Witch Folklore From the Midwest

Mysterious Heartland "focus[es] on unsolved mysteries, true crime, ghost stories, folklore, and books and movies about those topics." Yah, sure, you betcha!

Tradition holds that most tales of witchery in the United States center around New England, thanks to Salem, Massachusetts and those buzzkilling Puritans who pretty much thought everyone who wasn't a Puritan fellated the Devil on a regular basis. Only the sweaty bayous of Louisiana rival New England in terms of black magic stories set in the U.S.

But Mysterious Heartland editor and writer Michael Keen says hold on to your scrapple for five minutes. The American Midwest has some witch lore too. And he dug up ten good ones. Now, most of them read as pure urban legend, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with having a few new weapons in your ghost-story telling arsenal next time you need to scare your nephew.

Read Keen's list and enjoy the common themes it shares not just with other witchcraft yarns, but scary stories in general. There are false accusations, angry mobs, ghosts, curses, and lots of evil revenge. Sound familiar?

Yooper?

It's a Walpurgis Night

We've yammered before about Beltane, the Gaelic holiday on May 1 that traditionally marks the start of summer, as it's roughly halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice.

But today is April 30, and across Europe, those who give a hoot are lighting fires and toasting to the "other Halloween" known as Walpurgis Night, or more frequently, Walpurgisnacht.

Sitting on the opposite end of the calendar from Halloween/Samhain, Walpurgis Night behaves in a similar manner. It's believed that the barrier between our world and other worlds, especially the spirit world, is virtually non-existent on this night. Ghosts, demons and strange things will roam the land after sunset.

A strong association with witchcraft comes with Walpurgis Night, again, echoing the All Soul's/All Saint's dichotomy of Halloween and November 1. See, the Walpurgis refers to St. Walpurga, who is feted on May 1.

Naturally, to make things fair, the night before her feast, witches gather to do er, witchy things and non-witch types build bonfires to welcome summer ... and probably ward off malicious creeps from the nether realms. And that's Walpurgis Night.

Now, The Typing Monkey can't resist an opportunity to embrace the day and indulge in a little apple-blossom scented spookiness.

Thus:

Squeal! Can you stand it? If you didn't take us up on a previous Lovecraft recommendation, this is a workable compromise.

"The Call of Cthulhu" introduces Lovecraft's richly detailed horror mythology of the ancient Earth in a dynamite blast of fantasy pulp that reads like a mystery/adventure but delivers plenty of sci-fi haymakers in the form of wack-ass other-dimensional geometry, a sea-dwelling "god," and men driven insane by a totem that summons the beast.

Afraid of Lovecraft's text? Then take a short ride with deviantART madman DrFaustusAU* -- who has turned the tale into a Seussian nightmare, complete with illustrations.

His digital presentation starts at the bottom-right of the page, and moves up and to the left, so we've linked to page two of the collection, where the story actually begins. It's well executed and hits every vital part of the story.

A paper version is due eventually.


*It's pure kismet (or is it?) that we post DrFaustusAU's creation on Walpurgisnacht, as his user name reference the legend of the mad magician who sold his soul to the devil. You see, in Gounoud's opera, Faust, act two begins with a depiction of Walpurgisnacht in the devil's realm. Naturally, it's the sexiest part of the story.

Dirty Deeds & the Men Who Investigate Them

Two book reviews that make us want both books in our possession:

Matthew Walther enjoyed Wretched Writing: A Compendium of Crimes Against the English Language by Ross and Kathryn Petras. The volume collects examples of head-scratching sentences from famous, and sometimes even reputable, authors. See what Walther's on about here via The Spectator.

The other comes from Josephine Livingstone, who we've tagged before, so I guess that makes us fans of her work. In her review of Bran Nicol’s The Private Eye: Detectives in the Movies, Livingstone is genuinely pleased that Nicol touches on a pet theory of hers: That the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo is a retelling of the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

And you know what? She's right. But it's Nicol's book she's discussing, and Livingstone gives it a scholarly scrubbing -- the kind of gimlet-eyed critical writing that doesn't happen often enough in the usual crap we read. Either way, The Private Eye sounds like catnip to us.

