We can now see how a galaxy will look 10,000 years in the future.

“It takes high-speed, sophisticated computer programs to measure the tiny shifts in the positions of the stars that occur in only four years’ time,” said astronomer Jay Anderson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., who conducted the study with fellow STScI astronomer Roeland van der Marel. “Ultimately, though, it is Hubble’s razor-sharp vision that is the key to our ability to measure stellar motions in this cluster.”

That is awesome.

[Space]

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town. Wednesday we learned how one man created his own lake monster sham.

Maybe it’s because we’re at a century’s distance with only selective research sources left to go by, but I feel like there’s respectable, genteel nobility behind both the Hodag hoax and the Lake George Monster prank. I say this in light of the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco, which mirrored modern film and record promotion campaigns far more than it did the homegrown ingenuity of yesteryear’s cryptid shenanigans. At the same token, it’s difficult, in the case of the Sasquatch carcass thimblerig, to figure out exactly where the wild dream logic and delightful homespun madness ended and where the frustrating dishonesty and grubby-handed cash pawing began.

It’s easy to point fingers at Carmine Thomas Biscardi, the Las Vegas promoter and notorious Bigfoot hoaxer, who teamed up with the two Georgia pranksters after they had already set their small-scale practical joke in motion… easy because he’s obviously guilty, and by far the least sympathetic party involved. In 2005, Biscardi went on Coast to Coast AM to brag about a live Bigfoot specimen that everybody could watch and enjoy via live webcam feed… for a subscription fee of $14. The surprise here isn’t that there wasn’t actually a captive Sasquatch pacing circles in front of the camera lens, but rather that there was nothing pacing anything anywhere; Biscardi didn’t even try to fake a spectacle. After announcing that there was never a live specimen and claiming that he, too, had been ripped off by the people in possession of the non-existent Bigfoot, Biscardi took the webcam money and ran. (To his dubious credit, he did refund all post-prank-revelation subscription orders.) The refusal to present even the drunkest of vagrants in the nattiest of Gorilla Grodd costumes clearly crosses the line between hoax and scam.

So after Biscardi jumped on the bandwagon-cum-Yeti-hearse of the Georgian sheriff’s deputy and his used car salesman buddy, it was really tempting to cite him as the reason that the hoax felt less like a harmless, misguided jape than a carefully orchestrated deception. After all, Biscardi’s the one who called down the media frenzy, and who organized the ridiculous live press conference, and who, at the outset, before pictures of the so-called corpse were released on the Internet, charged folks $2 a pop for cadaver photos. On the other hand, Biscardi didn’t start the hoax. He didn’t author the boys’ tale of hiking through the woods and finding the 7’ 7” fur-covered body amid a gathering of three similar living creatures. He even joined up after the first YouTube video was filmed. Biscardi is just a savvy, opportunistic mooch, the crooked conductor of a runaway train built by Deputy Matthew Whiton and Rick Dyer.

Get the rest of the story AFTER THE JUMP…

Dyer and Whiton are harder to pin down. It takes very specific sort of f***-all enthusiasm to dash out into the world claiming to have found the bloating corpse of a monster. Still, a century before, Eugene Shepard ran into Rhinelander, Wisconsin with not only the faked corpse of a monster, but also an epic tale detailing how he and a lumberjack posse had killed the beast with dynamite. In both cases a false cadaver was created, and advertised as the genuine artifact. I haven’t found anything to indicate that Shepard charged anyone to take a look-see at the immolated Hodag, but neither is it clear what sort of monetary designs Dyer and Whiton did or didn’t have before Biscardi joined up (though the ease with which the Vegas promoter convinced them that their bizarre animal was, in actuality, a cash cow doesn’t speak well of their intentions). “But,” you point out, “Shepard did charge people a dime to see the supposed live Hodag at the County Fair.” And here, again, we are walking the high wire between hoax and scam.

Even disregarding the fact that’s Shepard’s Hodag wasn’t presented in a cultural vacuum – patrons were almost certainly familiar with sideshows and similar humbugs that offered creative, entertaining, but generally obvious, deceptions for a minimal fee – the lurching automaton voiced by Shepard’s son and accompanied by Shepard’s own manic, silver-tongued narration provided enough of a spectacle to justify the minimal price of admission. And it’s hard to tell whether or not Dyer and Whiton possess whatever unnamable compulsion drives people to rig up robot monsters or add a set of blue ears to a painted, pulley-rigged stick. They certainly aren’t like Biscardi, who uses big talk and empty promises to pocket fat stacks of money for nothing. At the same time, they seemed to lack the joyfulness and enthusiasm that both Shepard and Watrous felt for their respective creations. Despite their commitment to creating an ad hoc monster body, they seemed more obsessed with the publicity and cultural caché than with the actual source of attention – Bigfoot remains. Seriously low rent Bigfoot remains.
And for me, that was what ultimately made the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco seem so disingenuous. Initially, the whole business had me really excited – not because I believed the body was real, but because I wanted to see how far they would take it. How much effort they would put into the spectacle. Whether or not, like Shepard and Watrous, they would show us something that, while false according to its supposed identity, was real in its creativity and craftsmanship. I was hoping for a fully autopsy-ready body, with layers of correctly placed viscera, a stomach rife with clues pointing to the identity of its last meal, and maybe even a couple ridiculous, but no less entertaining, physiological revelations (Bigfoot has two hearts! Bigfoot has an artificial hip, indicating that Sasquatches have surprisingly advanced medical capabilities!) So when word came out that it was just an ape suit stuffed with hotdog ingredients, I was more than a little chagrined.

I don’t know where this leaves us. It’s seems reductive to blame Dyer and Whiton’s misguided bottom-shelf prankery on new media and a reality show culture that promise fame to the commoner and increasingly value the frenzied swapping of digital information over a tangible engagement with a physical product, though I’m sure once Biscardi was involved he convinced the boys that, these days, a ridiculously low investment often yields high temporary returns. After all, the hoax was never meant to go undetected forever… just long enough for the three yeti coroners to fill their coffers through the exploitation of Bigfoot enthusiasts and cryptid research groups. Then again, in this day and age, even a well-intentioned prankster with boundless integrity would be remiss to entirely forego a Web presence in favor of some falsely idealized “old fashioned” route.

No, I think the problem with all of this – the thing that made Dyer and Whiton’s Bigfoot prank feel dire and witless – was the pranksters seeming lack of fun. Imagine a grinning Eugene Shepard storming out of the woods with his carbonized Hodag, or a giggling Harry Watrous hiding in some shrubs, waiting to loose his hippogriff upon a hapless boater. These locally performed stunts were just that – performed, with the jerry-rigged monsters taking center stage as their creators MC’d or crouched behind an azalea bush. A snarling Hodag. A blue-eared hippogriff. A hypothetical surgically enhanced dual-hearted Bigfoot. These pranks are attractive because they seek to knit our dreams and nightmares from the mundane yarn of the everyday – to bring us as close as we’ll ever come to actual monsters. What the Dyer and Whiton did was mug for the camera, all the while taunting us with a shi**y cat’s cradle strung between 10 middle fingers.

It’s happening again… again. Give it up for Bloody Mary.

You have already been acquainted with the drill: I look up a popular American cryptid/folktale (e.g., Bloody Mary) on three foreign language Wikipedia pages and summarize the results (including the requisite [sic]-implied Google Translate nuggets).

You try to match each of the three versions to the Wikipedia site on which you believe it have originated.

If you want to. Otherwise, proceed straight to the answers. There’s no reward for right answers, creative problem solving techniques or subtle attempts at blackmail. And if there were, it would be something plagued by poorly welded corner seams and filled with molten lava, and nobody would want it.

If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the general ghost-in-the-mirror slumber party exploits of Bloody Mary, read this English-language Wikipedia article

As David Bowie once crooned, “Let’s dance!”:

Your Language Choices:
a.) Italian
b.) Japanese
c.) German

Bloody Mary:

1. This language’s Bloody Mary entry is little more than a single-paragraph blurb that identifies the ritual as a courage test, mentions the optional use of candles and explains that the ghost is often summoned via the “rearview mirror of a car where there was associated in his lifetime, in which case at least one person has walked up it turned out to talk with her, but once.” The related links, however, guide readers to a page about a different legend – the legend of “Anne toilet.” According to the story, Anne was a young woman who was killed in the bathroom of her school and subsequently began haunting other school bathrooms. Supposedly, “in a certain school toilets should not everyone in a certain way and call Anne [ reply comes back from the shot. ‘ Wearing a red skirt , the most famous figure of the girl bobbed hair.”

2. On this language’s Wikipedia, the legend behind the familiar sleepover game goes thusly: there was a girl of 14 who died in an unspecified, but almost certainly tragic, accident. Her mother went so insane in the grief-coping center of her membrane that she “attacked on his arm a wire connected to a bell outside the coffin and the ground.” Mary’s mother swore she could hear the bell jingling, over and over again, resounding in her skull like some horrific parody of Christmas. Finally, she persuaded her already devestated husband to dig up their daughter’s coffin. “As soon as it was opened in horror as their parents saw that Mary had tried to open the coffin and had pulled all the nails against the wall to exit. But now Mary had died and the parents went mad with grief that he killed their daughter.” The page goes on to explain that in America, Bloody Mary is usually described as a girl killed in a car accident or “a girl buried alive by his own beliefs are so many parents.”

3. This language’s Wikipedia site doesn’t even have a page for Bloody Mary, but instead, after automatically sending users to a page about the cocktail, redirects folklore researchers to a catch-all page about Bogey figures throughout the world. Aside from an easily missed nod to Bloody M., the page features descriptions of Hakemann, “A hybrid of man and fish. Attracts swimmers children drown in water with a hook to it and be eaten by him,“ Schneider with the Shear, “which cuts the disobedient child,“ and Stranger, “a bright green pants and a black coat in appearance.“

Answers:

Description 1.) was found on b.), the Japanese Wikipedia
Description 2.) was found on a.), the Italian Wikipedia
Description 3.) was, therefore, found on c.), the German Wikipedia

Thanks for playing. Let’s do this again some time! I think I almost learned something.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town.

The Lake George Monster never saved a town. It didn’t herald a tourism boom or lure swarms of industrialists to the shores of Hague Bay. It doesn’t funky chicken around the sidelines of any public school basketball courts. And Lake George isn’t known as “Home of the Lake George Monster,” but rather as “Gateway to the Adirondacks.” Credit where credit is due, though, the Lake George Monster is probably the most extreme point (short of boat murder) to which a friendly fishing contest has ever escalated.
In 1904, Harry Watrous, a professional painter, made a bet with his friend, Colonel William Mann, the editor of an infamous gossip rag, over who could reel in a larger trout. And so it began. The men fished on the lake, often in sight of each other, each one determined to fish better, harder, faster than the other. In retrospect, that Mann decided to cheat shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

The paper the Colonel edited, “Town Topics,” once a respectable arts and leisure magazine, had, under Mann, become an inky mire of high society gossip and scandal-mongering. Mann’s ploy to avoid libel charges? Print standard, sometimes even complimentary, articles about known New York society members on the front of a page, then, on the flip side, directly lined up with the corresponding fluff pieces, run scandalous news about the same individuals, sans identification. Anyone who knew how to read the paper – and anyone who was anyone did – could easily match the public figures to the defaming rumors. “Town Topics,” of course, stayed in business by collecting bribes from guilty parties who wished to keep their faux pas private. Still, when Watrous finally identified the hulking monster of a trout that Mann casually held up from inside his own fishing craft, and later, in a ridiculous display of bravado, exhibited in his house, as a sculpted and painted hunk of wood, he swore revenge.

Like the Rhinelander Hodag, the Lake George Monster began life as a chunk of wood (specifically, a cedar log). Using bits of glass, metal and wood, Watrous affixed eyes, ears and a toothy snout to the 10-foot-long log, which he then painted in alternating yellow and black stripes. Also, white teeth, red mouth, red nostrils, and blue (yes, blue) ears. (Later, Watrous would repeatedly refer to his creation as a “Hippogriff”- the mythical offspring of a griffin and a mare, and noble companion to the Boy Who Lived – but I’m not seeing it.) He rowed out to an area of the lake frequented by his friend and nemesis, and rigged up the creature to a simple pulley system – a 100-foot-rope anchored to a rock on the shore.

Then he waited.

MUCH MORE… AFTER THE JUMP

Mann, who floated by sometime later, was accompanied by several guests, including one Mr. Davies and one Mrs. Bates. Watrous loosed his Hippogriff. I’ll let the monster’s creator describe the ensuing scene as he related it years later to the New York “Evening Sun”:
“Mr. Davies, who had a rather high pitched voice, uttered a scream that must have been heard as far away as Burlington, Vt. Mrs. Bates, a very intrepid lady, of Milesian extraction, stood on a seat in the boat and beat the water with her parasol, shouting indistinguishable sentences in her native tongue. Col. Mann shouted, ‘Good God, what is it?’ through his whiskers and kept repeating his query as long as the boat was in sight.”
Soon, rumors of the Lake George Monster began spreading throughout the town. Needless to say, Watrous was overjoyed. Ecstatic. So entirely freaking jazzed that he proceeded to systematically move his wood beast around the lake, setting it up near dock- and shore-side attractions, including the Lake View Restaurant and the Island Harbour House hotel, so that he could confound and terrify locals and tourists alike. It’s not known exactly how long Watrous kept up this game, but season after season, talk of a strange monster trolling the waters of Hague Bay persisted. While Eugene Shepard’s outsized promotion of his captive Rhinelander Hodag attracted scads of curious out-of-towners, Watrous’ unrestrained hippogriff had little effect on the Lake George Area (though some hotel owners supposedly feared that tales of a ferocious, unpredictable lake beast might actually hurt the tourist industry), and soon, the inventor of the world’s first functioning blue-eared DIY hippogriff packed away his hobby and moved on with his life.

30 years after the fearsome Lake George Monster delivered the winning punch in a rousing, street-rules fishing contest, Harry Watrous, who by this time was known locally as the master of the bygone beast, was asked to resurrect his monster one last time for a surprise cameo at a local Independence Day festival. During one of the day’s many aquatic events, Watrous pulled the rope and, to the shock and delight of the celebrating crowds, gave his creation life.

Despite the fact that Lake George never immortalized its monster in statue form nor baptized an amateur sports team “The Hague Bay Hippogriffs,” one can still see Watrous’ original monster at the Lake George Historical Association Museum. It’s a bit banged up, missing its marvelous blue ears and layered with the chipping evidence of repeated repaintings, but research done by Joe Nickell, an investigator for the “Skeptical Inquirer,” confirms that it is most likely the authentic object.

After basking in the triumph of the Hodag, it’s almost disheartening to read about the Lake George Monster, which, outside a small community of hoax groupies and cryptid enthusiasts has been nearly forgotten. But put it into perspective – the hostage Hodag was created to save a town, while the hippogriff was built to win a derailed fishing contest. And then there’s the joy the creature brought to its creator: “I spoofed the world once with the horrendous beast; and I spoofed it again this afternoon.” These were the words spoken by George Watrous after he loosed his creation upon a lake full of revelers on July 4th, 1934, and they speak a wonderful truth – inauthentic though it might be, any successful hoax is a marvelous falsehood joined on either end by evident creativity and unfeigned triumph.

I finally watched “The Poughkeepsie Tapes.” And I say Booo! I’m not gonna dress this post up in some florid over-long introduction and frilly poetical conclusion just so I can puke up all over it after the dance. The movie is no good.

For those of you who don’t obsessively track the misadventures of distributionless horror movies: “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” is a 2007 serial killer flick, filmed documentary style, about a mass murderer in Poughkeepsie, New York, who videotaped his numerous hellacious homicides. Written, produced and directed by the Brothers Dowdle, the film kicked around the festival circuit, got bought by MGM, was scheduled for a tentative, ultimately cancelled, 2009 theatrical release, and then just sort of faded away. (You can dig it up online in all of the places you’re already thinking to check.)

Dance time.

AFTER THE JUMP…
The movie cuts between two different formats – talking head-style interviews with cops, FBI agents, members of the victim’s families, etc., and grainy footage from the titular video cassettes made by the killer.

As for the interviews, even the ones that aren’t poorly acted feel overly scripted, making the characters about as believable as the sultry, coifed astrophysicist of every-action-movie fame. I know. The problem with my critique, at least in terms of the “overly scripted” allegation, is that it hinges on the essential notion that the filmmakers’ goal was either to fool the viewer into watching the film as an actual journalistic document, or to deconstruct the broader nature of documentary film via seamless facsimile. “The Poughkeepsie Tapes,” however, seems happy to use “documentary” as a broad structural guide to aid in crafting a budget-conscious, requisitely twisty Hollywood serial killer romp.

So, fine, I can’t rightfully bitch about the part where an FBI film analyst tells a story about how his wife saw a half-hour of one tape and was so traumatized that she wouldn’t let him touch her for a year. But my acting gripe stands. Even if the performer doesn’t have to convince me that he’s an actual FBI forensic technician in real life, he at least has to be a convincing FBI forensic technician in the film’s internal reality. And that shouldn’t be too hard… it’s a reality where a murderer amasses hundreds upon hundreds of videotapes detailing his crimes, and none of the police ever think to hit up local electronic stores for security footage that might reveal one creepy dude, perhaps even with a camera (I mean f***, the guy seems to record everything else he does) consistently purchasing blank tapes.

That’s another thing – ignoring all the procedural gaffs committed by the police and g-men who the killer manages to outsmart at every turn, the killer’s procedures are ludicrous. He constantly switches up his murder weapons, his victim profiles and his body disposal methods. He holds one random victim hostage for years, but kills everyone else. From quick and easy to horrifically slow and muffled by animal feces, this guy does it all. To the cops in the film, this unpredictable versatility makes him the most brilliant serial killer ever in the entire history of wild, blood-drenched maniacs. Every character goes on ad nauseam about how smart and savvy he is, and each promising forensic lead gives way to another complex and nefarious psyche out orchestrated by a man who we’re meant to believe is sadistic, emotionally disturbed, misogynistic, bloodthirsty, violent… and somehow also completely capable and sane. Again, one could argue that the movie is no less realistic than a movie like “Se7en,” and that I’m allowing the film’s superficial usage of documentary techniques to cloud my assessment – which is true – but maybe that points to a larger truth. Maybe documentary – a style deeply immersed in the notion of authenticity or the subversion thereof – wasn’t the most efficient medium through which to narrate this boilerplate cat-and-mouse gore thriller.

The early introduction of the tapes into the film isn’t bad. Short clips are shown in the context of expert commentary and the testimony of victims’ acquaintances. We catch blurry glimpses of gruesome dismemberments and see a few longer sequences in which the killer captures victims, all the while letting the camera roll. As the film moves on, though, the talking head testimonies and tape commentaries become sparser, and long segments of tape are just allowed to roll, uninterrupted. The masked killer takes his aforementioned hostage. We watch as he dominates and abuses her. More bodies pile up. Plot twists get increasingly nutty. Soon, it almost feels as if the filmmakers settled on the documentary style as a compromise after realizing the infeasibility of shooting an entire killer-centric first-person, Blair Witch-style venture without finding some way to show things from the perspective of the law enforcement officers who their brilliant antagonist is repeatedly punking (note that the Brothers Dowdle did, in fact, go on to make a first-person POV horror film – “Quarantine,” the inferior American remake of the brilliant Spanish movie, “[REC]”).
In the end, the worst use of the “found footage” also offers one of the film’s most uniquely creepy images: a terrified, lingerie-clad woman being ordered from off camera to inflate and bounce atop a giant balloon. The scene escalates into a twisted nightmare of Lynchian proportions as the still-off-camera killer begins screaming “Now pop it! Pop it!” Out of context, it’s a fittingly creepy scene, but in the film, it’s squandered. The FBI video analyst explains that there’s over 100 hours of weird balloon footage, but we’re only shown the single minute-long sequence before the movie lopes away into familiar hack-and-slash territory. Balloons are never mentioned again.

Cinematical’s review of “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” briefly suggests that, through the footage, which represents the killer’s own voyeuristic fetishization of his murders, the film engages viewers to consider their own voyeuristic fascination with violent cinematic imagery. And maybe for some folks it does. Me? I just wondered why even America’s independent horror directors are content to recycle the same violent imagery, repackaged though it might be.

BARF!

I can only go so many consecutive weeks ascribing deep cultural significance to the folkloric capers of cryptozoological second stringers before I start getting a bit antsy. Sure, it’s interesting to think about that aspect of the human condition that abets our collective addiction to narrative and ordered fictions by sticking its fingers in its ears and humming away every time Bigfoot or Nessie or fear Liath is heartily debunked… to think about the way we happily allow stories to fool us. But what are stories? They’re motiveless, elusory things.

If you can identify authorship, though, you can find the meat and bone and beating heart behind the ghostly, transient words. Demystifying? Yeah. But there are more than enough legends packed with mystique. The Jersey Devil. Black dogs. Bloody Mary. One reason they’re so effective, evocative and widespread is that, though they’re myths, they’re dressed in the guise of collective knowledge. Unsourcable, voiceless echoes resounding through time
But what about a fiction that has an identifiable and outspoken (some might even say over-spoken) author? A story that’s obviously invented – that everyone knows is invented – but that’s embraced anyway. What about the story of the Rhinelander Hodag?

When rifles, hunting dogs and poison-filled water guns all failed to fell the fearsome Hodag, Eugene Shepard and his posse of Wisconsinite lumberjacks were forced to resort to sticks of dynamite, which they bravely lobbed at the slavering beast. The Hodag was 200 odd pounds of flame-spewing, black-furred muscle and lizard skin, complete with various spikes, claws and horns. The ever-quotable Shepard described the animal as smelling like “a combination of buzzard meat and skunk perfume.” Even as the creature’s crispy remains were triumphantly carted back to Rhinelander to be put on display, Shepard was bemoaning his inability to capture the Hodag alive.

In name, the Hodag already existed as a fixture of local folklore – a vengeful spirit that rose from the ashes of cremated lumber oxen. Though a popular bedtime story among the loggers and woodsmen who collectively shouldered the economy of the rural Wisconsin town, Shepard was the first man to see, describe and kill one of these ferocious monsters. (Later, Shepard imbued his Hodag with a less industry-specific back story – as a “remnant of the rehistoric dinasaures.”) And three years later, during the fall of 1896, he would become, along with another band of artillery-laden locals, the first – and, to this day, only – man to trap a live specimen. This triumph for humanity, which was immortalized in the aptly-titled photograph “The Hodag Capture” (in reality, taken three years after the “actual” event), found Shepard and his men equipped with both standard-issue angry mob accessories (pitchforks, shotguns, etc.) and long wooden sticks topped with chloroform-soaked rags. Needless to say, the still-breathing Hodag timbered like a Douglas Fir.

The twitching, growling monster that Shepard subsequently displayed for 10 cents a gander at the first-ever Oneida County Fair was actually a carved-out stump, covered in ox hide and cattle bones, and brought to marvelous, shuttering life by a simple electrical system. The coup de grace – it’s ferocious, inhuman roar – was provided by Shepard’s young son. Accounts vary as to whether a majority of fairgoers actually believed the hoax, or simply appreciated it as a harmless, clever caprice, but, either way, the dimes poured in and people from all over the state flocked to the exhibit in order to lay eyes on the hostage monstrosity.
But the Hodag is remembered as more than just a money-grubbing prank perpetrated by a known practical jokester (even before Hodag-mania, Eugene Shepard was infamous for organizing entertaining shenanigans). At the time of the county fair, Rhinelander was a dying town. In less than two decades, the booming logging industry had sawed and chopped its way through a majority of the surrounding pine forests (which might account for all the downtime Shepard had to rig up mechanical dinasaures). While other local communities flourished via long-standing livestock and farming businesses, Rhinelander struggled to gain a foothold in either industry. In fact, the Oneida County Fair was conceived as a means by which to promote Northern Wisconsin, and bring tourism and industry to the struggling region. Without an impressive gallery of crops and livestock to display, the Hodag tent was actually born out of a request by city officials, who asked Eugene Shepard, showman that he was, to find some way to draw in out-of-towners. One almost has to wonder if they were implicitly begging him to revisit his Hodag antics.

Though Shepard’s modest bid to save his town – a bundle of skin, bones and wires – was ultimately destroyed in a fire, both the memory of the Hodag, and the city of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, now unofficially known as Hodag City, live on. A giant fiberglass Hodag adorns the lawn of Rhinelander’s Chamber of Commerce. The local high school’s mascot is a roof-raising Hodag. Even the town’s website proudly identifies Rhinelander as the Home of the Hodag.
It would be reductive to claim that Eugene Shepard single-hodaggedly saved his town, but even Shepard himself wasn’t shy about acknowledging that he’d played a part: “Not only hundreds but thousands of people came to view the Hodag… and not one of them went away without having learned a little more about northern Wisconsin…”

Whether by luck or by skill, Shepard managed to author a tale that was remembered as much for the story as it was for the story of the story. The Hodag, as imagined and built by Eugene Shepard, became as important as the details of the hoax itself. Other merry pranksters haven’t fared nearly as well…

Wednesday: The Lake George Monster

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Rougarou. Monday we looked at the origin story, Wednesday we explored the byzantine rules that come along with the curse.

We’ve heard almost too many stories of white colonists co-opting and literalizing indigenous folklore. Starting with Lake Champlain’s Champ and moving westward, plenty of the classic American lake monster tales started when some eager fishermen heard about, or saw a native drawing of, a serpentine lake spirit and took it as a warning of tangible aquatic horror. Aboriginal bunyip legends found British interlopers tramping through the Australian brush, rifles raised and taxidermists on call. More recently, American Indian Skinwalker legends were dumped into the boiling, paranoid slurry of UFOs, portals, cryptoeverythingology and government conspiracy theories. So it’s kinda nice to know that the Rougarou legend cross-pollinated in the opposite direction.
The Rugaru of Chippewa and Ojibwa legend isn’t the wolf-headed antagonist that bullied the French, nor does it adhere to that monster’s seasonal schedule or incomprehensible 101-day statute of limitations. So what is it? That, my buddies, is a source of some contention. While scholars know for a fact that the word “Rugaru” isn’t derived from any Native American language – meaning it’s almost certainly a bastardized version of either the Cajun term “Rougarou” or the French “Loup Garou” – it’s not entirely clear as to how various tribes and groups applied the word to their established mythologies.

It’s clear that the native Rugaru was a mysterious hairy humanoid who lived out in the forest. Some researchers suggest that tribes began using the term “Rugaru” in relation to their already-extant Sasquatch equivalents (not actually Sasquatch, but rather a physically similar entity with the same Type B personality). And that makes sense. If you aren’t Catholic, haven’t been raised in constant aural proximity to European werewolf stories and can already account for your own packed pantheon of culturally loaded monstrosities, it jibes that, when French traders start going off about some sort of animal guy hiding out in the wilderness, your mind turns immediately to the one animal guy hiding out in the wilderness that you’re already hip to. In this way, this native Rugaru is loosely comparable to our modern Bigfoot – a lumbering mascot for the enduring connection between nature and man, and an animal that couldn’t give two bunyips whether or not you eat a cheeseburger on Good Friday.

(Interestingly, the only other version of the Rougarou legend that portrays the monster in a positive light is that of the uber-devout Catholics, who saw him as a wolf-headed murderer, but regarded the murders as a form of holy cleansing. To them, the Rougarou was protecting the salvation of mankind by eviscerating those who undermined the divine word.)

The other native re-contextualization of the Rougarou isn’t as favorable. Remember the Wendigo? It was that voraciously hungry human-eating monster that the snowed-in Algonquian chapter of Cannibals Anonymous used to deter their people from eating their people, claiming that a man who eats the flesh of another man becomes a wandering, insatiable beast? Well, most tribes had a Wendigo figure, but, as not all tribes faced the harsh meteorological conditions that had occasionally found the Algonquians seeing each other as giant, storytelling turkey legs, not all Wendigo transformation stories hinged on an act of cannibalism. The Wendigo itself was always eatin’ folks and snarfing down children like so many mini-quiches, but the mechanism for transformation differed. Many groups in the Dakota Territory – the area where the Ojibwa and Chippewa tribes most likely picked up the Rougarou story from French traders and missionaries – for example, believed that a man who so much as looked upon a Wendigo subsequently became one. It’s these rules and conventions that were sometimes synonymously applied to the Ruguru.

This understanding of the French bogeyman not only takes into account the hairy, forest-dwelling monster, but also that monster’s former identity as a human who was cruelly transfigured. The Indians most likely heard the tale and, ignoring the leaden complexities of the French version, immediately related it to their own Wendigo story. (I’d be curious to know if the Rugaru legend served to strengthen tribal belief in the Wendigo, as it seems to provide corroborating evidence of the creature’s existence, or if the existence of said creature was already taken as a given and the French tale merely resulted in a minor, if striking, lexicographical addition to the oral tradition.)

Interestingly, it was a variation of this second version that appeared on the CW’s “Supernatural” – in the fourth-season episode “metamorphosis, the brawny, homophobic Winchester boys go up against a Rougarou, which, according to the show’s mythology, is a person who turns into a voracious cannibalistic monstrosity due to a rare genetic disorder.

So the Europeans took indigenous tales of sacred beings and phantasmagoric threats and recontextualized them to fit the demon-haunted landscape of the Western theology; the Native Americans took the evil grotesqueries of the guilt-stricken Christian world and built them into broader figures that prowled outside the boundaries of culture, working their teeth into the most basic, elemental foundations of both nature and humanity. “Supernatural” demonstrates that, even today, we continue to borrow from borrowed legends, copying copies of copies. The Rougarou was born of the Loup Garou and the Rugaru was born of the Rougarou. And all of them want nothing more than to remind us of the hungry, lonely animal inside us all.

I’ve been reading the 1980 Arkham House anthology “New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos,” in which 9 Lovecraft-lovin’ fiction authors were given the opportunity to trifle in the late horror master’s occult, cosmic sandbox, and it’s made me realize how easy it is to reduce Lovecraft’s time- and dimension-spanning vision to a stock set of props. That’s not a shot at the book, the contributors to which are, generally speaking, immensely imaginative in their takes on all things eldritch, stygian and squamish (if you can find it online, check out Basil Copper’s moody and frightening entry, “Shaft Number 247”).

Aside from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lovecraft is probably the inspiration behind the largest quantity of published fanfic. It just occurs to me that, given the current uptick in Lovecraft’s cultural stock value – Cthulhu plush dolls consorting among the superhero maquettes in so many comic stores, the continuous rumors surrounding Guillermo Del Toro’s never-gonna-happen “At The Mountains of Madness” adaptation, the recent DVD release of the documentary “Strange Tales – The Weird Life of H. P. Lovecraft” – it’s easy to get caught up in the physical landmarks of the author’s fiction while still ignoring their path, and that path’s downward trajectory into an insanity that transcends the clichéd jabbering symptoms of the stock lunatic, and defies the single crisp snap of the mind that is too often ascribed to the boundary between lucidity and madness.

Devil’s advocate, though – if you’re intent on adding to the bevy of lazy Lovecraft-inspired tales that, together, read like the Taco Bell menu, with each uniquely named product comprising the same dependable set of tired ingredients, here’s what you might want to include:

Giant, Really, Really Old Books of the Occult

The tomes are always heavy and dusty, with brittle, yellowed pages and a voluminous quantity of forbidden information regarding alchemy and the summoning of ancient powers. Sometimes they are written in archaic, forgotten languages, but, for the multilingual late bloomer, the library at Miskatonic University usually has the last existing translation. Someone’s always searching for these volumes so they can discover wild, pseudo-scientific secrets, but then they just end up summoning Nyarlathotep or a bunch of Shoggoths. Note to Hollywood: Please make a “NeverEnding Story” remake in which the kindly book dealer gives Bastian the Necronomicon. Lots of times, these books are owned by…

Find out AFTER THE JUMP!

Nutty Cult Members

These guys are crazy, but also crazy dedicated to one of the Elder Gods. Sometimes they’re bookish, lonely, quietly sinister and waiting patiently for the inevitable return of their sacred destroyer. These ones are usually old white guys. Other times, they’re crazy, and naked and killing people and actively trying to call an Old One down out of the void. These ones are usually young, black guys. (I would like to note that, despite Lovecraft’s well-documented racial prejudices, it hardly seems offensive to suggest that black people are proactive.) Either they’ll meet a main character and pull him into their twisted sacrificial and/or library-smelling web, or just sort of wander through the background, serving as silent portents of the Old One-fueled madness to come. Some of these cult guys have…

Ancient Stones/Statuettes/Obelisks/Pendants Covered with Frightening, Cryptic, Yet Macabrely Curious, Etchings/Pictographs/Runes

Lovecraft’s works are replete with bizarre monoliths, mysterious carved stones and horrific figurines, all of which tend to be rendered from some indestructible, unearthly and usually kinda green rock substance. Generally, they hold dark sway over the mind of their owners and, as such, lead hapless beachcombers, archaeologists, artists and everymen to dark, mind destroying dreams and revelations about the Old Ones and the ultimate fate of humanity. A great way to start even the palest Lovecraft imitation is to have someone find one of these objects. Ancient cave, ocean floor, paleontological dig, a bowl of Wendy’s chili (actually, that’d be a good idea for a combo corporate lawsuit drama, cosmic horror epic)… it doesn’t really matter where a character finds the evil chunk of crazy, just so long as it perverts mortal souls and molests reader expectations. Usually, these relics depict the Old Ones, which are…

Crazy, Indescribable Monsters That Make You Go Insane If You Even Just Look At Them

This is the easiest element to execute poorly because you don’t actually have to describe them. Just talk about tentacles and giant eyes and lobster claws and snouts, maybe a hoof here or a creepy ear way over there, all glanced fleetingly through black fog, a patina of fear and the swiftly descending venetian blind of insanity. Personally, I like to picture a half-zebra, two-thirds praying mantis with an anus where its everything should be. These guys appear around…

Cosmic/Dimensional Thin Spots

The Elder Gods are like the velociraptors in “Jurassic Park.” They’re testing our universe systematically for weakness. They remember. There are places where the border between the horrific parallel cosmos of the Old Ones and our Team Edward-rooting home sweet home is rubbing thin, and where, at times, the two co-mingle. This device is always a great way to explain why the nutty cult members are sacrificing folks at [remote location], or to explain why [miscellaneous creepiness] is occurring in [otherwise peaceful small town]. Probably a main character ends up travelling along the borders of two realities. Familiar things become monstrous. The sky darkens. The streets fill with unrecognizable refuse and eerie biological waste. Crazy, giant cathedrals appear in the distance. McDonald’s is called G’trn-ekny’s. One mark of the Old Things’ world is…

Wild, Geometrically Impossible Architecture

Like the creatures themselves, this Lovecraftian standby is great for the amateur scribe because, by definition, one can’t describe the indescribable. Ultimately, you probably just end up talking about how all the angles are impossible and how the sky is a color that isn’t actually a color. Probably also the sun is black and there are staircases set at impossible angles and the buildings have an infinite number of sides. Maybe the toilet seats are square. Definitely there aren’t any wheelchair ramps.

I’m going to shimmy out to the end of a limb and guess that most of you aren’t chomping your nails to the quick in fearful expectation of Lent 2011 and its supernatural enforcer, the Rougarou. Maybe it’s because you aren’t Catholic, you don’t live in Louisiana or you own an elephant gun. Maybe it’s because you are the Rougarou (in which case, stop Googling yourself). The point is, a monster that’s only on duty for 1/11 of the year and only kills people of one religion in one state doesn’t have the scare potential of, say, Bloody Mary, who only requires a mirror and mood lighting.

Fortunately, as Cajun culture began expanding to include not only those of Acadian decent, but also miscellaneous immigrants who fully embraced the local lifestyle, the Rougarou legend expanded as well, metastasizing into an equal opportunity nightmare.

Many believe the Rougarou to be a transfigured human, cursed or infected, double-crossed in a deal with the devil or otherwise debased by some catch-all evil contagion. Louisiana’s Caribbean population even threw some voodoo witch doctor malpractice into the mix. Aside from the standard threat to children –eat your greens, take your bath, go to bed or get Rougaroued – the most prevalent of these stories holds that a person, once transformed into the wolf-headed monster, hungers for human meat treats and stalks the bayous and swamps. In some versions, he seeks out victims and attacks without mercy; in others, he hides in the shadows, travels by night and invests all his energy in resisting the urge to draw blood.
Additionally, there’s a 101-day clause that appears consistently throughout these stories, though the specifics of it differ.

A few of the rules to Rougarou-ship AFTER THE JUMP…

Wikipedia claims that the Rougarou is a blood sucker, and that the creature is “under the spell for 101 days. After that time, the curse is transferred from person to person when the rougarou draws another human’s blood.” This information is suspect and unhelpful for two reasons:

1.) Worded as it is, it’s kinda confusing. Is the Rougarou a monster for 101 days, but doesn’t draw blood until the 101st, at which point the next unwitting sap is grandmonstered in? Does it mean that every person he drinks from becomes a Rougarou, but only after the attacking Rougarou’s 101-day contract ends? Shrugs all around. The article does, at least, confirm that, once re-humanized after 101 days, the former Rougarou retains full memory of his horrific misdeeds.

2.) Every other popular Rougarou article simply cut and pasted this inane phrase (sometimes with hilariously lackluster edits straight out of the Lazy High School Plagiarist’s Handbook – “Afterwards, the spell was passed on to another person when the Rougarou drank the new victim’s blood”). Of course, this means that, even if it wasn’t a legitimately popular version of legend before, it definitely is now. Presumably, the Rougarou understands it.
After some poking around, I came up with a separate version of the 101-day itch, this one being far more coherent and a tad more interesting:

So, you’re walking through a swamp, going like, “doo doo doo,” minding your own beeswax, when all of a sudden, a wolf-headed maniac comes rushing out of the trees, eyes like aerial views down active volcanoes and clawed hands snicker-snacking like dual Vorpal blades. Fortunately, you’re awesome and you stomp the end of a fallen branch so that it flips up into your hand, and you just totally wail the ad hoc cudgel across the wolfman’s goofy face. It draws blood. Suddenly, the Rougarou transforms back to human form. It’s your high school history teacher, Mr. Shoner. You used to sing a song about him, and how he was stupid and bald. And how he can’t get a boner. He looks up at you with those big, watery, Unit-3-The-Phoenicians eyes. When you get back to town, Do you tell everyone that Mr. Shoner (smells like an armpit / can’t get a boner) is a Rougarou? Perhaps this will inform your decision – legend has it that a person who unmasks a Rougarou must wait at least 101 days before publicly revealing the monster’s identity (presumably to give the former killer time to process his crimes, take a shower and make his own confession). If the witness does not wait to gab, he or she becomes a Rougarou. Many Louisianan suicides, it is said, are a result of a chatty Cathy’s inability to deal with the gossip-initiated transformation from blabbermouth to wolf face.
I like this version. It doesn’t indict the Rougarou for being a beast, but rather the man for not taking responsibility for his actions (supernaturally motivated though they were) and the victim for prematurely robbing someone of his rightful shot at redemption. Incidentally, I also read that the Rougarou can be killed by jamming a wooden stick through its chest, so if you’d been just a tad more aggressive in fending off Mr. Shoner (gut like a beach ball / butt plug owner), you wouldn’t have had to worry about any of this.

Now, if you’ve been thinking, “blood sucking? Sharp hunk of wood through the chest? Sounds kinda vampirey, no?” I’m right there with you. A huge vampire scare swept Europe (including France) during the 1700s. French theologian Dom Augustine Calmet even penned one of the era’s seminal works on the existence (or, perhaps, non-existence – his studies were inconclusive) of vampires. It’s possible that, while the French colonists and criminals who settled Louisiana and built New Orleans were familiar with stories of the walking, seducing, violin-playing undead, the emigrating Acadians were more accustomed to the older Loup Garou legends. Perhaps, as the Rougarou stories evolved throughout the Cajun community, they came to incorporate aspects of popular European vampire tales.

Friday: Rougarou, Injuns and the CW

Walk it Off – an abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

Today’s ailment: Fever

Zeus’ Toolbox

You will need: 1 THUNDER AXE (Symmetrical Double-Headed Axe)
Instructions: Use THUNDER AXE
Note: Use caution when operating THUNDER AXE

From The Country That Gave You The Blood Of Kali…

You will need: Water; Dirt Collected From Tomb Of St. Thomas In Chennai, India
Instructions: Mix water and holy grave dirt; Drink

Neptune’s Formalwear Accessory

You will need: 1 Seahorse (fresh or dried)
Instructions: Fasten seahorse to left arm
Note: If you think it looks weird having a seahorse attached to only one of you arms, use THUNDER AXE to remove other arm

Sweet, Merciful Oats

You will need: 1 Pious Neighbor; 1 Dish; Grain
Instructions: Place grain in dish; Instruct pious neighbor to pray over grain
Note: Works best for fevers caused by “ill wishers”

The Cure Is Worse Than The Disease (9 End Pieces Worse)

You will need: 9 Loaves of Bread
Instructions: Eat first slice from each loaf

Repentance Of The Drunken Steel (Preventative)

You will need: 1 Wine-Soaked Sword Formerly Used To Decapitate A Man
Instructions: Touch sword
Note: If you don’t have such a sword, make one! All you need is a regular sword, a man, a steady arm and wine

Audubon’s Last Resort

You will need: 1 Bag; 1 String; 1 Tub of Cold Water; 1 Live Eagle
Instructions: Clip nails; Place clippings in bag; Tie bag around eagle’s neck; Hold eagle in tub of water; When eagle becomes sick, fever will dissipate

3k Exorcism Dash

You will need: 1 Garter; 1 Koorsboom Tree
Instructions: Compel fever spirits to leave body and enter garter;
Tie garter around Koorsboom tree; run from Koorsboom tree without once looking back
Note: fever can also be driven into a Fedora, which should then be placed on a baby bear

Woah! Shell Shock!

You will need: 1 Live Turtle; Pepper; Incense
Instructions: Cut open live turtle; Rub insides with pepper and incense; Apply to feet
Note: Cure is most likely to work if selected turtle’s demeanor is cool, but also rude

Larva THIS, Buttface! (Preventative)

You will need: 1 Righteous Loogie; 1 Hairy Caterpillar
Instructions: Spit on caterpillar; Say, “Take that!” (optional)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Rougarou. Come back Wednesday and Friday for more!

The Protestants have always seemed happy with limiting the fate of sinners to eternal suffering in a big torture cave filled with fire and basically every type of snake. Leave it to the Catholics to throw an Earth-dwelling, flesh-eating mutant into the mix.

The French emigrates of the Cajun community had it pretty lousy even before the bloodthirsty, wolf-headed Rougarou shambled out of the swamps all parched and grumpy. A cultural casualty of the French and Indian War, the Cajuns (then known as Acadians, Acadia being the ye olde moniker for the eastern coast of Canada and northern tip of Maine) were ousted by the British. Some were returned to sender on French-bound ships, while others found themselves scurrying southward in search of a replacement home. French-speaking and accustomed to a maritime lifestyle, the Canada-forsaken exiles headed southward through the states, wending their way to the coast of Louisiana, where they could comfortably re-settle along the waters of the Gulf, in a region owned and operated by the French government. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the wandering Acadians, France had recently signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which, among other things, ceded control and ownership of Louisiana to the Spanish government. Sácre bleu!

Fortunately, both the newly empowered Spaniards and the hang-dog former French Canadians were fervent Roman Catholics, and got along well enough that the Cajuns were allowed to hang out and roll how they rolled. After the Revolutionary War (in which many land-snatching-limey-despising Acadians fought with gusto), thousands of Cajuns returned to New Orleans and Southern Louisiana, some arriving haggard and powder-stained from the battlefront, and others showing up nauseous and gaunt after government-authorized emigrations from France. Resettled and reunited, the former Acadians started a new life amid the swamps, bayous and prairies of Louisiana, where, every spring, the Rougarou lifts his nose and sniffs the air, canvassing the ether for the acrid hint of sin. Upon finding it, he narrows his eyes and bounds onward toward the smell, goaded onward by the promise of struggling, guilty meat, and the colorful warning mess it will leave on the ground.

Click AFTER THE JUMP to find out how even you could become a Rougarou!
Similar to “Wodewose,” the word “Rougarou” is but one of the linguistic variations used to encapsulate this chomp-happy lupine monster man, whose other dialect-variant labels include Roux-Ga-Roux, Rugeroo, Rugaru and, occasionally, Loup-garou. That latter term – “Loup-garou” – is, in all probability, the word from which all of the other spellings and pronunciations derive. Also, it’s French for “werewolf.” And in the same way that the word “Rougarou” riffs on the term “Loup-garou,” so too does the Rougarou legend use European werewolf lore as the pentatonic scale for its terrifying, Catholic jazz variations.

For example: the Rougarou is part man and part wolf, but the parts aren’t all mashed up together in a bipedal hairball of teeth and halitosis – Human body. Wolf head.

The Rougarou isn’t erratic or wild. It doesn’t commit the kinds of savage, random assaults in which traditional werewolves (rooted as their lore was in stories of serial murderers, rapists and the rabid) specialized. The Rougarou kills sinners, especially those who fail to observe the traditions of Lent – a 40-day period, ending with Easter, during which many Christians sects, including the Catholics, pray a whole bunch and give up various Earthly indulgences (alcohol, coffee, drunken barista pornography, etc.) in order to prepare for the anniversary of Christ’s death and resurrection.

