The Ghost in My Machine

The Ghost in the Machine. 1949. An early 20th century criticism by philosopher Gilbert Ryle of philosopher Rene Descartes belief that the mind is separate from the body and that the soul can survive death. Ryle called the physical body the machine and he called the soul the ghost.

The Ghost in the Machine. 1967. The title of a book by Arthur Koestler which is a passionate exploration of what it means to be human and the human tendency for self-destruction.

The Ghost in the Machine. 1981. The fourth studio album by the musical group, The Police which, legend has it, was inspired by Koestler’s book.

The Ghost in the Machine. 1982. Book chapter by the esteemed science fiction author, Arthur C. Clarke, which explores the inner consciousness of a computer.

The Ghost in the Machine. 1991. Stephen King’s description in the book “The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands” of the character Blaine the Mono, a sentient monorail, a train with a mind.

The Ghost in the Machine. 1993. A horror movie about a serial killer’s consciousness in a computer system who uses that technology to commit his crimes.

The Ghost in the Machine. 2022. A phrase that describes when machinery or technology behaves independently from what its operator wants it to do, when it runs contrary to the programmer’s expectations, as if it were thinking on its own (artificial intelligence excluded). This is a challenge, for how does one find a ghost in a machine that appears to be thinking independently and then tell it what to do?

***

The ghost in my machine is a little different than an intellectual treatise, a beloved album, a horror movie, a technological mystery or a killer train. It is a real ghost, and it lives in my great grandmother’s antique sewing machine. And even though it seems eager to communicate, it often behaves contrary to what I would expect it to.

Let me back up a bit. I am a paranormal investigator, a ghost hunter if you will. I look for the unusual, the unseen, and the mostly invisible lifeforms that appear to exist all around us, but that most of us aren’t consciously aware of.  Unlike most people, who maybe aren’t excited by the presence of things unseen, I go looking for them. On purpose. I use my senses and my equipment to try to find out what and who they are. It has always been the next great mystery to me, and it would be the culmination of a life-long quest if I were able, with certainty, to figure out who and what they are.

Which brings me back to the ghost in my (sewing) machine.

I bought a new camera last week, an SLS (structured light sensor) camera, which other paranormal investigators may be familiar with. It is based on Microsoft Kinect technology and purports to be able to identify not only human figures but also entities that can’t be seen with the human eye. Through this special lens, both humans and entities look like stick figures. It is easy to tell the humans in the room as you can see the body shape with the stick figure super-imposed on top of it, but when you see a stick figure that is just a stick figure that is when you may be getting something. It is not an exact science as there can be false positives, but for the most part you can adjust for that and learn to tell what is the (hopefully) real deal and what isn’t. False positives can often be cleared by waving your hand in front of the sensors. The figure will disappear and should not come back again. If a stick figure disappears and reappears (especially on command) you may have mapped something of interest. If you give the stick figure a directive (raise your hand or leg, wave at the camera) and it does, there may be some intelligent interaction going on. With experience, it becomes easier to tell what is a false positive and what is something unexplained that the camera is sensing in the environment. Which is what happened with my machine.

I had expected that there would be some sort of entity in my house. When I am in bed at night, I hear noises in the empty living room and kitchen. That is a tip-off to people who are used to listening for things that go bump in the night that there might be unseen guests about. What I didn’t expect when I panned the SLS camera around the room was that I would see a stick figure jumping up and down on the side of my grandmother’s treadle sewing machine. Or that it would disappear when I asked it to and reappear on command.

Remember those false positives I was talking about? Sometimes, the SLS will take objects in the area and make them look like they are a figure when they really aren’t. So, like any good investigator, I attempted to debunk what I was seeing. I cleared the top of the sewing machine of everything on it and looked at it through the SLS camera again. The figure was still there, but things were getting a little more interesting. With the items off of the machine, the figure looked to be inside the machine, not standing next to it. To my mind, if the items on top of the machine were causing a false reading, there shouldn’t have been any figure there at all when they were removed, but there it was. It was smaller, but definitely still there.

