well believing and close mindedness are not really the best of companions now are they

You bet they can. Some of my greatest events have been with skeptics when sommething of the paranormal, literally came up and bit them.

I went from being a skeptic to a possible believer for years until my last scary incident. Now i am a believer.

Care to explain what that may have been? I'm certainly curious.

I awaken and came downstairs to get ready to go to work. I picked up some old mail and placed it into the trash, cleaned up for 3-4 minutes, petted my dog....I was very awake. I walked into my kitchen, flipped on the light, and there was a dark shadow of a person standing 8 feet away. It rushed at my dog and me! My dog barked and we both very quickly moved backwards. There was "something" that came at me and my dog. It also scared my dog so she saw "It".

Well, this is a bit of necromancy, but hey - it's the newest thread in this section.

Yeah, I don't see any reason to think that skeptics cannot experience paranormal activity, if any such thing exists. I myself have experienced many things that I used to classify as "paranormal" - ghosts, visitations, even a few cases that I was convinced were possession - until I found out that there was a better explanation for them. All of them could be explained through simple, natural means - and many times, when I went back and asked the people involved, they admitted that they had staged the effects in the exact way that I believed they had been staged in.

While I do believe that it is possible that a paranormal phenomenon, such as ghosts or ESP, exists, I have not yet seen any reason to believe in it.

Why certainly they can. How they resolve what they saw, with their belief system, is something else.

Does the word skeptic also mean non-believer?

Skeptics believe that they are breathing and that the sky is blue, it's just that they want irrefutable evidence first.

It's ironic to me, but many who claim to be skeptics aren't really skeptical at all, they are believers against the paranormal. A true skeptic would be open minded to any explanation of a phenomenon supported by the evidence, even if that evidence led to the conclusion that super-natural forces were indeed at work.

What many or most skeptics ought to be saying more often is "I don't know". Such a beautiful three words that are much too infrequently intoned. For that matter, we here also need to be mindful of when we have sufficient evidence to believe something versus when we should also say, "I don't know."

Not necessarily. Most of the time, though, we skeptics are not believers.



This is true, but the evidence for the sky being blue and me breathing is right there, accessible whenever I want it.



Exactly. That's me. I haven't seen any evidence yet, but I'm open to it.



It seems that you have met a lot of pseudoskeptics and very few actual skeptics. Real skeptics do say "I don't know" a lot. Of course, it's often followed by "Let's find out", or "That doesn't mean that it's paranormal, though".
Pseudoskeptics, on the other hand, do exactly what you said - deny instantly what goes against their beliefs. There are an awful lot of them around, but there are real skeptics, too.

I certainly wouldn't rul it out and be warry of those that are dogmatic in saying it is impossible.