Haunted Technologies

Why are there no stories about a haunted WhatsApp?

Think of a ‘classic’ ghost story:—the dead haunt the living. The dead are the past, and the places associated with them are the places of the past: ancient castles, country houses, churches, graveyards. The dead hand of the past reaching out and grasping the present: uncanny, scary, spooky. Original Gothic (‘Gothic Classic’, like Coke Classic) is full of these things. But through the nineteenth-century a new mode of ghost story came along. The traditional old-set spooky story continued to be written, characters, like Scrooge in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, haunted by the past; but Dickens also wrote the wonderfully effective ghost story ‘The Signalman’ (1866), where the main character is haunted by the then-current technologies of the railway. The story’s narrator (his name is Barbox) encounters the titular signalman, who controls the signals at a tunnel, making sure two trains don’t enter at the same time, to avoid accidents and collisions. An approaching train causes a signal bell to ring, but it transpires the signalman sometimes hears ghostly rings — he does so when Barbox is visiting, and the latter hears nothing. More, the signalman has seen a ghost, and more than once: a spectre who appears at the mouth of the tunnel and waves at him. The visitor asks what the apparition looks like.

“I never saw the face,”’ the Signal-man replies. ‘“The left arm is across the face, and the right arm is waved. Violently waved. This way.” I followed his action with my eyes, and it was the action of an arm gesticulating with the utmost passion and vehemence: “For God’s sake clear the way!”

In fact the Signalman is being haunted by his own death: the future, cathected through the materiality of this (for 1866) brand new technology: electrical messages, steam locomotives. David Seed praises ‘the skill which Dickens demonstrates’ in this story, explaining it ‘in terms of his preference for one of three notional kinds of supernaturalism which were available to him — conventional gothic, spiritualism and mystery evoked by day-to-day materials. The first of these would draw on traditional settings like a country house and would revolve around equally traditional themes like aristocratic dishonour or guilt. Dickens recognized how old-fashioned this kind of story was at least as early as 1850 in a sketch entitled A Christmas Tree’. His disdain for the ‘fraud’ of spiritualism is present in lots of his writing. By avoiding these two possible paths, the hackneyed on the one hand and the ridiculous on the other, Seed argues that Dickens cannily utilises the trappings of everyday modernity to focus and intensify precisely the uncanny affect of the ghostliness. [David Seed, ‘Mystery in Everyday Things: Charles Dickens’ “Signalman”’ , Criticism, 23:1 (1981), 44]

This becomes an increasingly important element in Gothic as the century goes on and into the twentieth century. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is about a figure from the deep past, a representative aristocratic figure, predating ordinary humanity. Contrastingly, H G Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898) is also a vampire-monster story—Wells’s Martians directly consume the blood of human victims to support their own life, lacking stomachs and digestive tracts from which to derive nutrients—but it’s one that sees the present preyed-upon by the future, by overwhelming and destructive technology.

Or consider the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell’s first patent for this device was 1876; by the end of the century phones were fairly widespread. Roger Luckhurst notes that Bell ‘a séance-goer after a number of familial deaths’ worked on his telephonic technology ‘working through a pact to communicate with his brothers’, who had both died of tuberculosis.

The first words heard on Bell’s line were addressed to Thomas Watson, Bell’s assistant, who was also a spirit medium. After a dreamy childhood and attendance at spirit circles, Watson moved into a career in that ‘occult force, electricity’, since ‘I felt sure that spirits could not scare an electrician and they might be of some use to him in his work.’ Watson listened to the electrical interference on the ‘dead’ telephone line, convinced, as were many others, of their intelligent origin. Rather than fully evacuating the supernatural, Watson revalues it by a special transformer, into electrical currency. Recall the case of Cromwell Varley, pioneer transatlantic telegraphist, who tracked psychical messages from his mediumistic wife running parallel to the wire. Note the early association of Thomas Edison’s phonograph with the uncanny preservation of the dead voice … Technology, the instrument of modernity, was here animated by ghostly inhabitants. [Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy 1870-1901 (Oxford 2002), 135-6]

There is something spooky about the telephone, when you think about it: attenuated voices arriving from a great distance, a whisper from the far-beyond sounding clearly in your ear.

Anthony Burgess’s Beard’s Roman Women (1976) novelises his experience of bereavement, after the death of his wife Lynne in 1968. In the story the Burgessian writer Ron Beard, living in Rome, has been likewise bereaved of a Welsh wife. During the course of the story he starts receiving eerie phone calls, by day and by night, seemingly from his dead wife. The haunted phone! In an emotionally powerful sequence towards the end of the novel, a broken down Beard, naked in his flat at night, picks up the telephone receiver and speaks a long monologue to the ‘soft expectant rhythmical purr’ of the dial-tone, talking as he believes to his departed wife, telling of his simultaneous inability and necessity of letting her go.

