Elizabeth Bathory, known as the Blood Countess, was convicted of unspeakable crimes. The story goes that she tortured and killed virgin women and then bathed in the blood of her victims, believing it would preserve her youthful looks. Her legend partially inspired the tale of Dracula. Bathory is credited with killing 600 people, which is a world record for female serial killer.

However, most of what is told about Elizabeth Bathory was added to the narrative long after she died in 1614. If you go back to the actual investigation and trial, you'll find it severely lacking in evidence. There is no documentation of her torture chambers, and almost all the witnesses were powerless servants. Plus the investigator and the prosecution had powerful political motives for getting rid of Bathory. When you know all this, and how the other "facts" were added later, its easy to see how the whole incident could have grown from nothing at all. Read the Elizabeth Bathory story from another angle at Cracked.

In 1949, the Washington Post published an article about a 14-year-old boy who had been cured of demon possession. William Peter Blatty, then a college student, read the article, and many years later wrote the 1971 novel The Exorcist. Blatty had used the diary that Father Raymond Bishop, who assisted in the exorcisms, as a reference. The family had consulted their own Lutheran priest because their son "Roland Doe" (a pseudonym) heard mysterious noises and objects would move when he was present. The boy underwent an exorcism by a local Catholic priest in Maryland. The phenomena worsened, and the family went to St. Louis to consult the Jesuit order for guidance. That led to twenty exorcism sessions, led by William S. Bowdern and assisted by Father Bishop and two other priests.

When the book The Exorcist came out, and the movie two years later, supposedly based on a true story, journalists and skeptics wanted to find the real Roland Doe. It turned out that both Roland Doe and another name used in various 1949 news articles were pseudonyms, and also his hometown was misidentified to preserve his privacy. However, some background information yielded clues that various parties traced back further and further until they knew exactly who Roland Doe really was. Read how they figured it out at Skeptical Inquirer. -via Strange Company

After a year of delays, closures, and disrupted schedules, movies roared back into theaters in 2021, and  new movies debuted on streaming services in abundance. The release schedule hasn't quite caught up with regular Hollywood operations yet, but we got way more movies in 2021 than we did in 2020. Sleepy Skunk was ready, taking notes for his annual mega trailer mashup. This artful mix comes in three sections: comedy, drama, and action -or as one commenter put it, hilarious, touching, and thrilling. There are a lot of movies here. How many of them have you seen? This video contains a tiny bit of NSFW language.

See Also: Sleepy Skunk's year-end mashups from previous years.

The war-torn history of Cambodia in the 20th century is told in the ruins of a purpose-built town. Bokor Hill Station was designed as a retreat for French colonists. Of course, it was built by Cambodian labor, with hundreds of deaths among them during the construction. Bokor Hill Station, centered around the Palace Hotel and Casino, was completed in 1925, but then abandoned in the late 1940s as the colonial French saw the end of their rule. In the 1950s, elite Cambodians moved in. They left in the 1970s as the Khmer Rouge moved in. They stayed through a war with Vietnam in the '80s. But by then, Bokor Hill Station had fallen into ruin. Some Cambodians believe it should remain in ruins as a monument to its history, while others think it should be restored to its former glory, or something close. Meanwhile, tourists go to Bokor Hill Station to take pictures, which you can see at Kuriositas.

(Image credit: Flickr user michaël stone)

Your brain is a computer, you've got logic in your soul, Mr. Spock.

John C. Worsley (previously at Neatorama) is back with another master edit celebrating Christmas with Star Trek. This time, the characters from Starfleet sing "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" except it's targeted to our other favorite green-blooded fictional character. The video is taken from Star Trek: The Animated Series, while the audio clips are taken from wherever they were. The lyrics follow the original song except in places where something else would work better. I can't imagine how much work goes into one of these songs, but I, for one, am glad he took the time.  -via Metafilter

Check out Worsley's Star Trek Christmas playlist.

My late mother-in-law was quite superstitious. Every New Year's Day, she waited by the phone, hoping that the first person to call her would be a man. If a woman called first, the year would be a disaster. She believed the same about people coming to her door, although that was less likely to happen than getting a telephone call. My husband took on the duty of calling her early in the morning, just to set her mind at ease (no matter how late we stayed up). He also called the other people in the family who believed in this tradition, and at a respectable hour, we'd go see them, always making sure I was still messing with the car or something when the door was answered. I'd never heard of this superstition before then, but it appears to be one, or maybe two, of the Victorian New Year customs in a list from Mental Floss.

