The Voynich manuscript, a mysterious medieval document that has confounded the best cryptographers for centuries may finally have been cracked.

A researcher studying the manuscript suggests that the secret coding may be anagrams created by a young Leonardo da Vinci? Does it sound far fetched? We’ll have to ask Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon…

Read: Voynich manuscript decoded?

Wikipedia

All this week: Halloween urban legends – horrific truths, bald-faced lies, wild embellishments and insane speculations. On Monday, Matt explored the panic over tainted candy.

Today: Questing After Haunted House Eden

Like the lost city of El Dorado, or perhaps more appropriately like the profusion of rumored “midget towns” across the country, the ultimate haunted house attraction is an infamous and highly sought after fantasy destination. These rumored Halloween paradises aren’t advertised and move to a different hidden location every year. They’re generally described as multi-floored (anywhere from 3 to 13) warehouses run by mysterious, wealthy cabals. Some allegedly offer full refunds to anyone who can make it through the entire production (sometimes the refund is offered in installments paid out as a participant completes each floor). Of course, they’re so genuinely terrifying that no one has ever managed to reclaim the full entry fee.

Interestingly, unlike the diminutive midget towns, which always seem to be tucked away in unmapped corners of forgotten counties, these Edenic bastions of fright are generally rumored to exist in urban areas – warehouse districts or dilapidated portside neighborhoods. Fueling these stories is a suburban fascination with the city. A panic-tempered awe. A wonder-blanched fear. The middle school kids who look forward to annual jaunts through the plywood corridors of local Kiwanis-run haunted houses construct elaborate fantasies about said houses’ wild urban equivalents. The stories are built from an ingrained hyperbolic vision of the city as a concrete wilderness that’s at once less sympathetic, less polite, less controlled and, most importantly, more grown up than the familiar suburban landscape. Like a profusion of the message board posts debating the supposed locations of these hidden terrordomes state: “Half the fun is finding [the attraction].” By the very nature of the attraction’s non-existence, the search becomes the destination and the “ultimate haunted house” is actually the city streets as seen through the eyes of cul de sac sons and development daughters.

The richest version of the legend I could find was actually the one I grew up hearing: Somewhere in Philadelphia, PA is a 13-floor haunted house called, well, “13 Floors.” The first couple floors are rumored to be laughably standard haunted house fare; subsequent floors give way to trapdoors, complete darkness, live insects and reptiles, and, supposedly, violent physical assaults by masked assailants. Really, the whole thing unfolds into a beautiful allegory for growing up. The horrific, whispered climax of the story? Every year, the one or two participants who manage to successfully soldier on past the seventh or eighth floor are Never. Heard from. Again.

These few fearful, but brave, souls become the ghosts of suburban grade school legend. Neither living nor dead – just lost to the city. They matured into vapor. Grew up into steam. In truth, they are the ones who escaped.

An eerie weather vane depicting a dog riding a bolt of lightning still stands atop the Suffolk church where, in 1577, an electrical storm propelled the specter of a black canine down into the holy sanctum. The apparition killed two praying supplicants and badly burned another before sublimating back into the amethyst sky and the roar of thunder.

From Hades’ babysitter Cerberus to the hound of the Baskervilles, dark canines have loyally heeled alongside European folklore and literature for centuries; the British Isles are uniquely overstocked with tales of sinister black dogs. Direct instruments of death, omens of misfortune and sentinels of the netherworld are among the most common vocations foist upon these ubiquitous ebon heck puppies (also called Hell Hounds or Grims), which are most often encountered during electrical storms or at places of transition – a dark silhouette at a crossroads, a black, starlit ghost in a cemetery or a pacing shadow, immune to moonlight, circling a hanging tree.

Dogs are natural scavengers with a heightened olfactory sense. Even in the wake of domestication, they are drawn to the blood and the meat of dead or dying animals, and pursue odors far too subtle for the human nose to detect. That this natural predilection toward, and ability to sense, the smell of the wounded and deceased – the very scent of death – could neither be trained nor bred out of them partially explains why they’ve historically been linked to supposed crossover spaces where the world of the living and the world of the dead bleed into each other like the soft-edged tendrils of colliding fog banks.

