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. This week we chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town. Wednesday we learned how one man created his own lake monster sham.

Maybe it’s because we’re at a century’s distance with only selective research sources left to go by, but I feel like there’s respectable, genteel nobility behind both the Hodag hoax and the Lake George Monster prank. I say this in light of the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco, which mirrored modern film and record promotion campaigns far more than it did the homegrown ingenuity of yesteryear’s cryptid shenanigans. At the same token, it’s difficult, in the case of the Sasquatch carcass thimblerig, to figure out exactly where the wild dream logic and delightful homespun madness ended and where the frustrating dishonesty and grubby-handed cash pawing began.

It’s easy to point fingers at Carmine Thomas Biscardi, the Las Vegas promoter and notorious Bigfoot hoaxer, who teamed up with the two Georgia pranksters after they had already set their small-scale practical joke in motion… easy because he’s obviously guilty, and by far the least sympathetic party involved. In 2005, Biscardi went on Coast to Coast AM to brag about a live Bigfoot specimen that everybody could watch and enjoy via live webcam feed… for a subscription fee of $14. The surprise here isn’t that there wasn’t actually a captive Sasquatch pacing circles in front of the camera lens, but rather that there was nothing pacing anything anywhere; Biscardi didn’t even try to fake a spectacle. After announcing that there was never a live specimen and claiming that he, too, had been ripped off by the people in possession of the non-existent Bigfoot, Biscardi took the webcam money and ran. (To his dubious credit, he did refund all post-prank-revelation subscription orders.) The refusal to present even the drunkest of vagrants in the nattiest of Gorilla Grodd costumes clearly crosses the line between hoax and scam.

So after Biscardi jumped on the bandwagon-cum-Yeti-hearse of the Georgian sheriff’s deputy and his used car salesman buddy, it was really tempting to cite him as the reason that the hoax felt less like a harmless, misguided jape than a carefully orchestrated deception. After all, Biscardi’s the one who called down the media frenzy, and who organized the ridiculous live press conference, and who, at the outset, before pictures of the so-called corpse were released on the Internet, charged folks $2 a pop for cadaver photos. On the other hand, Biscardi didn’t start the hoax. He didn’t author the boys’ tale of hiking through the woods and finding the 7’ 7” fur-covered body amid a gathering of three similar living creatures. He even joined up after the first YouTube video was filmed. Biscardi is just a savvy, opportunistic mooch, the crooked conductor of a runaway train built by Deputy Matthew Whiton and Rick Dyer.

Get the rest of the story AFTER THE JUMP…

Dyer and Whiton are harder to pin down. It takes very specific sort of f***-all enthusiasm to dash out into the world claiming to have found the bloating corpse of a monster. Still, a century before, Eugene Shepard ran into Rhinelander, Wisconsin with not only the faked corpse of a monster, but also an epic tale detailing how he and a lumberjack posse had killed the beast with dynamite. In both cases a false cadaver was created, and advertised as the genuine artifact. I haven’t found anything to indicate that Shepard charged anyone to take a look-see at the immolated Hodag, but neither is it clear what sort of monetary designs Dyer and Whiton did or didn’t have before Biscardi joined up (though the ease with which the Vegas promoter convinced them that their bizarre animal was, in actuality, a cash cow doesn’t speak well of their intentions). “But,” you point out, “Shepard did charge people a dime to see the supposed live Hodag at the County Fair.” And here, again, we are walking the high wire between hoax and scam.

Even disregarding the fact that’s Shepard’s Hodag wasn’t presented in a cultural vacuum – patrons were almost certainly familiar with sideshows and similar humbugs that offered creative, entertaining, but generally obvious, deceptions for a minimal fee – the lurching automaton voiced by Shepard’s son and accompanied by Shepard’s own manic, silver-tongued narration provided enough of a spectacle to justify the minimal price of admission. And it’s hard to tell whether or not Dyer and Whiton possess whatever unnamable compulsion drives people to rig up robot monsters or add a set of blue ears to a painted, pulley-rigged stick. They certainly aren’t like Biscardi, who uses big talk and empty promises to pocket fat stacks of money for nothing. At the same time, they seemed to lack the joyfulness and enthusiasm that both Shepard and Watrous felt for their respective creations. Despite their commitment to creating an ad hoc monster body, they seemed more obsessed with the publicity and cultural caché than with the actual source of attention – Bigfoot remains. Seriously low rent Bigfoot remains.
And for me, that was what ultimately made the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco seem so disingenuous. Initially, the whole business had me really excited – not because I believed the body was real, but because I wanted to see how far they would take it. How much effort they would put into the spectacle. Whether or not, like Shepard and Watrous, they would show us something that, while false according to its supposed identity, was real in its creativity and craftsmanship. I was hoping for a fully autopsy-ready body, with layers of correctly placed viscera, a stomach rife with clues pointing to the identity of its last meal, and maybe even a couple ridiculous, but no less entertaining, physiological revelations (Bigfoot has two hearts! Bigfoot has an artificial hip, indicating that Sasquatches have surprisingly advanced medical capabilities!) So when word came out that it was just an ape suit stuffed with hotdog ingredients, I was more than a little chagrined.

I don’t know where this leaves us. It’s seems reductive to blame Dyer and Whiton’s misguided bottom-shelf prankery on new media and a reality show culture that promise fame to the commoner and increasingly value the frenzied swapping of digital information over a tangible engagement with a physical product, though I’m sure once Biscardi was involved he convinced the boys that, these days, a ridiculously low investment often yields high temporary returns. After all, the hoax was never meant to go undetected forever… just long enough for the three yeti coroners to fill their coffers through the exploitation of Bigfoot enthusiasts and cryptid research groups. Then again, in this day and age, even a well-intentioned prankster with boundless integrity would be remiss to entirely forego a Web presence in favor of some falsely idealized “old fashioned” route.

No, I think the problem with all of this – the thing that made Dyer and Whiton’s Bigfoot prank feel dire and witless – was the pranksters seeming lack of fun. Imagine a grinning Eugene Shepard storming out of the woods with his carbonized Hodag, or a giggling Harry Watrous hiding in some shrubs, waiting to loose his hippogriff upon a hapless boater. These locally performed stunts were just that – performed, with the jerry-rigged monsters taking center stage as their creators MC’d or crouched behind an azalea bush. A snarling Hodag. A blue-eared hippogriff. A hypothetical surgically enhanced dual-hearted Bigfoot. These pranks are attractive because they seek to knit our dreams and nightmares from the mundane yarn of the everyday – to bring us as close as we’ll ever come to actual monsters. What the Dyer and Whiton did was mug for the camera, all the while taunting us with a shi**y cat’s cradle strung between 10 middle fingers.

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. This week we chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town.

The Lake George Monster never saved a town. It didn’t herald a tourism boom or lure swarms of industrialists to the shores of Hague Bay. It doesn’t funky chicken around the sidelines of any public school basketball courts. And Lake George isn’t known as “Home of the Lake George Monster,” but rather as “Gateway to the Adirondacks.” Credit where credit is due, though, the Lake George Monster is probably the most extreme point (short of boat murder) to which a friendly fishing contest has ever escalated.
In 1904, Harry Watrous, a professional painter, made a bet with his friend, Colonel William Mann, the editor of an infamous gossip rag, over who could reel in a larger trout. And so it began. The men fished on the lake, often in sight of each other, each one determined to fish better, harder, faster than the other. In retrospect, that Mann decided to cheat shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

The paper the Colonel edited, “Town Topics,” once a respectable arts and leisure magazine, had, under Mann, become an inky mire of high society gossip and scandal-mongering. Mann’s ploy to avoid libel charges? Print standard, sometimes even complimentary, articles about known New York society members on the front of a page, then, on the flip side, directly lined up with the corresponding fluff pieces, run scandalous news about the same individuals, sans identification. Anyone who knew how to read the paper – and anyone who was anyone did – could easily match the public figures to the defaming rumors. “Town Topics,” of course, stayed in business by collecting bribes from guilty parties who wished to keep their faux pas private. Still, when Watrous finally identified the hulking monster of a trout that Mann casually held up from inside his own fishing craft, and later, in a ridiculous display of bravado, exhibited in his house, as a sculpted and painted hunk of wood, he swore revenge.

Like the Rhinelander Hodag, the Lake George Monster began life as a chunk of wood (specifically, a cedar log). Using bits of glass, metal and wood, Watrous affixed eyes, ears and a toothy snout to the 10-foot-long log, which he then painted in alternating yellow and black stripes. Also, white teeth, red mouth, red nostrils, and blue (yes, blue) ears. (Later, Watrous would repeatedly refer to his creation as a “Hippogriff”- the mythical offspring of a griffin and a mare, and noble companion to the Boy Who Lived – but I’m not seeing it.) He rowed out to an area of the lake frequented by his friend and nemesis, and rigged up the creature to a simple pulley system – a 100-foot-rope anchored to a rock on the shore.

Then he waited.

MUCH MORE… AFTER THE JUMP

Mann, who floated by sometime later, was accompanied by several guests, including one Mr. Davies and one Mrs. Bates. Watrous loosed his Hippogriff. I’ll let the monster’s creator describe the ensuing scene as he related it years later to the New York “Evening Sun”:
“Mr. Davies, who had a rather high pitched voice, uttered a scream that must have been heard as far away as Burlington, Vt. Mrs. Bates, a very intrepid lady, of Milesian extraction, stood on a seat in the boat and beat the water with her parasol, shouting indistinguishable sentences in her native tongue. Col. Mann shouted, ‘Good God, what is it?’ through his whiskers and kept repeating his query as long as the boat was in sight.”
Soon, rumors of the Lake George Monster began spreading throughout the town. Needless to say, Watrous was overjoyed. Ecstatic. So entirely freaking jazzed that he proceeded to systematically move his wood beast around the lake, setting it up near dock- and shore-side attractions, including the Lake View Restaurant and the Island Harbour House hotel, so that he could confound and terrify locals and tourists alike. It’s not known exactly how long Watrous kept up this game, but season after season, talk of a strange monster trolling the waters of Hague Bay persisted. While Eugene Shepard’s outsized promotion of his captive Rhinelander Hodag attracted scads of curious out-of-towners, Watrous’ unrestrained hippogriff had little effect on the Lake George Area (though some hotel owners supposedly feared that tales of a ferocious, unpredictable lake beast might actually hurt the tourist industry), and soon, the inventor of the world’s first functioning blue-eared DIY hippogriff packed away his hobby and moved on with his life.

30 years after the fearsome Lake George Monster delivered the winning punch in a rousing, street-rules fishing contest, Harry Watrous, who by this time was known locally as the master of the bygone beast, was asked to resurrect his monster one last time for a surprise cameo at a local Independence Day festival. During one of the day’s many aquatic events, Watrous pulled the rope and, to the shock and delight of the celebrating crowds, gave his creation life.

Despite the fact that Lake George never immortalized its monster in statue form nor baptized an amateur sports team “The Hague Bay Hippogriffs,” one can still see Watrous’ original monster at the Lake George Historical Association Museum. It’s a bit banged up, missing its marvelous blue ears and layered with the chipping evidence of repeated repaintings, but research done by Joe Nickell, an investigator for the “Skeptical Inquirer,” confirms that it is most likely the authentic object.

After basking in the triumph of the Hodag, it’s almost disheartening to read about the Lake George Monster, which, outside a small community of hoax groupies and cryptid enthusiasts has been nearly forgotten. But put it into perspective – the hostage Hodag was created to save a town, while the hippogriff was built to win a derailed fishing contest. And then there’s the joy the creature brought to its creator: “I spoofed the world once with the horrendous beast; and I spoofed it again this afternoon.” These were the words spoken by George Watrous after he loosed his creation upon a lake full of revelers on July 4th, 1934, and they speak a wonderful truth – inauthentic though it might be, any successful hoax is a marvelous falsehood joined on either end by evident creativity and unfeigned triumph.

I can only go so many consecutive weeks ascribing deep cultural significance to the folkloric capers of cryptozoological second stringers before I start getting a bit antsy. Sure, it’s interesting to think about that aspect of the human condition that abets our collective addiction to narrative and ordered fictions by sticking its fingers in its ears and humming away every time Bigfoot or Nessie or fear Liath is heartily debunked… to think about the way we happily allow stories to fool us. But what are stories? They’re motiveless, elusory things.

If you can identify authorship, though, you can find the meat and bone and beating heart behind the ghostly, transient words. Demystifying? Yeah. But there are more than enough legends packed with mystique. The Jersey Devil. Black dogs. Bloody Mary. One reason they’re so effective, evocative and widespread is that, though they’re myths, they’re dressed in the guise of collective knowledge. Unsourcable, voiceless echoes resounding through time
But what about a fiction that has an identifiable and outspoken (some might even say over-spoken) author? A story that’s obviously invented – that everyone knows is invented – but that’s embraced anyway. What about the story of the Rhinelander Hodag?

When rifles, hunting dogs and poison-filled water guns all failed to fell the fearsome Hodag, Eugene Shepard and his posse of Wisconsinite lumberjacks were forced to resort to sticks of dynamite, which they bravely lobbed at the slavering beast. The Hodag was 200 odd pounds of flame-spewing, black-furred muscle and lizard skin, complete with various spikes, claws and horns. The ever-quotable Shepard described the animal as smelling like “a combination of buzzard meat and skunk perfume.” Even as the creature’s crispy remains were triumphantly carted back to Rhinelander to be put on display, Shepard was bemoaning his inability to capture the Hodag alive.

In name, the Hodag already existed as a fixture of local folklore – a vengeful spirit that rose from the ashes of cremated lumber oxen. Though a popular bedtime story among the loggers and woodsmen who collectively shouldered the economy of the rural Wisconsin town, Shepard was the first man to see, describe and kill one of these ferocious monsters. (Later, Shepard imbued his Hodag with a less industry-specific back story – as a “remnant of the rehistoric dinasaures.”) And three years later, during the fall of 1896, he would become, along with another band of artillery-laden locals, the first – and, to this day, only – man to trap a live specimen. This triumph for humanity, which was immortalized in the aptly-titled photograph “The Hodag Capture” (in reality, taken three years after the “actual” event), found Shepard and his men equipped with both standard-issue angry mob accessories (pitchforks, shotguns, etc.) and long wooden sticks topped with chloroform-soaked rags. Needless to say, the still-breathing Hodag timbered like a Douglas Fir.

The twitching, growling monster that Shepard subsequently displayed for 10 cents a gander at the first-ever Oneida County Fair was actually a carved-out stump, covered in ox hide and cattle bones, and brought to marvelous, shuttering life by a simple electrical system. The coup de grace – it’s ferocious, inhuman roar – was provided by Shepard’s young son. Accounts vary as to whether a majority of fairgoers actually believed the hoax, or simply appreciated it as a harmless, clever caprice, but, either way, the dimes poured in and people from all over the state flocked to the exhibit in order to lay eyes on the hostage monstrosity.
But the Hodag is remembered as more than just a money-grubbing prank perpetrated by a known practical jokester (even before Hodag-mania, Eugene Shepard was infamous for organizing entertaining shenanigans). At the time of the county fair, Rhinelander was a dying town. In less than two decades, the booming logging industry had sawed and chopped its way through a majority of the surrounding pine forests (which might account for all the downtime Shepard had to rig up mechanical dinasaures). While other local communities flourished via long-standing livestock and farming businesses, Rhinelander struggled to gain a foothold in either industry. In fact, the Oneida County Fair was conceived as a means by which to promote Northern Wisconsin, and bring tourism and industry to the struggling region. Without an impressive gallery of crops and livestock to display, the Hodag tent was actually born out of a request by city officials, who asked Eugene Shepard, showman that he was, to find some way to draw in out-of-towners. One almost has to wonder if they were implicitly begging him to revisit his Hodag antics.

Though Shepard’s modest bid to save his town – a bundle of skin, bones and wires – was ultimately destroyed in a fire, both the memory of the Hodag, and the city of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, now unofficially known as Hodag City, live on. A giant fiberglass Hodag adorns the lawn of Rhinelander’s Chamber of Commerce. The local high school’s mascot is a roof-raising Hodag. Even the town’s website proudly identifies Rhinelander as the Home of the Hodag.
It would be reductive to claim that Eugene Shepard single-hodaggedly saved his town, but even Shepard himself wasn’t shy about acknowledging that he’d played a part: “Not only hundreds but thousands of people came to view the Hodag… and not one of them went away without having learned a little more about northern Wisconsin…”

Whether by luck or by skill, Shepard managed to author a tale that was remembered as much for the story as it was for the story of the story. The Hodag, as imagined and built by Eugene Shepard, became as important as the details of the hoax itself. Other merry pranksters haven’t fared nearly as well…

Wednesday: The Lake George Monster

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. This week we chronicle the Rougarou. Monday we looked at the origin story, Wednesday we explored the byzantine rules that come along with the curse.

We’ve heard almost too many stories of white colonists co-opting and literalizing indigenous folklore. Starting with Lake Champlain’s Champ and moving westward, plenty of the classic American lake monster tales started when some eager fishermen heard about, or saw a native drawing of, a serpentine lake spirit and took it as a warning of tangible aquatic horror. Aboriginal bunyip legends found British interlopers tramping through the Australian brush, rifles raised and taxidermists on call. More recently, American Indian Skinwalker legends were dumped into the boiling, paranoid slurry of UFOs, portals, cryptoeverythingology and government conspiracy theories. So it’s kinda nice to know that the Rougarou legend cross-pollinated in the opposite direction.
The Rugaru of Chippewa and Ojibwa legend isn’t the wolf-headed antagonist that bullied the French, nor does it adhere to that monster’s seasonal schedule or incomprehensible 101-day statute of limitations. So what is it? That, my buddies, is a source of some contention. While scholars know for a fact that the word “Rugaru” isn’t derived from any Native American language – meaning it’s almost certainly a bastardized version of either the Cajun term “Rougarou” or the French “Loup Garou” – it’s not entirely clear as to how various tribes and groups applied the word to their established mythologies.

It’s clear that the native Rugaru was a mysterious hairy humanoid who lived out in the forest. Some researchers suggest that tribes began using the term “Rugaru” in relation to their already-extant Sasquatch equivalents (not actually Sasquatch, but rather a physically similar entity with the same Type B personality). And that makes sense. If you aren’t Catholic, haven’t been raised in constant aural proximity to European werewolf stories and can already account for your own packed pantheon of culturally loaded monstrosities, it jibes that, when French traders start going off about some sort of animal guy hiding out in the wilderness, your mind turns immediately to the one animal guy hiding out in the wilderness that you’re already hip to. In this way, this native Rugaru is loosely comparable to our modern Bigfoot – a lumbering mascot for the enduring connection between nature and man, and an animal that couldn’t give two bunyips whether or not you eat a cheeseburger on Good Friday.

(Interestingly, the only other version of the Rougarou legend that portrays the monster in a positive light is that of the uber-devout Catholics, who saw him as a wolf-headed murderer, but regarded the murders as a form of holy cleansing. To them, the Rougarou was protecting the salvation of mankind by eviscerating those who undermined the divine word.)

The other native re-contextualization of the Rougarou isn’t as favorable. Remember the Wendigo? It was that voraciously hungry human-eating monster that the snowed-in Algonquian chapter of Cannibals Anonymous used to deter their people from eating their people, claiming that a man who eats the flesh of another man becomes a wandering, insatiable beast? Well, most tribes had a Wendigo figure, but, as not all tribes faced the harsh meteorological conditions that had occasionally found the Algonquians seeing each other as giant, storytelling turkey legs, not all Wendigo transformation stories hinged on an act of cannibalism. The Wendigo itself was always eatin’ folks and snarfing down children like so many mini-quiches, but the mechanism for transformation differed. Many groups in the Dakota Territory – the area where the Ojibwa and Chippewa tribes most likely picked up the Rougarou story from French traders and missionaries – for example, believed that a man who so much as looked upon a Wendigo subsequently became one. It’s these rules and conventions that were sometimes synonymously applied to the Ruguru.

This understanding of the French bogeyman not only takes into account the hairy, forest-dwelling monster, but also that monster’s former identity as a human who was cruelly transfigured. The Indians most likely heard the tale and, ignoring the leaden complexities of the French version, immediately related it to their own Wendigo story. (I’d be curious to know if the Rugaru legend served to strengthen tribal belief in the Wendigo, as it seems to provide corroborating evidence of the creature’s existence, or if the existence of said creature was already taken as a given and the French tale merely resulted in a minor, if striking, lexicographical addition to the oral tradition.)

Interestingly, it was a variation of this second version that appeared on the CW’s “Supernatural” – in the fourth-season episode “metamorphosis, the brawny, homophobic Winchester boys go up against a Rougarou, which, according to the show’s mythology, is a person who turns into a voracious cannibalistic monstrosity due to a rare genetic disorder.

So the Europeans took indigenous tales of sacred beings and phantasmagoric threats and recontextualized them to fit the demon-haunted landscape of the Western theology; the Native Americans took the evil grotesqueries of the guilt-stricken Christian world and built them into broader figures that prowled outside the boundaries of culture, working their teeth into the most basic, elemental foundations of both nature and humanity. “Supernatural” demonstrates that, even today, we continue to borrow from borrowed legends, copying copies of copies. The Rougarou was born of the Loup Garou and the Rugaru was born of the Rougarou. And all of them want nothing more than to remind us of the hungry, lonely animal inside us all.

I’m going to shimmy out to the end of a limb and guess that most of you aren’t chomping your nails to the quick in fearful expectation of Lent 2011 and its supernatural enforcer, the Rougarou. Maybe it’s because you aren’t Catholic, you don’t live in Louisiana or you own an elephant gun. Maybe it’s because you are the Rougarou (in which case, stop Googling yourself). The point is, a monster that’s only on duty for 1/11 of the year and only kills people of one religion in one state doesn’t have the scare potential of, say, Bloody Mary, who only requires a mirror and mood lighting.

Fortunately, as Cajun culture began expanding to include not only those of Acadian decent, but also miscellaneous immigrants who fully embraced the local lifestyle, the Rougarou legend expanded as well, metastasizing into an equal opportunity nightmare.

Many believe the Rougarou to be a transfigured human, cursed or infected, double-crossed in a deal with the devil or otherwise debased by some catch-all evil contagion. Louisiana’s Caribbean population even threw some voodoo witch doctor malpractice into the mix. Aside from the standard threat to children –eat your greens, take your bath, go to bed or get Rougaroued – the most prevalent of these stories holds that a person, once transformed into the wolf-headed monster, hungers for human meat treats and stalks the bayous and swamps. In some versions, he seeks out victims and attacks without mercy; in others, he hides in the shadows, travels by night and invests all his energy in resisting the urge to draw blood.
Additionally, there’s a 101-day clause that appears consistently throughout these stories, though the specifics of it differ.

A few of the rules to Rougarou-ship AFTER THE JUMP…

Wikipedia claims that the Rougarou is a blood sucker, and that the creature is “under the spell for 101 days. After that time, the curse is transferred from person to person when the rougarou draws another human’s blood.” This information is suspect and unhelpful for two reasons:

1.) Worded as it is, it’s kinda confusing. Is the Rougarou a monster for 101 days, but doesn’t draw blood until the 101st, at which point the next unwitting sap is grandmonstered in? Does it mean that every person he drinks from becomes a Rougarou, but only after the attacking Rougarou’s 101-day contract ends? Shrugs all around. The article does, at least, confirm that, once re-humanized after 101 days, the former Rougarou retains full memory of his horrific misdeeds.

2.) Every other popular Rougarou article simply cut and pasted this inane phrase (sometimes with hilariously lackluster edits straight out of the Lazy High School Plagiarist’s Handbook – “Afterwards, the spell was passed on to another person when the Rougarou drank the new victim’s blood”). Of course, this means that, even if it wasn’t a legitimately popular version of legend before, it definitely is now. Presumably, the Rougarou understands it.
After some poking around, I came up with a separate version of the 101-day itch, this one being far more coherent and a tad more interesting:

So, you’re walking through a swamp, going like, “doo doo doo,” minding your own beeswax, when all of a sudden, a wolf-headed maniac comes rushing out of the trees, eyes like aerial views down active volcanoes and clawed hands snicker-snacking like dual Vorpal blades. Fortunately, you’re awesome and you stomp the end of a fallen branch so that it flips up into your hand, and you just totally wail the ad hoc cudgel across the wolfman’s goofy face. It draws blood. Suddenly, the Rougarou transforms back to human form. It’s your high school history teacher, Mr. Shoner. You used to sing a song about him, and how he was stupid and bald. And how he can’t get a boner. He looks up at you with those big, watery, Unit-3-The-Phoenicians eyes. When you get back to town, Do you tell everyone that Mr. Shoner (smells like an armpit / can’t get a boner) is a Rougarou? Perhaps this will inform your decision – legend has it that a person who unmasks a Rougarou must wait at least 101 days before publicly revealing the monster’s identity (presumably to give the former killer time to process his crimes, take a shower and make his own confession). If the witness does not wait to gab, he or she becomes a Rougarou. Many Louisianan suicides, it is said, are a result of a chatty Cathy’s inability to deal with the gossip-initiated transformation from blabbermouth to wolf face.
I like this version. It doesn’t indict the Rougarou for being a beast, but rather the man for not taking responsibility for his actions (supernaturally motivated though they were) and the victim for prematurely robbing someone of his rightful shot at redemption. Incidentally, I also read that the Rougarou can be killed by jamming a wooden stick through its chest, so if you’d been just a tad more aggressive in fending off Mr. Shoner (gut like a beach ball / butt plug owner), you wouldn’t have had to worry about any of this.

Now, if you’ve been thinking, “blood sucking? Sharp hunk of wood through the chest? Sounds kinda vampirey, no?” I’m right there with you. A huge vampire scare swept Europe (including France) during the 1700s. French theologian Dom Augustine Calmet even penned one of the era’s seminal works on the existence (or, perhaps, non-existence – his studies were inconclusive) of vampires. It’s possible that, while the French colonists and criminals who settled Louisiana and built New Orleans were familiar with stories of the walking, seducing, violin-playing undead, the emigrating Acadians were more accustomed to the older Loup Garou legends. Perhaps, as the Rougarou stories evolved throughout the Cajun community, they came to incorporate aspects of popular European vampire tales.

Friday: Rougarou, Injuns and the CW

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. This week we chronicle the Rougarou. Come back Wednesday and Friday for more!

The Protestants have always seemed happy with limiting the fate of sinners to eternal suffering in a big torture cave filled with fire and basically every type of snake. Leave it to the Catholics to throw an Earth-dwelling, flesh-eating mutant into the mix.

The French emigrates of the Cajun community had it pretty lousy even before the bloodthirsty, wolf-headed Rougarou shambled out of the swamps all parched and grumpy. A cultural casualty of the French and Indian War, the Cajuns (then known as Acadians, Acadia being the ye olde moniker for the eastern coast of Canada and northern tip of Maine) were ousted by the British. Some were returned to sender on French-bound ships, while others found themselves scurrying southward in search of a replacement home. French-speaking and accustomed to a maritime lifestyle, the Canada-forsaken exiles headed southward through the states, wending their way to the coast of Louisiana, where they could comfortably re-settle along the waters of the Gulf, in a region owned and operated by the French government. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the wandering Acadians, France had recently signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which, among other things, ceded control and ownership of Louisiana to the Spanish government. Sácre bleu!

Fortunately, both the newly empowered Spaniards and the hang-dog former French Canadians were fervent Roman Catholics, and got along well enough that the Cajuns were allowed to hang out and roll how they rolled. After the Revolutionary War (in which many land-snatching-limey-despising Acadians fought with gusto), thousands of Cajuns returned to New Orleans and Southern Louisiana, some arriving haggard and powder-stained from the battlefront, and others showing up nauseous and gaunt after government-authorized emigrations from France. Resettled and reunited, the former Acadians started a new life amid the swamps, bayous and prairies of Louisiana, where, every spring, the Rougarou lifts his nose and sniffs the air, canvassing the ether for the acrid hint of sin. Upon finding it, he narrows his eyes and bounds onward toward the smell, goaded onward by the promise of struggling, guilty meat, and the colorful warning mess it will leave on the ground.

Click AFTER THE JUMP to find out how even you could become a Rougarou!
Similar to “Wodewose,” the word “Rougarou” is but one of the linguistic variations used to encapsulate this chomp-happy lupine monster man, whose other dialect-variant labels include Roux-Ga-Roux, Rugeroo, Rugaru and, occasionally, Loup-garou. That latter term – “Loup-garou” – is, in all probability, the word from which all of the other spellings and pronunciations derive. Also, it’s French for “werewolf.” And in the same way that the word “Rougarou” riffs on the term “Loup-garou,” so too does the Rougarou legend use European werewolf lore as the pentatonic scale for its terrifying, Catholic jazz variations.

For example: the Rougarou is part man and part wolf, but the parts aren’t all mashed up together in a bipedal hairball of teeth and halitosis – Human body. Wolf head.

The Rougarou isn’t erratic or wild. It doesn’t commit the kinds of savage, random assaults in which traditional werewolves (rooted as their lore was in stories of serial murderers, rapists and the rabid) specialized. The Rougarou kills sinners, especially those who fail to observe the traditions of Lent – a 40-day period, ending with Easter, during which many Christians sects, including the Catholics, pray a whole bunch and give up various Earthly indulgences (alcohol, coffee, drunken barista pornography, etc.) in order to prepare for the anniversary of Christ’s death and resurrection.

The notion of a religiously sponsored werewolf isn’t entirely unique to the Rougarou, either. Back in France, some Catholics had already popularized a version of the secular (a loaded word when used in this decidedly supernatural context) Loup-garou legend in which transformation from human sinner to murderous beast occurred automatically after an individual’s seventh consecutive unobserved lent (still, the resulting monster killed in typical indiscriminate rampage fashion).

Having been raised Catholic myself, I’m all too familiar with the sometimes antic lengths to which the religion’s pedagogues will go to guilt kids into ritualistic piousness. I specify kids because I’m assuming it’s largely these hyperactive, overly curious, free-thinking wastrels that constitute the Rougarou’s key demo. Adults – directly bound to their mortality by sick relatives, dying acquaintances and their own creeping physical ailments – have hell to fear. It’s the children – optimistic, unselfconscious rascals who bask in a false sense of immortality as tragedy after tragedy roll off them like a boulder down a chute trying to kill Indiana Jones – who need a more immediate reason to mind their Ps and sacred religious traditions.
At the same time, the Rougarou doesn’t limit itself to Catholic killings and Lenten justice. That would be inefficient.

Wednesday: Non-Denominational Werewolf

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. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. On Monday, we heard about the origins of the beast. Wednesday, we investigated claims that it is the missing link.

Fear Liath and Science.

After writing that tantalizing gem of a teaser for today’s column, I looked at it for a moment and considered whether I should maybe put some qualifying quotation marks around the word science. And I decided not to. The concepts to be discussed herein are definitive scientific realities… it just happens that we’re going to talk about them as they relate to a 7-foot-tall man-ape descended from the wood spirits of ancient Europe.

Plenty of yella-bellied hikers and goose-pimpled mountaineers have attributed Mount Ben Macdui’s pervasive atmosphere of dread to the mystical aura of the mysterious Greyman; lots of Cryptozoologists blame Fear Liath, too. But not because it has magical fright-throwing abilities. It turns out that, apparently, all Sasquatches, from Bigfoot to Wampas, use powerful pheromones to elude capture by preemptively instilling panic in their would-be pursuers. That’s right. Fear Liath squats down and blows out a mess of chemical fear that drifts through the mist and infects human trespassers.
I can follow this line of thought. Sure, it’s scribbled and erratic and leads off the paper and onto the nice tablecloth, but I can follow it. A threatened aphid, for instance, will blast out a haze of alarm pheromones, thereby, warning any nearby companions to flee the scene. Frightened termites and bees can also pinch off a cloud of fear, though, in their case, it usually psyches up the chest-bumping former half of the fight-or-flight instinct. Likewise, dogs, bears, et al, have all been shown to deploy and perceive an intraspecies “scent of fear” – “intra” being the key prefix here. Based on all existing scientific evidence, the pheromones of any given species are detectable only to members of that species, meaning that even if all the mist clinging to Ben Macdui were one massive pheromone cloud squirted out by cowardly Fear Liath, it wouldn’t elicit even the slightest of pant pees in area humans. Furthermore, considering the termites and bees, if humans were affected, it’s just as likely that they’d pick up a giant rock and charge hulk style toward the jelly-spined source of the panic fog. (Although, if the pheromone did work correctly, Scarecrow would be poaching the hell out of these things.)

Much more scientific justification for the Fear Liath AFTER THE JUMP…Somewhere, a cryptozoologist just threw up his hands in frustration and said, “Duh! He’s the missing link… his pheromones have some shared human biological stuff. Idiot.” – a rejoinder that, I admit, would present the most sensible zany retort if studies hadn’t already demonstrated that the human ability to perceive or otherwise act on another human’s wafting panic stink is nil. If people can’t sense pure human fear, it’s ridiculous to think that they might respond to some horrific, ape-tainted knockoff.
Another theory? Infrasound.

Infrasound refers to any sound below 20 Hz, which, in terms of the low-end of the auditory spectrum, is considered the cutoff for normal human hearing. The reason excited cryptozoologists have pointed to this particular phenomenon as a possible candidate for Sasquatch’s scare-sharing mechanism is that various experiments have shown that almost a quarter of all human beings, when exposed to infrasound or near-infrasonic frequencies (17 Hz was the frequency used by a 700-subject UK study), have displayed peculiar physical reactions, such as feelings of fear, anxiety and revulsion. Additionally, Vic Tandy, a researcher at Coventry University, has suggested that sounds at around 19 Hz may be responsible for a butt load of ghost sightings. Morrow made this discovery while working in a supposedly haunted lab, where he and other researchers experienced strange sensations of dread, and where Morrow himself witnessed a gray blob drifting through his periphery. Turns out, an extraction fan vibrating at 18.98 Hz was not only inspiring his feelings of anxiety, but also generating an optical hallucination by vibrating his eyes (the natural resonant frequency of the human eye is about 18 Hz).

So far, it’s a pretty thin case: Travelers of regions known to be inhabited by sasquatches are often plagued by strange, unaccountable feelings of dread. Infrasound has been known to cause such feelings. Sasquatches, therefore, must be terrifying people away by generating some sort of infrasound.

Still, writers on Bigfoot-manic message boards and crypto-crazed blogs love to point out that African elephants have been proven to communicate using nasally generated infrasound vocalizations, a zoological revelation that wasn’t even theorized until 1984. The low frequency calls, which are probably used to, among other things, deliver herd movement updates and initiate mating rituals, range between 15 and 35 Hz – well within the limits that can, in some instances, cause less than pleasant sensations within the human body. Some suggest that sasquatches, like elephants, have the capacity to generate these types of ether-rattling ululations. (To be fair, one of the message boarders did pragmatically point out that, “Even if sasquatches use infrasound, we need a video of the species making these sounds as solid evidence.”) Elephants are big animals. It’s not difficult to look at an elephant’s head and understand how a sound beyond the realm of human perception could bellow out of it. Now, I’m not a scientist or anything, but wouldn’t Bigfoot essentially need nasal cavities with the anomalous spatial properties of the Tardis in order to raise such a (inaudible) ruckus?

Look, I know that this isn’t a debunking site, where stories are hunted and vivisected for inaccuracies. I’m way more interested in chasing down the legends, tagging their ears and sending them back to frolic through the collective imagination. If folks want to say that Fear Liath, beautifully monstrous fiction that it is, can, from a distance, raise hackles and roil up visceral fear, I’m totally on board. But pheromones? Infrasound? Maybe Bigfoot, contemporary American icon that he is, might need to resort to the modern narrative contrivance of overwrought, unnecessary, straw-grasping explanation (why bigfoot needs any sort of emotion-finagling superpower is beyond me), in the same way that every modern Hollywood villain gets a tired tragic past to justify his ultimate treachery and every good-hearted hero gets a backlog of clichéd vestigial guilt to explain his eventual honor, but Fear Liath comes readymade with a back story of primitive thaumaturgy and ancient races. Of Wodewoses and of Pagan nightmares. Of the high shrieks, the bite marks on flesh, the cold water shaken from course fur, the electric smell of blood on the wind and all the other things that would one day clatter together into a human being. Save your science for the urban legends and the contemporary myths. The “are they really extinct?” case studies and desperate EVP analyses.

Sometimes it’s better if a villain is just bad. Sometimes it’s better if a hero is just good. And sometimes it’s better if a sasquatch is just magic.

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. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. On Monday, we heard about the origins of the beast.

Wudewas. Wodwos. Wodewoses. Woodwoses. Variants of the word are as numerous as the trees in the forests inhabited by the feral possessors of these ancient names. The wild men. The tidiest accounts of Scotland’s Fear Liath would have you believe that the giant grey creature’s closest relative is Bigfoot – that noble missing link who hides deep within America’s dwindling native woods, and in whom hides lost vestiges of man… scattered dust from genetic corners that were sanded down into curves during the civilizing renovation of the primal human spirit, the process itself an exciting necessity of the social evolution that created both the modern world and the most basic, aching nostalgia found therein. This nostalgia takes the form of a chromosomal muscle memory, a scuffed shoebox, brimming with relics, tucked beneath the bed of the collective id.

It’s more than just the bare carnal reasoning of the reptilian brain – the eat, kill or screw impulse that any cynical 16-year-old can tell you is as alive today in the forests of laminate boardroom furnishings as it was millennia ago amid the dark tangles of forgotten jungles. No. This is about an understanding of place, an unselfconscious symbiosis between man and topography, man and biology. The unvoiceable knowledge that, if dropped in the woods – any woods – one could navigate the soil, elude danger, secure shelter, procure food and still find time to gaze up in wonderment at the twinkling panorama of space.

It’s also probably an illusion. After all, humans still have these senses and abilities. Modern man has just repurposed them for urban environs, so that if dropped in a city – any city – one could navigate pavement, listen for sirens, and recognize chain hotel logos and the trademark color schemes of a half-dozen burger chains.

Get the rest of the story… AFTER THE JUMP

Put simply, missing links represent, among other things, a false notion that it was only post fire and after the wheel that man’s trip from ape to commuter lapsed into a bumbling process of trial and error. That people were born with knowledge to efficiently take down an elk, to strip the meat off its bones and, when preparing the side dish, to use non-poisonous mushrooms. It’s this misplaced (a less generous person might say, “B.S.”) sentimentality that makes a brief glimpse of Bigfoot so magical; it’s as if we’ve been afforded a peek at an organized era before flatware and firearms came along and mucked everything up. It’s why a fog-shrouded encounter with the Fear Liath is so terrifying (besides, of course, the monster’s mystical fear conjuring ability) – we are on his turf now, and he is living a life we abandoned. A life that, try is we might, by camping, hiking, etc., we can never fully reclaim – a sad fact that finds us physically and mentally vulnerable to that bygone lifestyle’s dangers and obstacles, among them the hulking Greyman.

Wodewoses – mythic wild men of ancient Europe – represented something similar to the modern Bigfoot. They possessed the same sort of preternatural, pre-civilized bond with nature (some of them could even see years into the future, evincing a sense that, in giving up its primal beginnings, mankind likewise sacrificed some broad and mysterious link to the larger universe), and represented a similar understanding of man’s anti-domestic roots… but they also had a bit more personality. Whereas Sasquatch represents an iconic image of a missing link as recalibrated by modern science to include overwhelmingly ape-like features, Wodewoses had human physiques (swathed though they were in a carpet of fur) and demonstrably human faces. Most of them measured in well below the slam dunk-ready height of most modern man-apes. Many boasted leonine hair and wild beards. Some were part goat. Some, part elf. Some descended from elementals or dark spirits. Others carried clubs. Some even had hairless, feminine chins and tig ol’ bitties.
Essentially, Wodewoses hopelessly blurred the lines between fairy tale creatures, missing links and hirsute madmen. The parenthetically aforementioned prophetic wild men, for example, were generally portrayed as contemporary humans driven mad by ancient and powerful forces. Even outside the bounds of the mythic and supernatural, rumors of feral tribes prowling the landscapes of unexplored continents ran rampant. Early Christians believed that Wodewoses had supernatural powers of seduction, and feared their ability to coerce virtuous women into debased and vile sex acts (which at the time, probably constituted, like, gentle reverse cowgirl). The church no doubt viewed the mischievous perverts, drunk as they were on animal lusts and the howling winds that stir the leaves, as horny, impish mascots of Paganism.

Meanwhile, French monarch King Charles VI saw the Wodewoses as a limitless source of amusement. During a 1393 masquerade ball held in the honor of the Queen Mother, Chuck and five of his courtiers donned hemp wild man costumes, chained themselves together and trudged out into the ballroom, where the amusement quickly assumed a very real limit – embers from a torch ignited the flammable costumes, resulting in the horrible, fiery deaths of at least three of the King’s companions.

In Germany, club wielding wild men, buxom wild women and even whole wild clans were fixtures of family seals and coats of arms, offering the suggestion that each family’s roots were both deep-set and brawny. This usage highlights the sense of primitive strength and wild power evoked by Wodewoses. In short, even before humans had any coherent sense of the mechanisms of evolution, there existed inside people an understanding that man had fought his way out of the wooded darkness and into the light of civilization, but that that emergence was bittersweet, held as it was in the receding presence of things left behind.

