Wednesday 29 April 2015

Tylenol Terror:

Time for another unsolved mystery.


This time, we’re going back to Chicago, 1982, where seven people died due to the consumption of cyanide laced Tylenol pain killers from several different pharmacies.
It wasn’t until a member of the fire department noticed the Tylenol bottles at the homes of every victim that the link was made.

The incident resulted in all Johnson and Johnson products to be recalled from shelves and destroyed. It also lead to the development of the non-tamper pharmaceutical containers that we see used today.
Despite investigation, the culprits were never brought to justice, and the crime lead a string of copycat incidents involving tampering with products with the intention of harming or killing consumers.

More recently, Scott Bartz, an ex-employee of the company not only came forward to dismiss the lone mad-man angle that the media had pushed, and claims that the cyanide was actually put into the pills by an employee working in the packing and distribution section of Johnson and Johnson at the time.

The company and FBI accused the ex-employee of being an angry worker who was laid off from the company, and said that his theories had no evidence to back them up.
Another theory is that serial killer Ted Kaczynski, or the Unabomber, was responsible, although he hasn’t been charged for anything relating to the case.


So next time you have a headache, maybe it’d be safer just to sleep it off. 


Tuesday 28 April 2015

Man escapes alien abduction:

Time to get your tin foil hats out again, people.
These are stills from the flip-phone video shot by a Texan crude oil transport driver by the name of Ronny Dawson.
Dawson claims to have escaped an alien abduction, and admitted that it was impossibly frustrating trying to catch a picture or movie of the UFO on the inadequate device.


He claims that this is the alien. I've enlarged it for you guys.
I'm pretty certain it's pure pareidolia, but it's pretty interesting none the less. 


Ronny stated that he got a lot of hassle from the seasoned pro's of the UFO scene, as his visuals and claims didn't fit in with the preconceived ideas of what an alien craft usually looks like. This was back in 2013.

I looked him up and it looks like he's continuing with his exploration into extra terrestrials.
You can check out his channel here << Click click


The girl in the window:


If you're looking for a creepy holiday, why not try York, UK? 

The walled, historical city of York, in North Yorkshire, England, is famous for its history and rich heritage.

It is also often dubbed the most haunted city in the UK.


When you walk the cobbled streets of the shambles, the fifteenth century timber framed buildings lean crookedly into each other, almost touching at the roofs, staring down at you with a gloomy inquisition. The very ground you walk on was once known as The Fleshshammel, due to the volume of butchers shops that took up occupancy of the street in 1872.
 Go on one of the many scheduled Ghost tours and the theatrical guide will give you goose bumps describing how the shambles are a place of suffering, how animals were slaughtered in the streets and their blood ran through the stones of the cobbled road.   


One of its most prominent attractions is the Minster, an impressive Gothic Cathedral; the oldest and second largest of the kind in Northern Europe, and probably the most photographed building in the city. The building, like most others in York, has its fair share of ghost stories, from ghost dogs, to murder victims being built into its walls.


One of the more eerie stories I recall from the city is from a small house behind the Cathedral, on the corner of College Street. This story takes place in the time of the Black Death.
The young girl lived with her parents during the time of the plague. Her parents had begun showing symptoms of the disease, and as was customary at the time, their house was sealed up and bolted from the outside, with the little girl still inside.
It was assumed that because she was in such close proximity of the plague, that she too had the disease. Eventually her parents died inside of the house, she remained locked inside with them, pressing her hands and face up against the small window, crying and staring out at the people walking around outside.
She died of starvation.
Since then, her ghost has been sighted multiple times, hands and face pressed up against the small window. She is one of the most sighted ghosts in the whole city to this day.
The house is currently occupied. 

Monday 27 April 2015

Holiday in Cambodia:


The Dead Kennedys are an American hardcore punk rock band from San Francisco.
In May 1980 they released a single called "Holiday in Cambodia". 
The black and white image that they used  as the artwork depicts the hanged body of a second year student from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, being beaten with a metal folding chair by a right wing onlooker as a crowd cheers on and smiles.


The Holiday in Cambodia single was a satirical view on the attitude of a well off, self righteous, blissfully ignorant, American youth, with a false sense of empathy and compassion for third world countries under brutal regimes, much like that of Khmer regime of Cambodia during the 1970's.