I was intrigued, so I moved the sewing machine to a different location in the room. Still there. I looked at it from different angles. Still there, although the perspective changed like it might if you were taking pictures with a regular camera from different viewpoints. The figure would still appear and disappear on command although not always consistently, which is not unusual and very frustrating when you are trying to gather evidence. I wonder sometimes if it is because the entity gets tired of us saying “Can you disappear? Thank you. Can you reappear? Thank you.” They may just decide to stop playing that game after a while. The only thing it didn’t ever do was leave the sewing machine, which is unusual. Entities can usually move from place to place, but this little guy (for some reason I think it is male) didn’t do that. He never left the machine. The ghost was truly inside the machine, and I began to realize that might mean he was attached to it.

Attachment to objects in the paranormal field is not that unusual, but I have never caught one on film before. And it made me wonder, if something was truly attached to my grandmother’s sewing machine, who or what was it and how long had it been there? And, if it had been a person and if Rene Descartes was right and the soul could separate from the body at death and continue to exist, how in the world had this one become trapped in my family sewing machine and why couldn’t it get out? I don’t know the answer to that, but as a paranormal investigator, it is my job to try to figure it out.

Another piece of equipment that I use on occasion is the Paranormal Music Box. The theory behind the music box is that if ghosts were formerly living persons and are from an era long past, they might recognize a music box as something they can interact with. It has a sensor on one end that is triggered when anything moves in front of it, and that is what prompts the music box handle to turn and the music to play. The paranormal music box has a unique design to it, though. It is not one of those pretty boxes you see from back in the day that had a ballerina with arms outstretched on the top twirling as the music played and it is not a polished wooden box engraved with timeless designs that open to show a tuned steel comb making music as it moves against a rotating cylinder. No, this music box is shaped like a coffin, and the music, while not disturbing, has a decidedly creepy air to it. It is an effective piece of equipment, though, both for identifying the presence of things that are just passing through and for using the music as a way to carry on a “yes” and “no” conversation. For instance, if the answer to a question is yes, the entity can trigger the music box to play, and if it is no, the box can stay silent.

There are some amazing question and answer sessions that happen in the paranormal community where the responses on a variety of devices that can make sounds or use light for yes and no answers appear to be intelligent and consistent. Most of the time, it is more frustrating and harder to decipher. The responses are often random or can stop suddenly like whatever was trying to talk ran out of steam or just got tired of talking with you. You also have to be very careful when doing question and answer sessions to make sure that you are not seeing something happening there that is not. Paranormal investigation is definitely not an exact science, and until ghosts can text, send emails or Zoom with you, it is likely to continue to be difficult to interpret what is happening at times.

Using multiple pieces of equipment can be helpful for gathering additional information when you investigate, though, so I decided to do a brief question and answer session with the music box to see if there would be any response. I turned it on, calibrated it to decrease false positives, set an audio recorder next to it, stated the date and time so that I would remember the when and the where and began the session.

The first question of course was, “Are you there?” The machine gave a quick turn of the handle and some bars of music floated on air. I took that as a positive.

“Can you talk into the recorder and tell me your name?” Brief music. (There was no answer I could hear on the recording when I played it back.)

“Are you attached to my sewing machine?” Brief music.

“Are you trapped in there?” Brief music.

“Are you a relative of mine?” Nothing.

“Are you the spirit that I saw on my camera?” Several seconds of music.

I asked questions about whether or not the entity had come with my house (no answer), had it always been in the sewing machine (no answer) and if I knew it (positive answer but no responses when I asked for extra details.) When I got ready to stop the session after several questions that didn’t provoke any response, I asked if it would like to communicate later and got a lengthy burst of music longer than any of the others. I again identified the location and the date of the session and asked the entity if it knew that that was the current date. There was a brief response on the music box. When I asked it if had more to tell me, there was a lengthy musical response and as I ended the session, I said that I would be back to communicate with it again. I decided to leave the music box on the sewing machine to see what would happen and it went on and off multiple times that evening with no one near it, but when I asked additional specific questions, I didn’t get any answers. It may have been some kind of a calibrating malfunction at that point, but it made me wonder, just as the stick figures can pop in and out on the SLS camera, could the music box sensor be reading the sewing machine ghost if it was coming and going? If so, where was it coming and going from, and, if it was really trapped in the machine, how could that happen? I pulled out the camera again to see if the figure coming and going on the camera correlated with the music box going off and on, but it didn’t seem to be connected. I could see the figure on the camera, but the music box didn’t make any more sounds even when the lively figure appeared and disappeared.

