Victorians loved their technology and prided themselves on their rationalism and empiricism, but something in the Victorian mind also knew that those things were in tension with the emotional, the intuitive, the imaginative, and the unknowable. We can see that tension in the fact many Victorian writers sought to bridge that gap by writing both realistic stories and ghost stories. Some, such as Dickens, often hedged his bets; others, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, did not: Doyle created that Victorian paragon of reason, Sherlock Holmes, but also believed in fairies and attended seances to communicate with his deceased wife. The "haunted technology" story is a perfect symbol of this tension.