The notion of a religiously sponsored werewolf isn’t entirely unique to the Rougarou, either. Back in France, some Catholics had already popularized a version of the secular (a loaded word when used in this decidedly supernatural context) Loup-garou legend in which transformation from human sinner to murderous beast occurred automatically after an individual’s seventh consecutive unobserved lent (still, the resulting monster killed in typical indiscriminate rampage fashion).

Having been raised Catholic myself, I’m all too familiar with the sometimes antic lengths to which the religion’s pedagogues will go to guilt kids into ritualistic piousness. I specify kids because I’m assuming it’s largely these hyperactive, overly curious, free-thinking wastrels that constitute the Rougarou’s key demo. Adults – directly bound to their mortality by sick relatives, dying acquaintances and their own creeping physical ailments – have hell to fear. It’s the children – optimistic, unselfconscious rascals who bask in a false sense of immortality as tragedy after tragedy roll off them like a boulder down a chute trying to kill Indiana Jones – who need a more immediate reason to mind their Ps and sacred religious traditions.
At the same time, the Rougarou doesn’t limit itself to Catholic killings and Lenten justice. That would be inefficient.

Wednesday: Non-Denominational Werewolf

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. On Monday, we heard about the origins of the beast. Wednesday, we investigated claims that it is the missing link.

Fear Liath and Science.

After writing that tantalizing gem of a teaser for today’s column, I looked at it for a moment and considered whether I should maybe put some qualifying quotation marks around the word science. And I decided not to. The concepts to be discussed herein are definitive scientific realities… it just happens that we’re going to talk about them as they relate to a 7-foot-tall man-ape descended from the wood spirits of ancient Europe.

Plenty of yella-bellied hikers and goose-pimpled mountaineers have attributed Mount Ben Macdui’s pervasive atmosphere of dread to the mystical aura of the mysterious Greyman; lots of Cryptozoologists blame Fear Liath, too. But not because it has magical fright-throwing abilities. It turns out that, apparently, all Sasquatches, from Bigfoot to Wampas, use powerful pheromones to elude capture by preemptively instilling panic in their would-be pursuers. That’s right. Fear Liath squats down and blows out a mess of chemical fear that drifts through the mist and infects human trespassers.
I can follow this line of thought. Sure, it’s scribbled and erratic and leads off the paper and onto the nice tablecloth, but I can follow it. A threatened aphid, for instance, will blast out a haze of alarm pheromones, thereby, warning any nearby companions to flee the scene. Frightened termites and bees can also pinch off a cloud of fear, though, in their case, it usually psyches up the chest-bumping former half of the fight-or-flight instinct. Likewise, dogs, bears, et al, have all been shown to deploy and perceive an intraspecies “scent of fear” – “intra” being the key prefix here. Based on all existing scientific evidence, the pheromones of any given species are detectable only to members of that species, meaning that even if all the mist clinging to Ben Macdui were one massive pheromone cloud squirted out by cowardly Fear Liath, it wouldn’t elicit even the slightest of pant pees in area humans. Furthermore, considering the termites and bees, if humans were affected, it’s just as likely that they’d pick up a giant rock and charge hulk style toward the jelly-spined source of the panic fog. (Although, if the pheromone did work correctly, Scarecrow would be poaching the hell out of these things.)

Much more scientific justification for the Fear Liath AFTER THE JUMP…Somewhere, a cryptozoologist just threw up his hands in frustration and said, “Duh! He’s the missing link… his pheromones have some shared human biological stuff. Idiot.” – a rejoinder that, I admit, would present the most sensible zany retort if studies hadn’t already demonstrated that the human ability to perceive or otherwise act on another human’s wafting panic stink is nil. If people can’t sense pure human fear, it’s ridiculous to think that they might respond to some horrific, ape-tainted knockoff.
Another theory? Infrasound.

Infrasound refers to any sound below 20 Hz, which, in terms of the low-end of the auditory spectrum, is considered the cutoff for normal human hearing. The reason excited cryptozoologists have pointed to this particular phenomenon as a possible candidate for Sasquatch’s scare-sharing mechanism is that various experiments have shown that almost a quarter of all human beings, when exposed to infrasound or near-infrasonic frequencies (17 Hz was the frequency used by a 700-subject UK study), have displayed peculiar physical reactions, such as feelings of fear, anxiety and revulsion. Additionally, Vic Tandy, a researcher at Coventry University, has suggested that sounds at around 19 Hz may be responsible for a butt load of ghost sightings. Morrow made this discovery while working in a supposedly haunted lab, where he and other researchers experienced strange sensations of dread, and where Morrow himself witnessed a gray blob drifting through his periphery. Turns out, an extraction fan vibrating at 18.98 Hz was not only inspiring his feelings of anxiety, but also generating an optical hallucination by vibrating his eyes (the natural resonant frequency of the human eye is about 18 Hz).

So far, it’s a pretty thin case: Travelers of regions known to be inhabited by sasquatches are often plagued by strange, unaccountable feelings of dread. Infrasound has been known to cause such feelings. Sasquatches, therefore, must be terrifying people away by generating some sort of infrasound.

Still, writers on Bigfoot-manic message boards and crypto-crazed blogs love to point out that African elephants have been proven to communicate using nasally generated infrasound vocalizations, a zoological revelation that wasn’t even theorized until 1984. The low frequency calls, which are probably used to, among other things, deliver herd movement updates and initiate mating rituals, range between 15 and 35 Hz – well within the limits that can, in some instances, cause less than pleasant sensations within the human body. Some suggest that sasquatches, like elephants, have the capacity to generate these types of ether-rattling ululations. (To be fair, one of the message boarders did pragmatically point out that, “Even if sasquatches use infrasound, we need a video of the species making these sounds as solid evidence.”) Elephants are big animals. It’s not difficult to look at an elephant’s head and understand how a sound beyond the realm of human perception could bellow out of it. Now, I’m not a scientist or anything, but wouldn’t Bigfoot essentially need nasal cavities with the anomalous spatial properties of the Tardis in order to raise such a (inaudible) ruckus?

Look, I know that this isn’t a debunking site, where stories are hunted and vivisected for inaccuracies. I’m way more interested in chasing down the legends, tagging their ears and sending them back to frolic through the collective imagination. If folks want to say that Fear Liath, beautifully monstrous fiction that it is, can, from a distance, raise hackles and roil up visceral fear, I’m totally on board. But pheromones? Infrasound? Maybe Bigfoot, contemporary American icon that he is, might need to resort to the modern narrative contrivance of overwrought, unnecessary, straw-grasping explanation (why bigfoot needs any sort of emotion-finagling superpower is beyond me), in the same way that every modern Hollywood villain gets a tired tragic past to justify his ultimate treachery and every good-hearted hero gets a backlog of clichéd vestigial guilt to explain his eventual honor, but Fear Liath comes readymade with a back story of primitive thaumaturgy and ancient races. Of Wodewoses and of Pagan nightmares. Of the high shrieks, the bite marks on flesh, the cold water shaken from course fur, the electric smell of blood on the wind and all the other things that would one day clatter together into a human being. Save your science for the urban legends and the contemporary myths. The “are they really extinct?” case studies and desperate EVP analyses.

Sometimes it’s better if a villain is just bad. Sometimes it’s better if a hero is just good. And sometimes it’s better if a sasquatch is just magic.

Find the Fiend

Below are descriptions of three grotesque monsters. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a creature that has actually been reported. Can you Find the Fiend?

a.) This gray gelatinous creature, which, like a slug, is rumored to favor warm beer, is sometimes blamed for abducting both pets and people from neighborhoods in Eastern Maine.

b.) Similar to genies, these small monsters supposedly possess the ability to realize the fantasies of their victims, though, once realized, the dreams are said to turn deadly.

c.) These winged monsters allegedly kidnap children, fly the children to the peak of a dormant volcano and then devour the children.

Answer AFTER THE JUMP…

The correct answer is c.)

The basic story of the Orang-bati – a story that originated in, and remains local to, the Indonesian island of Seram – asserts that crazy flying simian-type monsters (see how the name is kinda like Orangubat?) live on the slopes of Mount Kairatu and periodically storm villages in search of their favorite Indonesian take-out – kids. Indonesian folklore tells of repeated child-stealing raids performed by the young-hungry sky apes. Tyson Hughes, an English missionary living in Indonesia during the 1400s, even claimed to have encountered one of the beasts.

Modern Orang-bati enthusiasts theorize that the monsters are actually bats of Batsquatch proportions that naturally prey upon small monkeys, which are common on many Indonesian islands. Unfortunately, Seram lacks a notable monkey population, so, according to the theory, peckish monster bats looking for a nearby nibble will resort (by mistake or on purpose) to noshing on the nearest child. Meanwhile, skeptics assert that the Orang-bati are clearly just a fictional invention of myth and that if there’s anything eating the children of Seram, it’s probably the last living pterodactyl, or a confused bear.

Statement a.) described Richie Grenadine’s father, a drunken layabout who, in Stephen King’s short story “Gray Matter,” pounds some tainted beers and inexplicably transforms into a lager-slurping carnivorous blob monster. The story first appeared in a 1973 issue of the men’s magazine “Cavalier,” and was later reprinted in “Night Shift,” King’s first published anthology of short stories. The latter publication features a ridiculous number of stories that would eventually get optioned for the screen, including “Children of the Corn,” “Sometimes They Come Back,” “The Mangler,” “Quitters, Inc.,” and “Trucks,” which became the basis for King’s directorial debut, “Maximum Overdrive”… or, as I like it to call it, “Minimum Under…Reverse!” Am I right guys? Am I right?!?!

Statement b.) described the hobgoblins from Rick Sloane’s 1988 cheesebomb “The Hobgoblins.” Ripping off the sly, mischievous comedy of “Gremlins,” the outer space back story that “Gremlins” rip off “Critters” used to make it look like it wasn’t just ripping off “Gremlins,” and the “careful-what-you-wish-for” moral of 60% of all “Twilight Zone” episodes, “The Hobgoblins” tells the tale of a bunch of nasty, pint-sized aliens that, after escaping from a locked vault, use their magic alien powers to fulfill people’s dreams, which inevitably turn ugly, resulting in death. Like, one guy wants to be a rock star, and then he is a rock star, and he’s rocking out on stage, and then he dies. The Criterion Collection release features two alternate endings and a rare BBC radio interview with the director.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. On Monday, we heard about the origins of the beast.

Wudewas. Wodwos. Wodewoses. Woodwoses. Variants of the word are as numerous as the trees in the forests inhabited by the feral possessors of these ancient names. The wild men. The tidiest accounts of Scotland’s Fear Liath would have you believe that the giant grey creature’s closest relative is Bigfoot – that noble missing link who hides deep within America’s dwindling native woods, and in whom hides lost vestiges of man… scattered dust from genetic corners that were sanded down into curves during the civilizing renovation of the primal human spirit, the process itself an exciting necessity of the social evolution that created both the modern world and the most basic, aching nostalgia found therein. This nostalgia takes the form of a chromosomal muscle memory, a scuffed shoebox, brimming with relics, tucked beneath the bed of the collective id.

It’s more than just the bare carnal reasoning of the reptilian brain – the eat, kill or screw impulse that any cynical 16-year-old can tell you is as alive today in the forests of laminate boardroom furnishings as it was millennia ago amid the dark tangles of forgotten jungles. No. This is about an understanding of place, an unselfconscious symbiosis between man and topography, man and biology. The unvoiceable knowledge that, if dropped in the woods – any woods – one could navigate the soil, elude danger, secure shelter, procure food and still find time to gaze up in wonderment at the twinkling panorama of space.

It’s also probably an illusion. After all, humans still have these senses and abilities. Modern man has just repurposed them for urban environs, so that if dropped in a city – any city – one could navigate pavement, listen for sirens, and recognize chain hotel logos and the trademark color schemes of a half-dozen burger chains.

Get the rest of the story… AFTER THE JUMP

Put simply, missing links represent, among other things, a false notion that it was only post fire and after the wheel that man’s trip from ape to commuter lapsed into a bumbling process of trial and error. That people were born with knowledge to efficiently take down an elk, to strip the meat off its bones and, when preparing the side dish, to use non-poisonous mushrooms. It’s this misplaced (a less generous person might say, “B.S.”) sentimentality that makes a brief glimpse of Bigfoot so magical; it’s as if we’ve been afforded a peek at an organized era before flatware and firearms came along and mucked everything up. It’s why a fog-shrouded encounter with the Fear Liath is so terrifying (besides, of course, the monster’s mystical fear conjuring ability) – we are on his turf now, and he is living a life we abandoned. A life that, try is we might, by camping, hiking, etc., we can never fully reclaim – a sad fact that finds us physically and mentally vulnerable to that bygone lifestyle’s dangers and obstacles, among them the hulking Greyman.

Wodewoses – mythic wild men of ancient Europe – represented something similar to the modern Bigfoot. They possessed the same sort of preternatural, pre-civilized bond with nature (some of them could even see years into the future, evincing a sense that, in giving up its primal beginnings, mankind likewise sacrificed some broad and mysterious link to the larger universe), and represented a similar understanding of man’s anti-domestic roots… but they also had a bit more personality. Whereas Sasquatch represents an iconic image of a missing link as recalibrated by modern science to include overwhelmingly ape-like features, Wodewoses had human physiques (swathed though they were in a carpet of fur) and demonstrably human faces. Most of them measured in well below the slam dunk-ready height of most modern man-apes. Many boasted leonine hair and wild beards. Some were part goat. Some, part elf. Some descended from elementals or dark spirits. Others carried clubs. Some even had hairless, feminine chins and tig ol’ bitties.
Essentially, Wodewoses hopelessly blurred the lines between fairy tale creatures, missing links and hirsute madmen. The parenthetically aforementioned prophetic wild men, for example, were generally portrayed as contemporary humans driven mad by ancient and powerful forces. Even outside the bounds of the mythic and supernatural, rumors of feral tribes prowling the landscapes of unexplored continents ran rampant. Early Christians believed that Wodewoses had supernatural powers of seduction, and feared their ability to coerce virtuous women into debased and vile sex acts (which at the time, probably constituted, like, gentle reverse cowgirl). The church no doubt viewed the mischievous perverts, drunk as they were on animal lusts and the howling winds that stir the leaves, as horny, impish mascots of Paganism.

Meanwhile, French monarch King Charles VI saw the Wodewoses as a limitless source of amusement. During a 1393 masquerade ball held in the honor of the Queen Mother, Chuck and five of his courtiers donned hemp wild man costumes, chained themselves together and trudged out into the ballroom, where the amusement quickly assumed a very real limit – embers from a torch ignited the flammable costumes, resulting in the horrible, fiery deaths of at least three of the King’s companions.

In Germany, club wielding wild men, buxom wild women and even whole wild clans were fixtures of family seals and coats of arms, offering the suggestion that each family’s roots were both deep-set and brawny. This usage highlights the sense of primitive strength and wild power evoked by Wodewoses. In short, even before humans had any coherent sense of the mechanisms of evolution, there existed inside people an understanding that man had fought his way out of the wooded darkness and into the light of civilization, but that that emergence was bittersweet, held as it was in the receding presence of things left behind.

Misleading notions that earlier times were simpler, truer, better, etc. are attractive shadows under which to toil through this modern life. Our ancestors dreamt up the wild men to keep an imagined ideal alive, even if it sometimes led to irrational fear or catching on fire. Sure, modern science has re-shaped the wild men – grown them and aped out their faces and robbed them of supernatural powers – but the ideal remains. We retain that strange nostalgia.

Ancient Scotland was host to an uncountable number of feral elves, dark spirits, vengeful ghosts and hirsute wild men. There’s no doubt that today’s simian Fear Liath is a direct descendent of the Wodewoses of yesteryear. The proof is in the supernatural power that the creature displays – its ability to covertly project feelings of panic and fear into the hearts of hikers and mountaineers.

Crypytozoologists, however, have a different theory about this “magic” power.

Friday: Fear Liath and Science

Sure, the monsters that stalk through horror films aren’t great guys but they aren’t all bad. Matt Finley investigates the Upside Of Evil…

I didn’t write a tribute to the late Dennis Hopper. I wanted to. But what I could add to the conversation? Yeah, I saw “Speed” in the theatre, but I didn’t feel as though that qualified me to pen an adoring elegy to Easy Rider himself. The director of “Colors.” King of the Koopas.

Then, last night, I watched “Blue Velvet.” I gotta say, the movie gets more rewarding with every consecutive viewing, and it’s largely due to Hopper’s unfailingly disturbing portrayal of Frank Booth, a monster twice as grotesque as the latex-bound, corn syrup-smeared atrocities I usually address in these posts. Just like how every rose has its thorn, every thorn has its dreams (Or, you know, its overly cautious bee that has a crush on it but doesn’t want to get stabbed, or to jump-start the rumor mill). It would be arrogant to assume that, just because Frank Booth is a psychotic, gas-huffing, misogynistic sadist with a longshoreman’s tongue and a wolverine’s temper, we can’t learn something from him.

So, Mr. Hopper – Here’s to your f*ck:

The lessons begin AFTER THE JUMP. Also, if you haven’t seen Blue Velvet, consider yourself spoiler warned.

F*ck Heineken! PABST BLUE RIBBON!

Jeffrey Beaumont – Kyle MacLachlan’s character – comes home from college with a fancy red convertible, a cooler than thou smile and an affected craving for imported beer. Let the story run on past the ending and I’m sure he’d be mail ordering limited run EPs by inscrutably named psych rock revival bands and waving around a dog-eared copy of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Frank Booth is honest, simple and, more importantly, patriotic. All he needs is gas to snort, a woman to punch and a tall cold glass of classic American beer. It’s no surprise, then, that when the two finally meet up, Booth is revolted by Beaumont’s transatlantic booze preference. Say what you want about Jeffrey’s empathy, compassion and quietly seductive haircut – at least Frank Booth wouldn’t allow America’s drinking habit to get outsourced to Europe in the name of a high school trim hunt.
Revenge is a dish best served hot, with a side of lipstick
When fancy-beer Beaumont gives Booth a chivalrous pop in the jaw, Booth could have easily slit his throat and left him for dead. Instead, he puts on a Roy Orbison song, smothers Beaumont’s face in sloppy kisses, threateningly recites the song’s lyrics (“in dreams… I walk with you…”) and tops it all off with a low- to medium-strength pummeling. Now I certainly don’t condone the latter bit of violence, but if we just focus on that first bit – a song, some aggressive kissing and some cold-eyed speakalong intimidation – I think we could drastically improve the situation in Iraq.

Probably don’t do this on a date…

I rarely fall back on mining for virtue in the negative space of an inexcusable atrocity, but, seriously, I’m one winkingly enthusiastic interpretation of Frank Booth’s inexcusable behavior away from actually fight-kissing Kyle MacLachlan. Besides, token Dennis Hopper tribute aside, it’s just about the only honest-to-goodness goodness that can come from watching his character in “Blue Velvet.” Guys – probably don’t do this on a date – DON’T kidnap your date’s doting husband and adorable son. DON’T limit your vocabulary to phrases co-opted from David Mamet plays and Phillies fans. DON’T tell her that “Daddy wants to f*ck!” DON’T make light of your frustrated impotence by shotgunning liquor, snorting amyl nitrate and violently dry humping her while tonguing her robe. Also, maybe DON’T beat her up. That part where he tears up listening to her sing, though… DO that… just without all the psycho-sexual baggage and rapey punch shenanigans.

RIP Dennis Hopper. With any luck, your clocking an angel in the jaw, and telling her to “spread it.” Hopper to God: “Don’t f*cking look at me!”

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. Come back Monday and Wednesday for the rest of the story.

Leave it to Scotland’s Fear Liath to meet any (or all!) of your horrifying cryptozoological encounter needs. A sudden sense of creeping psychic dread followed by inexplicable panic and unprovoked activation of your fight-or-flight response? Leave it to the Liath! A more traditional, rampage-style assault, up to and including wild pursuit of a moving car? He’s on it! Or maybe a subtler, mysterious encounter – a huge, lumbering figure glanced through the fog… a giant footprint in the mud… a stolen picanic basket? Greyman’s got it!

“What is the Fear Liath?” you ask.

Some folks refer to it as Scotland’s Bigfoot, and in some ways that’s accurate. Hiker’s who have seen the Fear Liath (also known as “The Greyman”) have described it as a burly giant with a strikingly inhuman face and a head-to-toe coating of thick, ash-colored fur. What makes the Fear Liath a taxonomical oddity, however, is the effect it’s said to have over people in its vicinity. Supposedly, travelers of the Cairngorm Mountains, and especially visitors to Ben Macdui, the range’s highest peak and suspected site of the Greyman’s lair, have experienced bizarre sensations of terror that come out of nowhere and, often, send the suddenly stricken mountaineers screaming into the mist.
John Norman Collie, an experienced British mountaineer famous for performing pioneering climbing feats in the Himalayas and the Canadian Rockies, authored the most famous account of this strange phenomenon.

In 1895, while hiking near Ben Macdui’s peak, Collie sensed that he was not alone. After listening for several moments, he discerned a distinct and frightening crunching sound trailing him up the mountain: “For every few steps I took I heard a crunch, and then another crunch as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own.” Collie desperately struggled to identify his stalker through the thick curtains of mist that shrouded the rock formations, but perceived nothing but drifting fog and the slow, crunching persistence of the phantom interloper’s progress. Eventually, consumed by fear, Collie took off running, scrambling up and around an estimated five miles of boulders and out-cropping rocks.

Other hikers and adventurers have descended Ben Macdui with similarly eerie tales. Some report finding giant footprints stamped into the mountainside. Many claim to have seen a giant grey figure, plowing through the fog or, sometimes, looming behind them as their strange sense of terror reached a crescendo. In the ‘90s, one guy even called out Fear Liath for chasing his car through a nearby forest.

From a logical standpoint, it’s fairly easy to explain away all the varied symptoms of a standard Fear Liath encounter. For example, scientists have suggested an easy explanation for the towering silhouette sighted skulking up the mountain – the same blankets of fog that make the mountain look like the set of gothic melodrama on closing night, when all the leftover dry ice gets poured into the bucket, create perfect conditions for the Broken Spectre effect; angled sunlight casts a trail-weary hiker’s shadow onto a nearby fog bank and ACH! Giant grey figure. That combined with the standard cast of cryptid rationalization factors – the natural anxiety provoked by lonely, fog-draped surroundings; exhaustion; cultural memory of the entire gamut of cryptid encounters as dutifully recounted in books, by television and on this website, etc. – make the Greyman shrug-offable as any other hirsute missing link.

From a folkloric standpoint though, there’s a lot more here than just a tam-topped, haggis-devouring Sasquatch. There’s a reason that the Fear Liath seems to share traits of both classically simple ape-men (like Yetis and Skunk Apes) and creepy, sense-meddling phantasms (like maybe a magic ghost or something). It turns out that “Scotland’s Bigfoot” has a history that pre-dates all Bigfoots, dating back to a time when men were men, and furry ape-men were, like, feral elf spirit monster things.

Wednesday: Fear Liath, Wudewas and other words guaranteed to be useless in Scrabble

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we pity the poor Babysitter. Monday we found out why these darlings are hunted. Wednesday we look at how the legend survived the digital age.

Babysitter. Killer. Telephone. We’ve taken a neatly assembled story and plucked off the buttons, ripped the stitching and unloaded fistfuls of stuffing. Might as well see it the rest of the way through. Parents. Children. Let’s add them to this strewn mess of analog technology, gender stereotyping, Aquarian culture wars and artificial maternity.

I had briefly mentioned that, in many versions of the Babysitter and the Stranger Upstairs, at least one of the sitter’s employers is a doctor. In almost every version, the parents, doctorate holding or not, are wealthy. On the surface, this seems a mere plot device – the teenaged kid-herding neophyte is lured into the job by the promise of healthy dividends while, at the same time, the couple’s sizeable home fulfills certain narrative logistics. In other words, it would be difficult for the killer to call the babysitter from inside a single-phone apartment, or sneak unnoticed through a ranch-style house. And that makes enough sense. But let’s say we take a moment to get cynical:
Even if we accept many folklorists’ assertions that, when deconstructed, this urban legend takes on gender oppression and warns girls away from fast-tracking themselves toward some sort of patriarchically enforced homemakership and oppressive motherhood – that it’s a GRRL power ballad played in the key of independent womanhood – we need to consider the story’s intended demographic. After all, “gala-bound rich couple seeking responsible teen for one-night babysitting job $$$” rarely bypass the nearby middle-class McMansions and make a beeline for the barrio. Likewise, many blue collar families comprise two working parents who are beholden to shift work, and older children who are busy enough looking after each other, or working themselves. (Obviously, these are gross generalizations, but remember, we’re applying them to a story in which the main characters are Rich Couple, Attractive Teenage Girl, Sleeping Children, and Anonymous, Motivationless Killer.)

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP…

That the story is geared toward young women seems sensible. What’s offensive (or if we’re keeping with the whole cold, removed cynicism thing, wholly predictable, given the ongoing undermining of the American working class), is that the story, in engaging with the tropes and situations that it does, seems to disqualify an entire social strata of adolescent girls. Perhaps these ladies are assumed to be beholden to a hard-scrabble life of early pregnancy, working motherhood or looking after their existing immediate family members. Or, even worse, maybe, on a subconscious level, independent poor women, who are perhaps deprived the educational opportunities of their moneyed sisters (many of whom were only able to burn their bras because, once the message was sent, they could afford to buy new ones), don’t represent the type of spokespeople that the political side of the feminist movement are looking for.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Obviously, I’m not suggesting that whatever cadre of feminists ideologues may or may not have perpetuated this story in the name of a positive social movement purposefully approached it with an agenda of class discrimination, but rather that even the most idealistic among us are not immune to underlying culture biases that lay hidden, like live black widows inside the smallest nesting dolls, within otherwise socially conscious and progressive narratives.

Just something to think about.

On a lighter note… The Children. I only mention the kids because there’s a sanitized, Cub Scout-ready version of the tale in which there is no killer and, in fact, the frightening phone calls coming from inside the house are made by the children themselves, who have amalgamated all of their bratiness and initiated a prank call campaign against the babysitter. I only mention it because in all the other versions, the kids are little more than bug-snug snoozing cutlets awaiting the fall of the knife. Here, though, the children have the power and use it to terrify and ultimately embarrass the ad hoc adult, thereby, revealing the man-behind-the-curtain quality of the so-called power and responsibility wielded by authority figures. And what kid doesn’t want to hear about that? If I were 8 years old, listening to this story would probably be almost as fun as harassing an actual, live babysitter.

So, if any of you folks are spending tonight at a high-paying babysitting gig at a secluded mansion near the back-up perimeter fence of the asylum for the criminally wigged out, remember: you had some calls traced, they were coming from inside the house, you fled on foot. Clearly, the murderer upstairs killed the single-malt scotch.

I don’t know what to say about “Splice.” On the one hand, it does exactly what a thoughtful sci-fi story should: uses genre trappings to raise socio-culturally relevant, real-world questions without being so presumptuous as to provide pat, definitive answers. The story of a self-assured couple who literally have the equipment to create life, but lack the foresight and self-knowledge to responsibly care for it is essentially presented as the larger, catch-all story of modern parenting. The movie then painstakingly breaks down a variety of parental concerns – from education to discipline to gender imprinting to sexuality – all within a fast-paced and suitably creepy 103 minute runtime.

On the other hand, and I don’t really know how else to put this… the movie is kinda goofy. And I should love that, right? There are melodramatic lab sequences, crazy camera angles, lurid sex scenes, and a glut of increasingly nutty creature effects. Add in the thoughtful deconstructions of parenthood and the insight into genetic evolution and I should be a happy camper, right? A fun genre flick that’s comfortable enough in its own thematic depth to throw in some wild gore and zany action sequences. Why am I not obsessed with this movie?

(Before I get any more involved in my own personal struggle, I want to say now that if you haven’t seen “Splice,” go. Go watch it. I totally recommend it. Believe me I wouldn’t drag you through a post full of neurotic ambivalence just to tell you not to see a movie.)

Get the rest… AFTER THE JUMP

So, why am I not obsessed with this movie? I think, for some reason, I’m annoyed that it’s as goofy and fun as it is. A casual moviegoer walking into “Splice” (especially after the ridiculously unrepresentative ad campaign that pitched it as, at worst, an anemic monster-on-the-loose actioner and at best, a bit of hunt-and-hump “Species” redux) probably isn’t going to think about the central conceits of the film. The brilliant conundrums the movie presents – Has modern American culture’s influence over, and obsession with, the mechanisms of parenthood wholly overwhelmed our animal parenting instincts?; What seperates a culturally productive organism from a naturally effective one, and where do the two overlap and/or diverge?; As a society so morally obsessed with enforcing bio-ethics in laboratory settings, shouldn’t we be equally concerned with, and self-aware of, our own intentions and mental states when we create life in a domestic setting; etc. – are likely to be overshadowed by the soapy dialogue, titillating sexual intrigue and off-the-wall third act.

I know this because when I watched the film on opening day, the people around me were either giggling and shaking their heads, as if the film represented the same ironic entertainment as any bottom-shelf straight-to-DVD slasher deal, or sighing with boredom, clearly waiting for the Blackhawks to swoop in bearing jarheads and hollow points. (During the film’s final scene, when a character naively intoned, “What’s the worst that could happen?” the burly man behind me gruffly declared, “They could make a sequel.”) Meanwhile, all the supposed sci-fi fans populating website message boards are bemoaning how silly and stupid the film is because they hate fun and, apparently, were expecting “The Squid and the Whale” by way of Cronenberg and Henenlotter.

I don’t know what to say about “Splice.” I can make fervent indictments against the marketing for a minor dishonesty committed in the name of maximizing the number of people who choose to see a fun movie that I like, and that I want people to see. I can rail against the haters whose distaste of the film stems more from their own unmet expectations and subsequent lack of self-awareness regarding those expectations than from anything actually on the screen. But we’re here to talk about a movie.

And, I gotta say, I have very little beef with “Splice.” It’s at once funny, unsettling, violent and sad. It may be that I’m not used to my cynical, pinched-faced speculative fiction movies having this much fun, or, for that matter, to my gore-smeared T&A monster flicks containing this much lasting insight. Or maybe I was one of those aforementioned dour genre enthusiasts expecting “The Fly” by way of Noah Baumbach.

I don’t want to make some “Time” magazine-caliber bon mot about “Splice” recombining the DNA of sci-fi movies past to make a fascinating hybrid, so just accept this: The mother/step-father/child relationship hits all the right notes (maybe sometimes a bit to boisterously, but that’s part of the fun), the creature design is superlative (whereas Cameron’s Na’avi fail miserably in the alien-but-effable category, Berger and Nicotero’s Dren succeeds almost too well) and, despite its predictability, the ending, you know, works.

In other words – best darkly funny independent sci-fi film backed by pedigreed writer/director and given major summer release since “District 9.”

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we pity the poor Babysitter. Monday we found out why these darlings are hunted. Come back Friday for the conclusion.

I don’t know how the story of the intercourse-interloping hook murderer plays out these days – the inset latch that adorns most modern car doors doesn’t seem especially conducive to bloody-hook dangling. Likewise, “hitchhiker” is a distinctly 20th century identifier. Vanishing or not, a trail-schlepping wayfarer with a hopefully extended thumb would confound even the hippest wagoneer or pony express messenger. So that whole police- or phone company-traced call coming from inside the house thing? Nothing to worry about, right? The legend is quarantined in the 1960s, a primitive ape of a horror story, thwacking an analog phone receiver against a monolithic switchboard to the swelling soundtrack of a droning dial tone.

Well, no. Not exactly.

It’s true that the initial story was rooted firmly in the days of land lines and ancient analog phone hook-ups, when a few patient taps to the receiver button could make intra-house Jerky Boying possible, but unlike the aforementioned door handles, which made it increasingly difficult for murderers to lose their deadly prostheses to inadvertent chastity warnings (though probably much easier for murderers to simply click open the door and bury their tines into the writhing flanks of the intertwining lovers), technology kept pace with the psychos. Despite the death of the veritable Cro-Magnon phones of the (club) swinging 60s, in-house murderers were quickly afforded new means of telephonic harassment in the form of multi-line phone systems (note that in many versions of the babysitter v. homicidal stranger story, one of said babysitter’s employers is a doctor, a fact that lends veracity to the presence of a second phone line in the house). Then, of course, everyone got cell phones, which put every babysitter (not to mention every babysitter-employing landline-reliant household) just ten digits away from the hungry fingers of the merciless sadist upstairs. Give it a few months and the stab-happy psychotics will be Skypeing their victims from portable media devices.

Do the evolution… AFTER THE JUMP

Say what you want about horror re-makes (or say nothing and feel free to leave the middle finger-assisted vitriol to me), but the two versions of “When a Stranger Calls” – the first, a loveably schlocky Carol Kane vehicle circa 1979; the second, an achingly hollow shadow thereof, produced in 2006 – demonstrate the ease with which the story can be believably transplanted into the modern milieu without sacrificing the most imperative aspects of its plausibility. Landlines to cell phones and still the babysitters remain in season.

If you’re taking this time to balk at the legal ramifications that, especially in the privatized modern age, plague the police department’s (or phone company’s) ability to perform same-night traces, understand both that the bureaucratic rigmarole is well outside the bounds of concise discussion, and that, well, it doesn’t really matter – how’d a frenzied killer manage to both retrieve his confiscated hook appendage and escape a guarded psychiatric facility? Urban legends’ cultural currency exists in wild stories told with reckless abandon… “reckless,” here, implying a certain practiced ambivalence to the laws of both man and nature (hitchhiking ghosts?).

Beyond the practicality of the telephone as medium for Nutty’s threatening monologues, there are certain related social stereotypes as well. Look no further than Milton Bradley’s 1991 board game “Electronic Talking Dream Phone” – girls love to continuously and indiscriminately spray their feelings into the talk holes on phone receivers. In this way, the killer’s use of a telephone – the very device that the babysitter was no-doubt using to learn that her secret admirer was not wearing a hat – serves as a sort of pseudo-ironic and grotesquely generalized gender comeuppance. Or so say some folklorist interpretations of the legend. It’s unclear whether these are the same folks who like to suggest that the tale plays out like a fear-inspiring intro to GRRL power posturing, in which case the phone-based antagonism serves as a warning to young girls who might be considering succumbing to the Chatty Cathy stereotype. Still, I suspect that this may just be interpretation-happy nit-pickery, as I can only see this fact being relevant if the story established that the sitter was eschewing her supervisory responsibilities in order to blab at a BFF, and I have yet to find that version (the 2006 “When a Stranger Calls” film veers perilously close – the main character is forced to take the babysitting job after she exceeds the cell minutes allotted by her parentally funded phone plan). Still, it’s worth noting that the telephone in the story can be viewed as more than a narrative means to an end. If the babysitter were a guy, I’m sure the killer would contact him through Call of Duty 4’s private chat function.

“We’ve traced the calls! They’re coming from inside the house!”

I have a feeling that “house” will be replaced by either “bunker,” “tube” or “habidome” before “call” changes nomenclature.

It’s happening again. This time, though, it’s all about the Mothman.

You have already been acquainted, albeit briefly, with the drill: I look up a popular American cryptid (e.g., the Mothman) on three foreign language Wikipedia pages and summarize the results (including the requisite [sic]-implied Google Translate nuggets). You try to match each of the three versions to the Wikipedia site on which you believe it originated.

If you want to. Otherwise, proceed straight to the answers. There’s no reward for right answers, good effort or savvy investment advice. And if there were, it would be something packed with asbestos and covered in blood, and nobody would want it.

(If you’re unfamiliar with the standard American telling of the Mothman, read this English-language Wikipedia article.

As a jazz-dancing midget in a Twin Peaks dream sequence once said, “Let’s rock!”:

Your Language Choices:

a.) Russian
b.) Japanese
c.) German

Mothman:

1. After repeatedly referring to Point Pleasant’s red-eyed antagonist as “man-moth,” this brief account of the flying humanoid’s spooky spree ends with several possible real-world explanations, including the popular notion that the man-moth was a misidentified bird and a theory that “in the 60-s test of a new type of weapon that causes hallucinations in humans.” The page’s final hypothesis, titled “hypothesis of genetic errors,” makes the lofty suggestion that the man-moth “appeared during the experiment in a secret lab, and ran all three of these creatures, which then allegedly capture.” The page also cites a supposed 1980 “New York Times” article that described three New Yorkers’ encounter with a creature similar to the man-moth. “Witnesses said that he had a hard face.”

2. This Wikipedia’s Mothman page admits there’s a possibility that, given the creature’s occasional linkage to cattle-mutilating aliens, the Mothman “may be a Vampire To act or he would be a Rite been invoked with animal blood.“ The page also recounts a thrilling Illinoisan Mothman encounter: “1951 being the correct description of the Mothman, was allegedly seen on Chicago, and this flying.“ One day later? The Chicago Earthquake. Coincidence? This Wikipedia article says, “No way!“ – “Allegedly wanted the Mothman help people to get out of their houses to safer outside.“ Chief among this page‘s rational explanations for the winged, bird-taloned monstrosity? Some kind of bear.

3. Chock full of familiar Mothman history and wholly unfamiliar possible explanations, this site lovingly refers to the creature as the “Mossman” (occasionally, “Mosman”) and explains that “Many of the witnesses, but did not see a moment Mossman, Mossman was face to remember is not much more, with glaring red eyes shine.” The page’s subsequent list of Mothman theories includes the “Curse of indigenous theory,” which claims that there’s an “interesting and conformity” between legends of the Thunderbird and Point Pleasant’s “area onceIndian, Shawnee TribeCurse”; and the “Pet Alien Theory,” which identifies the Mossman as “the idea of animals for experiments on Earth.”

ANSWERS AFTER THE JUMP!
Answers:

Description 1.) was found on a..), the Russian Wikipedia
Description 2.) was found on c.), the German Wikipedia
Description 3.) was, therefore, found on b.), the Japanese Wikipedia

Thanks for playing. Let’s do this again some time! I think I almost learned something.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we pity the poor Babysitter, check back Wednesday and Friday for more.

“We’ve traced the calls! They’re coming from inside the house!” Not exactly a shocking twist these days. Let’s face it: the elements that make urban legends so compellingly repeatable and readymade for national ubiquity (not to mention fun) – bloodshed, panic, sexual disaster, embarrassment and grotesque coincidence – are the same things that make them so falsifiable. Only so many people’s cousin can have the same friend who got a cheek full of spider eggs, a candy apple full of razors or a snizz full of frozen hotdog before folks start wising up. The legends manage to live on because each new generation of kids represent blank slates upon which someone’s gonna scratch out a Pepsi and Pop Rocks death equation or caricature a hook-handed killer. At the same time, these legends undergo the inevitable cultural makeovers required to ensure that they neither outstay their welcomes nor develop unsightly anachronisms.

So even if the call isn’t coming from inside the house… even if there aren’t even any calls because, clearly, the babysat children’s parents, wherever they me be, are available via portable media devices… the babysitter suffers.

So we have the cash-hungry high schooler whose babysitting experience is repeatedly disrupted by the eerie presence of a life-sized clown doll that, from one fearful glance to the next, seems to slightly shift its position; when she finally calls the parents to ask if she can toss a blanket over it, they have no idea what she’s talking about. Of course, by then it’s too late.

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP…

We have the deranged au pair with the split personality who’s ultimately revealed to be both victim and killer. (I call this the “technology vs. horse” version.)

And we have the two-for-one babysitter massacre, in which a couple friends team up and agree to split their babysitting profit, but then find themselves victims of the all-too-predictable series of threatening phone calls; while one girl stays downstairs to attend to the drawing of hearts around an 11th grader’s name, her friend goes upstairs to check on the children. By the time the downstairs sitter hears the shocking punchline from the dutiful call tracer, something is already thump, thump, thumping down the stairs. Surprise! It’s her friend, sans limbs, desperately dragging herself away from the killer and the slaughtered bodies of the children that he already murdered.

Why all the babysitter hack and slash jobs? Folklorists and feminists alike have continually asserted that these stories represent the social obligations placed upon young women, who, through seemingly innocuous babysitting jobs, are groomed for an adult life of housebound maternity. And given that the original legend first started whispering its way down the lane during the 1960s, that’s not an unreasonable interpretation. After all, conservative adults have employed fictional lover’s lane-stalking madmen to try to scare developing women out of pre-marital sex. (Though, if the prospect of an eight pound parasite shredding its way out of her snatch doesn’t stop her, a little hook murder can’t possibly make a difference.) It only follows that the equally (though understandably) extremist views of women’s libbers might create a fictional murderer to filet the possible future inhabitants of homemaker hell. And what better group to focus on than babysitters, who are not only grandmothered into a parody of adulthood via false notions of inert, maternal complacency – all soda guzzling and unsupervised television – but who are also compensated for it. (As expected, lots of feminists have voiced their approval of this urban legend, but I would’ve predicted a larger Marxist cheering section.)

I’m completely willing to accept that the urban legend of the babysitter and the man upstairs has wicked overarching feminist implications. But an insidious brainwashing by a gender-fascist patriarchy isn’t the story’s only scare factor. On a literal level, the tale exploits the simplest and most horrible fear of the babysitting profession: children in immediate, mortal danger. In a way, this makes it far more ingenious than, say, the hook-hand killer story, which weakly offers the wildest of hypothetical situations – “don’t have sex because maybe a killer will escape from a facility near the place where you’re having sex and maybe he’ll pass directly by your car and maybe, while he’s there, in the process of fleeing the law, he’ll decide to take a breather and murder you.” The babysitter story is far more clever because it takes what, to any teenage babysitter (imbued as they are with, perhaps, premature, but certainly unwieldy, adult responsibilities) is a bad situation – the children coming to harm – and amplifies it into a worst case scenario, planting new and gruesome seeds of doubt next to already flourishing mental shrubbery. Perhaps, on its own, the threat of the hidden homicidal killer isn’t enough to dissuade someone from a night of stranger-financed rugrat wrangling, but add it to the established list: house fires, accidental poisonings, choking deaths and bathtub drownings… Maybe “We’ve traced the calls! They’re coming from inside the house!” isn’t a shocking twist, but it might be enough to keep Wendy’s in fry cooks.

Wednesday – Hangin’ On The Telephone: Technology and the Babysitter Legend

Walk it Off – an abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

Today’s ailment: Boils

“Shotgun!”

You will need: A Glass of Water; Buckshot
Instructions: Place buckshot into water; Drink water
Note: Substitute water with kerosene to make Ted Nugent’s hangover cure.

White Elephant

You will need: 1 Stick
Instructions: Smear boil pus on stick; Place stick on ground; Boils will transfer to first person who picks up stick
Note: Be careful not to procure your stick in an area frequented by other boil-sufferers lest your attempt at a cure result in the acquisition of additional boils via someone else’s discarded pus branch.

The Last Kind Act of a Burgeoning Serial Killer

You will need: 1 Disturbed Child, 1 Steinbeckian Retard Who Loves All Things, But, Tragically, Does Not Understand His Own Strength, Or Anyone Else Who Has Crushed A Mole To Death With His Or Her Bare Hands

Instructions: Have mole crusher touch boil with hand used for mole crushing

Like Peas in a Pot

You will need: 1 Pot; Peas; Water
Instructions: Fill pot with water; Drop into water one pea for every boil; Hide pot; Never tell anyone about pot
Note: The CIA entrance exam uses the standardized question “When curing your boils, where did you hide your pea pot?” to immediately eliminate unfit applicants; anyone who answers is immediately ineligible for covert government service.

An Inarguably Impressive Bird-To-Stone Ratio

You will need: 1 Saw
Instructions: Amputate afflicted limb

The Alabama Limbo

You will need: An arching bramble grown into soil on both ends

Instructions: Crawl beneath bramble

Note: This cure is only officially considered “Alabama Limbo” if the bramble thorns meet the minimum regulation 2 inches in length and if, after crawling forward under the plant, you reverse back out and pass the corncob to the next competitor.

The Lunch Special

You will need: Lettuce; Tomato
Instructions: Apply lettuce and tomato to boil-ridden flesh
Note: The archive includes a separate cure in which bacon is pressed against the skin, so if you want take the extra step to go full on BLT, it probably couldn’t hurt.

Capricorn’s Pedicure

You will need: Goat; Nail Clippers; Scraper; Water
Instructions: Clip goat’s toenails; Scrape toenails; Ingest toenails and water

“Some Pig! …Also, This Looks Infected. Maybe Consult An Actual Medical Doctor.”

You will need: Spider Web
Instructions: Wrap boils in spider web
Note: If you’re going to seek direct spider assistance, you’ll want to learn to differentiate between Charlotte, the Shelobs and Tony Shalhoub, whose webs are carcinogenic.

It’s Not Like He’s Doing Anything Else…

You will need: A Nearby Wake Honoring A Person Scheduled To Be Buried The Following Day
Instructions: Attend wake; Approach corpse; Ask the corpse to take the evil with him; Leave without talking to any other attendees

Find the Fiend

Below are descriptions of three grotesque monsters. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a creature that has actually been reported. Can you Find the Fiend?

a.) This gilled, razor-clawed man-fish is known for terrorizing day-tripping teenagers.

b.) This legendary monster can supposedly be summoned by witches to enact revenge upon those who have wronged its summoner.

c.) Though human, this ruthless, burly killer is alleged to have had all of his teeth replaced with those of a ferocious dog.

Answer AFTER THE JUMP

The correct answer is a.)

