Ghosts

I like a good ghost story as much as the next guy. Always have. Have even had some fun with such at the expense of friends.

But there is a difference between enjoying and believing.

This past week the San Fransisco Chronicle had a piece about a para-normal conference held in the city titled "Investigations of Consciousness and the Unseen World: Proof of an Afterlife." From the article:

These academics take their paranormal work seriously; they also risk ridicule on campus and struggle to find sources of funding to investigate what happens after we die. One of the issues they face is whether an afterlife is provable by scientific method. Some, like Julie Beischel, who co-founded Arizona's Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential, think it is.

I wrote up this story from my adolescence a couple years back, thought since it was Hallowe'en I'd dig it out to share...

* * * * * * *

We stood there on the corner, looking up at The House. Max, Marty, and me. It sat back from the street on a high corner lot, a classic Midwestern Victorian two-story, with a large porch that ran along two sides. The lot itself was landscaped in such a way that there was a steep hill of perhaps six feet, rising up from where we stood on the sidewalk on the downhill side. A set of concrete stairs cut up through the grass, a sidewalk leading from there to the front door.

"So, um, it's haunted, right?" asked Max. He was tall and thin, as I was, but he had an athlete's natural grace. I hated him for that since, at the same age of 14, I was nothing but clumsy. Max played basketball and ran cross-country. I think he still holds some of the school records to this day.

"Yeah, that's what they say."

My wife passed on an item posted over on Forum Wales which I found of interest. Not saying that I "believe" or anything, but it is definitely something to take a look at. It's a short clip, and you should turn your sound up a bit:

And in the true spirit of Halloween I give you this British Car Ad that was never run:

This is a car advertisement from Great Britain. When they finished filming the ad, the film editor noticed something moving along the side of the car, like a ghostly white mist. They found out that a person had been killed a year earlier in that exact same spot.

The ad was never put on TV because of the unexplained ghostly phenomenon. Watch the front end of the car as it clears the trees in the middle of the screen and you’ll see the white mist crossing in front of the car then following it along the road….Spooky!

Is it a ghost, or is it simply mist? You decide. If you listen to the ad, you’ll even hear the cameraman whispering in the background about it near the end of the commercial.

Car Ad

I know it's Halloween, but this one is just silly as hell.

A civil engineer from Boston named Christopher Ogden had his dad take a picture of him in a high-contrast outdoor setting with a low-power CMOS-based camera phone. A typical camera phone, in other words. The resulting image seems to show a second, eerily spooky man in the light and shadow areas of the tree trunk behind Ogden.

This is not the surprising part, or the silly part. Low-resolution digital images often include artifacts due to the poor quality of the lenses on a camera phone, and also due to the low-power-consumption CMOS technology that enables a digital camera to be shoehorned into a tiny little cell phone. Whereas your typical "real" digital cameras allow a great deal of control over such things as exposure and focus at the moment the picture is taken, camera phones usually only have one control: "take a picture".

In other words, there's a hell of a lot more to quality digital imaging than simply increasing the number of megapixels in the camera's image sensor. Camera phones take muddy, distorted, pixelated pictures full of odd digital artifacts. That, my civil engineering friend Christian Ogden, is what we like to call a "fact".

The other not-silly part of this story is the fact that humans are pattern-seeking animals. We see human faces and figures everywhere - in tortillas, on plate glass windows, or in the pattern of a water stain seeping from the wall of an underpass. So, again this isn't so surprising.

What is silly is the engineer's assertion that digital cameras have the ability to capture images of supernatural things.

[link] "I’ve never really believed in apparitions," Ogden said. "I believe in an afterlife and all that, but I've heard a lot of stories about similar things occurring with digital cameras' spectral system picking up what the typical eye can’t see."

Ah. I see. Well, I suppose that as long as he's not one of those nasty, dirty, stinking, immoral, uppity atheists, then we should believe him. I mean after all, he's a civil engineer. Why, that's practically almost a real scientist!

Personally, I prefer this ghost.