Skepticism

Divining for a Date: October Challenge

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a Divining for a Date Challenge.  For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s a psychic challenge that started back in February. At the end of the series, we’ll have a psychic face off and the winner gets to have a dinner date with a skepchick of choice!

I’ve gotten lazy since the summer, but now I think it’s time for us to get back to doing some psychic-ing!

This month I’m going easy on you. Just answer this question:

When I was 10, I saw a ghost. Whose ghost was it and where did I see it?

You should be able to use your psychic powers to contact that ghost. (S)He should remember the incident.

Good luck!

Elyse

Elyse MoFo Anders is the bad ass behind forming the Women Thinking, inc and the superhero who launched the Hug Me! I'm Vaccinated campaign as well as podcaster emeritus, writer, slacktivist extraordinaire, cancer survivor and sometimes runs marathons for charity. You probably think she's awesome so you follow her on twitter.

Related Articles

46 Comments

  1. I talked with a ghost that claimed to be the ghost that you speak of, but how do I know it’s not lying to me?

  2. Hi there!

    Was it little Jimmy Osmond?! When I was about 5 or 6, I begged my grandmother to take me to see the Jimmy Osmond show. His older brother Donnie was the teen heartthrob at the time, but Jimmy started doing kids shows around the country.

    He was at Radio City Music Hall, and during his concert he did a spooky kind of ghost production with flying ghosts and dancing skeletons. I was just short of terrified, but I continued to tell myself that these were just actors in costumes. Then one of the skeletons took his head off and started tossing it around with the other skeletons on stage. This convinced me that they were ACTUAL skeletons, and I screamed and ran out of the theater with my annoyed grandmother following closely behind. (Well not THAT closely, I was halfway to New Jersey by then)

    But since it was Jimmy Osmond’s show, I’d imagine that you could call them HIS ghosts. Although this would make you 4 to 5 years older than me, so feel free to deny this theory. It wasn’t actually the restless spirit of Jimmy Osmond or anything, since he’s actually still alive. :)

  3. Hi there!

    Wait!! Ignore my previous comment! Can I guess again!?

    It should have been obvious whose ghost it was. I’ll bet it was Pepper’s Ghost, and you saw it at Disneyworld. :) (Or Disneyland)

  4. It was Casper, who was Harvey Comics’ ghost, and you saw him on a cartoon on TV. I can’t use my psychic powers to contact him, since he is a character and not real. So, instead I did some remote viewing in both time and space in order to determine what you were doing when you were 10.

  5. I’m using my psychic powers now…

    Hm… I see a C… Or could it be a B? Gee! I think it’s a G… Perhaps the spirit of an ex?

    Oh, damn! That’s why it was so difficult to get in touch with this ghost. It’s been many years, and it has crossed over since. I was able to contact the ghost of the ghost, though. It wants you to be happy.

  6. I’m getting a D name, or an M. Possibly a David, or a Dean, or a Diana. Not sure where the M fits in, but I’m getting an older male connection. I’m also getting something about a pain in the chest. Does this mean anything to you?

  7. It was the ghost of your great aunt Gwendolyn. She was sitting in the gazebo in your grandmother’s back yard. You were so surprised, you spilled your Grape Nehi, ruining your sun dress.

    I never got the hang of doing a cold reading.

  8. I am feeling the energy from the dark plane now.

    I’m getting a name.

    C …

    Casper?

    Hmmmmm. The place?

    I’m seeing a giant screen of some sorts.

    A theatre?

    Yes, that’s it! The Ghost was Casper and you saw him in a movie theatre.

  9. @Andrés Diplotti:

    Hm… I see a C… Or could it be a B? Gee! I think it’s a G… Perhaps the spirit of an ex?

    Barry Gibb. It was Barry Gibb.

    (Is Sam one of the options for when I win?)

    I am a Hedge

  10. Joshua #4: I was going to predict the same thing! Except the more I think of it, ghosts that appear when you’re lying awake in bed tend to be dressed all in black, are frightening, and they sit on your chest and hold down your arms and legs so you can’t move.

    So, it was the ghost of elderly female relative — let’s go ahead and say grandmother. You were staying at your Grandmother’s house. You were reading a book in that big, comfy chair in Grandma’s living room. The grownups were in the kitchen, talking. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw Grandma walking past the living-room doorway on her way to the bathroom. And you could swear she paused and looked right at you, before passing out of your line of sight. You called out to her, and she didn’t answer, so you got up to see if she was okay — and there was no one there!

    And the weird part is, your Grandma had died when you were just a little girl.

  11. It was dark, in your house. You’d woken to head to the bathroom, or maybe get a drink of something. I’m not sure; it’s fuzzy, but there was liquid involved somehow. Did your family own a pool? That might be what’s coming through (or maybe you bathed that day).

    Anyways, you were walking in your house, and you felt a presence, and you felt it was the presence of someone you care about. It was someone older than you, someone who was family, or maybe someone you thought of as family, or someone you looked up to as an older sibling.

    (Damn, cold reading is harder over the intertubes….)

    It was your Aunt Mary, in the hallway of your house. She’s telling me you used to be a little brat, but you were cute and smart enough that no one really held it against you.

