On the 15th of May, 2001, the first of many reports about a mysterious creature known as a ‘man-monkey’, who was attacking people as they slept on their roofs during the insanely-hot summer months in Dehli. These attacks caused one death and at least 35 injuries as people were injured by the assailant or in the panic to escape from him. The effects of these attacks were so severe that in one suburb of Delhi ordered its police officers to shoot-on-sight at the creature.Described as ‘short, dark and hairy, with human legs and an ape-like face’, the monkey-man of Dehli sounds as if he could infact be a pre-historic human, such as a Neanderthal.

What adds mystery to the assailant is his apparent ability to survive leaps that would kill a normal human being, and his ability to cover long distances in a short amount of time. Because of this, he inspires terror into all that see him, causing a man to die as he jumped from the roof as his house in an attempt to save himself.

The police on the night of these first attacks, received 29 ‘distress calls’ from the eastern and north-eastern areas of Dehli. Patrols were stepped up, and police were tasked to investigate the mysterious happenings. However, this wasn’t the last sighthing of the Monkey-man, as he is still being sighted today, becoming something of a legend amongst the people of New Dehli.

[Wikipedia]

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.

On July, 30, 1763, during Pontiac’s Rebellion, amid all the fort sieges and small pox blankets, the Nain Rouge was supposedly sighted dancing and cavorting along the banks of the Detroit River, following alongside Capt. James Dalyell’s boat. The next day, Dalyell and his men were ambushed by Pontiac’s troops, who killed 20 Brits and wounded 34 others, causing the river to run red with blood.

In 1805, three years after the legislature of the Northwest Territory officially incorporated Detroit, multiple Nain Rouge sightings were allegedly reported. Then, on June 11, 1805, a stable fire burned the entire city to the ground.
These stories of the jaunty, smirking red gnome share a commonality that Nain Rouge tales, if recounted by a responsible author, all contain – “supposedly,” “allegedly” and the lack of even cursory information about the witness(es). This trend continues on through the decades as the swarthy dwarf makes appearance after non-specific appearance, with each visitation followed by a citywide tragedy. In short, it starts to feel less like the Nain Rouge is predicting disaster and more like disasters are predicting new Nain Rouge stories. Each person who, from the banks of a bloody river or the ashes of the city, declares that they saw the Nain Rouge adds a swath of flesh to the skeletal fairytale that crossed the Atlantic, until finally, the growing populace of a burgeoning metropolis has constructed a living monster to press into civil service.

For media reporting on a local tragedy, Nain Rouge sightings become diverting fluff pieces that can get snuck in between death tolls and damage-to-dollar conversions. They’re (marginally) topical and so thoroughly entangled with the city’s history, the reports almost validate the depth and severity of the human suffering that has taken place; after all, if the event weren’t a true and utter disaster, the Nain Rouge would not have appeared.

For the people, the Nain Rouge’s disaster-presaging existence and appearances can create communal comfort through the assurance that the events were unavoidable and that the city is on a path – chaos doesn’t reign, and Detroit survived every prior visitation of the creature with the fortitude and confidence to face him again. The Nain Rouge belongs to the city, and until the day he doesn’t arrive to smile and laugh and mock its defeats and misfortune, Detroit remains intact.

Friday: The Nain Rouge today

photo credit: Jeremy Burgin

Prompted by reports of human like creatures near a Siberian cave, a team of investigators lead by Igor Burtsev from the International Center for Hominology is heading out to the tundra to see what they can see:

The local administration has so far received 14 written reports from residents of far-off villages who allegedly saw yetis near the Azasskaya cave. According to the reports, the creatures were heavyset, about two meters’ tall and looking a lot like bears. Their bodies were covered in red and black fur, and they could climb trees.

If they’re successful we might have finally found the elusive Yeti. If not then hopefully this turns out to be some sort of other cool new species we didn’t know about before.

photo credit: iwantamonkey

The Bigfoot Enthusiast Group: Elusive Primates of North America (EPNA) claims that they have found a primate like Handprint on Sand Mountain in Alabama. The discovering group from the Alabama Chapter of the EPNA came across the apparent handprint on an expedition in the Sand Mountain area, where they also heard strange animal noises:

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The latest news from cryptozoology.com links to an article from a local Trinidad newspaper. Apparently a one horned beast washed ashore on the island of Cedros and excited locals claimed that it was anything from a Narwhal to a Unicorn. The local Government Counselor’s explanation for what the creature was is far less exciting.

Link to the article.