Okay, I think I've been patient enough. Let's do a post-mortem on this thing.
It started when I responded to Alarica's post about haunted houses. I quoted her description of one event, and offered sleep paralysis as an explanation. You came out of right field swinging at the fences with misguided, patronizing blather about how you're "a better skeptic than [me]". You fired off snotty accusations that I had applied one explanation to a variety of experiences, based on an obvious misreading of my post. So you began the conversation with a shitty attitude, and error - not an attractive combination.
For my own part, I quietly overlooked your invitation to petty dick-measuring contests and pointed out in flat, clinical English that you had misunderstood me. The mistake, once called, was so obvious that you didn't even try to defend it. Instead, you cheerfully agreed that the "incident itself [was] unquestionably an incident of sleep paralysis", and made a half-baked attempt to pretend that the issue had been my lack of an explanation for sleep paralysis. That was in naked contradiction to the stuff in your first post about "seeing things while fully awake" and "hallucinogenic properties". So you dropped that whole line of argument like a sack of rotten potatoes and came up with some canard about how maybe the sleep paralysis itself was being caused by ghosts.
I decided to let you off the hook for the shell games. I responded to the canard in calm, neutral terms, making the case that natural explanations are preferable to supernatural ones. You didn't have anything substantive to say in response to that, either, so you conjured up some silly quibble about how there could be multiple causes of sleep paralysis, completely missing the point that the argument I had just made applied with equal force regardless of how many phenomena or causes were into the picture. It was in that same post that you hit us with this little gem:
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Also, why is said woman getting sleep paralysis in a supposedly haunted house?
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That was such a stunningly bad piece of thinking that I had to read it over several times before I could convince myself I wasn't misunderstanding you. It made a sick joke out of your claim to be any kind of skeptic at all, let alone a better skeptic than me. Nevertheless, I fought down the instinct to castigate you, and responded once again in a flat tone, pointing out why the argument was not a compelling one. Again, no response from your side.
It was at about this point that I responded to the post of another user (the one about electrical phenomena). That was a windfall, because it gave you a whole new front upon which to launch sniveling attacks in an attempt to distract attention from the intellectual thrashing you were getting. Perhaps having noticed by now that playing hide and go seek wasn't winning the day, you thought you would give equivocation and word games a shot. So you nitpicked my definition of "ghost".
Notice that neither at this point, nor at any point before or since, has anyone, including yourself, been confused in the least about what I'm talking about. Notice also that you had yourself used the term "ghost" to describe concious entities earlier in the course of the same thread. You must and do concur that my usage of the term is a correct one. So the very best you could ever have had is a case that my use of the term was correct, but I was drawing its meaning up a little two narrowly, albeit without producing confusion. In other words, semantic masturbation.
To add comedy to tragedy, you botched even that, and just for good measure you thought you would throw some dishonesty into the mix. You shlepped yourself around the Internet shopping for definitions, carefully ignoring all the dictionaries which give as their primary definitions descriptions of "souls of dead persons" and so forth, until you found one that you thought you could bend to your purposes. You still had a problem, though, because the definition was pretty hard to misinterpret in the way you wanted to, and worst of all, it included an example of usage: "the ghost of a smile". Hey, no problem - you redacted that, and proudly posted your own hacked version. Plainly speaking, you lied.
I had put up with the the bad thinking, bad arguments, and bad attitude, but I have a peeve about dishonesty. That little stunt annoyed me enough that I sent you a private message suggesting - again in reserved language - that you drop it. I then responded to the thread, noting that context matters with definitions. You claimed your definition was in context. I demurred, and dropped a not very subtle hint that I had noticed your attempt at deception. You knew you couldn't defend that, so you stayed true to form and pretended it had never happened. You re-asserted that the definition was in context and elucidated your point about a wider definition for "ghost". That time your post was innocuous, so I decided to let bygones be bygones one last time.
You couldn't let it go, though. You had to toot your horn to Jillian about your imaginary victory. That's just about enough. In this thread you started with false pride and error, transitioned to evasion and casuistry, and finally retreated into dictionary la-la land before reducing yourself to outright mendacity. If you look over the course of our conversation, what you'll see in your posts is aimless meandering almost totally disconnected from any relevant topic. The only common thread holding it together is your desperate attempts to find something,
anything to prove me wrong on.
I don't know if you're annoyed by my skepticism or if this is some kind of pathetic monkey politics, but you've finally dragged things out to a sufficiently ridiculous extent that I think it's in order to call out your bullshit. If you wanted to inflate your self esteem by taking someone else down a notch, you picked the wrong victim.
You might even say that you never had a ghost of a chance. And that's in context.