The picture was taken by American born photographer Neal Hirsh Ulevich, in Bangkok, during the Thammasat University massacre of October 1976.

The Thammasat University Massacre, or Massacre of 6 October 1976 was an attack on students and protesters that occurred on the campus of Thammasat University and at Sanam Luang in Bangkok. Students from various universities were demonstrating against the return to Thailand of Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, a former military ruler.

Ulevich shot the image and quickly returned to his office to develop the negatives and send them to Tokyo by telegram, as the Thai government had ordered all photographers and journalists to give up their film.

(Image: Neal Ulevich)

He went on to win the pulitzer prize for the picture in 1977, but until this day the prize winning  picture has not been printed in any Thai publications.The award was mentioned in an English language newspaper “The Bangkok post”, however the picture failed to accompany the text only report.

The official body count was reported as 43 but allegedly the number of those dead was tragically higher.
There was said to have been hundreds of victims and a quick google will pull up other pictures of the event.

Here is an exert from the wikipedia page on the event, as a bit of an insight to the happenings that day:

"In the chaos of the attack, students were shot and hanged, pulled through gates and beaten, dragged across city streets, and bludgeoned with sticks and poles. A few escaped. More than three thousand were rounded up by police, stripped to their waists, and told to lie on their stomachs and await incarceration......kicking, clubbing, shooting, lynching. Youths hurled themselves into the river to keep from being shot. Then the blazing finale as a heap of gasoline-soaked bodies was set afire.About a thousand demonstrators were taken prisoner and humiliated by being stripped to the waistmade to crawl or kicked.Female students allegedly were raped, alive and dead, by police and Red Gaurs....By evening, the democracy was overthrown and martial law was enforced. Many of the bodies were cremated en masse. The true count of those who died will likely never be known.”Even today, the Thammasat University massacre is seldom mentioned."

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Ulevich
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holiday_in_Cambodia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Kennedys


Wednesday 22 April 2015

The case of the Antonio Vilas Boas abduction:


You may need to get out your tin foil hats for this one. 

It was October the 16th, 1957.
23 year old successful landowner and farmer Antonio Vilas Boas was working his fields, as he usually did at night to avoid the heat that came with the Brazilian daylight hours.
He looked up to the sky and noticed what he’d later describe as a “red star” with rays of light exploding from it. According to Vilas Boas the star grew in size as it quickly approached him and he began to make out the details of the elongated oval shaped craft, which he later claimed to have red lights and some kind of cupola rotating on top of it.
It landed in the field on three legs that extended from it as it neared landing.
Boas ran to his tractor and attempted to flee the scene, but to his despair the vehicles engine had shut down and he was forced to continue his escape on foot.
He was apprehended by a being that stood around 5 foot, had small blue eyes and was dressed in grey unevenly striped overalls and a helmet. It communicated in barks and yelps of various canine like pitches and was joined by others. Together the group managed to drag Antonio to their craft, where he was stripped naked and smothered with a gel that he couldn’t identify.
There were red symbols marking the interior of the craft, which he would be able to remember and reproduce later during the investigation of his case.


The beings took blood samples before leaving him alone for around what felt like 30 minutes. Suddenly a nausea inducing gas was released into the room, followed by the entrance of a naked female being with long white hair and large blue slanted eyes. She also made the same dog like noises as the others.
The two had intercourse, and after the encounter the female rubbed her stomach, smiled, and pointed to the sky.

He was given his clothes and lead on a tour of the craft. Antonio felt he needed proof of his encounter, but unfortunately his attempts to take a souvenir were infiltrated by the beings.
Eventually he was released and watched as the illuminated craft took off.

When he finally made it back home, he realized that hours had passed.

Later Boas would complain of several symptoms, including irritations, lesions, bruises, sleeplessness, lack of appetite, nervousness, anxiety, burning eyes and aches.
After a medical examination of his body, high levels of radiation were found.
The skin around the area that the aliens had taken his blood sample was thinner and pigment less. He also had hardened pores that secreted yellow pus like discharge.

Unlike the famous Betty and Barney Hill case that was to follow, Boas remembered his experience with complete clarity, and did not need hypnosis to recall the happenings.



