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June 5, 2003
Real Ghosts! Because so many people come to Ghost Sites looking for information on Real Ghosts - not the metaphoric kind that haunt the spectral directories of abandoned Web servers but the ectoplasmic kind whose invisible presences cause the hackles of one's neck to turn up and the thermometer to turn down, perhaps it's time for a short excursion into the realm of the paranormal in an attempt to answer the oft-asked question: "what does the editor of Ghost Sites of the Web think of Real Ghosts?" Let me say at the outset that I've never actually seen a ghost, nor, have I ever had any communications with any departed spirits in what would be termed the ordinary waking state of consciousness. Like most of us, I have had a handful of dreams in my life wherein people who have died have spoken to me, but I cannot fairly say that these encounters were anything but normal and explicable mental fantasies. I am not saying that spirits do not actually walk the earth, only that I have never seen one in the way that you or I would see a tree, and know immediately that it is a tree. Of course, I should probably also say that I may well have never run across the kind of ghosts that many people have claimed they've run into for the mere fact that I do not actively go out hunting for them. One reason that I do not do so is that an incident happened to me about 25 years ago which was terrifying enough to make me decide that there probably really is something out there that is so damned frightening that I really have no business messing with it. I will recall this instance for you, not because it necessarily provides evidence of the so-called "paranormal" but because it bears on the larger question of why people sometimes decide that it's best not to go rambling through the world of occult on their own. Let's turn back the clock to 1977. I had just moved out of my parent's apartment and was living alone and starting to make my way in the world. I was going to New York University and there was a place called the Loeb Student Center that housed a dark, fairly depressing little bar called "The Pub" in which all manner of people - students, adminsistrators, homeless people from Washington Square Park, and God knows who else, hung out there. I remember that I met two people there one day, and I believe that they were named Alec and Genevieve. They weren't active NYU students, but recent dropouts who continued to come to the Pub, possibly to buy drugs from the Washington Square Park people. Alec and Genevieve were "strange" in a way that was new to me. Alec was gaunt, hollow-cheeked, and vaguely Germanic-looking. Genevieve had luminous purple eyes, jet black hair, and always wore white theatrical makeup. A casual friend of mine quipped that that the pair looked like Charles Adams had drawn them. I didn't care. I was young and looking for excitement. And I soon found it. Alec, Genevieve and myself were sitting there one afternoon in that dark place, with a yellow circle of light over our heads, sharing a pitcher of beer, and while I don't know who started it, and it might have been me, because I was reading all kinds of strange books in those days, especially "The Center of The Cyclone", a book written by John Lilly on sensory deprivation experiments, Alec suggested that if I was really interested in the topics that Lilly was talking about, which dealt with telepathy and astral projection, I try a little experiment. "Go out and buy a candle", Alec said. "Then set up a mirror. Not a little one, but as large a mirror as you have. Turn out every light in your apartment, but leave the candle lit. Then sit in front of the mirror and simply look into your own eyes, and within a very short period of time, you will see it." "See what?", I asked. "I am not going to spoil it for you", said Alec, reaching for his glass. "C'mon, Alec", I probed. "What will I see?" At this point, Genevieve entered the conversation. "I'd suggest that you turn on some music before you do this. Music distracts the mind and lets in the spirit world". "Yes", said Alec. "Put on whatever music you want, but preferably nothing with words. Keep it instrumental". "Allright", I said. "I'll do it". "Well", said Alec, standing, "you have your homework now". He put on his cape (no, I'm not making this up), took Genevieve by the hand and they disappeared up the stairs, leaving me in the gloom with a half-glass of beer. I don't remember what I did for the rest of the afternoon, but by early evening, I had bought a small candle from a nearby deli, darkened the lights of my apartment, and had turned on my record player. I wish I could tell you what the record was that I was playing, but I really don't recall it. Given that I never had much of an instrumental record library, it may well have been Michel Jarre's soundtrack to "The Professionals", but again, my memory is not clear about this. But this is probably the only part of this experience that I don't recall with precision. I sat down on the floor in front of the mirror with the candle beside me, and began staring into my own eyes. I remember thinking "this is sort of ridiculous - I mean, what the hell is going to happen?" I stared at myself for one minute, then two, growing a bit bored with the whole thing. I recall feeling intense, self-conscious stabs of shame. Why was I - a believer in science, in reason, in Bill Moyers, sitting here, staring at my dumb face in a thumb-smeared mirror? Who the hell were Alec and Genevieve anyway? But these feelings began to pass and I grew more relaxed. I remember thinking that whatever I was doing, it was no more stuipd than doing what I usually did at seven o'clock, which was to watch TV. The music played on in the dark room, the features of my face shifting in the deep shadows cast by the dim, wobbling flame. Soon, I became calmer, more comfortable, less tense, almost at peace. Suddenly - and it happened so quickly and with so little warning that my only reaction was to scream at the top of my lungs - I saw something in the mirror, right there in my own face. To this day I do not know what it was, but I can only say that my face was no longer there. There was something behind my face - a skull-like, grinning apparition that bore no resemblence to the person that I, at that moment in time, in that room, so long ago, had up until that moment understood myself to be. I jerked my head back, stood up, and fumbled with the light switch. Shaking uncontrollably, my