Experience has shown me that having specific information about a location you are investigating or names that might be relevant to whoever is trying to communicate with you can facilitate more efficient two-way communication, and I wanted some answers. Instead of asking twenty questions to establish the basics (“Are you a male?”, “Are you a female?”, “Are you young?”, “Are you old?”, “Did you live here?”), it really cuts to the chase when you can say “Are you George Smith?” and you get a positive response that helps you know where to focus your questions. With that in mind, I decided to ask the person who gave the sewing machine to me, my mother, to tell me what she knew about its history before I tried any further communication with whoever was living in it. My mom wasn’t sure where it originally came from (“It has just always been in the family,”) although she is pretty sure she got it from her mother, who got it from her mother-in-law, my great grandmother.

My mother told me that there have been a lot of family clothes sewn on that machine throughout its history (full disclosure, I made some of my children’s clothes on it before the bar that made the treadle work broke) and that it was always a beloved centerpiece in the house she grew up in and in her grandmother’s house before that. There was no tragedy associated with it that she knew of, but there was one death in her grandmother’s family of a two-year-old child back in 1904, who would have worn clothes sewn on that machine by his mother, my great-grandmother. The child’s name was Edward and they called him Teddie. He was my great grandfather’s son and would have been my great uncle. It was the only information I had to go on that might yield any fruit, so I pulled out the music box again, calibrated the sensor, set up an audio recorder beside it and began to ask more detailed questions.

“Is your name Teddie?” No answer.

“Are you my great uncle?” No answer.

“Are you my great grandfather’s son?” No answer.

“Is your name Christiana?” (Teddie’s mom and the original owner of the machine – no answer).

“Are you from that family?” No answer.

Well, that line of questioning wasn’t getting me anywhere, so I decided to take a chance that whoever was playing with the music box before might be another little kid, even though it didn’t identify as Teddie. The figure I was seeing through the camera did look pretty small.

“Are you a little kid?” Brief one key sound.

“What is your age?” Now, this is not technically a “yes” or “no” question, so I asked it to make sounds on the music box to tell me how old it was, and I counted the tones of the music, 11 in all. “Are you 11?” No answer. “Are you 10?” No answer. “Are you 9?” Positive response. Now we were getting somewhere.

“Is there a reason why you aren’t telling me your name?” Brief music. “What is that reason?

Say it into the recorder.” No answer that I could hear.

“Do you like living in the sewing machine?” Enthusiastic burst of music.

“Do you want to leave the sewing machine?” Silence, after which there were no more responses to my questions.

This may surprise you, but even though I am a paranormal investigator, I am not a big fan of ghosts living in my house. They can be noisy; they can demand extra attention once they realize you know they are there and sometimes the energy of whatever they are doesn’t mix too well with live human physiology. It can make some sensitive people feel pretty ill. There are also some entities that can be pretty nasty, and they can be a general negative presence. I find those to be pretty few and far between, maybe because I don’t go looking for them, but even though that wasn’t the case here I still really preferred for the little guy to move on. There are many ways to get entities to leave a location: cleansing with sage, giving blessings, following a spirit release process, to name a few, and many times, just having a conversation about it and asking them to go will work. It is your house, after all, and there does seem in many cases to be a ghostly understanding of the landlord-tenant laws and when they are asked to go, they do. Once in a while you will get one that is more difficult to evict, but that has been the exception to the rule in my experience. And usually, when they are trapped, they seem happy to be able to get out into fresh air and go wherever it is they go.

I was definitely curious about the little guy, but once I realized he was there my mission was to release him and send him on his way which I naively thought might be what he would want too. He made it pretty clear, though, that he was happy where he was at which was confusing if he was trapped in there. And that, for my purposes, begged the question, what do you do when a ghost doesn’t want to go? And, even more importantly, what was keeping this ghost in my machine?

The answer, it seemed, was another ghost. When I turned on the camera again the next evening, a new stick figure appeared in the door frame right next to the sewing machine. This one wasn’t small, it was tall, very tall. Because of its location, I had to make sure that it wasn’t some anomaly from the camera, so I asked it to lift its leg up, which it did. I asked it to move away from the door jamb if it could. It disappeared and as I panned the camera around the room, I noticed it on top of the dining room table and then in other locations in my living room. The place it appeared the most by far, though, was right next to the sewing machine. It kept pointing with its stick arm right over to where the little guy had been nestled inside, almost patting it like you would pat a child on the head. The little guy in the machine didn’t make an appearance until the very end of that session and then they both were visible side by side. The tall one put what I presume was an arm out and the little one disappeared. The little one almost seemed shy, nervous, if you can extrapolate that from a stick figure. That got me to thinking, was the tall one keeping the little one in the machine? Or was it there to get it out?

