Fish With Human Face Stuns China!
A bizarre piece of footage out of China shows a fish that seems to sport the face of a human. The eerie video was reportedly filmed by a tourist visiting the city of Kunming earlier this week. While stopping a popular pond in the area, she caught sight of a strange fish, said to be a carp, in the water that appeared to possess the eyes, nose, and mouth of a person. The astounded witness mused to someone nearby "the fish has become a fairy, it has a human-like face."
The video quickly went viral in China after it was posted to the social media site Weibo with viewers offering all manner of opinions on the odd creature. Fortunately, there was nothing sinister or supernatural about the fish's unique 'condition' as the spooky visage was merely the result of markings on its body coincidentally resembling a face, likely 'enhanced' by the water. The phenomenon, so to speak, is actually not altogether rare for this particular species of fish as 'human-faced' carp spotted in England and Taiwan made similar headlines in recent years.
[SOURCE: Coast2Coast AM.]
Caught On Tape: Howl of a Bigfoot?
A chilling piece of footage from Canada features what appears to be a series of haunting howls coming from a forest and some suspect that the eerie screams could have come from a Bigfoot. The strange scene reportedly occurred earlier this month as Stargell Blackstar was grouse hunting with his wife and grandson at a rather remote wooded location around 30 miles Sioux Lookout, Ontario.
In a subsequent post of the video to YouTube, the bewildered witness says that the odd sounds lasted for around five minutes, but they were only able to film around 2 minutes of the weird event. In the footage, Stargell can be heard marveling "oh my God" as a number of unsettling howls repeatedly erupt out of the nearby forest.
At one point in the video, Stargell's grandson starts crying, which we imagine was a worrisome moment as the family probably would have preferred that whatever creature was behind the screams did not know they were there. To that end, some observers have suggested that the animal in question was the legendary Sasquatch. However skeptical viewers argue that the howls could have come from a moose or some other prosaic animal.
[SOURCE: Coast2Coast AM.]
Canadian Professor Lost Her Job for Telling the Truth About ‘Endangered’ Polar Bears
James Delingpole | 27 Oct 2019
A Canadian university has frozen a zoologist out of her adjunct professor post as punishment for saying the unsayable about polar bears: that populations are thriving; that they are not endangered; that stories about how they are being caused to starve by melting summer sea ice are junk science #FakeNews.
Dr Susan Crockford is one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears and had held her post as Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada for 15 years.
But by speaking the truth about polar bears she fell foul of environmental activists who have long treated Ursus maritimus as one of the poster children for their “the Earth is doomed and it’s all our fault” narrative. As a result, without explanation, Crockford was ousted from her position at the university.
In an interview with Crockford this week for Breitbart News, I ask: ‘Do you think you’ve been blacklisted for telling inconvenient truths?’
She replies:
“Oh I absolutely do.”
Crockford’s “crime” was to point out that contrary to environmentalists’ computer projections, polar bear populations have increased, not decreased — despite “global warming”.
“What happened was that in 2007 there was a prediction that when sea ice declined to about 42 per cent below what it would have been in 1979 that two-thirds of the polar bears in the world would be gone. That would be 10 out of the 19 sub populations that exist.
But what has happened, we find from research, is that bear numbers have not gone down but in fact have gone up by at least 16 per cent and probably more. So the bears are thriving despite the fact that sea ice has declined dramatically.”
The “polar bears starving because of melting sea ice” story has been a staple of the green scare narrative.
In 2017, for example, footage of an emaciated polar bear rummaging pitifully through trash cans became a huge international story.
The video for National Geographic attracted over two million views. It was set to tear-jerking music and accompanied by the utterly dishonest and misleading message “This is what climate change looks like.”
In fact, as Crockford explains, this was the purest green #FakeNews.
“Starving is the leading natural cause of death for polar bears. It just happens.”
If the polar bear was starving to death, it was likely the result of its being old or sick — not because of melting summer sea ice.
Crockford says:
“Polar bears do most of their feeding in the spring time, not the summer. Starving polar bears don’t tell us anything about populations.”
