At the almost-900-year-old village church in Sauherad, Norway, you'll find murals that are hundreds of years old. But look closely at one wall, and you'll see that it is covered with tiny devils and demons, crowded together like doodles in a bored student's notebook. This is the demonveggen, or demon wall. The mystery of the demon wall is not in how old it is or who did it, because those things are known. The real question is why.

Experts in historical preservation and restoration are dedicated to bringing history to life accurately. But in 1940, Gerhard Gotaas, a renowned conservator of medieval church art, completely painted over an artwork on one wall of the church in Sauherad and left it with the demons. Locals who knew the church were confused, but bowed to Gotaas' authority and reputation. It was assumed that he found and revealed what had been there for hundreds of years. Then World War II came along and the demons on the wall were ignored due to other priorities. Gotaas continued his work elsewhere with no complaints, and his alterations in Sauherad were only recently discovered. Now, Norwegian cultural heritage laws say Gotaas' demons must remain as a historical artwork of their own, despite the fact that they cover a painting that is 300 years older. Read the story behind the demonveggen at Atlas Obscura.

The article is part of Atlas Obscura's Fright Club series for the month of October.

Rapa Nui, now known as Easter Island, was first populated by Polynesians somewhere between 690 AD and 1200 AD. But that appears to be a singular event, as the culture of the island developed in complete isolation afterward, due to the distance it lay from other populated islands of the Pacific. That is, until 1722, when Europeans found their way to the island. Along the way, the people of Rapa Nui developed a system of writing called rongorongo, consisting of around 600 hieroglyphs.

Rongorongo was mainly used by the elite, and was not accessible to most of the population. Europeans had no clue about rongorongo documents etched in wood until a missionary found them in 1864. Tragically, by then there was no one left on Rapa Nui who could read the written language. Peruvian raids had taken many islanders away into slavery, and when they returned, they brought diseases that wrecked the native Rapa Nui population.

Writings in rongorongo are rare, with only 23 known examples still in existance. A new study takes a look at a wooden tablet from Rapa Nui known as the Berlin tablet. The rongorongo symbols on it are barely decipherable thanks to erosion and woodlice, but a 3D scan reveals the tablet, which is the largest rongorongo tablet ever found, contains 387 legible glyphs, and may have contained up to 5000 symbols before the wood was damaged. That would make it the longest rongorongo document ever found, if it were still a full document. The research was aimed at determining the age of the Berlin tablet by the species of wood and the history of its deterioration. Read about rongorongo and the Berlin tablet at The History Blog. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Rafał M. Wieczorek et al/CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

How well would you be able to spot a predator stalking you in the jungle? Or even an urban jungle? Redditor donibobes took this picture of his cat. You might assume he was taking picture of the front of the house, but the cat is there. You just can't see him because of his feline camouflage skills. I had to go to the comments for a spoiler.   

If you need to, and you probably will, you can enlarge the picture greatly here. Then imagine if this were a hungry tiger sitting in a tree you just walked by. You'd never know what hit you. 

We all know someone of whom it has been said "could drink anyone under the table." However, pushing the limits can be dangerous, and binge drinking has led to many deaths. The problem with drinking alcohol in a hurry is that you can imbibe too much before the effects show at all, and then you are suddenly too drunk to understand your limits. A competition to see who can drink more than someone else may remind you of a certain scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which Marion Ravenwood not only survived the contest, but also an attempted murder and the fact that her bar burned down. Real life is not as exciting, nor as survivable.

