Lucid Dreams and Saturn Skies The Life and Writing of Andrew Kincaid

Tag Archives: Monsters

The Beast of Bray Road

August 30, 2012 9:16 am / 5 Comments /

A medieval wood cut of a werewolf. The Beast of Bray Road looks a bit like this, except bulkier, hairier, and minus that mankini thing this guy has going on.

Bray Road is a rural stretch of road near Elkhorn, Wisconsin, unremarkable in nearly every respect save for one.  It is said that a monster lurks in the surrounding woods, a hulking thing of fur and claws and teeth called the Beast of Bray Road.  Sightings of the supposed beast began in the 1980′s, but similar creatures have been seen around southern Wisconsin, northern Illinois, and parts of Michigan.  The creature is also known by a less publicized but a much more descriptive moniker, the Michigan Dogman.

The Beast is described as being between seven and ten feet tall and about four to eight hundred pounds.  Its body is covered in shaggy, brown gray hair, and it is described as being built like a very large, very bulky man.  It is primarily said to walk on two legs, but eyewitness reports also claim that it’s almost equally comfortable dropping down on all fours.  Witnesses also claim there is a strong odor associated with the creature, like a musky or musty smell.  In general, this critter sounds like a fairly standard description of Bigfoot, save for two important differences: the occasional four footed gait and the fact that the Beast of Bray Road is said to have a wolf’s head atop a mostly humanoid body.
This strange twist led local papers to dub the Beast a “werewolf”, although there are no accounts of any humans transforming into the creature so the label is a bit of a misnomer.

Now, at least Bigfoot has the benefit of plausibility.  After all, at one time there were gigantic apes alive in parts of Asia, and there are about 6.5 billion bipedal apes wandering around the planet as we speak.  While there have been hundred and hundreds of stories over the span of human history of anthropomorphic animals, so far there is no scientific evidence of such a being’s existence.  Such a being, say an anthropomorphic dog, would not make any biological sense.  There’s a good reason why humans look like we do–we’ve evolved over millions of years to a bipedal, omnivorous lifestyle.  Wolves look like they do also for very good evolutionary reasons–they are highly adapted predators, designed by evolution to hunt.  There’s really no way you could mix and match a hominid body and a canine skull and get an animal that could survive.  Not that you would ever see such a mix anyway, since the two lines are of descent are at best distant cousins.

I think that the Beast of Bray road is not a biological organism, but rather a being of belief, like so many folkloric monsters.  Probably the stories resulted from either tall tails that took on a life of their own, misidentification of local fauna (such as bears) or some combination of both.  That being said, it doesn’t make the story any less real for the people who have had the misfortune of seeing the Beast of Bray Road.

Posted in: Abnormal Psychology, Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Madam LaLaurie–The Murderous Mistress

August 16, 2012 8:37 pm / Leave a Comment /

An image of the LaLaurie mansion from a post card circa 1906. It was on the third floor of this mansion that Madam LaLaurie built her torture chamber.

More often than not, when you hear the word “serial killer” you think of a man.  You would not be far off, as the vast majority of serial killers are male.  However, the fairer sex is not immune from murderous instincts, and some of the most notorious serial killers in history were women.  Among their number is the wealthy New Orleans socialite Marie Delphine LaLaurie, better known as Madam LaLaurie, whose mansion has gone down in the eccentric history of New Orleans as a house of horrors.

On April 10, 1834 a fire broke out in her mansion.  While neighbors and firefighters struggled to put out the flames, LaLaurie herself went about the mansion trying to save her valuables.  Rescuers began to question where all the household slaves were, and why they weren’t helping to fight the fire.  I also imagine they were curious as to why an elderly slave was chained to the stove.

Rumors had abounded before the fire of LaLaurie’s alleged cruelty towards her slaves.  Certainly slavery itself was a cruel institution, but slave holders were expected to treat their slaves with some minimum degree of humanity (I should mention that I waffled over that word choice for about ten whole minutes and it still doesn’t fit).  This evidently didn’t exclude slave holders from using whips and chains to discipline their slaves, so to be considered “cruel” back then meant very much going above and beyond.

