This New Year’s, rather than sitting around scratching your head, tugging your beard and slapping your mustache trying to think of great big resolutions and corresponding little, tiny loopholes to accompany them, consider using one or more of these pre-made resolutions, complete with not-quite-pathetic instant bail-outs for those times when self betterment and personal integrity just sort of make you feel like a showoff.

Resolution: Hunt down Bigfoot and turn him in for tax evasion.

Loophole: The weather. “I mean, seriously. You expect me to hunt Bigfoot in a (insert weather condition, e.g., cold snap, heat wave, downpour, breeze storm, moon happenstance, etc.)?!”

Resolution: Learn to read minds, use the ability to read the minds of psychics, and then use some of the acquired visions to convince the psychics that you’re a person from the future who’s willing to confirm psychic predictions at a price.

Loophole: The billing. “I don’t know how to format and print professional-quality invoices.”

Resolution: Attack middle school slumber parties while naked and making an “OHH-REE-ROE-ROO” sound in order to create a new urban legend about a naked ghost that makes a sound like “OOH-REE-ROE-ROO” and attacks middle school slumber parties.

Loophole: Fear of the sophomore slump. “I dunno. I’m starting to feel like it lacks the raw pizzazz of the public urination boogeyman urban legend I started in 2009.”

Resolution: Set world record for Most Times Abducted by Aliens in a Single Year.

Loophole: Alien fickleness. “I don’t know how to get them down here. The old peanut-butter-on-the-junk trick isn’t working anymore.”

Resolution: Reanimate a whole bunch of skeletons, train them to play their ribcages like xylophones, and take them out on tour under the name Dob Socket and his Rock-A-Bone Carnivale.

Loophole: Piousness. “Historically, anything that’s gotten as big in Japan as Dob Socket inevitably will has ultimately broken, like, four commandments.”

Resolution: Stop relying on gypsy curses to lose weight.

Loophole: Portion sizes. “Look, as long as this is what Applebee’s is calling a single chicken Caeser salad, I’m going to have to keep spitting on gypsies. And swearing at them.”

Resolution: Build a perpetual motion machine.

Loophole: Ingrained misogyny. “I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t shake the feeling that women are too ugly and stupid to appreciate perpetual motion. Alas, but would my parents have raised me with an open mind!”

Weird Thingamagodgers! Another dispatch from the irritable bowels of the Deep South -

The Ghost of Callaway Hall

A little background on Columbus, Mississippi: the town was founded as a summer vacation spot for the wives and daughters of wealthy plantation owners – a shady, riverside retreat in which white, columned mansion after white, columned mansion were built up to loom over one another, each casting out a stark, boastful shadow of wealth across the green lawns and flowering magnolias. Columbus also had a private university, The Columbus Institute for Women – an all-girls teaching academy built less as an academic haven than as a cloistered safe deposit box for the sexually mature daughters of conservative cotton moguls. It was during the Civil War, when the school’s buildings were repurposed into ad hoc hospital wards for wounded Confederate soldiers, that the ghost story begins.

According to the tale, a beautiful woman named Mary arrived in Columbus with the intention of joining the war effort. While bleeding and feeding the fallen Grays, she met a requisitely dashing, handsome and physically compromised fighter, and quickly fell into the sort of mad, perfect love so common of characters in romantic comedies and tragic ghost stories. In short order, her man went back to war and died in combat, and Mary hauled herself six stories up to the top of the Callaway Hall clock tower and hanged herself.

These days, the campus is home to the Mississippi University for Women (known locally as “The W”), a public institution that’s name remained beautifully descriptive until 1982, when the Supreme Court decreed its gender-based admissions policies discriminatory, forcing the school to accept men. Despite the ruling, the college’s current male population hovers around 15%, and Callaway Hall remains an all-female dormitory. As for Mary – her lingering, lovelorn spirit has been known to weep and moan its way across the building, visit the rooms of sleeping Freshman and give the clock tower bell an bonus 13th ring when the hour hits midnight.

Now think on this: Prior to ’82, the university was stocked exclusively with crowds of locked-down, curfewed females defiantly dreaming of late-night dalliances parlayed into tender, dad-despised love affairs. The most popular course of study for these women? Nursing. In fact, The W has consistently boasted one of the strongest nursing programs in the state of Mississippi. Really, it’s almost hard to imagine a more appropriate haunt for the depressive specter of a Civil War nurse.

