Clunk, bang, rattle: Is that a ghost inside your machine?

Old Victorian building

My first job was working in an old Victorian building in Aldwych back in 1987

Was working late one evening - by myself.

The office was basically split into two with a computer room in the middle, the far side, where my desk was only had one way in or out, past the computer room and it was the 6th floor.

Long story, but part of my job was developing oil survey graphs in a dark room that was in the computer room.

I came out of the room and out of the computer room and heard the floor creaking to my right (one way in or out), it was a slightly raised floor and only creaked if someone walked on it. So I went down the corridor as was expecting the building security guard to be doing his rounds.

Got round the corner, the creaking immediately stopped and nobody was visible, as i said, I was the only one there. 11pm at night, old Victorian building, Usain Bolt had nothing on me on exiting the floor with two 90 degree left hand turns.

Rest of the time I worked there, used to turn out the lights and leave at a run!

This year's Halloween house decorations had the addition of a 1m tall skeletal figure. When the SFX computer sequencer shorted a "try me" contact it would come to life. Glowing red eyes and choice phrases accompanied by the vigorous nodding of its head.

To maximise the shock effect it lay face down by the front door - and was dragged upright at the appropriate point in the sequencing. The hall was dimly lit from the strings of flickering lights of a "magic field" on the carpet. Sitting there waiting for visitors - the figure occasionally started muttering. The sort of half-intelligible utterances that make you give someone a wide berth in the street.

The relay indicator for the figure's sound was "off". It started to get to me - my atmospheric decorations were a tad too good for my primitive instincts.

Then I realised that the figure's body was flat on top of some of the flickering lights. Sure enough the EMI was affecting the figure to give random short bursts of speech components.

Masterful Thievery

Some years ago I did administration for a small town, including the elementary schools there.

Several brand new laptops were stolen from teachers' lounge but they were anonymously returned a few days later in good condition.

I was asked to check if they had eny evidence before deployment - amongst the installed games there were plenty of webcam videos and stills of teenage boys from the same school, identified by the teachers.

My co-worker at an old job bought some Walkie-Talkies as part of hurricane season prep, he took one home and left the other to charge in the office.

I was working late, probably faffing about with deployment images, when a woman's voice came over the handset, lousy with static, saying "You must find the keys to achieve freedom", then about half an hour later a fragment of a sentence "Your doom will arrive in one minute".

The next morning I asked my boss and he professed no knowledge of the sentences, he had been home alone and had left the other handset in his car overnight. Throughout the week we got a few more cryptic, garbled, or static heavy messages.

Thoroughly unnerved, a few days later I spotted an ad in the paper for an Escape Room type place that had recently opened several buildings away, the penny finally dropped that it would have been at the extreme range of our walkies and they must be using the same frequency!

Bah!

The OS1100 operating system used to have a vary rarely seen feature in which the console would clear, a giant eye would appear, wink, and then the console text stream would be replaced.

There was just enough time for a shocked operator to recover his/her wits turn away to a colleague and say “have a look at this” for the evidence to vanish.

The big 132 character impact line printers were very Stephen Kingy too, if placed behind the operator’s seat. When they ran out of paper the lid would slowly open like the maw of a vengeful machine on The Rise. The operator would feel the change of air pressure behind his/her seat or maybe catch the light being reflected off the console as the printer window angled up and turn to see the printer apparently in full Zombie mode, about to take a bite.

And an ICL engineer once told me of an old 1900 that was surplussed and the engineers fitted with an exec that played the Dead March on it’s teletype whistle and various noisy peripherals (percussion courtesy of the old barrel printer hammering all Xs in proper time and so forth). Then an emergency customer need was fulfilled by delivering said 1900 to the customer, who was not impressed when it was fired up.

Library of Doom

My first computer job in college was as the backup operator for the research library's computer system. When I applied for the job I was told they had fast turn over on the position because people got freaked out by the sounds at night in the library. Being young, and really needing the job, I told the head librarian that I didn't spook easily and would be there for at least a year. I was wrong. My shift started at 10pm until around 1-1:30 am depending on the backup, so I was alone, in a darkened library isolated in the computer room. Thing about libraries, the books are constantly settling, making lots of odd shifting, creaking and other strange noises. After a month I was getting paranoid and started walking the library lobby between tape changes, sure someone had gotten into the building. After about 3 months, I couldn't handle it anymore and quit to preserve my sanity. Knowledge is power, stacks and stacks of books are just evil.

Bah!

No IT component, just some makering.

