In his 2009 column entitled Ghost In The Machine: Batman & Midnight Society Tackle TV’s Toughest Demonic Electronics, Matt explored how popular culture interpretations of the fear of addictive escapism through video games were portrayed by Batman: The Animated Series and Are You Afraid of the Dark? Spoiler alert: Batman gets it right, of course. In his intro to the column, he makes the following statement:

“Every major technological trend or development is always addressed by pop culture with a movie or show that illustrates the breakthrough’s potential for wild mass homicide. What if a VHS tape… were haunted? What if your cell phone… were haunted? What if the Internet… were haunted?”

Today, we are going to explore another question that people ask themselves a surprisingly large amount of the time. What if a video game… were haunted? Here are five times that question has been asked.

1. The Haunted Ms. Pac Man Machine – This particular Ms. Pac Man machine apparently came with one extra ghost. It was first spotted on Craigslist in Boston where it was being offered for free. When the owner was contacted and asked why it was being given away, he responded saying:

“Three-year old daughter started talking about the “man in the video machine”, didn’t think much of it, then my wife saw a dark figure move across the basement and into the machine. She ran out of the house, would not return until the machine was out of the house.”

Haunted video game or clever ruse to rid the house of Ms. Pac Man?

2. Pokeman Black – A bootleg version of Pokemon found in a flea market that was a modified version of Pokemon Red. The game starts out with an extra Pokemon simply called “GHOST” that had an attack called Curse. When used in battle, GHOST would slaughter any other Pokemon and when the end of the game was reached, the gamer was faced with “GHOST wants to fight!”. The battle always ended in death for the gamer and the game being erased.

3. Majora’s Haunted Mask – This legend has a really involved back story, but the basic premise is that a video game was purchased at a garage sale that belonged to a boy named Ben who had died, most likely from drowning. Check out these videos from the affected game. They are definitely creepy if nothing else.

4. Polybius, The Haunted Arcade Game – The legend of Polybius originated in Portland in the 1980s and involved a strange game that showed up at various Portland arcades mysteriously. The few gamers that actually got a chance and played the game supposedly became addicted and started acting strangely.

“Some say they experienced an extreme form of vertigo and vivid hallucinations long after they had finished playing while others claim they suffered amnesia, in some cases forgetting their own name. And most horrifying of all, it’s said that some players were haunted by horrific nightmares and eventually driven to insanity and suicide after coming under the game’s influence. ”

Just as quickly and mysteriously as the game had appeared, it disappeared leaving few clues as to where it came from. Conspiracy theories range from government experiments, to ghosts, to Atari recalls. This legend is quite detailed and much more information can be found in the article and on Wikipedia.

5. Minecraft and the Legend of Herobrine – This is my favorite legend that we are covering today and it could easily be an entire post by itself. There is a lot of detail and information if you are willing to dig around the internet for it. The basic premise for the legend is that while playing in single player mode gamers started reporting structures and tunnels they did not build. They would also occasionally spot a user identified as Herobrine, who it was later discovered was the dead brother of Notch, the developer of Minecraft.

One of the most interesting parts of this legend to me is the hilarious and sometimes vitriolic interaction between the believers, the scammers, and those people who are clearly irritated with the whole idea.  I also love the growing library of videos that have appeared on YouTube chronicling Herobrine encounters. I have embedded some of my favorite ones below.

This one is long, you only need to watch like the last minute if you want.

It should be noted that four of the five stories involve haunted hardware, perhaps because it is easier to attribute something intangible, like a ghost, to a tangible object you can touch. Minecraft is a shared experience; however, Herobrine is only reported in the single player version of the game, which is not shared. Even so, as the legend of Herobrine has grown, the Minecraft community as a whole has shared the experience. This has been but a small sampling of the good ghost shenanigans in video games that are out there today. Anybody know any additional stories?

[image Jess Bradley]

In the Colombian city of Medellin, a local undertaker has started a “ghost census” to count and catalog the spirits of the city. His team of four “properly attired”  funeral parlor workers has spread out around the city in the past few weeks cataloging no fewer than 215 ghosts.

“It’s beyond question that many of the city’s buildings and homes have ghosts. For years, we’ve heard stories about them and we thought the time had come to approach, catalog and classify them through a census,” William Betancur told AFP.

