Scary

[Checkm8]

I am sitting at work today and no one is really here due to the holiday weekend. It reminds me of a ghost town. Next, I thought man... ghosts are scary but so are hostile aliens. Which one scares you more?

[Supreveio]

Ghosts, man. Hostile aliens always have some stupid weakness like water or earth bacteria, which makes them less of a threat.

And even if they don't have some dumb mundane weakness, you can still shoot them. You can't shoot ghosts.

[Boss Llama]

I'm going with the aliens. Supreveio's right about aliens probably having weaknesses, but aliens would also be able to shoot back. Ghosts wouldn't be able to do that.

[Fraulein Arztin]

Well, I've never been scared of ghosts really. Shows like Ghost Hunters have really dulled down my scared-ness towards them.

Aliens on the other hand, scare the living bejesus out of me. My dad would watch X-Files all the time when I was young, so I associated the theme song music with creepy aliens. I still get chills down my back whenever I hear that tune, because I trick myself thinking that aliens are coming. lol
Also, I'm a girl. Being scared of aliens doesn't need reasoning. They're just plain creepy.

[M's]

I'd take on an alien any day, as I can see and track their movements.
Can't do that with a ghost.

[Tungsten]

I'm going with the aliens. Supreveio's right about aliens probably having weaknesses, but aliens would also be able to shoot back. Ghosts wouldn't be able to do that.

What if it's a Civil War ghost who swore revenge against the man who slept with his wife and killed his brother? But he didn't know what the other man looked like, so he wandered the world killing men with the gun his wife gave him before he left to fight in the war. He wandered until he died, trying to find this man who took so much from him, and continued his search in the afterlife...shooting people with his ghost pistol.

The twist is, the brother is the one who slept with his wife...and his wife killed the brother to cover it up.

[THE Flying chihuahua]

Ghosts, They can posses you. Look at the guy in my avatar for what happens when you get possessed.

[TTHREAZ]

I still get chills down my back whenever I hear that tune

Boo!

VIEW CONTENT:

[Boss Llama]

I'm going with the aliens. Supreveio's right about aliens probably having weaknesses, but aliens would also be able to shoot back. Ghosts wouldn't be able to do that.

What if it's a Civil War ghost who swore revenge against the man who slept with his wife and killed his brother? But he didn't know what the other man looked like, so he wandered the world killing men with the gun his wife gave him before he left to fight in the war. He wandered until he died, trying to find this man who took so much from him, and continued his search in the afterlife...shooting people with his ghost pistol.

The twist is, the brother is the one who slept with his wife...and his wife killed the brother to cover it up.

Ghost bullets aren't exactly scary. Bullets kill by transferral of physical forces, so an incorporeal one is as harmless as, well, anything else that's completely harmless.

To bring a bit of logic in to it (which I realize isn't the intent of this poll, but I'm gonna do it anyway), it is my considered opinion that ghosts and other such supernatural things do not exist. They tend to show up where there's profit to be made (television, books, interviews), or conditions are conducive to overactive imagaination or mis-remembering (isolation, fear, disorientation). Extra-terrestrial life on the other hand, even intelligent extra-terrestrial life, is almost 100% certain to exist. It takes what I would call a certain arrogance (or perhaps a desperate ego) to think Earth is the only planet out of billions to sustain life, and that as humans, we are the only life out there. Now then, I don't have any belief that Earth ever has been, or ever will be, visited by intelligent aliens, but I consider the infinitesimally tiny chance of that to still be more likely than that there are port-mortum spirits of some kind that can interact with or harm us. Ergo, I have no fear of ghosts, and a microscopic fear of potentially hostile aliens. Aliens win.

[MrBlah]

What about the disgruntled ghosts of hostile aliens?

[Cpt._Keyes]

What about the disgruntled ghosts of hostile aliens?

Well...humans are alien to earth...and we have ghosts! blah is correct!

[BETTEH]

You may not believe in them Al, but there was no money to be made when I was growing up living in a haunted house. My family moved into an old three story house in New England, the third floor would have objects randomly moved and placed in awkward places. My parents were sure it was me, I assured them it was not. Later on they began to hang pictures and mirrors on the walls only to have them smashed on the floor. We could hear them being tossed upstairs one at a time. We had a security system installed, police patrols. I still live with that, growing up and being terrified just to go home after school. I don't speak of it often, as most people cast aside what they don't know and instill their own sense of reason on the matter. I lived it, I know it, I feared it.

tl;dr Ghosts

[Stevo]

You may not believe in them Al, but there was no money to be made when I was growing up living in a haunted house. My family moved into an old three story house in New England, the third floor would have objects randomly moved and placed in awkward places. My parents were sure it was me, I assured them it was not. Later on they began to hang pictures and mirrors on the walls only to have them smashed on the floor. We could hear them being tossed upstairs one at a time. We had a security system installed, police patrols. I still live with that, growing up and being terrified just to go home after school. I don't speak of it often, as most people cast aside what they don't know and instill their own sense of reason on the matter. I lived it, I know it, I feared it.

tl;dr Ghosts

How did you determine that ghosts caused these events? How do you know it wasn't aliens?

[Will T.]

I honestly think that ghosts make for much better stories. Aliens are overdone and hokey to me at this point; there's just nothing inherently scary about outer-space creatures. While the same can be said about ghosts for other people, I personally find that there's a much higher fright factor in something which started out as something familiar, then turned into a hostile and unfamiliar entity (ghosts) than something altogether unfamiliar that just shows up out of the sky with no clear motivation (aliens).

I think there is a possibility of both ghosts and aliens. I also think that, if there are ghosts, not all are hostile. Some people/things just stick around for whatever reason without any hostile intent.

[MateoTheBold!]

Zookie had something happen to her when she was younger (Jr Highish) that leaves her convinced to this day that ghosts exist. It's a rather creepy story I admit, and its a little hard to punch any logical holes in it. I won't steal her thunder by spoiling the beans, though.