Gost in the machines...
Time and time ago, back in the days when the pentium was new and exiting, when the SNES was very nearly the bees knees of all things entertaining, and the PS1 was the very cutting edge of excellent...

Came home one late one evening. Bleary eyed and with my head still full of curly brackets, ampersands and double equals signs. To find Best Beloved cowering in the corner of the sofa, curled around a pillow and with evidence of extensive crying all around. Poor girl was utterly terrified.

Over the next 15 minutes I tried to pry an explanation out of her in between bouts of sobbing. Whatever this was it had scared her very badly, badly enough that she didn't want to talk about it.
So I wrapped my arms around her and we just sat there quietly.
About 20 minutes later she screamed, jumped up and started crying again. Managing to tell me this time that she'd heard "The noise" that she was certain I'd managed to banish from the house just by being there.

Explanation pours out of her like water from a burst dam. All afternoon, ever since she got home, there has been this strange high pitched screaming half heard in the background, too quiet to pin down and too intermittent for her to be certain of its objective reality.
Given that her mother is a full blown Loop-De-Doo schizophrenic and has the paperwork to prove it, the poor lass was pretty certain that it was either a) ghosts (unlikely) or b) the onset of The Voices trying to talk to her. She wasn't keen on either.
I had, of course, heard nothing...

Quietened down again and listened intently, about 15 mins later there it was. A definite, if faint, ethereal screaming noise. Lasted a long and faintly sphincter tightening 30 seconds and then faded away.

I knew that noise of old, I recognised my foe and knew how to deal with it in seconds. Told best beloved to leave the room as she wouldn't want to see what I was about to do, and took up the universal remote as the closest blunt instrument to hand...

Closing the door so that the dear girl would not be disturbed by my actions I did what I knew had to be done to banish the specter.

Switched off the amplifier that was feeding from the Playstation to the speakers. Seems that setting the volume to zero when you pause Silent Hill doesn't _quite_ result in utter silence.

Nasty bug, they should fix that...
( DukeEuphoria Comes highly reccomended, Wed 19 Sep 2012, 18:50, 1 reply)

Back in the day...
I used to play Clive Barker's Undying in the room next to our bedroom, early in the morning on our old win98 what-was-then beast.
The volume was turned down to nothing and I would occasionally take a break to watch tv.
The missus would wake up to the sounds of the of baying of the demon dogs whilst the game was on pause.
Took me a couple of weeks before I decided to eventually fess-up and tell her where this sound could possibly be coming from...
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Wed 19 Sep 2012, 22:57, closed)