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Seeking a Ghost via Web Cam
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.
"
But whatever you do, don't cross the beams.
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!
in response to the above photo link:- 1. The background in the picture is definately very course and blurry. 2. Not so unusual in photography admittedly to have objects in the foreground to look sharper. 3. Big problem though is that you can plainly see the table edge near the pile of papers, and its damn blurry. 4. Funnily though the "misty image" of the ghost is amazingly sharp. Check out the supposed sleeve near the pile of papers. Very sharp definition that only appears on our "ghost" and no where else in the picture (even in object near the ghost). 5. This is a poor job of faking a ghost picture. 6. I beleive thses opaque effects would be relatively easy to reproduced in many grpahics packages, and that the creator forgot to "fuzz" out the eges of his/her newly created "ghost". Brad
Anyone done it yet? Brad
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
ac.uk
You can use a watermarking technique on the images, this effectively embeds a CRC checksum into the original photo, before it is published on the Web. Any editing to the image breaks the CRC and you know that the image has been tampered with.
I believe Adobe implement this kind of technique in the Photoshop software. The can get the license info from an image created or edited in Photoshop.
ac.uk
Check out the entry for pareidolia in "The Skeptic's Dictionary" (http://www.skepdic.com/pareidol.html ) to learn more about why people see ghosts in a bunch of blurry pixels. You may also wish to visit my page, which deals specifically with such images on the Moon (http://wfmh.org.pl/~thorgal/Moon/). Enjoy.
"Man in the Moon and other weird things" - wfmh.org.pl/thorgal/Moon/
and assume the existence of ghosts, for argument's sake. With this I'd need to assume the existence of a spiritual plane/dimension/universe, etc. Even if I do this, (thus stepping into ghost belivers' shoes) I find the whole notion of capturing an image or recording of a spirit entity on a mechanical device to be half absurd, even when viewed from their own angle.
After all, this is supposed to be an incorporeal entity, is it not? And thus why assume it would actually emit or reflect any kind of electromagnetic energy, light/infrared/radio waves included, at all?
Humans, from a believer's view, are a hybrid - part material, part spirit. Ghosts are sprit entities. Who knows hows much control they have over their own universe? They might manifest a material essence, or they might circumvent material-space entirely. The way an "image" of a ghost can be projected onto human consciousness is considerably different than the way an image appears to an optical device. The ghost might be able to set up an image directly on the optic nerve. Ghosts could even selectively appear to some people and not to others. The trouble with paranormal investigation is that, when you add this enormous X nature of the "spritual" world to your analysis all bets are off.
Even if you belive in ghosts, the idea that you could candidly "catch" them using a device intended to record material phenomena is nonsensical.
- The Count
No, it's pure crap regardless. Billions of people. Millions of cameras. No real proof found EVER in any thing close to a scientific setting. Strange, no?
Some of you people need to chill. This is set up for fun. So what if the image quality is pretty bad and the pictures in their proof section aren't really that great quality. It's Halloween. Halloween is always a time for ghost stories and such. Instead of complaining about what's wrong with the site, think of the fun qualities of it and get in the spirit of Halloween dammit. Oh yeah, like Happy Halloween too and stuff.
Yet another stupid going-on in my town to give everyone the impression that we're dumb hicks. Please please please don't think that all of us from Evansville are as ridiculous as these folks.
Here's one situation for the use of a webcam:
Say you are a college student, and you are going home for the weekend. However, you also want to see what your rommate does with your stuff while you're gone. THAT, I think, is a much better use of a webcam than taking pictures of a library and then adding gaussian blurs in the shapes of people.
Now, I haven't tried this myself (yet) and I believe that taking jpegs every 5 seconds, even with checking for differences would fill up space pretty quickly given that if you have a curtain flapping next to the window that would generate enough motion to store the image... so don't try this without vast amounts of space.
-S
I saw Monica Lewinski going down on a Pink Elephant once. I'm a believer.
