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

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

In 2016, I got a tip from a friend about an eerie new phenomena spreading across the internet. Following the death of Nelson Mandela in 2013, people began reporting that they remembered him having died in jail sometime in the 1980’s. They claim to have no memory of his release from prison, his inauguration as the first black president of… Read More »Is The Mandela Effect a Psy-Op? – Preview

For over a thousand years Europeans took for granted that black swans were mythological beings, like unicorns and mermaids. The Roman poet Juvenal wrote in his Satires that the ideal wife was “rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno” or, “a rare bird on earth, like a black swan.” Black swans were assumed not to exist because no one had… Read More »On Black Swans

Moral panics are nothing new. Collective anxieties over periods of social instability manifest a primal desire to either propitiate, or punish, whatever is causing the ill fortunes. The Biblical ritual of the Scapegoat placed the sins of the tribe upon a sacrificial animal that was driven into the wilderness. Ironically, in the modern era the scapegoat became a human sacrifice.… Read More »Satanic Panic at the Disco

Few phrases in the English language evoke the unique horror associated with the words “witch hunt” in any context. That specific form of religious persecution has become synonymous with injustice, so much so that notorious criminals will routinely invoke the words when deflecting questions about legitimate charges. The historical phenomena of witch hunts peaked between the 16th and 17th Centuries… Read More »On Witch Hunts: A History of Gender, Politics, & Labor – Preview

The late 20th Century information technologies revolution democratized access to the documentation of violations of both civil and human rights on all levels of government around the globe. The facts of these conspiracies could no longer be hidden by the bottlenecks created by subject matter experts and the traditional news media. Anyone with a library card and the patience to… Read More »More On Conspiracy Theories – Preview