Sami Campagnano saw that her neighbors had several full-size skeletons in their yard for Halloween decorations. Cool! But even cooler, those skeletons moved around. Oh, not that you could see them, but each day they arre posed in a different scene.

People who are blind can become very good at negotiating the world by touch, but that presents real hazards while cooking, specifically sharp knives and burning heat. Kevin Chiam designed some kitchen products to mitigate these dangers during his final year at the National University of Singapore. You can see that if these came to market, sighted people would use them, too. Chiam explains the design behind the products at his website.  -via reddit

Among the many quality anthology TV series of the the mid-20th century, few people today are familiar with the short-lived Thriller. The show ran only two years, from 1960 to 1962, and was hosted by the legendary horrormeister Boris Karloff.

Thriller originally presented little more than quite ordinary tales on crime and mystery, the content and format (including a host and his opening narration) being in apparent imitation of the popular contemporary program Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  However, it soon became a showcase for gothic horror stories, many of which were based on works by authors who were the greatest writers in the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Cornell Woolrich, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, Richard Matheson, and Charlotte Armstrong.

As would also occur later during the 1960’s with the gothic daytime television series Dark Shadows, Thriller’s producers quickly came to realize that television viewers of that era had a pronounced taste for horror and the supernatural, as opposed to mere mystery and crime drama, and there came a sea change in Thriller as a result. Suddenly, instead of mere mystery and ‘cops and robbers’ intrigue, there soon appeared a host of zombies, witches, demons, vampires, ghosts, ghouls, sorcerers, voodoo practitioners, and other unworldly beings and things, with a much greater thematic emphasis on supernatural horror.

The effect was astounding. Thriller quickly became one of the first, if not the first, ‘must-see TV’ programs of the 1960’s, and it has since garnered a cult following that is active to this day.

If you enjoyed The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, you'll love watching Thriller. Read a full rundown of the TV series, including full videos of the best episodes, in an article by Neatoramanaut WTM.

Trick-or-treating can be a  bit different when you live in Nunanvut. In addition to watching out for traffic, you have to keep clear of polar bears! The town of Arviat cancelled outdoor Halloween activities for years because of bears, and now armed guards surround the town during trick-or-treat.

Wars have been fought for a lot of dumb reasons, but when political, religious, or ethnic tensions are inflamed, it only takes a spark to light a conflagration. In medieval Italy, all those tensions were sprung into war by a bucket. To be honest, the two regions were already fighting, but the bucket incident blew everything up, drawing thousands of fighters to their deaths in the battle of Zappolino. It was called the War of the Bucket. Be aware that the last minute of this video is an ad, so it's not as long as it seems. -via Digg

The Avoca Museum in Altavista, Virginia, sits on what was once the property of Colonel Charles Lynch. In 2005, a graveyard was discovered in the grounds. Now known as the Enslaved Persons Cemetery, it holds at least 32 graves, which were once marked by local stones without inscriptions. The stones were still there, but had been moved from the graves. Museum director Michael Hudson is committed to preserving and honoring the cemetery.  

In order to find the exact location of the bodies beneath Avoca’s grounds, to illuminate the past for the broader Lynchburg community, a geolocation radar tool was used to detect the depth of compromised soil (unsurprisingly, usually six to seven feet under). This meant the graves didn’t have to be dug up, an option Hudson says was out of the question. Other general clues that it was a cemetery included the irregularly shaped rocks, a trend found in slave cemeteries across several states, which tended to be naturally occurring field stones like marble and granite found in the vicinity of the slave holder’s house.

At Avoca, Hudson says, “Some of them are in the shape of a human eye, kind of like an oval with points on the end.” According to local African-American families, growing up they were told that the purpose of this rock shape was to symbolize that the eyes of the dead watch over the living. The deliberate patterns in these rocks was a black mortuary tradition usually marking adult graves. Children’s graves were demarcated by a stone even more cherished; in some family circles, pink quartz indicated a child’s grave. At Avoca in particular, two quartz markers were uncovered, visibly unchanged from their natural state. “The graves we have that are covered with pink quartz, two of those graves are short. [They’re] tiny and little graves,” Hudson says.

