Here's the fourth in our popular series of paranormal puzzlers in which you have to guess which of the four stories presented here is completely made up by your About Guide. All of the stories are incredible, but only three of them are true. Which is the fictitious story? Read them all, then cast your vote for the phony story.
Story 1: The Ghost in the Computer
We are all familiar with the accounts of spirits communicating through knocks and mediums at seances, through divination tools such as Ouija boards... even through electronic voice phenomena (EVP) captured on audiotape. Quite rare, however, are the accounts of spirits communicating with the living through computers.
One possible case took place in the autumn of 1984. At this time, home computers were fairly new; the Internet and e-mail were non-existent. Yet Ken Webster of Dodleston, England received messages on his personal computer screen from a being who seems to have lived in the 1500s.
Previous to the messages, Webster had been experiencing strange poltergeist activity in his small terraced house called Meadow Cottage, which was in the process of being renovated. Most of the activity focused in the kitchen where Webster would experience stacked objects, unexplained marks on the walls, noises and an occasional thrown object.
Webster was a teacher who had access to one of these primitive computers - by today's standards, a laughably "weak" machine with 32K of memory, a simple word processor and an external 5.25" floppy disk drive. It certainly had no network connection of any kind. One day, Webster left, forgetfully leaving the computer on. When he returned, there was a message on the screen in the form of a poem, written in what seemed to be Elizabethan English. Webster dismissed it as a prank, but saved it on disk. Two weeks later, a second messages appeared, which said, in part:
"Wot strange wordes thou speke, although I muste confess that I hath also bene ill-schooled... thou art a goodly man who hath fanciful women who dwel in myne home... 'twas a greate cryme to hath bribed myne house."
Webster began to write responses to the messages, which began a dialog with a personage who identified himself as Tomas Harden who claimed to have lived in the very same cottage during the mid-sixteenth century. Besides using the computer, Harden also left messages on blank pieces of paper and in chalk on the home's walls and floor.
An investigation could not uncover any hoax or offer any explanation, although linguistic experts concluded that the style of the writing was not genuine to the time period claimed - it was a phony Tudor style. And while the "dialogue" was taking place between Webster and Hardin, the poltergeist activity subsided. Yet later, other psychic phenomena took place, and messages in other voices appeared. Ken Webster later wrote a book about these experiences.
Next page > Story 2: The Hairy Dwarf from Outer Space