Better yet, the jpeg artifacts the first picture claims as a ghost appear to be generated by the crude Paint scrawls outlining 'her' position. The ghost is the message!
I have a cheapo USB QuickCam (waiting hopefully for kernel 2.4 and a driver) that I use when in Windoze. My desk is directly in front of a window (behind the cam) that the sun comes in. At certain points of the day, the cam picks up wierd "ghostly" images that are simply reflections and refractions of the light off other objects in the room playing off the camera lens. The images look remarkably like the table the "ghost" was sitting on if anyone looked at the proof page.
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
"False modesty is the refuge of the incompetent." - The Stainless Steel Rat
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.
[
why the hell are they always in academic institutions?!?!?! I suppose the buildings are old and thus chock full of explanations for the presences
Georgia Tech'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
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
The "proof" photos and the comments are what one can expect
from a site like this; someone with an imagination can look
at a poor quality photo and see anything. Anybody interested
in for real ghost photos, check out Dave Oester's excellent site at:
http://www.ghostweb.com
They are doing some *serious* work in that direction, and besides
archives of photos, also offer a wealth of info.
They should put a web-cam in :
- The Loch-Ness Lake
- Bill Clinton's Pants
- Monica Lewinski's Mouth
- Random low-class family rooms
- Ben Stein's podium (on his gameshow)
- Directly up my ass
oh, yeah-- first post!how much you wanna bet people start superimposing images of ghosts or whatever on it (i'm talking actually doing a decent job, working with translucency, etc) and saying they plucked it off the site and were the first to see it? aye. seems kinda ridiculous to me to even put one up, but i guess it's a decent way to generate page impressions.
--
you must amputate to email me
i read all replies to my comments
From what i saw earlier I think the camera leaves a lot to be desired and may be leaving artifacts... i would really like to see infrared actually.
I recall there was even an episode of a Nickelodeon show about that very library... Maybe it really is haunted! :-) Webcams really are everywhere though... I ran into a site with a camera in the same building I was in a few days ago, and the people on the other end of it came looking for me when they saw my IP connect. It's a very scary thing when the person on the other side of the web appears in real life - maybe this ghost thing will be cooler than I thought!
This page has pictures that people have submitted who claim to have spotted the ghost. Having made every effort to try not to be overly cynical, I must say that those pictures combined with their comments make for the dumbest reading ever. This would likely be more interesting to an individual with vision impairment than it is to me, because I can clearly see that there isn't a ghost.. they'd have to squint or take the ignorant folks' words for it. People appear to be seeing ghosts in the graphic compression algorithm (blocky images in certain places), not to mention some outright hallucination.
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.
I thought the proof page was quite weak, whenever you blow up a picture it looks really bad. For the most part you could circle anything and it would get posted as proof. I didn't see any good ones, anybody else got the time to find a good pic?
Its karma, Kramer.
It seems like another waste of time that will probably as an april fools or halloween joke superimpose an image onto it!
I mean, what is the point? It is like watching a ghost on video or 'real life UFO footage', you as the watcher, just can't believe it unless you're actually there (due to the number of hoaxes out there).
still, this site is still worth a quick look and a laugh.
I'd be surprised if any real ghosts show up, but I wouldn't be very surprised to see people doing the usual sorts of things in front of it. Or doing unusual sorts of things, at least for the location ;)
Ghost cams have been around for quite a while now, some other interesting ones are @
GhostWatch
Ghostwatcher
I believe there is even a Loch-ness monster cam @
"Offical Lochness Site
Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.
I've heard my fair share of ghost stories - why the hell are they always in academic institutions?!?!?! I suppose the buildings are old and thus chock full of explanations for the presences. In any event, I'd be curious to know whether the folks running the webcam actually hold on to the pictures themselves for comparison purposes when someone sends in a potentially edited "evidence" image.
;-)
Chances are it's a celebration of photoshop, not a ghost.
OH MY GOD I JUST SAW THE LADY IN GRAY!!!! She's right over there, on that blurry spot... oh wait, maybe the webcam's images are just pretty grainy and low quality.