Not the UFO Carnival We Wanted

... still, the very phrase "UFO Carnival" made our eyes turn into hearts and we salivated like dogs in Pavlov's paddock.

Parapolitical brought the news to our attention: A press release announcing that an organization called Paradigm Research Group will be presenting a forum called the "Citizen Hearing on Disclosure" at the National Press Club in Washington DC.

The "Citizen Hearing ..." earned the term "UFO Carnival" from Parapolitical because Paradigm Research Group is behind many of the "show us the proof we know you have!" type petitions that go up on the White House petition page. Proof, that is, of a vast government conspiracy to hide the alleged truth about visitors from other planets coming to Earth.

Weirder still, and rightly highlighted by the article, is that many of the speakers are retired U.S. congress members, some flat broke from bad investments, others simply kooky and ready to share their theories, or perhaps inside information.

Give it a close read and get lost on the Web, looking up the bios of some of the folks participating.


[A firm handshake to The Fortean Times for the info.]

Thank You, Donald J. Sobol

There are two Leroy Browns in pop history. Well, two that we know of: Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, who receives a royal beatdown within the confines of Jim Croce's jangly, loose pop hit.

The other is Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown, boy detective. Encyclopedia Brown's creator, Donal J. Sobol died July 11, 2012, but the news only came to public attention the 16th. Any kid who likes to read has probably spent some time trying to solve the mysteries that Brown cracked.

The books were not only a great way to encourage readers, and critical thinking, they were also a gateway for many into other mystery-themed writing, telelvision and film.

Coolest of all is the deatil in The Washington Post's obituary for Sobol: He was still writing the books and one final Encyclopedia Brown book is due out this year.

We didn't realize how much we'll miss Sobol until now. It's too often like that.

Exit Mr. Bradbury

He had to go sometime. His short stories are always worth reading. Dig into the novels.

[Image courtesy of Poe Foreward]

Many Kinds of Close Encounters, Apparently

The sordid tale of former U.S. Senator and vice-presidential candidate John Edwards' affair with a videographer named Rielle Hunter has provided miles of column inches for newspapers, magazines, tabloids and Websites since the story broke.

Old and often repeated, the story of infidelity and apparent cracks in the moral character of a public official (gasp, faint, etc.) is far less interesting than a detail of the scandal brought to light via the court testimony.

That detail being that Rielle Hunter, the videographer with whom Edwards fathered a child out of wedlock, wanted to claim she had been abducted by aliens. This was part of an effort to deny that Hunter and Edwards had been romantically involved.

The Typing Monkey wants to make it clear to any politicians, celebrities, spin doctors, historical revisionists and public relations flacks that we think this is a marvelous idea.

Have a starlet who needs to lay low in rehab for a few weeks? Tell us she is taking time off to document sightings of the chupacabra.

Grassy knoll and second shooter theories are no more provable or easy to deny than, say, a coven of Satanists eager to assassinate the first Catholic president. See? You really can't handle the truth. [You're mixing up your Oliver Stone films. -- ed.]

We'd like to posit that William H. Seward got such a deal on Alaska when he purchased it from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million because Russia agreed to evacuate all of the Yetis residing there, hoping to bring them all back to Siberia so they could create an army of abominable snowmen. The U.S. got a gold rush untroubled by Yetis, Russia gained an army of cryptids.

The Loch Ness Monster attacked and sank Nazi U-Boats during the war? Why not?

Take any historical controversy or even minor event and make it more exciting by adding paranormal explanations and interference. Our tabloid political climate could use some actual tabloid fodder instead of this banal baby-mama drama.