The idea of domestication itself, when paired with the already fevered imaginings of pre-enlightenment, Satan-phobic Western society, could have easily catalyzed tales devil dogs. When a blindly obedient animal can be taught to hone, focus and direct its strength, cunning and ferocity, it becomes an extension of its owner’s will. As man has always charged the devil and his minions with using man’s own free will, intellect and cunning against him, it’s no surprise that creatures like Cerberus and black dogs were imagined. After all, what’s more malevolent than co-opting the loyalty of man’s best friend and siccing the beast upon him?

The Britons’ nightmare of a loveable-mutt-turned-Beelzebub’s-PA proved indelible enough to survive the tumbling trek across the mighty Atlantic…

Wednesday: Black dogs and the American South

Weird Things Culture Researcher Matt Finaly takes a weekly look into the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

In 1837, something dark and quick began hunting women on the streets of London, pouncing upon them from the shadows and going to work on their clothes with razor talons and flaming breath, only to disappear seconds later, leaping silently over impossibly high hedges and rooftops, leaving behind only the shrill, hollow ghost of maniacal laughter and, of course, a panicked victim.

Descriptions of Spring Heeled Jack varied over the 65 years that he laid siege to London’s gas lit back alleys and dark urban bowers, but early witnesses (somewhat) consistently agree that he sported large pointed ears, an equally pointy nose, bulging eyes, sharp claws, the ability to breathe fire and a penchant for agile escapes via inhumanly powerful jumps (hence his media-coined moniker).

John Thomas Haines’ 1840 play, Spring-Heeled Jack, the Terror of London, marked the first official appearance of Jack in a popular entertainment (he had already become a staple of various Punch and Judy street puppet shows), which was followed by a rash of both sightings and corresponding sensationalized fictionalizations throughout the 1840s and ‘50s. In the name of both topicality and word economy, however, we aim to focus on the years prior to Jack’s assimilation into the everyday pop cultural dialogue of Victorian England.

Accepting, as many experts do, that the initial attacks between 1837 and 1838 were perpetrated by a still-anonymous (though one Henry de La Poer Beresford, dubbed “The Mad Marquess,” is a prime suspect) malicious, costumed prankster, and noting that the perpetrator’s image and misdeeds became the stuff of pop culture legend, the question must be posed: What overriding cultural factors contributed the specific physical attributes that the misogynistic hoaxer built into his monster? In short, why was a quick-footed, fire-breathing demon the obvious avatar for blind dread and mass hysteria in 19th century London?

While some details remain fuzzy (one witness reported that Jack actually had pointy ears while another insisted that he wore a large helmet with two points on it), it’s a given that, with the claws and the various points and the long black cloak, Jack’s intention was to appear as much like the devil (or some other lesser, equally stereotypical demon) as possible. With the post-enlightenment era in full swing and the upper-class spiritualist revival still pending, it’s easy to imagine Jack’s rationale: the upper class is retreating into academies and coffee houses to argue over the need for faith and spirituality in a supposedly enlightened society, while the lower class, fearing both the moral and technical ambiguities of science, keeps a firm (but, suddenly, somewhat unsure) hold on not only religion, but also folklore, both of which are rife with demonic and satanic imagery. Imagine being relieved of the possibility of eternal damnation by an academically driven cultural reformation centered on reason and the explicability of the natural world, only to be attacked by a fire-breathing monster. Invoke the devil at a time when society is certain of his existence, and it only serves as terrifying confirmation – invoke the devil at a time when his existence is in question, and chaos ensues.