Said rumors were probably in the back of the rescuer’s minds as they put out the fire.  They headed up the stairs toward the attic, guided by the words of the elderly kitchen slave who had told them about her fellow slaves who were sent to the attic, never to return.  Some believe the slave set the fire in the kitchen herself to try to draw attention from the outside world to Madam LaLaurie’s cruelty.  If that was her intention, the plan worked.

Rescuers broke down the attic door and found a scene straight out of the worst modern day horror movies.  Accounts vary, and likely they have become exaggerated with the passage of time, but regardless what was inside was terrible enough to make hardened firefighters become sick to their stomachs.  Slaves were bound in chains to the wall, with collars around their throats.  Some were locked in dog cages.  All of them showed signs of starvation and maltreatment, and some were horribly mutilated.  One man had had his genitals removed in a crude sex change operation.  One woman’s limbs had been broken at the joints which were then reset at odd angles, resulting in a crab-like appearance.  Another woman’s limbs had been removed and strips of her flesh had been stripped away in sort of a striped pattern.  A man had been vivisected (autopsied while alive) and lay on the makeshift operating table with his organs exposed.  Buckets of organs and blood were scattered all over the room.

Now I should mention that descriptions these rather more horrific and specific tortures came later, as near as I can tell.  They may not (and hopefully didn’t) occur, but rather they might be embellishments of the legend of Madam Laurie.  Regardless, the fact seems to stand that Madam LaLaurie and her husband committed atrocities against their slaves that were shocking even to the culture of the day that regarded them as nothing more than property.

Not long after the discovery, Madam LaLaurie was forced to flee her home as an armed lynch mob attacked the mansion when word spread of the attic room and its grisly contents.  LaLaurie and her husband fled in a carriage and escaped to Paris, France.  On December 7, 1842 Madam LaLaurie died in Paris, allegedly of wounds sustained during a boar hunt.  She was never punished for her crimes.

Posted in: Killers and Serial Killers, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My Guest Post From JapanPowered–The Gashadokuro

August 4, 2012 4:30 pm / Leave a Comment /

A painting depicting a GashadokuroMy brother runs a Japanese pop culture blog called JapanPowered.  I’ve begun doing semi-weekly guest posts there about Japanese pop culture, which I will now share with you!  Without further ado, here is my post about the strange story of Japan’s giant skeletons, the Gashadokuro.

***

Japan is home to some very strange spirits, to say the least.  Not long ago I did a post about an odd breed of spirit that exclusively haunt Japan’s bathrooms.  Last night I was poking around, looking for more Japanese ghouls and goblins when I came across the Gashadokuro (also known as the Odokuro).

Read more here…

Posted in: Ghost Stories, Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to Make a Zombie, the Haitian Way

July 26, 2012 9:11 am / 1 Comment /
The cemetary zombie from Night of the Living Dead, directed by George Romero

Sure this guy’s from Night of the Living Dead and not exactly a voodoo zombie, but he’s one of my favorites so here he is!

Zombies are a popular topic on this blog since, and this may be shocking to some, I’m a big fan of the zombie sub genre.  In the past I have speculated on whether the plague zombie, the type of zombie most famous in pop culture these days, could occur outside the silver screen.  However, there is one type of zombie that can and does exist in the real world–the voodoo zombie.  And today, I’m going to tell you how to make a zombie, the Haitian way!  [Disclaimer: This goes without saying, but please don't try this at home!  Leave zombification to voodoo professionals =P]

First, you need to identify a victim.  In Haiti, this would be a person who is what we in America would call a class A douchenozzle.   By way of example, Clairvius Narcisse, probably the most famous “zombie” in history, was a deadbeat dad who screwed his brother out of a land deal prior to being marked for zombification.

