The mid-19th century was the heyday for séances, mediums, and psychics. In Boston, a chemist and silver engraver named William H. Mumler saw an opportunity to mix the hot new technology of photography with paranormal activity to make some big bucks. So he announced that if you sat for a picture in his studio, your dead relative might just turn up for the photo opp. Mumler's secret? Ye olde magical double exposure that he stumbled upon after accidentally taking a self-portrait on an already-used negative. From Mysterious Universe:

Typically, he would take a glass photographic plate that held the image of the dead person in life and simply place it over a new glass plate meant to hold the image of the customer. When the photo was then developed the two images would be fused together into a composite and voila, ghost photo. On many occasions Mumler did not have access to an actual photo of the deceased, and so he got creative, using other figures that were blurred just enough that the client could believe that it was the presence of the lost loved one, easy enough to do with a bereaved, gullible person who is willing to do anything to see them again.[...]

Mumler might have been able to keep this going for many more years if he had been a little more careful. He started producing ever more outlandish ghost photographs, including even one of the dead president Abraham Lincoln photobombing a picture of his wife Mary Todd Lincoln.

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Dating back to the 19th century, occultists, engineers, and hoaxers have employed new audio technology to communicate beyond the grave. This includes wax cylinders, white noise generators, AM radios, hacked phonographs, and other curious contraptions. Even Thomas Edison got in on the phone, making a machine to communicate with the spirit world. He later admitted it was a joke but, of course, his phonograph does enable anyone to hear from those who have passed on (and left a recording behind). Over at the Daily Grail, John Reppion surveys the history of "Ghost Boxes and Psycho-Phones":

In 1957 a Swedish painter by the name of Friedrich Jürgenson – a man so famed for his artistic ability that Pope Pius XII had a total of four portraits painted by him at his personal request – purchased a reel to reel tape recorder. Jürgenson only wished to record his own voice singing but, listening back to the tapes, he began to notice strange fadings in and out. In 1959 he and his wife went to spend the summer at a cottage they owned in the countryside, and Jürgenson took his tape recorder along. The machine had been left running outdoors to record the bird song, but on listening back hardly any birds could be heard. What sounded like a thunderstorm of static was, shockingly, interrupted by a loud trumpet and then a voice speaking in Norwegian. Friedrich was amazed to realise that it was the voice of his own long-dead father, seemingly speaking directly to him through the machine.

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Earlier this spring, more than 20 members of Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos pan flute orchestra left their homes in Bolivia and embarked on a European tour. They arrived in Germany on March 10, right as that country's government imposed a ban on large gatherings to fight the spread of coronavirus. Within days, their bus had broken down, and all of their performances had been cancelled, and their own government back home in Bolivia announced that it would close its own borders, leaving the orchestra stranded. Read the rest

If there's something strange, in your Mumbai 'hood, who you gonna call? Indian author and strange phenomena investigator Jay Alani has started a helpline for people freaked out about "ghosts, spirits, black magic or anything related to the paranormal world." Alani says he receives eight to 10 calls each day. From the Hindustan Times:

He has been receiving various calls of people claiming to see a ghost, hearing some unusual noise, or feeling that someone is constantly watching them, during this quarantine period.

“In most of the cases, I have found that person who claims to experience any such unusual incident has been watching horror films and series during this lockdown period. After questioning them about their daily routine, family history, past trauma etc, I and my team of psychologists found out that many of them actually create a fictional ghost in their mind”, said Jay Alani who has been a full-time paranormal investigator for last many years and has investigated over 100 haunted locations and looked after over 150 paranormal cases[...]

As per Jay Alani, “The main motive behind this helpline number is to provide scientific solutions to those who are encountering any unusual incidents or have any question about the paranormal world. We see that black magic and mesmerism are propagated and advertised openly in India. People usually fall in the trap of such Babas, Tantriks and Ojhas due to lack of knowledge.”

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According to a 2019 YouGov survey, 45 percent of adult Americans believe in ghosts. What's it like for people who are convinced they are quarantining with a specter? The New York Times' Molly Fitzpatrick interviewed several true believers about their ghostly roommates and puts their experiences in context. From the New York Times:

John E.L. Tenney, who describes himself as a paranormal researcher and is a former host of the TV show “Ghost Stalkers,” estimates that he received two to five reports of a haunted house each month in 2019. Lately, it’s been more like five to 10 in a week.[...]

Mr. Tenney has no doubt that the vast majority of these cases in his inbox are “completely explainable” in nature. “When the sun comes up and the house starts to warm up, they’re usually at work — they’re not used to hearing the bricks pop and the wood expand,” he said. “It’s not that the house wasn’t making those sounds. They just never had the time to notice it.” [...]

Kurt Gray, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studies how we perceive and treat the minds of other entities, including animals, machines and the dead. Times of great unease or malaise, when there is an increased drive to find meaning in chaos, can lend themselves to perceived hauntings, he said — not to mention that disease itself shares certain psychological parallels with a “malevolent spirit,” creeping invisibly upon its unsuspecting victims.

