I believe in ghosts. I also believe that mental states are probably not separable from physical states. There indeed are ghosts in the machine. I just didn’t think they would exist in my machine. Better yet, my phone and computer.

I just recently got a new phone. Before exchanging my old phone, for which I only got $40, I downloaded all my photos onto my computer. My new phone is one of those that does not have a card slot as it uses dropbox. It is so high tech but that is besides the point. I managed to save all my old phone photos onto my computer. I decided to look at a few of them just to see what I should use for some upcoming posts and which I should transfer to my new phone. I then came across the creepiest sets of photos that were not mine.

There was a set of five black and white photos that I had never taken of people I had never seen in my photo gallery. All were of people facing the camera from the shoulder on up. There was one photo that really caught my attention. It was of this woman smiling creepily at the camera as if she knows a secret. Who were these individuals staring back at me? They truly gave me the

heebie jeebies; with goosebumps running up and down my arm. Their faces and looks were so raw.

I closed the computer photo gallery and started playing with my new phone and scrolling through its photo options. I had transferred a select number of photos to my new phone looking to pair photos up with various phone contacts. I then came across a photo that just gave me the chills. There was my mother’s deathbed photo. The photo was specifically at the moment that she had died at which her mouth was left wide open. I had not looked at that photo in a long time. I had not wanted to. Probably, rightly so. What was eerie was that the photo was now associated with the contact log for an employee my agency had let go over a year ago. What was the machine trying to tell me? Creepily, when I inquired as to how this former employee had been doing I found out he had suffered a stroke. Which is how my mother had died.

I know that there must be a 101 technological explanations for why these photos were on my phone and how my mother’s photos got switched up. However, ghosts in the machine I can do without. There was an episode on the television show Supernatural, that my mom loved to watch on her little portable DVD player, called Of Grave Importance. In that episode the lives of ghosts were detailed in a slightly different way from most other television shows treatment of the subject. In that episode, they noted that ghosts often bring one more or things from their past lives into their spirit realm. Usually what they bring is an object that is very closely linked to the ghost during their past life, or perhaps even more so linked strongly to their death. Kind of creepy indeed. Considering that my mother was not very technologically savvy it does give me pause. Although, my mom sure did love that cell phone we got her since it kept her connected to family and friends in a way that she had not been used to before. I wonder, if we were to follow that Supernatural logic, what that means going forward in terms of future 21st century ghosts. What objects will now be haunted or infused with other-worldly spirits considering that everything we do is so closely connected with social media and technology. Who does not sleep with their phone under their pillows anymore? Used to be that the pillow was prime tooth fairy real estate now it just may belong to the ghosts that inhabit technology. Beware of that phone and sweet dreams.