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It’s that time of year, when we look to graveyards for tales that scare the Dickens out of us. You’ve read about 9 Creepy Places to Visit for a Good Scare and you’ve seen lists of haunted houses. Now how about cemeteries? These six stories don’t all contain ghosts -some are about vampires, poltergeists, and unidentified flying objects! Shown here is Chesnut Hill Cemetery in Rhode Island, the site of a vampire exhumation in 1892.
Chesnut Hill Baptist Church Cemetery in Exeter, Rhode Island is reported to be haunted by a vampire named Mercy Lena Brown. She was preceded in death by her mother and sister, victims of tuberculosis, and Mercy would often visit their graves. In January 1892, 19-year-old Mercy herself fell to tuberculosis and was interred with her family members. Mercy’s father George claimed she haunted him every night, complaining of hunger. His son Edwin fell sick, also with tuberculosis, but as he experienced visits from Mercy, the family and townspeople considered the cause of his illness to be the restless dead. George Brown, with the help of others, dug up the graves of his wife and two daughters on March 17, 1892. Only Mercy, who died in January, was free of decomposition. This led George to believe she was a vampire.
Read what happened then, and other tales, at mental_floss. Link
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader.
Have you ever participated in a séance or tried to contact the “spirits” using a Ouija board? You probably don’t realize it, but the modern conception of communicating with the dead only dates back to the late 1840s. Here’s the story of the hoax that started spirit-mania.
BUMP IN THE NIGHT
In 1848 a devout Methodist farmer named John Fox and his family began to hear strange noises in their Hydesville, New York, farmhouse. The noises continued for weeks on end, until finally on one particularly noisy evening, Mrs. Fox ordered the two children, 13-year-old Margaret and 12-year-old Kate, to stay perfectly quiet in bed while Mr. Fox searched the house from top to bottom. His search shed no light on the mystery, but afterward, Margaret sat up in bed and snapped her fingers, exclaiming, “Here, Mr. Split-foot, do as I do!”
“The reply was immediate,” Earl Fornell writes in The Unhappy Medium: Spiritualism and the Life of Margaret Fox. “The invisible rapper responded by imitating the number of the girl’s staccato responses.”
Mrs. Fox began to make sense of what she was hearing. “Count ten,” she told the spirit. It responded with ten raps. So she asked several questions; each time the spirit answered correctly. Next, Mrs. Fox asked the spirit if it would rap if a neighbor was present; the spirit said yes. So Mr. Fox ran and got a neighbor, the first of more than 500 neighbors and townspeople who visited over the next few weeks to watch Margaret and Kate interact with the spirit. As long as either Margaret or Kate was present, the spirit was willing to communicate.
MURDER MYSTERY
Using an alphabetic code that Margaret and Kate devised, “Mr. Split-foot” explained that in his Earthly life he’d been a peddler, murdered by the person who lived in the farmhouse. The spirit identified the killer as “C. R.” Some citizens tracked down a man named Charles Rosana, who’d lived in the house years earlier, but with no body and no evidence other than the testimony of a ghost, he was never charged.
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Comments Off The hatbox ghost was included in the original haunted mansion and marketing materials for the attraction, but almost no one actually saw the ghost in the park. For years, debates raged on about whether or not the ghost ever really existed, but for the first time ever, someone has video evidence of him.
Link Via BoingBoing
I know a lot of people don’t believe in ghosts, but for those who do believe (or are undecided about their existence), this great Oddee article features 10 ghost pictures and recordings that are certain to be accepted by the believers and debated by the skeptics. What do you guys think? Are ghosts fact or fiction?
Walt Disney Imagineering is updating the features of the Haunted Mansion. Here’s a look at how they are changing the beloved “hitchhiking ghosts.” -via Boing Boing
Unless otherwise noted, all photos by Zeon Santos.
Since I was a kid, I loved ghosts and haunted houses and Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion has always been one of my favorites and I’m sure many of you agree. But what do you really know about the mansion and the stories behind its layout and design? The history behind the ride is almost as cool as the experience itself, so for today’s Neatorama Facts, I give you an inside look at the Haunted Mansion.
Image via Passport to Dreams.
The Haunted Mansion wasn’t open until 1969, but the idea was kicked around since the beginning. In the one of the original park designs created by artist Harper Goff showed a crooked street coming off of Main Street and winding past a church and a graveyard and leading to a run-down mansion on a hill. The idea wasn’t incorporated at first, but Disney liked the idea and assigned imaginer Ken Anderson to build a story around the drawing and create a full experience around it.
Because plans for New Orleans square were currently in progress, it was decided that the ride would be built in the style of an antebellum manor. The original souvenir map that showed New Orleans Square promised that the area would include a thieves market, a pirate wax museum and a haunted house when it was open.
The first drawings for the mansion showed it overgrown with weeds, filled with swarms of bats and having boarded up doors and windows. While this certainly would have set the mood for a scary adventure, Disney hated the idea of a run-down building in his park and insisted, “we’ll take care of the outside and let the ghosts take care of the inside.”
When working on the original plans for the mansion, Anderson developed a number of wonderfully chilling tales, the main of which revolved around a ghost of a sea captain who killed his nosy bride and then hung himself. He was even hoping to incorporate some of the monsters used in Universal films. Most of this ended up not materializing because Disney wanted to take things in another direction.
For the special effects, Rolly Crump and Yale Grace were hired to create creepy effects that would be far from obvious. The pair researched real haunting stories, Greek myths and monster movies and then started building elaborate effects in their private studio. The effects got to be so good that they scared some of the cleaning crew. Thinking that was funny, they hooked up all the effects to a motion sensor so it would all go off when the cleaning crew entered the room. After that, the crew refused to enter the area and they had to clean up their own studio.