Once you have your target in mind, it’s time to mix up some zombie powder.  Now the recipe varies from bokor to bokor (bokors are voodoo sorcerers by the way), but the best mixes all have three things in common: ground human bones, plants with urticating hairs (science talk for irritating little spines–you can substitute ground glass or tarantula hairs.  Anything that pricks the skin and makes a person itch), and dried, ground puffer fish.

Each component serves a distinct purpose.  The bone dust is just damned creepy and really shows you’re dedicated to making your nemesis into a zombie (since, you know, unless you’re a serial killer most people don’t just have human bones laying around).  The glass or stinging hairs serve to irritate your victim’s skin, giving a way for the puffer fish’s toxin to enter their system, especially when they start to scratch, while the puffer fish contains tetrodotoxin, a neurotoxin five hundred times more deadly than cyanide.  In sub lethal doses, tetrodotoxin can induce a death-like state in victims as it suppresses vital functions to the point where even a trained physician couldn’t tell they were still alive.  Though paralyzed, victims of tetrodotoxin maintain consciousness throughout their entire ordeal, a fact that makes the later part of zombification all the more gruesome.

But more on that later.  So now you have your zombie powder.  It’s time to administer the dose!  You’ll have to be sneaky.  In order to work properly, you’ll need to apply the powder to the victim’s skin.  Bokors suggest dumping it into a person’s shoes or down the back of their shirt.  Ideally you’d find a way to dump the stuff into an open wound.  It might take more than one application of the zombie powder to lay your victim low, so if they don’t immediately fall over into a coma, stick with it!

Once your soon to be zombie is in his or her death trance, make certain they’re buried soon after.  Now they’ll be awake and conscious the entire time.  They’ll know that they’ve just been declared dead, and they’ll be able to see the coffin lid as it is shut over them.  Timing is critical, as you’ll want to dig them up before brain damage from lack of oxygen sets in.  Once you and your henchmen (one who is inevitably named Igor, because I’m imagining you as a Frankenstein-esque mad scientist here) dig up your victim, you’ll need to feed him/her a concoction containing Datura, the so-called “zombie cucumber”.  Datura contains hallucinogenic compounds that will keep your zombie in a docile, obedient fugue.  After all, it wouldn’t do you much good should you go through all of this effort and your zombie doesn’t obey your every evil command.  Sort of defeats the whole point of the exercise, doesn’t it?

There you have it!  You’re well on your way to making a zombie, the Haitian way!

Posted in: Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World, Weird Science / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Repeat After Me–Chimps Are NOT Pets!

July 13, 2012 11:52 am / 4 Comments /

A chimpanzee at the Los Angeles Zoo

Imagine a creature that is four times stronger than a man, with four grasping hands and inch long fangs.  It’s covered in bristling fur, it hoots and hollers like an animal, and it is incredibly agile.  It’s smart too, almost as smart as a human.  As if that’s not bad enough, it’s incredibly temperamental–it will turn on you in an instant, with little or no warning, and can quite literally rip your face off.

You might think I am talking about a monster from one of those B-movies I like so much, but I am talking about a very real animal, one that shares 98% of its genes in common with us.  Its Latin name is Pan troglodytes, but you probably know it by its common name–the chimpanzee.

Now you might think I’m being  melodramatic, but I am not.  Yesterday in Las Vegas, a pair of chimps escaped from a private residence and put an entire neighborhood at risk.  One of the chimps was shot and the other tranquilized and returned to her cage.  Luckily, nobody was hurt.  With all of the people around–including a lot of kids–the situation could have ended very badly.  Other instances where chimps sprang loose from their cages ended with people being mutilated if not killed.

When chimps attack, it is brutal.  They go out of their way to incapacitate their victims, first going for hands and feet, then the face, and then the genitals.  Yes, chimps will not only rip your face off but they will neuter you as well.  They manage all of this with one inch fangs and thick, tough fingernails.

