Ghosts & Computers (Including The Vertical Plane)

Yes! Thankyou thankyou thankyou!

*smothers escargot1 with sloppy kisses*
 
Yes it was indeed someone puporting to be from Elizabethan times and communicating throught the family's trusty BBC Micro. :)

Damn! There was me clicking on this Thread and expecting 586FAC75 to be claiming to be a computer entity communicating from the far future. Thereby providing many hours, or days of harmless entertainment and speculation. :(
 
The book referred to The Vertical Plane by Ken Webster is now going for £16 on ebay. Methinks from what has been posted its not worth the money currently being bid.
 
We have that book. I have read it, andI saw the original TV thing. Looked like a big legpull to me. :lol:
 
He went back downstairs and came straight back up with more stuff, only to find the drill unboxed and the cord completely unwound, all in a matter of 30 seconds with no one else upstairs
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Sounds a bit boggartish to me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggart. Or perhaps he has a springer spaniel like mine? He can open doors, boxes, packages and even the zipped pockets of discarded clothing. He also likes unwinding anything on a drum (toilet and kitchen rolls for instance). He usually then helpfully leaves things around (unless he eats them). He can perform such feats in seconds and in complete silence. In a way this is associated with electronic communication. I often turn around from reading my email to find all the cushions have been removed from the sofas and stacked in the centre of the room. The best part is to watch him grinning afterwards.
 
Re: FUTURE CONTACT BY COMPUTER.

zardozzz said:
UPDATE: I personally know the man who lives in the cottage now. He is an extremely down to earth person, in fact he is the sort of person to challenge a ghost rather than run away. Nevertheless the evidence of his own eyes has been challenged several times since he moved in a few years back. Here are two incidents which i remember off the top of my head, (i'll ask for more)
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Hey Zardozzz if you are still on the MB did you ever find out more?
 
Re: FUTURE CONTACT BY COMPUTER.

zardozzz said:
The next one was last week. The family were in bed, at 3AM or so, when woken by all the house lights coming on and great noise downstairs. On walking down the stairs it became obvious that the TV was on very loud and changing channels, as he entered the room the channel surfing stopped, but the TV and all the lights stayed on.
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Hmmmm. I started a thread about weird stuff happening about 3 am. Why does the creepy stuff happen around then?

I remember the programme about Tomas. Wasn't there something about the couple coming home to find all the cutlery arranged in some sort of delicate sculpture which clattered to the ground as soon as they entered the room?
 
Re: FUTURE CONTACT BY COMPUTER.

jimv1 said:
Hmmmm. I started a thread about weird stuff happening about 3 am. Why does the creepy stuff happen around then?
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There's a really bad film called "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" which said that things happen at 3am becuase according to religious bods it's the opposite of the time Jesus died (3pm), but this could have just been made up for the film.
 
No - it's something about the holy trinity, and it's Satan sending it up.
I thought that movie was mostly ok, actually.

And Will Storr mentions his encounters with 3.33 am, too, in that book - (Sniiiip - ed.)
 
A friend, not the kind of chap to make things up or tell tall tales, told me about a strange experience he had recently.

He was out running, while listening to his Ipod. As he went past a disused school, built early 19th century, disused for decades, he became aware of the sound of schoolchildren playing outside, (voices, laughter etc) and the clear voice of a young girl repeating the question "Can you hear me?

It went on until he was past the school, and 'out of earshot' if that could apply here.

Obviously there was no one in the area at the time who could have been making the noise externally. And it's unlikley that it was on the music he was listeining to, unless Snow Patrol have been doing some very experimental remixes.

He runs reguallry in the area, with the same Ipod and this has only happened once ever.

Any other reports of this kind of thing? Sounds a bit like some kind of evp, although a 'live' event rather than a recorded one.
 
did he feel like it was coming through the headphones, or from outside them?
 
Sounds like he was picking up a radio transmission - probably there was a delivery vehicle in the area trying to make contact with its home office.
"Can you hear me?" is the sort of thing you'd expect.
 
