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…
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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…

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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…

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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…
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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…

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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… (more…)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. 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!
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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…
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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…

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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… (more…)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. 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!

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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… (more…)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Matt broke down the basics of the legend Monday and keep an eye for the finale Friday…

Forget the demure courtesy and silent disappearance of that archetypical vanishing hitchhiker who left her stupid dead-person scarf in your car. If you’re going to haul a mysterious stranger around, you want something a little bit juicer than a sun-faded bandana. Like how about some prophecies? Impending natural disasters. Looming personal tragedies. Even the occasional standard-issue end-is-nigh doomsday harangue.

Sir/Madame, you are in luck -

As folklorists Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey sifted through a mess of 79 phantom hitchhiker stories, 9 of the retellings stood out immediately. In these accounts, the kindly driver is less freaked out by the sudden evaporation of his passenger than by the passionate fortune teller act she pulls immediately prior. (Note that the “she” in these stories is rarely the quiet, button-cute lass of the standard tale, but rather a haggard old crone who is only too eager to talk.)

Two such phantom seers predicted that a disaster would occur at Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair Exhibition. (The show ran smoothly.) One wrinkly clairvoyant warned that Michigan’s Northerly Island would disappear beneath the dark waters of the lake. (It remains unsaturated.) Another posthumous, psychic ol’ biddy even predicted the end of WWII. (A safe bet given the self-limiting timeline of every past global conflict, though, as this prediction had to have been made prior to Beardsley’s and Hankey’s 1941 study, the statement is still more of an empty logical truth than a spookily prescient observation.) Post prediction, each story played out as usual: hitchhiker poofs away without as much as a “thanks, sonny,” and the curious driver ultimately learns of the ride bummer’s deceased status.

To Beardsley and Hankey, these uniquely strange versions of the tale were merely evidence of a local variation, with 8 of the 9 accounts of mouthy dead know-it-alls coming out of the Chicago area. In a way, these head-scratching foretellings are no different than the supposedly prophetic tabloid articles that use numerology, liberal interpretation of ancient texts and an unapologetic flare for wild BSary to create endless predictions of natural disaster and apocalyptic horror. Except these ghost predictions don’t seem to be based on anything at all, opting instead to use the extant hitchhiker lore as a Trojan horse filled with strange portents of Illinoisan doom. To that end, it’s hard to decipher these legends. After all, tabloids have a bottom line to consider. It behooves them to traffic in the sensationalist and the deathly, no matter how spuriously derived.

Other than to shiver the timbers of the superstitious, what’s the sense in turning a harmless campfire tale into a timely warning of local catastrophe?

Find out, AFTER THE JUMP! (more…)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Look for new installments Wednesday and Friday…

It’s isn’t that I necessarily think that ghosts oughta have cars. It’s depressing to imagine an ectoplasmic ex-president or dead astronaut shoving some stalled out spectral beater along the shoulder of a deserted interstate. But they should have some form of transportation, right? Even if there were just a criss-crossing network of transastral zip lines that they could clip their faces to or something. The dead shouldn’t have to hitchhike. Looking through the annals of American folklore, though, I’d caution all of you to croak with at least one thumb intact because it looks like you’re going to be bumming a crapload of postmortem car rides to nowhere. Especially the ladies.

The vanishing hitchhiker is such a ubiquitous folktale that Jan Harold Brumvand, the University of Utah professor who, through a series of books, introduced the culture at large to the concept of urban legends, titled his first volume, “The Vanishing Hitchhiker.” If you haven’t heard the legend (or if it’s been updated so now it’s about a ghostly Facebook poke or something), the basic story goes as follow:

It’s late at night. A lonely dude is on his way home from a party. As he steers his car around a particularly spooky curve, his headlights catch the figure of an attractive female hitchhiker thumbing down his car from the shadows along the shoulder. The guy picks up the girl, who seems shy and distant. She quietly tells him where to drop her off, and they continue on in silence until they reach her nearby destination, at which point the pretty wayfarer vanishes without a trace.

Find out how the family or the vanishing hitchhiker gets dragged into all this nonsense AFTER THE JUMP…

Like every threepeated tale of a hook-handed killer or a crybaby bridge, this legend has variants. A lot of variants. In fact, it has so many alternate endings and interchangeable spine tingles that numerous folklorists have conducted exhaustive studies of the legend in an attempt to map out, both in space and time, the story’s multiple evolutions. One version finds the hitchhiker leaving a scarf or a hat behind in the car. When the driver grabs the forgotten accessory and runs it up to the hitchhiker’s door, the house’s current resident (sometimes a relative of the hitchhiker, sometimes not) informs him that the scarf’s owner, who matched the description of the hitchhiker to a t, died years ago. In another version, the driver offers the hitchhiker, who appears chilly and pale, his own coat or scarf, which he later finds draped over a cemetery headstone. Upon making some inquiries, he discovers that the person he picked up is the marked grave’s occupant. Sometimes the wandering ghost is hitchhiking on the anniversary of her death. Other times she was picked up at the former site of the horrific auto accident that killed her.

(Use of the female pronoun in regard to the hitchhiker is fairly consistent. I can’t think of any reason for this other than the obvious – it’s unlikely that a lonely midnight driver would pick up a pale, brawny man on the side of the road, no matter how shy he appeared.)

Obviously, the crux of all of these stories is a lone traveler’s unknowing encounter with the other side – a random act of kindness punctuated by a moment of wholly unexpected mortal dread (often on the part of both the driver and the queried family member) in the wake of the wandering ghost’s unceremonious departure. In one way, the story offers a strange sense of comfort – a restless spirit lost and desperate for a posthumous homecoming finds momentary deliverance in the kindness of a lonely stranger. In another way, though, the story is chilling in that its confronts us with a vision of death that finds wayward souls wandering dark roads in continual searches for the comfort of home… searches that always end fruitlessly in the cold passenger seat of an anonymous car.

Folklorists Richard Beardsly and Rosemarie Hankey were the first scholars to collate and organize all of the thumb-waving road-weary specter stories. Their 1941 study collected 79 disparate
American accounts of the tale. Their resulting report on the data managed to separate the tellings into four distinct categories, the first being the full version I related above, which was the most common and, in all likelihood, the original, “authentic” version. Another category involved the aforementioned ill-fated return of the forgotten personal affect. The other two versions? They get a bit more interesting…

Wednesday: Vanishing Hitchhikers and Prophecy

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!

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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…

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