November 2, 2011
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1 I have a bit of a correction to do today.
2 Yesterday I reported that a girl in my fifth period class, a straight A+ student skeptical about the Heidi stories, had written a shorter version of her own ghost story. She merely wanted to get some extra credit, but when she finished writing, her computer somehow got stuck on the six button, and a series of sixes suddenly appeared on her screen.
3 I said that when she walked away and came back, three giant sixes appeared on her screen.
4 That was inaccurate. I approached her yesterday for corroboration and she told me that it as just three small sixes, the same size as the others.
5 I thanked her, and assured here that it was probably just some sort of sticky key thing with her keyboard, and not to worry.
6 Great kid, and honest. She didn't seem too phased by any of it, but I still thought her story about her story remained high on my list of interesting stuff.
7 It also demonstrated the difficulty of trying to chronicle real stories told by students.
8 As the key "scribe" of the Heidi Chronz, I have tried to remain true to the story as much as possible, so that my credibility will remain strong.
9 And as careful as I try to do that, I still find little things that are inaccurate. I do check and re-check with primary sources, but many times their memories are worse than mine.
10 It's an interesting experiment, when you think about it.
11 I remember, for instance, one time years ago a drama class had a teevee suddenly go on. A video played, and the students claimed that the video recorder was unplugged. I asked them several times about that, and the students had insisted this was true.
12 Well, at the time I kept that as a part of the stories because I had reliable witnesses, but I never saw that happen.
13 I couldn't really wrap my head around that one, because there really was no explanation.
14 I eventually dismissed the story because it was inconsistent with the other stories, and because it was virtually impossible for that to have been a "ghostly" encounter.
15 Fast forward to this year.
16 Last week I had an similar oddity occur in an amazing series of oddities with electrical things. I have a small Altec iPod dock that I use to audio-out movies in order to give them a little extra punch. It's easy to do: you simply take a small cable from the audio out to the audio-in on the dock, and it amplifies any film. You need a small adapter to take the left and right wires into one in-connection, and it's done.
17 Well, I was in the middle of doing something with The Sixth Sense, and pushed the power button on the iPod dock. Suddenly The Sixth Sense music came on even though the power button on the DVD player apparently wasn't on.
18 When the power is on, a little red light comes on, and it was off, but the music from the DVD player blasted through the room, and the red light wasn't on.
19 I immediately pushed the power button on the DVD player, but the thought instantly occurred to me that the sound came out of the iPod deck but that it had no powered source. When I pushed the power button, the music on the iPod deck stopped abruptly.
20 I asked several students if I had pushed the DVD or the iPod deck first, and all of them said I had pushed the iPod deck first. There should have been no sound, since the DVD player evidently wasn't on.
21 For a second I completely freaked out, because all week we had strange things going on with nearly every plug-in device in my classroom and in my regular life. But most of that was just them not working properly: for instance, the printer jammed, and had only jammed maybe two or three times in seven years. The computer failed a few times, and wouldn't open Microsoft Word at one point. The light switch in the tech booth didn't go on when I flipped the switch. The stapler broke several times. The worklights in the Theater went on with nobody at the switches (I earlier ruled this out as anything odd because a district electrical truck was parked right outside the Theater, but the concidence was a bit unnerving.) My car battery failed at the end of that day, but started up after I goosed the battery.
22 There were several other things that happened, but I can't recall them right now.
23 But a device going on with no power? I had to trace that one down. I did.
24 The red power light on the DVD player was clearly not on, and the music from the DVD player WAS playing. What I didn't see was that when the DVD player is playing, the red light goes out, and a green light on the right side of the player lights up indicating that it is in "Play" mode. Duh. So the DVD player was already playing when I pushed the iPod button.
25 I diagnosed that rather quickly, and figured that probably a similar occurrence had happened all those years ago. Both incidences clearly causal, and explainable.
26 What wasn't explainable was the series of coincidences that occurred over the same couple of days: the day after I had reported a bunch of electrical malfunctions in and around my room, the school bells failed to work in the morning, AND the attendance program shut down about an hour later. That was the same day that my car battery clicked.
27 Never mind the amount of computer failures that happened to a series of students, all in the same two or three day windows. I had at least six students needing to print their ghost stories. I usually get one or two in a class, sometimes three or four.
28 The night that the girl had the sixes appearing on her computer was the same night that a nineteen wound up at the bottom of the page of my DN, the one that had a picture of Steve Jobs with orbs.
29 I also accidentally pushed a button on Xanga that took me to my first pics ever, and two pictures of students in the Theatre appeared. One had three girls on a couch at center stage, nothing unusual. The other had a girl with the same backlighting as the Jobs picture. I decided against posting those pictures because I wanted to respect the privacy of the parties involved.
30 When I went to exit Xanga (and hastily I might add!), the number 19 was somehow in the bottom left-hand corner.
31 Heidi's "numbers" have traditionally been one and nine. Long story, but you'll need to trust me on that one.
32 All simple coincidences in a series of coincidences upon coincidences upon coincidences.
33 All scientifically explainable.
34 To me, each coincidence of itself is simply that: a causal coincidence that could easily be explained.
35 What becomes acausal to me is the massive number of explicable occurrences involving electrical things happening in too short a span of time. And that occur every single year during the Heidi stories.
36 This year was a banner year for things happening publicly. I remember telling one class last week about the time I was preparing a Poe lesson right before Halloween. I was Activities' Director at the time, and was caught down at the school past ten at night working on my computer. I was putting together the Heidi stories and working on a Poe unit.
37 I heard a fluttering sound, looked up from my computer, and a black bird had landed on a small teevee in the Activities' office. It didn't utter a sound, but kept turning its head and looking at me with beady eyes. It eventually flew back out and disappeared into the night sky.
38 Last week, I had my students watch the end of The Sixth Sense and then write journal entries as the end credits and music played eerily through the selfsame Altec speakers.
39 Towards the end of class, several students looked up to a window across the room from them and started giggling and pointing. When I looked up at the window, I saw the shadow of a large crow resembling a raven suddenly take off. Evidently it was putting on a bit of a show for those students, and when I looked, it took off instantly.
40 We all laughed, but it was just another oddity in a week of massive oddities. A couple of days ago I found a picture that looked exactly like that shadow. If you can imagine this picture animated, almost putting on a little shuck-and-jive, then you'll get the idea of what we saw. Here's the picture:
41 At some point, when all of this stops, I fully intend to go back through my DN's for this week and measure all of the strange occurrences, because there were too many really even to count.
42 But I did know that I owed it to that girl to correct her account. The three sixes were not filling her screen.
43 They were just there after she deleted a bunch of others.
44 So it was nothing, really.
45 Nothing at all.
46 Gottago.
47 More to come.
48 Peace.
~H~
