Jonathon Bright, a paranormal investigator who’s started adding ‘Monster Hunter’ to his resume – because who WOULDN’T want ‘Monster Hunter’ on their resume – has started sharing a photo that might be the famous camera-shy creature that has become legendary.

“Three years ago, I came to Scotland to investigate the Nessie legend and took thousands of photographs. It took me six months to look at them all and I found this one which I showed when I spoke at the Scottish Paranormal Festival in Stirling this week. After I had finished there, I came north to spend more time searching for an answer to the Nessie story. My picture is a talking point. Some people will say it is physical and the monster, others will say it is a trick of the water, others will say it is a hoax.”

It would be great if this was in fact the mysterious animal that everyone says lives in the Loch.

It would be even greater if a professional photographer with ninja-like focusing skills and a decent camera would add “Monster Hunter’ to their resume.

[The Scotsman]

It’s All in Your Heads – Mass Hysteria, Rampant Psychosomaticism and Contagious Hypochondria. Monday, how a town danced themselves to death.

Today: Honey, I Shrunk the Dong – The Todger Inversion Delusion

In the “Seinfeld” episode where a naked, mortified George finds himself in a humiliated tizzy about shrinkage, imagine that, instead of engaging in whiny banter with Jerry, he runs screaming down to the kitchen, hand stretches his penis, mashes a stack of dinner plates on it to keep it extended and then starts to cry and hyperventilate. Cue funky bass riff.

Sufferers of Genital Retraction Syndrome believe that their genitals are rapidly disappearing into their bodies – a situation that they perceive as not only shameful, but also fatal. GRS, a very real fake malady, is a psychological syndrome akin to a panic attack, but one which feeds on sexual guilt, sexual ennui or sexual dissatisfaction. It’s most prevalent in cultures that hyper-moralize sexuality while also using sexual prowess as a barometer for measuring masculinity. As such, its perceived onset is generally viewed by the afflicted as a punishment for either sexual immorality (masturbation, hooker purchases, etc.) or their inability to please a sexual partner. The resultant panic and anxiety, of course, lead to further shrinkage and, as a result, often drive sufferers to employ a variety of household ephemera – shoelaces, chopsticks, fishhooks, kitchen tongs – in rigging up painful ad hoc penile extenders. (In rare cases, GRS affects women, who became convinced that their nipples or vulvae are retracting.)

The whole business of GRS is most common to Asia and Africa, and only became a popular topic of conversation among sniggering anthropologists after a 1967 epidemic in Singapore (where GRS is known as “Koro,” meaning, appropriately, “head of the turtle”) that found thousands of men desperately yanking and tugging themselves into a screaming panic. The mass freakout only ended after the government launched a massive educational campaign to assure dudes that their little soldiers weren’t in danger of going permanently AWOL. What the Singapore epidemic underscores is the tendency to mystify aspects of the human condition, even when they relate to things as concretely rational as biology – these cultures have, and understand, medicine, but in ascribing masculinity and sexuality to a morally policed intangible divinity, the sexual organs come to be

There’s no shortage of explanations for the demise of the newspaper industry. Could one more be the complete lack of face to face confrontation with paranormal creatures like zombies?

We at Weird Things lament the days when a brassy gal like Inez Wallace would leap feet first into adventure and track down an actual zombie and find out the supernatural and scientific explanations.

Check out these excerpts from her May 3rd, 1942 column in the Milwaukee Sentinel:

Although I rode a short distance each day into the mountains, I had practically given up hope of ever seeing a Zombie.

Then, one sultry afternoon, I was riding slowly toward Haiti’s capital when I saw HIM. Or, perhaps, I should say IT.

He was standing at a spot where a cane and a cocoa plantation met – just standing.

What did this creature look like you ask?

His face was neither the bronze of the Jamaican Negro nor the ebony black of the Haitian I had come to know in these mountains. The color was a sickly gray – like fresh Russian caviar and his skin, drawn tight over his bones, resemble old parchment.

There could only be one conclusion!

The thing before me was a ZOMBIE!

Read on for all the exhilarating details: The Milwaukee Sentinel – Google News Archive Search

This comes from The Metro.co.uk:

The young teenagers were playing by the waterfront in a Panama lake near Cerro Azul when the bald beast emerged from a cave behind a waterfall. They started screaming as it shuffled out “as if to attack them”.

Locals told Panama news the monster was like “Gollum from Lord of the Rings”…

But in a “desperate bid to defend themselves” four children grabbed rocks from the beach and hurled them at the beast.

After offing the beast, the children threw the body in the water and confessed to their parents what they’d seen. The carcass of crazy creature was later found picked apart by buzzards. Like, really, picked apart considering only bleached bones remain of what looks to be a completely intact, if waterfall dwelling, Gollum.

We might never get to examine this anomaly in a laboratory but at least those Central American youths had the times of their lives beating a rare creature to death before carelessly tossing it into a lake.

Hat tip to the one and only Brian Brushwood for this link.

For decades, the Nain Rouge leap-frogged one disaster to the next, always arriving in time to pre-empt tragedy with some goggle-eyed nose thumbing before evaporating into the high drone of an emergency broadcast signal, and for decades, from one disaster to the next, Detroit marshaled and rallied and summoned hope up out of the ashes and bones of the city’s past. In July of 1967, everything changed.

What should have a been a routine raid on an illegal bar turned into a five day riot that ended with the deployment of National Guard and U.S. Army troops. Fueled by festering racial tensions that were only exacerbated when the Detroit police, a source of friction to begin with, started making mass arrests, the riot surprised the entire country – urban living statistics coming out of Detroit portrayed it as a diverse, racially integrated wonderland. (Ultimately, the fault didn’t lie in the numbers, but in rampant, unquantified everyday prejudice, including frequent racially based mistreatment of consumers by local merchants.) In the wake of the confrontation, which was supposedly preceded by several chortling visits from the hyperactive Nain Rouge, even the most adept statistician couldn’t argue with the 43 deaths, 467 reported injuries, 7,200 arrests and more than 2,000 immolated buildings.

Like a wounded, shell-shocked Veteran, the city never fully recovered. The crime rate skyrocketed in the 1970s and the town’s social fabric unraveled. Through much of the decline, the cheeky red gnome didn’t issue so much as a somber Bronx cheer.
For more than two and half centuries, the Nain Rouge seemed conjoined to the city, genetically tethered to it by a thin band of fiction, sharing whatever municipal organ secretes narrative dopamine in the wake of urban injury. But it’s hard to define the identity, the personhood, of a city. It lives in constant symbiosis with its citizens and the culture they mold and consume and re-mold, defining the place as it, in turn, defines them. The Nain Rouge was an identifying aspect of Detroit since its founding, a lodestone of a socio-cultural foundation that many believe to have crumbled in 1967.

After the riots, local and state government banded together to form a committee meant to revitalize – to redefine – the city. In defiance of history, they called the group “New Detroit.” In the last three decades, only a single Nain Rouge sighting has been reported.