Chimps do that sort of thing to each other often in the wild.  They are a very aggressive species, and they will quite literally go to war with other troops of chimps over territory.  But those are wild chimps.  Believe it or not, “domestic” chimps are a lot more dangerous than their wild cousins. That is because wild chimps know how to be chimps, while domestic chimps raised by humans don’t.  You might think that’s a good thing, given chimps’ war-like ways, but it isn’t.  While chimps are violent in the wild, like most animals they will attempt to intimidate an enemy and make it give ground rather than fight.  From a biological standpoint that makes more sense, because fighting is risky business–you’re as likely to get injured as your foe.  So, wild chimps give threat displays that will warn other chimps of an impending attack and give them time to back off in an attempt to avoid a fight.

“Domestic” chimps, never having lived with other chimps, do not learn these threat displays.  Their attacks come completely without warning–they could go from playing one moment to chewing a hand to a stump the next.  Put short, chimpanzees are not cute, cuddly pets.  Not only are they wild animals, but they are our closest living relatives, and they deserve a healthy amount of respect.  They should not be kept caged by private amateurs, who often hold the delusion that they have some sort of special bond with these animals.  If chimps are going to be held in captivity, it should be by trained professionals for the purposes of conservation and education.  To do anything else is to needlessly risk human and chimp lives.

Chimps are not the only exotic animals being held this way, and they might not even be the most dangerous.  There are more tigers in the United States than live in the wild in India, and many of them are kept by private owners.  Many states have no laws regulating the ownership of exotic animals, and there are no federal laws on the books.  Think about that a moment.  There are more laws for dog owners than for people who want to buy a tiger or a chimp.  If that isn’t crazy, I don’t know what is!

A bengal tiger. Native to India

This is a Bengal Tiger….also NOT a pet!

There are bigger problems than simple animal attacks, although those are terrible enough.  Exotic animals can bring contagious diseases with them, that local human and animal populations could not have resistances to.  For example, monkeys carry Herpes B, a strain of the herpes virus they can spread through bites and scratches that, in humans, can cause brain swelling and in rare cases death.  What’s more, some African monkeys carry Ebola Marburg.  Ebola Marburg is so far not able to cross the species barrier as far as I know, but it is a cousin to the infamous Ebola Zaire, a hemorrhagic fever that basically liquifies a person’s insides.  It has a mortality rate of 80-90%.  Not precisely something you want in the neighborhood.

Plus, exotic animals often become invasive species, crowding out native species in competition for similar resources and thus destroying the local ecosystems.  A great example of this is the veritable invasion of pythons and boa constrictors in Florida.  These species entered the US as pets, and they entered the wild when owners got rid of them.  They bred quickly, having no natural predators to keep their numbers in check, and now they’re spreading to other states, which have become more hospitable to their taste for warmer climates as global warming slowly ekes the temperatures up year after year.

The point is that we need to make a concerted effort to protect both human and animal lives, to pass better laws to curb the inflow of exotic animals into this country.  A few people’s selfishness and ignorance should not be allowed to put the larger community at risk.

Posted in: Abnormal Psychology, Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World, Weird Science / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comic Book Science is Right for Once! (Sort of)–A Quasi Review of The Amazing Spider-Man

July 9, 2012 4:07 pm / 1 Comment /

The Amazing Spider-Man theatrical posterAfter watching Prometheus, I couldn’t resist rambling about some of the scientific failings of the movie.  Since I enjoyed putting the “biology” part of my Bachelors of Science to use, I decided to do the same for The Amazing Spider-Man.