Moreover, Jack targeted women. Barring all discussion of spiritual terror or academic ennui, the largest threat to women in 19th century England was the prevailing social hierarchy. Women were often married off to distant relations, to the highest bidder or to the highest social advantage, meaning, in many cases, to strangers or casual acquaintances. Innate to English womanhood was the knowledge that, someday, you will leave your home and move in with a husband you don’t know outside of carefully regulated social gatherings and courtship rituals (if even those) – a man whose true personality and domestic demeanor are a complete mystery. You know, and fear, that your husband could turn out to be a slovenly boor, an inattentive malcontent or, worse, a temperamental, abusive monster. There’s something, then, of the hidden evil in men, worn outwardly by Jack, that would seem particularly frightening to the young women he victimized. Admittedly, it’s ridiculous to suggest that Jack’s victims, or Jack himself, consciously contemplated this dimension of Spring Heeled Jack’s imposingness, but the obvious sex profiling that was paramount to Jack’s victim selection justifies the point, and it’s worth considering the perpetual state of psychological duress that the patriarchy held women in, even before someone donned finger blades and started leaping out of darkened alleys.

And what of the spring heels? By 1837, the industrial revolution was enjoying its heyday in London, including the mass production of all nature of machine components, like coiled springs, which began being manufactured in bulk during the 1780s. The wide availability of mechanical sundries, combined with an alleged spate of urban legends involving the devil pursuing a man over the rooftops of the city, could have easily led Jack to the idea of constructing some kind of springed footwear (the first patent for spring shoes wasn’t filed until 1889, but the materials required to build them existed for decades prior) as a means of further solidifying his demonic persona by increasing his jumping ability. Though the construction of a viable pair of such shoes, equipped for both running and jumping, would require certain metallurgic skills and resources, it seems that he did have metal claws constructed for his fingertips. At the same time, Jack’s agility could have just as easily been an inadvertent concoction of hysterical witnesses – an attempt to rationalize the sheer suddenness of the assaults – that was then co-opted and reiterated by policemen who now had an excuse for their inability to apprehend jumping Jack. And though it was two 1837 assaults involving clawing and leaping that earned Spring Heeled Jack his name, it was two 1838 attacks involving fire breathing that transformed the public’s general wariness into bona fide panic.

Most theories of Jack’s true identity cite that he probably came from an upper class, if not aristocratic, background, and his tendency toward flame exhalation only reinforces this notion. The 17th and 18th centuries had seen two prominent British fire eaters gain notoriety among the aristocracy, and, during the 1820s, fire eating and breathing became a common popular upper-class entertainment. A growing fascination with the strange and seemingly mystic cultures of Britain’s Eastern colonies was mounting, and, with the Mughal Empire defeated and India under complete company control, more and more British noblemen were travelling throughout India, where they were captivated by the wondrous and unfamiliar practices of the Hindus, including fire eating and fire breathing, which some Hindu sects utilized in performances demonstrating spiritual attainment rites. It was the perfect time for an aspiring prankster to see and learn the art of fire-breathing, which the returning young aristocrats had re-purposed from a religious ritual into a cheap parlor trick.

While many working class Londoners would have been altogether ignorant of the practice, even those who had seen a fire breathing performance in a theatrical context would be wholly unprepared to see the art used randomly (and threateningly) on the streets of London, and (even if the person performing wasn’t dressed as a demon) would find it frightening. Take the analog of today’s guerilla magic fad – guerilla magic works precisely because, by removing the traditional physical environs of a performance, the intangible barrier between performer and audience is shattered, creating extremes of both surprise and veracity that don’t exist naturally within the confines of traditional spectatorship. Jack exploited this fact to add the last (and most convincing) attribute to his marauding devil – hellfire.

As if all of the physical trappings of a demon weren’t enough to send the women of London into a collective fit, Jack added one more thing: self-awareness. On February 19th, Jane Alsop heard at knock at the door of her father’s house. Upon opening it, a man concealed by shadows told her he was a police officer and asked her to fetch a light. “We have caught Spring Heeled Jack here in the lane” he said. Upon handing him a candle, the man threw off his cloak, revealing pointed ears and bulging eyes. He spewed flame towards the girl and then began to tear at her clothes and her skin with his claws until, finally, her sister came to her rescue, and the assailant fled.