This phenomenon could also be a side effect of the loneliness of our time.

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The Hollywood Hills home that was the TV and real life abode of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson is now on the market for $6.5 million. Airing from 1952-1966, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet featured many exterior shots of the family's actual house. (Recently, it was also used as Ari Gold's residence on Entourage.) The current owner of the 1916 home is Law & Order: SVU star Christopher Meloni who purchased it in 2014. The home features many amenities, including a ghost, likely that of Ozzie Nelson who in 1975 reportedly died in the bedroom. From Architectural Digest:

It should be noted that—possibly as a result of Ozzie’s death—numerous previous owners have reportedly complained that the property is haunted. Spooky incidents include Ozzie’s model train, which runs on a track near the ceiling in the pub room, inexplicably running on its own in the middle of the night; and the smell of rose-scented perfume.

image: Hilton & Hyland Read the rest

Do you believe in ghosts? I don't. But I do believe in the active powers of the human imagination, especially in an old, cold building filled with the world's "acquired" ancient treasures and mummified humans. Read the rest

With more Webcams online than ever before, and the abundance of time stuck inside, you might enjoy conducting your own armchair expeditions in search of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, ghosts, and other strange phenomena. Over at Mysterious Universe, Paul Seaburn put together a list of "webcams with continuous feeds pointed at the sky, the waters, the buildings and the other places where these anomalies may occur." Here are a few:

Popocatepetl volcano UFOs

Mexico’s Popocatepetl volcano is active and well-known for UFO sightings both during and independent of eruptions. The multiple webcams serve a useful purpose of providing officials with advance warnings of eruptions but many UFO hunters watch it religiously. (Watch them here.) In fact, there was UFO activity there just this week. (Video here.) Was it birds, bugs, drones, alien spaceships refueling or ships from the alleged alien base that uses Popocatepetl as a portal?

Bigfoot

For Bigfoot watchers, the U.S. National Parks provide webcams everywhere for capturing glimpses of Sasquatch as well as the many other animals, birds, natural events and lost hikers that inhabit the park. Yellowstone has some, the Old Faithful cam being the most popular, but its greatest service is a list of links to all of the active webcams in other national parks.

"Stuck at Home? Use These Webcams to Hunt for UFOs, Bigfoot, Ghosts and Monsters" (Mysterious Universe)

Above, "The Surgeon's Photograph" of 1934, known to be a hoax. Read the rest

Either it's windy in the warehouse today, or there's an extremely muscular poltergeist in occupation.

Reagan Steiner: "A table that seems to be controlled by a ghost totally attacks this random guy" Read the rest

A college student in North Carolina heard rattling in her closet that sounded like a raccoon, but she thought it was a ghost. She'd had other strange things happen in her apartment, like finding strange handprints in her bathroom, and having some of her clothes disappear. She worked up the courage to ask through the closet door, "Who's there?"

And someone answered back, "Oh, my name is Drew."

Turns out a 30-year-old gentleman was hiding in her closet, wearing her clothes.

According to Vice:

As horrifying as the whole thing might be, Maddie—who has declined to reveal her last name—apparently didn't think [Andrew] Swofford posed any sort of immediate threat. She reportedly kept up a conversation with him and let him roam around her home while she called for help.

“He tries on my hat," she said. "He goes in the bathroom and looks in the mirror and then is like, ‘You’re really pretty, can I give you a hug?’" According to Maddie, he never actually tried to touch her.

When Maddie's boyfriend arrived, Swofford took off, but was arrested at a gas station shortly after.

Strangely enough, this wasn't the first time she's had an intruder in her place. In December she found two men in her living room. This might explain the mysterious handprints and missing items. And in both cases there were no signs of entry. I'd say it's moving time.

This is Andrew Swofford. A UNCG junior got home on Saturday, to find him in her closet, wearing her clothes.

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I don't drink wine, but living in Northern California I still end up visiting wineries in Napa and Sonoma with friends and visitors. Next time we're headed on a wine tasting trip, I'm going to suggest we hit the spooky spots described in this Mysterious Universe guide to haunted California wineries, starting with this one:

Sitting within the wine country of Sonoma, California is a winery called Bartholomew Park Winery, and it is imbued with quite a colorful past that perhaps makes it unsurprising that it should be haunted. In its days before putting out fine wines, Bartholomew Park Winery underwent several metamorphoses, being used at one time or another as a women’s prison, a hospital, and a morgue, before becoming a vineyard and winery in the 1830s, after which it was acquired by European immigrant Agoston Haraszthy, who also happens to have been the owner of the equally haunted Buena Vista Winery, which we’ll get to later. It then became the Hacienda Cellars winery, with the wine cellars being right there in the old hospital, going on to become the Sonoma Valley Wine Museum and then the Bartholomew Park Winery in 1992...

