blog of the damned

Virtual Out of Body Experience

2007-08-24T10:21:00.000Z

From the BBC website, scientists recreate out of body experience using VR...

Out of Body Experience Recreated

Oscar the Cat of Death

2007-08-03T15:29:00.000Z

Well it's summer and two of the Internet's preoccupations have collided: Forteana and photos of cats with humorous captions. Today is also Friday, the traditional day for cat blogging.

The story concerns Oscar the grim reaper. I first came across the story in this Guardian article along with the photo of Oscar. According to the Guardian

Oscar the rescue cat is not simply a welcome feline companion at the Steere nursing home in Providence, Rhode Island. According to a new report in a medical journal he has a remarkable, though morbid talent - predicting when patients will die.

Perhaps rather ironically, the story was titled "Oscar the rescue cat." It was soon to collide with the Internet juggernaut known as the "lolcat". A lolcat is a "laugh out loud cat photo" which is to say it is a photo of cat with a humorous caption. Naturally, humour is a matter of opinion. The original lolcat seems to be "I can has cheezburger?"

These days its rare website that doesn't feature a lolcat or two somewhere.
The next day I was reading one of my favourite debunking blogs (yes, I know, I find both Forteana and debunking interesting) and who should show up but Oscar the lolcat.
Unsurprisingly, Oscar the lolcat has spread across the net like wildfire. I suspect as well that like the psychic parrot and the cat the chased a bear up a tree, Oscar's due for a long stint on the net. There is of course a long tradition of Forteana about animals with extraordinary perceptions and lolcat has, in a short period of time, become an extremely widely used tag. I suspect that skeptical cat is going to have his work cut out.

Ghost for Sale

2007-07-09T15:14:00.000Z

Found on Ghost-stories.net, a ghost for sale on Ebay.

My Mother the Ghost

If you are the high bidder, in addition to purchasing my mother’s ghost, this is what you will receive:
– A small scrapbook with my mom’s story in it. It will include photos of my mom as a child; in her 20’s; at her wedding; a photo taken on her last birthday in 2001 (four generations: my grandmother, my mom, me and my daughter); photos of the TVs and light fixture that she haunts; and a photo of her cemetery headstone. (She is buried at the cemetery surrounding a world-famous wedding chapel, Duncan Memorial Chapel in Floydsburg, Kentucky.) The chapel is clearly visible behind her grave.
– Her eternity band that she wore with her engagement ring and wedding band. It is 18K white gold and has an intricate floral pattern, no stones. We believe Mom’s ghost will go with the ring.
– A that this story is true, signed by me, my husband and my children.
Please help! Thank you in advance for taking good care of Mom's ghost.

The ideal gift for the fortean in your life.

Facebook of the Dead

2007-07-03T10:04:00.000Z

I have been bitten by a Zombie. And a vampire. All from the comfort of Facebook.

Among the 'rate my mates' and 'Simpsons quote of the day' applications on Facebook lurks a darker purpose, an endless battle being fought between Vampires and Werewolves, and Zombie mobs roaming the network 'biting chumps', until we all fall under the brain munching spell.

It's funny, but I also think it's interesting in tracking the path of a viral idea through a social network. I think Romero would love it, the idea of Zombie infection through the internet, thousands of us clicking away, adding friends, poking friends, biting chumps until there's no-one left...

Many Dead things

2007-06-21T09:20:00.000Z

I just came across an interesting blog - many dead things. The author is a self-confessed steampunk fan and says that he is into "illustrating, concocting and generally fabricating your darkest and deepest desires, be those four headed foetus's or artwork for your various needs.My current projects include various pseudo historical and scientific collections, "history that never was" type affairs..."

What drew my attention was a post about Lovecraftian horrors in specimen jars. Lovecraft's work has tended to take on a life of its own - especially his fictional book, The Necronomicon. Although the book is a fictional creation, some readers have come to believe that it is real, some people have playfully or maliciously produced hoaxes and some "anti-occult" activists appear to believe that the book is real. Wikipedia gives a reasonable account of this "blurring of fact and fiction".

Lovecraftiana appears to be to a prime candidate for Forteana 2.0 in that there is enough interest out there for people to play with the notion (e.g. try this delicious tag for necronomicon - check out the Necronomicon plush pillow) and there is enough information out there that an incautious observer might assume the simple truth. There are already plenty of 'real' Necronomicons out there and I suspect that there are no lack of virtual ones too. It would be good to determine if there is a name for this deliberate recreation of fiction as the real.

Michael Pennington (Deceased)

2007-06-20T21:57:00.000Z

I recently came across a forum post about a 'ghost' called Michael Pennington who appeared to haunt the local forums of Birminghamuk.com, which was then adapted into a book.

Find out more here - Michael Pennington at Birminghamuk.com. There is a caution on the site that, whatever we believe, we should treat this story as fiction - I don't know if that's meant to stop us getting scared or to stop them getting sued!

I think most of the original forum posts have now disappeared (I did a search on the Birminghamuk forums), but it there is still some discussion of it on there...

Check out the Amazon link on there too for one of the worst book reviews you'll ever read.

More Electronic Ghosts...

2007-06-20T19:22:00.000Z

I just discovered this on YouTube...

