PARANORMAL & MONSTER LEGENDS

[Dr.Teufel Geist]

sure, any ways ...Haunted Muncie

Apartment on West 6th - A family moved into the possible haunted home on West 6th Street in Muncie after the landlord lowered the rent. He explained to the family that previous tenants didn't want to stay longer than 2 months. After the family had lived there for a while, the children were scared of the upstairs playroom because of the old lady that lived there. The old lady that the kids were seeing was a ghost. Later unexplained happenings were pacing sounds in the playroom, kids tucked into bed, and items in the kitchen, such as mayonnaise being moved. A boy had died in the bedroom and his mother died there years afterwards. I have also heard about weird occurrences like past tenants waking up and having some sort of oil dumped on them. The new tenant of the home believes it's haunted also. There is a road in Jay County, Indiana where if you drive it from one direction, it's a normal road. If you drive from the opposite direction, there looks to be blood forever stained on the road. It has been given the name " Blood Road ."   

[Dr.Teufel Geist]

MERCY BROWN,THE RHODE ISLAND VAMPIRE




Mercy Brown, the Rhode Island Vampire
By Jeff Belanger

"There are such beings as vampires, some of us have evidence that they exist. Even had we not the proof of our own unhappy experience, the teachings and the records of the past give proof enough for sane peoples," said Dr. Seward's diary in Bram Stoker's Dracula. It was Bram Stoker who took the vampire of folklore and made him beautiful, powerful, and sexy. There were cases of vampires all over the world before, during, and even after Dracula both seduced and frightened us -- one of these cases was Mercy Brown, the Rhode Island vampire.

Mercy Brown has the distinction of being the last of the North American vampires -- at least in the traditional sense. Mercy Lena Brown was a farmer's daughter and an upstanding member of rural Exeter, Rhode Island. She was only 19 years old when she died of consumption on January 17, 1892. On March 17, 1892, Mercy's body would be exhumed from the cemetery because members of the community suspected the vampire Mercy Brown was attacking her dying brother, Edwin.

For help with Mercy Brown and vampirism, I spoke with Dr. Michael Bell, a folklorist and author of Food for the Dead, a book that explores the folklore and history behind Mercy Brown as well as several other cases of New England vampires. Many people's understanding of what a vampire is comes mostly from Bram Stoker's work and Anne Rice novels, but the traditional vampire is actually quite different.

So what is a traditional vampire? "Paul Barber wrote a book called Vampires, Burial, and Death," Dr. Bell said. "He gives a forensic interpretation of vampire incidents. They're a natural phenomenon that wasn't understood by the people at the time because they didn't really know what happens to the bodies under different conditions. His definition is that a vampire is your classic scapegoat. I think his definition, if I can paraphrase it, is something like a vampire is a corpse that comes to the attention of a community during a time of crisis, and is taken for the cause of that crisis." Vampires of folklore were not the romantic characters of modern cinema -- they were the walking dead who literally drained the life out of their victims. Attacking vampires was a way for a community to physically embody and fight an evil that is plaguing them. In the case of Mercy Brown, that evil was consumption.

During the 1800s, consumption, or pulmonary tuberculosis, was credited with one out of four deaths. Consumption could kill you slowly over many years, or the disease could come quickly and end your life in a matter of weeks. The effects were devastating on families and communities. Dr. Bell explained that some of the symptoms of consumption are the gradual loss of strength and skin tone. The victim becomes pale, stops eating, and literally wastes away. At night, the condition worsens because the patient is lying on their back, and fluid and blood may collect in the lungs. During later stages, one might wake up to find blood on one's face, neck, and nightclothes, breathing is laborious, and the body is starved for oxygen.

Dr. Bell feels there is a direct connection between vampire cases and consumption. He said, "The way you look personally is the way vampires have always been portrayed in folklore -- like walking corpses, which is what you are, at least in the later stages of consumption. Skin and bones, fingernails are long and curved, you look like the vampire from Nosferatu."

Consumption took its first victim within the Brown family in December of 1883 when Mercy's mother, Mary Brown, died of the disease. Seven months later, the Browns' eldest daughter, Mary Olive, also died of consumption. The Browns' only son, Edwin, came down with consumption a few years after Mary Olive's death and was sent to live in the arid climate of Colorado to try and stop the disease. Late in 1891, Edwin returned home to Exeter because the disease was progressing -- he essentially came home to die. Mercy's battle with consumption was considerably shorter than her brother's. Mercy had the "galloping" variety of consumption -- her battle with the disease lasted only a few months. Mercy was laid to rest in Chestnut Hill Cemetery behind the Baptist church on Victory Highway.

After Mercy's funeral, her brother Edwin's condition worsened rapidly, and their father, George Brown, grew more frantic. Mr. Brown had lost his wife and two of his daughters, and now he was about to lose his only son. Science and medicine had no answers for George Brown, but folklore did. For centuries prior to Mercy Brown there have been vampires. The practice of slaying these "walking dead" began in Europe -- some of the ways people dealt with vampires was to exhume the body of the suspect, drive a stake through the heart, rearrange the skeletal remains, remove vital organs, or cremate the entire corpse. All of these rituals involve desecrating the mortal remains. The practice happened with enough regularity that the general population felt it could cure, or at the very least help, whatever evil was overwhelming them.

So much death had plagued the Brown family that poor George Brown probably felt he was cursed in some way. It wouldn't take too many chats with those empathizing with George's plight to come up with a radical idea to stop the death. Maybe the Brown family was under vampire attacks from beyond the grave. Was Mercy Brown the vampire, or was it Mercy's mother or sister? George Brown was willing to dig up the body of his recently deceased daughter, remove her heart, burn it, and feed the ashes to his son because he felt he had no other choice.

In Dr. Bell's book, Food for the Dead, he recounts an extensive interview he conducted with Everett Peck, a descendent of Mercy Brown and life-long resident of Exeter, Rhode Island. "Everett heard the story from people who had been there [at the exhumation of Mercy Brown] -- who were alive at the time," Dr. Bell said. "The newspaper [Providence Journal] says they exhumed all three bodies, that is, Mercy's mother, her sister who had died before her, and Mercy. Everett said they only dug up Mercy. He implied that there was some sign that Mercy was the one -- that's the supernatural creeping into his story. Everett said that after they had dug her up, [they saw that] she had turned over in the grave -- but there's no mention of that in the newspaper or the eyewitness accounts."

Mercy Brown died before embalming became a common practice. During decomposition, it is possible for bodies to sit up, jerk -- even sounds can emit from them because bloating can occur, and if wind escapes by passing over the vocal chords, there could be groans.

We don't know exactly what position her body was in on that day in March when George Brown, and some of his friends and family, came to examine Mercy's body. We do know that she looked "too well preserved."

"There's a suggestion in the newspaper that she wasn't actually interred in the ground," Dr. Bell said. "She was actually put in an above-ground crypt, because bodies were stored in the wintertime when the ground was frozen and they couldn't really dig. When the thaw came, they would bury them. So it's possible that she wasn't even really interred."

Her visual condition prompted the group to cut open her chest cavity and examine her innards. Dr. Bell said, "They examined her organs. The newspaper said her heart and liver had blood in it. It was liquid blood, which they interpreted as fresh blood." Bell explained how forensics can clarify how blood can coagulate and become liquid again, but at the time, the liquid was taken as evidence that Mercy was indeed a vampire and the one draining the life from Edwin and possibly other consumption victims in the community.

Dr. Bell said, "They cut her heart out, and as Everett said, they burned it on a nearby rock. Then according to the newspaper, they fed them [the ashes of the heart] to Edwin." The folklore said that destroying the heart of a vampire would kill it, and by consuming the remains of the vampire's heart -- the spell would be broken and the victim would get well.

The community's vampire slaying had failed to save Edwin -- he died two months later, but maybe it helped others in the community? Dr. Bell's view on Mercy Brown is that she was the scapegoat author Paul Barber discussed. Dr. Bell said, "She basically absorbs the ignorance, the fears, and in some cases the guilt that people have because their neighbors, friends, and family are dying, and they don't understand why and they can't stop it."

Mercy Brown is arguably North America's most famous vampire because she is also the most recent. The event caused such a stir in 1892 because newspapers like the Providence Journal editorialized that the idea of exhuming a body to burn the heart is completely barbaric in those modern times.

As Dr. Bell said, "Folklore always has an answer -- it may not be the scientifically valid answer, but sometimes it's better to have any answer than none at all."

[Dr.Teufel Geist]

RHODE ISLAND VAMPIRES PART 2

Mercy Brown wasnt the first, I dug these up earlier


Beginning in 1799 and ending in 1892 you can find various accounts of six local vampires. Some of the records are very detailed and with some, there is only a simple short statement to be found. All these stories have one thing in common; the Rhode Island Vampires were all women in the first blush of youth. They are gruesome accounts of family tragedies and brutal mutilations in often failed attempts to stop and kill the vampires.

The first record is a short cryptic request made by a Mr. Stephen Staples to the Cumberland Town Council in 1796 to "try an experiment" in an attempt to save one daughter's life by digging up his other daughter who had recently died. There is no explanation of what the experiment was, but reading the other accounts of how vampires were dealt with we can assume it was similar.

The next vampire case was recorded in 1799. Sarah Tillinghast's fate was revealed in a prophetic dream her father Stuckely "Snuffy" Tillinghast had some months before tragedy struck the family. A dream in which half of his orchard died. The Tillinghast's were well to do farmers in Exeter, and Sarah was the first of the Tillinghast children to die. Soon others fell sick, and all complained that Sarah was returning at night to press on their chests. By one account, six of the 14 Tillinghast children died and a seventh was taken ill before neighbors convinced Mr. Tillinghast to dig up those who had died. When they did so, Sarah was found to have fresh blood in her heart and veins. Unlike European tradition where the vampire was killed with a stake through the heart, in New England the solution was to burn the vampire's heart. When the gruesome task was done the bodies where reburied, but still some accounts state the seventh child died. Other records show only four of the 14 children died, and some researchers speculate the others were added in legends to match the dream.



The reports of vampires moved to Foster in 1827 when the body of the 19-year-old daughter of Captain Levi Young was exhumed after others in the family became ill. The remains of Nancy Young where burned and the fumes inhaled by the family members as a cure and protection, still four more of the family's eight children died. Peacedale was the next town to be struck. Believing his recently deceased daughter Ruth Ellen to be a vampire, William G. Rose had her body exhumed and her heart cut out and burned in 1874. Onward the vampires and the gruesome solutions marched to West Greenwich. There in RI Historical Cemetery No. 2 you can find the grave of Nelly L. Vaughn who died at the age of 19 in 1889. Legends hold that nothing will grow on her grave and it is cursed.

[Sean]

We've discussed things like ghosts & bigfoot, but I'm curious...  What do you think is more likely to exist? >>>>>>>

   Well, you know where I stand on the former... and believe me, there wasn't a day during the 1st year after my 'sighting' that I didn't try to convince myself it was all in my head---------but onto the latter... BIGFOOT.  My wife and I are on our honeymoon.  We took 2 weeks... the 1st week was a trek from San Francisco to Seattle up the Pac Coast highway and the 2nd week was an Alaskan Cruise out of Seattle (which I completely recommend as long as you get an outside cabin with a balcony)..... anyway, we're leaving Frisco by way of Sonoma Valley and I forget if we had just left out of Eureka, CA and headed for Oregon-----------or if we were on our way TO Eureka from Sonoma, but it was definitely Northern CA.  There were no other cars on the road that we could see either ahead of us or behind... it was getting late, near dusk.  I really didn't want to be on this road after dark because it was SO winding and I KNEW there was plenty of wildlife to run into with my rental car after the sun set.  We were driving at a very low point, elevation-wise and the road snaked all over the place in what I would describe as a canyon of sorts.  I was anxious to get closer to civilization... but as I looked around at the landscape, I got chills.  I swear I had been here before.  Now the furthest west I had been prior was Chicago-----so it didn't make sense.  I asked my wife if it was OK that I pull over and walk around a bit.  She thought I needed to stretch my legs-----but what I really wanted was to solve my deja vu moment.  I SWEAR I had seen this place before.  BEEN there before... maybe more than once-----which was impossible.  I walked around a bit through a dry ravine and some fallen timber, then I returned back to the car and got in and jotted some details down in our travel log.  After the trip, the 1st thing I did was google the place where we were on Rt. 1.... and wouldn't you know it------I was (unbeknownst to me) at the place of the infamous Patterson Film, which I HAD seen a hundred times in photos and on TV with Leonard Nimoy on those 'In Search Of' shows!!  And that's why I felt like I had been there.  I had a big laugh at my own expense.  I gotta tell you-----I could totally picture a sasquatch lumbering across my field of view there.... and with the sun setting behind the rim of the canyon------it was a pretty eerie visual at the time.  All I would have needed was to hear some blood curdling shriek and I would have had to change my drawers.

