Hit counters and haunted couches

Well, the hit counter here at The Teeming Brain broke the thousand mark this weekend. I’m gratified to see how much interest the blog has generated. Thank you to everybody who has stopped by in the past six weeks or so since I started this thing, whether you’ve commented or not. I appreciate your patronage (or indulgence, as the case may be).

I’ve only had a single experience in the past where I was involved in something that turned into a really enormous traffic generator. That was back in the spring of 2003 when I mentioned to my brother-in-law that somebody had sold a “ghost in a jar” on eBay for over $50,000, and he and I started joking that we should think of something we could milk like that. Then we both looked at each other and realized that we had something almost as good: a haunted Victorian fainting couch that his mother owned. She had experienced a ghostly encounter associated with the couch many years before, after buying it at an antiques store in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, the popular tourist town that is famed not only for its natural hot springs, restored 19th century hotels, live passion play, and bohemian arts atmosphere, but also for its many supposed hauntings.

More recently my brother-in-law’s daughter, age three, had spontaneously started acting disturbed by the room where the couch was kept. Some of the coincidences between the older and younger lady’s stories were indeed striking. My little neice, who had never been told about the supposedly haunted couch, kept talking about a “lady” in the room with it. Over a decade earlier, it had been a nocturnal vision of a luminous Victorian woman wearing a dress and large hat that had terrified her grandmother.

So after kicking the idea around for awhile — and after I had done some soul searching to determine whether my involvement in such a scheme would violate my conscience — we created a sellers’ account at eBay and wrote up an item description for the couch that told the history of the family’s experiences with it. It wasn’t necessary to embellish the facts at all since the real story was so interesting (and since I had announced that I would absolutely refuse to exaggerate the truth). I wrote the actual text for the auction and framed it as if my brother-in-law were telling the story in the first person.

The auction received quite a few page hits during its first few hours. As I’ve since learned, there’s a large crowd of people who regularly peruse the items in eBay’s “paranormal” section, so this alone would have meant a lot of traffic. But what really got the ball rolling was the white orb that appeared hovering over the couch in one of the photos we posted:

Amazingly, neither of us noticed it until an excited eBayer sent us a message saying, “You can see the ghost!”

And then the proverbial dam broke. Emails started flooding in as self-proclaimed psychics, ghost hunters, and interested laypeople pointed out the same thing. Quite a few of them claimed that in addition to the clearly-visible orb, they could also make out a portion of a woman’s face in the wood on the back of the couch. I was surprised to find that when I had another look, I could see the same thing. But I don’t think I would have seen it unless it had first been pointed out to me, which speaks volumes.

Of course we found the whole thing interesting and exciting, so we started posting daily additions to the item description in the form of further information about the couch, listings of people’s questions and comments along with our responses, and new photos. Oddly enough, many of the further photos we snapped showed more orbs, as in the following, which achieved a truly weird effect:

A couple of them even showed ectoplasmic-looking streaks or trails:

This last type proved especially exciting to the cybercrowd who had gathered to watch the auction, since, as we were informed by more than one person, mere lens flares will never show apparent motion like that, and since the camera we were using didn’t have a shutter speed control that would allow the intentional creation of such effects. I didn’t doctor up any of the photos in any way, other than to decrease the brightness or increase the contrast on a couple of them in order to render the visual artifacts more visible. So I didn’t know, and still don’t know, what to make of it, although I think a combination of lens flares and dust motes illuminated by the flash bulb makes a likely explanation.

Oh — one weirder fact was that these visual oddnesses would only show up in photos that I had taken myself. Three other family members shot multiple photos but couldn’t get any orbs or trails, whereas they showed up in about a third of the ones I took. When we mentioned this fact in one of our auction updates, several people wrote to say that ghosts and spirits will often “sit,” as in a photo session, for some people but not for others. This kind of outlandish claim never fails to trigger my natural skepticism, which in this case manifested as an emotion of sharp distaste and disgust. But of course I didn’t say anything publicly. And of course I didn’t have any explanation for the photos anyway.

Our little auction was rapidly becoming a phenomenon. But the floodgates didn’t really open until mid-week, about three days into the seven-day auction, when my brother-in-law convinced me to call Coast to Coast AM, the long-running, massively popular, paranormal-themed radio show that had formerly been hosted by Art Bell and had recently gained a new host in George Noory. Astonishingly, I got through on the first call and ended up describing the entire couch story, along with the news about our eBay auction, to George on the air.

The next morning I awoke to find that our auction had been linked to from the main page for Coast to Coast AM’s website. (You can still see the link on the archived page for that night’s show, although the page that it points to is of course long since dead.) Millions of people around the world listen to that show and visit the site. To make a long story short, thousands of hits per day started pouring in to the auction. By the time it ended — and yes, someone indeed bought the couch, although only for the modest sum of $1500, which was about what it was worth as an antique — the auction had amassed over 25,000 hits and become one of eBay’s top 50 most viewed auctions of all time. When I did a little poking around on the Web, I found people talking about it on ghost hunter websites and paranormal forums. When I created a separate Webpage for additional photos, it instantly received around 2000 hits.

So that’s all related to nothing in particular. It’s just that I can’t think about the issue of Web traffic and hit counters without remembering that bizarre and rather fun experience. (And to think that I posted a recent essay about anti-intellectualism. James Randi would be ashamed of me.)

So thanks again for visiting The Teeming Brain. I’m having a good time with it and I hope you are, too. I invite you to visit again and visit often. l promise I’ll do my best to continue entertaining us both, in a more substantial sense of the word than what’s current in most pop entertainment.

~ by Matt Cardin on July 22, 2006.