Seeking a Ghost via Web Cam
Posted by
Hemos
on Sun Oct 31, 1999 01:33 AM
from the i-kinda-believe dept.
from the i-kinda-believe dept.
dogberto writes "It seems that people are using a web cam for everything these days. Starting with a web cam to watch the daily lives of people in their rooms. Now, it seems that the folks at The Evansville Courier & Press have decided to install a video camera in the 114 year old Willard Library to give internet viewers a chance to spot the legendary ghost (a.k.a., the "Lady in Grey") via this Ghost Cam. CNN was the first I saw running an article. The Willard Library link gives some more background on the ghost.
"
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Seeking a Ghost via Web Cam
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Rename! (Score:5)
The great JPEG Blur search of Halloween '99
BTW, I've already submitted my faked ghost sighting, I put my slashdot username on the picture and recommend any /.'ers with some time to waste to do the same. Damn it, we want verifiable ghost cams!
Ghostly cam images (Score:3)
While that would explain a lot of stuff, I'm afraid the jury is still out on ghosts for me. Never believed in the stuff until I lived in my last house. Footsteps, doors opening themselves, and other assorted weirdness generally associated with haunted houses occurred daily. The all time best was when a deadbolted door we never used opened itself just out of sight. When we went to check it, the door was open and the bolt was still sticking out of the door. I'm keeping an open mind, but I'm glad I don't live there anymore.
Skippy
Checking photos for genuine status (Score:5)
There are a lot of ways to post a photo that you have created but not stored, and still tell whether it was unmodified when you get a copy back from an untrusted reporter.
Off the top of my head,
Also, Photoshop has a digital signature filter which works on similar methods. I think it has lots of redundant information so that it won't break down with lossy compression (or even print-then-scan cycles). It was intended to FIND photos, not to DISCARD photos, that may be from a given source, such as porn CD-ROMs stockpiling illegal scans of Playboy (C) artwork.
GA Tech Library (Score:5)
Georgia Tech [gatech.edu]'s Library is the perfect setting for a ghost story. When one first walks into the place, they feel a sense of age without glory, as if the building is in the process of dying. It is heightened by the creaky wood staircases, the cramped little restrooms set in odd places, and the sealed-off stairwell with water-corroded paint that can only be seen by looking out the right windows in another stairwell.
The bare flourescent light tubes are covered by parallel, flat plates in the shape of a half-arc that stick down like small guillotines. The large atrium formed by floors 1 and 2 of the West wing is duplicated on floors 3 and 4 (like the old identical-room-switcharoo trick). The building incorporates at least 6 different architectural styles among its operative stairwells: one of them is straight, small, narrow, and creaky; another is constructed like a huge, tomato-green spiraled tube that secretly snakes down towards the basement.
The East wing is two or three floors taller than the West wing, and from here one may peer down on the oldest of campus buildings. The light behaves differently on these floors... the sunlight traces shadows through ancient, hazed-over glass. Even when I stand there, beholding it with my own eyes, the scene appears impossibly faded, like one of grandma's wedding pictures (or maybe some JPEG compression artifacts).
The building has many secret places. Most striking are the many locked rooms that appear randomly scattered throughout the floor plans... their practical purposes forgotten. In this one particular room, statues and busts can be seen through the darkened glass. If I remember correctly, the entire top floor of the East Wing is closed to the public, accessible only to invisible research librarians.
Finally, the building stands at the highest geographical point on campus. "The Hill" was of strategic significance during the civil war battle that this region of Atlanta saw.
Funny, though... Nobody here is creative enough to make up any stories about it. That's Tech for you...
Stephen Bennett
.... (Score:4)
Re:Holy Schnikies! (Score:4)
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to find the URL for the Loch Ness web cam.