I'll leave you with this clip from a BBC Documentary by Louis Theroux.
This is a clip of the late Rev. short channeling an alien named "Korton" from another dimention / time period in the future, with whom he has been communicating with for years.





The May day mystery:

The May day mystery is a series of ongoing full page adverts, published every may 1st since 1981, in an Arizona university newspaper called “The wildcat”.

Each published advert would feature the title “SR/CL: (date)” and would usually be signed with a big eared smiley face signature at the bottom.



The Xeroxed cut and paste pages are usually compromised of chaotic, seemingly intellectual gibberish with text in different languages, math equations and scientific diagrams.
Throughout the year there would also be sporadically placed smaller ads, usually with a message or one line of text in multiple languages.


Over time, people began to notice the monthly postings and attempted to work out what they were all about, speculating that the pages were some kind of code. One of those people was a man named Bryan D. Hance. Bryan is an ex student of the Arizona University and also used to work at the Wildcat newspaper.
Hance set up a website dedicated to scanning and cataloguing the adverts, where people can post “clues” in a message board fashion underneath specific articles in an attempt to figure out the seemingly random adverts.

Another interesting point about the website is that in 1999 a group contacted the site host and claimed to be part of the network who was posting the adverts. They referred to themselves as “The orphanage”.  The also indicated that there was some sort of prize if anyone was ever to figure the whole campaign. They gave him their own clues and input as well as sending in physical mail to his P.O box in the form of even more flyers and adverts, photographs, objects and even cash sometimes, with or without relevant serial numbers and always in overly decorated envelopes.



Through a conversation with a previous manager of the Wildcat newspaper, the adverts from the past ten years were placed by a 60 something year old Tucson lawyer by the name of Robert Truman Hungerford.
 Hungerford, a self-proclaimed hermit, apparently had an office filled with encyclopedias and books on history, language, science, philosophy, but when asked about said they were simply chosen because of their colour and aesthetics. It’s unclear as to if he is a part of the adverts or simply obsessed with them. He is also a member of Mensa, but claims to have no involvement with the creation of the adverts, and simply states that he only sends them to publish and does as he is asked.

You can visit Bryan Hance’s website HERE << Click click
And perhaps you’ll also find this Reddit thread interestingtoo << Click click

Finally, maybe you'll find this video interesting:


Wednesday 15 April 2015

The max headroom incident:

Max Headroom was introduced in the mid 80’s as the world’s first computer generated TV host.
He portrayed the character of an AI with disjointed movements and an electronic voice. The cyber character had a blonde plastic quiff and wore Ray bans and a suit.
This is him in action in a Coke commercial:


During a Chicago Bears sports report on November 22nd 1987, the signal for a local station WGN-TV (now channel 9) was hijacked by an unknown person wearing latex Max Headroom mask in front of a corrugated metal door with buzzing audio.
Some hours later at 11:15pm during an episode of “Dr.Who” the signal was hijacked once again by the same man in the mask. This time there was a distorted audio and a dialogue of screaming and laughing and humming and moaning.
Here’s a video of the incident with subtitles:


The case is still unsolved today, however some years ago a Reddit user claimed to know the person / people involved, however he refused to disclose their names and couldn’t get in contact with the old friends of his when he tried.

"J was at the party in the apartment that afternoon. I didn't talk with him directly (me, and the friend of mine that I was there with didn't really talk to anybody that day), but I did overhear what the others were talking about. They were referring to J planning to do something "big" over the weekend. I remember that word, "big", because it piqued my curiosity as to what might be considered "big" by their standards. I later asked them collectively during the dinner we all had at Pizza Hut later that night what they were talking about earlier, what "big" was, and someone (probably K) told me to "Just watch Channel 11 later tonight." ...As sort of an offhanded suggestion. I did happen to be watching Channel 11 later that night, having forgotten about the whole "big" conversation earlier that day. I saw it, but I didn't put 2 and 2 together at the time."


Check out his story HERE << Click  

Number stations:

(Above The Lincolnshire poacher) 

Number stations started broadcasting at the end of world war 1 and are allegedly used to send encrypted messages via the short wave radio stations that broadcast them.
The untraceable transmissions interupt static and begin with their general pattern of repeating music and pre-recorded voices, usually those of women or small children, repeating a series of numbers. The broadcasts are global, so whichever recipients they are intended for could be anywhere in the world and still be able to tune in.

