The Appalachian mountains are ancient. In geological terms, this range of mountains first formed over one billion years ago. As tall as the Rockies at one time, erosion has reduced the Appalachians to the bare bones of a mountain range. The history of the Earth is exposed in the undulating layers of sedimentary rocks, volcanic rocks, and slivers of ancient… Read More »Feral?
Weird News has always been a personal passion of mine. As a kid, when I went to the grocery store with my father, he’d always buy me a copy of the World Weekly News. He wanted to encourage me to read and believed analyzing the absurd often transparently fictitious stories would help develop my critical thinking skills. I did read… Read More »The Other Dimension Radio Story
Wild men, woodboogers, and Indian devils, are all terms that were applied to a phenomenon that can be traced back to the Woodwose of Medieval English lore. The antagonist of the earliest known epic in what we now know as the English language presents a hero who defeats a cave-dwelling wild man. The legend of Gilgamesh, the earliest known narrative… Read More »The Bigfoot Paradox
It is the easiest thing in the world to be a skeptic. Just reject any implausible story as false and give it no more thought. People experience delusions, they have psychotic episodes, or just lie their way out of our shared reality. A skeptic can casually dismiss most of what Charles Forte called High Strangeness as some combination of mental… Read More »Seeing is Believing
In the folklore of the American colonies there exist so many specimens of primeval megafauna, apex predators, and fantastical creatures to comprise a unique sub-genre of bestiaries, the most famous being Fearsome Critters, published in 1939. A compendium of the tall tales told in lumber camps across the North Eastern U.S., Fearsome Critters (and its 1910 predecessor Fearsome Creatures of… Read More »What in the Hell is the Jersey Devil
Behind the thin plastic shell of the Modern idea of Christmas as the “most magical time of the year” (ding-dong! ding-dong!) is a well known trope that Christmas is an appropriation of the Pagan midwinter festivals known as the Yuletide. Winters were especially cruel in Northern Europe during the Middle Ages, and the odds were very grim for a child who got lost in the woods after sundown.
The first Hellfire Club was founded in 1719 at the George and Vulture tavern in the City of London by Philip Wharton a popular and powerful politician, who had inherited considerable wealth and power when he was about the age most people are learning to drive. Both well educated and intelligent, Wharton entered the Irish House of Lords when he… Read More »The Hellfire Club and the Art of Blasphemy
Running from the tip of Florida to the top of Maine, US Route 1 was the first major construction project of the interstate highway system. Begun in the early 20th Century, the original Baltimore-Washington Boulevard was already obsolete within a decade. The increased traffic from military convoys during WWI continued as the University of Maryland moved its undergraduate campus from… Read More »The Haunted Highway: Route 1 and the Legend of the Goatman – Preview
In the introduction to The Mystery of the Sherman Ranch: Horror or Hoax, I mentioned the notable parallels between the Native American legends of Skinwalkers and certain secret societies indigenous to West Africa. Sensationalized accounts of the mysterious events documented in George Knapp’s 2005 book Hunt for the Skinwalker have brought international fame to an aspect of Navajo culture that… Read More »Human Leopard Societies and the Politics of the Taboo – Preview
For the most part, the articles I publish are the product of a traditional journalistic methodology. I observe a given phenomena, investigate it, and document my findings. Often the sources I’m working from are second or third hand, when I do get to interview primary sources they rarely want to talk on the record. This subject matter lends itself to… Read More »Who’s Afraid of the Shadow People? – Preview
