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dead woman shows up for dinner
I don't know how well Ananova archives its stories, and this one is so short, it's worth sharing in full (please don't sue me!): A Brazilian woman shocked her family by turning up alive and well a week after her own funeral.
Relatives of 18-year-old Maria Fabiana Franco thought she was a ghost and wouldn't let her in the house. Miss Franco, from Vitoria, had been missing for two weeks when her sister wrongly identified the body of a young woman as being her. Adriana Lacerda, the sister, said: "The dead woman was identical to my sister. They even had the same scar on the same eyebrow!"
The body was buried in the family grave and the family were still mourning a week later when Miss Franco turned up. A police spokesperson told Terra Noticias Populares: "The family was so happy but really scared at the same time. They didn't let her in until we arrived, they thought they were seeing a ghost."
Miss Franco told police she had run away with her boyfriend but had to return home after he was arrested.
scientists discover shadow person
Yet another thing that we must keep in mind during the Project: “Electrical stimulation [to the temporoparietal junction region of the brain] repeatedly produced a feeling of the presence of another person in [the patient's] extra-personal space,” said Olaf Blanke, co-author of the study conducted by a team of researchers from University Hospital in Geneva, Switzerland. ... When the patient sat up, leaned forward and clasped her knees, she felt that the figure was also sitting, embracing her in its arms -- a feeling she described as “unpleasant.” During a language task, in which the seated patient held a card in her right hand, she described the person sitting next to her and trying to interfere with the task. “He wants to take the card ... he doesn’t want me to read,” she said. ... Because it was possible to induce the sensation repeatedly, and because the "shadow person" closely mimicked the patient’s posture and movements, the researchers conclude that the patient was experiencing a perception of her own body. “The strange sensation that somebody is nearby when no one is actually present has been described by psychiatric and neurological patients, as well as by healthy subjects,” said Blanke. Until now, however, it was not understood how the illusion was triggered in the brain. The temporoparietal junction is known to be involved in creating the concept of "self," and the distinction between "self" and "other." According to the researchers, stimulation of this region interfered with the patient’s ability to integrate information about her own body, leading to her experience of a "shadow person." It could well be that ghosts are only illusions, created by strange vortices of sound and electro-magnetism that the brain tries to interpret, which is all the more reason to definitively study the issue instead of just with cursory sweeps of geiger counters and EMF detectors, or dismissing it all together. Who knows what invisible forms of energy there are and how they are perceived by the human senses? And who's to say whether or not they are intelligent entities (for lack of a better term) without proper investigation of them?
patience
Long time, no updates. My apologies, but since OSR, nothing much has been happening. I did get my computer back up and running, but now the stars are out of line and I simply haven't had a moment to process the audio we got from OSR. Also, there are no updates from Tim on any progress toward a GhostBox (etc). I have a feeling this is how the project will go at first, though: In fits and bursts -- at least until we have a good reason to devote more consistent time to it. In the meantime, the project requires a little patience. (Which was really just a weak way of leading up to this segue:) And speaking of patience ... On July 8, 1913 St. Louis housewife Pearl Lenore Curran received an odd message while playing with a Ouija board: "Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name. If thou shalt live, so shall I." This message would begin a 25 year relationship with the spirit, during which time "Patience Worth" dictated a vast amount of literary work to Curran, including six novels, hundreds of pages of poetry, proverbs, and prayers. Many of the works were published under the name Patience Worth, including the novels The Sorry Tale, Telka (an "idyll of Medieval England"), and Hope Trueblood. The method of dictation used by Curran was automatic writing: The modest middle-class housewife would sit in a brightly-lit room and wait for the sentences to form in her mind, then write or type them out. The only problem Curran experienced was that the messages were received in a dialect which was often difficult for her to understand -- because Patience Worth had been a young girl who had lived on a farm in the county of Dorset (on the south coast of England) in the 1600s. The Worths had later emigrated to America, where the whole family was murdered in a frontier skirmish. And by all accounts the character and temperament of Patience Worth -- with her biting, satirical wit -- was quite different from that of the "academically below average" Curran. Many critics, including those from The New York Times and The Bookman, praised the literature of Patience Worth, citing the beauty of some of her imagery and her use of archaic words in her descriptions of objects that had been out of use for hundreds of years. The faithful wondered how a simple St. Louis housewife had acquired such precise historical details and such sophisticated literary skill. Skeptics, however, noted that the appearance of Patience Worth coincided with a revival of Spiritualism in Europe and America, creating an environment where much of the public were only too willing to believe in the reality of the channeled ghost of a 17th century English girl. Indeed, they pointed out that, while Curran's use of 17th century dialects was compelling, the fact that one of the Patience Worth novels ( Hope Trueblood) was set in Victorian England -- a full 200 years after Patience supposedly died -- proved that the whole story was little more than another fiction perpetuated by the admittedly talented Curran to help her sell books.
