A family were given holy water to sprinkle around their house after the ghostly shape of a'civil war maid' floating in their living room was caught on camera - with their terrified dog looking right at it. Tim Welty, 25, had visited his parents' home to fix their computer when his mother got in touch to say their camera installed to keep an eye on the dogs had captured something unusual while he'd been round. A picture that the camera had taken while he had been sat in the room alone showed the shape of a large lady hovering over the sofa and the cocker spaniel looking up at her, with her ears pulled back in fear. After sharing the image, some Catholic friends of the family were so'freaked out' by what they saw that they gave them holy water and urged them to sprinkle it around. The family home is thought to be based on the location of a bloody American Civil War battle, and Welty claims the woman looks like an old farm maid from the period.

As I walked into one of the warehouses run by the aptly named Quiet Logistics in a suburban town outside Boston, I instinctively lowered my voice to a whisper. The room's massive ceilings reverberated my voice and there was surprisingly no noisy work to drown it out. In front of me, a subset of the building's roughly 200 employees earning between 12-18 an hour carefully packaged trendy clothes, shoes, and jewelry into brand-specific boxes, all without a sound. "We were shocked at how calm our warehouses felt," Bruce Welty, the founder and chairman of Quiet, which handles the packaging and shipping of items purchased online, told me in a phone interview before my visit. Many of the products come from a growing class of ecommerce startups that favor the direct to consumer model over brick and mortar stores.

An Amazon warehouse is a flurry of activity. Towering hydraulic arms lift heavy boxes toward the rafters. And an army of stubby orange robots slide along the floor like giant, sentient hockey pucks, piled high with towers of consumer gratification ranging from bestsellers to kitchenware. Those are Kiva robots, once the marvel of warehouses everywhere. Amazon whipped out its wallet and threw down US 775 million to purchase these robot legions in 2012.

An Amazon warehouse is a flurry of activity. Towering hydraulic arms lift heavy boxes toward the rafters. And an army of stubby orange robots slide along the floor like giant, sentient hockey pucks, piled high with towers of consumer gratification ranging from bestsellers to kitchenware. Those are Kiva robots, once the marvel of warehouses everywhere. Amazon whipped out its wallet and threw down 775 million to purchase these robot legions in 2012.