Back during a very busy time at work, people were working late often enough to notice that there were strange sounds in the building at night. Some even said there were strange goings on. While most of this was written off to rodents and thermal shifting of the building, some people were not convinced.
We decided to set up a ghost cam.
I myself am not superstitious, and did not believe it was a ghost. But we were stressed out from the long hours, and it sounded like fun.
I brought in an old USB webcam and hooked it to my desktop PC in my cube. Then I installed motion to weed out all the boring pictures when nothing was happening. (It's quite a fine program.) I left it running overnight a few times. We found some unsettling pictures when we returned one morning. A shadowy profile moving through the dark.
Sadly, the pictures were very fuzzy. My cube was simply too far from the action. We decided to try to move the camera closer. We located a nice spot along a high traffic area, close to the previous night's ghost sightings.
However, my webcam was a USB model, and we didn't have anyone sitting near there who was willing to become my minion, or otherwise lend me a USB port on their PC. We found something else, though: an abandoned Windows box. Or mostly abandoned. It had been sitting there for at least a month, and was still running. I didn't have a login for it. We really wanted Linux on it, but I didn't want to break it, in case it had something important on it. So I poked around the system and made sure that nobody had been doing anything on it for a while. Then I booted a Knoppix CD.
Knoppix is a wonderful thing. It's a full blown Linux OS that runs entirely from a CD. Doesn't touch the hard drive at all. It has such great hardware detection that it finds and configures almost all the hardware you need (as long as doing so isn't dangerous, as in the case of the hard drive). It even has development tools. (You know, compilers and such.)
So I booted into Knoppix, downloaded and compiled motion, and set up my webcam to work with it. Since we weren't touching the system's hard drive at all, we just set up motion to record all the images to an NFS (network) filesystem on another PC.
Now that's just cool, if you ask me.
Despite the location, we never did get any better shots of the ghost. The only pictures we have are far off, grainy, shadowy profiles. They remind me of Loch Ness Monster photos.
The perfect stuff for legends. ;-)