Used to live in Cornwall. Superstition abounds.
But so does mining.

All the 'My door suddenly slammed shut, must be a ghost' stories, the tales of 'The crockery rattled mysteriously', or 'The unexplained knocking sounds at night' anecdotes, the 'I heard the floorboards creak as though an invisible ghostly presence was walking outside my bedroom door' guesses.

SCIENCE! Cornwall is riddled with old mines, uncharted mines, extensive mines, that are so widespread that some of the galleries go a mile offshore under the sea bed. I actually had to pay extra for a mining survey when I applied for the mortgage to buy the house.

But suspicions aside, there are plenty of reports where Camborne/Redruth people wake one morning to find their back gardens have vanished into a hole in the ground because there was no knowledge that the house had been built over a minework.

e.g. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/real_story/6405519.stm

Solid rock is a very good conductor of sounds so the mechanical drilling and blasting done deep underground will form seismic waves that might make your best china rattle. Also, rockfalls in old areas where the wooden pit props have rotted through.

Then there's the fact that in the modern age we tend to understand things a bit better, i.e. if the back door is open and you then open the front door, an air pressure differential can cause the other door to be sucked/blown shut, usually with a slam. Makes you jump but you don't usually thing 'Zoiks! A g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-GHOST!'

The house I lived in down there was a newbuild and it has settled over time so that doorframes become distorted and things can pop open whereas once they used to fit. Add subsidence on top and it could become quite odd... 'this door wasn't locked 4 minutes ago!'.. well, no, it may be jammed though.

Because it's a modern house, it was not built with wooden timber planks for floorboards (which contract at night when it gets cold and may creak as they pull on the nails) as MDF is cheaper, so it's not potentially haunted because it doesn't make noises at night.

As olden time rumours of hauntings go, in a time of gas lamps and candles (and in certain rural areas of Cornwall we could be talking up to the 1950s here) a non-understanding about ventilation in closed quarters will not help. If all the lights (lamps, candles gaslights etc) in the room go out at once it's probably because the air in the room has become oxygen depleted- that would bring on the dual effect that combustion is impossible as the air/fuel ratio is wrong, and you're about to die of Carbon Monoxide poisoning and simultaneously are hallucinating like a champ.

So, in essence beliefs in ghosts can be almost as much as primitive assumption as religious beliefs about miracles- just because you don't understand a thing doesn't mean that it must have been made to happen by a paranormal, supernatural, mysterious or religious agent trying to scare you.

ALT- you live on a deserted fairground and the janitor is trying to scare you away so he can search for the missing treasure without interruption.
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Thu 13 Sep 2012, 17:49, Reply)