Stephen Wagner, over at About.com, is sponsoring a contest to create a paranormal photo hoax. You have until April 30 to submit your entries. The prize is a copy of Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings.
In May 2001 Charli Claypool, who lives on Kent Island in the Chesapeake Bay, began to hear voices coming from her Krups coffee maker. After listening to these voices for many, many hours she concluded that they were voices of ghosts. And lucky for us, she recorded the 'voices' and made a large number of them available on her website, CoffeePotGhost.com. A visitor (Elizabeth A.) sent me the page and asked me whether I thought it was for real. At times it's tempting to think the entire thing is a joke, especially when you come across sections of the site such as the Ghost Pot Dance. But all in all, I'd say it's just too elaborate to be a joke. This is not to say that I think the coffee pot is really possessed. To be honest, I can't really hear what Charli Claypool claims to be able to hear in the squeaks and whistles of her coffee maker, but I'm pretty sure the voices are clear to her.
Kingdom Hospital. It's the 'Hospital that brings out the best in you.' From its website you would think that it's a real hospital, until you start poking around it a bit. Then it gets creepy. It's a tie-in, of course, with ABC's Kingdom Hospital miniseries. But it's pretty well done. (submitted by Brian Flynn).
We've seen ghosts in jars being sold on eBay, as well as ghosts in toasters. Now you have a chance to buy a ghost in a Coke can. And while you're at it, don't pass up the opportunity to bid on this videotape of a meeting with an 'interdimensional alien.' Minimum bid is only $1,300,000.
It seems like whenever I turn on the SciFi channel, there's John Edward talking to the dead. I don't really care if he actually can talk to the dead or not (I assume he can't). I'm more concerned by the fact that his show is boring. But on the start of his Australian tour, a man has sued him, claiming that Edward's show violates the Trade Practices Act which stipulates that suppliers of goods can't make claims that they can't substantiate. In this case, Edward claims he can talk to the dead, but the guy suing him is pretty sure he can't. It'll be interesting to see how the case is resolved.
In the tradition of the Ghost In A Jar, but not as funny or clever, we recently had a Satanic Toaster offered for sale on eBay. The toaster first began to burn the toast. Then, when the seller tried to throw it away, it mysteriously reappeared back in his kitchen. Like I said, a pale imitation of the ghost in a jar. (Submitted by Bob Pagani)
It looks like Amazon.com is branching out into a lucrative new market: brains for zombies. They're offering celebrity brains and tasty brains in addition to the more generic brains. In reality, the site is a spin-off of goats.com, the 'tasty yet morally ambiguous' webcomic. (Thanks to Charles Martin for the link).
I just received this spooky photo from Katherine DeLong who explains that it's been making the rounds via email. The photo is accompanied by the following text:
A new book by Peter Lamont chronicles the history of the Indian rope trick. According to him the trick is a hoax, not just in the sense that it's an illusion. Rather, in the sense that the trick never existed. It was never performed. In fact, it began its life in 1890 as the fictional creation of a Chicago reporter. The book is reviewed by The Guardian.
Quite a few people have sent me links to this: a ghost captured on film exiting Hampton Court Palace (where Henry VIII once lived). Or maybe it's just a guy wearing a bathrobe and a mask.
Here's a spooky site. It's called 'My Son Peter.' I'll use the text from the site itself to describe it: "My son Peter has always loved to play hide and seek. In fact, he loves it so much that he will wake me up in the middle of the night to play. The only problem is that Peter has been dead for eight years. This website documents the hell I've lived and continue to live every night." It's a fairly simple site, and it doesn't look like it's been updated for quite a while, so maybe Peter has discontinued his hauntings. But it does have a ghost video of Peter that's worth checking out. (Oh, and apparently the site was created by an advertising agency called Yarnbird that specializes in viral content).
A newspaper in the Indian city of Tiruchirappalli published a picture of a boy with an eerie ghost hovering behind him. They claimed the boy had encountered the ghost while on a school picnic, and went into a coma. Now the ghost was stalking other boys. As a result, families throughout the region started keeping their kids home, out of school. The photo, of course, was a photoshopped fake. More details here.
