Archive for
‘May, 2013’

A mysterious map of the battlegrounds of Europe appears on a sooty ceiling in a Texas house in 1919. The face of a man and a coiled serpent also materialized. What did it all mean?

The Stamford Wild Man: A Berkshire Scare of 1861 In 1861, on a slow-news day, a journalist scribbled a story about a wildman. Suddenly people began reporting encounters with the tall, hairy creature. Was it a hermit, a wendigo, a lunatic, an idiot, or a true monster?

Twenty Acres of Skulls “It wasn’t war, it was murder.” Twenty acres of skulls at the Civil War battlefield of Malvern Hill–a memento mori for Memorial Day.

Large-scale flower apports from materializing medium Elizabeth d’Esperance and her spirit guides. And some less impressive floral offerings from Mrs Guppy.

In a shameless bid to ride the coattails of publicity for Dan Brown’s new book Inferno, and since I have previously covered Hell and its geography as well as some fiery relics of the Poor Souls in Purgatory, let’s look at some stories about Purgatorial pranks, where the living impersonate the dead for their own purposes.

The Bird-Woman Horror A horrifying creature described as a bird-woman with beak and talons.

A Family Bewitched: The Hoffman Poltergeist In 1871 the David Hoffman family of Wooster was attacked by an entity they called “IT.” The poltergeist stole money, food, and seemed to have a special hatred for clothing, which it slashed and shredded. Here is the story of a family haunted and tortured by malignant spirits.

Child Mediums and Indian Spooks: A Shaker Girl’s Out-of-Body ExperienceThe Shakers of Union Village, Ohio were in the midst of a Spiritualist revival: child mediums fell into trance, were dictated songs by angels, and were visited by Indian spirits. As an experiment, one telepathic Shaker girl was sent on a strange errand–to fly a message from Ohio to New York state.

Maternal Influence and Monsters It was widely believed in the 19th century that whatever a pregnant woman gazed upon would affect her baby. The papers were full of stories of children born with birth defects or phobias ascribed to their mother being frightened by such horrors as a snarling dog, a rat crushed in a trap, a lightning storm, or a ghost. They are disturbing reading for it was an insensitive age and those born deformed were referred to by journalists in terms like rat baby, human frog, infant monster, or “It.” This is a look at some of those maternally influenced monsters.