In reading through one of MR's threads, most everyone here is a skeptic when it comes to paranormal/ghostly activity. What would it take for you to ''believe''?
Believe in what? That's not an expression of sarcasm, it's meant in all seriousness. When people say 'paranormal', they might mean all kinds of things.
Believe that uncanny experiences happen? I already believe in uncanny experiences since I've experienced them. However my feeling that something is uncanny is subjective and doesn't really say very much about the objective world. So I'm inclined to give these psychological explanations.
Believe that apparitions and other anomalies may exist objectively? I definitely hold open the possibility. But I have a much higher skepticism threshold when the phenomenon is supposed to be objective.
Of course this objective alternative is going to be very diverse.
There might be objective apparitions that reduce to mundane explanations. I'd expect this happens fairly often.
And there might be a residual class of apparitions that has a supernatural explanation. While I'm inclined to believe in the possibility of the supernatural for philosophical reasons, I'd be very doubtful in particular cases. I can't think of any that have convinced me that what I was experiencing transcended physical reality. The transcendent is epistemologically problematic by definition. If we experience anomalies, how can we ever know that they had a supernatural cause as opposed to a currently unknown natural cause?
Which leaves the crucial question that is usually ignored. Even assuming that something weird exists or is happening in objective reality, and even assuming that it is supernatural in the philosophical sense,
what is it? Assuming for the sake of argument that it is supernatural, how could we ever know what it is?
Experiences of the uncanny require further interpretation before they become 'ghosts of the departed' or whatever they are supposed to be. That's where my doubt is greatest. I flat out don't believe in ghosts in the spirits of the deceased sense. Addressing your question, I'm not sure what it would take to convince me. That's more of a psychological question than an epistemological one I guess.
When do you consider accounts of ghost activity to be mere folklore or legend, as opposed to factual?
I'm inclined to think of the spectral vapors sort of 'ghost' as a holdover from obsolete biological metaphysics prevalent in ancient times. People thought of life in terms of some supernatural life force that animates physical bodies and makes them sentient. Then they associated this life force with the breath. So the idea took hold that when people die, their last breath carried their life force away from their body to wherever it was headed, the afterlife. And the belief took hold that this last-breath of the departed might linger around the place of death, particularly if the death was unjust somehow and the deceased had unresolved issues regarding it.
So we have supposedly haunted houses where murders took place and the victim's ghost lingers.
Well, I don't literally believe any of that and consider it folklore. Fascinating folklore, but folklore nevertheless.