Maybe Mary did exist. Maybe she loved and lost and ultimately succumbed to passion-honed misery. Regardless, what she stands for now is something more than war-shattered ardor and antiquated medicine – truly, she’s the mascot of future love affairs, carried in the hearts of the smiling, hopeful soon-to-be nurses of a unified United States.

La Llorona is your Monster Of The Week. On Monday we look at the origins of this weepy, slutty, murderous ghost story. Wednesday, we explored how you too can utilize terrifying legends to control your kids.

Whether it’s used to keep the kiddies alive or families together, La Llorona’s bawling downstream trek and the drowned bodies she leaves in her wake share certain narrative earmarks with other cultural-specific legends from around the globe. Some scholars have theorized that La Llorona is an updated version of the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl, who appeared just prior to the conquistadors’ arrival and swooned through the Aztec cities, weeping continuously over the loss of her children. The woman’s stuttered, pitching sobs served as a wailing death omen, resounding off the high walls of the ziggurats and signaling the imminent cataclysmic arrival of bullets and alien disease. The figure of a wailing woman whose tortured cries presage ultimate doom is all too familiar to the ancient Irish. The Irish Celts believed in shrieking otherworldly messengers called banshees, whose ear-splitting laments were said foretell the death of a culturally significant figure (later, banshees became equal opportunity augurs, crying out to anyone on the brink of bucket kicking).

The ancient Greeks passed around a li’l campfire story about a beautiful woman named Lamia, who knocked boots with the mighty Zeus and bore him some younglings. Hera, Zeus’ no-nonsense spouse, was none too pleased to discover the infidelity, and forced Lamia to eat the children. In the end, post-baby-snarfing Lamia was so horrified and grief stricken over what she’d been forced to do, she went nuts, turned demon and began wandering the Earth devouring any child she encountered. (In some versions of the tale, Zeus tries to calm Lamia down by giving her the ability to remove her eyes. Something to keep her hands busy, I guess?) Of course, this directly parallels La Llorona’s post-infanticide tailspin into continued child murder.

The Lamia story is also, along with the tragedy of La Llorona, one of the few legends to offer a supernatural villain who works double duty in the threat department – children fear encountering Lamia and La Llorona, while young women fear transforming into either of them. (Of course, of the two, Lamia isn’t really showing up in the urban legend Top 40 these days [although you can still see her boobs in a bunch of paintings]). This duality is what sets La Llorona apart from the other marauding specters and bogeymen that run riot through modern folklore. No one drives safely out of fear of becoming the hitchhiking ghost and no one minds their hands around machinery to prevent transformation into a hook-handed madman; these tales seek to shape behavior by positing listeners as unknowing victims. La Llorona gets to the very heart of the naïve, un-self-conscious darkness inside of all people and suggests that one bad decision can make someone an unknowing victimizer – one false step can make someone a monster.

In the Southwestern United States, as the sunlight fades and nocturnal creatures awaken from their wild dreams of the moon, a series of high wailing sobs sounds out from river banks. The choking cries stutter and fade into the soft chatter of running water before rising up again to pierce holes in the wind and throttle the trees. It’s the sound of La Llorona, half-crazed with guilt, chasing her grief downstream. And beware, o children, should she catch sight of you, for she will not hesitate to reach out with icy fingers and claw you down into the freezing heart of the black water.

In the journalistic sense of who, what, where, when and why, the tragic story of La Llorona (Spanish for “the weeping woman”) is frustratingly elusive. Obviously, given her name’s etymology, the legend is most commonly told by Hispanic communities, and has roots in ancient Mexican folklore. Predictably, regional variants and local extrapolations abound. The constant is the bereaved ghost of a guilt-stricken mother who drowned her children and, in doing so, doomed herself to an eternity of endless wandering, futilely scouring the rivers and lakes of the world for some lingering trace of her murdered offspring.

The circumstances surrounding the homocide change in each version. A typical telling goes like this: La Llorona is a peasant woman who, in deference to her lower-class roots, takes to disguising herself in a fancy gown and walking into town each night to impress wealthy men with sophisticated conversation and sultry dancing. To do this, of course, she has to abandon her children. Eventually, La Llorona is fully seduced by her bachelorette lifestyle and drowns her children out of resentment (In the declawed version of the tale, her neglected kids accidentally fall into the river). After committing the murder, La Llorona is overcome with grief and eventually starves to death as she catatonically paces up and down the riverbank. Now her ghost, the frowny-faced nutso that it is, trolls the world’s waterways waiting to indiscriminately grab any youngling unfortunate enough to enter her tear-distorted field of vision.