[SOURCE: Breitbart.com]
"Blob" Creature Mystifies Scientists
A fascinating new exhibit at a zoo in Paris showcases a mysterious and bizarre creature dubbed the 'Blob.' The strange slime mold, which will reportedly be unveiled to the public for the first time this coming Saturday at the Paris Zoological Park, boasts an array of odd and rather wondrous characteristics that have left scientists scratching their heads. "The blob is really one of the most extraordinary things on Earth today," marveled museum director Bruno David, "it's been here for millions of years and we still really don't know what it is."
What makes the blob remarkable is that it lacks eyes, a mouth, a stomach, a brain, and a nervous system, yet it can accomplish a number of things which should seemingly be impossible. For example, the creature was stunningly able to navigate its way through a maze in order to find food, which it subsequently somehow consumed. Noting that the weird slime is apparently capable of memory, adapting its behavior, and solving problems, David observed that it seems to behave "like a little animal."
To that end, however, David noted that "we don't really know if it's an animal, if it's a fungus, if it's in between." The creature is made all the more confounding by the fact that it also boasts incredible healing powers and, if merged with another of its kind, can inexplicably share information with its counterpart. And, amazingly, in one experiment, scientists cut the creature into multiple pieces and it managed to reconstruct itself in a manner akin to what one might expect from a science fiction film.
Named after the 1958 Steve McQueen film The Blob, this particular form of the perplexing organism has been known to scientists for nearly 50 years, yet continues to astound researchers by what it is capable of doing and how it appears to defy classification. Ultimately, David mused that "the blob is a living being which belongs to one of nature's mysteries." And, adding one more achievement to the list, the creature is likely to become a star attraction at the zoo, despite resembling nothing more than a small puddle of goo.
.
[SOURCE: Coast2Coast AM.]
A Cultural Historian Explores an Old Mental Hospital, and Why They Scare Us
They are haunted, but not by ghosts.
By Troy Rondinone | 31 October 2019
I’m an academic historian of American culture at Southern Connecticut State University, and my trip to the Trans-Allegheny began years earlier, when I saw it featured late one night on a ghost-hunter television show. What was it that made this place so scary? Was it always that way? (According to the Travel Channel, the hospital is one of the 10 most haunted spots in the country.) I spent the next five years tracking the dark narrative of mental hospitals through fiction, memoir, film, media, and art. I watched hundreds of movies, read scores of novels, and pored over heaps of periodicals. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that Americans have always been deeply invested in what goes on within the walls of these institutions, and I began to understand why. The term “asylum” itself, which has negative connotations today, was originally used to evoke confidence, safety, and security. How and why this changed is part of this longer story of stigma, fear, and horror. A “ghost tour” through the Trans-Allegheny is the logical end of the story. Or perhaps, more precisely, the opening of another chapter.
THE TRANS-ALLEGHENY WAS ONCE AMONG the most expensive buildings in the United States. Ground broke on this massive collection of sandstone buildings in 1858, with the forced work of incarcerated African-American laborers, and continued on and off through the 1950s. Situated on over 300 acres, it was designed to evoke optimism and the spirit of reform that gave birth to similar mental hospitals around the country, beginning in the 1830s.
These public works were sold as monuments to healing, mansion-like and airy, with cutting-edge medical treatments and scientific architecture. Inside, a person committed there was said to encounter occupational therapy, medication, hydrotherapy, even hypnotherapy. Superintendents boasted that the older methods—chaining up the “mad” in basements—had been abolished. Straitjackets and strong rooms, it was said, would be used only sparingly. Clean air, baths, simple food, and healthful activities were considered cures for disorders of the mind, and the reported “cure” rates were—at least at first—terrific.
These “asylums”—the word in common use at the time—were meant to feel like a refuge, but were also products of a very different understanding of mental illness. As such, they also employed high doses of opium, bleeding, harsh purgatives, and devices such as the “Utica Crib” and the “phrenological hat.” Still, the institutions were not operated as though they had something to hide. Tourists were encouraged to visit, and postcards and even patient newspapers were printed for public consumption. In 1842, Charles Dickens called on a number of mental facilities during his American tour. He was famously unimpressed by Blackwell’s Island Asylum in New York, but found the Connecticut Retreat for the Insane in Hartford “admirably conducted” and the Boston Lunatic Asylum to be a place embodying “enlightened principles of conciliation and kindness.”