Misleading notions that earlier times were simpler, truer, better, etc. are attractive shadows under which to toil through this modern life. Our ancestors dreamt up the wild men to keep an imagined ideal alive, even if it sometimes led to irrational fear or catching on fire. Sure, modern science has re-shaped the wild men – grown them and aped out their faces and robbed them of supernatural powers – but the ideal remains. We retain that strange nostalgia.

Ancient Scotland was host to an uncountable number of feral elves, dark spirits, vengeful ghosts and hirsute wild men. There’s no doubt that today’s simian Fear Liath is a direct descendent of the Wodewoses of yesteryear. The proof is in the supernatural power that the creature displays – its ability to covertly project feelings of panic and fear into the hearts of hikers and mountaineers.

Crypytozoologists, however, have a different theory about this “magic” power.

Friday: Fear Liath and Science

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. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. Come back Monday and Wednesday for the rest of the story.

Leave it to Scotland’s Fear Liath to meet any (or all!) of your horrifying cryptozoological encounter needs. A sudden sense of creeping psychic dread followed by inexplicable panic and unprovoked activation of your fight-or-flight response? Leave it to the Liath! A more traditional, rampage-style assault, up to and including wild pursuit of a moving car? He’s on it! Or maybe a subtler, mysterious encounter – a huge, lumbering figure glanced through the fog… a giant footprint in the mud… a stolen picanic basket? Greyman’s got it!

“What is the Fear Liath?” you ask.

Some folks refer to it as Scotland’s Bigfoot, and in some ways that’s accurate. Hiker’s who have seen the Fear Liath (also known as “The Greyman”) have described it as a burly giant with a strikingly inhuman face and a head-to-toe coating of thick, ash-colored fur. What makes the Fear Liath a taxonomical oddity, however, is the effect it’s said to have over people in its vicinity. Supposedly, travelers of the Cairngorm Mountains, and especially visitors to Ben Macdui, the range’s highest peak and suspected site of the Greyman’s lair, have experienced bizarre sensations of terror that come out of nowhere and, often, send the suddenly stricken mountaineers screaming into the mist.
John Norman Collie, an experienced British mountaineer famous for performing pioneering climbing feats in the Himalayas and the Canadian Rockies, authored the most famous account of this strange phenomenon.

In 1895, while hiking near Ben Macdui’s peak, Collie sensed that he was not alone. After listening for several moments, he discerned a distinct and frightening crunching sound trailing him up the mountain: “For every few steps I took I heard a crunch, and then another crunch as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own.” Collie desperately struggled to identify his stalker through the thick curtains of mist that shrouded the rock formations, but perceived nothing but drifting fog and the slow, crunching persistence of the phantom interloper’s progress. Eventually, consumed by fear, Collie took off running, scrambling up and around an estimated five miles of boulders and out-cropping rocks.

Other hikers and adventurers have descended Ben Macdui with similarly eerie tales. Some report finding giant footprints stamped into the mountainside. Many claim to have seen a giant grey figure, plowing through the fog or, sometimes, looming behind them as their strange sense of terror reached a crescendo. In the ‘90s, one guy even called out Fear Liath for chasing his car through a nearby forest.

From a logical standpoint, it’s fairly easy to explain away all the varied symptoms of a standard Fear Liath encounter. For example, scientists have suggested an easy explanation for the towering silhouette sighted skulking up the mountain – the same blankets of fog that make the mountain look like the set of gothic melodrama on closing night, when all the leftover dry ice gets poured into the bucket, create perfect conditions for the Broken Spectre effect; angled sunlight casts a trail-weary hiker’s shadow onto a nearby fog bank and ACH! Giant grey figure. That combined with the standard cast of cryptid rationalization factors – the natural anxiety provoked by lonely, fog-draped surroundings; exhaustion; cultural memory of the entire gamut of cryptid encounters as dutifully recounted in books, by television and on this website, etc. – make the Greyman shrug-offable as any other hirsute missing link.

From a folkloric standpoint though, there’s a lot more here than just a tam-topped, haggis-devouring Sasquatch. There’s a reason that the Fear Liath seems to share traits of both classically simple ape-men (like Yetis and Skunk Apes) and creepy, sense-meddling phantasms (like maybe a magic ghost or something). It turns out that “Scotland’s Bigfoot” has a history that pre-dates all Bigfoots, dating back to a time when men were men, and furry ape-men were, like, feral elf spirit monster things.

Wednesday: Fear Liath, Wudewas and other words guaranteed to be useless in Scrabble

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. This week we pity the poor Babysitter. Monday we found out why these darlings are hunted. Wednesday we look at how the legend survived the digital age.

Babysitter. Killer. Telephone. We’ve taken a neatly assembled story and plucked off the buttons, ripped the stitching and unloaded fistfuls of stuffing. Might as well see it the rest of the way through. Parents. Children. Let’s add them to this strewn mess of analog technology, gender stereotyping, Aquarian culture wars and artificial maternity.

I had briefly mentioned that, in many versions of the Babysitter and the Stranger Upstairs, at least one of the sitter’s employers is a doctor. In almost every version, the parents, doctorate holding or not, are wealthy. On the surface, this seems a mere plot device – the teenaged kid-herding neophyte is lured into the job by the promise of healthy dividends while, at the same time, the couple’s sizeable home fulfills certain narrative logistics. In other words, it would be difficult for the killer to call the babysitter from inside a single-phone apartment, or sneak unnoticed through a ranch-style house. And that makes enough sense. But let’s say we take a moment to get cynical:
Even if we accept many folklorists’ assertions that, when deconstructed, this urban legend takes on gender oppression and warns girls away from fast-tracking themselves toward some sort of patriarchically enforced homemakership and oppressive motherhood – that it’s a GRRL power ballad played in the key of independent womanhood – we need to consider the story’s intended demographic. After all, “gala-bound rich couple seeking responsible teen for one-night babysitting job $$$” rarely bypass the nearby middle-class McMansions and make a beeline for the barrio. Likewise, many blue collar families comprise two working parents who are beholden to shift work, and older children who are busy enough looking after each other, or working themselves. (Obviously, these are gross generalizations, but remember, we’re applying them to a story in which the main characters are Rich Couple, Attractive Teenage Girl, Sleeping Children, and Anonymous, Motivationless Killer.)

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP…

That the story is geared toward young women seems sensible. What’s offensive (or if we’re keeping with the whole cold, removed cynicism thing, wholly predictable, given the ongoing undermining of the American working class), is that the story, in engaging with the tropes and situations that it does, seems to disqualify an entire social strata of adolescent girls. Perhaps these ladies are assumed to be beholden to a hard-scrabble life of early pregnancy, working motherhood or looking after their existing immediate family members. Or, even worse, maybe, on a subconscious level, independent poor women, who are perhaps deprived the educational opportunities of their moneyed sisters (many of whom were only able to burn their bras because, once the message was sent, they could afford to buy new ones), don’t represent the type of spokespeople that the political side of the feminist movement are looking for.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Obviously, I’m not suggesting that whatever cadre of feminists ideologues may or may not have perpetuated this story in the name of a positive social movement purposefully approached it with an agenda of class discrimination, but rather that even the most idealistic among us are not immune to underlying culture biases that lay hidden, like live black widows inside the smallest nesting dolls, within otherwise socially conscious and progressive narratives.

Just something to think about.

On a lighter note… The Children. I only mention the kids because there’s a sanitized, Cub Scout-ready version of the tale in which there is no killer and, in fact, the frightening phone calls coming from inside the house are made by the children themselves, who have amalgamated all of their bratiness and initiated a prank call campaign against the babysitter. I only mention it because in all the other versions, the kids are little more than bug-snug snoozing cutlets awaiting the fall of the knife. Here, though, the children have the power and use it to terrify and ultimately embarrass the ad hoc adult, thereby, revealing the man-behind-the-curtain quality of the so-called power and responsibility wielded by authority figures. And what kid doesn’t want to hear about that? If I were 8 years old, listening to this story would probably be almost as fun as harassing an actual, live babysitter.

So, if any of you folks are spending tonight at a high-paying babysitting gig at a secluded mansion near the back-up perimeter fence of the asylum for the criminally wigged out, remember: you had some calls traced, they were coming from inside the house, you fled on foot. Clearly, the murderer upstairs killed the single-malt scotch.

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. This week we pity the poor Babysitter. Monday we found out why these darlings are hunted. Come back Friday for the conclusion.

I don’t know how the story of the intercourse-interloping hook murderer plays out these days – the inset latch that adorns most modern car doors doesn’t seem especially conducive to bloody-hook dangling. Likewise, “hitchhiker” is a distinctly 20th century identifier. Vanishing or not, a trail-schlepping wayfarer with a hopefully extended thumb would confound even the hippest wagoneer or pony express messenger. So that whole police- or phone company-traced call coming from inside the house thing? Nothing to worry about, right? The legend is quarantined in the 1960s, a primitive ape of a horror story, thwacking an analog phone receiver against a monolithic switchboard to the swelling soundtrack of a droning dial tone.

Well, no. Not exactly.

It’s true that the initial story was rooted firmly in the days of land lines and ancient analog phone hook-ups, when a few patient taps to the receiver button could make intra-house Jerky Boying possible, but unlike the aforementioned door handles, which made it increasingly difficult for murderers to lose their deadly prostheses to inadvertent chastity warnings (though probably much easier for murderers to simply click open the door and bury their tines into the writhing flanks of the intertwining lovers), technology kept pace with the psychos. Despite the death of the veritable Cro-Magnon phones of the (club) swinging 60s, in-house murderers were quickly afforded new means of telephonic harassment in the form of multi-line phone systems (note that in many versions of the babysitter v. homicidal stranger story, one of said babysitter’s employers is a doctor, a fact that lends veracity to the presence of a second phone line in the house). Then, of course, everyone got cell phones, which put every babysitter (not to mention every babysitter-employing landline-reliant household) just ten digits away from the hungry fingers of the merciless sadist upstairs. Give it a few months and the stab-happy psychotics will be Skypeing their victims from portable media devices.

Do the evolution… AFTER THE JUMP

Say what you want about horror re-makes (or say nothing and feel free to leave the middle finger-assisted vitriol to me), but the two versions of “When a Stranger Calls” – the first, a loveably schlocky Carol Kane vehicle circa 1979; the second, an achingly hollow shadow thereof, produced in 2006 – demonstrate the ease with which the story can be believably transplanted into the modern milieu without sacrificing the most imperative aspects of its plausibility. Landlines to cell phones and still the babysitters remain in season.

If you’re taking this time to balk at the legal ramifications that, especially in the privatized modern age, plague the police department’s (or phone company’s) ability to perform same-night traces, understand both that the bureaucratic rigmarole is well outside the bounds of concise discussion, and that, well, it doesn’t really matter – how’d a frenzied killer manage to both retrieve his confiscated hook appendage and escape a guarded psychiatric facility? Urban legends’ cultural currency exists in wild stories told with reckless abandon… “reckless,” here, implying a certain practiced ambivalence to the laws of both man and nature (hitchhiking ghosts?).

Beyond the practicality of the telephone as medium for Nutty’s threatening monologues, there are certain related social stereotypes as well. Look no further than Milton Bradley’s 1991 board game “Electronic Talking Dream Phone” – girls love to continuously and indiscriminately spray their feelings into the talk holes on phone receivers. In this way, the killer’s use of a telephone – the very device that the babysitter was no-doubt using to learn that her secret admirer was not wearing a hat – serves as a sort of pseudo-ironic and grotesquely generalized gender comeuppance. Or so say some folklorist interpretations of the legend. It’s unclear whether these are the same folks who like to suggest that the tale plays out like a fear-inspiring intro to GRRL power posturing, in which case the phone-based antagonism serves as a warning to young girls who might be considering succumbing to the Chatty Cathy stereotype. Still, I suspect that this may just be interpretation-happy nit-pickery, as I can only see this fact being relevant if the story established that the sitter was eschewing her supervisory responsibilities in order to blab at a BFF, and I have yet to find that version (the 2006 “When a Stranger Calls” film veers perilously close – the main character is forced to take the babysitting job after she exceeds the cell minutes allotted by her parentally funded phone plan). Still, it’s worth noting that the telephone in the story can be viewed as more than a narrative means to an end. If the babysitter were a guy, I’m sure the killer would contact him through Call of Duty 4’s private chat function.

“We’ve traced the calls! They’re coming from inside the house!”

I have a feeling that “house” will be replaced by either “bunker,” “tube” or “habidome” before “call” changes nomenclature.

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. This week we pity the poor Babysitter, check back Wednesday and Friday for more.

“We’ve traced the calls! They’re coming from inside the house!” Not exactly a shocking twist these days. Let’s face it: the elements that make urban legends so compellingly repeatable and readymade for national ubiquity (not to mention fun) – bloodshed, panic, sexual disaster, embarrassment and grotesque coincidence – are the same things that make them so falsifiable. Only so many people’s cousin can have the same friend who got a cheek full of spider eggs, a candy apple full of razors or a snizz full of frozen hotdog before folks start wising up. The legends manage to live on because each new generation of kids represent blank slates upon which someone’s gonna scratch out a Pepsi and Pop Rocks death equation or caricature a hook-handed killer. At the same time, these legends undergo the inevitable cultural makeovers required to ensure that they neither outstay their welcomes nor develop unsightly anachronisms.

So even if the call isn’t coming from inside the house… even if there aren’t even any calls because, clearly, the babysat children’s parents, wherever they me be, are available via portable media devices… the babysitter suffers.

So we have the cash-hungry high schooler whose babysitting experience is repeatedly disrupted by the eerie presence of a life-sized clown doll that, from one fearful glance to the next, seems to slightly shift its position; when she finally calls the parents to ask if she can toss a blanket over it, they have no idea what she’s talking about. Of course, by then it’s too late.

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP…

We have the deranged au pair with the split personality who’s ultimately revealed to be both victim and killer. (I call this the “technology vs. horse” version.)

And we have the two-for-one babysitter massacre, in which a couple friends team up and agree to split their babysitting profit, but then find themselves victims of the all-too-predictable series of threatening phone calls; while one girl stays downstairs to attend to the drawing of hearts around an 11th grader’s name, her friend goes upstairs to check on the children. By the time the downstairs sitter hears the shocking punchline from the dutiful call tracer, something is already thump, thump, thumping down the stairs. Surprise! It’s her friend, sans limbs, desperately dragging herself away from the killer and the slaughtered bodies of the children that he already murdered.

Why all the babysitter hack and slash jobs? Folklorists and feminists alike have continually asserted that these stories represent the social obligations placed upon young women, who, through seemingly innocuous babysitting jobs, are groomed for an adult life of housebound maternity. And given that the original legend first started whispering its way down the lane during the 1960s, that’s not an unreasonable interpretation. After all, conservative adults have employed fictional lover’s lane-stalking madmen to try to scare developing women out of pre-marital sex. (Though, if the prospect of an eight pound parasite shredding its way out of her snatch doesn’t stop her, a little hook murder can’t possibly make a difference.) It only follows that the equally (though understandably) extremist views of women’s libbers might create a fictional murderer to filet the possible future inhabitants of homemaker hell. And what better group to focus on than babysitters, who are not only grandmothered into a parody of adulthood via false notions of inert, maternal complacency – all soda guzzling and unsupervised television – but who are also compensated for it. (As expected, lots of feminists have voiced their approval of this urban legend, but I would’ve predicted a larger Marxist cheering section.)

I’m completely willing to accept that the urban legend of the babysitter and the man upstairs has wicked overarching feminist implications. But an insidious brainwashing by a gender-fascist patriarchy isn’t the story’s only scare factor. On a literal level, the tale exploits the simplest and most horrible fear of the babysitting profession: children in immediate, mortal danger. In a way, this makes it far more ingenious than, say, the hook-hand killer story, which weakly offers the wildest of hypothetical situations – “don’t have sex because maybe a killer will escape from a facility near the place where you’re having sex and maybe he’ll pass directly by your car and maybe, while he’s there, in the process of fleeing the law, he’ll decide to take a breather and murder you.” The babysitter story is far more clever because it takes what, to any teenage babysitter (imbued as they are with, perhaps, premature, but certainly unwieldy, adult responsibilities) is a bad situation – the children coming to harm – and amplifies it into a worst case scenario, planting new and gruesome seeds of doubt next to already flourishing mental shrubbery. Perhaps, on its own, the threat of the hidden homicidal killer isn’t enough to dissuade someone from a night of stranger-financed rugrat wrangling, but add it to the established list: house fires, accidental poisonings, choking deaths and bathtub drownings… Maybe “We’ve traced the calls! They’re coming from inside the house!” isn’t a shocking twist, but it might be enough to keep Wendy’s in fry cooks.

Wednesday – Hangin’ On The Telephone: Technology and the Babysitter Legend

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. Monday we heard about Snallygaster’s slave scaring history and Wednesday it saved the newspaper industry.

Prohibition was a drag. And not just because all the legal booze had been flushed down congress’ toilet. While destitute souses gave up their livers to searing shots of fuel-ready methyl alcohol, white-collared sots hired like-minded chemists to re-nature chemically denatured alcohol into an unforgivably potent, though non-toxic-ish, liquor (the “girly drinks” of the modern college campus have roots in this era as the alcohol was so potent that upper class juiceheads turned to all nature of seltzers, tonic waters, juices and citrus to sand the edges off their cocktails), and the government, desperate to stay one step ahead of the socialite-employed Dr. Feelgoods, pursued increasingly elaborate denaturing schemes, involving the addition of powerful toxins, including cyanide, to large shipments of industrial alcohol. Poor drinkers were often permanently blinded or killed by low-quality, high-proof poisons while the wealthy, egged on by the once-passive activity’s newfound lawlessness, descended into new levels of decadence. Despite the controversial ratification of the eighteenth amendment, alcoholism in America was at an all time high.

Meanwhile, rural moonshine stills began pumping out a steady supply of corn whiskey and pure grain alcohol. The wilds of Maryland’s Blue Ridge Mountains were host to a cast of lone shiners, well-connected bootleggers and industrious drunks, all of them firing up (with varying degrees of success) illegal stills. Along with the clangs, hisses and host of acrid odors inherent to the production of moonshine, there were explosions and fires and bloody conflicts between smugglers. With Federal prohibition agents inevitably Toucan Samming their way through cities and towns, hot on the pungent trail of speakeasies, stills and saloons, the shiners had cause to be nervous. Fortunately, they also had an historical ace up their collective, sour mash-stained sleeve: The Snallygaster.

We’ve already made one tenuous connection between Maryland’s beaked and feathered reptilian antagonist and Jersey’s own nefarious Devil (the suspiciously coincidental timing of the Middle Town Valley Register’s hoax), and, lo, here’s a another: The Jersey Devil myth was supposedly perpetuated by the loose cadre of runaway slaves, criminals and, yes, even moonshiners, who had turned the monster’s supposed stomping grounds into their own lawless, pastoral Xanadu. The more terrified folks were to enter the aptly named Barons, the less likely it was that the community of scoff laws would be discovered, hassled or caught. The Snallygaster, too, served this general fearful purpose, but the recruitment of this particular insidious cryptid was, by several measures, far more ingenious than the Piney’s spooky whisperings.
The Snallygaster as bootlegger sentry had three things going for it:

Find out what they are… AFTER THE JUMP1.) During the days of Rhoderick’s and Wolf’s Register con, witnesses of the Snallygaster imbued the beast with a vast, sometimes conflicting, array of physical characteristics. Like its grotesque appearance, which capitulated between avian, mammalian, reptilian and Lovecraftian, its horrible vocalizations occupied an impressive swath of descriptive terrain. The available palate of roars, hisses, shrieks and yells that tumbled from the Snallygaster’s hideous larynx could easily account for the cornucopic din of both functioning and malfunctioning stills. As a bonus, some of Rhoderick’s and Wolf’s more florid accounts of the creature’s attacks included fire breathing and the discovery of charred human corpses – an easy explanation for the echoing explosions from poorly run stills, and the immolated shiners sometimes left smoldering in the aftermath.

2.) The Middletown Valley Register functioned as the shiner’s journalistic constituent. Aside from the paper’s archives, which chronicled the entire saga of the Snallygaster’s past rampage, beginning with its commute from Ohio and concluding in an open-ended, sequel-ready battle royale, the shiners also counted on the paper (which remained in operation in a large part because of the Snallygaster) to pick up the new “sightings” and run with them. They were not disappointed. As rumors of the Snallygaster’s return spread out across the state, the Middle Valley Register picked up exactly where it left off, penning sensationalist paeans to the terror-cum-mascot of the Old Line State.

3.) The bootlegger’s drunken clients served as even better potential monster witnesses than the fear-addled townsfolk of the original Snallygaster hullabaloo. Who better to succumb to the suggested hallucination of a man-eating dragon than a speakeasy’s worth of delirious, whiskey-blanched sots?

Whether it was fear of the Snallygaster, stupid luck or the persistent presence of bigger fish in larger distilling vats that kept the Blue Ridge Mountain moonshine business strong and largely unraided is a mystery… as is the extent to which the Middle Town Valley Register worked directly with the bootleggers to re-perpetuate the legend of Maryland’s dragon. Whether active participants or passive observers, the paper once again afforded the Snallygaster tale an epic ending – just weeks before the repeal of prohibition, the Register ran an article, complete with a conveniently blurry photograph, detailing the death of the Snallygaster – screaming and flailing in a vat full of sour mash that later exploded, atomizing both the unrealized liquor and its intrepid protector.

More than that, though, the alleged conflagration symbolized the imminent demise of the failed, and largely reviled, eighteenth amendment.

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. This week we focus on the Snallygaster, on Monday we looked at the beast’s slave scaring past!

These days, there are plenty of failing newspapers so hard up for cash that they can barely afford the nails to board up their doors. Shrinking page counts, reduced dimensions and an inability to successfully monetize online content have all contributed to the imminent downfall of the publishing industry. Luckily, I have a solution.

During the first years of the 20th century, Maryland journalists George Rhoderick and Ralph Wolf watched their home paper, The Middletown Valley Register, take a financial nosedive. (Reading some archived online content, it’s not hard to see why. The June, 7 1895 edition, for example, contained this urgent bulletin: “Mr. William E. LIGHTER and wife of near Funkstown, Washington county, were
visiting relatives in this place on Sunday and Monday last.”) Surely the men were familiar with the area’s olden day whisperings of a heptaphobic dragon, and perhaps they’d also heard about the rash of so-called “devil” sightings that had swept New Jersey just three years prior. Either way, looking back at their subsequent actions, it’s hard to tell whether the men saw their plan as a wild gambit aimed at the paper’s salvation, or just a merry cryptozoological jape intended to see the publication off with an inhuman scream. Either way, when they published the first erroneous account of a local Snallygaster sighting, it became immediately clear that, despite the dour mood in the accounting department, someone was still reading the Register.

The 1909 Snallygaster hoax was a carefully orchestrated affair that began with a printed letter of warning written by a fretful Ohio man who had witnessed a big bastard dragon monster storming towards Maryland. After peeing all of his clothes, including a headdress he inherited from an Apache ancestor, he thoughtfully decided to warn the soon-to-be-dragon-stricken state’s inhabitants. (I know the first thing I consider when I see an inhuman monstrosity is its probable destination based on the approximate direction of its homicidal rampage.) Predictably, the next report came out of the Old Line State itself and featured testimony from a rurally based kiln operator who saw the horrific winged beast taking a well-deserved nap that ended with a drowsy banshee scream and a quicksilver ascent into the darkening sky.

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP…
Having laid out their bait, Rhoderick and Wolf urged readers to take a deep breath, stay calm and, of course, report every man-eating monster encounter directly to the Middletown Valley Register. And Sightings poured in.

The paper, for its part, dutifully published the accounts and occasionally sweetened the pot with a bit of fallacious bloodshed and ovipositing; soon it seemed that the creature was sucking blood, carrying children off into the freezing skies and squirting out humungous eggs that, thankfully, resisted all attempts at incubation. The entire affair is an incredible example of how a single story, no matter how fantastical, can, once absorbed into the general consciousness, come to flying, screeching, cattle-shredding life. When is a bird not a bird? In 1909, when it’s a Snallygaster.

Locals actually believed that they saw the creature silhouetted against the sky and gliding onward to its next blood-smeared atrocity.

When rumors began circulating that the nearby Smithsonian Institute had placed a $100,000 bounty on the dragon’s head, wings, body and, in the event of tentacles, also tentacles, I’m sure Rhoderick and Wolf had a good laugh; when self-appointed demon hunting mercenaries laid siege to the surrounding forests, riling up the townsfolk and blanketing the woods in garbage and amateur campfires, the men’s smiles may have dropped a little bit; when Teddy Roosevelt, President of the United States, announced that he was considering postponing an African safari in favor of a Marylandian one, complete with designs to fell the mighty Snallygaster, one can easily imagine Rhoderick turning to Wolf (or vise a versa), tugging at his collar and whispering “ix nay on the allygaster say.” After all, subscriptions were up and circulation had improved. The Snallygaster had outlived its usefulness.

The first modern era of the Snallygaster came to a fitting close, complete with an epic battle. According to the pages of the unimpeachable Middletown Valley Register, three brave Marylanders engaged the beast in an hour-long fight that ended in triumph as the badly wounded creature retreated into the darkness, never to be heard from again.

At least, that was Rhoderick’s and Wolf’s plan. But neither of them had counted on prohibition, which would find illegal moonshine stills cropping up throughout the Blue Ridge Mountains… stills that hissed and screeched and, occasionally, exploded.

You might tell a kid that booming thunder is just the angels bowling. Marylanders might tell a Federal Prohibition Agent that booming moonshine stills are just the Snallygaster.

But now I’m just rambling. That solution to the publishing industry’s current predicament? Edible paper. But it has to taste really good. I mean, if you’re going to shell out a dollar for the turkey edition of the New York Times, that sh*t better taste like Thanksgiving.

Friday: How the wets recruited a monster

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. This week we focus on the Snallygaster, come back Wednesday and Friday for more!

I’ve always loved words that carry a sense of their meaning within their phonetic pronunciations. You don’t need to know what “vile” means to infer that it probably doesn’t describe something desirable. Likewise, “mush” sounds inherently unappetizing. It’s in this spirit of efficient verbiage that I bring you the tale of the Snallygaster. I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word “Snallygaster,” I’m immediately certain of two things: 1.) it’s some kind of animal; 2.) it’s totally bughouse bananas. True, my initial imagining – a flame-farting alligator with a giant snail shell – isn’t entirely accurate, but it’s no farther out than the abandoned carpet warehouse next to the ballpark.

Maryland’s Snallygaster is part bird, part reptile, sometimes tentacled and perpetually ticked off. Half-reptile, half-bird sounds evocative, until you remember that many classic folkloric dragons are just that – giant, feathered lizards with bad tempers and a wicked set of wings. Its name doesn’t represent a concerted effort to encapsulate the ferocious mutant’s hideous visage into a single descriptive, multisyllabic sobriquet, but rather a concerted, if failed, Anglican attempt to pronounce the German term “Schneller Geist,” meaning “quick spirit.” See, the mid-1700s found a rabble of German immigrants setting up shop in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Much more AFTER THE JUMP…

Along with superior beer-brewing techniques and primitive convection-driven Zoetropes featuring the first vomit fetish pornography, the German’s showed up with a variety of traditional folktales, including terrifying stories of man-eating dragons, and superstitious tales of the aforementioned Schneller Geists – unseen ghosties responsible for sudden drafts of air that extinguished candles and slammed doors shut. While it remains unclear how these two wholly separate entities got conflated into a single, ravenous monster that devoured men whole and laid eggs large enough to hatch horses (my money is on the same jumbled oral repetitions that yielded the word “Snallygaster”), the beast quickly became the most famous resident of Northern Maryland.

Pre-20th Century reports of the Snallygaster are fairly non-specific. In fact, to this day, no actual recorded 18th or 19th century sightings have been discovered. While more superstitious farmers took to drawing hex signs, such as seven-pointed stars (heptagrams represent the seven days of creation and are said to ward off evil, hence, the traditional seven-pointed sheriff’s badge) on their barns in order to deflect the ferocious creature’s unholy presence, it’s likely that many early incarnations of the Snallygaster inhabited bedtime stories designed to allow the swaying shadows on bedroom walls to append a silent, dangling “or else…” to parents’ otherwise gentle admonitions of, “stay in bed and get some sleep.”

Wikipedia briefly notes that the legend was put to more nefarious use during the 1800s, when slave owners began using tales of the wild Snallygaster in the deep, dark woods as a folklore-based fear campaign to discourage their human property from escaping. The sole source of this information, however, only further complicates the history of the tale – it appears as an interesting aside to the definition of “snollygoster” (a calculating and dishonest politician) in lexicographer Erin McKean’s book “Weird and Wonderful Words,” which also points out that the first written use of “snollygoster” actually precedes that of the suspiciously similar, and equally reprehensible “Snallygaster” by about 100 years. (If McKean’s tidbit about the legend’s relationship to slavery is true, I can’t help but imagine the type of slave owner who might employ this tactic. While the next plantation over oils up a leather strap and waits for the branding iron to heat up [this slave owner could be played by Nick Nolte], these folks are withholding dessert and wielding fierce threats of a 10-minute Time Out followed by Snallygaster story time [this would be the late John Ritter].)

What is certain is that, beginning in the early 1900s, the Snallygaster became a common topic of the Middletown Valley Register, a local Maryland paper that began reporting an increasing number of Snallygaster sightings, including giant Snallygaster eggs and frightening evidence of the creature’s fondness for hot, running blood and ability to immolate its pitiable victims.

Wednesday: What do scheming journalists, Teddy Roosevelt, creative moonshiners and the Smithsonian Institute have in common? It rhymes with “gallyfaster.”

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. This week we focus on the Tooth Fairy, Monday he questioned why we value baby teeth to begin with. Wednesday we delved into the bloody origins of the legend.

On the barest cultural level, if you strip away the membranous wings, packed wallet and any over-eager pseudo-anthropological interpretations, all the tooth fairy really amounts to is the narrative spoonful of sugar that helps the inevitable biological medicine – specifically, the terrifying reality that all of one’s teeth are about to loosen and drop out – go down. Quite simply, kids are less apt to be scared by the unique and uncomfortable process of losing their teeth if that process comes with its own smiling, magical (and accordingly wealthy) benefactor. On a literal level, if you strip away the glittery trappings, all the tooth fairy really amounts to is an otherworldly home invader with a cryptic agenda and a free pass into a nation’s worth of children’s bedrooms.

Fittingly, one of the primary talents of the horror genre is processing sugar back into bitter, bitter medicine by exploiting the darker side of pleasurable activities and joyful traditions. Sex, parties and road trips frequently serve as typical set-ups for mounting bloodbaths. More to the point, Santa Claus, another breaking-and-entering denizen of popular folklore, has repeatedly been portrayed standing on the woodsman’s side of a bloodied axe. Is it really all that surprising that the tooth fairy has, likewise, been depicted as a nefarious trafficker of living nightmares?

Given the conclusions we’ve arrived at thus far, “Every legend has its dark side.” seems like a more than fitting tagline for a horror movie about the tooth fairy. My two favorite things about the so-taglined 2003 horror film “Darkness Falls” are the adorable Emma Caulfield (for anyone aware of my Buffy obsession, this requires no explanation), and the fact that the ending credits had to be extended to 11 minutes in order to pad out the film’s meager 75-minute runtime. My least favorite things are all the aspects of the film that are actually relevant to this post. Basically, a disfigured woman who, because she gave out coins to children who lost their teeth, was known as the “Tooth Fairy,” is wrongly accused of child murder and blah blah blah. Now, when a kid loses a tooth, her ghost shows up and kills them. Likewise, the 2006 straight-to-video “The Tooth Fairy” centers on a witch who murders children for their teeth. (It might be the ghost of the witch. I can’t honestly say that I care.) Additionally, “Hellboy II:The Golden Army” and Graham Joyce’s novel “The Tooth Fairy” both explore the darker ramifications of this magical nighttime marauder. (Apparently there’s also an episode of “All in the Family” where Archie Bunker refers to an effeminate dentist as the “tooth fairy.”)

Get the rest… AFTER THE JUMP

The big question: Understanding that the tooth fairy legend is rife for horrification given that it’s well-known, inferably creepy and devoid of a unique canonical back story, why make a teen- or college-geared horror movie about something the intended viewership no longer believes in? Sex, parties and road trips all make for pretty intuitive horror backdrops because the primary horror-going audience can conceivably imagine themselves stranded in the middle of murderous hillbilly nowhere, or being suddenly scythed off their wriggling eff buddies, whereas, lost teeth and pillow money represent fading memories of an irretrievable past that’s terrifying only in that its relationship to the present belies the transience of youth and the unstoppable progress of time. So… why?

One possibility is that we have an underlying yearning to nullify our past gullibility (or, to put it a bit more sweetly, childhood naivety) by returning to the fictional dogmas of our youthful realities and turning them inside out. As if the revenge of the tooth fairy portrayed in the films is actually our revenge against a narrative that tricked us – that exerted a calculating, if benevolent, power over our immature minds, making us passive participants in an ongoing and involuntarily inherited story arc that, as adults, we can now actively control, distort and subvert.

But I don’t know. That view is a little agro for me.
I like to think that these re-imaginings of the tooth fairy story are our way of allowing a trusted, comfortable narrative to mature alongside us. And I can’t deny that there’s some degree of bitterness in that growth, though I don’t view the bitterness as directed at the story, but rather at the generalized loss of innocence that found the curtain pulled back on the banal, yet frustratingly byzantine, machinery of real life… of money… of love… and, of course, of our parents, who were ultimately unmasked as the legend’s true protagonists.

The innocent mythologizing of currency; a belief in actual magic; and a beautiful, misguided self-worth that placed an external and measurable value on even discarded aspects of ourselves – all things we couldn’t take with us into adulthood. But the legend itself – that’s another story. So we forced it to grow along with us, and to suffer the same loss of innocence. How could the results be anything but awkward? Really, the tooth fairy story as horror movie only makes sense for an audience full of confused teens and disorganized 20-somethings – before that, the story inhabits our lives as an aspect of reality. After that, we inhabit the story as its main character – tooth fairies to the gullible (nay, innocently naïve) children in our lives.

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. This week we focus on the Tooth Fairy, Monday he questioned why we value baby teeth to begin with.

The tooth fairy started life as a mouse that started life as a fairy. Or, in some tellings, a fairy who started life as a mouse. I know. Not the radiation-laced tale of shame and vengeance for which most of you were probably jonesing. And the fairies’ nemesis? An evil, tyrannical king. For our purposes, though, he’s an evil, tyrannical king with a plasma cannon for a hand. So, according to this French fairy tale (called “La Bonne Petite Souris,” meaning “The Good Little Mouse”), there was a happy queen who was all crepes and smiles until the evil king from a different castle started blowing up all the cafes and boulangeries with his triple-barrel plasma arm. Fortunately, the queen was friends with, depending on the version, a good little mouse or a just-above-average fairy who agrees to lend a helping paw, or tiny, unsettling fairy hand with creepy little painted fingernails. The mouse then proceeds to transform into a fairy (or vise a versa), plant itself under the king’s pillow and, come nightfall, knock out all of the king’s teeth, thereby, chasing away the shadows of war (You’d think that this would just make the king angrier, but for some reason it drives him crazy and topples his empire. Maybe the diamond power cells for the plasma arm were hidden in his molars.)

A fairy, some teeth, a pillow – that’s most of the ingredients right there. Cut out the king and equip the miniscule hero with tooth radar and a slush fund (also make it take off that insipid beret) and you’ve got yourself the tooth fairy.

Unfortunately, the specifics of this transatlantic process’ evolutionary particulars remain shrouded in mystery. Some saucy folklorists even argue that the French fairy tale and America’s hardest working flight-capable civil servant are entirely unrelated. After all, in the French story, the fairy goes on a perilous mission to liberate a dying nation; in the American story, the fairy just sort of dodders around with a change purse and a trash bag full of dental waste. Perhaps, then, she’s more closely related to British house fairies, like Brownies – naked, scruffy mensches who tidy a home at night, or even churn butter and thrash grain. Or like the elves from the classic Grimm’s fairy tale “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” about a group of industrious, mystical scamps who make with the grunt work for a destitute cobbler. As long as there’s a supernatural race willing to devote their powers to hand-cramping minutia in the name of the ever-entitled human race, why not assign one to the disposal of useless, cluttersome bones? (Not all house fairies were good. Despite their seeming enthusiasm for chores, some Brownies were known to un-tidy a house that was too neat, and Boggarts got up to all sorts of poltergeist-style domestic shenanigans.)

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP…

Regardless of which story supplied more of the legend’s raw material, fairies were a cornerstone of Western European folklore. America, fetid cultural stew that it is, could have easily borrowed piecemeal from both the French and British traditions. What everyone does agree on is that isolated variants of today’s tooth fairy myth started popping up in the United States around 1900, and portrayed the fairy not as a unique, specific being wrought by the fates to wrangle children’s teeth, but rather as a standard-issue benevolent fairy who merely had a weird predilection for tooth collection.

Then, in 1949, author Lee Rogow published a children’s story called “The Tooth Fairy.” It was about a very specific, one-of-a-kind fairy, and it hit America at the perfect time. WWII had ended and the 1950s were about to begin. American cultural values shifted their attentions from world politics and a collectivist all-for-one jingoism to a fresh American insularity that placed new significance upon the so-called nuclear family unit, domestic (meaning both intranational and intrafamilial) politics and social values. Suddenly, active parenting became a national concern, and kid-centric stories like that of the tooth fairy – stories that few parents had the time for while they were stamping out rifle rounds in ad hoc munitions factories or firing those rounds into the ugly faces of fascist Kraut bastards – became stalwart American narratives. Exactly how American? Well, according to a number of occasionally conducted economic surveys and studies, the tooth fairy calculates for inflation.

Alternately, perhaps the true measure of an American folktale’s successful ubiquity is its conversion into a viable horror property. Santas slaughtering, Bigfeet mauling and Bogeymen terrorizing the older brother from 7th Heaven are all familiar genre fodder. Likewise, the tooth fairy has seen her fair share of violent, bloody action.

Friday: The Tooth Fairy as Villain

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. This week we focus on the Tooth Fairy, come back Wednesday and Friday for more!

More than just the story of a shrewd harpy with brimming coffers and an inexplicable calcium fetish, the legend of the tooth fairy is a tale of a Western superstition’s complete 180 degree turn from paranoid delusion to celebratory rite (I’m ignoring the recent additional 10-degree nudge toward Dwayne Johnson-helmed cinematic atrocity). But before we take a look at the wand-assisted incisor seizure perpetrated by she of the glittery wings and deep pockets, we need to look at baby teeth. Now they’re commodities, but back in the olden days, the exchange rate wasn’t so favorable. Today an exfoliated molar might fetch you a couple dollars; a few hundred years ago, the best you could hope was to not be fatally hexed by dark magicks.

To lay a wicked pox on someone’s house, all a witch needs is a sample of the victim’s DNA and some elbow grease (preferably that of a middle-order demon, notorious as they are for their excessively greasy elbows). Or, at least, such was the belief of many ancient civilizations, who devised all manner of creative disposal methods for nail clippings, hair sheerings and disenjawed teeth. Hair and nails (along with samples of urine and menstrual blood) were often relegated to hidden witch bottles – ceramic or wooden vessels that, when intact, protected the owner against naughty mojo. Meanwhile, baby teeth were disposed of by a variety of regionally variant means, including burying, burning and swallowing. Some folks even tossed the derelict chompers into rats’ nests because, as you probably already know, if a mouse or a rat gnaws on a child’s lost milk tooth, the child’s permanent teeth will grow in healthy and strong.

Find the rest AFTER THE JUMP…

An observation: Over the last couple centuries, I’m sure these antiquated superstitions appeared increasingly ridiculous – who would believe that an errant stray hair or ill-discarded crescent of nail could be collected and used against its former body? Today, though, with the evolution of modern forensic techniques and DNA research (as recently as this past Friday, Walgreen’s began selling OTC consumer-grade genetic tests, and fingerprint ID cards are already starting to come into vogue), an increasing percentage of the population has become wary of, or least self-conscious about, the wider ramifications of their discarded genetic detritus.

All fairies, witches and lab techs aside, one thing that baby tooth lose has consistently represented is the first stumbling step toward adulthood. To this end, I find the evolution of tooth disposal – especially as it relates to Western Europe and, hence, America – fairly fascinating. Early Western Europeans, including those living in the British Isles, favored burying as the preferred method of milk tooth chucking. Relegating tooth to earth isn’t just an effective witch deterrent, but also a symbolic rite of passage – the child’s impending adulthood, and corresponding entry into self-sufficient agriculturalism, is represented by interring an icon of the child’s youth in the very soil he or she will be expected to tend, or else which carries much of his or her gross financial worth. Interesting, then, that this tradition gradually changed into a ritual involving the exchange of stray teeth for money. After all, in a capitalist, industrial society, short of pitching teeth into the whirring gears of some droning machine, what better way to induct a maturing child into the modern world than with an exchange of hard currency?

The larger point here – the 180 degree turn referred to above – is, of course, that ages ago, people stowed away their children’s teeth in a desperate attempt to keep the loose, vagrant bones away from the pernicious claws of magical beings. Today, people invite a magical being into their homes, and encourage her to steal their children’s teeth.

Who is this tooth fairy that we’ve come to trust with what once was so much in exchange for what, even now, is relatively little?