In the most basic sense, the story serves to prevent accidental drowning by threatening disobedient kids with vast supernatural repercussions should they wander too close to a river or wade unsupervised into a lake. On a deeper level, though, the legend uses the paranormal as a means by which to inure pre-adolescent Hispanic girls into a traditional gender-based ideology that places a premium on maternity while subtly repressing female identity.

Wednesday: La Llorona – dead woman, living patriarch

“The Shining” makes you think: what is Jack Torrance worse at – writing, fatherhood or hotel maintenance? His novel is repetitive, he tries to murder his family and it’s only a matter of time before that brainstorming tennis ball of his knocks over a lamp. Still, he is under the influence of some tricksy ghosts who have evolved oogity-boogitying techniques that far exceed the paltry chain rattling, door slamming and Christmas time travel employed by their peers. Stupid ghosts could learn a lot from this film.

Pool Your Resources

There’s only so much one ghost can do – you’re in the ballroom saucing up the Jackster, and that’s all well and good, but who’s wigging out Danny while he scoots around on his Big Wheel? Maybe chat up those twin girls and see if they’ll tandem talk and make with some murder flashbacks. The spirits of the Overlook function like a big, expensive machine where each ghost is a vital mechanical component and all the components work together and the machine manufactures frowny-faced light bulbs (which represent homicidal ideations). Follow this example and “Make screamwork teamwork!” Then, make posters that they say that, sell them and give me half the money.

Human Weakness = Ghost Strength

Note that the ghosts of the Overlook transcend standard creak-and-boo haunting by exploiting Jack’s human flaws and moral weaknesses. Jack meets a random naked lady and starts making out with her – BUT SHE SUDDENLY TRANSFORMS INTO A HORRIFIC, DECAYING CRONE! Jack tosses back a few bourbons and enjoys a peaceful, stultifying drunk – BUT IT GRADUALLY TRANSFORMS INTO A MILD HANGOVER! Jack puts on Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” in hopes of enjoying the interweaving storylines and overt biblical symbolism – BUT IT TRANSFORMS INTO PAUL W.S. ANDERSON’S “EVENT HORIZON”!

Can’t Scare Them? Confuse Them.

Just when the ghosts exhausted all their best tricks driving Jackie Boy bananas, his wife Wendy starts running around the hotel practically demanding to be haunted at. What’s left to do but show her a guy in a bear-dog costume blowing a butler? Never discount the power that abject befuddlement can exert over a distressed person. If you don’t believe that this works outside a Kubrick film, here’s a simple test you can try: go to a vacant hotel, dress up in a bear costume and blow the butler while Shelley Duvall is running past. Now, tell me she doesn’t look terrified.

Bloody Mary is the Monster of the Week! Matt Finley will look into three elements of the terrifying female specter today, Wednesday and Friday.

Venture into a darkened bathroom, stare into the mirror and chant “Bloody Mary” three times. Or 13 times. Or 100. Maybe spin around. Perhaps try again at exactly midnight. Alternately, you could light a candle and whisper the admission, “Bloody Mary, I killed your baby.”

The procedural variants of this popular courage-summoning, folklore-based sleepover game are outnumbered only by the staggering quantity of regionally differing supposed results, ranging from violent death at the hands of the invoked spirit to the opportunity to chat up a deceased loved one for precisely one minute. With indefinite origins lost at the far end of geometric growth and drowned out by the sounds of sleeping bag zippers, furtive match strikes and socks on tile, it’s impossible to form a clear picture of the gross tangle of history, hearsay, embellishment and fiction that are bound up like flesh and bone to form the legend’s jumbled anatomy. Bloody Mary as murderess, Bloody Mary as seer, Bloody Mary as vengeful victim and Bloody Mary as post-mortem switchboard operator – all spectral faces conjured up in the cold glass of a dark mirror.

