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There's a nice article on Elisa Lam with this insight:quote:In fairness, however, you or I might also appear to be in thrall to some supernatural force when confronted with a lift, appliance or other man-made machinery that was uncooperative, and it’s not entirely implausible that someone who filmed us without sound, reacting to slow internet or a freezing computer, might conclude that we were on drugs or having a psychotic episode. The article also mentions she has a blog...that has apparently been updated since her death by some unknown person. Wildeyes has a new favorite as of 04:17 on Sep 16, 2014 |
# ? Sep 16, 2014 04:13 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 03:15 |
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Wildeyes posted:There's a nice article on Elisa Lam with this insight: Some additional creepy little details from that article: quote:The Cecil Hotel, as most reports hasten to mention, was at one time home to serial killer Richard Ramirez, a.k.a. The Nightstalker, and at another to fellow serial killer Jack Unterweger. It was also allegedly the last place butchered actress Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. The Black Dahlia, was seen before her grisly – and still unsolved – murder in 1947.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 04:29 |
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Turfahurf posted:One of my exes was bipolar and the type of behavior in that video is pretty much what I would expect from someone off their meds. Yeah, I've got a friend who's bipolar, and I thought the exact same thing. Within that context, there's nothing even remotely surprising about her behaviour in the elevator.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 04:48 |
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Wildeyes posted:There's a nice article on Elisa Lam with this insight: What was written in her blog? I cant find anything.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 05:13 |
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Her blog was a tumblr (http://nouvelle-nouveau.tumblr.com/) and from what I remember seeing it just seems like she had a post queued and it was auto-posted on the schedule she'd set.
Chococat has a new favorite as of 05:51 on Sep 16, 2014 |
# ? Sep 16, 2014 05:49 |
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Wildeyes posted:There's a nice article on Elisa Lam with this insight: Oh good, someone else thinks this. I was starting to wonder if maybe I was a bit odd.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 06:32 |
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Oh good, someone else thinks this. I was starting to wonder if maybe I was a bit odd. [/quote] Oh no, you definitely are, it's just the author of the article is also a bit odd.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 13:32 |
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Chococat posted:Her blog was a tumblr (http://nouvelle-nouveau.tumblr.com/) and from what I remember seeing it just seems like she had a post queued and it was auto-posted on the schedule she'd set. Ah, didn't realize you could do that. She also had another blog with more words (I basically write obituaries as part of my job, and it's always disturbing when the deceased was active on Twitter or something. You can read someone's final thoughts and learn way more about them than their surviving family would ever reveal...the miracles of modern technology) Wildeyes has a new favorite as of 14:02 on Sep 16, 2014 |
# ? Sep 16, 2014 13:57 |
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Wildeyes posted:(I basically write obituaries as part of my job, and it's always disturbing when the deceased was active on Twitter or something. You can read someone's final thoughts and learn way more about them than their surviving family would ever reveal...the miracles of modern technology) Her twitter is heartbreaking.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 14:23 |
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So fills the morgue with the sound of gentle buzzing, ringing "There was an explosion! Are you okay? Are okay!?" I had to leave the room.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 14:38 |
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Elisa Lam came up in this thread before, but for a repost: quote:You can read about her last trip under the tags "Caliblah," including the fact that she a.) was planning to go to LA, despite the early reports that LA was not on her itinerary, and b.) missed a flight and had to spend the night in an airport not long before she died, which could possibly have triggered an episode.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 16:37 |
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Helena Handbasket posted:I'm glad somebody else is intrigued by this case. I agree that it's hard to sort important from unimportant with Maura Murray. E.g. when I was writing that post, I saw some references to the potential significance of her "clearing out her bank account," which seems to refer to the fact that she took $280 out of an ATM and left almost nothing in her account, but she had some paychecks incoming. If I had disappeared during any random weekend in college, and payday was soon, they would have noticed that I had also "cleared out" my bank account. College kids, not usually maintaining a healthy cushion of savings. Missed seeing your post earlier. Yes, that's an excellent point about the bank account. I guess what drew me to Maura's disappearance is the sad sense of how much she lived her life the way other people wanted her to. West Point for her dad, running for her boyfriend, planning a wedding for his (more than a little overbearing) mother, etc. I think the odds are heavily against her staging her own disappearance, but if she did God knows I wouldn't blame her. She was being smothered under other people's expectations for almost all of her life.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 18:52 |
