Gremlins

 Along with Shadow People another type of haunting has emerged since the coming of the “Industrial Age”, where electrical, mechanical, and communications apparatuses have come to hold modern life together.

A gremlin is a mythological creature commonly depicted as mischievous and mechanically oriented, popularly depicted as having a special interest in disabling aircraft. Some see the Gremlins' natures as similar to those of folkloric imps, while their inclination to damage or dismantle machinery is seen as a modern variation on their nature.

Although their origin is found in myths among airmen, claiming that the gremlins were responsible for sabotaging aircraft, John W. Hazen states that "some people" derive the name from the Old English word “gremian” meaning "to vex". The term "gremlin", as we now know it, denoting a creature that sabotages aircraft, originates in Royal Air Force slang from the 1920s among the British pilots. Other sources have sometimes claimed that the concept goes back to World War I, where the last message from a French submarine before it sank supposedly stated that they were being attacked by "gremlins", but there is no hard evidence of this.

Following the end of World War II the legend of the gremlin began to fade, with only occasional references to them such as in the classic “Twilight Zone” episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", in which a pre-Captain Kirk William Shatner sees a “gremlin” trying to take apart the wing of the airplane he is riding in. But, with the arrival of the computer and the internet the gremlins seem to have come back to life and along with the ability to crash airplanes have acquired the ability to crash computers.

Many, perhaps even most of us have at least suspected the existence of these “computer gremlins” at work ranging from full blown system crashes to that email the spellchecker seems to have changed into meaning something completely different from what you wrote before hitting “send”.

There are many theories about what may be the nature of these gremlins from some Matrix like conspiracy planting bugs in the system to demonic entities riding the “ether” of the ethernet, both with the goal of influencing the unsuspecting masses.  If you need a theory to believe in you can find plenty out there.  But of course, the gremlins themselves could be planting the theories on the internet.  So, you might never know what really caused the glitch, but don’t be too fast to dismiss it as only a glitch. 

And, in what may be a point of interest, on the day as we began to add this gremlins section to our website the system crashed at the webhost level and it was down for 17 days, only to be restored on "Halloween".  A true story that you can take as you like.

 Part 1  "The Paranormal"

Part 2  "Hauntings"