To think of a monster that haunts the dark streets and stalks prey out of an unquenchable, instinctual thirst for blood or violence is scary, but the idea of a creature calling out its own name, a name assigned to it by its victims, as a means of exploiting that fear, is something all together more terrifying. As much as you can blame popular culture for later propagating the legend of Spring Heeled Jack through Penny Dreadfuls and stage plays, leading to further sightings and, supposedly, copy cats, it was only weeks after appearing in the news that the man who was Jack began propagating his own legend, breathing the three chilling syllables – Spring Heeled Jack – into the air of a warm London home, before spitting fire and baring his claws and insisting with every pouncing, cackling ounce of his being that this monster was real.

In retrospect, though, away from the fog-shrouded gas lights and the sharp echo of boots on cobbled streets sounding out into the wind-haunted spaces between buildings, it’s this self-awareness (self-centeredness, really) that most belies the true mortal nature of Spring Heeled Jack. After all, Bigfoot isn’t known for pyrotechnic displays and sponsorship deals, and Nessie has yet to strike poses mid back flip. Jack may as well have said, “Pay no attention to the man behind the cloak.”

Matt Finley is a regular contributor to Weird Things and is currently based in Cleveland. His works can be found at Finfizzler.wordpress.com.

Tear Up The Town is a weekly column investigating the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

For two warm spring nights in 1977, a monster trolled the quiet streets of Dover, Delaware, haunting passersby with its large, almost-featureless head and glowing, empty stare.

When one considers that none of the witnesses to the so-called “Dover Demon” (dubbed as such by the press) were in direct contact immediately before or after the alleged sightings, and all of their descriptions of the creature varied slightly (orange eyes versus green eyes, etc.), an orchestrated hoax seems unlikely. But a microcosmic case of teenage mass hysteria built around a confused infant moose and a pop cultural zeitgeist that piled a brand-new sensationalist Leonard Nimoy television program onto known UFO tracking at a local airforce base, a rampaging serial killer and an imminent star war?

Many skeptics believe it isn’t a coincidence that all three witnesses (Bill Bartlett, age 17; John Baxter, age 15; and Abby Brabham, age 15) to the spindly, large-eyed, four-foot-tall, melon-headed creature, which was witnessed clambering along Dover roadsides on April 21st and 22nd, 1977, were adolescents; even after disregarding the high school prank theory, some experts believe the Dover Demon, a veritable celebrity among American cryptids, was probably a woefully misidentified baby moose. Others admit the possibility that it could have been the product of a covert genetic engineering experiment. Sure, certain spirit hunters and cryptophiles with a new-age bent believe that the witnesses’ age demographic suggests that the alleged creature was related to a poltergeist, appearing only to those whose hormones and bio-rythyms were in continuous flux, and phrases like “extra-terrestrial” and “inter-dimensional being” have been tossed around, but the same trixy pubescence that collectively robs the witnesses of credibility also helps explain how a demon was born.

Though the Hollywood extra-terrestrial boom that began in 1977 with the May release of Star Wars (followed almost immediately by the November release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind) was still a month away when 17-year-old Bill Bartlett saw the bulbous head and shining eyes of an unearthly quadruped reflected in his headlights as he drove home through Dover on April 21st, a cultural obsession with UFOs and the paranormal was already a fixture of American life. Starting with the release of the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage in 1967 and the publicized discontinuation of the U.S. Air Force’s UFO research division, Project Blue Book, in 1969, and bolstered by a sudden spike in reported UFO sightings in 1973 (The fact that the government was no longer searching for the truth about flying saucers clearly put the perceived responsibility back into the hands of the public), the culture was in the throes of an obsession.

Meanwhile, New York City, just three hours north of Dover, was caught in a media frenzy as the .44 Caliber Killer, later identified as David Berkowitz, roamed through the city committing a mounting series of violent shootings. More than half of his, as of that time, 11 victims were teenagers, one of whom had been killed on April 17th, just four days before the first Dover Demon sighting. With news of the seemingly random killings and the ensuing investigation garnering play-by-play national coverage, it’s not unreasonable to imagine a country of teenagers, suddenly confronted with the truth of their own mortality, feeling, understandably, on edge.

