The Vault

Vault Video

noreply@blogger.com (GHOSTRIDER) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 23:09:00 +0000

Our Spooks Player.. Favorite Picks..
Various Paranormal Television Shows
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Leap Castle

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:14:00 +0000

Located in County Offaly in Ireland is the famous Leap Castle. Over 400 years ago in what is now known as the "Bloody Chapel" a shocking murder occurred. Leap Castle was then a stronghold of the O'Carroll family, powerful Irish Princes, Chieftains of the area.In 1532, on the death of the O'Carroll Chieftain, a fierce rivalry for the leadership erupted within the family. The bitter fight for power turned brother against brother. One of the brothers was a priest. The O'Carroll priest was holding mass for a group of his family (in what is now called the "Bloody Chapel"). While chanting the holy rites, his rival brother burst into the chapel plunging his sword into his brother. Fatally wounding him, the butchered priest fell across the altar and died in front of his family.The heinous act of brother killing brother and the blasphemy of a sacred mass cut short by such an evil event sent an echo of misery ringing throughout the castle.Another source of evil was found at Leap Castle that may have compounded and nurtured the spirit of the elemental. A hidden oubliette (a dungeon) was found off the bloody chapel. It was a small room with a drop floor. Those who were forgotten within this room suffered unimaginable pain and misery until their death. Prisoners would be pushed into the room to fall through the floor and land on a spike eight feet below. If you were not lucky enough to die quickly on the spike, you died of starvation in a door less room while the aroma of food and the sounds of merriment drifted up from the rooms below. A narrow window would let you watch those who came and went in freedom from the castle. Around c.1900 workmen who where hired to clean out the oubliette made a hideous discovery, human skeletons laid piled on top of each other. It took three full cart loads to remove all of the bones. Among the bones workmen found a pocket watch made in the 1840's. It is not certain if the dungeon was still in use then. Because of its extremely bloody history Leap Castle has always had a reputation of being haunted, a reputation so strong local people avoided it at night. Completely gutted by fire, Leap Castle was boarded up and it's gates were pad locked for over 70 years. Locals have described seeing the windows at the top of the castle "light up for a few seconds as if many candles were brought into the room" late at night. The castle laid in ruin for years.Shortly after Leap's dungeons gruesome discovery, a psychic disturbance may have caused the emergence of the elemental spirit. In 1659 ownership of Leap Castle passed in marriage from the O'Carroll family to an English family, the Darbys. The Darby family turned Leap into their family home, with improvements and additions and landscaped gardens . In the late 19th century descendants Johnathan and Mildred Darby were looking forward to raising their family here. The occult was the fashion of the day, and Mildred Darby did some innocent dabbling, despite the castle's history and reputation for being haunted. Mildred's dabbling with magic awakened the elemental with ferocious velocity. In 1909, Mildred Darby wrote an article for the Journal Occult Review, describing her terrifying ordeal. "I was standing in the Gallery looking down at the main floor, when I felt somebody put a hand on my shoulder. The thing was about the size of a sheep. Thin gaunting shadowy..., it's face was human, to be more accurate inhuman. Its lust in its eyes which seemed half decomposed in black cavities stared into mine. The horrible smell one hundred times intensified came up into my face, giving me a deadly nausea. It was the smell of a decomposing corpse.The elemental is thought to be a primitive ghost that attaches itself to a particular place. It is often malevolent, terrifying and unpredictable. After Mrs.Darby's experiments in the black arts, Leap Castle has never been the same. Hauntings plague Leap leaving a sinister air throughout the castle. The Darbys remained at Leap until 1922. Being the home of an English family, it became the target of the Irish struggle for independence. Destroyed by bombs, completely looted, nothing but a burned out shell remained. The Darby's were driven out.In the 1970's Leap Castle was purchased by an Australian, who had a white witch brought in from Mexico to exorcise the castle. She spent many hours in the bloody chapel, when she emerged she explained that the spirits at Leap Castle were no longer malevolent, but they wished to remain.In the 1990's the castle was sold to the current owners. They were aware of the castle's troubled history. Shortly after moving in they began restoration of the castle. During which time a "freak accident" left the owner with a broken kneecap delaying restoration work on the castle for nearly a year. One year after his "accident" the owner was back at work restoring his castle when the ladder he was standing on suddenly tilted backwards away from the wall causing him to jump several stories resulting in a broken ankle. Both were strange accidents.

Thomas Blood

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:07:00 +0000

Thomas Blood

Enigmatic Raider of the Crown Jewels

1671 was a year of unlimited opportunity for two of history's greatest adventurers. In the West Indies that year, the Welsh buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan was made Deputy Governor of Jamaica, while in England, self-styled 'Colonel' Thomas Blood was putting a plan into action that would result in the most daring robbery of all time; the theft of the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London!

The Crown Jewels

Thomas Blood (alias Ayliffe, aka Allen) was born in 1618, the son of an Irish blacksmith. Information on his early life is very scant, but it is known that he served the parliamentary cause during the English Civil War. Just exactly what Blood's role was during the war isn't known, but he seems to have been involved in espionage, and he was rewarded for his services with considerable estates in Ireland. However, when the monarchy was restored in 1660, Blood lost his lands and his position, and the Irishman became an embittered terrorist with a dark genius for ruthless schemes designed to disrupt and intimidate his aristocratic enemies. But long before he fell on hard times, Blood was a mysterious individual who expressed no particular allegiance to any religion or political wing unless it suited his own ends. It is easy to dismiss him as an adventurer, but Blood seems to have been in the pay of someone. Behind all of his 'who dares wins' exploits, there are tantalizing glimpses of a man who was somebody's agent. Many suspected him of being a spy - but a spy for whom?

In 1633, Blood and a group of abettors tried to kidnap the Duke of Ormonde, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, at Dublin Castle, but the conspirators were betrayed, and all but Blood were captured and thrown into prison. A reward was offered for Blood's capture - dead or alive but the Colonel wasn't worried about the price on his head, and he attempted - unsuccessfully - to free his co-conspirators, and was forced to flee to Holland.

In 1639, Blood was active among the Fifth Monarchy Men, an extreme Puritan sect who literally believed that the 'fifth monarchy' - foretold in the Book of Daniel - was at hand. The Biblical prophecy claimed that a fifth monarchy of Christ would succeed the rule of the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans. The sect was led by Thomas Venner, a religious fanatic, who launched two abortive risings in 1657 and 1661. Venner was subsequently captured and executed. Blood got away Scot free. The Irishman had an uncanny habit of staying with rebellious groups until they were about to be eradicated. It was the same story when he joined the Covenanters - the Scottish Presbyterians who opposed the introduction of Charles I's religious policies into Scotland. Blood was right behind the movement and sat at the table with the counsel. But days before the going got tough, and a confrontation with the King's troops was imminent, Blood was suddenly nowhere to be seen. In 1667, Blood heard that an old militant acquaintance, a Captain Mason, was being taken under guard to a prison in York. With three accomplices, Blood rode up to the soldiers and opened fire on them. Captain Mason was rescued, and a badly-wounded Blood led him to safety. The price put on Blood's head was trebled, but the Irishman still managed to evade capture, and in 1670, he turned up in the middle of London, where he perpetrated another audacious crime. He rode up to the coach carrying the Duke of Ormonde and yanked open the door. The terrified Duke was pulled from the coach by Blood and an accomplice and thrown onto the horse of another henchman - who rode as far as Tyburn before the cry went up that the nobleman had been kidnapped. The Duke was soon rescued, but Blood and his men escaped without harm.

This brings us to the event in 1671 for which Blood is best remembered; the theft of the Crown Jewels.

For several weeks, Thomas Blood, disguised as a parson, had been getting regularly acquainted with Talbot Edwards, the 77-year-old keeper of the Crown Jewels, in order to win his confidence. After just a few visits, the old man succumbed, and the 'parson' became thoroughly trusted and was completely above suspicion.

On May 9th at seven in the morning, Blood turned up in his clergyman guise for the last time with three accomplices. Again, the aged keeper greeted Blood with respect.

The keeper's daughter was around, so to keep her attention diverted, Blood introduced her to his 'nephew' - who was in fact the youngest accomplice, a fairly handsome man of about twenty-five. As the couple began to chat, Blood steered the small-talk to the subject of the Jewels, and the keeper excitedly told Blood and his accomplices to follow him to the chamber of Martin Tower, where the jewels were kept. Upon reaching the chamber, the old man turned to lock the door behind him and the visitors, when Blood suddenly pulled a cloak over his head. The keeper struggled, so a gag was rammed into his mouth. Still, the old man protested, so one of the thieves battered his head with a mallet before callously plunging a dagger into his stomach.

The Colonel grabbed the mallet and used it to flatten St. Edward's Crown so he could stuff it in his coat. Another thief filed the sceptre in two, while the robber who had murdered the keeper was putting the orb down his trousers as he laughed.

Then the unexpected happened. The son of the dead keeper turned up, and bumped into Blood's 'nephew', who was acting suspiciously like a lookout. The son attacked Blood's accomplice, but was coshed and gagged by him.

The lookout then raced to the chamber and warned the others. Blood and his men instantly made a dash out of the chamber, and in the panic, the sceptre was dropped and left behind. The son of the murdered keeper regained consciousness, tore the gag from his mouth, and raised the alarm, shouting, "Treason! Murder! The crown is stolen!"

Within seconds, the keeper's daughter arrived and clung to her brother with fear. One of the yeoman warders also answered the alert and challenged Blood squarely. The Colonel levelled his flintlock at him and blasted a hole in his chest, killing him instantly. As the fleeing gang headed for the Tower Wharf, they encountered another guard, but when he saw Blood and his men approaching, the yeoman got cold feel, dropped his musket and stepped aside, letting the thieves pass unchallenged.

The Tower was suddenly swarming with soldiers, and Blood's three accomplices were soon captured. The Colonel's escape route was blocked by Captain Beckman, a fearless Civil War veteran, and he was the only man who managed to subdue the Irish daredevil. Blood was escorted to a cell in the Tower and interrogated for hours. But the prisoner insisted he would talk to no one but the king about his deeds.

Two days later Blood's request was granted, and the miscreant was taken to Whitehall, where he had a lengthy conversation with King Charles II. Blood was taken back to the Tower, but was later inexplicably released and given a Royal pardon - as well as a 'pension' of œ500. Blood's confiscated estates in Ireland were also restored. Not long after all this, the English author and diarist John Evelyn was invited to dine at the king's table. When he arrived at the dinner, he was astounded to see Thomas Blood seated near the king. This didn't make sense to Evelyn, who knew that the Irishman had served as a parliamentarian in the Civil War and had made numerous kidnap attempts on the nobility. Yet, despite these crimes of treason, and the attempted theft and damaging of the Crown Jewels and the murder of the old keeper who looked after them, Blood was apparently still held in favour by the king. And therein lies the mystery that has baffled generations of historians.

The Akashic Records

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:12:00 +0000

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - did he access Akashic Records?

Throughout the history of human civilisation there have been individuals who have claimed to be the possessors of arcane knowledge that had allegedly been accessed from unknown sources. The masons, Mystery schools and various other esoteric groups have professed to possess secrets of the occult; but where did these secret societies get their clandestine information from in the first place?
Some of the occult knowledge was probably carefully passed from generation to generation by initiates of the fabled Ancient Wisdom; this being a vast collection of books about cosmic law, the hidden powers of mankind and other mystical matters, supposedly written by the scientists of a super-civilisation in antediluvian times.
But for centuries, occultists have claimed that there is another source of hidden knowledge called the Akashic Records. These records are said to contain data on everything in the universe; every thought and deed of every lifeform from the beginning of the cosmos to the present.
The word 'akashic' derives from the Sanskrit akasha, meaning the fundamental etheric substance of the universe and of which the records consist. The substance is said to fill all space and to link every atom of animate and inanimate matter.
The Akashic Records are therefore like some colossal databank (similar to the Net but unimaginably more extensive) that contains information about every person and event from the dawn of time to the present day. The Western counterpart of these records would be the Book of Life, where all details about a person's conduct are recorded by their attendant angel.
If you think the notion of vast amounts of information existing in the ether is a bit far-fetched, consider this: gigabytes of data are passing through you and surround you at this very moment as you read these words. TV, satellite and radio signals carrying pictures, music, chat, classified and encoded military information, messages from mobile phones etc, are radiating through your body at the speed of light. This modernday continuous chatter of the elctromagnetic spectrum is a good analogy when referring to the Akashic Records. The same thing happens in both cases; unless you know how to tune in and decode the signals around you, they are undetectable and of no use.
How then, do you tune in to access the records? Mystics use meditation or visualisation techniques where you simply picture a blank chalkboard and wait for the information you need to appear on it.
Sometimes it would seem that the records are unconsciously accessed at random by people who believe that they have been inspired. For instance, Mozart claimed that he often heard new symphonies playing in his head which didn't seem to be of his making, while Sir Paul McCartney has always maintained that his most popular song, Yesterday, came to him from the depths of his sleep. Many writers and poets, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Dickens, have made the same curious assertions about novels and poems that seemed to have been dictated to them from some invisible author in their unconscious minds. In fact, Coleridge dreamed the whole of his poem Kubla Khan and simply wrote it down in the morning.
Scientists have also made many discoveries in the time-honoured tradition of 'sleeping on the idea'. In 1863, a young German scientists named August Kekule experienced such a dream of discovery while dozing on a bus. The scientist dreamt that he was watching chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms slithering about like snakes. Suddenly, one chain formed a type of loop which instantly revealed to the dreamer what the molecular structure of benzene was. Kekule awoke excited; he had been wracking his brain trying to work out the structure of benzene for months and now all had been revealed to him in a dream.
Of course, all the previous cases could be rationalised as the products of a fertile subconscious. However, if the Akashic Records do exist on some higher plane of existence, then the information they contain could often be accessed by more than one person simultaneously. It is often said that when the time is ripe, ideas, inventions and discoveries usually appear in different parts of the world at the same time. For example, in 1900, three scientists in Holland, Germany and Austria Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak respectively independently discovered the laws of genetics on the same day.
In 1876 the same thing happened when Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Another inventor named Elisha Gray sent a detailed description of his telephone to the US Patent Office a few hours after Bell's invention had been patented. More and more patents for a telephone poured into the office and, within few years, there were some 600 lawsuits over the Bell telephone patents.
But how would something new as the telephone be a part of the Akashic Records? Some occultists maintain that because the records are universal, they therefore contain the history of other planets in the cosmos that are more technologicallly advanced than Earth. The scientists of these older worlds will have progressed further in physics than Earth's scientists and will doubtless have long accomplished telephonic communication and other technological advancements. Thus all such achievements would be recorded in the Akashic repository.
How could the Akashic Records store such a phenomenal amount of universal data? No one seems to have an answer to that question but that doesn't mean that there isn't an explanation, simply that it is not known, or perhaps not recognised for what it is, at the present moment. After all, a laser hologram is a not dissimilar concept, yet this would have baffled scientists of the 1950s completely. We now know that if a photographic plate containing the interference patterns of an object that has been recorded as a 3-dimensional hologram is shattered, the whole 3-D image can be recreated by shining a laser through one small sliver of the smashed plate. All the information about the total image of the object has been recorded somehow onto every point of the plate. This discovery was not made until 1965 and was totally unexpected, so who are we to dismiss the possibility of something similar on a far grander scale?
The Akashic Records are reputed to exist as a network of 'etheric space' which science has yet to discover. All the same, most scientists would no doubt scoff at the concept of this mysterious ethereal archive. Yet Einstein himself once expressed how science is unable to work out just what empty space actually is with a very profound remark. He said, 'What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?'

Friendly Ghosts

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:45:00 +0000

THE 'BLOKE'
The following incident took place at a certain house in Liverpool, England in 1985. The ghost in the story is still active, but as the people who currently live in the haunted house aren't yet fully aware that they have a resident ghost on their premises, the street can't be mentioned in the story. In the late summer of 1985, a 12-year-old boy named Alan was sitting having breakfast with his family, when suddenly, a jar of marmalade in front of him slid a few inches across the tablecloth, startling everyone. The boy's parents and 7-year-old daughter were naturally quite astonished, but Alan just smirked and whispered, "Stop it, Jarvis."His mother's mouth dropped, and she looked at the marmalade jar, then looked at Alan and said, "How did you do that?""I didn't Mum." said Alan, "Jarvis did it.""Who?" asked Alan's father, who had been reading the newspaper."The bloke from upstairs." Alan replied, and resumed eating his cornflakes."Eh? What bloke son?" Alan's father was very intrigued at his son's comments.Alan had a lot of explaining to do. He said, "Well, Dad, this bloke comes into my room of a night. He tells me stories sometimes, and he looks as if he's a ghost, cos you can see through him. He's like a fuzzy shadow, and I told him that I'd never tell anyone about him. He said he's French and his name's Jarvis something. I can't remember his second name. It isn't Smith or anything."Alan's parents looked at each other, not knowing whether to laugh or be concerned. Alan's sister, Kelly, giggled and put her hand to her mouth. She said, "Stop telling fibs Alan. There's no bloke upstairs in your room. Stop giving him pocket money Dad, cos he's telling lies."That night, Alan's Dad left his bedroom to go to the toilet, and as he walked past his son's bedroom, he heard a conversation. He thought his son was talking in his sleep, and opened the door to look in, and saw Alan sitting up in bed with his bedside lamp on. Near the foot of the bed there was an outline of a shady figure which vanished as he looked at it. Alan's Dad slapped the light switch to turn the light on and looked in complete disbelief at the space at the end of Alan's bed where the ghostly figure had stood seconds before. He grabbed his son by the arm and yanked him out the bed, then dragged him to his bedroom, where he closed the door and put a chair against it. Alan's Mum woke up and asked what all the noise was about. Her husband said, "I saw it! I saw the ghost. He's bloody right! There is a ghost in his room! I can't believe what I saw."Alan said, "Oh calm down, Dad. It's okay. Jarvis is all right. He's sound, honest.""I'm frightened." said Alan's mother, and she got up and turned the light on."Shall we stay over at your mum's?" Alan's father asked his wife."Are you sure you weren't dreaming love?" Alan's mother asked her husband."I know what I saw!" he shouted, and suddenly there was a rapping at the door. Alan's parents jumped and his mum screamed."Mummy." said a girl's voice. It was little Kelly. She'd woken up with all the commotion.Kelly's parents opened the door and took her in the room. "It's all right Kelly. You can sleep with Mummy and Daddy tonight." said Kelly's mum."I'm tired Dad, " complained Alan, and he yawned and said, "I want to sleep in my own bed.""No you can't. There's a - you know what in there - " replied his father in a harsh voice. He couldn't mention the ghost in case he scared Kelly, but he seemed to be the most terrified.The whole family slept in the same double bed and hardly got any sleep. Throughout the night, Alan's parents kept jumping at every little sound.On the following day, when the kids were at school, Alan's parents visited a Catholic priest. He was very sympathetic and said he himself had seen a ghost many years ago and told them that he thought he was a bit psychic. He promised he'd visit the house in the evening and bless Alan's bedroom. The priest turned up and interviewed Alan in his bedroom for over an hour, taking notes throughout. After talking at length to the child, the priest came down to the living room and checked a few details he'd taken down in his notebook. He sat facing Alan's parents and Kelly, and said, "Is it true that there was a break-in about three months back?""Yes, " said Alan's father, "but nothing was taken. They broke in through the back door. Why?""And the robbers took nothing. Don't you find that unusual?" said the priest, scratching his head. He looked at Alan's parents over his spectacles."What do you mean?" said Alan's mum."According to your son, the ghost, Jarvis, scared the robbers away from the house." said the priest.Alan's parents looked at each other in disbelief, and the priest quoted the other notes from his little black book, "Er, let me see. Then there was a chip pan that went on fire, but a damp tea-towel mysteriously put the fire out - even though no one remembers who put the towel on the fire? Then you madam, " the priest addressed little Kelly. He said, "You were playing in the street with Alan and ran out in front of a car to get an ice cream, and something lifted you off your feet and pulled you out the path of the car. Is that true?""Oh yeah Mum. That's right. I forgot." said Kelly."And you sir," the priest addressed Alan's father, "lost your car keys, and looked everywhere for them - then found them on the roof of your car. Is that true?""Yes. That was weird. But what are you driving at?" said Alan's dad."All the work of one ghost named Jarvis. Your son says he's a friendly ghost who looks after you all like a guardian angel. I can't exorcise good ghosts, only evil spirits. You'd be better just turning a blind eye to him. He's done a lot of good." the priest then chuckled, and after drinking a cup of tea, left the house.Unfortunately, only Alan and Kelly could accept poor Jarvis, and so Alan's cowardly parents moved their family from the house. According to Alan, on the last night in the house, he heard Jarvis crying.

