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Why Do Children See Ghosts While Adults Don't? Exploring the Paranormal Perception Gap in Why Kids See Ghosts More Than Adults · Eye Opener Society

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  Good afternoon, everybody. This is Anne Lund, and I'm coming to you from my
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  podcast, Haunted and Waiting.
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  As always, I want to thank Gary from the Eye Opener Society for allowing me
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  this platform to share my stories
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  and my passion for anything haunted or paranormal, specifically ghosts.
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  Today's subject is easily titled, Why Children See Ghosts and Adults Don't.
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  So I feel that we have been conditioned
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  to ignore the obvious and that is why we
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  generally don't see ghosts or I shouldn't
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  say that I should say pay attention to them because I do believe they are around
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  all the time they give us messages all the time however we've been conditioned
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  to ignore them children however often report seeing ghosts and spirits and unexplained
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  figures things that adults usually will dismiss as imagination.
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  But what if children are actually perceiving a little bit more?
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  And it's the adults who have trained themselves to tune it out.
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  So in this podcast, I'm going to share some of my own experiences,
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  explore some famous childhood paranormal experiences of some famous people,
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  and maybe even examine some of the science behind the possibility as to why
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  children might see more or experience more than we do.
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  So if you have a child or you're around children, you're going to notice that
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  some things do stand out when they're little.
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  For instance, children tend to talk to themselves. They do this when they're playing.
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  A lot of times they will come and they will say they have an imaginary friend.
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  I know with my children, one of the two, this was the case.
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  I would walk into the room and there was a full-fledged conversation, nobody there.
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  And when I would ask him, who are you talking to? He would look at me as if
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  to say, well, that person right there, and then go on.
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  At that time, he was very young, so his language skills weren't developed.
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  I would say maybe about 18 months.
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  So I couldn't dwell more into it than what I just said, a key point.
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  It was very obvious that he saw something that I didn't see.
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  Other things that might key you into your children seeing things,
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  if they refuse to walk into a room or visit a specific house, open a closet,
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  things like that, it could be that there was a situation when they saw something
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  maybe that startled them, and now they don't want to go back into that same situation.
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  Or sometimes a child might come over to you and say, well, you know,
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  that pencil moved or the door opened or the pillow fell off,
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  things like that, a lot of times we will just dismiss them.
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  But I don't know if we should.
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  Sometimes I feel spirits feel like they can communicate more with children because
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  they're not going to be judged as harshly.
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  So let's move on.
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  Namely, I want to talk about something called a poltergeist or noisy ghost as
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  it translates into German.
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  And poltergeists typically happen to children.
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  It can happen to an adult, of course, but more often than not,
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  it does happen to children.
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  Just in the movie that was with that same title, The Poltergeist,
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  where young Carol Ann is able to speak to spirits through her television,
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  things like that are not as uncommon as we may think.
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  Surely it may not be as spectacular as in the movie, but little things like
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  that are not that uncommon.
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  With my own childhood encounter, if you've listened to my blog or,
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  I'm sorry, my podcast or read my blog, which is called hauntedandwaiting.blog,
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  if you're interested, just hop on over.
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  If you'd rather read these things, then listen to them.
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  I talk about the house that I grew up in, New York City, which I was wholly
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  convinced was a haunted house, wholly convinced.
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  It was only myself and one other person that lived in the house that saw things,
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  experienced things where everybody else seemed to be oblivious to it.
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  Childhood friends would come in and see things though. Again, all children.
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  But when I was young, I did see a full-bodied apparition. Again,
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  I was about 11, I would say.
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  And I tried telling people about it and I was chastised and kind of should have
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  been conditioned maybe to stop
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  talking about these things, but I wasn't because it was so clear to me.
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  But in that house, we've had other children and I can tell you,
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  one of my nieces routinely used to talk to somebody who,
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  when she was about this person that she saw.
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  Oftentimes when she was in her crib, she described it as a man.
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  She said he was wearing a hat.
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  She said he wore black clothes. But other than that, she couldn't say anything else.
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  He didn't seem to scare her, but she did see him a lot and she did speak about him a lot.