A dead ringer for the Creature From the Black Lagoon, the Thetis Lake Monster has, on two occasions, appeared to visitors of Victoria, British Columbia’s Thetis Lake conservation area: once on August, 22, 1972, when it burst forth from the lake and chased two beach-combing adolescents, one of whom suffered a laceration to the hand when the monster slashed at him with its grotesque, unmanicured fin-claws; then, on August, 26, 1972, when two adults watched a strange, reptilian creature emerge from the lake, take stock of its surroundings, and gently ease its way back into the water.

In truth, there are likely two separate solutions to the mystery of the fearsome Canuck gillman. On the same day that two grown men looked on in knock-kneed terror as the ferocious manphibian evil-eyed its tranquil surroundings, the local paper got word that a man had lost his pet Tegu lizard – a four-foot long, carnivorous bruiser that seemed a likely match for the witnesses’ kill-crazed, but otherwise sedate, lake-dwelling antagonist. Subsequently, one of the boys who had allegedly played blood tag with the aquatic miscreant reported that he and his lollygagging buddy had fabricated the entire encounter because it was probably either perpetrate a cryptozoological hoax or eat ham sandwiches with their moms.

Statement b.) described Pumpkinhead from late special effect maven Stan Winston’s directorial debut, “Pumpkinhead.” A witch calls Pumpkinhead out of his sinister pumpkin patch to help Lance Henriksen get revenge on the teenage miscreants who accidentally killed Henriksen’s young son. The resurrection of the ancient vengeance demon swiftly reveals itself to be the worst Plan A on record. That having been said, I do like to imagine Pumpkinhead is what Linus van Pelt is actually waiting for and that, once present, will slaughter the rest of the Great Pumpkin-doubting Peanuts gang. But leave Schroeder alive long enough to the play the music… because Pumpkinhead doing the Snoopy dance? (The answer to this question can only be expressed by my expectant grin.)

Statement c.) described the character Bulger from Glenn McQuaid’s 2008 period horror comedy “I Sell the Dead.” So, Bulger is a super minor character and I only really included him so that I could recommend this movie to y’all. Dominic Monaghan plays Arthur, a Victorian-era grave robber who stumbles into a specialized niche of the casket-plundering business – corpse theft of monsters, aliens and the undead. Working with his partner Willie (Larry Fessenden), the two predictably bumbling exhumers desecrate vampire, alien and zombie gravesites, all the while trying to avoid rival cadaver-snatching gang The House of Murphy, which includes the aforementioned dog-toothed henchman. Pace-wise, the first half of the film could use a good kick in the arse, some of the humor is a bit too winky-winky and production costs were obviously kept to a bare minimum (though the make-up is great, and I found some of the more blatantly cheesy effects [e.g., excessive graveyard mist] to be adorably charming), but if you like this sort of thing (or if you’re suffering from “Lost” withdrawal and already gave up on “Speed Racer” and “Stealth”), you really ought give this film a look-see.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Monday we heard about Snallygaster’s slave scaring history and Wednesday it saved the newspaper industry.

Prohibition was a drag. And not just because all the legal booze had been flushed down congress’ toilet. While destitute souses gave up their livers to searing shots of fuel-ready methyl alcohol, white-collared sots hired like-minded chemists to re-nature chemically denatured alcohol into an unforgivably potent, though non-toxic-ish, liquor (the “girly drinks” of the modern college campus have roots in this era as the alcohol was so potent that upper class juiceheads turned to all nature of seltzers, tonic waters, juices and citrus to sand the edges off their cocktails), and the government, desperate to stay one step ahead of the socialite-employed Dr. Feelgoods, pursued increasingly elaborate denaturing schemes, involving the addition of powerful toxins, including cyanide, to large shipments of industrial alcohol. Poor drinkers were often permanently blinded or killed by low-quality, high-proof poisons while the wealthy, egged on by the once-passive activity’s newfound lawlessness, descended into new levels of decadence. Despite the controversial ratification of the eighteenth amendment, alcoholism in America was at an all time high.

Meanwhile, rural moonshine stills began pumping out a steady supply of corn whiskey and pure grain alcohol. The wilds of Maryland’s Blue Ridge Mountains were host to a cast of lone shiners, well-connected bootleggers and industrious drunks, all of them firing up (with varying degrees of success) illegal stills. Along with the clangs, hisses and host of acrid odors inherent to the production of moonshine, there were explosions and fires and bloody conflicts between smugglers. With Federal prohibition agents inevitably Toucan Samming their way through cities and towns, hot on the pungent trail of speakeasies, stills and saloons, the shiners had cause to be nervous. Fortunately, they also had an historical ace up their collective, sour mash-stained sleeve: The Snallygaster.

We’ve already made one tenuous connection between Maryland’s beaked and feathered reptilian antagonist and Jersey’s own nefarious Devil (the suspiciously coincidental timing of the Middle Town Valley Register’s hoax), and, lo, here’s a another: The Jersey Devil myth was supposedly perpetuated by the loose cadre of runaway slaves, criminals and, yes, even moonshiners, who had turned the monster’s supposed stomping grounds into their own lawless, pastoral Xanadu. The more terrified folks were to enter the aptly named Barons, the less likely it was that the community of scoff laws would be discovered, hassled or caught. The Snallygaster, too, served this general fearful purpose, but the recruitment of this particular insidious cryptid was, by several measures, far more ingenious than the Piney’s spooky whisperings.
The Snallygaster as bootlegger sentry had three things going for it:

Find out what they are… AFTER THE JUMP1.) During the days of Rhoderick’s and Wolf’s Register con, witnesses of the Snallygaster imbued the beast with a vast, sometimes conflicting, array of physical characteristics. Like its grotesque appearance, which capitulated between avian, mammalian, reptilian and Lovecraftian, its horrible vocalizations occupied an impressive swath of descriptive terrain. The available palate of roars, hisses, shrieks and yells that tumbled from the Snallygaster’s hideous larynx could easily account for the cornucopic din of both functioning and malfunctioning stills. As a bonus, some of Rhoderick’s and Wolf’s more florid accounts of the creature’s attacks included fire breathing and the discovery of charred human corpses – an easy explanation for the echoing explosions from poorly run stills, and the immolated shiners sometimes left smoldering in the aftermath.

2.) The Middletown Valley Register functioned as the shiner’s journalistic constituent. Aside from the paper’s archives, which chronicled the entire saga of the Snallygaster’s past rampage, beginning with its commute from Ohio and concluding in an open-ended, sequel-ready battle royale, the shiners also counted on the paper (which remained in operation in a large part because of the Snallygaster) to pick up the new “sightings” and run with them. They were not disappointed. As rumors of the Snallygaster’s return spread out across the state, the Middle Valley Register picked up exactly where it left off, penning sensationalist paeans to the terror-cum-mascot of the Old Line State.

3.) The bootlegger’s drunken clients served as even better potential monster witnesses than the fear-addled townsfolk of the original Snallygaster hullabaloo. Who better to succumb to the suggested hallucination of a man-eating dragon than a speakeasy’s worth of delirious, whiskey-blanched sots?

Whether it was fear of the Snallygaster, stupid luck or the persistent presence of bigger fish in larger distilling vats that kept the Blue Ridge Mountain moonshine business strong and largely unraided is a mystery… as is the extent to which the Middle Town Valley Register worked directly with the bootleggers to re-perpetuate the legend of Maryland’s dragon. Whether active participants or passive observers, the paper once again afforded the Snallygaster tale an epic ending – just weeks before the repeal of prohibition, the Register ran an article, complete with a conveniently blurry photograph, detailing the death of the Snallygaster – screaming and flailing in a vat full of sour mash that later exploded, atomizing both the unrealized liquor and its intrepid protector.

More than that, though, the alleged conflagration symbolized the imminent demise of the failed, and largely reviled, eighteenth amendment.

Jason has killed a lot of folks with a lot of different tools. His victims may wonder, “Who is this man? And why is he murdering me?” Meanwhile, we the viewers want to know, “What is that tool he’s using? And what’s its history?”

Wonder no longer.

Today: Syringe

As used by Jason in: Friday the 13 Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan

Victim(s): Gang Banger 1

Nobody likes getting a shot. But also, nobody likes getting shot. Now pretend you have to choose one or the other. See? Shots aren’t that bad. (That clever word joke has inspired me to write a book where a killer “shoots” people with an injection of molten copper that he got by melting bullets. “.44 caliber… 10ccs… 1 chance of survival… 0 if you don’t already have liquid metal for blood… Sharpshooter!”) The earliest syringes date back to ancient Rome, where they were used to treat medical complications. Additionally, many Romanologists agree that “Roman Syringe” would have been a good title for an “In Utero”-era Nirvana b-side.

A syringe doesn’t necessarily include a needle – “Syringe” merely refers to the body of the tool, including a plunger, barrel and nozzle. In ancient Egypt, for example, primitive syringes were used to suck cataracts off of people’s eyes. In fact, before the advent of syringes, medical licensing exams included a hickey test that judged a doctoral candidate’s oral suction capacity, as cataracts had to be removed via traditional mouth suckage. In the liquid substance industry, hoses are attached to syringes, which are then used to draw liquid substances out of barrels.

DID YOU KNOW THAT union policy dictates that all syringe liquid substance-drawing assignments be based on the seniority of the team member? A 35-yearer might get to syringe out the barrel of chocolate syrup. The 5-yearer probably has to syringe out the barrel of tomato juice (I wanted to say scorpion eggs, but they shovel those). DO YOU KNOW WHAT kind of factory uses those ingredients? SOMEONE TOLD ME it was a shoe factory. DO YOU THINK they’d let me taste some of the chocolate syrup? I’M hungry.

Get the rest of the lesson AFTER THE JUMP…

The first effective skin-puncturing syringe needle was co-invented in 1853 by a French guy named Charles Pravaz and a Scottish guy named Alexander Wood. Previous results of French/Scottish team-ups include a cigarette holder that clips on to bagpipes, haggis crepes and a pill that makes having sex with goats pretentious. This particular international co-production proved invaluable to modern medicine, but tragic for Wood, whose wife became the world’s first intravenous morphine addict and, ultimately, died from an overdose. A way to make this funny is to picture it as a Daffy Duck cartoon. Almost 100 years later, the British Chance brothers created an all-glass syringe with interchangeable parts. Now people could sterilize syringes en masse without having to match specific components to individual units. The best I can do with this one is tell you to imagine the brothers as animated snowmen trying to roast marshmallows but their hands keep melting. The first disposable plastic syringe was invented in 1956 by New Zealand pharmacist Colin Murdoch, who also invented the tranquilizer gun.

DID YOU KNOW that tranquilizer darts are simply ballistic syringes propelled by compressed air and steadied in flight using a fibrous tailpiece? DO YOU KNOW WHERE I could get some? AND, ALSO, A gun for them? ARE YOU GOOD at making groups of high school girls scatter and kind of run off in all directions? DO YOU HAVE an inconspicuous van?

WANNA HELP ME with something?

Probably, when you think of syringes, you think about how they use them to refill printer ink cartridges, and to insert all the nummy oo-gooey fruitiness into Gushers. You probably think about veterinarians using milk-filled syringes to suckle tiny, adorable baby animals, and about my made up Nirvana song, and that one sorta happy part of “Requiem for a Dream.” But what about HIV and hepatitis, both of which can be acquired from dirty syringes? What about heroin addicts and that part in Trainspotting where the baby dies? Or the rest of “Requiem for a Dream”? What about your diabetic aunt who your parents said died from a lack of insulin shots, but who actually died when a CIA operative mistook her for Illuminati and injected her with a syringe full of Ricin? Why didn’t you think about any of that stuff? Christ, you didn’t even think about snus!

DID YOU KNOW that snus is a Scandinavian tobacco product that, like dipping tobacco, is meant to be packed under the upper lip, but which, unlike dipping tobacco, doesn’t require the user to spit? DID YOU KNOW THAT some snus aficionados use wide-orifice syringes to “inject” quantities of tightly packed snus into the space between their gum line and lip? WHAT WOULD YOU SAY if I told you that these snus depositing devices were called “Snussies”? WHAT IF I TOLD YOU they were called “Packajams”? WHAT WOULD YOU DO if you found out they’re actually called “Portioners”? YEAh. I PUNCHED a wall, too.

Thank you, Jason, for helping us learn through murder.

Join me again soon for another thrilling installment of Jason Vorhees’ Arsenal!

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we focus on the Snallygaster, on Monday we looked at the beast’s slave scaring past!

These days, there are plenty of failing newspapers so hard up for cash that they can barely afford the nails to board up their doors. Shrinking page counts, reduced dimensions and an inability to successfully monetize online content have all contributed to the imminent downfall of the publishing industry. Luckily, I have a solution.

During the first years of the 20th century, Maryland journalists George Rhoderick and Ralph Wolf watched their home paper, The Middletown Valley Register, take a financial nosedive. (Reading some archived online content, it’s not hard to see why. The June, 7 1895 edition, for example, contained this urgent bulletin: “Mr. William E. LIGHTER and wife of near Funkstown, Washington county, were
visiting relatives in this place on Sunday and Monday last.”) Surely the men were familiar with the area’s olden day whisperings of a heptaphobic dragon, and perhaps they’d also heard about the rash of so-called “devil” sightings that had swept New Jersey just three years prior. Either way, looking back at their subsequent actions, it’s hard to tell whether the men saw their plan as a wild gambit aimed at the paper’s salvation, or just a merry cryptozoological jape intended to see the publication off with an inhuman scream. Either way, when they published the first erroneous account of a local Snallygaster sighting, it became immediately clear that, despite the dour mood in the accounting department, someone was still reading the Register.

The 1909 Snallygaster hoax was a carefully orchestrated affair that began with a printed letter of warning written by a fretful Ohio man who had witnessed a big bastard dragon monster storming towards Maryland. After peeing all of his clothes, including a headdress he inherited from an Apache ancestor, he thoughtfully decided to warn the soon-to-be-dragon-stricken state’s inhabitants. (I know the first thing I consider when I see an inhuman monstrosity is its probable destination based on the approximate direction of its homicidal rampage.) Predictably, the next report came out of the Old Line State itself and featured testimony from a rurally based kiln operator who saw the horrific winged beast taking a well-deserved nap that ended with a drowsy banshee scream and a quicksilver ascent into the darkening sky.

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP…
Having laid out their bait, Rhoderick and Wolf urged readers to take a deep breath, stay calm and, of course, report every man-eating monster encounter directly to the Middletown Valley Register. And Sightings poured in.

The paper, for its part, dutifully published the accounts and occasionally sweetened the pot with a bit of fallacious bloodshed and ovipositing; soon it seemed that the creature was sucking blood, carrying children off into the freezing skies and squirting out humungous eggs that, thankfully, resisted all attempts at incubation. The entire affair is an incredible example of how a single story, no matter how fantastical, can, once absorbed into the general consciousness, come to flying, screeching, cattle-shredding life. When is a bird not a bird? In 1909, when it’s a Snallygaster.

Locals actually believed that they saw the creature silhouetted against the sky and gliding onward to its next blood-smeared atrocity.

When rumors began circulating that the nearby Smithsonian Institute had placed a $100,000 bounty on the dragon’s head, wings, body and, in the event of tentacles, also tentacles, I’m sure Rhoderick and Wolf had a good laugh; when self-appointed demon hunting mercenaries laid siege to the surrounding forests, riling up the townsfolk and blanketing the woods in garbage and amateur campfires, the men’s smiles may have dropped a little bit; when Teddy Roosevelt, President of the United States, announced that he was considering postponing an African safari in favor of a Marylandian one, complete with designs to fell the mighty Snallygaster, one can easily imagine Rhoderick turning to Wolf (or vise a versa), tugging at his collar and whispering “ix nay on the allygaster say.” After all, subscriptions were up and circulation had improved. The Snallygaster had outlived its usefulness.

The first modern era of the Snallygaster came to a fitting close, complete with an epic battle. According to the pages of the unimpeachable Middletown Valley Register, three brave Marylanders engaged the beast in an hour-long fight that ended in triumph as the badly wounded creature retreated into the darkness, never to be heard from again.

At least, that was Rhoderick’s and Wolf’s plan. But neither of them had counted on prohibition, which would find illegal moonshine stills cropping up throughout the Blue Ridge Mountains… stills that hissed and screeched and, occasionally, exploded.

You might tell a kid that booming thunder is just the angels bowling. Marylanders might tell a Federal Prohibition Agent that booming moonshine stills are just the Snallygaster.

But now I’m just rambling. That solution to the publishing industry’s current predicament? Edible paper. But it has to taste really good. I mean, if you’re going to shell out a dollar for the turkey edition of the New York Times, that sh*t better taste like Thanksgiving.

Friday: How the wets recruited a monster

A couple weeks back I wrote a series of posts about Kuchisake-onna, Japan’s infamous slit-mouthed woman. For the third installment, fearing that, owing to my relative ignorance of Japanese culture, I was woefully misrepresenting/misinterpreting an important folktale, I used Google translate to read authentic (and grammatically butchered) versions of the tale on the Japanese-language Wikipedia site. Then I looked up the Japanese take on the Jersey Devil. Why? To make myself feel better about butchering the country’s canonical urban legends (or, as I’m sure I would have argued at the time, to revel in the inherent mutability of oral tradition that exists between cultures, even in a media-saturated, post-post-modern age). I was not disappointed. The Japanese version, or, more accurately, understanding, of the Jersey Devil was awesomely nutty and involved a bunch of kids finding a big, crazy egg in the forest. Probably they thought they were hatching a Yoshi.

Anyway, I thought it would be a fun to look at the story of the Jersey Devil on three other international Wikipedia pages, summarize the results (including the requisite [sic]-implied Google Translate nuggets) and have you folks try to match each of the three versions to the Wikipedia site on which you believe it originated.

If you want to. Otherwise, just, you know, go straight to the answers. There isn’t a prize anything. And if there were, it would be something undead or coconut flavored or both, and nobody would want it.

(If you’re unfamiliar with the standard American telling of the Jersey Devil, here’s a Wayback Machine link for you)

Okay! (Rubs hands together creepily) Here we go:

Your Language Choices:

a.) Russian
b.) Italian
c.) German

1.) This version of the legend states that the devil’s mother was a witch who abandoned her malformed 13th child in the swamps of New Jersey, where the “beast of a humanoid form would become malignant over time.” This account also adds this unfamiliar detail: “In 1740, The local priests exorcise these marshes, preventing the monster to kill people, but exorcism last hundred years, and according to local stories the Jersey Devil continued to feed on men.” Also, apparently “from 1909 his popularity grew, over time it was believed that this was a Chupacabras From unnatural speed.”

2.) This Wikipedia site’s only entry for “Jersey Devil” is for the season 1 “X-Files” episode of the same name. Though most of the page is devoted to summarizing the episode (“Mulder, alone watching a dark alley near the forest, where according to Jack roamed the forest devil.”), there is a footnote containing this summary of the Jersey Devil story: “The legend of ‘The Devil Jersey’ known since the XVIII century, descriptions of the creature vary, but most of it ‘sees’ as a stealth, sneaking up on the cattle and attack him.”

3.) Easily the most thorough of the three entries in question, this language’s Wikipedia page offers the standard Mother Leeds version of the story, along with a variant in which the devil’s birth was the result of a gypsy curse, and a version in which “the devil is originally been a human child, who locked his mother in the cellar. According to another tale of the Jersey Devil was at the door, knocked three times and is said to have asked his mother to let him in, but the mother did not want a devil and sent him away.“ The page goes on to cite the frequent comparisons of the Jersey Devil to El Chupacabra, but imediately puts the kibosh on the possibility of any real connection, stating that “The Chupacabra is not traditionally depicted as a biped,“ and helpfully reminding readers that “the devil has never been described as prickly.“

ANSWERS AFTER THE JUMP

Answer Key:

Description 1.) was found on b.), the Italian Wikipedia
Description 2.) was found on a.), the Russian Wikipedia
Description 3.) was, therefore, found on c.), the German Wikipedia

Thanks for playing. Let’s do this again some time! I think I almost learned something.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we focus on the Snallygaster, come back Wednesday and Friday for more!

I’ve always loved words that carry a sense of their meaning within their phonetic pronunciations. You don’t need to know what “vile” means to infer that it probably doesn’t describe something desirable. Likewise, “mush” sounds inherently unappetizing. It’s in this spirit of efficient verbiage that I bring you the tale of the Snallygaster. I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word “Snallygaster,” I’m immediately certain of two things: 1.) it’s some kind of animal; 2.) it’s totally bughouse bananas. True, my initial imagining – a flame-farting alligator with a giant snail shell – isn’t entirely accurate, but it’s no farther out than the abandoned carpet warehouse next to the ballpark.

Maryland’s Snallygaster is part bird, part reptile, sometimes tentacled and perpetually ticked off. Half-reptile, half-bird sounds evocative, until you remember that many classic folkloric dragons are just that – giant, feathered lizards with bad tempers and a wicked set of wings. Its name doesn’t represent a concerted effort to encapsulate the ferocious mutant’s hideous visage into a single descriptive, multisyllabic sobriquet, but rather a concerted, if failed, Anglican attempt to pronounce the German term “Schneller Geist,” meaning “quick spirit.” See, the mid-1700s found a rabble of German immigrants setting up shop in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Much more AFTER THE JUMP…

Along with superior beer-brewing techniques and primitive convection-driven Zoetropes featuring the first vomit fetish pornography, the German’s showed up with a variety of traditional folktales, including terrifying stories of man-eating dragons, and superstitious tales of the aforementioned Schneller Geists – unseen ghosties responsible for sudden drafts of air that extinguished candles and slammed doors shut. While it remains unclear how these two wholly separate entities got conflated into a single, ravenous monster that devoured men whole and laid eggs large enough to hatch horses (my money is on the same jumbled oral repetitions that yielded the word “Snallygaster”), the beast quickly became the most famous resident of Northern Maryland.

Pre-20th Century reports of the Snallygaster are fairly non-specific. In fact, to this day, no actual recorded 18th or 19th century sightings have been discovered. While more superstitious farmers took to drawing hex signs, such as seven-pointed stars (heptagrams represent the seven days of creation and are said to ward off evil, hence, the traditional seven-pointed sheriff’s badge) on their barns in order to deflect the ferocious creature’s unholy presence, it’s likely that many early incarnations of the Snallygaster inhabited bedtime stories designed to allow the swaying shadows on bedroom walls to append a silent, dangling “or else…” to parents’ otherwise gentle admonitions of, “stay in bed and get some sleep.”

Wikipedia briefly notes that the legend was put to more nefarious use during the 1800s, when slave owners began using tales of the wild Snallygaster in the deep, dark woods as a folklore-based fear campaign to discourage their human property from escaping. The sole source of this information, however, only further complicates the history of the tale – it appears as an interesting aside to the definition of “snollygoster” (a calculating and dishonest politician) in lexicographer Erin McKean’s book “Weird and Wonderful Words,” which also points out that the first written use of “snollygoster” actually precedes that of the suspiciously similar, and equally reprehensible “Snallygaster” by about 100 years. (If McKean’s tidbit about the legend’s relationship to slavery is true, I can’t help but imagine the type of slave owner who might employ this tactic. While the next plantation over oils up a leather strap and waits for the branding iron to heat up [this slave owner could be played by Nick Nolte], these folks are withholding dessert and wielding fierce threats of a 10-minute Time Out followed by Snallygaster story time [this would be the late John Ritter].)

What is certain is that, beginning in the early 1900s, the Snallygaster became a common topic of the Middletown Valley Register, a local Maryland paper that began reporting an increasing number of Snallygaster sightings, including giant Snallygaster eggs and frightening evidence of the creature’s fondness for hot, running blood and ability to immolate its pitiable victims.

Wednesday: What do scheming journalists, Teddy Roosevelt, creative moonshiners and the Smithsonian Institute have in common? It rhymes with “gallyfaster.”

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we focus on the Tooth Fairy, Monday he questioned why we value baby teeth to begin with. Wednesday we delved into the bloody origins of the legend.

On the barest cultural level, if you strip away the membranous wings, packed wallet and any over-eager pseudo-anthropological interpretations, all the tooth fairy really amounts to is the narrative spoonful of sugar that helps the inevitable biological medicine – specifically, the terrifying reality that all of one’s teeth are about to loosen and drop out – go down. Quite simply, kids are less apt to be scared by the unique and uncomfortable process of losing their teeth if that process comes with its own smiling, magical (and accordingly wealthy) benefactor. On a literal level, if you strip away the glittery trappings, all the tooth fairy really amounts to is an otherworldly home invader with a cryptic agenda and a free pass into a nation’s worth of children’s bedrooms.

Fittingly, one of the primary talents of the horror genre is processing sugar back into bitter, bitter medicine by exploiting the darker side of pleasurable activities and joyful traditions. Sex, parties and road trips frequently serve as typical set-ups for mounting bloodbaths. More to the point, Santa Claus, another breaking-and-entering denizen of popular folklore, has repeatedly been portrayed standing on the woodsman’s side of a bloodied axe. Is it really all that surprising that the tooth fairy has, likewise, been depicted as a nefarious trafficker of living nightmares?

Given the conclusions we’ve arrived at thus far, “Every legend has its dark side.” seems like a more than fitting tagline for a horror movie about the tooth fairy. My two favorite things about the so-taglined 2003 horror film “Darkness Falls” are the adorable Emma Caulfield (for anyone aware of my Buffy obsession, this requires no explanation), and the fact that the ending credits had to be extended to 11 minutes in order to pad out the film’s meager 75-minute runtime. My least favorite things are all the aspects of the film that are actually relevant to this post. Basically, a disfigured woman who, because she gave out coins to children who lost their teeth, was known as the “Tooth Fairy,” is wrongly accused of child murder and blah blah blah. Now, when a kid loses a tooth, her ghost shows up and kills them. Likewise, the 2006 straight-to-video “The Tooth Fairy” centers on a witch who murders children for their teeth. (It might be the ghost of the witch. I can’t honestly say that I care.) Additionally, “Hellboy II:The Golden Army” and Graham Joyce’s novel “The Tooth Fairy” both explore the darker ramifications of this magical nighttime marauder. (Apparently there’s also an episode of “All in the Family” where Archie Bunker refers to an effeminate dentist as the “tooth fairy.”)

Get the rest… AFTER THE JUMP

The big question: Understanding that the tooth fairy legend is rife for horrification given that it’s well-known, inferably creepy and devoid of a unique canonical back story, why make a teen- or college-geared horror movie about something the intended viewership no longer believes in? Sex, parties and road trips all make for pretty intuitive horror backdrops because the primary horror-going audience can conceivably imagine themselves stranded in the middle of murderous hillbilly nowhere, or being suddenly scythed off their wriggling eff buddies, whereas, lost teeth and pillow money represent fading memories of an irretrievable past that’s terrifying only in that its relationship to the present belies the transience of youth and the unstoppable progress of time. So… why?

One possibility is that we have an underlying yearning to nullify our past gullibility (or, to put it a bit more sweetly, childhood naivety) by returning to the fictional dogmas of our youthful realities and turning them inside out. As if the revenge of the tooth fairy portrayed in the films is actually our revenge against a narrative that tricked us – that exerted a calculating, if benevolent, power over our immature minds, making us passive participants in an ongoing and involuntarily inherited story arc that, as adults, we can now actively control, distort and subvert.

But I don’t know. That view is a little agro for me.
I like to think that these re-imaginings of the tooth fairy story are our way of allowing a trusted, comfortable narrative to mature alongside us. And I can’t deny that there’s some degree of bitterness in that growth, though I don’t view the bitterness as directed at the story, but rather at the generalized loss of innocence that found the curtain pulled back on the banal, yet frustratingly byzantine, machinery of real life… of money… of love… and, of course, of our parents, who were ultimately unmasked as the legend’s true protagonists.

The innocent mythologizing of currency; a belief in actual magic; and a beautiful, misguided self-worth that placed an external and measurable value on even discarded aspects of ourselves – all things we couldn’t take with us into adulthood. But the legend itself – that’s another story. So we forced it to grow along with us, and to suffer the same loss of innocence. How could the results be anything but awkward? Really, the tooth fairy story as horror movie only makes sense for an audience full of confused teens and disorganized 20-somethings – before that, the story inhabits our lives as an aspect of reality. After that, we inhabit the story as its main character – tooth fairies to the gullible (nay, innocently naïve) children in our lives.

Walk it Off – an abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

Today’s ailment: Snake Bite

Why Settle For The Local When The General Will Do?

You will need: Moonshine
Instructions: Drink moonshine
Note: This method is a twofer – the hair that moonshine puts on one’s chest can be removed and used to sop up excess venom.

Li’l Chomper’s Finger Wigglin’ Toxin Easement

You will need: A child born with teeth
Instructions: Have toothy kid employ innate healing powers in curing snakebite

…It Made Sense On Paper

You will need: 1 Snake With Less Potent Venom Than Original Bite-Delivering Snake
Instructions: Irritate less poisonous snake until it bites victim of first, more poisonous snake bite
Note: A funny way to irritate the snake is to grab it with both hands and dance with it while pretending it’s a woman. This is extra irritating to male snakes.

Chariots Of Poisonous Snakes

You will need: Speed; Determination; Score By Vangelis
Instructions: Immediately after bite, race snake to nearest river; Win race

Just Don’t Use The Peanut Butter This Time

You will need: 1 dog that has survived snakebite
Instructions: Have dog lick snakebite; Reward dog with Beggin’ Strip

One Foot In The Grave

You will need: Shovel

Instructions: Dig hole; Place bitten limb into hole; Fill in hole; Remain until feeling not poisoned
Warning: Method does not work if snakebite is above the neck; Method immobilizes you such that you are open game for all area snakes.

Countersnakewise Healing Massage

You will need: Baby-soft hands
Instructions: Rub bite in opposite direction of that in which the offending snake coiled

Guess What?

You will need: Chicken Butt (Live)
Instructions: Apply live chicken’s anus to the wounded area.
Note: Method works best if snakebite is above the neck.

The Twin Peaks Church Service

You will need: The ability to recite prayers backwards
Instructions: Recite prayers backwards

Lauren Bacall: “You Do Know How To Cure A Snakebite, Don’t You?

You will need: A buddy; Chewing gum
Instructions: Have buddy blow three times into afflicted’s mouth
Note: For maximum healing, perform simultaneously with poultry anus compress

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we focus on the Tooth Fairy, Monday he questioned why we value baby teeth to begin with.

The tooth fairy started life as a mouse that started life as a fairy. Or, in some tellings, a fairy who started life as a mouse. I know. Not the radiation-laced tale of shame and vengeance for which most of you were probably jonesing. And the fairies’ nemesis? An evil, tyrannical king. For our purposes, though, he’s an evil, tyrannical king with a plasma cannon for a hand. So, according to this French fairy tale (called “La Bonne Petite Souris,” meaning “The Good Little Mouse”), there was a happy queen who was all crepes and smiles until the evil king from a different castle started blowing up all the cafes and boulangeries with his triple-barrel plasma arm. Fortunately, the queen was friends with, depending on the version, a good little mouse or a just-above-average fairy who agrees to lend a helping paw, or tiny, unsettling fairy hand with creepy little painted fingernails. The mouse then proceeds to transform into a fairy (or vise a versa), plant itself under the king’s pillow and, come nightfall, knock out all of the king’s teeth, thereby, chasing away the shadows of war (You’d think that this would just make the king angrier, but for some reason it drives him crazy and topples his empire. Maybe the diamond power cells for the plasma arm were hidden in his molars.)

A fairy, some teeth, a pillow – that’s most of the ingredients right there. Cut out the king and equip the miniscule hero with tooth radar and a slush fund (also make it take off that insipid beret) and you’ve got yourself the tooth fairy.

Unfortunately, the specifics of this transatlantic process’ evolutionary particulars remain shrouded in mystery. Some saucy folklorists even argue that the French fairy tale and America’s hardest working flight-capable civil servant are entirely unrelated. After all, in the French story, the fairy goes on a perilous mission to liberate a dying nation; in the American story, the fairy just sort of dodders around with a change purse and a trash bag full of dental waste. Perhaps, then, she’s more closely related to British house fairies, like Brownies – naked, scruffy mensches who tidy a home at night, or even churn butter and thrash grain. Or like the elves from the classic Grimm’s fairy tale “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” about a group of industrious, mystical scamps who make with the grunt work for a destitute cobbler. As long as there’s a supernatural race willing to devote their powers to hand-cramping minutia in the name of the ever-entitled human race, why not assign one to the disposal of useless, cluttersome bones? (Not all house fairies were good. Despite their seeming enthusiasm for chores, some Brownies were known to un-tidy a house that was too neat, and Boggarts got up to all sorts of poltergeist-style domestic shenanigans.)

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP…

Regardless of which story supplied more of the legend’s raw material, fairies were a cornerstone of Western European folklore. America, fetid cultural stew that it is, could have easily borrowed piecemeal from both the French and British traditions. What everyone does agree on is that isolated variants of today’s tooth fairy myth started popping up in the United States around 1900, and portrayed the fairy not as a unique, specific being wrought by the fates to wrangle children’s teeth, but rather as a standard-issue benevolent fairy who merely had a weird predilection for tooth collection.

Then, in 1949, author Lee Rogow published a children’s story called “The Tooth Fairy.” It was about a very specific, one-of-a-kind fairy, and it hit America at the perfect time. WWII had ended and the 1950s were about to begin. American cultural values shifted their attentions from world politics and a collectivist all-for-one jingoism to a fresh American insularity that placed new significance upon the so-called nuclear family unit, domestic (meaning both intranational and intrafamilial) politics and social values. Suddenly, active parenting became a national concern, and kid-centric stories like that of the tooth fairy – stories that few parents had the time for while they were stamping out rifle rounds in ad hoc munitions factories or firing those rounds into the ugly faces of fascist Kraut bastards – became stalwart American narratives. Exactly how American? Well, according to a number of occasionally conducted economic surveys and studies, the tooth fairy calculates for inflation.

Alternately, perhaps the true measure of an American folktale’s successful ubiquity is its conversion into a viable horror property. Santas slaughtering, Bigfeet mauling and Bogeymen terrorizing the older brother from 7th Heaven are all familiar genre fodder. Likewise, the tooth fairy has seen her fair share of violent, bloody action.

Friday: The Tooth Fairy as Villain

Sure, the monsters that stalk through horror films aren’t great guys but they aren’t all bad. Matt Finley investigates the Upside Of Evil…

I just re-watched the 1997 horror film “The Relic,” and I gotta say: Not bad. It makes you pine for the bygone days of leading lady Penelope Ann “Cute as a Bug’s Ear” Miller, and R-Rated horror films that were less about graphic torture and gore than they were about a superstitious cop and a sexy, hard-nosed evolutionary biologist using suspect science and street smarts to immolate a CG monstrosity. While the late Gene Siskel’s assertion that the film’s primary antagonist – Kothaga, a wily, mutated beetle-mohawk-lizard monster de-braining its way through Chicago’s Museum of Natural History’s staff – could “hold its own with the Alien” is enough of a stretch to dislocate something, the Stan Winston-designed creature definitely managed to a do a number on my preconceived notions of beetle-mohawk-lizard monsters. For every heart Kothaga broke, and every head he ripped off, ate parts of and then discarded, he did some nice things to:

Encouraged the Museum to Up its Exhibit Quality

Basically, if you’re the curator of a museum, you want to make sure that all the exhibits you’ve intentionally displayed are at least as interesting as the incidental stuff that just happens to be wandering around. It’s why there aren’t any art museums in the red light district. Additionally, if something’s actively murdering patrons, you should make it your beeswax to ensure that said patrons are risking their lives for a reason. A stuffed giraffe and a water tank that doesn’t make a whirlpool because the button broke aren’t going to cut it anymore. Maybe attach wires to all the dinosaur bones and host an elaborate prehistoric marionette show where the skeletons act out scenes from “The Land Before Time” and “The Crying Game.” Or wax down the main hall and let everyone use the mummies like boogie boards. Maybe just get a liquor license, a bigger tank and fix the button. No matter what you decide, no one should be leaving the museum saying that the coolest thing they saw was the freak beast that glory-holed their head bone.

Democratized Gala Crashing

Time was that if you wanted to break up a swanky fundraising soiree, you had to be, like, Mr. Freeze or the Penguin, and perpetrate some sort of outrageous stunt, like filling a giant cake with poison-beaked hummingbirds or shooting a freeze beam out of a largish pie. The message: if you can’t bring the goods, find a block party or a bridal shower to hijack because black tie means in it to win it (feel free to use that sentence as the backbone for a zany movie called, “Grand Theft Party,” or a poignant novel entitled, “Last Year’s Daughter.”) Kothaga arrived to let everyone know that if you want to crash a ritzy, elite gathering of the city’s diamond-spangled, champagne-quaffing blue bloods, all you need is a mouth full of teeth, a heart full of crazy and the legs to transport them. Or a hand truck. Keep in mind there are stairs, though.

Gave Hope to the Children

If you haven’t seen “The Relic,” let me ruin it for you – it turns out that Kothaga, which just kind of shows up at the museum one day, is actually a former anthropologist who ate a hormone-laced fungus and mutated into the horrible beast that Penelope Ann Miller’s character explodes apart using chemicals. The point being? You can grow up to be anything. Seriously! If a smart, wealthy research scientist can turn into a monster, and “Ghostbusters” Harold Ramis can turn into “Knocked Up” Harold Ramis, there’s no reason why a poor kid from the murder capital of the Bronx can’t grow up to be an astronaut. Or why an astronaut can’t go broke and join the Latin Kings. Or why the Bronx can’t become a sentient monster that gets sent to explore an impoverished, crime-ridden galaxy. I think what I’m saying is that you can grow up be anything you want unless it requires a credit check.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we focus on the Slit-Mouth Demon of Japan. Monday we were introduced to the world’s worst Butterface. Wednesday we gave you sure fire tips to avoid her wrath.

I still don’t feel like I’ve completely managed to twist my mind around Kuchisake-onna. By extension, it’s likely that you haven’t either. If you’re deeply familiar with Japanese culture and society, you probably feel as though I’ve only brushed the surface of the legend, regurgitating all the requisite facts – slit mouth, surgical mask, vain inquisition and murder – without arriving at any real interpretive narrative insight save for another bogeyman rant and some tired Women’s Studies rhetoric that, itself, was plucked from an American curriculum. If, like me, your understanding of Japanese culture and society is wrested from a pack of cultural stereotypes and loose associatives – anime, game shows, Samurai and academically motivated suicides – Kuchisake-onna probably remains, quite literally, a ghost, a fanciful story, untethered from any definitive cultural prerogative or fixed history. I can confidently link the Bermuda Triangle to the New Age movement, to the UFO mania that began in the 1950s and to a curious fixation on Atlantis. Kuchisake-onna? All I can do is tell the story.

Even the intrepid, if over-confident, know-it-alls over at our English-language Wikipedia have desperately tried to resolve the slit-mouthed woman through a Western lens. The “See also” column provides links to Bloody Mary, which is described as “a similar apparition in Western urban legends” (they’re both women who terrorize children, but, otherwise, I’m missing the connection), La Llorona (which I covered in November 2009) and the Glasgow smile, the popular Western (more specifically Scottish) term for the wound caused by the slitting of a victim’s mouth from ear to ear (think the Black Dahlia and/or Ledger’s Joker). Of course, run the Japanese Wikipedia page for Kuchisake-onna through Google translate, and you don’t get any of that. In fact, the page alludes (I’m sure in Japanese it flat out says, but the auto-translate made the syntax all wonky and there’s enough subject/verb disagreement to constitute a full-on armed conflict) to clashing histories and varied folkloric iterations of the legend, all of them re-shaping the grinning specter through the susurrus murmurs and whisperings rising up out of individual prefectures.

All of the treasures of Japanese Wikipedia lie AFTER THE JUMP…

There’s the Two-Mouthed Woman, who carries an extra mouth on the top of her head, and the Cracked-Mouthed Woman, who, rather than bloodying her hands cutting her victims, curses them so that three days later, their cheeks crack open and split up to the ears. There are versions where Kuchisake-onna has a sister. Or two sisters. Or her wounds were the product of a botched plastic surgery. Versions packaged in loaded accounts of peasant uprisings and the war with Korea. There are versions where she floats in the air, where she outruns motorcycles, where she lurks in school nurses’ offices and where she circles victims’ houses at night, wrapping on the shutters and lacing the wind with sweetly spoken threats and trick questions.

In Japan, the legend of Kuchisake-onna shoulders deep cultural significance and immense historical weight. But I don’t have the background to decode it, or demystify it, or wrestle it down onto a vivisectionist’s table and lay bare its throbbing present-tense heart or the glinting, white bones of the past. And that’s refreshing. After all, what good to me is el chupacabra when it’s just a wayfaring panther or mange-afflicted wolf? What good to me is the Loveland Frog when it’s a flood-fleeing hobo, bindle in hand, signaling nothing stranger than the coming demise of the American railroad? Yes – there’s academic fascination, and cultural truths and beautiful, ear-ready narratives tucked away in the most recent of my neurological filing drawers – “things for my future children” – but there isn’t any mystery. Kuchisake-onna, in being just a story, is, for me, just that – a mystery. Even if, in my disenchanted, over-calculating mind, it isn’t the type of mystery that these types of stories used to represent – goosebumps and closet checks and wary, fearful glances out beyond the campfire into the dark copse of trees painted in flickering shadows – it’s still exciting. It’s books left to read, history left to learn, and monsters left to grapple and subdue. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it bliss, but this particular ignorance does feel pretty good.

A final experiment: While poking about Japanese Wikipedia, I decided to run a search on the Jersey Devil. The page cites the expected pop cultural references (“X-Files,” “The Last Broadcast,” et al.), but then goes on to offer this version of the actual legend:

Some siblings find a strange egg in the forest. They take it home and go down into the basement, hoping to avoid parental intercession. They light a fire and warm the egg. It hatches. The kids decide to nurture the strange, sinister-looking creature, and keep it as a pet. By the time their parents finally discover the animal, it’s become large and unwieldy. It bites one of the children and refuses to obey any commands. Though the adults attempt to exterminate the beast, it charges up the basement steps and escapes into the woods.

I gotta say… that – whatever the hell that is – makes me feel a lot better about the extent to which I almost certainly mangled the story of Kuchisake-onna, the slit-mouthed woman, a devil who, as proven by my ignorance, exists well outside the details.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we focus on the Slit-Mouth Demon of Japan. Monday we were introduced to the world’s worst Butterface.

Popular folktales are just that – popular. And they belong to the populace in a way that few other types of media ever will. Like in any game of telephone, these whispered stories are just one subversive tongue away from being notably and untraceably altered. If parents can use fictions to manipulate a child’s fears to form a sort of behavioral corral, the child can use fiction to build a ladder over the fence or, better yet, smash the beams entirely. One kid says something; a few more repeat it, and pretty soon you’ve got mobs of little Asian children pelting hotties with Pocky. Or, at least, that’s what you get in the case of Kuchisake-onna. While smirking mothers berated their children with threats of slice-and-dicement at the scissor-wielding hands of the grinning curfew enforcement proxy, the children were spreading rumors that a defensively thrown stick of Pocky proves perfectly sufficient in warding off the hungry snippers of ol’ Slit-gob McCutty. No Pocky on hand? Don’t worry. There are plenty more head-scratching Kuchisake-onna evasion techniques.

Blood Ruby

This is less a defensive technique than a befuddling rewrite of the whole story. In this version of the Kuchisake-onna legend, a person who answers, “Yes.” to the mutilated woman’s gash-flashing second query is handed a giant, blood-soaked ruby. I guess because kids are so nutty about their precious stones. Just make sure to wash it off before setting it in the eye socket of a cursed pirate skull. Also to make sure that it isn’t just a blood-soaked Ring Pop.

Confusion

This is a strategy that could only come from the Pocky-crusted mind of a grumbling, apathetic adolescent: In response to Kuchisake-onna’s maskless “Do you think I’m beautiful now?” simply reply, “You’re so-so” (in the seventies, when teens still exhibited a modicum of verbal competency, it was, “You’re average looking.”) The response will cause the insane monster to pause and think for a moment, giving you the opportunity to sprint away, or else trudge hollowly onward, burdened as you are by the soul shackles of your drone parents’ suburban conformity deathstyle. A more recent variation of this same strategy claims that you can tell Kuchisake-onna that you’re late to a previous engagement, and she’ll apologize for her rudeness and let you pass, unscathed (this also works with sharks).

Do the do

This variation’s a mixed bag – it spares your life, and you don’t have part with any of your crunchy snacks, but you also don’t get a fat gem smeared all over with someone else’s blood, and you have to wear Pomade. Because Kuchisake-onna hates the smell of Pomade. But, then, so do most ghosts. That’s why licensed parapsychologists call it “exorjism.”

Find four more SURE FIRE ways to avoid mutilation at the hands of the Slit-Mouth Woman AFTER THE JUMP…
Try the Stairs

Here’s a Kuchisake-onna addendum that will be heartily embraced by any large-breasted, underpant-clad co-ed who, while mourning the sudden deaths of her 2 to 5 other attractive friends, has had to flee a distinctive-mask-wearing, knife-brandishing serial killer: The slit-mouthed woman can’t ascend beyond the second floor of a building. So, when this monster chases you, by all means run up the stairs, toward the wood-and-plaster convergence of every possible dead end. For the first time ever, the joke will be on the people yelling at the screen.