The New Year is a time not only for for parties, but for omens of how the year ahead will go. Most of the traditions listed are methods for predicting the future, or at least getting a clue as to whether it will be good or bad. But there's a few that grew out of the party mode, and were dropped because they were more trouble than they were worth. I'm particularly thinking of the ridiculous New Year pie, which you can read about at Mental Floss.  -via Strange Company

Enjoy a new Christmas song by Ingrid Michaelson featuring Zooey Deschanel called "Merry Christmas, Happy New Year." This is from her album Songs for the Season.

Also enjoy the video, in which Mr. Needlefelted Rabbit brings home a Christmas tree while Mrs. Needlefelted Rabbit bakes Christmas cookies. They are joined by plenty of woodland creatures celebrating the season. This sweet video was directed by Phoebe Wall and animator and fiber artist Andrea Love (previously at Neatorama).  -via Nag on the Lake

Merry Christmas from all of us at Neatorama!

For Christmas, The Hatching Cat has strung together similar stories in several animals posts with holiday themes. One is a list of cats who saved lives in New York around the holiday season between the years of 1904 and 1932. The list has six stories about six cats who saved the lives of a dozen people, plus four kittens. One story involves Patches, pictured here. Patches hung around a building and was owned by no one, until that fateful day during the Christmas season of 1912, when Patches jumped up on the shoulders of Daniel De Lena, the building resident who was the cat's worst enemy.

According to the New York Press, one morning Patches jumped on Daniel’s shoulder and then kept running to and from a rear window while excitedly meowing. At first, Daniel kicked at Patches and tried to shoo the cat away.

But finally, the cat’s persistency paid off. When Daniel got up to look out the first-floor window, he saw that the rear of the building was in flames. He ran through the four-story brick building, waking several people who lived and worked there.

De Lena afterward became Patches' best friend, and even adopted the hero cat. Read the rest of Patches' story and those of five other hero cats at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

See also: Christmas stories of hero dogs and hero horses.

A lamprey is a jawless fish that sports a sucker full of teeth for a mouth. Many lamprey species will latch onto another fish and feed on its blood. While that may seem thoroughly unpleasant, word is that they are pretty tasty themselves. In the Middle Ages, lamprey was a dish restricted to the rich, or even royalty, as Portuguese King João made the fishing of lampreys without permission illegal with a penalty of death. The fish was so prestigious, those who couldn't indulge in lamprey made a not-so-reasonable facsimile by creating a dessert shaped like a lamprey made of sugar and eggs. This is lampreia de ovos, a recipe that survives today as a Christmas tradition in Portugal.  

Lampreia de ovos was more available than the fish, but it was still expensive due to the number of eggs and the expertise required to make it. Today you can buy mass-produced lampreia de ovos, but those that are hand-made by experienced chefs are coveted and expensive. That said, if you think your cooking skills are up to it, you can find a recipe at Atlas Obscura, along with the history of lampreia de ovos.

In 1963, Bing Crosby got another big Christmas hit with "Do You Hear What I Hear?" The song was notable for being new but sounding like a classic Christmas carol. Hundreds of other artists recorded it in the decades that followed. It tells the story of how the news of a newborn messiah spread across the land. But the inspiration for the song is a very different story.

In October of 1962, Cuba and American warships faced each other in teh Caribbean over American demands that the Soviet Union remove its intercontinental ballistic missiles from Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis, as it came to be known, lasted for about five weeks and scared the wits out of everyday people. It was during this time that composer Noël Regney was charged with writing a Christmas song that would be a B-side. He wrote the lyrics and then his wife Gloria Shayne wrote the music. The simple lyrics drew inspiration from the contrast between innocent babies Regney saw on the street and the global crisis unfolding in the news. "A star dancing in the night with a tail as big as a kite" is a direct reference to an incoming missile. Read how the Cuban Missile Crisis gave us a beloved Christmas carol at Smithsonian.

This big boat looks like Noah's ark, and likewise it was constructed to sail only once, and not even on the ocean. Back before Russia had railroads, they developed a method of moving timber from the forests to the cities on the Volga and Kama rivers. They built these huge boats called belyanas from the timber, floated them downriver, and then disassembled them as their cargo. Oh yeah, there's plenty more timber inside.