This rather grim past came back to haunt the winery in the 1970s, perhaps literally, when the body of a former prisoner at the old prison was supposedly found buried within one of the walls of the establishment, and the main building and its basement are situated right atop what was once the morgue. Since the beginnings of the winery there have been tales of employees hearing disembodied voices singing or whispering, as well as moving objects, roving cold spots, footsteps when no one else is around, and the eerie sound of a piano playing.

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Welcome to 2018.

Here's an archived clip of ghost-hunting vlogger Moe Sargi having an oops moment. This peek behind the curtain was supposedly left in a now-removed original posting due to an editing error. The interesting thing, though, isn't the embarassment of a paranormal poseur, but the fact that the only consequence is a new layer of kayfabe: both his official twitter account and channel are currently "occupied" by an anonymous-style "hacker" character, Project Zorgo, who supposedly forced him to post the obviously-faked video.

Ah, but is it this the real fake Project Zorgo?

Millions of subscribers! The future of entertainment! The older you are, the more likely you are to bring something with you, cultural receptors from an earlier media age, that means this kind of thing (if not this exact thing) somehow manages to fool you. But Sargi's tween fans just want him to knock it off and go back to the spooky basement crawls. Read the rest

Paranormal investigator Christian J. Devaux of Tolland, Connecticut called 911 to report an intruder in his home. While on the phone with the 911 operator, Devaux fired two shots at the intruder. Police finally arrived but found no evidence of a home invader. Devaux claimed it could have been a ghost. From the Journal Inquirer:

Troopers also found problems with Devaux’s sworn statement, where he described firing the two bullets as warning shots that he intentionally aimed over the intruder’s head. Investigators found that scenario unlikely, however, after a ballistic analysis showed that the two bullets had punctured a wall in Devaux’s home less than three feet off the floor.

After state police uncovered even more inconsistencies — including shell casings discovered in front of Devaux’s supposed firing location — Devaux told troopers that “there are some things he just can’t explain, like seeing ghosts.”

Devaux then told state police that he has been a paranormal investigator for five or six years and most recently encountered an apparition at the former Mansfield Training School and Hospital, investigators said. Devaux said that while he did not want to be considered “insane,” he had to allow for the possibility that the intruder was of supernatural origin.

Devaux was "charged with illegal discharge of a firearm, making a false statement to police, second-degree reckless endangerment, misusing an emergency call, and disorderly conduct." Apparently he had made a similar call in 2011 and police turned up no sign of an intruder then either.

"Man charged with firing gun at ‘ghost’" (Journal Inquirer) Read the rest

This unbelievable video was reportedly captured earlier this month by CCTV cameras in Inner Mongolia's Baotou Railway Station. From Mysterious Universe:

Is this a video of a ghost train? The comments run the gamut from definitely ghost train to an image from a parallel universe to a secret military cloaking train to a reflection in a window of a nearby train to a hoax. The Daily Express online says the last scenario is supported by debunker Scott Brando, who claims it’s a merger of two videos and dates back at least to 2012 to a railway station in not the Baotou Railway Station in Inner Mongolia but the Polezhaevskaya station in Moscow.

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Caltech posted video of a stable plasma torus, created by engineers using water and a dielectric plate: "lightning in a bottle, but without the bottle."

In addition, engineers working with the plasma noticed that their cell phones encountered high levels of radio frequency noise—static—while they were in the same room as the experiment. It turns out that the plasma ring emits distinct radio frequencies. "That's never been seen before. We think it's because of the piezo properties of the materials that we used in our experiments," Pereira says, referring to the materials' ability to be electrically polarized through mechanical stress—in this case, the flowing of water.

They've got no idea what it might be useful for, but have already filed a patent on the method for genereating the torus. Commercial proposal: a pretty random number generator to replace the lava lamps in Cloudflare's HQ. Read the rest

Heather Dockray and a band of amateur queer ghost hunters rented Trump's childhood home on Airbnb and found some creepy stuff, which of course begs the question: were they non-professionals seeking queer ghosts, or were they seeking queer non-professional ghosts? Read the rest

You could be the next proprietor of the Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nevada. Packed with kitschy-creepy clown figurines, paintings, and mannequins, it's conveniently located next to a cemetery with the graves of residents and prospectors who died of a strange plague in 1902. Reportedly the ghosts of some of those folks haunt the Clown Motel. You could own it for $900,000 so long as you contractually agree that the Clown Motel won't shut its doors. From Mysterious Universe:

The greasepaint ghouls came from Leona and LeRoy David, a brother and sister who built the motel in 1985 and chose the site next to the cemetery because their father was buried there. They put their small collection of clown memorabilia on display and ran the inn until 1995 when they sold everything to Bob Perchetti, whose family has lived in Tonopah for four generations and most certainly knew the haunted history of the motel and its clownish contents...

Seven-year employee Marlena Dufour says she’s seen apparitions and moving mannequin hands and has heard disembodied voices. Dufur told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that a guest had a room key mysteriously disappear. However, it’s the clowns that cause the most trouble. While many guests come dressed as clowns and enjoy the experience, others have walked into the office and screamed or fainted.

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