Blood Type Cast

Perhaps stemming from Japanese beliefs that associate blood types with astrology, or perhaps stemming from a cocky punk with Type O blood and a flare for storytelling, one version of the tale attests that Kuchisake-onna has difficulty chasing down people with Type O blood. In the Japanese blood type personality rubric, Type O blood is often linked to vanity – Kuchisake-onna’s primary flaw. How crazy Is that? I mean, in real life, it’s probably just a coincidence. But on “Breaking Bad,” it would be, like, the physical manifestation of some deep moral conundrum. I don’t know what it would be on “Damages” because I still haven’t watched that show. Based on what I hear, though, it would probably be pretty cool.

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

File this one under “L” for “Last Resort.” Face Kuchisake-onna, say “garlic” three times, draw the character for “dog” on your palm, show her the palm and yell, “HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” Apparently this repels her or something. Maybe she’s too polite to slay the retarded. Maybe it reminds of her childhood, when everything was simpler and her face wasn’t awful and she and her friends would just sit around for hours, talking about garlic, drawing crap on their hands and shouting “HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” Either way, cross-file this one under “P” for “Pick Up Lines.”

The title “Snakes on a Plane” offered a fairly explicit promise, which the so-named film delivered on in full. Now, I’m not saying that it was an amazing movie, or that it provided said snakes on said plane to the scaly, flaming, fangs-v.-martial-law degree that the Internet hive mind rabidly hoped… just that all the grumping and grousing about it left a bad taste in my ears (which, on the upside, resulted in my being diagnosed with synesthesia). Snakes. On a plane. Say what you want about the less-than-stellar CG, fanboy pandering re-shoots and laughably self-conscious cult-status-hungry mugging – the film delivered on its title. How can anyone complain?

Is my view apologistic? Perhaps. Self-righteous? Definitely. Have I ever believed this opinion was anything other than 100% objectively correct? C’mon. I write. On the Internet. The thought would never occur to me. Until this weekend, when I saw “Human Centipede (First Sequence).” Now I feel like I can’t even tell my left from my right. (Dyscalculia diagnosis is pending.)

“Human Centipede (First Sequence),” as you’re probably aware, has caused quite the e-ruckus among cinematic thrill seekers and genre enthusiasts alike. If you aren’t aware, the film’s notoriety comes from its gruesomely straightforward premise – a mad scientist kidnaps three people with the intention of sewing them together, mouth to anus, in order to create the ultimate domestic plaything: the human centipede. First sequence.

Get the rest of this post AFTER THE JUMP…

Those of you who entered “Snakes on a Plane” harboring grandiose visions of an enormous plane and millions of snakes and a part where Sam Jackson gets cloned and then the two Jacksons team up to fight a drink cart full of wily, fire-belching cobras understand where I’m coming from when I say that the movie was kind of whatever.

I know! I hate me, too. First I totally defend “Snakes on a Plane” based entirely on the argument that the film only exists to – and, therefore, can only be judged by its ability to – deliver, to some arbitrary and unstated minimum extent, on the facile premise encompassed by its title. And yet, here I sit bemoaning “Human Centipede (First Sequence),” a film that has a proportionately more complex set of promises to uphold, and I’m kvetching despite its complete dedication to hitting (and re-hitting) every note of the above-detailed premise. I got my human centipede. I even got some gratuitous tooth pulling and butt-cheek slicing. Then I bitch about how the film kind of loses steam after the 1-hour mark?

Want to hear something really egregious? “Human Centipede (First Sequence)” is a better movie than “Snakes on a Plane.” It’s calculating, surgically adept antagonist, played with the requisite German intensity by Dieter Laser, is a more than adequate villain. And, despite what you might assume (or even read), the movie largely forgoes gore and squeaming anatomical effects (at least as much as can be expected from a film centered around the surgical creation of a shambling, involuntary six-limbed rim job) in exchange for two-sided psychological horror that offers, on the one hand, the disturbingly portrayed, and ultimately mysterious, obsessions of the mad doctor, and, on the other, the sheer sympathetic revulsion wrought from ogling the human centipede and imagining yourself as a component (particularly the middle component) thereof. The movie even plays with thematic genre mainstays, like the Final Girl trope.

I could hide behind snobbery, decry all the critical comparisons to early Cronenberg and write off my disappointment as an inevitable factor of my foolhardy error – how could anyone expect anything close to Cronenberg from a director other than Cronenberg? But the truth is I wasn’t expecting Cronenberg. As a body horror obsessive who personally prefers even the mediocre “The Brood” to the far-superior “Eastern Promises,” I don’t even expect Cronenberg from Cronenberg anymore.
Honestly, I think I bought into the hype – anticipating the film for its most sensational, gratuitous and sophomoric qualities. Gruesome surgery. A horrific freak show oddity. Mouths. Asses. The human centipede.

I mentioned earlier on that there were two types of people excited for the film: cinematic thrill seekers and genre enthusiasts. I’d love to be able claim that I walked into this movie as one of the latter. 99% percent of the time, I could say that. And it would be true. But I don’t know that a genre enthusiast would be so sorely disappointed by this movie. After all, how much would he or she really be expecting?

No. I walked into this experience expecting a thrill. Like a human centipede. Or snakes on a plane. And when, instead, I got a film, a story, I felt disappointed. For the first time ever, I understand people’s rejection of “Snakes on a Plane.” But it’s an understanding that’s only made me more resolute in my belief that you – that we – were given everything we were promised. That, in fact, we were disappointing viewers.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we focus on the Slit-Mouth Demon of Japan, come back Wednesday and Friday for more!

Ancient, feudal Japan’s legends of proud warriors and disgraced Samurai haven’t always mixed well with contemporary urban legends and trendy pop cultural fads. The harakiri-inducing “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III,” for example, found its titular rubber-suited pizza fetishists travelling back to 15th century Japan, where they pose as demons, fight an evil warlord and learn a valuable lesson about self-esteem. The legend of Kuchisake-onna, the grotesque and reviled slit-mouthed woman, however, gets the job done in both timelines. Bonus: some newer versions of the story sprint so far into left field that, by the time you realize the entire business is just another cautionary tale engineered to keep the ladies demure and the unaccompanied minors from running roughshod over the pachinko arcades, they’ve collided with the outfield wall.

Kuchisake-onna is, on initial inspection, a beautiful woman, save for her surgical mask – a not-uncommon Japanese urban accessory worn for protection against airborne viruses. She’s tall and graceful, with dark eyes and, often, a black umbrella. Most of the stories begin on a foggy night, just as a school-aged dawdler, procrastinating his way home, passes by the mysterious woman, who is standing in a circle of streetlamp light. As the boy glances up at her, she approaches him and asks, in a soft voice, “Do you think I’m beautiful?” He looks her up and down in his best, ignorant approximation of his horny uncle’s notorious roving-eyed strip leer. “Yes.” He replies. The woman’s response is not the anticipated, blushing “Arigatou.” Instead, Kuchisake-onna tears of her mask to reveal a hideous, gaping mouth that’s been slit open ear to ear. For some reason (probably because she’s evil), she has rows upon rows of razor-sharp teeth. “Do you think I’m beautiful now?” cackles the poo-grinning -Onna. The child freezes. He stammers. He swallows once and attempts a double-time version of the top-to-bottom ocular hump.

Who the hell is this lady?

Find out… AFTER THE JUMP…

For just a moment, let’s take leave of our sniveling youth, whose second bod scan of the mystery woman’s slender figure has inadvertently target locked on the puffed, scarred edges of the toothy grin, and fire up the Time Scepter (on loan from the aforementioned turtles).
The first modern version of the Kuchisake-onna legend, which germinated throughout the 1970s, gave the slit-mouthed woman a tragic, if simplistic, back story: An ignoble, jealous Samurai, who also was in love with / married to / performing the nasty on (there are a buncha versions) the beautiful and much-lusted-after Kuchisake, slit his lover’s face open in a fit of unjustified / justified jealousy, shouting “Who will think you’re beautiful now?” / ”Why so serious?” After her death, the disfigured Kuchisake-onna became a vengeful ghost hell-bent on, well, doing this:

Desperate to escape from the woman’s terrifying smile, and overcome by his natural rosy-cheeked charm, our trembling schoolboy once again replies “Yes.” Without hesitation, Kuchisake-onna produces a giant pair of used-car-lot-grand-opening-style scissors and snips the kid a mouth extension identical to her own / follows him home and kills him like in “The Dead Zone” (the part with scissors… not the part with the hypothermic drowning). If you’re thinking that maybe it was some weird girl trap and he was supposed to answer “No.” the second time, it aint like that. Say “no” and get an immediate, on-the-spot skewering.

Obviously, as mentioned above, these early versions of the tale do that behavior modification via irrational fear induction thing we’re always talking about. The slit-mouthed woman’s feudal days would have gone better if she – being a woman – hadn’t be so vain or cheaty or otherwise morally independent, and her inquisitive latter day ghost wouldn’t have any victims if kids were sure to come straight home from school, feed their Bulbasaurs and do some homework.

Additionally, I feel like this story is an obvious riff on the ol’ Vagina Dentata classic. Kuchisake-onna outwardly appears a paragon of iconic feminine beauty, but is ultimately revealed hideous through the uncovering of her slit. Her gash. The story manages to both propagate the male fear of unbridled (read: unrepressed) female sexuality, while also reinforcing the notion of the vagina as something unclean, unattractive and antithetical to the strict cultural ideals of superficial feminine beauty. It’s this enduring stigmatizing shame that has led to things like waxing and labioplasty in an attempt to extend socially mandated ideals of beauty beyond facial makeup and weight limits. (Granted, I’m interpreting this through the lens of Western culture, so it’s right possible she really is just a bog-standard closet monster.)

Buck up! It’s not all murdered children and oppressive patriarchy! Wednesday, from the country that brought you pillow marriages, panty vending machines and “Yatta” – Kuchisake-onna evasion techniques: out-thinking and undoing Japan’s most notorious butterface.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Monday we learned just why The Triangle might be the strangest result of number fudging in history and on Wednesday we explored the Triangle’s connection to aliens.

It only seems appropriate that our hatch-battened voyage through the Bermuda Triangle should take us from the star-gazing visions of Steven Spielberg to the subaqueous dreams of James Cameron. Sure, “The Abyss” has nothing to do with Atlantis, but given the number of Triangle enthusiasts whose necks are cramped in all the opposite places of the upward-looking UFO seekers, the film seems like a good place to start. USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects), like the one that Ed Harris’ character hangs out in while assuring the aliens that humans do, in fact, remember how to love, make frequent appearances in Atlantean-themed conspiracy manifestos.

While you can find various reports from around the world of actual submarine crafts sighted tearing through the waves of this or that ocean (Japan’s Dragon’s Triangle, another of the certified-vile vortices, boasts a panty vending machine’s worth) most USO sightings seem to involve mysterious lights shining up from deep below the surface of the water. Over the years, tons of sea-faring busybodies have reported seeing these bizarre illuminations, both in motion and stationary, within the increasingly non-specific bounds of the Bermuda Triangle. Many sightings have come with the speculation that, below the Triangle’s waters, lay the ruined spires and crumbling streets of Atlantis, a long dead city where, prior to its cataclysmic destruction, a bunch of forgetful mermen left the lights on.

Of course, I’m joking –Atlantis obviously didn’t use the wasteful electric lights on which we primitive humans so desperately rely. They used giant crystals. Or so said Edgar Cayce, the late 19th/early 20th century American psychic who used his cosmic extra-sensory brain power to chug down a trough load of Atlantean revelation, which he then spat back out during a number of his “readings.” These “readings,” which began in 1901 and continued on for 40 years, always started with Cayce entering a dozy trance state, and ended in mystical predictions about everything from politics and business to ancient history and fallen empires, of which Atlantis seemed to be Cayce’s favorite.

A background on Atlantis and the one piece of hard proof that might have proved the whole theory correct…

Quick background on Atlantis – the civilization was first mentioned by the Greek writer Plato, who portrayed the Poseidon-worshipping island nation as a powerful naval empire that was swallowed by a cataclysmic earthquake. Most believe Plato was simply using certain political and geological events of the time to tell a story both entertaining and germane. Others argue that the legend constitutes historical record. Still others, in true “Local Children Die in Sewer While Seeking Out ‘Ninja’ Turtles” fashion, are totally fixated on GPS-ing the joint. Cayce fell in that half-crazed, but full-on-enthusiastic middle category.

Cayce’s Atlantis was roughly the size of the Eur-Asian continent, and was divided into three giant islands. They had awesome technology. Their Xbox360s actually wrapped completely around the player, their version of Avatar was shot in 3E and all their novels were enjoyed in the form of physically addicting hypodermic injections. Powering the whole shebang? A whole bunch of huge, resonating crystals, including a super crystal that Cayce fans have decided must have been located in what is now the Bermuda Triangle.

But things weren’t all video games and book serums. There were two warring political factions – the upright crusaders for sunshine, called The Sons of the Law of One, and the mean old dag nasty constituents of yuckiness, The Sons of Belial. The biggest ongoing socio-political conflict hinged on “the Things,” a diverse species of subhuman chimeras with the intelligence and physical traits of animals, but the souls of humans. The Sons of Belial naturally wanted to enslave the Things. The Sons of the Law of One, on the other hand, wanted to evolve the Things into full-fledged humans. Probably by way of crystals. Long story short, the factions kept fussing and feuding until one day, they overpowered the crystals and the entire empire exploded (this may or may not have involved some sort of doomsday machine/”death ray” to which Cayce frequently alluded). According to the story, then, the lights that folks see shining up through the darkness of the Atlantic are still-pulsing remains of the Atlantean power cells. Likewise, the UFOs and USOs and crazy electromagnetic disturbances are also, supposedly, caused by the out-gassing of excess ancient crystal energy, which can cause strange manifestations and stuff.

Cayce also made a prediction: the Empire of Atlantis will rise again… in the 1960s.

So… that didn’t quite work out. What did happen in the ‘60s, though, was the discovery of the Bimini Road (sometimes referred to, drably, as the Bimini Wall), a half-mile-long linear strip of rectangular limestone blocks submerged beneath 6 meters of water off the northwestern coast of North Bimini Island (part of both the Bahamas and the Triangle). People effing freaked. Conjectures were pitched and volleyed. Is it an Antlantean thoroughfare? The outer surface of a much-more-complex Atlantean structure, like a weird octopus church or a lobsterball stadium? Could it actually be just a boring Atlantean wall?

No, no and no. Turns out it’s just a bunch of rocks. No tool marks are evident, similar formations have been discovered near other island chains and, also, seriously? A super advanced, crystal-powered civilization and the best they can do, road-wise, is jumble some stones into sort of a line? Even the enslaved Things could make a better road than that, and half of them had giraffe hands. Regardless, the Bimini Road was all it took to get a whole of mess New Agers and truth-seekers all frothed up and bonering over the possibility of a connection between The Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis and their precious crystals.

All we can conclude for sure is that, if there was an Edenic crystal-powered empire criss-crossed by uneven roads that were built by hideous subjugated mutants, they probably had some really weird pornography.

Walk it Off – an abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

Today’s ailment: Hair Loss

A Box of Memories

You will need: One Box
Instructions: Save all hair sheddings in box
Note: Also great for your “Hoarders” audition tape.

Lard and Iron: The John Goodman Story

You will need: Magnetic Iron Ore (Powdered); Hog Lard
Instructions: Mix ore into lard; Rub on head

Hair Of The Babe That Bit You After You Pulled Its Hair Out

You will need: A Baby That Has Just Grown its First Hairs; Baby’s Mother’s Permission; One Toy Train
Instructions: Pull out baby’s hair; Reward baby with choo-choo

Sort Of Like The Opposite Of Your Werewolf Transformation
You will need: New Moon (In terms of phase, not freshness)
Instructions: Cut hair at night
Note: Hair will grow back fuller and longer than before. Does not work on genitals.

Only Smokey Can Prevent Head Deforestation, Meaning Hair Loss. Okay, That’s a Stretch

You will need: 1 Bear; 1 Grease Harvesting Implement
Instructions: Obtain bear’s excess grease; Massage grease into scalp.

Hobo Percussionist

You will need: Both hands
Instructions: Rub fingernails together
Note: Works best if done continuously and in the same room where someone is trying to read.

Aesop’s Deleted Scene

You will need: 1 Lion; Pliers; String; Iron Cajones
Instructions: Pull out one of lion’s teeth; Tie tooth to string; wear as necklace
Note: Also great for your “When Animals Attack” audition tape.

Amateur Choreography

You will need: 1 Elder Tree
Instructions: Walk around elder tree three times; Jazz hands (optional)

The Rerouting Method (Only for Beardos)

You will need: 1 Razor
Instructions: Shave off beard

Bah Ram Eww!

You will need: 1 Ram; 1 Rubber-Tipped Ram-Gagging Stick
Instructions: Use gagging stick to gag ram until ram vomits; Continue gagging ram; Gag ram until ram’s stomach is empty and ram is still sort of vomiting but is really just bringing up thick strings of bile; Smear bile on head.
Note: Not the worst “Amazing Race” audition tape you could submit.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Monday we learned just why The Triangle might be the strangest result of number fudging in history.

It might be lost forever, but Flight 19 will never be forgotten. And not because generations to come will delight in the hootenanny that is the history of military training disasters. It’s because of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” in which Flight 19 is discovered (minus its directionally challenged flight leader and 13 aerial lemmings) in the Arizona desert. Spielberg’s implication was, of course, that the Brian Eno-wannabe aliens, who later blasted their astro-synths at a potato-sculpting Richard Dreyfus, were somehow responsible for the group’s disappearance and, it would seem, at least some of the Bermuda Triangle’s alleged spooky weirdness.

When Spielberg suggested that aliens are cherry-picking human subjects out of the Atlantic Ocean, he was merely creating a broad historically based fiction in order to bolster the plot of a narrative film. When writer Ivan Sanderson proposed that the Bermuda Triangle is one of 12 “Vile Vortices” – lozenge-shaped areas of ocean where the Earth’s energy fields host slammin’ electromagnetic parties – he was stating a scientific hypothesis. Sanderson’s ideas were subsequently absorbed into the New Age movement, which used them to create the World Grid theory. Essentially, according to pony-tailed acolytes of energy fields, Earth is a giant, resonating crystal with equidistant harmonic power areas, both positive (Sedona, AZ; Easter Island, etc.) and negative (the Bermuda Triangle, etc.). New Agers use these principles to explain stuff like crystal healing and energy centers and how pan flue music shields your soul from psychical tumors or whatever. UFO groupies apply them to abduction theories.

One theory states that the Triangle’s electromagnetic disturbances represent the opening and closing of transdimensional portals – the 12 Vile Vortices serve as doggie doors for daytripping extraterrestrials looking to sightsee and butt probe without all the cumbersome intergalactic schlepping. This notion hinges on the assumption that the alien races visiting Earth have mastered a means of transportation that involves the bending of electromagnetic fields and gravity. The vortices, then, operate sort of like naturally existing station platforms to which the intrepid space kidnappers can easily navigate. Or else the aliens earmarked a few selected areas of the planet for inter-spatial teleportation. You get to decide. At a certain point, the craziness just sort of plateaus off into a flat surface perfect for use as a bughouse buffet table of competing insanities.

Government tests! Alien joy riding! Abduction! AFTER THE JUMP!

Take the Philadelphia Experiment, for example. This classic conspiracy theory states that, in 1943, the Navy conducted a series of invisibility/teleportation experiments on a destroyer escort called the USS Eldridge. The government, it’s said, was using the principles of Einstein’s unified field theory to bend light, thereby, making the ship invisible. Supposedly, the first test got it right, but also managed to nauseate the crewmen, who, as a result, were none too excited when it was announced that there was gonna be an even lengthier second take. The next time around, the Eldridge vanished AND instantly teleported over 200 miles away, where it was discovered that several crew members were both nauseated and molecularly fused to portions of the ship.

Do you see where this is going? The field bending? The teleportation? Yup. Some folks think that the government was employing the same experimental propulsion tactics used by the Triangle-frequenting UFOs, whose repeated jaunts over the restless mid-Atlantic waters either account for, or confirm, the area’s deadly and mysterious physics. (For a great pop cultural example of this type of government testing, see the fantastic X-Files two-parter “Dreamland” in which electromagnetic experimentation finds David Duchovny swapping bodies with a randy, wise-cracking Man in Black played by Michael McKean.)

The other theory? Aliens have nothing to do with the forces that find folks getting lost, confused and turned around in the Triangle, but they do take advantage of them. Historically, whatever time the space-hopping weekend warriors weren’t spending helping humans build pyramids and teaching guerilla armies to guard their crystal skeletons, they were watching boatloads of people tread tiring circles through the tidal currents and magnet storms of the Bermuda Triangle. When the time came to start grabbing up human test subjects for microchip installations and dentistry practice, they knew where to find some easy pickins who – bonus! – would be assumed to have simply fallen victim to a wholly terrestrial threat. Basically, in the oil-black eyes of a fat-headed alien, a person in the Bermuda Triangle is like the cross-eyed Korean-made teddy bear sitting on the tippy-top of the crane game prize pile.
And if the combined threat of electromagnetic storms raging all around you while space aliens attack from above wasn’t enough, wait until you hear what’s lurking beneath the frothing waters of the Bremuda Triangle.

Friday: The Triangle and Atlantis

Below are descriptions of three grotesque monsters. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a creature that has actually been reported. Can you Find the Fiend?

a.) This bizarre man-sized grub-like creature is rumored to assist populations in containing outbreaks of mass hysteria or insanity.

b.) These giant crustaceans are supposedly able to increase their own intelligence by feeding on the brains of smarter animals.

c.) This shape-shifting mosquito-like monster is accused of sucking unborn fetuses out of pregnant women’s wombs.

Answer after the cut.

The correct answer is c.)

As early as the 1500s, and probably going back even further, the Aswang terrified the good folks of the Philippines. It isn’t just that the Aswang is whip smart, mega evil and squarin’ to suck the baby right outta yer gut (or even, in some stories, the infant outta its crib) – Aswangs can shapeshift, and are thought to masquerade themselves as neighbors, friends or even family members. During the day, when an Aswang is in human form, it’s as demure and reserved as a Catholic girl. Come night time, though, that sh*t goes wild. Like a Catholic girl. Fortunately, there are ways to tell if a person is an incognito Aswang.

If your reflection in someone’s eye is upside down, or otherwise distorted, that person is probably an Aswang. Additionally, there’s a special Aswang alarm juice that can be cooked up from coconut meat and a variety of other plant stems; When an Aswang approaches the fragrant potion, the liquid begins to boil. Known Aswangs can be quickly dispatched via stingray tails or salt. Also, they apparently don’t like to be shown pictures of grandmothers or have semen thrown on them. According to Wikipedia, semen “irritates” them. (I always hate this kind of stuff, like how vampires can be killed by decapitation. Only tell me if something can’t be killed that way. Or, in this case, if something wants me to throw semen at it. Otherwise, I sort of just assume.) Anyway, Aswangs – as terrifying as their name is funny.

Statement a.) described the queller demon from the Season 5 “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” episode “Listening to Fear.” Far from loved, but not quite hated, this mediocre episode always struck a chord with me for some reason. As Glory terrorizes Sunnydale, feeding off the minds of its residents, insane people start stacking up and Ben – Glory’s frustrated, individually sentient human vessel – decides to summon a meteorite-riding queller demon. Deemed an “X-Files reject” (it totally does have Flukeman mouth) by one BuffyGuide.com user, the half-larval, half-roachy creature that zips down out of space and starts suffocating the nutters is one of the more ridiculous practical monsters ever designed for the show. My counter argument? Der Kindestod from Season 2’s “Killed by Death” – an even stupider monster in an even more worthless episode.

Statement b.) described the crab monsters from Roger Corman’s 1957 film “Attack of the Crab Monsters.” The crab monsters were created by the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll. They eat brains and then get smart from the brains. Had they been allowed to flourish unchecked, the crab monsters would have eventually eaten enough brains to figure out how to conduct their own nuclear tests, resulting in a bunch of mutated starfish fixing to deliver wild, unrestrained karmic justice. Instead, humanity kills the crab monsters and stumbles blindly forward toward the next inevitable mutant catastrophe – 1959’s “Attack of the Killer Shrews.”

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Make sure you come back to read all about the Bermuda Triangle Wednesday and Friday.

If certain versions of events are to be believed, Flight 19 – and the 14 skilled airmen who were desperately trying to navigate 5 TBM Avengers back to the safety and dry land of the Floridian coast – disappeared with their compasses inexplicably spinning and the crewmen babbling incoherently across a static-drenched radio connection. We know the planes took off from Fort Lauderdale’s Naval base on December 5, 1945, with instructions to perform a standard training exercise dubbed “Navigation problem No. 1.” We also know that navigation soon became the mission’s no. 1 problem. To quote flight leader Charles Taylor, “I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land but it’s broken. I am sure I’m in the Keys but I don’t know how far down and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.” We also know that Flight 19 pulled an impressive aerial abracadabra – five planes and 14 people, poof, gone, forever.

19 years later, “Argosy” magazine, a classic American pulp publication specializing in adventure stories, published a feature article written by Vincent H. Gaddis. The piece was entitled “The
Deadly Bermuda Triangle” and introduced America to a new and dangerous menace whose insidious machinations were as wily and mysterious as its three-sided geometry was certain. While past articles in various other publications had laundry listed notable boat and plane disappearances in the southern Atlantic, including a 1962 piece in America Legion magazine
– “The Lost Patrol” – that directly implicated supernatural forces in the vanishing of Flight 19, no one had previously assigned such a snappy, sensational title to the area, much less such a handily imagined shape.

Gaddis’ version of the triangle’s wily super powers read like something out of a Dharma Initiative file folder: “[The] aberration might be called ‘a hole in the sky’… It is obvious that it occurs only occasionally in the well-traveled triangle area, without warning, but frequently enough to be alarming.” The article goes on to talk about the possibility of severe, but highly localized, magnetic storms and gravitational anomalies. Gaddis never addresses the possibility
of designing a simple button that could be pressed to control these phenomena, but does make several cryptic Slusho! references.

Find out why the factual basis for the Bermuda Triangle is shoddy even by urban legend standards AFTER THE JUMP…

If you’re trying to picture the hypothetical borders of America’s most infamous polygon outside of the Pentagon and Times Square, don’t bother. The imaginary limits have been altered and expanded so many times by so many different authors desperate to scapegoat the death shape in explaining this or that oceanic disaster, it’s a wonder that the thing hasn’t metastasized into an octagon and sprawled its magnet-crazed ass out over half the continent. For what it’s worth, Gaddis described the triangle thusly: “Draw a line from Florida to Bermuda [I assume he means, like, on a map], another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third line back to Florida through the Bahamas.” Boom. Bermuda Triangle.

Let’s be clear on one thing though: This is complete codswallop. And not in that urban legendy way where the facts aren’t explicitly true, but the story provides a narrative window into the culture clockwork of American social paranoia and phobias. It’s really just a heap of wanton data mangling and a butter-fingered handling of research reporting. Period. Proportionately speaking, the area doesn’t actually boast any more disappearances or accidents than any other like-sized chunk of aquatic real estate. Furthermore, many of the ships that supposedly “disappeared” in the triangle merely got lost and returned to port several days later than scheduled. FurtherGurthermore, the area is known for its abundance of tropical storms, and the invisible tugging mischief of the Gulf Stream, which can easily make trouble for carelessly piloted small water craft. Look, sundry debunkers have flapped their jaws numb on this topic, so I’m not gonna draw it out.

One last thing though – remember when flight leader Charles Taylor reported that his cadre of government bombers was lost, but chugging along, above the Florida Keys? Well, Taylor and his crew were actually wandering the skies above the Bahamas, which Taylor mistook for the Keys. Meaning Taylor’s report that all of the compasses had failed was most likely the result of the pilot’s faulty navigational assumptions rather than the compass’ functionality. The subsequent investigation, accordingly, placed full responsibility on Taylor, who, it turns out, had a prior record of plane ditching and ocean-rescue needing.

But, hey, let’s not let any of that truthy garbage spoil our fun. After all, The Bermuda Triangle is a cool idea… it’s just, you know, a colossally stupid theory. Five decades of triangle contemplation have led to some wild hypotheses and wonderful collisions between the deadly
new shape and existing folktales and legends.

Those of you who have been impatiently waiting for an excuse to exhume the playful, early-aughts slang exclamation “booyah!” – this would be it.

Wednesday: The Triangle and UFOs

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Check out the origins of the Grinning Man or how one journalist became the the focal point of the legend.

As has become apparent to any frustrated readers who would prefer insane stories of paranormal weirdness over weird stories of insane journalists, the tale of the Grinning Man says a lot more about reporter John Keel than it does about any sort of alien visitors or psychic
census takers. Looking at Internet assessments of Grinning Man facts and guesses, then, it’s hard to ignore that, in many cases, Keel is missing. The Wikipedia article at least mentions that Keel recorded all three sightings. (The opening blurb says that ufologist John Moseley also investigated the Grinning Man, which is sort of true… he tagged along on Keel’s initial trip to gather testimony from the Jersey witnesses.) Meanwhile, other sites simply paraphrase accounts of the stories without so much as a tip of the hat to the intrepid reporter, save for, in some cases, a brief walk-on appearance as Interviewer 1.

As one of Weird Things’ major preoccupations is examining the ways in which legends like that of the Grinning Man are able to proliferate and thrive outside the slipshod pretenses of their primary sources, it’s important to understand the significance of Keel’s relative absence from
the this whole smiling, green-suited clustercuss. I think we can all agree that, without Keel’s badgering insistence, it would be pretty difficult to make the case that the entities encountered in all three sightings are one in the same, or even distantly related. In fact, the only real link between them (aside from an affinity for easily donned green haberdashery) is the ancillary UFO activity that allegedly preceded each encounter. It’s no surprise, then, that these supposed
(by Keel no less!) unearthly airspace incursions provide the basis for the Grinning Man’s continued legacy.

From ProfilingtheUnexplained.com: “He usually appears around the time of UFO sightings.” Also – “He couldn’t be associated with the Men in Black, since he supposedly wears a shimmering green outfit.” (I just enjoy the latter quote because a.) It’s the concluding sentence in the site’s article and b.) you’d think cryptid-rabid Web publishers would immediately conclude that the green suit is precisely why he might be Men in Black, as not wearing black would be a great way for him to hide his affiliation. Come on guys, I’m not even a paranoid maniac and I figured that one out.)

Find the rest, AFTER THE JUMP…

On his blog “The Truth,” UFO enthusiast “Zapruder” described driving past the Grinning Man, who was creepily loitering among some bushes in Roswell, NM. He asserts that “The grinning man is often said to be brutal, beating people up.” Well… all right. His account also includes
this even more ridiculous assessment of the chorus to “Easy Lover”- “I was listening to the radio at the time, Phil Collins and Phillip Bailey’s Easy Lover. However, before the amazing chorus, the radio cut out… ”

What’s interesting about this image of the Grinning Man as some sort of otherworldly, perhaps even governmentally employed, UFO chaser is that, while based on Keel’s three disparate accounts of Indrid Cold, it doesn’t match Keel’s actual theory at all. Keel believed that UFO
activity, The Grinning Man, the Mothman, Bigfoot, etc. are all physical manifestations of an “ultraterrestrial” force that asserts its presence on Earth by taking the physical form of popular folkloric/legendary figures. He posits, for example, that demon sightings in the middle
ages were more prevalent than demon sightings today because a majority of ye olde citizenry accepted the notion of living, tangible demons, a belief that allowed the “ultraterrestrial” power to take on the visible characteristics of said demons. In the 1960s, when everyone believed in
UFOs (and Mothmen and Grinning Men… I guess????), the super magic alien aura physically emulated the antagonists of those stories. Hence, all the various oogity boogitys that Keel encountered.

See? Maybe he was a bit of a nut. Aside from the argument’s inherent logical catch-22 (an otherwordly power is responsible for sightings of well-known phenomena when said phenomena are only well known because of previous sightings), what the hell is he talking about?

All well-meaning Keel mocking aside, the larger point here is that because The Grinning Man legend only attained “legend” status in the first place because Keel was intent on taking three similar stories and playing narrative connect-the-dots, without Keel’s interpretation, it falls on readers of the accounts (accounts that are still being treated as legitimately linked related occurrences) to formulate their own conclusions. Today’s theories about the so-called Grinning Man are based on a slanted correlation between three accounts sans any acknowledgement of the slant or its eccentrically biased architect. And so the stories begin to form a fresh, though equally baseless, legend – a legend linked to wild government conspiracy, alien abduction and UFO sightings.

Next time you read an eye-witness account of a paranormal encounter or supernatural happenstance, don’t just consider the witness. Consider the writer. Most of them – me included – have far more decisive agendas than the blurry creatures and sinister lens smudges that they aim to uncover.

Look, people – I like those Saw movies. Judge if you want, but please don’t convict. I didn’t accost your delicate sensitivities when you were spit polishing the crown for Jason Reitman’s indie cred coronation. I politely clenched my throat to stifle the wet gags that came rolling up in the wake of your sacred dagger-wielding, blood-sworn Family Guy sacrament. Please withhold the stones, the jeers, the mass up-thrusting of rusty pitchforks, the lighting of oil-soaked rags
draped around halved shovel handles, the mob chants and rally cries and out-of-sync choruses – “Heretic! Blasphemer!”

I was at a bar the other night, ripping into a chorizo enchilada like I was the slow back-half of a wolf pack arriving late to the kill and diving in gracelessly, all desperate expectation, certain of the organic warmth, but unsure of the contents, and the topic of Saw wormed up to the surface. A bearded kid who was all Child’s Play and Elm Street (Brad Dourif and Robert Englund, we toast thee) before finally asking, maybe expecting confrontation, maybe even out for blood, maybe already charting a course to the door – weave around Giggling Cleavage, two steps left passed Ice-Stirring Stubble, then a cursory “scuse me” to Nose-Ringed Desperation and Dreadlocked Fear of Commitment before, swish, night air, fists up and into the ally – what do you think of the
Saw movies?

“I – I like the Saw movies” I responded, before, of course, appending the self-delusional caveat (read: justification) “or… I like the idea of them.”

Matthew decides enough is enough… AFTER THE JUMP

But then I steeled up, armored my convictions, accessorized my tone with a confidence that bore down across the pint glasses and tortilla wreckage like a peppermint-striped jousting rod front-ending an oncoming black knight. “I like the Saw movies because they represent the first
dependable horror franchise…” (And excuse me here – I’m stripping all the booze, passion and untoward verbal pauses out of my otherwise demonstrative declaratives) “… since Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street.” More than that though – because who but the most chat-
rooming, semantics-happy opinion parser among you can disagree without at least offering me two hands raised toward the heavens and an ecstatic proclamation of “Amen, Brother… but…” – I foamed and blathered about the Saw folks’ unfaltering dedication and commitment to a green-label story with black-label pretensions.

Because, at the end of all things – the volcanic immolation, the meteoric sayonara, the inevitable turning of blood to powder in the wake of the final Kaboom! – isn’t that what the Saw series is? Isn’t that its well-meaning Pollyanna?

When the first film landed like an altar boy’s hangover fart, assaulting a sacred space with the noxious byproducts of wondrous past intoxicants (here, of course, I’m referring to the cinema, and the bevy of superior films, beginning with Se7en and ending with all the movies that ripped off Se7en, ladies choice), I was able to shrug it off with the same brand of indifferent, popcorn-stuffed ambivalence I’ve proffered to half-decent could’ves like Orphan and The Collector, and
indecent should’ves like The Unborn and Mirrors. But when 2, 3 and 4 came out, intent, brows-furrowed and limbered up, desperate to play with structure, to plumb the creek-deep mythology for bigger thematic fish than could ever possibly survive in such shallow, hard water, well, they
earned my respect.

And continue to do so.

It’s all about that commitment. The way the characters stack up in tilting, swaying columns and, though we beg the filmmakers, “reduce, remove, toss some to the side, it’s falling, it’s falling for the sweet holy love of Jesus, our Jesus, heads up!,” the scribes and directors refuse, resist, cross their arms and insist – despite stutters and sweat, nervous glances and shuffling feet – “there’s a plan!” The way the timeline loops back around itself, movie after movie, twist
after twist, covering the cost of ridiculous high-stakes expositional bets with sure winnings cached through blood and guts card counting – like early M. Night Shyamalan forgoing the cinematic table games for hard-R nickel slots. The hard-headed insistence – or sheepish contractual surrender – that finds Tobin Bell in every film, defying even the implied statutes of the franchise’s fast-and-loose canon. The whole thing plays out like one of jigsaw’s tedious contraptions – an over-engineered device for brain destruction where any other slasher movie would’ve used a knife and been done with it in a single, linear swipe.

But that would be too easy.

I like those Saw movies.

And who are you to judge? You probably like Family Guy.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Check out the origins of the Grinning Man and hear how things with ol’ GN are these days on Friday.

A brief personality test to help determine optimist/pessimist status: Is John Keel half full of crap or a halfway decent, if overly superstitious, journalist?

Let’s lay all our cryptid trading cards on the table – The Grinning Man is sort of John Keel’s joint. He interviewed the kids in Jersey and he recorded the account of Woodrow Derenberger. More to the point, he linked the accounts together under a looming, toothy umbrella, thereby, creating a monster. Had there only ever been those two encounters, and had Keel been content to forego conclusions and just revel in the sheer weirdness of the whole thing, I’d be more apt to come down on the optimist side of the test question – that Keel is well-meaning and proficient at collecting accurate witness accounts, but a tad overeager in the extent to which he analyzes and collates his data.

But then there’s the third account.

Grinning man aside, Keel spent much of 1966 in Point Pleasant West Virginia hot footing it after a shadowy airborne monstrosity with giant red eyes and a penchant for lurking. Written and filmic accounts of the Mothman’s year-long tenure in the Mountain State are multitudinous. For our purposes, all you really need to know is that beginning in November of 1966, multiple residents of Point Pleasant reported seeing a giant creature flying in the skies above their homes and just sorta milling about in their yards. Residents of the small town chattered and cowered and speculated themselves to the brink of mass hysteria. The sightings only tapered off the following December after the Silver Bridge, a local suspension bridge spanning the Ohio river, collapsed, killing 46 people. Keel suggests that all the Mothman’s ooking and spooking was a prescient, unheeded warning of the bridge’s unstable condition (in which case, worst supernatural portent ever). I, on other hand, tend to wonder if, in the minds of the populace, a massive, bloody disaster trumps rumored sightings of a fairly non-descript neighborhood bogeyman.

Much more AFTER THE JUMP…Either way, Keel chronicled the Mothman investigation in his first book, “The Mothman Prophecies.” Along with all the Mothman speculation, Keel goes on and on about a pantsload of other paranormal phenomena that supposedly accompanied the red-eyed seers arrival, including psychic activity, UFO sightings, encounters with the Men in Black and, of course, a cameo by the Grinning Man.

The Lilly family – momma, daddy and teenage daughter – lived on the outskirts of Point Pleasant. During the reign of the Mothman, they began experiencing a bunch of Poltergeist-like activity (slamming cabinets, bumps in the night, two knocks on the pipe because, apparently, the Mothman didn’t want them) in conjunction with weird, colored lights in the sky above their house. A concerned Keel Muldered his way into their lives and, under the auspices of “investigating” the phenomena, asked them totally not at all leading questions about whether they’d encountered any strangers in or around the house. 16-year-old Linda Lilly confessed that she had, in fact, awoken suddenly one night and seen a large, smiling man standing over her bed.

Maybe, one might suggest, it was merely a vivid dream, or a drowsy hallucination molded from shadows by the slowly receding fingers of sleep. Maybe visions of that sort aren’t all that unexpected when the person in question has bughouse parents who are tripping balls off the heresay exhaust vented off by the town’s overactive rumor mill.

But Keel didn’t make any of those suggestions. He took the girl’s vague account at face value and, voila! A third appearance by the Grinning Man.

So, is John Keel half full of crap or a halfway decent, if overly superstitious, journalist?

His enthusiasm to link the gaudily-attired Jersey Grinning Man to Derenberger’s telepathic Indrid Cold to the shadowy figure in Linda Lilly’s bedroom represents an involved subjectivity that runs far too deep to take any of the accounts at face value. At the same time, I don’t believe Keel intentionally fabricated anything.

Does that make me an optimist or pessimist? I dunno. Maybe there’s a third option.

Perhaps John Keel was sort of a nut. A half full of crap, halfway decent journalist nut.

Either way, he certainly managed to start something.

Friday: The Grinning Man Today

If for some reason you haven’t see Alien, this post contains minor spoilers. And is probably really confusing.

Last week, Ridley Scott coughed up a bunch of details regarding his forthcoming Alien prequel. As many speculated, the film will, among other things, explain the origins of the strange chair-mounted “space jockey” that the Nostromo’s crew discovers inside the ova-packed derelict spaceship. In other words, Scott’s going for the obvious choice and, in doing so, opting to destroy one of the weirder, more evocative touches of mystery in the entire series. I have no problem with X-Men Origins-ing this bitch, but let’s be smart about it. There’s a whole Nostromo’s worth of characters to back story:

Treacherous Milk: The Story of Ash – How about a film centered on the construction and programming of this back-stabbing android? You can have the Weyland-Yutani scientists churning his robot milk and priming his dickish superiority engine while they have heated arguments about what sort of combat training to give him. Once they finely land on rolled up magazine suffocation tactics, there can be a bad-ass Danger Room-type fight simulation where Ash’s only means of defense is a bandolier full of National Geographics. Obviously, we also want to see them programming Ash’s weird xenomorph fetish, complete with complexly rendered sex dreams featuring the alien’s big, shiny banana head.

Or how about The Rise and Fall of Parker and Brett, a show business biopic in which we learn that the Nostromo’s engineering officers were once a popular Vaudeville act whose signature routine, “The Bonus Situation,” found them cashing in big on the interracial corporate-themed slapstick duo circuit. But when the mob comes knocking, Brett and Parker let them in, and take their coats. And then escape out a window. Now the mob wants their coats back. Disguising themselves as starship HVAC techs, Brett and Parker stowaway on a cargo vessel, flee the planet and contract space alcoholism. Cut to “Alien.”

I’d also watch South to Dallas, an action-adventure/coming-of-age movie depicting the thrilling tomfoolery of a rugged, young Captain Dallas as he smuggles, gambles and sass-talks his way to the wrong side of the tracks, where he meets, and falls in love with, a promiscuous tattooed smoker. During the course of their sexy, gun-slinging, cross-country romp, we learn that Dallas is terrible at orienteering and often gets North and South confused, which is like a metaphor for his life and decision making, and also, at one point, the hard-living couple actually travels from Oklahoma to Texas. What I’m saying is that the title is really clever.

Kane’s movie would probably be a raucous workplace comedy in which his good intentions, pleasant demeanor and consummate professionalism make him an object of scorn, ridicule and an escalating series of hilarious pranks involving toilets. Maybe it could be called Hazing Kane. That way, when you re-watch alien, you’ll be so used to seeing the quiet and sweetly pathetic Executive Officer bagged on, the chest burster sequence will evoke only resigned head shaking and tutting exclamations of, “Oh, Kane!”

Nobody wants to see a Lambert movie. Maybe if the plot of the movie was that she fell off a boat. Even then I wouldn’t want her to have any dialogue. And it would have to be a super awesome boat. Like, super super.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Keep your eyes peeled for more on this legend Wednesday and Friday.

If there’s anything our humble website has consistently supplied, it’s wicked band names. Peruse the site’s archives and you’ll find any number of stage-ready esoteric idioms referring to manimals, animen, lake monsters, alchemists and bigfeet. And today, I’ve got a good one for you, so all you pale faces with the triangle haircuts and emotional hematomas listen up: Indrid Cold. Or “Blood Roof.” There’s no story behind Blood Roof, though. I just made that up now. Indrid Cold, on the other hand, is a name that was telepathically whispered into the jittering mind of a petrified man named Woodrow Derenberger (terrible f***ing band name) as he stared into the black eyes of a creature unlike anything he had ever encountered.

Before we get there though, you need to hear about these two snot-nosed Jersey kids. The year was 1966. The place: Elizabeth, New Jersey. It was the beginning of October and James Yanchitis and Marvin Munoz were heading home after a long day of whatever. (Let’s say walking the local railroad tracks to stick-prod a corpse and, as a result, come of age.) As they turned onto Fourth Street, the topic of conversation probably turned from girls onto the recent reports of nearby UFO sightings and a rumor that, earlier that same evening, a tall green man had chased one of their neighbors down the very road they were travelling. As the talk turned back to how much a girl’s boobs would bounce if she were being chased by a tall green man, the boys saw something that befuddled and terrified them – standing behind a sizeable wire fence, which separated the residential streets from the steep hill leading up to the bustling Jersey turnpike, was a giant, looming figure decked out in shiny green coveralls.

According to the boys, the man guy thing, who was bald and beady-eyed and well over six feet tall, turned toward them and pulled his lips up into a gargantuan smile. Needless to say, they made like bananas and split. And then they made like bloggers and didn’t stop blathering on about the “crazy thing that happened to them today,” which is how they attracted the interest of a journalist named John Keel. Keel, who met with the boys three days after the incident and heard all about the mystery man’s giant black belt and apparent lack of ears and a nose, had recently undertaken a massive, nationwide study of UFOs and related paranormal phenomena. Soon after chatting up the Jersey boys about the hulking brute of a weirdo that Keel dubbed the Grinning Man, the journalist met with West Virginian Woodrow Derenberger, who supplied him with a different moniker for the smiling interloper.

Want more Grinning Man? Find him AFTER THE JUMP!

