You know how sometimes you go online for something completely innocent—like, say, looking up a recipe for banana bread—and suddenly it’s 3 a.m. and you’re reading about people vanishing into thin air on a rural road in 1972? That was me these past two weeks. I somehow stumbled across these message boards devoted to “Glitches in the Matrix,” and oh boy, my curiosity has been hijacked ever since.
I’m not talking about the movie The Matrix (though, yes, I did rewatch it last weekend—purely for research, of course). These forums are filled with people swapping stories about bizarre coincidences, déjà vu moments that last too long, and encounters with “impossible” situations. Think: a man swears his apartment door used to be on the opposite side of the hallway. A woman runs into her childhood dog who supposedly died years ago—except this dog was very much alive, and wearing the same collar. And then there’s the big one: people claiming they literally stepped out of time for a moment.
Now, being the internet, I take all this with a grain of salt. Some of these tales are so wild you can practically hear the X-Files theme playing in the background. But here’s the thing—whether or not they’re true, they’re fascinating. They got under my skin enough that I started poking around in old books, academic articles, and (let’s be honest) way too many YouTube videos about quantum physics narrated by people with soothing British accents.
And that’s when the thought hit me: what if ghosts—the classic “person in Victorian dress walks through a wall” type of ghosts—are just another kind of glitch?
Ghosts as Echoes in a Badly Rendered Program
One theory in paranormal circles (I’ve apparently joined them now) is called residual haunting. It’s basically the idea that certain events, especially emotionally intense ones, can “record” themselves onto a place, like a psychic VHS tape. You don’t interact with these ghosts; they don’t acknowledge you. They’re just… playing on a loop. The famous “Brown Lady” at Raynham Hall? The spectral soldiers at Gettysburg? These are the classic examples.
But think about it in Matrix terms. What if those “recordings” are more like a program glitching? The code hiccups and for a second, you’re seeing old data that’s not supposed to be there anymore—like an outdated texture popping up in a video game. It’s not an actual Victorian woman, but a flicker of reality-as-it-was bleeding into reality-as-it-is.
That also ties into the idea of time slips, which I find even creepier. People report suddenly being in a different era—walking down a street and everything looks old-fashioned, everyone’s dressed like it’s 1905, and then poof, they’re back in modern times. Are they experiencing a mini wormhole? A misfire in the universe’s rendering engine? Or is it our perception playing tricks on us?
My Inner Skeptic vs. My Inner Mulder
Part of me thinks, “Okay, Roger, slow your roll. The world is weird but not that weird.” Our brains are ridiculously good at pattern-matching and filling in gaps. If you’re tired, stressed, or primed to see something spooky, you’re going to notice things you wouldn’t normally notice—or misremember them entirely.
But another part of me—the part that still remembers reading The Butterfly Effect tie-ins as a teen and loving every creepy Twilight Zone episode—can’t help but hope there’s something genuinely strange out there. Not necessarily ghosts rattling chains in attics, but something weirder and bigger about how time and memory work.
Could residual hauntings be some kind of environmental memory we haven’t figured out yet? Could time slips be a glimpse of another layer of reality? Or (my current favorite idea) could the “ghost” phenomenon simply be the universe’s equivalent of a software bug, where past events “lag” for a moment before fading completely?
Why This Thought Won’t Leave Me Alone
I think part of the appeal of this “glitch” theory is that it makes ghosts less about death and more about time. It’s not a person stuck on Earth, sad and unfinished—it’s the world hiccuping, letting you peek at an old version of itself for a split second. Weirdly enough, that feels less scary to me. More like catching a behind-the-scenes blooper reel than running into an actual restless spirit.
Of course, all of this is just speculation on my part. But I’ll tell you what—it makes me look at those classic ghost stories differently. The lady in white at the end of the lane? Maybe she’s not haunting you. Maybe you’re haunting her timeline.
Anyway, my coffee’s gone cold while writing this, which is probably a sign I should step away from the forums for a bit. (Who am I kidding—I’ll be back tonight reading about people who swear they’ve met alternate versions of themselves.)
What do you think? Are ghosts really spirits, or are they just cosmic coding errors flickering through our perception? Either way, the stories are a lot more fun than doomscrolling the news.
Buying a fixer-upper is always risky, but for Marek and Randy, the risk isn’t just financial. Their new Michigan farmhouse comes with no hot running water, endless repairs… and a resident ghost. Marek can’t ignore the young man who appears in fleeting visions, dressed in old-fashioned clothes and radiating sorrow. While Randy struggles with his new job and their strained romance, Marek is pulled deeper into the farmhouse’s past—a past that demands to be remembered. A Touch of Cedar is about the things that haunt us: broken trust, lost love, and tragedies that refuse to stay silent.