When strange archaic messages appeared on his computer in 1984, in the midst of classic poltergeist activity, Ken Webster sought the help of top paranormalists and wrote a book about the phenomena The Vertical Plane. Confronting them with an active and complex mystery, Ken was surprised by the inadequacy of their responses and investigations.

What would you do if something very strange and bewildering happened to you; something uninvited yet benign; something which happened over and over again and which involved your friends, lover and colleagues? Would you want people to know ? Would you want help in understanding it ? Yes, yes! But my experience suggests you would be wasting your time.

I was living with `D' (my girlfriend) and, for a short period, Nicola (a college friend) in Meadow Cottage, a small terraced house in the village of Dodleston, near Chester. Beginning in the Autumn of 1984, a series of poltergeist events took place, focused on the kitchen area, including the stacking of objects, noises, marks on the walls and `thrown' objects. Although we did not know it at the time, poltergeist events are relatively frequently reported `anomalous' phenomena and are, frankly, rather tedious and disruptive over a period of time.

What made this different was the appearance of`direct' communications in hand written form and, unusually, other communications mediated through a primitive computer. Personal computers were only just appearing in 1984 and, as a school teacher, I had access to primitive BBC `B' computers at school. These machines had around 32k of memory, a word processor on an installed chip and the only means of saving files was to a 5.25" floppy disk on an external drive. No networking, no modem, definitely no Internet.
One evening, the computer was accidentally left on and, on our return, there was a `message', a poem of sorts. It was treated as a joke of course, but saved to disk anyway. The computer returned to school and we to our sporadic poltergeist events. A different machine, borrowed on another occasion resulted, unexpectedly, in another communication. This time the language had an archaic flavour, seemingly of 17th century Elizabethan English. It wasn't right, linguistically as my colleague Peter Trinder pointed out but the tone was threatening and we felt the joke was now in bad taste.

Setting out, deliberately, to try and catch the hoax meant borrowing yet another computer, checking the disk for preloaded material, checking the house was secure and leaving the computer in the kitchen as before. Another message appeared in the same quirky `mock Tudor' style. In a matter of fact way, over a coffee, a friend suggested, well, replying ... and the results were surprising.

The reply was met with a further response and the two-way communications began in earnest. At the same time Peter Trinder's language investigations into the language style pointed up a coherence and subtlety which was not easily dismissed. But they were not perfect and in one message soon to become notorious in following investigations Peter felt particularly uncomfortable both with the history and the language.
We increased our efforts to uncover any deception; but there was a positive side effect of the computer in the kitchen ... it seemed to calm the `poltergeist' activity. Over a period of around 16 months, other associated phenomena included altered states of consciousness for D and evidence of other communicators (besides the main communicator, one Tomas Harden). Some of these other communications were unreadable (their messages were child-like nonsense and often angry); others were coherent but seemed completely contemporary and designed to unsettle. Not all messages were on the computer; they appeared on paper that was lying around, the walls or the floor. Some messages seemed unfinished unsigned as if the writer had been disturbed.

What was haunting Ken Websters computer? ,