'KINDRED SPIRITS'
This is a weird, but touching story which allegedly took place in the Dingle area of Liverpool, England in the early 1980s. The case has been investigated by a staggering number of paranormal investigators, and yet the tale has had no publicity at all - until now. It is the story of a lonely old bachelor named John Blythe.John Blythe was born in 1907 in Aigburth district of Liverpool. Even from an early age, Mr Blythe realised he could see things his four older brothers and two sisters couldn't see. One of his earliest memories was a smiling, kind-looking man with a long beard rocking his cradle. Years later, when he was seven, John Blythe saw a portrait of the bearded man in his mother's bedroom, and he was told that the man was his granddad who had died in 1902 - five years before John had been born. In other words, a ghost had rocked John's cradle.At the age of 13, when John's school friends were discovering the opposite sex, John told his puzzled mother that he had sent a love letter to the beautiful auburn-haired girl across the road. John asked his mother if she knew the girl's name. Mrs Blythe said that there was no girl living in the house opposite, just two old brothers. It soon transpired that the love-struck teenager was infatuated - with the ghost of a girl who had committed suicide at the house across the street forty years before. Almost every day John would go missing for hours, and return late each night, all dewy-eyed, telling his parents that he had just walked Emily home. John's intrigued parents asked the boy where he had been on his 'date', and their blushing son told them that he had been walking hand-in-hand with Emily around the Palm House in Sefton Park. Mrs Blythe was naturally worried about her son's tales, and rather than believe that he was courting a phantom, she surmised that he was just confused and fantasising the episodes he'd mentioned. But one day, John Blythe came home in tears. He said that Emily would be 'going away' soon because her house was to be demolished. John said that Emily wouldn't be able to live in the new house that would be built over her one. And sure enough, just under a year later, the house facing John Blythe's was condemned and knocked down. John was devastated, and almost starved to death because the heartbroken teenager refused to eat.Around this time, an elderly man who heard about John's so-called imaginary girlfriend confirmed that a girl named Emily Webster did once live at the house that stood facing the Blythes house. The girl in question hanged herself from the stairs after discovering that her fiancee intended to marry another girl.During the Second World War, John Blythe served in the Irish Guards, but refused to shoot at the enemy. Whenever he confronted the German troops he would fire over their heads. He was almost discharged from his platoon because the sergeant thought he was insane when private Blythe threw up his arms after saying there were Germans closing in all around. Minutes later, over two hundred bodies of German troops were found scattered in the next field. Blythe said that he had mistaken the bewildered ghosts wandering the field for living German soldiers. Blythe's eerie comments naturally put the wind up the other platoon members, and his sergeant told him to shut up about his weird experiences in future.John Blythe continued to live in this world and the next one for the next forty years, and was often misunderstood and sneered at because of his talk about the 'invisible society' of kindred spirits that was all around us. He finally moved into a terraced house in Colebrooke Road in the Dingle area of Liverpool, and at this final residence old John Blythe happily settled down with his family; a family of assorted ghosts, that is.John's nephews and nieces regarded their old uncle as an eccentric but loveable soul, and constantly advised him to move into sheltered accommodation. But Mr Blythe said he was happy with his 'spirit-wife' Deliah, who had departed the world of the living in 1900. The other members of Mr Blythe's adopted phantom family were Edward Goode, a refined top-hatted Victorian gent who was fascinated by the television set and the telephone, and Mrs Ludwig, an old German maid who had also lived at the house in the 19th century. There were two other family members, and they were the 12-year-old twins Thomas and Alice, but they were always moving backwards and forwards between this world and the hereafter for some reason.John Blythe's living nephews and nieces obviously assumed that there uncle was going senile and making all the tales of his spirit family up. But something later took place which made everyone have second thoughts about the family of ghosts.In March 1980, John Blythe tripped and fell down the stairs at his Dingle home. He lay unconscious at the foot of the stairs with blood dripping from a gash to his forehead and a badly-broken arm. He most probably would have died there, if someone hadn't telephoned Mr Blythe's nephew, Steven.Steven's phone rang incessantly at 8 a.m. on that Sunday morning, and when the young man answered, an excited, well-spoken voice said: "Please send help. I beseech you to send assistance, for Mr Blythe has suffered a terrible fall at his home."Steven thought the call was a prank, as he didn't recognise the caller's voice, and so he said: "Who is this?"And the caller replied: "My name is Edward, and I live at Mr Blythe's address. Please come at once or he will not be long for this world!"Steven said: "Look, if this is some - "But the caller hung up.Steven hastily got dressed and drove from his Knotty Ash home all the way to the Colebrooke Street house. He hammered on the knocker but could get no answer. He pushed back the flap of the letterbox and saw something that he was to remember for the rest of his life. A concerned-looking man in a black outdated suit and a long top hat was crouched over a man slumped at the foot of the steps. Steve saw that the man on the floor was his Uncle. Nearby two twins were giggling and pointing at the inert-looking Mr Blythe. They were a boy and a girl of about 10 or 12 years of age, dressed in matching royal blue satin outfits embroidered with pearls.Steven shouted "Hey! What's going on. Open the door." And he stood back and waited. But the door never opened. Steven looked through the letterbox - and saw that the top-hatted stranger and the twins were nowhere to be seen. Mr Blythe's nephew backed up and charged at the door. He did this three more times, and the neighbours of the adjoining houses came out to see what the racket was about on this sunny Sunday morning. When they learned that Mr Blythe was unconscious, the neighbours also put their weight behind the door, which finally yielded. An ambulance was called for, and Mr Blythe was taken to hospital. In his hospital bed, the old man asked his nephew how he had known about the fall down the stairs. Steven said that a mysterious man named Edward had telephoned him. Mr Blythe gave a broad smile, then said: "He finally did it then.""Did what?" one of the old man's niece's asked.Mr Blythe tried to explain. He said: "Mr Goode was always trying to use the telephone. He was absolutely intrigued by the workings of it, but he used to hold the receiver upside down and couldn't dial properly. He must have called you."Sadly, Mr Blythe passed away in his sleep on Christmas Eve of that year. Strangely enough, the sounds of a woman laughing were heard in his bedroom that night when his nephews visited him. Perhaps it was Mr Blythe's spectral wife Deliah, overjoyed because her husband had crossed over to join her in the spirit world. And here's the strange epilogue to this incredible story. In 1996, one of Mr Blythe's niece's phoned up a certain highly-rated medium being featured on a local Liverpool radio station. She asked the psychic if there was anybody on the "other side" with any messages for her. The psychic said "Your uncle John is over there. He said something about a house in the Dingle and that he's with his wife Deliah and the twins. The funny thing I'm picking up is that these people go way, way back."Mr Blythe's niece was absolutely shocked at the medium's comments.The radio psychic then said: "Who's Edward? He keeps saying something about a telephone."

By Tom slemen

An Old Woman's Intuition

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:42:00 +0000

Intuition is a strange, subtle faculty of the human mind that we often dismiss, sometimes to our subsequent regret. The following story concerns the tale of a woman who heeded the hunch of an old woman.One blue-skied summer morning on Saturday, 9 July 1994, the postman plodded his way to a beautiful house near Earlston Gardens, Wallasey. He walked up the steps to an eggshell white portico overhung with blood-red roses. The small manila envelope was posted through the gleaming brass letterbox, and, almost immediately, on the other side of the door, 56-year-old Mrs June Higgins walked across the impressive encaustic tiles of the hall and picked the letter up. It contained two 'complimentary tickets' to see a play about the life of John Lennon called Imagine at the Liverpool Playhouse on Monday, 11 July. The performance would begin at 7.30 p.m. The typewritten letter explained that the tickets had been sent to Mr and Mrs Higgins randomly by the theatre as part of a publicity exercise.June's husband David was delighted with the free tickets as he had been a Beatles fan in his youth. He had heard that the widely-acclaimed Liverpool actor Andrew Schofield was already getting rave reviews from the drama critics of the local newspapers because of his stunning portrayal of John Lennon. David therefore cancelled a dinner engagement that was to have taken place in two days so he could take his wife to the play instead. David decided he would make a night of it and take his wife over to Liverpool in his prized Bentley Continental. He would then take her to dinner after the play. It would be the perfect end of a fortnight's holiday David had taken from running his highly successful catering supply business. Later that day, June Higgins was sitting in the garden of an elderly neighbour named Gloria Silver. When June mentioned the free tickets she had received from the theatre, Gloria said she had a strange feeling about the letter.'What do you mean Glo?' June inquired.'Have you called the theatre to see if they have sent those tickets?' said Glo.'No, I haven't.' June respected her old neighbour, and had always valued her advice. June believed the elderly woman was psychic, as she had mentioned many premonitions that had come to pass.'Well you should June. It could be a gimmick. Someone could burgle the place while you and David are watching the play.' Said Gloria sombrely.'But the place is alarmed Glo,' June told her.'That wouldn't stop them dear,' said Glo, 'How many times do we simply complain among ourselves when we hear car alarms going off around here? No one gives two hoots about alarms and sirens any more. People just turn their television sets up because the noise is a nuisance. We're glad when the alarm goes off. I called the police once to complain about a burglar alarm that had been driving us potty for hours and they took over an hour to come out.''That's it, I'm not going.' June announced.'June, I might be wrong. Check with the theatre first; see if they did send those tickets out.'So June phoned the box office at Liverpool Playhouse. A woman said that as far as she knew, the theatre was not sending out free tickets to anyone besides official critics and reviewers. June checked the envelope's postal franking mark to see where it had been posted but the marking was too smudged to be legible.June told David about old Gloria's suspicions and he shook his head. 'That is so paranoid,' he told his wife. 'Tell her she can mind the house then, until we get back.''Don't be ridiculous David, she's an old woman,' June said. She looked up at her tall husband with a pensive, worried expression. 'What if she's right?''June, this house has a sophisticated alarm system. No one can get in here without that alarm going off. Now, listen to me. We are going to enjoy a play with the best seats in the house, and then we are going to dinner, and no one, especially old Gloria, is going to spoil it. Okay?'June shrugged. 'Look David, I have a feeling about this.'David sighed. 'For Christ's sake, June, look if you really think some expert cat burglar is going to attempt to break in here, I'll ask the police to patrol the area on Monday evening.''David you're being unrealistic; the police don't have the resources to drive in circles round our home while we go out for the night.' June shook her head as her husband turned to look through the window in one of his typical sulks.'Well you know I can't go if you want to stay here so I may as well rip the tickets up,' he lamented.'No David, you can go with your friend - George.' June suggested.David turned to face his wife. 'I'd rather take you,' he said, with a fretful look.'I know that love, but I'd feel better staying at home, just in case - you know…''Well if you are going to stay here, you can bring a friend round to keep you company.' David said. He walked to his wife and hugged her.'Yes, I will. So, that's sorted then?' June asked, muffled as her husband kissed her.David nodded, then he said, 'Are you sure about this?''Yes,' June said.'You've got me worried about you now,' David released his embrace.'Don't be, it's probably all in my mind.' June said, squeezing his hand.At 6.15 pm, on the Monday evening, David and George left the house in the Bentley. June and Gloria sat in the house watching television with the volume turned down to a whisper lever. The blinds were drawn, the windows were closed and locked, and the doors were bolted. June carefully set the dimmer light control in the lounge until the extravagant crystal chandelier glimmered with a faint orange radiance. Gloria picked up the handset of the telephone and listened to the purring tone. If anyone attempted a break in she'd dial the police immediately. She replaced the handset and then sipped a cup of tea. Then the old woman reached into a plastic carrier bag she'd brought and took out a packet of digestive biscuits. Then she took out an old World War One bayonet. She held it and smiled at June.June froze.Gloria leaned towards her and handed the steel military blade to her. 'If anyone does break in here, don't hesitate to use it.''Gloria - where on earth did you get that from?' June was astonished, and she took hold of the bayonet and felt the blade - which was still fairly sharp.'It belonged to my Uncle Jim. He was in the first lot in France,' said Gloria.'Wonder how many lives it took?' mused June, morosely.'None,' Gloria cackled. 'Uncle Jim said he only used it for making toast, opening cans and scraping the mud off his uniform. At least he was honest.'June put the bayonet down on the coffee table and tried to make pleasant conversation, but Gloria cut through the small talk. 'Have you put all your valuables away?' the old woman asked her.'Yes Glo, I have.' June had put all of her jewellery, cash, credit cards and various expensive items away in a small safe that had been installed in the basement floor.Around ten minutes after seven June heard a sound in the hall. She hurried from the lounge after telling Gloria to stay put. The silhouette of a small figure was visible through the array of stained glass panes of the front door. Someone was standing on the front door step. June could hear her heart palpitating. She backed away, then bumped into Gloria with a yelp. 'The line's dead,' said the old woman.'There's someone at the door,' June whispered; her throat dried up. She felt so weak with fear, she couldn't scream, even though she had the urge to.The two women stood back in the lounge doorway, peering through the darkness of the lounge, watching the silhouette moving slightly.One of the window pains was smashed. A black leather-gloved hand removed the pieces of shattered glass from the frame. Then the hand reached in and felt for the knob of the door lock. It turned the knob and tried to open the door, but the door was bolted. The burglar kept trying to force the door. Gloria fetched the bayonet, and June tried to persuade her old friend not to use it, but the old woman waddled across the hall and stabbed away. The first thrust of the bayonet missed, but the next two attempts were successful, and the blade was plunged through the gloved hand. The terror-stricken Gloria stabbed the hand with such ferocity, the point of the bayonet went straight through the palm and into the wooden doorframe. The person on the doorstep let out a high-pitched scream that gave June and Gloria the impression that the burglar was a woman.The hand was rapidly withdrawn through the six-inch-square smashed pane, and the burglar dashed off.June turned on all the lights and tried the telephone again. It was disconnected as Gloria had said. When David arrived home shortly before 10 o'clock, he saw the smashed pane in the front door and bloodstains on the doorstep. June opened the door and hugged her husband. She told him what had happened. He took June next door to Gloria's house and called the police on a neighbour's telephone. He then called his brother-in-law Martin who lived locally in Liscard, and told him if he could come around with his wife Angela to sit with June because she was in a terrible state after the attempted break-in. Martin said a strange thing: 'I've just returned from the hospital. Angela was returning from her mother's house tonight when a mugger stabbed her with a knife.''Oh my God!' David Higgins exclaimed, but then became a little intrigued.'Yes, they stabbed her in the hand as she tried to grab the knife off him,' Martin explained. She'd had her wounds stitched because they had been so serious, and she'd also received a tetanus jab.David called George and told him to sit with June while he paid his sister Angela a visit. He later told his sister about the burglar who had tried to break into his home earlier that evening, and how the person had been stabbed in the hand twice with a bayonet. Angela began to stutter and avoided eye contact. Then David related how Gloria and June had heard the burglar let out agonised screams in a distinctly effeminate voice. 'What are you trying to suggest?' Angela reacted with what seemed to be a poorly acted mock recoil. 'Yes, what are you getting at David?' said Angela's husband, Martin.'I'll call my mother shall I Angela, and see if you paid her a visit this evening?' David suggested, reaching for the telephone. Angela sat down and started to cry. 'I did it,' she said, and her words were almost unintelligible through the sobs.'Why?' David asked.'Angela, what's going on?' Martin asked his wife, and knelt before her, awaiting an explanation.The truth gradually emerged, and the motive behind the attempted burglary. Angela's husband had recently lost his job, so she had decided to burgle her rich brother's home. It would provide a ready means of paying the bills and keeping up the mortgage payments. David's own sister had sent the theatre tickets in an attempt to get the couple out of the house. Angela had minded the house of her brother and sister-in-law in the past when they were on holiday and knew the numeric code to disable the burglar alarm. Fortunately, for Angela, her brother sympathised with her situation, and he ended up employing her husband in his catering supply firm. No charges were brought against Angela, and never again did David doubt the intuition of old Gloria Silver.

By Tom Slemen.

The Tree of Life

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:36:00 +0000

We depend on the world's rainforests in ways that we are only just beginning to understand. The rainforests play a significant role in maintaining weather patterns and the world's limited supply of fresh water. Of course, the natural elements and species from the rainforests are the basis of many consumer, agricultural, medical, and industrial products. Although rainforests cover less than 2 per cent of our planet's surface, they are home to more than half of all plant and animal species.
According to The Nature Conservancy, eight million square miles of tropical rain forest originally encircled the Earth. More than half of these forests have been burned, bulldozed and destroyed. Only 3.4 million square miles remain. If deforestation continues at these current rates, scientists estimate that nearly all the tropical rainforest ecosystems will be destroyed by the year 2030. In the meantime, with the passing of each second, more than an acre of the world's rainforests disappears.
In 1971, there weren't many people in England thinking about the importance of trees and how we were mistreating the Earth. Ecology and green issues had not fully entered the mass consciousness of the public in most countries, and yet, in the Oxton area of Wirral, there lived a girl of fourteen who was in love with all of nature; a girl who believed trees were important life-giving, oxygen-bearing creatures. Her name was Prudence, but she told her well-to-do parents that she preferred to be known by the name of her own choosing, which was Harmony. Harmony's bedroom wall was covered not only with posters of pop stars, but also with charts depicting different species and types of trees, constellations, and a map of the Solar System. Harmony was also a frequent visitor to Ness Botanic Gardens, and she often pestered her father to take her and her school friend Sharon (christened Starshine by Harmony) to the Lake District or the Delamere Forest.
Stuck over Harmony's bed, on the blank reverse of a strip of wallpaper, she had scrawled the first verse her favourite poem, Woodman Spare That Tree, written by George Pope Morris in 1830:

Woodman, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I'll protect it now.
'Twas my forefather's hand
That placed it near his cot:
There, woodman, let it stand,
Thy axe shall harm it not!

The sensitive otherworldly schoolgirl was an easy target for the school bullies who could not understand a girl who would stop in her tracks and kneel in awe to admire a cluster of wild crimson poppies in bloom at the side of the road. What did the oddball girl find so fascinating about a morning moon that made her stand in the playground, gazing up at the pale lunar orb, oblivious to the joker tying her shoelaces together? Why did Harmony get excited each August when the Perseid meteors were due to arrive after midnight in streaks of dazzling silver across the starry skies? Normal girls had boys on their minds, but Harmony and Starshine were in love with the Northern Lights and shooting stars. Crazy, thought the mundane teenage girls in Harmony's school.
Then came the attempt to save the tree that was to later provide the dullards of the school with many mindless laughs. An old oak was scheduled to be uprooted because it was an obstacle to a new road that was to run through a stretch of greenery on the outskirts of Oxton. The removal of the old oak had been mentioned in an inch of column in the local newspaper, and no one opposed the plan. There was no environmental campaign to save the oak, but Harmony decided she would sit beneath the large tree - one of her favourite friends - on the last night of its 'life'. Starshine joined her, and the two girls sat drinking soup from a Thermos beneath the twinkling canopy of the night. The parents of the girls were not keen on the all-night vigil at all, and Starshine's 18-year-old brother Kristian checked on them several times on his moped.
At dawn, Harmony was hugging the tree. Tears trickled from her weary eyes. Starshine, fatigued and longing for the cosiness of her bed, tried to convince her friend to go home. Harmony refused, and Starshine complained about being unable to keep her eyes open. 'You're being like the disciples who fell asleep as Jesus was suffering on his last night in the Garden of Gethsemane,' Harmony told her weary friend. Starshine went home, leaving her friend with the condemned oak. The sobs from Harmony faded into the hush as she made her way home. An hour later, Starshine returned to her outlandish friend with a bundle of biscuits, lemonade and a blanket. Harmony embraced her and Starshine the two girls cried a little. It wasn't long before they were singing to while away the hours. Harmony had a fine singing voice, and she sang a song she and Starshine liked. A song that had been in the charts for a while called You've Got A Friend, by James Taylor. After the song, Harmony made a morbid request to her friend. She said, 'If I die before you, could you plant something, like an acorn?'
'Don't talk like that,' said Starshine. A chill ran down her spine.
'I have a feeling I will never become a woman,' Harmony said.
'That's a horrible thing to say,' Starshine said, and she told her friend to sing another song.
Harmony laughed, and agreed she was being gloomy, and she said, 'I'll probably live to be a hundred at least.'
That morning, the earthmoving and construction equipment arrived in a convoy. Despite the hysterical protestations of Harmony, the tree was chain-sawed and its roots were wrenched up by the shovel of a JCB.
A week later, Harmony was on her way to school when she saw a beautifully iridescent Silver Studded Blue butterfly fluttering upwards from a hedge. She watched the sapphire winged creature rise up into the morning air as she walked on across the road. Starshine stood on the other side of the street - with her hands to her face.
A car hit Harmony. The impact threw her back onto the pavement, where she rolled into a hedge. Blood trickled from her nose and ears. The car that hit Harmony screeched to a halt.
From across the road came terrible screams. They came from Starshine. She came running across the road.
'Harmony,' Starshine muttered in shock, gasping to get her words out. She knelt beside her friend, trembling.
'I'm dreaming,' Harmony said.
Starshine saw her smashed teeth. She grabbed her best friend's hand. Both hands were shaking, but Starshine squeezed tight. 'It's okay Harmony,' Starshine said, and tears streamed down her face.
'Am I dreaming? I thought I might have dreamt that,' Harmony whispered, and her eyes looked not at her friend, but somewhere in the hedge, as if she couldn't see properly.
'Harmony you're going to be -' Starshine's found herself too choked up to speak any further as she saw the damage the car had done to her soul-mate.
Harmony died. Those eyes that had been so full of life, so full of inquisitiveness and wonder, were devoid of some spark of consciousness now. Some sacred essence was no longer evident in the teenager's eyes now.
'I love you Harmony,' Starshine said, and she burst into tears.
'She just stepped out in front of me,' said a voice.
Starshine turned and saw a middle aged man standing beside her. He was also in shock, and he had his hand pressed over his face. He looked through his splayed fingers, moving his lips without saying anything audible.
'She was my best friend,' Starshine told him, and as she gazed back at her dead companion, a crowd started to form.
Three months after the tragedy, Starshine - or Sharon as she was now known again - was staying at her Aunt Gretta's house in Bromborough one night, when the two of them heard something very strange. The old upright piano in the parlour of Gretta's house had been locked since the Second World War, and the keyboard lid had remained shut because its key had never been found. The sound of piano music emanating from the parlour, half-past eleven at night, was therefore particularly baffling. Gretta and her niece slowly descended the stairs in their night-gowns and stood on the bottom steps, listening to the melody. 'Aunt, I know that song,' exclaimed Sharon excitedly. It was the song Harmony had sung on the night they'd held a vigil at the oak tree: You've Got A Friend.
The piano suddenly stopped playing, and Gretta and Sharon cautiously entered the parlour and quickly switched on the light. There was nobody there, but Sharon and her Aunt glanced about the room, feeling very uneasy. 'What's that?' Gretta pointed to something on top of the piano.
It was an acorn.
Sharon recoiled in amazement. She picked up the acorn and held it in her clenched palm. A single tear welled in her eye. The next day, Sharon buried the acorn, not far from the spot where the old oak tree had once stood.

