I am afflicted with a strange kind of writer's block. Over the past nine months or so, I have been continuously writing assignments, papers, exams, and my thesis. After all this, I find myself completely unable to write anything non-technical. So despite having plenty to write about, this blog has been seeing nothing of it.

The time has come to rectify this situation. The solution to my problem lies in graphs. That is how I overcame writer's blocks while I was writing the thesis: produce a graph and then write about it. This is exactly what I will do. The plenty of things that I wanted to blog about all revolve around a central theme - the haunting of our university accommodation by a poltergeist.

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Abstract

In this article, I describe the haunting of the Ratcliffe Terrace university accommodation by a poltergeist. The poltergeist activities are described in detail, with photographs and videos wherever available. I try to trace its origins, and end with a note on the final exorcism.

Introduction

I moved into the Ratcliffe Terrace accommodation in November 2007 [1]. Various aspects of this university residence are described in earlier posts [1], [2]. The first manifestations of unnatural activities were reported by residents in the form of frequent and spurious ringing of the fire-alarm all over the building [1]. Although this resulted in cordial relations with the local fire department personnel, residents were understandably unhappy about having to bump into each other in pyjamas and various degrees of sleepiness whenever the fire-alarm necessitated the evacuation of the rooms. Initially, these incidents were attributed to burnt toast and over-sensitive equipment. However, over the next few months, other incidents occurred which unquestionably pointed to poltergeist activity. Extensive research and the abundance of unexplained phenomena originating in the author's flat, number eight, have confirmed that this flat was the hub of the poltergeist activity.

The Progression of Supernatural Activity

As soon as it was suspected that a supernatural agency was at play, the author started scientific measurements of the activity. Over the period March 2008 to July 2008, the author tracked all supernatural phenomena using equipment he assembled from parts bought over ebay and at yard sales in churches all over Edinburgh, and some spare cricket equipment. Complete details are provided in Appendix A. The residents would react to the incidents in various ways: these included sleeping through everything with ear-plugs on, but the ultimate result was that an email would be shot off to the property manager complaining about the inconvenience. Figure 1* shows a plot of poltergeist activity over this period, with a plot of email activity. The X-axis corresponds to time, and Y-axis corresponds to activity. Poltergeist activity is plotted in the standard SI unit of BogoPolts. Email activity is plotted in the standard SI unit of MegaFwds. As can be seen from the two curves, there is a strong correlation between the two activities. It is of course the most basic maxim that correlation does not imply causation, but in this case it does. Through personal communication with the residents, the author has established that they are not in the habit of casually communicating with the property manager through email. Any email activity therefore corresponds to a spurt of complaints and expressions of concern following major incidents.

ghost

Next, we turn our attention to the spikes in the activity curve - these are the actual incidents which I will go on to describe in the next few sections. These include but are not limited to the oven explosion in Flat 8; the major water leakage, again in Flat 8; and the untimely death of the computer mouse of the author.

- to be continued.

Bibliography

[1] N. Manerikar, "The Ratcliffe Terrace accommodation and the first fire-alarm incident". Blog. (link)

[2] N. Manerikar, "On the quality of internet access in 61 Ratcliffe Terrace". Blog. (Part1) and (Part2)

(*) Graph generated using gnuplot. Sadly, I have to use to the png/jpeg terminal type for producing graphics suitable for the internet. This means I cannot get the beautiful anti-aliased curves you can get with the eps-terminal/latex/pdf combination.