Wednesday – Weird Things Origins: The Tooth Fairy

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. This week we focus on the Slit-Mouth Demon of Japan. Monday we were introduced to the world’s worst Butterface. Wednesday we gave you sure fire tips to avoid her wrath.

I still don’t feel like I’ve completely managed to twist my mind around Kuchisake-onna. By extension, it’s likely that you haven’t either. If you’re deeply familiar with Japanese culture and society, you probably feel as though I’ve only brushed the surface of the legend, regurgitating all the requisite facts – slit mouth, surgical mask, vain inquisition and murder – without arriving at any real interpretive narrative insight save for another bogeyman rant and some tired Women’s Studies rhetoric that, itself, was plucked from an American curriculum. If, like me, your understanding of Japanese culture and society is wrested from a pack of cultural stereotypes and loose associatives – anime, game shows, Samurai and academically motivated suicides – Kuchisake-onna probably remains, quite literally, a ghost, a fanciful story, untethered from any definitive cultural prerogative or fixed history. I can confidently link the Bermuda Triangle to the New Age movement, to the UFO mania that began in the 1950s and to a curious fixation on Atlantis. Kuchisake-onna? All I can do is tell the story.

Even the intrepid, if over-confident, know-it-alls over at our English-language Wikipedia have desperately tried to resolve the slit-mouthed woman through a Western lens. The “See also” column provides links to Bloody Mary, which is described as “a similar apparition in Western urban legends” (they’re both women who terrorize children, but, otherwise, I’m missing the connection), La Llorona (which I covered in November 2009) and the Glasgow smile, the popular Western (more specifically Scottish) term for the wound caused by the slitting of a victim’s mouth from ear to ear (think the Black Dahlia and/or Ledger’s Joker). Of course, run the Japanese Wikipedia page for Kuchisake-onna through Google translate, and you don’t get any of that. In fact, the page alludes (I’m sure in Japanese it flat out says, but the auto-translate made the syntax all wonky and there’s enough subject/verb disagreement to constitute a full-on armed conflict) to clashing histories and varied folkloric iterations of the legend, all of them re-shaping the grinning specter through the susurrus murmurs and whisperings rising up out of individual prefectures.

All of the treasures of Japanese Wikipedia lie AFTER THE JUMP…

There’s the Two-Mouthed Woman, who carries an extra mouth on the top of her head, and the Cracked-Mouthed Woman, who, rather than bloodying her hands cutting her victims, curses them so that three days later, their cheeks crack open and split up to the ears. There are versions where Kuchisake-onna has a sister. Or two sisters. Or her wounds were the product of a botched plastic surgery. Versions packaged in loaded accounts of peasant uprisings and the war with Korea. There are versions where she floats in the air, where she outruns motorcycles, where she lurks in school nurses’ offices and where she circles victims’ houses at night, wrapping on the shutters and lacing the wind with sweetly spoken threats and trick questions.

In Japan, the legend of Kuchisake-onna shoulders deep cultural significance and immense historical weight. But I don’t have the background to decode it, or demystify it, or wrestle it down onto a vivisectionist’s table and lay bare its throbbing present-tense heart or the glinting, white bones of the past. And that’s refreshing. After all, what good to me is el chupacabra when it’s just a wayfaring panther or mange-afflicted wolf? What good to me is the Loveland Frog when it’s a flood-fleeing hobo, bindle in hand, signaling nothing stranger than the coming demise of the American railroad? Yes – there’s academic fascination, and cultural truths and beautiful, ear-ready narratives tucked away in the most recent of my neurological filing drawers – “things for my future children” – but there isn’t any mystery. Kuchisake-onna, in being just a story, is, for me, just that – a mystery. Even if, in my disenchanted, over-calculating mind, it isn’t the type of mystery that these types of stories used to represent – goosebumps and closet checks and wary, fearful glances out beyond the campfire into the dark copse of trees painted in flickering shadows – it’s still exciting. It’s books left to read, history left to learn, and monsters left to grapple and subdue. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it bliss, but this particular ignorance does feel pretty good.

A final experiment: While poking about Japanese Wikipedia, I decided to run a search on the Jersey Devil. The page cites the expected pop cultural references (“X-Files,” “The Last Broadcast,” et al.), but then goes on to offer this version of the actual legend:

Some siblings find a strange egg in the forest. They take it home and go down into the basement, hoping to avoid parental intercession. They light a fire and warm the egg. It hatches. The kids decide to nurture the strange, sinister-looking creature, and keep it as a pet. By the time their parents finally discover the animal, it’s become large and unwieldy. It bites one of the children and refuses to obey any commands. Though the adults attempt to exterminate the beast, it charges up the basement steps and escapes into the woods.

I gotta say… that – whatever the hell that is – makes me feel a lot better about the extent to which I almost certainly mangled the story of Kuchisake-onna, the slit-mouthed woman, a devil who, as proven by my ignorance, exists well outside the details.

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. This week we focus on the Slit-Mouth Demon of Japan. Monday we were introduced to the world’s worst Butterface.

Popular folktales are just that – popular. And they belong to the populace in a way that few other types of media ever will. Like in any game of telephone, these whispered stories are just one subversive tongue away from being notably and untraceably altered. If parents can use fictions to manipulate a child’s fears to form a sort of behavioral corral, the child can use fiction to build a ladder over the fence or, better yet, smash the beams entirely. One kid says something; a few more repeat it, and pretty soon you’ve got mobs of little Asian children pelting hotties with Pocky. Or, at least, that’s what you get in the case of Kuchisake-onna. While smirking mothers berated their children with threats of slice-and-dicement at the scissor-wielding hands of the grinning curfew enforcement proxy, the children were spreading rumors that a defensively thrown stick of Pocky proves perfectly sufficient in warding off the hungry snippers of ol’ Slit-gob McCutty. No Pocky on hand? Don’t worry. There are plenty more head-scratching Kuchisake-onna evasion techniques.

Blood Ruby

This is less a defensive technique than a befuddling rewrite of the whole story. In this version of the Kuchisake-onna legend, a person who answers, “Yes.” to the mutilated woman’s gash-flashing second query is handed a giant, blood-soaked ruby. I guess because kids are so nutty about their precious stones. Just make sure to wash it off before setting it in the eye socket of a cursed pirate skull. Also to make sure that it isn’t just a blood-soaked Ring Pop.

Confusion

This is a strategy that could only come from the Pocky-crusted mind of a grumbling, apathetic adolescent: In response to Kuchisake-onna’s maskless “Do you think I’m beautiful now?” simply reply, “You’re so-so” (in the seventies, when teens still exhibited a modicum of verbal competency, it was, “You’re average looking.”) The response will cause the insane monster to pause and think for a moment, giving you the opportunity to sprint away, or else trudge hollowly onward, burdened as you are by the soul shackles of your drone parents’ suburban conformity deathstyle. A more recent variation of this same strategy claims that you can tell Kuchisake-onna that you’re late to a previous engagement, and she’ll apologize for her rudeness and let you pass, unscathed (this also works with sharks).

Do the do

This variation’s a mixed bag – it spares your life, and you don’t have part with any of your crunchy snacks, but you also don’t get a fat gem smeared all over with someone else’s blood, and you have to wear Pomade. Because Kuchisake-onna hates the smell of Pomade. But, then, so do most ghosts. That’s why licensed parapsychologists call it “exorjism.”

Find four more SURE FIRE ways to avoid mutilation at the hands of the Slit-Mouth Woman AFTER THE JUMP…
Try the Stairs

Here’s a Kuchisake-onna addendum that will be heartily embraced by any large-breasted, underpant-clad co-ed who, while mourning the sudden deaths of her 2 to 5 other attractive friends, has had to flee a distinctive-mask-wearing, knife-brandishing serial killer: The slit-mouthed woman can’t ascend beyond the second floor of a building. So, when this monster chases you, by all means run up the stairs, toward the wood-and-plaster convergence of every possible dead end. For the first time ever, the joke will be on the people yelling at the screen.

Blood Type Cast

Perhaps stemming from Japanese beliefs that associate blood types with astrology, or perhaps stemming from a cocky punk with Type O blood and a flare for storytelling, one version of the tale attests that Kuchisake-onna has difficulty chasing down people with Type O blood. In the Japanese blood type personality rubric, Type O blood is often linked to vanity – Kuchisake-onna’s primary flaw. How crazy Is that? I mean, in real life, it’s probably just a coincidence. But on “Breaking Bad,” it would be, like, the physical manifestation of some deep moral conundrum. I don’t know what it would be on “Damages” because I still haven’t watched that show. Based on what I hear, though, it would probably be pretty cool.

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

File this one under “L” for “Last Resort.” Face Kuchisake-onna, say “garlic” three times, draw the character for “dog” on your palm, show her the palm and yell, “HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” Apparently this repels her or something. Maybe she’s too polite to slay the retarded. Maybe it reminds of her childhood, when everything was simpler and her face wasn’t awful and she and her friends would just sit around for hours, talking about garlic, drawing crap on their hands and shouting “HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” Either way, cross-file this one under “P” for “Pick Up Lines.”

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. This week we focus on the Slit-Mouth Demon of Japan, come back Wednesday and Friday for more!

Ancient, feudal Japan’s legends of proud warriors and disgraced Samurai haven’t always mixed well with contemporary urban legends and trendy pop cultural fads. The harakiri-inducing “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III,” for example, found its titular rubber-suited pizza fetishists travelling back to 15th century Japan, where they pose as demons, fight an evil warlord and learn a valuable lesson about self-esteem. The legend of Kuchisake-onna, the grotesque and reviled slit-mouthed woman, however, gets the job done in both timelines. Bonus: some newer versions of the story sprint so far into left field that, by the time you realize the entire business is just another cautionary tale engineered to keep the ladies demure and the unaccompanied minors from running roughshod over the pachinko arcades, they’ve collided with the outfield wall.

Kuchisake-onna is, on initial inspection, a beautiful woman, save for her surgical mask – a not-uncommon Japanese urban accessory worn for protection against airborne viruses. She’s tall and graceful, with dark eyes and, often, a black umbrella. Most of the stories begin on a foggy night, just as a school-aged dawdler, procrastinating his way home, passes by the mysterious woman, who is standing in a circle of streetlamp light. As the boy glances up at her, she approaches him and asks, in a soft voice, “Do you think I’m beautiful?” He looks her up and down in his best, ignorant approximation of his horny uncle’s notorious roving-eyed strip leer. “Yes.” He replies. The woman’s response is not the anticipated, blushing “Arigatou.” Instead, Kuchisake-onna tears of her mask to reveal a hideous, gaping mouth that’s been slit open ear to ear. For some reason (probably because she’s evil), she has rows upon rows of razor-sharp teeth. “Do you think I’m beautiful now?” cackles the poo-grinning -Onna. The child freezes. He stammers. He swallows once and attempts a double-time version of the top-to-bottom ocular hump.

Who the hell is this lady?

Find out… AFTER THE JUMP…

For just a moment, let’s take leave of our sniveling youth, whose second bod scan of the mystery woman’s slender figure has inadvertently target locked on the puffed, scarred edges of the toothy grin, and fire up the Time Scepter (on loan from the aforementioned turtles).
The first modern version of the Kuchisake-onna legend, which germinated throughout the 1970s, gave the slit-mouthed woman a tragic, if simplistic, back story: An ignoble, jealous Samurai, who also was in love with / married to / performing the nasty on (there are a buncha versions) the beautiful and much-lusted-after Kuchisake, slit his lover’s face open in a fit of unjustified / justified jealousy, shouting “Who will think you’re beautiful now?” / ”Why so serious?” After her death, the disfigured Kuchisake-onna became a vengeful ghost hell-bent on, well, doing this:

Desperate to escape from the woman’s terrifying smile, and overcome by his natural rosy-cheeked charm, our trembling schoolboy once again replies “Yes.” Without hesitation, Kuchisake-onna produces a giant pair of used-car-lot-grand-opening-style scissors and snips the kid a mouth extension identical to her own / follows him home and kills him like in “The Dead Zone” (the part with scissors… not the part with the hypothermic drowning). If you’re thinking that maybe it was some weird girl trap and he was supposed to answer “No.” the second time, it aint like that. Say “no” and get an immediate, on-the-spot skewering.

Obviously, as mentioned above, these early versions of the tale do that behavior modification via irrational fear induction thing we’re always talking about. The slit-mouthed woman’s feudal days would have gone better if she – being a woman – hadn’t be so vain or cheaty or otherwise morally independent, and her inquisitive latter day ghost wouldn’t have any victims if kids were sure to come straight home from school, feed their Bulbasaurs and do some homework.

Additionally, I feel like this story is an obvious riff on the ol’ Vagina Dentata classic. Kuchisake-onna outwardly appears a paragon of iconic feminine beauty, but is ultimately revealed hideous through the uncovering of her slit. Her gash. The story manages to both propagate the male fear of unbridled (read: unrepressed) female sexuality, while also reinforcing the notion of the vagina as something unclean, unattractive and antithetical to the strict cultural ideals of superficial feminine beauty. It’s this enduring stigmatizing shame that has led to things like waxing and labioplasty in an attempt to extend socially mandated ideals of beauty beyond facial makeup and weight limits. (Granted, I’m interpreting this through the lens of Western culture, so it’s right possible she really is just a bog-standard closet monster.)

Buck up! It’s not all murdered children and oppressive patriarchy! Wednesday, from the country that brought you pillow marriages, panty vending machines and “Yatta” – Kuchisake-onna evasion techniques: out-thinking and undoing Japan’s most notorious butterface.

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. Monday we learned just why The Triangle might be the strangest result of number fudging in history and on Wednesday we explored the Triangle’s connection to aliens.

It only seems appropriate that our hatch-battened voyage through the Bermuda Triangle should take us from the star-gazing visions of Steven Spielberg to the subaqueous dreams of James Cameron. Sure, “The Abyss” has nothing to do with Atlantis, but given the number of Triangle enthusiasts whose necks are cramped in all the opposite places of the upward-looking UFO seekers, the film seems like a good place to start. USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects), like the one that Ed Harris’ character hangs out in while assuring the aliens that humans do, in fact, remember how to love, make frequent appearances in Atlantean-themed conspiracy manifestos.

While you can find various reports from around the world of actual submarine crafts sighted tearing through the waves of this or that ocean (Japan’s Dragon’s Triangle, another of the certified-vile vortices, boasts a panty vending machine’s worth) most USO sightings seem to involve mysterious lights shining up from deep below the surface of the water. Over the years, tons of sea-faring busybodies have reported seeing these bizarre illuminations, both in motion and stationary, within the increasingly non-specific bounds of the Bermuda Triangle. Many sightings have come with the speculation that, below the Triangle’s waters, lay the ruined spires and crumbling streets of Atlantis, a long dead city where, prior to its cataclysmic destruction, a bunch of forgetful mermen left the lights on.

Of course, I’m joking –Atlantis obviously didn’t use the wasteful electric lights on which we primitive humans so desperately rely. They used giant crystals. Or so said Edgar Cayce, the late 19th/early 20th century American psychic who used his cosmic extra-sensory brain power to chug down a trough load of Atlantean revelation, which he then spat back out during a number of his “readings.” These “readings,” which began in 1901 and continued on for 40 years, always started with Cayce entering a dozy trance state, and ended in mystical predictions about everything from politics and business to ancient history and fallen empires, of which Atlantis seemed to be Cayce’s favorite.

A background on Atlantis and the one piece of hard proof that might have proved the whole theory correct…

Quick background on Atlantis – the civilization was first mentioned by the Greek writer Plato, who portrayed the Poseidon-worshipping island nation as a powerful naval empire that was swallowed by a cataclysmic earthquake. Most believe Plato was simply using certain political and geological events of the time to tell a story both entertaining and germane. Others argue that the legend constitutes historical record. Still others, in true “Local Children Die in Sewer While Seeking Out ‘Ninja’ Turtles” fashion, are totally fixated on GPS-ing the joint. Cayce fell in that half-crazed, but full-on-enthusiastic middle category.

Cayce’s Atlantis was roughly the size of the Eur-Asian continent, and was divided into three giant islands. They had awesome technology. Their Xbox360s actually wrapped completely around the player, their version of Avatar was shot in 3E and all their novels were enjoyed in the form of physically addicting hypodermic injections. Powering the whole shebang? A whole bunch of huge, resonating crystals, including a super crystal that Cayce fans have decided must have been located in what is now the Bermuda Triangle.

But things weren’t all video games and book serums. There were two warring political factions – the upright crusaders for sunshine, called The Sons of the Law of One, and the mean old dag nasty constituents of yuckiness, The Sons of Belial. The biggest ongoing socio-political conflict hinged on “the Things,” a diverse species of subhuman chimeras with the intelligence and physical traits of animals, but the souls of humans. The Sons of Belial naturally wanted to enslave the Things. The Sons of the Law of One, on the other hand, wanted to evolve the Things into full-fledged humans. Probably by way of crystals. Long story short, the factions kept fussing and feuding until one day, they overpowered the crystals and the entire empire exploded (this may or may not have involved some sort of doomsday machine/”death ray” to which Cayce frequently alluded). According to the story, then, the lights that folks see shining up through the darkness of the Atlantic are still-pulsing remains of the Atlantean power cells. Likewise, the UFOs and USOs and crazy electromagnetic disturbances are also, supposedly, caused by the out-gassing of excess ancient crystal energy, which can cause strange manifestations and stuff.

Cayce also made a prediction: the Empire of Atlantis will rise again… in the 1960s.

So… that didn’t quite work out. What did happen in the ‘60s, though, was the discovery of the Bimini Road (sometimes referred to, drably, as the Bimini Wall), a half-mile-long linear strip of rectangular limestone blocks submerged beneath 6 meters of water off the northwestern coast of North Bimini Island (part of both the Bahamas and the Triangle). People effing freaked. Conjectures were pitched and volleyed. Is it an Antlantean thoroughfare? The outer surface of a much-more-complex Atlantean structure, like a weird octopus church or a lobsterball stadium? Could it actually be just a boring Atlantean wall?

No, no and no. Turns out it’s just a bunch of rocks. No tool marks are evident, similar formations have been discovered near other island chains and, also, seriously? A super advanced, crystal-powered civilization and the best they can do, road-wise, is jumble some stones into sort of a line? Even the enslaved Things could make a better road than that, and half of them had giraffe hands. Regardless, the Bimini Road was all it took to get a whole of mess New Agers and truth-seekers all frothed up and bonering over the possibility of a connection between The Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis and their precious crystals.

All we can conclude for sure is that, if there was an Edenic crystal-powered empire criss-crossed by uneven roads that were built by hideous subjugated mutants, they probably had some really weird pornography.

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. Monday we learned just why The Triangle might be the strangest result of number fudging in history.

It might be lost forever, but Flight 19 will never be forgotten. And not because generations to come will delight in the hootenanny that is the history of military training disasters. It’s because of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” in which Flight 19 is discovered (minus its directionally challenged flight leader and 13 aerial lemmings) in the Arizona desert. Spielberg’s implication was, of course, that the Brian Eno-wannabe aliens, who later blasted their astro-synths at a potato-sculpting Richard Dreyfus, were somehow responsible for the group’s disappearance and, it would seem, at least some of the Bermuda Triangle’s alleged spooky weirdness.

When Spielberg suggested that aliens are cherry-picking human subjects out of the Atlantic Ocean, he was merely creating a broad historically based fiction in order to bolster the plot of a narrative film. When writer Ivan Sanderson proposed that the Bermuda Triangle is one of 12 “Vile Vortices” – lozenge-shaped areas of ocean where the Earth’s energy fields host slammin’ electromagnetic parties – he was stating a scientific hypothesis. Sanderson’s ideas were subsequently absorbed into the New Age movement, which used them to create the World Grid theory. Essentially, according to pony-tailed acolytes of energy fields, Earth is a giant, resonating crystal with equidistant harmonic power areas, both positive (Sedona, AZ; Easter Island, etc.) and negative (the Bermuda Triangle, etc.). New Agers use these principles to explain stuff like crystal healing and energy centers and how pan flue music shields your soul from psychical tumors or whatever. UFO groupies apply them to abduction theories.

One theory states that the Triangle’s electromagnetic disturbances represent the opening and closing of transdimensional portals – the 12 Vile Vortices serve as doggie doors for daytripping extraterrestrials looking to sightsee and butt probe without all the cumbersome intergalactic schlepping. This notion hinges on the assumption that the alien races visiting Earth have mastered a means of transportation that involves the bending of electromagnetic fields and gravity. The vortices, then, operate sort of like naturally existing station platforms to which the intrepid space kidnappers can easily navigate. Or else the aliens earmarked a few selected areas of the planet for inter-spatial teleportation. You get to decide. At a certain point, the craziness just sort of plateaus off into a flat surface perfect for use as a bughouse buffet table of competing insanities.

Government tests! Alien joy riding! Abduction! AFTER THE JUMP!

Take the Philadelphia Experiment, for example. This classic conspiracy theory states that, in 1943, the Navy conducted a series of invisibility/teleportation experiments on a destroyer escort called the USS Eldridge. The government, it’s said, was using the principles of Einstein’s unified field theory to bend light, thereby, making the ship invisible. Supposedly, the first test got it right, but also managed to nauseate the crewmen, who, as a result, were none too excited when it was announced that there was gonna be an even lengthier second take. The next time around, the Eldridge vanished AND instantly teleported over 200 miles away, where it was discovered that several crew members were both nauseated and molecularly fused to portions of the ship.

Do you see where this is going? The field bending? The teleportation? Yup. Some folks think that the government was employing the same experimental propulsion tactics used by the Triangle-frequenting UFOs, whose repeated jaunts over the restless mid-Atlantic waters either account for, or confirm, the area’s deadly and mysterious physics. (For a great pop cultural example of this type of government testing, see the fantastic X-Files two-parter “Dreamland” in which electromagnetic experimentation finds David Duchovny swapping bodies with a randy, wise-cracking Man in Black played by Michael McKean.)

The other theory? Aliens have nothing to do with the forces that find folks getting lost, confused and turned around in the Triangle, but they do take advantage of them. Historically, whatever time the space-hopping weekend warriors weren’t spending helping humans build pyramids and teaching guerilla armies to guard their crystal skeletons, they were watching boatloads of people tread tiring circles through the tidal currents and magnet storms of the Bermuda Triangle. When the time came to start grabbing up human test subjects for microchip installations and dentistry practice, they knew where to find some easy pickins who – bonus! – would be assumed to have simply fallen victim to a wholly terrestrial threat. Basically, in the oil-black eyes of a fat-headed alien, a person in the Bermuda Triangle is like the cross-eyed Korean-made teddy bear sitting on the tippy-top of the crane game prize pile.
And if the combined threat of electromagnetic storms raging all around you while space aliens attack from above wasn’t enough, wait until you hear what’s lurking beneath the frothing waters of the Bremuda Triangle.

Friday: The Triangle and Atlantis

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. Make sure you come back to read all about the Bermuda Triangle Wednesday and Friday.

If certain versions of events are to be believed, Flight 19 – and the 14 skilled airmen who were desperately trying to navigate 5 TBM Avengers back to the safety and dry land of the Floridian coast – disappeared with their compasses inexplicably spinning and the crewmen babbling incoherently across a static-drenched radio connection. We know the planes took off from Fort Lauderdale’s Naval base on December 5, 1945, with instructions to perform a standard training exercise dubbed “Navigation problem No. 1.” We also know that navigation soon became the mission’s no. 1 problem. To quote flight leader Charles Taylor, “I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land but it’s broken. I am sure I’m in the Keys but I don’t know how far down and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.” We also know that Flight 19 pulled an impressive aerial abracadabra – five planes and 14 people, poof, gone, forever.

19 years later, “Argosy” magazine, a classic American pulp publication specializing in adventure stories, published a feature article written by Vincent H. Gaddis. The piece was entitled “The
Deadly Bermuda Triangle” and introduced America to a new and dangerous menace whose insidious machinations were as wily and mysterious as its three-sided geometry was certain. While past articles in various other publications had laundry listed notable boat and plane disappearances in the southern Atlantic, including a 1962 piece in America Legion magazine
– “The Lost Patrol” – that directly implicated supernatural forces in the vanishing of Flight 19, no one had previously assigned such a snappy, sensational title to the area, much less such a handily imagined shape.

Gaddis’ version of the triangle’s wily super powers read like something out of a Dharma Initiative file folder: “[The] aberration might be called ‘a hole in the sky’… It is obvious that it occurs only occasionally in the well-traveled triangle area, without warning, but frequently enough to be alarming.” The article goes on to talk about the possibility of severe, but highly localized, magnetic storms and gravitational anomalies. Gaddis never addresses the possibility
of designing a simple button that could be pressed to control these phenomena, but does make several cryptic Slusho! references.

Find out why the factual basis for the Bermuda Triangle is shoddy even by urban legend standards AFTER THE JUMP…

If you’re trying to picture the hypothetical borders of America’s most infamous polygon outside of the Pentagon and Times Square, don’t bother. The imaginary limits have been altered and expanded so many times by so many different authors desperate to scapegoat the death shape in explaining this or that oceanic disaster, it’s a wonder that the thing hasn’t metastasized into an octagon and sprawled its magnet-crazed ass out over half the continent. For what it’s worth, Gaddis described the triangle thusly: “Draw a line from Florida to Bermuda [I assume he means, like, on a map], another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third line back to Florida through the Bahamas.” Boom. Bermuda Triangle.

Let’s be clear on one thing though: This is complete codswallop. And not in that urban legendy way where the facts aren’t explicitly true, but the story provides a narrative window into the culture clockwork of American social paranoia and phobias. It’s really just a heap of wanton data mangling and a butter-fingered handling of research reporting. Period. Proportionately speaking, the area doesn’t actually boast any more disappearances or accidents than any other like-sized chunk of aquatic real estate. Furthermore, many of the ships that supposedly “disappeared” in the triangle merely got lost and returned to port several days later than scheduled. FurtherGurthermore, the area is known for its abundance of tropical storms, and the invisible tugging mischief of the Gulf Stream, which can easily make trouble for carelessly piloted small water craft. Look, sundry debunkers have flapped their jaws numb on this topic, so I’m not gonna draw it out.

One last thing though – remember when flight leader Charles Taylor reported that his cadre of government bombers was lost, but chugging along, above the Florida Keys? Well, Taylor and his crew were actually wandering the skies above the Bahamas, which Taylor mistook for the Keys. Meaning Taylor’s report that all of the compasses had failed was most likely the result of the pilot’s faulty navigational assumptions rather than the compass’ functionality. The subsequent investigation, accordingly, placed full responsibility on Taylor, who, it turns out, had a prior record of plane ditching and ocean-rescue needing.

But, hey, let’s not let any of that truthy garbage spoil our fun. After all, The Bermuda Triangle is a cool idea… it’s just, you know, a colossally stupid theory. Five decades of triangle contemplation have led to some wild hypotheses and wonderful collisions between the deadly
new shape and existing folktales and legends.

Those of you who have been impatiently waiting for an excuse to exhume the playful, early-aughts slang exclamation “booyah!” – this would be it.

Wednesday: The Triangle and UFOs

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. Check out the origins of the Grinning Man or how one journalist became the the focal point of the legend.

As has become apparent to any frustrated readers who would prefer insane stories of paranormal weirdness over weird stories of insane journalists, the tale of the Grinning Man says a lot more about reporter John Keel than it does about any sort of alien visitors or psychic
census takers. Looking at Internet assessments of Grinning Man facts and guesses, then, it’s hard to ignore that, in many cases, Keel is missing. The Wikipedia article at least mentions that Keel recorded all three sightings. (The opening blurb says that ufologist John Moseley also investigated the Grinning Man, which is sort of true… he tagged along on Keel’s initial trip to gather testimony from the Jersey witnesses.) Meanwhile, other sites simply paraphrase accounts of the stories without so much as a tip of the hat to the intrepid reporter, save for, in some cases, a brief walk-on appearance as Interviewer 1.

As one of Weird Things’ major preoccupations is examining the ways in which legends like that of the Grinning Man are able to proliferate and thrive outside the slipshod pretenses of their primary sources, it’s important to understand the significance of Keel’s relative absence from
the this whole smiling, green-suited clustercuss. I think we can all agree that, without Keel’s badgering insistence, it would be pretty difficult to make the case that the entities encountered in all three sightings are one in the same, or even distantly related. In fact, the only real link between them (aside from an affinity for easily donned green haberdashery) is the ancillary UFO activity that allegedly preceded each encounter. It’s no surprise, then, that these supposed
(by Keel no less!) unearthly airspace incursions provide the basis for the Grinning Man’s continued legacy.

From ProfilingtheUnexplained.com: “He usually appears around the time of UFO sightings.” Also – “He couldn’t be associated with the Men in Black, since he supposedly wears a shimmering green outfit.” (I just enjoy the latter quote because a.) It’s the concluding sentence in the site’s article and b.) you’d think cryptid-rabid Web publishers would immediately conclude that the green suit is precisely why he might be Men in Black, as not wearing black would be a great way for him to hide his affiliation. Come on guys, I’m not even a paranoid maniac and I figured that one out.)

Find the rest, AFTER THE JUMP…

On his blog “The Truth,” UFO enthusiast “Zapruder” described driving past the Grinning Man, who was creepily loitering among some bushes in Roswell, NM. He asserts that “The grinning man is often said to be brutal, beating people up.” Well… all right. His account also includes
this even more ridiculous assessment of the chorus to “Easy Lover”- “I was listening to the radio at the time, Phil Collins and Phillip Bailey’s Easy Lover. However, before the amazing chorus, the radio cut out… ”

What’s interesting about this image of the Grinning Man as some sort of otherworldly, perhaps even governmentally employed, UFO chaser is that, while based on Keel’s three disparate accounts of Indrid Cold, it doesn’t match Keel’s actual theory at all. Keel believed that UFO
activity, The Grinning Man, the Mothman, Bigfoot, etc. are all physical manifestations of an “ultraterrestrial” force that asserts its presence on Earth by taking the physical form of popular folkloric/legendary figures. He posits, for example, that demon sightings in the middle
ages were more prevalent than demon sightings today because a majority of ye olde citizenry accepted the notion of living, tangible demons, a belief that allowed the “ultraterrestrial” power to take on the visible characteristics of said demons. In the 1960s, when everyone believed in
UFOs (and Mothmen and Grinning Men… I guess????), the super magic alien aura physically emulated the antagonists of those stories. Hence, all the various oogity boogitys that Keel encountered.

See? Maybe he was a bit of a nut. Aside from the argument’s inherent logical catch-22 (an otherwordly power is responsible for sightings of well-known phenomena when said phenomena are only well known because of previous sightings), what the hell is he talking about?

All well-meaning Keel mocking aside, the larger point here is that because The Grinning Man legend only attained “legend” status in the first place because Keel was intent on taking three similar stories and playing narrative connect-the-dots, without Keel’s interpretation, it falls on readers of the accounts (accounts that are still being treated as legitimately linked related occurrences) to formulate their own conclusions. Today’s theories about the so-called Grinning Man are based on a slanted correlation between three accounts sans any acknowledgement of the slant or its eccentrically biased architect. And so the stories begin to form a fresh, though equally baseless, legend – a legend linked to wild government conspiracy, alien abduction and UFO sightings.

Next time you read an eye-witness account of a paranormal encounter or supernatural happenstance, don’t just consider the witness. Consider the writer. Most of them – me included – have far more decisive agendas than the blurry creatures and sinister lens smudges that they aim to uncover.

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. Check out the origins of the Grinning Man and hear how things with ol’ GN are these days on Friday.

A brief personality test to help determine optimist/pessimist status: Is John Keel half full of crap or a halfway decent, if overly superstitious, journalist?

Let’s lay all our cryptid trading cards on the table – The Grinning Man is sort of John Keel’s joint. He interviewed the kids in Jersey and he recorded the account of Woodrow Derenberger. More to the point, he linked the accounts together under a looming, toothy umbrella, thereby, creating a monster. Had there only ever been those two encounters, and had Keel been content to forego conclusions and just revel in the sheer weirdness of the whole thing, I’d be more apt to come down on the optimist side of the test question – that Keel is well-meaning and proficient at collecting accurate witness accounts, but a tad overeager in the extent to which he analyzes and collates his data.

But then there’s the third account.

Grinning man aside, Keel spent much of 1966 in Point Pleasant West Virginia hot footing it after a shadowy airborne monstrosity with giant red eyes and a penchant for lurking. Written and filmic accounts of the Mothman’s year-long tenure in the Mountain State are multitudinous. For our purposes, all you really need to know is that beginning in November of 1966, multiple residents of Point Pleasant reported seeing a giant creature flying in the skies above their homes and just sorta milling about in their yards. Residents of the small town chattered and cowered and speculated themselves to the brink of mass hysteria. The sightings only tapered off the following December after the Silver Bridge, a local suspension bridge spanning the Ohio river, collapsed, killing 46 people. Keel suggests that all the Mothman’s ooking and spooking was a prescient, unheeded warning of the bridge’s unstable condition (in which case, worst supernatural portent ever). I, on other hand, tend to wonder if, in the minds of the populace, a massive, bloody disaster trumps rumored sightings of a fairly non-descript neighborhood bogeyman.

Much more AFTER THE JUMP…Either way, Keel chronicled the Mothman investigation in his first book, “The Mothman Prophecies.” Along with all the Mothman speculation, Keel goes on and on about a pantsload of other paranormal phenomena that supposedly accompanied the red-eyed seers arrival, including psychic activity, UFO sightings, encounters with the Men in Black and, of course, a cameo by the Grinning Man.

The Lilly family – momma, daddy and teenage daughter – lived on the outskirts of Point Pleasant. During the reign of the Mothman, they began experiencing a bunch of Poltergeist-like activity (slamming cabinets, bumps in the night, two knocks on the pipe because, apparently, the Mothman didn’t want them) in conjunction with weird, colored lights in the sky above their house. A concerned Keel Muldered his way into their lives and, under the auspices of “investigating” the phenomena, asked them totally not at all leading questions about whether they’d encountered any strangers in or around the house. 16-year-old Linda Lilly confessed that she had, in fact, awoken suddenly one night and seen a large, smiling man standing over her bed.

Maybe, one might suggest, it was merely a vivid dream, or a drowsy hallucination molded from shadows by the slowly receding fingers of sleep. Maybe visions of that sort aren’t all that unexpected when the person in question has bughouse parents who are tripping balls off the heresay exhaust vented off by the town’s overactive rumor mill.

But Keel didn’t make any of those suggestions. He took the girl’s vague account at face value and, voila! A third appearance by the Grinning Man.

So, is John Keel half full of crap or a halfway decent, if overly superstitious, journalist?

His enthusiasm to link the gaudily-attired Jersey Grinning Man to Derenberger’s telepathic Indrid Cold to the shadowy figure in Linda Lilly’s bedroom represents an involved subjectivity that runs far too deep to take any of the accounts at face value. At the same time, I don’t believe Keel intentionally fabricated anything.

Does that make me an optimist or pessimist? I dunno. Maybe there’s a third option.

Perhaps John Keel was sort of a nut. A half full of crap, halfway decent journalist nut.

Either way, he certainly managed to start something.

Friday: The Grinning Man Today

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. Keep your eyes peeled for more on this legend Wednesday and Friday.

If there’s anything our humble website has consistently supplied, it’s wicked band names. Peruse the site’s archives and you’ll find any number of stage-ready esoteric idioms referring to manimals, animen, lake monsters, alchemists and bigfeet. And today, I’ve got a good one for you, so all you pale faces with the triangle haircuts and emotional hematomas listen up: Indrid Cold. Or “Blood Roof.” There’s no story behind Blood Roof, though. I just made that up now. Indrid Cold, on the other hand, is a name that was telepathically whispered into the jittering mind of a petrified man named Woodrow Derenberger (terrible f***ing band name) as he stared into the black eyes of a creature unlike anything he had ever encountered.

Before we get there though, you need to hear about these two snot-nosed Jersey kids. The year was 1966. The place: Elizabeth, New Jersey. It was the beginning of October and James Yanchitis and Marvin Munoz were heading home after a long day of whatever. (Let’s say walking the local railroad tracks to stick-prod a corpse and, as a result, come of age.) As they turned onto Fourth Street, the topic of conversation probably turned from girls onto the recent reports of nearby UFO sightings and a rumor that, earlier that same evening, a tall green man had chased one of their neighbors down the very road they were travelling. As the talk turned back to how much a girl’s boobs would bounce if she were being chased by a tall green man, the boys saw something that befuddled and terrified them – standing behind a sizeable wire fence, which separated the residential streets from the steep hill leading up to the bustling Jersey turnpike, was a giant, looming figure decked out in shiny green coveralls.

According to the boys, the man guy thing, who was bald and beady-eyed and well over six feet tall, turned toward them and pulled his lips up into a gargantuan smile. Needless to say, they made like bananas and split. And then they made like bloggers and didn’t stop blathering on about the “crazy thing that happened to them today,” which is how they attracted the interest of a journalist named John Keel. Keel, who met with the boys three days after the incident and heard all about the mystery man’s giant black belt and apparent lack of ears and a nose, had recently undertaken a massive, nationwide study of UFOs and related paranormal phenomena. Soon after chatting up the Jersey boys about the hulking brute of a weirdo that Keel dubbed the Grinning Man, the journalist met with West Virginian Woodrow Derenberger, who supplied him with a different moniker for the smiling interloper.

Want more Grinning Man? Find him AFTER THE JUMP!

Derenberger claimed that he’d been innocently tooling along Interstate 77 (not doubt imagining a tall green man pursuing a naked lady) when he heard a loud crashing sound and, looking in the rearview, witnessed a bizarre vehicle shredding balls down the highway behind him. The zany car, which Derenberger described as looking like an “old-fashioned kerosene lamp chimney,” tore past him and immediately screeched to a movie-worthy sideways halt, so as to block off the entire road. According to Derenberger’s testimony, the thing that climbed out of the chimney-mobile was immensely tall, sporting shiny green coveralls and wearing an absurd parody of a grin. It was at this point that the figure introduced itself, telepathically of course, as Indrid Cold, and began to interrogate the wigged out motorist about recent UFO activity in the area.

Before leaving the frightened West Virginian to puzzle over the strange encounter, and secretly dream of one day owning his own asphalt-crushing lamp chimney, Cold promised Derenberger that he’d see him again.

Keel scoured the details of both Grinning Man encounters. In the kids’ story, the manthing had been bald. But Derenberger described him as having slicked-back hair. Was there more than one smile-sporting fashion-ignorant giant on the loose? Was one of them a character from Wacky Races? Every witness agreed that the stranger sported a discomforting smile, and both meetings seemed linked to UFO activity. Was the Grinning Man (or men) as ridiculously stricken with paranoid sky-watching as the rest of 1960s America? Isn’t the phrase “Blood Roof” vivid and evocative?

The Kolchakian reporter’s second-hand dalliances with the Grinning Man were far from over – their next supernatural tango would coincide with the biggest case of the Keel’s career.

Wednesday: Indrid and Mothman – Another Suitable Band Name

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 see how the legend was used to thwart Hitler on Wednesday…

That the classic tale of the vanishing hitchhiker took a bizarrely (pseudo)prophetic turn is, if not shocking, wholly unexpected; that this turn quickly veered religious seems inevitable. Really. How long could these regional tales of localized disaster survive as viable urban folklore? As the predictions often dealt with the short-term timelines of specific upcoming events (1933 World’s Fair, WWII, etc.), most of the prophecies, true or not, were rendered moot within a five-year time period. Also, doomy as they were, the random prognostications were missing what, to me, are the whole point of confabulating horrific future visions in the first place – specific lifestyle directives. (Perhaps the World’s Fair catastrophe rumors were meant to keep people away from the exhibition, but the prophecies themselves don’t indicate as much. I’m talking about something a bit more obvious.) Right? If you start a rumor that a town is going to succumb to a week-long hornet frenzy, you should build in a self-serving “unless…” Unless the townspeople buy x brand of pants (where x = company you own). Unless the residents build a windmill (where you stand to win $200 in bar bet that said town will construct a windmill). Unless people adhere to the tenets of x church.

Where x = the Church of Latter Day Saints.

The 1950s through the 1960s saw a preponderance of hitchhiking Nephites. For those of you who are a little bit rusty on your Book of Mormon, the Nephites (meaning followers of the prophet Nephi) are essentially Jesus’ personal assistants, and have been left to hang out on Earth until JC returns. Traditionally, the Nephites help out the Mormons during times of stress or upheaval. Accordingly, the stories of Nephite hitchhikers indicate struggles… struggles of a most interesting variety.

Read about how the wayward auto-prone ghost legend became an ominous portent for the end of the world AFTER THE JUMP…

These thumb-wagging friends of Jesus were telling Mormons to stockpile food. As the hitchhikers repeatedly explained over the course of more than 50 bummed rides, a nationwide famine was imminent and the Mormons needed to prepare for the blight, which would indicate the first signs of the coming apocalypse. According to Utah folklorist William Wilson, this story of the Nephite hitchhikers, and its corresponding message, was the most popular folktale among Mormon followers between 1955 and 1965. I specify Mormon followers because the story actually serves as sort of a challenge to Mormon Church leadership. Those struggles I alluded to earlier? They were within the Mormon Church.

The Book of Mormon, like most religious texts, features a vague grocery list of apocalyptic portents. Mormons are also taught that, come the first of these portents, food is to be stockpiled. With the Korean War raging, the Cold War feezing and the whole world walking on nuclear eggshells, it’s not surprising that some fraction of the Mormon faithful believed that the events alluded to in their doomsday scripture corresponded directly to the international crises of the time. The Mormon Church elders, however, did not hold this view.