By Tom slemen

ROLL OUT THE BARREL

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:29:00 +0000

The Mary Russell - the Ship of the Seven Murders

Up in Blundellsands in the north-west of England, there stands an old Victorian house which overlooks the waters of Liverpool Bay. In the 1950s, a gang of workmen were charged with the task of converting the waterfront house into flats. Before the workmen started their job, the foreman started to inspect the run-down house. In the attic, he came across something unusual: the huge helm wheel of an old ship that had been mounted in front of the garret window. The bemused foreman surmised that the previous occupant of the house had been some sailor or captain, and as he playfully turned the wheel, he looked beyond the dusty attic window at the sea's horizon. One of the workers meanwhile, was examining an array of maps and charts that dotted the wall. These maps covered every part of the globe. More maritime items were uncovered in the attic that afternoon. A sextant, a finely-balanced compass, a small brass folding telescope - and a huge battered-looking trunk. The foreman expected the trunk to be locked, but the lid lifted open to reveal nothing but an old sword which resembled an 18th century naval cutlass. The foreman lifted the sword out of the trunk, and as he did, he and the labourer were startled by a strange, eerie noise. They heard an accordion playing in the house somewhere, accompanied by the cries of seagulls. As the foreman turned to the workman with a look of puzzlement, he saw the old ship's wheel spinning on its axis. The workman turned and witnessed this strange activity too, then backed out of the attic, saying, "I don't like this."The foreman was more amazed than frightened, until events took an even stranger turn. Another weird noise also echoed throughout the attic, and it was just like the creaking sounds of a ship's timbers. Suddenly, the whole floor of the attic seemed to tilt and sway, and the two men thought the whole house was ready to collapse. With the helm spinning and the yells of the phantom seagulls, the foreman felt as if he was standing on the swaying deck of a ship at sea. He decided to run, but as he bolted for the door, something powerful yanked the old sword from his hand. The foreman glanced back, and saw the cutlass suspended in mid-air, as if hanging by an invisible thread.Understandably, the foreman and his gang refused to work in the attic, and instead of converting it into a room, they left it the way it was and simply locked its door. When the landlord of the old house heard this, he took the foreman to court. All the same, even the landlord didn't like the spooky atmosphere in the attic, and never ventured up there alone. The landlord knew that in the 1860s, a demented sea-captain named William Stewart lived in the Blundellsands house, and, according to old rumours, that captain had been a cruel and twisted man who had committed some unspeakable act of evil on the premises. No one knew just what Captain Stewart had done, but the landlord had heard from his father that there had been a double murder in the house long ago.In 1955, the Blundellsands dwelling was subdivided into six flats, which were occupied by 5 couples and an elderly spinster. In April 1955, the spinster, a Miss Jean Fleming, let out a scream one night at half past twelve. Two medical students and their girlfriends who were lodging at the house ran up to the third-floor flat to see what the matter was. They found Miss Fleming lying on the floor, unconscious. When the spinster came to, she said she had fainted after seeing a terrible apparition. The bodies of a naked man and woman were lying on her bed, dismembered and disembowelled. Their heads, arms and legs had been severed from their torsos, and the apparition had looked so real. Miss Fleming had even seen the blood soaking into her duvet. The spinster was so scared, she left the lodging house that night and stayed with a cousin in Kirkdale.Everyone in the lodging house surmised that the confused old spinster had simply had a bad dream. But later that week, in the dead of night, something took place which turned the lodgers into shambling nervous wrecks. The time was 3.15 a.m., and a young couple on the ground floor were awakened by a loud bang which echoed down the stairway. It seemed to originate...in the attic. The couple listened intently, and they heard a succession of thumps on the stairs. Then the strains of an accordion playing some sort of sea-shanty drifted down the stairway. On the second floor, the medical students and their girlfriends were also awakened by the racket, and one of the girls got out of bed and looked through the keyhole. She let out a terrible scream, then rushed into the arms of her alarmed boyfriend, who was sitting up in bed."What's wrong? Who is it?" the student asked.His girl hugged him and started to shake. She said a weird-looking man with wild staring eyes was on the landing outside, trying to carry a barrel down the stairs. The man wore a leather cap and a long black coat, and he had blood on his hands.The student and his girl were so frightened, they refused to budge from that room until first light, and barricaded themselves in. Across the landing, the other medical student, a young man named Robert, had made the mistake of opening the door to see who was making all the noise. He got the clearest view of the strange man before slamming the door and locking it. Robert later described the man as outdated, with a black cap similar to the ones worn by the sea skippers in the 19th century. Robert had seen the bloody hands too, and had also noticed blood around the man's mouth, on his grizzled beard and moustache. The odd-looking stranger's glaring mad eyes had also sent a shiver down Robert's eyes.The couple in the ground floor flat of the house never opened their door to see what all the commotion was about, but they noticed how the rumbling sound and strange music seemed to continue down into the cellar, where it came to an abrupt end. The lodgers soon realised that a ghost was at large in the house, and they contacted the landlord to tell him about the nerve-shattering episode. He visited the house, and instead of dismissing the claims, he seemed very jumpy and continually on edge. The landlord went up to the attic and found that the door had been forced open. He arranged for a new padlock to be fitted to the door, but in the following week, the sinister man in black gave a repeat performance, only this time, the terrified lodgers who were brave enough to peep through their keyholes saw that the seafaring shade was now pulling a trunk down the stairs. On this occasion, the heart-stopping ghost was heard to cackle and mutter to himself in a raspy voice as he made his way down to the cellar.Enough was enough, and early next morning there was nothing short of a mass exodus from the haunted lodging house. All the lodgers had suffered enough sleepless nights living in dread of the disruptive phantom. The landlord begged them to stay but soon found himself alone in the house. As a last resort, a priest was invited into the house to exorcise the ghost, but even the holy man fled when he saw the blade of the old sword being thrust at him through the attic door. As the priest and the landlord flew down the stairs in a state of absolute panic, the sound of laughter reverberated through the house.The landlord later died from a short illness, and the house was bought by a wealthy retired couple from Aintree named Joan and Freddie Osborne. A few days after the Osbornes moved into the Blundellsands house, they too heard the spooky sea shanty being played somewhere by an invisible accordion. Then, in June, 1958, Joan Osborne awoke in bed one night to see the menacing ghost of the bearded sea captain leaning over her. His wide insane-looking eyes gazed at her terrified face. Joan Osborne couldn't speak or even move with fear. The face of the ghost was spattered with droplets of blood, and he raised his arm. In his hand he brandished a long sword, ready to strike Joan with it. The woman managed to close her eyes. She suddenly regained the power to move, and she let out a scream, thinking some burglar was about to slay her in her bed.Freddie, Joan's husband bolted upright from the bed and he actually saw the ghostly sea captain melt away into the darkness of the bedroom.The Osbornes got in touch with a local historian friend named Ian MacCauley, who specialised in maritime history. They asked him to research the history of their newly-purchased house, and over two months, the local historian uncovered a disturbing tale of murder and madness which seemed to explain the ghostly phenomena.MacCauley learned that in the 1860s, a Captain William Stewart bought the house now occupied by the Osbornes. Stewart had a streak of insanity which he had undoubtedly inherited from his grandfather, a captain who had murdered seven of his own crew on a ship called the Mary Russell in 1828. Stewart's grandfather had stood trial for murder, but had been found guilty and insane. After serving seven years at an asylum in Cork, he had been released to return to his hometown of Liverpool. Like his grandfather, William Stewart was also accused of murdering one of the crewmen on a ship named Seabird in 1859, but he was later acquitted. After a prosperous career importing rum and sugar from Barbados, Captain Stewart retired and married an Irish girl named Mary. The couple moved into the waterfront house at Blundellsands, and when Stewart learned that his old ship, the Seabird was being decommissioned, he salvaged the wheel of the vessel, along with sections of the deck. The floorboards of the deck were laid in the attic of the Stewart's new home and the helm was also mounted in front of the attic window. The ship's sextant and compass were also recovered by Stewart for sentimental reasons, and he kept them in a trunk, along with his trusty old spyglass and sword.The neighbours of Captain Stewart nicknamed him "Jack Tar", and often sneered at the way the old seafarer went down to the waterfront promenade each morning to feed the seagulls. But what really amused the neighbours was the way William Stewart stood before his attic window, manipulating the ridiculous wheel of his imaginary ship as he gazed out at the distant horizon of Liverpool Bay.Then Mary Stewart went missing. People asked William what had become of her, but the old seadog would always smile enigmatically and say, "Gone back across the Irish Sea no doubt."When Mary hadn't been seen in over a month, the police were alerted by the neighbours of the retired captain, and he was taken into custody and quizzed. There was a thorough search of the house, and bloodstains were found on the mattress of the Stewarts double bed. Traces of blood were also found in a barrel and trunk in the cellar.Stewart was asked to explain the bloodstains, but he gradually became incoherent and started to sing and laugh out loud. He was committed to an asylum for the criminally insane, and in 1870, just before he died, he made a startling deathbed confession. Stewart claimed that he had murdered his wife and her lover upon discovering them in his bed. On the night he discovered his wife was being unfaithful, a thunderstorm was raging, and Stewart was able to enter his house without being heard. In a fit of jealous rage, Stewart entered the bedroom, then impaled Mary and her lover with his old sword in one swift thrust through the man's lower back. He then hacked the screaming couple to death, dismembering their limbs in the process. Stewart was so enraged at the man who had been to bed with his beloved wife, he sliced off his ears and fried them in a pan before eating them. Stewart hid the body parts in a barrel and trunk he kept in his attic, but later transferred the containers downstairs to the cellar. The arms, legs, torsos and heads were gradually sawed up into small chunks which Stewart fed to the seagulls during his morning walks along the promenades of Blundellsands. The fragmented bones of the murder victims were simply tossed into the sea.When the Osbornes had heard the story of the murderous Captain Stewart, they promptly left their new home and put it up for sale. That house is still standing today, and for some reason, it lies empty...

By Tom slemen.

The Frozen Woman

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:09:00 +0000

Was a survivor of the titanic disaster Rescued 76 years too late?

There are many sane and respected people around the world today who intend to have their bodies 'put on ice' when they expire. Their frozen corpses will be stored in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of minus 196 degrees centigrade until a future time when advances in medical technology will allow the deep-frozen dead to be resurrected. These attempts at cheating death through freezing are practical examples of the relatively young science of applied cryonics. The Cryonics Society of California is a pioneer in this field and started freezing newly-dead bodies in 1967, but there are now cryonic storage societies starting up in other parts of the world.
Many scientists still regard the prospect of cryogenic immortality as a slim and laughable chance, because it is still difficult if not impossible to freeze human tissue fast enough to avoid vital-cell destruction. This problem will undoubtedly be resolved in the not-too-distant-future, and already rudimentary human embryos have been successfully frozen at sub-zero temperatures. Moral watchdogs are concerned at the pace of progress in cryonics, and recent legislation in Britain has limited the period scientists can hold the embryos in cold storage.
We don't have to look to cryogenics to see examples of deep-frozen mammals; nature has already beaten us to it. In the summer of 1977, a perfectly-preserved specimen of a six-month-old baby mammoth was disinterred by a bulldozer from permafrost in the Yakutsk Republic of the former USSR. This baby mammoth, nicknamed Dinah, is over ten thousand years old. In 1900, a larger Russian mammoth was found in Berezovka standing upright in the Arctic permafrost. The frozen beast was so perfectly preserved by the sub-zero temperatures that the ancient buttercups it had been eating when it died were still stuck to its tongue. No reason has ever been given to explain why the mammoth died so suddenly it never had a chance to swallow the flowers, but the beast seems to have been literally frozen in its tracks.
Human bodies that have been frozen naturally in Arctic conditions have been reported from time to time. In August 1984, scientists chipped through five feet of gravel and permafrost on Beechley Island, which is situated at the entrance to Canada's Wellington Channel. What the excavating scientists came upon was breathtaking - three graves containing the bodies of sailors who had died in 1846. One of the corpses was perfectly preserved. The body was subsequently identified as that of seaman John Torrington of the ill-fated Franklin Arctic expedition. Sir John Franklin had left England in 1845 on a mission to find the Northwest Passage, a long-sought sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific by way of Canada's arctic islands. The British Government and its Admiralty were confident that Franklin would find the Passage, and they gave him two ice-region ships named 'Erebus' and 'Terror' which had been completely overhauled and refitted for the expedition. Franklin and his men perished in the Arctic Circle before they could find the Northwest Passage, but the fate of the ships is unknown. However, in 1851, the captain and crew of a brig named 'Renovation' were astounded to see two full-sized ships perched on top of a huge iceberg in the North Atlantic. Two old seadogs on the 'Renovation' identified the ships through a telescope; they were the frozen wrecks of 'Erebus' and 'Terror'. The 19th century ice-bound wrecks were allegedly seen once more in the early 1950s still embedded in a berg.
There have also been more sinister reports of people frozen in ice. The following story was buzzing across the Internet in the late 1980s and was even reported in a BBC radio bulletin in Britain.
According to the story, in March 1988, towards the end of the Cold War, a Russian destroyer was on manoeuvres in the North Atlantic, about 800 miles south of Iceland, when a lookout on the ship with high-powered binoculars spotted an iceberg on the horizon. There was nothing unusual about an iceberg being in that area of the ocean in March, but what excited the lookout was the curious dark spot he could see on the iceberg. As the berg floated nearer to the destroyer, the lookout zoomed in on the dark spot, and sighed in disbelief; the dot was the figure of a woman lying on a ledge, covered in a thin layer of ice. She was dressed in a black jacket and a long black dress, and was lying on her back. The captain of the destroyer immediately dispatched a motorboat to take a closer look. Two divers left the boat and swam over to the ledge of the iceberg to take a closer look at what was obviously the frozen corpse from some sea disaster. Three more men, including a physician, came off the ship and spent almost an hour freeing the body from the ice. The woman, who looked about tenty-five to thirty years old, was perfectly preserved, except for one ankle, which was blackened by the tissue-destroying ice crystals. However, the out-dated clothes she wore indicated that she had been frozen for a long time, perhaps fifty years or more. The corpse was put into a body bag and taken on board the Russian destroyer, where it was put in refrigeration until the ship returned to the Soviet Union.
The corpse was then transferred to a military hospital in Leningrad and slightly thawed to just under room temperature. Even the lipstick on the woman's face looked fresh, and the woman looked as if she was only sleeping. Suddenly, the woman's eyes flew open. It seemed to be just a reflex action, and not a sign of life. The blue eyes were slightly bloodshot, but looked animated.
All of the scientists present recoiled in shock. The eyes then rolled upwards and the eyelids of the corpse flickered, then closed.One report said that the scientists tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate the corpse by firing a high voltage current through its chest, but the lungs were full of ice and the other internal organs were damaged beyond repair.
In the pockets of the woman's coat, several papers and belongings were found. A brooch, a purse with old money that dated to the early 1900s, and a number of documents which stated that the woman had been a passenger on the Titanic liner, which sank after hitting an iceberg 350 miles southeast of Newfoundland in 1912.
It was surmised that the woman had probably fallen or jumped overboard from the stricken vessel, and had probably somehow been swept onto one of the icebergs drifting through the waters. The story was reported in some Russian satellite states, but the Soviet Union allegedly hushed up the strange find because the Russian destroyer that found the ice-bound corpse had been involved in electronic eavesdropping on very-low-frequency broadcasts from American submarines.
According to further reports that leaked out of the crumbling USSR in 1990, scientists removed the frozen woman's ova cells and were attempting to clone her.

Arrows in the Snow

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 01:10:00 +0000

One blazing hot day in July 1815, a sailing ship named Lothair arrived at Liverpool Docks from North America. Among the gaggle of passengers who disembarked from the trans-Atlantic vessel were a rich Scottish merchant named John Allan, his wife Frances, her younger sister Nancy, and the couple's sickly-looking 6-year-old foster-son Edgar. At Liverpool, the Allans met Thomas MacKenzie - a cousin of William Mackenzie, the Scottish railway engineer entombed in the famous pyramidal tomb on Rodney Street. Thomas MacKenzie found two trustworthy and hardworking Liverpool maidservants - Isabel Cook and Joan Slaidburn - to accompany the Allan family to Irvine in Scotland. Isabel's 7-year-old sister Mary went to Scotland as well, and became a playmate for little Edgar, the Allans adopted son.
Just a week before Christmas, little Mary decided she would go out in the nearby woods one snowy afternoon to collect holly and ivy to decorate the Allans' home. Young Edgar accompanied the Liverpool girl, and somehow managed to slip out of the cottage unnoticed. The two children collected holly, ivy and pinecones, and placed them in Mary's basket, but during their stroll in the Scottish countryside, a strange incident occurred. A trail of arrows was mysteriously drawn in the snow on the ground, before the children's astonished eyes. Mary and Edgar followed the etched arrows, and at one point, Mary wrote 'Who are you?' in the snow with the tip of her umbrella - and the invisible doodler crossed out the question with three lines.
The arrows continued to appear, one after the other, and so the children followed them out of curiosity - until Edgar realised he and Mary had been lured onto the thin ice of a frozen lake. As the ice creaked, ready to give way, Edgar seized Mary by the arm and dragged her to safety. The children then heard the voice of an old woman cursing them, but they could see no one, so they ran home and told the adults what had happened. When Mary's 17-year-old sister Isabel went to investigate the arrows, she saw that they really did exist, and when she tracked them to the lake, she recoiled in horror. Barely visible under the thin icy layer of the lake, was the face of a child, and the sight of it sent the servant running for help. Police later discovered that the unfortunate child under the ice was 6-year-old Carol McClean, a farmer's daughter who had gone missing days before. John Allan opined that the arrows had been drawn in the snow by the evil spirit of a witch known as Old Nelly, who had been drowned in the lake by the local villagers a hundred years ago. A total of nine children had drowned in the lake since, most probably lured to their deaths by Old Nelly's evil sorcery. Mary Cook and Edgar Allan were therefore warned to stay well away from that lake. Incidentally, Edgar Allan later grew up to become Edgar Allan Poe, the most famous horror-story writer of all time.
By Tom slemen

TheWarning Mirror

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 01:08:00 +0000

One rainy afternoon in February 1896, Margaret Hodges, a 35-year-old widowed woman who originally hailed from Liverpool's Pomona Street, moved into a house on Devonshire Road, High Park. Margaret had no children, but her 13-year-old niece Marie Ann was currently proving to be excellent company for the widow, who had been mourning the death of her husband for almost two years. John Hodges had died from tubercular complications in 1894, and had left a substantial legacy to Margaret, who now wanted to start anew in the suburbs of Southport, where she could attempt to forget Liverpool and the life that had been.
Upon this February afternoon, Margaret stood before a small square mirror she'd placed on her dresser, and she was complaining that the looking glass was too small to see anything in. She had to stand quite a distance away from it to see the new bonnet on her head, and Marie Ann kept nudging her out of the way to look at her own new hat. Later that afternoon Margaret and her niece were pleased to find a full-length mirror under a dusty sheet in the garret of the house. Three days later, Margaret Hodges was standing before this mirror, with Marie Ann brushing her hair for her, when the girl yelped, and said she had seen something flit out of the corner of her eye - in the mirror.
Margaret could see nothing, but several minutes later, the two females got the shock of their lives when they saw a woman appear in the mirror. She wore a fine white wedding gown, a coronet of orange blossoms on her pearl-blonde hair and a fine veil of diaphanous silk covered her face. In her white-gloved hands she clutched a bouquet, and she stood staring out of the mirror, seemingly oblivious to Margaret and Marie Ann, who were staring at the looking glass apparition in shock. The bridal spectre suddenly turned and walked away from the mirror, dragging the train of her gown with her.
After the initial scare of seeing the ghost, Margaret and Marie Ann became curious to know just whose spectre they had seen in that mirror, and would frequently go to the room to stare at the mirror to see if the apparition would return. They didn't have to wait long. Two days after the ghost made her debut, on 12 February, Margaret and her niece saw not one, but two phantasms in the long mirror. They saw the silvery blonde lady from behind on this occasion, and a man with black, centre-parted hair and a curled up moustache was embracing her, and looking over her shoulder - directly at Margaret and Marie Ann. He was saying something to the woman, who was perhaps his wife, but no sound came forth from his lips. Marie Ann held on to her aunt, and although she was a little frightened by the ghostly image, she was riveted by the supernatural spectacle. The images faded, and the same gentleman appeared - but now he was further away in the depths of the mirror, and he was kissing a dark-haired woman. Margaret touched her forehead, chest and then each shoulder as she made the sign of the cross. Then the images faded, and the room reflected in the glass reverted to the normal mirror-image of Margaret's room.
'Are you scared Auntie? I wasn't afraid this time,' Marie Ann told Margaret, and the woman reassuringly hugged her niece, and pondered on the meaning of the images the mirror had shown. Had the man in the looking glass been the ghost of a man who had committed adultery with the dark haired lady? It was as if the mirror had recorded all of the scenes from the lives of the previous occupants of the house, and was now replaying key events in the lives of these people. As Margaret and Marie Ann were about to walk out the room, they heard the cry of a child. They both turned, and slowly walked to the source of the unseen infant's cries - the mirror. There in the reflected room, they saw a bed, and the woman with pearl-coloured hair was giving birth, with a midwife in attendance. Margaret covered her niece's eyes at the shocking sight. As the midwife presented the mother with her babe, the images faded, and all of a sudden, the black-haired man reappeared close to the mirror, and he had tears in his eyes. He moved away from the mirror - to reveal an open coffin on a stand. In that coffin rested the silvery blonde who had given birth moments before in the strange mirror vision. The gentleman walked back into view, near to the coffin, shaking his fist at the deceased lady, and then the scene quickly faded away. Margaret and her niece hurried from the room on this occasion, unnerved by the sight of the lady in the coffin.
Two days later, on Friday, 14 February, a paper-lace Valentine card, was sent to Margaret's home on Devonshire Road. The card said that Margaret had an admirer, and the widow was flattered at the Valentine, and wondered who had sent it. Several days later, the admirer turned up on the doorstep of Margaret Hodges, and when she saw who it was she almost fainted. It was unmistakably the raven-haired man she'd seen in the mirror. She refused to allow him over the threshold, despite his bold attempts to walk into the house. She told the man to go, and he finally left in a huff. Almost a year passed until Mrs Hodges discovered from a neighbour that the man had lodgings in the street, and had once lived at the house where the Liverpool widow now lived. He was a renowned womaniser, and there were rumours that the man had once pushed his wife down a flight of stairs. He claimed she had fallen. Her neck was broken by the fall, and not long afterwards, the cad had an affair with the wife of a policeman, and the constable almost left him for dead when he found out about the affair. The adulterer also abandoned his daughter, and she was put in the care of a relative. Margaret Hodges shuddered when she heard about the scandalous reputation of the man, and realised that only for that extraordinary mirror, she could well have fallen for the charms of a murderous adulterer.

By Tom slemen

The Red Gnome

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 01:05:00 +0000

In 1858, a 138-foot long, 385-ton wooden brig called the Black Hawk, built by Stevens and Presley of Ohio City, sailed from Detroit, Michigan to Liverpool laden with very strange cargo. Down in the hold, stowed away among the 19,000 bushels of corn and padded parcels of stained glass, there was a barrel containing the pickled corpse of something truly terrifying. Before I relate just what that thing was, let me take you back 242 years in time and 3,600 miles away in space to the days of the early settlers in Detroit, Michigan. In June 1763, British captain James Dalyell and 58 of his officer’s were followed near the banks of Detroit River by a small, misshapen crimson-clad figure with penetrating eyes, a large fanged mouth, and a hideous scarlet face. Several soldiers shot at the weird looking figure. An old trapper warned Captain Dalyell and his men that they were being stalked by what the French settlers called the ‘Nain Rouge’- the Red Gnome – a sinister supernatural entity whose appearance foretold misfortune and death. Sure enough, shortly after seeing the crimson dwarf, Captain Dalyell and his soldiers were ambushed and massacred by the Indian Chief, Pontiac, and the blood of the slain turned the tributary of the Detroit River red for days. Decades earlier, the founder of Detroit, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, was also unlucky enough to see the Red Gnome, and soon lost his vast fortune and political standing. The diminutive omen of impending misfortune and death was seen again in 1801, shortly before the wooden city of Detroit was destroyed by a fire. Then, in the War of 1812, the Nain Rouge was seen prowling about in a fog by many witnesses, including General William Hull, who was forced to hand over Detroit to the British troops days later.
Around the end of 1857, there was a rumour that two hunters had killed the Red Gnome in a forest. They had shot him several times and fixed him to a tree with their bayonets to prevent his escape, and the body had been exhibited and packed in salt. The superstitious people of the colony arranged for the monstrosity to be burnt, for there was a widespread fear it would return to life, and a bonfire was built in a clearing, but someone approached the men who had killed the strange creature, and purchased it for an undisclosed sum. A collector of oddities in Liverpool arranged for the Red Gnome’s cadaver to be shipped to the home of warehouse keeper Michael Connolly, at 25 Clarence Street, Everton. The Black Hawk brig brought the curious cargo to Liverpool Docks, and the small cask was delivered – to the wrong Clarence Street. There were three streets of that name in the city at the time, and instead of going to Everton, it was delivered to the home of Abraham Harris, a jeweller living at 25 Clarence Street in the city centre. A servant signed for the cask, and Mr Harris was horrified when he saw the grotesque little man, pickled in brine in the barrel. The cask was stored in the cellar, and in the evening when the jeweller went down to show a colleague the terrifying corpse – they found the barrel empty and its lid lying on the floor. The evil-looking creature was never seen again. Had someone stolen the Red Gnome – or was the real explanation much more sinister?

VAMPIRES

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 01:01:00 +0000

Is there any Truth behind the Tales of the Undead?

