October 2005) The Spellchecker Case: Computer-Mediated Mediumship? THE SPELLCHECKER CASE: COMPUTER-MEDIATED MEDIUMSHIP? by JULIE ROUSSEAU and DaviD ROUSSEAU ABSTRACT In late summer 2001, we were invited by David Fontana and Montague Keen to join an investigation into what appeared to be a remarkably reliable and consistent case of post-mortem communication. The communication manifested through anomalous spelling suggestions made by a computer's spellchecker. During our technical investigation, we discovered a software bug that accounted for many of the reported phenomena, but did not entirely defuse the mystery. Rather, the questions to be answered became more subtle, and the research situation more complex, Although the initial hope of a straightforward survival case has been deflated, there remains an interesting case that reiterates and sharpens many of the questions posed by more familiar types of survival cases. In this paper, we describe our methods and discoveries. We discuss the case's loose ends and characterise the assumptions that would be necessary to support a non-paranormal explanation. We also evaluate various paranormal interpretations, and consider the potential for a form of ITC involving computers in this way. We discuss the type of evidence that the ongoing research would need to produce in order to make the case for paranormality more compelling. INTRODUCTION Northwood Hall! is a comprehensive high school near Stoke-on-Trent, housed in a former stately Victorian home erected on the site of a much older building in the grounds of what was once Dieulacres Abbey, dissolved in 1538. The building has a reputation for being haunted. The Revd J. Sleigh’s History of the Ancient Parish of Leek (1883) recorded a ghost, thought to be of Lady Vane Tempest, that was so troublesome that clergy had been summoned to exorcise it. In more recent times, school staff had reported occasional unexplained events. The school’s drama teacher had unlocked the door to the performing arts room one morning to find that a number of props for a school play had been placed in a neat circle on the floor in the middle of the room, all pointing inwards. The room was routinely locked at night and not accessible by any other means. In a similar event, stacks of boxes were found to have been scattered around a study that was both locked and alarmed, and for which the then estate manager, Dan Short, had the only key. Two of the staff reported hearing the sounds of people talking, moving about and shifting boxes emanating from the tower rooms at one end of the school studio. Both of them left the school soon afterwards, as did one of the cleaners, who said she had met a female ghost in what is now the men’s staff toilets. The key event in terms of later developments was another ghost sighting, this time by Mrs Judith Pennyhough,' a cleaner at the school, on 28th July 1998. The event occurred in full daylight in the women’s staff toilet. Mrs + All names are pseudonyms. m7Journal of the Society for Psychical Research [Vol. 69.4, No. 881 Pennyhough, who had previously regarded herself as an arch-sceptic, reported suddenly finding the apparition alongside her when she was washing her hands. It ‘pushed’ against her before disappearing by walking through the wall at the end of the room. Mrs Pennyhough gave a clear description of a tallish woman in a full-length black skirt and cream high-necked blouse, with hair gathered up on top of her head. Naturally enough, this sparked a great deal of interest and speculation at the school. The following month, a particularly intriguing object disappearance was reported by Dan Short, the estate manager, and Mike Shaw, the school’s IT technician. During a clear, sunny day on 12th August 1998, they were laying a cable duct across the grounds to link the two main buildings of the school for the computer network. Shaw described what followed (Fontana & Keen, 2002):— We had six-metre lengths of plastic pipe and a 300 mm long and 50 mm wide bright yellow tube of grease to ease jointing, and an old paintbrush with which to apply it to the pipe socket. We had completed about three-quarters of the job, having established a good routine. Dan would grease the pipe socket, place the tube and brush on the ground and line up the pipe ends, and I would push the new pipe home into the socket. We were in a small area of sparse woodland, and performed the steps as normal, but as I was about to push the new pipe home into the socket, Dan and I were both astonished when both the tube and the brush, both clearly visible on the ground between us, just disappeared before our eyes. We started to search for it, but we knew that it was futile, because we had both seen them vanish into thin air, as if dissolving. Later that same afternoon Short found that the lights in Room 112 could not be turned off. The light switch was new, and even when he removed the switch and opened the electrical contacts, the light remained on. It took several attempts