Greetings children, Captain disillusion here. What do you say we revisit a topic we haven't properly discussed in nearly six years:
Ghosts. A ghost of particular interest recently is the one that likes to stroll around the happiest place on Terra:
Disneyland
Out of the haunted mansion, through the closed gate, down the pier, and over the surface of the lake.
Four surveillance cameras caught a mysterious figure walking through the park at night in real time.
Terrifying.
See this is why you don't go to Disneyland, but to Walt Disney World in beautiful, Orlando
Florida. Scariest thing that can happen to you there is an alligator might try to preach to you.
*Explosion*
Hiya Pal
Hello?
Can I help you?
Oh don't mind me. Our boys at trademark watch detected the word "Disney" uttered three times within a few seconds,
so I'm just dropping by for a simple video audit.
An audit?
Standard procedure to make sure there's no brand
Misappropriation going on. Just do your thing the exact way you usually do it, pretend
I'm not even here and don't have the power to easily shut you down. Go ahead. I'll be quiet as a mouse, huh?
Okay, well then let's dive in to this mystery
Um with a little more character, please
Let's dive into this spooky mystery
Since the only source of detailed information about ghosts, the "new age section" of Barnes & Noble, is no longer available to most of us,
the best way to answer the question, "is this a ghost?" is by answering the question,
"Could this be something else?"
And the answer is "yes."
Goodnight!
*coughs* I would like you to elaborate.
Yes, sir
So what is that something else?
Simple: it's a technical glitch caused by a worn out recording head, capturing footage of an empty park, onto a
recycled VHS tape that already contained a different night's recording of a maintenance worker walking through the same area.
That night things were slightly different: The gate was open, and the last camera was panned further down the path,
which is why the employee looks like he's walking on the surface of the lake instead of along the dock in the last shot.
Beautiful glitches like this were possible with this analog technology which recorded images converted into an electrical signal as
patterns of Magnetic tape.
I'm not an expert, but I know a thing or twenty.
To make a stable image, VHS tape recorded a special control track,
which set the cadence for how to read the video and audio signals
Like the formatting of a hard drive.
So normally each new recording completely obliterated the previous one.
That's why when you accidentally recorded over something important, at the tail end, you'd see noise, and then a slow, painful
re-emergence of the previous recording.
But for certain, professional applications, like video editing or surveillance,
you could dub video or audio on an existing control track laid onto the tape in advance.
That way, you could clean the insert shots into the middle of a video, or make sure there were no
timecode breaks in a tape that's intended to record continuously for dozens of hours.
And that's when all kinds of crosstalk and print through became possible.
I feel a great disturbance in the force, as if a million Reddit users
commented in anger that they've already disproved every aspect of this theory.
Nice cross-promotion, I like it.
Here's the thing though:
almost everyone on Reddit is wrong, each in their own special way.
"So a few years ago. They were still using VHS,
that's hard to believe Disney would not have gone digital by then."
Wrong. The video was uploaded in 2009,
but there are reasons to believe it was filmed much earlier:
The monitor images have a 4:3 aspect ratio, and the video itself is in 4:3 as well.
The vertical streaking from the lights is an artifact of CCD chips,
which predate the CMOS sensors used in most cameras today.
And the short, consistent shutter speed in the Handheld video makes me think it wasn't recorded with a smartphone, but a camcorder.
"The figure is consistent across changing tapes and cameras."
Wrong.
Multiple tapes or recorders weren't involved. Most tape based surveillance systems save time and tape
by recording a split screen of all the cameras as a single video on a single tape.
Clearly this is one those.
"Why is there a beam of light coming up from it? If this was just a burned image of a person walking would that be there?"
Wrong. I mean, yes.
I mean, look not everything that shines is gold.
Just because the lights are streaking doesn't mean the streak on the person is caused by the same thing.
This is a previous recording forcing itself through a newly recorded image.
It's based on motion.
The person shows up because the person is the only thing in motion in the older recording; everything else is rendered invisible.
The streak is an artifact of this motion based bleed-through.
Like sticking your head through this smooth,
artificial waterfall of a hotel lobby.
In your face!
And they lived happily ever after.
Good work.
But not good enough. I'm shutting you down.
What?
Your message just isn't compatible with our brand.
Disney is the breeze of a fast approaching hug, the dance of freckles, and a pair of smiling ginger twins.
Disney is the opposite of disillusion.
*Phone rings*
Yeah? I don't know, late. It'll be a while.
What do you want me to say? I have to work. That's what I do, Minnie.
That's what puts cheese on the table and new bows on your head, in case you haven't noticed. I don't care. Do whatever you want
Is everything okay?
I don't know. I'm not sure I ever knew.