The myth of the vampire is a very old one, dating back to ancient Egypt and Greece. Today, in our well-lit sprawling cities, there is no place for such a legend, except in horror films and the books of the American fantasy novelist Anne Rice. Vampires are just figments of the imagination, the bogey-men of gullible rural peasants who lived in a bygone superstitious age. That's what common sense leads us to believe; but even in modern times Dracula-like beings prowling the world continue to be reported. Shortly before midnight on 8 June 1993, over a thousand people turned up at a cemetery in Pisco, Peru, in the hope of witnessing the resurrection of an alleged vampire named Sarah Ellen Roberts. Local historians and officials from the British Embassy had recently been shocked to learn that the corpse of Mrs Roberts had been brought to Pisco from Blackburn, England, by her husband John Roberts in 1913, because British authorities refused to let him bury his wife in England, as they believed her to be a vampire. Mr Roberts dismissed the refusal as an absurdity, but subsequently bought a lead-lined coffin for his deceased wife, and allegedly roamed the world for four years, seeking out a country that would allow him to bury her. Finally, Mrs Roberts came to Peru, where he was allowed to inter his wife at Pisco for the sum of five pounds. Shortly after the ad hoc burial service, Mr Roberts boarded a ship for England and was never heard of again. Then the news from England reached Pisco; Sarah Ellen Roberts had been bound in

chains and shut up in the lead-lined coffin after being found guilty of witchcraft, murder and vampirism. Just before the lid of the coffin was screwed down, the Lancashire witch had screamed she would return from the grave to seek vengeance.
The Peruvian peasants in the town trembled at the news. Eighty years later in June 1993, people visiting a grave in the Pisco cemetery were terrified when they witnessed a large crack appearing in the headstone of the Blackburn woman's grave. That night, over a thousand excitement seekers and occultists descended on the graveyard when the word went round that the vampire would rise

from her grave at midnight. Hundreds of local women left the town 'to prevent the vampire being reincarnated in their new-born children', and cloves of garlic and crucifixes festooned the front doors of almost every house in the region. When midnight arrived, the vampire mania reached a peak, and police had to be called in to controll the hysterical crowds. Shots were fired in the air, and slowly the crowds dispersed. A small group of local witch doctors were apparently allowed to stay at the controversial grave, where they splashed the cracked headstone with holy water and sprinkled white rose petals around. The English vampire did not rise, and the witch doctors later celebrated their 'success' at laying the undead woman to rest.
Such superstitious mumbo jumbo is excusable in a remote Peruvian town, but there have also been a number of vampire alerts in the bustling metropolis of London. The first scare occurred in the spring of 1922, when an enormous black bat-like creature with a wing span of six feet was seen flying around West Drayton Church during the night of a full moon. Several terrified witnesses watched the creature dive into the churchyard, where it roamed the tombs. When it was chased by two policemen, the creature let out a loud blood-curdling screech, flapped its wings, and soared skywards. An old man who claimed he had seen the giant bat twenty-five years previously, maintained that it was the spirit of a vampire who had murdered a woman to drink her blood in Harmondsworth in the 1890s. No one took the oldster's tale seriously. Later that month, on the morning of 16 April at around 6 am, an office clerk on his way to work was walking down Coventry Street in London's West End. As he strolled into a turning off the street, something invisible to his eyes seized him and pierced his neck. The man felt blood being drawn, then fell to the pavement unconscious. He woke up in Charing Cross Hospital and told his unusual tale. The surgeons who quizzed him said someone must have stabbed him with a thin tube, but the victim disagreed; he was absolutely certain that no one had been close enough to deliver such a thrust. Two and a half hours later something incredible happened which still defies explanation; a second man was brought to the same hospital. he too was bleeding profusely from the lower neck, and when he regained consciousness, he also told how he had been walking down Coventry Street when something intangible attacked him - on the very same corner where the office worker had been struck down by an unseen attacker. Later that evening a third victim of the invisible assailant was admitted to the hospital. The doctors at Charing Cross were absolutely dumbfounded when the police told them that the latest victim had been stabbed at precisely the same spot as the two other casualties - at a turning off Coventry Street. An investigation into the bizarre crimes was launched as rumours of a vampire at large in London swept the capital. The newshounds of Fleet Street pricked their ears up at the rumours. The Daily Express reported the sinister Coventry Street assaults and asked the police if they had any theories on the strange crimes. A police spokesman reluctantly admitted that the injuries sustained by the three men at Coventry Street defied rational explanation, and there had been no headway in finding the bloodthirsty attacker. With his tongue placed firmly in his cheek, a reporter asked the spokesman if the police had considered the theory of the Coventry Street attacker being a vampire. The spokesman just chortled nervously and said 'That's all'.
Another rumour swept the City; the Coventry Street vampire had been cornered by the police and killed by a professional vampire hunter who had been drafted in for the job! Furthermore, the bloodsucker had been secretly interred with a wooden stake through its heart in a deep vault up in Highgate Cemetery. The rumour was traced to a pub in Covent Garden where an off-duty policeman told a landlord of his part in the vampire hunt that had stretched across London. It is of course, easy to dismiss the policeman's yarn as bunkum, but by a strange coincidence, London's second vampire scare took place at Highgate Cemetery forty-eight years after the Coventry Street vampire episode.
Highgate Cemetery was founded in 1836 when the London Cemetery Company purchased 17 acres of land in the north of the city. The company's gardener was something of a horticultural genius who transfigured the purchased acreage into a breathtaking peaceful oasis of greenery with tree-lined avenues, shrubs and meandering pathways. But there were problems ahead. The outbreak of the First World War deprived the cemetery of labour, and the number of plots for sale were dropping to double figures. Furthermore, cremation was also emerging as a popular alternative to burial. With insufficient funds for its upkeep, the cemetery was neglected, and the shrubbery and wildflowers were overtaken with weeds which enshrouded tombs and gravestones by the score. Then the vandals invaded the wilderness of the abandoned cemetery, daubing their names and profanities on the tombs. In December 1969, a group of occultists prowled the forsaken dormitory of the dead painting Voodoo symbols on a number of gravestones and chanting incantations in the hope of resurrecting a corpse. Urban legend has it that the occultists broke into a tomb and disturbed something that sent them running for their lives; an eight-foot wiry figure clad entirely in black which emerged from a hole in the tomb that led to catacombs. The fleeing necromancers scaled the railings of the cemetery and leaped to safety; one of them looked back as he raced down Swains Lane and saw the man in black reaching through the railings at him with a long boney arm.
The next alleged sighting of the Highgate Vampire occurred in January 1970, when a motorist from Milton Park was driving down Swains Lane near the entrance of the cemetery, when the engine of his car started to sputter. The man pulled into a parking space and got out the vehicle to lift the bonnet open, when he noticed an abnormally tall shadowy figure peering at him through the entrance gates of the cemetery. The motorist was so terrified at the apparition, he ran off without closing the bonnet of his car.
The vampire rumours gained substance over the following months with several more macabre encounters which attracted the attention of the media. An Essex schoolteacher, appropriately named Alan Blood organized a mass vampire hunt that would take place on Friday 13 March, 1970. Mr Blood was interviewed on television, and the London Evening News ran a front page story on him. Blood said he thought the Highgate Vampire had been driven from his lair in the cemetery by the crowds of sensationalists who had kept an all-night vigil near the tomb where the vampire was frequently seen. The schoolteacher's plan was to wait until dawn, when the first rays of the rising sun would force the vampire to return to his subterranean den in the catacombs, then he would kill the Satanic creature in the time-honoured tradition; by driving a wooden stake through its heart.
On the night of Friday 13th, hundreds of people stormed Highgate Cemetery carrying lit and electric torches, crucifixes, garlic cloves and sharp wooden stakes. At dawn on the following morning, there was no sign of the vampire. Some thought that the irresponsible rowdy mobs had scared the creature off. By the morning light, œ9,000 worth of damage had been caused by the rampaging crowds. In an orgy of desecration they had exhumed the remains of a woman from a tomb, stolen lead from coffins, and defaced sepulchres with mindless graffiti.
In September of that year, police apprehended a Mr David Farrant - a self-appointed vampire hunter - as he scaled the wall of Highgate Cemetery, armed with a cross and a wooden stake. The police took him to court, but Mr Farrant was released on a technicality. The vampire hunter evidently sent shivers up the magistrate's spine with his final remark to the court: "The Highgate Vampire has to be destroyed. He is evil."
Mr Farrant later told press reporters that he had seen the vampire on several occasions, and described it as a gangly figure about eight feet in height. He believed the vampire slept by day in the catacombs beneath Highgate.
Today, Highgate Cemetery is open to the public. In its Eastern Cemetery you will find the tomb of Karl Marx near to the grave of Sid Vicious of the notorious Sex Pistols punk rock band. The Western Cemetery is only open for guided tours.
Some students of the occult believe the whole vampire story is just a fictitious yarn that snowballed out of hysteria, but many of the people who allegedly saw the Highgate fiend say it was real and not the result of some mass hallucination.
Another vampire was said to be at large in England's picturesque Lake District in 1900. In January of that year, a Captain Edward Fisher left Croglin Grange - a bleak glorified granite-brick farmhouse in Cumbria - and headed south to Guildford, where he had purchased a new residence for business purposes. The new residents of Croglin Grange were Fisher's godsons, Edward and William Cranswell, and their young sister, Amelia, who had jumped at the opportunity of taking up the seven-year lease on the secluded but beautifully located property. The trio were popular with the neighbours, and seemed to be settling in well at their new home. Amelia enjoyed cooking and was a student of oriental languages. In the first summer at Croglin Grange, which was infernal, Amelia found it difficult to sleep at night. She would lie in her stifling bedroom, gazing out at the moonlit nightscape beyond the windows. One night she opened her bedroom window and stared out into the darkness when she suddenly noticed the silhouette of a lanky, bony figure darting across the moonlit lawn. Within seconds the agile, sinister-looking stranger was scaling the wall below her, so she slammed the window shut and fastened its catch. Almost paralysed with fear, Amelia retreated from the window as she listened to the figure scrambling up the wall. She sat on the end of the bed, trying to shout out to her brothers, but found she could hardly raise her voice. Then the figure was at the window. At this closer range she could see he was grotesque. The face was yellowed and shrivelled, and the eyes were almost black circular sockets. The nose was long and pointed, and the mouth, which was unusually large, showed a set of pointed, gruesome-looking teeth. The creature's bony finger scratched at the window as it picked away the lead lining of a pane. The pane rattled, then fell out, and the ghoul reached in through the hole and undid the window catch. It opened the window and bolted across the room towards its terrified prey. Amelia collapsed onto the bed in a state of sheer terror. The skeletal freak seized the trembling teenager by her hair and held her still as he bit into her neck. In the life-threatening situation, Amelia somehow summoned up enough courage to let out a scream which sent her brothers running into her room. They caught a glimpse of the nimble intruder leaping out of the bedroom through the window. They ran downstairs, unbolted the door and pursued the wiry assailant across the lawn and over the neighbouring churchyard wall, where they lost sight of him. William and Edward stood staring into the darkness for a while, then returned to their traumatized sister. When they saw the crimson fang-marks on her neck they knew that no ordinary intruder had been in her bedroom, but they could not believe the assailant had been a vampire.
One night in the following March, the creature returned to Croglin Grange during a severe gale. As the winds howled across the barren landscape outside, the bony finger was once again at work removing a pane from the Amelia's bedroom window, but this time the moan of the gales swamped the sound of scratching finger. The teenager awoke and found the vampire leaning over her. His cold and clammy hands grabbed her neck, and the woman screamed. The two brothers burst into the room armed with pistols. The vampire left his prey and attacked the brothers, but Edward opened fire, blasting a hole in the bloodthirsty stalker's thigh. Apparently unaffected by the gunshot, the Cumbrian vampire turned and literally dived through the open window. The chase was on again, but this time the brothers saw where the creature went to ground; in an old family vault in the churchyard.
The brothers alerted the local villagers, and on the following morning over seventy people gathered around the family vault that was said to be the vampire's lair. William, Edward and three brave villagers lifted the large sandstone slab of the vault and peered into the darkness. A torch was lit, and the crowd beheld the disturbing scene within the vault. Four broken coffins and their mutilated corpses. A fifth coffin in the corner was intact. The crowd drew back in fear as the brothers lifted the lid on this coffin - to reveal the same hideous creature that had attacked their sister twice at Croglin Grange. The corpse even bore the recent mark of the pistol shot in its thigh. One of the villagers stepped forward and told the brothers he too had seen this same creature of the night attacking and killing livestock, and he said the only way to destroy a vampire was with fire, so he and the brothers took the creature out into the churchyard, and after the villagers had gathered enough wood, the vampire was burned on a bonfire.

By Tom slemen

The Tunguska Explosion

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 00:52:00 +0000

Evidence of the mysterious blast 13 years after the cataclysmic explosion.

Had the following unexplained incident occurred today, even in the slightly relaxed atmosphere of the post-Cold War, it would have probably triggered World War Three. Fortunately, the greatest hammer blow from space to hit our Earth since prehistoric times happened when the 20th century was barely eight years old. Even today, scientists are still at loggerheads as regards to the nature of the extraterrestrial object which shook the world after exploding in the skies of pre-Revolutionary Russia.

The momentous event happened at 7.15 a.m. local time on the last day of June 1908. At that precise moment, an object brighter than the morning sun ripped through the atmosphere over Siberia. A trainload of passengers on the trans-Siberian railway stared in horror at the towering pillar of flame roared through the clear blue skies at a phenomenal velocity of around one mile per second. The sonic boom given off by the sky invader shook the railway track, convincing the engine driver that one of his coaches had been derailed. The driver jammed on the brakes and as the train screeched to a grating halt, the mysterious fiery object thundered north. The trembling train passengers listened in relief as the overhead danger became fainter, and many of them looked out the windows of the carriages and eyed the vapour trail with bafflement.

Almost 350 miles to the north of the train, the nomadic hunting tribes of the Evenki people felt the ground shake violently as they witnessed what seemed to be a second sun racing across the heavens. Only this sun seemed to be cyclindrical. By now, the immense apocalyptic object had been seen to change course as if it was being controlled or steered. After passing over the terrified travellers of the trans-Siberian train, the object made a forty-five degree right turn and travelled 150 miles before performing an identical manoeuvre in the other direction. The tubular shaped object then proceeded for another 150 miles before exploding over the Tunguska valley. The detonation occurred at a height of five miles, and the 12-megatonne explosion (it might have even been 30 megatonne) destroyed everything within a radius of 20 miles. Herds of reindeer were incinerated as they stampeded away from the explosion, and all wildlife in the area was ignited by the searing heat blast. Thirty-seven miles from the blast, the tents that the frightened Evenki people had taken refuge in were lifted high into the air by the resulting atmospheric shock wave, and the Evenki's horses galloped off in terror, dragging their ploughs with them. At the centre of the explosion a monstrous mushroom cloud rose steadily over Siberia. Such a strange and unsettling sight would not be witnessed for another thirty-seven years at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But this explosion was even fiercer than the A bombs which were dropped on the Japanese cities. The blast from the Tunguska explosion felled trees as if they were matchsticks for 20 miles around and set whole forests alight. The shockwave generated by the mysterious cataclysm travelled around the world twice and shook the recording pens of the microbargraphs at three meteorlogical stations in London, where they were interpreted as seismic jolts from some distant earthquake.

At a distance of 400 miles from the epicentre of the Tunguska blast, the relentless shockwave showed no signs of abating, and knocked fishermen from their boats on the River Kan. By the time the blast had deteriorated into a hurricane-like storm, a strange black rain started to fall over the Tunguska valley. Days later, strange scabs started to break out on animals that had been too far away to be directly burnt by the blast, and weeks later, curious investigators who ventured to the site of the explosion became sick and complained of strange burning sensations within their bodies. Were these signs of radiation sickness? But what meteoric object could be radioactive? Stranger still, why was there no crater at the site of the explosion? All meteorites leave a crater. And how would a meteorite travel horizontally for hundreds of miles and change course twice? Then there were other strange occurrences which seemed to suggest that the object which had exploded over Siberia was not a meteor at all, but perhaps some nuclear-powered spacecraft from another world which had had made an emergency crash-landing in a forbidding area of our world.

The first reports of a strange glow in the sky came from across Europe. Shortly after midnight on 1 July 1908, Londoners were intrigued to see a pink phosphorescent night sky over the capital. People who had retired awoke confused as the strange pink glow shone into their bedrooms. The same ruddy luminescence was reported over Belgium. The skies over Germany were curiously said to be bright green, while the heavens over Scotland were of an incredible intense whiteness which tricked the wildlife into believing it was dawn. Birdsong started and cocks crowed - at two o'clock in the morning. The skies over Moscow were so bright, photographs were taken of the streets without using a magnesium flash. A captain on a ship on the River Volga said he could see vessels on the river two miles away by the uncanny astral light. One golf game in England almost went on until four in the morning under the nocturnal glow, and in the following week The Times of London was inundated with letters from readers from all over the United Kingdom to report the curious 'false dawn'. A woman in Huntingdon wrote that she had been able to read a book in her bedroom solely by the peculiar rosy light. There were hundreds of letters from people reporting identical lighting conditions that went on for weeks after the Tunguska explosion. Scientists and meteorologists also wrote to the newspaper giving their opinions about the cause of the strange skyglare which ranged from the Northern Lights to dust in the upper atmosphere reflecting the rays of the sun below the horizon. No one connected the phenomenon with the strange object which had come down in Siberia to explode with the fury of a H-bomb. Even the national press in Russia gave no mention to the catastrophic even in the Tunguska Valley, because the country was then entering a major period of political upheaval. A serious investigation of the Tunguska incident did not take place for another thirteen years, when a Soviet mineralologist named Leonid Kulik led an expedition to the site of the explosion. But within those thirteen years, strange whispers and rumours spread across Siberia. There were tales of a strange being wandering the remote forests of Tunguska near the scenes of devastation. The nomadic reindeer herdsmen of Siberia sighted the gigantic grey humanoid figure some 50 miles north of the Chunya river. They saw the man, who seemed to be over 8 feet in height, picking berries and drinking water from a stream. The superstitious Mongol herdsmen regarded the freakish-looking stranger as one of the fabled chuchunaa - a race of hairy giants similar to the abominable snowman which were said to inhabit the region. The nomads crept through the forest to get a better look at the figure, and they saw that the grey colour of the man was not hair, but tattered overalls of some sort. The herdsmen sensed that there was something unearthly about the being, and they retreated back into the forest and moved away from the area. There were several more sightings of the grey goliath over the years, and each report indicated that the entity from the cold heart of Siberia was moving westwards. Alas, all of the accounts of the strange giant were interpreted as mere folklore tales of the Russian peasants.

In February 1927, Leonid Kulik went in search of the strange object that had impacted into Tunguska. He had read countless old newspaper clippings on the Siberian explosion and had conjectured that the object that had caused the widescale destruction had been a large meteorite made of stone and iron. Being a mineralologists, Kulik looked forward to obtaining samples of the meteorite for analysis. Kulik got off the Trans-Siberian railway at the Taishet station and on horse-drawn sledges they set off on an arduous three-day odyssey through 350 miles of ice and snow until he and his men reached the village of Kezhma, situated on the River Angara. At the village Kulik and his party of researchers replenished their supplies of food, then struggled on for a three-day journey across wild and unchartered areas of Siberia until they reached the log-cabin village of Vanavara on 25 March. Kulik then tried to make headway through the untamed Siberian forests, or taiga as the Russians call it, but was forced to turn back after heavy snowdrifts almost froze the horses to death. For three days Kulik was forced to remain in the snow-bound village of Vanavara, but during this period he interviewed many of the Evenki hunters who had witnessed the Siberian fireball's arrival on this planet. The tales of the sky being ripped open by a falling sun and of a great thunder shaking the ground made Kulik even more eager to penetrate the taiga to find his holy grail. When the weather gradually improved, Kulik set out for the Tunguska Valley. When he finally reached the site of the mysterious explosion, he was almost speechless. From a ridge overlooking the scene, Kulik took out his notebook and scribbled down his first impressions of the damage wreaked by the cosmic vandal. Kulik wrote:

From our observation point no sign of forest can be seen, for everything has been devastated and burned, and around the edge of the dead area, the young, twenty-year-old forest growth has moved forward furiously, seeking sunshine and life. One has an uncanny feeling when one sees twenty to thirty-inch giant trees snapped across like twigs, and their tops hurled many yards away.

Kulik then proceeded towards the felled forest, but two of the guides who had taken him and his assistants to the area refused to go any further. The guides told the bemused scientist that there was something or someone still lurking about in the area. Kulik thought the guides were superstitious fools, but they told him that strange things had been seen at twilight in the shadows of the dead taiga. The guides returned home and Kulik fortunately met a few bold members of the Evenki tribe, who took him and the researchers further into the taiga. By June, Kulik and his men had reached the middle of the explosion site, where uprooted trees were scattered from the centre of the blast like the tangled spokes of a wheel. There were no signs of a crater. Kulik realised that the explosion had occurred above ground. The Evenki tribesmen seemed to become very uneasy in the middle of the devastation zone, and started to talk about a supernatural presence in the area. But Kulik didn't have time to listen to such irrartional ramblings of the nomads; he had limited time to collect data for his friends back home at the Russian Academy of Sciences. There were three further expeditions to the site of the Tunguska explosion, all of them headed by Kulik. In 1941, Hitler attacked Russia. The 58-year-old Leonid Kulik volunteered to defend Moscow, but was wounded by the Nazis. He was captured by German troops and thrown in a prison camp where he died from his wounds.

The next three expeditions to the Tunguska Valley in 1958, 1961 and 1962 were led by the Soviet geochemist Kirill Florensky, who used a helicopter to survey and chart the blast area. Florensky's team sifted the soil in the area and discovered a narrow strip of dust which was of extraterrestrial origin. The dust consisted of magnetic iron oxide (magnetite) and minute glassy droplets of heat-fused rock. Florensky carefully checked the radiation levels at the site, but the only radioactivity present seemed to be from the fallout which had drifted into the area from distant Soviet H-bomb tests.

Scientists who examined the findings of Florensky and the data from further investigations of the Tunguska explosion site began to postulate that a fragment of Comet Encke had collided with our planet and smashed into Siberia in June 1908. Today, some scientists believe that the blast was caused by a wandering black hole or a chunk of anti-matter. However, there is one piece of curious evidence that seems to vindicate the spaceship theory. At the site of the Tunguska blast, there is a strange irregular shape at the centre of the circle of damaged terrain. Scientists and geologists who have analysed the shape say it looks as if it was caused by something exploding within a cylinder. Comets are not cylindrical, and they do not travel horizontally to the ground making forty-five degree turns.

And what of the fabled 'chuchunaa' creature? What became of him? The last known encounter of the grey giant took place in 1941 in Daghestan. A Colonel V. S. Karapetyan and his troops were called out to investigate sightings of an enormous 'beast-like' figure in the Buinaksk Mountains. The soldiers spotted what they regarded as a monstrosity and gave chase. They cornered the towering figure in a cave and opened fire on it with their rifles. The creature fell with a loud echoing thud, quite dead. Colonel Karapetyan later wrote an account of the confrontation with the unidentified human-like creature:

He stood before me like a giant, his mighty chest thrust forward. His eyes told me nothing. They were dull and empty - the eyes of an animal. And he seemed to me like an animal and nothing more...a wild man of some kind.

The corpse of the creature was left to to the scavengers, and the colonel and his men left the mountains and concerned themselves with the task of defending Russia from the Nazis. The humanoid they had killed may simply have been one of those mysterious 'men-beasts' such as the Yeti or Bigfoot, but according to some of the peasants of the Buinaksk Mountains, the oversized man wore ragged grey clothes. Is it therefore possible that the creature in the cave murdered by the military was the same being that had first been seen by the Evenki tribe near the scene of the Tunguska explosion? This leads us to a tantalising possibility; was the abnormally tall entity some marooned alien from another world who had managed to eject himself from a damaged spaceship after steering the craft away from the inhabited areas of Siberia? If this was the case, what a sad and barbaric end for a visitor who might have been able to teach us so much.

