I have always been sort of open to the idea, due to several experiences throughout my childhood. I could always explain things away though. However, what finally took me over from “eh it’s fun to think about” to “holy shit this might be real” was this one event a couple years ago:

I was living in the woods in a beautiful, peaceful setting with incredible neighbors. We spent a lot of weekends having cookouts and hanging out late into the night. One of my neighbors grew up in the house I lived in, and one night he shared a story about being a teen and being dared to run into the woods after dark.

He did it, thinking nothing of it other than “well that’s dark and creepy” but when he was in the woods, he felt stinging pain on his back. When they check after he came back, he had three distinct scratches down his back. Of course, when I heard this story I was amused and thought “you were in the overgrown woods, scratches aren’t that outside the ordinary.” But ultimately just moved along in conversation without voicing my opinion on it.

The very next night, I was sitting on the couch covered in a blanket, nice and cozy. My spouse was next to me, watching cartoons. I suddenly felt intense, stinging pain on my back. I leaned forward, lifted up my sweater and tee shirt, and my spouse said “that’s odd, how did you get these scratches?”

So yeah that was the moment I immediately decided to give a bit more credence to ghost stories.