Michael Pennington (Deceased)

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.

Ghosts of Facebook

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

From Paranormal.about.com;

Find Ghosts with your Mobile

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

Paranormal Underworld

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"

Browser as scrying tool?

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.