard. Along the back border of our property was this twenty foot thick wall of wild overgrowth that the previous owners had never cut down. It was a dense mass of tangled trees and bushes all grown into each other, with a thick carpet of leaves covering everything -- you could walk through it, but just barely, and you had to watch out for bugs and snakes and rodents and god knows what else.

I remember this one summer night when I was around thirteen, my neighbor and I were hanging out in front of my house. It was really late at night, almost pitch black. I lived a couple of miles outside the city limits so there were no streetlights. You could barely see your hand in front of your face.

We started hearing this very faint violin music coming from somewhere. It freaked us both out, but at the same time we were curious. Slowly, nervously, we started to walk in the direction the music was coming from. As we walked the music grew slightly louder, but you still couldn't hear it clearly. It would rise and fall on the wind. It sounded very... ghostly. It seemed to be coming from behind my house.

As we stalked toward it we tried to figure out why the hell we might be hearing ghostly violin music coming from my backyard in the middle of night. Both of our families were asleep. I had some other neighbors who lived in front of my house, across the road. I saw their garage was open and they had a light on inside. But the music was coming from behind my house, and there was nothing there but that patch of wilderness, and an empty field beyond that.

I grew more and more apprehensive as we approached the backyard. The music, though still faint, had become slightly louder. I was scared as we started to round the corner of my house. Would there be some kind of insane violinist standing in my backyard?

We rounded the corner. I gazed all around my back yard, yet didn't see anything unusual. But the music was clearly coming from somewhere in that wild thicket. We cautiously approached it and peered into it's dark depths. And then, suddenly, the music stopped. Everything was quiet, except for the faint sound of the wind in the trees.

We walked around a bit more, wondering aloud about what it might have been. Eventually we just kind of laughed it off. But we both clearly felt as though something vaguely supernatural had just gone down.

Anyway, I never heard anything like it again, until a few years ago when I was visiting my parents. I couldn't sleep one night and walked outside for some air. I heard some faint music, just like that night many years ago. This time I took a different approach, and walked in the opposite direction. The music became fainter at first, but then after I walked for a bit, it started to grow louder. Eventually I realized that there was a radio or something playing in the garage of the neighbors in front of my house, maybe five hundred feet away. I realized that what I had heard long ago must have been the sound waves bouncing weirdly off that thicket behind my house.

So the moral of this long story is that people have a natural predisposition to be afraid of things they can't explain and that fear makes us grasp for simplistic explanations like ghosts. But if you look hard enough, you can always find a reasonable answer.

What he said. I agree. Even though, I "think" I have seen one when I was a kid, the only reason I think that is because I can't think of any of reason for what I "saw." But it certainly could've been a daydream, or a memory I formed when I was a teen for some unknown reason. But I otherwise, don't really believe in them. I mean, either they don't exist and I formulated the experience for some unconscious reason, OR they do exist, and I saw one, and I refuse to believe it.

Maybe they were hoping you would attribute it to some ghost ;)

People who believe in ghosts usually base it on past personal experiences, and fail to realize that there own point of view is too subjective to be the base for any conclusions about the truths of the world...

Aliens are possible - you base this statement on theory and conjecture because we as humans have figured out (up to a certain extent) the mechanics of the dimension of space. i agree with you.

magic potions/time travel/cures and hypnosis; all of these are possible because we are slowly figuring out the science of tangible natter - i agree with you.

but when you say "ghosts/spirits are impossible", i am sorry i have to dispute that. 1000 years ago an airplane or traveling to the moon was "impossible" but today it is because we have started mastering space travel. but because we haven't traveled inter-space or inter-dimensional travel can we say that they are an impossibility?! (considering that ghosts/spirits are beings who travel from this dimension to another after they leave the fetters of the mortal body.)