Friday the 13th, what an unlucky day. You can feel it, right? The shadows grow longer, the trees creak and moan in the wind, and it seems like the night will never end. Especially for this day, we’ve collected three spooky but real and scientifically amazing stories.
Playing with a ghost
A few years ago, in a normal room of an ordinary 16-old teenager, you could witness a surrealistic scene: The boy played with a ghost. Objects moved around, controlled by an invisible force, a presence of a deceased loved one, and a struggle – the game is on. The boy tried to win, again and again, but he wasn’t as good as the ghost. At least for a while, the ghost played better. The boy knew exactly whose ghost it was: His father’s, who’s else? His father died when he was 6, and now his ghost came to play with his son.
Whether you believe in ghosts or not, the story is real. It was told by a person nicknamed 00WARTHERAPY00, in Youbute’s comments section of a piece about whether video games can be a spiritual experience. Here are his words:
Well, when I was 4, my dad bought a trusty Xbox. You know, the first, ruggedy, blocky one from 2001. We had tons and tons and tons of fun playing all kinds of games together – until he died, when I was just 6.
I couldn’t touch that console for 10 years. But once I did, I noticed something. We used to play a racing game, RallySport Challenge. Actually pretty awesome for the time it came. And once I started meddling around… I found a GHOST. Literally. you know, when a time race happens, that the fastest lap so far gets recorded as a ghost driver? Yep, you guessed it – his ghost still rolls around the track today.
And so I played and played, and played, until I was almost able to beat the ghost. Until one day I got ahead of it, I surpassed it, and… I stopped right in front of the finish line, just to ensure I wouldn’t delete it.
Bliss.
Celestial plans
Sometimes, the whole world is against you.
It was a clear, calm, and very cold night. A gigantic ship, named after the Titans of Greek mythology, moved confidently forward, not knowing that the celestial powers had special plans for this voyage. Even the greenish sky didn’t reveal the coming disaster. The trouble was ahead, and above. It was 11:40 p.m. April 14, 1912 ship’s time, and the Titanic hit the iceberg.
Later, much later, the Second Officer Charles Lightoller will describe this night with the following words:
Of course, we know now the extraordinary combination of circumstances that existed at that time which you would not meet again in one hundred years; that they should all have existed just on that particular night shows that everything was against us.
But even Lightoller didn’t suspect that some of the unfolding events probably have been affected by a mysterious force. Some members of the crew could “sense” it, feel it in their bones, unconsciously notice its influence: Ship’s coordinates were altered, radio signals behaved “freaky”, the compass lied. These powers were mysterious back then, but not now.
According to a paper published by Mila Zinkova in the Royal Meteorological Society’s journal Weather, many of the events that day may have been caused by the effect of space weather. Titanic survivors and people on other ships in the area noticed Aurora Borealis, or the northern lights, “the most beautiful, visible manifestation of a geomagnetic storm”, says Zinkova.
Such storms are caused by solar activity, and “major to strong geomagnetic storms can produce significant disturbances to Earth’s magnetic fields and electric currents in the upper atmosphere… and may have a detrimental impact upon communication and navigation systems.”
“At the time they had incomplete knowledge of the influence that geomagnetic storms may have on the ionosphere and disruption to communication…”, explains Zinkova. Some ships couldn’t hear Titanic’s SOS call, while they were able to communicate with much more distant ships, “The official report of the Titanic sinking suggested amateur radio enthusiasts had caused interference, by jamming the airwaves, and so prevented the accurate dissemination of emergency signals to other ships in the vicinity… The Titanic’s Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall worked out the ship’s SOS position [but his] position was around 13 nautical miles (24km) off their real position. The rescue ship Carpathia received this wrong position, but somehow miraculously steamed directly to the Titanic’s lifeboats. Both the error and correction may have been caused by the effect of space weather.”
If indeed the northern lights had at least some of its potential influence, “it could have affected all aspects of the tragedy: Including the collision with the iceberg (a negligible compass error, which might have resulted from the storm, could have placed the Titanic on the collision course), the navigation errors, the failed communications. On the other hand, the solar activity could have affected Carpathia’s compass [which] helped her to navigate directly to the lifeboats. Additionally, the light from the aurora may have given some sight on a moonless night.”
Could it be that at least some of the described above was the result of the storm? We will never know, but there are forces out there that are beyond us. Some of them are already familiar to us, but what forces we still don’t know, and how do they affect us?
Frozen alive
On October 7, 2006, Mitsutaka Uchikoshi, a 35-year-old Japanese, had a barbecue with colleagues in Mount Rokkō in western Japan. He refused to go back with them by cable car and instead decided to walk down the mountain. The sun was out, he was in a field, felt very comfortable laying down in a grassy area… and eventually felt asleep – That’s was the last thing he remembered.
From here everything went downhill. During the trip down the mountain, Uchikoshi lost his way, slipped in a stream, and broke his pelvis. The cold was another problem: While losing lots of blood, which caused multiple organ failures, he also suffered from severe hypothermia. The temperature on the mountain dropped to 10 °C (50 °F), and his body temperature dropped as well. His pulse slowed down, he was unconscious, and there won’t be anyone around for many days. These were the last moments of his life.
Weirdly, these moments lasted longer and longer, a moment after moment, like the time itself was stretched, frozen, for more than three weeks.
24 days had passed until he was found by a passing climber… and without any food or water, with a body temperature of 22 °C (71 °F), and a barely discernible pulse, Uchikoshi survived.
Doctors who treated him believe his body’s survival instincts kicked in. “He fell into a state similar to hibernation and many of his organs slowed, but his brain was protected,” said the head of the hospital’s emergency unit, Dr. Shinichi Sato. “I believe his brain capacity has recovered 100%,” Doctors said they did not expect Uchikoshi to experience any lasting ill-effects.
This is the first recorded case of human hibernation. So far, various hints and clues have indicated that human hibernation is theoretically possible. For example, there are a few other recorded incidents that describe people surviving extreme hypothermia, which may be related to human hibernation. Like a teenager stowaway that survived surrounding temperature of -34 °C (-30 °F) for eight hours, a woman that survived being trapped in a river under a layer of ice for 80 minutes, with a body temperature of 13.7 °C (56 °F) and a few more, but these cases never lasted longer than a few hours. Another hint comes from a few primates that are known to be able to hibernate, like The Madagascan fat-tailed dwarf lemur, Cheirogaleus medius, that hibernates up to seven months in tree holes.
Additional pieces of evidence lie in an ancient mass grave in Spain. In the archaeological site of Atapuerca that is located on the Atapuerca Mountains in the north of Spain, scientists studied 400,000-year-old fossilized bones, and based on the environmental conditions, bones, and lesions’ structure, concluded that Neanderthals and other early hominins may have had the ability to hibernate.
It’s curious to note that there are many Eastern traditions and stories about yogis and gurus who could achieve a meditative state in which they don’t need to eat or drink for a long time, slowing their body’s activity to a bare minimum – probably it’s worth considering ancient stories, traditions, and myths more seriously in light of the new discovery.
Related Articles: