Product Spotlight: A Madman’s Song by Jim Martin
With Halloween right around the corner everyone is looking for that scary tale that keeps you up at night. Look no further.
With Halloween right around the corner everyone is looking for that scary tale that keeps you up at night. Look no further.
I’m pretty skeptical about people’s stories – especially the more bizarre and flamboyant they get, but I’m not interviewing people to judge their credibility. I’m interviewing them to hear about all the different experiences people have (or claim to) with the paranormal, be it ghosts, aliens, monsters, or other unexplained phenomena. The experience I will relate in this week’s article is one I collected from an interesting person with a particularly interesting experience. Nelson, as I will refer to him since he didn’t want me to use his real name, caught my attention at a local coffee shop when he asked the cashier if the change she was handing back to her was “marked.” She assured him it was not, but he still insisted on her replacing the three bills and several coins with different ones, just to be sure. Now, I usually have to look carefully for people with stories, but Nelson fell in my lap and I had to ask about his paranoia. “Someone after you, man?” I
Fans of fictional characters such as Cyclops from the X-men, or Sookie Stackhouse from TrueBlood will appreciate the fantastic human ability to generate light, whether as concussive optic beams, or ambient mystical flashes. Nothing quite this spectacular exists in the real world, but humans may have evolved a subtle, but complex system of light detection and generation beyond what is normally expected. Light detection is an expected characteristic in biology. Vision and photosynthesis are the most common manifestations of this ability, but there is now evidence that some of the molecular machinery related to sight can be found deep within the body, without an immediately apparent evolutionary rationale as to why it would be in tissues other than in the eyes. In a series of experiments on a species of eyeless fish, animals exposed to light consistently demonstrated avoidance behavior, termed negative phototaxis, despite the fact that they had no eyes. Maybe this ability to detect light within the body can be related to the notion that the body emits
“I used to live out in the sticks, you might say,” Jenny told me apologetically, “I mean, it was a small town. Still is. And with them small towns like that, they come chock full of stories, I’m sure you know.” Having grown up mostly in small towns myself, I did know. She was right, small towns seem to have a story of intrigue attached to nearly every family, building, or landmark. Wetumka, Oklahoma was no different, and had its share of stories, including one about the haunted old school house just outside of town. “Nearly everyone knows about it,” she explained, “Most folk pass it sometime or another – being that it sits nearby the Wetumka Cemetery. Now, it isn’t the cemetery that makes the school spooky in itself – fact is the school isn’t hardly that spooky at all. Neither is the cemetery, now that we’re on the topic.” Jenny describes the town, a small farming community near a few bodies of water and rivers, mostly flat grasslands
I can see the goose-bumps raise the hairs on his arms, Carlos swallows before blurting out, “Them eyes along the road, they… they follow you!” I’m rather used to my interviewees taking pleasure in building their story up from the ground before getting to the good part. Carlos was different though, he was sure that nature itself was out to get him – as he described himself, he was “a born’n’bred city boy, no shame in it.” He explained that his father had left his family when he was too young to remember it, and his mother had the insurmountable task of raising him and his four siblings alone in the Detroit slums. Carlos was the youngest of the five children, and when he graduated from high school (he was only the second of his siblings to do so) he moved out of his mother’s home to start his own life. This freed his mother from the burden of dependent children and she soon started to date again. Carlos’ mother,
In literature, foretelling death is the kind of ability alternately regarded as a curse or a blessing; the former because seeing the end without being able to avoid it drives home the sense of inevitability, the latter because there is always hope that premature death can be guarded against or postponed. Though methods of predicting human death have evolved from mystic to scientific, there still remain some unexplained phenomena which suggest that being able to sense impending death could be an intrinsic human ability.
Nestled at the northwest base of Mount Fuji in Japan is an innocent enough looking forest that has a sinister and shocking past. Looking at pictures of the scenic Aokigahara, also known as the Sea of Trees, one might feel it would be a good place to soak up some beautiful and inspiring nature. Indeed it’s a popular tourist attraction for its well known Icy Cave and Windy Cave, as well as its mostly pristine and untouched by man environment. However just one look at the signs that dot the landscape may be enough to change your mind. Why? Aokigahara is the second most popular place to commit suicide in the world (next to the Golden Gate Bridge) and has seen thousands of such deaths in recorded history.
“Oh yes, I’ve seen her many, many times,” Mrs. Carlsen tells me with pride, “I doubt anyone is counting – I know I’m not – but I’m sure I’ve seen her more than just about anyone alive today!” The girl that Mrs. Carlsen refers to having seen so many times is a long dead Native American Princess that haunts the waters of one of the largest lakes in Minnesota, Mille Lacs. She’s very sparse on the details of the Princess’ story. She quickly explains that the Princess was left on an island in the lake by a Prince to keep her from harm’s way during a battle. When the battle was complete, and the Prince victorious, he was to return for her and they were to be married. Mrs. Carlsen describes that as days passed, the Princess soon came to realize her Prince must have been killed in the battle, and that she would be stranded on the island. Unable to swim, the Princess sat down and died of heartbreak
Watching a gymnast demonstrate their acrobatic ability, or a parkour cruise effortlessly over urban obstacles, or a martial artist maneuver around opponents as if dancing always leaves a spectator amazed at the range of human athleticism. But imagine if an individual, never having trained or practiced any of these skills, suddenly was able to perform any of these things after watching someone else do it…
This story is a recollection of something that happened when I was in high school… so yes, a long time ago, back in the 90’s. Though I’ve actually ventured to the location that this story centers on, I have not actually had any of the experiences that I am relating. Nor is this an interview, at least not in the strictest sense, as it is a re-telling of the facts and supposed events.
Chernobyl. That single word conjures images of a terrible disaster that occurred just outside the town of Pripyat in Russia. On that nightmarish day on April 26th, 1986, nuclear reactor number four exploded causing a catastrophic spreading of radiation that spewed into the atmosphere that eventually spread over much of Western USSR and Europe.
“Don’t see what the fuss is,” Jim said as he lit another cigarette, “They been there forever, and how many kids go missing for ‘em? None!” Jim is a retired construction worker who just recently moved from Omaha to his lake house on Long Lake in Nebraska. His wife was quietly reading next to him on the blue bench in the smoking booth of the airport we met at as the couple waited to board their flight back home.