But before the science, it’s time for a mini-review.  The Amazing Spider-Man is a reboot of the Spider-Man trilogy, which ended on a weak note with Spider-Man 3.  Unlike the reboot of the Batman or James Bond series, Spider-Man wasn’t exactly gritty.  Certainly it was darker thematically than its predecessors, but not quite so dark as to qualify for the term “gritty”.  On a similar note, The Amazing Spider-Man didn’t bring anything new to the table in terms of plot either.  Minus the mention of Peter’s parents, the focus on cross-species genetics as the cause of Spidey’s, and the Lizard’s mutations (and that the Lizard is the antagonist rather than the Green Goblin), it doesn’t differ a ton from Tobey McGuire’s Spider-Man.  The differences are more superficial, rather than what you’d expect from an ground up reboot.  For a more thorough (and spoiler-free!) review, check out my friend Amanda Rudd’s post “They Finally Got It Right: A Review of the Amazing Spider-Man”.

That being said, I found this an entertaining movie and I am looking forward to future sequels.  What I especially thought was interesting was how cross-species genetics was cited as the cause for Spidey’s powers.  It certainly makes more sense that a bite from a genetically modified spider would result in profound mutations in its victim, rather than the bite of a radioactive spider from the original comics.  That doesn’t answer the question of exactly how those unique properties were transferred to Parker, but hey it’s a movie, right?

You might be surprised to learn that cross-species genetics is not merely the stuff of comic books, but it’s a very real and very vital part of modern biology and modern pharmaceuticals.  While we can’t make giant lizard men or man-spiders, we can make glow in the dark kittens.

On a more practical note, cross species genetics have been saving lives for decades now.  Known as recombinant DNA technology, these are a set of techniques that allow scientists to manipulate DNA, the code containing the recipe for all life.  DNA is a funny thing–it can make all of the weird and wonderful shapes we see in nature, but on a basic level it’s all the same thing.  My DNA is the same chemically speaking as yours, and both of ours are the same as a spiders.  What differs is the DNA sequence–it is the sequence that determines what goes where at what time, be it in a spider, lizard, or a human.

Heeere kitty, kitty, kitty! From Gawker.com

Since DNA is universal across all (Earth) life, and it’s only the sequence that matters in terms of what is expressed, it stands to reason you could mix DNA sequences from one species into the DNA of another and potentially get the foreign DNA expressed.  Really, that’s what they were talking about in a basic sense in The Amazing Spider-Man.  People have been doing just that sort of thing for decades now, although with less city destroying and more life saving results.

That’s twice now that I’ve said that s0-called cross-species genetics can save lives.  You might be wondering what I mean by that, since in the movie that was the whole rationale behind their research as well.  We haven’t progressed to the point where we can use these technologies to jab you with a needle and force your arm to grow back, but we can use recombinant DNA technology to produce a variety of life saving chemicals, most famously insulin.

It used to be that insulin was taken from animals like cows and pigs, but this wasn’t a very efficient means of harvesting the stuff in sufficient quantities.  In the 1970′s, using recombinant DNA technology, researchers were able to splice the gene for human insulin production into E. Coli bacteria (yes, that E. Coli…it’s a useful lab organism, what can I say?).  These new strains of bacteria happily did what bacteria do, all the while pumping out live-saving insulin for the diabetics of the world.  Similar techniques are used to make everything from Hepatitis B vaccines to blood clotting factors.

While recombinant DNA technology has saved thousands and thousands of lives over the years, there is a dark side.  Similar techniques can be used to produce genetically modified organisms (GMOs) which include those adorable kittens up there, but they’re more famous for their role in agriculture.  There is a lot of worry about GMO crops out there these days, that somehow they could be harmful to consumers.  I’m not certain about that, but their income on the environment when they begin to spread on their own is certainly a cause for concern.  The jury is still out.

What we can be certain of is that movie and comic book science have both gotten better over the years.  I don’t expect my movies to be scientifically accurate in any way shape or form, but it is always nice when it happens.  In this case, the writers took a very real and very beneficial technology and used it to drive the plot behind an entertaining piece of cinema.  You can’t go wrong with that :)

Posted in: Movie Reviews, Reviews, Weird Science / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Twilight Zone (Original Series)

July 2, 2012 2:04 pm / 2 Comments /
The Twilight Zone was a Sci-fi/horror/Thriller anthology series created by Rod Serling in 1959. It is considered by many a classic piece of television, and iconic in the horror genre

There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.
—Rod Serling

The Twilight Zone is a classic piece of television, and it really set the benchmark by which any sci-fi or horror television series (especially if they are anthologies) are judged against.  Probably right now the iconic theme is in your head–even people who have never watched the show have likely heard it, it’s imitated so often.