The belyanas were constructed without any tar as waterproofing, and only in the middle of the 19th century did they even begin to use nails. The logs, beams, and planks were tied together for the trip. Once they arrived at a port city, the lumber was sold to fuel steamships and heat homes. The cabins on the deck that housed the crew were sold whole as houses. What I'd like to know was how the crew made it back up to the forests afterward. Read about the belyanas of Russia and see more pictures at Amusing Planet.

Charles Dickens gave us the classic tale of Christmas joy and generosity, along with ghosts, in his story A Christmas Carol. He also gave us a classic villain in Ebenezer Scrooge, a mean and miserly type we've all known at some time in our lives. The greatest literary characters are drawn from real life, and there has been plenty of study on who inspired the Scrooge character.

Dickens drew from more than one real person to make Scrooge. Literary scholars believe that his miserly ways came from member of parliament John Elwes, who lived in the previous century and was well-documented in a bestselling biography that Dickens would have no doubt read.  

The inspiration of the character's name came from the very real Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, who died in 1836, and was unknown to Dickens. How that happened is a bit weird. Read about Scroggie and Elwes and how they contributed to the character of Ebenezer Scrooge at BBC.  -via Damn Interesting

Here's a profession that's right up there with mattress tester. A team of expert ham sniffers are employed by the Spanish company Cinco Jotas. They specializes in very expensive premium quality acorn-fed Iberian hams. The ham sniffers are quality control workers who can appraise the quality of a ham just by smell. But they've been overworked lately due to increased demand.

Manuel Vega Domínguez has been sniffing hams since 1998, and in normal times will sniff around 200 hams a day, but this holiday season, he's up to 800 a day, which he refers to as "at the limit of human possibility." But he will soldier on. Read about the busy ham sniffers at Thrillist.

-via reddit

A Steller's sea eagle — a very-rare, muppet-ass looking bird native to Asia — has been spotted in Massachusetts! For more info, check out @TheBirdist https://t.co/bmsEziktIw pic.twitter.com/JTjEVQFMl3

— Wild City NYC (@wildcitynyc) December 21, 2021

Every year, birdwatchers all over spent time between December 14 to January 5 to take part in the Christmas Bird Count. The data they contribute helps to track the fates of thousands of bird species. What would it take for Nick Lund, blogger at The Birdist and advocacy and outreach manager for Maine Audubon, to abandon the Christmas Bird Count? A very rare bird sighting.

The Steller's sea eagle is the largest eagle on earth. Its wingspan can be as much as eight feet! But the Steeler's sea eagle is native to northeastern Asia, mainly Siberia, Japan, Korea, and occasionally coastal Alaska. They never wander into the continental US. But one eagle appears to have gone rogue. It was spotted in inland Alaska, then in Texas, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and then in Massachusetts. Lund, in Maine, heard about it on Monday, immediately ditched the Christmas Bird Count, picked up a few birder buddies, and drove another two hours to Massachusetts to see the eagle.

Bird enthusiasts were texting and alerting each other about the bird's location, and Lund caught up with it at Dighton Rock State Park. By noon, there were 200 or so birders set up with cameras to see the single specimen of the Steller's sea eagle, who was just chilling with some smaller bald eagles. For a birdwatcher this is like finding the Holy Grail. The story is delightful because the birders were so excited, and their enthusiasm for something we know nothing about is contagious. Read about the sighting and the banzai rush to see this bird at The Birdist. -via Metafilter

Christmas comes with a lot of stories, folklore, and media characters. Most of these characters have nothing to do with each other. There's baby Jesus, of course, and Santa Claus, but also Krampus, Rudolph, Belsnickel, the Grinch, Scrooge, the Little Drummer Boy, Yukon Cornelius, Zwarte Piet, Elf on the Shelf, the Yule Cat, Dominick The Donkey, and for some reason a Nutcracker, among others. Come up with a new Christmas character, and if you're lucky you can make tons of money. Janelle Shane is not looking to make tons of money, but to train artificial intelligence algorithms. Her latest project is generating new Christmas entities. She fed a few existing characters into the neural network, and out came three Christmas weasels. But that's not all. Go to Shane's site, AI Weirdness, to meet the Hostile Choir, Chrishmak, the Blop, and more brand new, uh, things we can write a Christmas story around.