That said, there was a drinking contest in which two young, large, and wealthy men felt compelled to outdrink each other. Lord Louth, age 34, was visiting from England, and made the acquaintance of 32-year-old Albert Haller Tracy, Jr., of Buffalo, New York. Tracy was showing Louth around Buffalo, as the two were of comparable social standing and had much in common. However, both prided themselves on the ability to drink copious amounts of whiskey, and Louth challenged Tracy to a public showdown. They engaged a bartender to prepare and keep count of how many whiskey cocktails each man drank. Word got around, and spectators came and placed their bets between the British lord and the American. The contest made the papers for years afterward. While the story grew in later years, even the immediate reports had the men drinking an astonishing number of cocktails. Read the entire story of the drinking contest, plus notes on how it was researched, at The Daily Beast. -via Digg

(Image credit: Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast)

A horror offering from Omeleto, the short film Seek follows two sisters on a road trip who stop at an apparently empty rest area. Spoiler- it's not empty. Seriously, if it were me, I would have turned around as soon as I saw the interior. I don't mind going on the side of the road if this is the alternative. The short film doesn't waste any time on special effects (or money, either), but focuses on the buildup of dread that makes a world of difference when creeping you out is the point. Seek was directed by Aaron Morgan and has won several awards. Contains NSFW language. Read more about the short at io9.

This is a spider made from an Oreo cookie. They are pretty easy to make with pretzel sticks and a dab of icing. But nature has its own Oreo spider. National Geographic wildlife photographer Joel Sartore explains.

A species of trapdoor spider, the oreo spider does not spin webs, but instead, burrows, using its hardened abdominal disc to plug the entry to its underground home. A member of the Cyclocosmia genus, these rare spiders are the smaller, less hairy cousins of tarantulas. pic.twitter.com/LNp2Lajh5N

— Joel Sartore (@joelsartore) October 13, 2021

Cyclocosmia has a pretty fancy trapdoor, if you know what I'm saying. Now we have to wonder if the cookie took its look from the spider. Nah, we know that Oreo cookies took their look (and everything else) from Sunshine Hydrox cookies. -via Fark

Psychosocial - Baby Shark Edition. Apologies to @slipknot More at https://t.co/HhcVKqo25o pic.twitter.com/IxFj1Q79xa

— There I Ruined It (@ThereIRuinedIt) October 12, 2021

The demented mashup artist known as There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama) combined "Psychosocial" by Slipknot with "Baby Shark" in order to introduce our young children to heavy metal. At reddit, he said he made this to terrify his son for Halloween, but expects that like his other metal mashups, it may become the child's favorite song. From the YouTube page (which has since been pulled):

Sorry the comments are disabled. YouTube is rightfully confused as to whether or not this is a children's video.

I can tell you, this is not a children's video, but you might get a kick out of it. -via reddit

Sooner or later, you will run across a collection of Victorian postmortem photographs on the internet. The early days of photography overlapped a period in which families would produce numerous children, but many of them died in childhood, or even infancy. The death toll was high for every age group. We know Victorians had plenty of rituals surrounding death and mourning that seem strange to us. Arranging to have a portrait made of someone who died would often be the only photograph ever taken of them. Photographers even had special equipment used to prop up dead bodies to make them seem alive in these photographs.

Except that most of the previous paragraph is just plain bunk. It's true that pictures were made of the dead, but those are usually of a mother holding a deceased infant, or a body lying in a coffin. The vast majority of postmortem photographs you see in such galleries are either faked or real pictures of living people. They may look dead, but that is explained by how portrait photography came about in the first place. Read how postmortem photography became a thing despite evidence to the contrary at Atlas Obscura.

If you haven't seen Squid Game, it's a South Korean series on Netflix about a game show in which the stakes are very high- riches if you win, death if you don't. It's become a global sensation for its drama, violence, and social commentary... and the fact that it's available in dozens of languages. This Honest Trailer warns you of spoilers, but I doubt it gives away too much, in case you want to sign up for Netflix for Squid Game. Be warned that this Honest Trailer contains lots of violence. The entire first season of Squid Game is streaming now, and there's no decision yet on whether there will be a second season.

Vampires are supposed to be terrifying. The legends go back several hundred years of dead people who rise from their graves and stalk the living to drink their blood. But there was a sea change in the legend when vampires made it to the movies. Dracula was a well-dressed member of the noblity that struck the audience as kind of sexy. Hollywood ran with that idea, and made vampires attractive monsters that didn't always kill people, but could, so that they gave us the thrill of danger that draws audiences in. Even in supposedly scary movies, some are scarier than others.

