Bill Tufts always wanted a pipe organ and had one installed in his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tufts recently passed away, and the home is for sale, with the organ and its 2300 pipes.
By the kitchen table is the pipe organ with three sets of keyboards, stacked on top of each other with foot pedals. When you turn it on, a giant blower it can be heard in the basement. The organ, however, is only the half of it.
A door in the back of the house reveals a room with hundreds of pipes of all sizes. Through another door there are even more pipes, some two-stories tall. In all, there are around 2,300 with each pipe providing a different musical note. The whole organ takes up more than one third of the house.
Don Haan of Haan Pipe Organ, who originally installed the organ, said the same job today would cost over a million dollars. Strangely, Tufts never learned to play the organ. The house is on the market for $129,000. See more pictures here. -via Fark
Watch a cute little Jack-o-Lentern hover in the air and speed around a track while oozing mist behind him! You don't have time to prepare this stunt yourself for Halloween, but you can share the video with your kids. There’s a perfectly logical scientific explanation, involving magnetic fields and superconductors, which are explained by Andy from The Royal Institution. No matter, it still looks cool! -via mental_floss
You’ve visited many wonderful places in your imagination: Oz, Gotham City, Jurassic Park, King’s Landing, Neverland… but the magnets on your refrigerator say Martha’s Vineyard and Nashville.
Impossible Magnets will spice things up with souvenir magnets of places that only exist in movies, TV, literature, and video games! The series was created by Madrid artists Martín Feijoó (previously at Neatorama), Miguel Sousa, and Sara Enríquez. Put these on your refrigerator, and you can tell tales about your trip to anyone who comes in the kitchen!
Last month, we had an up-close look at the process of tattooing. Now Smarter Every day brings us the next step- laser tattoo removal. Of course, you can skip this part -and I hear it's even more painful than the tat- by thinking very carefully about a lifetime with your chosen tattoo before you get it inked. -via Buzzfeed
November 7th through the 9th, Berlin will celebrate the 25th anniversary of Mauerfall, or The Fall of the Wall. One of the events is an art installation called Lichtgrenze by artists Christopher and Marc Bauder, in which 8,000 illuminated balloons will be lighting up the 15 kilometer route of the wall. On the night of the 9th, the balloons will be released, carrying messages with them.
Every 500 feet along the path of the lights there will be historical footage and imagery of what each area was like when the wall was still intact, leading up to its world-watched destruction in 1989. While there were walls, mines and no-mans-land zones outside of Berlin as well, there is something particularly powerful about the way the boundary impacted Germany’s capital, slicing it brutally through its center, often cutting streets and even buildings in half.
The most chill cats in the world are all dressed up for Halloween! And as usual, it's a non-stop party atmosphere... if your idea of a party is a good nap. This video will have you on the edge of your seat -Shiro’s eyes almost opened once! -via Tastefully Offensive
Cartoonist Charles Addams was almost as bizarre as the characters he drew. His most famous creation, The Addams Family, has been reincarnated time and again during the past 70 years, coming back to life from the grave. Are his drawings morbid? Sure. But they’re also immortal.
As The New Yorker’s star cartoonist from the 1930s to the 1980s, Charles Addams practically invented dark humor in America. His cartoons found comedy at the intersection of the bizarre and the everyday, featuring ordinary people harboring exotically morose tendencies. Over the course of his lifetime, Addams illustrated 68 covers for The New Yorker and contributed more than 1,300 cartoons to the magazine, inspiring everyone from The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson to film director Tim Burton. If the stories of writers such as Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, and John Cheever were the lifeblood of The New Yorker, then Addams’ drawings were its spirit.
Charles Addams’ most enduring creation, The Addams Family, reflected American values in a funhouse mirror, showcasing the paranoia, the darkness, and the sweetness of suburban life. In the past seven decades, The Addams Family has spawned two live-action television series, two animated cartoons, and two blockbuster feature films—and the reincarnations keep coming. Right now, there’s a musical of the cartoon on Broadway, and Tim Burton is slated to direct a new film version. But as creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky as the characters are, they have nothing on Charles Addams himself.
The Man Behind the Macabre
In his heyday, Charles Addams was a celebrity, the type of person everyone wanted to know. Director Alfred Hitchcock once made a pilgrimage to Addams’ front door, just to catch a glimpse of him in his natural habitat. Popular lore had it that the cartoonist was a regular patient at New York State sanitariums, and that he preferred his martinis garnished with eyeballs. And while many of the stories about Addams were exaggerated, there’s no doubt he had a penchant for the peculiar. Instead of a standard coffee table, Addams used a Civil War-era embalming table. He also kept a collection of antique crossbows above his sofa, and he used a young girl’s tombstone (“Little Sarah, Aged Three”) as a perch for his cocktails.
The League of S.T.E.A.M. does Dia de los Muertos! The League of S.T.E.A.M. (previously) is a group of steampunk ghostbusters (“Serving all your supernatural elimination needs since 1884”). In this adventure, they investigate a horde of skeletons who won’t return to their graves after the Day of the Dead festivities. Yes, it’s corny, but the skeletons are funny, and it has the perfect punch line at the very end. -via the Presurfer
You’ve read about mediums, seances, and Ouija boards here at Neatorama. What do all these things have in common? The Spiritualist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And in the wake of the new movie Ouija, people are interested in the devices, gimmicks, and gadgets Spiritualists used to contact the dead. Collectors Weekly takes a look at Spiritualism and the devices used in a talk with Brandon Hodge of Mysterious Planchette.
Hodge says that most spirit-communication concepts started out with serious religious intentions, but eventually got co-opted by popular culture as playthings or curiosities. “The Spiritualists come up with these devices and use them to communicate with the dead. Then, pop culture comes along and goes, ‘Oh, look what they’re doing over here.’ And entrepreneurs with vision and foresight take these devices, market them, and suddenly, they become a huge parlor hit.”