The telephone is one example of a ‘new’ technology hospitable to ghostly hauntings, and stories about them. Another is, as Luckhurst notes, is sound-recording. Listening to nineteenth-century worthies creaking out their long-dead voices on wax-cylinders is, today, an unnerving and spooky matter: Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, speaking muffled-adenoidally, against a sonic backdrop of coming-down washes and flushes of white noise, background clicks and burps and scratches, is a miniature aural ghost-story. Listen, at the one minute mark, to the way his voice starts, eerily, echoing itself, just as he says that the (to him) new technology will trap sound ‘forever’. Eerie!

The notion that reel-to-reel tape recording ‘captures’ ghostly voices and poltergeist presences, in amongst or behind what was actually being recorded, is a belief of many ‘supernatural investigators’. In the late 1970s, the case of the alleged Enfield poltergeist engaged researchers from the the Society for Psychical Research: in addition to knocks and bangs and furniture being overturned, Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair, examining the house, made tape-recordings of the interiors of the house which, they claimed, revealed spectral voices and ghostly content when played back. Since then, paranormal investigators often make tape recordings of supposedly haunted environments, and assert that ghostly speech and sound is captured in the medium, and that ghosts ‘jam up’ reel-to-reel tapes when researchers try to play them back. Sceptics are, as per their name, sceptical about such claims; but my point is not the truth or otherwise of this, but the fact that this 20^th-century technology is hospitable to these ghostly emanations, or iminations. Nigel Kneale’s superbly scary and uncanny BBC horror drama The Stone Tape (1972) reverse engineers this: the old house in which the story takes place is old, and the ghosts that haunt the 1970s characters are the dead past, but the conceit of the play is that certain houses act as, in effect, magnetic recording tape, catching and keeping the voices, the pain and trauma, of the dead. Jimmy Page, of Led Zeppelin, believed that Headley Grange, the recording studio, were he and other bands worked (Genesis’s mighty Lamb Lies Down was recorded there) was haunted. Maybe ghosts entered into the tape recordings of those albums. I mean, obviously they didn’t, but the technology is hospitable to such stories. Play a vinyl record backwards and listen to the Satanic muttering and importuning. You see what I mean.

Television (invented in the 1920s, introduced into the west in the 1950s, presently, of course, the drug-of-the-nation, breeding ignorance and feedin gradiation) is another significant modern technological medium hospitable to haunting. Two examples of this story being told: the big-budget success of Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist movie (1982)—a decent if not particularly scary slice of multiplex entertainment, in which ghosts enter a house through the television screen—and Ring (Ringu, 1998) directed by Hideo Nakat, based on Koji Suzuki’s 1991 novel, about a haunted video tape that kills people. I saw Poltergeist when it was on cinematic release in 1982 and was pleasantly entertained. I saw Ring on a VHS cassette in the early noughties, when I was living in a rented flat in Putney. It was a bright, sunny, summer’s afternoon, and, at a loose end, I put this film on. But though the sun was shining, the air was warm, the vibe was pleasant, I watched it with increasing anxiety and fear until the (spoilers, but) famous scene where Sadako's vengeful spirit literally crawls out through the TV screen and kills Ryuji, when—and I say this advisedly, as a repressed Englishman, rarely moved to emotional display or affective discombobulation—I screamed aloud in pure terror.

I note this not merely to indicate what a pusillanimous cringer I can be, how easily spooked, but to say something else. And this brings me to the point of this post. Because I wonder if television was the last new technology to be hospitable to this Gothic, ghostly narrative. There have been plenty of new tech of course, and in some way the internet has been more transformative—or perhaps on a level, in terms of influence—than telephony, sound-recording or television. But there are no notable stories of the internet being haunted. There are no notable stories of a haunted TikTok, or getting WhatsApp messages from the dead. I mean, it’s possible people have written such stories—given how many people are writing Gothic and New Weird and ghost stories and novels nowadays, I’d be surprised if people haven’t rolled the concept-dice and given it a go—but they haven’t resonated, because I don’t think these technologies are hospitable to haunting.

Of course, actual messages from dead people, from automated systems, what to do with social media accounts when their owners die, the whole online penumbra of our personhood surviving our individual demise, is a real-world problem. But it’s not a Gothic story; it’s not an idiom amenable to telling the sort of stories that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, that chill and scare you.

Is this right? Are these new media, these defining technologies of 21^st-century life, not suited to ghost-stories? If so, I wonder why not? Text messages are not so different to telegrams, mobile phones are still phones (as well as being computers, cameras, music-players and so on). What is it about new media that renders them unhaunted?