After filming “The Mothman Prophecies” in 2001, Richard Gere allegedly became obsessed with the film’s titular mystery beastie. When his Craigslist ad seeking “The Legendary Mothman” failed to turn up anything more than nine imposters, three middle-aged vigilantes and one historically insignificant mothman, Gere resigned himself to searching for “The World’s Most Moth-like Man,” who he plans to transform into the Legendary Mothman using chemicals. While Pedro Veranza, the world’s most moth-like man, has been imprisoned in Gere’s second-largest bathroom for over two years, the actor’s Craigslist postings indicate that he’s still “Seeking Chemials [sic].”

The editors of Carrie Fischer’s recent memoir, “Wishful Drinking,” supposedly excised a controversial chapter in which the “Star Wars” actress described a decade-long addiction to exotic intoxicants including Bigfoot dander, Martian extract and Phoenicus Lite, “this awful beer from Atlantis that tasted like piss, but reminded me of my college years.”

Before washing up on a Long Island beach, the so-called “Montauk Monster” was named Reggie and belonged to a now-devastated Sean William Scott. A friend of Scott reports that he got a call from the actor during which a weeping Sean William both recounted the tragedy and lashed out at the Internet response: “We were out on my boat together, and the little guy must have gotten over excited. It all happened so fast. I turned around for, like, two seconds… and then I heard a splash…” an inconsolable Scott went on to say, “Montauk Monster!? How about Montauk Friend? How about Montauk Best Friend? These [expletive deleted] bloggers… these [expletive deleted]s are the monsters!”

Inside sources report that actress Zooey Deschanel recently a purchased a Chupacabra with the intention of entering the beast in dog fighting competitions. Upon discovering that even illegal dog fighting has some rules, the actress quickly packed the creature into a large wooden crate. She then moved the crate in front of her couch and covered it with a table cloth, upon which she positioned two bowls of M&Ms and a coffee table book about trains. When guests ask about the smell, Deschanel allegedly replies, “It’s nothing. Have some M&Ms. And look at these trains!”

In David Cronenberg’s The Fly, the Brundlefly’s last horrific mutation was actually played by a deformed swamp monster owned by actor Jeff Goldblum. Goldblum reportedly told members of the crew that he bought the creature to “punch when I’m frustrated.” The actor then offered, “Go ahead. Try it! It’s like punching a girl in her brain!”

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

Below are descriptions of three grotesque monsters. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a creature that has actually been reported. Can you Find the Fiend?

a) This fearsome humanoid bear-like creature, which is said to have the face of a man and the feet of a swine, supposedly resides deep inside a cave near Colorado’s Manitou Cliff Dwellings.

b) Part owl, part bear and part man, this 7-foot-tall flying monstrosity stalks the skies surrounding an ancient church.

c) This grotesque mystery of nature exhibits both feline and canine features. Research into the animal’s parentage has turned up few leads and even fewer revelations.

Answer after the cut.

The correct answer is

b) The Owlman, whose first victim was a family holiday that ended three-days early after two young female vacationers spotted the dreaded creature circling Mawnan Church in Cornwell, Great Britain. Two years later, another pair of girls encountered the Owlman while camping in the woods near the church. According to one of the girls, the red-eyed monster, which she discovered skulking around outside her tent, hissed loudly and took to the sky. Subsequent Owlman sightings, paired with increased UFO activity in the area, have kept cyptoozoologists wondering: “Is the Owlman a sinister alien visitor with a dark past, or simply a human pedophile who molested a radioactive owl?”

Statement a) described ManBearPig, the homicidal half man, half bear and half pig abomination that Al Gore sought to destroy in the aptly named “South Park” episode “ManBearPig.” In recent ManBearPig news, an Afghanistan war update printed in the New York Times on February 1st, 2010, included a reference to Observation Post ManBearPig – a Marine-occupied watch station in Treekha Nawa. The US government has since stated that if this tactical South Park reference proves successful in the War on Terror, pentagon authorities will initiate the detonation phase of a massive Middle Eastern Snuke campaign.

Statement c) described CatDog, a gross cat and dog hybrid that starred in its own eponymous Nickelodeon cartoon from 1998 until 2004. CatDog is disgusting. I don’t know how it defecates. Probably out of the cat’s mouth and then the dog eats it and that goes on over and over again in an endless loop, like some kind of copraphelic M.C. Escher drawing. It’s probably the only children’s cartoon that no serial killer has ever masturbated to. Revolting.

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.

As was tradition from whence Weird Things editor and writers Justin Robert Young and Matt Finley come from, the two have picked the Oscars against the lingering spirits of the Undead. Using random human mediums, the picks were divined without human meddling.

Enjoy!

