Buzzghost

Buzzghost (n.) is the small, confident shiver against your thigh that announces a message which does not exist. You feel it. You are certain of it. You reach into your pocket with the brisk efficiency of an important person, pull out the phone and find a blank screen, no messages, no calls and the time, which you did not need. Sometimes the phone is not even in that pocket. Sometimes it is on the kitchen table in another room.

The buzzghost is a polite visitor. It never rings loudly or flashes. It simply taps once, like somebody touching your sleeve in a crowd, and waits for you to check. It prefers quiet moments: queues, waiting rooms, the last five minutes of a meeting, and the exact second after you have sent a message you were not sure about. People expecting important news are visited far more often than people expecting nothing at all.

There are regional variations. The breast pocket buzzghost is common among people who wear jackets. The handbag buzzghost is a faint, muffled thing that can only be felt through the strap. Very experienced sufferers report a ringghost too, the faint sound of their own ringtone in the hum of a shower or a hairdryer, which sends them out dripping to find, once again, nothing.

Nobody has ever caught a buzzghost in the act. It is always one step ahead. A person who takes the phone out of their pocket and holds it in their hand will, within a few minutes, feel a buzz in the pocket where it used to be. It has even been reported in people who have left their phone at home for the day on purpose, and who spend the afternoon patting an empty pocket like a loyal dog that has lost its ball.

There is only one proven way to banish a buzzghost, which is to receive a real message. The genuine buzz, when it comes, feels slightly different and entirely convincing, and the ghost retreats for a while. It is back by teatime. It knows you have not really stopped waiting.

The real thing behind the word has a name in research: phantom vibration syndrome. Surveys of university students and of hospital staff who carry phones or pagers have found that a clear majority have felt a vibration that never happened, many of them regularly. Most people find it mildly odd rather than upsetting, and it tends to fade when they carry the phone somewhere else or switch the vibration off.

The likely explanation is that the brain is always trying to spot important signals in a noisy world, and it would rather raise a false alarm than miss something real. When you are expecting a message, it lowers its threshold, so an ordinary sensation such as clothing brushing your skin or a tiny twitch of a muscle gets read as the phone. In other words, a buzzghost is not a fault in your phone. It is a small sign of how much attention you are paying to the people who might be trying to reach you.