Gandalf said:
I do believe that there may be some form of energy in existence in the universe that many people call ghosts.
This is where you run into problems with physics...
I take the opposing view and believe physics may (eventually) actually be a way to explain what these heretofore unknown phenomenon are.
As a case in point, both my wife and I have heard bluegrass music coming from one of the bedrooms of the home we live in. We've heard it more than once and at the same time. There was no radio/TV/mp3 playing anywhere in the house. There was no sound of music outside when we went to check. Still, we heard bluegrass music. It had a "tinny" sound to it, like you'd expect from an old-timey radio, but we ruled radio out as a source already.
What was going on? I don't know. Yet the phenomenon was experienced by two people simultaneously in at least three separate incidents. I can raise a hypothesis to explain it, even if there is no way to scientifically prove it. Many discoveries in science were predicted even before there was hard evidence for them.
For my example, we could be looking at something involving the field of space/time. Some paranormal researcher believe that an area can "imprint" with an event (usually emotionally powerful) and the human mind and some electronics can pick it up.
Why such a thing would happen in one bedroom of our home, only discernible at warmer times of the year (for some unknown reason) I have no answer for. To me, there is no grand event that I'm reliving. It's just that somehow, by a process still unknown, my wife and I heard bluegrass music coming from the middle of an empty room. The ordinary laws of physics
should preclude us from experiencing bluegrass music out of empty space, but they didn't. So we're left with trying to find a cause/explanation based on sketchy hypotheses we try to develop.
I speculate that these "residual energies", or whatever they are, are able to interact with the phenomenon we know as consciousness. Our music might not have come from empty space as its starting point, but may have been heard only within our minds. The fact that it was two minds simultaneously is what begs an answer for me. Either way,we're still left with: how did this process occur? What laws of the universe allow for it.
Again, currently we only have speculations to which no one has any definitive answer. Still, that doesn't mean we don't stop exploring them. It's both intriguing and fun.
Those of us who are intrigued by these phenomenon
really need to do a better job at NOT couching our conclusions about them so smugly and being so sure of ourselves about the explanation. The truth is, we don't know what the heck it is we're experiencing.
As Dwywyddyr posted earlier, it could be a glitch in our minds. It could be that, or it could be a process of the universe we've yet to understand fully. For me, it's not dumb to offer up possible explanations; the human mind almost demands them. What is dumb about the process for many who speculate on these things is that so many of us want to assign absolute certainty to our answers and immediately promote our sometimes half-baked ideas to "Gods-honest-truth" status. All we've been able to do, for the most part is merely throw darts in the dark.