at rewiring the switch for the lights to switch off. He had further difficulties setting the alarm system, with several sensors being triggered in succession, even though there seemed to be nothing to set them off. On 9th September, another staff member returned to the tea room after washing his cup, to find the kettle half full of hot water in the middle of the floor. He complained to staff who had been standing outside, but they denied involvement. When they all returned, they found the kettle back in its place on the table, with no evidence of spillage. However, it was the ghost that Judith Pennyhough saw in July that sparked the interest of the estate manager, Dan Short, and made him resolve to research the history of the Hall and its ghost. He enlisted the help of Michael Burnham, a keen amateur local historian who was his predecessor at the school and had written a booklet about the history of Northwood Hall. Based on their research (and despite the discrepancy of dress), the two concluded that, rather than Lady Vane Tempest, the ghost was more likely to be that of Lady Prudentia Trentham, who had apparently lived in the previous building on the site and died in 1642. In late September, the Religious Education teacher invited Short to give a talk on his findings to the students. In preparation, Short wrote a summary document (hereafter called the ‘LP Text’), and on 28th September he prepared to print out a copy to send to Burnham. At this point, the incident occurred that triggered all the subsequent events. Short ran his spellchecker over the document he had written, and it stopped on a misspelling of the surname of 178October 2005] The Spellchecker Case: Computer-Mediated Mediumship? the lady presumed to be the ghost, ‘Trenham’ (missing the ¢), and offered as an alternative spelling the word ‘Pennyhough’, i.e. the surname of the person who had so recently seen the ghost. Readers familiar with spellcheckers will be aware that they highlight words that they do not recognize, and offer similar alternatives selected from their built-in dictionaries. Trentham and Pennyhough are such dissimilar words that the spellchecker’s behavior in offering one as a replacement for the other was very surprising. The meaningful and topical connection between the two names made Short wonder whether the ghost might be using his spellchecker in an attempt to communicate with him. The Birth of the LPRG This first anomalous spellchecker response was so striking to Dan Short that he showed it to Mike Shaw, the school’s IT technician, who could not account for it. Shaw taught Short how to make a permanent record of the screen image by capturing it to disk; over the years, Short has collected a substantial file of such screenshots. Over subsequent days, Short deliberately added more spelling errors to the text of his document, finding that each time he ran the spellchecker he would get further anomalous suggested corrections. New words appeared that again bore no similarity to the misspelled words they were supposed to correct, but did seem to be relevant to the subject-matter of the document. For instance, in response to a misspelling of Trentham the spellchecker once offered ‘Dieulacres’ as an alternative (in addition to the conventional suggestions). The same word misspelled elsewhere in the text, or reached on a different occasion, would produce different anomalous suggestions, such as ‘Bagnall’, ‘John’, ‘gate’, ‘Bakewell’. Many of these events were witnessed by others. Short found that the anomaly did not appear when he spell-checked other documents unrelated to the haunting. Also, if he added irrelevant misspelled words into the ‘LP text’ (e.g. ‘aeroplanee’), the spellchecker would offer only the expected suggestions for those words. The anomaly only occurred on words relating to the history of Lady Prudentia (LP), and the anomalously produced words always seemed as if they could conceivably be relevant to that history. However, not every misspelled word produced an anomalous result, even if apparently relevant. Michael Burnham, an amateur local historian, started researching the names and words received, to see whether some could be veridical. He had recognised ‘John’ as the name of Lady Prudentia’s butler, a fact that he had recorded in his earlier history of the hall. He and Short agreed to separate their activities, with Short receiving messages and Burnham researching them (Short claims that his prior knowledge of local history was very limited). Burnham found, for example, that Bagnall was the name of a local mill owner with whom LP might have been acquainted. Bakewell turned out to be the town where LP was married. The name ‘Ellen’ was received, and was subsequently discovered to be the name of LP’s housekeeper. Short continued to explore the phenomenon. He found that it only appeared if he was using Word 6 on a computer running Windows 3.11, but would not manifest on a more modern system. He consulted another local IT technician, 179