Of course Slashdot readers aren't critical (Score:5)
At first glance it seems as though this is some public service to people who are ghost-seeking folks. But, then you scroll down and see ad banners and (at least to me) it all clicks. They want tons of people to spend their entire day sitting on their web site looking at the "ghost cam" as it refreshes every 30 seconds, building up tons of impressions. Okay, don't think I'm pretending that 90% of Slashdot readers didn't realize this.. but for those of you who are too skeptical to even go look at the Ghost Cam (or when everyone wakes up in the morning in the US and the site dies), I think my explanation is pretty valid.
Another thing that's interesting is that all of the "comments" on the proof page seem strikingly similar. Without knowing anything else I'd say that most of them were fabricated. Who knows? I think I have an extreme aversion to anything on the Net with a central theme of "ghosts". Except maybe GhostView.
Nothing new (Score:5)
GhostWatch [irelandseye.com]
Ghostwatcher [flyvision.org]
I believe there is even a Loch-ness monster cam @
"Offical Lochness Site [lochness.co.uk]
thoughts (Score:3)
Seriously, I really doubt that any of these images found can be drawn to an exact conclusion. First of all, the camera simply doesn't provide suffcient quality images for one to really verify the presence of a ghost. Also, I looked at the "proof" section and noticed nothing out of the ordinary in any of the pictures. Maybe this was because these pictures were even more blurry and grainy the live webcam shots, but all I saw were random colored arrows pointing to blurs.
And as someone said earlier, how do they judge whether a picture is fit for proof or not? I bet you could easily blur or anti-alias a section in photoshop, draw a few colored lines around it, post, and you'd have yourself a spot on the page. I think some of us
Yeah I know this is mainly a little just for fun project, but still I'd like to see some level of realism here. Maybe it's just years of watching Unsolved Mysteries, but I think paranormal investigation is an interesting (even if it seems like a crock) field and should be given some credit. A bunch of random people posting blurry quickcam shots isn't going to prove anything, rather it would further damage the credibility of any legitimate efforts to locate paranormal activity (I think there are some, regardless whether the activity is really ghostly or logically explained).
Oh well, I bet there is no ghost in the library, because by now she would definitely have gone up to the camera and gave everybody the finger in an attempt to look leet.
One of the funniest.... (Score:3)
However, if you read Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World Science as a Candle in the Dark", specifically the chapter on "baloney detection"...
I think that you will see that this is bunk. People that cannot apply skeptical thinking to things such as these frighten me more than the existance of a real ghost would!
Fortunatly, there seem to be a good number of skeptics on Slashdot.
But on a lighter note: Its all hallows eve! So we might as well have fun with it.
Explain this (Score:4)
Re:jpeg artifacts (Score:3)
Re:thoughts (Score:3)
because of this, a blur in an picture will easily look like a face.
I wonder if people would report ghost sightings if they didn't know the library was haunted.
what about setting up a camera on a location where there are no ghosts sightings.
and tell the visitors there are ghosts and then you count how much reports you'll get from people who see ghosts in the blurs.
---
www.sleepstation.com is more exciting (Score:3)
Heh, maybe it'll be revealed to be just another boring webcam that some cracker changed the URL to make into a ghostcam. Any cam is a ghostcam if you really try.
"Whoa man, did you see that spook in the Voyerdorm's bathroom? Yeah right there by Jamie's butt!"
Quantization error, anyone? (Score:3)
Most of the ghosts look more like JPEG artifacts (eg. ringing and smoothing) than actual ghosts. To make this a serious endeavor, they need to take the IR filter off the camera and set the JPEG quality factor to maximum.
The rest look like they were done in Photoshop. One of them [courierpress.com] has such sharp lines on the "blurry ghost area" that it seems to be a rather obvious fake. (If the blurry area were that sharply delineated in real life, then there would've been more artifacts in the JPEG.)
Given the nature of it all, this looks more like a PR stunt than anything else. Welcome to the Web 1999!