But even in those years, exposés, novels, and short stories began to cast America’s asylums as mysterious, even sinister. In 1833, one Robert Fuller called the McLean Asylum for the Insane in Massachusetts a “tyrannical Institution” and a “dungeon.” Isaac Hunt’s 1851 description of the Maine Insane Hospital told of a “most iniquitous, villainous system of inhumanity, that would more than match the bloodiest, darkest days of the Inquisition or the tragedies of the Bastille …” Pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft locked her protagonist up in an asylum for her controversial 1798 novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman. Edgar Allan Poe set a dark comedy, “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether,” at the fictional Maison de Santé hospital, where the protagonist encounters a mad doctor who lords over a topsy-turvy world ruled by the patients.
Without a firm understanding of the causes of mental illness, or more advanced pharmaceutical or therapeutic options, these places were never going to achieve their goal of humane treatment of mental illness—a goal we still grapple with today. By the end of the 19th century, the hospitals were clearly overwhelmed. Stays grew longer, treatments were revealed as ineffective, and conditions worsened markedly. And thanks to a widely copied 1890 New York state law that made the state wholly responsible for the care of people with serious mental illness, patients kept flooding in. Overworked doctors tried dangerous new drugs and treatments, or simply neglected their charges. Things were even worse in the segregated, “colored” hospitals for African Americans, which typically had much lower budgets and fewer treatment options. In an effort to reverse the bad publicity, superintendents started renaming their institutions “hospitals.” It made little difference.
The demise of these big state hospitals began in the late 1960s, spurred by the widespread availability of thorazine (called the “chemical lobotomy”), a new Medicaid provision that funneled federal mental health funds to nursing homes, and a new emphasis on outpatient care. Deinstitutionalization of mental illness emptied many struggling hospitals, but also put many former patients, damaged by their institutional quarantine, on the streets and in prison.
This larger historical arc is mirrored, beat for beat, in the history of the Trans-Allegheny. Inspired, like many of the large state hospitals, by physician-reformer Thomas Story Kirkbride, it was designed for “moral treatment.” Kirkbride’s animating idea was that space, air, and rest would cure most cases of mental illness, hence the wings were set back in a staggered pattern to facilitate maximum light and air into each ward, and the grounds were planned with pleasant walkways, lawns, and fish ponds. Renamed the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane by the new state government of West Virginia in 1863, it welcomed its first batch of 20 patients in fall 1864. By 1881, the massive clock tower and the fourth wing of the main structure were completed, at significant cost to the state. It was touted as the largest hand-cut stone building in America.
The hospital was designed for 250 patients, but by the end of the century there were nearly 500 in residence. Intake diagnoses included “hereditary,” “epilepsy,” “menstrual,” and “masturbation.” By that time the cure rate was reported as 26 percent, much lower than earlier levels. Another name change, to Weston State Hospital in 1915, reflected a lack of confidence in the operation of the hospital, and within a couple of decades, the patient population was more than 2,000. New treatments, such as electroconvulsive therapy and lobotomies, were introduced. The crowding increased and conditions further declined.
By the time the hospital closed, at the tail end of nationwide deinstitutionalization, in 1994, it had lived through the lifecycle of just about every American mental hospital: early optimism, local boosterism, poor results, declining conditions, overcrowding, and finally desperation and closure. As with other hospitals, Weston shut its doors after years of diminishing support and patient numbers.
The grand old abandoned asylums carry the weight of a heavy past. Many are Kirkbride structures: massive faces, extended bat-like wings, tall ceilings, and extensive facilities. Cupolas and towers top many of them, which look castle-like. Nature has reclaimed many of the forgotten ones, which makes them alluring and hazardous. Hydrotherapy tubs, ventilation pipes, broken toilets, empty bed frames, and rotting dance floors: The mental hospital has become core to the idea of “ruin porn.” And for good reason. These features that these sites are known for, frankly, have long been associated with hauntings in popular culture.
Some states have declared their abandoned hospitals strictly off-limits, citing health hazards, including asbestos. Some hospitals have been repurposed. Fairfield State in Newtown, Connecticut, for example, has recycled and updated some of the buildings for municipal functions, and added a large youth sports complex to the site. Others, such as Blackwell’s Island (on what is now called Roosevelt Island) combined demolition with extensive refurbishment to create luxurious private living and commercial spaces. And then there are the hospitals that have entered the paranormal tourist trade.