[Dr.Teufel Geist]

BOYD'S SANATORIUM


http://www.sgha.net/nm/lascruces/boyds.html

[Dr.Teufel Geist]

WITCHES HOLLOW ROAD


http://www.lostdestinations.com/witches.htm

[Dr.Teufel Geist]

DEVIL'S HOUSE/SAPPHIRE WOODS


http://www.lostdestinations.com/saphwood.htm

[werebeast]

I've had two wierd experiences. Whether they were paranormal or not I don't know.

When I was about eleven, I had a habit of staying up late in the summertime. One night about 12 AM or so, possibly later, I was watching movies when nature called. I got up to go to the bathroom. While there, I heard my cassette player come on. No one else was awake, and even if they were by the way the bathroom was located no one could have gotten up and gone into the living room without me noticing. When I went back to the living room to investigate I found my boglin perched on top of my cassette player. The boglin was nowhere near the player when I left. Strange.

Another time I was walking down the road with my parents' friends' five year old little girl. We looked up and noticed something strange in the sky. A grey silvery thing. We both freaked and headed to my house, which was closest. When we got there I figured we were safe. The problem was the girl was scared and wouldn't calm down until she had her stuffed Garfield. So I had to go back out, risking alien abduction and anal probes to go to her house, get the stuffed Garfield and bring it back. The whole time I was creeped out, half expecting to encounter some bug eyed space demon along the way.

[Dr.Teufel Geist]

CLINTON ROAD AND DEMONS ALLEY


http://www.lostdestinations.com/clinton.htm

[Unknown Primate]

Werebeast, that was a heroic thing to do!

[Dr.Teufel Geist]

DOVER MENTAL CAGE OF HURD PARK


http://www.lostdestinations.com/cage.htm

[werebeast]

Werebeast, that was a heroic thing to do!

Thanks. I  loved that kid like a little sister. Once she came running up to my house with a video she had. She wanted to show it off so I had to sit through Rainbow Brite. Another time I left school early because I was puking my guts out. I find out later on the School bus that day she started bawling her eyes out because she didn't know I had left with my mom earlier and thought the bus driver left me behind. I also got her addicted to the old My Pet Monster cartoon. I had every episode on tape and every time she'd come over she'd want to watch it. She was worth risking dissection for.

[Dr.Teufel Geist]

WANNA HAVE SOME FUN??        CHECK OUT PLEASURELAND


http://www.lostdestinations.com/pleasure.htm

[Dr.Teufel Geist]

CREEPY HAUTED HOUSE WITH CREEPY PLAYER-PIANO

STEP INTO JACKSON HOUSE,JACKSON NJ


http://www.lostdestinations.com/jackson.htm

[Dr.Teufel Geist]

El Chupacabra


The legend of el chupacabra began in about 1992, when Puerto Rican newspapers El Vocero and El Nuevo Dia began reporting the killings of many different types of animals, such as birds, horses, and as its name implies, goats. At the time it was known as El Vampiro de Moca since some of the first killings occurred in the small town of Moca. While at first it was suspected that the killings were done randomly by some members of a Satanic cult, eventually these killings spread around the island, and many farms reported loss of animal life. The killings had one pattern in common: each of the animals found dead had two punctured holes around their necks.

Soon after the animal deaths in Puerto Rico, other animal deaths were reported in other countries, such as the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Panama, Peru, Brazil, the United States and, most notably, Mexico.

Both in Puerto Rico and Mexico, "el chupacabra" gained urban legend status. Chupacabra stories began to be released several times in American and Hispanic newscasts across the United States, and chupacabra merchandise, such as t-shirts and baseball hats, were sold.




Sightings
The first reported attacks occurred in March 1995 in Puerto Rico. In this attack, eight sheep were discovered dead, each with three puncture wounds in the chest area and completely drained of blood.

In July of 2004, a rancher near San Antonio, Texas, killed a hairless, dog-like creature which was attacking his livestock. This creature is now known as the Elmendorf creature. It was later determined to be a canine of some sort, most likely a coyote, with demodectic mange. In October of 2004, two animals which closely resemble the Elmendorf creature were observed in the same area. The first was dead, and the second was noticed by a local zoologist who was called to identify the animal while she was travelling to the location where the first was found. Specimens were studied by biologists in Texas. The creatures are thought to have been canines of undetermined species with skin problems and facial deformities.