two machines that don't work
Don't fret: I haven't forgotten about the promised audio from our Labor Day stroll through OSR -- I just haven't been able to physically access it. See, the power supply unit on my PC died, and until the new one arrives tomorrow, I'm sans the computer with the file on it. (As an aside, if you need computer parts, be sure to hit PriceWatch.com -- I scored a $70 PSU for $20, with shipping.) And speaking of electronics and parts, you should get to know John Murray Spear, a minister of the Universalist church who converted to Spiritualism in 1851, a scant three years after the Fox sisters first claimed they had proof of intelligent communication with spirits who banged on things in their farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. Spear also claimed contact with a "spirit guide," which proclaimed him to be the earthly representative for the Band of Electricizers, a fraternity of philanthropic spirits he said were directed by Benjamin Franklin and dedicated to elevating the human race through advanced technology. It was through this contact that Spear decided to build the New Messiah in High Rock, Boston (the town whose mob had hospitalized him in 1844 for speaking against slavery). Assisting Spear and the Electricizers was a group of area Spiritualists that included the "New Mary," a woman whose true identity was never revealed. Since Spear had no scientific or technical knowledge, the blueprints for the New Messiah -- also known as the God Machine -- were channeled to him by the Electricizers, and when completed, it had cost the modern-day equivalent of some $25,000. The spirits then instructed the New Mary to appear at High Rock on June 29, 1854 for the final stage of the experiment, which included Mary undergoing two hours of "labor" in front of the machine, after which she stood up and touched it. Spear and his friends proudly proclaimed the touch had animated the machine, though others were as quick to point out that nothing at all had happened. Subsequent visitors to High Rock remained equally unimpressed by the "infant" God Machine's animate development. In 1859, Spear changed his tune and began to preach free love, perhaps only after impregnating his lover (he eventually divorced his wife and married his lover). He also dismantled the God Machine and rebuilt it in Randolph, Pennsylvania, where local opinion of the thing (or of Spear) was so inflamed that a classic mob was formed and the machine smashed to bits. No photographs of Spear's God Machine exist. And I assure you, Tim's GhostBox has nothing to do with God, birth, or mobs. At least, I don't think it does.
overcoming the hard-won consensus
Scientists claiming to have evidence of life after death and the powers of telepathy triggered a furious row at Britain’s premier science festival yesterday. ... The disputed session featured research from Rupert Sheldrake, an independent biologist who is funded by Trinity College, Cambridge, that claims to have found evidence that some people know telepathically who is calling them before they answer the telephone. Other presentations came from Peter Fenwick, a doctor who thinks deathbed visions suggest that consciousness survives when people die, and from Deborah Delanoy of the University of Hertfordshire, whose work suggests that people can affect the bodies of others by thinking about them. ... “Work in this field is a complete waste of time,” said Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford. The "furious row," it turns out, what not so much that scientists had these ideas (though critics took as many potshots as they could at what they called nothing more than a "charlatan’s fantasy"), but rather that the panelists were allowed to present their findings without the usual opposing view also being presented. Grudgingly, I have to agree with the critics on this one: The work can only truly be seen for its worth if opposing work is also presented, thus allowing participants to decide for themselves which is the most compelling case. As some of the participants said, the way these topics were presented was like "inviting creationists to address the prestigious meeting without an opposing view from evolutionary biologists." On the other hand, I think it rather biased that there would be a furor over this, regardless, when we all know that, had the papers dismissed the afterlife and telepathy as illusion or chicanery, there would have been no uproar at all. Which means that what this really boils down to is scientists being confronted with something that shakes the foundations of their world views with no one there to throw them a life ring. Just like this other news of "taboo" science, in which orthopedic surgeon Edwin Cooper has discovered that "electricity applied deep in the brain can jolt patients out of irreversible comas." Cooper started testing this hypothesis in 1993. ... The results indicate that people given electrical stimulation emerge from comas sooner and then regain function more quickly than if they are given only traditional treatment. They're more likely to leave the hospital under their own steam, with less-severe disabilities than would be predicted by the nature and extent of their injuries. ... But despite being published in the peer-reviewed journals "Brain Injury" and "Neuropsychological Rehabilitation," his work has yet to attract the attention of mainstream researchers. ... Cooper's best hope may lie overseas in Japan, where over the last two decades doctors have used electrical stimulation on hundreds of patients -- some of whom have been unconscious for many years. The evidence that the Japanese doctors have amassed could confirm Cooper's claims and bring hope to the families of patients most American doctors consider beyond cure. But it may also undermine the hard-won yet fragile consensus on what, neurologically speaking, makes someone alive and when it is acceptable to pull the plug. Read that last part again: But it may also undermine the hard-won yet fragile consensus on what, neurologically speaking, makes someone alive and when it is acceptable to pull the plug. Yes, that's the rub with all these kinds of things: Overcoming the "hard-won consensus" of mainstream science.