Derenberger claimed that he’d been innocently tooling along Interstate 77 (not doubt imagining a tall green man pursuing a naked lady) when he heard a loud crashing sound and, looking in the rearview, witnessed a bizarre vehicle shredding balls down the highway behind him. The zany car, which Derenberger described as looking like an “old-fashioned kerosene lamp chimney,” tore past him and immediately screeched to a movie-worthy sideways halt, so as to block off the entire road. According to Derenberger’s testimony, the thing that climbed out of the chimney-mobile was immensely tall, sporting shiny green coveralls and wearing an absurd parody of a grin. It was at this point that the figure introduced itself, telepathically of course, as Indrid Cold, and began to interrogate the wigged out motorist about recent UFO activity in the area.

Before leaving the frightened West Virginian to puzzle over the strange encounter, and secretly dream of one day owning his own asphalt-crushing lamp chimney, Cold promised Derenberger that he’d see him again.

Keel scoured the details of both Grinning Man encounters. In the kids’ story, the manthing had been bald. But Derenberger described him as having slicked-back hair. Was there more than one smile-sporting fashion-ignorant giant on the loose? Was one of them a character from Wacky Races? Every witness agreed that the stranger sported a discomforting smile, and both meetings seemed linked to UFO activity. Was the Grinning Man (or men) as ridiculously stricken with paranoid sky-watching as the rest of 1960s America? Isn’t the phrase “Blood Roof” vivid and evocative?

The Kolchakian reporter’s second-hand dalliances with the Grinning Man were far from over – their next supernatural tango would coincide with the biggest case of the Keel’s career.

Wednesday: Indrid and Mothman – Another Suitable Band Name

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Matt broke down the basics of the legend Monday and see how the legend was used to thwart Hitler on Wednesday…

That the classic tale of the vanishing hitchhiker took a bizarrely (pseudo)prophetic turn is, if not shocking, wholly unexpected; that this turn quickly veered religious seems inevitable. Really. How long could these regional tales of localized disaster survive as viable urban folklore? As the predictions often dealt with the short-term timelines of specific upcoming events (1933 World’s Fair, WWII, etc.), most of the prophecies, true or not, were rendered moot within a five-year time period. Also, doomy as they were, the random prognostications were missing what, to me, are the whole point of confabulating horrific future visions in the first place – specific lifestyle directives. (Perhaps the World’s Fair catastrophe rumors were meant to keep people away from the exhibition, but the prophecies themselves don’t indicate as much. I’m talking about something a bit more obvious.) Right? If you start a rumor that a town is going to succumb to a week-long hornet frenzy, you should build in a self-serving “unless…” Unless the townspeople buy x brand of pants (where x = company you own). Unless the residents build a windmill (where you stand to win $200 in bar bet that said town will construct a windmill). Unless people adhere to the tenets of x church.

Where x = the Church of Latter Day Saints.

The 1950s through the 1960s saw a preponderance of hitchhiking Nephites. For those of you who are a little bit rusty on your Book of Mormon, the Nephites (meaning followers of the prophet Nephi) are essentially Jesus’ personal assistants, and have been left to hang out on Earth until JC returns. Traditionally, the Nephites help out the Mormons during times of stress or upheaval. Accordingly, the stories of Nephite hitchhikers indicate struggles… struggles of a most interesting variety.

Read about how the wayward auto-prone ghost legend became an ominous portent for the end of the world AFTER THE JUMP…

These thumb-wagging friends of Jesus were telling Mormons to stockpile food. As the hitchhikers repeatedly explained over the course of more than 50 bummed rides, a nationwide famine was imminent and the Mormons needed to prepare for the blight, which would indicate the first signs of the coming apocalypse. According to Utah folklorist William Wilson, this story of the Nephite hitchhikers, and its corresponding message, was the most popular folktale among Mormon followers between 1955 and 1965. I specify Mormon followers because the story actually serves as sort of a challenge to Mormon Church leadership. Those struggles I alluded to earlier? They were within the Mormon Church.

The Book of Mormon, like most religious texts, features a vague grocery list of apocalyptic portents. Mormons are also taught that, come the first of these portents, food is to be stockpiled. With the Korean War raging, the Cold War feezing and the whole world walking on nuclear eggshells, it’s not surprising that some fraction of the Mormon faithful believed that the events alluded to in their doomsday scripture corresponded directly to the international crises of the time. The Mormon Church elders, however, did not hold this view.

In this case, the repurposing of the already-popular vanishing hitchhiker legend was a direct attempt to undermine church leadership and catalyze a sectarian deathwatch movement aimed at immediate doomsday preparation. And it was intelligently executed. Some versions of the tale even had the driver pick up the Nephite while on the way to the Latter-day Saint temple, a detail that’s irrelevant to most, but which would, in the eyes of a devout Mormon, lend immediate validity to the tale – only certain qualified Mormons were allowed to enter the temple. If the story came from such a highly regarded, faithful member of the congregation, it must be true. Of course, it probably didn’t. Regardless, Mormon leadership repeatedly downplayed the tales, claiming that if god really wanted to warn the church about the end of days, he’d certainly start with elders rather than send highway-trudging disciples to flag down random congregants.

Eventually, the stories tapered off, but accounts of all the reported Nephite encounters can still be found in the archives at Brigham Young University.

Onward and upward. Where x = the Catholic Church

Whether inspired by word of the Nephite road warriors or, more likely, by the same folklore-savvy, proselytizing mindset, similar stories about hitchhiking nuns began to crop up at the tail end of the 1970s. (There are a few disparate accounts of random hippy-type prophets breezily expounding upon the wonders of Jesus, but these hardly represent a trend.) While prophetic, vanishing nuns had already been appearing throughout Europe, their predictions (imminent natural disasters that never happened) seemed more in line with those of the secular Chicago-area hitchhikers. The nuns of the Pacific Northwest bore revelations that struck a bit closer to home.

Always described as a 50-60 year-old woman, and often portrayed wearing a nun’s habit, the Washington-/Oregon-based oracular phantom began her reign of randomized augury with a spate of suitably grim personalized predictions. One man reported that soon after picking up the woman, she started in on a spiel about God and salvation that ultimately ended in a warning: atone for your sins or die in a horrific road accident. Hearers of the tale, I suppose, were meant to reflect upon their own spiritual shortcomings and arrive at some sort of fear-induced religious epiphany. “But,” folks must have said, “the message was directed at that one person in the car. He probably murders kids and sells the bodies to pederasts or something. Until the creepy Cheshire nun tells me to repent, I ain’t doin’ nuffin’. C’mon, story, get up outta my figurative grill!”

This is where things start to get hazy. Supposedly, in the weeks leading up to the May 18, 1980, eruption of Mount Saint Helens, the same hitchhiking nun who had previously promised vehicular carnage to individual sinners began correctly predicting the date of the eruption and threatening all lapsed Christians (it’s interesting that, while many accounts portray her in the nun’s habit, a familiar accoutrement of the Catholic faith, several others don’t. Clearly, the tale began in the Catholic community and eventually broadened its scope to include Protestants, as well as all possible Christian converts) with volcanic immolation should they persist in their religious truancy. Of course, as tends to happen, all of the accounts in which the eruption was accurately predicted began circulating after said eruption. (There were pre-eruption accounts in which the volcanic eruption was ambiguously mentioned, but this can be accounted for by the fact that Mount Saint Helens had been experiencing venting and earthquakes as early as March of that year.)

While the Mormon story is one of the cleverest practical applications of modern folklore I’ve ever heard, the naggy nun tale actually hints at a broader cultural learning curve. The 1930s predictions of disaster in Chicago were rattling, but immediately dismissible when they didn’t pan out. But start spreading past tense, pre-dated stories after a definitive disaster? Folks will buy that for dollar.

In summary, if you see some wayward woman tramping along the shoulder of the road, one pale thumb extended into the dark air, keep driving. Or spray her with gravel if you want. Not because she’ a ghost, but because, you know, take that, hitchhiker!

Jason has killed a lot of folks with a lot of different tools. His victims may wonder, “Who is this man? And why is he murdering me?” Meanwhile, we the viewers want to know, “What is that tool he’s using? And what’s its history?”

Wonder no longer.

Today: Fireplace Poker

As used by Jason in: Friday the 13 Part III; Friday the 13th (2009)

Victim(s): Chili; Officer Lund

The history of man’s dominion over every non-shark thing on Earth hinges upon one thing: the creation of fire. It’s what sets humans apart from the firemen. After discovering the three elements needed to make fire (oxygen, an ignition source, a police car), man created three additional elements to maintain that fire – the spade, the tongs and the poker. The poker is used to push and pull logs around so as to moderate and distribute the fire’s airflow. If we compare the power structure of these three tools to that of an animal crime fighting team where there’s a lizard that can teleport, a dog that can push and pull flaming logs around and an eagle that can fire a gun with its beak, the poker is most like the eagle because it’s the leader of the team. If we compare the abilities of the tools to those of the same team, I guess the poker’s more like the dog, though I don’t see why the Eagle couldn’t just shoot the logs into place.

TRUTH BUSTERS TRUE CRIME ATTACK! In 2008, 71-year-old realtor Ann Nelson was beaten unconscious with a fireplace poker and then burnt to death. Her killer, Illinoisan sex offender James Hole, received life in prison. BOOM! That’s a justice sandwich with Coke and a side for just $4.95. No napkins, extra mayo. (Sound of jail door closing.)

Did you call my firestick a stoker? More True Crime Attacks! AFTER THE JUMP…

Some people call a poker a “stoker,” which comes from the term “stoked,” an adjective one uses to describe his or her feeling of excitement while waiting for the lights to go down at a Poison concert. Other people call it a “firestick.” These are the same people who call the television a “picture box” and a sandwich a “food whatever.” The first pokers used by the cavemen were their big, stupid hands. Next they tried to use a long wooden stick, but then the scene panned out and we saw that the stick was actually a dinosaur’s tail and the the dinosaur glared at the cavemen and the cavemen sheepishly smiled and put down the tail and a wacky chase ensued. Finally, one caveman in lab coat invented metal, thus paving the way for the modern fireplace poker. Some pokers only have a poking end for pushing. Some only have a hook end for pulling. Others have both a pokey bit and a hooky bit, giving them the ability to reproduce in the wild. Jeff Goldblum – we owe you a Diet Sierra Mist.

TRUTH BUSTERS TRUE CRIME ATTACK! In 2005, Pvt. Timothy Parker fought and killed Spc. Piotr Szczypka. The prosecution alleged the Szczypka was done in by a fireplace poker, but the coroner testified that his death was most likely caused by powerful punch to the skull. BOOM! That’s a free 14-day trial of conflicting forensic evidence with no obligation to join. And we’re gonna send you a tote bag. (Sound of jail door closing.)

While poor people diddled their dying embers with bent metal poles and ad hoc stoker’s made from their own amputated bones, rich folks designed elaborate custom pokers to match the architecture and decorative schemes of their palatial homes. Belgian Lords prodded burning hops using glass pokers filled with beer. French Ladies shuffled piles of cigarettes with giant pewter baguettes. Even King of Sky told Earth Mother send rock stick for stir moon fire. During the 1730s, some noble English families commissioned gold-inlayed ivory pokers carved to imitate the simple human bone pokers used by many destitute cripples. It wasn’t until 1898 that an affordable set of fireplace tools was mass produced for consumer purchase. The three-piece collection, manufactured in Missouri by the RL Hendrickson Manufacturing Company, sold for $1. Today, an original Hendrickson set sells at auction for upwards of $3,500. This is because the handles were made from pure cocaine, and were originally intended to double as drink stirrers.

TRUTH BUSTERS TRUE CRIME ATTACK! In 2007, Arkansas native Randall Lacy attacked and killed 47-year-old Randall Walker. Lacy confessed to slitting Walker’s throat after beating and stabbing him with a fireplace poker. Lacy was sentenced to death. BOOM! That’s an Arkansas conviction prize pack! 4 sun visors, 2 tickets to Six Flags, a $35 gift certificate to Chile’s, and a mystery prize that we can’t reveal, but I’ll give you a hint… IT’S A 2010 TOYOTA COROLLA! Swedish Fish for the kids! (Sound of jail door closing.)

Thank you, Jason, for helping us learn through murder.

Join me again soon for another thrilling installment of Jason Vorhees’ Arsenal!

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Matt broke down the basics of the legend Monday and keep an eye for the finale Friday…

Forget the demure courtesy and silent disappearance of that archetypical vanishing hitchhiker who left her stupid dead-person scarf in your car. If you’re going to haul a mysterious stranger around, you want something a little bit juicer than a sun-faded bandana. Like how about some prophecies? Impending natural disasters. Looming personal tragedies. Even the occasional standard-issue end-is-nigh doomsday harangue.

Sir/Madame, you are in luck -

As folklorists Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey sifted through a mess of 79 phantom hitchhiker stories, 9 of the retellings stood out immediately. In these accounts, the kindly driver is less freaked out by the sudden evaporation of his passenger than by the passionate fortune teller act she pulls immediately prior. (Note that the “she” in these stories is rarely the quiet, button-cute lass of the standard tale, but rather a haggard old crone who is only too eager to talk.)

Two such phantom seers predicted that a disaster would occur at Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair Exhibition. (The show ran smoothly.) One wrinkly clairvoyant warned that Michigan’s Northerly Island would disappear beneath the dark waters of the lake. (It remains unsaturated.) Another posthumous, psychic ol’ biddy even predicted the end of WWII. (A safe bet given the self-limiting timeline of every past global conflict, though, as this prediction had to have been made prior to Beardsley’s and Hankey’s 1941 study, the statement is still more of an empty logical truth than a spookily prescient observation.) Post prediction, each story played out as usual: hitchhiker poofs away without as much as a “thanks, sonny,” and the curious driver ultimately learns of the ride bummer’s deceased status.

To Beardsley and Hankey, these uniquely strange versions of the tale were merely evidence of a local variation, with 8 of the 9 accounts of mouthy dead know-it-alls coming out of the Chicago area. In a way, these head-scratching foretellings are no different than the supposedly prophetic tabloid articles that use numerology, liberal interpretation of ancient texts and an unapologetic flare for wild BSary to create endless predictions of natural disaster and apocalyptic horror. Except these ghost predictions don’t seem to be based on anything at all, opting instead to use the extant hitchhiker lore as a Trojan horse filled with strange portents of Illinoisan doom. To that end, it’s hard to decipher these legends. After all, tabloids have a bottom line to consider. It behooves them to traffic in the sensationalist and the deathly, no matter how spuriously derived.

Other than to shiver the timbers of the superstitious, what’s the sense in turning a harmless campfire tale into a timely warning of local catastrophe?

Find out, AFTER THE JUMP!

All I can do is offer a baseless, but plausible, possibility: Before the 1933 A Century of Progress exhibition opened in November, Chicago’s large Germanic population was in an uproar. Famed German pilot Hugo Eckener was scheduled to visit the fair in the “Graf Zeppelin,” an innovative passenger hydrogen blimp designed to travel long distances. Theoretically, his flight from the motherland would bolster German American pride, and offer the public a firsthand look at the pioneering airship. The only problem? Eckener was a huge supporter of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement. (Awkward!) Older German Americans insisted that the fair’s German American Building fly their home country’s traditional flag – a fashionable striped number featuring black, red and yellow. Meanwhile, both the German government and recent German immigrants demanded that the building use the country’s new German Reich flag – a red banner with a central white circle containing a black swastika. Soon, Jewish groups got in on the action and threatened a boycott. Things were not looking good.

In light of all this this, it wouldn’t be surprising if any one of these groups (or even frightened outsiders) started rumors of a fair disaster, based on the seething racial tensions or even just the slight possibility of a zeppelin disaster (though this was four years before the Hindenburg explosion). Having proven to be as virulent as it was creepy, the popular vanishing hitchhiker legend was a perfect vehicle for such a fearful prediction of urban chaos. This would also account for the one opposingly optimistic prediction about WWII, and, possibly, the statement about Northerly Island – one of the two exhibition-themed warnings described the entire fair toppling over into the lake, an image that could have easily been co-opted and re-packaged by local Northerly tale spinners.

Just a theory.

(Ultimately, the German American Building opened sans swastika flag, and the exhibition went off without ein hitch. Even the Hitler enthusiasts left the grounds happy after watching the “Graft Zeppelin” flying overhead, its monstrous tail merrily adorned with a pair of giant swastikas.)

But, Hey! That’s hardly the end of the hitchhiker story, though the next epidemic of phantom thumb-waggers – the 1970s invasion of evaporating nuns – would carry even larger socio-cultural ramifications.

Friday: Vanishing Hitchhikers and Divinity

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Look for new installments Wednesday and Friday…

It’s isn’t that I necessarily think that ghosts oughta have cars. It’s depressing to imagine an ectoplasmic ex-president or dead astronaut shoving some stalled out spectral beater along the shoulder of a deserted interstate. But they should have some form of transportation, right? Even if there were just a criss-crossing network of transastral zip lines that they could clip their faces to or something. The dead shouldn’t have to hitchhike. Looking through the annals of American folklore, though, I’d caution all of you to croak with at least one thumb intact because it looks like you’re going to be bumming a crapload of postmortem car rides to nowhere. Especially the ladies.

The vanishing hitchhiker is such a ubiquitous folktale that Jan Harold Brumvand, the University of Utah professor who, through a series of books, introduced the culture at large to the concept of urban legends, titled his first volume, “The Vanishing Hitchhiker.” If you haven’t heard the legend (or if it’s been updated so now it’s about a ghostly Facebook poke or something), the basic story goes as follow:

It’s late at night. A lonely dude is on his way home from a party. As he steers his car around a particularly spooky curve, his headlights catch the figure of an attractive female hitchhiker thumbing down his car from the shadows along the shoulder. The guy picks up the girl, who seems shy and distant. She quietly tells him where to drop her off, and they continue on in silence until they reach her nearby destination, at which point the pretty wayfarer vanishes without a trace.

Find out how the family or the vanishing hitchhiker gets dragged into all this nonsense AFTER THE JUMP…

Like every threepeated tale of a hook-handed killer or a crybaby bridge, this legend has variants. A lot of variants. In fact, it has so many alternate endings and interchangeable spine tingles that numerous folklorists have conducted exhaustive studies of the legend in an attempt to map out, both in space and time, the story’s multiple evolutions. One version finds the hitchhiker leaving a scarf or a hat behind in the car. When the driver grabs the forgotten accessory and runs it up to the hitchhiker’s door, the house’s current resident (sometimes a relative of the hitchhiker, sometimes not) informs him that the scarf’s owner, who matched the description of the hitchhiker to a t, died years ago. In another version, the driver offers the hitchhiker, who appears chilly and pale, his own coat or scarf, which he later finds draped over a cemetery headstone. Upon making some inquiries, he discovers that the person he picked up is the marked grave’s occupant. Sometimes the wandering ghost is hitchhiking on the anniversary of her death. Other times she was picked up at the former site of the horrific auto accident that killed her.

(Use of the female pronoun in regard to the hitchhiker is fairly consistent. I can’t think of any reason for this other than the obvious – it’s unlikely that a lonely midnight driver would pick up a pale, brawny man on the side of the road, no matter how shy he appeared.)

Obviously, the crux of all of these stories is a lone traveler’s unknowing encounter with the other side – a random act of kindness punctuated by a moment of wholly unexpected mortal dread (often on the part of both the driver and the queried family member) in the wake of the wandering ghost’s unceremonious departure. In one way, the story offers a strange sense of comfort – a restless spirit lost and desperate for a posthumous homecoming finds momentary deliverance in the kindness of a lonely stranger. In another way, though, the story is chilling in that its confronts us with a vision of death that finds wayward souls wandering dark roads in continual searches for the comfort of home… searches that always end fruitlessly in the cold passenger seat of an anonymous car.

Folklorists Richard Beardsly and Rosemarie Hankey were the first scholars to collate and organize all of the thumb-waving road-weary specter stories. Their 1941 study collected 79 disparate
American accounts of the tale. Their resulting report on the data managed to separate the tellings into four distinct categories, the first being the full version I related above, which was the most common and, in all likelihood, the original, “authentic” version. Another category involved the aforementioned ill-fated return of the forgotten personal affect. The other two versions? They get a bit more interesting…

Wednesday: Vanishing Hitchhikers and Prophecy

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Look read about the origins of the legend from Monday and how Charlie Sheen inevitably got involved from Wednesday…

As we’ve already established that murder footage shot by a serial killer would not, in all but the most specific hypothetical conditions, be considered snuff, and because the Internet is already rife with clip art-skull-ridden serial killer annals, I promise not to belabor this bit. I’m only bringing it up because, going into writing this series of posts, I didn’t have any clear idea of how many killers, serial or otherwise, were known to have taken video footage of their crimes. If you had told me there was a government warehouse of the stuff right next to that ark storage depot, I couldn’t have argued with you. The reality, though, is that depraved maniacs who murder just for pickle tickles don’t tend to D.A. Pennebaker their heinous acts (or, at least, do a great job of hiding or destroying the tapes/discs/files).

In the 1980s, Northern California crazies Leonard Lake and Charles Ng tortured and killed at least 20 women, videotaping some of the torture, but none of the hands-on killing. Likewise, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, a couple of murderous Canadian sex nuts, videotaped the sexual torture of two of their three teenage victims, but none of the deaths. In 1997, two German citizens (Ernst Dieter Korzen and Stefan Michael Mahn) who recorded the murder of a prostitute became the first people ever to be convicted for making snuff, but, prior to their arrest, they made no attempt to distribute the film and documentation of the case (most of which I found in UK tabloids) is unclear (or in German). Also in Germany, that dude (Armin Miewes) who slaughtered and ate his willing Internet lunch buddy taped his Killin’ and Cookin’ pilot episode. Most recently, in 2007, two sadistic Russian thugs (dubbed the “Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs”) used a cell phone to record themselves murdering a defenseless old man.

(Rumors continue to circulate about “snuff” footage filmed by the Zodiac killer. Most recently, as reported by Blue Line Radio’s blog on January 14th of this year, a man named Dennis Kaufman, who claims his father, Jack Tarrance, was Zodiac, supplied the FBI with segments of a heavily damaged film reel alleged to contain video evidence of a murder.)

Where, oh where, kind readers, does this leave us?

Find out AFTER THE JUMP!

If there is a booming underground market for snuff, the wackos and loonies, who are killing people any way, don’t seem to be particularly interested in taking advantage. Who knows? Maybe the murderers of the world just need the right business managers to show them how to monetize their crimes.

Average folks seem to like imagining a dark global sub-culture where murders are committed with the requisite methodical bureaucracy of a shipping firm or a modeling agency. We imagine the anonymous, muscled thugs stuffing girls into vans that peel out into the trash-strewn alleyways of foreign cities. Condemned warehouses with blood-stained floors. Tangled AV cables and smoking men apathetically hunched over clusters of television monitors and tape dubbing equipment (though, in our heads, we know it would be computers). And the screaming girls caught in the viewfinders – girls whose final screams are robbed of their desperation by the tinny inefficiency of in-camera mikes.

But how do we picture the buyers – the viewers? Fringe sexual deviants? Psychopaths? Seething maniacs whose camel’s spines are just one straw short of fracture?

If you remember from Wednesday, Allan Shackleton did everything he could to market “Snuff” as an actual snuff film. And people paid to see it. People who, it’s a pretty safe bet, would identify themselves as “curious” long before copping to any sort of sadistic sex mania or scopophilic bloodlust. And that self-identification would probably be accurate. The thing is, curious money is as carefree and green as crazy money.

The idea of snuff exists, in part, because we live in society without real sub-cultures. There’s a reason why the mondo films of the ‘60s and ‘70s, which sensationally documented things like African tribes, surf culture and strip clubs, quickly turned in to the vacuous morbidity of Faces of Death – the moment a fringe ideology is identified and embraced as a labeled sub-culture, it becomes (weirdly enough) part of the mass culture. With the steady democratization of ideas and information on the Internet, what hasn’t found a place, however dubious, in the mass consciousness? Furries, feeder porn, slash fiction… Jesus, there was a “30 Rock” episode where the punchline was Japanese moe relationships. At a moment’s notice, we can access hundreds of real examples of all of these things, and more.

Snuff is different. We, as a culture, have made sure of it by winnowing the definition down, making it unobtainable, making it the final frontier of commoditized human depravity – a fringe ideology so distant from our own as to create one of those ever sought-after lines between Us and Them. A culture to marvel, gasp and shutter at from an isolated place that, theoretically, it – in this case snuff – has never contaminated. And I understand that need to have something – some unclaimed taboo – for the marveling and the gasping and the shuttering. But where’s the line between concept and realization? When does a loose idea earn ideological weight?

Whether it turned out real or not, when “Snuff” was released in 1976, Them weren’t the only ones lining up around the block.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Look read about the origins of the legend from Monday and come back Friday for the finale…

The grisly half-truths associated with the Manson Family did more than just inspire one author to off-handedly coin the term “snuff film” (see Monday’s post) – they inspired a nation to collectively wet its pants and shriek at the thought of a cult pandemic. Manned by the media and powered by irrational fear, the rumor mill began grinding out stories of cult activity, both in the US and abroad. The assumptions offered about Manson snuff films had some basis in fact – In 1969, several of Manson’s BFFs hijacked and robbed an NBC-TV truck packed full of film equipment, some of which was eventually recovered, snuff-free, by police. The ancillary whisperings of an International outbreak of brainwashed cabals with wicked leaders and sinister agendas, though? Grossly (and I mean really extra disgustingly) exaggerated in almost every way possible.

But no less artistically inspiring.

The story of the first nationwide snuff freakout supposedly began with one man, one newspaper and one appallingly awful exploitation film. When Allan Shackleton, President of Monarch Releasing Company, a small film distribution venture known for releasing low-budget nudie flicks, read a newspaper article about a rumored South American snuff ring, he saw dollar signs. And motorcycles. And boobs. Shackleton was remembering a little-known exploitation film called “Slaughter” that had been just barely released in the early ‘70s. It had what he needed: South America and a cult-themed premise. All it was missing was the snuff climax. But it took a lot more than that to discourage the executive producer of 1972’s “When the Cat’s Away” (tagline: “She’s X-rated and IN COLOR!”)

In 1976, Shackleton re-released “Slaughter” as “Snuff,” complete with the tagline “The film that could only be made in South America… where life is CHEAP,” and a newly filmed ending, in which an abrupt cut gives way to a vérité-style scene of an actual murder. To help sell the implication that the film contained real-life snuff footage, Shackleton even pulled a William Castle-esque stunt in which actors playing anti-“Snuff” picketers were planted outside theaters. He needn’t have made the effort. Women Against Pornography (WAP), a radical feminist group that, three years later, held a notorious protest march through Times Square, immediately bunched up their panties, declaring the film a revolting paean to sexual violence. Their very-real boycott of the movie was covered by CBS news. By the time “Snuff” was outed as a fake, and “Slaughter”’s original filmmakers were suing Shackleton for altering their film without permission, the idea of snuff had become a mass cultural folktale, spawning a bevy of low budget horror films (including Weird Things favorite, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”) and plenty o’ friend-of-a-friend accounts of actual snuff film screenings.

Learn how Faces of Death and Charlie Sheen play pivotal roles in our international fascination with the snuff film urban legend AFTER THE JUMP…

The ‘80s saw the proliferation of “Faces of Death,” an independent pseudo-documentary that collected real footage of assorted accidents, executions, animal murders and autopsies, including several staged grotesqueries, such as the infamous (and obviously artificial) bit in which a table of Asian diners bash in a monkey’s head and feast on its brains “Temple of Doom” style. Though often described as “snuff” by its enthusiastically morbid audience, who are further egged on by the film’s classic, if unverified, claim of being “banned in 40 countries,” this film- turned-increasingly-low-budget/high-sh(l)ock-value-series is nothing more than a gratuitously violent descendent of the often racist (see above monkey scene), always lurid exploitation documentaries (known by cinephiles as “mondo films”) of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

The other major American snuff film blowup also resulted from an atrocious, foreign-made film, but the catalyst wasn’t a newspaper article and the man involved was Charlie Sheen. In 1991, Sheen came into possession of an Asian video tape in which a Samurai warrior slowly tortured and chop sueyed a captive girl. Believing it to be an honest-to-gourd snuff affair, a concerned Sheen immediately turned the tape over to the MPAA, who contacted the FBI, who, rightfully alarmed that a foreign power possessed a weapon strong enough to disgust Charlie Sheen, launched a full-bore investigation. Sheen’s involvement and word of the information probe prompted immediate media attention, which turned into the usual rabble of confusion-lacquered BS. Snuff films were once again a hot-button topic, and this time, it seemed that the US government possessed actual evidence.

What the FBI actually had was “Flower of Flesh and Blood,” the second installment of the Japanese gore series “Guinea Pig.”After interrogating the filmmakers, who eventually used the publicity to release a making-of documentary detailing how the hideously realistic gore effects were created, the FBI gave up their investigation. Rumors persist that, despite the fact that “Flower of Flesh and Blood” was faked, it (and its similarly presented prequel, “The Devil’s Experiment”) was based on actual snuff films sent to the Tokyo police.

Then, in 1999, Joel Schumacher directed 8mm. The punchline there is either “Joel Schumacher,” “directed” or “8mm.”

Friday: Super 8 Serial Killers and Cultural Reflections

I’m sitting here watching Wes Craven’s original “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” trying to ambivalently accept the almost-certainly mediocre reality of the forthcoming remake (or “reimagining” or “reboot” or whatever limp cultural buzz word the blogging apologists and taste-making glossies are using to describe the new Bay-produced “A Nightmare on Elm Street”) and I’m trying to be positive. How am I doing so far? Christ, guys, I know that the new movie won’t make the old one disappear, and I know that the original film’s latter-day sequels (save for The Dream Warriors and New Nightmare, which are awesome) tarnished the original’s reputation far more than any dully predictable modern update ever could, but still. I get weirdly emotional about this stuff, okay? Last time Pepsi changed its logo, I got drunk and set a fire in a graveyard.

The point is, if they’re going to recast Freddy and play with the story a little, I’d rather see them fully embrace a new mythology rather than simply redecorate the old one. Here are my suggestions:

Make Freddy something other than a power plant employee…

Apologies to all organ banks in Sector 7G, but Freddy’s a clever guy. His blade-gloves denote a flair for craftsmanship, his murders scream creativity, and he had the confidence and self-motivation to come back from the dead and learn how to murder people in their dreams. Imagine how fast he’d pick up QuickBooks. Maybe he was an architect. He could say stuff like, “I’m an architect of nightmares!” and “Your skin will shingle the gambrel roof of my Dutch Colonial hell!” Or maybe he was a chef – “I’m cooking up nightmares!” “I used to be a chef.” Either way, they should find a way to fit in an insert shot of his last W-2. I think the fans would like that.

Add a parents of Elm Street vigilante arson B-plot…

The parents of Elm Street rose up mob-justice style and burned Freddy Krueger to death. It only follows that, as a result, they’ve acquired a taste for blood and roam the streets of town looking for any excuse to reclaim the surge of empowering, adrenaline-soaked horniness they felt as they watched Freddy crisping away into a carbonized husk. Maybe do it so we begin to associate them with the weapons they use – like one guy only uses Molotov cocktails and one lady only uses hairspray and a lighter. The other two just use matches, but one’s really fat and the other has a weird birthmark covering half his face, so we associate them with those things and, anyway, those two die early on in a fight with drug dealers.

Have the token nerdy kid program a robot to dream, then use a wig and lipstick to disguise the robot as one of the girls so that Freddy goes inside the robot’s dreams and gets trapped somehow (software?), but then gains control of the robot’s consciousness. Then have the robot fight Molotov Cocktail and Flaming Hairspray…

During these scenes, the kids can watch Freddy on a computer monitor and he yells stuff at them. Either “I’ll open your skulls as if they were casement windows” or “I’ll chef all of you!” depending.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Look for new installments Wednesday and Friday…

This week, I want to talk about the rumors and assumptions surrounding snuff films, and the supposedly booming black market that creates and distributes them. First things first, though, we need to look at how most folks define snuff in order to understand one of the core truths about it – Snuff doesn’t not exist because of the limits of human greed or depravity; snuff doesn’t exist because of the limits of its definition.

The verbal dances we undertake in attempting to nail down specific definitions for broadly understood, but taxonomically elusive, phenomena like pornography have nothing on the addendum-flinging rumba that people perform in pinning down snuff films. In this sense, snuff is the opposite of the former example – the struggle to dogmatically codify pornography is an exercise in encapsulating an ever-expanding set of subjectivities as they relate to the perceptions and intentions of both producer and consumer. Porn can encapsulate anything from video recordings of fully exposed penetrative intercourse to a photograph of a person’s bare feet. The working definition of a “snuff film” is so ludicrously specific as to systematically eliminate every known snuff-like recording from the mass hypothetical understanding of what constitutes true snuff.

Snuff started out as a fairly open-ended term. First used by author Ed Sanders in his 1971 true crime book “The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion,” the term “Snuff films” was used to describe an alleged series of violent (possibly murderous) home movies shot by Manson and his acolytes. Though no footage ever surfaced, the term caught on and became a catch-all label for any video recording depicting the actual murder of a human being (I’ll get into the specific history and examples in Wednesday’s column).

Today, the definition has been vastly constrained by a huge honkin’ caveat:

Said murder must have been committed for the express purpose of distributing (and, according to the strictest definition, profiting from) the recorded footage.

Click AFTER THE JUMP for the rest!

It’s this collision of action and intention that eliminates every would-be snuff film from the hence non-existent snuff canon. Taliban-shot beheading footage, for example, can’t be considered snuff because it was made as a political statement/threat. Likewise, a serial killer’s recreationally filmed and privately archived murders are out of the running. Something like the “Faces of Death” series, which anthologized real (and plenty of fake) deaths, executions and autopsy footage for profit, is disqualified as its scenes were either filmed for distribution, but staged, or real, but filmed without the requisite intentionality. Even if we imagine a serial killer who films his murders and then, later, decides to market the tapes, he isn’t selling snuff because the recordings were made to fulfill his personal desires and only later recontextualized as commodities. (Note that intention of the producer is also a factor in considering pornography, though, in the case of porn, perception of the viewer always manages to become a vital component. With snuff, the viewer is wholly irrelevant [i.e., a film of a staged murder, however convincing to the viewer, simply does not constitute a snuff film].)

As you can see, while snuff would initially seem to hinge on the grisly images on the screen, it’s really the nefarious calculations being made behind the camera that truly define the phenomenon.

And if snuff is all about distribution and moola, why risk filming new murders when there are plenty of gruesome recordings already available for collection and sale?

Perhaps in a modern age where the barest edges of the cultural fringe have a visible Web presence, the definition of snuff has been narrowed down to an impossibly specific criteria in order fulfill the ongoing societal yen for tales of mysterious, uncharted subcultures. In other words, a thirst for boundary fences (however artificial) in an increasingly borderless culture – fences that keep the darkest things out, but still permit a stolen glance through into the blackness.

Either way, who do people think these alleged filmmakers are?

Wednesday: Blood on the Lens – Famous “Snuff” Films

Re: Changelings – I’ve got good news and bad news.

The bad news is that, if your kid was covertly swapped for an aging elf or weird, magical stick, you’re pretty much boned. True, there are a couple fairy tales where parents manage to wrangle their young one back from its abductors. In one Swedish story, a mother is advised to brutalize or abandon her newly acquired changeling boarder. After the woman refuses, she finds her real son wandering through the woods. He explains that his troll abductors freed him, unharmed, after witnessing the woman’s compassion toward their big-boned, slobbery offspring. Unfortunately, I would assume that this is a late edition to changeling lore, as it reads like a fanciful PSA put out by some child-welfare lobbying group trying to halt all the folklore-fueled child beatings. In all probability, the closest you’re ever going to come to getting your baby back baby back baby back is ridding your house of the magical imposter.

To humanely evict a changeling, simply brew beer, or cook stew, in a bunch of eggshells. European cultures as disparate as Spain, Wales and Germany all believed that this bizarre and seemingly random culinary display would essentially gobsmack the miniature pretender into revealing its true identity. According to the stories, the changeling will begin laughing and shout something like “I was born 100 years ago, and since then I have not seen so many egg shells near the fire!” before vanishing or jumping up the chimney. (Interestingly, the notion of changelings as far older beings than their appearance suggests extends beyond the elvish elder tales – a post-pubescent developmentally disabled teen was often feared for having the mental capacity of a child and the sexual urges of an adult. Women, especially, were afraid of being sexually assaulted by what superstition told them was a creature possessed of a hidden, ancient, and ultimately malicious, intelligence.)

The other way to give a changeling the boot was to, quite literally, give the changeling the boot. Right in its goofy face. And then whip it with a belt. And throw it in the fire. Then chug a beer and spit on everything from “The Dark Crystal.” Abuse the monster to the point where it fearfully retreats, or its mommy comes to collect it.

Ahem.

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to prevent stupid elves from sticking you with their stupid senior citizen in exchange for your stupid baby.

Martin Luther, captain of the protestant reformation and full-on panty-tossing God groupie, had a big foam finger that said “Changeling Infanticide.” He wasn’t shy about letting everyone know that a changeling was a malformed progeny of Satan’s oogy womb and, as such, was “only a piece of flesh,” soulless and fit for brutal dispatch. It’s no surprise, then, that many Protestant churches advertised Christian baptism as a great way to protect a baby from the handsy mitts of devil-humping trolls. For extra insurance against magical baby theft, Protestants recommended that a bible be placed in every child’s crib. The Catholic Church also hopped aboard the bandwagon, espousing the crucial importance of baptism, and recommending nursery decoration that included rosaries, a liberal smattering of holy water and crosses. Lots of crosses.

The most popular secular changeling prevention method? Constant vigilance. The effect of this simple advice was two-fold:

It ensured that, should a child turn out to be mentally or physically handicapped, the blame fell squarely on the mother. In an age when the mom was expected to do all the early child rearing while dad was out felling trees with his bare nuts, even the most innocuous negligence (an accidental nap, a trip to the bathroom) was seen as an open invitation to all eerie creeping things – “Free Baby! Come and F***ing Steal It!” As a result, mothers of suspected changelings were often ostracized by neighbors and abandoned by their husbands, especially if they refused to take the steps necessary (i.e., booted steps onto the changeling’s goofy face) to rid the household of the mystical blight.
On the upside, it allowed mothers to focus solely on parenting, which, in many cases, gave destitute women a well-deserved break from butt-mauling labor. People (presumably women) even began spreading stories about newborns that had been stolen after landlords had prematurely forced the recovering new mothers back to work in the fields. Score one for the ladies.

Most articles about changelings mention that if folks still credited developmental disabilities to supernatural baby trades, there’s no question that autism would be blamed on dark elves, nefarious fairies and regular trolls. I’m glad that people are past these beliefs – past the fantastical scapegoating of unlikely enemies and ready to turn to science for rational, empirically derived answers. Now we know, for example, that it’s actually evil, undetectable chemicals hidden in vaccines that cause developmental disabilities.

How far we’ve come.

Still, it’s interesting to think about how Martin Luther and Jenny McCarthy are connected by more than just a storied reputation for nailing things.

Jason has killed a lot of folks with a lot of different tools. His victims may wonder, “Who is this man? And why is he murdering me?” Meanwhile, we the viewers want to know, “What is that tool he’s using? And what’s its history?”

Wonder no longer.

Today: Meat Cleaver

As used by Jason in: Friday the 13th Part 3; Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter; Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

Victim(s): Harold; Jimmy; Junior Hubbard, Ethel Hubbard, Jake

A cleaver is a big square knife. (Not square like the kid who sits behind you and talks about taking his guinea pig on vacation with him; square like the head of the kid in front of you who has a giant square head and everyone calls him “nipple finger” because, also, one of his fingers is all messed up and looks like a nipple.) Staring at a meat cleaver, you might think “Don’t cut me with that! It looks sharp!” To which I would reply, “Actually, it’s rather blunt. Cleavers aren’t like most kitchen knives, which are made from very hard steel and designed to gently, but precisely, slice. Cleavers are made from soft steel and designed to violently chop, using the power put behind the knife to forcefully propel the blade through sinew and bone.” “Okay, okay!” you’d reply, “Just please don’t cut me, mister!” “Then shut your mouth and hand over the emerald spider” I’d yell. Then you’d toss me the emerald spider and I’d return it to the museum and you’d escape from the police but then die from the Curse of the Emerald Spider. And as you died, you’d whisper “Ugh! I’ve been killed by ‘the Curse of the Emerald Spider’” because people like it when characters say the title of the movie.

STORY TIME! (Cleavers appear throughout Zen Chinese lore) Once upon time, an unskilled knifesmith was watching a professional butcher cut up ox carcasses. “How do you do that?” he asked the butcher, to which the butcher replied, “Instead of cutting through the bones, I cut between the bones.” “No, I meant the way you’re sitting.” The first man replied. “Oh. I’m quadruple jointed.” HAPPILY EVER AFTER!

Speaking of China, many stupid gringos refer to a Chinese chef’s knife as a “Chinese cleaver.” I guess they look sort of similar… IF YOU’RE RETARDED! The Chinese chef’s knife has the same thin structure as a general-purpose American kitchen knife, and is primarily used to cut vegetables or boneless meats. The reason for this is China’s exorbitant bone tax. By the time animals are mature enough to be slaughtered for food, they’ve already paid most of their bones to the government in order to avoid being killed for sexual pleasure by jailed sex criminals who receive delinquent animals in exchange for good behavior. The amorphous, obstacle-free structure of dutiful taxpayers makes mass food production easier, and also reduces transportation costs by ensuring that livestock can be stuffed into, and blown through, pneumatic tubing. Meanwhile, the government has a steady supply of animal bones for their secret project. (Some people think it’s a skeleton boat.)

STORY TIME! (Cleavers appear throughout Zen Chinese lore) Once upon a time, a frustrated peasant asked Confucius to explain why the philosopher was always discouraging commoners from emulating the habits of the wealthy. Confucius responded, “Why use an ox-cleaver to carve a chicken?” “Because I’m effing poor,” responded the peasant, “and I can’t afford a good chicken knife.” “Then I shall make you a chicken knife by pulling metals out of the Earth and shaping them with my mind, like how Magneto makes his chicken knives in X-Men.” All Confucius asked in exchange for the knife was a chicken dinner, but the man refused and so Confucius wrapped him up in synthetic webbing, explaining, “This is like in Spiderman.” HAPPILY EVER AFTER!

Try crushing a bunch of garlic cloves with the flat side of a hard, slicing knife.

Whoops! The blade cracked. That was your parents’ best knife! It cost, like, $200! What were you thinking?! It’s from William Sonoma. That means it was the Pre-Jay-Z-boycott Cristal of knives! You are in so much trouble! Oh my God!

But wait… hold my hand and with one lick of my Time Patch…

We’re back before you broke the knife. Now – try crushing a bunch of garlic cloves with the flat side of a cleaver.

Look at that! The softer steel and wide shape of the cleaver blade makes it perfect for crushing things. Whoops! You’re parents were saving that garlic for their turn on neighborhood vampire patrol tomorrow. I guess they’re going to get turned into vampires and then come back here and kill you and you’re sisters.

Sorry, I only have one more lick before the Time Patch runs out and I want to be able to see Spoon twice without having to drive all the way to Boston. Yeah, no, they’re awesome live.

STORY TIME! (Cleavers appear throughout Zen Chinese lore) Once upon a time, a taxpaying pig slid all the way to the Chinese capitol and asked the Duke of China what the government was doing with all of his bones, “Secret project.” Replied the Duke. “And the bones of my family?” asked the pig. “Secret project.” Replied the Duke. “And the bones of my friends?” “Secret project.” “And the bones of my enemies?” asked the pig. The Duke put placed his hands on his hips. “We put those in a big hole and spit on them for fun. And pee on them.” “Oh.” Said the pig, smiling, and painfully slid away. Later, one of the Duke’s closest aides asked the Duke, “Why did you lie to that pig and tell him that his enemies’ bones didn’t go to the secret project?” To which the Duke replied, “Because I wanted him to leave. Duh! It was, like, a strategy. That pit thing sounds pretty good, though. Get some people on that. I wanna pee on some bones.” HAPPILY EVER AFTER!

Thank you, Jason, for helping us learn through murder.

Join me again soon for another thrilling installment of Jason Vorhees’ Arsenal!

Out of all the ye olde speculations as to the motives of changeling-planting baby swappers, my favorite involves geriatric elves using human homes as unknowing assisted living facilities. Essentially, an aging elf musters up some sort of human infant glamour, gets traded off with a human child and spends his golden years playing peek-a-boo and getting ambushed by the tickle monster. No word on what the other elves did with their newly acquired human fussbudget, but if they can make an ancient elf look like a newborn baby, they can make a newborn baby look like an impressive hand-carved mahogany desk.

Another popular theory was that magical younglings needed human milk to thrive, while their birth mothers ran smoothest on squirming baby meat. The changeling would drink its fill from an oblivious human’s teat as the breastfeeding mommy’s actual child got all ate up. What’s more, stories of milk-ravenous fairies resorting to kidnapping extend beyond changeling lore – some European cultures told tales of strange creatures stealing lactating women for use as perpetual wet nurses in maternity wards of the damned. Many of the same people also theorized that a pregnant fairy required a female human midwife to assist with the birthing.

