White Noise

Everything was ready for the ritual. “I’d say we’re just about ready to begin” murmured the old man. The dank air in the cellar hung with a certain stillness; today was a day where the weather could send a chill down your spine without even a hint of paranormal involvement. Ten or so faces nervously peered at each other in the dimly lit room, while a damp smell massaged their nasal passages. Heartbeats increased, hairs stood on end and cold sweat bathed the spectators. The old man straightened himself up and cleared his throat, announcing loudly to the room, his voice echoing off the stone walls: “Spirits - reveal yourselves!” His serious expression melted into a warm smile. “We like to maintain a bit of tradition here!” He chuckled. “We try and keep a little bit of a facade of mystery - things like this have scared our ancestors for centuries! Not so different than thunder and lightning from the gods I suppose”. He promptly reached to a dial on a device situated in the corner of the room and slowly turned it clockwise. White noise emanated from a large speaker and filled the cellar as the visitors exchanged excited glances with one another. Then - did someone say something? It sounded like a voice - it was a voice! Fading out of the white noise, the customers could hear screaming and shouting from what sounded like a young woman. Murmurs of awe echoed off the walls of the dank cellar, adding a perverse counterpoint to the sounds of suffering. “Some say…” Hal began, “that these are the screams of a young woman from the 19th century, murdered by her fiancé on the eve of their marriage… spooky stuff eh?” This was met with coos of amazement and shallow curiosity from the visitors. “This device here is acting like a radio receiver, as this disembodied voice is hanging around here like a kind of radio wave. Now, onto another kind of ghost - I suppose you’re all familiar with the stone tape theory?” A few subtle murmurs followed. “Perhaps it’s a name you know, but I’ll explain the basic science to those who aren’t aware. Stone- rocks - are full of ferromagnetic minerals, and they can be affected and aligned by different phenomena - the earth’s magnetic compass, for example, when they are first solidified from molten magma. This time they’re being affected by psychic waves - such waves are most powerful in a time of strong emotion like death for example. If the conditions are just right, we might just have a recording left behind in the stone. And to think this psychic energy was dismissed as pseudoscience fifty years ago! ha! What did they know? Anyway, these waves can affect the alignment of magnetic minerals in the rocks - like an old fashioned tape - raise your hand if you know what that is - yes, showing your age there sir! We can use this machine to play back the psycho-magnetic imprints and amplify the signals, because only those who are born sensitive to this energy could previously detect it. Besides, the signals seem to degrade over time and we need to find a way to separate it from the noise, so to speak. Any questions so far?” But Hal was only met with satisfied smiles from satisfied customers. 

“Let’s take you all back a little further in time…” Hal said as he initiated the next phase of his tour, his fingers dancing on a touch-screen interface. Suddenly every member of the party heard a piercing trumpet call blare through the cold air, completely overpowering the white noise from which it emerged. It sounded so real, and yet there were no horns or speakers here. And again, like a piercing foghorn from a boat on the horizon. A few young men exchanged sniggers and smirks. And then a golden reef atop a large pole appeared through the wall, carried by what appeared to be a man in fancy dress. He looked as real as any other person in the room, and yet, he had passed through a solid wall moments ago. A company of men followed him, carrying weary expressions on lined and haggard faces, holding small round shields in their left hands, with small dagger-like swords holstered on their right side. They almost looked like historical re-enactors, but this was no act - this was the real deal. Real Roman soldiers. The visitors rushed for selfies with the oblivious roman soldiers on their weary trek to nowhere. “What you see here are the famous roman ghosts - these men here were locals recruited to protect the city in the third century - and don’t they look tired? They’ve marched around on patrol in the area for a week now, and are just returning to the city. Why are they being projected here? Well, a roman road travels across this cellar, and these men were probably about to meet a certain doom - marched to exhaustion maybe? Perhaps half of the group were picked off by Celtic raiders. But what we have here as been absolutely invaluable to historians - just look at their uniforms! Nothing like what the history books told us.” The parade continued, a pony-like horse passing among the many soldiers, moving now through the wall on the opposite side of the cellar, appearing and disappearing like prizes moving on a conveyer on a gameshow. 

