Atlanta Vampire Alliance [AVA]

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AVA Mention in Red

Ghosts in the Machine
By Janna Silverstein, Associate Producer, MSN Tech & Gadgets

Spooky Halloween fun lurks on weird World Wide Web.
Ghosts on the Web (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)

Every year at Halloween, Web sites all over the Internet offer spooky screensavers and desktop art. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find that the World Wide Web is full of pages that open a door into darkness you may only have imagined before, and they don’t show up just at Halloween. They offer the creepy and the incredible every single day.


Spirits in the material world

It seems as though Halloween starts and ends with ghosts. But for some folks, ghosts, ghost hunting and ghostly communications are a way of life. With the advent of TV shows such as “Ghost Hunters” and “A Haunting,” everyone’s interested in spirit activity now. Discover ghost detectives near you with this state-by-state directory of paranormal investigators. If you need their services—whether for confirming a haunting or purging your household of unwanted ghostly guests—most don’t charge a fee for helping out.

If your concerns aren’t that close to home but you’re still curious, you can keep an eye out for apparitions at any one of these GhostCam Web sites. The Ghost Research Society offers a whole page of links to ghost photos for your own examination. If seeing isn’t believing, then listen to recordings of electronic voice phenomena (EVPs), said to be the recorded sounds of spirits trying to communicate. Some say the voices aren’t only human apparitions speaking, but voices of more sinister origin—demons, for example--trying to make their presence known.

Want to gather and examine the evidence for yourself? Buy your own ghost hunting gear, everything from digital recorders to electromagnetic field detectors. You can also learn how to take ghost photographs and how to capture EVPs.


Vampire blues

Dracula is Halloween’s other headliner. These days, vampires are so mainstream that they’re almost out of fashion. I say start with the original by reading the novel that started it all, Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Once you’ve got the basics—fangs, bloodsucking, aversions to sunlight and pointy wooden sticks—check out the history behind the myth.


Now you’re ready to delve a little deeper. If you’re feeling brave (or concerned you may have a taste for blood of which you were previously unaware), dive into the deep end with support sites for real vampires such as Sanguinarius.org or the Atlanta Vampire Alliance.

Some have speculated that diseases such as porphyria, which causes a sensitivity to light and a reduction in the production of red blood cells, may be the origin of vampire legends. Another source of such legends might be solar urticaria, a rare but very real allergic reaction to sunlight.


Night of the living dead

With his flesh-eating shamblers, George Romero added zombies to the Halloween lexicon. But zombies, like many legendary creatures, have a loose basis in fact and, at least according to the movies (perhaps not your best source of cultural reference), Haitian voodoo practice. There is, however, at least one documented case of a man actually having lived as a zombie. As recently as 2005, outbreaks of “zombism” in Cambodia and (more humorously) in Halifax have occurred. If you’re of a more philosophical bent, you might want to see what philosophers have to say about the experience of zombism. I think the philosophers are thinking too hard.


It’s a scary Web out there

From here, it’s all gravy. If you’re interested in shape changers, you can learn about real werewolves or read stories about those that have tramped through America’s heartland. You might want to visit one of America’s most haunted places. Or you might enjoy a glimpse into the 19th century art of spirit photography, an outgrowth of the era’s obsession with spiritualism and séances, in which the most unlikely looking of ghosts could be seen in formal portraits.

But if you prefer a quieter Halloween, one in which the spooks are only in your mind, there’s no reason you can’t stick with more traditional Halloween activities. Find a good source for ghost stories at www.halloweenghoststories.com. Let librarian Nancy Pearl, author of “Book Lust,” recommend the best ghost stories she has ever found. The Paranormal Stories blog, which covers the weird year round, has declared this October Vampire month, and will be covering the subject regularly. And The Moonlit Road offers stories and folktales of Southern ghosts in text or audio format, so you can listen or read to your heart’s (dis)content.

Of course, if you’re looking for a scary audio experience, you should probably start with the granddaddy of them all: Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater on the Air production of “The War of the Worlds” (MP3| RealAudio). This is the one that threw 1938 America into an uproar on Halloween eve, convinced that New Jersey was overrun by invaders from Mars. Get the background on the broadcast before you listen, then step back in time to an era when radio was king and even the weirdest, spookiest things were possible.


Janna Silverstein is a New York expatriate living in Seattle. She has written articles on subjects from travel to technology for Microsoft Magazine, Expedia.com, and Microsoft Security at Home among others. She has never seen a ghost but can’t resist a good haunted house at Halloween.