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  And the family members in our family tend to think it was cute.
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  It was made up. I, on the other hand, did not see it that way.
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  My own son, when he would come to that house years, decades later,
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  he had a habit of, again, he was about 18 months, two years old,
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  poking in the corner of my mother's kitchen.
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  And he would say that he saw a man there. And he'd say it all the time,
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  like there was a man as if it was floating in the room.
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  Again, we thought it was cute, I didn't.
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  I wholly believed him, but people in the family thought it was cute.
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  They joked about it. Oh, you know, do you see him again?
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  And he'd nod his head and sometimes he'd babble. He was a late talker,
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  but he'd put his fingers in his mouth and you could tell he was tracking something
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  that nobody else seemed to see.
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  So, and if you've listened to my other podcast on crisis apparitions or read
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  my blog on crisis apparitions,
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  I mentioned another story where a dear friend of mine had her niece over and
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  the moment her, the niece's grandfather had died,
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  this was a grandfather on the other side of the family, not related to my friend.
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  And she didn't know that the grandfather had passed, and she raised her hands
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  up in the air, and basically to be lifted, and she said, Grandpa.
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  And obviously, he was not there, and my friend didn't know it at the time, but he had passed away.
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  So clearly, it's a little bit too coincidental that this man had died,
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  and the granddaughter had spoken to him and clearly had seen him.
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  Again, she said she was around that 18-month to, I want to say maybe two-year
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  age level. I did not know this child.
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  But let's go into some famous cases with children seeing ghosts.
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  And there is documentation.
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  Some of the earliest that I was able to find was from 1716, documented a family
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  called the Wesley family in Epworth, England.
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  It was a Methodist family, very religious family, where the children from the
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  years of 1716 and 1717 saw many apparitions in this house.
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  One who they called Old Jeffrey, and they would have conversations with this
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  spirit that the adults could not see.
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  Now, there were people that worked in the house. I guess they were...
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  Maybe nannies, or it was a rich family that would report these stories,
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  and it spread through the town.
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  And sadly, the father of these children was so upset about this and thought
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  this was just utter nonsense that he adamantly refused to have any of the servants
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  perpetuating these stories of these apparitions that the children were claiming that they saw.
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  And it's documented that they heard footsteps, chains, horns being blown,
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  and oddly enough, wood being sawn, as if somebody was sawing wood.
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  But all the children were hearing this and reporting it. And then when the father,
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  a reverend, a religious man, found out that the stories were perpetuated,
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  he basically put his foot down and he said, no more.
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  Very sad because this sounded like a very active home and we could have got
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  some more information than just the one year span time where they were reporting these things.
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  If we skip over to America, there was this case in 1877 called the Watsika Wonder.
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  Where a young girl, I want to say her name was Laurency. I don't know if I'm
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  pronouncing it correctly.
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  She was living in Illinois at the time. She was 14.
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  And you do hear this sometimes, this spike. There's a lot of it happening with
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  young children, preschoolers, so before the age of three where language is fully
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  developed, which is sad because they can't really express what they're seeing.
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  But then there's this other spike that happens during puberty.
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  That's when it happened to me. I was around 11. And so this other spike and
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  this girl, Laurency, she was 14 years old. And,
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  apparently had a ton of experiences in her house where she was claiming to hear
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  all these ghostly voices.
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  She was probably what we would call a clairaudient.
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  So someone who senses voices as opposed to seeing things visually.
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  But at night, she was hearing a lot of voices and a lot of the information that
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  she was telling family members later claimed to be true.
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  So there were things, names of people that had passed, that had mentioned places
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  that she could not have possibly known.
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  So apparently in this family, the people surrounding this girl went the extra
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  step to see if these people that she was talking to or these places that they
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  were mentioning were actually true.
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  And apparently they were, and they couldn't explain how she could have known all of this.
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  Move more into the 19th century.
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  We're going to talk now 1977, right?
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  So this was about the time that I was experiencing my hauntings.
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  But this happened in London, and this was called the Enfield Poltergeist.
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  You can look all of these up, by the way.
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  I will link um, web pages to my blog.