Both of these ideas hinge on the notion of human maternity – both physical (lactation) and emotional (maternal instinct/experience) – as some sort of specialized Earth magic required even by those beings with direct, mystic lines to the planet’s center. In other words, it makes women, and, by extension, humanity, an innate and integral component of nature, even as it applies to mythological eco-systems. But what’s folklore if not an opportunity for the tellers to embellish the details of their own universal significance? Regardless, Imagine having your boobs sucked down to husks by a magic cave’s worth of caterwauling fairy spawn. Or just watch some of the anime where that happens.

Then, of course, there are the people who think all the trolls, fairies and elves are just being mean. In the stories where this is the case, and the creatures are perpetrating tike exchanges just to rattle the ranks of humanity, the kidnappers hold on to their offspring and, instead, leave a stock – a magic, baby-lookin’ hunk of wood that gradually appears to sicken and die. Meanwhile, the mystical child thieves can raise the stolen baby as their slave, eat it or sell it for parts. In one Scandinavian tale, a bunch of trolls set up an arranged marriage between their changeling and a troll prince with a human fetish. There are even bittersweet stories where desperate monsters steal babies because they just want to experience the love of a child (feel free to add your own bitter quotes around the word love if you were molested by trolls or something).

All of this just so adults could feel better about punching under-aged retards. Or, as you will read about on Friday, so they could feel obligated to throw them into fires.

Friday: Changeling Prevention and Stolen Child Retrieval

An abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

Today’s ailment: Sore Throat

Eddie Vedder’s Noose

You will need: 1 Strip of Red Flannel

Instructions: Tie flannel around neck

Some Kind of Crazy Voodoo Sh-t

You Will Need: 1 Sheep’s Heart; A Bunch O’ Unused Pins; 1 Fire

Instructions: Insert pins into sheep’s heart; burn heart in fire

Note: Apparently, this doesn’t actually cure the sore throat, but rather summons the witch that caused it. What I’m saying is, you might want to have, like, a blessed dagger or Methodist gun or something.

Human Health ? Goose PTSD

You will need: 1 Live Gander; 1 Competent Fowl Wrangler

Instructions: Have wrangler dip live gander’s head into throat of the afflicted 3 times, each time making sure not to remove the head until the gander honks.

The Neck-Water Swig

You will need: 1 Bowl; Water

Instructions: Fill bowl with water; Bathe neck; Drink water

Note: If you live on a mountain or a hill, the water MUST be procured from the side opposite the one you inhabit. Otherwise, you’d have to drink the water and then bathe your neck in it, and this isn’t that kind of website.

LEECHES!

You will need: LEECHES!

LEECHES!: LEECHES!

Note: !!!!!!!!!!

You Say “Tomato,” I Say “Sore Throat Curative!” Then, for Legal Reasons, I Add, “I am Not a Medical Professional, so you May Want to Call the Whole Thing Off.”

You will need: 1 Tomato

Instructions: Rub tomato on feet; Rub tomato on throat

Mixology 205 Final Exam

You Will Need: 1 Glass of Water; 1 Rusty Nail; 1 Bedbug

Instructions: Mash up bedbug; Put mashed bedbug into glass of water; Stir bedbug drink with rusty nail; Gargle resulting concoction

Necrophiliac’s Foreplay

You Will Need: The Hand of a Person who Died an Untimely Death

Instructions: Rub throat with corpse hand; Enjoy

A Day like Any Other

You Will Need: Sweaters; Whiskey; Quilts

Instructions: Don several layers of heavy clothes; Jog around the block; Drink 4 ounces of whiskey; Go to sleep beneath heavy quilts or blankets

Dr. Wistar’s Balm of Wild Cherry

You Will Need: 1 Time Machine; Confederate Money

Instructions: Use Balm as Directed

All this week Matt Finley takes a look into the changeling. Look for posts Wednesday and Friday that complete his horrendous tale about tricksy elves and those unfortunate enough to be mistaken for them.

Even for 17th century Sweden, it was a strange trial. If their court testimony is to be believed, the couple didn’t intend to kill their son. Or, rather, the thing that wasn’t their son. According to them, the ailing 10-year-old being they abandoned atop a freezing heap of fermenting manure wasn’t even human. The couple did have a son, but, years earlier, he had been stolen by elves and replaced with the strange, growth-impaired elfin facsimile that had just coughed up its last breath from atop a lonely pile of animal crap. And that wasn’t the couple’s fault – the elves should have retrieved their dying offspring and, in exchange, returned the family’s rightful child.

Note that it wasn’t the parents’ story that made this trial so unusual; it was the fact that the case was brought to trial at all. Back then, in the same way that severe mental illness was often diagnosed as demon possession, birth defects and growth impairments in children carried their own mythologically charged explanation – changelings. Identifiable by their pale skin, or strange vocalizations or malformed limbs or spines, changelings were believed to be children of elves, fairies or trolls – dwindling races that used the human baby swaps to ensure nurturing upbringings for their twisted younglings. Cases of changeling neglect, abuse and murder weren’t uncommon, and certainly weren’t often prosecuted. Hell, Protestant leaders, including Martin Luther, were famously ambivalent to, sometimes even trending toward approving of, the murder of suspected changelings.

The problem was two-fold:

Scientifically speaking, diseases like Down syndrome, spina bifida, cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis weren’t understood. Especially given that many of these disorders take months, or even years, to fully manifest, it was easy for people to believe that their once seemingly healthy child had been covertly switched with the grotesque spawn of a foreign biology. Remember: supernatural creatures were already a rich part of European – and proto-European – oral tradition. Attributing these strange maladies to these ubiquitous fantastical antagonists took only the slightest flick of Occam’s razor. Also, most changeling tales, including the one recounted above, involve a male child. It’s not a coincidence that human males are more susceptible to birth defects than females. Also, pragmatically speaking, have you ever tried to pass off a baby troll as a little girl? It’s like trying to take E.T. into Chuck E. Cheese and not get arrested.

Economically speaking, the peasant class (traditionally the most superstitious of the social castes) was poor. It’s no wonder that one of the classic marks of a changeling was a voracious, insatiable hunger. If a family was comfortable, it was because every member of that family was working their backs to the front to put food on the table. Sad as it is, an impaired child whose only physical contribution was food consumption could easily become an object of resentment, derision and, ultimately, neglect or abuse. It’d be a lot easier to rationalize such blatant dereliction of the maternal/paternal instinct if the wittle cutie were actually an insidious cuckoo placed in the residential nest by nefarious monsters.

But wait… what was the endgame for the supernatural baby traders? What kind of futile insanity did folks invest in preventing these Middle Earth switcheroos? And what happened to that Swedish couple who were tried for murdering their son?

Freaking relax. Jesus. All your questions will be answered this Wednesday and Friday.

Except that last question. I never found out what happened to them.

Shortly after being dragged to shore and cut out of the custom-made oak barrel that she’d ridden over Niagara Falls, Annie Taylor told the press, “If it was with my dying breath, I would caution anyone against attempting that feat…” It was on October 24, 1901 – her 63rd birthday – that Taylor packed both herself and a mattress into the wooden vessel and became the first person to ever stunt drop over Horseshoe Falls (all such stunts are performed on the Canadian falls due to the jagged rocky hostility of the American ones). Arriving on shore with a gash on her head, but otherwise intact, the aging schoolteacher patiently awaited the riches and fame that she had been certain would follow her (and her outsized three-quarter-life crisis) over the pummeling torrents of icy water. Alas, Taylor would spend the last 20 years of her Earthly existence hustling pocket change from tourists who, in exchange for a meager fee, could take a picture with the pioneering daredevil and her sidekick, the barrel. It wasn’t just her act of daring that was largely ignored – it was also those admonishing words she had spoken to journalists.

10 years after Taylor unknowingly opened up a new frontier of falls stunting, English circus performer Bobby Leach, who had already made multiple trips through the Niagara river’s whirlpool rapids, became the second non-suicidal person to purposely careen, unguided, over the perilous 173-foot drop and into the river below. Leach survived the fall, but still managed to break both knees and fracture his jaw. Though he was able to parlay his stunt into a successful touring career, his death was as inauspicious as Anne Taylor’s life – he broke his leg slipping on an orange peel and succumbed to the resulting infection. Wah wah waaah.

The next person to challenge the falls was Charles Stephens, whose ill-fated 1920 journey ended with the removal of a single severed arm from the splintered mess of Russian oak that had once been the British barber’s protective barrel. Don’t feel bad though – both Bobby Leach and Niagara River boater William “Red” Hill, Sr. warned Stephens that his untested barrel was likely to double as his coffin. Sure enough, the anvi-lcum-ballast that Stephens had attached to his feet tore right through the bottom of the cask, ripping Stephens, who was secured into an arm harness, into three distinct pieces.

Stupid and tragic as it was, Stephens’ death had a bright side – the next brave-hearted, fool-headed Niagara daredevil could look at that gross, severed arm and reflect on how not to go over the falls. In 1928, Frenchman Jean Lussier took his reflections beyond the obvious conclusion of “test your friggin’ barrel” and decided to take on Horseshoe Falls in a giant rubber ball. 6 feet in diameter, with a still frame, 32 liner inner tubes and a heavy rubber bottom to prevent rolling, the ball cost Lussier his entire life savings, but earned its keep on July 4, 1928 when it successfully bore its intrepid French cargo over the watery precipice.

In 1930, an obsessive mystic name George Strathkis attempted a barrel ride over Niagara. He survived the drop but suffocated to death when his vessel became trapped behind the falls. Oops.

Remember Red Hill, Sr., who, along with Bobby Leach, called-out Charles Stephens for being a careless idiot? Well Red was a local celebrity, known both for rescuing countless careless swimmers and boaters from the Niagara River’s dastardly current, and for several well-publicized jaunts through the whirlpool rapids. Red had a son – William “Red” Hill, Jr. Red Sr. was never goofy enough to attempt a falls stunt, and died of a heart attack in 1942. Nine years later, though, Red Jr. decided that the best way to honor his father’s memory would be a madcap jaunt over the falls. Eschewing wood, steel and common sense for inner tubes, canvas webbing and outright insanity, Red, Jr. built “The Thing,” a stack of inflatable rubber rings bound together with canvas and fish netting. With a crowd, including his wife and 10-year-old daughter, looking on, Red, Jr. slid inside his maniac tube and rode the river over the falls. The next morning, after Red’s mangled corpse was discovered near the Maid of the Mist boat dock, the Niagara Parks commission declared falls stunting illegal.

Like that ever stopped anybody.

Little is known about Nathan Boya who, in the summer of 1961, showed up unannounced at the falls with a giant reinforced rubber-and-metal orb called the “Plunge-O-Sphere.” Boya took the plunge, came out unscathed, paid a $113 dollars in fines and went on his way, saying only that his trip had not been a “stunt,” but rather something he needed to do. Years later, a family member of the Caliguiri Brothers, the owners of a New York fixtures company that helped design the Plunge-O-Sphere, reported that the native Bronxite had performed the feat to impress his girlfriend. Given this information, I’d move the Plunge-O-Sphere from the middle of the “Necessity” circle to the portion of the Venn diagram where “Stunt” and “Necessity” overlap (but, obviously, still completely outside of the “Revenge” circle).

By the 1970s, the excitement surrounding courageous Niagara plunges had dwindled. More folks survived than not; modern technology continually offered better and better solutions to the problems of air supply, impact and river currents; and the success of survival only meant being pulled from a barrel or bathysphere in handcuffs. A full 12 years after Boya’s necessity, a Canadian named Karl Soucek, who billed himself as “The Last Niagara Daredevil,” survived a trip over the falls, resulting in the confiscation of his homemade barrel. In 1985, 22-year-old Stephen Trotter became the youngest person to live through a falls stunt (and, later, the only probable member of the 172-Foot-Drop Club: he repeated his stunt 10 years later, this time with his girlfriend riding shotgun). 1989, however, saw the first two-person trip over the falls, when two Canadian men, Peter DeBernardi and Jeffrey Petkovitch, took the plunge in a giant, handcrafted steel barrel. Additionally, Canadian John David Munday took on, and survived, the falls twice: once in 1985 in a homemade barrel and once in 1993 in a converted diving bell.

And that’s it for successful and/or mentally competent trips over Niagara’s Horseshoe Falls. June 5th 1990 saw Tennessean Jesse Sharp steer a kayak over the falls. Yeah – his body was never recovered. Then in 1995 man named Robert Overcracker jet-skied himself over the brink of the falls. To his credit, he had a parachute, and planned to drift softly down into the river. To his detriment, the friend who prepared the parachute forgot to tether it into Overcracker’s pack. *blushing shrug.* The last person to tumble over was an unemployed Michigan man named Kirk Jones, who successfully blundered over the cataract without any sort of barrel or life preserver or even floaties. Jones’ testimony as to stunt vs. suicide attempt flip-flopped several times, though his family remains convinced that the act was a courageous spectacle rather than a gratuitously awesome goodbye, cruel world. The good news is that Jones has a job now – stuntman at the Texas-based Toby Tyler circus.

Phew.

The stunts described above were performed alternately by professionals, morons and insane people. You probably shouldn’t try any of them unless you really, really want to.

Below are descriptions of three grotesque monsters. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a creature that has actually been reported. Can you Find the Fiend?

A) This terrifying ape-like creature, which is rumored to be the deformed offspring of a gorilla loosed during a circus train crash, prowls the woods surrounding Kansas City.

B) Alleged to stalk the hallways of a well-known American University, this monstrous primate is supposedly an escaped scientific specimen.

C) These vicious, man-sized apes are rumored to protect the forests surrounding a legendary city of riches.

Find the answer AFTER THE JUMPThe correct answer is A)

The Beaman Monster. Even if a train full of circus animals did crash outside of Kansas City in 1904, and a Gorilla did survive, escape from the wreckage and haul ass into the woods, I can’t imagine what he or she could’ve mated with to produce the Beaman Monster. Some accounts of the story describe the beast as an uncannily ferocious, but otherwise ho-hum, rampaging gorilla. Others claim that the monster is some sort of hellacious wolf-ape hybrid that prowls the forests and fields with the cunning of a wolf and the kitten-rearing skills of a gorilla. Still others are convinced that the monster is actually just Bigfoot. So, to review, either an escaped gorilla got cozy with some other gorilla that just happened to be passing through Kansas at the time; an escaped gorilla and wolf humped so hard and fast that it shattered the laws of nature; or, you know, it’s Bigfoot, mindin’ his business, takin’ his time and workin’ for the weekend.

Statement B) described the crazy monkey thing that makes with the chaos in the fourth part of George Romero’s horror-comedy anthology film “Creepshow.” “The Crate,” based on a story of the same name by Stephen King, begins when a wooden crate from a 19th century arctic expedition is discovered in the basement of a college. When a downtrodden English Professor learns that there’s a murderous beast inside the box, he does the only sensible thing – tries to use the monster to kill his abusive, alcoholic wife. The results can only be described as “foreseeable.”

Statement C) described the killer grey gorillas that guard the lost city of Zinj in Michael Crichton’s novel “Congo.” In the book, a diamond-seeking scientific research team finds Zinj and discovers that the violent apes are a new species, bred by an ancient tribe and trained to protect the city’s plentiful diamond reserves. In the film, Laura Linney shoots a heat-seeking missile with a flare gun. Needless to say, both contain an excess number of scenes in which scientists have to jump over barrels to get to ladders.

If you graduated from high school, there’s a good chance that, at some point, you had your physics acumen tested by way of an egg drop competition. So, you suffocated your egg in old bubble wrap and foam insulation, wrangled a mess of Popsicle sticks into the approximate shape of a box, Koosh-balled the hell out of the whole business and left its fate to gravity’s butter fingers. The brass-balled Niagara daredevils attempted similar feats – except they were the eggs, and while it was blind, stupid courage that brought them to the lip of the falls, it was their makeshift barrels, boats and bathyspheres that ultimately had to carry them over. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. 75 years’ worth of stuntmen, performers and sailors challenged the Niagara River before anyone dreamed of taking on the falls.

When people look at a giant waterfall, they instinctually want to send crap over it. Visit Niagara and then tell me you didn’t wish you had a dilapidated schooner full of wild animals to drop over the roaring cataract. I use that example because it’s totally what you wished, but also because in 1827, the owners of the only three Niagara-area hotels had the same collective dream (although their vision also involved lots of flying “No Vacancy” marquees and airborne dollar signs slam-dunking cash wads through money hoops). After procuring a condemned boat called the Michigan, the intrepid hoteliers began rabidly advertising that the “pirate Michigan,” along with a cargo of “animals of the most ferocious kind, such as Panthers, Wild Cats and Wolves,” would plunge over the falls on September 8. Word spread and people gathered. On the publicized date, a crowd of 10,000 onlookers watched as one buffalo, two raccoons, one dog and one goose road the Michigan over Horseshoe Falls (two bears were placed on the boat, but escaped into the river before the vertical drop). Only the duck survived.

The first Niagara daredevils, who may have had the recently pancaked buffalo in mind, avoided the actual falls, preferring instead to take on the surrounding rapids, gorges and whirlpools. Beginning in 1829, when famed stunt jumper Sam Patch (AKA “The Yankee Leaper”) successfully completed a 125-foot feet-first leap into the Niagara River, performers and wannabes from all corners of palookaville began squaring off with the area’s most treacherous geography, and the falls became an incidental backdrop to a vast culture of thrilling death defiance. Swimmers challenged the rushing river waters upstream from the falls. Along the river’s banks, divers flung themselves from makeshift ladders and platforms. Stuntmen and sailors attempted to steer boats and converted barrels through the treacherous downstream whirlpool rapids. But in 19th century Niagara, amid all the varied calculated showmanship and reckless heroism, one type of act reigned supreme– the gorge-spanning tightrope walk.

Of the dozen or so high-wire performers who balanced their way across the 160-foot-drop between tenuously strung cables and a definite, tangible fate (most on foot, though in 1869 J.F. “Professor” Jenkins crossed on a velocipede [all I can picture is Professor Frink riding Mr. Garrison’s IT]), none compared to the nimble Charles Blondin, AKA The Great Blondin, and his well-muscled, business-savvy rival William Hunt, AKA The Great Farini.

The Great Blondin (real name Jean-Francois Gravelet), a French-born acrobat, arrived in Niagara in 1859 with the intention of crossing the gorge on a tightrope. After stringing a 3 ½-inch-thick, 1,100-foot-long rope across the canyon, the svelte, mustachioed performer completed his goal with seemingly effortless aplomb, and immediately began working to up the ante. Over the next two years, Blondin performed a cornucopia of increasingly absurd acts, all while perched high above the Niagara River’s icy water and pummeling currents. He crossed blindfolded. He crossed on stilts. He crossed carrying his manager on his back. He crossed with a portable stove, sat down in the middle of the rope and cooked and ate an omelet.

During the second year of Blondin’s success, a new talent arrived in Niagara. New Yorker William Hunt had abandoned his family, his girlfriend and his name to become the high-wire extraordinaire known as The Great Farini (an unapologetic bid to cash-in on the erotic mystery of a European pedigree). Strong as moonshine and focused as a Ford Focus, Farini had one goal – out-perform Blondin. For his first stunt in Niagara, Farini high-wired halfway across the gorge, used a second rope to descend all the way down to the waiting Maid of the Mist, enjoyed a glass of wine (how European), climbed 160 feet back up to the tightrope and completed his crossing… only to re-cross minutes later, blindfolded and wearing baskets on his feet. Whereas Blondin ended his performances by humbly asking the audience for donations, Farini preceded his stunts with solicited sponsorship deals and publicity campaigns that guaranteed larger crowds and bigger profits. Farini matched Blondin stunt for stunt, carrying a local woman across the falls after Blondin piggybacked his manager, and even one-upping the omelet act by schlepping a washtub out on the line, lowering the basin down into the river, hoisting it back up and washing a dozen handkerchiefs in it. On several occasions, he called Blondin out, directly challenging him to mano a mano competition. The Frenchman never responded.

Eventually, Blondin moved to England where he became a respected acrobatic performer. Farini followed him and ultimately emerged the more successful man, touring much of Europe as an acrobat before eventually teaming up with P.T. Barnum to work behind the scenes as a circus coordinator. Interestingly, despite Farini’s long and varied career, it’s still Blondin whose name is synonymous with Niagara high-wire acts. As they say – life’s a bitch and then you yell at it until you get throat cancer and die a prolonged and agonizing death.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the ropes and platforms and fearsome freestyle strokes of daredevils past would be overshadowed by a new frontier in insane, ridiculous name-making – the journey over the falls.

(Continued on Friday)

Niagara Falls also has five separate year-round haunted houses because, well, it’s a huge, majestic waterfall. The house with the most tourist acclaim (based on TripAdvisor.com’s user ratings) is Nightmares: Fear Factory, where Canada’s primary export – fear – is rendered from the phantasmagoric dreams of children who saw their parents murdered, sweetened with real Maple syrup and shipped off to Africa. Nightmare’s prolific brochures and advertisements lure in the tourists (myself included) using three gimmicks:

1. A vague back story about a grumpy old coffin maker who used to operate out of Nightmare’s building. Kids made fun of him, and when he tried to shoo them away, somehow a coffin fell on him and he died. Now his ghost haunts the building or something.

2. A Splash Mountain-inspired offer of two mid-attraction keepsake photographs taken during the house’s most terrifying moments.

3. A safe word (“Nightmares”) to shout if and when you want to prematurely back out – an option that, according to the ads, has been taken advantage of by more than 100,000 paying guests.

My experience as it relates to the gimmicks:

1. I still don’t know what this almost-certainly apocryphal tale has to do with anything. The story suggests a cantankerous ghost, bloodied coffins and a vengeful agenda. Also, maybe an America’s Funniest Home Videos tape where the coffin topples over, or a Benny Hill sketch where the guy chases the kids. Nightmares: Fear Factory is a pitch black maze where startling sound effects give way to screaming actors shooting pressurized air at your genitals.

2. The closest thing I experienced to the freak-out visible from space that they portray in the ads was my reaction to Nightmare’s 13.95 CAD admission fee, and even then I just quietly wet my pants while sighing. Granted, in my picture, I was nervously laughing while cowering my way through the maze, holding my girlfriend in front of me like some sort of fright plow. Needless to say, I didn’t pay the extra scratch for the photo. (If you’re that desperate for it, just picture a quivering Shaggy desperately clinging to a stoic Ellen Ripley.)

3. I don’t know. I bugged the guy at the box office to give me more information about the chicken tally, but all he could tell me was that it spanned 26 years of bok-bok-b’gokking wieners. I can’t imagine that many people being inconsolably terrified of a dark hallway that they paid handsomely to grope their way down. The x-factor is drunkenness – the 600,000 gallons of water that drop over Horseshoe Falls every second have nothing on the gross volume of alcohol consumed by college-aged tourists every hour. 90,000 of these so-called chickens were probably just triumphantly declaring their location. “Nightmares! WHOOOO!”

Unrelated Note: If you look at Niagara Falls, Ontario as Canada’s perception of what leisure-seeking Americans value, there’s nothing more telling than the giant sculpture of Frankenstein’s monster eating a hamburger. Seriously, take a look AFTER THE JUMP!

Wednesday: 100% more barrels

Weird Thing Thing Th-th-thing Things! I just got home from Niagara Falls, Canada and have plenty of legends to share with you. Most are awesome, and a couple are even not gross fabrications. But before I get to the good stuff, I need to check up on some facts and catch up on some Caprica. Until Wednesday’s information-stuffed edu-palooza of falls facts and historical japery, please accept these ramblings on some Weird Things-relevant Canadian miscellanea that I encountered:

Apparently, nothing complements an enduring wonder of nature like creepy waxen celebrity models. The Ripley-owned Louis Tussaud’s waxworks are here, as are the Movieland Wax Museum of the Stars and the Rock Legends Wax Museum. The clear winner, though, if even just for its esoteric morbidity, is the Criminals Hall of Fame Wax Museum.

The heart of a standard wax gallery’s charm is, of course, physical recognition – artistic skill is represented through the artist’s ability to create lifelike facsimiles of ubiquitous public figures. The Criminals Hall of Fame clearly understood this principle enough to know that, given their artist’s ability, it might be best to stick to the second- and third-stringers. In other words – name recognition. The downside is that the well-known criminals – Al Capone, John Wilkes Boothe, Charles Manson – all end up looking like the same dead-eyed off-the-shelf mannequin in a fly-by-night Halloween store’s window display. Even Hitler comes off as a Fuhrer-inspired SS surplus emporium floor model. The upside is that you get to see what are probably the only existing wax replicas of halfway-obscure, all-the-way-bitchin’ ne’erdowells like Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory (bonus: this display features a gratuitous, but lovingly sculpted, naked tit) and 19th century American serial killer H.H. Holmes.
Sure – some of the costumes were probably bought wholesale from a bankrupted Olde Time Photo business, and yes, many of the wigs look to have been stripped off inherited taxidermy, but the museum does a good job of varying up the criminal element, such that cowboy fans, gangster aficionados and serial killer buffs will all find something to enjoy. In particular, the Mafia displays have extensive information placards. Also, it’s the cheapest wax museum in the area… and where else are you going to see a life-sized wax statue of Timothy McVeigh sharing a jail cell with a one-to-one scale model of Ted Kaczynski?

Unrelated Note: Saw that the Lundy’s Lane Best Western has a delightful little restaurant called “Windows on the Lane,” with (doy!) floor-to-ceiling windows boasting views of the aforementioned lane. Sights include a Wendy’s, a paint shop and an adult video store. If they really want to make people happy, put the windows on the adult video store so the shiftless, defeated pervert of a counter clerk can stare out of the glass and, for at least one moment, revel in the unobtainable beauty of a mid-priced corporate hotel franchise.

The adventure seekers and treasure hunters amongst you already know about the HMS Hussar, the millions of dollars in gold that she was allegedly carrying and her doomed passage through New York’s Hell Gate. If you’re like me, though, and have a standing eye-drop prescription on file at the pharmacy because your doctor got tired of writing one every time you got ranch Dorito powder all rubbed in there, you need a little background:

The Hussar was a 28-gun frigate (a warship built for speed and maneuverability) used by the British fleet during the American Revolution. In 1779, as French troops joined forces with George Washington’s soldiers just north of NYC, the Brits moved their 20-ship fleet south, instructing Charles Pole, captain of the Hussar, to transfer the army’s payroll to Long Island’s Gardiners Bay, where the Brits would continue to store provisions through the War of 1812. Pole was apparently feeling extra saucy because he decided to steer the Hussar through Hell Gate, a tidal strait in the East River known for its wacky currents, narrow berth and retarded amount of giant rocks. The decision was a definitive strategical oops.

Hell Gate, which connects the East River to Long Island Sound, got its awesome name from Dutch explorer Adriaen Block, who, in 1614, bitch-slapped the treacherous waterway right across its goofy face with a 42-foot yacht called the Onrust (Dutch for “Restless”). (Block, being a ruddy Dutchman, actually named the strait “Hellegat,” which can mean either “bright gate” or “hell gate,” but after scads of seamen lost their boats to the channel’s turbulent wiles, the latter Anglicization stuck.) Another frequently traded story of Hell Gate’s ignominious reputation is that of the General Slocum, a big bastard paddle steamship that, on June 5, 1904, was carrying 1,342 Lutherans up the East River to a Long Island church picnic when it caught fire (due to crew incompetence… not, like, Hell Gate magic or anything) and burned away into soggy carbon, incinerating 1,021 hungry Protestants in the process.

More interesting, though, is the story of Execution Rocks, a rock wall in the Hell Gate basin that’s visible during low tide and then slowly swallowed as the currents pull the water back into the strait. Legend has it that during the American Revolution, British soldiers dragged captured American patriots down into Hell Gate, lashed them to the exposed rock wall and watched as the tidal flow silenced their desperate screams. The story goes that when the Hell Gate Lighthouse was finally erected, the lighthouse’s keepers were plagued by the constant ghostly shrieking of murdered American rebels. It’s also possible that Execution Rocks is named as such due to all the horrific nautical disasters and whatnot. Nobody knows for sure. (If I had to watch a cartoon of one of those explanations, I’d want it to be the first one, but I think that’s just because in my head the lighthouse keepers are alcoholics with stumbling walks and swirling google eyes.)

Anyway, Captain Pole steered the Hussar into Hell Gate, where the ship was pinballed from rock to rock, scoring two free games before ultimately surrendering, gold and all, to the river’s hungry depths. For years afterwards, adventurous divers and Scrooge McDuckesque millionaires have braved the East River in search of the sunken treasure. Could New York’s gate to Hell actually be a stairway to Heaven? Because, like… the gold? Get it?

Even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter.

In 1876, the army Corp of Engineers began a decade-long dynamiting campaign during which thousands of pounds of explosives were used to clear the strait of its most dangerous obstacles. Later, nearby Randall’s Island and Ward’s Island were connected by a landfill and formed into a single, diaper-strewn mass. What I’m saying is, if there actually were heaps o’ gold on the Hussar, they’ve been blown up so many times, and had so much medical waste heaped on top of them, even Cash4Gold wouldn’t be interested – and they’ll accept gold teeth that are still set in a jawbone.

Frigate captains and Steamship sailors once feared the perilous corridor, referred to in hushed, reverential tones as “Hell Gate.” Today, canoeists flip U-eys all over its saggy ass. They might as well call it “Heck Gate.”

Or “Crap Alley.”

Jason has killed a lot of folks with a lot of different tools. His victims may wonder, “Who is this man? And why is he murdering me?” Meanwhile, we the viewers want to know, “What is that tool he’s using? And what’s its history?”

Wonder no longer.

Today: Speargun

As used by Jason in: Friday the 13th Part 3; Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

Victim(s): Vera Sanchez; Paul

Spears don’t just throw themselves. And why should you have to do it?! A speargun puts you a single drunken trigger nudge away from the zesty satisfaction that comes from shooting a spear at something. Some spearguns have a small buoy attached to the spear. After you shoot a big, stupid fish, this buoy helps subdue it, and lets other boat captains know that there might be a diver in the water retrieving a subdued fish. If a boat captain runs over a spearfishing diver, PETA gives him a chocolate chip cookie. In the 1960s, all the spearfishermen got together like in The Warriors and tried to have spearfishing added to the Olympics like in Spearfishing Bronze: Austria’s Shame, starring Robert Patrick. Unfortunately, nobody could dig it.

RAD LIB! In the [adjective] movie [porno title], James [formal contract to repay borrowed money with interest at fixed intervals] used a speargun to [verb] a bunch of SPECTRE [plural noun], and also probably to [verb] a woman’s [noun] for, like, [number larger than 17] hours.

European speargun users traditionally prefer rear-handle spearguns. American speargun users traditionally prefer mid-handle spearguns. Every speargun users puts a blonde wig on his speargun before taking it into the bedroom. South African speargun designers have improved upon speargun design by doing something with a rail or something. Anyway, speargun users were happy about it because the rail is scratch-and-sniff and comes in hot cinnamon roll or cherry bubble gum. A lot of people get spearguns confused with harpoon guns. Spear gun users make fun of these people, so if you have any doubts, just call it a fish popper. If you’re fish popper’s mounted to the boat, though, it’s probably a harpoon gun.

RAD LIB! After [your name] Bond gave [female senator] the biggest [type of orgasm] since the [period of the Cenozoic era], Bond meets with [letter of the alphabet], who gives him a [noun] that turns into a [animal], a [marital aid] that’s actually a [sex toy] and a [racial slur] that explodes when you [swear word] him.

Look up in the sky. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… a plane. It’s a plane. In 1994, FedEx employee Auburn Calloway sneaked spearguns into the future. Air spears! Calloway, who was facing dismissal from his job after a supervisor discovered some half-truths on his resume (he was actually Bruce Wayne’s in-house chocolatier’s apprentice), boarded a FedEx flight with hammers, a grudge and a speargun and set about hijacking the plane in the name of life insurance fraud. Fortunately, the swarthy crewmates managed to subdue Calloway with help from the buoy attached to the spear. Or they just beat the crap out of him, landed the plane and called the police. Either way, PETA gave everyone macadamia nut cookies. Except Calloway, obviously. No cookie for Calloway.

RAD LIB! Finally, [cereal mascot] used the speargun to [past tense verb] the head of [clever acronym] in his [adjective] [synonym for wiener]. Then he [past tense verb] 6 [plural type of storage container] of [imaginary creature that isn’t a griffin] blood and invented a new sex position called Amazon [construction vehicle] [predatory mammal] [type of natural disaster].
Thank you, Jason, for helping us learn through murder.

Join me again soon for another thrilling installment of Jason Vorhees’ Arsenal!

Let the kids have their evil sewer tunnels and drunken graveyard reveries. Adults have bigger things to worry about. Like giant Soviet drills. And how the giant Soviet drills are tunneling through the Earth and into hell, where the howling souls of the damned are torn apart, set on fire, sewn back together and covered in bees.

In 1989, as the decade stumbled to a close, Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), America’s Christian television goliath, reported that, according to a Finnish science journal, a Soviet deep drilling experiment had accidentally tunneled all the way to Satan’s doorstep. More than that, the shocked scientists, who watched as the drill’s temperature sensors peaked out at an extra spicy 1,100 °C, tossed a microphone down the pit and recorded a nature sounds tape worthy of a sleepless Ozzy – the noises of hell. And nothing bunches evangelical panties like the desperate wailings of the damned. (Truthfully, the recording sounds more like the pipe-and-tile-echoed rumpus at a particularly rowdy rest stop glory hole.) Some viewers were terrified, declaring it the end of times. Others were outraged, declaring it a hoax. One viewer – a puckish Norwegian tourist named Guy Rendalan – was bemused to the point of action.

As Baby New Year 1990 filled his diaper with optimistic tidings, TBN continued their coverage of the 9-mile hole to Hades, claiming that over 2,000 individuals had converted to Christianity after hearing of the chasm’s existence. This seemingly random numerical figure, which was offered during a January 29 broadcast, came with another revelation – in addition to the Finnish coverage, the network had a fully translated hard copy of a Norwegian paper’s hell drill article, which contained even more shocking details. A giant bat creature flew out of the hole! The words “I Have Conquered” were burned into the Siberian sky! The Soviet government was administering amnesia pills to everyone who witnessed the incident! This article, along with the helpful translation, had been sent directly to TBN by our impish pal Guy Rendalan.

“None of it is true. I fabricated every word of it!” explained Rendalan during an interview with TruthorFiction.com’s Rich Buhler. Rendalan, who, during his trip to America, was gob-smacked by the serious coverage of the ridiculous story, sent the article (which was actually about a community building inspector) and fake translation to TBN just see whether the network’s fact checking practices were really as, well, non-existent as they seemed.

And… they were.

As for the original article from that anonymous Finnish “science journal” – debunkers eventually tracked it backed to a Christian magazine called “Ammennusastia,” which was merely summarizing a similar story from a different Finnish paper. That paper, “Etela Soumen,” had printed its hell hole piece in a grab bag letters-from-readers section. From there, the trail continues. Savvy debunkers have sweated this paper chase all the way to a dead end at another Christian newspaper, “Jewels of Jericho,” out of f***ing California, USA.

In the end, the drill to hell is a story of doubt. The imagined fires and staged screams of that non-existent abyss suggested proof of the dark side of an afterlife that even TBN bible thumpers occasionally questioned. Why go to such stunning lengths to ignore the truth unless the lie – unattractive as it is – offers something more satisfying than integrity or credibility? In other words, unless the lie offers confirmation of an even deeper, more bibley truth. Who would’ve thought that the gaps in people’s faith could be briefly filled in by a cavernous hole?

Or that that hole would simultaneously give everyone else a sound recording packed with metal album hidden track potential.

Friday: Shipwrecked in the East River – the Real Hell Gate

Walk it Off – an abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

TODAY’S AILMENT: Toothache

Kermit’s Undoing

You will need: 1 Frog

Instructions: Spit on frog

Note: This method transfers the toothache to the frog, so maybe use a frog that committed a crime or something.

Less Achin’, More Coffin

You will need: Coffin Nails

Instructions: Pick afflicted tooth with coffin nails

The Chompy Botanist

You will need: The First Fern of Spring

Instructions: Bite the first fern of spring

Note: This cure also prevents the return of the toothache for an entire year. Use the time to finish your novel about the serial killer who’s killing one member of every pair of identical twins in Reno.

The Banal Misdemeanor

You Will Need: Stealth

Instructions: Steal a dishrag; Bury the dishrag

The Prestidigitator’s Secret

You Will Need: Pen; Paper; 1 Kindly Magician

Instructions: Have magician write secret message on paper; Carry magician’s message forever

Warning: DO NOT READ THE MAGICIAN’S MESSAGE. Toothache will return. Also, the message is extremely racist.

The Sacred Pendant of OINK!

You will need: 1 Length of String; 1 Bone from Hog’s Head

Instructions: Tie pig bone to string; Wear string around neck

The Glue Factory Special

You Will Need: Intermediate Knowledge of Equine Anatomy; Beginner’s Knowledge of Equine Anatomical Vocabulary; Hoof-like Substance from a Horse’s Inner Foreleg

Instructions: Shave hoof-like substance from horse; Pack substance into hollows of afflicted tooth

The Lazy Masochist

You Will Need: A straight face

Instructions: Trust in God.

“I’m Finally Getting Some Use Out of this Thing!”

You Will Need: A Mule’s Skeleton

Instructions: Touch the mule’s skeleton

Note: Like you mean it. Touch it like you mean it.

His Cure Friday (A Toothache Prevention Method)

You Will Need: Nail clippers

Instructions: Trim fingernails on a Friday; Read magician’s message

There’s a cemetery in Stull, Kansas where, once a year, the devil sashays out a gate to hell and MCs a homecoming dance for the damned. There’s a drainage pipe in Clifton, New Jersey that leads to a secret network of underground corridors – corridors that wend down through earth into the accursed depths of the netherworld. There are seven evil fence gates in the forests of York, Pennsylvania that, when entered consecutively, usher the adventurous onto the plains of Hades. Why would someone want to find a doorway to the pit (aside from the outside chance of a gift shop)?

I wish I could’ve asked the 150 or so revelers who gathered in Stull’s cemetery on March 20, 1978. Or the group of TV news reporters that was ejected from the privately owned graveyard on October, 31, 2002. These rowdy gatherings of Satan-hungry looky-loos began in 1974, when The University Daily Kansan, Kansas University’s student paper, published a piece detailing the local graveyard’s nefarious reputation as one of two places (the other being somewhere in buttfrack, India) where the devil has been known to appear in-person, either on Halloween (lame) or the vernal equinox (acceptable).

According to legend, Stull, Kansas was once called Skull, Kansas (Wrong. It was called “Deer Creek Community”), and the Skull, Kansas cemetery was the site of a grisly event – a stable hand stabbed the mayor to death (Wrong. Stull has never been incorporated and, as such, has never had a mayor). Other Stull-centric legends include the birth of a deformed demon baby, now, appropriately, buried in the dread graveyard, a cornucopia of witch executions and a rumor that, in the early ‘90s, Pope John Paul II ordered a cross-country flight redirected so that the aircraft wouldn’t pass over the Kansas town’s blighted soil. (Wrong. He had the flight re-routed so he could flush the toilet over the actual evil that is Oskaloosa, Iowa.)

Stull locals regard the legends as, alternately, hokum, bunkum and snorkum (a regional idiom), while Stull tourists are convinced that the locals are just, like, saying that to cover up the truth, man. The Satanic stalemate is only furthered by the town’s zero tolerance policy for cemetery trespassers, a fact that’s been used again and again as evidence that, at least in the graveyard, folks aren’t in Kansas anymore… and the townsfolk know it.

Alternately, the answer to my question, why oh why seek a gate to hell? Humba humba hum (that’s my new single. I’m multi-tasking) could be sought out in Clifton, where the local rainwater drainage system is rumored to hold a maze of catacombs chock full o’ human remains, lit candles, medieval weaponry and even demonic sentinels. Bonus: somewhere in the labyrinth is a bona fide passage to the Inferno. Over the years, the legend has proliferated thanks to coverage in Weird New Jersey magazine and whip-it-fogged teenagers, who cover the tunnels in messy pentagrams and spray-painted “Gate to Hell” signs, including helpful arrows pointing down into the darkness. Local kids use the lengths of tunnel as a ruler for courage measurement – a folklore-enhanced pissing contest designed to organize a social hierarchy based on pipe-distance-travelled. Likewise, York County, PA’s seven gates of hell dare scared kids to charge through the very real fence gate on Trot Run Road and freak out in the woods at night – the only time when the six subsequent gates become visible to man. Pass the seventh gate, and find yourself in Lucifer’s breakfast nook.

Suffice it to say, there’s something enticing about the idea of hell as a physical place, with skirtable borders, surveyable zip codes and, most importantly, a visible town center. As such, there are innumerable stories like the above – creepy tales traded by teens in the name of reshaping familiar geography into a mysterious (but navigable), deadly (but survivable) unknown. Other legends have taken this idea even deeper, mining mortal terror from the very core of the Earth.

Wednesday: Drilling to Hell

Spine-tingling action! Tear-jerking romance! Head-scratching pseudo-science! It’s the Weird Things Lake and River Monster Round-up – an occasional roll call of aquatic serpents that gives you, the reader, three lake monsters in three days. That’s almost two a day!

Today: Utah’s Bear Lake Monster

Technically, the story of Northern Utah’s Bear Lake monster begins with the Ute Indians, who believed that the lake was infested with whole schools of Pawapicts (or “Water Babies”) – nasty little critters that lured victims out into the water and then transformed said victims into Pawapicts themselves. Really, though, it starts with journalist Joseph C. Rich, who, while prospecting feature nuggets for the Mormon-owned Deseret News, heard the Pawapict legend and thought to himself, “Zippity-Jim! I love all of it! Except the part about the Pawapicts!”

Rich’s subsequent series of articles, published starting in 1868, were headlined “Monsters in Bear Lake” and recounted the experiences of several Mormon witnesses who attested to seeing unidentifiable brown creatures tearing ass across the tranquil waterway. The pieces went on declare open season on the monsters, which Rich helpfully suggested should be captured and sold to sideshow magnate P.T. Barnum. The only problem was that Rich had fabricated the entire story. There weren’t any monsters. More than that, there weren’t any witnesses.

I don’t want to suggest that the good people of Utah are born gullible. It’s probably something in the groundwater that builds up in their fatty tissue as they age. The point is, the same folks who Joseph Smith hooked, lined and sinkered with a tale of golden plates and a new testament of Jesus Christ were likewise bamboozled by Joseph Rich’s fantastical lake monster hokum. And I mean the exact same folks. (To be fair, a 2005 Princeton study found that 75% of all Christians and 66% of non-Christians hold some paranormal beliefs.)

While returning from a religious summit in Salt Lake City, three Northbound Deseret News readers – Molando Pratt and Williams Budge and Broomstead – saw what appeared to be a very large duck. On closer inspection, though, it turned out to be the monster from Rich’s articles. It was William Budge who penned the letter to former Utah governor, and head of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young. “As there has been considerable interest excited in regard to the ‘Bear Lake Monster’ I submit a description of what we have seen thinking it might be acceptable to you.” wrote a toadying Budge after describing the creature’s not quite horsey ears, sorta-foxlike face and the space between the animal’s eyes, which “equaled that of the distance between the eyes of a common cow.” (While resoundingly apt in this particular instance, this uniquely Utahan unit of measurement can be confusing, such as when panicked tourists are informed that the nearest Emergency Room is “79 times the distance between the eyes of a common cow west of here.”)

Young, who had apparently received several other monster letters from various correspondence-happy Latter Day Saints, kicked into full “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” mode, found himself an accomplice and set out to capture the Bear Lake beast. The plan was this: Young would give his friend, fellow Mormon Phineus Cook, some rope. Cook would then use the rope to catch the monster. Profits from the monster’s sale would be split down the middle.

Rope in hand, Cook dashed off to a blacksmith’s shop to oversee the creation of a giant hook, which the dutiful Mormon then baited with a large chunk of meat and attached to Young’s half of the bargain. Using 20 feet of heavy chain, Cook attached the hooked-and-baited end of the line to a floating buoy and tied the opposite end to a tree on the shore. Suffice it to say, Cook’s unique monstering apparatus failed to attract anything more than a perturbed letter from Young, bemoaning the team’s failure and demanding return of the rope.

While the Mormon community continued to spread tales of the Bear Lake monster via shared letters and, of course, continuing coverage in the Deseret News, other Utah newspapers, including the Salt Lake Tribune, skewered Joseph Rich’s shoddy reporting and mocked both the his home paper and the Mormon community for buying into the baseless farce. Though Rich ultimately confessed that his articles were wholly fictitious, monster sightings were eventually reported from every major lake in the State of Utah. Apparently, the power of suggestion doesn’t recant with its suggester. And the Bear Lake monster? It still makes the occasional cameo in the local newspapers. Usually around Memorial Day weekend – the start of tourist season.

That leaves one final loose end – Brigham Young’s rope. I’m sorry to report that he never got it back.

No one is all bad. Weird Things Cultural Researcher Matt Finley takes a look at the silver lining in famous fictional monsters.

Spoiler Alert(s), Internet!