In 2007, a contractor purchased the derelict Weston building from the state at auction for $1.5 million. The new owners revived its original, more frightening, less socially acceptable name, and began a program of limited restoration and courting of audiences interested in history or that like a good scare. The employees at Trans-Allegheny report that the site, as an attraction, has been a great boon to a local economy, which calls to mind the civic optimism that came along with its construction in the 19th century.
I arrived at Trans-Allegheny in the afternoon, and my experience began with a historical tour led by a docent dressed as a nurse. She explained the history of the buildings in great detail and related the stories of some of the patients with sensitivity and a modern understanding of mental illness. We meandered through a section of the central building, including a small museum, medical facilities, and the parklike courtyard in the back. A few spaces, such as one well-appointed hallway section, have been renovated to their midcentury splendor, with period furniture, fresh paint, and carpeting. In other places peeling paint and grimy floors spoke to the fact that most of the building has been untouched since 1994, and in many cases much earlier.
BUT I HAD SIGNED UP for more than the history experience. I was to return that night for the “Ghost Hunt,” in which about 30 visitors were allowed to see much more of the hospital between 9 pm and 5 am. I arrived that evening with a thermos of Starbucks, some snacks, a notepad, a headlamp, and a Ghost Meter EMF sensor (purchased online for $39.95). I wanted to understand the place that the old asylums have taken in the modern American imagination.
The large group was broken up into teams of 10 or so, and each was led through tours of different floors within the massive central building and its attached wings. The guides related history and legend and then let us wander freely for an hour or so in each new area. Walking through such a dark space is disconcerting and disorienting by itself. With my headlamp on a subdued setting, I could make out objects and doors but little else until I got close up. There were many times that I found myself alone. The hallways were staggered, and opened onto bedrooms, offices, bathrooms. One section had a row of cells. Wheelchairs seemed to have been strategically placed. My EMF device remained quiet.
In one area, a guide told me about Big Jim, who, it is said, murdered another patient with a bedpost. Here was the process for contacting him. Sit in the dark room and unscrew the head of your flashlight until bulb and battery lead are just disconnected. Then ask Big Jim a question and wait to see if his spirit would make the connection to make the light flicker on. There was some flickering, which means that it was at least a very good story to tell your friends later. I returned there later, after the tour, and sat in the dark room across the hall, my headlamp off, curious if something would happen—some noise or creak or visual artifact of the kind that tends to inspire ghost stories.
There was nothing, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying.
As the night went on, I continued patrolling the dark halls, sometimes away from the group, and I heard the sounds and thought I saw things in the shadows (though nothing that couldn’t be explained a dozen ways by animals, architecture, and the psychology of the unknown). I entered rooms and sat as still as I could. I checked that ghost meter. If there was a sensation that stuck with me, it might be the smell of old cigarette smoke—a direct sensory connection with the departed residents, it seemed. I’m a scholar, a skeptic, someone who knows how, over the years, a drumbeat of movies, rumors, horror stories, and more have made the classic American state mental hospital into an object of terror—maybe the most haunted class of buildings in the country. I know all that. But it’s impossible not to be affected by this.
These abandoned hospitals still have a lot to teach us. And sometimes that’s what’s most scary about them. None of us visitors slept that night, but rather spent the whole time exploring. I left in the light of the morning, tired but glad that I had had the experience. I neither saw nor heard any evidence of the supernatural, but I recalled all the stories and films from my years of research and started to see them in a new way. We, as a society, created these horrors, in allowing the overcrowding and decline of places of healing, in the stigmatization of people with mental illness, in the mistreatment of even the staff. Something about spending the night in the facility let me trace this path of hope and despair for myself.
[SOURCE: Atlas Obscura.]
How Mexico’s Most Sorrowful Spirit Became a Cultural Phenomenon
As America’s immigrant population grows, so does La Llorona’s cultural stature.
