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Ghosts & Computers (Including The Vertical Plane)

Odd if true but it reeks of urban legend (albeit a new hybrid). Perhaps i've spend too much time at snopes. In particular the 13 in the username (explained as her age), and the 3 'very personal questions' which the author 'cannot go into here'. Its all too 'mysterious' for me.
 
The Yitthian said:
Odd if true but it reeks of urban legend (albeit a new hybrid). Perhaps i've spend too much time at snopes. In particular the 13 in the username (explained as her age), and the 3 'very personal questions' which the author 'cannot go into here'. Its all too 'mysterious' for me.
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Yeah, it is very urban mythy but I can't find it anywhere on Snopes and a google search for "chatroom ghost" didn't turn up anything about this story either, so it dose seam to sugest weather urban leagend, hoax or a real ghost it's a fairly unknown tale.

However theres also a faily well known road in liverpool called belvedere road and as it's not a very comman family name this could also perhaps indicate it's a UL.
 
Sounds to me like a complete and total UL. The medical diagnosis that the girl is suffering from is an extreamly rare condition. Remember ' The boy in the bubble'? He was 'alergic to life' too. Only a very few people in the world have been diagnosed with that condition.
The skin condition sounds suss too. Of course it is common with other allergies but to have it so serverly that it cuts off her social life pushing her more towards her computer is a bit to convienient for the story to my liking.
Also, people give all sorts of info away about themselves on-line wether conciously or not.
I guess one way to prove things is to look for a death certificate (Or even birth, as it's not obvious that this is a real person.). Her first and last name is given, her age, year of death and location.

BTW, on a kind of similar-but-not note, I watched 'E-mails you wish you hadn't sent' on BBC 2 the other night, subject 'Chain mail.' It was about a 7 year old boy who had cancer. His mum wanted his friends and relatives to send him loads of get well cards to keep his spirits up. A couple of family friends mailed each other and passed the info on, which in turn passed on and chinese whispers started. It turned into the boy being terminaly ill and wanting to beak to world record for get well cards before he died.
Well, he's in his late teans now and the cancer is gone yet he still gets up to 500 cards a week from well wishers trying to help him break his 'record'! A fine case of misinformation, and chain mail becomming a UL! ;)
 
Lord_Flashheart said:
yes thats the authors name:confused:
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Several years ago. Letters pages of FT... people complaining about the word "slemen" appearing on their computers in various inexplicable ways...

There was one site about it, which has now disappeared, but I made a copy of it here.

I reckon it was just a big hoax though...
 
When Mrs belvedere asked how it was possible to be in a chatroom on the internet when she was dead, Belvedere_13 failed to reply
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A pretty tough question, even for a ghost. Reminds me of the only funny line in The Matrix, "How can he be The One, if he's dead?"
 
Wintermoon said:
BTW, on a kind of similar-but-not note, I watched 'E-mails you wish you hadn't sent' on BBC 2 the other night, subject 'Chain mail.' It was about a 7 year old boy who had cancer. His mum wanted his friends and relatives to send him loads of get well cards to keep his spirits up. A couple of family friends mailed each other and passed the info on, which in turn passed on and chinese whispers started. It turned into the boy being terminaly ill and wanting to beak to world record for get well cards before he died.
Well, he's in his late teans now and the cancer is gone yet he still gets up to 500 cards a week from well wishers trying to help him break his 'record'! A fine case of misinformation, and chain mail becomming a UL! ;)
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The Craig Shergold story:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/children/shergold.htm

sureshot
 
On a couple of occasions when I was about 11 I heard the keys on my atari 800 (which was off, being night and all) keyboard depressing while I was trying to get to sleep in my room.

From the position my bed was in I could not actually see the keyboard and at the time I was far too scared at the time to glance over to see the keys move. My older brother also said later that he had heard this happening (as he was in the top bunk of the beds) and was also too scared to move during the noise (we also used to hear the pool balls in the next room clicking together.. but thats not really relevant here).

Interestingly this came up in conversation with my brother recently and i asked him if he'd wished he would have left on the computer to see what was typed. The answer was a definite "No, as how would you feel if it typed something like 'I'm going to kill you all'?". A bit obvious, but a fair point...
 
When I was a kid, I came home from school to find the sound of a BBC Micro/Electron tape playing (the distinctive weeeee-shhhhh-weeeee-shhhhh sound) was audible throughout the living room. It seemed to be coming from an external wall, and gradually faded away. It couldn't be heard from outside, and there was no tape playing in the house.