My wife, daughter and I used to decorate our house for Halloween with a "wrought iron arch" and fences (actually panels from an old "tent" gazebo corner bits strapped to the fence with black cable ties and festooned with purple lights). We had a small graveyard in the little garden you had to walk past to get to the front door, with bones and skulls and bats and so forth, and I seeded the lawn with some nifty flats I made from plywood that made ghostly shadows of, er, ghosts and black cats. Passing cars would throw shadows from the matte black painted flats that were very effective.

All designed to be "six year old scary". We left "terror" to the neighbour five doors down, who had a "working" electric chair out front. One Christmas he was executing Santa in it. I digress.

Each year we would go to the post-halloween sales and add to the kit at rock-bottom prices. I picked up six sets of "ghostly marching footprint" lights for a song one year, enough to make for a ghost padding alongside the pathway as trick or treaters dared the front porch.

Every year it was the same. Before sunset mothers would turn up with their youngsters and ask if they could photograph their kids in some part of the display. After dark is was Dads with kids in tow, and they would hang back at the gate while the kids came in for candy.

One year, towards the end of the era when the nabe had young kids, I splurged and bought a smoke machine. Of course, the problem is that the "smoke" is actually hot glycol-based vapour and it goes *up* in the cold November air. So I made a fog chiller. I started with an old 40 gallon beer cooler, and cut three inch holes in each end near the bottom. I glued in some PVC schedule 40 pipe with gorilla glue and connected the two ends inside the cooler with a pipe made from chicken wire.

I built a "U" bend from pipe so that the fog machine could sit on the cooler and shoot the fog into the bend, through the cooler and out through a two-foot extension pipe I fed into the graveyard foliage. Eight three pound bags of ice went into the cooler, forming an "ice-pipe". Still with me?

When it got dark I turned on the fog machine and slow-moving clouds of ground-hugging fog enveloped the graveyard. Passing cars would dissipate the fog quickly and any wind at all was disastrous of course.

But that night the Halloween Gods were on my side and the wind dropped and the traffic was non-existent for once. The fog built to Hammer House of Horror levels across the entire property. The black cat flats were poking out just enough to show heads and tails, and kids would be walking shin-deep in the lovely stuff.

That night I opened the door for the kids and was greeted by the sight of a garden full of wandering dads trying to figure out how the hell I had managed to fill the garden with horror-movie fog.

An hour or so later the traffic picked up and it was all dispersed.

Possessed CD player

Didn't happen to me, read about this on a theatre sound mailing list:

When the sound operator sat at the sound desk, the CD drawer of the CD player on the other side of the booth would open randomly. If the operator walked to the unit and pressed Close the drawer would stay closed while the operator was by the CD player, but would open again when they walked away from it.

They eventually discovered that on the shelves on the opposite wall a heavy book had fallen on the CD player remote control, pressing the Open button if there was any vibration. However, when the operator was standing in front of the CD player they would interrupt the IR beam, hence the drawer would not open at that time.

Car wouldn't let girlfriend leave

I once had a car that would lock all the doors when my girlfriend and I were in it and I turned off the engine. Wouldn't do it for anyone else, nor when it was just me in the car, but did it consistently for her.

We eventually figured out that she was leaning on the lock knob, which was *pneumatically* connected to the locking system. When the engine was turned off, the vacuum pump would also turn off; this combined with the pressure she was exerting on the knob would lock all the doors.

Not a ghost in the machine

At work, a school, it was a Saturday as l had to install some software, it was going on dusk as i headed back to my car, and heard a cheery "Hello Sir !" , turned to a boy who looked about 15, and noticed he had the old school badge on shirt, hackles started to rise, went to reply and then he was gone. I later found out that that "Charlie" as he is called, is a boy who was skylarking upstairs and went over the verandah railing , dying instantly due to skull damage. The teacher that shares my office claims to have given Jenny Dixon a lift https://www.centralcoastaustralia.com.au/news/the-ghost-at-jenny-dixon-beach-urban-legend/.

I really don’t believe in the paranormal, but

Before I retired, I had a customer site that is now a museum, It had been a Victorian prison. I was doing some on-site database work one night, when nature called. I left the small room that contained the server and workstation that I was using and walked past an adjoining small room to get to the corridor. It suddenly felt very cold (yes, it was a cold night, and the corridor was draughty) and more than a little creepy. I knew that the first small room had been a warder’s guard room (from the sign on the door), later I found that the second room was the condemned cell where prisoners were held before their execution.