In this case, the repurposing of the already-popular vanishing hitchhiker legend was a direct attempt to undermine church leadership and catalyze a sectarian deathwatch movement aimed at immediate doomsday preparation. And it was intelligently executed. Some versions of the tale even had the driver pick up the Nephite while on the way to the Latter-day Saint temple, a detail that’s irrelevant to most, but which would, in the eyes of a devout Mormon, lend immediate validity to the tale – only certain qualified Mormons were allowed to enter the temple. If the story came from such a highly regarded, faithful member of the congregation, it must be true. Of course, it probably didn’t. Regardless, Mormon leadership repeatedly downplayed the tales, claiming that if god really wanted to warn the church about the end of days, he’d certainly start with elders rather than send highway-trudging disciples to flag down random congregants.

Eventually, the stories tapered off, but accounts of all the reported Nephite encounters can still be found in the archives at Brigham Young University.

Onward and upward. Where x = the Catholic Church

Whether inspired by word of the Nephite road warriors or, more likely, by the same folklore-savvy, proselytizing mindset, similar stories about hitchhiking nuns began to crop up at the tail end of the 1970s. (There are a few disparate accounts of random hippy-type prophets breezily expounding upon the wonders of Jesus, but these hardly represent a trend.) While prophetic, vanishing nuns had already been appearing throughout Europe, their predictions (imminent natural disasters that never happened) seemed more in line with those of the secular Chicago-area hitchhikers. The nuns of the Pacific Northwest bore revelations that struck a bit closer to home.

Always described as a 50-60 year-old woman, and often portrayed wearing a nun’s habit, the Washington-/Oregon-based oracular phantom began her reign of randomized augury with a spate of suitably grim personalized predictions. One man reported that soon after picking up the woman, she started in on a spiel about God and salvation that ultimately ended in a warning: atone for your sins or die in a horrific road accident. Hearers of the tale, I suppose, were meant to reflect upon their own spiritual shortcomings and arrive at some sort of fear-induced religious epiphany. “But,” folks must have said, “the message was directed at that one person in the car. He probably murders kids and sells the bodies to pederasts or something. Until the creepy Cheshire nun tells me to repent, I ain’t doin’ nuffin’. C’mon, story, get up outta my figurative grill!”

This is where things start to get hazy. Supposedly, in the weeks leading up to the May 18, 1980, eruption of Mount Saint Helens, the same hitchhiking nun who had previously promised vehicular carnage to individual sinners began correctly predicting the date of the eruption and threatening all lapsed Christians (it’s interesting that, while many accounts portray her in the nun’s habit, a familiar accoutrement of the Catholic faith, several others don’t. Clearly, the tale began in the Catholic community and eventually broadened its scope to include Protestants, as well as all possible Christian converts) with volcanic immolation should they persist in their religious truancy. Of course, as tends to happen, all of the accounts in which the eruption was accurately predicted began circulating after said eruption. (There were pre-eruption accounts in which the volcanic eruption was ambiguously mentioned, but this can be accounted for by the fact that Mount Saint Helens had been experiencing venting and earthquakes as early as March of that year.)

While the Mormon story is one of the cleverest practical applications of modern folklore I’ve ever heard, the naggy nun tale actually hints at a broader cultural learning curve. The 1930s predictions of disaster in Chicago were rattling, but immediately dismissible when they didn’t pan out. But start spreading past tense, pre-dated stories after a definitive disaster? Folks will buy that for dollar.

In summary, if you see some wayward woman tramping along the shoulder of the road, one pale thumb extended into the dark air, keep driving. Or spray her with gravel if you want. Not because she’ a ghost, but because, you know, take that, hitchhiker!

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!

All I can do is offer a baseless, but plausible, possibility: Before the 1933 A Century of Progress exhibition opened in November, Chicago’s large Germanic population was in an uproar. Famed German pilot Hugo Eckener was scheduled to visit the fair in the “Graf Zeppelin,” an innovative passenger hydrogen blimp designed to travel long distances. Theoretically, his flight from the motherland would bolster German American pride, and offer the public a firsthand look at the pioneering airship. The only problem? Eckener was a huge supporter of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement. (Awkward!) Older German Americans insisted that the fair’s German American Building fly their home country’s traditional flag – a fashionable striped number featuring black, red and yellow. Meanwhile, both the German government and recent German immigrants demanded that the building use the country’s new German Reich flag – a red banner with a central white circle containing a black swastika. Soon, Jewish groups got in on the action and threatened a boycott. Things were not looking good.

In light of all this this, it wouldn’t be surprising if any one of these groups (or even frightened outsiders) started rumors of a fair disaster, based on the seething racial tensions or even just the slight possibility of a zeppelin disaster (though this was four years before the Hindenburg explosion). Having proven to be as virulent as it was creepy, the popular vanishing hitchhiker legend was a perfect vehicle for such a fearful prediction of urban chaos. This would also account for the one opposingly optimistic prediction about WWII, and, possibly, the statement about Northerly Island – one of the two exhibition-themed warnings described the entire fair toppling over into the lake, an image that could have easily been co-opted and re-packaged by local Northerly tale spinners.

Just a theory.

(Ultimately, the German American Building opened sans swastika flag, and the exhibition went off without ein hitch. Even the Hitler enthusiasts left the grounds happy after watching the “Graft Zeppelin” flying overhead, its monstrous tail merrily adorned with a pair of giant swastikas.)

But, Hey! That’s hardly the end of the hitchhiker story, though the next epidemic of phantom thumb-waggers – the 1970s invasion of evaporating nuns – would carry even larger socio-cultural ramifications.

Friday: Vanishing Hitchhikers and Divinity

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

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 read about the origins of the legend from Monday and how Charlie Sheen inevitably got involved from Wednesday…

As we’ve already established that murder footage shot by a serial killer would not, in all but the most specific hypothetical conditions, be considered snuff, and because the Internet is already rife with clip art-skull-ridden serial killer annals, I promise not to belabor this bit. I’m only bringing it up because, going into writing this series of posts, I didn’t have any clear idea of how many killers, serial or otherwise, were known to have taken video footage of their crimes. If you had told me there was a government warehouse of the stuff right next to that ark storage depot, I couldn’t have argued with you. The reality, though, is that depraved maniacs who murder just for pickle tickles don’t tend to D.A. Pennebaker their heinous acts (or, at least, do a great job of hiding or destroying the tapes/discs/files).

In the 1980s, Northern California crazies Leonard Lake and Charles Ng tortured and killed at least 20 women, videotaping some of the torture, but none of the hands-on killing. Likewise, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, a couple of murderous Canadian sex nuts, videotaped the sexual torture of two of their three teenage victims, but none of the deaths. In 1997, two German citizens (Ernst Dieter Korzen and Stefan Michael Mahn) who recorded the murder of a prostitute became the first people ever to be convicted for making snuff, but, prior to their arrest, they made no attempt to distribute the film and documentation of the case (most of which I found in UK tabloids) is unclear (or in German). Also in Germany, that dude (Armin Miewes) who slaughtered and ate his willing Internet lunch buddy taped his Killin’ and Cookin’ pilot episode. Most recently, in 2007, two sadistic Russian thugs (dubbed the “Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs”) used a cell phone to record themselves murdering a defenseless old man.

(Rumors continue to circulate about “snuff” footage filmed by the Zodiac killer. Most recently, as reported by Blue Line Radio’s blog on January 14th of this year, a man named Dennis Kaufman, who claims his father, Jack Tarrance, was Zodiac, supplied the FBI with segments of a heavily damaged film reel alleged to contain video evidence of a murder.)

Where, oh where, kind readers, does this leave us?

Find out AFTER THE JUMP!

If there is a booming underground market for snuff, the wackos and loonies, who are killing people any way, don’t seem to be particularly interested in taking advantage. Who knows? Maybe the murderers of the world just need the right business managers to show them how to monetize their crimes.

Average folks seem to like imagining a dark global sub-culture where murders are committed with the requisite methodical bureaucracy of a shipping firm or a modeling agency. We imagine the anonymous, muscled thugs stuffing girls into vans that peel out into the trash-strewn alleyways of foreign cities. Condemned warehouses with blood-stained floors. Tangled AV cables and smoking men apathetically hunched over clusters of television monitors and tape dubbing equipment (though, in our heads, we know it would be computers). And the screaming girls caught in the viewfinders – girls whose final screams are robbed of their desperation by the tinny inefficiency of in-camera mikes.

But how do we picture the buyers – the viewers? Fringe sexual deviants? Psychopaths? Seething maniacs whose camel’s spines are just one straw short of fracture?

If you remember from Wednesday, Allan Shackleton did everything he could to market “Snuff” as an actual snuff film. And people paid to see it. People who, it’s a pretty safe bet, would identify themselves as “curious” long before copping to any sort of sadistic sex mania or scopophilic bloodlust. And that self-identification would probably be accurate. The thing is, curious money is as carefree and green as crazy money.

The idea of snuff exists, in part, because we live in society without real sub-cultures. There’s a reason why the mondo films of the ‘60s and ‘70s, which sensationally documented things like African tribes, surf culture and strip clubs, quickly turned in to the vacuous morbidity of Faces of Death – the moment a fringe ideology is identified and embraced as a labeled sub-culture, it becomes (weirdly enough) part of the mass culture. With the steady democratization of ideas and information on the Internet, what hasn’t found a place, however dubious, in the mass consciousness? Furries, feeder porn, slash fiction… Jesus, there was a “30 Rock” episode where the punchline was Japanese moe relationships. At a moment’s notice, we can access hundreds of real examples of all of these things, and more.

Snuff is different. We, as a culture, have made sure of it by winnowing the definition down, making it unobtainable, making it the final frontier of commoditized human depravity – a fringe ideology so distant from our own as to create one of those ever sought-after lines between Us and Them. A culture to marvel, gasp and shutter at from an isolated place that, theoretically, it – in this case snuff – has never contaminated. And I understand that need to have something – some unclaimed taboo – for the marveling and the gasping and the shuttering. But where’s the line between concept and realization? When does a loose idea earn ideological weight?

Whether it turned out real or not, when “Snuff” was released in 1976, Them weren’t the only ones lining up around the block.

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 read about the origins of the legend from Monday and come back Friday for the finale…

The grisly half-truths associated with the Manson Family did more than just inspire one author to off-handedly coin the term “snuff film” (see Monday’s post) – they inspired a nation to collectively wet its pants and shriek at the thought of a cult pandemic. Manned by the media and powered by irrational fear, the rumor mill began grinding out stories of cult activity, both in the US and abroad. The assumptions offered about Manson snuff films had some basis in fact – In 1969, several of Manson’s BFFs hijacked and robbed an NBC-TV truck packed full of film equipment, some of which was eventually recovered, snuff-free, by police. The ancillary whisperings of an International outbreak of brainwashed cabals with wicked leaders and sinister agendas, though? Grossly (and I mean really extra disgustingly) exaggerated in almost every way possible.

But no less artistically inspiring.

The story of the first nationwide snuff freakout supposedly began with one man, one newspaper and one appallingly awful exploitation film. When Allan Shackleton, President of Monarch Releasing Company, a small film distribution venture known for releasing low-budget nudie flicks, read a newspaper article about a rumored South American snuff ring, he saw dollar signs. And motorcycles. And boobs. Shackleton was remembering a little-known exploitation film called “Slaughter” that had been just barely released in the early ‘70s. It had what he needed: South America and a cult-themed premise. All it was missing was the snuff climax. But it took a lot more than that to discourage the executive producer of 1972’s “When the Cat’s Away” (tagline: “She’s X-rated and IN COLOR!”)

In 1976, Shackleton re-released “Slaughter” as “Snuff,” complete with the tagline “The film that could only be made in South America… where life is CHEAP,” and a newly filmed ending, in which an abrupt cut gives way to a vérité-style scene of an actual murder. To help sell the implication that the film contained real-life snuff footage, Shackleton even pulled a William Castle-esque stunt in which actors playing anti-“Snuff” picketers were planted outside theaters. He needn’t have made the effort. Women Against Pornography (WAP), a radical feminist group that, three years later, held a notorious protest march through Times Square, immediately bunched up their panties, declaring the film a revolting paean to sexual violence. Their very-real boycott of the movie was covered by CBS news. By the time “Snuff” was outed as a fake, and “Slaughter”’s original filmmakers were suing Shackleton for altering their film without permission, the idea of snuff had become a mass cultural folktale, spawning a bevy of low budget horror films (including Weird Things favorite, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”) and plenty o’ friend-of-a-friend accounts of actual snuff film screenings.

Learn how Faces of Death and Charlie Sheen play pivotal roles in our international fascination with the snuff film urban legend AFTER THE JUMP…

The ‘80s saw the proliferation of “Faces of Death,” an independent pseudo-documentary that collected real footage of assorted accidents, executions, animal murders and autopsies, including several staged grotesqueries, such as the infamous (and obviously artificial) bit in which a table of Asian diners bash in a monkey’s head and feast on its brains “Temple of Doom” style. Though often described as “snuff” by its enthusiastically morbid audience, who are further egged on by the film’s classic, if unverified, claim of being “banned in 40 countries,” this film- turned-increasingly-low-budget/high-sh(l)ock-value-series is nothing more than a gratuitously violent descendent of the often racist (see above monkey scene), always lurid exploitation documentaries (known by cinephiles as “mondo films”) of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

The other major American snuff film blowup also resulted from an atrocious, foreign-made film, but the catalyst wasn’t a newspaper article and the man involved was Charlie Sheen. In 1991, Sheen came into possession of an Asian video tape in which a Samurai warrior slowly tortured and chop sueyed a captive girl. Believing it to be an honest-to-gourd snuff affair, a concerned Sheen immediately turned the tape over to the MPAA, who contacted the FBI, who, rightfully alarmed that a foreign power possessed a weapon strong enough to disgust Charlie Sheen, launched a full-bore investigation. Sheen’s involvement and word of the information probe prompted immediate media attention, which turned into the usual rabble of confusion-lacquered BS. Snuff films were once again a hot-button topic, and this time, it seemed that the US government possessed actual evidence.

What the FBI actually had was “Flower of Flesh and Blood,” the second installment of the Japanese gore series “Guinea Pig.”After interrogating the filmmakers, who eventually used the publicity to release a making-of documentary detailing how the hideously realistic gore effects were created, the FBI gave up their investigation. Rumors persist that, despite the fact that “Flower of Flesh and Blood” was faked, it (and its similarly presented prequel, “The Devil’s Experiment”) was based on actual snuff films sent to the Tokyo police.

Then, in 1999, Joel Schumacher directed 8mm. The punchline there is either “Joel Schumacher,” “directed” or “8mm.”

Friday: Super 8 Serial Killers and Cultural Reflections

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…

This week, I want to talk about the rumors and assumptions surrounding snuff films, and the supposedly booming black market that creates and distributes them. First things first, though, we need to look at how most folks define snuff in order to understand one of the core truths about it – Snuff doesn’t not exist because of the limits of human greed or depravity; snuff doesn’t exist because of the limits of its definition.

The verbal dances we undertake in attempting to nail down specific definitions for broadly understood, but taxonomically elusive, phenomena like pornography have nothing on the addendum-flinging rumba that people perform in pinning down snuff films. In this sense, snuff is the opposite of the former example – the struggle to dogmatically codify pornography is an exercise in encapsulating an ever-expanding set of subjectivities as they relate to the perceptions and intentions of both producer and consumer. Porn can encapsulate anything from video recordings of fully exposed penetrative intercourse to a photograph of a person’s bare feet. The working definition of a “snuff film” is so ludicrously specific as to systematically eliminate every known snuff-like recording from the mass hypothetical understanding of what constitutes true snuff.

Snuff started out as a fairly open-ended term. First used by author Ed Sanders in his 1971 true crime book “The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion,” the term “Snuff films” was used to describe an alleged series of violent (possibly murderous) home movies shot by Manson and his acolytes. Though no footage ever surfaced, the term caught on and became a catch-all label for any video recording depicting the actual murder of a human being (I’ll get into the specific history and examples in Wednesday’s column).

Today, the definition has been vastly constrained by a huge honkin’ caveat:

Said murder must have been committed for the express purpose of distributing (and, according to the strictest definition, profiting from) the recorded footage.

Click AFTER THE JUMP for the rest!

It’s this collision of action and intention that eliminates every would-be snuff film from the hence non-existent snuff canon. Taliban-shot beheading footage, for example, can’t be considered snuff because it was made as a political statement/threat. Likewise, a serial killer’s recreationally filmed and privately archived murders are out of the running. Something like the “Faces of Death” series, which anthologized real (and plenty of fake) deaths, executions and autopsy footage for profit, is disqualified as its scenes were either filmed for distribution, but staged, or real, but filmed without the requisite intentionality. Even if we imagine a serial killer who films his murders and then, later, decides to market the tapes, he isn’t selling snuff because the recordings were made to fulfill his personal desires and only later recontextualized as commodities. (Note that intention of the producer is also a factor in considering pornography, though, in the case of porn, perception of the viewer always manages to become a vital component. With snuff, the viewer is wholly irrelevant [i.e., a film of a staged murder, however convincing to the viewer, simply does not constitute a snuff film].)

As you can see, while snuff would initially seem to hinge on the grisly images on the screen, it’s really the nefarious calculations being made behind the camera that truly define the phenomenon.

And if snuff is all about distribution and moola, why risk filming new murders when there are plenty of gruesome recordings already available for collection and sale?

Perhaps in a modern age where the barest edges of the cultural fringe have a visible Web presence, the definition of snuff has been narrowed down to an impossibly specific criteria in order fulfill the ongoing societal yen for tales of mysterious, uncharted subcultures. In other words, a thirst for boundary fences (however artificial) in an increasingly borderless culture – fences that keep the darkest things out, but still permit a stolen glance through into the blackness.

Either way, who do people think these alleged filmmakers are?

Wednesday: Blood on the Lens – Famous “Snuff” Films

Re: Changelings – I’ve got good news and bad news.

The bad news is that, if your kid was covertly swapped for an aging elf or weird, magical stick, you’re pretty much boned. True, there are a couple fairy tales where parents manage to wrangle their young one back from its abductors. In one Swedish story, a mother is advised to brutalize or abandon her newly acquired changeling boarder. After the woman refuses, she finds her real son wandering through the woods. He explains that his troll abductors freed him, unharmed, after witnessing the woman’s compassion toward their big-boned, slobbery offspring. Unfortunately, I would assume that this is a late edition to changeling lore, as it reads like a fanciful PSA put out by some child-welfare lobbying group trying to halt all the folklore-fueled child beatings. In all probability, the closest you’re ever going to come to getting your baby back baby back baby back is ridding your house of the magical imposter.

To humanely evict a changeling, simply brew beer, or cook stew, in a bunch of eggshells. European cultures as disparate as Spain, Wales and Germany all believed that this bizarre and seemingly random culinary display would essentially gobsmack the miniature pretender into revealing its true identity. According to the stories, the changeling will begin laughing and shout something like “I was born 100 years ago, and since then I have not seen so many egg shells near the fire!” before vanishing or jumping up the chimney. (Interestingly, the notion of changelings as far older beings than their appearance suggests extends beyond the elvish elder tales – a post-pubescent developmentally disabled teen was often feared for having the mental capacity of a child and the sexual urges of an adult. Women, especially, were afraid of being sexually assaulted by what superstition told them was a creature possessed of a hidden, ancient, and ultimately malicious, intelligence.)

The other way to give a changeling the boot was to, quite literally, give the changeling the boot. Right in its goofy face. And then whip it with a belt. And throw it in the fire. Then chug a beer and spit on everything from “The Dark Crystal.” Abuse the monster to the point where it fearfully retreats, or its mommy comes to collect it.

Ahem.

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to prevent stupid elves from sticking you with their stupid senior citizen in exchange for your stupid baby.

Martin Luther, captain of the protestant reformation and full-on panty-tossing God groupie, had a big foam finger that said “Changeling Infanticide.” He wasn’t shy about letting everyone know that a changeling was a malformed progeny of Satan’s oogy womb and, as such, was “only a piece of flesh,” soulless and fit for brutal dispatch. It’s no surprise, then, that many Protestant churches advertised Christian baptism as a great way to protect a baby from the handsy mitts of devil-humping trolls. For extra insurance against magical baby theft, Protestants recommended that a bible be placed in every child’s crib. The Catholic Church also hopped aboard the bandwagon, espousing the crucial importance of baptism, and recommending nursery decoration that included rosaries, a liberal smattering of holy water and crosses. Lots of crosses.

The most popular secular changeling prevention method? Constant vigilance. The effect of this simple advice was two-fold:

It ensured that, should a child turn out to be mentally or physically handicapped, the blame fell squarely on the mother. In an age when the mom was expected to do all the early child rearing while dad was out felling trees with his bare nuts, even the most innocuous negligence (an accidental nap, a trip to the bathroom) was seen as an open invitation to all eerie creeping things – “Free Baby! Come and F***ing Steal It!” As a result, mothers of suspected changelings were often ostracized by neighbors and abandoned by their husbands, especially if they refused to take the steps necessary (i.e., booted steps onto the changeling’s goofy face) to rid the household of the mystical blight.
On the upside, it allowed mothers to focus solely on parenting, which, in many cases, gave destitute women a well-deserved break from butt-mauling labor. People (presumably women) even began spreading stories about newborns that had been stolen after landlords had prematurely forced the recovering new mothers back to work in the fields. Score one for the ladies.

Most articles about changelings mention that if folks still credited developmental disabilities to supernatural baby trades, there’s no question that autism would be blamed on dark elves, nefarious fairies and regular trolls. I’m glad that people are past these beliefs – past the fantastical scapegoating of unlikely enemies and ready to turn to science for rational, empirically derived answers. Now we know, for example, that it’s actually evil, undetectable chemicals hidden in vaccines that cause developmental disabilities.

How far we’ve come.

Still, it’s interesting to think about how Martin Luther and Jenny McCarthy are connected by more than just a storied reputation for nailing things.

Out of all the ye olde speculations as to the motives of changeling-planting baby swappers, my favorite involves geriatric elves using human homes as unknowing assisted living facilities. Essentially, an aging elf musters up some sort of human infant glamour, gets traded off with a human child and spends his golden years playing peek-a-boo and getting ambushed by the tickle monster. No word on what the other elves did with their newly acquired human fussbudget, but if they can make an ancient elf look like a newborn baby, they can make a newborn baby look like an impressive hand-carved mahogany desk.

Another popular theory was that magical younglings needed human milk to thrive, while their birth mothers ran smoothest on squirming baby meat. The changeling would drink its fill from an oblivious human’s teat as the breastfeeding mommy’s actual child got all ate up. What’s more, stories of milk-ravenous fairies resorting to kidnapping extend beyond changeling lore – some European cultures told tales of strange creatures stealing lactating women for use as perpetual wet nurses in maternity wards of the damned. Many of the same people also theorized that a pregnant fairy required a female human midwife to assist with the birthing.

Both of these ideas hinge on the notion of human maternity – both physical (lactation) and emotional (maternal instinct/experience) – as some sort of specialized Earth magic required even by those beings with direct, mystic lines to the planet’s center. In other words, it makes women, and, by extension, humanity, an innate and integral component of nature, even as it applies to mythological eco-systems. But what’s folklore if not an opportunity for the tellers to embellish the details of their own universal significance? Regardless, Imagine having your boobs sucked down to husks by a magic cave’s worth of caterwauling fairy spawn. Or just watch some of the anime where that happens.

Then, of course, there are the people who think all the trolls, fairies and elves are just being mean. In the stories where this is the case, and the creatures are perpetrating tike exchanges just to rattle the ranks of humanity, the kidnappers hold on to their offspring and, instead, leave a stock – a magic, baby-lookin’ hunk of wood that gradually appears to sicken and die. Meanwhile, the mystical child thieves can raise the stolen baby as their slave, eat it or sell it for parts. In one Scandinavian tale, a bunch of trolls set up an arranged marriage between their changeling and a troll prince with a human fetish. There are even bittersweet stories where desperate monsters steal babies because they just want to experience the love of a child (feel free to add your own bitter quotes around the word love if you were molested by trolls or something).

All of this just so adults could feel better about punching under-aged retards. Or, as you will read about on Friday, so they could feel obligated to throw them into fires.

Friday: Changeling Prevention and Stolen Child Retrieval

All this week Matt Finley takes a look into the changeling. Look for posts Wednesday and Friday that complete his horrendous tale about tricksy elves and those unfortunate enough to be mistaken for them.

Even for 17th century Sweden, it was a strange trial. If their court testimony is to be believed, the couple didn’t intend to kill their son. Or, rather, the thing that wasn’t their son. According to them, the ailing 10-year-old being they abandoned atop a freezing heap of fermenting manure wasn’t even human. The couple did have a son, but, years earlier, he had been stolen by elves and replaced with the strange, growth-impaired elfin facsimile that had just coughed up its last breath from atop a lonely pile of animal crap. And that wasn’t the couple’s fault – the elves should have retrieved their dying offspring and, in exchange, returned the family’s rightful child.

Note that it wasn’t the parents’ story that made this trial so unusual; it was the fact that the case was brought to trial at all. Back then, in the same way that severe mental illness was often diagnosed as demon possession, birth defects and growth impairments in children carried their own mythologically charged explanation – changelings. Identifiable by their pale skin, or strange vocalizations or malformed limbs or spines, changelings were believed to be children of elves, fairies or trolls – dwindling races that used the human baby swaps to ensure nurturing upbringings for their twisted younglings. Cases of changeling neglect, abuse and murder weren’t uncommon, and certainly weren’t often prosecuted. Hell, Protestant leaders, including Martin Luther, were famously ambivalent to, sometimes even trending toward approving of, the murder of suspected changelings.

The problem was two-fold:

Scientifically speaking, diseases like Down syndrome, spina bifida, cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis weren’t understood. Especially given that many of these disorders take months, or even years, to fully manifest, it was easy for people to believe that their once seemingly healthy child had been covertly switched with the grotesque spawn of a foreign biology. Remember: supernatural creatures were already a rich part of European – and proto-European – oral tradition. Attributing these strange maladies to these ubiquitous fantastical antagonists took only the slightest flick of Occam’s razor. Also, most changeling tales, including the one recounted above, involve a male child. It’s not a coincidence that human males are more susceptible to birth defects than females. Also, pragmatically speaking, have you ever tried to pass off a baby troll as a little girl? It’s like trying to take E.T. into Chuck E. Cheese and not get arrested.

Economically speaking, the peasant class (traditionally the most superstitious of the social castes) was poor. It’s no wonder that one of the classic marks of a changeling was a voracious, insatiable hunger. If a family was comfortable, it was because every member of that family was working their backs to the front to put food on the table. Sad as it is, an impaired child whose only physical contribution was food consumption could easily become an object of resentment, derision and, ultimately, neglect or abuse. It’d be a lot easier to rationalize such blatant dereliction of the maternal/paternal instinct if the wittle cutie were actually an insidious cuckoo placed in the residential nest by nefarious monsters.

But wait… what was the endgame for the supernatural baby traders? What kind of futile insanity did folks invest in preventing these Middle Earth switcheroos? And what happened to that Swedish couple who were tried for murdering their son?

Freaking relax. Jesus. All your questions will be answered this Wednesday and Friday.

Except that last question. I never found out what happened to them.

The adventure seekers and treasure hunters amongst you already know about the HMS Hussar, the millions of dollars in gold that she was allegedly carrying and her doomed passage through New York’s Hell Gate. If you’re like me, though, and have a standing eye-drop prescription on file at the pharmacy because your doctor got tired of writing one every time you got ranch Dorito powder all rubbed in there, you need a little background:

The Hussar was a 28-gun frigate (a warship built for speed and maneuverability) used by the British fleet during the American Revolution. In 1779, as French troops joined forces with George Washington’s soldiers just north of NYC, the Brits moved their 20-ship fleet south, instructing Charles Pole, captain of the Hussar, to transfer the army’s payroll to Long Island’s Gardiners Bay, where the Brits would continue to store provisions through the War of 1812. Pole was apparently feeling extra saucy because he decided to steer the Hussar through Hell Gate, a tidal strait in the East River known for its wacky currents, narrow berth and retarded amount of giant rocks. The decision was a definitive strategical oops.

Hell Gate, which connects the East River to Long Island Sound, got its awesome name from Dutch explorer Adriaen Block, who, in 1614, bitch-slapped the treacherous waterway right across its goofy face with a 42-foot yacht called the Onrust (Dutch for “Restless”). (Block, being a ruddy Dutchman, actually named the strait “Hellegat,” which can mean either “bright gate” or “hell gate,” but after scads of seamen lost their boats to the channel’s turbulent wiles, the latter Anglicization stuck.) Another frequently traded story of Hell Gate’s ignominious reputation is that of the General Slocum, a big bastard paddle steamship that, on June 5, 1904, was carrying 1,342 Lutherans up the East River to a Long Island church picnic when it caught fire (due to crew incompetence… not, like, Hell Gate magic or anything) and burned away into soggy carbon, incinerating 1,021 hungry Protestants in the process.

More interesting, though, is the story of Execution Rocks, a rock wall in the Hell Gate basin that’s visible during low tide and then slowly swallowed as the currents pull the water back into the strait. Legend has it that during the American Revolution, British soldiers dragged captured American patriots down into Hell Gate, lashed them to the exposed rock wall and watched as the tidal flow silenced their desperate screams. The story goes that when the Hell Gate Lighthouse was finally erected, the lighthouse’s keepers were plagued by the constant ghostly shrieking of murdered American rebels. It’s also possible that Execution Rocks is named as such due to all the horrific nautical disasters and whatnot. Nobody knows for sure. (If I had to watch a cartoon of one of those explanations, I’d want it to be the first one, but I think that’s just because in my head the lighthouse keepers are alcoholics with stumbling walks and swirling google eyes.)

Anyway, Captain Pole steered the Hussar into Hell Gate, where the ship was pinballed from rock to rock, scoring two free games before ultimately surrendering, gold and all, to the river’s hungry depths. For years afterwards, adventurous divers and Scrooge McDuckesque millionaires have braved the East River in search of the sunken treasure. Could New York’s gate to Hell actually be a stairway to Heaven? Because, like… the gold? Get it?

Even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter.

In 1876, the army Corp of Engineers began a decade-long dynamiting campaign during which thousands of pounds of explosives were used to clear the strait of its most dangerous obstacles. Later, nearby Randall’s Island and Ward’s Island were connected by a landfill and formed into a single, diaper-strewn mass. What I’m saying is, if there actually were heaps o’ gold on the Hussar, they’ve been blown up so many times, and had so much medical waste heaped on top of them, even Cash4Gold wouldn’t be interested – and they’ll accept gold teeth that are still set in a jawbone.

Frigate captains and Steamship sailors once feared the perilous corridor, referred to in hushed, reverential tones as “Hell Gate.” Today, canoeists flip U-eys all over its saggy ass. They might as well call it “Heck Gate.”

Or “Crap Alley.”

Let the kids have their evil sewer tunnels and drunken graveyard reveries. Adults have bigger things to worry about. Like giant Soviet drills. And how the giant Soviet drills are tunneling through the Earth and into hell, where the howling souls of the damned are torn apart, set on fire, sewn back together and covered in bees.

In 1989, as the decade stumbled to a close, Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), America’s Christian television goliath, reported that, according to a Finnish science journal, a Soviet deep drilling experiment had accidentally tunneled all the way to Satan’s doorstep. More than that, the shocked scientists, who watched as the drill’s temperature sensors peaked out at an extra spicy 1,100 °C, tossed a microphone down the pit and recorded a nature sounds tape worthy of a sleepless Ozzy – the noises of hell. And nothing bunches evangelical panties like the desperate wailings of the damned. (Truthfully, the recording sounds more like the pipe-and-tile-echoed rumpus at a particularly rowdy rest stop glory hole.) Some viewers were terrified, declaring it the end of times. Others were outraged, declaring it a hoax. One viewer – a puckish Norwegian tourist named Guy Rendalan – was bemused to the point of action.

As Baby New Year 1990 filled his diaper with optimistic tidings, TBN continued their coverage of the 9-mile hole to Hades, claiming that over 2,000 individuals had converted to Christianity after hearing of the chasm’s existence. This seemingly random numerical figure, which was offered during a January 29 broadcast, came with another revelation – in addition to the Finnish coverage, the network had a fully translated hard copy of a Norwegian paper’s hell drill article, which contained even more shocking details. A giant bat creature flew out of the hole! The words “I Have Conquered” were burned into the Siberian sky! The Soviet government was administering amnesia pills to everyone who witnessed the incident! This article, along with the helpful translation, had been sent directly to TBN by our impish pal Guy Rendalan.

“None of it is true. I fabricated every word of it!” explained Rendalan during an interview with TruthorFiction.com’s Rich Buhler. Rendalan, who, during his trip to America, was gob-smacked by the serious coverage of the ridiculous story, sent the article (which was actually about a community building inspector) and fake translation to TBN just see whether the network’s fact checking practices were really as, well, non-existent as they seemed.

And… they were.

As for the original article from that anonymous Finnish “science journal” – debunkers eventually tracked it backed to a Christian magazine called “Ammennusastia,” which was merely summarizing a similar story from a different Finnish paper. That paper, “Etela Soumen,” had printed its hell hole piece in a grab bag letters-from-readers section. From there, the trail continues. Savvy debunkers have sweated this paper chase all the way to a dead end at another Christian newspaper, “Jewels of Jericho,” out of f***ing California, USA.

In the end, the drill to hell is a story of doubt. The imagined fires and staged screams of that non-existent abyss suggested proof of the dark side of an afterlife that even TBN bible thumpers occasionally questioned. Why go to such stunning lengths to ignore the truth unless the lie – unattractive as it is – offers something more satisfying than integrity or credibility? In other words, unless the lie offers confirmation of an even deeper, more bibley truth. Who would’ve thought that the gaps in people’s faith could be briefly filled in by a cavernous hole?

Or that that hole would simultaneously give everyone else a sound recording packed with metal album hidden track potential.

Friday: Shipwrecked in the East River – the Real Hell Gate

There’s a cemetery in Stull, Kansas where, once a year, the devil sashays out a gate to hell and MCs a homecoming dance for the damned. There’s a drainage pipe in Clifton, New Jersey that leads to a secret network of underground corridors – corridors that wend down through earth into the accursed depths of the netherworld. There are seven evil fence gates in the forests of York, Pennsylvania that, when entered consecutively, usher the adventurous onto the plains of Hades. Why would someone want to find a doorway to the pit (aside from the outside chance of a gift shop)?

I wish I could’ve asked the 150 or so revelers who gathered in Stull’s cemetery on March 20, 1978. Or the group of TV news reporters that was ejected from the privately owned graveyard on October, 31, 2002. These rowdy gatherings of Satan-hungry looky-loos began in 1974, when The University Daily Kansan, Kansas University’s student paper, published a piece detailing the local graveyard’s nefarious reputation as one of two places (the other being somewhere in buttfrack, India) where the devil has been known to appear in-person, either on Halloween (lame) or the vernal equinox (acceptable).

According to legend, Stull, Kansas was once called Skull, Kansas (Wrong. It was called “Deer Creek Community”), and the Skull, Kansas cemetery was the site of a grisly event – a stable hand stabbed the mayor to death (Wrong. Stull has never been incorporated and, as such, has never had a mayor). Other Stull-centric legends include the birth of a deformed demon baby, now, appropriately, buried in the dread graveyard, a cornucopia of witch executions and a rumor that, in the early ‘90s, Pope John Paul II ordered a cross-country flight redirected so that the aircraft wouldn’t pass over the Kansas town’s blighted soil. (Wrong. He had the flight re-routed so he could flush the toilet over the actual evil that is Oskaloosa, Iowa.)

Stull locals regard the legends as, alternately, hokum, bunkum and snorkum (a regional idiom), while Stull tourists are convinced that the locals are just, like, saying that to cover up the truth, man. The Satanic stalemate is only furthered by the town’s zero tolerance policy for cemetery trespassers, a fact that’s been used again and again as evidence that, at least in the graveyard, folks aren’t in Kansas anymore… and the townsfolk know it.

Alternately, the answer to my question, why oh why seek a gate to hell? Humba humba hum (that’s my new single. I’m multi-tasking) could be sought out in Clifton, where the local rainwater drainage system is rumored to hold a maze of catacombs chock full o’ human remains, lit candles, medieval weaponry and even demonic sentinels. Bonus: somewhere in the labyrinth is a bona fide passage to the Inferno. Over the years, the legend has proliferated thanks to coverage in Weird New Jersey magazine and whip-it-fogged teenagers, who cover the tunnels in messy pentagrams and spray-painted “Gate to Hell” signs, including helpful arrows pointing down into the darkness. Local kids use the lengths of tunnel as a ruler for courage measurement – a folklore-enhanced pissing contest designed to organize a social hierarchy based on pipe-distance-travelled. Likewise, York County, PA’s seven gates of hell dare scared kids to charge through the very real fence gate on Trot Run Road and freak out in the woods at night – the only time when the six subsequent gates become visible to man. Pass the seventh gate, and find yourself in Lucifer’s breakfast nook.

Suffice it to say, there’s something enticing about the idea of hell as a physical place, with skirtable borders, surveyable zip codes and, most importantly, a visible town center. As such, there are innumerable stories like the above – creepy tales traded by teens in the name of reshaping familiar geography into a mysterious (but navigable), deadly (but survivable) unknown. Other legends have taken this idea even deeper, mining mortal terror from the very core of the Earth.

Wednesday: Drilling to Hell

Spine-tingling action! Tear-jerking romance! Head-scratching pseudo-science! It’s the Weird Things Lake and River Monster Round-up – an occasional roll call of aquatic serpents that gives you, the reader, three lake monsters in three days. That’s almost two a day!

Today: Utah’s Bear Lake Monster

Technically, the story of Northern Utah’s Bear Lake monster begins with the Ute Indians, who believed that the lake was infested with whole schools of Pawapicts (or “Water Babies”) – nasty little critters that lured victims out into the water and then transformed said victims into Pawapicts themselves. Really, though, it starts with journalist Joseph C. Rich, who, while prospecting feature nuggets for the Mormon-owned Deseret News, heard the Pawapict legend and thought to himself, “Zippity-Jim! I love all of it! Except the part about the Pawapicts!”

Rich’s subsequent series of articles, published starting in 1868, were headlined “Monsters in Bear Lake” and recounted the experiences of several Mormon witnesses who attested to seeing unidentifiable brown creatures tearing ass across the tranquil waterway. The pieces went on declare open season on the monsters, which Rich helpfully suggested should be captured and sold to sideshow magnate P.T. Barnum. The only problem was that Rich had fabricated the entire story. There weren’t any monsters. More than that, there weren’t any witnesses.

I don’t want to suggest that the good people of Utah are born gullible. It’s probably something in the groundwater that builds up in their fatty tissue as they age. The point is, the same folks who Joseph Smith hooked, lined and sinkered with a tale of golden plates and a new testament of Jesus Christ were likewise bamboozled by Joseph Rich’s fantastical lake monster hokum. And I mean the exact same folks. (To be fair, a 2005 Princeton study found that 75% of all Christians and 66% of non-Christians hold some paranormal beliefs.)

While returning from a religious summit in Salt Lake City, three Northbound Deseret News readers – Molando Pratt and Williams Budge and Broomstead – saw what appeared to be a very large duck. On closer inspection, though, it turned out to be the monster from Rich’s articles. It was William Budge who penned the letter to former Utah governor, and head of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young. “As there has been considerable interest excited in regard to the ‘Bear Lake Monster’ I submit a description of what we have seen thinking it might be acceptable to you.” wrote a toadying Budge after describing the creature’s not quite horsey ears, sorta-foxlike face and the space between the animal’s eyes, which “equaled that of the distance between the eyes of a common cow.” (While resoundingly apt in this particular instance, this uniquely Utahan unit of measurement can be confusing, such as when panicked tourists are informed that the nearest Emergency Room is “79 times the distance between the eyes of a common cow west of here.”)

Young, who had apparently received several other monster letters from various correspondence-happy Latter Day Saints, kicked into full “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” mode, found himself an accomplice and set out to capture the Bear Lake beast. The plan was this: Young would give his friend, fellow Mormon Phineus Cook, some rope. Cook would then use the rope to catch the monster. Profits from the monster’s sale would be split down the middle.

Rope in hand, Cook dashed off to a blacksmith’s shop to oversee the creation of a giant hook, which the dutiful Mormon then baited with a large chunk of meat and attached to Young’s half of the bargain. Using 20 feet of heavy chain, Cook attached the hooked-and-baited end of the line to a floating buoy and tied the opposite end to a tree on the shore. Suffice it to say, Cook’s unique monstering apparatus failed to attract anything more than a perturbed letter from Young, bemoaning the team’s failure and demanding return of the rope.

While the Mormon community continued to spread tales of the Bear Lake monster via shared letters and, of course, continuing coverage in the Deseret News, other Utah newspapers, including the Salt Lake Tribune, skewered Joseph Rich’s shoddy reporting and mocked both the his home paper and the Mormon community for buying into the baseless farce. Though Rich ultimately confessed that his articles were wholly fictitious, monster sightings were eventually reported from every major lake in the State of Utah. Apparently, the power of suggestion doesn’t recant with its suggester. And the Bear Lake monster? It still makes the occasional cameo in the local newspapers. Usually around Memorial Day weekend – the start of tourist season.