--Joe --Joe--
Causes of Ghosts (Score:3)
Anyway, I doubt anyone will see a ghost at that site, the image quality is real bad... maybe if there is a ghost, she should write her own cam software for it that takes better pics =)
#----------------------------
$mrp=~s/mrp/elite god/g;
Re:One of the funniest.... (Score:4)
Most recently while driving home after a long whitewater kayaking trip (I had been awake for 2 days straight) I witnesses one of the shadows on the right of the road... Get up and walk across the road! Not only that, but my tired brain saw it as one of the Nine Riders in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings!!!
I swear to you that this is what I saw. Now, I don't for a moment believe that one of the Nine is out walking along the highway near my house. I do believe however that I was very tired and started to hallucinate. (Sleep deprivation causes such things, so sayeth my Psycology professors). Really, I should NOT have been driving under those conditions.
Now, after I saw this apparition I thought "Cool!", then I burst out laughing at myself. I don't think myself immune to hallucinations. I don't think anyone REALLY is. (If they were, LSD would have no effect on those people IMO.) Not that I have done LSD, but my point is that the human brain is a electro-chemical device. Minor changes in brain chemistry (for whatever reason) or simple changes in thought processes can radically alter how we percive our world. I have had other events similar (and creepier) than this occur throughout my life. I don't find the events reproducable, nor quantifiable under current scientific (Physical and Psycological) thinking.
I think its fine to believe in what you saw. Again, I am not doubting that you actually saw what you did, I am doubting that what you saw was explanied "only" by ghosts. There are other explanations.
As to the "poltergeist" you describe, there are many other reasonable explanations (other than hallucination). Occham's [sp] razor comes into play here: The simplest solution is probably the correct one. I won't proffer any explanations, I will leave it as an experiment for the readers of slashdot (those who understand the scientific method anyway) to come up with their own.
It is fine to believe in ghosts (or relgion, or magnetic therapy, or channeling, or crystals, or...) Again, many people believe in such things.
I however do not.
I believe (notice that believe is a key word here!
I just hope to see more skeptical thinkers in this world. A lack of skepticisim IMO breeds faith (which can be quite a positive force!) but faith can become fanatacism. I fear fanatics.
Thats my take anyhow!
Re:Rename! (Score:3)
Oh, no! That was almost the perfect joke!
Try this...
The Blur Jpeg Project
Proof positive... (Score:4)
Anyway, it would be so easy to prevent this from happening, it's as if they don't care. First and foremost, time-stamp all the images. Duh.. Secondly, (and they had BETTER be doing this already) recording the feed on location, or AT LEAST archiving each image that gets posted to the web.
With these two SIMPLE procedures in place, in the event of a really convincing shot, it will give them the ability to see if the shot being submitted is at least the same shot as the one that was on the web, without any altering.
PS - Maybe it's just me, but the circles and arrows and whatnot bugged the hell out of me... If there HAD been something there, I wouldn't have seen it because it was already too grainy WITHOUT the distracting yellow indicators. Also, I really don't think I saw anything ghost-worthy. One pic with a blur close to the camera was okay, but coulda been faked far too easily..
Software Ghost Hunter (Score:3)
Write a program. The program could use an existing picture of good quality, then download new images and compare. If there is a block pixel change (a square of x size, having all pixels changed) then, the new image is flagged. Else, the image is thrown away. The resulting "ghost pictures" can be inverted in Photoshop, it will be obvious which ones were camera caused an which were not...
This would rule out human interpretation, and could be used over a long period of time. What do you think?
Biguser@hotmail.com [mailto]
couldn't they just... (Score:4)
now for quality... they should set jpeg quality to 100%.. sure it will load slower, but if they wanna capture pics of ghosts, this is a must! or better yet, also save as a bmp, and compress the bmp, then if you think you see a ghost, you can d/l the compressed bmp of the image and see if what you saw is actually a ghost.... but until something is done, this is pure crap!
#----------------------------
$mrp=~s/mrp/elite god/g;
investigations (Score:3)