heart racing, I extinguished the candle. To this day I do not know what the thing that I saw, but what I saw was not me. The terrifying visage might have been a hidden self that lurked within me, or a yet-to-be-revealed self that I would someday become: a grim, grinning ghost that looked out from behind my own eyes toward its own reflection. This visage might have been an image of Death, or simply an illusion that was created by the optical phenomenon known as "retinal aftereffect" - the mental image that is caused when one stares at the color red long enough that it turns green. The next day, I went back to the Pub to seek out Alec and Genevieve. What was the thing that I had seen, there in the dark, with the flickering candle and the mirror and the music playing? Was it real? A trick? An illusion? Was this "little experiment" a game they played with total strangers to drive them to the brink of terror? But they were not there, and, in fact, I never saw them again. They had, like ghosts themselves, disappeared. There were many other odd things that happened to me in succeeding years. There was the time that I, lying in a a pre-dawn, pre-waking state, became absolutely convinced that I had been visited by a Succubus (if you don't know what that is, you have some homework of your own that you need to do), an event that was later attributed to the discovery that someone in the apartment below me had inadvertently broken a bottle of Ether and that the hallucinogenic fumes had, for hours, been drifting through my apartment. And the time that somebody - and I still don't know who it was - apparently spiked a Coke I was drinking with LSD without doing me the favor of telling me anything about it. For several days afterward, I was convinced that I had spoken personally with God, that She was a woman, and that everything was going to be all right. Finally, somebody took me aside and explained that I had been used as a guinea pig in yet another "little experiment". Let us leave the 1970's now, and return to the present day, which finds me, for reasons I hope that I've made clear enough tonight, unwilling to actively seek out any Ghosts, Spirits, Apparitions, or Succubi/Incubi beyond those turned up in my nightly nocturnal hunts for the fleeting, spectral spirits which once inhabited the life-giving Web sites you see in Ghost Sites' Screen Shot Collection. Perhaps it is because 25 years ago, I had already become a believer in things which, if you look hard enough at them, will likely send you screaming toward the nearest priest in the nearest church. Or maybe it's because I'm now at the point in my life where I'm finally willing to accept something that was always a pet childhood superstition of mine: that we, the living, are already ghosts, and our time here is one long, amazingly convincing flashback, replete with sound, light, and feeling, into a fleeting, dimly-understood world from which we've already emerged. Even if we're not - i.e. the dead really are dead and we really are alive, the way I figure it is that there will be plenty of time to enjoy the company of any ghosts, once our breathtakingly short period of time among the living has elapsed. And if there are no ghosts in our future, no persistent afterlife, no nothing save for the Void that made Jean Paul Satre so nauseaus in the 1940's, why not then simply live? I suppose I am in sympathy with my long-dead Grandfather, who visits me very rarely, only in dreams, to chew me out for some action or omission on my part which still pisses him off. He was a Unitarian with a lifelong fondness for nature, and he'd often would walk, fearlessly through a cloud of hornets that had most of the younger grownups, and certainly, all of the kids completely terrified of being stung.
"Don't bother them", he'd say, "and they won't bother you."
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Ghost-o-Meter You're on the web a lot. You've seen many a dead site. You've forgotten our email address... and you don't feel like coming back here to get it. What do you do? Ghost-o-Meter (javascript required) The Ghost-o-Meter opens a small, movable window... if you've found a Ghost Site, fill in the blanks, fire it off, and go back to foolin' around. Its that easy. You can also use this form: What the ??! Well, this is all very interesting, but what the heck is Ghost Sites anyway? Why devote a live site to Dead Sites? If you're interested in this Ghost Sites thing, it is a project that I began in the summer of 1996 while I was working for Time-Warner's Pathfinder. Late in the evening of July 4th, while piloting a small craft across Long Island Sound, I had what only can be described as an epiphany. From out of the depths came a cruel vision of the World Wide Web. It wasn't a friendly place - an innocent place of community, commerce and chat. It was a great and utterly pitiless electronic ocean that swallowed up sites, careers, and venture capital like a ravenous killer whale. Great sites - sites like Mecklerweb and iGuide - were going down with all hands. Great fortunes were collapsing and proud content sites lay wrecked on the bottom. No one seemed to care. The future was a vast abyss - who would record these days of New Media folly, disaster and despair? Back on shore, but still haunted by this vision, I launched Ghost Sites as a modest attempt to document the great disappearing fleet of web sites sinking beneath the waves. This project briefly made me spectacularly famous, and then I was quickly, and completely forgotten. By March of 1997, Ghost Sites had succumbed to the same deadly entropy that had settled over the Internet, and became a crewless wreck itself. For six cruel months, it drifted like a despised garbage barge, broke its keel in a summer squall, and finally washed up on Geocities. On an icy November morning, Morbus boarded the wreck, inspected the damage, and offered the captain a safe harbor. The bilge pump was started, and the squealing, rusty hull lifted off the sands again. It soon arrived here - in the dark, unquiet waters of Disobey.Com. If you have a favorite rotting site that you'd like to mention, email me at Steve_Baldwin@hotmail.com. Ghost Sites has appeared in a number of places including Time Magazine, ZDNet, The Netly News and more. For a list of all those we know of, as well as links to online counterparts, click here. You can also take a look at the limited edition t-shirt we once offered. Previous Issues Text issues? Click here.
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