As the vampire became an iconic movie character, comedies about them popped up. Vampires in comedies are not all that scary. Then there are movies that have entire families and communities of vampires, in order to give us something a little different. In these larger groups, there will be variations in how terrifying and how lame a character can be. You might be surprised at how many movies and TV shows have featured vampires, some of them horrifying, but others comically impotent, while a few are downright beloved. Read a list of the least scary vampires we've watched at Den of Geek.

The Merkins, who do horror film song parodies all the time, but espacially around Halloween, are back with a takeoff on Mötley Crüe's "Girls Girls Girls." Except the band is named Möstly Crüel and the song is "Kills Kills Kills." This one knocks it out of the ballpark, as the production values are top-notch, they've got the hair band moves down, the lyrics are, yeah, weird, and the music is good, too! Check out their previous slasher film parodies, "As Long as You're Bloody," "Every Life I Take," "I'll Kill You That Way," "Friends with no Faces," and others. -via Geeks Are Sexy

A lot of the mythic lore surrounding classic monsters only came about because of the movies they appear in. We have a distinct image when we think of Frankenstein, or more accurately, Frankenstein's monster, but it is nothing like the monster that Dr. Frankenstein brought to life in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. We recognize a vampire by the costume made popular by the actor Bela Lugosi, but Eastern European vampire lore bears no resemblance to the Hollywood Dracula at all.    

Also, considering how many movies have used the same monsters over and over, certain characteristics about them have become canon in our minds, like slow walking zombies shuffling up to consume our brains. Why are they like that? It's the movies. They give us an image, and it sticks, so they use that vision in our minds over and over to make sure we recognize what we see on the screen. Read about the myths of monsters that Hollywood made up at Mental Floss.

Fashion trends of the past were often so ridiculous that we have to wonder whether future generations will laugh at what we wear today. Yeah, they probably will. Taking a look at some trends of the past, we see that they are often a scheme to flaunt one's status at the expensive of others. Sometimes that idea backfired spectacularly. BlueJay explains four really weird fashion trends from previous centuries in a rather amusing way. -via Nag on the Lake

Remember when buying a box of sugary cereal meant there was a free toy inside? Remember your brother spilling cereal all over the kitchen to get the prize, and then your siblings would fight over it? It still happens, but those prizes are fairly rare these days, limited to special movie premieres or something. The premiums began to appear in cereal boxes in 1948 and were often disappointing, but some were surprisingly cool. Mr. Breakfast compiled a list ranking the 50 best cereal box prizes, and some of them make me wish my parents had bought sugary cereal. Coming in at #15:

In the 1950s, Wheaties cereal offered a snazzy little 2-inch high microscope with an adjustable focusing lens designed by General Scientific Corp. "Kids! Explore the Wonders of Nature with your 6 Power Microscope Free in this Box! Magnifies objects to 6 times normal size. See things invisible to the naked eye on leaves, flowers, insects (and) rocks."

Then I remembered that my dad was a science teacher and we had a full-size microscope. Here's #5, from 1989 or 1990:

To have a send-away offer to get a watch from a cereal wasn't unusual, but to have a working watch actually inside the box was very exciting for kids. To make matters even more incredible, it didn't display just the time. It could also show the date! From what we could find looking at pictures, there were as many as 8 different styles available over a couple years. The best ones had the Honey-Comb logo and graphic interpretations of the cereal pieces.

Yeah, you can imagine that toys containing batteries didn't last long considering the expense, but they have resurfaced as recently as 2008. Check out the list of the top 50 cereal box prizes for a walk down memory lane or a glimpse at what you missed out on. -via Fark

Halloween will be here in three weeks, and the theaters are full of horror films. But you don't want to go out. The TV schedule is full of horror films, but you don't want to spend the time. Why bother when you can get everything in them in about a minute?

Alasdair Beckett-King (previously at Neatorama) presents a horror movie about a haunted house that has everything that every haunted house movie has, except maybe the long slow buildup that you already know from seeing all the other haunted house movies. There, now you've saved yourself a couple of hours. If you were expecting a surprise twist, you may notice that the husband and wife are the same person. Surprise!