I was headed home from friends house and decided to use the lyft application, not knowing what to talk about i asked the driver Charles “Carlos” Van Stuesen if he knew any folk lore, he asked and i explained and he told me a rather interesting, supposedly factual story his mother had told him she witnessed, Afterwards he told me this:

Informant: Well there is a.. feels like a ghost sprirt in our house umm.. me and my roommates named him Prior Walter for like the Walters before him.. but.. just a funny name that we gave him .. but everybody that comes to our house.. kind of feels this..  that spends the night their question the next day is is there a ghost in the house cause they always feel something..but umm.. he’s not ever evil.. he seems like he is always at the entry way .. its a split level home so when you come in your either going to go up down or at that main level..and he seems like he is always at that main level.. like to me it seems like he’s waiting for family to come home but they are no longer there.. and he doesn’t know any better.. whats the weirdest thing is .. is when my dogs will walk around him they will go up do a U and go.. keep on walking they do not walk through him and thats the weirdest thing to see… um but.. like i said he’s never been evil or bad or anything.. just you feel a presence every now and then and like i said everyone who has stayed the night has always asked that the next day..

Collector: where do you live?

Informant: In montabello … i’ve kinda gooled but nothing comes up.. but we’ve always just said we have a ghost named Prior Walter.

Collector: Do the dogs look at the ghost as they walk around him.

Informant: umm yea actually all of them would look and walk around him except for one.. she would sometimes just sit at the bottom of the stairs and just stare at him.. she would just look at his direction when there was no one there to look at.

This story definitely raises some flags to me, i have personally asked the question of whether there was a ghost or not and people have responded.. everyone asks that. This consensus of “feeling” of a ghost might shed light on why we believe things. There could be multiple reasons why people are feeling this without it being a ghost but we begin to believe in the unbelievable, when multiple people are experiencing and witnessing an inexplicable phenomena the tipping factor of belief might be that it is a unanimous or majority consensus. Also for some reason Dogs always sense spirits as shown above as in the movies as well. Dogs have a great sense of smell maybe whatever is causing these sensations also gives off a smell which triggers the Dogs attention. Regardless the Dog’s attention is a contributing factor in the weighing of odds of whether or not there is a spirit, and as my informant has told us he believes that there is a Ghost because (1) he himself feels a presence (2) multiple people have felt a presence without foreknowledge of others’ feeling. and (3) because the Dogs don’t act as they usually do near where this presence is felt. These three pieces of folk-evidence might be sufficient to inspire belief in Ghosts.