Archive for
‘July, 2013’

Please allow me to introduce Mr. Herman Menz, Detroit resident, stone-mason, and blasphemous free-thinker who erected a statue of the Devil in front of his home, to the dismay of his church-going neighbors.

In an isolated valley in Western New York lived a colony of strangely malformed settlers. It was almost as though they had been marked by the Devil himself.

Dreams of Death: Interesting People #5 The person who dreamed of his own death was as hoary a psychic chestnut as one could find in the press or in Spiritualist literature. Here are two ladies who fell short in the prophecy department.

A story of a royal baby–the daughter of Queen Victoria herself–switched at birth. The claimant, Mrs Sophia Adelaide Kent, attracted much attention and some supporters, but could never come up with the paperwork to prove that she really was the Princess Royal. Here is her convoluted story, with just enough plausible details to keep you reading and wondering….

The Leech Barometer “The Leech Barometer,” a unique (and slimy) way to tell the weather.

A tyrannical Russian governor forces a young girl to marry him, then extracts a death-bed promise that she will not marry her former beloved after he is gone. When she is persuaded out of that promise, on the very night of the betrothal feast, she is found beaten and bitten by what she said was the ghost of her dead husband. This went on, night after night, until she was at the point of death….

The Haunt-Hunter Haunted Psychic researcher Dr. Walter F. Prince, the man who studied the fire-spook of Antigonish and the multiple personalities of “Doris Fischer,” found that his own house was haunted and that the vector was again a young woman.

A Woman’s Strange Delusion–Believed Satan To Be the Father of Her Children—
And in Her Mind They Each Had Horns a Foot Long.—In a Frenzy She Smothers the Two Youngest to Death, And Then Turns In and Attempts to Slaughter the Whole Household

While Washington DC and the White House attracted a wide variety of cranks, the Washington Monument was a shrine for the eccentric, the deluded, and the proto base-jumper.