I don't understand why many people (myself included) fear ghosts?<p>If I heard something go bump in the night it would freak me out. Yet I've never read of a historic event of haunting where the ghost (or whatever phenomenon) actually did anything terrible. Tipping stuff over, opening doors, or in this case knocking on wood, isn't exactly threatening. Yet if that were me I'd split out of that house faster than you can say Casper :-)<p>I don't think it's the fear of the unknown. I see unknown stuff all the time that's not at all frightening. There's something about poltergeist (or poltergeist-seeming natural phenomenon) that's just too much.<p>My wife and her sister both claim to have seen the same ghost from separate rooms. In a house where someone was known to have died, one night she saw a man wearing older clothing standing in her bedroom doorway, looking at her with a puzzled look on his face. She blinked and he was gone. Her sister from her bedroom saw the same man. Only once, and it never happened again.