And that’s not even taking into account that Dover Air Force Base, which tracked and verified several local UFO sightings throughout the early ‘70s, is located just southeast of the city. Local teenagers who were already exposed to, and demographically poised to take the brunt of, a burgeoning cultural interest in the paranormal would have certainly been aware that within the corporate limits of their hometown existed a government facility that was on record as having monitored unexplained phenomena.

Certainly after the release of Star Wars (and well after the Dover sightings), a rash of alien-themed narrative television shows and films appeared, including Battlestar Galactica, Mork and Mindy, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Alien, etc. (1978 even saw a short-lived television adaptation of Project Blue Book, entitled “Project UFO”). Based on these dates, one might draw the faulty conclusion that the Dover Demon sightings seem to hold more water as legitimate evidence of an undeniably ridiculous looking cryptid stalking The Blue Hen State, given that they occurred before the start of the pop cultural science fiction renaissance, but I would argue that it actually makes more sense, and verges on unsurprising, that sightings like those reported in Dover happened prior to the debut of the above popular entertainments.

Pop culture isn’t a proactive phenomenon. It simply reacts to the wider cultural milieu, absorbing current social, political and scientific thought trends and translating those into the narrative structures that humans seem to require to bring already-present ideas into the sphere of general consciousness. This description, of course, is a gross oversimplication, but the point is that by the time TV and media started addressing instances of paranormal phenomena, the country was already deeply concerned with, and afraid of, all things unearthly.

Next, I’d like to posit that, in assimilating national fears and then reproducing visions of them, pop culture goes through two stages: addressing the fear and answering the fear. For example, in the late ‘60s, supposed Bigfoot footage landed all over the news and the government stopped officially researching UFOs. These and other events (the promise of continued manned space exploration, a sudden spate of books about The Bermuda Triangle, the continuing growth of the new age movement, etc.) led to a growing, unarticulated fear of the paranormal and the supernatural in America. As in every instance of irrational national fear or obsession, the first things the entertainment industry begins to produce are documentaries and dramatizations of actual events. 1975 saw the airing of a made for TV movie called The UFO Incident, which portrayed the supposedly true story of an East Coast couple who, years after a strange experience on a mountain road, discover, through hypnosis, that they were abducted by, and experimented on, by aliens. Even more telling, on April 17th, 1977, just four days before the first Dover Demon sighting (and on the night of the fifth and sixth Berkowitz murders), “In Search Of…”, a Leanord Nimoy-hosted television documentary series that investigated all corners of pseudo-science and sensationalist natural anomalies, ranging from UFOs to Atlantis to The Elephant Man, premiered with an episode about communicating with plants and, more importantly, an opening title sequence that featured a laundry list of topics to come, including extraterrestrials, witchcraft and monsters.

It’s only after a fear is addressed through such documentaries and dramatizations, like those stated above, which simply reduce and collate the most striking and mysterious aspects of the terrorizer in question into a comprehensive consumable piece, that people begin to create answers to the fear by constructing fictions that both put a face to the unknown and present a clear resolution in which, generally, the physical manifestation of our terror is either destroyed or robbed of its power over us. For example, after “realistically” re-enacting the nation’s collective UFO fear in “The UFO Incident,” Close Encounters of the Third Kind presented a fictionalized version of an alien encounter in which the aliens abducting humans and staging high-speed flyovers are reveled to be friendly explorers reaching out to humanity through a simple, delightful tune. Fear momentarily allayed.

The Dover Demon sightings took place in the middle of a cultural shift wherein all of the country’s supernatural curiosity and fear was out in the open, being actively documented and dramatized, but few contemporary fictions had been created to soothe the American psyche. On a spring night, in a quiet town, as the cultural climate around the adolescent witnesses erupted with teen murders, supernatural documentaries, UFO sightings and commercials for film after film about cosmic misadventure, who knows what the hormonal, pubescent mind will do when confronted by something as atypical as a newborn moose, much less some disgusting genetic experiment gone awry. Add Fleetwood Mac’s then-top-selling album Rumours into the mix, and it’s a shock that there wasn’t significant property damage.