That leaves one final loose end – Brigham Young’s rope. I’m sorry to report that he never got it back.

Spine-tingling action! Tear-jerking romance! Head-scratching pseudo-science! It’s the Weird Things Lake and River Monster Round-up – an occasional roll call of aquatic serpents that gives you, the reader, three lake monsters in three days. That’s almost two a day!

Today: Russia’s Brosno Dragon

If I were the Brosno Dragon, I would be pissed. And not in the Stolichnaya-induced way.

In 2002, members of the Kosmopoisk research association (a large, paranormal-obsessed non-government brain trust) panty-raided Lake Brosno with echo sounding equipment and low-impact underwater explosives. If the conversation on the Kosmopoisk boat mimicked that of the Internet blogging community, dragon debunking theories – ranging from giant sturgeon to mutant beaver- clouded the cabin and deck while, beneath the water, the equipment’s hydroacoustic pulses tripped blindly over solid matter. After a time, the onboard computer indicated a strange, amorphous shape, about the size of a train car, skulking just above the floor of the 140-foot-deep lake. “That’s gotta be the most mutated beaver ever.” remarked one of the researchers as his crewmates deployed an explosive device intended to startle the mysterious blob into action.

This after all the Brosno Dragon did for its country.

In the 13th century, when the Tatar-Mongol army fanned out across Asia and Eastern Europe, conquering the Russian army and dividing the Kievan Rus’ principalities into vassal states of the Mongol horde, the city of Novgorod (now Kiev), capital of the Kievan Rus, was spared invasion. If you ask a historian (or Wikipedia, for that matter) why the fierce invaders from the east pulled a U-ey a mere 100 km from the urban hub, he or she will probably tell you that, having conquered every other major city in the region, the Mongol commanders simply didn’t want to bother trudging through the area’s outlying squishity marshity swamplands. Ask a local, and you might hear a different story:

On the way to Novgorol, big cheese Mongol Batu Khan ordered his troops to take a rest along the shores of Lake Brosno. While the soldiers massaged each other’s feet and sang songs about blood, their thirsty horses moseyed down to the water’s edge. Suddenly, the Brosno Dragon burst from the lake, his razor teeth glinting like a soon-to-be-conceived baby’s father’s eye. The dragon fed. Horses, men, armor and weapons all cowed to the creature’s monstrous deglutition, the men’s shrieks and the horses’ whinnying screams all turned to horrid gargles by the torrents of foul mucous and hot spit that forced them over the drooling cataract of the beast’s yawning gullet. As the dragon gulped down flank after flank of the Mongolian army, Batu Khan hollered orders for an immediate retreat. The Mongols never attempted a second assault on Novgorol.

For the next few centuries, the Brosno Dragon napped and lazed and crapped out bridles and swords, rousing only for the occasional snack. For example: At one point, some Swiss mercenaries tried to bury some ill-gotten treasure on one of the lake’s small islands, until the dragon called “shenanigans” and devoured said island. (One modern theory suggests that surface disturbances attributed to the monster are actually caused by an underground volcanic vent. Just to play dragon’s advocate – you’d figure a giant creature whose diet consists of whole islands and live, armored horses would also create some significant bubbles in the tub, so to speak.) Otherwise, not much was seen of, or heard from, ol’ Brosny until WWII, when yet another invading army attempted to harsh Russia’s mellow. Always the national loyalist, the Brosno Dragon happily swallowed a Nazi airplane. (I wish this legend was a bit more fleshed out. It’s more fun, for example, to imagine the dragon leaping from the water to engulf a low-flying Luftwaffe craft than to picture him apathetically cherry-picking an already-disabled plane as it spiraled, smoking, out of the sky and into his slack-jawed mouth.)

On top of all that, there’s only one story that even suggests that the monster ever caused any Russian casualties, and in that tale, the dragon eats a single fisherman. And who knows? Guy was probably a wife beater.

2002 saw Russia sending a well-earned “Thanks, Dragon!”… In the form of low-impact, underwater explosives.

When the charge detonated, the researchers leered at the monitor, watching for any reaction from the giant, mystery lump at the lake’s bottom. Suddenly, movement! The shape on the screen began to drift toward the surface. The team scrambled to the side rails. I’ll let Vadim Chernobrav, Kosmopoisk coordinator, finish the story, as he told it to Russian newspaper “Argumenty i Facty”: “We starred at the water, and it was clear; there was nothing resembling a monster, however something unusual was still felt in the lake water.”

Perhaps that feeling was the vexed frustration of the last true Russian patriot, who Vadim Chernobrav’s team was lobbing bombs at it.

Or maybe the mutant beaver can exert psychical control over human emotions.

Friday: Utah’s Bear Lake Monster – the Mormon lake monster

Spine-tingling action! Tear-jerking romance! Head-scratching pseudo-science! It’s the Weird Things Lake and River Monster Round-up – an occasional roll call of aquatic serpents that gives you, the reader, three lake monsters in three days. That’s almost two a day!

Today: Ogopogo – British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake Monster

Nessie, Champ and Normie are all well and good in that 20th century third-hand account, blurry Polaroid sort of way. Ogopogo, though – Ogopogo demanded animal sacrifices from anyone wishing to cross over its lake. The Ogopogo of today seems a gentle giant, keeping to itself, and surfacing only for oblivious tourists and hopelessly unskilled videographers. But there was a time when the camera shy beastie trolled Okanagan’s waters with a ruthless vigilance and a bridge troll’s business acumen.

Aboriginal Salish people called the monster N’ha-a-itk, which supposedly means “lake demon” (lake demons – research that before you start thinking tribal tattoo). In the 1800s when the Europeans came barreling into the area, land-claim flags all a-thrust, it was these Aboriginals who warned the settlers about N’ha-a-itk’s strict lake toll, its supposed lair on the already-unenticing Rattlesnake Island, and its hunting grounds at Squally Point, where the Salish feared to fish. The Europeans took the news in stride, assigning armed guards to nightly lakeside patrols (not a bad idea any way, seeing as how they’d just, you know, stolen a bunch of land) and ensuring that the demon got his nummy blood tribute. It was these settlers who offered the first physical documentation of the monster – an engraving of the creature printed in the “Canadian Illustrated News” on November 30, 1872. That’s more than 60 years before the first recorded Nessie encounter.

With a paper trail of hearsay and sightings spanning back that far, one might think that Ogopogo would be eligible for a better name. N’ha-a-itk is as authentic as it is unmemorable, and other erstwhile monikers, like Snake-in-the-Lake and Wicked One, seem to serve the monster-wary namers more than the fearsome, aquatic named. But still – Ogopogo?! According to Mary Moon, author of “Ogopogo: the Okanagan Mystery” (1977), this amateurish palindrome that’s, depending on who you ask, a racist send-up of aboriginal dialect or a wacky homage to the just-introduced Pogo Stick, was supposedly coined by Bill Brimblecomb, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Canadian predecessor. In a 1924 parody of a popular British Music Hall song, “Barmy Bill” Brimblecomb sang:

I’m looking for the Ogopogo,
His mother was a mutton,
His father was a whale.
I’m going to put a little bit of salt on his tail

Two years later, 30 carloads of beachgoers watched the monster surface into the open air and then dive back down into the depths of Okanagan. In the wake of the mass sighting, “Vancouver Sun” editor Roy Brown penned an article that more or less championed the existence of the beast, and the local Board of Trade met to decide on the animal’s Official Name. Guess what they chose.

Over the decades, more than 200 sightings of Ogopogo have been reported. Proponents of the legend enjoy pointing out that most witnesses describe the creature similarly – 15-20 feet long with a horse-like head. Many accounts also liken the creature’s appearance to that of a floating log. If it looks like a log and floats like a log, it’s probably a surviving Basilosauraus. Or so concludes British cryptozoologist Roy Mackal, who, in his book “Searching for Hidden Animals,” claims that Ogopogo resembles this prehistoric snake-like whale to a T.

The Jim Henson Creature Workshop had a different take on the Snake-in-the-Lake’s appearance. When asked to design puppets and CG models of the creature for the Lake Okanagan-set (New Zealand-filmed) family adventure movie “Mee-Shee: the Water Giant,” they decided to model Ogopogo after Walter Matthau. Had he been alive to see it, I’m sure Matthau would have been honored: “Ogo – Wha? I’m a muppet now? I thought I was already those other two muppets in the balcony. Ugh. Just make sure they pay my blood tribute.”

Wednesday: Russia’s Mongol-terrorizing, Nazi-eating Brosno Dragon

As stories of the Goatman clop their way westward across the American continent, the thoughts of a nation turn to Maryland’s monster in a desperate bid to assimilate his cloven feet and rugged beard, his buff physique and uneven temperament, his steely glare and nasal bray, into the larger framework of national mythology. Texas! Missouri! Oklahama! California! The Goatman marches. In the same way that Maryland turned their intrepid mutation into a nightstalking vessel for an age’s worth of urban legend – the hookman, the Crybaby Bridge and even Bigfoot – so, too, do other states incorporate the fantastical axe-wielding émigré into their own local folklore.

While the Goatman blazed his way across the American South, stopping once in Arkansas to brandish a severed human leg at a Sonic waitress and once in Texas to chase after a rowdy band of teenagers, rumors of his possible connection to El Chupacabra began to surface. Could the insidious goat sucker that’s been exsanguinating American beef stock be the unholy progeny of the Goatman’s cross-country sex safari? Probably not – though it has been suggested. A more popular theory is that, given his penchant for ruthlessly dispensing with neighborhood pets, the Goatman might be El Chupacabra’s cousin. Sounds similar to Maryland’s “Bigfoot is a relative of the Goatman” theory, no?

While the Goatman diverted northward through Oklahoma and, eventually, Washington State, Bigfoot aficionados began to balk at the monster’s popularity. Many modern Sasquatch enthusiasts branded the creature a children’s story, undeserving of either national press or rigorous scientific attention. In a 1998 article in the “Washington City Paper,” (“The Legend of Goatman”) Tennessee Bigfoot hunter Scott McNabb dismissively declared, “Goatman is not an interest of mine.” McNabb went on to explain that, unlike Bigfoot, the Goatman tale lacks historical and scientific plausibility. Other Bigfoot hunters, while equally skeptical, have been more diplomatic in their assessment of Maryland’s fair-weather paranormal mascot – perhaps, they posit, the so called “Goatman” is a sasquatch that has fallen ill and lost patches of hair, causing it to appear more like a human/animal hybrid than a full-on missing link. One thing’s certain – for someone who’s feeling a bit under the weather, homeboy sure gets around.

The question is, what is it about the Goatman story – once the paragon of a locally confined myth – that has allowed its progress from anytown, MD to everytown, USA? Other equally compelling taxonomical conundrums (the Dover Demon, the Loveland Frog, the Beast of Bray Road, etc.) have gained national attention without ever managing to parlay local infamy into a physical nationwide presence.

Maybe it’s the fact that, as a humanoid creature with a consistently dark, but methodologically varied, modus operandi, the Goatman fits in nicely with America’s array of local Bigfoot analogs (Skunk Ape, Wild Man, Sasquatch, Tsiatko, etc.), many of whom display varying behaviors, but all of whom exhibit similar physical attributes. Bipedal posture. Hirsute bodies. Man-like faces. Heck, even Marylanders have posited the Goatman as Bigfoot’s genetic constituent. And the thing both Bigfoot and the Goatman have over, say, the Loveland Frog (a giant frog) is that they kinda look like big, hairy dudes in the woods. In the eyes of an observer, an axe-schlepping lumberjack is just four beers and forty feet away from the Goatman (or from evidence that Bigfoot’s a shill for the logging industry).

Maybe it’s a combination of natural Internet proliferation combined with his striking resemblance to the devil. Given that urban legends tend to spread most readily among an American teenage demographic that has, for decades, afforded all things Satanic a bleary eyed thumbs up (see every pentagram etched apathetically on to middle-school notebooks ever), a story about an evil marauding demon who hunts down doers of “it” comes pretty much campfire ready.

Maybe it’s just because he’s a man-sized goat with an axe.

Regardless, you might think about setting an extra place at the kitchen table. And picking up a third ticket to prom. The Goatman is coming to your town. And attending your prom after he eats dinner at your house. Maryland totally owes you one.

Save for one generalized tale of Satanism (The Goatman is a ritualistically summoned demon), the origin stories ascribed to the Goatman are the best kind of local folklore – geographically obsessed, historically revisionist and unflinchingly paranoid. That isn’t to say that they’re particularly original. You’ll recognize the antiseptic white of the research facility’s corridors, and the hollow screams resounding from mental ward cells. Still, of all the secret government labs in all the towns in all the world, the Goatman walked out of Beltsville, Maryland’s.

Given Maryland’s proximity to Washington, D.C., it’s no surprise that the government has been implicated in the genesis of the Goatman. Specifically, it’s the government’s Agricultural Research Facility, located in Beltsville, that often takes the blame (though I would think it unlikely that they also gave their horrific mutation an axe. Perhaps a rogue Smithsonian curator got involved). If the government has property in or near a town, you can count on it becoming the nexus of at least one sensational and horrifying urban myth (e.g., the U.S.S. Eldridge, the Montauk Project, et al).

There are two schools of thought as to the true nature of the Goatman – some folks believe that he’s an anomalously hairy, super-sized human whose feral lifestyle has earned him the appearance, and corresponding badittude, of a goat; Others think that he is an actual, genuine monster composed of one-half horrifying goatness and one-half unfettered masculinity. For the people whose theories tend toward the former, the Goatman was once a burly, 7-foot-tall government scientist who lost his funding and, subsequently, his mind, then ran screaming out into the woods and began a new life of regimented beard growth and teen sex intervention. (Because a monster? That’s ridiculous!) For the latter camp, the Goatman is the accidental result of a government experiment gone horribly awry. What kind of experiment? It usually isn’t specified, though one version suggests that an early cancer researcher injected a goat with live cancer cells, which, when combined with radiation or something, kick-started the animal’s transformation (metastasis?).

In his book “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” journalist Jon Ronson does, in fact, claim that the government has been known to use de-bleated goats for various training and tests, but given the Goatman’s alleged noisy vocalizations, it seems unlikely that he started as a member of Uncle Sam’s black ops seen-not-heard herd. Fortunately, there’s another, more recent theory: the Goatman is an escaped inmate of Glenn Dale Hospital. Again, in this case, two variations exist – the one where he’s a hulking nutcase and the one where he’s a freakish medical experiment. Both versions agree that he came straight from the stark-raving hell of restrained lunatics and abused maniacs that constituted the now-derelict Glenn Dale Hospital. There’s only one problem with this hypothesis – Glenn Dale Hospital was never, as many websites suggest, a mental hospital. It was a tuberculosis sanitarium used to isolate contagious victims of the then-common disease from the public at large, and from other hospital communities. After the building was declared a free-range asbestos ranch and shut down in 1982, however, paranormal investigators and urban photographers laid siege to the grounds, extensively (and inaccurately) blogging about their explorations of the abandoned Glenn Dale asylum. Interestingly, no story that I’ve found suggests that the Goat Man is an escaped tuberculosis patient, driven insane by his disease and often mistaken for a goat due to his rasping, nasal cough. But I guess a brawny psychopath is more frightening/goat-like than a wheezing tubercular corpse, despite historical veracity.

Nowadays, in deference to his fantastical origins and initial rambunctiousness, the Maryland Goatman seems to have abandoned flamboyant assaults on copulating youth in favor of covert pet theft and vandalism. It seems more than likely that the Goatman has fled its stomping grounds, leaving the people of the Old Line State to repurpose his horrific legacy into a banal catch-all blame depository. Can’t find the dog? The Goatman took it. Something dented your car door? ‘Twas the Goatman’s axe. Thankfully, as Maryland trembles in the wake of their misdemeanorous Scapegoatman, the true monster has taken his act on the road.

Friday: The America Goatman

The legend of the Maryland Goatman is as much a narrative chimera as its deformed antagonist is a physical one. Descriptions of the hulking manimal, whose bushy beard and hairy human torso sit atop sinewy goat legs and fibrous hooves, immediately recall the mischievous satyrs of Greek mythology. Pop a couple horns on his fat, angry head (as some cryptozoologically inclined artistes have), and the Goatman even looks a bit like certain artist renderings of Satan, only with a cartoonishly threatening double-bladed axe in lieu of the classic sinner-pokin’ pitchfork.

I know. It’s hard to think of a modern story that doesn’t owe something to the Greeks or the Pagans or medieval personifications of evil. (Maybe “Sideways,” but even there – who can honestly look at Paul Giamatti without picturing him wearing a diaper and shooting heart-tipped arrows at a cartoon dog just as it’s looking at a cartoon cat?) But even as a modern American urban legend, the Goatman is a different animal.

Take, for instance, the monster’s aforementioned ‘50s debut – a bombastic affair in which the axe-toting Goatman went violently a-knockin’ on the hood of a car that was a-rockin’. After gleefully cutting in on the teenage couple’s horizontal mambo, the crazed monster fled into the woods, leaving the terrified adolescents practically peeing their pants, but actually just peeing the car seat near the pants that they had so lustfully removed. This story, and its ensuing echoed repetition among the randy pubescent suburbanites of Prince George’s County, bears all the tongue-clucking sex-negative hallmarks s of the ubiquitous hook-handed killer urban legend. Granted, some irritating scraping and a hook on the door handle is a bit subtler than enraged, melee-ready, bipedal livestock, but, you know, whatever it takes to chop a message through those thick teenage skulls, right?

Now, I don’t know about where you live, but here in Ohio, we’ve got at least two dozen alleged crybaby bridges – water-spanning roadways from which nighttime drivers claim to hear the sobbing of apparitional infants and women. These bridges are reported in every state (to the extent that well-known folklorist and artist Jesse Glass even declared the phenomenon Internet-perpetrated “fakelore”), and every bridge has its own story about a drowned baby or a suicidal lady, blah blah blah, hear the pathetic whiners’ posthumous boo-hooing. In Prince George’s County, though, that isn’t a fussy ghost you hear bawling its stupid eyes out under the bridge – it’s the Goatman. And he’s braying. Because he’s enraged. Or in heat. Either way, it’s another prevalent urban legend that Maryland has appended to the ink, type and whisper patchwork that is the Goatman tale.

A few imaginative Marylanders have even gone as far as to dub the Goatman “Bigfoot’s cousin.” Man ape. Man goat. It’s all the same to them.

The Goatman story may be composed of a buncha locally repackaged urban myths, but he isn’t only that. He has an origin story. More accurately, in typical “now make it giant and crazy and give it an axe” Maryland fashion, he has about five. And all of them are winners. Check back on Wednesday to find out how this bridge-sobbing hump disrupter came into being, and what the U.S. Government had to do with it.

If you want another example of the difference between Native American Skinwalker lore and white America’s (find me a black person fondling crystals in Sedona and I’ll issue a correction) embarrassing Mulderfication thereof, one need look no further than Utah’s 480-acre Sherman Ranch, AKA Skinwalker Ranch. The muddled mythology of this supposed paranormal hotbed reads like a veritable roll call of late 20th century fringe culture supernatural obsessions. UFOs. Interdimensional vortices. Sasquatches. Psychic disturbances. Cattle mutilation. Glowing orbs. Ghostly apparitions. They’re all present and scientifically unaccounted for in one dusty, northern corner of the Beehive State.

It was investigative journalist George Knapp, best known for his frequent presence on talk radio’s paranormal mecca Coast to Coast AM, who first called “Jinkies!” on Sherman Ranch. Likewise, it was Knapp who invoked the Skinwalker legend in explaining some of the area’s countless tales of things that make any variety of ridiculous onomatopoeias in the night (for example, I have no idea what a “large humanoid creature” crawling out of a “glowing portal” sounds like). Knapp’s resulting two-part 2002 newspaper feature “Path of the Skinwalker,” which appeared in Sin City’s alt weekly “the Las Vegas Mercury,” is thousands of words worth of largely anonymous testimony (such as that of “a scientist” who has “a long list of peer-reviewed papers about cutting-edge scientific concepts”), grossly subjective reporting and references to the movie “Predator.”

What does any of this have to do with Skinwalkers? Well, according to Junior Hicks, helpfully identified in Knapp’s article as “the area’s unofficial historian for all things weird,” the local Ute Indian tribe believes that the ranch is cursed by evil Skinwalking Navajo spirits, who have turned the area into a dimensional base camp for their malevolent magical shenanigans. Hicks, the only source cited for Knapp’s Skinwalker info, goes on: “The Utes say the ranch is `the path of the Skinwalker.’ Tribe members are strictly forbidden from setting foot on the property.”

Okay… but ghosts, aliens and the Predator? What does any of that have to do with Skinwalkers? For the sake of progressing, let me rephrase: why, given all of the various phenomena reported at the ranch, did Knapp choose the Skinwalker story as the lynchpin of the article? The Ute story is mentioned all of two times, and even Knapp concludes that it fails to explain most of the mysterious happenings.

Wednesday’s post covered my thoughts on some of the larger socio-cultural ramifications of the larger proliferation of the Skinwalker legend. Self-hating white liberals reductively correlate Native American tradition with nature, spiritualism and, most condescendingly, innocent simplicity, brand it as “true” American heritage, sell it to other self-hating white liberals and think of it as reparations. The resulting mysticism Americans associate with Native Americans is once removed from their own cultural experience in a way that Bigfoot or crop circles aren’t. In the end, the same people who wouldn’t even skim a story called “Path of the UFO” will devour a narrative piece that has the slightest glaze of exaggerated indigent tribalism.

But none of that is Knapp’s fault. Homeboy’s just making a living. Obviously, Knapp, who would probably make a better salesman than he does a journalist, understands that the Indian curse angle is more compelling to most people than the psychic vortex angle, accuracy be damned. (On a side note, I always thought it was funny how paranormal researchers always try to back up their claims using the legends of primitive cultures. “We’ve got historical evidence! See, these scientifically ignorant superstitious guys who worshipped trees drew pictures of UFOs! If we made up UFOs, how did these people who thought lightening was a demon know about them?”)

Anyway, I want to end this week on a positive note. So, why did Knapp choose the Skinwalker story as the lynchpin of the article?

Because Skinwalker is an awesome word. Seriously. Even deprived of all cultural associations. It’s an unfamiliar pairing of two familiar concepts that induces an evocative mental image. Skinwalker. Totally wicked!

Though, I can’t help but think that conclusions like these are why the Navajo don’t like to talk about Skinwalkers.

The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers – especially with monster-obsessed whiteys who invariably convert rich oral tradition into airport-ready supernatural thrillers (Tony Hillerman’s “Skinwalkers”) and straight-to-DVD horror flicks (James Isaac’s “Skinwalkers”). That means that, assuming the four or five template-based paranormal blogs that feature excitable Skinwalker posts aren’t written by defecting Navajo tribesmen (a fairly safe bet), it’s difficult to separate the authentic Skinwalker lore from the hyperactive Native American fan fic of cable doc-obsessed Fox Mulder wannabes. For every believable, richly folkloric Navajo Skinwalker legend, there are two or three stories about this one time really late at night when a crazy manimal totally attacked someone (I swear, it happened to my cousin’s friend).

According to some (supposed) Navajo legends, during the Long Walk, when the U.S. government forced over 9,000 Navajos to take a 300-mile trudge to newly established reservation land near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, the Skinwalkers were the first to reach the destination. As Navajo women keeled over in the heat, and exhausted men struggled with unconscious children, Skinwalking witches simply transformed into coyotes and crows, which easily sprinted or flew all the way to the reservation. Despite the Skinwalkers’ traditionally evil nature, they are distinctly Navajo and, therefore, proved vital to the preservation of Navajo heritage in the wake of the cultural upheaval brought on by external forces.

Granted, there are plenty of Navajo tales that portray Skinwalkers in a more traditionally antagonistic light. Still, you’d be hard-pressed to find a non-Native Skinwalker story that offered anything but a watered-down cocktail of mystery and terror. They essentially play out like this:

One night a New Mexico state trooper was patrolling the desert around a Navajo reservation. Suddenly, he noticed a strange shape rushing up

alongside his car. The shape resolved into a hideous creature that ran as fast as the officer’s sedan could accelerate. The monster kept pace with the trooper for miles before finally dropping back and disappearing into the darkness. To this day, the officer refuses to patrol that accursed stretch of land.

The same non-native America that repackaged Native American art as kitschy fetish crafts and airbrushed paintings of wolves has turned Skinwalkers, who have a uniquely dynamic relationship with their origin culture, into generic monsters that lurk in the shadows and jump out at passing victims.

And I don’t think that’s a negative a thing.

For decades Native Americans have fought to retain their unique heritage and identities in the face of an ever homogenizing American culture. For most countries – countries with separate and independent geographies – it’s a low stakes game. Germanic tradition, for example, can be assimilated into America’s aggregate culture without losing its physical roots in Germany, or its emotional and intellectual roots in the Germans that still reside there. Native Americans only have America, and most of that was taken from them. The borders they do have – both geographical and cultural – are shrinking. The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers, and so the cable doc-obsessed Fox Mulder wannabes think of the beings as mystical native werewolves – feral and savage, or magic and prescient, or sexy and strong. Cold. Uni-dimensional. Non-dynamic. Inhuman.

The Navajo don’t really like to talk about Skinwalkers, and so the Fox Mulder wannabes are ignorant and xenophobic and maybe even mildly racist. But these things – ignorance, xenophobia, racism – build boundaries between people and cultures. These things strengthen borders.

During the Long Walk, the white men let the Skinwalkers charge on, unmolested, toward Fort Sumner because they saw them as animals. Because they didn’t recognize them for what they truly were – scouts and emissaries; patriarchs and magicians; Navajo. Perhaps today the Native Americans depend on white men to sell cheap headdresses and inauthentic drums and synthetic dream catchers, to make terrible straight-to-DVD horror movies, so all eyes are looking down at cash registers or through camera lenses while, unnoticed, a flock of crows passes by overhead.

The best thing about secret government research projects is the fun, random codenames. For example – Project Bluebird… Weaponized birds activated by pitching peanut butter-and-seed-coated pinecones into an enemy camp? Not even a little bit. This 1950s CIA program was created to research alternative (generally psychopharmacological) prisoner interrogation techniques, and to create a new breed of puppet spook, whose free will, up to and including his self preservation instinct, was completely suppressed. Most of the experiment was spent administering low dosages of synthetic drugs and chemicals, including heroin, PCP, mescaline, LSD and ether, to unknowing military personnel stationed at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. While the CIA was tangentially interested in the direct effects of the psychotropics and narcotics, their real mission was to study the exploitability of withdrawal-addled soldiers – a goal they accomplished by suddenly ceasing test patients’ regular mickey slips. Of the 7,000 unwitting Project Bluebird participants, 1,000 demonstrated symptoms of epilepsy and clinical mopiness, including suicide attempts and the writing of songs with the word “Blues” in the titles.

(Project Bluebird was later renamed Project Artichoke, a surprisingly apt name that recalls bitter thistles cooked in acrid vinegar water and served up on admittedly delicious pizza, but Satan is the delivery guy and he thinks it’s funny to “forget” to seal the insulated transport bag.)

In 1953, after CIA director Allen Dulles allegedly started bitching and moaning about how many more brain-diddling experiments the government could conduct if they had additional human test subjects, the CIA consolidated all of its varied interrogation research under a singular covert umbrella – the now-infamous MKULTRA. While most folks associate these experiments with LSD research, the MKULTRA project had so many facets and subprograms that its claims of heightened efficiency are dubious. Project QKHILLTOP studied Chinese brainwashing techniques. Subproject 68, operated out of Canada, attempted to chemically erase subjects’ minds (via drug-induced comas) so that scientists could then rewrite the subjects’ personalities based on government specifications. The best, though, both methodologically and fun-codename-wise, was Operation Midnight Climax (yes, that is just what you were looking for, name-seeking high school-aged rock band), in which CIA-compensated hookers lured clients to government safehouses, where the johns underwent LSD dosings and sexual blackmail all in the name of interrogation research.

MKULTRA was shut down in the early 70s, though many believe that contemporary psychological interrogation techniques, such as those employed in Guantanamo Bay, are direct descendents of the CIA’s zany research.

While MKULTRA was chugging along, the U.S. Army, plied as it was on CIA-administered hallucinogens, conducted a wide array of chemical experiments, which didn’t have fun codenames, so whatever. I’ll just rattle them off real quick like. They tested chemical weapon dispersion patterns by blitzing six cities with toxic chemical sprays (I would have called it Project Bandersnatch). They (in cooperation with Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson and Dr. Albert Kligman) injected 70 Holmesburg State Prison inmates with herbicides (I would’ve called this one Project Potpourri Elitism). Additionally, they subjected other Holmesburg prisoners to toxic skin-blistering acids, so that scientists could observe the healing process (me thinks Project Sapphire Dingle).

The important things to get out of all this are a) you’re probably drinking government chemicals right now, but don’t worry… any damage that was going to happen already happened way back in your mom’s uterus when you were sucking whooping cough and DDT through your umbilical cord. It’s probably why coffee smell makes your eyes bleed; b) lots of the experiments detailed in this week’s posts had irrefutably positive results and saved dying babies and whatever so chill out. Christ; c) fun codenames. I’m serious about this. Even it just means re-titling the index cards in your recipe binder or sitting down with your significant other and assigning black ops aliases to your favorite sex positions, you need to apply this to your life.

Historical journeys can be a slog. What can I say? It’s all those damn facts. Even human medical experimentation in America can read a little bit yawny when it’s dragged out in paragraph form. Fortunately, I have no integrity and am, therefore, not above the use of cheap structural gimmicks. It’s like in that song from Mary Poppins about the sugar and the medicine, except the sugar is the structural gimmick and the medicine is the cough syrup that I’m drinking right now. Chim-chim-cheroo.

Time Period: 1940s

Problem: All the darn malaria that’s plaguing U.S. Naval troops in the Pacific theater.

Solution: Bring a bunch of malarial mosquitoes and experimental malaria vaccines to Statesville Penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, infect a whole mess of volunteers and then test the vaccines on them.

Negative results: One of the 441 volunteers died from a heart attack (the scientists pinky swore that it totally had, like, nothing to do with malaria); during the Nuremberg trial, sucky Nazis attempted to use the Statesville experiment to defend their malarial infection experiments on… you know… not volunteers… at Dachau.

Positive results: Hearty support from the American public enabled the testing to continue for 29 years. The experiments were instrumental in pioneering modern malaria treatments.

Time Period: 1952

Problem: “Hey, does anyone understand cancer? I just… I don’t get it.” – Chester M. Southam, Sloan-Kettering Institute

Solution: “Okay, okay… I’m gonna go down to Ohio State Prison with a bunch of needles filled with live cancer cells, inject the cells into hundreds of unknowing inmates and then… see what happens, I guess?”

Results: “Nope. I still don’t get it…”

Time Period: 1955

Problem: Is America prepared to deal with biological warfare? The CIA does that hand-tilting “sorta” gesture that people do when they mean “no.”

Solution: U.S. boats off the coast of Tampa Bay, Florida, fire a chunky dose of whooping cough toward the city.

Negative results: Tampa suffers a massive whooping cough epidemic that infects 1,080 citizens, resulting in 12 deaths.

Positive results: The government’s worst fear – a “baker’s dozen” casualty scenario – proves unfounded

Time period: 1956-1957

Problem: Could terrorists attack the country using a swarm of mosquitoes infected with either yellow or Dengue fever?

Solution: Release millions of uninfected mosquitoes in Savannah, Georgia, and Avon Park, Florida, and monitor the insects’ impact and range.

Negative results: Once released, the “uninfected” mosquitoes naturally contracted all sorts of contagious horribleness, leading to outbreaks of typhoid, encephalitis and other miscellaneous fevers. As the diseases spread, Army workers disguised as public health officials tested and photographed suffering citizens. Scientists later admitted that the experiment was a “terrible idea.”

Positive results: Some of the Army guys were allowed to keep their victim cameras.

Time period: 1962

Problem: “Hey, does anyone understand cancer yet? Man, this is frustrating!” – Chester M. Southam, Sloan-Kettering Institute

Solution: “Okay, okay… I’m gonna go down to Brooklyn’s Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital with a bunch of needles filled with live cancer cells, inject the cells into 22 unknowing patients and then… see what happens, I guess?”

Positive result: Southam’s medical license was suspended for a year after the hospital tried to cover up the doctor’s experiment.

Negative result: Two years later, Southam was elected head of the National Cancer Society.

Friday: Matt retreats back to conventional prose when confronted with government-run chemical experiments and psychological torture

I don’t think it too spoiler-y to tell you that Scorsese’s atmosphere-drenched “Shutter Island,” set as it is in a fictional 1950s mental institution staffed and populated by more than a few WWII vets, features several conversations about Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners. I’m sure you’ve heard about these atrocities – high altitude endurance tests, malarial infection research, sterilization projects, poisoned bullet experiments, etc. If you haven’t, turn on the History channel for two hours and you’ll hear about all of it, plus the Spear of Destiny and a computer simulated hypothetical melee fight between Hitler and a velociraptor.

Japan’s less notorious Unit 731, a black ops Imperial Army unit that, from 1937 to 1945, carried out horrific chemical and biological tests on Chinese and Korean prisoners, can offer an equally horrifying research project, if that’s the kind of thing that floats your pickle. What I want to do, though, is take a whirlwind tour of the creepy, grotesque, weird or otherwise cringe-worthy human medical experimentation that has occurred right here on American asphalt.

Due to the graphic nature of some of the experiments mentioned, we are putting the rest of this puppy AFTER THE JUMP…

During the early 19th century, when American medicine was still a loosely regulated syringe-scattered ethical free-for-all, respected medical professionals subjected prisoners, orphans and slaves to all manner of ickiness. J. Marion Sims, for example, who’s known today as the father of gynecology, was known yesterday as the high prince of vaginal hack-and-slash experiments as performed on enslaved African women sans anesthesia. Many of the ladies, some of whom underwent more than two dozen surgical crotch scrambles, died of infection while Sims used cobbling tools to reconfigure their babies’ skull bones (Sims believed trismus, a disorder that prevents infants from properly opening their mouths, could be cured through skull rearrangement). And if you think disenfranchised girlie bits had it bad in the 1800s, wait until you hear about what happened to disenfranchised manly parts in the 1900s…

For 33 years, Dr. Leo Stanley, San Quentin Prison’s chief of surgery, went testicle crazy. Those unfortunate enough to find themselves castrated by Dr. Stanley’s Knives of Sweet Baby Jesus You’ve Got To Be F***ing Kidding had their extracted pride replaced by one of two (well, really two of four) things: the verile cojones of a goat, ram or boar, or the retired balls of an executed prisoner. See, Dr. Stanley thought that the criminal instinct nested in a man’s marble bag, and could be nullified if the marbles in question were replaced by those of a corpse. Dead people nards in live people sacks. He also thought livestock nuts could cure age-related impotence. (They can’t.)

The 1900s saw the continuation of the convict and kiddie medical experimentation trend, as viral and bacterial agents like cholera, plague, beriberi and syphilis were shot into vein after unwilling vein, often just so doctors could observe the full course of an infection in multiple patients in a controlled setting. And when purposely infecting folks began to fall out of vogue, doctors settled for simply not curing the already infected. Such was the basis of the Tuskegee experiment, a 30-year study of syphilis carried out between 1942 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service, who went to rural Alabama, singled out 400 destitute syphilitic African American men and pretended to treat them, all the while observing the unknowing subjects’ gradual physical and mental decline. Under the stoic gaze of government scientists, 128 men died of syphilis or related conditions, 40 women became infected via sexual transmission and 19 children were born with the disease. The secret study only ended because the press found out and had a month’s worth of field days.

Coming up on Wednesday and Friday: Deadly Radiation, CIA Acid Casualties, Nuremberg Defense Lawyers and “the Effect of Frigid Temperatures on Mental Disorders”

In the 2005 film “White Noise,” Keegan Connor Tracy’s anxiously stuttering character tells Michael Keaton’s character that Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) is dangerous… “like homemade Ouija boards and… and, and teenage séances on Halloween.” Of course, desperate to hear from his dead wife, the recent widower doesn’t listen, and his obsession with pressing is ear to the mortal coil finds him at the business end of some serious supernatural monkey business. In real life, the supposed spirit voices that force their way through the surface noise of amateur paranormal investigators’ off-brand microcassettes are as likely to corrupt your soul as the hidden Satanic messages that pop-averse evangelists Where’s Waldo out of reversed Beatles’ songs. Even so, if any of you are thinking about doing a little ethereal eavesdropping, maybe should start out small – say, with animals.

As far as I can gather from the half-hearted Internet research I did while watching a movie, animal EVP is just as common as human EVP, but nobody pays it much attention. Despite the frequency of dog and cat noises on their hissy tapes, spook tapers spend a majority of their time decoding the barely audible human voices in hopes of unlocking afterlife secrets. Why shove an earbud halfway into your brain just to listen to the static-laced meows of a fussy, discorporate calico? Still, I thought for sure I’d find a fringe paranormal knitting circle that only chased after puppy EVP or something, but no dice. All I located were some random bits of animal EVP within larger databases of human voice samples, and several EVP FAQ-page references to the commonality of animal sounds.

One website did mention that an Illinoisan EVP enthusiast, who was taping near the sight of the famous 1918 Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train crash, captured the horrific cries of dying circus animals. (I can neither corroborate the existence of this alleged recording, nor whether any animals even died in the crash.) Meanwhile, some folks claim that, in spirit form, animals can speak in human tongues. In her book “Phantom Felines and Other Ghostly Animals,” Gerina Dunwich explains that, while most animal ghosts ought to be approached with the same baby talk and kissy noises as their still-breathing kith, she has heard stories of “ghost animals speaking to the living in human voice – either audibly or telepathically.” If that’s the case, then half-garbled EVP of people saying “Hello,” or something… something… “Randy”… something, are just as likely to be messages from deceased house pets as they are the post-mortem orations of dearly departed neighbors.

As for all the Internet EVP nuts – you’d think that people so obsessed with the nature of the beyond would be more curious about the implications of animal ghost chatter; after all, if in fact, EVP is real-time magnetic field-enabled communication with former earthlings now residing in some nether-dimension (as many EVP fanatics believe), the notion that other living things likewise transform and relocate is pretty heavy, especially in terms of its broader implications regarding the spiritual identity of man. On the other hand, I also found some enthusiastically described EVP of trains. I guess if hopper cars transubstantiate, anything is fair game.

If there’s an educational takeaway from the story of David Berkowitz – New York’s notorious trigger happy killer who claimed to receive murderous orders from his neighbor’s Labrador retriever – it’s “don’t listen to talking animals.” Or maybe “only listen to talking animals if the animals are horses and they’re explaining that, for them, horse races are basically set up like the WWE, with good horse characters and evil horse characters, and if you help them write the scripts, you’ll know in advance who’s going to win each race.” I wasn’t always so cynical regarding this topic. As a child, I was fascinated when my parents told me about the European superstition that Christmas Eve (technically, 12 am Christmas morning) finds animals imbued with the ability to speak. In fact, if our cat had sidled up to me and said “Yo, Matty, kill me some folks, would ya? I love you!” I can’t guarantee that I wouldn’t have at least gone downstairs and selected a knife. Probably even the biggest knife. But not anymore.

Like many early European Christmas traditions, it’s difficult to trace the talking animal thing back to any definitive Christian origin (because it’s pagan as f***). According to Christian bloggers, the temporary gift of gab is god’s annual thanks to all animals because several animals were present for Jesus’ birth. I’m gonna be honest, god – kinda feels like you’re reachin’ there. What’s really crazy, though, is that, despite the legend’s seemingly holy origins, Europeans also believed that it was never good to listen to the speaking animals (probably because it’s pagan as f***). My favorite story re: talking animals – don’t listen to them! comes from the German Alps:

A farmer was so curious to hear what his two horses might say (probably he was hoping for the WWE thing) that he decided, against all rational thought, to listen in on their holiday jabberjawing. So, come Christmas Eve, he hid in the rafters of his barn and eagerly awaited the stroke of midnight, upon which one horse suddenly turned to the other. “We shall have hard work to do this week,” said the horse. “Yes. The farmer’s servant is heavy,” answered the other. “And the way to the churchyard is long and steep,” replied the first. The farmer was baffled by the conversation until, later that week, his servant died suddenly. The horses were then needed to carry the man to his grave.

There are other, more predictable tales in which mistreated animals use their speech to fatally trick abusive owners; there are even kids’ stories where house pets are all grins and giggles and psyched about Jesus. But that horse story… utterly chilling. The old Christian view was that it was god’s intention for the animals to share the gift amongst one another, but not with people – animals have strange and secret knowledge (bordering on pagan as f*** occult power) not intended for human ears. As in the horse story, to eavesdrop on their whisperings is to receive startling insight into the dark heart of a natural mysticism from which humans, in civilizing, became unknowingly disconnected.

All inevitable questions (Is the significance of the gift simply to offer lower beings the power of human [read: higher] language? If so, do non-domesticated animals – animals that don’t willingly cede to man’s dominion – really even give a care?) aside, the superstition is another interesting example of how, in the same way that the architecture of Rome was defined by the heathen network of pagan shrines that compose its foundations, Christian beliefs are pasted to a skeleton of solstice orgies and magic animals.

“I am a freak. I have hands and I have feet, and if you saw me you’d faint, you’d be petrified, mummified, turned into stone or a pillar of salt!”