By Tom slemen

BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 23:58:00 +0000

Julius Caesar

Although the Romans were the most level-headed and fearless people the world has ever known, they were obsessed with prophecies and omens. Arguably the most famous prediction in history is the one concerning the fate of Julius Caesar, made by the see Vestricius Spurinna: 'Beware the Ides of March.' This warning was made in 44 BC. That year the oligarchic republic was collapsing, and Pompey, the champion of the Roman nobility had been killed in a battle. Julius Caesar, his father-in-law and conqueror, at the age of 55 had been declared dictator for life, and he dreamed of a Pax Romana stretching from Parthia to the western shores of Spain. Then came a terrible omen which even made Caesar shudder. In the city of Capua, Roman settlers unearthed the tomb of Capys, the city's founder, and discovered a bronze plaque which was inscribed with the chilling warning: 'When once the tomb of Capys is brought to light, then a branch of the Julian house will be slain by the hand of one of his kindred.'It wasn't widely known at the time, but a relative was involved in an assassination plot against Caesar. This person was Marcus Brutus, who was commonly believed to have been a descendant of Lucius Junius Brutus, who had routed an earlier monarchy of Rome. Marcus Brutus was cruelly goaded into joining in the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar by sixty conspirators who scrawled graffiti on the statue of Lucius Brutus which read: 'Your posterity is unworthy of you.' This message to Brutus was ambiguous, because it also intimated that he was the son of Caesar, and many thought that this was so, including Caesar himself.There were more 'omens' which intimated that something dire was in the offing. WIld birds fluttered and roosted in the Forum, and strange vision of fiery human-like figures were seen fighting. Caesar killed a wild animal, and when it was cut open, it was seen to have no heart. The respected augur Vestricius Spurinna told Caesar that a monstrous evil would manifest itself and threaten his life on the Ides (the fifteenth day) of March. Caesar never took the prophecy seriously, but as the 15th of March approached, many strange incidents took place around him. On the evening of 14th March, Caesar remarked to his wife that the best death would be the swiftest one, and no sooner had he ended the sentence when there was a loud unearthly howl somewhere outside. Later that evening while he and his wife Calpurnia were in bed, the couple were awakened by a tremendous howling gale which blasted open the doors and windows. Calpurnia awoke screaming and told Caesar that she had just suffered a vivid bloody nightmare about his fate. In the dream she had seen their home crumble and had been cradling her dead husband in her arms She begged him to postpone tomorrow's Senate meeting, and Calpurnia gave Caesar great cause for concern, because he had never known her to be superstitious.On the following day, Caesar, feeling confident and assuming all the so-called omens were but tricks of his mind, laughingly told his augur: 'Well Spurinna, the Ides of March have come.''Yes Caesar, come but not yet gone.' Spurinna replied. It was still only midday after all.Within minutes, Caesar had entered the Senate chambers and was distracted by Tillius Cimber until the other assassins had assembled close by. Then Cimber gave the signal to attack by baring Caesar's neck. The first blood was drawn by Casca, and Caesar grabbed his sword and shouted for help, but none came. The gaggle of assassins closed in, daggers drawn, ready to strike, when Brutus was allowed through. He stepped forward and stabbed Caesar in the groin.Struck with horror and despair, Julius Caesar gasped, 'You too, my child?' He knew by then that there was no hope of escape, and in a final act of pride, he covered his face with his robe and fell at the foot of Pompey's statue, with his blood ebbing away from the 23 stab wounds he'd sustained.Caesar's heir, the Emperor Augustus was another leader who consulted seers. When Augustus built a temple of Peace he asked the famous Oracle at Delphi how long the structure would stand. The answer he received was seemingly nonsensical at the time: 'Until a virgin gives birth to a child and yet remains a virgin.'Augustus interpreted the answer as an indication that the temple would last forever, but at the time of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the Temple of Peace suddenly collapsed on its foundations for no apparent reason. Furthermore, shortly before the temple crumbled, Augustus consulted another prominent prophetess known as the Tiburtine Sibyl. He asked her whether he should accept the title of God of Nations which had been conferred on him from the Senate.As the Sibyl muttered an unintelligible phrase in a trance-like state, a meteor flashed across the sky. The seeress suddenly broke out of her trance and stated: 'A Child has just been born who is the true God of the World. He is of humble birth and from an obscure race. He will work miracles but will be persecuted as a result. In the end though, he will be victorious over death itself, rising from where his killers entombed him.'

Delphi, Greece, where the Oracle uttered her uncanny predictions

Born Too Late

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 23:54:00 +0000

Speke Hall - where Maude fell in love with the boy from the distant past

Love can transcend almost any obstacle. It can leapfrog over age differences, it can see beyond the colour of a person's skin, and it can bridge the gulf between rich and poor. The following story, which happened a long time ago, seems to indicate that love can even transcend time itself.

On the snowy Saturday afternoon of December 1901, Mrs Rose Mooney sat in front of the blazing fire in the caretaker's quarters at Speke Hall, an old but beautiful half-timbered mansion in Liverpool, England. Rose's husband Desmond Mooney looked after the Hall with a few gardeners and a stableman. Upon this afternoon, he was in town having a drink with a relative. The only company Mrs Mooney had was her 11-year-old daughter Maude, who is described as a beautiful little girl with long dark red hair that was usually worn in two pony tails. Mrs Mooney was five months pregnant, and little Maude was looking forward to having a baby brother or sister to look after. Anyway, on this Saturday afternoon, the girl went out to play in the grounds of Speke Hall, as she did most days. Sometimes her cousin or a friend from school joined in the games, but being December, all Maud's friends were spending their time with their families and relatives. Maud decided to build a snowman, and even borrowed her father's old fishing hat to put on the snowman. Around 4 o'clock that afternoon, twilight started to creep across the sky, so Mrs Mooney went out and shouted to her daughter. There was no sign of her. Mr Mooney returned home, and he looked for his daughter too. The Mooneys followed the trail of footsteps leading from the snowman for over two hundred yards, and got the shock of their lives. There were unidentified footprints next to the impressions of Maud's shoes. They looked slightly larger than Maud's and the imprints seemed to have been made by shoes with a heel. The mystery deepened when the Mooneys discovered that both sets of footprints came to an abrupt end near two large 500-year-old Yew Trees known as Adam and Eve.
The gardener, George, turned up not long afterwards and he added another puzzle to the unfolding mystery. He said he had seen Maude Mooney throwing snowballs at what looked like a little girl who was wearing a large floppy hat. Mr Mooney said: 'No George, that's been the snowman with my hat on.'
The gardener shook his head and insisted that a young girl dressed in a peculiar black costume had been playing with Maude - and it had certainly not been a snowman by any stretch of the imagination. Mrs Mooney started to cry, and as her husband comforted her, she said: 'Where can she be?'
Mr Mooney said: 'Don't worry pet', and he asked the gardener to take her to the Hall. Mr Mooney whispered that he was going to the police. Moments later, the sound of a child laughing could be heard. It was Maude's laughter. The lost child suddenly came running across the snow-covered lawns. She was wearing a little cape of some sort.
Her parents and the gardener closed in on her and as her mother sobbed and hugged Maude, her father chided her and asked her where she had been. Maude sulked and her bottom lip quivered. She said: 'I'm not to say. It's a secret.'
Mr Mooney said: 'Secret?! I'll give you a damn good hiding my girl…'
But Mrs Mooney squeezed her child in her arms and led her indoors. The child refused to say where she had been, and Mr Mooney examined the little black cloak that had been found on his daughter. It was black velvet with a dark violet silk lining, and had a border of gold stitching. There were no labels on it to indicate who had made it. On many more occasions, until August of the following year, Maude vanished for hours on end, and her parents and many other people visiting the Hall were a witness to the strange disappearances. Sometimes, the girl's voice and laughter could be heard, even though she couldn't be seen, and the gardener's old English sheepdog used to behave strangely, and seemed to be able to see things in the grounds that humans couldn't. Anyway, in the end, Mr Mooney got a job in Ormskirk, and he and his family moved from Speke Hall. Maude Mooney cried her eyes out when they moved, as if she was in love with her invisible playmate and couldn't bear to leave him or her.
In 1911, when Maude reached the age of 21, she finally broke her silence, and told her mother about the supernatural circumstances of the strange goings-on at Speke Hall. She said she had fallen in love with a little cavalier boy named Tristam. He lived hundreds of years in the past, but could come into the present now and then. How this happened Maude did not know, but what she did know was that she loved Tristam, and he loved her. They would walk hand in hand, and she had even met his parents and their servants at the Hall. They rode on Tristam's horse along the Mersey and kissed under one of the old Yew Trees. He played an instrument like a guitar and serenaded her, and gave her roses. He even gave her his cape when Maude was cold. The little lovers even carved their initials on a tree. The identity of Tristam has not been established yet. It's said that in 1969, Maude asked to be taken to Speke Hall, where she passed away on a brigh sunny afternoon, aged 79. Perhaps she is with Tristam for good now.

The Strange Case of the American Knights

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 23:49:00 +0000

In August 1972 a respected New York hypnotherapist named Donald Ketticott regressed a retired property developer from Palm Springs named George Freemont. Freemont had been visiting a cousin in the Big Apple and had decided to pay a visit to Ketticot's surgery on East 26th Street to book an appointment, but was surprised when Ketticott asked him if he wanted to have a 'quick taster' of hypnotic regression.
Freemont said he would and that he'd like to be regressed to a certain summer's day in 1910 when he was just seven years old. Ketticott asked Freemont why he wanted to be taken back to that day, and the latter explained that upon that date he had experienced a strange vision which had haunted him all of his life. He had been hiking with his father through the woods near Lake Tahoe in California when he had felt an intense urge to turn around. Upon turning, young George Freemont saw a knight in armour carrying a lance, mounted on a white horse. The apparition was shimmering with a golden light, and the knight, who wore a crown, smiled and said something. George had forgotten what it was the vision had said, and seconds later it had vanished, leaving the boy with an unbelievable tale to tell.
Ketticott acted strangely when Freemont related the strange episode from his childhood. He took out a notebook and scribbled something down, then enthusiastically went to the windows and pulled down the blinds. He told Mr Freemont to relax on the chesterfield, and within a couple of minutes, the retired Californian was in a hypnotic trance.
'Go further back, further to that day George. Fall through time, fall through the years back to that sunny day. You are there now.' Ketticott intoned in a gentle but reassuring voice.
'I am there. I'm with my father. The sun's in my eyes.' said Mr Freemont. His eyes were closed and his breathing rate was very slow.
'Move on to the moment when you see that vision. Move on.' Ketticott told him.
'Wow.' George Freemont's mouth opened and his face looked like the face of a surprised schoolboy who was in awe of something.
'Now listen to the vision.' said Ketticott softly.
George Freemont suddenly started speaking in an unknown language. It had elements of Latin and French in it, and as Freemont uttered the strange tongue, he lifted his hand and made a fist, as if he was saluting someone. In a deep voice Freemont said: 'Arturus Rex.'
At that point Ketticott brought the Californian out of the trance and asked him what he had learned. Freemont was quiet for a few minutes, then said that upon that summer's day long ago he had encountered a glowing vision of his 'master' - King Arthur. Arturus Rex, the words Freemont had uttered when he 'saluted' the vision were Latin for King Arthur. Ketticott asked him what the vision had said on that sunny afternoon.
'He told me that I was the reincarnation of one of his knights. He said I was Tristram, one of his most valiant men, and he told me that three other knights had been reborn in America and that I should try to seek them out.' George Freemont expected the hypnotherapist to laugh at the incredible claim, but Donald Ketticott told the retired Californian a bizarre tale.
Ketticott said, 'Just over a year ago I regressed a policeman who works right here in New York. He had recurrent nightmares since his childhood about being run through with a sword. The nightmares were so lucid, the policeman could actually feel the agonising pain and terror as the sword went through his torso. These nightmares began to effect his work, so he sought psychiatric help. A friend of mine tried psychoanalysis but that had no effect so he referred the policeman to me. That policeman said that when he was a child of about eight or nine, he was awakened on several occasions by a mysterious presence in his bedroom. The eerie glowing figure of a man in a crown would appear at the foot of his bed and smile at him. Well, I regressed the policeman and he told me that in a previous life he had died in a bloody battle as a knight; a knight of King Arthur named Gareth. Under hypnosis he said that when he would awake from the nightmare he would see the golden vision of Arthur standing near his bed with a reassuring smile.'
George Freemont was fascinated with Ketticott's story and asked if it would be possible to talk to the policeman in question.
Dr Ketticott was reluctant at first but later arranged for Freemont to meet the policeman. According to Ketticott, the two men became the best of friends and made many visits to England to see the historical sites where King Arthur and his men lived and fought. The two 'reincarnated knights' also travelled to what they claimed was the final resting place of their King - the Blessed Isle of Avalon - nowadays known as the Isle of Man.

By Tom slemen

The Mysterious Captain Moonlight

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 23:33:00 +0000

Aintree derives its name from the Anglo-Saxon “an-treow” – meaning “one tree” and that one tree was an ancient sprawling oak, sacred to the Druids and the Lily-White Boys cult of nature worshippers. This once heavily forested area is unusually flat, and when the trees of the great forest were cleared away, it became prime land for racing horses and pioneering aeroplane flights. In Elizabethan times, majestic horse races were held at Aintree, and of course, the place is synonymous today with the world-famous Grand National, but let us go back to the 1760s, when highwaymen such as Tom Barrow, Captain Moonlight, and Gentleman Higgins terrorised the good folk of Lancashire and Cheshire. Captain Moonlight was an unidentified highwayman, given his nickname by superstitious locals who believed him to be working in league with the Devil, as he always managed to avoid the law by apparently vanishing into thin air during the chase. Tom Barrow, a rather effeminate-looking scoundrel, was said to have been captured at Maghull, where a bounty-hunter discovered Barrow to be a Lord's beautiful daughter in disguise. Gentleman Higgins was a highwayman by night and a respectable member of the landed gentry by day, but someone finally put two and two together and Higgins ended up on the gallows in 1767 before a ring of well-to-do female spectators who wanted to see the handsome rogue die. The odd one amongst these bandits of the road was Captain Moonlight, who was, without a doubt, involved in Occultism. He was at large across Lancashire from Hunt’s Cross to Aintree, and was active over an impossibly long time-span, unless, of course, someone else took on his mantle when he retired.One night on Tithe Barn Lane at Melling Captain Moonlight held up a coach carrying a corrupt local magistrate and three of a local farmer’s daughters who were forced regularly to be his mistresses. With two flintlocks trained on the magistrate and driver, Moonlight ordered the Justice of the Peace to strip naked, and he complied. The mysterious highwayman took his share of jewellery and items of value from the magistrate, and said the word “Meadows”. The judge trembled and returned a shocked look, as if the uttered word meant something. “I know your little secret,’ said Moonlight, “and so shall everyone else unless you cease bothering these girls.” He then instructed the driver to take the farmer’s daughters home, leaving the judge naked in the road. Moonlight then rode off into the night, and the meaning of “Meadows” has never been unravelled. Some wondered if the judge had murdered an old landowner of that name years before, but no one really knows. Armed posses of men scoured Lancashire and beyond to capture Captain Moonlight, but he seemed to enjoy his cat and mouse games with his pursuers and would always vanish into the night. One foggy night he put a scarecrow on a horse and the posse chased it as far as Kirkby before they realised they’d been duped. Almost a hundred years later, the people of Wavertree, West Derby and Old Swan were terrorised by a masked, cloaked man in a tricorn, who was believed by the superstitious to be Captain Moonlight. Some asserted that he could be nothing more than an impostor, but the older folks who had seen him as children were convinced it was Moonlight, and that he’d returned from Hell to indulge in his demonic pastime again. Women on their way to church were allegedly outraged, and every blaze in the districts were Moonlight was said to be at large was accredited to him.Who was Captain Moonlight? Well, when I delved into the many adventures of this sinister yet fair highwayman, a certain name came up again and again with a curious regularity, but no one would have suspected this person because he was a man of the cloth, but I cannot prove he is the Highwayman from Hell. How can I explain his abnormally long life, which easily surpassed a hundred years? Such longevity with that type of agility is impossible, unless he struck a deal with someone who trades in souls...

By tom Slemen

The Man Who Knew...

noreply@blogger.com (GHOSTRIDER) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 01:31:00 +0000

When the Twin Towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001, among the thousands killed was the one man who may have known more about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda than any other person in America: John O'Neill.

The former head of the FBI's flagship antiterrorism unit in New York City, O'Neill had investigated the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa and the USS Cole in Yemen. For six years, he led the fight to track down and prosecute Al Qaeda operatives throughout the world. But his flamboyant, James Bond style and obsession with Osama bin Laden made him a controversial figure inside the buttoned-down world of the FBI. Just two weeks before Sept. 11, O'Neill left the bureau for a job in the private sector -- as head of security at the World Trade Center. He died there after rushing back into the burning towers to aid in the rescue efforts.

FRONTLINE's “The Man Who Knew,” chronicles John O'Neill's story -- a story that embraces the clash of personalities, politics and intelligence, offering important insights into both the successes and failures of America's fight against terrorism.

Drawing on exclusive interviews with many of O'Neill's closest friends and associates, this report opens with O'Neill's introduction into the new world of terrorism -- the capture in 1995 of one of the world's most wanted terrorists -- Ramzi Yousef, the ringleader of the group that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993.

Former U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White credits O'Neill with quickly grasping the danger Yousef and other terrorists represented to America.

“Yousef is one of the most dangerous people on the planet -- also very smart,” she says. “Getting and incapacitating him was a significant public safety issue. And John O'Neill recognized that and was not about to take 'no' for an answer before he was taken into custody.”

O'Neill immersed himself into learning everything he could about global terrorism and Islamic fundamentalist militancy. In 1997, O'Neill was promoted to special agent in charge of the national security division in the bureau's New York office. Observers say O'Neill grabbed at the chance to head the team that was investigating and prosecuting most major international terrorism cases. The job would also be the perfect base from which to continue his pursuit of bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

But while John O'Neill had succeeded in winning allies among CIA and international intelligence agencies, not everyone within the FBI was so enamored of him. A fixture on New York's celebrity social circuit, O'Neill's flamboyant style and his unconventional personal life -- he had several longtime girlfriends and a wife he never divorced -- had long raised eyebrows within the FBI.

“The Man Who Knew,” gives viewers an insider's perspective on O'Neill's investigations as well as the internal territorial debates among the FBI, the State Department, and the White House over how to deal with U.S. terrorist investigations in East Africa in August 1998 and the Yemen in October 2000.

“[O'Neill] believed the New York field office had the greatest depth of expertise of anybody in the country on this issue, and if it's Al Qaeda, how could you send anybody else but the people who know the most?” recalls Fran Townsend, former head of the U.S. Justice Department's office of intelligence policy.

O'Neill's New York FBI team was at the center of bureacratic arm-wrestling over who would head the 1998 investigation into the embassy bombings in East Africa. O'Neill again was the focus of a heated political battle over the investigation of the 2000 attack against the USS Cole in Yemen. Current and former government officials such as Richard Clarke, counterterrorism chief in the Clinton administration and Barry Mawn, former head of the New York FBI office, recount how O'Neill's desire to show the Yemeni security forces -- which he viewed as being less than cooperative -- that the FBI meant business was one of many issues in the investigation which angered U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine.

Finally, when O'Neill made a brief trip home to New York for Thanksgiving, Bodine denied his re-entry visa, preventing him from returning to the investigation. Insiders tell FRONTLINE that O'Neill's removal from the scene in Yemen may have seriously limited the Cole investigation -- an inquiry that some speculate might have led O'Neill to the Sept. 11 hijackers in time to foil their plans.

“The Man Who Knew” also chronicles O'Neill's increasing frustration with Washington's lax attitude toward the threat posed by bin Laden, including the possibility that Al Qaeda sleeper cells were already operating within the United States.

“What John O'Neill was trying to do was get a momentum going in the FBI to look seriously for those cells,” Clarke says. “It was not one of the priorities in most FBI field offices.”

By the summer of 2001, O'Neill had been so marginalized by FBI officials that key clues of the looming Sept. 11 plot apparently were never passed on to him. His 25-year career with the FBI would come to an end following bureau investigations into his temporary loss of a briefcase containing a classified report and charges that he used an FBI car to give a ride to his girlfriend. In August 2001, while the allegations were pending, O'Neill opted to retire from the bureau at age 49. Just eight days after he started his new job as director of security at the World Trade Center, the terrorists he had long pursued struck the towers.

O'Neill's critics contend that his personal failings proved fatal to his FBI career. His supporters, however, believe his main failing was refusing to conform to the standard-issue FBI mold.

“John was somebody that bureaucrats were not always pleased with because they felt he wasn't marching to their tune -- that he was too ambitious and that he operated out of the box too often,” ABC producer Chris Isham tells FRONTLINE. “And this was an FBI that believed very much under the [FBI Director Louis] Freeh regime of operating within the box. This was a guy that was constantly pushing the envelope when the envelope didn't want to be pushed. So the envelope fought back.”

Story Credit:

PBS FrontLine, Watch The entire show

"The Man Who Knew.."

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UFOs in the Old Testament

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:31:00 +0000

by Tom Slemen
Within the unimaginable depths of the universe there is a small family of worlds circling about a star we call the Sun;

it is just a single star among the billions upon billions which are shining in the cosmos.
Against the awesome backdrop of the infinite blackness of space, our world is just another planet; nothing more than an insignificant speck on the cosmological scale of things, but it is our home, and as of yet we have found no other planets which are remotely like Earth. The history of our world is a story which is still largely incomplete. Just a few centuries ago, the most learned historians knew virtually nothing about events beyond 3,000 years ago. These students of the past had a surplus of legends about the origin of man and his world, but the fables and myths were seemingly at variance with the fossilized bones of dinosaurs and apelike beings. These archaeological finds clashed severely with the beliefs and religions of people who took the Hebrew Bible's account of Genesis as a literal authentic history of the world. If prehistoric monsters roamed the Earth in the past, why were they not mentioned in the Book of Genesis? The halcyon tales of the Garden of Eden only mention Adam and Eve; there is no reference to the now-extinct races of ape-men and men-apes such as the Neanderthals, the Cro Magnon people, and other sub-human anthropoids.

Despite the conflicting evidence of the fossil records, the Church attempted to circumvent the problem by seriously asserting that the Devil had maliciously fabricated the fossils of ancient plants and animals and had planted them in rocks to disprove the Biblical scriptures. In fact, by meticulous analysis of the Book of Genesis, the Archbishop of Armagh (1581-1656) even came to the conclusion that God had created the world at 9 am on October 23, 4004 BC! Some writers and thinkers have conjectured that there is a theological no-man's land where the Biblical view and scientific version of man's history can co-exist. One of the earliest attempts to reinterpret the books of the Old Testament as a terrestrial account of alien visitations can be found in Yezad, a 1922 science fiction novel by George Babcock. Babcock's sci-fi treatment of the Old Testament was branded by many as sacrilegious, while others thought his concept was preposterous.

In the early 1950s, the Old Testament was once again interpreted from a scientific angle by the distinguished academic and Freudian psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky. After his extensive researches into Israelite history, Velikovsky proposed that certain parts of the Bible's Old Testament were factual, and he offered many outrageous theories to describe Biblical events as misinterpretations of cosmic incidents. Velikovsky argued that Earth had been involved with a near-collision with Venus. The effects of this hypothetical planetary near-miss on the Earth's axis and rotational speed would have been responsible for the account in the Book of Joshua 10:12-13: 'The Sun stood still in the midst of Heaven and did not go down about a whole day.'

Why did Velikovsky think Venus was the culprit? Well, until the second millenium BC, that planet was not grouped by astronomers with the rest of the planets; it was in fact always described as a menacing comet-like body which was said to have rained fire down on the Earth in the past. The Aztecs called Venus 'the Star that smoked' and claimed that it once passed by the world blazing, and killed many people in its wake. The Peruvians called Venus 'Chaska' - which means wavy-haired. Strangely enough, the Greek myths tell how a blazing star named Phaeton almost destroyed the world with fire before being transformed into the planet Venus. The Jews also regarded Venus in a similar manner for some reason, and a passage in the Talmud states: 'Fire is hanging down from the planet Venus.' Venus - the nearest planet to ours - was also classed as a dangerous fire-spitting planet by the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Arabs, Hindus, Chinese, and even the Samoans. Velikovsky strongly backed up his wandering planet hypothesis with more historical references to our nearest planetary neighbour in his controversial book, Worlds In Collision (1950), but predictably, the historians and astrophysicists ridiculed the work. The Biblical fundamentalists also attacked the book for equating the works of God as mere cosmic cataclysms. But other writers came along with even more controversial interpretations of the historical events which have allegedly inspired the world's religions and cultures.

