![]() ![]() The fact that the station itself had ceased to be and changed its call letters years prior added to the weirdness of the story, but also helped expose it for the hoax it was. He also tells the urban legend of a test pattern from a Houston, Texas television station, KLEE-TV, being received on British televisions thousands of miles away. (He also notes with interest that the term for phantom images on television screens is “ ghosts.”) Early in his book, Sconce introduces the story of a Long Island family convinced that their television is haunted. ![]() In his seminal 2000 work, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, media scholar Jeffrey Sconce says that from its earliest days, television seemed to attract stories of weird, phantom signals. Tales of television broadcast signals that intrude upon regularly-scheduled programming are by now a common cultural trope. And for the next century, telegraphy, the telephone, and wireless radio all seemed to be teeming with phantom transmissions from other worlds, whether from the dead or from outer space. With the introduction of telegraphy in the mid-19th century, a new virtual world-an uncanny “otherspace” of instantaneous communication over long distances, utterly new to the human experience-was unleashed. Almost as soon as the television entered the American home, forever changing the course of the American family, it became a novel, uncanny presence.
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