Gef, the Talking Mongoose

When the muted scratching behind the farmhouse’s old wooden walls turned into strange hissing and humanoid gurgling, the Irving family began doubting their early theories of wild mice and scavenging rats. So it seemed reasonable and, like, totally OK when, in 1931, a swaggering, bushy-tailed mammal sashayed out of the darkness and introduced himself, in perfect English, as Gef, “an extra, extra clever mongoose.” Over the years, Gef entertained thirteen-year-old Voirrey (the only Irving who could actually see the creature), and her parents, James and Margaret, with tales of his exotic Indian upbringing, fantastical claims of supernatural powers and even scandalous neighborhood gossip, which he claimed to obtain through extensive eavesdropping and daring spy missions. Occasionally, Gef would get rowdy and toss objects around the Irving house, or perpetrate Kutcherian japes, like the time he convinced the family that he had been poisoned, but overall, the mongoose’s seven-year stay, as documented in a journal kept by James Irving, was a pleasant one.

I came across the story of Gef while researching last week’s poltergeist posts. It seems that parapsychologist and poltergeist enthusiast Nandor Fodor, hoping that he could use Gef as an example of a case in which a human agent created sounds and manipulated objects via inadvertent psychokinesis, visited the Irvings at their home on the Isle of Mann. After staying with the family for several weeks, and interviewing numerous locals, Fodor left with the distinct impression that Gef (who the parapsychologist didn’t see or hear during his investigation) was neither a poltergeist nor a deliberate hoax, but rather some wholly unidentifiable phenomenon or entity.

Fodor wasn’t the only Mulderesque truth-seeker to make a pilgrimage to the Irving’s allegedly mongoose-prowled home – in 1937, magazine editor Rex Lambert and his close friend (and infamous paranormal investigator) Richard Price set out on a Gef-hunting expedition that led them to plasticized Gef footprints and tooth marks, and a sample of alleged Gef hair. The evidence was analyzed by Reginald Pocock of the British Natural History Museum, who concluded that the hair was definitely that of a dog, while the paw prints and teeth marks, while unclassifiable, were not made by a mongoose, and appeared suspiciously canine. In the end, Lambert’s and Price’s supernatural lark resulted in a light-hearted co-authored book titled “The Haunting of Cashen’s Gap,” and a windfall of £7,600, which Lambert won in a slander law suit after London councilman Cecil Levita publically accused the mongoose-seeking journalist of being “off his head.”

In 1937, the Irving family sold their farm – and, with it, their mischievous lodger – to a man named Leslie Graham who, 9 years later, confirmed that he had, in fact, encountered Gef in the house… and promptly shot him to death. Graham’s description of his victim, however, did not jibe with Voirrey’s descriptions of Gef, so it’s possible that the farmer murdered a different magic talking animal.

Magic talking animals. Can you believe it? Come back Wednesday and Friday for additional chatty critter stories, including Christmas Eve pet confessions, the Son of Sam murders and animal EVP.

The Grrl Power theory of poltergeist phenomena basically states that adolescent girls are like psychokinetic pressure cookers. Puberty heaps on the hormones, while historically male-biased cultural norms encourage young women to repress their burgeoning sexuality. Teenage angst! Social pressures! Familial stress! In certain young women, the combination of these factors supposedly leads to involuntary Carrie-style outbursts that are suspiciously similar to activities traditionally labeled as poltergeist goings-on.

To be fair, the theory doesn’t apply exclusively to the fairer sex. Psychologist Nandor Fodor, who was fascinated by the notion that poltergeist activity could be the result of an unknowing human agent’s psychic temper tantrums, felt that anyone with an undue amount of repressed rage or sexual desire was a likely candidate for psychokinetic agenthood (though his most famous case, the 1938 Thornton Heath poltergeist, did involve a neurotic woman). It wasn’t until the 1960s, when North Carolina’s William Roll got into the action, that blame fell squarely on the smooth, freckled shoulders of womanhood. Roll, of course, admitted that male teenagers have the capacity for psychic upheaval, but that young women, due to the aforementioned social and cultural factors, combined with their sugar-and-spice genetics, are much more susceptible to what he dubbed Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (RSPK).

Remember Gauld and Cornell, the guys from Monday’s column who allegedly collated over 500 poltergeist reports and created a percentage-based list of case-to-case similarities? They weren’t fans of Roll or Fodor, and claimed that both parapsychologists’ methods and conclusions were spurious (this is interesting in light of Roll’s claim that he used all of 116 cases in crafting his claims about the prevalence of teenage females in poltergeist incidents). Unfortunately, neither researcher ever detailed a plausible alternative theory. Even today, those who reject Fodor’s and Roll’s talk of unbounded psychic energy argue that most poltergeist cases are caused by angry ghosts. In recent years, poltergeist research has moved beyond teenagers to look at RSPK (or similar phenomena) in adult schizophrenics, depressives, manics and psychotics.

Knee-jerk feminism would almost certainly accuse Roll of sexism, but I think there’s a bit more to his ideas. The man’s a liberal-leaning fringe psychologist conducting his research amidst the cultural revolution of the 1960s. If anything, Roll’s theory is a back-door indictment of the repressive ideals of the ‘50s packaged as a finger-wagging pseudo-scientific document of the chickens-coming-home-to-roost variety. Women are robbed of irrepressible conscious power that then manifests unconsciously and unpredictably. Really, every poltergeist theory centers on the empowerment of the societally disenfranchised, whether they be kids, women or the mentally ill (and, hey, ghosts are corporeally disenfranchised). More than that, if we accept that a majority of poltergeist cases do, in fact, center on members of at least one of the aforementioned groups, and that, in all likelihood, the reports are fabricated, or the phenomena is rigged, by said disenfranchised people, then, at the very least, the empowerment is real. The mere possibility of poltergeist activity, via hoax or RSPK, has led to discussions about society’s attitudes towards women and the mentally ill, and about the emotional needs of adolescents. So all of you sexually repressed neurotic chicks, and all of you disregarded crazy dudes – keep flipping tables and slamming doors. Become agents. Grab the world by the light fixtures, and make yourselves heard.

Way back in 1682, when men were men and poltergeists were still thought to be nothing more than ghostly, table-flipping Foley artists, Richard Chamberlain, the secretary of the colony of New Hampshire, was hanging out at a local watering hole when most of all hell broke loose. Utensils took to the air and flew at the patrons and staff. Bricks and rocks cut deadly arcs through the barroom. Hammers, spits and iron-crows rose in unassisted flight and assaulted the confused crowd of onlookers. When the chaos ended, Chamberlain immediately confronted the pub’s owners, George and Alice Walton, coining the phrase “WTF?” in the process.

16 years later, Chamberlain published “Lithobolia: or, the stone-throwing devil,” a journal-style pamphlet in which, describing himself as an “Ocular Witness of these Diabolick Inventions,” he recounted the Walton’s woeful tale of three tortuous months spent battling the formidable pitching arm of the tavern’s invisible assailant. To this day, “Lithobolia” remains one of the most detailed layman accounts of poltergeist activity. The conclusion it reaches: demons are to blame. Or, possibly, witches.

288 years later in Rosenheim, Bavaria, another detailed account of poltergeist activity was created – this time by an animistic (an approach centered on human-generated psychic energy rather than atmospheric spirit energy) parapsychologist and two German physicists. When office equipment at Sigmund Allen’s law firm began operating independently of the clerical staff, Allen called the power company, who responded with robust shrugs. When dozens of voiceless phone calls disturbed the office, Allen contacted the phone company, who also had no explanation. When the light fixtures started swinging, Allen called the police, who called in famous parapsychologist Hans Bender and two physicists, Doctors Karga and Zicha, from Germany’s prestigious Max Planck institute.

After taking hours of video footage and interviewing dozens of witnesses, the only conclusive causal link that anyone could find was a young secretary – Annemarie Schneider – who was consistently present whenever the strange phenomena occurred. Interviewing Schneider, the scientists learned that a recent romantic entanglement had left the 19-year-old emotionally traumatized. The doctors also felt that, even disregarding her boy troubles, the young woman seemed to demonstrate pronounced neuroses and other symptoms of psychological imbalance – like, the type of imbalance that might cause someone to, say, fake ghost attacks as a means of attracting attention. While Karga and Zicha conceded that the events defied rational explanation (though they never accused Schneider of perpetrating a hoax), neither concluded, as many subsequent amateur students of the Rosenheim case have, that the events were clearly paranormal.

Annemarie Schneider lost her job and the poltergeist activity immediately stopped. And that’s where Lithobolia author Richard Chamberlain would see Schneider hanged for witchcraft. Or where, today, you or I might conclude that it was all a hoax. But there’s still Hans Bender, who, thanks to the work 1930s psychologist Nandor Fodor, reached an entirely different conclusion. That’s right – Grrl power.

(continued Friday)

Internet paranormal enthusiasts love to cite the work of parapsychologists Alan Gauld and A.D. Cornell, who famously collated over a 170 years’ worth of reported poltergeist incidents into a comprehensive database organized by the specific qualitative symptoms of the phenomena. For example, based on Cornell and Gauld’s rubric, out of more than 500 studied poltergeist cases, 64% involved the movement of small objects, 58% were more active at night, 48% featured knocking or rapping (though only 2% featured beat-boxing), 36% involved the movement of large objects, etc. What good is this data to anyone? Well, it’s pretty helpful if you write for Weird Things and need to introduce the basics of poltergeist activity (and ladies – if you run into Agent Mulder at a bar, it couldn’t hurt to pull out the ol’ “12% of poltergeist incidents involved the opening and shutting of doors” line).

How do these trinket-tossing ghoul infestations differ from classic hauntings? Good question. In the past, the distinction between the two really just hinged upon the perceived mischievousness of the entity: ghosts were restless depressives who stamped around houses out of discomfort and anger; poltergeists were ethereal miscreants who joyfully roused sleepers and vandalized property to satisfy their voracious adolescent appetites for prankery. As (ahem) research progressed throughout the 20th century, however, the poltergeist phenomena began to look less and less like traditional spirit activity. In modern day parapsychology circles, the party line is this: reported hauntings are generally centered on a place or an object, and last for extended periods; poltergeists are usually linked to individual people (most commonly females under the age of 20) and stop abruptly after only a few months. According to Gauld and Cornell, 98% of reported hauntings are actually cases of poltergeist activity, and that’s a number you can trust because it’s math AND science!

Was I what? Winking?! No! Why would you even say that? You’re funny.

The fact that “poltergeist” is a German word (“polter” coming from “poltern” meaning “to make noise,” and “geist” meaning “spirit” or “ghost”) helps to hint at the phenomenon’s international prevalence – poltergeists have been reported throughout Europe, Asia and both North and South America (I guess Africa’s too busy dealing with witchcraft and AIDs to be bothered by a few inexplicably airborne black market TEC-9s). So what are the scientific, psychological and supernatural ramifications of these wild non-ghosts?

Check back Wednesday and Friday for answers that are guaranteed to include talk of psychokinesis, female sexuality, befuddled physicists and the word “lithobolia.” In short – everything you’ve ever wanted, plus lithobolia.

Even if Apple’s already-divisive iPad doesn’t herald in a new age of laptop computing, it certainly offers a giant leap forward in tablet technology. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Weird Things is paying tribute to the fantastic tablets of yesteryear, and the brave tableteers who sculpted them.

Today: The Bembine Tablet

If the all-powerful monster kid from that Twilight Zone episode (“It’s a Good Life”) decided to trap Dan Brown and Alan Moore in a sealed elevator, the Bembine Tablet is one of the few viable conversation topics on which both could probably agree to waste the precious, dwindling oxygen.

Brown would be entranced by the artifact’s namesake, Cardinal Bembo, a Catholic antiquarian who originally purchased the mysterious hieroglyph-spangled Egyptian relic from a Roman locksmith sometime after the city’s famous sacking. Brown would revel in the tablet’s subsequent crisscrossing of Italy, as monarchs and papal officers swapped it from Mantua to Rome to Savoy to Sardinia to Paris, France, before returning it to Turin, Italy, where it still resides.

I imagine the cryptology-obsessed author would also drool over the tablet’s history as an almost-was Egyptian Rosetta Stone, although he might change some key details about 17th century Hermeticist Athanasius Kircher, who, with all the neurotic bravado of a Tom Hanks character, attempted to decode the Bembine tablet and create a translation key for Egyptian hieroglyphics. See, Kircher’s translation was ultimately ruled a complete fabrication – the bronze and silver tablet’s apparent hieroglyph’s were actually just decorative pictures of peasants, kings and deities, including the god Isis, for whom the tablet was most likely created. It’s like if you tried to translate English from a Where’s Waldo illustration. (Even Kircher’s published decipherments of actual hieroglyphs have since proved utterly fallacious. In one famous instance, he translated what amounts to “Osiris says” as “The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis; the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis.”) I’m sure in Brown’s version, Kircher would be discredited by the Catholic Church after discovering that the Bembine tablet really did contain what a continent’s worth of occultists predicted – the language of Adam and Eve.

Here’s where Moore’s eyes would lose their opium glaze. European occultists had little anthropological interest in the tablet, and what linguistic interest they had came from their belief in a legendary grimoire called the Book of Thoth. The theory was that the tablet revealed a code for translating the book, which was written in some proto-civilized god tongue and then buried in the City of the Dead with the Egyptian Prince Neferkaptah. A person who possessed, and could translate, the document would have the ability to talk to animals, cast incomparably powerful spells and control nature itself.

Also, the book is locked in a gold box that’s locked in a silver box that’s locked in an ivory and ebony box that’s locked in a sycamore box that’s locked in a bronze box. All of those boxes are locked in an iron box. The keys to the boxes are spread out across Egypt, with some hidden in treacherous natural formations, others entrusted to earthbound spirits and still others under the watchful eyes of ferocious beasts. On top of all that, the book is cursed, such that its master’s power comes at a terrible price – the death of all those close to him. Oh, the wet dreams and acid trips Moore has surely had about the Book of Thoth.

Too bad the tablet turned out to be the equivalent of a thousand-pound Hummel.

Still, before they suffocated, both authors would carefully list and map out the cities to which the tablet traveled – after all, the pattern is bound to form some sort of Masonic icon or runic sigil. Add Stephen King and John Grisham into the mix and you’ve got a pulpy religious conspiracy court drama with post-modern overtones and a shocking third-act revelation that it was aliens.

Wait. That what was aliens?

“You know. Everything.” replies Stephen King.

Even if Apple’s already-divisive iPad doesn’t herald in a new age of laptop computing, it certainly offers a giant leap forward in tablet technology. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Weird Things is paying tribute to the fantastic tablets of yesteryear, and the brave tableteers who sculpted them. For example, Curse Tablets.

Today: Miracle Tablets

Li’l William Creech’s legs were paralyzed, and his father, Doctor Richard Creech, was at his wits’ end. Willy had been stretcher-bound for almost a year. The regular electrical treatments designed to zap function into his hopeless, rubbery gams had, time and again, proven utterly unsuccessful. If anything, the boy’s condition seemed to be worsening. That’s when Doctor Creech received a letter from his mother, imploring him to dose the child with Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People – miracle tablets designed to treat most forms of weakness, including heart palpitations, nervous headaches, partial paralysis and even the post-flu icks. Always the simpering momma’s boy, Dr. Creech immediately crammed his son full of Doc Williams’ superlative curative and, lo and behold, the boy was back on his feet after only four short months worth of daily pill binges.

This story, or at least a QVC-ready version of it, was printed on the label of the aforementioned Pink Pills, which were a popular patent medicine created in the late 18th century. The phrase “patent medicine” is a misnomer – chemical patents weren’t even available until 1925, and by then, most of the patent medicine vendors had either gone belly-up or specifically avoided applying for patents due to the complete ineffectiveness of their so-called “medication” to do anything more than add cirrhosis to a patient’s list of ailments. But let’s back up a bit.

The phrase “patent medicine” was coined after the revolutionary war, and was used to refer to an increasing number of independently produced and marketed elixirs, tonics, tinctures and tablets that, by the 1800s, had become a stand-by of American over-the-counter pharmaceutical treatments. Snake oil tonics are the go-to example of these fallacious panaceas, but all manner of patent medications existed, boasting a cornucopia of miraculous curative properties. Dr. Morse’s Indian Root Pills cleaned the blood. Mug-wump Specific cured (and prevented!) venereal disease. Kickapoo Indian Sagwa renovated the blood, stomach and liver. And Hamlin’s Wizard Oil? That basically cured everything short of bankruptcy and amputations.

With fanciful names, colorful artwork and snappy ad copy, patent medicines almost certainly did more to help evolve product branding strategies than to alleviate physical suffering. Many amateur druggists held giant travelling medicine shows – raucous carnivals replete with sideshow performers, live music and, of course, product sales pitches full of quicksilver patter and volunteered testimonials by pay-rolled shills. Other press-hungry shysters published cheapo pulp-and-spit farmers’ almanacs filled with full-page ads for their homemade nostrums. Hucksters’ pitches and packaging invoked all manner of mystical and pseudo-scientific pabulum, including Native American magic, soothing electromagnetism and healing radiation. Of course, the medicine itself was generally composed of things like cocaine, grain alcohol and various diuretics, then flavored with cayenne, camphor or pennyroyal.

In 1905, a sensationalistic Collier’s magazine article entitled, “Death’s Laboratory,” followed immediately by the 1906 instatement of the Food and Drug Act, which forced amateur pharmacologists to include ingredient lists on all product labels, effectively killed the patent medicine movement. While some patent medications (Vicks VapoRub, Luden’s Throat Drops, Doan’s Pills, etc.) survived into the modern age, their recipes and/or curative claims had to be grossly amended. Others (Coca Cola, Dr. Pepper, 7-Up) persisted by dropping their healing pretenses, removing their opiates and calling themselves soft drinks. Most, however, including Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People, didn’t live to help any more paralytic Creech kids out of bed.

Still, as long as the savvy American charlatan can wring a livelihood from a populace of vain and ignorant quick fix-hungry sponges, patent medicine will live on in the form of vitamin supplements, diet plans and bottled water. Dog Bless America!

Even if Apple’s already-divisive iPad doesn’t herald in a new age of laptop computing, it certainly offers a giant leap forward in tablet technology. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Weird Things is paying tribute to the fantastic tablets of yesteryear, and the brave tableteers who sculpted them.

Today: Curse Tablets

If you’re anything like me, the escape plan appended to your Ty Diggs assassination scheme involves traveling back to ancient Greece, and getting a job as Zeus’ animal-transformation/rape coordinator. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I just read this thing about cursed tablets – metal plates with etched binding spells designed to exact bloody revenge against, or coax games of footsy from, your fellow Greeks (Yes. Romans, too. Who are you?). All it takes is a thin sheet of lead (cheap and readily available), a gruesomely (or erotically) worded request to the appropriate god and, depending on the request, a small figurine of the spell’s intended target. Bada-boom! Curse tablet. Sure – the love spells can be tricky, and often require a lock of the intended’s hair followed by careful concealment of the entire schmear in said intended’s place of dwelling, but the other ones? (Especially the violent ones?) You just fold or roll the sucker up, maybe knock a nail through it (to ensure that the invoked magics are bound to the victim) and install it wherever it needs installing (most infernal gods prefer that tablet requests be buried in a sepulcher or tomb, thrown down a well or affixed, Luther-style, to a temple).

Now, folks with mystic inclinations and an affinity for light metalwork will, of course, render these tablets for themselves. That usually means love spells (which come in both “force sexual relations” and “encourage adorable affection”), but those are the more complicated ones, anyway. The mojo-carriers you want focus on are simple, cold-hearted vengeance curses, which were produced en masse by various tablet artisans. These generic vengeance tablets, complete with a blank space just itching to have a disreputable’s name etched into it, were mainly sold outside courtrooms. Greeks tried to do things democratically, but what’s democracy without a little third-party hoodoo laying its fat finger on the scales of Justice? Folks embroiled in court battles would purchase tablets begging the gods to screw with their legal opponents’ court performances, thereby, creating litigation foibles of “Liar, Liar” proportions.

And if ancient Greece isn’t really your thing – maybe you were thinking about one of the Roman Empire’s British providences, or perhaps even ancient Egypt – that’s fine, too. In fact, in the popular past-tense resort town of Aquae Sulis (now Bath, England), archaeologists have unearthed over 100 curse tablets, most of them damning the towel and clothing thieves who made a living off the untended bathing accoutrements of Aquae Sulis vacationers. And in 12th century Egypt, where they never really cottoned to all this tablet stuff, people used “execration texts” – spells etched into clay statues and pottery – to bring on all sorts of glorious misfortune. Just craft, etch, and bury or shatter. Execration complete!

Oh, and not all the “curse tablets” summoned actual curses. For example – you can work with a town to create “judicial prayers,” which are essentially curse tablets aimed at anonymous criminals who did the locals dirty. Or you could etch tablets designed to help the dead find peace in the afterlife. But if you had wanted to do that, you probably wouldn’t have subjected Ty Diggs to the sort of violent death that’s almost certain to turn him into a ghost so that now other ghosts have to hang out with him.

Cursed tablets. Think on it.

This week Weird Things’ Matt Finley explores the failed utopian societies of history. Monday, he traipsed through the memories of the Oneida sex community, Wednesday we delved into the most oxymoronic utopia ever conceived. Enjoy!

As Monday’s post was all about fringe spiritualists and Wednesday’s was dominated by fringe philosophers, you’ll be glad to hear that today you get a little of both. New Harmony, Indiana – even the most well-mannered smart-ass among you surely can’t help but ask, “What happened to Old Harmony?” (And even the most dapper pothead among you can’t help but snigger and give the well-mannered smart-ass a limp high-five.) The answer is “finicky Shakers and drunken abolitionists.” Harmony was established by the Harmonists, a sect of Lutheran separatists who, according to the Historic New Harmony website, “lived by combining the Swabian work ethic (‘Work, work, work! Save, save, save!’) with the Benedictine rule (‘Pray and work!’).” So… “Pray and work, work, work! Pray and save, save, save!” Constant excitement. The Harmonists had already established a colony in Harmonie, Pennsylvania, but, with an eye on expansion, purchased the much larger tract of land in Indiana.

Starting in 1814, they built an entire town. Visitors from nearby Shaker communities stayed with them. Their neighbors, a rowdy (or, at least, rowdy by Harmony standards) group of abolitionists looked at them. Then the Shakers started getting argumentative, and the abolitionists (who they viewed as drunken lollygaggers) began to harass them. Finally, in 1824, a comparable land opportunity opened up in Western Pennsylvania, and Harmony founder George Rapp sold Harmony to British utopian idealist Robert Owen. The Harmonist gang – work horses, save benches and prayer mills in tow – headed back to PA, and Owen went to work on New Harmony – a godless paradise for working class radicals.

New Harmony was founded on the basis that religion is nonsense, an individual’s will and actions are 100% environmentally defined (the “blame society” model) and labor ought always be conducted via the put-out system (individual skilled subcontractors putting out in the privacy of their own homes rather than uniting in a factory for mass whorish industrial orgies). Owen was so confident about the success of his communal, 800-person “New Moral World” that he shipped over progressive European educators and scientists to help ensure the commune’s success. United States currency was abandoned in favor of Harmony-minted “time money,” with each note worth a certain number of labor hours; necessities were assigned prices in the form of time increments, and sold at the “time store.” Luxury items and the notion of private property were also abolished, so that everyone would work for the good of the community, which would, in turn, ensure each individual’s personal well-being.

Well-mannered smart-ass – is that you laughing? You’re nothing if not perceptive. With no common goal or shared belief system beyond the perpetuation of an arbitrary cloistered society, Harmony quickly fell apart. The first problem was that, while many of the community’s residents were dedicated thinkers, skilled laborers and imported academics, plenty of others were wandering philosophers, transient misanthropes, and even petty criminals looking for a fresh start. The second problem was a complete and utter lack of leadership, or even mutually held ideological beliefs (this partially stemmed from Owen’s refusal to live full-time in the community, as he was simultaneously managing a similar failing communal experiment in Europe). In four years, Harmony collapsed under the weight of the very same ideals it was founded upon, as, without individual responsibility, residents were able to selfishly exploit community resources while blaming their capitalist upbringing.

I know, dapper pothead – no high-fives here. No high-fives here.

This week Weird Things’ Matt Finley explores the failed utopian societies of history. Monday, he traipsed through the memories of the Oneida sex community. Enjoy!

Jumbo shrimp. Military intelligence. Anarchist organization. Classic oxymorons, right? And the founders of the now-defunct Ferrer Colony in Stelton, New York, don’t disagree. In fact, they repeatedly stressed that the colony was not an anarchist organization, but rather an organization of anarchists (a semantic parsing that seems, at best, a lateral move, but if it makes the anarchists happy…). This all took place back in the first half of the 20th century, when Ferrer Schools – self-proclaimed Libertarian learning institutions named for Spain’s famous educator and anarchist, Francesc Ferrer i Guardia – were becoming more popular among working class idealists who wanted to ensure their children were educated from a secular, liberal and socio-culturally conscious point of view.

Formed as an experimental offshoot of Manhattan’s Ferrer School, the Ferrer Colony was intended to take anarchist education to its logical extreme through the establishment of a year-round settlement for students and their likeminded families. Now, I don’t want suggest that the philosophical Poobahs of fringe ideological movements aren’t always the most pragmatic people, but the Stelton project lacked a certain degree of planning forethought. The land was unfit for farming. The bathing facilities were a nearby stream. Early pupils lived in makeshift tents and shacks, from which they watched the dormitory’s sluggish construction. The first winter (1915/1916) found the school staff and five resident families living in a freezing shantytown (though the farmhouse kitchen and nearly-completed dorm had limited heating) where the only bright spots were communal Saturday night dinners, which often ended in joyful, raucous all-night celebrations.

Finally, come spring, the dorm was finished and more families began arriving.

You’re wondering where the anarchy comes in, aren’t you? I mean, organizationally speaking, doesn’t this bear all the markings of idealized socialism? Or a ranch for raising free-range hippies?

You’re not wrong. Many of the school’s founders identified with (and even wandered the outskirts of) the socialist movement, especially in light of the then-raging Russian revolution. In fact, life at the Ferrer Settlement often found itself at the whim of various social fads, including a variety of dubious dietetic trends that Stilton defenders cite when recounting the colony’s stellar health record during the 1918 flu epidemic. Still, to play anarchists’ advocate, the colony’s few written organizational tenets were defined only as a matter of legality, and there were no membership requirements or visitation regulations. The community’s only stated purpose was to provide an inclusive institution to “lead a group of people back to a natural, mutually self-sufficient relationship with one another.”

The colony, which offered an increasing number of adult classes and opportunities for artistic – especially musical – performance, grew throughout the late teens and early 1920s. As one would expect from anarchists, most of the adult couples were unmarried, and the biggest ongoing ideological conflicts revolved around the use of violence in furthering the anarchist agenda (or would that be “the agenda of anarchists”?). Folks were marginally bummed that an increasing number of colonists were converting over to full-on socialism, but, generally, everything was copacetic. While most sources agree that the colony only truly achieved its humanist goals during its earliest days, when residents were forced to rely on each other for survival, the collapse of the Ferrer Colony wasn’t born out of internal struggles, but rather out of outside conflict and the dependable ravages of time. The last straw came during WWII, when the government erected numerous barracks on the land surrounding Stilton, and rowdy soldiers allegedly began vandalizing the school and assaulting residents. The aging colonists left and the community dissolved, proving that, as oxymorons go, the communal individualism of anarchy is no match for the organized chaos of war.

Friday: New Harmony… because old harmony went to the drunks

Seeing as how you’re on the Internet, I can only imagine that much of your time is spent pissing and moaning about all manner of meaningless cultural apocrypha. Eventually, all the minor complaints gather and accresce into a swollen negativity cloud that represents everything that’s wrong with society. You’re not alone. Throughout history, numerous cantankerous idealists have blown gaskets over family values this and sexual politics that. And their friends all rolled their eyes and said, “I’d like to see you make a better society!” That shut most of them down, leaving their tired eyes to peer gloomily through half-empty bottles, quietly thinking, “so that’s what a stripper would look like if she were in my beer.” But those aren’t the folks I wanna talk about… I wanna discuss the ones that went straight out to an ideological field, stretched their legs and ran, shoulder first, into the nearest paradigm, tipping its entire ungainly mass into the philosophical mud. In other words, attempted utopias – the houses that crazy built.

I can’t think of a better place to start than Oneida, New York, where, in 1848, a man named John Humphrey Noyes founded a communalistic sex cult that would shape the very history of flatware. Noyes and his constituents were certain that, way back in the year 70, Jesus Christ had already returned, which somehow meant they could form a sin-free, heavenly clubhouse right here on Earth. Over the next 30 years, the Oneida community’s population would grow to 300 people, all of them subsisting off the money they earned selling homemade canned fruit, silk thread, animal traps and silverware – the raw material from which dreams are made.

I know, I know… get to the sex stuff.

So, Noyes was worried that relationships between men and women had been tainted by a modern society that pushed selfishness, unspoken social castes, bigotry and insularity. A functioning community, he reasoned, ought to function communally (“…and why am I wearing the watermelon on my feet?”). For starters, men and women were valued as equals, and encouraged (read: forced) to dress in simple shirts and trousers. Everyone was married to everyone else, and they were enthusiastically encouraged to discard any notions of monogamy and romance in exchange for community-fostering spiritual oneness (i.e. slutting around). It was not, however, the sweaty, unfettered Kubrickian orgy that you’re currently picturing… but here’s a little more sentence so you can enjoy one more fleeting moment of boundlessly vivid perversity.

The Oneidans developed a sexual hierarchy – referred to as “ascending fellowship” – based around the arbitrarily assessed spiritual and moral purity of the individual (the group even held regular meetings during which members were encouraged to individually harp on other members’ moral transgressions, spiritual shortcomings and, uh, annoying tendencies toward verbal pauses). Older folk were deemed purer than younger folk and men were deemed purer than women. So, how does one level up, so to speak? By sleeping with someone purer than themselves (the purer, the better). If you’re playing at home, that means the most impure folks were young women and the purest were older men. I know… nutty, but by cult standards, predictable. But wait… in 1869, Noyse introduced Stripiculture, a good old fashioned eugenics scheme that found baby-crazy Oneidans going before an evaluation panel that assessed their spiritual and moral Blue Book value and then assigned them an optimal mate. The resulting offspring were taken away from their assigned biological parents and whisked off to the newly constructed Children’s Wing, where kids were communally raised by chosen Oneidan nurse maids.

Man… can you believe that this perfect society unraveled?

In the end, no one could agree on the minimum age at which the Oneidan children should be sexually inducted into the order (Do I hear 14? Going once…). Eventually, Noyse fled to Canada in the wake of statutory rape charges, and his atheist son – the heir apparent – abandoned the commune, exchanging rape victimhood for worm foodom. Stripiculture was halted, the pubescent sexual rituals stopped and women said “kill whitey” to their mandatory dungarees. The only thing that never ended? The production of Oneida flatware, which can still be purchased today. So next time you’re out a restaurant, and someone dares you to start your own ideal society, look down at your sex fork or your sex spoon and just keep on with the idle, actionless bitching.

Wednesday: Ferrer – colonized anarchy

With a name like Jenny Greenteeth, it’s not surprising that she’s a bit cranky. “You’re overreacting,” her parents said, “you’ll just end up changing it when you get married.”

Green skin. Mangy, tattered hair. Crazy eyes. Sharp teeth clogged with duckweed. Hobbies: snatching children off riverbanks; drowning snatched children; sand art.

Maybe she could talk Florida’s Skunk Ape into some sort of Green Card marriage, but otherwise…

You get the picture. Jenny Greenteeth is one of those oh-so-frequent folkloric inventions conjured up to save children from drowning, all the while saving parents from actual parenting. Fittingly, the name “Jenny Greenteeth” is also used colloquially to refer to duckweed, which can completely cover a pond’s surface, giving the illusion of solid, mossy earth. (Greenteeth is also accused of purloining wandering senior citizens. Given Britain’s spotty eldercare history, one can only assume that this aspect of Jenny’s legacy justified the “not neglecting… protecting” mentality that found England unveiling the first-ever cure for dementia – a kitchen chair in a locked closet.) While Jenny is said to haunt most of Britain’s ponds, rivers and lakes, she does have a cousin, Peg Powler, whose soul charge is the River Tees, and whose dossier – from appearance to skills to special commendations awarded – is identical to Jenny’s.

As if Britain’s waterways weren’t packed full enough with malicious murder-happy ghouls, Jenny and Peg have roommates – a pack of slimy cephalopoid gremlins knows as Grindylows. “So, what do the Grindylows do?” Well, pretty much the same thing as Jenny and Peg – assault and drown careless children. “So… why does Britain need both? Aren’t they kind of bogarting all the water monsters? No wonder America just has a metric buttload of smelly dino-serpents.” Yeah, I know. And the stupid Loveland Frog… what the hell is up him? Still, a lot of British folklore experts have suggested that the Grindylows are the real mythic Scared Straight anti-drowning constituents, while Jenny Greenteeth and Peg Powler actually represent lingering cultural guilt at the giant island’s human sacrifice-happy pagan past. Greenteeth and Powler, then, are ghosts of women come to seek vengeance on the offspring of the architects of a modern society built from hair and skin and blood and bones.

Granted, none of this really sounds like the Storm Hag’s M.O. – she thinks big, has a flair for the theatrical and tends towards full-on disaster rather than individual tragedy. What I conveniently didn’t mention in Monday’s post is that some versions of the Storm Hag legend refer to Lake Erie’s beastly biddy as none other than Jenny Greenteeth. Same name, new flavor. It’s understandable why this legend, originating from a British shipwreck, is associated with one of Britain’s most ubiquitous water spirits, but what about the Great Lakes suggests the presence of forces outside the eco- and meteorological?

Friday: The Great Lakes Triangle

Muffled by pockets of mist and lost to the mechanical thrum of ships’ burnished vasculatures, the haunting lullaby of the Storm Hag dresses the darkling air:

“Come into the water, love,

Dance beneath the waves,
Where dwell the bones of sailor-lads

Inside my saffron cave.”

In 1782, an owler boat (“owlers” being a British term referring specifically to sheep or wool smugglers, but applicable to contraband carriers of any kind) making its way across Lake Erie stood its ground against a sudden violent squall. As the small craft pitched in the roiling waters beneath lightening-torn skies, the crew desperately maneuvered the boat toward the Presque Isle, a calm inlet carved into the Pennsylvania side of the lake. Miraculously, they broke from the storm, glided into the inlet and, for a moment, lulled in the black calm, the exhausted crew sighing and smiling and mopping sweat and freshwater from their cheeks and brows. Minutes later, a horrid crone – gnarled and twisted, with wild yellow eyes, rotted teeth and jaundiced, skeletal limbs – burst from the dark surface, spewing lightning and wind, her long arms stirring the water and air into a furious maelstrom that toppled the boat and drowned its crew and plunged everything – everyone – down into the crushing, algid silence of the lake.

Since that night, the unassuming waters of the Presque Isle have been whispered to harbor the maleficent Storm Hag. As swathed in superstition as maritime culture is, it’s unsurprising that Erie’s ship-swallowing reputation has produced legends of a witchy storm elemental with an ookey body and unstable temperament. After all, nautical legends seem intent on taking the untamable power of the sea and transferring it into some external, third-party threat, such that the vast waters remain a sailor’s companion, while its twisted, jealous tenants commit malicious acts in its name. And Erie’s waters have a history of malicious acts. Though it’s the smallest of the five great lakes, Erie is known for freak storms, harsh, unpredictable weather and a discomforting number of presumed shipwrecks – presumed, in this case, because the vessels in question simply vanish. The most famous among these – The Marquette & Bessemer No. 2, which disappeared in 1909, supposedly continues to troll the lake’s waters, perhaps seeking vengeance against the murderous Storm Hag what devoured her, bow to stern.

There it is – a simple legend based on the violent history of an unpredictable natural landmark. But let’s go back to that British ship, for while its anonymous contraband was lost to the cold hands of the hag, the tale of its demise led to one more posthumous act of smuggling, this time in the form of a British folktale. As one of the world’s largest shipping powers, Britain was no stranger to fantastical stories of supernatural nautical villainy, including Jenny Greenteeth and a whole host of other storm-stirring, aquatic miscreants; in fact, the Storm Hag was less created than imported.

Wednesday: Jenny Greenteeth, Peg Powler and Grindylows

It’s Friday. I don’t want harsh your mellow with another 450-word rant about a patriarchal society’s insidious attempts at manipulating women through fear-mongering Internet hoaxes. After all, the male ideologues, who have, for centuries, marshaled socio-cultural might through the systematic suppression of independent womanhood, did so out of fear. “Fear of what?” you ask. Menstruation. And that fear has led to some wide-spread beliefs that are way nuttier than any malicious hoax email that a fear-bullied woman might buy. I’ll give the ancients a pass because, while they did think that the gaze of a menstruating woman could blunt steel and kill a swarm of bees, they also thought that tired roosters yielded better meat. No, in some areas, these baseless folk beliefs persisted long into the 20th century, and a majority of them involve food production.

Jam making, for example, is a big, head-shaking uh-uh for menstruating women because, of course, the jam won’t set. Canning fruits or vegetables for future jams or jellies? Also out of the question. The hands of a menstruating woman are as those of Bizarro Midas, and the canned food will spoil. Winery tours are a no-go – one brisk pass by the storage vats and all that sweet, delicious vino turns acerbic vinegar. In fact, menstruating women can’t even touch fruit trees, lest the plants’ juicy, sun-plumped delights of nature shrivel and rot right there on the branch. Butter churning’s a no. Mayonnaise rendering is a no. And that ham that demands hook-hung curing? Better leave it to the chimney sweep or the cooper’s son. Alas, thy blood-tainted hands will render it rancid.

If all of that wasn’t insane enough, menstruating women were prohibited from a number of other activities. A visit to the dentist to fill that nagging cavity would have to be postponed, as fillings won’t stay put (no word on whether this is a result of the horse meat in the adhesive going bad). Thumbs down to hair washing – even the most vivacious curls will revert to dull, natty tangles. No screwing or swimming, and definitely no sex in the pool. Also, the protracted, beer-addled hunting expedition that’s every menstruating woman’s dream? Not doable. The scent of human period blood somehow frightens deer.

Ladies – I understand that these myths are offensive. They can make you feel ashamed, ugly or cursed, like a werewolf or Frankenstein monster that everyone fears and avoids, and even other werewolves and Frankenstein monsters won’t talk to it because they don’t want their hams to spoil, but I would really recommend embracing these fallacies. In fact, I’d consider making up some new ones. Women in the food preparation industry – you’re covered. Doctors? Maybe if a menstruating woman takes someone’s blood pressure, that person’s blood ages 13 years. Teachers? Maybe information received from a menstruating woman collects and hardens into a tumorous growth inside the brain. Lawyers? Maybe a class-action suit litigated by a menstruating woman results in a large settlement, but then all the checks bounce. Seriously. Females would get three to five holidays per month. Then, women could all move into a giant dorm room together, just long enough to synchronize their periods, and then use those three to five days to meet up and make plans to topple the ruling sexist paradigm. Also, maybe trade recipes. I bet someone out there has an inherited family banana bread recipe that’s off the f***ing chain.

In June of 2000, John Robinson, a 56-year-old Midwestern man, was found to have murdered five women, several of whom he had met online using his classy alter-ego, “Slavemaster.” Robinson was promptly tried, convicted and sentenced to death. While Robinson sat in custody, something strange began happening – women all over the United States received frightening email forwards from friends and relatives and co-workers: “If a guy by the name of ‘Slavemaster’ contacts you do not answer. He has killed 56 women that he has talked to on the internet.” Out of respect for the fatally duped victims, I don’t want to harp too much on the fact that “Slavemaster” doesn’t exactly have the ring of a full-proof panty-dropper, like, say, the old telephone call to god re: AWOL angel. Even self-hating vicarious CSA nostalgics tend to go for something a bit subtler. Plus, by the time this warning was being haplessly fired into inboxes, Robinson was both sans chat room access and dozens of victims short of the warning’s claim. It’s a perfect example of the role that gross hyperbole plays in turning real tragedy into panic-fueled Internet hoax.

Things get more interesting still: Because the real “Slavemaster” is in jail, and because people on the Internet are apparently only stupid when they’re talking about movies, the original “Slavemaster” email began to change and recirculate, like some evolving viral strain matched in heated reconfigurative battle with human immunity and pharmaceuticals. The fictional bogeyman’s screenname was altered multiple times. By 2006, the emails included a note saying that the email was simply reiterating a warning put out by all the major ISPs, and by 2007, the emails included the killer’s MySpace page address. As Internet savvy increased and BS detectors were recalibrated to higher sensitivities, the hoax – 56 murders, warn every woman you know – followed in suit.

Here is a list, lovingly compiled by the consummate workhorses over at Snopes.com, of just a few of the monikers that appeared in nearly identical warning emails sent out between 2002 and 2007: monkeyman935, jokerkid613, imahustlababay, ratbonesblakstar, rooster and, of course, ooosparklesooo88. Note that many of these screennames are clearly adapted to mind-bully a younger generation of females who have been warned repeatedly (with some limited precedent) that the Internet’s population is limited to their friends from school and 1 billion crafty pedophiles.

