At 2:51 AM on August 1, 2008, a surveillance camera at Asheville High School in Asheville, NC, caught a mysterious figure flitting around onscreen. It seemed to float in front of the two lit doorways. At one point it even vanished and popped up in a new place!

Local news reports did their best journalistic take. You can watch their video here.

My favorite: overzooming a featureless blur, the announcer says, "At one point, it even takes the form of a child." They also brought in a paranormal expert who declared, "That definitely is paranormal activity."

Here's a link to a digest of the relevant frames. Watch it yourself, then see below for my stone-hearted skeptical take on it.

My answer, of course, is that it's a spider crawling on the camera lens. It seems to appear and disappear because this is a security camera with a frame rate around one frame per second, and spiders can move faster than that. (Plus, watch the time in the upper left– at the jump, ten seconds have gone by.) Although the spider is blurry, the movement is clearly spiderish, and you can see the blur of its legs in a few frames.

Aside from the fact that, well, it's a spider, it's pretty clearly not floating around in the room. It doesn't cast a shadow. (It looks like it does in one frame, but that's the spider's leg.) Plus, Spidey moves in more or less a straight line after the jump, but there's a fish-eye lens on the camera. It's either moving in the precise arc to appear straight to the fish-eye lens, or it's crawling on the surface of the lens. Not to mention that it's a spider.

Plus, I waved my EMF detector at the screen and it didn't detect any paranormal activity, so that clinches it.

Thanks to Neurologica for the tip. Their link is here. (Although Dr. Novella seems to think it was a bird or bat. Spider, I tell you!)

Update: My new favorite quote is from this link: "It's a ghost! Of course it's a ghost! It's the ghost of some former student who's really angry with his teacher and has come back to get back at the teacher." Stated with tremendous glee by… a teacher.

P. S. Spider! (Or maybe something else.)