In 1967 a book called Chariot of the Gods? was published, and within the space of five years it had become a best-seller in 38 countries and was translated into 26 languages. The author of the book was Erich Von Daniken, the managing director of a Swiss 5-Star Hotel. The claims made by Von Daniken in his work were bold and blasphemous. Von Daniken had been educated at the College of St-Michel in Fribourg, where even as a student, he had occupied all of his spare time studying ancient holy writings. His lengthy research led him to the following conclusions: Humanoid aliens from a remote galaxy had visited the Earth around 10,000 years ago, apparently after an intergalactic war. These 'sons of the stars' created the human race in their own image by tinkering with the genes of the primates. The alien visitors so overawed their creations with their far superior technology that they were worshipped as gods. Evidence, such as artefacts and relics of the visiting ancient astronauts have been uncovered by archaeologists but unrecognised. Many of the fabulous stories in the Bible and other sacred books are actually accounts of the ancient spacemen intervening in human affairs.

Von Daniken was heavily criticized by theologians, archaeologists, social anthropologists, cultural historians, astronomers and astrophysicists, but his first book sold five and a half million copies and captured the imaginations of people the world over. Chariots of the Gods? spawned a deluge of books with the same theme of ancient astronauts, many of which became bestsellers. Today, Erich Von Daniken still holds dearly to his beliefs, although he admits there were some errors in his books. In 1985, he wrote a book about the errata of his works entitled, Did I Get It Wrong? and he even asked his readers to consider if he had misconceived the whole ancient astronauts theory in the first place.

Could there be at least a grain of truth in the claims of Von Daniken and the other writers who say God was an astronaut? Let us analyse the Bible in our quest for ancient spacemen. The Christian sacred book is actually a collection of books, divided into two parts: the Old Testament and the New Testament. The former contains thirty-nine books (according to the Protestants), plus a supplement of fourteen books known as the Apocrypha. These are books of doubtful authority, but are included in the Greek (Septuagint) and Latin (Vulgate) versions of the Old Testament, but are usually viewed as non canonical or of little value by most Christians and Jews. The Old Testament was compiled during a period ranging from the 13th century to the first century BC. No original manuscripts have actually survived, and the present versions are based on two main sources: the Septuagint - a Greek translation made from the Hebrew in Alexandria in about 250 BC - and the Massoretic Text, which resulted from the collaborations of a group of Jewish scholars, beginning in the sixth century after Christ. This group of scholars assigned themselves to the task of preserving the Hebrew versions then available, and the Massoretic Text was finally finished at the end of the 10th century.

The Septuagint became the accepted Old Testament of the Christians, and the Massoretic Text became the Hebrew canon. There were, however, even more versions of the Old Testament; they were the Samaritan Pentateuch - fourth century BC text preserved by the Samaritan community - and a Latin translation by St Jerome (begun in 382 AD) called the Vulgate, which is the authorized Roman Catholic version.

The New Testament of the Bible was most probably written in Greek during the first century. Without a doubt, the New Testament is laced with mistakes, mostly introduced by the scribes, although, none of them are significant enough to affect the doctrinal essence of the texts. If we take the Bible literally, as it is intended to be taken, according to Christians, then its scriptures are open to some intriguing interpretations. In Genesis, we are told that:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters...

Further on another passage reads:

And God said, Let the Earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the Earth: and it was so. And the Earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

If we are to interpret the aforementioned passages not as some sacred account of creation, but as a primitive allegorical interpretation of an real higher intelligence transforming a cratered, barren planet into an oasis, we would see striking parallels with the far-sighted plans the scientists of today have for 'terraforming' planets in out solar system which are at present too hostile for us to survive on. The late astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan once put forward an ingenious plan for terraforming (making a planet hospitable) the currently infernal world of Venus. Sagan calculated that if we bombarded Venus with 1000 rocket-loads of blue-green algae, some of the hardy one-celled organisms would reproduce in the upper atmosphere before crashing down to the surface, which has a temperature of 900 degrees Fahrenheit. This incredibly hot temperature is nothing to some algae that thrive in boiling hot springs on Earth. Rocket-loads of the tough algae cells released into the thick cloud cover continually over a period of years would ultimately allow a flourishing colony of cells that would convert the carbon-dioxide in the Venusian atmosphere into oxygen. After several hundred years, enough oxygen would be formed on Venus to cool down the planet and vastly reduce the Venusian greenhouse effect. This in turn would allow the significant amounts of water vapour which is known to exist in the atmosphere of Venus to fall as rain. The end product would be a cycle of rainfall and the formation of rivers and lakes on the planet. Sagan's plans are not pipe dreams; computer simulations have determined that a terraforming programme for Venus is entirely feasible if enough time, money and technology is provided for the project, which would literally reap astronomical profits. A transformed Venus would not only become a second Earth for humanity to colonise, it would present unprecedented territorial ownership disputes among the nations of Earth.

As Venus has no tectonic plate system like Earth, it would be earthquake free. Secondly, the Venusian day lasts 243 Earth days; that would be 243 days of continual sunshine in the planet's tropical belt, which entails obvious advantages over Earth's tourist industry. Venus would become the ultimate retreat for this planet's millionaires, and the ultra-novel extraterrestrial holiday location would require a sizeable workforce from Earth. The prolonged period of sunshine on Venus would probably necessitate subterranean or air-conditioned dwellings where artificial night could be simulated. Another possibility at stimulating a localised form of night could work by orbiting inflatable reflective myelin mirrors around the planet. The shadows of these mirrors falling on the surface of Venus would create an oasis of darkness which the inhabitants would experience as a solar eclipse effect. Alternatively, perhaps anyone tiring of the eight-month day could even journey to the dark side of Venus, where the stars would be on view for as long as there were clear skies. Of course, no one is entirely sure what resources lie beneath the Venusian crust, but as the planet is almost a twin of the Earth in size and gravity, we must surmise that there will be radioactive ores, gold, silver and many other precious metals and minerals present. This brings us back to the problem of who would own these resources. When NASA landed its first astronauts on the Moon, the Soviet Union, China and many other nations frowned at America planting the tinfoil flag of the Stars and Stripes in the lunar soil. The other nations of the world argued that a united banner of humanity should have been planted there instead. This suggestion outraged NASA and the American government, which had spent billions of dollars and lost a number of astronauts in order to reach the Moon. If an American company as successful as Microsoft financed the Venus terraforming venture, there would be similar squabbles amongst the Terran leaders of our much-hyped 'Global Village'. In fact, it is highly likely that wars would rage over the possession of the new world. Perhaps even a war of independence for the new Venusians who wish to become autonomous and free from the Earth governments. Going back to the Biblical texts of Genesis; is it possible that a similar war over planetary possession was fought when the gods transformed the Earth from a lifeless sphere 'without form and void' into the Garden of Eden? Curiously, American Charles Fort (1874-1932) the great student of the unexplained and collector extraordinaire of bizarre newspaper clippings and reports, once made a profound statement in 1919 in his Book of the Damned, an incredible examination of the holes and contradictions in our scientific understanding of the universe. Fort wrote:

I think we are property. I should say we belong to something. That once upon a time, this earth was No-Man's land, that other worlds explored and colonised here, and fought among themselves for possession, but that now it's owned by something. That something owns this earth - all others warned off.

Did Fort hit on a truth? It would explain all the tales in Apocrypha and other religious works about the ancient conflict called 'The War In Heaven' which was fought by dissenting factions of angles, led by rogue Archangel Lucifer against his master, Yahweh, the God who made a lifeless world fertile and created Homo Sapiens to tend to his Garden of Eden. In the Book of Isaiah 14:12, it says of Lucifer:

O Shining star, son of morning, how you have fallen from the heavens... For you said in your heart, I will go up to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God...

Most people equate the name 'Lucifer' with Satan, however the Bible implies that this is not the case, and the name Lucifer is only mentioned in one passage of the Old Testament.

According to the Book of Job 26:11-13, when Lucifer, 'the Boastful Angel' and his followers rebelled, Yahweh destroyed their dwelling places a place in the heavens called 'Rahab', which was reduced by God to 'stones of fire'. The Book of Enoch hints that Rahab was an actual world in the sky which God smashed. In some accounts, Rahab is curiously connected with the mythical planet Phaeton, which was said to have been destroyed by a catastrophe millions of years ago. Is there any physical evidence that Rahab once existed?

Each planet in our solar system is somewhere between 1.3 and 2.0 times as far from the Sun as the next nearer planet. The one exception in this numeric relationship is the fifth planet Jupiter; it is 3.4 times as far from the Sun as Mars. This inconsistent gap puzzled astronomers for years, especially after Uranus was discovered in 1781. It was quite obvious that a planet was missing which should have been orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers scanned this gap in the orbits for years, hoping to discover the absent planet, but in 1801, the first fragment of the missing planet was discovered by stargazers. It was a carbonaceous chunk of rock, 620 miles in diameter, and it was named Ceres. By 1807, more enormous fragments were spotted, and as the century progressed, it became clear that there were thousands of chunks of something spread in a belt around the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Today, it is known that there are at least 100,000 asteroids in the belt, and the debate still rages over just what the asteroids are the remnants of. Some astronomers think they are leftover material from the birth of the solar system which never formed into a planet, while others think the asteroids are the remains of a world which exploded in the distant past. What force could destroy an entire planet? Cometary collisions, and even geological catastrophes could have been responsible. Water from the planet's oceans seeping down through faults in the crust to the core would be sufficient to generate a super-heated blast of steam that would blow a planet into oblivion. This scenario was witnessed on a small scale here on Earth in 1883 when seawater seeped into the active volcano on the East Indian island Krakatoa. The ensuing blast destroyed the island, killed 36,000 people, and hurled fragments over an area of 300,000 square miles.

The evidence for the demolished world of Rahab could then, be the hundreds of thousands of chunks floating about between Mars and Jupiter, but in the search for an extraterrestrial angle on the Bible, we must now turn our attention to the chronicled events which allegedly happened here on Earth.

One thing which does seem absolutely certain in the Old and New Testaments, is that something unearthly caused a stir in the Middle East, in the time of Moses and in the period Jesus was on Earth. let us begin with the Old Testament. Whatever way we look at it, something that was literally not of this world commanded Moses to lead the Israelites out of the bondage of the Pharaoh and through the wilderness to the Promised Land. It all began when Moses was eighteen years old, according to the Talmud. The sight of the wickedness being inflicted upon his people by the Egyptians moved Moses to tears, and it culminated in him killing an overseer who was beating a Hebrew labourer. Moses was saved from execution by an angel and transported instantly to Ethiopia where he fought as a general. Soon after the death of Kikanus, Moses was crowned king and Queen Adonith became his wife. However, Moses abdicated and journeyed to Midian, where he married Zipporah, the daughter of Jethro, and for forty years lived as a shepherd. Scriptures then give a strange account about Moses's encounter with an unearthly entity:

Moses was minding the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, Priest of Midian. He left the flock along the side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in the flame of the burning bush. Moses noticed that although the bush was on fire, it was not itself being burned up; so he said to himself "I must go across to see this wonderful sight. Why does not the bush burn away?" When the Lord saw that Moses had turned aside to look, he called out to him out of the bushes "Moses, Moses." And Moses answered "Yes I am here." God said "Come no nearer; take off your sandals; the place where you are standing is holy ground."

This passage has been interpreted by researchers looking for scriptural spaceships as perhaps some account of bush silhouetted against a lit-up spacecraft which had landed on the secluded mountain. The 'Lord' warning Moses to keep his distance has also been construed as the amplified intercom voice of the captain or pilot of the landed ship advising Moses to keep out of range of harmful radiation emanating from the craft.

The Lord told Moses to deliver the Israelites out of bondage and lead them to the Promised Land 'flowing with milk and honey'.

Aided by his elder brother, Aaron, Moses finally led the 600,000 Israelites out of thraldom and embarked on the epic forty years of wandering to Canaan. In the Book of Exodus XIII,21 it is written:

And Yahveh went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night. He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people.

The pillar has been the subject of much speculation to scholars, critics and theologians over the centuries. One Biblical scholar, M .Daniel-Rops, asserts that the pillar of cloud - the visible sign of Divine Presence in the eyes of the Hebrews - was nothing more than a side effect of the 'Qadim', a sirocco-like wind of Arabia, which raised opaque clouds of spiralling dust. But Mr Daniel-Rops neglects to explain how this whirlwind of sand kept going for forty years, and how it became highly luminous and fiery upon nightfall. What we can assume, without the risk of being sacrilegious, is that the pillar of cloud and light was not of this Earth, and definitely not a product of weather conditions. Something from above was intervening in the affairs of the Hebrews, and it was not some mass hallucination affecting the thousands of Israelites and the Egyptian nation; something real and tangible was taking place.

The Pharaoh was well aware of the reality of the Hebrew Lord when he decided to send his cavalry and chariots after the fleeing Israelites. Faced with the obstacle of the Red Sea, Moses could lead his persecuted people no further, but at the Lord's behest, Moses suddenly stretched out his hand towards the river, and the waters parted. A tremendous wall of seawater moved off to the right, and another water-wall roared off to the left, exposing a vast tract of dried seabed stretching from one shore to the next. Moses and his people fled across the dry path to the safety of the other side, but when the Egyptian army tried to follow them across the seabed of the Red Sea, the water came thundering back down on top of them and they were drowned.

No natural phenomenon can account for the parting of the Red Sea, but if we are open-minded enough to entertain the hypothesis that extraterrestrials were responsible, we could imagine some potent antigravity forces pushing back the waters. We can already manipulate liquids at a distance with electrostatic forces. Many computer printers utilise this affect by using electrical fields to manoeuvre jets of charged ink around paper. If you let a thin stream of water run from a tap, then comb you hair and place the comb inches from this stream, the static electricity in the comb will actually bend the flow. If the static charge was greater, the water would flow at right angles, and if the electricity was charged further by a Van de Graff generator, you would be able to draw up gallons of water from a swimming pool. To part the Red Sea would take millions of watts of power, but that would easily be expendable to a space faring race. Two more incidents mentioned in Exodus give the impression that something akin to a spaceship landed on Mount Sinai:

And the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai, on the top of the Mount; and the Lord called Moses up to the Mount; and Moses went up.

Also, we read:

And it came to pass on the third day in the morning that there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled, And Moses brought forth people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the nether part of the Mount. And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke because Yahveh descended upon it in fire; and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole Mount quaked greatly.

Scripture then records that Moses advances towards the landing of Yahveh, but is given a stern warning by the Lord not to let anyone near the landing site. Only Moses is allowed to proceed. Yahveh says to the leader and prophet: 'And thou shall set bounds unto the people round about, saying, Take heed to yourselves that ye go not up into the Mount, or touch the border of it: whosoever toucheth the Mount shall be surely put to death: there shall not an hand touch it, but he shall surely be stoned, or shot through; whether it be beast or man it shall not live.'

Intriguingly, after an undefined period of time has elapsed, Yahveh lifts his exclusion zone from around the mountain, and Moses is allowed to take Aaron and seventy elders with him as he goes up to get a closer look at the mysterious cloud-pillar, although they all maintain a respectful distance from the supernatural sight. But then they see the awe-inspiring figure of Yahveh:

And they saw the God of Israel and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of sapphire stone...

Standing on a blue scintillating platform, they actually see the elusive but powerful God who co-ordinated the Exodus of the Jews after sending ten plagues against Egypt, the last of which resulted in the death of the Egyptian first-born (and may have only affected the Pharaoh's family). The celestial deity instructs Moses to construct a large tent of specific dimensions with the aid of the craftsmen in the encampment. The Hebrew lawgiver was told that the tent would be a 'Dwelling Place' for Yahveh and would also serve as a rendezvous where Moses and Aaron could meet with the extraterrestrial host. The specialized enclosure, also known as the Tent of Reunion, later served as the shelter of one of the most enigmatic objects in history: the Ark of the Covenant.

The Ark of the Covenant was an ornate chest of acacia wood which accompanied the Israelites throughout their nomadic wanderings. The Ark contained Aaron's rod, a pot of manna, and the broken stone tablets of the Decalogue - or Ten Commandments. It was 2.5 cubits (3 ft 9 ins) in length and 1.5 cubits (2 ft 3 ins) in height, and was carried by poles at the longs sides. Bezaleel, a Judahite artisan who was highly skilled at working in metal, wood and stone, was the principal architect of the Ark, but it was built to plans revealed to him by God, not to his own designs. The instructions imparted from Yahveh were very intriguing indeed. The poles used to carry the Ark were to be made of acacia and overlaid with gold leaf. In order to transport the Ark, these poles were to be carefully inserted into specially made receiving rings mounted on the sides of the chest. The poles were to remain in the rings at the sides of the Ark and never to be removed. The instructions for transporting the Ark of the Covenant were equally specific. Only the Kohathites - a clan of Levi - were allowed to carry the Ark and the holy things associated with the tabernacle. God warned that anyone else who touched those things would meet a swift death. What potent power did this Ark contain to be so jealously guarded? It was soon discovered why there were so many precautions regarding the handling of the Ark; as it was being transported by oxen, the beasts of burden stumbled, an a man named Uzzah who was not a Kohathnite or of the clan Levi - instinctively reached out to steady the Ark in case it toppled off the cart - and he was struck down dead by a tremendous bolt of energy (2 Samuel 6:7). The religious interpretation of this tragic event is that God smote Uzzah for being disobedient to his conditions, but one freethinking French writer, Robert Charroux, has conjectured that the Ark of the Covenant seems suspiciously like some high-voltage condenser which may have been a part of apparatus for communicating with the heavenly Yahveh. Erich von Daniken has also opted for this startling possibility, and the idea was also partly used in the 1981 Spielberg film, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The fate of the Ark is not known. Some scholars have concluded that it was captured by the Babylonians in 587 BC, when the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple was completed by Nebuchadnezzar. Yet, for some unknown reason, the Ark was not recorded in the list of the Babylonians' stolen booty. The current theory is that the Ark is in Ethiopia, because of an old legend, which goes as follows. The Queen of Sheba once visited King Solomon and was highly impressed by his wisdom (that is mentioned in the Book of Kings). She had an affair with him and when she returned to her nation, the Queen discovered she was having Solomon's child. The queen subsequently gave birth to a son, who was called Menelik, meaning son of the wise one. Upon adulthood, Menelik travelled to Israel to seek his father, who welcomed him with honour. Solomon gave so much attention to his illegitimate son, the elders complained and demanded that Menelik should return to Ethiopia. Solomon agreed, but only on the condition that all of the elder's oldest sons would accompany Menelik. The elders had to agree with the King, and Azarius, the oldest son of Zadok, the high priest of Israel, went to Ethiopia with Menelik - after stealing the sacred Ark of the Covenant. When Menelik reached Ethiopia, Azarius revealed the Ark, but Menelik believed that the theft would not have been successful without God's consent. And so, it is said that to this day, the Ark of the Covenant is under lock and key in the Church of St Mary of Zion in Axum. Should a thorough investigation ever get underway and successfully trace the Ark, it will be interesting to see if it is just an acacia chest - or something more hi-tech.

In other sections of the Bible there are other fascinating descriptions of fantastic events which have parallels with the modern UFO era. One apparent close encounter with a craft from the sky takes place in the Book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel was one of the Jews deported to Babylon during the first exile of 597 BC. His call to be a prophet came in Babylon and his entire prophetic ministry was carried out there. By the River of Babylon - the Khobar - Ezekiel was sitting, in a sad mood, on the 'fifth day of the fourth month of the fifth year since the captivity' (the year 593 BC) when he suddenly saw what he assumed to be a 'chariot of Yahveh' coming towards him through the sky. In a state of shock the prophet stood transfixed, looking skywards at the strange craft:

And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire unfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out the midsts thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midsts of the fire. Now as I beheld the living creatures behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of beryl [a greenish sheen] and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides, and they turned not when they went. As for their rings, they were so high they were dreadful, and their rings were full of eyes [portholes?]. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up. Withersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go; and the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.

Ezekiel goes on further to say that above the discs, there was another amazing object which he enigmatically alludes to as 'something that had the appearance of the likeness of the glory of Yahveh.' In earlier books of the Old Testament, the glory of Yahveh is always referred to as pillars of could or fire. Perhaps that was what Ezekiel was seeing above the landed object he could hardly describe in his limited language.

There are other accounts of possible UFOs in the Old Testament. The outstanding narrative concerning the adventure of Elijah when he is taken up by a 'whirlwind' - the same description Ezekiel uses for his UFO. Then there is the incredible tale related in a 4th century apocryphal work known as The Vision of Isaiah:

After taking Isaiah to Heaven, the angel was requested to return the prophet to earth. Isaiah said: 'Why so soon? I have only been here two hours.' The angel said: 'Not two hours, but thirty-two years...do not be sad, you will not be an old man.'

This seems like the well-documented effects of time-dilation. If Isaiah had been onboard a spacecraft capable of travelling near to the speed of light, time for him would run slower compared with someone back on Earth. Einstein was one of the first scientists to predict this curious effect, and in the 1970s, an experiment was carried out to prove the time-dilation theory. Two highly accurate atomic clocks were synchronized so they both had the same read-out, right down to the last decimal place. One clock was put on the supersonic airliner Concord, and flown from London to New York and back, while the other clock remained on the ground. When the read-outs from the clock on the ground and the travelled clock were compared, it was seen that the clock from Concord had somehow lost microseconds. In short, with a risk of oversimplification, the faster an object moves through space, the slower it moves through time compared to a stationary object. Simple extrapolation and a modicum of mathematics will tell us that if you were to embark on a two-hour trip into outer space at a speed close to the velocity of light, you would return to find your friends and family decades older than when you left, while you would only be two hours older. This complicated effect was only predicted by Relativity Theory in the 20th century, so how did the author of the Vision of Isaiah know about it?

The Dead of Night

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:23:00 +0000

A Sinister True Story About Evil Forces, Official Cover-ups and Devil Worship

by Tom Slemen

The following story is about an evil discarnate being which may have been responsible for thousands of deaths in 18th century Liverpool, England. The tale is the most incredible one I have ever researched, and it suggests a sinister conspiracy in high places. It all began in the early 1970s.

One wintry night in 1972, the Joneses, a family of four in Old Swan heard a faint regular thumping noise which sounded like a human heartbeat. The strange pulsation seemed to be coming from below, and getting stronger by the minute. By midnight, the throbbing vibration was driving the Jones family to distraction. The budgerigar became hysterical in its covered cage, the family dog started to howl, and the goldfish swam around their tank as the weird pulse shook it. Mr Jones went outside and was intrigued to hear the eerie beating sound in the street. The old next-door neighbour Gladys came out and asked what the thumping sound was, and Mr Jones shrugged. About five minutes later, the vibration stopped suddenly, but it returned on various occasions over the following weeks, and was even investigated by the council. The sound could not be traced, but was of subterranean origin, and seemed most intense within a triangular area bounded by Broad Green Lane, St Oswald's Street, and Edge Lane Drive. One woman in the centre of this triangle had to move from her home in Cunningham Road because the deep vibrations gave her migraines. Meanwhile, in the home of the Jones family, a strange spate of incidents started to take place whenever the pounding heartbeat shook their dwelling. In September 1972, Mr Jones was putting the milk bottles out, when he heard the deep rhythmic thuds beginning once again. This time they seemed more heavy and nearer. Mrs Jones was enjoying a cosy bath at the time. She let out a shriek, and Mr Jones raced up the stairs to his wife. In the bathroom, five strange faces were appearing on the steamed-up window panes. The faces were contorted and looked like skulls. As Mr and Mrs Jones looked on, the faces melted away, leaving streaks of condensed water behind. Then the vibrating heartbeat stopped abruptly.