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  Um, so if you hop on over to, um, my blog, which is haunted and waiting again,
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  haunted and waiting, hauntedandwaiting.blog.
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  I will link all these stories there so you can research some more,
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  but the Enfield poltergeist happened in 1977, um, to an 11 year old.
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  Again, we're talking that puberty, just entering puberty. Um,
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  a young girl named Janet Hoxson and actually her sister were experiencing very strange things.
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  So levitating furniture, disembodied voices, again, probably a clairaudient.
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  Disembodied means you're hearing a voice, but there's no body attached to it.
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  And earring knocking, earring knocking throughout the whole house.
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  Now this, again, is what we would call a poltergeist. It's a noisy ghost,
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  one that wants to be heard.
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  But interestingly enough, this drew the attention from the police department
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  because they were called several times to investigate the house.
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  And apparently they had seen some stuff and journalists also wrote about this.
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  So real classic hallmark of a childhood ghost sightings.
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  So I'll link those blogs on my, those web pages on my blog.
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  Let's talk about celebrities, because this isn't just happened to just your
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  common friends and what have you, but Kate Hudson famously said,
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  I see dead people all the time.
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  Kind of like in the sixth sense where he says, I see dead people,
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  they don't know they're dead.
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  Well, Kate Hudson said the same thing. She said, I see dead people all the time.
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  And she claims that from a young age, she had many childhood ghost encounters,
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  including one that kept repeating itself, and she referred to it as a faceless woman.
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  That's pretty horrifying.
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  You know, my experience with the paranormal or ghosts have always been good.
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  They've never been really scary.
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  I can't imagine seeing a faceless woman, but Kate Hudson claims she had.
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  She credited this all to her grandmother, apparently, who had a gift.
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  You'll see this sometimes.
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  People that are able or children that are able to see this, you've got some family.
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  It usually skips a generation, so it most likely would be a grandparent or an
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  aunt on that level, that family line.
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  Um a Keanu Reeves who doesn't love
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  Keanu Reeves sensitive soul if I could say the least
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  but um he claimed while he was living
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  in New York City um he used to see as a
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  child um a ghostly figure in a white suit um he said it would drift in and out
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  of his bedroom um he had very vivid memories about this and he speaks about
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  it as well um so um Keanu Reeves very sensitive person um if you know anything
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  about him and it would make sense that he'd be sensitive to these sorts of things as well.
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  And believe it or not, Ariana Grande claims that when she was in Kansas City,
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  she smelled sulfur and she heard whispering voices and she saw shadow figures.
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  And this was, again, when she was a child. Now, Ariana Grande was famous,
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  started her career as a child.
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  So I'm imagining this happened at that time.
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  But she is an enthusiast and you can link or look at the links on my blog on her as well.
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  So why do children see ghosts more?
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  Or is it just that they have no filter like we have?
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  Well, I personally think it has something to do with their brain development.
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  So I'm going to give you a little bit of science here.
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  Children's brains, they're just developing. So they don't have the same brain structure that we have.
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  And so the prefrontal cortex, it controls logical thinking, all right?
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  So as adults, we see something. we always go for a logical explanation because
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  that part of our brain, which is in the front of our heads, is well-developed.
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  In children, this is not the case. It is not well-developed. It is developing.
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  And so they rely more on instinct, which is like the older brain,
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  which is kind of in the back.
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  They react a lot on instinct. I mean, as infants, they still have some reflexes
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  that we don't have anymore.
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  And so I feel that this lack of this logical thinking, as I'm going to say in
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  quotes, because I don't think it's too logical to dismiss something as being
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  paranormal, but they lack that.
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  So I think they automatically don't try to understand it and just accept it.
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  The other thing is, I've spoken to Gary about this a lot.
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  I am an avid meditator. And the type of meditative practice that I engage in
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  requires me to meditate twice a day. And I've been doing this for years.
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  And we know that when you meditate, your brainwaves slow down.
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  It calms your whole nervous system down.
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  So beta brainwaves are very much associated with focus, attention,
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  and again, logical thinking. okay um,
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  Children, on the other hand, their brainwaves are a little bit slower.