Many believe the famous Patterson-Gimlin footage, taken in 1967, is definitive proof of the existence of Sasquatch. What they fail to realize is that Bigfoot is, in fact, a courier on his way to pick up The Pentagon Papers from then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

The Inscrutable Charm of "Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files"

In 2010, the Syfy network premiered a reality program that combined the nerds-blowing-stuff-up charm of Discovery's Mythbusters with the ludicrous phantom chasing of the network's own Ghosthunters.

Fact of Faked: Paranormal Files is reality television at it's best and worst -- both illuminating and frustratingly stagy and convinced of it's own authenticity. It's also supremely addictive to viewers willing to let go and enjoy the show's Law & Order-esque predictability.

The premise of Fact of Faked is simple: Six experts in disparate fields team up to investigate allegedly supernatural events caught on film, with the goal of trying to recreate those events and thus expose them as hoaxes.

That's where the Mythbusters angle plays in. In each episode, the cast members/investigators split into two teams, with each taking apart the details of footage they've screened, and attempting to reverse engineer what they've seen.

Many viewers probably disregard the major message of Fact or Faked. That is: Just about every alleged sighting of a cryptid, UFO or supernatural apparition is either an accidental misidentification of something horribly mundane, or a big fat fake. And those fakes look surprisingly easy to construct based on what the stars of the show manage to pull off with average resources.

To sate those viewers, and because this is a product of the Syfy network, the showrunners frequently add a third act to each segment in which the teams consider the possibility that the footage or pictures they're scrutinizing depict actual supernatural occurrences.

That portion of the investigation is posited as a control aspect to their experiments, but really it's a way to fill a few minutes with unnecessarily amped-up tension that rarely results in anything notable.

As soon as they switch to night-vision -- Fact or Faked's shorthand for spooky time -- is when any sliver of legitimacy disappears. All they ever get out of the control test is an agreement that those who recorded the video believe they saw something extraordinary.

Fact or Faked does much better when, in those instances where they've made clear that the footage was a hoax, they confront those responsible and try to get them to admit the hornswoggling. It's never mean spirited or hammy. These "c'mon dude" moments instead come off like a school teacher trying to elicit a confession from the kid who made fart noises during a math test.

That the six people cast in this show do it all with such conviction is enough of a hook. Theirs is a universe where irony doesn't exist and the kooks get as much airtime as the sane. Why not?

The first episode of season three airs April 17, 2012. Older episodes are online via Syfy.com.

Time for Comics

Let us break up the long sad string of obituaries we've been documenting and mourning here and move on to something much lighter: free comic books.

The Digital Comics Museum is a great place to spend time getting lost in the public domain world of vintage comic books.

You don't have to love superhero tales, as the world of mainstream comics prior to the 1960s hosted any number of topics having little or nothing to do with boy scouts from other planets or deranged millionaires deciding to rid their cities of crime.

There are plenty of hero titles, but some are war stories or Old West glories. Horror and suspense/mystery titles abound, as well as quite a few jungle-adventure serials.

Other titles embrace the "comics" aspect in the traditional Sunday comics sense, where the punchline and the sight gag rule.

The romance titles from publishers such as Charlton, Prize and Ace can be quite fun too. Some dare to document genuine romantic problems facing women and men, others go scandalous and some, as in issue 70 of "Young Romance" from Prize go the romance novel route.

And the previously mentioned Charlton Comics hosted a number of now legendary artists and writers at a time when they were just trying to get started in the industry. The cover of Charlton's "The Thing!"  (issue 14) was done by Steve Ditko before he was Steve Ditko. [What? -- ed.]

Either way, you get an army of grotesque bat-men attacking terrified humans as a group of ancient Egyptians give chase. Neat!

Dig in and have fun. It's free.

From the Fortean News Desk

Maybe not so much Fortean as much as the "Possible Con Artist, Tax Dodger or Guy Who Owes the Mob a Bunch of Money Desk" but no matter. The point is, there's a man in jail in Utah who doesn't really exist. Which is to say, he has no traditional identification, won't identify himself, and no one else has come forward to claim him.

Read all about it.