Cinematography
The guys: Avatar
Undead: Harry Potter

Sound editing
Guys: Avatar
Undead: Hurtlocker

Supporting Acotor
the guys: Christoph Waltz
Undead: Christoph Waltz

COSTUME DESIGN
The guys: Nine
Undead: Nine

MAKEUP
The guys: Il Divo
Undead: Star Trek

SOUND MIXING
The guys: Avatar
Undead: Star Trek

LEADING ACTRESS
The guys: Sandra Bullock
The Undead: Meryl Streep

DIRECTION
The guys: The Hurt Locker
The undead: The Hurt Locker

ORIGINAL SCORE
The guys: Up
Undead: Avatar

VISUAL EFFECTS
The guys: Avatar
Undead: Avatar

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
The guys: Mo’Nique
Undead: Maggie Gyllenhaal

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
The guys: Food, Inc.
Undead: The Most Dangerous Man

ORIGINAL SONG
The guys: The Weary Kind
Undead: The Weary Kind

SCREENPLAY ADAPTED
The guys: Up in the Air
Undead: District 9

ANIMATED FEATURE
The guys: Up
Undead: Up

DOCUMENTARY SHORT
The guys: The Last Truck
Undead: Music by Prudence

SHORT FILM ANIMATED
The guys: Logorama
Undead: French Roast

SCREENPLAY ORIGINAL
The guys: Inglourious Basterds
Undead: Up

ART DIRECTION
The guys: Avatar
Undead: Avatar

FILM EDITING
The guys: District 9
Undead: The Hurt Locker

SHORT FILM LIVE ACTION
The guys: Miracle Fish
Undead: Instead of Abracadabra

BEST PICTURE
The guys: Avatar
Undead: The Hurt Locker

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.

Jason has killed a lot of folks with a lot of different tools. His victims may wonder, “Who is this man? And why is he murdering me?” Meanwhile, we the viewers want to know, “What is that tool he’s using? And what’s its history?”

Wonder no longer.

Today: Road Flare

As used by Jason in: Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

Victim(s): Vinnie (Lit flare is forced into his mouth)

What do you get when you cross strontium nitrate with a bunch of boring crap? That’s right! Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” covered in strontium nitrate! I would have also accepted “the Arctic (or Indian) ocean filled with strontium nitrate!” “A road flare!” or “Lunchables!” Yup. Typical red-flamed road flares ignite and burn by way of strontium nitrate mixed with a stupid fuel source like dumb sawdust. Or moronic charcoal. Or something extra retarded called a “polymeric resin.” Most flares ignite at around 375 °F and burn at a wicked pissa hot 3,000 °F – the exact temperature of Satan’s bones (for this reason, most Mormon’s refuse to use them).

YOU CAN DRAW SORT OF! Some people have gone as far as to call strontium nitrate “The Best Nitrate” due to its use as the colorant in red fireworks. Can you draw red fireworks? Good. Can you label the picture “fireworks” so people don’t think I asked you to draw a bunch of buttholes? Perfect. Now, go ahead and draw a butthole next to the fireworks. It’s okay. People will just think it’s another firework. Really, though, it’s a butthole. And the butthole is watching fireworks.

What you know as “road flares,” your dead hobo grandparents knew as “fusees” (or “railroad flares”). On ye olde raily ways, when no one had radios and everything was crashing into everything else and then catching on fire and exploding, a train travelling an unsignaled line would drop flares to announce its existence to the train behind it. If that train encountered a burning flare, they stopped until the flare went out. Often, a conductor would use this time to quickly grope as many sleeping passengers as possible. Conductors would share their numerical groping stats with other conductors at the conductor bar. The conductor with the most gropes from a single flare wait won a day off. This is where we get the phrase “groper’s holiday.”

YOU CAN DRAW SORT OF! Railroad flares had spikes attached to them so they could be embedded in wooden railroad ties. Draw whatever you were actually thinking about when I was telling you that boring fact. Extra points if it has more than eight nipples or fewer than one head.

Road flares are also used to prevent forest fires via controlled burns – li’l baby fires ignited to clear away excess plant debris and keep fire breaks intact. Flares are also used in backfiring, a wildfire fighting technique that employs localized, low-intensity blazes, which burn off a progressing fire’s potential fuel sources. Like Smokey the Bear says: “Only you can prevent forest fires. And sometimes that means setting forest fires. But don’t set forest fires. Unless they’re the type of forest fires that actually prevent the other, non-preventative forest fires and… ugh. I tell you what – how about everyone just lights fires in sets of three and we’ll just count on it sorting itself out.”

YOU CAN DRAW SORT OF! Fighting fire with fire! That’s crazy! But sometimes it works. Draw a scene where something you’re afraid of is defeated using more of that thing. Examples might include an erupting volcano placed upside-down on top of a second erupting volcano so the volcanoes just erupt into one another, 2 police lieutenants shooting each other in the face, or something with two sandwiches. Maybe they have flare guns.

You tell me it’s a firework exploding a firework, but all I see is two buttholes inhaling each other.

Thank you, Jason, for helping us learn through murder.

Join me again soon for another thrilling installment of Jason Vorhees’ Arsenal!

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.