The 1984 film Ghostbusters starred Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, and Dan Akroyd as paranormal exterminators in New York City (later joined by Ernie Hudson). The script was written by Ramis and Akroyd. The movie was #1 for five weeks straight that summer, and became the most successful comedy of the 1980s. But you already knew all that, didn’t you? Here are ten things you might not know about Ghostbusters.
1. The story as Dan Akroyd originally envisioned it involved time travel and many more ghostbusters. He wrote the principle roles for John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, and John Candy. Belushi died before the movie was made, and Candy and Murphy weren’t interested. Harold Ramis changed most of the original plot to make the production affordable.
2. The film had no name through most of its development. One name that was considered was Ghoststoppers. After the producers settled on Ghostbusters, plans went ahead. Some time later, it was brought to their attention that a live action children’s show named The Ghost Busters had aired during the 1975-76 TV season. Columbia quickly pursued negotiations with Filmation, the owners of the series, to secure rights to the title they were already using. After the movie became a hit, Filmation went back and produced an animated series called Filmation’s Ghostbbusters, using the same characters from the earlier live-action series. A separate animated series from Columbia Pictures called The Real Ghostbusters based on the movie began in 1986.
3. The voice of the gatekeeper Zuul, the minion of Gozer, was that of Ivan Reitman, the film’s director, but he didn’t take a credit for it. Just another trick at a producer’s disposal for saving money -one more voiceover artist they didn’t have to pay!
4. The Proton Pack is the weapon of choice for the Ghostbusters. It is sort of a particle-beam weapon. We have some of those in real-life now, such as the Large Hadron Collider and other particle-acceleration laboratories, but you can’t carry something like that on your back. Columbia Pictures had the Proton Packs made by the prop department out of fiberglass with various gizmos added like pneumatic fittings, resistors, and anything else lying around that might look appropriate.
5. Adult film star Ron Jeremy appeared in a the crowd as the containment unit explodes. The scene is about an hour into the movie, and Jeremy is to the left, sporting his iconic mustache.
6. Harold Ramis, who played Dr. Egon Spengler, is better known as a director. Before writing and acting in Ghostbusters, he directed Caddyshack and National Lampoon’s Vacation. After Ghostbusters, he directed Bill Murray again in Groundhog Day.
7. The spirit/diety Gozer takes the form of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man because Dr. Raymond Stantz (Akroyd) thought of him as someone who would never hurt him. Stay Puft is a fictional company. The Marshmallow Man was only one of many oversized monsters in the original script -the rest were cut due to budget concerns.
8. The voracious green ghost that passes through walls and leaves slime behind is known as Slimer, although he was never referred to by name in the first Ghostbusters movie. Instead, the cast and crew called him “Onion Head”! Oh yes, the voice of the-ghost-to-be-later-known-as Slimer was also director Ivan Reitman.
9. “Who you gonna call?” The theme song “Ghostbusters” by Ray Parker, Jr. went to #1 on the Billboard singles chart and stayed there for three weeks. It was nominated for an Academy Award in the best original song category, and won a Grammy. But you won’t find the music video on the home video version of the movie Ghostbusters, due to a plagiarism suit brought by Huey Lewis in 1984. Lewis charged that the tune to “Ghostbusters” was essentially the same as “I Want a New Drug” by Huey Lewis and the News, which came out six months earlier. The suit was settled out of court in 1985, with one of the stipulations being that neither party would ever discuss the suit in public. Believe it or not, Huey Lewis was asked to come up with a theme song for Ghostbusters, but turned down the project, after which the producers approached Ray Parker, Jr.
10. Ghostbusters III has been in discussion for years. Dan Akroyd had a script ready long ago. Producer Ivan Reitman says the movie will begin filming this fall for a 2012 release. The principle characters will be played by younger actors, although the original cast may appear as well. Bill Murray is not interested in participating.
Ghostbusters Stuff From the NeatoShop:
More: Video Game & Cartoons Inspired Energy Drinks and Candies
Martin Refsal created this whimsical artwork in honor of Pac-Man’s 30th anniversary. This will make it easier to recognize a Pac-Man ghost when you see one! Link -via Holy Kaw!
A woman in New Zealand sold two glass vials at auction for the equivalent of $1,983 USD. She claimed that they contained souls that she had exorcised from a house in the town of Christchurch:
The “ghosts” were put up for bidding by Avie Woodbury from the southern city of Christchurch. She said they were captured in her house and stored in glass vials with stoppers and dipped in holy water, which she says “dulls the spirits’ energy.”
She said they were the spirits of an old man who lived in the house during the 1920s, and a powerful, disruptive little girl who turned up after a session with a spirit-calling Ouija board. Since an exorcism at the property last July led to their capture, there has been no further spooky activity in the house, she said.
Link via io9 | Photo: flickr user Nancy Wombat, used under Creative Commons license
The term ghost ship can refer to a mysterious apparition of a ship when a ship is not really there, or it can refer to an abandoned ship found with no crew or passengers, usually under mysterious circumstances. Both kinds are listed in these ten stories spooky enough to share with anyone to whom you want to give nightmares. Pictured is the Baychimo, used in Arctic waters until it became trapped in ice in 1931. The crew was airlifted and the ship abandoned. However, the boat survived to mysteriously float on its own for decades. It was last seen in 1969. Link -via Unique Daily
Last week, CNN took a trip through Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. In one of their clips, there seems to be a strange shadowy figure crossing the screen. While I’m reserving my judgment, I couldn’t help but think you readers might have your own opinions on the subject. So, is it a ghost or merely an optical illusion?
Link Via News Bizarre