As laypeople experimented with these devices at home, others turned to Spiritualist mediums, a job that eventually gave young women—who were thought to be so receptive to the divine they would come to embody the spirits themselves—power they couldn’t have dreamed of before. These mediums were able to flagrantly violate strict Victorian social taboos and speak unpopular or radical opinions.
They also talked to Jill Tracy, who has a show called The Musical Seance which recreates Victorian seances for modern audiences. In addition to a history of Spiritualism, you’ll learn about automatic writing, spirit guides, spirit photos, spirit trumpets, ectoplasm, planchettes, and other spirit communication devices at Collectors Weekly.
Wouldn’t it be great if a haunted house tour was like a Choose Your Own Adventure book? In the 3D world, that would make haunted house attractions unbelievably big and expensive, but it’s possible, with the technology of YouTube. YouTube Nation assembled some of the biggest video stars for the project: Glozell, Tay Zonday, Felicia Day, and others. Each time you start the video, the story might be different, depending on your choices. I don’t yet know which choices are best. -via The Daily Dot
On October 30, 1938, Orson’s Welles presented an episode of the radio drama anthology The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The offering was an adaptation of H. G. Wells's 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. The broadcast went down in history, as there were some people who mistook the staged alien invasion for a news report. Neatoramanaut Ron Geraci’s mother remembers that broadcast from her childhood.
“I was little. If it was on Halloween in 1938, then I was four years old. I was little but I have some vivid memories from that night. We were in my grandparent’s farmhouse in Ferrell, New Jersey, and my grandmother and grandfather were listening to the radio as usual. Their names were Mary and George. They were my father’s parents. All of a sudden there was a lot of confusion in the house and the next thing I know we were down in the cellar. But it wasn’t a normal cellar, it was just a dug-out hole. It was all dirt. Not just the floor, everything was dirt. I don’t know what it was used for. I had never been down there before. I left that house in the fourth grade and I never went down there again. The house is still there.
“My grandpop didn’t tell us why he brought us down there, though I remember him saying something like ‘they were coming.’ It was dark except for one light, probably a gas lamp. I remember watching my grandparents talking while me and my little brother Billy sat there. Billy would have been about three. They couldn’t take the radio down there since there was no electricity, so it was quiet except for them talking. They were both telling us to be quiet, to not make any noise, though I don’t remember me or Billy saying anything.
But that’s only the beginning of the story. Her grandfather guarded the family with a shotgun, and they came up with an idea for protecting themselves from poison gas. Read the full story at The Minty Plum.-Thanks, Ron!
Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee, offered $10,000 in tuition for performing an amazing basketball stunt: sink a layup, free throw, three-pointer, and a half-court shot, all within 30 seconds. Gustavo Angel Tamayo, a soccer player for the Lions, won the opportunity to try it. Tamayo grew up in England, and never played on a basketball team. Watch him rush through all four shots, ending with a Hail Mary toss from half court -and the crowd goes wild!
"It's just football [soccer], that's all I do," he said. "And I had a broken finger on my left hand."
Tamayo is a senior and his tuition is already paid, so he will take the prize money in cash. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Wes Craven’s 1984 horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street became an instant classic- not particularly because of the cerebral plot or the sublime acting, but because of the terrifying villain Freddy Krueger. Not only is he a killer, but we are all vulnerable to the monster because we all sleep -although after watching the movie, we tend to stay awake for as long as possible. Even if you’ve seen Elm Street quite a few times in the past thirty years, there are some behind-the-scenes trivia you might not know, like
2. The movie was inspired by real-life events.
Craven decided to make A Nightmare on Elm Street after reading a series of L.A. Times articles about a group of teenage Khmer immigrants who, after moving to the U.S. from refugee camps, died in their sleep after suffering from disturbing nightmares.
4. Freddy’s sweater is scientifically scary.
Craven designed Freddy’s striped sweater after reading in Scientific American that the human eye has difficulty recognizing those particular shades of red and green side by side. Therefore, looking at it is subliminally unsettling.
A thoroughly modern horror film shows us what really instills fear into the hearts of young adults. You know you’ve stepped into another dimension when there’s suddenly …no cell service! The spoof from Paul Gale Comedy contains NSFW language. -via Time
Dr. Linda Hazzard ran the Institute of Natural Therapeutics in Olalla, Washington, in the early 20th century. People looked to her clinic for alternative medical care, which mainly consisted of fasting as a cure-all.
Despite little formal training and a lack of a medical degree, she was licensed by the state of Washington as a “fasting specialist.” Her methods, while not entirely unique, were extremely unorthodox. Hazzard believed that the root of all disease lay in food—specifically, too much of it. “Appetite is Craving; Hunger is Desire. Craving is never satisfied; but Desire is relieved when Want is supplied,” she wrote in her self-published 1908 book Fasting for the Cure of Disease. The path to true health, Hazzard wrote, was to periodically let the digestive system “rest” through near-total fasts of days or more. During this time, patients consumed only small servings of vegetable broth, their systems “flushed” with daily enemas and vigorous massages that nurses said sometimes sounded more like beatings.
An extended stay at the Institute was only affordable to those who were well-off, and only desirable to those who were desperate to improve their health. But when Claire Williamson died while staying with Hazzard, her childhood nurse came to investigate and found that Claire had only weighed 50 pounds when she died. Furthermore, she’d left her estate to Hazzard. And Claire’s sister Dora was still at the facility. It then came to light that Claire wasn’t the first patient to die under Hazzard’s care. Read the story of the “doctor,” her bigamist husband, the mortuary that may have been in cahoots with them, and the sister held prisoner, at Smithsonian.