I think it's related to Epic 2014, or seems to be, as there's a link to it on the YouTube page (although under a different name). The idea that we might eventually evolve to a post-human electronic avatar is obviously one which crops up often in fiction, but I like here that it relates directly to the search engines, softwares and MMORPG's we use today.

I thought there was something interesting and Forteana 2.0 in there relating to the evolution of online 'souls', and I noticed in the comments that someone had made reference to an Anime called 'Serial Experiments Lain', as Brett did in the recent comment on Electronic Ghosts.

In Channel 4's Second Lives series last year, Steve Millar spoke about the idea that after his death, his 'data' may one day be able to be uploaded to Second Life to continue living - Steve Millar on Channel 4

Here's a link to Serial Experiments Lain on Wikipedia. It looks really interesting and I'm going to check it out more.

Interghost Connection

2007-06-11T19:42:00.000Z

From 'A blog around the clock';

The Interghost Connection

Interesting article which compares social networking to the Ghost Hook-Up, pioneered by The Three Investigators!

Electronic Ghosts

2007-06-11T19:10:00.000Z

I don't know what to make of this, but it piques my fortean interest;

From Animated Trigger;

"I’ve heard about these “ghosts,” coded information sent through an electronic source that can turn into a physical apparition. The science behind it is baffling, and I wish I had never even tried to figure them out, because the more I read, the more I saw, the less sense it made. Some say the government made them, some say it’s extraterrestrials, and some say it’s the Illuminati. The most interesting idea was that they’re people who were struck by lightning and killed, literal ghosts."

One Hacker's Paranioa

It sounds like a sci-fi idea to me, but I wonder if anyone else has heard anything similar?

Ghosts of Facebook

2007-06-11T18:53:00.000Z

Chris alluded to this on his his earlier comments (see the Browser as Scrying Tool post), the 'ghosts' of the dead still haunting the pages of MySpace, Facebook etc.

Ghosts on the Internet, from College Dispatch.

Electronic Death Ratttle from TheRimy's Blog.

The Wired and the Dead, from Drewspeak.

Mobile Phone Ghost Detector

2007-06-10T15:40:00.000Z

From Paranormal.about.com;

Find Ghosts with your Mobile

Most Haunted have launched a tool for ghost detedting on your mobile!

Mr.Bungle and Virtual Voodoo

2007-06-09T22:53:00.000Z

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.

Paranormal Underworld

2007-06-08T12:37:00.000Z

Just found this link to a virtual (or at least live cam) ghost hunt -

Paranormal Underworld

The collaborative software element looks interesting - I wonder if it's possible through a remote window to build up the tension, intimacy and fear that a live seance/ouija board/ghost stories round a campfire does. I guess if not, might it be considered a more effective (at least from a skeptic/scientific analysis point of view) form of investigation as it doesn't offer the same opportunity for (however unwitting) collusion - the kind that we see between the team on Most Haunted? Or, at the very least, the elements are recorded, so evidences can be analysed later objectively.

I can imagine Derek Acorah typing in furiously -

Derek says: "Uhh! Uhh! I'm a little witchy!!!!"

Derek says: "Ooh, what happened? I think I just got possessed"

Sam says: " :-( "

Derek says: "Thank you Sam"

Haunted Media Archive

2007-06-07T22:03:00.000Z

The site gallery organised a Symposium and group exhibition around Jeffery Sconce's Haunted Media in 2004;

Haunted Media Exhibition Archive

Sadly, the individual works in the show aren't shown here, but are described. More sad is the broken link to the Symposium website...

If anyone saw the show or went to the Symposium, please get in touch, it would be great to find out more.

Browser as scrying tool?

2007-06-07T10:03:00.000Z

One of the areas I've been particularly interested in when thinking about Forteana 2.0, is the idea that the Internet is haunted, and that the clients we use, our browsers, IM softwares, IRC clients etc., might be thought of as crystal balls, or Ouija boards.

It's the sense of the 'over there' which brings to life the idea of the internet as a digital afterlife, a space filled with disembodied voices, presence and memory.

It's an idea picked up on by Jeffrey Sconce in his book 'Haunted Media', and one which I wrote about in Digital Me, an MA project I recently completed.

While the notion is metaphorical, I think the increasing use of technology in Paranormal investigation inevitably leads us to the idea of scrying online, an idea which is increasingly developed through popular culture - through films like The Ring, Phone, and more directly Internet related, Pulse.

An early example of computer scrying is The Vertical Plane by Ken Webster. Now out of print, it describes communications between Webster and a character called 'Tomas', seemingly sharing the same space across a divide of hundreds of years... Like some godawful movie with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, but with computers.

Forteana 2.0

2007-06-06T10:45:00.000Z

Charles Fort would have loved the internet. It has, throughout its history, been a breeding ground for weird science, conspiracy theories, mass panics, 'pseudo' science, hauntings and even viral crypto-zoology. On a wider level, the very nature of the internet, through collective intelligence, collaboration and user generated tagging is decidedly Fortean.

I was inspired to start this blog by this post - Abominable Snowman 2.0 - by Bruce Mason on the Production and Research in Transliteracy blog, and the discussion that followed. It seemed to me that it might be worthwhile to gather evidence and ideas relating to the Fortean internet, a virtual Cabinet of Curiosities.

Please feel free to send me examples of any internet Forteana you find, and I'll post them here!

Find out more about Fort here, at the Fortean Institute; http://www.forteana.org/

Gareth