On the following day, old Gladys next door was taken into an ambulance. She'd just suffered a heart attack. Mr and Mrs Jones visited her in hospital that evening, and the old neighbour told them a curious tale. She said that she had dozed off in her armchair and had awoke to find the parlour crowded with horrible dead-looking people. The gruesome crowd had faces like skeletons and they were all leaning forward, watching Gladys intently. She was so terrified of the ghouls she screamed out and had a heart attack.

Later that week, Gladys died.

Around the same time one evening, Mr Jones's 18-year-old daughter knocked over a cup of tea. As she went to mop up the puddle of spilt tea from the coffee table, she let out a scream. Right in front of the Jones family, the puddle started to form the distinctive face of a grinning skull - then it suddenly evaporated.

On the following night, an old night watchman told Mr Jones that he had been on his way to work around 11.30 PM, when he had been chased by a bizarre-looking figure. It looked like a monk wearing a long black robe with a hood. The watchman said the weird figure seemed to come out of nowhere near Mr Jones's house and never made a sound as it ran after him. On the corner of Broad Green Lane and St Oswald's Street, the medieval looking figure gave up the chase and vanished.

A year later, the Jones family moved to another house in the city, as they were so eager to escape the ghostly goings-on at their old house. The year was 1973, and the council decided to knock down the row of houses where the Jones family had moved from. The houses were flattened, and the strange phenomena continued. An empty JCB was almost overturned as some powerful but invisible force lifted the vehicle so it was only resting on two wheels. The workmen looked on in stunned silence and felt a tremendous wind blowing from the direction of the overturning JCB. Seconds later, the vehicle dropped back onto its wheels again as if the thing lifting the JCB had decided to let go. Later that day, an incredible discovery was made by the operator of that JCB as he was clearing the rubble from the foundations of the demolished houses. The JCB driver saw what looked like a box protruding from a mound of uprooted rubble. A gang of demolition workers inspected the box and saw to their horror that it was an unmarked coffin. The authorities were notified, and this is where the mystery deepens in a most sinister way.

The demolition men were ordered to leave the site immediately and a cordon of secrecy was thrown around the area. However, the press learned of the unearthed coffin and reporters were amazed to discover that an phenomenal 3,561 coffins were buried beneath that street in Old Swan. The coffins were all unmarked and stacked sixteen feet deep. This site had never been a graveyard, and no one could determine just why thousands of people had been buried there. Stranger still, all the bodies were neatly grouped according to their ages, which ranged from children of ten or 12 to adults in their twenties and thirties. All the older skeletons had intact sets of teeth, which indicates that they were fairly young when they died. But just how the people in the mass grave had died was never established, but there were grisly rumours that their hearts had been removed. These peculiar claims were backed up by several people who had viewed the skeletons and noted that their breastbones had been smashed or removed, perhaps to retrieve the hearts of the corpses.

Archaeologists in London read of the astounding mass grave in Liverpool and immediately journeyed to the city to investigate, but for some mysterious reason, Liverpool City Council had the three thousand corpses cremated. When the archaeologists from London arrived in Liverpool, they were horrified to learn that the thousands of corpses had been exhumed and cremated. The ashes were then reburied in a special container. The authorities did all of this under a cloak of secrecy.

The angry and disappointed archaeologists branded the council as philistines and examined the site of the mass-burial pit. The site was definitely not a plague pit from the 15th century, and despite a thorough search of local historical records, the identities of the bodies could not be found. One investigator from the British Museum thought the mass burial had taken place in the early 1700s but couldn't be certain.

The strange hooded monk in black was seen again throughout the years, and continues to be seen in the vicinity of Broad Green Lane to this day. A group of mediums in the mid 1990s who investigated the bizarre case said they definitely felt the strong presence of an evil discarnate being in the neighbourhood where the mass grave was unearthed. One of the mediums said he felt as if multiple sacrifices to Satan had been carried out by Devil-worshipping monks in the locality of Old Swan centuries ago. He also hinted that there were three other sites of mass graves in Liverpool, and that the locations of these sites would form a huge cross facing the west. Traditional Christian churches face the east, where the sun rises, but the west has always been revered by followers of Satan.

It has since come to light that there are more mass graves in Liverpool, and yes, they do form a somewhat crude cross that faces the west. One of these graves was uncovered in the 1960s in Cobden Street in the Everton district. The Everton grave contained only three hundred bodies, but they too were grouped according to their age, and no one can determine when or why they were buried there. The other two mass graves are still being investigated and their locations are being kept secret

The Real Doctor Who

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:14:00 +0000

I am today, I am yesterday, I am tomorrow. As I pass through recurrent births I am ever young and vigorous...

The Egyptian Book of the Dead

The enigmatic Count St Germain

In 1745, one of the most intriguing people in history visited London; a man who was said to be over a thousand years old! Some said he was in league with the Devil, others thought he was a Himalayan yogi of the highest order; all that we know is that, according to written historical references, a Count St Germain was apparently on the European scene from 1651 to 1896 - a period of 245 years. Unable to explain the incredible lifespan of this man, the historians either omitted him from the history books or claimed several impostors in different time periods were responsible for the myth. But if we face the unadulterated facts about the count as they were written, they paint a very perplexing picture of a phenomenal man. Here then, is the story.

When the English soldiers returned from the Holy Land after the third Crusade came to a disastrous end in the twelfth century, they brought back with them many fabulous tales of the mysterious Orient.

One particular story the crusaders often told was of a man known in the East as the Wandering Jew. The story went as follows. In the Judgement Hall of Pontius Pilate, there was a Jewish doorkeeper named Cartaphilus, who had actually been present at the trial of Jesus of Nazareth. When Christ was dragging his cross through the streets on the way to Calvary, he halted for a moment to rest, and at this point, Cartaphilus stepped out from the large crowd lining the route and told Jesus to hurry up.

Jesus looked at Cartaphilus and said, "I will go now, but thou shall wait until I return."

The Roman soldiers escorting Christ to the crucifixion site pushed Cartaphilus back into the crowd, and Jesus continued on his way.

What did Jesus mean? thought Cartaphilus, and many years later, the doorkeeper gradually realized that all his friends were dying of old age, while he had not aged at all. Cartaphilus remembered Christ's words and shuddered. He would wander the earth without ageing until Christ's Second Coming.

This tale was dismissed by the religious authorities of the day as an apocryphal yarn, and the legend of the Wandering Jew was later interpreted by the Christians as an allegorical story, symbolizing the global wanderings and persecutions of the Jewish race because of their refusal to accept Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah. The tale gradually passed into European folklore and joined the other fairy tales of the Middle Ages.

Then, in the 13th century, a number of travellers returning to England from the Continent spoke of meeting and hearing of a strange blasphemous man who claimed he had been around when Christ was on earth. These curious reports were later strengthened in 1228 when an Armenian archbishop visited St. Albans. The archbishop told his astonished audience that he had recently dined with an unusual man who confessed to being Cartaphilus, the man who mocked Christ.

Many more encounters with Cartaphilus were reported in the following centuries, and each meeting seemed to be taking place nearer and nearer to Western Europe. Then one day in the year 1740, a mysterious man dressed in black arrived in Paris.

The gaudily-dressed fashion-conscious Parisians instantly noticed the sinister stranger, and admired the dazzling collection of diamond rings on each of his fingers. The man in Black also wore diamond-encrusted shoe-buckles, a display of wealth that obviously suggested that he was an aristocrat, yet nobody in Paris could identify him. From the Jewish cast of his handsome countenance, some of the superstitious citizens of Paris believed he was Cartaphilus, the Wandering Jew.

The man of mystery later identified himself as the Count of St. Germain, and he was quickly welcomed by the nobility into the fashionable circles of Parisian life.

In the distinguished company of writers, philosophers, scientists, freemasons and aristocrats, the Count displayed a veritable plethora of talents. He was an accomplished pianist, a gifted singer and violinist, a linguist who spoke fluent Spanish, Greek, Italian, Russian, Portugese, Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit, English, and of courese, French. The Count of St Germain was also a fine artist, an historian, and a brilliant alchemist. He maintained that he had travelled widely, and recounted his many visits to the court of the Shah of Persia, where he had learned the closely-guarded science of improving and enlarging gemstones. The Count also hinted that he had learned many other arcane lessons of the occult.

But what stunned his awestruck listeners most was his insinuation that he was over a thousand years old. This came about one evening when the course of conversation turned to religious matters. When the Count was invited to comment on the subject, he movingly described Christ as if he had personally known him, and talked in detail of the miraculous water-into-wine event at the marriage feast of Cana as if he were describing a party-trick. After his peculiar anecdote, the Count became tearful, and in a broken, uncharacteristically sombre voice, he said, "I had always known that Christ would meet a bad end."

The Count of St Germain also spoke of other historical celebrities such as Cleopatra and Henry VIII and as if he had known them personally. Whenever sceptical historians would try to trip the Count up by questioning him about trivial historical details that were not widely known, the Count would always reply with astonishing accuracy, leaving the questioner quite perplexed.

The Count's claim to be much older than he looked was reinforced one day when the old Countess von Georgy met him. She immediately recognized the enigmatic nobleman as the same individual she had met fifty years previously in Venice, where she had been the ambassadress. But she was amazed that the Count still looked the same age now as he did then, which was about forty-five. The Countess was naturally confused by this, and asked the Count St Germain if his father had been in Venice at that time. The Count shook his head and told her that it had been himself, and he baffled the Countess by telling her how beautiful she had looked as a young woman<>

"That is not impossible." replied the Count.

"You are a most extraordinary man!" exclaimed the old Countess, "A devil!"

The comparison to a demon touched a sore point in the Count, and in a raised voice, he replied, "For pity's sake! No such names!"

He turned his back on the shocked Countess and stormed out of the room.

The King of France, Louis XV was intrigued by the stories of the mysterious Count St Germain. He sought him out and offered him an invitation to attend the royal court. The Count accepted the invitation, and succeeded in captivating the king and his courtiers, as well as Madame de Pompadour, the king's mistress.

During the spectacular banquets that were held at the court, the Count would abstain from food and wine, but would sometimes sip mineral water instead. Furthermore, when the Count did dine, it was always in private, and precisely what he did consume is not known, although some of the courtiers claimed he was a vegetarian.

Count St Germain arrived in London in 1743 and lodged at a house in St Martin's Street. He stayed in the capital for two years, and during that time he set up a laboratory and carried out mysterious experiments in it that seem to have been of an alchemical nature. His work was closely guarded, but seems to have involved attempts at manufacturing artificial diamonds. During his stay in London, the count was a frequent guest at the Kit-Kat club, where he mingled with members of the highest nobility. At this prestigious club, the Count once astounded members by talking of two inventions he was working on; the steam train and steamboat. This was twenty years before James Watt put together his crude prototype of the steam engine, and 84 years before George Stephenson's Rocket steam train of 1829.

In 1745, the year of the Jacobite Rebellion in Britain, the Count St Germain was arrested at a coffee house in Paternoster Row and charged with spying. Horace Walpole, the son of Sir Robert Walpole, Britain's first Prime Minister, mentioned the incident in a letter to his lifelong correspondent, Sir Horace Mann. Walpole wrote:

The other day they seized an odd man who goes by the name of the Count St Germain. He has been here these two years, and will not tell who he is or whence, but professes that he does not go by his right name. He sings and plays on the violin wonderfully, is mad and not very sensible.

At a time when English xenophobia was at an all-time high because many foreigners, especially Frenchmen were known to be sympathetic to the Jacobite cause, the Count should have been imprisoned. But instead, he was released. Just why this occurred is still a mystery. One curious report that circulated at the time claimed that the Count used hypnotic suggestion to 'persuade' his detainers that he was innocent. This is a real possibility, because, true enough, Anton Mesmer, who is credited with the discovery of hypnotism, stated years before that the Count possessed a 'vast understanding of the workings of the human mind' and had been directly responsible for teaching him the art of hypnosis.

In 1756, the Count was spotted by Sir Robert Clive in India, and in 1760, history records that King Louis XV sent Monsieur St Germain to The Hague to help settle the peace treaty between Prussia and Austria. In 1762, the Count took part in the deposition of Peter III of Russia and took an active role in bringing Catherine the Great to the throne.

Count St Germain opened a mass-production factory in Venice in 1769 where he developed a synthetic form of silk. During this period he also executed several magnificent sculptures in the tradition of the classical Greeks. A year later he was again active in interfering in the politics of other nations; this time he was seen in the uniform of a Russian General with Prince Alexei Orloff in Leghorn!

After the death of Louis XV in 1774, the man from nowhere turned up unexpectedly in Paris and warned the new monarch, King Louis XVI and his Queen, Marie Antoinette of the approaching danger of the French Revolution, which he described as a 'gigantic conspiracy' that would overthrow the order of things. Of course, the warning went unheeded, and among the final entries in her diary, Marie Antoinette recorded her regret at not taking the Count's advice.

In February 1784, Prince Charles of Hesse-Cassel, Germany, announced the news that the Count was dead, and was to be buried at the local church in Eckenforde. Among the crowds that attended the fueneral service were many prominent occultists, including Count Cagliostro, Anton Mesmer, and the philosopher Louis St Martin.

The coffin was lowered into the grave, and many of the mourners sobbed at what seemed so unbelievable; the death of the immortal count. But that is not the end of the story.

A year later, in 1785 a congress of Freemasons was held in Paris. Among the Rosicrucians, Kabbalists and Illuminati was the supposedly dead Count St Germain.

Thirty-six years after his funeral, the Count was seen by scores of people in in Paris. These included the diarist Mademoiselle d'Adhemar, and the educationalist Madame de Genlis. Both women said the Count still looked like a forty-five year-old.

In 1870 the Emperor Napoleon III was so fascinated by the reports of 'The Undying Count' he ordered a special commission to be set up at the Hotel de Ville to investigate the nobleman. But the findings of the commission never came to a conclusion, because in 1871, an mysterious fire of unknown origin gutted the Hotel de Ville, destroying every document that related to the self-styled count.

The Count St Germain was briefly seen in Milan in 1877, attending a meeting of the Grand Lodge of Freemasons.

In 1896, the theosophist Annie Besant said she had met the Count, and around the same year, Russian theosophist Madame Blavatsky said the Count had been in contact with her, and she proclaimed that he belonged to a race of immortals who lived in an subterranean country called Shambhala, north of the Himalayas.

In 1897, the French singer Emma Calve also claimed that the Count St Germain had paid her a visit, and she called him a 'great chiromancer' who had told her many truths.

The story of the immortal count went out of vogue at the beginning of the Twentieth century - until August 1914, in the early days of World War One. Two Bavarian soldiers captured a Jewish-looking Frenchman in Alsace. During the all-night interrogation, the prisoner of war stubbornly refused to give his name. Suddenly, in the early hours of the morning, the unidentified Frenchman got very irritable and started to rant about the futility of the war. He told his captors, "Throw down your guns! The war will end in 1918 with defeat for the German nation and her allies!"

One of the soldiers, Andreas Rill, laughed at the prisoner's words. He thought that the man was merely expressing the hopes of every Frenchman, but he was intrigued by the prisoner's other prophecies...

"Everyone will be a millionaire after the war! There will be so much money in circulation, people will throw it from windows and no one will bother to pick it up. You will need to carry it around in wheelbarrows to buy a loaf!" the Frenchman predicted. Was he referring to the rampant inflation of post-WWI Germany?

The soldiers scoffed at the prediction. They let the prophet ramble on. He gave them more future-history lessons: "After the confetti money will come the Antichrist. A tyrant from the lower classes who will wear an ancient symbol. He will lead Germany into another global war in 1939, but will be defeated six years on after doing inhuman, unspeakable things.

The Frenchman then started to become incoherent. He started to sing, then began to sob. Thinking he was mad, the soldiers decided to let him go, and he disappeared back into obscurity. His identity is stil unknown. Could he have been the Count St Germain?

Today, most historians regard the Count St Germain as nothing more than a silver-tongued charlatan. But there are so many unanswered questions. What was the source of the Count's wealth? How can we possibly explain his longevity? For that matter, where did he come from? If he had been an impostor, surely someone would have recognized him.

The only surviving manuscript written by the Count, entitled, "La Tres Sainte Trinosophie" is in the library at Troyes, France, and to date, it has resisted every attempt to be fully deciphered, but one decoded section of the text states:

"We moved through space at a speed that can only be compared with nothing but itself. Within a fraction of a second the plains below us were out of sight and the Earth had become a faint nebula."

What does this signify? Could it be that the Count St Germain was some type of traveller in the realms of space and time? A renegade timelord from the future who liked to meddle with history? If this were so, perhaps he really had talked with Christ and the kings of bygone days

By Tom slemen

The Wail of the Banshee

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:06:00 +0000

A Banshee

From the many years I have put in researching paranormal incidents, I have come to accept that besides the known dimensions of space and time, there are other realms in our universe of which we are entirely ignorant. Furthermore, I would hazard a guess and say that these undiscovered domains next door to our dimension are inhabited by various strange species of life-forms, ranging from the amorphous to the humanoid. These 'extra-dimensionals' or 'ultra-terrestrials' may be responsible for the ancient worldwide myths of elves, fairies and many other legendary creatures now forgotten and filed away under 'folklore'.

Those who think that the notion of unknown exotic and alien beings living in close proximity to us is nonsense only have to reflect on the peculiar life-forms inhabiting our world. Imagine what Captain Cook would have made of the surreal-looking kangaroo during his exploration of Australia. The existence of such an animal, carrying its young in a pocket-like pouch was entirely unexpected. Another comical-looking animal which eluded zoologist until 1937 was the giant panda of northern China. In 1912, another unusual creature was discovered when a pilot was forced to make an emergency landing on an island off Malaya. He was confronted with a living dinosaur; a huge 10-foot-long monitor lizard now known as the Komodo dragon. This fearsome 135-kilogram animal has a long tail and enormous jaws which can kill a man.

Nearer to home, on your clothes and in your bed, there are hordes of grotesque microscopic monsters known as dust mites, prowling all over you as they munch avariciously on the tiny detached flakes of your skin. These minute creatures look like some nightmarish bug-eyed monsters from an Hieronymous Bosch painting under the electron microscope, but thankfully, because they live on another scale of reality, we are never aware of them crawling about in the carpet and in our beds.

Similarly, could there be undiscovered species of weird but intelligent creatures living alongside us in a parallel dimension, perhaps secretly observing us and occasionally meddling in human affairs? Would this hypothesis explain poltergeists, the mysterious 'greys' allegedly responsible for global abductions, angels, and perhaps even some UFO sightings? In recent years, many respected researchers into the paranormal, including ufologists such as Jaques Vallee and John Keel, have presented convincing conjectures suggesting that some unknown agency outside space and time has been preying on the collective subconscious of mankind for many millennia, manifesting itself as angels, demons, visions, fairies, spirits, will 'o the wisp and various other supernatural guises. In this chapter [featured on this webpage] we will take a look at one of these sinister entities: the banshee.

The banshee is one of the most well-known figures of Irish folklore. The name is derived from the Irish Gaelic 'bean sidhe', meaning 'woman of the fairies'. According to tradition, the banshee's mournful cry is said to foretell death. The banshee is described as having long straight white or red hair which covers her face, and she combs her hair as she wails outside the family home of the person who is about to die. The person who is about to pass away never hears or sees the banshee, and once the death takes place, the crying ceases and the eerie apparition immediately vanishes. Although we're living in the modernistic hi-tech age of computers, genetic engineering and space travel, it seems from the following cases that the chilling Celtic mourner is still doing her rounds, and not only in Ireland; she is evidently active all over the world.

In Ellesmere Port, England, in the autumn of 1997, a 50-year-old housewife named Sarah Wayne was sitting up late one Saturday night, waiting for her 18-year-old daughter Cheryl to return from a nightclub. Sarah hadn't been keen on her teenaged daughter going out to the club, but Cheryl had argued that she was old enough to look after herself and added that Liam, the boy she was after, went to the club on a Saturday night.

Sarah's husband Derek was in Nottingham driving a heavy-goods vehicle to a depot. Derek was very protective towards his only daughter, and certainly would have done his utmost to prevent Cheryl from going to the nightclub.

The time was 2.30 a.m., and still there was no sign of Cheryl, so her mother dimmed the lights in the parlour and peeped through the net curtains at the deserted street outside. A wind was starting to stir, and a clutter of dried leaves scraped by on the pavement. Sarah scanned both ends of the road for twenty minutes, but Cheryl was nowhere to be seen. Around 3 a.m., Mrs Wayne sat sipping a cup of tea in the living room, watching the BBC News 24 service on the muted TV. At around 3.30 a.m., she fell into a light sleep, but a sound woke her up minutes later. Sarah opened her eyes, startled, and saw Cheryl walk past the living room in the hall outside. The girl was sobbing, and her platinum blonde hair was a mess. It hung down in front of her face.

'Cheryl! What's wrong love? Where have you been?' Mrs Wayne bolted from the armchair and followed Cheryl, who had headed straight to the kitchen. Sarah assumed that her distraught daughter had been rejected by Liam at the club, but when she walked into the kitchen, the woman got the shock of her life. The kitchen was empty; Cheryl was nowhere to be seen.

Then came the sounds of a yale key rattling in the front door. Cheryl came in with her friend Jacqueline, laughing and talking about boys they'd danced with.

Cheryl had her long blonde hair piled up in a bun on her head and wore a bright red mini skirt and a white sleeveless top. The figure her mother had pursued to the kitchen had its hair draped over its face and seemed to be wearing black clothes. Sarah Wayne suddenly realised that she had mistaken a weeping ghost for her daughter, and her heart somersaulted. She told Cheryl and her friend about the weird apparition, and the girls and Mrs Wayne became so scared, they all refused to go into the kitchen until it was dawn.

Later that morning, at 8.30 a.m., a policeman and policewoman called at Sarah Wayne's house to inform her of her husband's death in Nottingham. He had left the cab of his lorry at 3.30 a.m. that morning and suffered a fatal heart attack. The death happened at the precise time when the crying ghost walked through the Waynes home. Was the apparition just a so-called 'open-eye' dream of Mrs Wayne, who had just woken up, or was it a banshee? Mrs Wayne believes it was a banshee, and was so unnerved by the experience, she later moved from the house and now lives in Bebington, Merseyside.

The second report of a banshee comes from three witnesses. It all began in the early hours of a Wednesday morning in August 1998 when Freda Piers, a 44-year-old housewife of Saltney, Chester had difficulty sleeping. Freda usually had no trouble getting to sleep, but on this balmy morning at 2 a.m. she became restless, and insomnia began to steadily set in. Freda therefore left her snoring husband and went down to the kitchen to make a coffee. She turned on the radio and for about a minute she listened to Magic 1548, a Liverpool-based station. She was just about to tune into the MFM radio station, when the disc-jockey Jon Jessop urged listeners to go and look out their window to see if there was any sign of a lost snow-white terrier named Brandy, because its owner was frantic. Freda dimmed the lights, opened the window blinds, and gazed out at the moonlit close. She then heard a low howling sound which sent a shiver down her spine. The DJ then said that the terrier had been lost in northern Liverpool, so Freda realised that there was no hope of the dog being outside of her house in Saltney. She took a quick look through the gaps in the blinds - and saw a hooded figure in black standing across the road. The figure looked like a monk wearing a black habit and cowl. What's more, the figure seemed to be the source of the uncanny weeping, and it was looking up at the bedroom window of the house opposite. Red curtains were drawn in this window and a faint bulb burned behind them.