    So, when are you coming to Missouri? :-*

  12. You saw my future ghost going back in time to to set up a winning date. You were in the State of Imagination at the time.

    …er…nm…I’m married and not Mormon.

  13. Ah, it’s coming to me now …

    It was the ghost of a little creole girl named Inez Dumaine. She was murdered by a river pirate who placed a curse on her and now her ghost roams a plantation where she once lived. You will need to solve this riddle to free her from her curse:

    “Sleeping lies the murdered lass,
    vainly calls the child of glass.
    When the two shall be as one,
    the spirit’s journey will be done.”

    Let me know where/when for the date so I can schedule it with the wife.

  14. Fred, you saw Fred’s ghost. Why, at 2:30 in the morning, you were creeping around the Macy’s fitting room where he choked to death in a sweater two sizes two small though is beyond me.

  15. Ignore these phonies. You saw a ghost of … *listens to the aura around the description* … of E. Some place in your home …. yes. You saw E. in the hallway, visiting you in spirit from beyond the grave.

  16. It was the ghost of Benjamin Franklin. He’s been in the process of helping you uncover some great conspiracy perpetrated by the U.S. Guv’ment with the assistance of the Federal Agent who had originally been assigned to track yo- er, wait a minnit. That’s the plot to A Girl and Her Fed. Apparently I have no psychic powers. Sorry bout that.

  17. I am horribly offended by this question. Many of my ancestors are now ghosts and none of them belong to anyone. They are people, just like you and I. The only difference is that they lack matter to fill their shape.

    However, it is not possible to have sensory perception of things outside yourself that lack matter. The only conclusion is that you, yourself, are missing some of your matter (e.g. missing an arm) and are experiencing a part of your ghost. I believe this is called phantom pain.

    It has been argued, although not very convincingly, that visions of ghosts that represent other people are actually the representation of the person we hold in our mind. Although the person is gone, the representation isn’t (like a phantom limb). Because we expect people to leave and come back, we expect this phantom person to come back. And sometimes they do … as a phantom!

    A link to a source that talks about perceptions of other people’s death towards the end of the article.

  18. You saw your own ghost.

    She told you that in the future you invent a time machine that actually works.

    Your future-self’s inaugural journey was to travel back and have this inspirational talk with herself as a child.

    She turned on the machine and configured it appropriately. Unfortunately, as she was getting in to the pod, she tripped and broke her neck.

  19. It was Clyde, and you saw him in an Arcade. Unless it was Inky, Blinky, or Pinky, but Clyde was always the renegade of the bunch.

  20. dammit i had caffeine this morning in my red bull at work! shit! will have to wait until day after tomorrow to try. i wish they would explain comfortableness. i’m feeling a little ambiguous about that word…

  21. In the interest of helping you all with your cold reading skills, let me say that some of you are very close. Some of you are very far. And indeed the ghost’s name contained letters from the alphabet.

    Have I given away too much?

    @slxpluvs:

    So you are guessing that the ghost was my appendix? Or my virginity?

  22. It was your aunt Minerva, the one with the club foot who always got drunk at Christmas while she was making fruitcakes for the family. She appeared wearing her blue gingham dress with the pleats she sewed in there that nobody liked.

    She told you that the family silver was buried out behind the old septic tank, and that everybody is wrong about the Higgs boson rest energy and that she was really unhappy that her sister got all their mother’s best tea sets.

  23. You saw… wait, it’s coming… the ghost of… a young boy. He was… nine years old when he died. He… oh my, he killed himself with a shotgun! And you saw him… yes, I see that you saw him in Three Men and a Baby.

  24. Was it professor Plum in the Bedroom with the rope?

    If not then it was John Q. Adams (not his dad because he’s kind of dickish.) and it was oddly enough in the Lincoln Memorial in Springfield IL. Yes said Abe can’t find his car keys again.

  25. You saw an older woman, carrying a felted purse, wearing a long skirt, perhaps who passed with a heart or lung problem, definitely in the chest area. You didn’t immediately recognise her, and I can see why, looking at her now, because she’s indistinct in spirit, but I get the feeling that she was surrounded by children in her life, perhaps a schoolteacher (*pause to check reaction*) or maybe as the maternal head of a bustling family.
    Although she appeared in front of you she didn’t seem to notice you staring at her, and as soon as she caught your eye she went back to spirit, because to appear in a human form requires a great deal of concentration, and seeing you startled her out of it!
    (folksy chuckle)

    She’s telling me you have an old piece of jewelry in a box in your bedroom, and that the scar on your knee has healed nicely.

  26. It was the Ghost of Christmas Past, which was seen during a school play of “A Christmas Carol”.

    I’ve always known I could talk to ghosts; hell, I was reading books upside-down at the age of two.

  27. You saw the ghost of your little pet chipmunk ‘Sally’ on your bed. Sally died because you accidentaly stepped on it but Sally’s ghost forgave you and it said that you shall not mourn over it any longer…

  28. I, too, am getting an “M”. However, I am not a fakety-fake-fake charlatan like these other fake charlatan fakers.
    I sense an “M”. Muh… Muh… Mustard! Ah-ha! It was Col. Mustard in the Conservatory. Unequivocally.
    So is our date Dutch-Treat, or do you pay for it all?

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Back to top button