By Winnie Lee | 30 October 2019
DURING THE MAKING OF THE 2019 horror movie The Curse of La Llorona, some of the cast and crew were convinced that the spirit of La Llorona—Spanish for The Weeping Woman—lurked about. They were spooked by inexplicable cold chills and exploding jewelry on set, unexplained flickering lights and screaming dreams.
“We did have some creepy supernatural occurrences,” the director, Michael Chaves, told the Los Angeles Times. “Half the crew actually does believe the house that we shot in was haunted, and there might have been something to that.” Actress Patricia Velasquez added, “I think she was there just making sure we were doing right by her.”
In the film, the titular character is the ghost of a mother from 17th-century Mexico who drowned her sons and now haunts the living with her inconsolable crying. Dressed in white, she spends her days looking for other children to steal.
Off the screen, La Llorona is a well-known and pervasive legend who serves as a cautionary tale for multiple generations in Latinx households, often invoked to scare kids and stop them from misbehaving. Known throughout Central and South America but most often associated with Mexico, her story varies according to who tells it.
In some versions, she’s an indigenous woman who’s so enraged by her husband’s infidelity that she vengefully murders their children in a nearby river, then drowns herself in grief and remorse. In other versions, she blames her offspring for her lover’s desertion and throws them to their death in the river.
Regardless of which version is told, each tale results in her being doomed to wander the earth, always near water, wailing for her little ones (and thus earning her sad name). What earns her a scary reputation, is that La Llorona doesn’t just kidnap youngsters. She also brings woe and death to those who hear her cries or get in her way.
“The versions of the story we see today—including movies (The Curse of La Llorona, Mama, and La Leyenda de La Llorona) and television shows (the series Grimm)—all emphasize the spooky or frightening aspects of the story,” says Domino Renee Perez, author of the book There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture and associate chair of the English department at the University of Texas at Austin. “That this wandering woman who weeps will get you if you don’t watch out.”
Other, more complex versions of the grieving woman exist. She’s sometimes associated with Doña Marina, or La Malinche—the Nahua woman from the Mexican Gulf Coast who served as an interpreter, adviser, and mistress to Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, bore his child, and was then deserted by him (to compound her misery, she’s sometimes portrayed as a traitor for siding with the Spanish).
Other times, the mourning lady is thought of as an Aztec goddess whose weeping was an omen that predicted the Spanish arrival and ensuing slaughter of indigenous groups—an aggrieved deity who continues to weep to this day.
In Xochimilco, a section of Mexico City that’s called the Venice of Mexico, during an open-air theatrical spectacle that bears her name, La Llorona is portrayed as a woman warrior who kills herself and her baby to avoid leaving her land and people, swearing vengeance against the Spaniards. The performance—which has taken place each year on the water since 1993, to coincide with the Day of the Dead—was created to promote the history, ancient cultural traditions, and natural beauty of Xochimilco’s water canals, which date back to pre-Hispanic times.
Ultimately, what ties all these different stories together is the thread of overwhelming grief. “It’s a story about loss,” says Perez, “and the many ways that the woman at the center of the story chooses to respond to that loss. It’s also about how a community responds to her actions.”
Though her actions can be interpreted in a variety of ways, La Llorona has recently become more visible outside the Latinx population—not just in the arts and media but in mundane items such as cocktails and towels. Her myth may date back centuries, but her growing popularity today is a sign of the times, says Perez: “I think that as the Mexican-American and Mexican-immigrant populations continue to grow [in the U.S.], more and more of our stories, cultural practices, and customs are finding their way into the mainstream.”
For the Latinx community, The Weeping Woman is such a familiar and subjective subject, says Perez, that she’s malleable enough to be more than just a tool to discipline naughty kids. In fact, she can be—and is fast becoming—a potent and enduring cultural symbol.
“The story also has a timelessness to it,” says Perez, “dating back to pre-conquest portents foretelling, for some, the fall of the Aztec Empire and extending into the present, where thousands of women are being separated from their children at the border. La Llorona remains relevant, and as long as she does, her story will continue to be told.”
[SOURCE: Atlas Obscura.]
No comments:
Post a Comment
Greetings, monster lover! Thank you for leaving a comment at WORLD OF MONSTERS!.
NOTICE! Comments containing advertising or hyperlinks that take readers off this page will be deleted. Comments for posts older than five (5) days are moderated.