Posted in Paranormal, tagged campfire tales, creepy story, spooky story, urban legend on June 11, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Check out the Independent’s list of urban legends that just keep going. Then tell me if there is any one in particular that creeped you out.
(There was one for me that made me want to check round the room and under the bed but I’ll only tell you what it is later. Don’t want to skew the results.)
Posted in Insanity, Paranormal, religion, WTF, tagged exorcism, Paranormal on May 15, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Ok, I couldn’t help myself with that joke, but my good friend at One Large Prawn blog has an interesting post about exorcism in Russia. He’s even helpfully provided an audio clip. According to the linked article:
In the case of the sixteen-year-old girl, she was in a one-on-one
session with Father Basil. Watching from just several feet away, Eugene
could see that the girl possessed extraordinary strength as her mother
struggled to keep her seated. As can be heard on the recording, her
voice changed radically. Her face contorted and displayed “total hate”
for the priest as she cursed at him.Toward the end of the recording, the girl, with an unearthly
voice, shouts something in Russian at the priest. The translation,
Eugene says, is, “I am not leaving her! I am not!”
The clip itself is well freaky to listen to, and the sounds are…well, not something I’d fall asleep to. Part of me wants to shout “shenanigans!”, or the Russian equivalent thereof (what IS the Russian equivalent of “shenanigans”?), but I’ve also experienced too many weird things myself to be able to just throw the whole idea out completely.
So what’s your verdict? Shenanigans, truth, or just plain freaky?
Posted in Paranormal, tagged ghosts, hauntings, poltergeists on February 13, 2009 | 1 Comment »
A schoolkid in the UK has claimed to have caught the image of a ghost on video as it crossed the passage. From the article:
Terrified Reece Pitman, 12, heard whistling — and used his mobile to film the shadowy being.
It came days after his nine-year-old sister complained that someone was mysteriously finishing her jigsaws at night.
Yep…it’s creepy, even if the site IS The Sun. That boy’s voice sends a chill down your spine, doesn’t it? So what’s your take: real or hoax?
[Link: The Sun - Ghostbanisters]
Posted in April fool, Computers, Insanity, Paranormal, WTF, tagged errors, microsoft, Visio, WTF on February 8, 2009 | 3 Comments »
I love these 
I was happily working in Visio, and did the unthinkable … yes, I tried to … wait for it .. copy and paste a shape from one page to another.
Gasp! Shock! How could I! Should have known better!
Visio dies quickly; and then this error pops up:
Obviously, I need to click the link to MicroSoft Update, as so strongly encouraged by this message. So, yes, I click the link.
Guess what:
April fool!
Deep sigh.
Posted in Insanity, Latest world news, Paranormal, WTF, tagged hauntings, Latest world news, possession, WTF on January 28, 2009 | 5 Comments »
A high-school girl, Lashundra Clanton, in Mississippi allegedly started talking in tongues, making predictions, and revealing hidden pasts, including predictions when certain students would die. The authorities are convinced that an evil spirit has taken over the soul of the girl, but Ms Clanton claims that the experiences are from God.
“Some believe, some don’t.” Clanton said. “They say it was the devil, but the devil only tells lies. Everything I said was the truth.”
Clanton said she admits she spoke in tongues and made predictions for her classmates. But she said it was God speaking through her, not the devil.
“I didn’t cuss anyone out,” Clanton said. “If it was a demon, I would have tore that school up. I would have thrown desks and everything. I didn’t say no cuss words at all.”
According to the report, school officials have warned her that if she continues to disrupt class, she will be sent home, and not tried as a witch.
[Link: 10News.com - Was High School Girl Possessed in Class?]
Posted in Paranormal, Sci-Fi, TV, tagged tv series on December 2, 2008 | 4 Comments »
If not, why not? Esp all you buffy fans! Yes, you know who you are!
Here the imdb link and youtube channel link. Enjoy!
Posted in Animals, Captions, Images, Paranormal, WTF, tagged creepy, Images, nightmares, teddy bear on November 28, 2008 | 10 Comments »
Right! It’s contest time! Caption this fun ball of fuzz to the best of your abilities! No actual prize, but you do get bragging rights!
[Image from: knuttz.net]
Posted in Cool, Insanity, Latest world news, Movies, Paranormal, Philosophy, Psychology, Sci-Fi, Science, Techno, TV, tagged aliens, constructed language, doctor who, first contact, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, language, star wars, translators on October 20, 2008 | 4 Comments »
a) Babel fish,
b) a TARDIS,
c) telepathy, or
d) C-3PO.
I think the article explains it all better than I ever could:
…John Elliott of Leeds Metropolitan University believes he has come up with software which at least will decipher the structure of their language – and be the first step in understanding what they are saying.