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  So they function a lot of times on alpha and theta, which is more like a slower pace.
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  And when you meditate, you go into that alpha-theta states.
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  Those states are commonly associated with creativity, altered states of consciousness,
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  which we have to meditate to get to that area.
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  For those of you that meditate, it's an amazing feeling. If you pray,
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  it's an amazing feeling.
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  Children can access this a lot easier than we can. That's why they're so creative.
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  You might have noticed in yourself when you were younger, you were able to draw
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  better, or you were able to imagine things better. You could write better.
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  Your creativity was so much better than it. As you get older, it gets less and less.
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  Myself as a writer, I can tell you, I was a lot more creative of a writer when
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  I was in my teens than I am now.
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  So it could be that with children, this slower brainwave function allows them
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  to access altered states that we cannot.
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  So that's a theory that I have.
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  And then they have not also, the other thing I want to mentioned is they have
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  not learned to be skeptics.
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  So they haven't been taught yet to dismiss this, like, you're crazy, that's not there.
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  What typically happens with a young child is we'll say something,
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  oh, that's so cute, and we let it go.
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  As they get older, we say to them, you shouldn't talk like that.
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  You know you're making that up. That's insane.
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  There's nothing under your bed. There's no one in your closet.
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  And by continuously telling our
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  children this, I think we are basically conditioning them to be skeptics.
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  So that's that.
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  The other thing that I can think of is there's also less distractions.
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  So they are not as distracted as we are, like with social media and people around
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  us, excuse, that's my dog,
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  got an itch, but they can be a little bit more focused on this kind of stuff. So they accept it.
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  There's somebody in the room talking to them, they accept it.
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  And we, on the other hand, what are we going to do? Most likely we're going
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  to rub our eyes, dismiss it, walk out of the room,
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  say something, make something up, I must have imagined it. A child isn't going
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  to say that. They're not going to say I must have imagined it.
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  To them, it's right there.
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  Now, why do adults lose the ability? Well, as we get older, I think I've mentioned,
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  society and cultural conditioning teaches us to separate fact from fantasy,
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  although I don't think it's fantasy.
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  And adults, we're rewarded for being logical, okay?
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  And we're punished for accepting the paranormal.
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  So I've gone through this my entire life. There's a ton of people like myself
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  in my group that talk about this all the time.
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  You are punished for talking this way, and you cannot. So that's that.
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  Well, my final thoughts on this, basically, maybe we should just relearn to see things.
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  You know maybe children are seeing ghosts um and
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  it's not a matter of imagination after all but a matter of
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  openness um and that as adults
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  we've tuned out um from a whole reality
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  that exists around us but we won't allow it so um i've said this before i don't
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  think i am necessarily psychic I just think I don't give up or I look into things
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  a little bit more than other people.
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  I think we all kind of have a sixth sense. Some people are just a little better at accessing it.
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  So in closing, I think by letting go of fear and disbelief, we may slowly rediscover what we had once,
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  this ability to enter this world with like childlike wonder and curiosity and
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  see what actually is really there.
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  So in closing, I want to thank everybody for listening thus far.
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  If you are on Facebook, you can find me on Haunted and Waiting on Facebook.
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  It's a group. It's a small group. I like to keep it small.
• 20:37
  Friendly group. Share your stories there. If you're on TikTok,
• 20:40
  I've just joined TikTok.
• 20:42
  It is Haunted and Waiting at annlund333. You can find me there.
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  Of course, you can find me on the EyeOpener Society on PopBeam,
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  YouTube, Spotify. He's basically on all of the venues.
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  And of course, you can also find me on my blog, hauntedandreading.blog.
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  And I would love you to pay a visit, comment.
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  It just pushes the algorithm out so they can bring you more.
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  On that blog, I do have a free novel called My Browse Haunting,
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  where I talk about my stories growing up in a house in New York City that was haunted in the 80s.
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  So with that, I say goodbye to everybody. And just remember,
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  you may be seeing things, you may be experiencing things.
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  Don't dismiss it because you too may be haunted and waiting.
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  Till next time, my dear friends, this is Anne Lund.