Quite why a ghost would make a tape loading noise I'm not sure... I've often wondered whether it wasn't a timeslip or something else.
 
Ghosts using computers?

Wouldn't you have to wait for the generation that routinely uses computers to die off before you had ghosts that were computer-literate? (half a :D here).

The way technology progresses these days, these poor shades would be just as confuzzled by modern technology as your granddad. So I would figure, except for a few exceptions, that you would have few incidents ever of ghosts using any type of rapidly changing technology.
 
Philo T said:
Ghosts using computers?

Wouldn't you have to wait for the generation that routinely uses computers to die off before you had ghosts that were computer-literate? (half a :D here).

The way technology progresses these days, these poor shades would be just as confuzzled by modern technology as your granddad. So I would figure, except for a few exceptions, that you would have few incidents ever of ghosts using any type of rapidly changing technology.
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I respectfully disagree. Not to sound flippant, but people of all ages die in accidents every day. The majority of the general population (including the aforementioned unfortunates of accidental deaths) use computers and have for a number of years now so IMO, ghosts familiar with computers would not be that uncommon.
As for the rapid changes in computer technology, we can only imagine how a ghost could use a computer since it would seem to be more complex than speaking into a tape recorder or appearing on videotape or film. I sometimes wonder if they can do things from the inside without the need for a keyboard. Considering some of the strange phenomena that I have read that has been attibuted to ghosts, it wouldn't seem that much more farfetched. I've been fascinated with this subject even more so in the last couple years since an aquaintance of mine died suddenly one night while online, sitting at his personal computer.
 
Midnight said:
I've been fascinated with this subject even more so in the last couple years since an aquaintance of mine died suddenly one night while online, sitting at his personal computer.
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The ultimate "fatal exception"??:)

and this one because he was your friend:(
 
eljubbo said:
The ultimate "fatal exception"??:)

and this one because he was your friend:(
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Yes this was no FOAF. I've heard of a few cases of 'death in front of the monitor', but I know this one to be real.
 
My Dad died at his computer. Mum thought for a while that he'd been trying to hack into the government's system (for political reasons - my Dad was an angry man) and they'd "zapped" him at a distance. She doesn't understand computers very well. Then again, he did die of a sudden brain hemorrhage...
 
Philo T said:
Ghosts using computers?

Wouldn't you have to wait for the generation that routinely uses computers to die off before you had ghosts that were computer-literate? (half a :D here).

The way technology progresses these days, these poor shades would be just as confuzzled by modern technology as your granddad. So I would figure, except for a few exceptions, that you would have few incidents ever of ghosts using any type of rapidly changing technology.
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I see your point but maybe, assuming that ghosts are manifestations of the dead, it is this confusion about technology that gives them an interest in it, a curiosity of the unfamiliar, which most live humans have. But it depends on the extent of knowledge required to use the technology. Using a keyboard would be a fairly obvious state of affairs for someone with no previous experience of computers (press key with letter on), but things like accessing a word document and e-mailing it around the world (as a random example) would require a certain level of previous knowledge.
But then thats not to say that it's not possible. I sort of agree with Midnight in that we don't know if the mechanisms that they use to access technologies would be the same as human methods.

Like in the case of EVP testing, where people sit and record hours of white noise and while they don't actually hear anything at the time on playback voices can (allegedly) be heard. Now, for the sake of arguement, lets say that these sounds ARE in fact voices of dead people (something I'm not really convinced about..) then this implies that while not emitting a physical sound (in the form of vibrating air) they are able to somehow project the imprint onto the tape itself.

I'm not saying that this is right or wrong, I'm not even saying that it's what i believe, just an idea to think about.

Sorry i've gone on so long.... I didn't mean to:)
 
Frog Of Doom said:
On a couple of occasions when I was about 11 I heard the keys on my atari 800 (which was off, being night and all) keyboard depressing while I was trying to get to sleep in my room.

From the position my bed was in I could not actually see the keyboard and at the time I was far too scared at the time to glance over to see the keys move. My older brother also said later that he had heard this happening (as he was in the top bunk of the beds) and was also too scared to move during the noise (we also used to hear the pool balls in the next room clicking together.. but thats not really relevant here).
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Have you got a cat? Or rats? Or mice?
 