Dr Elliott’s programme would compare an alien language to a database of 60 different languages in the world to search see if it has a similar structure.
It would work great at deciphering our own human languages to start with! Imagine having a universal translator pinned to your lapel!
Because languages have different word orders, Dr Elliott is amassing a library of the syntaxes of 60 human tongues.
If a message is received from outer space, it could be compared against this database. Scientists would then be able to see if it resembled anything human, or a mix of Earthly languages.
The tiny kink in the plan, of course, is that we receive a written alien language before a spoken one…
Mind you, Dr Elliott might just have the perfect people to contact to test his program. According to sci-fi site io9.com, there are people who specialize in building non-human languages:
they’re called conlangers, and they construct elaborate languages for fun or to make the portrait of an alien race more believable.
[...]
Conlangers include everyone from Marc Okrand, the linguist who wrote Klingon, to the nerds who invented the most perfectly logical language in the world, known as Lojban. Anthony Burgess invented a little conlang for his characters in Clockwork Orange, and Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy is all about a group of rebel women linguists who create their own language to subvert their ultra-sexist society. Sometimes Hollywood employs conlangers to make alien talk seem more realistic[...]
Now that sounds like a really fun job!
[Link: The Telegraph - Scientist develops programme to understand alien languages]
Posted in Movies, Paranormal, Psychology, tagged fears, monsters, movie monsters, Movies, Psychology on August 27, 2008 | 7 Comments »
Cracked.com has an interesting post about the real fears that movie monsters embody, and it’s a fascinating look into an idea that what scares us isn’t what’s on the screen. I disagree with some of it, of course, because the nature of fear in movies is that we identify with the characters on the screen, and don’t symbolically tie the fear to some real world phenomenon. But it’s still a funky idea. Best quote from the article?
Spooky vaginas!
[Link: Cracked.com - Real world fears behind 8 popular movie monsters]
Posted in Art, Internet, Paranormal, tagged Art, curses, paintings, Paranormal on July 24, 2008 | 6 Comments »
I love me my twee creepy little stories, so settle down nicely by the fire while it pours with rain outside, and listen to this. My granny had a prohibition of putting up any pictures on the walls in the house that feature any eyes. From what I remember, she used to say that “things” could inhabit the pictures and watch you, or give you the “evil eye”. Not too sure about that myself, but this little gem of a story is right up there with some of my other favorite creepy stories.
Fortean Times has an article about a series of paintings they call the Crying Boy. The paintings (and reprints) all feature a portrait of a boy (not the same boy all the time) with tears running down his cheeks. The paintings are said to be cursed. Allegedly, hanging one of these paintings up is to invite trouble, and a burnt house. The fun part is that in each of the cases where a Crying Boy becursed house went up in flames, the said painting had survived untouched:
Rotherham fire station officer Alan Wilkinson who, it emerged, had personally logged 50 ‘Crying Boy’ fires dating back to 1973, dismissed any connection with the supernatural, having satisfied himself that most of them had been caused by human carelessness. But despite his pragmatism, he could not explain how the prints had survived infernos which generated heat sufficient to strip plaster from walls. His wife had her own theory: “I always say it’s the tears that put the fire out.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the stories had been started—and were being fueled by—The Sun tabloid paper, so a pinch of salt should go with paying attention to this story. So how much credence to the story did the boss of The Sun give it?
When the assistant editor took down a picture of Churchill, which had been hanging on the newsroom wall since the Falklands War, and replaced it with a Crying Boy, the mystery was resolved: “MacKenzie, bustling into the newsroom at his normal half-run, stopped dead in his tracks and went white. ‘Take that down,’ he snapped. ‘I don’t like it. It’s bad luck.’”
And what of the fireman, Alan Wilkinson?
Fireman Alan Wilkinson reacted in a similar fashion when his colleagues presented him with a framed Crying Boy on his retirement from the brigade. Like Kelvin MacKenzie, he denied being superstitious, but nevertheless immediately returned the painting, saying: “No thanks, you can keep it.”
The article then goes on to say:
Wilkinson admitted that he had been presented with another Crying Boy print by a worried woman who turned up at his home one night. He took it to work “as a joke” and mounted it on the office wall of the fire station. Within days, he was ordered by his superiors to take it down. Heaping irony upon comedy, the story continued: “The same day, an oven in the upstairs kitchen overheated and the firemen’s dinners were burned.”
Still, as far as creepy little stories go, it’s right up there with the other haunted painting. Does anyone out there have an actual copy of one of these prints? Has anything odd happened to you?
Sleep tight, children!
[Link: Fortean Times, via Boingboing]
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