The Woolworths Poltergeist
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The Woolworths Poltergeist
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Re: The Woolworths Poltergeist
#2We laugh at people of the past who believed stupid things, yet here we are in 2020 with so many believers of flat earth, pizza gate, vaccine dangers, and pandemic hoaxes. A hundred years from now it will be no different, but at least we'll finally have flying cars.
Re: The Woolworths Poltergeist
#3This sounds very interesting, along the lines of the spiritualist mania of the late Victorians. If you want to read of a more disturbing and widespread version of this sort of thing, check out Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon. Chilling!
Re: The Woolworths Poltergeist
#4We laugh at people of the past who believed stupid things, yet here we are in 2020 with so many believers of flat earth, pizza gate, vaccine dangers, and pandemic hoaxes. A hundred years from now it will be no different, but at least we'll finally have flying cars.
The future will be no different if people continue to believe or dismiss theories without first confronting the arguments and evidence that validates or invalidates them (in a healthy marketplace of ideas).
I never subscribed to flat earth theory, but did I learn about it and read the subsequent material confronting it? Yes.
It wasn't a waste of time because it served as a valuable mental exercise that helped me improve my discernment.
Discernment is the precise thing I need to avoid being taken in by false ideologies or beliefs. I can't obtain discernment by excluding everything that doesn't already fit my preconceived notions or the carefully crafted consensus of echo chambers.
Maybe while researching something I discover that there is some truth to it or that there are valid reasons why people believe what they do. Perhaps the final conclusion is not supported by evidence, but some of the evidence supporting it is in-fact very compelling. Then, I can come to my own conclusion and be better informed without subscribing to the theory (in whole or in part).
Re: The Woolworths Poltergeist
#5We laugh at people of the past who believed stupid things, yet here we are in 2020 with so many believers of flat earth, pizza gate, vaccine dangers, and pandemic hoaxes. A hundred years from now it will be no different, but at least we'll finally have flying cars.
Self flying cars, c'mon!
Re: The Woolworths Poltergeist
#6We laugh at people of the past who believed stupid things, yet here we are in 2020 with so many believers of flat earth, pizza gate, vaccine dangers, and pandemic hoaxes. A hundred years from now it will be no different, but at least we'll finally have flying cars.
Well count me as a guilty one :).
Bought a small cozy place in Wales a few years back. Whenever I visited, I would often experience the usual - cupboard doors flapping open or shut for no reason, cold bursts of air, lights flickering, you get it. I'm sure one could explain it perhaps with an environmental variable such as the temperature or wind or the levelling of the foundations. My female friends would actually experience these occurrences with more intensity compared to my male friends, along with regular nightmares (again, which could be explained by certain physiological or environmental factors). When I looked up the house' history, turns out one of the earlier inhabitants was a woman who died prematurely after her fiancé, a British Raj veteran, died in India (which is where I'm from, maybe this is important). Couple all of that and you've got yourself a nice ghost myth.
I ended up selling the place later to a retiree couple, who haven't faced any issues/ were too old to sense them/ were used to this stuff.
Re: The Woolworths Poltergeist
#7We laugh at people of the past who believed stupid things, yet here we are in 2020 with so many believers of flat earth, pizza gate, vaccine dangers, and pandemic hoaxes. A hundred years from now it will be no different, but at least we'll finally have flying cars.
I want my ray gun. I went through all the trouble to live until the future and I’ve yet to see a single ray gun. Roomba isn’t much of a robot maid. My robot car gets all pissy if my hands aren’t at 9 and 3. Nobody said anything about there being no Mexican pizza in the future, hope time is cyclical.
Re: The Woolworths Poltergeist
#8I'm reminded of the book by John Steinbeck - Once There Was A War. It takes the reader through some of his war-time experiences in WWII while he was in Great Britain.
In one passage he relates the story of passing along a lane late at night on his way home or back to base and seeing a cozy cottage warmly lit beside the road. It looked homey but he didn't remember seeing it before and when he revisited it during daytime there was nothing there so he asked around and discovered that indeed there had been a cozy cottage at that location where an old lady lived. It had been destroyed by a bomb which killed the old lady and consequently, it no longer existed.
I probably butchered that tale so if anyone else read that book feel free to correct me. That book and Catch-22 were a couple of my favorites growing up. Excellent writers both of them.
Re: The Woolworths Poltergeist
#9We laugh at people of the past who believed stupid things, yet here we are in 2020 with so many believers of flat earth, pizza gate, vaccine dangers, and pandemic hoaxes. A hundred years from now it will be no different, but at least we'll finally have flying cars.
I want my ray gun. I went through all the trouble to live until the future and I’ve yet to see a single ray gun. Roomba isn’t much of a robot maid. My robot car gets all pissy if my hands aren’t at 9 and 3. Nobody said anything about there being no Mexican pizza in the future, hope time is cyclical.
You can still make mexican pizza, you just need to believe it.
Re: The Woolworths Poltergeist
#10> "It started with the loss of religious faith in the 19th century and peaked in the late 1930s, a period of dislocating social change and mass bereavement following one war, with another seemingly imminent."
It is hard to overstate this point. From our relatively comfortable vantage point, it can be hard to fully appreciate the deep psychological impact that the unprecedented loss of life must have had on so many for so long. Eveyone knew someone who had been killed, and even the tiniest villages have war memorials to those lost (there isn't a single "thankful village"[0] at all in Scotland for example). Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes and later "spiritualistic study" fame, even said in a 1930 filmed interview that "it was only in the time of war that all these splendid young fellows were disappearing from our view and the whole world was saying what has become of them... have they dissipated into nothing ... it was only at that time that I realised the overpowering importance to the human race of knowing more about this matter"[1].
Also war related, there's an interesting story about the last person to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. It was during the Second World War, in 1944. She was actually prosecuted under section 4 of the Act which covered fraudulent "spiritual" activity[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thankful_Villages