/. readers should try tampering just to see if they get posted as real proof.
:) (just like every geek I know who gets a new webcam)
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.
Is it just me, or are all the "ghosts" on the site simply jpeg aliasing?
Maybe they should have the camera snapping gifs, then we will see how many ghosts are spotted!
If you can't figure out my address, just drop me an e-mail and I will explain.
This is one of the funniest links that I have seen in some time. I got a great laugh out of it. I realize that a substantial part of the population (American and otherwise) believes in the existance of ghosts.
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.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
A BOOKSHELF
The books start to slide forward then the whole shelving
unit topples over and almost crushes the team under a ton of
books. They jump to safety.
VENKMAN
Nice.
(out loud)
Hello...
Spengler looks at his meters and silently points at a dark
aisle intersecting the one they're in. The team inches toward
it.
SPENGLER
It's here.
They stop at the corner.
INT. THE DARK AISLE -- DAY
The team peeks around the corner and looks toward
camera.
THEIR POV -- DAY
An ethereal presence is hovering between the stacks about
four feet off the ground. It seems to waver on the edge of
being and non-being, then a large legless, headless torso
begins to emerge.
now, let me get something straight first. until today, I did not believe in ghosts. frankly, the idea that a public library would be encouraging some kind of ridiculous ghost hunt in the late 20th century appalled me. but no more! I'm a believer! rationalism is for the weak!
I don't want to go around ruining the contest for everyone, so I didn't submit it to the contest. I'm sure everyone will have a lot more fun if they still have a chance to win. however, my evidence is obvious and incontrovertible.
I've taken the liberty of adding a few arrows pointing toward the mysterious and beautiful apparation... she's sitting in a chair at the back of the room, reminding us all that there is life after death, that we are more than just another species of animal, that if we all close our eyes and wish hard enough, we'll become more than sex-crazed beasts hiding behind the silly mask of irrational spiritualism, possibly copulating and passing on our genes before dying and being recycled into nutrients for other forms of life! the answer is right before your very eyes!
Behold!
At least one of these pictures (blurry near the camera) really looks pretty good. I can see the arms holding a paper on the desk. Enlarge it in The Gimp if you have to, and compare it to any other picture. I did.
Of course, it could be faked. It looks like there's nothing to stop that. But I checked it against another file, the JPEG headers look the same (creator info and stuff) and the file size jives, too. So maybe it's real. Or maybe everyone uses Photoshop to fake their ghost pictures. :)
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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You may be to explain away the ghostly shadows, but try to explain how the camera ... ended up pointing in a different direction one day!!!!!! It's inexplicable! I'm starting to believe that there's really something out there!
Imagine someone crack this box and replace the webcam video by a fake video showing the ghost, wouldn't that be a cool crack?
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Hello, I am God. I would just like to say that I am going to be setting up a live webcam in heaven in a few weeks!
(Get your dirt cheap bridges at www.dirtcheapbridges.com!)
I noticed that too, and it was made with Photoshop. However, another image that didn't look faked was also, so either there are some really bad fakes out there, or someone else resizes them in Photoshop before they get to the web page...
A better option would be to have a 'Submit' button where it automatically saves that picture for review, instead of relying on people to send the pictures in. That would take out one layer of allowing people to fake entries.
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Seriously, though, "ghost photo's" have got to be one of the easiest things in the world to fake, even more then UFO's. I bet I could whip up some spectacular specimens right now, and I've only got Photoshop 5.02 on this rig. Certainly better then what's on the Art Bell ghost page, at any rate.
My grandparents live in Evansville and both my parents grew up in Evansville. Somehow this doesn't surprise me at all. ;) Actually, I think I may have been to that library before, I don't recall hearing anything about ghosts though. And I agree with every other sane person who has looked at that page, I don't see anything other than jpeg compression, and even then I can't even pretend to make out the image of a ghost in any of them. =P
It's actually quite amusing, because most of the "ghost" proof photos are really just very common jpeg compression and aliasing artifacts. I see stuff like that all the time when working on low bandwidth graphic designs: Look! That (--edited out for legal reasons--) company logo is waving at me!