In an interview, Paul Beamont, one of the co-owners of a radio group who track radio oddities and call themselves “Enigma2000”,  said that he thought number stations were most likely some kind of dead hand system:
  “If a nuclear war was to start, then the message would change, and that’s for the people who need to know, on what to do and where to go” He said. “Something possibly left over from the cold war”.\

Others think it's a system that governments use to send messages to spies operating outside of their respective countries. 

What do you think?

(Above: The swedish Rhapsody)



WEIRDO WEDNESDAYS : HORROR RELATED NOSTALGIA POST

(Edit: This post has been recently updated.) 

Thought I'd lighten up this blog with a bit of horror related nostalgia. 
It's sort of a childhood top 5 I suppose.

1.       Scary Stories to tell in the dark” 
is an amazingly illustrated series of children’s books from the eighties.


Written by Alvin Schwartz and inked by Stephen Gammell, the books contain bizarre and eerie short horror stories accompanied by incredibly creepy black ink visuals.  It’s worth checking them out for the illustrations alone.



THE CASE OF "OLD MIKE"


 August 21st, 1911: Prescott, Nevada country:
“Old Mike” the mortuary staff christened him, after all, nobody had any idea who this John Doe was.
Some people claimed that the nameless man was a travelling salesman, selling small items like thread and pencils; others said he was a travelling hobo.

Old Mike was found in Prescott city park, slumped up against an oak tree with eighty cents and a silver spoon in his pocket and no clues to his identity what so ever.
He was a 40 something Caucasian man, standing at 5”4, short and stocky, with a moustache, two gold teeth and crutches.
Despite photos of the unknown man being published, nobody came forward to identify him. He was embalmed and put on display at a local funeral home, in the hopes that someone would recognize him, take him home and lay him to rest.


The original intention was to have him displayed for around a week, but days passed, and months passed, and eventually 64 years had passed before it was decided ol’ Mike deserved retirement. He was finally buried on May 4th 1975.

For 62 years people came to gawp at the embalmed body of old mike, a man famous for dying without ID and having his eyeballs eerily painted onto his eye lids.
He was somebody to someone, but who was he?
I guess we'll never know.



Monday 13 April 2015

CREEPY PHOTOS POST:

(Post has been recently updated.)
1.The walking dead of Indonesia.


An Indonesian friend of mine showed me this photo some years ago.
It was titled “The walking dead” or “Zombie” but in actuality this is a photo from a ma-nene ritual in Toraja, South Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Families exhume their deceased relatives so they can clean them and change their clothing.
They bodies are usually taken on a tour of their town while repairs are made to their coffins.

Related posts:
To read the article about Indonesia black magic serial killer Ahmad Suradji click here <<
My visit to "Lewang Sewu" aka. "The house of a thousand doors" in Semerang, Indonesia. Cick here<< to read the post.

2.Aokigahara


This is a photo of a decomposed body in Aokigahara, Japan, also known as “The suicide forest”.
It’s infamous for being a suicide hot spot due to the volume of people who travel there to see out their final days.

Here's a VICE documentary about it:



3.Ghost Soldier


The title says it all really.
This WW1 photograph was taken in 1919 and features the ghost of solider Freddy Jackson, who had died a few days before the picture was taken as a result of an airplane accident.

4.Columbine kids
You’ll definitely have seen this photo.
A '99 class photo, featuring the two gun men of the Columbine school shooting, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, pretending to hold guns in the top left hand corner.
A week later they killed 13 of their classmates and themselves.

5.DOOMED


A man fell on the tracks, this is the last photo of him alive. 
Sad and disturbing that it even went to print. The tabloid unsurprisingly caused controversy.


6.       Blanche Monnier


Locked in a room for 24 years by her own family and fed nothing but scraps, for refusing to marry anyone other than her true love.