Thanks to Ti West’s recent ‘70s/‘80s genre-smooching, suspense-laden “The House of the Devil,” a film that foregoes the kitschy pastiche of early Roth and Zombie in favor of a pure, effortless authenticity that’s as refreshing as it is familiar, we can take long look back at the days when Satanism was America’s threat du jour. We all know the score: the cultists wander around kidnapping all the single ladies, putting a runic ring on it, and impregnating them with the Archfiend’s baby. West seems pretty down on these Satanic OB-GYNs and their sinister fertilizations, but, c’mon girls, you could do worse. Rearing demon spawn does have its perks:

Biological Clock Stopper

Tick. John cheated on you. Tock. Mark was a closeted gay who begged you to tell your friends you broke it off because he was an uncomfortably straight alcoholic. Tick. Julian organized car accidents for the mob. Tock. Stan said the only good kid is a kid that isn’t his, and that also isn’t looking at him or eating a loud food like sourdough pretzels. Meanwhile, your desperation-powered cervix Swatch is quickly counting down to a menopausal zero-hour that’ll find your therapist blown clear into the next tax bracket. So when Satanists kidnap you, tie you to a pentagram, force you to chug the contents of a goat skull blood bong and, of course, impregnate you with the spawn of Satan, I say roll with it. “Satan” is only one letter away from “Stan,” and did you ever look at Stan? Say what you want about Satan – I don’t see Beelzebub passing on the man-boob gene.

Parental Stress Eraser

Nurturant Parent Model or Attachment Parenting? Baby Einstein or Baby Mozart? Moral Nihilism or Epistemological Nihilism? Who cares?! You’re raising Satan’s baby! Go ahead – drop him. Feed him some fiberglass pipe insulation. Now drop him again. On his neck. It doesn’t matter. You could be the Carol Bradyiest mom ever and the kid’s still going to grow up, turn off the sun and change everything encompassed by nouns into purple fire. You might as well just make yourself a cup of tea and leave him to his evil. The worst that could possibly happen is that everyone craps blood out of their mouths instead of puking it out their butts.

Afterlife Reservation Confirmer

Ask yourself – Do I want a thread-bare nosebleed seat in heaven or a reclining courtside seat in hell? That high up in heaven, you have to walk down six flights of steps just to get ice cream. That far down in hell, a waitress brings you nachos. And there are cloth napkins.

Spine-tingling action! Tear-jerking romance! Head-scratching pseudo-science! It’s the Weird Things Lake and River Monster Round-up – an occasional roll call of aquatic serpents that gives you, the reader, three lake monsters in three days. That’s almost two a day!

Today: Russia’s Brosno Dragon

If I were the Brosno Dragon, I would be pissed. And not in the Stolichnaya-induced way.

In 2002, members of the Kosmopoisk research association (a large, paranormal-obsessed non-government brain trust) panty-raided Lake Brosno with echo sounding equipment and low-impact underwater explosives. If the conversation on the Kosmopoisk boat mimicked that of the Internet blogging community, dragon debunking theories – ranging from giant sturgeon to mutant beaver- clouded the cabin and deck while, beneath the water, the equipment’s hydroacoustic pulses tripped blindly over solid matter. After a time, the onboard computer indicated a strange, amorphous shape, about the size of a train car, skulking just above the floor of the 140-foot-deep lake. “That’s gotta be the most mutated beaver ever.” remarked one of the researchers as his crewmates deployed an explosive device intended to startle the mysterious blob into action.

This after all the Brosno Dragon did for its country.

In the 13th century, when the Tatar-Mongol army fanned out across Asia and Eastern Europe, conquering the Russian army and dividing the Kievan Rus’ principalities into vassal states of the Mongol horde, the city of Novgorod (now Kiev), capital of the Kievan Rus, was spared invasion. If you ask a historian (or Wikipedia, for that matter) why the fierce invaders from the east pulled a U-ey a mere 100 km from the urban hub, he or she will probably tell you that, having conquered every other major city in the region, the Mongol commanders simply didn’t want to bother trudging through the area’s outlying squishity marshity swamplands. Ask a local, and you might hear a different story:

On the way to Novgorol, big cheese Mongol Batu Khan ordered his troops to take a rest along the shores of Lake Brosno. While the soldiers massaged each other’s feet and sang songs about blood, their thirsty horses moseyed down to the water’s edge. Suddenly, the Brosno Dragon burst from the lake, his razor teeth glinting like a soon-to-be-conceived baby’s father’s eye. The dragon fed. Horses, men, armor and weapons all cowed to the creature’s monstrous deglutition, the men’s shrieks and the horses’ whinnying screams all turned to horrid gargles by the torrents of foul mucous and hot spit that forced them over the drooling cataract of the beast’s yawning gullet. As the dragon gulped down flank after flank of the Mongolian army, Batu Khan hollered orders for an immediate retreat. The Mongols never attempted a second assault on Novgorol.

For the next few centuries, the Brosno Dragon napped and lazed and crapped out bridles and swords, rousing only for the occasional snack. For example: At one point, some Swiss mercenaries tried to bury some ill-gotten treasure on one of the lake’s small islands, until the dragon called “shenanigans” and devoured said island. (One modern theory suggests that surface disturbances attributed to the monster are actually caused by an underground volcanic vent. Just to play dragon’s advocate – you’d figure a giant creature whose diet consists of whole islands and live, armored horses would also create some significant bubbles in the tub, so to speak.) Otherwise, not much was seen of, or heard from, ol’ Brosny until WWII, when yet another invading army attempted to harsh Russia’s mellow. Always the national loyalist, the Brosno Dragon happily swallowed a Nazi airplane. (I wish this legend was a bit more fleshed out. It’s more fun, for example, to imagine the dragon leaping from the water to engulf a low-flying Luftwaffe craft than to picture him apathetically cherry-picking an already-disabled plane as it spiraled, smoking, out of the sky and into his slack-jawed mouth.)

On top of all that, there’s only one story that even suggests that the monster ever caused any Russian casualties, and in that tale, the dragon eats a single fisherman. And who knows? Guy was probably a wife beater.

2002 saw Russia sending a well-earned “Thanks, Dragon!”… In the form of low-impact, underwater explosives.

When the charge detonated, the researchers leered at the monitor, watching for any reaction from the giant, mystery lump at the lake’s bottom. Suddenly, movement! The shape on the screen began to drift toward the surface. The team scrambled to the side rails. I’ll let Vadim Chernobrav, Kosmopoisk coordinator, finish the story, as he told it to Russian newspaper “Argumenty i Facty”: “We starred at the water, and it was clear; there was nothing resembling a monster, however something unusual was still felt in the lake water.”

Perhaps that feeling was the vexed frustration of the last true Russian patriot, who Vadim Chernobrav’s team was lobbing bombs at it.

Or maybe the mutant beaver can exert psychical control over human emotions.

Friday: Utah’s Bear Lake Monster – the Mormon lake monster

Spine-tingling action! Tear-jerking romance! Head-scratching pseudo-science! It’s the Weird Things Lake and River Monster Round-up – an occasional roll call of aquatic serpents that gives you, the reader, three lake monsters in three days. That’s almost two a day!

Today: Ogopogo – British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake Monster

Nessie, Champ and Normie are all well and good in that 20th century third-hand account, blurry Polaroid sort of way. Ogopogo, though – Ogopogo demanded animal sacrifices from anyone wishing to cross over its lake. The Ogopogo of today seems a gentle giant, keeping to itself, and surfacing only for oblivious tourists and hopelessly unskilled videographers. But there was a time when the camera shy beastie trolled Okanagan’s waters with a ruthless vigilance and a bridge troll’s business acumen.

Aboriginal Salish people called the monster N’ha-a-itk, which supposedly means “lake demon” (lake demons – research that before you start thinking tribal tattoo). In the 1800s when the Europeans came barreling into the area, land-claim flags all a-thrust, it was these Aboriginals who warned the settlers about N’ha-a-itk’s strict lake toll, its supposed lair on the already-unenticing Rattlesnake Island, and its hunting grounds at Squally Point, where the Salish feared to fish. The Europeans took the news in stride, assigning armed guards to nightly lakeside patrols (not a bad idea any way, seeing as how they’d just, you know, stolen a bunch of land) and ensuring that the demon got his nummy blood tribute. It was these settlers who offered the first physical documentation of the monster – an engraving of the creature printed in the “Canadian Illustrated News” on November 30, 1872. That’s more than 60 years before the first recorded Nessie encounter.

With a paper trail of hearsay and sightings spanning back that far, one might think that Ogopogo would be eligible for a better name. N’ha-a-itk is as authentic as it is unmemorable, and other erstwhile monikers, like Snake-in-the-Lake and Wicked One, seem to serve the monster-wary namers more than the fearsome, aquatic named. But still – Ogopogo?! According to Mary Moon, author of “Ogopogo: the Okanagan Mystery” (1977), this amateurish palindrome that’s, depending on who you ask, a racist send-up of aboriginal dialect or a wacky homage to the just-introduced Pogo Stick, was supposedly coined by Bill Brimblecomb, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Canadian predecessor. In a 1924 parody of a popular British Music Hall song, “Barmy Bill” Brimblecomb sang:

I’m looking for the Ogopogo,
His mother was a mutton,
His father was a whale.
I’m going to put a little bit of salt on his tail

Two years later, 30 carloads of beachgoers watched the monster surface into the open air and then dive back down into the depths of Okanagan. In the wake of the mass sighting, “Vancouver Sun” editor Roy Brown penned an article that more or less championed the existence of the beast, and the local Board of Trade met to decide on the animal’s Official Name. Guess what they chose.

Over the decades, more than 200 sightings of Ogopogo have been reported. Proponents of the legend enjoy pointing out that most witnesses describe the creature similarly – 15-20 feet long with a horse-like head. Many accounts also liken the creature’s appearance to that of a floating log. If it looks like a log and floats like a log, it’s probably a surviving Basilosauraus. Or so concludes British cryptozoologist Roy Mackal, who, in his book “Searching for Hidden Animals,” claims that Ogopogo resembles this prehistoric snake-like whale to a T.

The Jim Henson Creature Workshop had a different take on the Snake-in-the-Lake’s appearance. When asked to design puppets and CG models of the creature for the Lake Okanagan-set (New Zealand-filmed) family adventure movie “Mee-Shee: the Water Giant,” they decided to model Ogopogo after Walter Matthau. Had he been alive to see it, I’m sure Matthau would have been honored: “Ogo – Wha? I’m a muppet now? I thought I was already those other two muppets in the balcony. Ugh. Just make sure they pay my blood tribute.”

Wednesday: Russia’s Mongol-terrorizing, Nazi-eating Brosno Dragon

As stories of the Goatman clop their way westward across the American continent, the thoughts of a nation turn to Maryland’s monster in a desperate bid to assimilate his cloven feet and rugged beard, his buff physique and uneven temperament, his steely glare and nasal bray, into the larger framework of national mythology. Texas! Missouri! Oklahama! California! The Goatman marches. In the same way that Maryland turned their intrepid mutation into a nightstalking vessel for an age’s worth of urban legend – the hookman, the Crybaby Bridge and even Bigfoot – so, too, do other states incorporate the fantastical axe-wielding émigré into their own local folklore.

While the Goatman blazed his way across the American South, stopping once in Arkansas to brandish a severed human leg at a Sonic waitress and once in Texas to chase after a rowdy band of teenagers, rumors of his possible connection to El Chupacabra began to surface. Could the insidious goat sucker that’s been exsanguinating American beef stock be the unholy progeny of the Goatman’s cross-country sex safari? Probably not – though it has been suggested. A more popular theory is that, given his penchant for ruthlessly dispensing with neighborhood pets, the Goatman might be El Chupacabra’s cousin. Sounds similar to Maryland’s “Bigfoot is a relative of the Goatman” theory, no?

While the Goatman diverted northward through Oklahoma and, eventually, Washington State, Bigfoot aficionados began to balk at the monster’s popularity. Many modern Sasquatch enthusiasts branded the creature a children’s story, undeserving of either national press or rigorous scientific attention. In a 1998 article in the “Washington City Paper,” (“The Legend of Goatman”) Tennessee Bigfoot hunter Scott McNabb dismissively declared, “Goatman is not an interest of mine.” McNabb went on to explain that, unlike Bigfoot, the Goatman tale lacks historical and scientific plausibility. Other Bigfoot hunters, while equally skeptical, have been more diplomatic in their assessment of Maryland’s fair-weather paranormal mascot – perhaps, they posit, the so called “Goatman” is a sasquatch that has fallen ill and lost patches of hair, causing it to appear more like a human/animal hybrid than a full-on missing link. One thing’s certain – for someone who’s feeling a bit under the weather, homeboy sure gets around.

The question is, what is it about the Goatman story – once the paragon of a locally confined myth – that has allowed its progress from anytown, MD to everytown, USA? Other equally compelling taxonomical conundrums (the Dover Demon, the Loveland Frog, the Beast of Bray Road, etc.) have gained national attention without ever managing to parlay local infamy into a physical nationwide presence.

Maybe it’s the fact that, as a humanoid creature with a consistently dark, but methodologically varied, modus operandi, the Goatman fits in nicely with America’s array of local Bigfoot analogs (Skunk Ape, Wild Man, Sasquatch, Tsiatko, etc.), many of whom display varying behaviors, but all of whom exhibit similar physical attributes. Bipedal posture. Hirsute bodies. Man-like faces. Heck, even Marylanders have posited the Goatman as Bigfoot’s genetic constituent. And the thing both Bigfoot and the Goatman have over, say, the Loveland Frog (a giant frog) is that they kinda look like big, hairy dudes in the woods. In the eyes of an observer, an axe-schlepping lumberjack is just four beers and forty feet away from the Goatman (or from evidence that Bigfoot’s a shill for the logging industry).

Maybe it’s a combination of natural Internet proliferation combined with his striking resemblance to the devil. Given that urban legends tend to spread most readily among an American teenage demographic that has, for decades, afforded all things Satanic a bleary eyed thumbs up (see every pentagram etched apathetically on to middle-school notebooks ever), a story about an evil marauding demon who hunts down doers of “it” comes pretty much campfire ready.

Maybe it’s just because he’s a man-sized goat with an axe.

Regardless, you might think about setting an extra place at the kitchen table. And picking up a third ticket to prom. The Goatman is coming to your town. And attending your prom after he eats dinner at your house. Maryland totally owes you one.

All manner of sycophantic websites and pot-stirring gossip rags have run “fun” features about celebrities’ pets. With headlines like “Hollywood goes to the Dogs!” “Hollywood is the Cat’s Meow!” and “Hollywood: No One Here Likes Rabbits!” these articles beg the question: what are these stars trying to hide? I mean, if you bank three mil a year, and then you go out and buy some kind of $500,000 purebred something or other that looks like a bat and can fit on a sandwich, I’m willing to believe that it’s your only pet. But if you bank 15 mil a year and buy that dog, it’s a cover for something far more extravagant. Today, Weird Things is blowing the lid off the biggest story since yesterday when Corey Haim died: Cryptozoology and the Stars

After filming “The Mothman Prophecies” in 2001, Richard Gere allegedly became obsessed with the film’s titular mystery beastie. When his Craigslist ad seeking “The Legendary Mothman” failed to turn up anything more than nine imposters, three middle-aged vigilantes and one historically insignificant mothman, Gere resigned himself to searching for “The World’s Most Moth-like Man,” who he plans to transform into the Legendary Mothman using chemicals. While Pedro Veranza, the world’s most moth-like man, has been imprisoned in Gere’s second-largest bathroom for over two years, the actor’s Craigslist postings indicate that he’s still “Seeking Chemials [sic].”

The editors of Carrie Fischer’s recent memoir, “Wishful Drinking,” supposedly excised a controversial chapter in which the “Star Wars” actress described a decade-long addiction to exotic intoxicants including Bigfoot dander, Martian extract and Phoenicus Lite, “this awful beer from Atlantis that tasted like piss, but reminded me of my college years.”

Before washing up on a Long Island beach, the so-called “Montauk Monster” was named Reggie and belonged to a now-devastated Sean William Scott. A friend of Scott reports that he got a call from the actor during which a weeping Sean William both recounted the tragedy and lashed out at the Internet response: “We were out on my boat together, and the little guy must have gotten over excited. It all happened so fast. I turned around for, like, two seconds… and then I heard a splash…” an inconsolable Scott went on to say, “Montauk Monster!? How about Montauk Friend? How about Montauk Best Friend? These [expletive deleted] bloggers… these [expletive deleted]s are the monsters!”

Inside sources report that actress Zooey Deschanel recently a purchased a Chupacabra with the intention of entering the beast in dog fighting competitions. Upon discovering that even illegal dog fighting has some rules, the actress quickly packed the creature into a large wooden crate. She then moved the crate in front of her couch and covered it with a table cloth, upon which she positioned two bowls of M&Ms and a coffee table book about trains. When guests ask about the smell, Deschanel allegedly replies, “It’s nothing. Have some M&Ms. And look at these trains!”

In David Cronenberg’s The Fly, the Brundlefly’s last horrific mutation was actually played by a deformed swamp monster owned by actor Jeff Goldblum. Goldblum reportedly told members of the crew that he bought the creature to “punch when I’m frustrated.” The actor then offered, “Go ahead. Try it! It’s like punching a girl in her brain!”

Save for one generalized tale of Satanism (The Goatman is a ritualistically summoned demon), the origin stories ascribed to the Goatman are the best kind of local folklore – geographically obsessed, historically revisionist and unflinchingly paranoid. That isn’t to say that they’re particularly original. You’ll recognize the antiseptic white of the research facility’s corridors, and the hollow screams resounding from mental ward cells. Still, of all the secret government labs in all the towns in all the world, the Goatman walked out of Beltsville, Maryland’s.

Given Maryland’s proximity to Washington, D.C., it’s no surprise that the government has been implicated in the genesis of the Goatman. Specifically, it’s the government’s Agricultural Research Facility, located in Beltsville, that often takes the blame (though I would think it unlikely that they also gave their horrific mutation an axe. Perhaps a rogue Smithsonian curator got involved). If the government has property in or near a town, you can count on it becoming the nexus of at least one sensational and horrifying urban myth (e.g., the U.S.S. Eldridge, the Montauk Project, et al).

There are two schools of thought as to the true nature of the Goatman – some folks believe that he’s an anomalously hairy, super-sized human whose feral lifestyle has earned him the appearance, and corresponding badittude, of a goat; Others think that he is an actual, genuine monster composed of one-half horrifying goatness and one-half unfettered masculinity. For the people whose theories tend toward the former, the Goatman was once a burly, 7-foot-tall government scientist who lost his funding and, subsequently, his mind, then ran screaming out into the woods and began a new life of regimented beard growth and teen sex intervention. (Because a monster? That’s ridiculous!) For the latter camp, the Goatman is the accidental result of a government experiment gone horribly awry. What kind of experiment? It usually isn’t specified, though one version suggests that an early cancer researcher injected a goat with live cancer cells, which, when combined with radiation or something, kick-started the animal’s transformation (metastasis?).

In his book “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” journalist Jon Ronson does, in fact, claim that the government has been known to use de-bleated goats for various training and tests, but given the Goatman’s alleged noisy vocalizations, it seems unlikely that he started as a member of Uncle Sam’s black ops seen-not-heard herd. Fortunately, there’s another, more recent theory: the Goatman is an escaped inmate of Glenn Dale Hospital. Again, in this case, two variations exist – the one where he’s a hulking nutcase and the one where he’s a freakish medical experiment. Both versions agree that he came straight from the stark-raving hell of restrained lunatics and abused maniacs that constituted the now-derelict Glenn Dale Hospital. There’s only one problem with this hypothesis – Glenn Dale Hospital was never, as many websites suggest, a mental hospital. It was a tuberculosis sanitarium used to isolate contagious victims of the then-common disease from the public at large, and from other hospital communities. After the building was declared a free-range asbestos ranch and shut down in 1982, however, paranormal investigators and urban photographers laid siege to the grounds, extensively (and inaccurately) blogging about their explorations of the abandoned Glenn Dale asylum. Interestingly, no story that I’ve found suggests that the Goat Man is an escaped tuberculosis patient, driven insane by his disease and often mistaken for a goat due to his rasping, nasal cough. But I guess a brawny psychopath is more frightening/goat-like than a wheezing tubercular corpse, despite historical veracity.

Nowadays, in deference to his fantastical origins and initial rambunctiousness, the Maryland Goatman seems to have abandoned flamboyant assaults on copulating youth in favor of covert pet theft and vandalism. It seems more than likely that the Goatman has fled its stomping grounds, leaving the people of the Old Line State to repurpose his horrific legacy into a banal catch-all blame depository. Can’t find the dog? The Goatman took it. Something dented your car door? ‘Twas the Goatman’s axe. Thankfully, as Maryland trembles in the wake of their misdemeanorous Scapegoatman, the true monster has taken his act on the road.

Friday: The America Goatman

Below are descriptions of three grotesque monsters. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a creature that has actually been reported. Can you Find the Fiend?

a) This fearsome humanoid bear-like creature, which is said to have the face of a man and the feet of a swine, supposedly resides deep inside a cave near Colorado’s Manitou Cliff Dwellings.

b) Part owl, part bear and part man, this 7-foot-tall flying monstrosity stalks the skies surrounding an ancient church.

c) This grotesque mystery of nature exhibits both feline and canine features. Research into the animal’s parentage has turned up few leads and even fewer revelations.

Answer after the cut.

The correct answer is

b) The Owlman, whose first victim was a family holiday that ended three-days early after two young female vacationers spotted the dreaded creature circling Mawnan Church in Cornwell, Great Britain. Two years later, another pair of girls encountered the Owlman while camping in the woods near the church. According to one of the girls, the red-eyed monster, which she discovered skulking around outside her tent, hissed loudly and took to the sky. Subsequent Owlman sightings, paired with increased UFO activity in the area, have kept cyptoozoologists wondering: “Is the Owlman a sinister alien visitor with a dark past, or simply a human pedophile who molested a radioactive owl?”

Statement a) described ManBearPig, the homicidal half man, half bear and half pig abomination that Al Gore sought to destroy in the aptly named “South Park” episode “ManBearPig.” In recent ManBearPig news, an Afghanistan war update printed in the New York Times on February 1st, 2010, included a reference to Observation Post ManBearPig – a Marine-occupied watch station in Treekha Nawa. The US government has since stated that if this tactical South Park reference proves successful in the War on Terror, pentagon authorities will initiate the detonation phase of a massive Middle Eastern Snuke campaign.

Statement c) described CatDog, a gross cat and dog hybrid that starred in its own eponymous Nickelodeon cartoon from 1998 until 2004. CatDog is disgusting. I don’t know how it defecates. Probably out of the cat’s mouth and then the dog eats it and that goes on over and over again in an endless loop, like some kind of copraphelic M.C. Escher drawing. It’s probably the only children’s cartoon that no serial killer has ever masturbated to. Revolting.

The legend of the Maryland Goatman is as much a narrative chimera as its deformed antagonist is a physical one. Descriptions of the hulking manimal, whose bushy beard and hairy human torso sit atop sinewy goat legs and fibrous hooves, immediately recall the mischievous satyrs of Greek mythology. Pop a couple horns on his fat, angry head (as some cryptozoologically inclined artistes have), and the Goatman even looks a bit like certain artist renderings of Satan, only with a cartoonishly threatening double-bladed axe in lieu of the classic sinner-pokin’ pitchfork.

I know. It’s hard to think of a modern story that doesn’t owe something to the Greeks or the Pagans or medieval personifications of evil. (Maybe “Sideways,” but even there – who can honestly look at Paul Giamatti without picturing him wearing a diaper and shooting heart-tipped arrows at a cartoon dog just as it’s looking at a cartoon cat?) But even as a modern American urban legend, the Goatman is a different animal.

Take, for instance, the monster’s aforementioned ‘50s debut – a bombastic affair in which the axe-toting Goatman went violently a-knockin’ on the hood of a car that was a-rockin’. After gleefully cutting in on the teenage couple’s horizontal mambo, the crazed monster fled into the woods, leaving the terrified adolescents practically peeing their pants, but actually just peeing the car seat near the pants that they had so lustfully removed. This story, and its ensuing echoed repetition among the randy pubescent suburbanites of Prince George’s County, bears all the tongue-clucking sex-negative hallmarks s of the ubiquitous hook-handed killer urban legend. Granted, some irritating scraping and a hook on the door handle is a bit subtler than enraged, melee-ready, bipedal livestock, but, you know, whatever it takes to chop a message through those thick teenage skulls, right?

Now, I don’t know about where you live, but here in Ohio, we’ve got at least two dozen alleged crybaby bridges – water-spanning roadways from which nighttime drivers claim to hear the sobbing of apparitional infants and women. These bridges are reported in every state (to the extent that well-known folklorist and artist Jesse Glass even declared the phenomenon Internet-perpetrated “fakelore”), and every bridge has its own story about a drowned baby or a suicidal lady, blah blah blah, hear the pathetic whiners’ posthumous boo-hooing. In Prince George’s County, though, that isn’t a fussy ghost you hear bawling its stupid eyes out under the bridge – it’s the Goatman. And he’s braying. Because he’s enraged. Or in heat. Either way, it’s another prevalent urban legend that Maryland has appended to the ink, type and whisper patchwork that is the Goatman tale.

A few imaginative Marylanders have even gone as far as to dub the Goatman “Bigfoot’s cousin.” Man ape. Man goat. It’s all the same to them.

The Goatman story may be composed of a buncha locally repackaged urban myths, but he isn’t only that. He has an origin story. More accurately, in typical “now make it giant and crazy and give it an axe” Maryland fashion, he has about five. And all of them are winners. Check back on Wednesday to find out how this bridge-sobbing hump disrupter came into being, and what the U.S. Government had to do with it.

If you want another example of the difference between Native American Skinwalker lore and white America’s (find me a black person fondling crystals in Sedona and I’ll issue a correction) embarrassing Mulderfication thereof, one need look no further than Utah’s 480-acre Sherman Ranch, AKA Skinwalker Ranch. The muddled mythology of this supposed paranormal hotbed reads like a veritable roll call of late 20th century fringe culture supernatural obsessions. UFOs. Interdimensional vortices. Sasquatches. Psychic disturbances. Cattle mutilation. Glowing orbs. Ghostly apparitions. They’re all present and scientifically unaccounted for in one dusty, northern corner of the Beehive State.

It was investigative journalist George Knapp, best known for his frequent presence on talk radio’s paranormal mecca Coast to Coast AM, who first called “Jinkies!” on Sherman Ranch. Likewise, it was Knapp who invoked the Skinwalker legend in explaining some of the area’s countless tales of things that make any variety of ridiculous onomatopoeias in the night (for example, I have no idea what a “large humanoid creature” crawling out of a “glowing portal” sounds like). Knapp’s resulting two-part 2002 newspaper feature “Path of the Skinwalker,” which appeared in Sin City’s alt weekly “the Las Vegas Mercury,” is thousands of words worth of largely anonymous testimony (such as that of “a scientist” who has “a long list of peer-reviewed papers about cutting-edge scientific concepts”), grossly subjective reporting and references to the movie “Predator.”

What does any of this have to do with Skinwalkers? Well, according to Junior Hicks, helpfully identified in Knapp’s article as “the area’s unofficial historian for all things weird,” the local Ute Indian tribe believes that the ranch is cursed by evil Skinwalking Navajo spirits, who have turned the area into a dimensional base camp for their malevolent magical shenanigans. Hicks, the only source cited for Knapp’s Skinwalker info, goes on: “The Utes say the ranch is `the path of the Skinwalker.’ Tribe members are strictly forbidden from setting foot on the property.”

Okay… but ghosts, aliens and the Predator? What does any of that have to do with Skinwalkers? For the sake of progressing, let me rephrase: why, given all of the various phenomena reported at the ranch, did Knapp choose the Skinwalker story as the lynchpin of the article? The Ute story is mentioned all of two times, and even Knapp concludes that it fails to explain most of the mysterious happenings.

Wednesday’s post covered my thoughts on some of the larger socio-cultural ramifications of the larger proliferation of the Skinwalker legend. Self-hating white liberals reductively correlate Native American tradition with nature, spiritualism and, most condescendingly, innocent simplicity, brand it as “true” American heritage, sell it to other self-hating white liberals and think of it as reparations. The resulting mysticism Americans associate with Native Americans is once removed from their own cultural experience in a way that Bigfoot or crop circles aren’t. In the end, the same people who wouldn’t even skim a story called “Path of the UFO” will devour a narrative piece that has the slightest glaze of exaggerated indigent tribalism.

But none of that is Knapp’s fault. Homeboy’s just making a living. Obviously, Knapp, who would probably make a better salesman than he does a journalist, understands that the Indian curse angle is more compelling to most people than the psychic vortex angle, accuracy be damned. (On a side note, I always thought it was funny how paranormal researchers always try to back up their claims using the legends of primitive cultures. “We’ve got historical evidence! See, these scientifically ignorant superstitious guys who worshipped trees drew pictures of UFOs! If we made up UFOs, how did these people who thought lightening was a demon know about them?”)

Anyway, I want to end this week on a positive note. So, why did Knapp choose the Skinwalker story as the lynchpin of the article?

Because Skinwalker is an awesome word. Seriously. Even deprived of all cultural associations. It’s an unfamiliar pairing of two familiar concepts that induces an evocative mental image. Skinwalker. Totally wicked!

Though, I can’t help but think that conclusions like these are why the Navajo don’t like to talk about Skinwalkers.

Jason has killed a lot of folks with a lot of different tools. His victims may wonder, “Who is this man? And why is he murdering me?” Meanwhile, we the viewers want to know, “What is that tool he’s using? And what’s its history?”

Wonder no longer.

Today: Road Flare

As used by Jason in: Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

Victim(s): Vinnie (Lit flare is forced into his mouth)

What do you get when you cross strontium nitrate with a bunch of boring crap? That’s right! Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” covered in strontium nitrate! I would have also accepted “the Arctic (or Indian) ocean filled with strontium nitrate!” “A road flare!” or “Lunchables!” Yup. Typical red-flamed road flares ignite and burn by way of strontium nitrate mixed with a stupid fuel source like dumb sawdust. Or moronic charcoal. Or something extra retarded called a “polymeric resin.” Most flares ignite at around 375 °F and burn at a wicked pissa hot 3,000 °F – the exact temperature of Satan’s bones (for this reason, most Mormon’s refuse to use them).

YOU CAN DRAW SORT OF! Some people have gone as far as to call strontium nitrate “The Best Nitrate” due to its use as the colorant in red fireworks. Can you draw red fireworks? Good. Can you label the picture “fireworks” so people don’t think I asked you to draw a bunch of buttholes? Perfect. Now, go ahead and draw a butthole next to the fireworks. It’s okay. People will just think it’s another firework. Really, though, it’s a butthole. And the butthole is watching fireworks.

What you know as “road flares,” your dead hobo grandparents knew as “fusees” (or “railroad flares”). On ye olde raily ways, when no one had radios and everything was crashing into everything else and then catching on fire and exploding, a train travelling an unsignaled line would drop flares to announce its existence to the train behind it. If that train encountered a burning flare, they stopped until the flare went out. Often, a conductor would use this time to quickly grope as many sleeping passengers as possible. Conductors would share their numerical groping stats with other conductors at the conductor bar. The conductor with the most gropes from a single flare wait won a day off. This is where we get the phrase “groper’s holiday.”

YOU CAN DRAW SORT OF! Railroad flares had spikes attached to them so they could be embedded in wooden railroad ties. Draw whatever you were actually thinking about when I was telling you that boring fact. Extra points if it has more than eight nipples or fewer than one head.

Road flares are also used to prevent forest fires via controlled burns – li’l baby fires ignited to clear away excess plant debris and keep fire breaks intact. Flares are also used in backfiring, a wildfire fighting technique that employs localized, low-intensity blazes, which burn off a progressing fire’s potential fuel sources. Like Smokey the Bear says: “Only you can prevent forest fires. And sometimes that means setting forest fires. But don’t set forest fires. Unless they’re the type of forest fires that actually prevent the other, non-preventative forest fires and… ugh. I tell you what – how about everyone just lights fires in sets of three and we’ll just count on it sorting itself out.”

YOU CAN DRAW SORT OF! Fighting fire with fire! That’s crazy! But sometimes it works. Draw a scene where something you’re afraid of is defeated using more of that thing. Examples might include an erupting volcano placed upside-down on top of a second erupting volcano so the volcanoes just erupt into one another, 2 police lieutenants shooting each other in the face, or something with two sandwiches. Maybe they have flare guns.

You tell me it’s a firework exploding a firework, but all I see is two buttholes inhaling each other.

Thank you, Jason, for helping us learn through murder.

Join me again soon for another thrilling installment of Jason Vorhees’ Arsenal!

The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers – especially with monster-obsessed whiteys who invariably convert rich oral tradition into airport-ready supernatural thrillers (Tony Hillerman’s “Skinwalkers”) and straight-to-DVD horror flicks (James Isaac’s “Skinwalkers”). That means that, assuming the four or five template-based paranormal blogs that feature excitable Skinwalker posts aren’t written by defecting Navajo tribesmen (a fairly safe bet), it’s difficult to separate the authentic Skinwalker lore from the hyperactive Native American fan fic of cable doc-obsessed Fox Mulder wannabes. For every believable, richly folkloric Navajo Skinwalker legend, there are two or three stories about this one time really late at night when a crazy manimal totally attacked someone (I swear, it happened to my cousin’s friend).

According to some (supposed) Navajo legends, during the Long Walk, when the U.S. government forced over 9,000 Navajos to take a 300-mile trudge to newly established reservation land near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, the Skinwalkers were the first to reach the destination. As Navajo women keeled over in the heat, and exhausted men struggled with unconscious children, Skinwalking witches simply transformed into coyotes and crows, which easily sprinted or flew all the way to the reservation. Despite the Skinwalkers’ traditionally evil nature, they are distinctly Navajo and, therefore, proved vital to the preservation of Navajo heritage in the wake of the cultural upheaval brought on by external forces.

Granted, there are plenty of Navajo tales that portray Skinwalkers in a more traditionally antagonistic light. Still, you’d be hard-pressed to find a non-Native Skinwalker story that offered anything but a watered-down cocktail of mystery and terror. They essentially play out like this:

One night a New Mexico state trooper was patrolling the desert around a Navajo reservation. Suddenly, he noticed a strange shape rushing up

alongside his car. The shape resolved into a hideous creature that ran as fast as the officer’s sedan could accelerate. The monster kept pace with the trooper for miles before finally dropping back and disappearing into the darkness. To this day, the officer refuses to patrol that accursed stretch of land.

The same non-native America that repackaged Native American art as kitschy fetish crafts and airbrushed paintings of wolves has turned Skinwalkers, who have a uniquely dynamic relationship with their origin culture, into generic monsters that lurk in the shadows and jump out at passing victims.

And I don’t think that’s a negative a thing.

For decades Native Americans have fought to retain their unique heritage and identities in the face of an ever homogenizing American culture. For most countries – countries with separate and independent geographies – it’s a low stakes game. Germanic tradition, for example, can be assimilated into America’s aggregate culture without losing its physical roots in Germany, or its emotional and intellectual roots in the Germans that still reside there. Native Americans only have America, and most of that was taken from them. The borders they do have – both geographical and cultural – are shrinking. The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers, and so the cable doc-obsessed Fox Mulder wannabes think of the beings as mystical native werewolves – feral and savage, or magic and prescient, or sexy and strong. Cold. Uni-dimensional. Non-dynamic. Inhuman.

The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers, and so the Fox Mulder wannabes are ignorant and xenophobic and maybe even mildly racist. But these things – ignorance, xenophobia, racism – build boundaries between people and cultures. These things strengthen borders.

During the Long Walk, the white men let the Skinwalkers charge on, unmolested, toward Fort Sumner because they saw them as animals. Because they didn’t recognize them for what they truly were – scouts and emissaries; patriarchs and magicians; Navajo. Perhaps today the Native Americans depend on white men to sell cheap headdresses and inauthentic drums and synthetic dream catchers, to make terrible straight-to-DVD horror movies, so all eyes are looking down at cash registers or through camera lenses while, unnoticed, a flock of crows passes by overhead.

Walk it Off – an abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

Today’s ailment: Hiccups

The Homestead Thievery Gambit

You will need: 1 Convincing Accuser

Instructions: Have convincing accuser accuse hiccupper of stealing money “on a farm.”

The Nurturing Satanist

You will need: 1 Right Index Finger (yours); 1 Left Shoe (worn); 1 Accurate Clock; Functioning Salivary Ducts

Instructions: At the stroke of midnight, stand next to hiccupper’s bed, wet right index finger with saliva and draw shape of cross on left shoe. Recite Lord’s Prayer backwards three times.

(Note: also results in summoning of bog imp)

The Cute Little Heart-Breaker

You will need: An open mind

Instructions: Have hiccupper imagine a fox without imagining the fox’s tail.

IMPORTANT: This is very different from the vomit induction trick of imagining a fox without a tail.

The Anonymous Tumbler

You will need: 1 Paper Bag; 1 Grassy Hill

Instructions: Place paper bag over hiccuppers head; Have hiccupper roll down grassy hill

Note: Using a paper bag with a “dizzy face” drawn on it will neither improve nor hinder this method’s results. I repeat: it will not hinder this method’s results.

The Acrid Flavor of Death (AKA The “Needs Salt” Method)

You will need: The ability to discern the center of a graveyard; A graveyard

Instructions: Have hiccupper place dirt collected from the grave nearest a cemetery’s center on his/her tongue.

The Dent in the Breadbox

You will need: A strong right jab

Instructions: Punch hiccupper in the stomach

The Huey Lewis-Endorsed Power of Love Cure

You will need: to be pretty damned certain hiccupper isn’t as lonely as he/she looks.

Instructions: Have hiccupper picture a person of the opposite sex who loves him/her

Caution: May result in existential crisis

Bug Sack

You will need: Live Pill Bugs; Small Sack; Twine

Instructions: Place pill bugs in sack; Using twine, tie sack around hiccuppers neck

Note: Most effective on prom night

The Improvising Satanist

You Will Need: Two Black Candles; Matches or Lighter; 1 Wet Noodle

Instructions: Light both candles; drape noodle between hiccuper’s eyes

(note: also results in summoning of meatball orc)

The Wait, What?! No. I’m Not Doing That. That… That’s… No. Method

You will need: 1 Alligator

Instructions: Have hiccupper rub gator’s belly.

The best thing about secret government research projects is the fun, random codenames. For example – Project Bluebird… Weaponized birds activated by pitching peanut butter-and-seed-coated pinecones into an enemy camp? Not even a little bit. This 1950s CIA program was created to research alternative (generally psychopharmacological) prisoner interrogation techniques, and to create a new breed of puppet spook, whose free will, up to and including his self preservation instinct, was completely suppressed. Most of the experiment was spent administering low dosages of synthetic drugs and chemicals, including heroin, PCP, mescaline, LSD and ether, to unknowing military personnel stationed at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. While the CIA was tangentially interested in the direct effects of the psychotropics and narcotics, their real mission was to study the exploitability of withdrawal-addled soldiers – a goal they accomplished by suddenly ceasing test patients’ regular mickey slips. Of the 7,000 unwitting Project Bluebird participants, 1,000 demonstrated symptoms of epilepsy and clinical mopiness, including suicide attempts and the writing of songs with the word “Blues” in the titles.

(Project Bluebird was later renamed Project Artichoke, a surprisingly apt name that recalls bitter thistles cooked in acrid vinegar water and served up on admittedly delicious pizza, but Satan is the delivery guy and he thinks it’s funny to “forget” to seal the insulated transport bag.)

In 1953, after CIA director Allen Dulles allegedly started bitching and moaning about how many more brain-diddling experiments the government could conduct if they had additional human test subjects, the CIA consolidated all of its varied interrogation research under a singular covert umbrella – the now-infamous MKULTRA. While most folks associate these experiments with LSD research, the MKULTRA project had so many facets and subprograms that its claims of heightened efficiency are dubious. Project QKHILLTOP studied Chinese brainwashing techniques. Subproject 68, operated out of Canada, attempted to chemically erase subjects’ minds (via drug-induced comas) so that scientists could then rewrite the subjects’ personalities based on government specifications. The best, though, both methodologically and fun-codename-wise, was Operation Midnight Climax (yes, that is just what you were looking for, name-seeking high school-aged rock band), in which CIA-compensated hookers lured clients to government safehouses, where the johns underwent LSD dosings and sexual blackmail all in the name of interrogation research.

MKULTRA was shut down in the early 70s, though many believe that contemporary psychological interrogation techniques, such as those employed in Guantanamo Bay, are direct descendents of the CIA’s zany research.

While MKULTRA was chugging along, the U.S. Army, plied as it was on CIA-administered hallucinogens, conducted a wide array of chemical experiments, which didn’t have fun codenames, so whatever. I’ll just rattle them off real quick like. They tested chemical weapon dispersion patterns by blitzing six cities with toxic chemical sprays (I would have called it Project Bandersnatch). They (in cooperation with Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson and Dr. Albert Kligman) injected 70 Holmesburg State Prison inmates with herbicides (I would’ve called this one Project Potpourri Elitism). Additionally, they subjected other Holmesburg prisoners to toxic skin-blistering acids, so that scientists could observe the healing process (me thinks Project Sapphire Dingle).

The important things to get out of all this are a) you’re probably drinking government chemicals right now, but don’t worry… any damage that was going to happen already happened way back in your mom’s uterus when you were sucking whooping cough and DDT through your umbilical cord. It’s probably why coffee smell makes your eyes bleed; b) lots of the experiments detailed in this week’s posts had irrefutably positive results and saved dying babies and whatever so chill out. Christ; c) fun codenames. I’m serious about this. Even it just means re-titling the index cards in your recipe binder or sitting down with your significant other and assigning black ops aliases to your favorite sex positions, you need to apply this to your life.

In which I, Weird Thign Cultural Researcher Matt Finley, add a wholly unnecessary narrative spin to the satisfying, straight-forward conclusion of a film.

Today: Twist Minis

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – As Leatherface does his frustrational chainsaw-swingin’ twirly dance, the film suddenly freezes, the still image of the cannibalistic transvestite slowly pixelating and breaking down into blackness. Something beeps. Suddenly the blackness seems to lift away as we see a POV shot of two strong hands pulling stylish virtual reality glasses away from the screen. The hands belong to a middle-aged man with kind eyes and an “I’m really tired, but I also just drank some delicious hot cocoa” half smile. The camera cuts from the POV shot and we see that the through-the-glasses point of view was that of a sickly adolescent girl in a hospital bed. The man touches her IV-infused hand and says, “See, honey? That’s adulthood. Now do you understand why it’s almost better that you got sick?” The girl nods. Roll credits.

Alien – As the Alien spirals out into space, smash cut to sweat-drenched alien sitting up in bed. An alien next to him stirs and mumbles, “Is something wrong, honey?” The first alien catches its breath and replies, “I just had a nightmare where I was blown out of a spaceship by a horrific alien.” “You know,” says the other alien, “to an alien, you would look like an alien.” Before the first alien can reply, he begins choking and a human baby bursts out of his chest. Acid blood sizzles in the dark air. Smash cut to sweat-drenched predator sitting up in bed. A predator next to him mumbles, “Is something wrong, honey?” “I just had the funniest f***ing dream!” chuckles the first predator. Roll Credits.

Jurassic Park – As the helicopter gracefully banks toward the sunset, the camera tracks back through the aircraft, moving past the passengers and up into the cockpit, where it zooms in on the pilot, who’s a dilophosaurus. It deploys its neck fan. Roll credits.

The Shining – Cut to Grady and the bartender drinking scotch in the ballroom. “Wow.” Says the bartender, “I think that went really well.” Grady frowns pensively and replies, “Yeah… but I’m still not clear on how it’s supposed to make us rich…” The bartender freaks. “Dammit! I knew I forgot something.” He punches the bar top and shouts, “Well, how soon can we get another family in here with an unhinged dad and a kid who has the shining?” Grady shakes his head. “At least a couple months.” “Well… set it up, I guess.” The bartender says, shaking his head, “and this next time… this next we’re gonna get so rich!” They clink glasses. “So rich!” Roll credits.

Historical journeys can be a slog. What can I say? It’s all those damn facts. Even human medical experimentation in America can read a little bit yawny when it’s dragged out in paragraph form. Fortunately, I have no integrity and am, therefore, not above the use of cheap structural gimmicks. It’s like in that song from Mary Poppins about the sugar and the medicine, except the sugar is the structural gimmick and the medicine is the cough syrup that I’m drinking right now. Chim-chim-cheroo.

Time Period: 1940s

Problem: All the darn malaria that’s plaguing U.S. Naval troops in the Pacific theater.

Solution: Bring a bunch of malarial mosquitoes and experimental malaria vaccines to Statesville Penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, infect a whole mess of volunteers and then test the vaccines on them.

Negative results: One of the 441 volunteers died from a heart attack (the scientists pinky swore that it totally had, like, nothing to do with malaria); during the Nuremberg trial, sucky Nazis attempted to use the Statesville experiment to defend their malarial infection experiments on… you know… not volunteers… at Dachau.

Positive results: Hearty support from the American public enabled the testing to continue for 29 years. The experiments were instrumental in pioneering modern malaria treatments.

Time Period: 1952

Problem: “Hey, does anyone understand cancer? I just… I don’t get it.” – Chester M. Southam, Sloan-Kettering Institute

Solution: “Okay, okay… I’m gonna go down to Ohio State Prison with a bunch of needles filled with live cancer cells, inject the cells into hundreds of unknowing inmates and then… see what happens, I guess?”

Results: “Nope. I still don’t get it…”

Time Period: 1955

Problem: Is America prepared to deal with biological warfare? The CIA does that hand-tilting “sorta” gesture that people do when they mean “no.”