The cemetery at Avoca is more or less like many other cemeteries of enslaved people that are still being discovered across the South. Read more about them at Atlas Obscura.

(Image Courtesy of Avoca Museum)

Faking one's own death, or "pseudocide," is most often a scheme to escape the consequences of legal, financial, or marital problems. But not always. Without those powerful incentives, it's more likely that a pseudocide plan will be exposed, and there have been enough cases that psychologists have ideas of what may be going on in someone's head. In our modern, super-connected world, the "death" is often for a limited audience, as in one's online personality. Sometimes it's a sign of factitious disorder (FD), once known as Munchausen Syndrome, in which a person is seeking attention. Sometimes it's a cruel prank. Researcher Sheldon Solomon says some pseudocides are about finding meaning in life.

“The preponderance of pseudocide is for fraud purposes,” Solomon said. “But you could also imagine, from a psychodynamic existential point of view, that for some folks it could be an attractive way of wiping the proverbial slate clean in a life that, from one’s own perspective, doesn’t seem to be meaningful, and from which it’s hard to derive the feeling that you have value.”

In most cases, our posthumous fantasies imagine that we’re greatly missed and treasured, which aligns with what Solomon and his colleagues have discovered about basic mindsets in life. “Our view, based on our work, is basically that people, by virtue of being conscious—and therefore, to varying degrees, aware of the inevitability of their own demise—go to extraordinary lengths to perceive that life has meaning and that we have value.”

Read about the various reasons for faking one's own death at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Angelica Alzona/Gizmodo)

A cat strutted her stuff on the catwalk during a fashion show in Istanbul. Watch her graceful strides as she shows off a classic fur coat. Granted, she gets distracted by the models passing by, and has to stop for sudden grooming needs, but that's what you'd expect from a feline fashionista. -via Tastefully Offensive

Redditor DraftDraw posted this picture, possibly taken during New York Comic Con, featuring two versions of the same comic book superhero. There's a lot going on here. First, there's the contrast between the Golden Age Aquaman from the comic books and the Jason Momoa movie version. Mera seems either shocked, intrigued, or attracted. Maybe it's the dolphins, or the sense of fun. The staging is obviously that of the Distracted Boyfriend meme, gender-swapped for your pleasure. That makes it resemble the You vs. The Guy She Told You Not to Worry About meme. A good time was had by all.

When you think of the phenomenal popularity of pets dressed in Halloween costumes, you can thank internet memes, iPhones, Instagram, Amazon, and Etsy. They make it easy to find the most clever costumes and share them with everyone. But the fun of seeing animals dressed in clothing goes much further back. We know that Harry Whittier Frees made a living dressing up cats 100 years ago, because his photographs are still around. The practice of dressing up pets is still much older.   

During the excavation of the tomb of King Cuo of Zhongshan, who was king of China from 327 to 309 BC, archeologists found two large dogs buried in jeweled collars. The greyhound of Louis XI, king of France from 1423 to 1483, wore a red velvet collar with 20 pearls and 11 rubies, and Louis’s successor, Charles VIII, had robes made for his dog and marmot, according to Medieval Pets. Queen Victoria dressed her dog in a “scarlet jacket and blue trousers,” as she wrote in her diaries, right around the time that dog couture shops became a thing in Paris.

There were plenty of other milestones in the custom of dressing up our pets in costumes, as you'll see at Vox.

A father who is totally embracing modern technology discovers that Google Home had saved a year's worth of data, including his 5-year-old son's questions. He is charmed by his son's curiosity about the world, and appreciates the funny parts.

Rowan's questions are adorable. On the other hand, it's a bit creepy to think that all these commands to an app are recorded for someone else to find, and for Google to analyze and market.