blips and bleeps in OSR
To sum up this weekend's trip to OSR ... The EMF meter proved to make it a bit more exciting, but after traipsing around the place for 7 hours, we only got three "hits," which really boiled down to only one hit, after analysis. See, on the second hit we discovered that the EMF meter could detect itself if the separate sensor (connected by a three-foot wire) was held against a sweet spot on the main unit. I remembered then that on the first hit I'd been holding both sensor and main unit in the same hand, as I had been on the second hit, thus negating them both. The third hit, however, was more thought provoking. We were in the basement of the warden's quarters -- the same area we'd felt most creepy in 2005 -- and by this time I was making sure to keep the sensor in one hand and the unit in the other, leaving about 18 inches minimum between the two of them. As we came through a doorway, it beeped once, which corresponded to about a 1.5-2 miliGauss EMF signal ("normal" background EMFs start around 10 mG). I froze and took out my tape recorder to begin taping (haven't had the chance to hear it back yet) and Jinnet snapped a few pictures. As I swept the sensor around the same general location, it registered a hit again in the same area. Still sweeping to try and narrow the location -- and discover the wire or whatever had caused it -- the detector remained silent. I swept several more times with no hits, then turned and swept the other side of the door. This time, the detector went off again, just for a bleep or two. After sweeping the whole door and all around within several feet a few more times (other tests on live electrical boxes had shown that it needed to be about 6-8 inches from the source to detect it), the signal could not be reproduced again. So was it a ghost? Who knows. We didn't see anything, the pictures didn't show anything (I'll post them and the audio file soon), and we didn't feel cold or like we were being watched or any of the other things people report. All we can say definitively is that the detector registered something, that something appeared to move (from one side of the doorway to the other), and that something then disappeared. Had it been a live wire, for example, its signal would have been detected during the subsequent sweeps and could have been found in the same spot each time, neither of which happened. Now, your garden-variety ghosthunter will tell you this was evidence of ghosts ... I'm not so sure. I think it's evidence that some form EMF disturbance passed through the place, but without better readings it's hard to say much more than that. Could it have been some EMF equivalent of ball lightning? Or some other natural "release" that registered as an EMF? Or did the hot-spot move under intelligent control? And that, of course, is all the more reason to see if we can put our idea to the test.
Look Around You 4: Ghosts
Tim's GhostBox (tm), et al
Over the last week or so, Tim has been considering our sensors day and night, it would appear. So far, he has come up with working ideas for what he calls a GhostBox, GhostNet, and GhostWheel, all based on detecting disturbances that follow our hypothesis. Soon I imagine we'll begin construction of a prototype of the GhostBox, upon which the other GhostThings then will be built. His first order of business was to establish what off-the-shelf EMF (electro-magnetic field) meters can do, so we bought a SmartHome CellSensor, which seems to fit the bill -- and at the Very Good Price it sells for ($30), it is naturally a heavy favorite of other paranomal investigators. As luck would have it, the CellSensor arrived today -- just in time for another Zagdog Aggregate exploration of the Ohio State Reformatory tomorrow night. We'll be sure to post pictures and reports here upon our return!
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