I had mixed feelings about this. I was anthropomorphizing about what was happening with these two spirits, if you can even attribute human motivation, behaviors and characteristics to a ghost, but I also had an ethical conundrum here. If the tall one was keeping the ghost in the machine, should I be trying to get him out? If the tall one was there because I had drawn attention to the little guy was that a positive or a negative? How did the little one feel about all of this? I didn’t want to be responsible for causing that little spirit any harm. Yikes. What a dilemma.

So, I did what I do any time I see or hear or feel spirits. I decided to have a conversation about it by addressing them directly. I didn’t use any equipment to get any answers this time, I just laid it out the way I saw it. I said that I was aware of both of them, and I told each of them that the other one was there in case they weren’t aware of it. I told the little guy that if he was afraid of the big guy that he could stay in the machine as long as he wanted. I told the big guy that if he was keeping the little one trapped in the machine with ill intent that he could get out of my house. I asked them both if they had been looking for each other. And I said that if it was safe and healthy for both of them that I would really like them to leave. The little one was standing up straight by this time. Then they both disappeared and didn’t come back.

I decided to do another walk through my house with the camera just to see if anything was happening in any of the other rooms. Now this is a true story, but what happened in the next few minutes probably sounds even weirder than what you have read so far. I have already told you that I can tell when ghosts are in or passing through my house. Years of experience and some very slight medium skills help with that. But even though I get excited about otherworldly things, and rush towards them instead of away, I have boundaries. And one of them is that ghosts are not allowed in my bedroom. So, as I am moving through my house, when I pointed the camera towards my bedroom, guess who was there? Yup, you guessed it, the tall guy. I attempted to explain. “I know you might not know this, but spirits aren’t allowed in my bedroom.” He didn’t budge. I tried again. “This area is off limits; you need to go back out where you were before.” No movement. I was beginning to have flashbacks of my teenagers rolling their eyes when I asked them to do something, but as I moved toward the figure to reinforce that it needed to leave one of the strangest things happened that I have ever seen doing paranormal work. The tall figure jumped to my door frame from where he was across the room, lightning fast, disappeared, then reappeared on my bathroom counter. As I am following it, trying to catch up and document it with the camera, it disappeared again and then reappeared in my office, which is across the hall from my bedroom. That didn't make me happy. I don’t like spirits in my office either. That is where I work, and I don’t need to be distracted by ghost energy. It disappeared again, and I caught up to it just as it reappeared on my file cabinet.

Then I saw it. The little guy was standing on top of the file cabinet. The big guy was standing right beside him. I wish I could say that they held hands to show me that they were okay with each other or that they waved a fond farewell to me, but they didn’t. They just disappeared, and they did not come back.

Just like that, there was radio silence. No more music from the music box. No more noises in the night. When I looked at the sewing machine with the SLS camera, there was no stick figure in it, on it or anywhere around it. The tall one wasn’t there either. What had been there was gone. There was no more ghost in my machine.

I would like to think that they are happily reunited and that I helped to them to go to the light, just like the Ghost Whisperer, but to tell you the truth, I have no idea where they went. Are they out there, somewhere, flying around and doing whatever ghosts do, enjoying being together finally, enjoying their freedom, or have they indeed gone to be with others who might have been wondering where they were? Unfortunately, where we are at now with our technology and our ability to gather information about our ghostly friends, it just isn’t possible to know. I wish that I could say that I saw them fade gently into the sunset, but I didn’t. They were just gone. No fanfare, no goodbye. Just gone.

I am choosing to believe that wherever they are, what happened here was a good thing and that they are happy.

It has been quiet in my house now for several nights, but tonight I woke up to familiar sounds of movement and noises in the living room. I wonder sometimes if I have a sign on my roof that says, “ghost hunter lives here, come visit,” but I, weirdly enough, find those noises comforting. They don’t bother me. They make me curious. Think I will get my camera out and see what I can see. The hunt goes on.

 The Little Guy in the Machine

The Big Guy Lifting His Leg When I Asked Him To

Both of Them Together Side by Side