Julian Dibbell's 1993 Village Voice article A Rape in Cyberspace is I think a great example of Forteana 2.0.
Describing a 'rape' which took place in LambdaMOO, it is strange, spooky and, if I asked in the previous post if a remote experience can be as involving and immersive as a real world one, this story would seem to prove that it definitely can.
Featuring elements of posession, 'voodoo', a malevolent spirit somewhere between Freddie Krueger and Pennywise the Clown, wizards, and even Bewitched's Dr. Bombay, it is a genuine piece of cyber-gothic.
An interesting development from this original article is the idea that people visit the actual room online - a kind of virtual ghost walk. From Wikipedia:
creative writing instructor Cynthia Brantley Johnson of the University of Texas writes that after a discussion of the Dibbell article and Sherry Turkle's book Life on the Screen, which also mentions LambdaMOO, she has her classes log on to LambdaMOO en masse and congregate "in the 'room' where the virtual rape occurred" before sending them off to explore on their own.
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