It used to be that you might catch a few episodes here and there on the Sci-Fi Channel (I refuse to call it SyFy because…really?)  but now what with Netflix and Hulu it’s much easier to find.  Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of watching seasons 1-5 (minus season 4, for some reason) on Netflix.  I’d seen a few episodes here and there during Sci-Fi marathons, including a few classic episodes such as “Time Enough At Last”, where Burgess Meredith (better known as Rocky’s manager in the first three Rocky movies) plays a man who likes to read, and after a nuclear war finally finds the time, and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” where a young William Shatner sees a terrible creature on the wings of a plane.

Seeing those classics, I knew I like The Twilight Zone and I was excited to get to experience the rest of the series.  I was impressed by how edgy the show was, given the time period in which it was made.  It featured a lot of scathing social commentary, using sci-fi/horror themes to illustrate (and conceal from censors) its point.  “Monsters on Maple Street” is a perfect example of The Twilight Zone as social commentary.  It is about a neighborhood in a small town that sees strange lights and hears word that aliens have come down in human form.  Paranoia takes over, and soon the neighborhood devolves into panic and violence.  Another such episode whose name I can’t recall centers around a family who has a bomb shelter in a neighborhood of people who did not.  The authorities come over the airwaves with the warning that a nuclear attack is under way, and what once looked like a neighborhood straight out of a Norman Rockwell becomes a place of fear, panic, and the animal instinct to survive at all costs.

Not every episode of The Twilight Zone is quite so weighty.  Many are moralistic fables, many of which are intended to be humorous.  One hallmark of the series is the ironic, often horrific twist featured in nearly every episode.  The Twilight Zone beat M. Night (What a Twist!) Shymalan to the punch by fifty years, and more often than not this show does it better than ole Shymalan ever could, outside of The Sixth Sense that is.  Not every episode is great–like any anthology, the stories can be a bit hit or miss–but when The Twilight Zone gets it right, well, there’s a reason it’s considered classic television.

Posted in: Abnormal Psychology, Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World, Reviews, TV Show Reviews, Weird Science / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Legend of the Bunnyman (Based on True Events…Seriously, I Couldn’t Make This Stuff Up)

June 29, 2012 2:17 pm / Leave a Comment /
The Colchester Underpass, better known as Bunnyman Bridge

A photo of the Bunnyman Bridge during daylight. Officially known as the Colchester Overpass, two rail lines run over top of it and the road itself is also fairly busy. Keeping kids away from this place could be part of why the story of the Bunnyman came into existence.

Ask anyone under the age of twenty out in Fairfax County, Virginia if something lurks in the night under the Bunnyman Bridge, and they will tell you most assuredly that something does.  Be he a flesh and blood maniac or a being of a more ghostly variety, the Bunnyman is said to haunt the Colchester Overpass, now better known as Bunnyman Bridge.

The legend began somewhere around 1970, and the information that I have seen claims that it has spawned upwards of fifty-four variants(!).  The most common version of the story goes as follows.  Around 1904, the residents of Clifton, Virginia successfully petitioned to have the local asylum/prison shut down.  Since you can’t just release a bunch of violent crazy folks out into the countryside, the prisoners were to be transported to another facility.  All went well, at least until the transport crashed, killing several of the prisoners and allowing the rest to escape.  All but one of the escapees were rounded up.  Skinned, half eaten rabbit carcasses left hanging from trees and the Colchester Overpass began to appear soon after.  Officials then found the body of Marcus Wallster, left hanging from the Underpass in a similar manner to the rabbits.