My children came to me with incessant questions about the world throughout their childhoods, which I tried my best to answer, even if I had to look it up. As a result, they thought I was the repository of all the world's wisdom. They know better now, but I wouldn't trade that experience for all the chocolate. -via Laughing Squid

The normal life cycle of a salmon is to swim upriver and spawn right before they die. That leaves a lot of dead salmon in popular spawning areas. In the late 1980s, university students began studying the salmon population at Hansen Creek in Alaska. They counted and measured the dead salmon, and then by protocol, they flung the carcasses up onto the north-facing bank of the stream, in order to prevent the same fish from being counted again. The reason the protocol is to throw all the fish to one side of the stream and not the other was a long-term experiment in forest growth. Now the results are in. 

Over the past 20 years, researchers across the Northwest have shown that salmon play an essential role in forests: Trees next to salmon-bearing streams appear to grow better than their salmon-deprived counterparts, and the nutrients salmon bring from the ocean make their way into the needles and wood of trees. But this experiment, described in a recently published paper, led by Tom Quinn, a professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington, proves a basic fact: More salmon means faster growing trees.

We learned in grade school that Native Americans taught the Pilgrims to plant corn with a dead fish for fertilizer. That method still works today, even better than fertilizers that contain the same plant nutrients.

Yes, dead fish or fish guts present a problem in shipping and storage for agriculture or gardening, but the research highlights the importance of maintaining a population of wild salmon as well as forest creatures, such as bears, who transport those fish inland. -via reddit

(Image credit: Maitegonza)

In case you don't see the caption, it says,

“Stella’s home! I can’t wait for my girl to run directly into my arms like she always do—oh, right... that.”

A dog must have her priorities. This is Stella, Queen of the Sploot. She's a yellow Lab who lives in Maine. She's had knee replacements, but that hasn't slowed her down at all. Let's take another look at Stella in the leaf pile.



See more videos of Stella at Instagram. -via Metafilter, where you'll find more canine joy links.

Halloween thrill experiences like a haunted house or a haunted farm are more popular than ever. They range from PTA fundraisers staffed by students to professional productions with their own facilities. The people who work at these attractions have a lot of fun, but it's a peculiar job with peculiar perks and challenges.  

Getting hit in the face is one of the many occupational hazards of being a haunt actor. If actors are doing their jobs really well and scaring the living daylights out of people, it could trigger a “fight or flight” response in their patrons. The former reaction is when things start to get pretty scary—not just for customers, but for the actors, too. “They forget that they paid to have fun and play along with the show, and that they are not really in any danger,” Lowry says. “I’ve seen some hairy situations with drunk folks showing up and getting rough with actors.”

Jacob Hall, a former haunted house actor in San Antonio, Texas, wrote about his experience with drunk customers for Esquire. “On Friday and Saturday nights, the bar-dwellers came out. So did their inner demons. The first time I was ever punched in the face came courtesy of a frat bro,” he wrote. “The scariest thing in a haunted house is often the people who visit it.”

On the flip side, while the actors never deliberately cause injury, they feel a sense of triumph when a visitor is so scared they fall down -or soil themselves. It happens. Read about the job of a haunted house actor at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Paul Budd)

The winners of the 2018 Best Illusion of the Year contest have been announced. Once again, mathematician Kokichi Sugihara of Meiji University has taken the top honor, with his illusion called Triply Ambiguous Object. It's just a flat picture, with a 3D object drawn on it. But that object looks different in the two mirrors placed near it. You think you know what the object looks like, but when it is rotated, it looks ...different. Trying to suss out the individual shapes in the mirror images will tire you. So take a look at the second place illusion, from David Phillips, Priscilla Heard, and Christopher Tyler. It's called Movement Illusion with a Twist.



Cosmic! You can see all the top ten finalists from the contest here.  -via Gizmodo

See also: Best Illusion winners from previous years.