“They’ve reported back with 215 ghosts…. Our video and still cameras have captured 23,” he said with pride.

The idea came about after the undertaker sensed his dead dog still wandering the funeral home.

[AFP via io9] [photo: AFP]

Rent has gotten scary enough that 51% of those polled would happily share their house with a ghost if that meant that they could live there for free. In fact, over a quarter of the respondents would be quite satisfied with simply going halfsies with a haunted roommate.  No word yet from USA Today on cryptids or aliens, but we will keep you updated.

[USA Today]

So Justin Robert Young and I have been scoping out murder scenes, ancient burial grounds and sites of all out massacres in research for our Weird Things Live project (where we investigate paranormal phenomena in front of a live internet audience). On a recent moonlit night standing in the middle of a mass killing field I had an epiphany. What are we going to do when we make contact with some kind of demonic spirit that may have caused people to go on murderous rampages and infect the scene with some kind of contagious inter-dimensional gloom? We need protocols and stuff.

Sure, we’re skeptics and we don’t actually believe in ghosts and spirits, but to be scientific about it, we have to accept the possibility that our premise could be wrong and this stuff is pure concentrated wickedness. We have a moral imperative to do something when we come face to face with wicked evil supernatural forces. So I decided to develop a plan and protocol for capturing and containing all that evil we’re going to encounter for your entertainment pleasure. I’ll describe our method for the capturing process in a later post. Here I’ll describe how we plan to contain it for transport and permanent confinement.

Level 1: Ghosts aren’t real Our first level of protection is based upon the virtual scientific fact that ghosts aren’t real. While we’re confident this should protect us and you, it’s only our first defense.

Level 2: Physical confinement We’re going to use airtight glass jars to physically contain the malevolent spirits. If there is some unknown physical property to dark spirits (like some kind of intelligent airborne bacteria) this should help confine them inside a physical medium.

Level 3: Sacred ground Inside each jar we plan on putting dirt from some kind of sacred holy ground where spirits are able to chill out peacefully. Our plan is that this should contain the spirit long enough to transport it to our final containment area.

Level 4: Sacred seal Using the Egyptians as a guide, we’re going to seal the jar with some kind of inscription designed to keep evil spirits inside. As we know from movies, breaking sacred seals are a bad thing, so we’re going to get some and put them on our jars. So don’t break them.

Level 5: Super Evil Super Max We’ve staked out a couple of remote plots of land located near burial grounds. We plan to bury these jars of tortured souls in this resting spot that will then be festooned with a variety of religious artifacts. We plan on bringing in some kind of Holy Man (under blindfold) to consecrate the grounds. We also plan on creating a ring of powder and pouring holy water everywhere.

That’s just the starting point. Your suggestions are welcome. Our goal is to keep adding to our final resting spot of evil as we capture more spirits. For it to work we’re going to have to keep the actual location a very closely held secret. We don’t want some interlopers to stumble in there and unleash what may be the greatest concentration of evil ever.

If this sounds silly to you, ask yourself this: Would you want these jars filled with the presumed spirits of serial killers and maniacs under your bed at night? When asked if they’d briefly wear a sweater that belonged to a serial killer (dry cleaned no less) most people flat out refuse. I’m sure they’d be even less happy to have our jars buried in their garden.

The string of earthquake in Chile not only inspired an outpouring of foreign aide and worldwide attention, it’s also been the impetus for a ton of recently-minted ghosts to rattle around the areas in which they died.

Shadows cross the Cardenal Raul Silva Henriquez Bridge in Constitucion; Cell phone screens light up suddenly, as if trying to receive phone calls. The moans and tears of children and their mothers resonate throughout the wooded Curanipe camping grounds, where thirty people lost their lives on February 27th.

Situations such as these are being reported by residents of Region de Maule, who claim that they repeat over and over in the early morning hours. “It’s the people who died here. They’re asking to be found and be given a burial,” says Juan Morales Morales, who works nights doing repairs on the Constitución Bridge. Dozens of people died in this area while camping at Isla Orrego, at the mouth of the Maule River.

We’re guessing a regular morning ghost symphony of screams and cell phone rings won’t bolster the camping tourism in this area.

[Inexplicata]

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! (more…)

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

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?