The Dodleston Messages are one of the odder cases in the modern British paranormal record, not least because they took the form of typed text on a home computer rather than any more traditional sighting or sensation. In the autumn of 1984, Ken Webster, an economics teacher, and his partner Debbie were living at Meadow Cottage in the Cheshire village of Dodleston, and had brought home a BBC Micro computer, not connected to any network — this was well before the internet was a household fixture — to help with renovations to the centuries-old house.
What followed, according to Webster's account, was a series of messages that appeared on the machine seemingly without either of them typing them. The correspondent identified himself as Lukas Wainman, a man claiming to live on the same plot of ground in the year 1546, sharing his home with a servant girl named Katherine. As the exchange continued, a further and stranger layer was added: messages purporting to come from the year 2109, apparently monitoring the whole communication between the twentieth century and the sixteenth. Webster set the entire episode down in his 1989 book "The Vertical Plane", which remains the primary source for the case.
Interpretations of the Dodleston Messages split sharply. Skeptics have proposed the whole affair was an elaborate hoax, whether by Webster himself, by Debbie, or by an outside party with access to the cottage and the means to tamper with the computer. Believers, and Webster among them, have argued the case represents something closer to a genuine communication across time — a time-slip rather than a haunting in the conventional sense, since no apparition was ever reported, only text. No conclusive resolution has been reached in the decades since, and the case is recorded here as contested rather than assigned to either camp.
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