7.      Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos


German-born radiologist Carl Tanzler fell in love with 21-year-old Cuban Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos after she came to him for an examination.
Tanzler was convinced that this woman was the same dark haired beauty who had been visiting him in his dreams and believed that de Hoyos was his true love.
Unfortunately she died of a rare disease and was buried in a mausoleum.
Tanzler had a key and was visiting the body nightly. Eventually he took the body from the burial site and began to try and reconstruct it with wire and plaster.
The pair even shared a bed before being discovered.

8.      Killer Clown


This photo of Boy killer John Wayne Gacy in his "Pogo the clown" costume.
He managed to cover up being a serial killer well enough to be a highly regarded pillar of society. This is him entertaining children at an event. Creepy.

Related posts: 
A post about "The Last Victim", a book written by a student named Jason Moss, who formed a relationship with Gacy while he was incarcerated on death row. It did not end well. Click here<< to read. 

9.      Not Satanic enough


This is a facebook screen shot of a Thai self-proclaimed Satanist, who killed the lead singer of a metal band / a friend of his for “not being a real Satanist”.
He actually posted updates about his future plans to kill and even posted a photo of his handy work to his Facebook profile.
He continued to update with the press pictures after that, before running away and eventually handing himself over to the cops at the advice of his father. He had stabbed his victim in the face a total of 30 times.
I pixelated this one because of the gore/friends page identities.

Related posts: 
Read the full backstory on the above photo, click here <<
If you would like to know the origins of the "Holiday in Cambodia" cover photo click here <<
A post about Cannibal child killer Si-Oui and the Siriraj medical museum click here <<

10.  Catacombs girl


I pixelated this one . 
As mentioned in the previous post, this Russian girl was drinking in the tunnels with her friends, wandered off and got lost.
They found her dead body 2 years later. I’ve pixelated the image here.

If you would like to read my "horror underground" post, featuring this story, click here <<

HORROR UNDERGROUND:


The catacombs under the city of Paris, France are available to access only by scheduled tour. The man-made subterranean passageways are a complex labyrinth of tunnels that branch out like a network of veins under the city.
Built originally to relocate the dead from over filled mass graves in the city, the walls and ceilings of the catacombs are decorated in thousands of skulls and bones.  As you can imagine, the morbidly beautiful interior design attracts tourists in abundance.
It also attracts a lot of urban explorers, or cataphiles: I think this video is a good example of what it looks like inside:


If you’re looking for some catacomb related horror / thriller entertainment tonight, there’s a movie based about the underground tunnels titled “As above, so below” (2014) 

This is the trailer: 


Paris isn’t the only place you can find catacombs.


In Odessa, Ukraine, there are networks of underground tunnels, formed as a result of coal mining, that reach 60 feet below sea level, making it an unimaginably massive underground maze.
Needless to say, the tunnels attract the type of tourists who like to dabble in danger, and since it’s common knowledge that the Odessa tunnels have not been completely mapped out, and that the foundations itself is unstable, the Ukrainian catacombs are on the to-do lists of extreme tourists everywhere.
It’s not surprising to learn that there have been reported incidents of the occasional tourist entering the underground tunnels never to re-emerge again.
Those who go missing get so lost that they can’t find their way back and wander around in the cold darkness until they eventually die from dehydration- which is exactly what happened to the girl in the photo below. I’ve de-saturated and pixelated the photo here, but you get the idea.


She got lost while drinking with friends at an underground party, and stumbled off into the catacombs.
She was found by other explorers two years after her original disappearance.
It’s bad enough to wake up in your own bed with a hangover, now imagine waking up with a hangover in complete darkness, alone and lost in a maze of tunnels below sea level, with no food and water, completely alone.

To wrap up this creepy caving post, I’ll finish up with a link to a story about a man named Ted’s creepy caving experience, which you can read HERE << Click click

Sunday 5 April 2015

Hungarian suicide song:

Today marks the anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide – or murder, according to conspiracy theorists. 
The stories and movies and documentaries about Mr.Cobain have been done to death, so in order to tip my hat while letting the guy be, I’ve decided to write about another cursed composer; the late Rezső Seress


The case of the Hungarian suicide song.

“I’m to be a songwriter or a hobo” Rezső Seress responded, in retaliation to the constant stream of arguments about his failed songwriting career between himself and his fiancé.

Seress, a Hungarian songwriter, was living in Paris at the time. It was 1932 and so far his attempts to become internationally famous composer had failed miserably.