Urban legends used to be fantastical, to-the-point horror stories that gruesomely underlined some moral imperative – pseudo-scared straight tactics that attempted to use fear as a blunt tool for behavior modification among indiscriminate groups of fascinated youngsters; these emails are repeatedly designed, updated and honed to wring the maximum amount of unwarranted anxiety from women. That’s fear as a weapon, wielded to seize emotional power over a targeted, unknowing group.

And ladies – stop meeting up with people who have screennames like “Slavemaster.” (Also avoid “Slave1Master,” unless you’re into bounty hunter cosplay and carbonite bondage.)

In contemporary times, if someone asked you to design a gargoyle (or a grotesque), you would sculpt the most messed up thing you could think of – guts for a face, five butts and everything else lost to uncertainty beneath an ocean of batwings and giant gorilla nipples. Anyone would. What started as an honest-to-God evangelistic effort by the Church quickly turned into a demented fever dream as artists strayed from tradition and began taking more and more liberties with their creations. Soon, the modern notion of the grotesque – winged goblins with beaks and protruding tongues – became the standard in effective church façade Feng Shui. In earlier days, though, most gargoyles and grotesques were deliberately crafted to reach the illiterate Pagan audiences, and had traceable origins outside of a depressed artist’s absinthe-soggy imagination.

If pop culture has taught us anything, it’s that when the pagans weren’t wearing their druid Snuggies and making giant moon phones out of stacked rocks, they were running around totally naked in ritual tribute to weird animal gods that demanded nude exaltations in exchange for a plentiful annual snack time. The Catholics, who famously tapped the Pagan’s moon phone, knew about these rituals and specifically designed early gargoyles to resemble anthropomorphic animal figures from the Pagan tradition such that, at least from the outside, Catholicism would look as comfy and familiar as a Solstice tree orgy.

Many of these representations served the dual Noid-like purpose I spoke of in Wednesday’s post. For example – a man-serpent gargoyle represented evil and the sin of envy… but it also stood for the hope of eternal life, as many people believed that snakes’ skin-shedding meant that they were immortal. Goat-people gargoyles could be viewed as heinous representations of lust and Satan… but also somehow as Jesus. I guess they both have beards? No, according to Wikipedia’s gargoyle manual it’s because goats can “climb steep slopes and find edible food” – just like Jesus did in that part of the bible where he and Mary Magdalene get stranded on K6 after carelessly deciding to leave base camp during a storm. A dude-wolf stood for the sin of greed… but also for the Church’s protective pack mentality and the supposed willingness of priests to stand up for common folk.

At the same time, some gargoyles represented a singular notion of either unadulterated good or pure, icky evil. Eagle-people, for instance, called to mind an eagle’s ability to slay dragons and then renew its strength by staring at the sun (as seen in crystalline HD on BBC’s “Planet Earth”), while monkey-humans stood for human intelligence gone haywire, and the sin of sloth (man-sloths stood for peevishness).

In retrospect, it seems odd to imagine that the Catholics were able to successfully indoctrinate so many non-believers simply by co-opting their religious iconography and tacking it onto an already-defined – not to mention competing – theological system. But, then again, put SpongeBob on a toothbrush and a kid will get excited about brushing his teeth.

Gargoyles, yes… but first a personal anecdote of boyhood tribulation: Any child of the ‘80s will vividly remember the heinous exploits of the villainous Noid as portrayed in Domino’s Pizza advertisements. “Avoid the Noid!” Domino’s told us. “Avoid him – or suffer.” And I listened. I’m sure I had the precautionary mantra sounding in my head the day my father and I made the trip to a local Domino’s restaurant to pick up some pizza. I was hungry, but content. Noid-wary, but innocent. As my father and I approached the windowed storefront, however, I was overtaken by a feeling of near-Lovecraftian dread – The Noid (or some giant, waving facsimile) was in the restaurant! I promptly wrapped my body around a telephone pole and begged my dad to go in without me. Must avoid Noid. My father agreed. A wave of terror-bleached calm washed over me, and for a single moment, as my dad disappeared into the Noid-haunted realm beyond the restaurant’s glass door, I was at peace. And then The Noid came out of the restaurant and tried to entertain me. They say you haven’t really known fear until you’ve crapped tears.

That day, I knew fear.

Can y’all see where I’m going with this? Domino’s created the Noid as an enemy, but then used him interchangeably as a mascot. Avoid the Noid – eat at Domino’s… where the Noid lives. The Catholic Church used gargoyles in much the same way. Around the year 600, Europe was full of pagan cults. If the church was going to successfully convert all the free-roaming bands of Earth-worshipping pantheists they were going to need something more powerful than rhetoric – especially given that a staggering percentage of the population was illiterate. What better reminder of the wages of sin and the power of evil than actual three-dimensional renderings of horrific demons, sculpted in granite and set-up to lean threateningly over local avenues and squares? These creatures were the Noids of the early church – blatant reminders of the hellish torments that exist literally right outside the protective embrace of Christianity. When supplemented with oral folktales, like that of Gargouille, the dragon mounted to the church wall specifically to taunt all the moon-saluting pagans with the Christian god’s ultimate power over even the strongest natural foes, gargoyles represented a compelling argument for conversion to Catholicism.

On the other hand, the looming monsters clinging to cathedral walls offered church goers a sense of security by portraying the physical religious space as something of a fortress, protected from the exterior wages of sin by an army of unearthly sentinels (or perhaps, like in the tale of Gargouille, the mounted corpses of the churches enemies, boastingly displayed as a testament to the raw power of the holy spirit). The church was meant to appear as a well-protected safe haven built outside the sinful influence of the chaotic external world. As such, gargoyles acted almost as mascots for the specific brand of spiritual succor offered by the Catholic Church. In other words, folks were directed first to avoid these leering, winged Noids by accepting Jesus into their lives, but in doing so, were required to flock to a building that’s façade was teeming with demons – demons that stood for guaranteed protection against the very things that gnash and claw in the black corners of a dark, sinful world. And ruin pizzas.

Friday: A look at the specific monsters represented by gargoyles

“Hey hey, Weird Thingers!”… is what I would scream out at mailboxes if I were an 86-year-old man with Alzheimer’s. “Hello, Weird Thingers” is what I will scream at all of you. I’m here with a quick update typed live and delivered still twitching from my holiday visit to Columbus, Mississippi – birthplace of Memorial Day, Tennessee Williams and my newly acquired knowledge of “cake doctoring,” a process by which boxed cake mix is pimped out using sour cream and pudding to create from-scratch-tastin’ cakes using half the effort and twice the fat. But I wanna talk about Columbus’ own 3-Legged Lady Road.

The time the Southerners save punking visitors into believing that their delectable, snarf-ready cake is homemade? Apparently, they don’t spend it on their urban legends. If they did, the anonymous stretch of road that hosts the malicious spirit of a tri-gammed belle would probably have a more original name. As it stands, 3-Legged Lady Road (conveniently, no one knows for certain which road bears this less-than-subtle alias) is the ominous title given to a small stretch of street beginning outside an unspecified church and ending on the far side of an unnamed bridge (presumably one of the many small area conduits that span the sparkling Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway). According to the story, upon driving past the church, the sinister specter of a (seemingly random) 3-legged woman begins charging alongside your car, punching the windows and throwing herself against the side panels. If the ghost beats you across the bridge – you die. If you beat the ghost – I dunno. You survive and continue on to Huddle House.

Grab your Weird Things ghost story checklists, kiddos:

The church: old structures and areas that boast even a light dusting of religious background – churches, chapels, graveyards, nudie chapels – are practically assigned marauding spirits the moment they enter the historic registry. Plus, given that the culturally ingrained religious fervor of the South ensures that churches are so prevalent as to have been given the nickname “Mississippi Bus Stops” (2 minutes ago. By me.), the specifically sacrosanct nature of the landmark actually serves to make the location of the haunted road more elusive and mysterious.

The bridge: Bridges are classic “between places” frequently used in fiction and folk tales to represent areas in which the already-uncertain border between the land of the living and the land of the dead becomes even more fluid. (It also doesn’t hurt that incidents of wide-eyed innocents tumbling off bridges in runaway automobiles or burlap sacks hurled by wild-eyed killers represent go-to back story for the lazy man’s campfire tale.)

The race: Washington Irving wrote “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” famous for its hoof-clopping ghoul-initiated pursuit, in the early eighteen-teens, and he himself cribbed the legend from earlier Germanic folktales. The idea of a life-or-death man vs. ghost physical speed contest is both well-aged and, thanks to Irving, iconically American. The horseman’s arbitrary haunt boundary is even portrayed as a covered bridge (hence the “classic” in “classic ‘between places’”).

Sure, the third leg is an interesting wrinkle, but given that the tale hinges on an undead crone’s ability to out-pace a car, it seems almost too obvious. Really, after understanding its components, I can’t help but feel like the story of 3-Legged Lady Road is just another doctored cake – an illusion of from-scratch homemade goodness conjured up out of cheap, pre-made ingredients.

This week, you will be visited by three holiday-themed urban legends. Unless you don’t have an RSS feed set up. In that case, you’ll have to come to them. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday – a Very Weird Things Xmas.

Today: But What Does the Bed Represent? – The Allegorical Baby Death That Stole Christmas Back

If I go over to someone’s house for a Christening party, and they tell me I can just throw my coat on a bed, would I think to check that bed for the guest of honor? The bad news is that, in today’s story, which first began circulating en masse via chain emails during the early ‘00s, the hypothetical partygoers do not. The good news is that no baby has ever died because its parents 1.) Randomly plopped it, unattended, on a bed before hosting its Christening party; 2.) Started directing guests to just launch their crap onto the bed (i.e., the only piece of furniture in the house with a living human baby/party honoree on it); and 3) hosted a soiree full of spaced-out machine people with no peripheral vision who enter a house, doff their jackets and initiate some kind of Ctrl+Throw Coat commands without at least glancing at their target to calculate outerwear trajectory.

Plot-wise, you get the picture – a baby accidentally suffocates at its Christening party after its parents get so caught up in making sure the appetizer display is symmetrical that… well, you know. Dead baby. Unlike Monday’s tale of a dad’s misadventures in asphyxiation, this story isn’t necessarily presented as an actual tragedy that tore a real family apart, but rather as a symbolic tragedy that’s actually tearing the country apart. See, the christening party is Christmas. The baby? It’s Jesus! And the coats are all of the lights and booze and gifts (in this instance, the coats are only metaphorical for those people who didn’t buy or receive a coat for Christmas) that America uses to suffocate the baby Jesus on what’s meant to be a celebration of his birth. I know! Christ – how badly are you wishing that it was really just about some stupid moron’s dead idiot baby?

(By the way – I’m not just yanking that interpretation out of my brain’s butt like I do with everything else – an explanation of the story’s meaning is appended to many versions of the email; I guess it’s a necessary evil, like how in Act V of the Crucible, all the characters break the fourth wall and act out a spirited gang fisting of Joseph McCarthy. Oh wait… that doesn’t happen.)

Yes, I repeatedly bemoan these facile polemics that employ blatant scare tactics and brutal imagery to sear an otherwise half-cocked notion of moral sentimentality onto our greedy, capitalist brains, but seriously – this one doesn’t even really work. It sucks as an evangelizing Platonic allegory because it doesn’t offer anything that would ever cause you to relate yourself to the parents or the guests (unless you’re actually a completely oblivious imbecile, in which case you probably misread it as an advertisement for coat racks). It sucks as an urban legend because the scenario isn’t wacky or gruesome enough to warrant re-telling alongside the likes of Chick Who had Baby Spiders Hatching Out of Her Face or Chick Who “Fell” on a Hot Dog. And, even with the spelled-out explanation, it sucks as a Christmas email because it’s about a newborn baby dying. So… UGH!

Friday: Less ranting

This week, you will be visited by three holiday-themed urban legends. Unless you don’t have an RSS feed set up. In that case, you’ll have to come to them. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday – a Very Weird Things Xmas.

Today: Daddy’s Christmas Oops

One over-excited father, one rented Santa suit and one deceptively narrow chimney. We all know where this one’s going. The story is so classic and simple, it’s practically the peanut butter and jelly sandwich of Christmas urban legends. Maybe the family gathers around a burning Yule log and suddenly notices an odd, but deliciously meaty, burning smell. Or maybe the odor only arrives after the New Year, and isn’t meaty or burny, but just sort of pervasively rank. However you want to play it, the coup de grâce is, of course, the discovery of the father’s body – burnt or rotted out, asphyxiated or broken-necked – lodged firmly in the ash-dark guts of the flue. “But he was supposed to be on a business trip!” shrieks the wailing widow. A nosy on-looker turns to her overweight friend and whispers, “it’s just like in ‘Gremlins.’” (The good news is, unlike the haunted house hangings, there’s no truth to this one. Yes, over the years, some unlucky revelers in St. Nick garb have managed to Winnie the Pooh themselves into narrow fireplace vents, but those folks were ultimately rescued by bemused Emergency officials.)

Still, there’s a strange cultural impulse to exploit whatever darkness can be forcibly wrung from the well-intentioned. I mean, really – it’s Christmas. But when folks aren’t bitching about all the different ways it was raped by capitalism, or pointing out its indirectly involvement in “Jingle All the Way, “ they’re dreaming up seasonal horror stories that hinge on the joyful heart of the holiday coming back around to bite someone in the ass. This story’s particularly unforgiving in that it not only subverts yuletide intangibles, like generosity and togetherness, into the unraveling threads of a family’s undoing, but also incorporates Santa – a physical representation of holiday cheer – as the linchpin of tragedy.

Is it meant as a subtle jab at the head-scratching physics of the bizarre holiday mascot’s yearly spree? Is it trying to deliver another tired true-meaning-of-Christmas polemic – if the chimney-lodged father focused on the spirit of the day rather than its garish trappings his children would still have a dad? Or is it a viral PSA sent directly from the man himself – a finger-wagging “HO HO HO! Leave it the professionals! (no, seriously, I’m a magic elf. If you try this at home, you WILL die.)” As urban legends go, the story is refreshingly non-didactic. At the very least, it’s a beautifully simple foil to America’s smile-straining attempts at confabulating Norman Rockwell reality out of regurgitated carols and ingenuous, brandy-spiked Dickensian rejoinders.

Spine-tingling action! Tear-jerking romance! Head-scratching pseudo-science! It’s the Weird Things Lake and River Monster Round-up – an occasional roll call of aquatic serpents that gives you, the reader, three lake monsters in three days. That’s almost two a day! Monday? Lake monster fever! Tuesday? Lake monsters that Twitters!.

Today: “Messie” – The Lake Murray Monster

In a cautionary letter penned to the South Carolina Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, retired U.S. Army General Marvin Corder supposedly wrote, “[Lake Murray’s] home to something far more sinister than a big fish.” The letter goes onto describe a 40- to 60-foot-long snake-eel creature that Corder and his son encountered while fishing. What’s so sinister about it? It’s unclear whether Corder ever explained. Probably the way it was swimming – real evil-like. What I can tell you is that reports of some kind of serpentine beastie have been coming out of the Lake Murray area since 1933.

1933. Why does that year sound so familiar? Well, aside from King Kong, Hitler and the invention of the chocolate chip cookie, 1933 boasted the first globally reported sightings of the Loch Ness Monster. I’m not suggesting that the good people of South Carolina scammed up visions of an imaginary creature in order to hoodwink the national media and swing the abomination-of-nature coverage back to the West end of the Atlantic. Just, you know, you’re hearing about a lake monster… you’ve got a big lake in your backyard… maybe sometimes there’s spooky mist on the lake so it looks all creepy crawly and full of dinosaurs… I’m just sayin’ is all.

Regardless, after decades of everyone’s brother’s cousin swearing up and down that they’d seen violent, uncanny wakes cleaving Lake Murray’s waters, or even witnessed the monster’s plesiosaurian head erupting forth from the rippling darkness, the aforementioned Fish, Wildlife and Parks department opened a file on “Messie.” According to LakeMurrayMonster.com (a slap-dash affair through which someone called EZPopStar sells Messie light switch plates for $6.99 a pop), the wildlife official in charge of filling out lake monster paperwork (and, presumably, filing the oddly ominous letters from local military vets) is a biologist named Lance Harper. Harper concedes that, at 41 miles long and 380 feet deep, the lake could easily harbor a massive aquatic beast. He also mentions finding giant, inexplicable holes in the sunken nets he uses to monitor marine life.

As time wears on, and the Loch Ness Monster, Messie’s veritable birthday buddy, proves increasingly elusive, sightings of the Lake Murray Monster persist. Oh, and also UFO sightings over the Lake Murray Dam. And there are sporadic Bigfoot encounters in the nearby woods. What I’m asking is: Is the sinister lake monster’s arced neck acting as some dread antenna, broadcasting coded, cryptid-seeking homing signals across the forests of Appalachia and out past the boundaries of our solar system? Or had the Lake Murray community grown so accustomed to enjoying the pop cultural caché of housing a legend, that it wasn’t long before mysterious visions started piling up and otherworldly intruders went all-terrain? It’s impossible to know. Both options seem equally likely.

I’m just kidding. That first thing is totally insane. What are you thinking?

Go get something to eat.

Spine-tingling action! Tear-jerking romance! Head-scratching pseudo-science! It’s the Weird Things Lake and River Monster Round-up – an occasional roll call of aquatic serpents that gives you, the reader, three lake monsters in three days. That’s almost two a day!

Today: “Normie” – The Lake Norman Monster

I just started following the Lake Norman Monster’s Twitter feed (LKNmonster) and I gotta say – I’m a little skeptical. “Happy Thanksgiving from the Lake Norman Monster”? Really? If I’d wanted to follow the Lake Monster’s personal assistant, I would’ve gotten her name from whoever designed the Flash intro for LakeNormanMonster.com.

In a way, it almost makes sense – first sighted in 1982, the Lake Norman Monster is still in its 20s. Hell, Lake Norman itself didn’t even exist until the early ‘60s, when the Duke Power Company dammed up the Catawba River and built a hydroelectric plant along the shores of the resulting 34-mile-long body of water. The lake was even named after then-sitting Duke Power President, Norman Cocke. (I wonder if the town would have been quite as eager to spread stories of the Lake Cocke Monster.) The Mcguire nuclear station is also positioned along Lake Norman, and both power plants vent hot steam into the lake.

The monster was first sighted by a group of lollygagging high schoolers, who were no doubt playing grab ass in one of the lake’s fission-warmed hot spots. At one point, the teens saw what appeared to be a mass of leaves and floating debris drifting along in the current. They also noticed that, like everything else in 1982, it gave off a strong fetid odor. Suddenly, the thing splashed and submerged, leaving only a cloud of thick, reeky mud. Later reported sightings find the monster surfacing, usually out of a pocket of boggy filth, to reveal the stereotypical long neck and dinosaur head of classic reptilian lake lurkers the world over.

I know what you’re thinking (because I thought it, too). Clearly the legend here must be that some hapless lizard ventured to close to some broken canister of power plant ooze and went all teenage mutant stinky Normie. But, in fact, what little legend there is simply regards the beast as a mystery – and not without some reason. In the 1990s, baffled scientists found the lake teeming with a non-native species of fresh water jellyfish, and in 2000, the Department of Wildlife was called in to remove two alligators (although these were most likely abandoned pets). It only makes sense that, with the lake at the heart of these other zoological mysteries, the legend of Normie would persist.

As for the 21 years between the creation of the lake and the first Normie sighting – it’s just enough time for a generation of kids to be born. Kids disconnected from the lake’s unspectacular genesis. Kids who grew up along Lake Norman’s shores and read fantastical stories from older times, set in faraway places. Kids who slept with their windows open, breathing in the damp air blown off the lake and dreaming up fantastical stories of their own. Stories set in their time and their place. Stories they parlayed into visions.

And the Twitter feed? Perhaps it cheapens the mystery a bit. But it also represents America’s beautiful, enduring reliance on folktales, even in the face of strict character limits.

Spine-tingling action! Tear-jerking romance! Head-scratching pseudo-science! It’s the Weird Things Lake and River Monster Round-up – an occasional roll call of aquatic serpents that gives you, the reader, three lake monsters in three days. That’s almost two a day!

Today: “Whitey” – Arkansas’ White River Monster

The white river monster’s dominion over northeastern Arkansas – and the winding tributary of the mighty Mississippi that runs through it – supposedly began in 1915, the year a man saw the sinewy form of some fearsome, serpentine leviathan rise to the surface of the murky water. The witness, one George Mann, avows that he saw neither the creature’s head nor its tail, but only a crusty, gray-hided expanse of accursed flesh that issues a repulsive blowing sound from some horrid, unseen orifice.

One can only imagine how compelling this account would have sounded in 1915, coming in gasped breaths from the stuttering mouth of an arm-flailing maniac. And imagine one must – as it stands, the testimony was offered 22 years after the fact, in response to Arkansas farmer Bramlett Bateman’s 1937 encounter with the creature. In fact, before the ink dried on Bateman’s sworn monster-attesting affidavit, a variety of townspeople suddenly volunteered their own tales of the aquatic behemoth. While Mann’s 1915 account remains the oldest, Little Rock native Ethel Smith swore that she saw the creature in 1924, and three other townspeople, including Bateman’s wife, also signed cryptid-sighting affidavits, two of which merely stated that the signer had witnessed disturbances in the water.

Monster mania ensued – an ad hoc hunting committee began constructing a massive net to ensnare the animal; tourists from as far away as California swarmed to the White River area; the chamber of commerce collected a 25 cent monster-watch fee from excitable adventure seekers; professional divers were brought in to scour the riverbed; people state-wide spread bizarre rumors that the creature had enthusiastically overturned a gunship during the Civil War. But the monster failed to appear. As abruptly as it began, sea serpent fever ended. Restless hunters moved northward, following the first whisperings of Bigfoot. The net-building cabal ran out of money, their half-finished rope weave catching only the wind-blown remnants of amateur monster sketches and homemade signs offering “Binoculars for rent.”

Then, in July of 1971, startled onlookers witnessed a giant, snake-like creature thrashing in the current of the White River. The group shuttered as the animal’s giant, catfish-like head shrieked out, making a sound like the whinnying of a horse mixed with the lowing of a cow. Over the next year, multiple similar reports of the creature – dubbed “Whitey” by local media – were filed by campers and fishermen. Scientists continue to insist that the so-called monster was simply a lost, ocean-dwelling elephant seal that accidentally found its way into the Mississippi. The Arkansas State Legislature, which created the White River Monster Refuge in 1973, disagrees. To this day, according to Arkansas law, it is illegal to “molest, kill, trample, or harm the White River Monster while he is in the retreat.” All I have to say that is – it’s about damn time. Also, something something kill whitey. Thanks, folks. I’ll be here all week. Really.

Wednesday – North Carolina’s Lake Norman Monster – Prehistoric Monster + 20th Century Man-made Lake = What the What?

This week, Weird Thing Culture Reporter Matt Finley takes a look at the Homunculus, a strange idea that survived against reason and logic. Monday we looked at how long the idea has been around. Wednesday we found out how science got past the idea of little naked men ruling our lives.

The homunculi set a daring course – out of the genitals and into the brain. But before turning things over to all the scholarly yak yak of those incorrigible philosophers, I want to make a brief pit stop over in science. Remember that awesome part in “Blade Runner,” when Roy Batty is shaking down the replicant eye maker and says, “If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.”? Well, before humans had any real understanding of how vision functioned, some people believed that there was a little brain-dwelling homunculus whose job it was to see what we see through our eyes, and then relate the information to our brains, so that the images weren’t lost, like, in the words of Batty, “tears in the rain.” (Seriously, though, how awesome is “Blade Runner”?)

The flaw in this notion is that if a person requires an internal homunculus proxy to perceive the world, it follows that said homunculus must rely on its own even tinier, more disgusting homunculus proxy. And so on. This conceptual roadblock is known as infinite regression, and it represents, among other things, the intersection between homunculi in science and homunculi in philosophy.

Divorced from unsettling, naked men, infinite regress is still a popular philosophical rejoinder, especially during disputes about consciousness.

(Brief history lesson: It was 20th century philosopher Gilbert Ryle who initially spelled out these types of arguments in depth, initially using the example of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assertion that “The ancestor of every action is a thought.” Ryle essentially argued that if, in fact, every intelligent action is preceded by a conscious thought, and a conscious thought is, in itself, an intelligent action, then, etc.)

One classic (though woefully out-dated) philosophical argument about the nature of human consciousness is Descartes notion of dualism (AKA the mind-body problem) – that the mind is non-physical entity separate from the material brain. Descartes even identified the pineal gland as the area of the brain where this immaterial vapor soul thing resided. Cognitive science has since discredited this notion, leaving philosophers to reconstruct an entirely new model of human consciousness.

Lo, gaze yonder! The homunculi are returning! And contemporary American philosopher Daniel Dennett is carrying them in an adorable papoose. Dennett is extremely concerned that, even as philosophers attempt to divorce themselves from the long-standing notions of Cartesian dualism, its ghost haunts even the most logical materialist argument. He calls this effect Cartesian materialism, and basically argues that if you take Descartes’ intangible mind and regard it as physical, but still approach the mind and brain as separate material entities, the newly tangible mind entity becomes, in essence, a homunculus, perched back up inside the human head for the first time since that whole vision debacle, absorbing stimuli and whispering analyses into the cortex. And if that little guy’s up there functioning as our consciousness, then he himself is conscious and must have… well, you know the drill.

Centuries after the alchemists started trying to grow lab partners out of semen-smeared foodstuffs, the tiny man-creatures known as homunculi got their first big promotion. To understand how these pint-sized chaps wormed their way into 17th century scientific comprehension – and, in fact, directly into the human genitals – it helps to understand the theory of preformation. In the 17th century, people (scientists included) believed that when God created the universe, he had simultaneously created every living creature that would ever exist, such that animals were like Russian nesting dolls, packed with a theoretically infinite number of successively smaller versions of themselves that would go on maturing and birthing each other for generations. The ramifications for humans? Loins stuffed to bursting with tiny people – homunculi (who, in turn, have mini-homunculi inside their own tiny junk [et al]).

Beyond a shrugged “sex = babies?,” little was known about the specifics of human reproduction, so when Dutch tradesman Antoine Van Leeuwenhoek rubbed one out on his microscope and discovered spermatozoa, only one rational explanation came to mind: these cells were the tiny wriggling vehicles that the pre-formed future humans – the tiny Homunculi – piloted up through a woman’s vagina and into the womb, where they then grow to baby size. The idea sounded a little crazy, and not everyone was on board – some folks were convinced that the homunculi actually drove the ova, which had been discovered several years earlier. This controversy led to one of the great dead-end rivalries of proto-modern science: Spermists (or, as spell check is concerned, “Spearmints”) vs. Ovists. So the diehard Spearmints tried to explain why God would kill off millions of preformed humans in every batch of ejaculate. The Ovists struggled to understand why sperm, and, hence, men, are necessary if all future humans already exist within women. No one had any friggin’ idea why some children looked more like their mothers, some more like their fathers and others more like Uncle Jake, who isn’t really even their uncle. Mom just says to call him that.

Finally, the whole mess was brought to a screeching halt by spontaneous generation, a theory that seemed to nullify both sides, and found the homunculi pitched headfirst through the windshield of whatever sex cell they’d been illegally operating. Excited by Leeuwenhoek’s sperm revelation, scientists had started putting all kinds of crap under microscope lenses. What they found again and again – in broth and beer and bread – were tiny organisms that had seemingly sprout (or spontaneously generated) out of thin air. In an age before any understanding of microorganisms, this discovery seemed to demonstrate that new (read: non-preformed) living things could simply be grown out of inanimate matter. People began wondering if maybe human reproduction worked by a similar principle.

And with all the confidence of the alchemists, who had essentially used the tenets of spontaneous generation to imagine homunculi in the first place, scientists kicked homunculi to the curb, flipped off god and started trying to create life in sealed vials of mud (spoiler alert: epic fail. LOLZ).

Friday – Homunculi and Philosophy

Ages ago, mineralogical pseudo-sorcerers worked to exact divine control over human mortality using a strange hybrid of magic, meditation and metallurgy. In the 1600s, scientists hunched over simple microscopes scrabbled to understand the then-mysterious miracle of human reproduction. Modern day philosophers use advanced rhetoric to dispute classical notions of free will and the human soul. The common thread that connects all three? A teeny little naked guy called a homunculus (Latin for “little human”).

Small, brawny Homunculi run riot through the history of academic thought, offering scientists bizarre answers to life’s mysteries, all the while stealing polished buttons off formal wear and ripping pictures of boobs out of library books in order to construct their nests. It all started with the alchemists. While these rock-boiling polimaths are primarily remembered as the misguided dreamers who sought to transform common substances into gold, they were into plenty of other ambitious nuttiness, including the development of an eternal life elixir and the search for the so-called universal solvent – a theoretical chemical that could dissolve absolutely anything (much of their philosophical energies were ultimately exhausted in squabbling over the design of an insoluble container to store the solvent.) Homunculi entered the fray sometime during the 3rd century, after the Gnostic mystic Zosimos wrote about how he liked to mentally anthropomorphize various metals so that they took the form of tiny men who would writhed before him, enduring ungodly bodily tortures as a means of attaining alchemical transfiguration. And with that one nugget of wild insanity, Homunculi were born. Alchemists took the notion of these minuscule man-servants quite literary and began attempting to create them by combining various natural ingredients. (If you don’t like to picture old, bearded men jizzing all over everything, you should probably stop reading now.)

There are a variety of recipes for growing a homunculus, who will then serve its creator as a protector and willing gofer/lab assistant. The easiest method: allow a hearty load of human semen to putrefy in a sealed container until the goo resembles a transparent man, at which point all you have to do is feed the man fresh blood and he will grow into an itty bitty personal assistant. Another method involves poking a hole in an egg, filling the hole with human semen and then burying the egg and waiting for a homunculus to emerge from the ground. And on and on. Like every other aspect of alchemy, the homunculus-generation process underscores the belief that a communion of intellect and spiritual openness can reveal divinity through science and imbue scholars with the power of God.

Even the more traditional science of the 1600s relied on creationist notions, and would also come to briefly rely on the diminutive homunculi.

Wednesday: Homunculi and Spontaneous Generation

From KFC chicken mutants to lab-grown love bugs, urban legends featuring bizarre animal experimentation (and the resulting grotesqueries) are six for a nickel. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Weird Things takes a look at the top-shelf stuff – Real animals. Actual experiments. Monday we looked at a general history of animal experiments. Wednesday we explored the quest to breed humans and apes.

Today: Operation Dumbo Death

Hop on the Internet and search for “bizarre animal experiments.” Undoubtedly, the most ubiquitous result will be the story of several Oklahoma-based scientists who decided to see how an elephant would react to a massive injection of LSD. If you haven’t heard about this before, here’s what happened: the elephant died. But I don’t want to talk about that.

I want to talk about an earlier age – an age when folks didn’t have the time or inclination to play Dr. Feelgood with Stampy because they were too busy figuring out how to execute him. In the early 1900s, the hay-day of the American circus, death at the claws of performing animals was not uncommon. Many circus creatures were abused, and even those that weren’t were subjected to the constant stresses of daily performances, screaming crowds and, often, monotonous rail travel. When a lion freaked out and went claw bonkers on a trainer, the humane (read: easy) solution was a loaded pistol. For a giant, tough-hided elephant, though? (Keep in mind that the modern percussion hand grenade was still undergoing design refinements.)

This very question arose in 1903 when Topsy the (abused, homicidal) elephant, a popular attraction at Coney Island’s Luna Park, claimed her third victim. While no one questioned that the immense animal had to be put down, there was much debate as to the method. Hanging was suggested, but ultimately ruled inhumane by the ASPCA. It looked as if Topsy had been granted a stay of execution. That is, until Jersey native Thomas Edison enthusiastically stepped up with a solution: Alternating Current (AC) electricity. See, this new system of electricity, pioneered by the eccentric genius Nikola Tesla, was in direct competition with Edison’s Direct Current (DC) system, and Edison had taken to publically electrocuting stray animals with AC current as a means by which to prove AC power’s deadly potential. On January 4th, 1903, Topsy was fed a bowl full of cyanide-laced carrots (as a weakening aid), restrained using a ship’s hawser and fried by a 6,600 volt charge. Though Edison would ultimately lose his scientific war with Tesla, he won his battle against Topsy the elephant. He even committed the victory to film, which was later released with the unapologetically blunt title “Electrocuting an Elephant.”

Remember how folks suggested hanging Topsy, but the ASPCA intervened on the elephant’s behalf? Mary the elephant, an animal travelling the country with Charlie Sparks’ “Sparks World Famous Show,” wasn’t so fortunate. On September 12th, 1916, in Kingsport, Tennessee, Mary threw a little tantrum, during which she crushed a circus employee’s head. Tennessee freaked. People demanded elephant justice. Surrounding towns, fearful of violent stomping deaths, refused to host Sparks’ show if Mary wasn’t executed. Newspapers immediately joined the panicked rabble, publishing erroneous claims that Mary had a long history of head-mashing conniptions. The next day, a reluctant Sparks travelled with Mary to Erwin, Tennessee, home of a sturdy railcar-mounted industrial crane. The first attempt to hoist Mary to her death proved unsuccessful – the chain snapped and Mary her hip. On the second try, Mary was fatally hanged, and was then buried beside the train tracks.

Soon it was the 1960s. A team of Oklahoman researchers decided to share the love and good feelings with their elephant buddy. They loaded a hypodermic full of psychotropic chemicals and all of a sudden, there it was – the humane way to execute an elephant: lethal injection.

From KFC chicken mutants to lab-grown love bugs, urban legends featuring bizarre animal experimentation (and the resulting grotesqueries) are six for a nickel. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Weird Things takes a look at the top-shelf stuff – Real animals. Actual experiments. Monday we looked at a general history of animal experiments.

Today: The Forbidden Zone (i.e., the human uterus)

I know. You were promised a story about a human/monkey hybrid. This story’s actually about a human/ape hybrid (I only wrote “monkey” because it sounded funnier) that never was… but certainly not for lack of trying. The madcap cross-breeding adventure started in the early 1900s when Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanov began experimenting with equine artificial insemination and quickly realized that the semen from one stallion could be used to impregnate more than 500 mares. Before long, Ivanov was the toast of the livery; horse breeders from all over the world flocked to the scientist with lofty dreams of innumerable brawny foals. As Ivanov repeatedly realized these dreams, he became increasingly confident in his methods. Before long, he started experimenting with cross-species breeding. Ivanov hybridized a zebra and a donkey. An antelope and a cow. A mouse and a rat. A guinea pig and a mouse. He was like a kid at a sundae bar where all the toppings are different types of animal sperm.

Then, he got an idea.

Ivanov pitched his plan to the Soviet government. It seemed so simple. Pop some human semen into a female ape and boom goes the dynamite. If you’re questioning the scientific purpose of Ivanov’s scheme, well, the man was totally clear about why apeman needed doing – as an incalculable boon to atheist propagandists. In fact, when the government approved the funding and Ivanov strutted off to the chimp-filled Conakry botanical gardens in French Guinea, the only opposition he faced was from religious groups; scientists worldwide were massively supportive (and excited to cuddle the apish man baby). A quick word about 1920s evolutionary beliefs: Like today, experts pretty much agreed that humans evolved from apes, but also thought that specific racial characteristics provided a legend for determining what group of apes a person or group descended from (e.g., black people evolved from gorillas, Asians from Orangutans, etc.). No one had any doubt that Ivanov’s experiments would succeed.

But test subjects proved infertile. Apes died. Even though juicing chimps up with man seed proved wholly ineffective, Ivanov was undeterred. The scientist developed a new plan to inseminate human females with ape sperm. The French Guinean colonial government received this wild new venture with anxious collar tugging, and Ivanov was forced to return to the Soviet Union, which was boundlessly enthusiastic and immediately provided the biologist with organizational assistance. Alas, the program never got off the ground. Rumors that the government’s involvement spurred from a desire to banish any notion of God from the minds of the proletariat, and that any successful hybrid creatures would be recruited and trained as mutant soldiers, eventually led the state to arrest Ivanov, who ultimately died in exile. Scientists would later realize that apes have two more chromosomes than humans, making Ivanov’s proposed hybrid impossible. In the end, science muttered a quiet, “Oops.” and soldiered on…

Just last week, I mentioned the waddling, headless meat mutants that have been erroneously cited as the source of KFC’s chicken. In Florida, rumors of bizarre genetic experimentation are still used to explain the pervasive presence of sex-crazed flies referred to as “love bugs” (in truth, the insects are South American natives that are believed to have hitched a ride on a North America-bound freighter sometime in the 1920s). Urban legends featuring bizarre animal experimentation (and the resulting grotesqueries) are six for a nickel. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Weird Things takes a look at the top-shelf stuff – Real animals. Actual experiments.

Today: In Soviet Russia, Dog’s Head Transplants You

Before Soviet scientists began launching dogs into outer space, they spent a couple decades cutting the animals up, reconfiguring them and benefitting science via cruel and twisted experiments. Sergei Bruyukhonenko, for example, was known as the dog decapitator. He earned this fitting (though perhaps sensationalistic) moniker during his quest to introduce open-heart surgery to the USSR. In the 1920s, Bruyukhonenko invented the “autojektor,” a simple apparatus that was designed to fill in for a patient’s heart and lungs while doctors futzed around inside his or her chest cavity. To test the machine, Bruyukhonenko simply lopped the head off a dog, wired all the tubes and vessels up to the autojektor and watched in delight as the pup’s disembodied noggin came back to life (clinical low-brain-function life, not high-enthusiasm Beggin’ Strips-commercial life). The doctor was so pleased with his results, he held a public demonstration of the autojektor, during which he entertained the audience by feeding a dog’s head some cheese, which promptly oozed out of the neck through the disconnected esophagus (some Russians still grate cheese this way).

Thirty years later, an eager young scientist named Vladimir Demikhov showed up with a smile and a sewing kit. Demikhov was interested in perfecting live organ transplants – specifically heart transplants – and set about practicing on animals. While he made several important contributions to transplant medicine, he’s best remembered for a 1954 experiment in which he detached a puppy’s head, shoulders and front legs, and then sutured them, alive, onto the back of an adult dog. Remember the nasty esophagus cheese that leaked back out of Bruyukhonenko’s dog? This time it was milk, and it gushed out all over the host dog (some Russians still bathe dogs this way). Sadly, after only a couple weeks, the pitiable beast died of infection. Supposedly, though Demikhov never found a way to successfully transplant a heart, he did go on to make 19 more bizarre pup-and-dog recombinations, none of which survived longer than a month.

Less than ten years later, Rob White, a scientist in Cleveland (coincidentally, a city that measures its collective morale in units called “Trotskys” [1 Trotsky = -5 smiles]), used Demikhov’s transplantation techniques as a jumping off point to successfully perform the complete transplant of one monkey’s severed melon onto another’s decapitated body. Post-surgery, the plug-and-play primate, though paralyzed, retained use of its core senses. According to White’s notes, the monkey bit several lab techs.

This grumpy, neck-sutured, paralytic simian is the perfect segue into Wednesday’s diabolical (again Soviet) scheme – the monkey/human hybrid.

Thanksgiving’s over, your bowels are weeping to grief counselors and Weird Things is celebrating gastronomy, Epicureanism and indiscriminate face-stuffing with the last installment of a three-part look at the most delicious meat of them all. It’s a Cultural Tribute to Cannibalism (sans recipes). Monday we looked at the Wendigo, Wednesday we explored the deleted human eating element of fairy tales.

Today: Hard, Cold Facts and Soft, Chili Fingers – Modern Cannibalism Terror

A few lingering, neo-primitive cultures still employ cannibalism as a means of honoring the dead and dominating enemies. Meanwhile, the civilized world has spent centuries building cannibalism up into one of the cardinal cultural taboos (along with incest – another primal form of indulging in one’s kin), a mission that’s been so effectively carried out that even accidental cannibalism has become an object of fear. In America alone, a bevy of urban legends and contemporary folktales hinge on the hair-raising premise that soylent green has already arrived.

A classic: The body in the wine (or beer, soda, etc.) vat. Usually set in a impoverished country where an American vintner has outsourced production of cheap wine, the story goes that several shipments of wine have just left the facility when a man’s pickled corpse, complete with a knife sticking out of its back, is found lulling in the dregs at the bottom of the storage vat. The company decides it would be too expensive to recall the product, so, well, you’re the one who just wanted to buy the cheap stuff.

In this story, as well as many others, the incident is the result of low safety and cleanliness standards in the food production industry. These stories are cut from the same cloth as all the “KFC comes from headless mutants” and “chocolate milk is regular milk with too much cow blood” legends. It’s all paranoia and distrust of a modern culture to which we’ve ceded control in exchange for convenience (and the illusion of civility – people are so concerned with supposed modern sophistication, they’re no longer comfortable with meat looking like meat; hence, the nuggefication of chicken and the fingerizing of fish).

The worst food fear, then, combines our ancient aversion to people meat and our modern fear of corporate malfeasance. Just look at the woman who planted a human finger in her Wendy’s chili. She could have scammed the restaurant just as hard (and more believably) with a rat’s foot or a roach’s head, but, in her mind, the finger was the most disgusting of all readily available food contaminates. There are also cases in which minor production anomalies result in wild accusations – in 1987, a beef ligament in a can of tripe was mistaken for a finger, and in 2001, a mold growth in improperly sealed fruit punch was initially reported as a human penis. Clearly, cannibalism is as prevalent a nightmare to the modern subconscious as it was among the snowed-in Algonquians.

Now, enjoy your leftovers.

