Many Dead things

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)

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...

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

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

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

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!