The ghost who sabotaged the mainframe

Everyone missed Ernie -- until he came back, and started messing with the mainframe. I don't know where you stand on ghosts. Some people think if you believe in ghosts you've failed a primal intelligence test. I used to be one of those people. Then, in June of 1980, a ghost sabotaged the installation of an HP 3000 mini/mainframe. This is a true story. Really. Several Hewlett Packard engineers and their support l

Everyone missed Ernie -- until he came back, and started messing with the mainframe.

I don't know where you stand on ghosts. Some people think if you believe in ghosts you've failed a primal intelligence test. I used to be one of those people.

Then, in June of 1980, a ghost sabotaged the installation of an HP 3000 mini/mainframe. This is a true story. Really. Several Hewlett Packard engineers and their support logs can attest to its validity, and my staff will back me up, too.

The story really starts back in December of 1971. I had just started as the new Director of Data Processing for a large nonprofit in New York City. My predecessor, Ernie (I've changed his name), had held the position for many years, and only his wife's insistence that he retire had convinced him to leave. It was an extremely difficult decision for him. The mainframe we were running at the time was a Honeywell Model 120 with 64K of main memory, three 1200 BPI tape drives, a printer and a card reader -- all of which, by the way, needed a room the size of two large offices to hold it. This was Ernie's baby. He wrote all the programs (in COBOL), designed all the systems, and ran the department exactly the way he wanted to. He loved that machine.

One week after Ernie retired, he was killed in a car crash on the Long Island Expressway. Everyone was devastated. We couldn't grasp that Ernie was gone. As it turned out, we weren't given much time to grasp it at all.

Almost immediately, strange things began to happen in the office. Cards and papers would fall unassisted. Lights flickered and went out. Things were not found in the places that we thought we'd left them. We came up with rational explanations for all the weirdness ... until the day the door to the computer room, a heavy insulated metal door, began opening and closing on its own.

Access to the computer room was strictly limited to my staff -- and all eight of us were in a meeting down the hall when we heard that door close.

We looked at each other apprehensively. I grabbed Ralph, our computer operator, and we walked down the corridor to the computer room. Usually, when you opened the door to the computer room, you were frozen by a blast of harsh, cold air from the ten-ton air conditioning unit. But this time, when I opened the door, we felt a weird little breeze, gentle and warm, that stopped us in our tracks. Something strange was going on.

We stood there, holding the open door. No one was in the room. I was about to take a step forward when we heard a creaking sound from the small wooden trestle that ran between the printer and the CPU. It had been placed there to protect the cables that ran under it, and when you stepped on it, it would sink a bit, and creak. It was creaking now, and I could actually see the wood planks sinking down. Aiee!