I feel sorry for ghosts these days, if they want to make contact as everyone always blames radio transmissions or walkie talkies... :roll: ;)
 
UncleFidel said:
He was out running, while listening to his Ipod. As he went past a disused school, built early 19th century, disused for decades, he became aware of the sound of schoolchildren playing outside, (voices, laughter etc) and the clear voice of a young girl repeating the question "Can you hear me?

It went on until he was past the school, and 'out of earshot' if that could apply here.

Obviously there was no one in the area at the time who could have been making the noise externally. And it's unlikley that it was on the music he was listeining to, unless Snow Patrol have been doing some very experimental remixes.

Any other reports of this kind of thing? Sounds a bit like some kind of evp, although a 'live' event rather than a recorded one.
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Not at all! Snow Patrol for sure ----
Album: Eyes Open
Song: Untitled (bonus track)
Duration: 3 minutes and 55 seconds.

Content Sounds of a young female child talking, usually about something to do with her writing her name, and can you hear me. Later playing with a ball.

Case closed. Sorry... So yes "Snow Patrol doing some very experimental remixes." ;)
 
I have an MP3 player and a mobile phone, both of which have an in-built FM receiver and in both cases the headphones act as the antenna, so it is entirely possible that your friend pick up some sort of a broadcast from kids playing with a walkie talkie or similar...

When I was a teenager and still living at home (back in the 70s). my father had one of those big stereos that were in fashin then. You know the type, lots of knobs to fiddle with, 1 metre high speakers in wooden cases, the various components in polished aluminium, that sort of thing.

Anyway, I was sitting in the living room close to one of the speakers, reading a book. The stereo was completely switched off. And all of a sudden I am hearing voices coming thourgh the speakers, lots of static, too. But definitely discernible voices. Freaked me out no end. I checked the stereo thoroughly over after they stopped, but everything was definitely switched off... :shock:

So, I re-sumed reading for a while, blaming my over-active imagination, when the voices started talking again...and this time I could make out what they were saying: It was Taxi drivers talking to HQ and asking where the next pick-up was! Somehow, even without any amplification, the speakers managed to pick up the Taxi's radio signals.

Later on, a similar thing happened on a holiday whereby a small radio would broadcast the pilot's communications to the next airport whenever small Cessna-like plane was flying low overhead.

So - in short - it is possible to pick-up radio signals with an antenna and no amplification.

Then again, maybe ghost kids just like Snow Patrol? ;)
 
Waylander28 said:
Not at all! Snow Patrol for sure ----
Album: Eyes Open
Song: Untitled (bonus track)
Duration: 3 minutes and 55 seconds.

Content Sounds of a young female child talking, usually about something to do with her writing her name, and can you hear me. Later playing with a ball.

Case closed. Sorry... So yes "Snow Patrol doing some very experimental remixes." ;)
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aha! so 'tis
the unforgivable nonsense of the untitled 'bonus track', which basically consists of four minutes of background noises and children talking.
http://www.musicomh.com/albums/snow-patrol-2_0406.htm

thanks for all the other suggestions.

Strange coincidence nonethe less...
 
I am reminded of a story told long ago on alt.ghoststories. The teller was alone in a building (I think it was his college's theater) when he heard strange spooky noises. He tracked them down to a remote part of the building, where he found a casette player running, but he was convinced that it was picking up ghostly signals because it made no sense, bits and pieces of bars of music, muttery voices, and suddenly one very clear male voice saying: "Number nine, number nine, number nine."

Of course the older people on the list found his freakout hilarious; but I guess if you've never listened to the White Album, hearing "Revolution Number Nine" for the first time under those circumstances would be a little creepy.
 
PeniG said:
Of course the older people on the list found his freakout hilarious; but I guess if you've never listened to the White Album, hearing "Revolution Number Nine" for the first time under those circumstances would be a little creepy.
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Well, that now makes me officially one of the older people! :roll: Well, that an my new bi-focals.

But I'm sure John Lennon would have had a good laugh about that one.
 
The teller was alone in a building (I think it was his college's theater) when he heard strange spooky noises.
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I'd like to track that down and read that! But if he was really alone in the building . . . and the recorder was just there, and just on, for no apparent reason . . . that would be spooky in itself (especially with the White Album's Manson associations)!
 
Older is relative - you only have to be older than the person who posted this to qualify. (I had bifocals when I was 9, so don't let that make you feel aged.)

