Edition : 1587 Thursday 9-Jun-1988 Circulation : 5963
GHOST IN THE MACHINE
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Phantoms seem to be keeping abreast of computing developments in the
UK by haunting them.
In the latest of a series of ghostly visitations, an Amstrad 1512,
lying quietly in a Stockport architect's office, suddenly burst
into supernatural activity, leaving a cleaner suffering from the
shivers on two nights.
Ken Hughes, editor of Macclesfield-based micro magazine PCA, says
the architect bowed to pressure from frightened staff and got rid
of the spooky computer, giving it to Hughes.
"It started in January after the architect had had the computer for
two weeks", says Hughes. "The cleaner went to turn the monitor off
and found that it already was. It was also turned off at the socket".
"Four days later she noticed it glowing again, only this time there
was a feint yellow line around the screen. When she went to switch it
off she found the plug was out".
The computer, which is now being investigated by experts in psychic
phenomena, has since added to its repertoire of eerie stunts by
giving off sounds like human groans, emitting an unearthly
incandescent glow, projecting images without using software, and
displaying garbled messages.
Hughes has stripped the computer down in an effort to find the
errant spirit, and has also found further evidence of the machine's
ghostly afterlife.
"I took it away from the offices which are close to Manchester
airport so I could be sure it wasn't picking up any inductive
power from the airport's radar and radio installations". "Then I
set it up in a spare photo laboratory with a video camera trained
on it and left the camera running". "At the beginning of march it
went through its startup routine when it was disconnected and the mains
unplugged", says Hughes.
Hughes had also taken the added precaution of removing the time clock
batteries from the machine.
On May 10, the PC's disk drive lights flashed on and off, even though
there were no disks in the machine, and a string of characters flashed
across the screen.
Maurice Gross, chairman of the Society for Psychic Research, claims that
the Stockport phenomenon is not the first case of a computer passing
over to the Other Side.
He says the society is investigating a computer belonging to an
economics tutor called Ken Webster, which is said to have produced
messages from a 16th century chaplain who lived at an Oxford college.
"The chaplain's name was Harden, who had once existed but has been
dead for 400 years", says Gross. "Messages would appear on the screen
relating to contemporary moral issues that also contained historically
accurate information about himself and his times".
The first example ofspiritual interest in high tech occurred in
1978 when Rank Xerox called in ghost-busters to clear up the mystery
of an unhappy 'poltergeist' at its Uxbridge headquarters.
Gross thinks poltergeist activity is one of several possible
explanations for the Amstrad's behaviour.
"Poltergeist phenomena do affect computers. There's a lot more going
on in the universe than we understand", he says.
[Reminds me of a play I once saw on TV where a team researching
revolutionary storage methods took over an old house. They kept
seeing the ghost of a woman running up some stairs, falling off
and vanishing. Investigation showed that there did use to be stairs
at that point and that a girl was killed in such a way. They tried
various methods to record this and succeeded in manipulating the
phenomenan as it seemed to be stored in the house somehow, and it
might give them a lead in their research. Evdentually, they
accidentally deleted it, and discovered something else which
it overlaid ... the reason she ran up the stairs. It was called
"The Stone Tapes"].
