/x/ - Paranormal

>>830 (OP) 
According to traditional "ghost-lore", most spirits seem to be physically bound to a place that was somehow meaningful to them - be it their former homes, the graveyard where their mortals remains are buried, or perhaps even the battlefield upon which they died.
In much of the same tact, ghosts seem to have a relatively hard time manipulating objects in the physical world, with most of their activity being confined to short pushes and shoves. 

That being said, there also are multiple stories about ghosts that keep fighting their last fight ad infinitum. They say both Union and Confederate ghosts are still continuing the battle at Gettysburg. Britain itself has multiple locations where you supposedly can see Roman ghosts marching straight past you.

>>830 (OP) 
Britain has a fairly rich history of Roman ghosts (specifically Roman legionaries) prancing about left and right; often in whole armies. And Gettysburg likewise is supposed to see continued fighting between Union and Confederate spirits.

Why there's not more of them is up for debate. For the modern age, one possible explanation might be that actually becoming a ghost actively requires you to believe in ghosts. In the sense that - if you don't - you flatly come to accept that there's nothing more you can do in your doing moments. As opposed to the notion you might still have your vengeance from beyond the grave.

An interesting question would be whether or not soldiers suffering a very quick or instant death (i.e, by headshot) have a lower or higher chance of keeping on fighting on the other side. In the sense they flatly don't realize they died.

More to the /k/ point, haunted guns would be easy to detect, easy to prove, but hard to notice at random.
Unlike most potential supernatural events, which involve people (variable), large objects, distant sounds, or unobserved movements, a haunted gun could be characterized by massive differences in outcome from minimal force.
Due to rifling action and the extremely regularized nature of bullets and barrels, bullets almost never deviate from a straight/normal trajectory, only accounting for curvature and gravity (over huge distances).
A ghost even slightly "nudging" a bullet with the force of a gnat on the way out of the barrel could cause a visible deviation in final contact, the shape of hole or location, that could be forensically verified.
This goes for people claiming to be psychics as well, any power over metal at all (no matter how weak) could make a huge, demonstrable difference in bullet trajectory if you're aiming for 300 yards.

That's all hard to notice at random, because very rarely are old guns taken to the range, and people dismiss improbable deviations as bad aim or wind all the time, even where that makes little sense. IMO, if any thing is haunted at all, guns would be a top contender.
I'm kind of surprised the military never considered this; they invested a lot into "Psychic Combat," i.e. the use of the mind to affect the disposition of consciousness of any target, but there is no study of using the mind to bend a real bullet's trajectory, like for target-seeking bullets. That's despite their interactions with Uri Geller, and affecting objects was his whole schtick. It's possible that research is still classified, but I kinda doubt it.

>>889
What if the gun itself was possessed? Imagine the gun firing without you pulling the trigger because there's someone in its sights it doesn't like.

>>889
Wait, did military scientists actually try studying le nazi fox man as though he had legit powers? I know he claimed his powers were real but most people regard him as an illusionist.

>>890
Pulling a trigger is a good amount of force, but there's always been the thought of "misfires," so who's to say? 
It's almost totally unstudied, as far as I know.

>>891
Uri Geller worked with the military and CIA as part of a relatively small facet of the psychic warfare studies of the Cold War. He was brought in for a demonstration, studied for a week after he convinced them he had psychic powers, and collaborated with intelligence operatives in the years that followed. 
It's hard to say how much of the study was people "in on the joke" or true-believers rigging it for success, but taking his results at face value, he proved that he was somewhere in the space between psychically capable (doing the impossible) and psychically competent (doing the impossible reliably). The conclusions of administrators of the time was that he was not reliable enough to turn it into an active and useful program, not that he did not demonstrate any psychic powers.
Ultimately, mounting concerns that Uri had instead successfully conned people into giving him answers and information, on purpose or on accident, led to the whole thing getting canned.

Noteworthy addition: I do not believe he was ever evaluated on "spoon-bending" or physical telekinesis, which is bizarre, because that was his most public trick. Likely they knew it was a trick, and focused on what they perceived as authentic unexplainable events under his most obvious con, but I think that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Telekinesis would be the most provable and potentially the most useful psychic power, or way to interact with ghosts, as previously discussed.
Imagine for example you knew gunshots reliably swerved to target the gun-owner's murderer's heads. if you needed to assassinate a dictator, wouldn't arming the entire squad with their victims' firearms, or their murder weapons, be a massive advantage? Would "coincidences" start to line up just right to make the mission a success? Likewise, if psychics can curve bullets, would a squad of le nazi fox men do the job better than trained shooters?
Due to the fragility of the physical forces involved, how intimate guns are with death, and how regularized firing procedures are, it seems like a really good target for detecting "minimal" or "weak" supernatural activity of any kind.

>>892
Personally, I doubt self-styled "psychics" like Geller either
a) actually exist or
b) would go out of their way to promote their abilities to the public.

Try to put this into a mental scenario: If your local secret service realized you could employ a however weak force of telekinesis or what-have-you with your mind, do you really think they would make a big deal out of working with you (or allow you to write something like a book about it afterwards), or would they try to keep it behind covers while also keeping you in a cooperative mood via blackmail instead of cash prizes?
If such a person would exist, the military would make him or her disappear and then tell the PR department to write it off as a mysterious suicide with a corpse that was never foudn.

>>896
I agree as a rule on pop psychics, but it shouldn't stop relatively inexpensive experiments or bounties for guns exhibiting supernatural phenomenon, be it due to ESP or ghosts.

>>900
The problem with that it'd be hard to measure.  
Assuming spirits can possess guns that killed them and target the people that killed them, how do you measure that? You'd not only need the gun, you'd also need someone it's angry it and then shoot a couple inches past them to see if the bullet deviates. Nobody is going to volunteer for that.
To test that hypothesis, you'd need to go into some third world deathmatch-zone where you can find unwilling participants and homemade ghost-guns.

>>902
There's plenty of murderers in jails with their guns in evidence lockers. Offer a reduced sentence and take minimal precautions to make sure the process doesn't murder them, though it wouldn't be much of a loss. Here's a very simple drawing demonstrating how you could do it.

ghost_gunnin.png
[Hide] (38.6KB, 640x400)

>>918
The image server hates me, second time trying this.

>>830 (OP) 
>lust provoking image
>pointless time wasting question
It isn't a pointless question but still.

>>830 (OP) 
German soldiers practiced for centuries a kind of war magic called Festmachen(solid making). The practitioners of Festmachen claimed to be geforen(frozen) and hence invulnerable against bullets and melee weapons. Besides instructions for how to become invulnerable, the art also contained curses against soldiers and horses, how to heal diseases, how to build magical weapons and armors and how to curse and uncurse guns. Any battlefield ghost would have had to deal with this stuff, on top of that every war attracts legion of priests who sanctify weapons and burry all the dead they can find. 

At last you have to keep in mind the culture of people. People who see it as an honor to die in battle aren't bitches who come back as salty ghosts to torment the living. You would have to do some serious desecration and sacrilege against these poeple for them to come back.

>>954
can you drop me some sources to read about those german soldiers?