Pearl Bryan’s Shoes: Mr. Poock and the Clew that Solved her MurderThe discovery of the headless body of a woman near Fort Thomas, Kentucky in 1896 was the beginning of a murder case that thrilled the nation. The Pearl Bryan case had something for every taste: there was illicit sex, debauched young men with angelic countenances, a particularly horrific method of murder–and an intrepid shoe merchant from Newport, Mr. L.D. Poock, whose footwear expertise helped identify the victim and thus bring her killers to justice.
In a book that was over a century in the making, Haunted Ohio author Chris Woodyard, has unearthed another treasure-trove of Victorian and Edwardian ghosts, hauntings, and Fortean mysteries. Here’s what you can expect to find in The Headless Horror: Strange and Ghostly Ohio Tales….
The ghost of a murdered baby seen glowing in the window of its former house near Reynolds, Indiana–followed by a sighting of the infant’s killer carrying the child to its makeshift grave.
Enough Rope: The Hangman’s Rope in the Press The material, quality, and pedigree of the hangman’s rope was a subject of absorbing interest to the 19th century reading public, judging by the loving detail with which these items were reported in the papers.
A Vision of a Submarine Battle: Remote Viewing from the Great War A story of remote viewing from the Great War. A gentleman writes to The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1919 about his telepathic connection with his son, an officer in the Signal Corps of the US Army, and a vision of a submarine battle.
Inventive Deaths: How to Die in a Better Mousetrap Inventors often seem a hapless lot. If they aren’t being blown up by their own patented explosive shells, they hang themselves from their own perpetual motion machines or are found wandering the streets of great cities, hopelessly insane when their creations fail to make them rich….A look at obscure inventors—mostly Americans–who died at the hands of their better mousetraps.
The Ice Viking or Entombed in an Iceberg for Centuries Drifting for ten centuries through the uncharted seas north of the Arctic Circle, traversing heaven knows how many thousand miles of snow and silence, perhaps pushed by the ever-grinding ice floes of the North Pole itself, the body of a Viking king a thousand years old has been returned at last to civilization.
The Plague Shawl The history of disease is filled with cases of contagion spread by textiles. Was the 1878-79 Russian Plague caused by an infected shawl? Could a smallpox survive a year in the folds of a shawl, then kill?
Well before Indrid Cold and John Keel’s Mothman encounters, we find visitations from mysterious men dressed in black, sometimes accompanied by the same bizarre, poltergeist-like events Keel and others experienced when the Men in Black came to call. Here are two strange 19th-century MIB cases.