Understandably concerned, the police ramped up their efforts to find the madman and soon discovered that the culprit was none other than Douglas A. Grifin, who had been put in the asylum for killing his family on Easter Sunday.  When the climactic confrontation came between the authorities and the madman, Grifin was hit by an oncoming train in an attempt to escape.  Ever since, around Halloween when the veil between our world and the spirit world is thin, locals claim to see rabbit carcasses hanging from the Colchester Overpass.  Some have even claimed to see a figure standing there in the shadows.  Nobody ventures beneath the Underpass to see who it is though because the Bunnyman makes no distinction between rabbits and people–many variants of the legend have our costume-clad friend going Jason Vorhees on curious teenagers who come calling on Halloween Night, leaving their mutilated corpses dangling from the Colchester Overpass like Marcus Wallster so many years before.

Of course, this is all sorts of urban legend-y fun but how much of it is true?  Is this story, like Cropsey, more of a way to scare teens and preteens away from danger?  As you might suspect, the bulk of this story is false.  There never was an insane asylum in Clifton, and county records have no men named Marcus Wallster or Douglas A. Grifin on record as ever having lived.

However, there are some elements of the story which are true.  Namely, there really was a crazy guy dressed in a bunny suit terrorizing (actually more like confusing the hell out of) people in Fairfax County.  Two separate incidents from 1970 report a man dressed in a bunny suit yelling at people he felt were trespassing on his property.  In one incident he tossed a hatchet through a car window, and the other he attempted to chop down a porch post with a long handled axe.  No suspect was ever detained, but in one related incident a man calling himself the “Axe-Man” accused a representative of the Kings Park West Subdivision of dumping trash on his property. To this day no one knows the mysterious costumed man’s identity.

Not coincidentally, after these events in 1970 the Bunnyman story took wing.  It isn’t often in researching folklore and urban legends that you find their origin, but in this case it seems that the truth really was stranger than fiction.

Sources:

Bunny Man–Wikipedia

The Clifton Bunnyman–Castle of Spirits

The Bunnyman Unmasked

Posted in: Abnormal Psychology, Ghost Stories, Killers and Serial Killers, Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My Latest Netflix Addiction–Supernatural

June 25, 2012 12:52 pm / 4 Comments /
Supernatural is a paranormal tv show about two hunters who face the forces of evil.

The title card for season seven of Supernatural

You know, it’s kind of funny.  Now that I don’t have cable, I find myself watching more television than when I did.  More to the point, I watch more long running series.  That was something I never did too much when we had cable–I’d start a show and wind up fizzling out a few seasons into its run.  It would start with a few missed episodes here and there, until I wound up completely forgetting about the show until I saw a commercial for it.  So it was with the series Supernatural and just about every other television series on cable in the last ten years or so.  Netflix changed all that, mainly because it allows me to watch what I want, when I want (provided it’s on instant, that is).

Supernatural follows the brothers Sam and Dean Winchester as they go about the family business–hunting things that go bump in the night.  The series begins with a monster-a-week format under the arc of a main storyline that is slowly revealed over time.  Most of the first season focuses on the hunt for the yellow-eyed demon that killed the brother’s mother and burnt down their home.

While the subject matter of Supernatural is often dark and disturbing, they manage to keep a sense of humor.  The show manages to balance serious episodes with funny ones pretty well while never dropping the ball in terms of the plot.  Every episode is sprinkled with pop-culture references to classic rock bands, horror movies, and TV shows.

Despite the scale of events that occur as the series progresses, Supernatural retains a playful, self deprecating sense of humor.  Seriously, there are a lot of laugh out loud moments in this show.  It’s a great show, but not without some problems.  Sometimes the humor seems ill placed given the gravity of events.  It can get a bit repetitive as well, especially when they break away from the monster-a-week format and start focusing more on the main story-line.  The dynamic between Sam and Dean, while interesting, can get a bit grating.  Dean basically treats Sam like crap through half of the series, mostly because he’s older.  While Dean basically makes the series, his tough guy demeanor sort of started to get on my nerves on and off throughout.  Sam has a problem as well, mainly because he’s as overly sensitive as Dean is stereotypically macho.

