The first proper public speaking I did at a tech meetup was about ghost hunting in the digital age. Not because I believe in ghosts (there's no such thing as ghosts), but because ghost hunting is my guilty pleasure and I was fairly confident that it was the one thing I could talk about that I would be the most informed person in the room about, meaning no one would be able to embarrass me with a question I didn't know the answer to.
I've always been interested in the paranormal and cryptozoology and aliens and all the things that we don't understand, and as an adult that has only grown further. To reiterate, that's not because I believe in ghosts (there's no such thing as ghosts), but because I want to understand what's happening. We find it easy as humans to accept that there is no space in either the laws of physics or (to my knowledge) many religions for Anne Boleyn to be walking around the Tower of London carrying her head or for the urban legendary teenagers who's voices are heard in the abandoned railway tunnel once a year on the night they disappeared. It doesn't make sense, and there is no logical or scientific way that this could be real.
And yet - SOMETHING is happening. People are experiencing SOMETHING, and that's what I find fascinating. I like watching ghost hunting videos to attempt to understand how they've been faked, what's been misinterpreted, or what technology behaviour has been mistaken for the unexplained. Any footage on a potato quality doorbell camera can be immediately disregarded. Anything from a Youtube channel or TikTok account about ghost hunting where the creator has a financial incentive to find ghosts can be immediately disregarded. Anything where there is a strange bump in the night but you can't see the whole room and everyone in it can be immediately disregarded. And so on and so on. Having ruled out 98% of what's out there using these rules you're left with the stuff that's a bit more difficult to explain, and that's where the fun stuff is (for me anyway). We continue to be able to explain seemingly unexplainable happenings with apophenia (the human tendency to see connections between unrelated things), Pareidolia (seeing faces in things that aren't faces), and how quickly we assume that just because there is a creaky floorboard during the night that it must mean our entire scientific and theological understanding of the universe is wrong. When you rule out these as well, you're left with a handful of instances where SOMETHING is happening, but you can't explain what. Its not a ghost, but there's clearly something happening.
You might ask why I'm telling you all this, beyond personal vanity of sharing something I am interested in. Well...
As my background is in software testing, I've always thought there are some parallels between testing software and ghost hunting. You are looking for something that may or may not be there. You are looking for inconsistencies with what you would expect to find. And above all, you are seeking to gain a better understanding, and when presented with something unexpected - be that a test failure or a spooky sound at the abandoned funfair - there is a desire to find out what is causing it. We have bugs that are easy to explain and understand, we have those that we think are related or connected but are actually completely different and, especially in the age of AI, we have things that we can't necessarily explain what is happening or why...we can only mitigate it because something is definitely happening.
The point I made in my talk was that you could use the software testing mindset and techniques when ghost hunting and trying to understand the paranormal/unexplained. That was over 10 years ago and I'd like to think I've learned some new things (and hopefully got a bit better at presenting) since then, and one day I'd like to rewrite it and do an updated version. The principle goes both ways though - every time 'it works on my machine' or I can't replicate a bug, I remind myself that just because I can't imagine how something happened or make it happen again doesn't mean that a user didn't experience it, and that the possibility that SOMETHING might be happening is exciting and needs exploring.
Badly written with no assistance from AI by me :)