I love a good ghost story

[Shagman]

20. my (somewhat rational) take

A belief in the supernatural doesn't preclude disbelief in the unnatural. Religion posits some entity from outside nature, while a ghost is by definition linked to nature.

To believe in ghosts, I think you have to believe that science has not yet reached the point where it can produce suitable evidence. Simply dismissing everything for lack of evidence means you don't understand the nature of science. We don't (and can't) know everything.

Can't help you with subjective experience. There's no irrefutable evidence either way for ghosts or gods. People who have religious experiences are sure that something happened, but who's to say they didn't interpret an event outside their understanding by cloaking it in their cultural memes?

It's one thing to see a ghost when you know it might appear. It's another thing entirely to see a ghost, where others have seen it, when you don't know anything ahead of time. That's the best evidence for their objective existence.

We are curious creatures, we humans. Someone will examine anything we don't understand. If you learn something, you can count it a successful effort, even if you didn't confirm your original hypothesis.

We are drawn to ghosts because they confirm a possibility that we want desperately to be true, that all religions promise--there is (or can be) another existence after this one.

out of time ...