His blind ambition coupled with his evident lack of success was putting a strain on his relationship. His partner, uncomfortable with his lack of financial stability was pressuring him into getting a 9- 5 job. Seress, unable to give up chasing his dream refused to compromise, and the two separated on bad terms.

The next day, on a particularly gloomy Sunday, Seress sat at his piano, where he his fingers spelled out a morose melody just as hopeless and depressing as he felt on the inside.
He called it  "Vége a világnak”: The end of the world.

The original lyrics were about the tragedy of war and the evil of man. However later, a poet named László Jávor wrote his own lyrics about a man committing suicide following the death of his lover. The lyrics were inspired by a recent break-up with his girlfriend.


"On a sad Sunday with a hundred white flowers,
I was waiting for you, my dear, with a church prayer,
That dream-chasing Sunday morning,
The chariot of my sadness returned without you.
Ever since then, Sundays are always sad,
tears are my drink, and sorrow is my bread...
Sad Sunday.
Last Sunday, my dear, please come along,
There will even be priest, coffin, catafalque, hearse-cloth.
Even then flowers will be awaiting you, flowers and coffin.
Under blossoming (flowering in Hungarian) trees my journey shall be the last.
My eyes will be open, so that I can see you one more time,
Do not be afraid of my eyes as I am blessing you even in my death...
Last Sunday."

He sent his song to a record publisher, only to have it returned with a note of rejection explaining that the song had a “terrible compelling despair”.
Eventually another label picked it up and agreed to distribute it. The song took over the airwaves and Seress was finally a success.
However, his success came at a price.
A string of suicides followed the release of the song. People requested it and were later found dead by suicide; some with the sheet music or a copy of the record nearby.

Cited as an urban legend or myth, it’s not a stretch to believe that such a despairingly hopeless song in climate as miserable as 1930's Hungary could push people over the edge at a time of emotional vulnerability.

Radios eventually began to ban the depressing song, citing that it did nothing to alleviate the sadness of the social climate at the time, of which the morale had already been destroyed due to a great economic depression and the influence of fascism.

Seress attempted to reconnect with his ex-fiancé by way of letter, only to discover that devastatingly she had already committed suicide, with a copy of his record nearby.

Finally in 1968, Seress too committed suicide- He jumped from the window of his apartment but survived, only to succeed by choking himself to death with a wire whilst recovering in hospital.

So will you survive the suicide song this gloomy Sunday?
Here’s the original recording. 


Friday 3 April 2015

The Death of David Carradine and the haunted closet:


Since I wrote my last post, I’ve been thinking about Bangkok related weirdness that I can share with you guys. 

I know, I know, you’re thinking it’s not exactly difficult to find dodgy stories from the land of smiles, but finding something worth writing about with a bit of a back story and a mystery element isn’t so easy to track down.

So there’s a seemingly endless and fresh supply of daily tales of terror, complete with gory crime scene investigation photos, printed every morning in the tabloids in south East Asia.
But I don't want to write about those. 
I do, however, want to write about this little snippet of spooky that I found whilst on my searches today. I found an older article about the death of American actor and martial artist David Carradine.

Whilst on location, filming his latest movie titled “Stretch” on June 4th 2009, he was found dead in closet in his room, in a hotel by the name of "Swissôtel Nai Lert Park Hotel" in central Bangkok, Thailand. 
His hands were tied above his head and around the closets hanger rail. 
Apparently he also had a cord wrapped around genitals, leading people to believe that his death was accidental and due to an Erotic asphyxiation session gone wrong.
Two of his former wives confirmed that Carradine did have an interest in sexual self-bondage, so the story seemed to add up. 
Case closed, right?

Weirdly, while researching the article for any elements of foul play or mystery, I found a few articles mentioning Carradine’s appearance on a series called “Celebrity ghost stories” some months prior to his death, where he talked of being haunted by a ghost in a closet. 
Apparently it was the ghost was of his wife’s ex-husband, who he thought hung out in the closet where some of his things were still kept.
“The closet doors wound swing open and shut” He said. 



How creepy is that?
Coincidences happen all of the time, of course, but seriously, a closet ghost and then a closet related death only a few months later? 
You couldn’t even write this stuff.