I should clarify that I’ve only watched up to the first part of season five so far.  From what I understand, the main story arc of the series concludes at the end of season five.  A friend of mine said the quality of the show goes downhill starting with season six, so much so that one of the original creators is no longer a part of production.  Netflix only has up until season six, so pretty soon I suppose I will see for myself.  Still, if you like vampires, werewolves, demons, and other bogies, give Supernatural a look.  Despite its flaws, it’s a great show and well worth watching.

Posted in: Reviews, TV Show Reviews / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Legend of Cropsey

June 22, 2012 8:56 pm / 5 Comments /
The poster for The Burning, a horror movie featuring a blade wielding maniac named Cropsey

“A legend of terror is no longer a camp fire story anymore!”– tagline for The Burning, the only movie I’ve seen featuring a crazed killer named Cropsey.

Folks in the Northeast US who attended literally any camp in the past thirty or forty years will probably be familiar with the name Cropsey.  For the rest of us, there is a fascinating documentary on the subject on Netflix called, creatively enough, Cropsey that in large part inspired this post.  Outside of the Northeast, we might know Cropsey better as Jason Vorhees.  That is slightly overstating the case, but let me give you the bare bones version of the story, since there are a dizzying array of variations.

The core of the Cropsey legend involves a man named Cropsey who was a respected member of the local community who lived near the local sleep-away camp.  Campers tried to play a prank on Cropsey’s son that goes horribly wrong.  The prank left Cropsey terribly deformed and seriously pissed, not to mention insane.  As a result, Cropsey took to the woods, axe in hand, where he lay in wait for any unwary campers who happened to wander away from the relative safety of camp.

The parallels with the Friday the 13th franchise and nearly every slasher ever made are pretty clear.  They all involve a blade-happy maniac with a hate-on for campers/coeds/teenagers who break the rules, be they cultural rules (anyone who has premarital sex dies) or the camp rules (if you wander off you get axed).  The way to survive is clear–simply don’t break the rules, and you’ll be fine.

In that way, what started as a regional legend has become a part of pop culture at large, although Cropsey only shows up as a named character in one movie that I know of.  That movie is called The Burning, which is basically a Great Value version of the original Friday the 13th.  It is about a cruel camp caretaker named, you guessed it, Cropsey who is the victim of a prank that gets out of hand, leaving him deformed and very, very angry.  He gets his revenge years later on a group of campers that, oddly enough, contains characters played by Fisher Stevens and Jason Alexander (better known as George Costanza from Seinfield).  In any case, the movie is actually pretty good despite its slow start.  I don’t normally laugh at people getting hacked to bits (it seems in bad taste) but some of the stuff that happens when the bloodbath begins is pretty goofy and I couldn’t help myself.

Now that the legend of Cropsey has entered pop culture, it is much more difficult now to pin down whether or not there ever really was a man named Cropsey and whether he committed any crimes.  The answer is…it isn’t clear.  There was a man named Jasper Cropsey who lived in New York, but so far as I can tell he never committed any axe murders.  The documentary Cropsey frames its entire narrative around the crimes of Andre Rand, who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering several children in the 80′s on Staten Island.  While he certainly could not have been the man whose crimes originated the legend, given how recently he committed his crimes, he’s become part of the legend in that region of the country at least.

Like any number of urban legends, we probably will never know for certain where the legend of Cropsey originated.  These sorts of stories begin from seemingly nowhere and take on lives of their own.  Cropsey in particular has had a great deal of longevity, especially since his legend has inspired key parts of the modern slasher flick.  We might not know where Cropsey came from, but we can be certain that he’s here to stay.

Posted in: Ghost Stories, Killers and Serial Killers, Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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