Freda telephoned her best friend Eunice, who lived next door to the house where the strange figure was lurking. After some twenty or so rings, a bleary-eyed and grumpy Eunice answered her phone, and Freda told her about the figure in black standing in the neighbouring garden on the lawn. Eunice took her cordless phone to the window and peeped out. She told Freda that an old white-haired woman was looking up at next-door's window with a sorrowful but demented look, and she appeared to be crying. Eunice was so frightened at the sight of the deranged old woman, she hung up on Freda, dialled the police and shook her husband awake. Eunice's husband, Kevin reluctantly hauled himself out the bed and took a look out the window. He too saw the eccentric old woman in black. He opened the bedroom window, despite his frightened wife's pleas not to, and he shouted down to her, 'What's wrong love?' The creepy-looking woman failed to reply, and continued to stare up at next door's window and started to make a bloodcurdling howling noise.

Freda, meanwhile, was attempting to awaken her husband Sam from his slumbers to tell him about the crazy old woman on the other side of the close.

A police car zoomed to the scene with its roof-light flashing. Eunice and Kevin were distracted from looking at the old woman by the blue flash of light from the police car, and when they glanced back at the lawn, the nocturnal visitor had inexplicably vanished, in what must have literally been the blinking of an eyelid. Two policemen rushed from the squad car with high-powered torches and flashed their beams across the garden where the mysterious figure had stood. Eunice felt so stupid and confused at the woman's vanishing act, she withdrew from the window and pulled her husband back too. Seconds later, out of burning curiosity, she chanced a peep through the net curtains and the blinding beam of a police torch singled her face out at the window. Eunice had no option but to lean out the window and admit that she had rung the police because of the strange prowling woman.

The police listened, then knocked on the front door of Eunice's neighbour. A middle-aged man came to the door not long afterwards and invited the police in. About fifteen minutes later, an ambulance roared into the close. The ambulance men hurried to the house next door and were admitted in by the policemen. By now, Freda, Eunice, and their husbands were standing on the pavement near the house that was the cynosure of all the activity. Eunice and her husband recalled that an Irish couple named O'Brien had recently moved into the house.

About fifteen minutes later, the covered body of Mrs Obrien was taken to the ambulance on a stretcher. Later that morning, Freda and Eunice heard from neighbours that Mrs O'Brien had died in her sleep. Her husband Pat had awoken at 2 a.m. to the sounds of someone crying outside in the distance. He had tried to wake up his wife Philomena to tell her about the strange sobbing sound, but Mrs O'Brien failed to respond, and wouldn't wake up. Mr O'Brien panicked when he felt her neck and got no carotid pulse. She felt cold, and Mr O'Brien realised his wife was dead.

Mr O'Brien claims that his own mother's death 25 years earlier was foreshadowed by the wailing of a banshee, and has no difficulty accepting that a banshee cried for his late wife in the early hours of that warm August morning.

The aforementioned banshee reports are just a couple of examples of the many cases I've looked into, and a majority of the accounts are difficult to rationalize as hallucinations or outright lies, given the calibre of the witnesses. In many instances, the ghostly mourner was seen by several unrelated observers simultaneously, which surely rules out some sort of subjective mirage in the mind of the witnesses. A classic case in point is the doomed Piper Alpha oil platform disaster in 1988. Derek Ellington, a rig fitter, and many of his workmates on the oil platform heard an eerie screeching noise which sounded like a woman crying hysterically. Less than a minute later, an enormous fireball engulfed the Piper Alpha rig and 160 workers perished. Derek Ellington was one of the lucky survivors who was later plucked from the icy waters of the North Sea. He was later asked to describe the strange sound which seemed to be some portent of the disaster, and he recalled it was 'like the wailing of a banshee'.

Tom Slemen's Fireside Halloween Tales

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 21:50:00 +0000

The last day of summer in the old Celtic calendar was October 31, and during its night a festival was held to honour the Lord of the Dead, Samhain. Bonfires were lit to summon forth the spirits of the deceased to walk the earth again, and the pagan peoples of those times had an unquestioning belief in the reality of the returning souls. The belief was so powerful, even the introduction of Christianity could not eradicate the festival of Samhain, and so the Church ended up hijacking the ancient feast. The Church elders decreed in AD 834 that All Saints Day was to be moved from May 13 to November 1, and October 31 was to be known henceforth as All Hallow's Eve (Hallows was an antique word for saints). In AD 988, the pagans of Britain were still honouring Samhain, and the Church urged them not to pray to the dead but for them via the saints. The Church's indoctrinating directive had little effect on the psyche of the largely superstitious population, who continued to believe that the departed souls would rise from their cold graves on Hallowe'en and revisit their old homes to warm themselves at the fireside. Bonfires continued to be lit on Hallow's Eve, and the Church elders desperately racked their brains trying to think of a Christian holy day that could be utilised for the archaic pyromania. Perhaps the bonfire day could be moved to some date when a Christian martyr was burnt at the stake. Ironically, the Hallowe'en bonfire cult was later moved to Guy Fawkes Night, to mark the arrest of the conspirator on November 5, 1605.
However, the Church's attempts to sabotage and subvert the ancient Celtic festival was a dismal failure in the end. Nobody today regards Hallowe'en as the night before we pray to the saints; October 31 is synonymous with apple-bobbing (the vestige of a Roman custom), trick or treat, ghosts, witches flitting past the moon's disk on broomsticks, goblins, vampires, skeletons, bogeymen, the Devil, black cats, graveyards, candlelit pumpkin lanterns, spiders, bats and other supernatural images and entities. Hallowe'en is an enduring tradition that refuses to die, and here are three stories of the paranormal which allegedly took place in England on what is asserted to be the most ghostly night of the year...
On the night of Sunday, October 31, 1976, a bored security guard named Tony Baron was patrolling a warehouse in Warrington. The time was 10.45 pm, and Tony decided to light a cigarette and go up to the roof of the building with his thermos flask of coffee.
The guard looked up at the full moon looming on the eastern horizon and inhaled some fresh air. He then casually scanned the skyline of the town, then looked down at the streets. He noticed the silhouettes of two girls chasing one another around the moonlit playground of a school about a hundred yards down the road. The girls had long hair and both looked roughly the same age; about sixteen or eighteen. Tony assumed they were sixth-formers messing about in the deserted playground.
Then they vanished as he watched.
Tony was so shocked by the sight of the vanishing double act, his jaw dropped and the cigarette fell into his cup of coffee. The guard continued staring at the playground to see if the figures would reappear, but they didn't. Tony felt uneasy and returned to the interior of the factory via a door in the roof. He had never believed in ghosts, but knew that he had just seen the ghosts of two schoolgirls; it had not been a trick of the light or some hallucination. The guard telephoned his old uncle, Stan Jones, a retired policeman, to tell him about the strange spectacle he'd just witnessed.
After he'd heard Tony's strange account, Stand asked his nephew: 'Haven't you read the news recently?'
Tony confessed that he only read the sports pages of the newspapers. 'Why Uncle Stan? What's that got to do with what I saw?'
Stan replied, 'It was in the papers about a week back, two sisters died in a car crash up in Bolton. They were only fifteen, and they both attended the school just down the road from where you are now.'
'You're kidding.' said Tony, feeling a cold chill all of a sudden.
Tony's Uncle Stan then made matters worse by relating a strange experience he'd had himself eleven years before - in the very warehouse Tony was guarding. Stan said, 'It was around 1965, and funnily enough I recall it was in October. In those days the old night-watchman used to let me in and I'd have a cuppa with him and a good natter. Anyway, on this October night, I turned up and the watchman poured me a cuppa tea and kindly offered me one of his sandwiches from his turning-out box. He then went to the toilet at the other end of the building. Now, I was never one for believing in ghosts and the supernatural and all that mumbo jumbo, but while the night-watchman was gone, something happened which played on my mind for years. Perhaps I shouldn't tell you. It could play on your mind too.'
Tony didn't know whether he wanted to hear the rest of his uncle's tale. If he didn't he knew he'd be wondering what his uncle had seen all night. 'Go one, I'm not scared Uncle Stan.' Tony said, watching the moon through the windows of the warehouse with an anxious look.
'Well,' continued Stan, 'just after the night-watchman went to the loo, a horrible, penetrating coldness filled the place. I could see my breath it was that cold all of a sudden. Then I got this really creepy feeling that there was some presence beside me.'
'How do you mean uncle?' Tony asked, nervously fiddling with the coiled phone flex.
Stan paused then said: 'It's hard to explain; it's like when people say they know when they're being watched. They can feel someone's eyes on them. It was like that. It became really tense in that place while the watchman was gone. And then I saw something. Sure you're not nervous?'
'Nah, I'm more curious than scared.' Tony said, putting on a false brave front.
'I saw these covered bodies lying in a row in the dark corner of the room. Three or four I think there were. Covered in white sheets. I was really baffled. The watchman came back and I looked at him and said; "What are those?" But they'd gone.'
'What did the watchman say? Did he see them?' Tony asked. He was getting goosebumps on his arms and neck as he spoke.
'The watchman didn't see the bodies, but he knew what I was talking about, because he said he'd seen the bodies a few times over the years.' Stan said.
'That's really weird.' Tony told him, and he was now sensing, or perhaps imagining - a presence.
'You know what the watchman told me?' Stan asked his trembling nephew.
'No, what uncle?'
'I thought he was having me on but your Auntie Hilda later confirmed it. The watchman said that a morgue used to stand on the site of the warehouse.' Stan said, and suddenly, the phoneline went dead.
Tony Baron felt the hairs on the nape of his neck standing up. He had the overwhelming feeling that something or someone was approaching from behind. Then he noticed the foul smell pervading the place. What's more, something icy touched the back of his head. The guard ran off as fast as his legs could carry him and with his heart pounding he unlocked the main door of the warehouse. He ran out into the street and didn't stop running until he had a stitch in his side. He decided enough was enough and intended to hand in his notice at the warehouse in the morning. As his uncle's house was nearer than home, Tony paid him a late visit and told him about the spooky atmosphere which had just been too much for him to take. Stan said something which sent a shiver down his nephew's spine. He said, 'As I was talking to you on the phone, the line went dead, so I waited. I thought something had happened to you. About thirty seconds later, a woman's voice said, "Tony's just run out of here." And she sounded as if she was mentally deranged because she started to laugh hysterically, then she banged the phone down. Who was she?'
'There was no one else on the premises.' Tony replied with a shiver.
A year later, Tony was in a pub, and he got talking to a middle-aged man who said he'd done a stint as a security guard in the warehouse where Tony had worked three years back. The man startled Tony by telling him that he had packed in his job at the Warrington warehouse because one night he had a cat nap, and when he woke up, a sinister-looking woman in a long white gown was standing over him, smiling. Her face was as white as a sheet of paper and her eyes were yellowish with dark rings around them. There was also a disgusting smell like an aroma of decomposing flesh present. Seconds later, the woman cackled and vanished, and the obnoxious odour quickly faded.
The identity of the phantom is a mystery, but it's said that she still walks the warehouse in the dead of night. Perhaps she has some earthly tie with the old morgue that once stood on the site of the warehouse in the 19th century...
On Wednesday, October 31, 1979, at 11.15 pm, three girls in Northwich got more than they bargained for when they intended to get a glimpse of their future husbands by dabbling in the occult. The girls, all aged sixteen, were Emma, Melissa and Erika, and they were minding the house for Emma's Auntie June, who was in hospital for a few days, recovering from an operation. The house was Victorian and quite a creepy place at night, but the girls didn't notice the spooky atmosphere of the place at first. They were all too busy talking about boys they fancied, and Melissa, the bookish one, had an idea; she suggested carrying out an old Hallowe'en custom which supposedly allowed a person to see a vision of the person they would end up marrying.
Emma and Erika were quite excited at this magical prospect and asked Melissa how it was done. In a matter-of-fact manner she told them: 'You light two candles and place them on each side of you, then you look into a mirror, combing your hair with one hand and eating an apple at the same time. After a while you see your future husband looking over your left shoulder in the mirror. My mum did it when she was a girl and saw my dad's face.'
'Let's do it!' Emma exclaimed, enthusiastically.
'It's got to be at midnight exactly.' Melissa told her excited friend. The time was only 10 o'clock in the evening.
Emma went out the living room for a while, then returned with two scented candles, each mounted on twisted silver candlesticks. She also had a hairbrush taken from her aunt's bedroom. Emma positioned the candlesticks on opposite ends of the long mantelpiece over the flickering coal fire then gazed into the eyes of her reflection in the mirror situated over the fireplace. In a melodramatic voice Emma joked, 'Who will you marry Emma?' and started to laugh.
'Don't mess about with the Black Arts; it's dangerous.' Melissa warned her flippant friend.
At precisely midnight, the heavy curtains were drawn and the traditional Hallowe'en custom commenced. In the dark room lit only by two candles and the flickering flames in the grate, Emma solemnly stared at herself in the mirror. behind her to her left stood Melissa and Erika, holding on to each other's hands with electric excitement. They giggled at the sound of Emma's crunching into the apple, then watched the dim sparks of static electricity crackle through the girl's hair as she pulled the brush through it.
'Keep staring at the space over the left shoulder of your reflection. Concentrate on that space as you brush.' Melissa coached Emma, who was taking it all so serious.
Her friends behind her waited with baited breath, both yearning for something - anything - to happen.
And something did happen. Something which almost caused Emma to faint with shock.
A face came forward out of the darkness in the mirror and peered over the left shoulder of Emma's mirror image. It was a sinister, contorted, pallid face with reddish hair, snarling at her. Emma's natural reaction was to turn right, for she expected the terrifying disembodied face to be hovering over her right shoulder, but it wasn't there. It only existed in the mirror as a reflection.
A sudden whistling draught from nowhere blew out the candles on the mantelpiece and Erika let out a scream. She dashed off to turn on the light, but she couldn't locate the light switch, and in her panic she fell over a chair.
Melissa was rushing for the door by now, and she tripped over Erika who was lying across the floor. Emma yelled out in pain. A lump of orange hot incandescent coal had jumped out of the fireplace on its own and bounced off her arm. More and more fragments of glowing coal flew out of the fire and showered the room, until Emma raced to the light switch and flicked it on. Scattered about the room were smouldering lumps of coal sizzling on the carpet and furniture. As Melissa and Erika fled from the living room and into the hall, Emma bravely grabbed a pair of tongs hanging on a stand on the hearth and used them to pick up the dangerous chunks of coal. She threw them back into the grate, and as soon as she saw that nothing was on fire, she hurried out of the house and stayed at Erika's place for the remainder of that night.
The girls often talked about the scary Hallowe'en incident over the next five years - especially when October 31 loomed - and none of them ever meddled with the occult again.
Then, in 1984, Emma met a man named Roy. She really regarded him as the ideal man of her dreams. He was tall, blond, and had a pair of expressive sky-blue eyes. Emma introduced Roy to all her friends and by the summer of 1985 she was engaged to him and living in his flat. She really looked forward to marrying Roy.
But Roy gradually underwent a drastic change of personality, and Emma started to see a repulsive side of her fiance she never knew existed. He often came home drunk and ordered Emma to make him something for supper. His behaviour deteriorated and he ended up throwing a coffee table at his girl. Emma left him for a week and stayed at her sister's house, but Roy found out and continually phoned her, begging and pleading for her to come back. Emma did in the hope that Roy would clean up his act, but his drunken antics continued. Then, one night, as Roy was lying beside Emma in bed, she noticed that the hair at the crown of his head had red roots. She thought Roy was a natural blond, but he confessed that he hated his red hair and had gotten his sister to dye it blond for the last two years. Emma told him it didn't matter what colour his hair was, and she convinced him to let his normal colour return. Roy did this, and six months later, Emma got the shock of her life when she had an argument with her boyfriend one night. She was telling him to pack in the booze when he suddenly turned violent and slapped her across the face. He then grabbed a large knife from the kitchen and threatened he'd 'shut her up for good'. He snarled and screwed up his eyes with unbridled hatred, and suddenly, Emma remembered seeing that same face five years previously in the mirror on that eventful Hallowe'en night. The girl was so scared at the terrifying feeling of deja vu, she fled the house and went back to her parents. The police were called out and Roy was arrested. Emma vowed she would never return to her violent ex-boyfriend and married someone else years later. To this day, Emma believes that spirits warned her of Roy on that memorable Hallowe'en night and probably saved her life as a result.
And finally, this short but pleasant tale rounds off our trilogy of Hallowe'en ghost stories. This true incident occurred on Tuesday, October 31, 1995 in Widnes. A 5-year-old boy named Brandon came down from his bedroom giggling. Brandon's bemused mother, Kirsty asked her son what he was chuckling about, and his answer made her blood run cold.
'Granddad's got a Sooty puppet.' Brandon said, and he grinned ear to ear, but became puzzled at his mother's grim response.
Kirsty's father had died seven years before, two years before Brandon's birth, and her father-in-law had gone to his grave ten years ago. So Kirsty assumed little Brandon was just talking about an imaginary character, as the boy had a vivid imagination and often said Mickey Mouse or Spiderman was upstairs in his room playing with his toys.
But when Kirsty went up to her son's room she was shocked to see an old yellow glove puppet of 'Sooty', the character she used to watch on TV in the 1970s when she was a kid. Then, with a shudder, Kirsty recalled that her father had bought her an identical Sooty glove puppet one Christmas in her childhood. The only other explanation was that Brandon had taken the puppet off a friend, but she doubted that explanation. So, Kirsty quizzed her son about the puppet, and he told her that an old man had appeared in his room earlier that day. Brandon said that the man called him 'chuck'.
'Chuck' was the name Kirsty's dad called her when she was small.
Brandon then excitedly said, 'Oh yeah mum. He said you should hang apples up for me.'
Brandon's comments really jogged his mum's memories. When she was a child, her father and mother always tied cotton threads to the stalks of apples and hung them in the doorway. Kirsty and her brothers would then try to bite the apples with their hands behind their back.
Inspired by these nostalgic thoughts, Kirsty took Brandon to the greengrocer's and bought the apples and a big pumpkin to hollow out and cut a face into. That evening, Kirsty and her husband hung some of the apples from threads and challenged Brandon to seize them with his mouth without using his hands. Then Brandon's dad put four or five apples in his son's inflatable paddle pool and filled it with water. He and Brandon competed with Kirsty to clench the apples by mouth without using their hands. Brandon really enjoyed the customs of Hallowe'en, and his dad wanted to tell him a ghost story before bed, but Kirsty said he'd have nightmares, so Brandon was put to bed after Kirsty read him an innocuous "Mister Men" story.
At around 1 am, Kirsty picked up a solitary green apple floating in the paddle pool in the garden and took it into the kitchen. She noticed something embedded in it. Kirsty's husband saw it too and he said it was dangerous putting coins in the apple which Brandon could choke on. Kirsty said she hadn't put a coin in the apple, and she prised out the coin in question. It was a real blast from the past. The coin was one Kirsty and her husband had not seen since they were kids. It was a 'threepenny bit' - an old brass-coloured pre-decimal coin equivalent to three pence. The two adults were at a loss to explain who had put the antiquated coin in the apple, but Kirsty thought her dad was the culprit, as he always hid a threepenny coin in an apple for her on 'Duck-Apple Night'. Of course, Kirsty didn't dare tell her husband about her suspicions in case he thought she was crazy.
About a month later, Kirsty was leafing through her old family photo album one rainy afternoon in a reminiscent mood, when Brandon came over and studied the old photographs. The boy's face suddenly lit up and he pointed to an untitled picture of Kirsty's father and said, 'That's Granddad! He comes to my room!'

Through a Glass Darkly

noreply@blogger.com (Devilish.xx) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 22:42:00 +0000

In 1978, a student at Mabel Fletcher's College was passing the window of Olivier's Antiques shop, when something caught his eye. He stopped and peered through the window and saw a strange dark mirror next to an old violin. Matthew had read a lot of books on Occultism, and he immediately recognised the looking glass for what it was; a McGee's Mirror. He paid thirteen pounds for it, because it was genuine obsidian. Matthew took the weird mirror to the Penny Lane home of his friend Robin, and claimed the looking glass could summon forth any dead person. Robin was very nervous, and advised his friend to throw the obsidian mirror away. Matthew called his friend a coward and convinced Robin to hang the blankets of his bed over the drawn curtains of the room. The bedsit was soon in complete darkness. Matthew lit two candles and put them on each side of the mirror. He uttered several strange words that were incomprehensible to Robin, then kept saying the word "Hitler" over and over. Robin started to worry about his friend, because he kept chanting the name and staring at the jet-black mirror. Then suddenly, a face faintly appeared. It was a haggard looking face, and it resembled Hitler, but he looked older than the photographs of him most people are familiar with. Robin felt faint when he saw the ghostly face appear. The eyes of the face kept rolling upwards and the mouth opening, as if the apparition was trying to speak.

'Listen,' Matthew whispered.

The two young men could hear the faint sounds of someone speaking in German. Robin trembled, and rushed to the light-switch. He clicked on the light and the apparition vanished. Matthew was very angry. Robin could speak German and said he had panicked because he had heard the guttural-voiced apparition of Adolf Hitler ask: 'Why have you summoned me?'

Weeks later, Matthew told Robin that he had been scrying with the mirror, and that he had seen the faces of such notable historic celebrities as Marie Antoiniette, Henry VIII , Abraham Lincoln and Jack the Ripper. Matthew maintained that he had even conjured up his idol, Marc Bolan, who had perished in a car crash a year before.

Robin listened to his manic friend, then told him: 'You've gone too far Matthew, please get rid of that mirror.'

'No. Now I know why Adam chose forbidden knowledge,' Matthew replied.

A few days later, Matthew met up with Robin at the college canteen. Matthew looked white as a sheet. His friend asked him what was wrong, and Matthew told Robin that since he had started messing about with the mirror, he had seen the face of several living people, and each had died over the last few weeks from accidents, illness and suicide Each face had turned into a grotesque skull in the mirror, and what’s more Matthew had seen his own reflection turn gradually into a skull. Matthew had asked the mirror how he would die, and the smiling face of a white-haired man had appeared. Matthew had never seen this man before. The student became so scared he decided to return to Surrey to stay with his family. About a week later, Robin received a letter from his troubled friend. In the letter, Matthew said he had seen the man with the white hair walking down the street near his parent's home. Matthew had asked his parents who the man was, and they had told him he was a surgeon at the local hospital.

Robin wrote back to his friend and reassured him that he was just being over-anxious. After all how could a surgeon kill him?

No letter of reply ever came, so Robin telephoned Matthew's parents. They told him right away that Matthew had died. He had been admitted to hospital after collapsing from severe chest pains. He was treated for a suspected heart attack, and a surgeon later discovered that Matthew had a serious heart defect. He operated on him, but during the open-heart surgery, there had been complications, and Matthew had died during the operation without regaining consciousness. His mother said the surgeon who had treated him had only lived a few doors away. Robin attended the funeral down in Surrey, and during his stay down there, Matthew's parents introduced Robin to the surgeon who had operated unsuccessfully on their son. The surgeon had white hair, and Robin suspected it had been his face that Matthew had seen in the obsidian mirror.