Matt Finley is a regular contributor to Weird Things and is currently based in Cleveland. His works can be found at Finfizzler.wordpress.com.

Image Credit: j_naturalia_2

We know what you’re thinking, and no the Bird People have not decided to rise up against their human overlords….yet. The photo above depicts an individual fashioning the get up Plague Doctors wore when visiting patients during the Black Death in the 14th Century.

1/3 of the population of Europe was wiped out by the plague and the costume definitely reflects the creepiness of the times. Plague Doctors wore the frightening get up to mitigate their chances of catching the highly infectious disease, think of it as an archaic hazmat suit.

Now we get that the wide brimmed, black hat identified one as a doctor in those days, and that a long, tucked in cloak and leather breeches minimized skin exposure, but why would plague doctors want to appear to their patients as horrible birds? Were they trying to scare the bejesus out of their patients and the plague along with it?

According to Wikipedia, people of the day wrongly believed that the black death was being transmitted and spread by birds. Since Superstition abounded in the 14th century , it follows that if one dresses like a bird, the plague could be drawn away from the sick and on to the bird’s clothing (keep in mind medical science was non-existent at this time, they did what they could). The eyepieces of red glass were believed to shield the wearer from evil, which was obviously the root of the disease (they didn’t have the germ theory of disease back then either). But according to the same wikipedia article, the beak may have had a more practical use as well:

“The beak of the mask was often filled with strongly aromatic herbs and spices to overpower the miasmas or “bad air” which was also thought to carry the plague. At the very least, it may have served a dual purpose of dulling the smell of unburied corpses, sputum, and ruptured bouboules in plague victims.”

The kicker to all this is that the plague wasn’t being spread by birds, it was being spread by fleas, most often riding on rats, and the wicked cool get up the plague doctors wore probably provided a great carrier vehicle for fleas to get from place to place. The plague doctor get up has now entered the popular conscious as a hallmark of horror. Though plague doctors proved to be ineffective, the profession provided a convenient occupation for those who loved to poke bodies without being called a weirdo.

1 minute and 48 seconds into the above video you see a strange ball of light that appears to leap across the screen from one grouping of clouds to another just as the plane is taking off from the aircraft carrier. This video is being touted on youtube as proof of UFOs. But is the freaky ball of light an object in the sky or something much closer to the camera?

Gambling, incest, whorehouses, invoking the devil and Jupiter, our modern day troublemaking celebrities have nothing on Popes of a bygone age. Check out this account of the teenaged Pope John XII (elected at 18, pope from 955 – 964). FYI, his dad, Albrec the II got him the gig.

Then, rising up, the cardinal priest Peter testified that he himself had seen [John XII] celebrate mass without taking communion. John, bishop of Narni, and John, a cardinal deacon, professed that they themselves saw that a deacon had been ordained in a horse stable, but were unsure of the time. Benedict, cardinal deacon, with other co-deacons and priests, said they knew that he had been paid for ordaining bishops, specifically that he had ordained a ten-year-old bishop in the city of Todi… They testified about his adultery, which they did not see with their own eyes, but nonetheless knew with certainty: he had fornicated with the widow of Rainier, with Stephana his father’s concubine, with the widow Anna, and with his own niece, and he made the sacred palace into a whorehouse. They said that he had gone hunting publicly; that he had blinded his confessor Benedict, and thereafter Benedict had died; that he had killed John, cardinal subdeacon, after castrating him; and that he had set fires, girded on a sword, and put on a helmet and cuirass. All, clerics as well as laymen, declared that he had toasted to the devil with wine. They said when playing at dice, he invoked Jupiter, Venus and other demons. They even said he did not celebrate Matins and the canonical hours nor did he make the sign of the cross.

The Wikipedia entry on Pope John XII