The repurposing of the mirror into a spirit conduit, and Bloody Mary’s innocuous, psychic persona, which can tell a girl who she will marry, share links dating back to early gender-neutral, future-predicting Celtic divination rituals. These practices were slowly remolded and urbanized, resulting in the belief that a single woman can see a brief vision of her future husband if, on Halloween night, she looks at the room behind her in a mirror. As the patriarchal western media and culture became increasingly intent on grabbing young women by the training bra strap and slingshotting them into premature womanhood, pre-adolescent romantic soothsaying via soda can tabs, straw wrappers and cootie catchers became the new trend in pseudo-spiritualism. This future-foretelling version of the Bloody Mary legend marries an ancient rite to a modern narrative in order to generate an elaborate game that feeds equally off peer pressure-enforced courage and an eager impatience to encounter idealized love.
This is one of the few versions of the legend that offers a definitive reward – or even a goal – for summoning Bloody Mary. The others promise only the conduction of a cajones litmus test that demands patting the devil’s head while simultaneously rubbing the shadowy underbelly of local history.

Wednesday: Bloody Bloody Mary

Previously, this week, on Weird Things.

• A few tips for the novice Bigfoot hunter.

• Could the Son of Sam, a UFO investigating Air Force base and the birth of popular science fiction have helped create the Dover Demon?

• Michael Jackson may be dead, but his ghost is on a world tour.

• What happens, when myriad ghosts, have chosen to haunt a house, stop beings polite and start getting real? They say some really kooky stuff, that’s what.

• Rhode Island has never had a Bigfoot sighting, but that might be about to change.

Enjoy the weekend, as always, send weird photos, stories, sounds and happenings to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail.

King of Pop Michael Jackson may not have opened up his 50-show run in London’s O2 Arena, but the good news is he’s currently appearing in the homes of heart-broken fans nightly. Or at least that’s the word from folks who claim that MJ’s apparition has been ambling into their bedrooms since the icon passed.

Such sightings have been reported on every continent. From Japan to the Philippines, Sweden to Spain, South Africa to Nigeria and Brazil to the US devastated fans are claiming that Michael Jackson has paid them a post-mortem visit.

This according to AllNewsWeb.com. They also alert us to a piece of CNN footage that some people believe is irrefutable proof Jackson’s ghost is haunting Neverland. The spectral vision seemingly passes by the frame at 8:22. You can see a screen grab at right.

This video, filmed by the Greater Central Ohio Paranormal Society, is being touted on the main page of Ghost Videos as evidence of a ghost girl. Are we the only ones who don’t really see…..anything of interest at all?

Check out this dramatic investigation of St. Peter`s Church in Essex.

About a minute into this video you start thinking that this is just going to be a guy looking around his empty bathroom with a video camera for five minutes, but watch the sliding glass door of the shower. We don’t know why this guy had no audible reaction when he saw that ghostly figure, we would have been shouting expletives while running out the door.

Tony Iommi, iconic lead guitarist from Black Sabbath is sixty one this year. He has waited many moons to impart his personal belief that ghosts exist upon us rock mortals, based on an encounter he had at Clearwell Castle when he was touring with Ozzy back in the day. Though he can’t recall whether he was with Ozzy Osbourne or guitarist Terry Butler at the time of the sighting.

The band had come to Clearwell Castle in Gloucestershire seeking inspiration for their new album in 1973. According to Iommi, a cloaked and hooded figure approached him and his companion in the dungeons of the castle, before turning into a room and miraculously disappearing. Spooky stuff, at least they managed to pull the acclaimed rock album ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ out of the dungeons of Clearwater Castle, along with themselves and their gear after the sighting.

We were scanning through the interwebs today and realized that for all the great ghost-based horror movies that come out of Japan, we almost never cover Japanese ghost stories. So we hit up youtube to find a Japanese ghost video, and this is what we came up with. Enjoy.

Another Ghost Video. This one, taken in a Mexican Museum, has the added bonus of the security guards chatting it up about the improbable feat they’re witnessing.

British reality TV star Jade Goody lost her battle with cancer in March. Now her mother claims that she has been witness to two paranormal visitations from her daughter. Creepy stuff from the UK, find out more about it at Holymoly.com

An Indonesian Paranormal TV show is touting the above video as the real deal. This ghost video starts off looking like it’s going to be incredibly lame, with a person in a white gown slowly crossing the screen. Then suddenly with no explanation the figure takes to the sky, jumping to a tree before mysteriously exiting via the top edge of the frame. Why the cameraman didn’t follow eagerly with his lens? We don’t know.