Solution: U.S. boats off the coast of Tampa Bay, Florida, fire a chunky dose of whooping cough toward the city.

Negative results: Tampa suffers a massive whooping cough epidemic that infects 1,080 citizens, resulting in 12 deaths.

Positive results: The government’s worst fear – a “baker’s dozen” casualty scenario – proves unfounded

Time period: 1956-1957

Problem: Could terrorists attack the country using a swarm of mosquitoes infected with either yellow or Dengue fever?

Solution: Release millions of uninfected mosquitoes in Savannah, Georgia, and Avon Park, Florida, and monitor the insects’ impact and range.

Negative results: Once released, the “uninfected” mosquitoes naturally contracted all sorts of contagious horribleness, leading to outbreaks of typhoid, encephalitis and other miscellaneous fevers. As the diseases spread, Army workers disguised as public health officials tested and photographed suffering citizens. Scientists later admitted that the experiment was a “terrible idea.”

Positive results: Some of the Army guys were allowed to keep their victim cameras.

Time period: 1962

Problem: “Hey, does anyone understand cancer yet? Man, this is frustrating!” – Chester M. Southam, Sloan-Kettering Institute

Solution: “Okay, okay… I’m gonna go down to Brooklyn’s Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital with a bunch of needles filled with live cancer cells, inject the cells into 22 unknowing patients and then… see what happens, I guess?”

Positive result: Southam’s medical license was suspended for a year after the hospital tried to cover up the doctor’s experiment.

Negative result: Two years later, Southam was elected head of the National Cancer Society.

Friday: Matt retreats back to conventional prose when confronted with government-run chemical experiments and psychological torture

Watching the new Wolf Man movie, I couldn’t help but think that maybe it’s a little one sided. Really, though, what can you expect from those liberal Hollywood types? “Ugh! Wolf man! Boo! Hiss! Destroy all wolf men!” Sure, wolf men kill some people and send the local chamber of commerce into a bit of a tizzy, but water slide parks do that, too. Honestly, though, I think our local wolf man is the best thing to happen to this town since they closed down the water slide park. Now I’m not shouting “wolf man for mayor” or anything like that (certainly not here in print), but damned if that hairy virgin murderer hasn’t done his part for our humble village.

Lazy Gypsy Motivator

Before the wolf man came, all the gypsies did was lie around their camp drinking raven’s feather schnapps and selling cursed jewelry that turned pregnant women’s babies into foals. After the wolf man though – when everyone started blaming the gypsies for the wolf man – those shawl-draped reprobates really stepped up! At first, it was just little things, like giving away free horse brushes with the cursed jewelry, but as the wolf attacks persisted and the townsfolk got increasingly grumpy, the gypsies actually started to help out. That one-eyed gypsy with three teeth showed the butcher how to prepare goat meat for soothsaying, and the extra mysterious gypsy (the one without thumbs) taught the town drunk to play a funny little drum. I even heard that the one-eyed gypsy with no teeth called a lightning storm down to set fire to our rival town’s high school. Take that, Ockton Otters! Hawks rule!

Family Bonding Facilitator

Before the wolf man came, evenings were just an excuse for me to hit O’Higgity’s pub, for the kids to hickey their schoolmates comatose out in the woods and for my wife to short out the sewing machine motor with her drunken tears. Now, two nights a month, the streets and the woods become the gruesome playground for a voracious monster that can’t tell skin from blood from bone until he turns human again and has to crap out big chunks of bone. What’s that mean? Family fun night! Now, twice a month, evening is a time for awkward silence and forced conversations about daily banalities; a time for arguing over what movie to watch and losing rock, paper, scissors, and having to sit through “Ghost”; a time for me to know full well the sort of domestic hell storm that will result if I make even one hilarious fart noise during “Ghost,” but not caring and waiting until the big climactic kiss to make the biggest, most hilarious fart noise ever; a time for involuntary sobriety and screaming at each other about who cheated at Uno; a time for reminding ourselves why we stopped spending time together in the first place.

Sheriff Comeuppance

Before the wolf man came, everyone had to put up with the meddling Sheriff and his incessant law enforcement: “You can’t park in a crosswalk!” “Actually, the speed limit does apply to motorcycles!” “You’re under arrest for firing a gun in church!” But then, the wolf man ate the sheriff. After that, the deputy was made acting sheriff, and he was even worse! Everyone knows that no man can enforce the Law of the Lake, but try telling that to acting sheriff Reardon, who somehow got Art Putney sent to jail for beating his wife in the lake. Fortunately, the next month, the wolf man ate him, too. That’s when we started having new moon parties over at O’Higgity’s. Now, every month, the first night after the full moon, everyone gets together at the pub and celebrates the death of the most recent sheriff, who inevitably got elected on an “I’ll stop the wolf man” platform, and who inevitably died failing to stop the wolf man. Except sheriff Porter. He died in a lightning storm while watching his nephew’s football practice in Ockton. Hawks rule!

I don’t think it too spoiler-y to tell you that Scorsese’s atmosphere-drenched “Shutter Island,” set as it is in a fictional 1950s mental institution staffed and populated by more than a few WWII vets, features several conversations about Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners. I’m sure you’ve heard about these atrocities – high altitude endurance tests, malarial infection research, sterilization projects, poisoned bullet experiments, etc. If you haven’t, turn on the History channel for two hours and you’ll hear about all of it, plus the Spear of Destiny and a computer simulated hypothetical melee fight between Hitler and a velociraptor.

Japan’s less notorious Unit 731, a black ops Imperial Army unit that, from 1937 to 1945, carried out horrific chemical and biological tests on Chinese and Korean prisoners, can offer an equally horrifying research project, if that’s the kind of thing that floats your pickle. What I want to do, though, is take a whirlwind tour of the creepy, grotesque, weird or otherwise cringe-worthy human medical experimentation that has occurred right here on American asphalt.

Due to the graphic nature of some of the experiments mentioned, we are putting the rest of this puppy AFTER THE JUMP…

During the early 19th century, when American medicine was still a loosely regulated syringe-scattered ethical free-for-all, respected medical professionals subjected prisoners, orphans and slaves to all manner of ickiness. J. Marion Sims, for example, who’s known today as the father of gynecology, was known yesterday as the high prince of vaginal hack-and-slash experiments as performed on enslaved African women sans anesthesia. Many of the ladies, some of whom underwent more than two dozen surgical crotch scrambles, died of infection while Sims used cobbling tools to reconfigure their babies’ skull bones (Sims believed trismus, a disorder that prevents infants from properly opening their mouths, could be cured through skull rearrangement). And if you think disenfranchised girlie bits had it bad in the 1800s, wait until you hear about what happened to disenfranchised manly parts in the 1900s…

For 33 years, Dr. Leo Stanley, San Quentin Prison’s chief of surgery, went testicle crazy. Those unfortunate enough to find themselves castrated by Dr. Stanley’s Knives of Sweet Baby Jesus You’ve Got To Be F***ing Kidding had their extracted pride replaced by one of two (well, really two of four) things: the verile cojones of a goat, ram or boar, or the retired balls of an executed prisoner. See, Dr. Stanley thought that the criminal instinct nested in a man’s marble bag, and could be nullified if the marbles in question were replaced by those of a corpse. Dead people nards in live people sacks. He also thought livestock nuts could cure age-related impotence. (They can’t.)

The 1900s saw the continuation of the convict and kiddie medical experimentation trend, as viral and bacterial agents like cholera, plague, beriberi and syphilis were shot into vein after unwilling vein, often just so doctors could observe the full course of an infection in multiple patients in a controlled setting. And when purposely infecting folks began to fall out of vogue, doctors settled for simply not curing the already infected. Such was the basis of the Tuskegee experiment, a 30-year study of syphilis carried out between 1942 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service, who went to rural Alabama, singled out 400 destitute syphilitic African American men and pretended to treat them, all the while observing the unknowing subjects’ gradual physical and mental decline. Under the stoic gaze of government scientists, 128 men died of syphilis or related conditions, 40 women became infected via sexual transmission and 19 children were born with the disease. The secret study only ended because the press found out and had a month’s worth of field days.

Coming up on Wednesday and Friday: Deadly Radiation, CIA Acid Casualties, Nuremberg Defense Lawyers and “the Effect of Frigid Temperatures on Mental Disorders”

In the 2005 film “White Noise,” Keegan Connor Tracy’s anxiously stuttering character tells Michael Keaton’s character that Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) is dangerous… “like homemade Ouija boards and… and, and teenage séances on Halloween.” Of course, desperate to hear from his dead wife, the recent widower doesn’t listen, and his obsession with pressing is ear to the mortal coil finds him at the business end of some serious supernatural monkey business. In real life, the supposed spirit voices that force their way through the surface noise of amateur paranormal investigators’ off-brand microcassettes are as likely to corrupt your soul as the hidden Satanic messages that pop-averse evangelists Where’s Waldo out of reversed Beatles’ songs. Even so, if any of you are thinking about doing a little ethereal eavesdropping, maybe should start out small – say, with animals.

As far as I can gather from the half-hearted Internet research I did while watching a movie, animal EVP is just as common as human EVP, but nobody pays it much attention. Despite the frequency of dog and cat noises on their hissy tapes, spook tapers spend a majority of their time decoding the barely audible human voices in hopes of unlocking afterlife secrets. Why shove an earbud halfway into your brain just to listen to the static-laced meows of a fussy, discorporate calico? Still, I thought for sure I’d find a fringe paranormal knitting circle that only chased after puppy EVP or something, but no dice. All I located were some random bits of animal EVP within larger databases of human voice samples, and several EVP FAQ-page references to the commonality of animal sounds.

One website did mention that an Illinoisan EVP enthusiast, who was taping near the sight of the famous 1918 Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train crash, captured the horrific cries of dying circus animals. (I can neither corroborate the existence of this alleged recording, nor whether any animals even died in the crash.) Meanwhile, some folks claim that, in spirit form, animals can speak in human tongues. In her book “Phantom Felines and Other Ghostly Animals,” Gerina Dunwich explains that, while most animal ghosts ought to be approached with the same baby talk and kissy noises as their still-breathing kith, she has heard stories of “ghost animals speaking to the living in human voice – either audibly or telepathically.” If that’s the case, then half-garbled EVP of people saying “Hello,” or something… something… “Randy”… something, are just as likely to be messages from deceased house pets as they are the post-mortem orations of dearly departed neighbors.

As for all the Internet EVP nuts – you’d think that people so obsessed with the nature of the beyond would be more curious about the implications of animal ghost chatter; after all, if in fact, EVP is real-time magnetic field-enabled communication with former earthlings now residing in some nether-dimension (as many EVP fanatics believe), the notion that other living things likewise transform and relocate is pretty heavy, especially in terms of its broader implications regarding the spiritual identity of man. On the other hand, I also found some enthusiastically described EVP of trains. I guess if hopper cars transubstantiate, anything is fair game.

One movie. Five people, living or dead, at the screening. Who and why?

Today’s screening: “Masque of the Red Death”

One of eight gloriously lurid Poe adaptations directed by American B-movie auteur Roger Corman, this colorful tale of pestilence, corruption and Satanism, released in 1964, loosely adapts and combines Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories “The Masque of the Red Death” and “Hop-Toad.” Essentially, the sinister Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) joyfully tortures a village full of long-suffering peasants while hosting an elaborate, hedonistic costume ball for fringe members of the aristocracy, who are seeking shelter from a deadly bleeding disease that’s sweeping the countryside.

Anton LaVey (1930-1997), Founder – The Church of Satan

A mere two years after Vincent Price’s turn as the Satanist Prospero, Anton LaVey, already known around San Francisco for his occult lectures and paranormal research, founded the Church of Satan. Coincidence? Rather than have LaVey expound upon his best known works, “The Satanic Bible” and “The Satanic Rituals,” this film should spur some conversation about his lesser-known books, “The Satanic Chef” and “Satanic Jokes for Goateed Folks.”

Howard Zinn (1922-2010), Political Scientist

Sure, the highly controversial and recently deceased socialist-leaning populist historiographer probably hasn’t even gotten a chance to ghost flush the toilets at “The Weekly Standard,” but I can’t leave him out of this screening. Corman’s portrayal of Prospero’s relationship with the peasants – from the indiscriminate killing to the kidnapping of virgins in the name of forced Satanic conversion – plays out like a series of early scenes from the hypothetical “A People’s History of Europe.” Even if Zinny finds the socially just ending to be insultingly unrealistic, it’ll be worth it just to hear him reminisce about past outrages, present iniquities and the drinking game he played with Noam Chomsky where they watched “24” and solemnly took a shot every time a character’s human rights were violated.

Edgar Allen Poe, (1809-1849), Author

Obviously, Poe should get a chance to watch Corman’s adaptation of his classic story. And, if there’s time, “Wall-E.”

C.J. Peters (1940- ), Field Virologist

Famous for helping to control epidemics of deadly hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola and Hanta Virus (the book “Hot Zone” and the film “Outbreak” were inspired by his research and field work), Peters could provide speculative scientific insight on the titular “red death,” a fictional hemorrhagic fever that spreads rapidly via man-sized crimson-shrouded party crasher. Questions for Peters could include, “generally, what’s the mortality rate of a virus like this?” and “is actual Ebola as monochromatic in its wardrobe selections?”

Aeschylus (?525 BC- 456 BC), Playwright

Though best known for writing stage adaptations of mythological tragedies (“Agamemnon,” etc.), Aeschylus’ oldest existing play, “The Persians,” not only dramatizes the then-recent fall of the Persian Empire, but also opens with what is often credited as the first Western example of a performed dream sequence. As such, Corman’s love of psychedelic dream sequences, as evidenced by Prospero’s mistress’ emerald-tinted descent into Satanic allegiance, owes something to the ancient playwright… and Aeschylus is here to collect (I imagine this as the pilot episode of a series called “Aeschylus Collects,” in which Aeschylus is portrayed as a broken man, displaced in time, with 1,000 lost hopes and 1 gun that shoots nets.)

*On a more serious note – if you haven’t seen Corman’s Poe adaptations, you’re a wiener.

If there’s an educational takeaway from the story of David Berkowitz – New York’s notorious trigger happy killer who claimed to receive murderous orders from his neighbor’s Labrador retriever – it’s “don’t listen to talking animals.” Or maybe “only listen to talking animals if the animals are horses and they’re explaining that, for them, horse races are basically set up like the WWE, with good horse characters and evil horse characters, and if you help them write the scripts, you’ll know in advance who’s going to win each race.” I wasn’t always so cynical regarding this topic. As a child, I was fascinated when my parents told me about the European superstition that Christmas Eve (technically, 12 am Christmas morning) finds animals imbued with the ability to speak. In fact, if our cat had sidled up to me and said “Yo, Matty, kill me some folks, would ya? I love you!” I can’t guarantee that I wouldn’t have at least gone downstairs and selected a knife. Probably even the biggest knife. But not anymore.

Like many early European Christmas traditions, it’s difficult to trace the talking animal thing back to any definitive Christian origin (because it’s pagan as f***). According to Christian bloggers, the temporary gift of gab is god’s annual thanks to all animals because several animals were present for Jesus’ birth. I’m gonna be honest, god – kinda feels like you’re reachin’ there. What’s really crazy, though, is that, despite the legend’s seemingly holy origins, Europeans also believed that it was never good to listen to the speaking animals (probably because it’s pagan as f***). My favorite story re: talking animals – don’t listen to them! comes from the German Alps:

A farmer was so curious to hear what his two horses might say (probably he was hoping for the WWE thing) that he decided, against all rational thought, to listen in on their holiday jabberjawing. So, come Christmas Eve, he hid in the rafters of his barn and eagerly awaited the stroke of midnight, upon which one horse suddenly turned to the other. “We shall have hard work to do this week,” said the horse. “Yes. The farmer’s servant is heavy,” answered the other. “And the way to the churchyard is long and steep,” replied the first. The farmer was baffled by the conversation until, later that week, his servant died suddenly. The horses were then needed to carry the man to his grave.

There are other, more predictable tales in which mistreated animals use their speech to fatally trick abusive owners; there are even kids’ stories where house pets are all grins and giggles and psyched about Jesus. But that horse story… utterly chilling. The old Christian view was that it was god’s intention for the animals to share the gift amongst one another, but not with people – animals have strange and secret knowledge (bordering on pagan as f*** occult power) not intended for human ears. As in the horse story, to eavesdrop on their whisperings is to receive startling insight into the dark heart of a natural mysticism from which humans, in civilizing, became unknowingly disconnected.

All inevitable questions (Is the significance of the gift simply to offer lower beings the power of human [read: higher] language? If so, do non-domesticated animals – animals that don’t willingly cede to man’s dominion – really even give a care?) aside, the superstition is another interesting example of how, in the same way that the architecture of Rome was defined by the heathen network of pagan shrines that compose its foundations, Christian beliefs are pasted to a skeleton of solstice orgies and magic animals.

Find the Fiend – Pharmaceutical Edition

Below are descriptions of three medicinal compounds. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a prescription drug that actually exists. Can you Find the Fiend?

A This drug is effective in chemically treating near-sightedness, but causes life-threatening allergic reactions in some users.

B In high doses, this substance can decrease the human body’s metabolic rate to a near-death crawl; the military has experimented with smaller doses intended to dull soldiers’ emotional responses.

C This intended anti-depressant has been known to cause yawn-induced orgasms.

Answer after the cut.

The correct answer is c.

When the “Canadian Journal of Psychiatry” began researching a woman in her 20s who claimed to experience a powerful orgasm every time she yawned, the likely culprits were happily crossed neural wiring or some kind of weird boredom fetish. Instead, the phenomenon turned out to be a side effect of clomipramine, a tricyclic anti-depressant that the young woman was taking to manage her gloomies. Rather than trade in her coochie-zapping happy tabs for a bunch of pills that didn’t help her come during “Chariots of Fire,” the patient trained herself to yawn voluntarily. Given that one of clomipramine’s other side effects is insomnia, I’d say her gloomies were effectively managed.

Following the publication of the journal’s article, a study found that 5% of clomipramine users experience yawngasms. Clomipramine, which was developed in Switzerland, is still in use today.

Statement a.) described Retinax, a standard 23rd century remedy for prebyopia. Unfortunately, James T. Kirk, who began finding it increasingly difficult to locate the “yes to all” button on the food replicator’s pizza topping menu, is allergic to the drug, and, as a result, is forced to wear reading glasses. This minor character detail was given a whole new level of significance in Star Trek’s final episode, when Kirk finds himself stranded on an adult bookstore planet, but then stumbles, causing his glasses to shatter. “That’s… not fair…. There was… time… now!”

Statement b.) described betathanatine, a drug used both professionally and recreationally in Richard K. Morgan’s indescribably awesome cyberpunk noir novel “Altered Carbon.” The drug, street-named “The Reaper” and “Stiff,” is used by teenage hop-heads to experience a mind-dulling near-death high, and by military agents to suppress emotions and lower the body’s core temperature so as to avoid detection by thermal sensors. Perfect for evading predators and faking Alaskan king crab fisherman deaths. I’m on to you, Captain Phil Harris. I’m on to you.

“I am a freak. I have hands and I have feet, and if you saw me you’d faint, you’d be petrified, mummified, turned into stone or a pillar of salt!”

Gef, the Talking Mongoose

When the muted scratching behind the farmhouse’s old wooden walls turned into strange hissing and humanoid gurgling, the Irving family began doubting their early theories of wild mice and scavenging rats. So it seemed reasonable and, like, totally OK when, in 1931, a swaggering, bushy-tailed mammal sashayed out of the darkness and introduced himself, in perfect English, as Gef, “an extra, extra clever mongoose.” Over the years, Gef entertained thirteen-year-old Voirrey (the only Irving who could actually see the creature), and her parents, James and Margaret, with tales of his exotic Indian upbringing, fantastical claims of supernatural powers and even scandalous neighborhood gossip, which he claimed to obtain through extensive eavesdropping and daring spy missions. Occasionally, Gef would get rowdy and toss objects around the Irving house, or perpetrate Kutcherian japes, like the time he convinced the family that he had been poisoned, but overall, the mongoose’s seven-year stay, as documented in a journal kept by James Irving, was a pleasant one.

I came across the story of Gef while researching last week’s poltergeist posts. It seems that parapsychologist and poltergeist enthusiast Nandor Fodor, hoping that he could use Gef as an example of a case in which a human agent created sounds and manipulated objects via inadvertent psychokinesis, visited the Irvings at their home on the Isle of Mann. After staying with the family for several weeks, and interviewing numerous locals, Fodor left with the distinct impression that Gef (who the parapsychologist didn’t see or hear during his investigation) was neither a poltergeist nor a deliberate hoax, but rather some wholly unidentifiable phenomenon or entity.

Fodor wasn’t the only Mulderesque truth-seeker to make a pilgrimage to the Irving’s allegedly mongoose-prowled home – in 1937, magazine editor Rex Lambert and his close friend (and infamous paranormal investigator) Richard Price set out on a Gef-hunting expedition that led them to plasticized Gef footprints and tooth marks, and a sample of alleged Gef hair. The evidence was analyzed by Reginald Pocock of the British Natural History Museum, who concluded that the hair was definitely that of a dog, while the paw prints and teeth marks, while unclassifiable, were not made by a mongoose, and appeared suspiciously canine. In the end, Lambert’s and Price’s supernatural lark resulted in a light-hearted co-authored book titled “The Haunting of Cashen’s Gap,” and a windfall of £7,600, which Lambert won in a slander law suit after London councilman Cecil Levita publically accused the mongoose-seeking journalist of being “off his head.”

In 1937, the Irving family sold their farm – and, with it, their mischievous lodger – to a man named Leslie Graham who, 9 years later, confirmed that he had, in fact, encountered Gef in the house… and promptly shot him to death. Graham’s description of his victim, however, did not jibe with Voirrey’s descriptions of Gef, so it’s possible that the farmer murdered a different magic talking animal.

Magic talking animals. Can you believe it? Come back Wednesday and Friday for additional chatty critter stories, including Christmas Eve pet confessions, the Son of Sam murders and animal EVP.

The Grrl Power theory of poltergeist phenomena basically states that adolescent girls are like psychokinetic pressure cookers. Puberty heaps on the hormones, while historically male-biased cultural norms encourage young women to repress their burgeoning sexuality. Teenage angst! Social pressures! Familial stress! In certain young women, the combination of these factors supposedly leads to involuntary Carrie-style outbursts that are suspiciously similar to activities traditionally labeled as poltergeist goings-on.

To be fair, the theory doesn’t apply exclusively to the fairer sex. Psychologist Nandor Fodor, who was fascinated by the notion that poltergeist activity could be the result of an unknowing human agent’s psychic temper tantrums, felt that anyone with an undue amount of repressed rage or sexual desire was a likely candidate for psychokinetic agenthood (though his most famous case, the 1938 Thornton Heath poltergeist, did involve a neurotic woman). It wasn’t until the 1960s, when North Carolina’s William Roll got into the action, that blame fell squarely on the smooth, freckled shoulders of womanhood. Roll, of course, admitted that male teenagers have the capacity for psychic upheaval, but that young women, due to the aforementioned social and cultural factors, combined with their sugar-and-spice genetics, are much more susceptible to what he dubbed Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (RSPK).

Remember Gauld and Cornell, the guys from Monday’s column who allegedly collated over 500 poltergeist reports and created a percentage-based list of case-to-case similarities? They weren’t fans of Roll or Fodor, and claimed that both parapsychologists’ methods and conclusions were spurious (this is interesting in light of Roll’s claim that he used all of 116 cases in crafting his claims about the prevalence of teenage females in poltergeist incidents). Unfortunately, neither researcher ever detailed a plausible alternative theory. Even today, those who reject Fodor’s and Roll’s talk of unbounded psychic energy argue that most poltergeist cases are caused by angry ghosts. In recent years, poltergeist research has moved beyond teenagers to look at RSPK (or similar phenomena) in adult schizophrenics, depressives, manics and psychotics.

Knee-jerk feminism would almost certainly accuse Roll of sexism, but I think there’s a bit more to his ideas. The man’s a liberal-leaning fringe psychologist conducting his research amidst the cultural revolution of the 1960s. If anything, Roll’s theory is a back-door indictment of the repressive ideals of the ‘50s packaged as a finger-wagging pseudo-scientific document of the chickens-coming-home-to-roost variety. Women are robbed of irrepressible conscious power that then manifests unconsciously and unpredictably. Really, every poltergeist theory centers on the empowerment of the societally disenfranchised, whether they be kids, women or the mentally ill (and, hey, ghosts are corporeally disenfranchised). More than that, if we accept that a majority of poltergeist cases do, in fact, center on members of at least one of the aforementioned groups, and that, in all likelihood, the reports are fabricated, or the phenomena is rigged, by said disenfranchised people, then, at the very least, the empowerment is real. The mere possibility of poltergeist activity, via hoax or RSPK, has led to discussions about society’s attitudes towards women and the mentally ill, and about the emotional needs of adolescents. So all of you sexually repressed neurotic chicks, and all of you disregarded crazy dudes – keep flipping tables and slamming doors. Become agents. Grab the world by the light fixtures, and make yourselves heard.

This week’s poltergeist focus was, of course, inspired by the recent death of actress Zelda Rubinstein, who portrayed indefatigable medium Tangina Barrons in three Poltergeist movies and an episode of the short-lived Poltergeist television show. Barrons was one of many lucky performers spared from the infamous Poltergeist curse, which, if one is to believe the spooksational tale, felled four actors over the course of the three-film series: Dominique Dunne, who was strangled to death; Julian Beck, who died of stomach cancer; Will Sampson, who died of kidney failure; and Heather O’Rourke, who died from septic shock. Craig T. Nelson is still surly and kickin’.

I’d go into to greater detail, but everyone’s heard tell of the legendary the Poltergeist curse. Instead, let’s take a look at several of Hollywood’s lesser known, but equally shockifying, hexed films:

Citizen Kane (1941)

Though Orson Wells’ lived for 44 years after the production of his early opus, the supervising coroner at the Hollywood polymath’s autopsy has stated (off the record) that, while no surface injuries were detected, Wells’ innards were “violently trisected… as if sliced through by the sharpened runners of some phantom sled.”

Them! (1954)

Them!’s theme of hideous consequences wrought by an irresponsible nuclear age were mirrored by real life when several of the film’s cast and crew began to develop a series of strange physical mutations. Some performers – such as Joan Weldon, who sprouted a series of light-sensitive horns down the length of her spine – managed to keep their deformities secret; others – including Edmund Gwenn, whose teeth and fingernails reversed painfully back into his body – were forced to leave show business forever.

Rocky III (1982)

Rocky III is one of the few films that may have suffered from an actual magical curse. During one of the street scenes, Director Sylvester Stallone repeatedly asked a mysterious old woman to move out of a shot. Though the woman left without protest, she blew a palmful of strange yellow powder at one of the cameras. When that day’s reels were developed, the dusted camera’s film contained frame after frame of two-headed animals, leprous genitals and baby amputees. Stallone quietly ordered that the camera be blessed, encased in cement and buried beneath St. Peter’s Church in Philadelphia. Since then, a wary Stallone has allowed myriad old women to loiter, undisturbed, throughout his movies’ sets.

Swimfan (2002)

Rumor has it that Actress Erika Christensen actually drowned while shooting Swimfan’s thrilling climax, which was shot early on in the film’s production. The incident was kept secret for insurance reasons and a lookalike was brought in to film the rest of Christensen’s scenes. When the lookalike died in a tragic car accident just two days after production wrapped, the studio was forced to scout out a second lookalike, who, to this day, is still posing as Erika Christensen’s original secret lookalike.

Juno (2007)

Over the course of Juno’s 30-day shoot, Ellen Paige regurgitated over 75 pounds of human hair.

Way back in 1682, when men were men and poltergeists were still thought to be nothing more than ghostly, table-flipping Foley artists, Richard Chamberlain, the secretary of the colony of New Hampshire, was hanging out at a local watering hole when most of all hell broke loose. Utensils took to the air and flew at the patrons and staff. Bricks and rocks cut deadly arcs through the barroom. Hammers, spits and iron-crows rose in unassisted flight and assaulted the confused crowd of onlookers. When the chaos ended, Chamberlain immediately confronted the pub’s owners, George and Alice Walton, coining the phrase “WTF?” in the process.

16 years later, Chamberlain published “Lithobolia: or, the stone-throwing devil,” a journal-style pamphlet in which, describing himself as an “Ocular Witness of these Diabolick Inventions,” he recounted the Walton’s woeful tale of three tortuous months spent battling the formidable pitching arm of the tavern’s invisible assailant. To this day, “Lithobolia” remains one of the most detailed layman accounts of poltergeist activity. The conclusion it reaches: demons are to blame. Or, possibly, witches.

288 years later in Rosenheim, Bavaria, another detailed account of poltergeist activity was created – this time by an animistic (an approach centered on human-generated psychic energy rather than atmospheric spirit energy) parapsychologist and two German physicists. When office equipment at Sigmund Allen’s law firm began operating independently of the clerical staff, Allen called the power company, who responded with robust shrugs. When dozens of voiceless phone calls disturbed the office, Allen contacted the phone company, who also had no explanation. When the light fixtures started swinging, Allen called the police, who called in famous parapsychologist Hans Bender and two physicists, Doctors Karga and Zicha, from Germany’s prestigious Max Planck institute.

After taking hours of video footage and interviewing dozens of witnesses, the only conclusive causal link that anyone could find was a young secretary – Annemarie Schneider – who was consistently present whenever the strange phenomena occurred. Interviewing Schneider, the scientists learned that a recent romantic entanglement had left the 19-year-old emotionally traumatized. The doctors also felt that, even disregarding her boy troubles, the young woman seemed to demonstrate pronounced neuroses and other symptoms of psychological imbalance – like, the type of imbalance that might cause someone to, say, fake ghost attacks as a means of attracting attention. While Karga and Zicha conceded that the events defied rational explanation (though they never accused Schneider of perpetrating a hoax), neither concluded, as many subsequent amateur students of the Rosenheim case have, that the events were clearly paranormal.

Annemarie Schneider lost her job and the poltergeist activity immediately stopped. And that’s where Lithobolia author Richard Chamberlain would see Schneider hanged for witchcraft. Or where, today, you or I might conclude that it was all a hoax. But there’s still Hans Bender, who, thanks to the work 1930s psychologist Nandor Fodor, reached an entirely different conclusion. That’s right – Grrl power.

(continued Friday)

Walk it Off – an abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

Today’s ailment: Indigestion

The Belly Button Breathalyzer

You will need: Brandy; 1 drinker of brandy.

Instructions: Have brandy drinker swallow a mouthful of his/her favorite brandy; Immediately have brandy drinker blow onto your tummy; Repeat as desired by brandy drinker.

The Triple Threat

You will need: 1 small piece of a willow tree; 1 little chunk of misc. bone; 1 slice of an animal’s pelt.

Instructions: Eat willow fragment, bone shard and pelt niblet.

Note: This cure is most effective in children.

The Pit Snort

You will need: 1 musty armpit.

Instructions: Heartily inhale the armpit’s vaporous must.

That’ll Do, Pig

You will need: 1 serving of pig excrement.

Instructions: Eat pig excrement.

Note: Tummy aches are caused by an unnatural cooling of the stomach. Swine droppings help to dial the gastrointestinal thermostat back up to a healthy swelter.

The Ad Hoc Pie-Hole Surveyor

You will need: 1 thumb (yours); 1 mouth (yours).

Instructions: Using the thumb as a ruler, measure the length and width of your mouth; Repeat 5x.

Gizzard Dander Num-Nums

You will need: 1 chicken gizzard.

Instructions: Separate gizzard lining from gizzard; Dry gizzard lining; Powder gizzard lining; Eat gizzard lining.

Note: Also effective with carrier pigeon gizzard.

The Rock and Walk

You will need: 1 large open space; 1 rock.

Instructions: Approach rock; Bend over; Flip rock; Straighten up; Walk forward without ever looking back.

Note: It’s imperative that you don’t look back.

That’ll Do, Horse

You will need: 1 shirt with tails; 1 serving horse dung; 1 available heating surface; 1 tight-lipped companion (pref. owes you money).

Instructions: Have companion secretly sneak horse leavings into your shirt tail; have companion secretly remove horse leavings from shirt tail; Have companion thoroughly cook horse leavings; eat horse leavings.

The Head over Heels

You will need: The ability to somersault.

Instructions: Somersault.

…and then the Faint Odor of Smoke

You will need: ½ Tsp. Gun Powder

Instructions: Eat gunpowder.

Internet paranormal enthusiasts love to cite the work of parapsychologists Alan Gauld and A.D. Cornell, who famously collated over a 170 years’ worth of reported poltergeist incidents into a comprehensive database organized by the specific qualitative symptoms of the phenomena. For example, based on Cornell and Gauld’s rubric, out of more than 500 studied poltergeist cases, 64% involved the movement of small objects, 58% were more active at night, 48% featured knocking or rapping (though only 2% featured beat-boxing), 36% involved the movement of large objects, etc. What good is this data to anyone? Well, it’s pretty helpful if you write for Weird Things and need to introduce the basics of poltergeist activity (and ladies – if you run into Agent Mulder at a bar, it couldn’t hurt to pull out the ol’ “12% of poltergeist incidents involved the opening and shutting of doors” line).

How do these trinket-tossing ghoul infestations differ from classic hauntings? Good question. In the past, the distinction between the two really just hinged upon the perceived mischievousness of the entity: ghosts were restless depressives who stamped around houses out of discomfort and anger; poltergeists were ethereal miscreants who joyfully roused sleepers and vandalized property to satisfy their voracious adolescent appetites for prankery. As (ahem) research progressed throughout the 20th century, however, the poltergeist phenomena began to look less and less like traditional spirit activity. In modern day parapsychology circles, the party line is this: reported hauntings are generally centered on a place or an object, and last for extended periods; poltergeists are usually linked to individual people (most commonly females under the age of 20) and stop abruptly after only a few months. According to Gauld and Cornell, 98% of reported hauntings are actually cases of poltergeist activity, and that’s a number you can trust because it’s math AND science!

Was I what? Winking?! No! Why would you even say that? You’re funny.

The fact that “poltergeist” is a German word (“polter” coming from “poltern” meaning “to make noise,” and “geist” meaning “spirit” or “ghost”) helps to hint at the phenomenon’s international prevalence – poltergeists have been reported throughout Europe, Asia and both North and South America (I guess Africa’s too busy dealing with witchcraft and AIDs to be bothered by a few inexplicably airborne black market TEC-9s). So what are the scientific, psychological and supernatural ramifications of these wild non-ghosts?

Check back Wednesday and Friday for answers that are guaranteed to include talk of psychokinesis, female sexuality, befuddled physicists and the word “lithobolia.” In short – everything you’ve ever wanted, plus lithobolia.

Even if Apple’s already-divisive iPad doesn’t herald in a new age of laptop computing, it certainly offers a giant leap forward in tablet technology. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Weird Things is paying tribute to the fantastic tablets of yesteryear, and the brave tableteers who sculpted them.

Today: The Bembine Tablet

If the all-powerful monster kid from that Twilight Zone episode (“It’s a Good Life”) decided to trap Dan Brown and Alan Moore in a sealed elevator, the Bembine Tablet is one of the few viable conversation topics on which both could probably agree to waste the precious, dwindling oxygen.

Brown would be entranced by the artifact’s namesake, Cardinal Bembo, a Catholic antiquarian who originally purchased the mysterious hieroglyph-spangled Egyptian relic from a Roman locksmith sometime after the city’s famous sacking. Brown would revel in the tablet’s subsequent crisscrossing of Italy, as monarchs and papal officers swapped it from Mantua to Rome to Savoy to Sardinia to Paris, France, before returning it to Turin, Italy, where it still resides.

I imagine the cryptology-obsessed author would also drool over the tablet’s history as an almost-was Egyptian Rosetta Stone, although he might change some key details about 17th century Hermeticist Athanasius Kircher, who, with all the neurotic bravado of a Tom Hanks character, attempted to decode the Bembine tablet and create a translation key for Egyptian hieroglyphics. See, Kircher’s translation was ultimately ruled a complete fabrication – the bronze and silver tablet’s apparent hieroglyph’s were actually just decorative pictures of peasants, kings and deities, including the god Isis, for whom the tablet was most likely created. It’s like if you tried to translate English from a Where’s Waldo illustration. (Even Kircher’s published decipherments of actual hieroglyphs have since proved utterly fallacious. In one famous instance, he translated what amounts to “Osiris says” as “The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis; the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis.”) I’m sure in Brown’s version, Kircher would be discredited by the Catholic Church after discovering that the Bembine tablet really did contain what a continent’s worth of occultists predicted – the language of Adam and Eve.

Here’s where Moore’s eyes would lose their opium glaze. European occultists had little anthropological interest in the tablet, and what linguistic interest they had came from their belief in a legendary grimoire called the Book of Thoth. The theory was that the tablet revealed a code for translating the book, which was written in some proto-civilized god tongue and then buried in the City of the Dead with the Egyptian Prince Neferkaptah. A person who possessed, and could translate, the document would have the ability to talk to animals, cast incomparably powerful spells and control nature itself.

Also, the book is locked in a gold box that’s locked in a silver box that’s locked in an ivory and ebony box that’s locked in a sycamore box that’s locked in a bronze box. All of those boxes are locked in an iron box. The keys to the boxes are spread out across Egypt, with some hidden in treacherous natural formations, others entrusted to earthbound spirits and still others under the watchful eyes of ferocious beasts. On top of all that, the book is cursed, such that its master’s power comes at a terrible price – the death of all those close to him. Oh, the wet dreams and acid trips Moore has surely had about the Book of Thoth.

Too bad the tablet turned out to be the equivalent of a thousand-pound Hummel.

Still, before they suffocated, both authors would carefully list and map out the cities to which the tablet traveled – after all, the pattern is bound to form some sort of Masonic icon or runic sigil. Add Stephen King and John Grisham into the mix and you’ve got a pulpy religious conspiracy court drama with post-modern overtones and a shocking third-act revelation that it was aliens.

Wait. That what was aliens?

“You know. Everything.” replies Stephen King.

Jason has killed a lot of folks with a lot of different tools. His victims may wonder, “Who is this man? And why is he murdering me?” Meanwhile, we the viewers want to know, “What is that tool he’s using? And what’s its history?”

Wonder no longer.

Today: Ice Pick

As used by Jason in: “Friday the 13th Part II” and “Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning”

Victim(s): Alice Hardy, Les (during Tommy’s dream sequence)

Refrigerators are everywhere! My house… your house… your friends’ houses. Your teacher might even have one! But that didn’t used to be the case. Back before people had evolved the ability to invent refrigerators, everyone used ice boxes – unwieldy food preservation cabinets that had to be regularly restocked with fresh blocks of ice that folks bought from merchants called icemen (sorry, girls. There weren’t any actual icewomen. That’s just something daddies call mommies who have headaches). To shape an ice block to box size – or to chip off some cubes to cool down some tasty lemonade – people used ice picks. An ice pick is a sharp, wooden-handled tool that resembles a scratch awl.

Oh. In that case, picture a stitching awl with a straight point.

Really? May I ask what kind of awl you can picture?

Nope. Forget it.

It’s nothing like that kind of awl.

FUN WITH YOUR PARENTS’ STUFF! Breaking ice without an ice pick can be really hard! Try it! All you need are ice cubes and some of your PARENTS’ STUFF! Try crushing the ice with your mother’s jewelry box or the butt of your father’s handgun… try to chip it on the computer keyboard or smack it with the buckle of the Time Out Belt… try as hard you can to break it against the big window in the living room. See why ice picks were so useful?

Sure, ice picks were named ice picks because of their ice picking ability, but they can pick other things, too – human brains, for example! Walter Freeman, a famous neurologist (just a fancy word for “head shaman”), used ice picks to lobotomize (just a fancy word for “calm down”) the mentally insane. Freeman customized a van, which he called the “lobotomobile,” and set off on a nationwide mental hospital tour, during which he taught multiple doctors how to perform his violent and irreversible procedure – place an ice pick through the corner of the eye socket and, to quote the ‘50s pop sensation “Dr. Freeman Boogie,” “smack it like a broken Polaroid camera.” Soon, though, lobotomies went the way of the ice box as powerful neuroleptics like Thorazine took the psychiatric industry by storm.

FUNOLOGY PROJECT! How do you think lobotomized patients were treated? Probably not very nice! Try acting lobotomized around your family and friends, and see how they treat you. It’s easy! Tone down your personality. Quietly fiddle with random objects. Turn off your ability to love. Periodically soil yourself. CHALLENGE! How long can you keep it up for? A week? A month? Remember: science is all about the gathering of unrecorded, subjective data by way of long-running, secret deceptions (just a fancy word for “fun”).

Families… head shamans… who else used ice picks? Good question! Have you ever heard of Murder, Inc.? Well, Murder, Inc. was a group of steel-balled Italians and Jews who performed contract killings for the National Crime Syndicate between 1920 and 1940. Some of these Mafia hit men liked ice picks almost as much as Dr. Freeman liked lobotomizing the insane. Abe “Kid Twist” Reles and Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, well known members of Murder, Inc., both considered the ice pick their go-to goomba-elimination tool. Human bone is no match for the shattering force of an enthusiastically swung pick! You may have heard that Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky met his fate at the business end of Stalinist-wielded ice pick. Untrue! Trotsky was actually killed by an ice axe, which is like a super-sized ice pick designed to lobotomize thawed-out dinosaurs.

CONTEST! What sort of weapons would you use if you were an assassin working for Murder, Inc.? What if you worked for the KGB? How about Yakuza? Draw each weapon on a sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper, along with an illustration of yourself using the weapon, and mail each of them to: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500. The more entries you send, the better your chance of winning!

Thank you, Jason, for helping us learn through murder.

Join me again soon for another thrilling installment of Jason Vorhees’ Arsenal!

Even if Apple’s already-divisive iPad doesn’t herald in a new age of laptop computing, it certainly offers a giant leap forward in tablet technology. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Weird Things is paying tribute to the fantastic tablets of yesteryear, and the brave tableteers who sculpted them. For example, Curse Tablets.

Today: Miracle Tablets

Li’l William Creech’s legs were paralyzed, and his father, Doctor Richard Creech, was at his wits’ end. Willy had been stretcher-bound for almost a year. The regular electrical treatments designed to zap function into his hopeless, rubbery gams had, time and again, proven utterly unsuccessful. If anything, the boy’s condition seemed to be worsening. That’s when Doctor Creech received a letter from his mother, imploring him to dose the child with Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People – miracle tablets designed to treat most forms of weakness, including heart palpitations, nervous headaches, partial paralysis and even the post-flu icks. Always the simpering momma’s boy, Dr. Creech immediately crammed his son full of Doc Williams’ superlative curative and, lo and behold, the boy was back on his feet after only four short months worth of daily pill binges.

This story, or at least a QVC-ready version of it, was printed on the label of the aforementioned Pink Pills, which were a popular patent medicine created in the late 18th century. The phrase “patent medicine” is a misnomer – chemical patents weren’t even available until 1925, and by then, most of the patent medicine vendors had either gone belly-up or specifically avoided applying for patents due to the complete ineffectiveness of their so-called “medication” to do anything more than add cirrhosis to a patient’s list of ailments. But let’s back up a bit.

The phrase “patent medicine” was coined after the revolutionary war, and was used to refer to an increasing number of independently produced and marketed elixirs, tonics, tinctures and tablets that, by the 1800s, had become a stand-by of American over-the-counter pharmaceutical treatments. Snake oil tonics are the go-to example of these fallacious panaceas, but all manner of patent medications existed, boasting a cornucopia of miraculous curative properties. Dr. Morse’s Indian Root Pills cleaned the blood. Mug-wump Specific cured (and prevented!) venereal disease. Kickapoo Indian Sagwa renovated the blood, stomach and liver. And Hamlin’s Wizard Oil? That basically cured everything short of bankruptcy and amputations.

With fanciful names, colorful artwork and snappy ad copy, patent medicines almost certainly did more to help evolve product branding strategies than to alleviate physical suffering. Many amateur druggists held giant travelling medicine shows – raucous carnivals replete with sideshow performers, live music and, of course, product sales pitches full of quicksilver patter and volunteered testimonials by pay-rolled shills. Other press-hungry shysters published cheapo pulp-and-spit farmers’ almanacs filled with full-page ads for their homemade nostrums. Hucksters’ pitches and packaging invoked all manner of mystical and pseudo-scientific pabulum, including Native American magic, soothing electromagnetism and healing radiation. Of course, the medicine itself was generally composed of things like cocaine, grain alcohol and various diuretics, then flavored with cayenne, camphor or pennyroyal.

In 1905, a sensationalistic Collier’s magazine article entitled, “Death’s Laboratory,” followed immediately by the 1906 instatement of the Food and Drug Act, which forced amateur pharmacologists to include ingredient lists on all product labels, effectively killed the patent medicine movement. While some patent medications (Vicks VapoRub, Luden’s Throat Drops, Doan’s Pills, etc.) survived into the modern age, their recipes and/or curative claims had to be grossly amended. Others (Coca Cola, Dr. Pepper, 7-Up) persisted by dropping their healing pretenses, removing their opiates and calling themselves soft drinks. Most, however, including Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People, didn’t live to help any more paralytic Creech kids out of bed.

Still, as long as the savvy American charlatan can wring a livelihood from a populace of vain and ignorant quick fix-hungry sponges, patent medicine will live on in the form of vitamin supplements, diet plans and bottled water. Dog Bless America!