And almost as quickly as it had begun, the soldiers had marched from one wall to the other, the horn blares fading into the distance, and shortly all was silent again. Excitable snatches of conversation emerged, as the customers shared their personal experience and feelings with one another. “Thank you very much, gift shop up the stairs and on your left...”

Hal watched as the penultimate tour group of the day clambered up the creaky wooden stairs and out into the fresh night air. He recalled once again how, as a child, he was both terrified and intrigued by the old ghost stories, and would stay up late with a torch in his bedroom, waiting for any sign of the paranormal, and would jump out of his skin at the sound of the slightest creak. Perhaps the thrill was gone in this day and age - ghosts, of course, were now the latest share-on-social-media craze. BOO had the monopoly: Hal often felt that, in fulfilling his greatest childhood dreams, the thrill of the unknown had become his boring day job. And today, All Hallow’s Eve (always inexorably a popular time for ghost tours) this feeling was gnawing at his conscience more than ever: BOO were planning a shock surprise for Halloween.

***

“What if - just once - we could see every ghost on Earth? Picture that!” the precocious employee pitched with bold enthusiasm. “Imagine that - BOO reveals every single ghost to the public! Who knows what new characters we might uncover! And what a way to crush our competition - screw SPOOKe!” 

“Well”, responded his manager, “sounds like we could be onto something here - but do you think it’s safe? Our equipment may not be able to cope and it could end up costing us a lot of money.”

“Oh, we’ve already done the calculations - it’s perfectly safe. We think based on the number of ghosts that are currently accessible through our machines and the psychic energy floating around the world, we could maybe see a hundredfold increase - that’s 30,000 ghosts! That’s possibly every single ghost in the world! And our financial projections for the upcoming year aren’t looking quite where they should be - I’m adamant this is what we need to change our fortunes.”

“Sounds very interesting. I’ll double-check the decks and get back to you tomorrow…”

***

All BOO sites, around the world, would be synchronising their equipment and projecting the largest number of ghosts ever seen for ten minutes at midnight UTC. Nothing like this had been attempted before, and it was believed that with every machine projector working together, a powerful psychic field would be generated, allowing most of the world to be covered in projections of perhaps every single ghost. Everyone on Earth would be privy to this grand spectacle - and all in the name of advertisement. 

As the clock ticked irreversibly towards midnight, BOO employees around the world readied themselves. Hal and his tour group were gathered in the street, not far from the cellar, the motley crew lit by a small torch in Hal’s hand. Hal knew that there wouldn’t just be the Romans coming to town tonight, and though the prospect of new ghosts to discover should have been an exciting one, the joy of the chase was gone, and the once almost-sacred haunts of the ghosts now belonged to the corporations. “Ladies and gentlemen” He announced. “Tonight, this Halloween, in a couple of minutes time, you are about to be witness to something the world has never seen.” He attempted to mask his cynicism with a healthy dose of faux excitement. “Every ghost that we know of - that is, every being that has left its mark in the fabric of time, will come back, tonight, for ten special history-making minutes!” The ghost-tourists bubbled with excitement, and began a noisy, irreverent countdown. The machines hummed in anticipation as the moment grew nearer. Hal sighed under his breath as the clocks ticked over to midnight.

The world was covered in noise. A deafening, indescribable din, and a wall, that though psychically penetrable, was visually impenetrable. Not even an inch was visible ahead of the eye - it was though a blanket of interference covered every inch of the world, like a TV between channels. The psychic field was far stronger than any mortal anticipated, and unlike their predictions, it wasn’t just those who left their spirit recordings behind in the right conditions who had come back. Every single ghost, billions of them - every single human who had ever existed was here now. The machines had become overloaded, unable to process the huge number of returned souls. It looked like these visitors would be here to stay until the computers could be deactivated. How long would it be until someone could reach through the blinding fog of ghosts, this white noise, to pull the plug on the whole thing? Would every soul on Earth add to the macabre mixture and join their fellow projections? Would there be 10 billion more ghosts?