This week, as you prepare a variety of food blocks for the annual game of tummy Tetris that is Thanksgiving, Weird Things is celebrating gastronomy, Epicureanism and indiscriminate face-stuffing with a three-part look at the most delicious meat of them all. Monday, Wednesday and Friday – A Cultural Tribute to Cannibalism (sans recipes). Monday we looked at the cautionary tale of the Wendigo.

Today: Once Upon a California Cheeseburger – Cannibalism in Fairy Tales

It’s no secret that the blank-stared march of supposed social progress hasn’t been kind to fairy tales. Declawing. Sanitizing. Neutering. Whatever wince-evoking action verb you prefer, the children stories of yesterday have been pain-stakingly redacted to excise the rape, bloodshed and murder that were what made the concise narratives sufficiently cautionary in the first place. Along with all the forced, violent sex and baby murders, a requisite amount of cannibalism used to be a dependable bedtime story trope.

Before getting into the really gruesome stuff, I want to briefly respond to the gross number of people who cite “Hansel and Gretel” and “Jack and the Beanstalk” as examples of stories that retain cannibalistic overtones. I’m not including these stories because their respective threats – a blood-sniffing giant and feeder fetish witch – clearly exist external to the boundaries of human society. The giant obviously isn’t human. The witch is inhuman based on her narrative function as a spell-casting monstrous figure whose desire to eat porky little Hansel is, in itself, used to underscore her inhumanity. It’s kind of like how in Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” they specify that the zombies aren’t cannibals because they don’t each other. This witch ain’t ever gonna eat other witches.

Okay then.

In early variants of “Little Red Riding Hood,” before disrobing and going eat crazy on Red, the wolf tricks her into drinking a cup of her grandmother’s blood (a story point that was only removed when illustrators repeatedly refused to depict it). This theme of inadvertent cannibalism via sinister subterfuge can also be found in the Grimms’ telling of “The Juniper Tree,” in which a jealous step-mother turns her step-son into pudding and feeds it to her husband. Likewise, in an early version of “Sleeping Beauty,” soon after the titular sleepy-head is abandoned, she’s discovered by a traveling King, who hangs out for a while, repeatedly rapes her and then goes on his way. Upon learning of his infidelity, and two resultant bastard kids Beauty birthed mid-snooze, the King’s wife demands Sleeping Beauty’s children be kidnapped and cooked into a stew to be eaten by the King.

Mitochondrial versions of “Snow White” feature the vain step-mother demanding receipt of Snow White’s heart in a jeweled box so that she could eat the organ and inherent White’s youthful beauty. The Robber Bridegroom, which is also featured in the Grimms’ compilation, centers on a roving band of cannibalistic thieves who kidnap beautiful young women solely to butcher and eat them.

Obviously, in all of these examples, cannibalism is used as a thematic device to demonstrate the complexities of human (especially familial) relationships, and the ways in which we all emotionally chew each other down to the bone. I’m not saying the stories don’t work without all the people eating – I’m just saying they feel a bit anorexic.

(rimshot)

This week, as you prepare a variety of food blocks for the annual game of tummy Tetris that is Thanksgiving, Weird Things is celebrating gastronomy, Epicureanism and indiscriminate face-stuffing with a three-part look at the most delicious meat of them all. Monday, Wednesday and Friday – A Cultural Tribute to Cannibalism (sans recipes).

Today: The Legend of the Wendigo – America’s Original PSA

The gaunt, emaciated creature that Algonquian Indians knew as the “Wendigo” was almost certainly not the first imagined antagonist invented to enforce a cultural taboo – but it’s probably one of the more awesome. Basically, the tale states that a person who ingests human meat will be gripped by a powerful and insatiable hunger for seconds, thirds and beyond. This hunger will drive them to kill, butcher and devour all those around them, but they will never feel satisfied. All emotion, all morality – all humanity – will be lost to the gastrological void and an excruciating urge to consume. The person becomes the Wendigo – starving, ferocious and unstoppable.

Keep in mind, the Wendigo wasn’t created to stop folks from gallivanting around and snacking on each other just for poops and smiles. The Algonquians lived in the Northern Unites States and Canada. They faced unpredictable weather, limited food availability and, one would imagine, intermittent morale shortages. Basically, there were plenty of dark, freezing nights when an Algonquian warrior looked over at his friend, saw a giant, steaming beaver leg, thought of the horrific Wendigo and opted for death by starvation. (The Wendigo was also used as a catch-all poster boy for gluttony and greed in discouraging selfishness and promoting tribal unity and resource sharing. After all, the bogarters of today are the cannibals of tomorrow.)

Even more interestingly, the threatening tale of the Wendigo, and its less-than-subtle discouragement of cannibalism, wasn’t created solely out of tribal nobility or some consensually acknowledged moral imperative – the tale’s description of the monster and it’s meat-fueled creation, embellished as it is by hyperbole and requisite awesomeness, isn’t wholly fictional. The Algonquians had a limited cultural history of necessity-based cannibalism. The problem became that tribe members who indulged out of need during harsh times often found themselves craving succulent friend chops even come prosperous seasons. This culture-bound syndrome, known as Wendigo Psychosis, was almost certainly a psychological consequence of post-noshing guilt. It’s unclear whether these cases actually served as the genesis of the Wendigo story, but there are several reported cases of Wendigo-aware, famine-driven cannibals who begged to be executed out of fear of transformation.

And here we are, a nation of pregnant kids all high on drugs, smashing eggs with frying pans and calling it education. Where did all the monsters go?

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.

La Llorona is your Monster Of The Week. On Monday we look at the origins of this weepy, slutty, murderous ghost story.

For as much as they’re fun narrative diversions patently intended to elicit campfire pant pee, ghost stories are also tools for shaping children’s behavior and thought patterns through fear. Granted, it seems kind of ridiculous to portray a story like that of La Llorona as a Machiavellian device designed to threaten children into, well, not accidentally drowning, but the deeper ramifications of the story do reveal the manipulative inner-workings of societal value systems and the way that even the most trifling narratives run thick with cultural DNA.

I’ve been thinking: claiming La Llorona enforces a patriarchal cultural structure, and then just leaving the statement to dangle there so that modern feminism can do the work of disassembling the sentiment into the darkest, most insidious meaning possible, is unfair. Honestly, the story doesn’t enforce a patriarchal cultural structure so much as it acknowledges that the governing cultural ideology favors males, and then proceeds on without doing anything to overturn or subvert the paradigm. After all, the story – like many kid’s tales – isn’t meant as a socio-political call to action, begging children to rise up and overturn the status quo; it’s meant as a little creepy encouragement, urging kids to become the best people they can within the confines of a pre-existing, and inevitably flawed, value system. (Remember, La Llorona isn’t punished for going clubbing and being a sexy, independent woman; she’s condemned to ghosthood for murdering her children.)

The story’s Mexican roots and popularity among Hispanic residents of the United States suggest the story’s about more than just sentencing women to a homebound, maternal existence. Traditionally, Hispanic cultures (Generalizing. Don’t let’s get huffy.) place an extremely high value on family and the strength of a tight-knit family unit. Look: A different version of the La Llorona tale portrays La Llorona’s husband as a sleazy philanderer who eventually moves in with another woman, and only visits La Llorona so that he can see his children. Resentment of the kiddies ensues and La Llorona gives them the ol’ heave-ho into old man river. Now, consider the cultural context: the story is less about repressing a woman into blind subservience than it is about empowering a woman to overcome obstacles – even familial ones – and marshal the strength to keep what family she has together at all costs. If anything, the tale takes a back-handed swat at the patriarchy by portraying men as horny, drunken gadabouts who may have the cultural cache to run society, but who don’t have the wherewithal or personal fortitude to effectively foster and maintain a loving family, a duty that the progenitors of the La Llorona legend viewed as the ultimate social prerogative.

Friday: Weeping ghosts and cultural context

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

I find that there’s a fascinating relationship, even if it’s one of mere physical resemblance, between a good actor or actress and the string of historically based individuals he or she inevitably portrays. While a role says little about a performer’s true personality, it speaks volumes to his or her screen presence and cultural persona.

Culturally speaking, who is Michael Rooker? It’s a question that even robots that haven’t been built yet will eventually take days to answer. If the rumors are true, and Michael Rooker is the ghost of a Tyrannosaurus Rex trapped in the reanimated corpse of an alien cyborg pulled out of the Rosewell crash, then… I dunno. Case closed, I guess. But if he’s actually as enigmatic, fascinating and cannibalistic as he looks, the case may remain perpetually ajar. Let’s poke around five of his fact-based character roles and see if we can’t reveal some extraterrestrial circuitry or a tiny, ethereal dinosaur arm. So to speak.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

Rooker played: Henry

Who was inspired by: Henry Lee Lucas

Henry Lee Lucas was a bad mutha. And not in the Shaft way (unless you’re talking about late-period Shaft, when he was a homicidal drifter with a glass eye). John McNaughton’s darkly realistic film is partially based on Lucas’ eventual criminal confession, in which he attested to killing more than 600 people during the brief period between 1975 and 1983. Lucas’ admission, which included claims that he was a Satanist who practiced bestiality and cannibalism, was later recanted when authorities called shenanigans on his wild, unlikely tale. A Texas-based Lucas task force later stated that only 350 of the originally confessed murders could be even tangentially connected to Lucas’ supposed whereabouts and activities. Ultimately, Lucas was only conclusively linked to, and convicted for, 11 murders.

It’s interesting to watch McNaughton’s film (and Rooker’s performance) with this factual ambiguity in mind. Henry does commit horrible, brutal homicides, but look at the film’s opening – it features a number of disparate still shots of brutally murdered women, but never conclusively links Rooker’s character to the crimes. In scenes between the gory tableaus, Henry is seen performing banal, everyday activities. It’s as if, even at Henry’s most innocent, a world of horrors is playing out in his imagination – an imagination that begins to closely resemble his grotesque, tail-spinning reality. Even in these opening moments, the film provides a strong visual representation of the confounding uncertainties that remain part of Lucas’ repugnant legacy.

Mississippi Burning (1988)

Rooker played: Frank Bailey

Who was inspired by: Alton Wayne Roberts

On June 21, 1964, in the small town of Meridian, Mississippi, Alton Wayne Roberts, an ex-marine and gun-toting member of the Ku Klux Klan, executed two civil rights workers and helped to kill a third. Roberts went on to serve just ten years in Federal prison before returning to Meridian and opening a dance club. Sure, Rooker has a toned physique and imposing presence that make a buzz cut and starched uniform look right at home. He has a gruff bark and a bite that can be delivered either mouth-wise or with a big, chompy jump kick. But it must have taken every last one of his acting chops to play the kind of bigoted a-hole who would put on a white hood and open a dance club. Hi-yo! Seriously, though, if Ed Norton’s character from “American History X” and Michael Rooker’s character from “Mississippi Burning” had some kind of curb vs. bullets racist off… I’m gonna stop right there. If you’re already feeling uncomfortable, just picture Norton and Rooker in a soapbox derby. Look at Rooker’s big body in that tiny little car!

Days of Thunder (1990)

Rooker played: “Rowdy” Burns

Who was inspired by: Dale Earnhardt

While the film’s producers still deny that Rooker’s aptly named character is meant to represent the famously ‘tude-imbued stock car driver, many critics and fans cite Rowdy’s brash demeanor and trademark black car as tell-tale Earnhardt evocations. Earnhardt, whose reputation as an uncompromisingly aggressive driver earned him nicknames like “Ironhead” and “The Intimidator,” was a successful competitor in the NASCAR circuit, winning 76 races before dying in a crash during the final laps of 1991’s Daytona 500. Rooker’s portrayal, which begins with a series of car-bumping pissing contests between Rowdy and racing neophyte Cole Tickler (Tom Cruise), ends extremely sympathetically, as Rowdy confronts career-ending medical problems and the two head-butting drivers eventually bond and learn how to piss together. Watch Rooker transform Rowdy from a showboating dick-swinger into a loveable grouse and then tell me you don’t want to cover his big, craggy face with butterfly kisses.

JFK (1991)

Rooker played: Bill Broussard

Who was inspired by: William Wood (AKA Bill Boxley)

To accurately attempt to summarize both Boxley’s actual role in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination and Stone’s scapegoat-desperate repositioning of Boxley’s corresponding filmic character would be impossible for two reasons: first, because I don’t f***ing understand any of it; second, because I don’t really care. Jesus, I’m still trying to sort out that thing where you can see a ghost in “3 Men and a Baby.” Basically, Boxley was a disgraced, alcoholic ex-CIA agent hired by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison to investigate a possible government conspiracy surrounding the president’s assassination. Specifically, Boxley (an alias provided by Garrison to discourage any unwanted Federal scrutiny) was hired to draw specific links between traditional CIA operating procedures and the details of Kennedy’s death in order to prove that a CIA agent served as the triggerman. While in real-life, Boxley and Garrison were supposedly good friends and an efficient, if misguided, investigatory team, Stone has Rooker play Boxley as a consummate negative Nellie, doubting Garrison (Stone’s hero) every step of the way and ultimately causing the complete disruption of a conspiracy revelation via determined hard-headedness and general nay-saying. Basically, Rooker plays a meanie. Moving on…

Tombstone (1993)

Rooker played: Sherman McMasters

Who was based on: Sherman McMasters

In 1780, only two years after joining the Texas Rangers, Sherman McMasters was already under suspicion of stealing government mules and robbing a stagecoach. In the ensuing years, however, he drifted back towards the side of the law and joined up with Wyatt Earp, who he assisted in the famous Vendetta Ride, in which Earp and his posse of federal agents (illegally) hunted down outlaws and exacted bloody revenge for the death of Earp’s brother, Morgan. Some people claim that McMasters was an undercover agent working for Wells Fargo, and had only committed his early crimes as a means by which to infiltrate and disrupt a band of cattle rustlers, but experts remain uncertain. In the film, McMasters is portrayed as a badass who doesn’t live long enough to receive much of a back story beyond the outlaw-turned-renegade-lawman stuff. In this vision of McMasters, then, Rooker fills the shoes of a retired outlaw exhausted by the corruptive freedom of the American West and drawn to fight restlessly against the ignoble vestiges of his former self. In other words, “yee-haw!”

A chiseled face. Burning, soulful eyes. A lover’s mouth. A maniac’s chin. A taut body carved from the world’s most expensive marble by the world’s most hedonistic sculptor. A quiet soul whispered out of a crack in the Sphinx. He is Michael Rooker, and when you aren’t checking him out in his new Web series “Rooker,” or in everyone’s favorite film, “Skeleton Man,” your reading about him all this week, right here at WeirdThings.com

To understand the basis of Michael Rooker’s lengthy career as a deft character actor known for playing both hard-ass champions of justice and bad-ass bringers of death, it helps to look at his role in John Sayles’ 1988 film, “Eight Men Out,” which chronicles the 1919 scandal that found eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspiring with gamblers to fix the World Series. Rooker was cast as White Sox teammate and eager co-conspirator Chick Gandil, whose Wikipedia entry notes the following: “Described by his contemporaries as a ‘professional malcontent,’ [Gandil] was physically well built at 6’2″ and 195 pounds, and had a mean and callous expression. He used both to display his toughness, and also did not hesitate to use sheer strength to get his point across.” That Michael Rooker was perfect for this part should offer a sense of what makes the actor so compelling to watch on screen, and why he’s ideally suited to kick ass with the shoes of both protagonists and antagonists alike.

Rooker’s first major role, and perhaps the most indelible performance of his entire career, was the titular seething murderer in John McNaughton’s 1986 horror watershed, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” (a film that will be addressed in more detail later this week). The character of Henry is so fully realized by McNaughton and so completely embodied by Rooker, the role feels like a classic pop cultural mixed blessing that threatens to drive an actor past success and into the backwoods of type casting. Fortunately, Rather than banishing Rooker into a movie-of-the-week limbo filled with “misunderstood” deviants and mindless slash-and-hack murder junkies, this supremely creepy, nuanced performance somehow led the actor to a profusion of police officer portrayals.

“The Dark Half,” “Rosewood,” and “Replicant,” among many others, pit Rooker’s commanding presence, hard-edged focus and nails-tough attitude against the criminal element. In the same way that a lesser performance of a serial killer often results in a cold-staring, machete-brandishing caricature, so, too, can the aforementioned traits alone create a fairly reductive portrait of a policeman. Rooker understands the emotionality and subtle empathetic turns that are crucial to portraying an effective cop who’s as unforgiving to criminals as he is kind to, and understanding of, victims. Take his turn as Sherriff Pangborn in the 1991 Stephen King adaptation “The Dark Half”– Pangborn is heart-and-soul, scary-eyed dead set on bringing a killer to justice, but, even in his unfaltering determination, employs reason, soft eyes and cold brewskies when dealing with the prime suspect, Thad Beaumont – not because Pangborn fully trusts or believes Beaumont, but because he respects due process and, more importantly, sees Beaumont as a person first, even in light of his alleged misdeeds. In essence, Rooker fills a walking costume with a feeling individual. This relationship between societal role and individual emotional core highlights the sheer, unfaltering power of humanity and the impossibility of either purging it through the violence of a killer or numbing it with the focus and determination of a lawman – a fact that writers and actors alike ought pay heed to in crafting even the most archetypical narrative figures.

Sadly, even this summary understanding of characterization is reductive. To say a character has two sides – feeling and function – is to reduce humanity to a binary, and, further, to suggest that the halves are split – that they aren’t constantly and unforgivingly shaping and re-shaping each other. Just look at Rooker’s roles in “Mallrats” and “Slither” – or let me look at them for you and over explain them in a way that makes you never want to watch a movie again – This Wednesday on WeidThings.com.

This Week: It’s All in Your Heads – Mass Hysteria, Rampant Psychosomaticism and Contagious Hypochondria. Monday, we looked at a French town that danced itself to death. Wednesday, your junk shrank into your body.

Today: Still Crazy After All These Years – Modern American Hysteria

It’s tempting to shrug off wild epidemics of inexplicable panic as the stuff of the uncivilized, overly superstitious or poorly educated, and conclude that mass hysteria is a fading remnant of an older, less rational past. But, of course, if that were true, the shrieking, sweat-drenched rioting of a wild-eyed, fear-addled public wouldn’t be assigned the anti-rational moniker “hysteria” and wondered over. Folks would just be like, “Oh. This again.”

In compiling modern, first-world examples of a sane public turning mental, it’s almost too easy to include Orson Welles’ 1938 nation-punking War of the Worlds radio play, during which Welles trompe l’oreille news-broadcast style collided with the looming specter of WWII to create a volatile reaction… but how about this: United States, 1962. After several dressmakers working in a textile factory began developing flu-like symptoms, the overworked employees heard rumors that a swarm of strange, poisonous insects was loose in the factory and spreading an unidentified virus through unprovoked bites. By the time the media picked up on the story, dozens were feeling dizzy, nauseas and numb. In the end, 62 people were sickened by the phantom ailment. Though some sufferers did exhibit small bug bites, others didn’t and, anyway, there’s no known species of insect capable of causing the symptoms reported. Now known as the “June Bug Incident,” the events were ruled the hysterical imaginings of over-stressed laborers.

More recently, in 1994, several hospital workers fainted, one after another, in the presence of a dying woman’s skin and blood, which the employees later alleged was emitting toxic fumes. No evidence supporting this claim was ever recovered, and while scientists have suggested a number of possible chemical causes, no one has explained why the supposed fumes only seemed to affect females, or why no evidence of a foreign substance was found at the scene.

Mass hysteria is a stark example of the power society holds over the individual human psyche. With all of their internal idiosyncrasies, preconceptions and limitations of perception, people depend on external stimuli to provide critical data about the surrounding world. In a civilized, socialized community, other people – people with those same idiosyncrasies, preconceptions and limitations – become one of the most important sources of that data. This process allows people to act and react based on the perceived needs and intentions of those around them. It’s the basis for empathy, cooperation and understanding. But when there’s a glitch in the process – a stress-induced stutter in the feedback loop or interference from the drifting ghost of some primal, forgotten neural sub-routine – that social data can become corrupted, leading to a contagious collective discomfort – a communal panic. Mass hysteria.

This Week, It’s All in Your Heads – Mass Hysteria, Rampant Psychosomaticism and Contagious Hypochondria

Today: When Mirth Turns Malady – Dancing Plagues and Laughter Epidemics

It’s 1518 in Strasbourg, France. A lone woman dances in the street, pitching and twirling, her kinetic bodily enthusiasm clashing with her wide-eyed panicked expression. By the end of the week, 34 others have joined her, all of them endlessly swaying and skipping and lurching along to irresistible, inaudible music; it’s as if they’ve been hexed by the vengeful ghost of a forgotten melody. Soon, a morass of physicians is brought in to diagnose the sudden outbreak of rug-cutting insanity. They conclude that the condition is almost certainly a blood disease curable only through continuous dancing – the afflicted must boogaloo their sickness into remission. Bands are hired. A stage is built. Three weeks later, more than 400 hundred groaning, fear-stricken bodies flail and jitter through town. This is the dancing plague of 1518, an epidemic that only ended after a majority of the participants dropped dead from heart attacks, exhaustion and strokes.

Today, the dancing plague remains an enduring medical curiosity. Doctors have suggested phenomena ranging from ergotism (poisoning via a specific psychotropic bread mold) to chorea (a then-common movement disorder resulting from rheumatism) as possible, but unlikely, culprits, while other scholars have suggested that acute religious mania could be to blame. The most rationally palatable explanation seems to be Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI), a form of mass hysteria catalyzed by extended periods of widespread psychological stress – exactly the type of stress that Strasbourg endured throughout the fifteen-teens as a result of unprecedented famine, disease and, of course, religious torment from that incorrigible Roman Empire.

Frustratingly incomprehensible outbreaks of manic behavior, especially among superstitious or fervently religious populations, are not uncommon. In 1962, three Tanzanian schoolgirls began to laugh uncontrollably. The chorus of inexplicable guffawing spread to the girls’ classmates, who passed it along to their families, who managed to reduce over 1,000 individuals to gasping, rib-tickled jumbles of exhausted, teary-eyed chortling. A combination of village-wide quarantines and time eventually felled the laughing sickness, but to this day no definitive cause has been discovered.

These are just two examples of bizarre socially contagious mental illnesses, and the exacting power of mind over matter that allows them to propagate. Come back Wednesday for a closer look at the hows and whys of mass hysteria, this time in the delightful form of Genital Retraction Syndrome.

All this week: Halloween urban legends – horrific truths, bald-faced lies, wild embellishments and insane speculations

In a nation where fear is an effective substitute for money in greasing the oxidized gears of education and legislature, it’s not surprising that, year after year, one of the most pervasive Halloween horror stories centers around the cranky Scroogish sociopath hell bent on exterminating younglings by way of cyanide toffee and razorblade apples. While the general panic over randomized candy sabotage is an annual national reality, the specific nature of said sadistic treachery varies regionally based on local culture and current events – in the ‘70s, some square suburbanites were terrified that their respective hippy union locals were going to perpetrate MK Ultra Jr. with hallucinogenic fun-size bars, while hand-wringing city folk obsessed over garden variety maniacs loading goodies up with straight pins. Other alleged October antagonists have included Satanists, commies and old people. 1982’s still-unsolved cyanide-laced Tylenol poisonings, which killed seven people, gave whole new life to weaponized foodstuff fears, as the events validated the assertion that a person could commit a random mass poisoning with no apparent motive or calculated scope (most large-scale poisonings are later proven attempts to cover up a specific individual attack).

While untraceable and insidiously inured into the American psyche to the point of timelessness, the fear surely stems from the same social paranoia that confabulates severed fingers in fast food and scopolamine-drenched business cards. Dependable sulky party-pooping by a religious right that views Halloween as paganistic bacchanalia certainly doesn’t help diffuse the rumors, nor do the repeated incidences of reported candy tampering that turn out to be middle-school pranks perpetrated by kids inspired by the fallacious candy-tampering legends. In these cases, the media is often just as guilty, using the same legends that inspired the prank to construct a sensationalized, but wholly imagined, precedent for a poorly judged joke that is in no way tantamount to the stories that inspired it.

A study conducted by sociologist Joel Best, who reviewed thousands of newspaper articles dating back as far as 1958, concluded that there has never been an actual circumstance in which multiple random victims were harmed by the purposeful concealment of foreign agents in Halloween candy. But, hey, if it gives you an excuse to discard a pack of Good & Plenty, don’t stop believin’.

Golems, zombies and familiars – three cultures worth of mystical servants rendered, willingly or by force, from the wilds of nature and the bare, lumbering essence of humanity. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday – His Master’s Voice. Look back at Monday’s post about golems and Wednesday’s post about zombies.

Today: Familiars

It’s easy to imagine a golem or a zombie – all stiff jointed and glazed over, hefting huge rocks or serving giant Mimosas – but a familiar is harder to pin down. A generic black cat shadowing a mean, wartsy witch, maybe. Or perhaps a giant bird that a beardy wizard sends out into the woods to spy on a bunch of homely, meddling elves. The concept of a familiar, as it is understood in America, originated in Britain and essentially describes a spirit that attaches itself to a particular person either through its own will or the will of said human being. To ground this concept in something resembling reality, a familiar is thought to be the inspiring, ethereal confidante to a magician that a muse is to a poet or alcohol is to a novelist – not necessarily the source of the talent or ideas, but a supportive, ever present x-factor that serves to enhance and inspire confidence and effective execution.

All of this goes back to the 14th and 15th century when the British were already butt deep in the witch extermination business and the nagging naturalistic tenets of paganism had yet to fully burn off in the pious flames of Christian votives. Many practitioners of the so-called black arts believed that their magic could be sensed by spirits who, if impressed and so inclined, would take the shape of animals and serve that witch or wizard. Meanwhile, peasants, who viewed any animal associated with an alleged witch as a potential spy, or even an incarnation of the occultist herself, propagated this myth by executing supposed familiars alongside their masters.

Apparently, familiars don’t always assume animal avatars. Certain practicing magicians and imaginative citizens believed that they owned enchanted objects – like medallions or swords – that housed obedient supernatural tenants. These beneficent entities were thought to provide good luck, and sometimes even financial prosperity, to their owners. This version of the familiar seems to spur from the classic superstitious human tendency to believe that fortune and power are attainable through an otherworldly magical force that can be manipulated by sheer will or, in this case, a polite request.

Golems, zombies and familiars – three cultures worth of mystical servants rendered, willingly or by force, from the wilds of nature and the bare, lumbering essence of humanity. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday – His Master’s Voice. Look back at Monday’s post about Golems.

Today: Zombies

Prior to George Romero’s 1968 film “Night of the Living Dead,” zombies weren’t the brain-craving herders that modern corpse reanimation flicks portray. The rudiments of Romero’s bitey stumblers have always been there – walking corpse, glazed expression, inchoate moans and indifferent shamble – but traditional zombies are far less assertive. The classic Haitian zombie (or “zombi”) is supposedly the reanimated corpse of a recently deceased person who has been bodily resurrected to serve the will of a bokor – a powerful voodoo sorcerer. Unlike rabbis, who are thought to attain golem-creating abilities only after years of prayer, atonement and meditation, bokors are believed to innately possess powerful mystic abilities, including the capacity to trap specific aspects of departed human souls, which can then be bottled and sold as “zombie astrals” (e.g., an aspiring artist could buy the bottled artistic aspect of a famous artist’s soul).

To those waiting for the part where the zombies turn on their bokors and go all eat crazy – it doesn’t happen. The controversy surrounding zombies isn’t based around some legendary undead rampage that got everyone feeling iffy and nervous about necromancy; the controversy surrounding zombies is the probability that the so-called “walking dead” servants are actually living people who have been pharmacologically enslaved by covertly administered neurotoxins. According to ethnobotanist Wade Davis, who wrote two pioneering and heavily disputed books on the topic, zombies are created using a combination of two powerful neural agents (one of which, tetrodotoxin, is most famously found in blowfish) to dull a subject’s consciousness and autonomic function, creating both the illusion of death and a totally spaced-out, barely sentient obedience (Note that the power and longevity that Davis ascribed to these chemicals is scientifically dubious).

In truth, zombies probably result as much from mind-altering powders as from Haitian voodoo culture, in which they have always played a significant role. It wouldn’t be unfair to suggest that zombification is far more voluntary than it appears, with the toxins used to induce a prolonged stupor during which the participant, consciously or sub-consciously, fills the socio-cultural role of the zombie, thereby, legitimizing the bokor’s power and reinforcing sorcery’s role, even in a depressingly magic-less modern world.

Friday: Familiars

Golems, zombies and familiars – three cultures worth of mystical servants rendered, willingly or by force, from the wilds of nature and the bare, lumbering essence of humanity. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday – His Master’s Voice.

Today: Golems

A standby of early Jewish legend, Golems – humanoid beings shaped from clay and imbued with a mystical life force – were said to serve holy men, and could be used protect the Jewish people during times of conflict and social unrest. The most famous golem tale is set during a rash of anti-Semitic riots in Prague, where a racist priest incited his followers to storm the Jewish ghettos. In response, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, a powerful Rabbi, summoned a golem and commanded it to defend his people and assist in rebuilding their ruined homes. The golem was so devoted to his protective mission that he began violently attacking Catholic inciters, forcing Bezalel to return him to an inanimate state.

According to golem aficionados, a regular human can only shape the Earth into a figure of a man; a practiced, fervent Rabbi can, through a sacred ritual – usually a Hebrew inscription etched into the creature’s head or onto a scrap of parchment pressed into the golem’s body – give the figure life as a conscripted servant of God; God, and only God, can provide a soul, thus converting the being from an earthen grunt into a free-thinking man. Scripture actually portrays Adam as the first golem, a status he retained for only the briefest 12 hours between his construction and his ensoulment.

Not all golem lore is all half-guilty persecutor-maiming victory and triumph–even in the 1600s, many Jewish scholars felt that the ability to divinely summon life was a power that only God should possess. As these authors transcribed their interpretations of Jewish legends, classic golem stories became less about triumphant brandishing of sacred energy and more about the steep price that comes with divine dabbling, a narrative that Mary Shelly echoed in response to the foolhardy bravura of intermittently resurrection-obsessed Romantic Age science. It’s these tales of well-meaning hubris run amok that German filmmaker Paul Wegener embraced in his golem trilogy, the last of which, 1920’s “The Golem: How He Came into the World” immortalized the image of Bezalel’s creature setting fire to the ghetto and laying waste to Prague’s already-suffering Jewish community.

Wednesday – Zombies

Bloody Mary is the Monster of the Week! Matt Finley explained some of the ghastly woman’s other talents on Monday. Wednesday he explained exactly why you’ve been hoodwinked into calling her out all these years..

With all the varying verbal harpoons fired out into the ether to drag Bloody Mary back into the living world, it’s easy to forget that, though the current urban legend has been disassembled and reconfigured, often to the point of unrecognizability, the first fearful, double-dog-dared invocations of Bloody Mary were spoken with Mary I of England in mind.

Mary I (not to be confused with Queen Mary of the Scots, who is often wrongly identified as the crotchety mirror-dwelling apparition) was the only child of Henry VIII’s first wife, Catharine of Aragorn, to survive into adulthood. Despite being unfavored and disregarded by her family, she received the crown in 1553 after her half-brother Edward died of tuberculosis. Bloody Mary went on to earn her macabre epithet when, after officially restoring Roman Catholicism to Great Britain, she began rounding up Protestant leaders and burning them at the stake, igniting a flurry of religious riots and violence. The most enduring modern connection to the story is any variant of the game in which summoners must speak the words, “Bloody Mary, I killed your child”- Mary I became so obsessed with producing a male heir that she endured two phantom pregnancies, during which she firmly believed she was carrying a child that was then somehow miscarried or aborted.

Generalizing for purposes of brevity, the origins of Bloody Mary as a Protestant horror story belie the deeper history of both a uniquely Protestant fascination with the occult and a trend of propagandized anti-Catholic gothic literature. Unlike most 16th century Catholics, whose faith was entrenched in dogma, hierarchy, tradition and ritual, many Protestants, especially in Ireland, believed in ghosts and superstitiously permitted the occult to fill in certain gaps that existed in the post-enlightenment thought that Protestantism so thoroughly embraced. Beyond assigning Mary I her now-infamous soubriquet (despite the fact that, in reality, the queen didn’t execute any more people than her Protestant father), the Protestants were later known for distributing pulp novellas that portrayed convents as dark caverns of orgiastic chaos with priests travelling through underground tunnels to engage in violent fornication with nuns, yielding innumerable illegitimate children that were then disposed of by horrific means. Given these factors, it’s easy to understand how a violent, Catholic threat to the Protestant faith was transformed into a vengeful specter – a zombified appendage of history reaching out at the giggling great grandchildren of unjustly murdered Anglicans.

Bloody Mary is the Monster of the Week! Matt Finley explained some of the ghastly woman’s other talents on Monday. The series wraps up on Friday.

When the recitation of the phrase “Bloody Mary” doesn’t result in netherworld marriage predictions, it’s generally because Mary is either dragging her summoner into a twisted, backwards mirror world, clawing their eyes out or just kinda looking at them. The story behind her motive for these hideous acts of violence and ogling vary regionally (she was wrongfully accused of killing her baby, she actually did kill her baby, she’s a powerful witch, etc.). What never changes is the legend’s two-tiered structure – passive storytelling followed by the teller’s/listeners’ active participation in the narrative by way of the attempted invocation.

The tale functions as consequence-free test of courage, allowing children to mock and coerce each other into facing down a fictionalized representation of death or mortality without any actual risk. The game not only feeds and reinforces the imagined immortality of youth, but also permits children to test the true conditions of reality against the fantasy and dream logic of childhood perception. The strict methodology of the game’s ritual, which could be compared to a scientific process, hints at a burgeoning empiricism that can only exist in the mental space between a child’s steadfast belief in magic and an adult’s validated trust in reasoned rationalism. To play the game is to admit the belief that Mary might appear; to complete it is to reveal a mature skepticism (in the guise of courage) –the whole production is a group effort to challenge the limitations of “grown-up” thinking and form an independently verified picture of the conditions of existence (e.g., can ghosts hurt me?).

Bloody Mary also provides a ritualized means of participating in local history (or a grossly embellished version of it). The game begins with a historicized fiction, followed by an epilogue describing that history’s active power over the present, and concludes with an attempt to summon that power. Children are able to assert their own local relevance and individual community membership outside of their family’s real estate holdings and tax payments by linking directly into the whispering heart of the town’s past. The beautiful part is that while the details of the Bloody Mary legend are fictional, the story’s narrative fluidity makes each town’s version as vital and specialized to the region’s culture as the area’s actual crimes and intrigue.

Friday: The real Bloody Mary

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

Mermaids are the Monster of the Week! Monday, Matt Finley investigated the evolution of the bang-able mermaid. Tuesday, he looked at the Mermaids history as a sideshow attraction. Enjoy!

Sometime during the 1800s, after centuries of alternately fascinating, discomforting and titillating seamen and civilians, mermaids disappeared from the oceans, a loss for which the advancement of oceanographic science and the advent of international industrial and commercial air travel share culpability. Coincidentally, modern aviation also provides a minor, but fascinating, link to mermaid folklore in the 20th century.

(There was a rash of mermaid sightings off the coast of Israel in August of this year, when residents claim to have repeatedly witnessed a half-human, half-fish creature frolicking in coastal waters. These encounters, however, seem less relevant to a focused discussion of mermaids than to a broader analysis of how regional socio-political upheaval can yield increased cryptid sightings. See Tanzania’s Popobawa for the starkest example of this phenomenon.)

As addressed in Monday’s post, the earliest mermaid sightings, outside of mythological iconography, were reported during nautical expeditions, and circulated among sailors, most of whom were, by stated allegiance or signed contract, government employees. During the first half of the 20th century, there weren’t many historically relevant appearances of merfolk, but two that do exist directly correlate to the creature’s original background in the fevered imaginings of haggard nationalists flung across latitudes in the name of their countries. In WWI, Warsaw, Poland, used the image of a mermaid, part of their traditional city seal, on medals of valor awarded to homecoming soldiers. During WWII, cartoon mermaids – lips puckered and ample bosoms straining against oyster-shell brassieres – were included in the spate of cheesecake pinup icons adorning U.S. fighter plane fuselages. The mermaids sighted so long ago in strange waters surrounding unmapped continents informed a continued linkage between the image of these mythological temptresses and the indefatigable will of a nation to assert itself beyond its physical boundaries, whether through exploration or warfare.

By turning innovation and engineering skyward, aviation lent the ocean a less-triumphant-than-antsy “veni, vidi vici” quality. It isn’t surprising, then, that as mermaid sightings tapered and died, 1877 brought the first recorded encounter with a flying humanoid, reports of which have increased in number over the last 135 years. Such is the joyful blind redundancy of folklore, guaranteeing myriad new cryptids that people will someday hatch from wild half glimpses stolen in the buzzing blue forks of light between telepods and the thin, shadowed creases of wormholes.

Mermaids are the Monster of the Week! Monday, Matt Finley investigated the evolution of the bang-able mermaid. Enjoy!

Sideshow banner artist Paul Szauter

As the Earth shrunk in relation to man’s capacity to traverse it, mermaid encounters, once regarded as hallmarks of true seafaring expeditions, took second chair to empirical analyses of alleged mermaid sightings. The most popular explanation was (and is) that manatees and dugongs, when viewed underwater by a mob of exhausted, randy sailors could easily be mistaken for a human head and torso (albeit a meaty one) stuck atop a fish tail. This bad news for authors of realist nautical erotica proved profitable for sideshow proprietors and circus owners, who had been handed a 1,000-pound herbivorous solution to the problem of finding displayable mermaids (a popular alternative to marine mammals were humans afflicted with sironamelia).

These half-hearted merhoaxes proved more interesting as opportunities to gawk at animal remains or grotesque human deformity than as believable mermaid analogs. Then, in the 1840s, P.T. Barnum unveiled an attraction meant to debunk the debunkers. Rather than feature a petrified jumble of unrecognizable bio-matter and claim it as the remains of a folkloric, scaly, aquatic hottie, Barnum displayed a repulsive taxidermic perversion and billed it as “The Feejee Mermaid.”

Barnum’s grotesquerie was simply the top half of a taxidermied monkey grafted onto the preserved back end of a fish. In displaying an entire specimen that looked nothing like the mermaids of legend, Barnum’s humbug (which he was actually leasing from an associate) proved more believable than exhibits that offered varied components of traditional merfolk. Fiji mermaids of varying size and quality became a staple of the American carnival sideshow, along with other sawdust and stitch-work cryptids (most famously the jackalope, a jack rabbit with antlers sewn to its head).

The evolution of mermaid mythology and its intersection with sideshow japery elucidates an interesting dimension of the relationship between folklore as fiction and folklore in application – seeing is not believing. Barnum understood that people weren’t stupid and that, as in theater and cinema, a vital aspect of any illusion is the viewers’ complicit knowledge of, and participation in, that illusion. Freak show visitors didn’t want to see a fragmentary specimen of a real mermaid – they wanted to a see a complete spectacle representing a plausible mermaid. The game isn’t to make the legend real; the game is to make it realistic. And Barnum always won the game.

Friday: 20th century mermaids

The Mermaid is the Monster of the Week. Check back Wednesday and Friday for two more installments. Enjoy!

Untraceably ancient, mermaid legends date back to the first desperate twitchings of humanity’s awed, fearful love of the sea. Early polytheistic cultures worshipped various ocean deities and water gods that appeared as miraculous, eerie combinations of human and piscine anatomy.

Likewise, early Arabian cultures told stories about sea-dwelling humans that would occasionally venture onto land, but these beings were described as physiologically identical to terrestrial people. The familiar image of the buxom, long-haired girl a la poisson seems to have originated in European folktales and, as extensive sea exploration and empire building became increasingly viable enterprises, gradually seeped into the cultural vernacular.

Given the relative inefficiency and myriad dangers associated with early explorative expeditions, it’s easy to understand sailors’ fascination with mermaids; seafarers were trapped by water and wood, living in cramped, often squalid, conditions, with a gang of hard-living men, their anemic hearts powered by loneliness and lust. It’s only natural that the impossible prospect of finding a woman at sea became a tantalizing exercise in unfettered, horny creativity. Interestingly, due to this lascivious raison d’être, some early depictions of classic mermaids show the creatures with two tails (see original Starbucks logo), such that the female genitalia could be more easily, and comfortably, imagined and located.

Despite these raunchy confabulations, sailors also believed that mermaids, like sirens, used their feminine wiles to lure men into a watery grave. At the time, female sexuality was often construed as a terrifying, malevolent force. In some legends, mermaids are malicious, murder-happy fiends, while in other decidedly more fanciful (and pornographic) variations, they are so sexually excited that they forget humans can’t breathe underwater and accidentally drown their unwitting paramours. Regardless of these women’s motives, the stories, by portraying sailors’ desire for women and the attempted exploitation of that lust by deadly mermaids, reveals a vision of masculinity that understands carnal instinct as an inherent flaw in the otherwise perfect architecture of a manhood which is better employed in service of adventure and the empire (hunger was also portrayed this way, as exemplified in Homer’s Odyssey when Circe turns Odysseus’ gluttonous men into actual pigs). It’s sort of the ultimate “bros before hos,” in which the bros are the overarching patriarchal ideology and the hos are women, fishy or non, who, either consciously or ignorantly, attempt to overturn that ideology via sexual manipulation.

Wednesday: Taxonomy, taxidermy and mermaids