Sally said:
My Dad died at his computer. Mum thought for a while that he'd been trying to hack into the government's system (for political reasons - my Dad was an angry man) and they'd "zapped" him at a distance. She doesn't understand computers very well. Then again, he did die of a sudden brain hemorrhage...
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Well, monitors can blow up in your face or give you a really nasty jolt. It happened to me years ago - my face tingled for weeks afterwards.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Have you got a cat? Or rats? Or mice?
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Had a cat at the time but it was always downstairs (It wasn't allowed upstairs), and never had any signs of rodent activity.
But keys generally require bery little effort to push so maybe something small like a rodent could press them...
I can remember it being more coordinated though.. but saying that as soon as your brain makes the assumption about what the noise was (ie a ghost) is it might try to form pattern similar to what is expected, so memory records what we think went on...
 
Ok, I was only half serious about computer illiteracy amongst those that have passed on. I still think that could in part be a factor.

But with an unknown of this degree, we can't be certain if they are accessing the computer in the normal way, or directly influencing it in some otherworldly way.

Also, we don't know if ghosts have the ability to learn after their deaths, or if they are just echoes of the spiritual energy of the living. If the former, I see no reason why a suitably interested spirit couldn't pick this stuff up -- particularly if they can observe the legitimate users of the machine.

But then again, you might just have a script kiddie loose on your machine.
 
Philo T said:
But with an unknown of this degree, we can't be certain if they are accessing the computer in the normal way, or directly influencing it in some otherworldly way.
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Yeah, this is the point. The problem with this sort of thing is that there will never be the cycle of cause and effect needed to verify the truth of what is occuring (in a controlled situation, because that's just not the nature of the beast). So we can never really establish what the mechanism is, or even if it is paranormal in origin, could be a virus, etc. The only thing that can be done is to colloect as much eyewitness evidence as possible.... that people inevitably ignore.

Anyway, if you're not sure where I stand on this one, join the club.

Philo T said:
But then again, you might just have a script kiddie loose on your machine.
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I'm not sure what this means... I think it may be a joke? (in which case for politeness "haha"). sorry i'm not up n the lingo.
 
"script kiddie"

Thats just somebody who has access to your pc, so they can mess with it and you at the same time.
 
Actually, I was using script kiddie in the sense of "an immature person who thinks they are a hacker but only has skill enough to use pre-written scripts developed by other people". A would-be hacker that's not too bright.

Frog of Doom:
The problem with this sort of thing is that there will never be the cycle of cause and effect needed to verify the truth of what is occuring (in a controlled situation, because that's just not the nature of the beast). So we can never really establish what the mechanism is, or even if it is paranormal in origin
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You raise a good general point. Most of what we lump together under the 'Fortean' label is anomalous. Science has a hard time studying what it can't pin down, observe and reproduce. I'm not sure if this points out a flaw in Science, of if this can be overcome somehow.

In all my readings on Fortean or weird subjects, I've never run across someone seriously trying to resolve this issue. Is science inherently unable to cope with the anomalous? Normally we think of a Science / Religion dichotomy. But it almost seems like we have a category of phenomena that doesn't fall into either realm.

Is this data forever damned? Or does some of it end up fitting into new theories over time (metorites, for example)?
 
Maybe the best we can hope for from observing and recording such phenomena is actually convincing the establishment that they exist. This will be a hard enough task as it is, due to a lack of theoretical frame-work to slot them into, and exceptance of them as geniune would leave an unsightly gap in theory (which won't be filled by simply shouting ghostie, I imagine:D ).

I would think that it would be more likely that the explaination for the causes of this sort of occurance will be found in another area of science before it is applied here (maybe in particle physics, neurology etc...), as you were hinting at. For now though, amassing large amounts of anecdotal seems the only way forward, but theory is probably impossible to glean from this information.

I'm not sure what the meteorite reference was to.. (I'm a bit slow.)
 
Frog Of Doom:
The meteorite reference was to how in the 18th(?) century, the French academy of sciences ridiculed the idea that "stones could fall from the sky" as peasant superstition. Rocks can't fall from the sky, because there aren't rocks in the sky. Plus, they were there in the first place.
The flash / boom and the fact that they were hot just indicated that the rock had been struck by lightning. Etc, etc.
Eventually, these rocks falling from the sky fit into somebody's celestial mechanics theory.

I know Fort relates this scenario in at least one of his books. I haven't found an online reference in a cursory search. It could be one of those 'Scientists are as dogmatic as priests' memes that gets trotted out.

I just created a separate thread on this : Can Science cope with the anomalous?.
 
Does anyone know if any of the family asked her /it, to "send a file or photograph"?
*Giggle!*
Si thi....:p
 
Lern how to spell ureself before poasting complantes about others....
 
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