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!"
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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 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--
Program Intellivision!
Everyone, stay close...
GET HER!!!
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I just remember reading Michael Crichton's Rising Sun which went into detail on image analysis etc as it related to video. The image would not be 'still' in the sense that even if nothing is happening on screen, due to the technologies, there will be inherent 'movement'. There are algorithms available which will allow real movement to be detected and so on.
JPG is a pathetic format for something like this which (being a bit of a skeptic myself) a skeptic could easily tear apart. At least bump the quality up to maximum. Having said that, I haven't seen any TIFF cameras around lately. :)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
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This article brought back many happy memories. Imagine its way back in 1989, and you are in the middle of the cornfields of Southern Indiana. There is no World Wide Web--in fact, the best source of new information about the computer revolution is the grocery store--because it sold the Computer Shopper magazine, which I breathlessly waited for each month. Places like Willard Library were crucial to the development of a budding hacker/geek. It is a marvelous old Victorian building...beautiful polished wood everywhere--and creaky wooden stairs. Just exactly the place you'd think would be haunted. What kept me going back time and again were its awesome selection of sci-fi novels and its philosophy books--some of which you could find nowhere else in the Midwest. Without libraries such as Willard, my geeky instincts would have died from a suffocating lack of stimulation. Having a card from Willard actually had panache--I remember the one time when I was able to use my Willard Library card instead of my Driver's Liscence for ID, and it was accepted no questions asked. They knew if you went to Willard, you were a Good Guy (TM). Thanks for running this story--it brought back a lot of good memories.
It actually does neither of these as lots of old granite buildings (or whatever material it was) have no ghostly history and it ignores the photo evidence. Needless to say the jury is still very much out.
Those idiots! Don't they realize that doing this will rupture the barrier between the ethereal and physical worlds? It'll cause a black hole effect, that will throw our dimension back into the time when the demons ruled the Earth. This was a horrible and bloody time. Now our entire existance is threatened, because some dope wants to webcam something other than their office toilet. What a way to end the world!!!
If they had intended to make the webcam accurate, they would have used a form of encryption and data stamping - if not several.
Besides, if they were truely interested in discovering this ghost, a web cam is not an accurate way to do so, with ~20 second gaps between shots on some. A security camera would be more efficient. Technology is fun and great, but when it's not the most practical application to get the job done... use the least common denominator.
I mean, how many web cams have absolutely NOTHING happening, while there's someone 2 feet to the left of the camera, working on their computer? I'm sure it happens often.
And considering that ghosts haven't been known to stop by for tea, the likelyhood of a ghost being caught digitally are even more slim. I mean, they're called 'ghost sitings', not 'ghost visitations'...
I personally think that there are spirits out there in some shape or form, but rarely manefest themselves in the physical. (MHO)
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I found myself watching the picture of the library slowly appear on my screen several times,hoping to find something new, that didn't belong there. Although I never saw a ghost, I would like to believe there is such a thing. Perhaps if more members of society believed there was more to life than we consider normal reality, people would circumscribe their personal desires and be more considerate of others.
Okay, if they were REALLY trying to catch this bastardly little ghost, then why aren't there ANY fraud protection in place to prevent it... I mean, really, I could stick a picture of Mickey Mouse in there at this point, at a little gaussian blur, crank down the opacity, and voila... instant ghost.
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..
I remember seeing this way back, and thinking regardless of how silly it was, it was really smart. This new cam is kinda smaller scale compared to GhostWatcher...
Heres a solution:
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
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Even with firing up PSP and splitting it into CMYK and HSL channels(Predator's point of view almost), i really cant see any ghost they are talking about. It looks just like JPEG artifacts. They really should of used PNG and a larger image. Hmm. Interesting to look for the ghosts though.