If I'm right about him being in his college theater, there'd be too many liminal spaces, too many doors, and too many people with legitimate access to be sure he was alone in the entire building. All it requires is somebody to have been working on something with their tape player running, and to have gone off and left it on.

I wonder whether it was a homemade tape of "weird tracks," of which Revolution #9 was the last; or he was freaked enough to leave before "Good Night" came on and gave the show away. Or maybe it was a homemade tape of the White Album that wasn't quite long enough to take an entire side and cut off the last song - I had a couple of tapes like that back in the day.

As usual, I just retain the story and take no responsibility for its having reshaped itself in my head over the years.
 
Used to record all sorts of odd things on my old casette player! :) Bits of songs, sound effects from TV shows and movies, LPs played at the wrong speed, my brother and I wandering through the back yard at night looking for monsters . . .

"Several Specimens of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict" by Floyd -- that would be freaky to hear coming from somewhere in an empty building!
 
Content Sounds of a young female child talking, usually about something to do with her writing her name, and can you hear me. Later playing with a ball.

Case closed. Sorry... So yes "Snow Patrol doing some very experimental remixes."
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I have a passing acquaintance with Snow Patrol (why yes, I am down with the kids) in that I quite like their chart stuff etc, but that bonus track just sounds like it would be incredibly creepy - especially if you weren't expecting it.

Aren't children's voices and laughter often used in horror films/effects as they can just be a tad disconcerting?
 
Time-travelling/ghost computer messages

Apologies if this in the wrong section, I'm not sure where it should go!

I wonder if anyone can help me remember this story. Back in the late 1980s/early 90s on one of the regular UK telly channels I saw a programme which featured a segment on a ghost story of sorts.

The main subject was a computer (one of those old-fashioned green screened ones) on which messages appeared from a person hundreds of years previously. The owner of the computer could type messages to this person and get replies. The person from the past was puzzled by this magic green box which could talk through written words. By the end of the segment I seem to remember the messages had stopped after the historic person raised concerns over people she/he knew thinking he/she was a witch due to the magic green box.

Does this ring a bell with anyone? It might have been on something like 'Strange But True' or something similar. If anyone does remember it - does anyone know if anything came of the story?

Thanks.
 
Hello, and welcome to the board!

It rings a bell with me - and I think you're right, it was on Strange But True. Buggered if I know of anything that came of it though! The one I remember the most from that programme had the kids dancing round a pylon, whilst murky monks lurked by cars!

Shudder
 
Found this - which may or may not be the same event(s) ...


In 1984–86, Ken Webster (a school teacher) in Dodleston, UK, purported to be in contact with someone called Tomas Harden from the 16th century, along with other characters including one of them being known as 2109 (or 2105 communications in Luxembourg). The messages are purported to have been left on a humble BBC Model B fitted with an Acorn DFS upgrade. They were found on the editing screen of the ROM-based word processor EDWORD and within EDWORD files created on disk (or appended to them). The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) took the computer away to be examined by an engineer but were unable to make the computer work until its return to Webster's home. The SPR came to no conclusion regarding the case and left mystified. Ken detailed the curious case in his now out-of-print book The Vertical Plane [1989 Grafton Books, ISBN 0-586-20476-8], two episodes of a BBC 1 documentary series presented by Carol Vorderman [Out Of This World, 20 August 1996 & 27 August 1996 and in a Fortean Times article, The Vertical Plane - FT108, also a short interview with Ken Webster.
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SOURCE: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread286389/pg2

There's also a brief overview of the Webster exchanges here:

http://www.worlditc.org/c_04_s_bridge_24.htm
 
EnolaGaia said:
Found this - which may or may not be the same event(s) ...
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Thanks, that does indeed sound similar. At least it confirms I didn't dream up the story anyway! :lol:
 
We have the book. I remember it well on TV. It could stand a repeat!
 
Anyone remember the story about an old computer ghost?

I seem to remember reading somewhere years ago about a computer - probably a BBC Micro or Vic20 type thing (it was LONG before the internet) that had apparently started getting messages from a ghost or a person from the future or something.
Sorry to be vague, I can't really remember it all, which is why I'm asking :lol:
 
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