Teacher received perplexing emails 'from future' sparking ghostly time travel mystery
dailystar.co.uktime travel, or even bizarre ghostly phenomena.But in the middle of the 1980s, a Cheshire economics teacher named Ken Webster received a series of cryptic messages on his BBC home computer that appeared to have been sent by someone living in the reign of King Henry VIII.In those days, the Internet was a tiny, almost unknown network operated by a few specialists.The BBC Micro that Ken had been loaned by his employers had no means of connecting to the outside world, and lacked even a hard drive, relying on small-capacity floppy disks for storage.But the primitive machine somehow connected to an unknown entity across not just space, but across time.When Ken left the computer switched on, but unattended, the messages appeared on the Micro’s floppy drive.
Apparently sent by a man named Lukas who was living in the 16th Century, the messages were written in an old-fashioned, but still more or less understandable, form of English.The first of them, in a file apparently addressed to Ken, his girlfriend Debbie, and their housemate Nic, appeared in December 1984.
It appeared to be a sort of poem that began: “True are the nightmares of a person that fears, safe are the bodies of the silent world."Ken was baffled by the mystery file, but with Christmas coming up soon forgot about it and it wasn’t until the following February that he borrowed the machine from work again.The next message was more clearly the beginning of a conversation, commenting on Ken’s “strange” modern English.
The writer appeared to have been a former occupant of the cottage, who saw electric lights as a thing “the Devil maketh”.Adding to the mystery, at around the same time there was a spate of paranormal events in the cottage – tins were found inexplicably.
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