Walk it Off – an abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

Today’s ailment: Hiccups

The Homestead Thievery Gambit

You will need: 1 Convincing Accuser

Instructions: Have convincing accuser accuse hiccupper of stealing money “on a farm.”

The Nurturing Satanist

You will need: 1 Right Index Finger (yours); 1 Left Shoe (worn); 1 Accurate Clock; Functioning Salivary Ducts

Instructions: At the stroke of midnight, stand next to hiccupper’s bed, wet right index finger with saliva and draw shape of cross on left shoe. Recite Lord’s Prayer backwards three times.

(Note: also results in summoning of bog imp)

The Cute Little Heart-Breaker

You will need: An open mind

Instructions: Have hiccupper imagine a fox without imagining the fox’s tail.

IMPORTANT: This is very different from the vomit induction trick of imagining a fox without a tail.

The Anonymous Tumbler

You will need: 1 Paper Bag; 1 Grassy Hill

Instructions: Place paper bag over hiccuppers head; Have hiccupper roll down grassy hill

Note: Using a paper bag with a “dizzy face” drawn on it will neither improve nor hinder this method’s results. I repeat: it will not hinder this method’s results.

The Acrid Flavor of Death (AKA The “Needs Salt” Method)

You will need: The ability to discern the center of a graveyard; A graveyard

Instructions: Have hiccupper place dirt collected from the grave nearest a cemetery’s center on his/her tongue.

The Dent in the Breadbox

You will need: A strong right jab

Instructions: Punch hiccupper in the stomach

The Huey Lewis-Endorsed Power of Love Cure

You will need: to be pretty damned certain hiccupper isn’t as lonely as he/she looks.

Instructions: Have hiccupper picture a person of the opposite sex who loves him/her

Caution: May result in existential crisis

Bug Sack

You will need: Live Pill Bugs; Small Sack; Twine

Instructions: Place pill bugs in sack; Using twine, tie sack around hiccuppers neck

Note: Most effective on prom night

The Improvising Satanist

You Will Need: Two Black Candles; Matches or Lighter; 1 Wet Noodle

Instructions: Light both candles; drape noodle between hiccuper’s eyes

(note: also results in summoning of meatball orc)

The Wait, What?! No. I’m Not Doing That. That… That’s… No. Method

You will need: 1 Alligator

Instructions: Have hiccupper rub gator’s belly.

In European legends, the bite of the werewolf involuntarily turns a hapless victim into a fuzzy-wuzzy killing machine. In American pop culture, zombies prey on the flesh of living innocents who then become skulking face gnawers themselves. In mother Russia, clock punches you. All of these contemporary Western tales portray human atrocities committed by victims of circumstance – upstanding citizens who happen to get cursed, infected or punched by clock, and then go on to act as involuntary proxies for the new and accidental darkness inside them. According to certain Navajo lore, Skinwalkers – dark witches who possess the ability to, among other things, transform into animals – are former high priests who have murdered blood relatives. In other words, it’s a story of active unholy transformation knowingly catalyzed by conscious decisions.

Remember the Algonquian story of the Wendigo – the man who engaged in cannibalism and, as a result, turned into an eternally suffering flesh-craving beast? Skinwalkers are similar in that they are men (occasionally women) who undergo a monstrous transformation by way of a culturally forbidden act (in this case, intra-familial murder). (Granted, there are versions of the story in which Skinwalkers are simply Anakin-esque flock strayers who end up on the wrong side of the force, but I would assume that that’s equally frowned upon.) Whereas the Wendigos are forever damned to tormented lives of feral scavenging and desperate murder, Skinwalkers are powerful, deliberate and feared. Both legends, however, use the threat of once-human monstrosities to demonstrate the corruptive power of sin (“sin” meaning, in this case, culture-specific social malfeasance).

Lots of folks think that Skinwalkers are kind of like Florida’s Skunk Ape – culturally variant analogs of a familiar supernatural beasties – and regard them as Native American werewolves, but that’s totally not even close to right. Unlike werewolves, Skinwalkers transform at will, and can change into any animal of their choosing. These transformations allow Skinwalkers to travel swiftly and easily elude capture. Their shapeshifting abilities even extend to their voices, which can mimic any animal or human sound, up to and including “Sky Pilot” by human band “The Animals.” They can read thoughts, and, in some versions of the legend, even project themselves, by way of a hypnotizing stare, into their victims’ bodies, which then become mere skins in which the monsters walk (though the name “Skinwalker” actually [boringly] comes from their proclivity toward animal skin attire). As acolytes of the Witchery Way (a form of Navajo magic centered on death and corpses), Skinwalkers can use enchanted bone dust to paralyze, or even kill, their chosen victims.

Mostly, though, Skinwalkers are scary because they are self-aware, they are clever and they are malicious. They are monsters because they chose to become monsters. This Navajo legend holds individuals accountable for bringing evil into the world; werewolves and all those other stories? The excuses of desperate children pointing their guilty fingers toward the darkness of caves and the mystery of nighttime forests.

Wednesday: The boys (and girls) who cried, “Skinwalker!”