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Those are good points about not Elisa not actually hitting the buttons for any floors, and how her bipolar disorder and frustration may have given off the impression of the supernatural where there's only the mundane, but I want to believe. I just want a little bit of quantifiable mystery in the world. I just want to live in a world where some hotels are haunted by killer ghosts and sometimes they put you in a cistern. I found a list of wikipedia links "creepy Wikipedia articles", but most of them are serial killers or urban legends. I'll start with one that ends with no dead bodies: John Murray Spear and the New Motive Power. It's a short article, so I'll post the meat of it. Wikipedia posted:The following year, Spear and a handful of followers retreated to a wooden shed at the top of High Rock hill in Lynn, Massachusetts, where they set to work creating the ‘‘New Motive Power’’, a mechanical Messiah which was intended to herald a new era of Utopia. The New Motive Power was constructed of copper, zinc and magnets, all carefully machined, as well as a dining room table. At the end of nine months, Spear and ‘‘Nathanael Santoso’’, an unnamed woman, ritualistically birthed the contraption in an attempt to give it life.[citation needed] Unfortunately for Spear, this failed to have the desired effect, and the machine was later dismantled. And now, for something that ends in nine dead bodies! The Dyatlov Pass incident, in which 10 Russian hikers set out on a ski trek and all but one (who left the group early) die one night. Wikipedia posted:On February 26, the searchers found the group's abandoned and badly damaged tent on Kholat Syakhl. Mikhail Sharavin, the student who found the tent, said "the tent was half torn down and covered with snow. It was empty, and all the group's belongings and shoes had been left behind."[2] Investigators said the tent had been cut open from inside. Eight or nine sets of footprints, left by people who were wearing only socks, a single shoe or were even barefoot, could be followed, leading down toward the edge of a nearby woods, on the opposite side of the pass, 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mi) to the north-east. However, after 500 metres (1,600 ft) these tracks were covered with snow. At the forest's edge, under a large cedar, the searchers found the remains of a fire, along with the first two bodies, those of Krivonischenko and Doroshenko, shoeless and dressed only in their underwear. The branches on the tree were broken up to five meters high, suggesting that one of the skiers had climbed up to look for something, perhaps the camp. Between the cedar and the camp the searchers found three more corpses, Dyatlov, Kolmogorova and Slobodin, who seemed to have died in poses suggesting that they were attempting to return to the tent.[2] They were found separately at distances of 300, 480 and 630 meters from the tree.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 21:24 |
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I present this overachiever, Thomas Midgley, Jr. He was perhaps the closest thing we'll ever have to a literal Captain Planet villain. This one person invented not one but two products whose environmental effects your great grandchildren will still be dealing with: leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons. It's pretty easy to definitively state that the world would literally be better if he'd never been born. Fortunately he got the kind of end he deserved -- as an invalid, choked to death by his own invention. Wikipedia posted:Midgley died three decades before the ozone-depleting effects of CFCs in the atmosphere became widely known. Another adverse effect of Midgley's work was the release of large quantities of lead into the atmosphere as a result of the large-scale combustion of leaded gasoline all over the world.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 21:30 |
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Ague Proof posted:
Holy poo poo: http://jessicaredfield.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/late-night-thoughts-on-the-eaton-center-shooting/ Being near one shooting massacre, just to die in another a month later.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 21:44 |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Boeing_727-223_disappearance Everything about this is just weird. quote:Shortly before sunset on May 25, 2003, Ben Charles Padilla boarded the plane with a hired mechanic from the Republic of the Congo. Neither man was certified to fly the Boeing 727, which normally requires a three person aircrew. Both men were working with Angolan mechanics to get the plane flight-ready. Edit: Just read this and now i'm depressed as gently caress. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Amy_Lynn_Bradley Nckdictator has a new favorite as of 23:06 on Sep 16, 2014 |
# ? Sep 16, 2014 22:22 |
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RevSyd posted:While we're on the topic of Chernobyl, I simply can't resist quoting this passage from the excellent and highly unnerving Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters by James Mahaffey, because it is just so Further evidence for the dangers of nuclear fishin'
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 01:18 |
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For anyone interested in the dyatlov pass incident, I'd recommend "Dead Mountain: the untold true story of the dyatlov pass incident." Its fairly recent and written by an American who traveled to Russia and went on the same path the hikers took. It's a mix of modern interviews, the travel, and translated journals of the hikers who died as they took the trip. He comes to a pretty convincing conclusion of what likely happened that doesn't involve the usual explanations of conspiracies, murder, or aliens. Was a really good read and a great summary of the incident.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 03:41 |
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http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey%27s_Resort_Hotel_bombing TL; DR version is crazy dude who blew up a Gulag to escape comes to America, starts a new life, then gets into gambling debt. Plants a bomb in a casino for ransom. Bomb is unable to be disarmed, like at all. He desifned a bomb that could only end one way- by detonating 1000lbs of stolen TNT There are some better sites that I can't seem to find, but having spoke to EOD techs while in the Army, they say that even today, there is no way to disarm his bomb. His bomb design is still studied to this day Dude was like a bomb genius and it is unnerving that a guy with a bit of intelligence and a lot of balls could build something so devasting.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 06:29 |
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Nckdictator posted:Also, we just passed September 8th, the anniversary (1642, New England) of one of the first executions in what is now the US. ... but what happened to the turkey?
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 08:09 |
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bulletsponge13 posted:http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey%27s_Resort_Hotel_bombing Before being sent to a Gulag he was in the Luftwaffe, he certainly had an interesting life.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 09:27 |
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Strongylocentrotus posted:... but what happened to the turkey?
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 10:51 |
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Nckdictator posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Boeing_727-223_disappearance It's really weird to just steal a plane like that, but from the sounds of he might have just crashed in the ocean somewhere. The airport is right on the coast and he seemed to be heading that way, but you can't just make a trans-oceanic flight spur of the moment without making sure you have proper fuel and everything. And as we've seen it's really easy to just lose a plane in the ocean. tower time posted:For anyone interested in the dyatlov pass incident, I'd recommend "Dead Mountain: the untold true story of the dyatlov pass incident." Its fairly recent and written by an American who traveled to Russia and went on the same path the hikers took. It's a mix of modern interviews, the travel, and translated journals of the hikers who died as they took the trip. He comes to a pretty convincing conclusion of what likely happened that doesn't involve the usual explanations of conspiracies, murder, or aliens. Was a really good read and a great summary of the incident. Yeah a lot of the weirder stuff about Dyatlov Pass is either embellishment, completely made up or just the usual side-effects of severe hypothermia.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 12:35 |
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Imagined posted:Fortunately he got the kind of end he deserved -- as an invalid, choked to death by his own invention. Or so the time-travelers would have you believe. You don't want to see the timeline where he had three scientific breakthroughs.
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# ? Sep 17, 2014 20:10 |
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bulletsponge13 posted:http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey%27s_Resort_Hotel_bombing The bomb looks really really fascinating to me: Like nothing I have ever seen before. Here is an article, you can just about read it:
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 00:06 |
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my name is Joseph Yablonsky. I have never met you before, but I hate you regardless. if I met you in public, I'd still hate you. I probably wouldn't hate you any more than how much I currently hate you, because I don't think that would be humanly possible. I would probably punch you in the face though.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 02:04 |
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Imagined posted:I present this overachiever, Thomas Midgley, Jr. He was perhaps the closest thing we'll ever have to a literal Captain Planet villain. This one person invented not one but two products whose environmental effects your great grandchildren will still be dealing with: leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons. It's pretty easy to definitively state that the world would literally be better if he'd never been born. I could forgive him a little for his invention of CFCs. Their problem is not they they were reactive and toxic, but that they are so unreactive that they could float up into the stratosphere completely intact before they start breaking down ozone into oxygen. He solved a big problem, as preceding refrigerant gases were toxic enough to kill people who worked around them. On the other hand, he really should have known better with leaded gasoline. poo poo, he even gave himself lead poisoning working with it, and he was working to pump it out of cars.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 03:01 |
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Phobophilia posted:I could forgive him a little for his invention of CFCs. Their problem is not they they were reactive and toxic, but that they are so unreactive that they could float up into the stratosphere completely intact before they start breaking down ozone into oxygen. He solved a big problem, as preceding refrigerant gases were toxic enough to kill people who worked around them. Was this the guy who washed his face with leaded gasoline at a press conference to show how safe it was? Or did iI make that up in my head, because it sounds insane to say it out loud.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 03:34 |
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WaywardWoodwose posted:Was this the guy who washed his face with leaded gasoline at a press conference to show how safe it was? Or did iI make that up in my head, because it sounds insane to say it out loud. quote:On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL. In this demonstration, he poured TEL over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever I mean. Gasoline is toxic. You shouldn't even do that with unleaded gasoline. God knows why you'd put yourself through it when employees are dying in the plants because of lead poisoning. But, you know, villain gotta villain.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 03:53 |
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The NDT version of Cosmos has a pretty good episode about leaded gasoline and the fight to ban it.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 04:01 |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotitoquote:Michel Lotito (June 15, 1950 - June 25, 2007) was a French entertainer, born in Grenoble, famous for deliberately consuming indigestible objects. He came to be known as Monsieur Mangetout ("Mister Eats All"). In action; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZuFb3GBHuU Molentik has a new favorite as of 04:31 on Sep 18, 2014 |
# ? Sep 18, 2014 04:25 |
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Brainbread posted:I mean. Gasoline is toxic. You shouldn't even do that with unleaded gasoline. God knows why you'd put yourself through it when employees are dying in the plants because of lead poisoning. But, you know, villain gotta villain. Oh come on, you can't leave out the punchline! quote:On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL. In this demonstration, he poured TEL over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever...Midgley sought treatment for lead poisoning in Europe a few months after his demonstration at the press conference
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 04:54 |
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Come back when he's eaten Chichester Cathedral.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 05:07 |
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Strongylocentrotus posted:
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 06:03 |
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HEY GAL posted:"Cattle" can also mean livestock in general. I figured as much, but I'd like to believe that the turkey went on to live a fulfilling life, the sole survivor of this grisly episode of colonial-era buggery. Okay, I probably owe you guys some content after the turkey derail, so here we go: Cicada 3301 quote:Cicada 3301 is a name given to an enigmatic organization that on three occasions has posted a set of complex puzzles to recruit capable cryptanalysts from the public. The first Internet puzzle started on January 5, 2012 and ran for approximately one month. A second round began exactly one year later on January 5, 2013, and a third round is ongoing following confirmation of a fresh clue posted on Twitter on 5 January 2014. The stated intent was to recruit "intelligent individuals" by presenting a series of puzzles which were to be solved, each in order, to find the next. The puzzles focused heavily on data security, cryptography, and steganography. NSA recruitment tool? Google cryptanalysis hiring program? Shadowy internet cyber-mercenaries? Bitcoin nerds? Really elaborate ARG? No idea. Anybody who knows what it is, and who's behind it, hasn't shared details with the public. Regardless, the Cicada 3301 puzzles are both cool and kind of creepy. Unfortunately they're also pretty inaccessible to folks like me who know jack about the finer points of cryptography and computer security.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 08:19 |
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peter gabriel posted:The bomb looks really really fascinating to me: Maybe I am just tired, but I didn't pick up any sarcasm in this post at first. The bomb design was neat, because he anticipated the bomb techs reactions, and by making it a big rear end non-descript metal box he countered some of the simple and basic Bomb Squad methods of examining the device. The whole story is insane to me.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 09:41 |
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Sometimes we forget about the darkness just outside until the proper Wiki article springs up. Gef, a Poltergeist Purveyor of Horror quote:The Irvings say that Gef communicated to them that he was "an extra extra clever mongoose", an "Earthbound spirit" and "a ghost in the form of a mongoose" and once said, "I am a freak. I have hands and I have feet, and if you saw me you'd faint, you'd be petrified, mummified, turned into stone or a pillar of salt!" The Irvings made various claims about Gef: he supposedly guarded their house and informed them of the approach of guests or any unfamiliar dog. They said that if someone had forgotten to put out the fire at night, Gef would go down and stop the stove. The Irvings claimed Gef would also wake people up when they overslept. And whenever mice got into the house, Gef supposedly assumed the role of the cat, although he preferred to scare them rather than kill them. The Irvings say they gave Gef biscuits, chocolates and bananas, and food was left for him in a saucer suspended from the ceiling which he took when he thought no one was watching. The Irvings claimed the mongoose regularly accompanied them on trips to the market, but always stayed on the other side of the hedges, chatting incessantly. The Terror Gardens of Versailles quote:At this point they claimed that a feeling of oppression and dreariness came over them. They then saw some men who looked like palace gardeners, who told them to go straight on. Moberly later described the men as "very dignified officials, dressed in long greyish green coats with small three-cornered hats." Jourdain noticed a cottage with a woman and a girl in the doorway. The woman was holding out a jug to the girl. Jourdain described it as a "tableau vivant", a living picture, much like Madame Tussauds waxworks. Moberly did not observe the cottage, but felt the atmosphere change. She wrote: "Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees seemed to become flat and lifeless, like wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees." Although it's not a Wiki link, I stumbled on a blog post in connection with one of my favorite stories I linked earlier and most everyone has heard of before, Spring-Heeled Jack. The Black Flash of Cape Cod quote:From Cahill we learn that The Black Flash was a 'a giant monster,' a phantomlike creature dressed in black, 'black hood, black cape, black face but his fierce eyes and long pointed ears were a glowing silver.' A woman had a frightful evening encounter in Provincetown in the second week of November 1938. Afterwards she described the Black Flash as "black, all black, with eyes like balls of flame, and he was big, real big... maybe eight feet tall. He made a sound, a loud buzzing sound, like a June bug on a hot day, only louder... he disappeared like a flash." Could Jack have leapt from England to America while still causing innocent passers-by to recoil as he bounds over fences? I'll hop on any other similar stories I find.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 09:41 |
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DryGoods posted:
I think you're jumping to conclusions there.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 10:45 |
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Jack Gladney posted:I think you're jumping to conclusions there. Yeah I don't think that would fit into the Prince-Albert/Hitler hypothesis.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 13:10 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 03:15 |
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bulletsponge13 posted:Maybe I am just tired, but I didn't pick up any sarcasm in this post at first. I'm not being sarcastic at all, I can't recall ever seeing a bomb looking anything like that thing and would love to see the x rays of it that were took, I spent ages looking and couldn't find them online anywhere.
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# ? Sep 18, 2014 17:55 |