Believe it or not, I was searching for the origin of a quotation on the web and instead of typing the search terms into the Google search box, I typed them by accident into the place where I’m supposed to type URLs. To my great surprise I found myself in the middle of a chat forum (a bit Alice In Wonderland don’t you think?) where I encountered the following SMS postings (I confess to not understanding some of the abbreviations in use here.):
kitty843
10.28.2004, 02:24 PM
u know what is rele creepy, somebody i have never met just im’ed me on aim and told me to send a stupid chain thing to 10 people in 5 mins and the love of my life will kiss me on friday… :* i get kissed by her already, so it dosent matter.
lol, I hate that one. I get that chain all the time.
:* :* :* :wub:
This was followed by
kitty843
10.28.2004, 02:30 PM
rele? :* :*
Yeah, I get that chain like once or twice every two weeks. Also, I got this one about a ghost killing you if you don’t send the IM to 20 people in 5 minutes. That one freaked me out. CL knows why :unsure:…. ghhhoooossstttsss….. *shudders* .. they do exist…
Well, they may or may not exist, but the consensus of opinion has it that they are not murderers even if they were murderees in the past. I found several web sites that claim with great certainty that there is no evidence of a ghost ever killing anyone. Given that ghosts have are pretty limited in what they do (appear, make noise, and, at a stretch, move objects about) carrying out a murder may be beyond their powers.
However there are a number of reports out there of people being frightened to death by ghosts. Try Edinburghcapitalguide.com to learn the sad tale of an Edinburgh student, Andrew Muir, suffering such a fate or www.edu.pe.ca/birchwood/folktales/micha2a.htm for a sketchy account of a boy being frightened to death in Alberta, Canada or try jon-aristides.net/anybody.shtml for the tale of the lawyer, John Turdlington, who was reportedly frightened to death in his house in the small English village of Bedhampton.Finding examples of people “frightened to death” on the web is made a little difficult by the fact that the phrase “frightened to death” is used metaphorically most of the time, because fright doesn’t kill. People found dead of heart failure in supposedly haunted houses may have simply had heart failure provoked by cholesterol rather than fright. Of course fright may be the trigger, but heart failure is the cause of death.
While my search for murderous ghosts proved fruitless, I did turn up something odd. According to www.cronaca.com/archives/001460.html, mobile phones are killing off ghosts. A story on this site maintains that a British expert, Tony Cornell, of the Society for Psychical Research, told the Sunday Express newspaper that reports of ghost sightings started to decline when mobile phones were introduced in the late eighties/early nineties.
This is one of the most bizarrely random correlations (presented in all seriousness) that I’ve ever come across. I’m sure other experts might be inclined to assign other causes. Perhaps it was due to the introduction of cable TV or the fall of the Berlin Wall. To be honest, I blame Microsoft and Windows for this sad decline. (The blue screen of death actually exorcises ghosts.)
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