In Coleman, Texas, a farmer named Reggie Lagow caught an animal in a trap he set up after the deaths of a number of his chickens and turkeys. The animal was described as resembling a mix of hairless dog, rat, and kangaroo. Lagow provided the animal to Texas Parks and Wildlife officials for identification, but Lagow reported in a September 17, 2006 phone interview with John Adolfi, founder of the Lost World Museum, that the "critter was caught on a Tuesday and thrown out in Thursday's trash."A famous appearance in the city of Varginha, Brazil, (the "Varginha incident") is sometimes attributed to the chupacabra, although cryptozoologists more frequently associate the incident with aliens. In 1997, an explosion of chupacabra sightings in Brazil were reported in Brazilian newspapers. One report came from a police officer, who claimed to get a nauseous feeling when he saw a dog-like chupacabras in a tree.

In April 2006, MosNews reported that the chupacabra was spotted in Russia for the first time. Reports from Central Russia beginning in March 2005 tell of a beast that kills by the animals and sucks out their blood. Thirty-two turkeys were killed and drained overnight. Reports later came from neighboring villages when 30 sheep were killed and had their blood drained. Finally, eyewitnesses were able to describe the chupacabra.

In mid-August 2006, Michelle O'Donnell of Turner, Maine, described an "evil looking" rodent-like animal with fangs that had been found dead alongside a road. The animal was apparently struck by a car, and was unidentifiable. Photographs were taken and witness reports seem to be in relative agreement that the creature was canine in appearance, but in widely published photos seemed unlike any dog or wolf in the area. Photos from other angles seem to show a chow- or akita-mixed breed dog. It was reported that "the carcass was picked clean by vultures before experts could examine it". For years, residents of Maine have reported a mysterious creature and a string of dog maulings.

In May 2007, a series of reports on national Colombia news reported more than 300 dead sheep in the region of Boyaca, and the capture of a possible specimen to be analyzed by zoologists at Universidad Nacional of Colombia.

In August 2007, Phylis Canion found three animals in Cuero, Texas. She and her neighbors purported to have discovered three strange animal carcasses outside Canion's property. She took photographs of the carcasses and preserved the head of one in her freezer before turning it over for DNA analysis. Canion reported that nearly 30 chickens on her farm had been exsanguinated over a period of years, a factor which led her to connect the carcasses with the chupacabra legend. State Mammologist John Young estimated that the animal in Canion's pictures was a Gray Fox suffering from an extreme case of mange. In November 2007, biology researchers at Texas State University–San Marcos determined from DNA samples that the suspicious animal was merely a coyote.

On January 11, 2008, a sighting was reported at the province of Capiz in the Philippines. Some of the residents from the barangay believed that it was the chupacabra that killed eight chickens. The owner of the chickens saw a dog-like animal attacking his chickens.

The chupacabra has often been spotted in Michigan. A recent sighting occurred in Grand Haven, when a forty-two year old man claimed he saw it suck the blood out of a cat. On July 5, 2008, a 32 year old female was driving with her brights on when she witnessed a strange grey kangaroo like creature digging in a trash bin next to the road in Holly. It appeared to be over 3 feet tall with large glowing red eyes and a long pointy face. The creature reached for the ground with its front arms and jumped forward with its back legs swinging in front of it like a rabbit before it disappeared into the woods.


On August 8, 2008, a DeWitt County deputy, Brandon Riedel, filmed an unidentifiable animal along back roads near Cuero, Texas on his dashboard camera. The animal was about the size of a coyote but was hairless with a long snout, short front legs and long back legs. However, Reiter's boss, Sherrif Jode Zavesky, believes it may be the same species of coyote identified by Texas State University–San Marcos researchers in November 2007.




Theories
It has been described as similar to gargoyles, so it has been theorized that the creatures were seen in Medieval Europe. According to this theory, gargoyles were carved to resemble chupacabras, to keep the public afraid of any place with gargoyles.
Certain South American rain forest natives believe in the "mosquito-man", a mythical creature of their folklore that pre-dates modern chupacabras sightings. The mosquito-man sucks the blood from animals through his long nose, like a big mosquito. Some say mosquito-man and chupacabras are one and the same.
Some cryptozoologists speculate that chupacabras are alien creatures. Chupacabras are widely described as otherworldly, and, according to one witness report, NASA may be involved with this particular alien's residency on earth. The witness reported that NASA passed through an area in Latin America, with a trailer that was thought to contain an incarcerated creature.
Some people in the island of Puerto Rico believe that the chupacabras were a genetic experiment from some United States' government agency, which escaped from a secret laboratory in El Yunque, a mountain in the east part of the island.