14 Jul (1) This ATM Dispensed Cash With A Note Indicating There Was Someone Trapped Inside 

For the vast majority of the time, visiting an ATM is not a particularly frightening experience. In fact, typically, it’s as mundane an experience as possible. Oh sure, maybe you’ll feel a numbing swell of anxiety if you haven’t checked your bank balance in a while and you’re expecting to be poorer than the guy who invested all his assets in Blockbuster.

There are times when you might have your credit card swallowed by an especially evil machine, or maybe you’ll be confronted by a particularly angry person demanding cash on pain of stabbing. I’ve even had the uncomfortable experience of being so deep in my overdraft that the machine has pointedly refused to dispense any money at all.

I remember being terrified by an episode of the X-Files in which an insane killer hallucinates that an ATM is talking to him. It feeds him an eerie message of “KILL EM ALL” in bright-green letters.

Something about that scene made me inherently mistrustful of them. Even though the story that inspired that mistrust was patently ludicrous, I could never quite shake the fear that maybe these things might one day try to speak to me; that there could be a literal ghost in the machine. But that idea is pure science fiction. It could never really happen … right?

It turns out that maybe I should have stayed wary all these years. This week, a police officer was left dumbfounded when an ATM started dispensing handwritten pleas for help. What was going on? Have the machines finally gained sentience? Or is there another explanation?

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