The Yamabiru Are Coming!

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Long sequestered in the mountains of Japan, the Yamabiru have decided their time is at hand. Urbanization and reforestation efforts have ignited the flames of migration and the long silent Yamabiru have teamed up with their forest brethren and come down from their isolated realm to feed. Feasting on the blood of the humans that have inadvertently rousted them from their quiet existence, they have been known to gorge upon their victims to the point that they reach 10 times their normal size. So clandestine are the methods of the Yamabiru that frequently their victims are unaware they have been visited until they discover the bloodied point of entry and the predator has moved on.

The Japanese see three options in confronting this invasion. They can dramatically reshape the environment to something less hospitable in the hopes that the Yamabiru return from whence they came; they can fight them off with poisons and chemical warfare, or they can concede and accept their place in the food chain. All of these are obviously dramatic and carry their own hazards. However, in these dire times when nature is rising to subjugate humanity the dramatic may be the last hope.

– Prof. Gruntsplatter

Creepy Crawlies in Fairyland

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Here are a couple of tangled tales for you. The picture to the left (They removed the picture) appeared with a LiveScience.com article on a 200 yard long stretch of trail in Lake Tawakoni State Park in Northern Texas that is enveloped in spider webs. Some entomologists are calling this potentially a once in a lifetime event, while one killjoy is saying he sees them every couple of years.

“At first, it was so white it looked like fairyland,” said Donna Garde, superintendent of the park about 45 miles east of Dallas. “Now it’s filled with so many mosquitoes that it’s turned a little brown. There are times you can literally hear the screech of millions of mosquitoes caught in those webs.”

The next tale comes to us from Dortmund, Germany, via The Sun tabloid out of Britain…Mark Voegel loved reptiles and insects. He loved them so much that he had over 200 of them in his small apartment, many of them running free that were quite dangerous and even deadly. Most notably for our purposes was his pet black widow “Bettina.” Bettina bit and killed Mark, and the other critters proceeded to eat and infest his body over the next 7-14 days before he was discovered by police when neighbors complained of a foul odor…

Police broke in to Mark Voegel’s apartment to find spider Bettina along with 200 others, several snakes, a gecko lizard called Helmut and several thousand termites had gorged on his body.

Police spokesman said: “It was like a horror movie. His corpse was over the sofa.

“Giant webs draped him, spiders were all over him. They were coming out of his nose and his mouth.

“There was everything there one could imagine in the world of reptiles.

“Larger pieces of flesh torn off by the lizards were scooped up and taken back to the webs of tarantulas and other bird-eating spiders.”

One thing I was curious about… The article describes Mark as a loner, which is how the media diplomatically calls someone crazy and friendless. Yet somehow the police knew the names of the animals that were eating him. Even if the tanks were labeled how would they know who went where if most were loose in the apartment.

I suggest someone tack this story to the a few of the trees in Lake Tawakoni State Park.

– Prof. Gruntsplatter

Why Goats?

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A couple stories I found recently got me wondering “why goats?” For centuries they have had a symbolism attached to them that is cross cultural and malleable, but seemingly ever present in some form or another.

The ChristStory Bestiary runs through a lot of them, largely in a negative or neutral light, but to summarize… Christians art uses it as a symbol of the damned, and frequently as the antithesis of sheep. This evolved into the goat as a personification of the devil, and during the European Witch Trials, not to new confused with the equally retarded sequel The American Witch Trials, goats were seen as the witches familiars and it was believed, even had the ability to bestow supernatural rewards upon the alleged witches.

It has been mentioned as a symbol of freewill, lust, lechery, fertility, courage, and spiritual initiation, in alchemy the goat represents sulfur, there is an association with thunder and lightning across cultures… The term scapegoat came about from a Day of Atonement ritual where one goat was sacrificed for Israel’s sins, and one was ritually burdened with the sins of the people and cast out into the world to fend for itself, this was “scapegoat.” Similarly in France and areas of the Mediterranean a “scapegoat” was kept on the farm in the belief that it would absorb bad germs or diseases and thereby protect the rest of the livestock. The Chinese include the goat in their calendar, and someone born in the year of the goat is considered sociable, trustworthy and considerate… In addition, the half man half goat motif appears in many mythologies, and the goat is a popular mount for the gods of multiple cultures to ride while seeing to their godly chores. The International Kiko Goat Association (who knew) also as some additional background on goats in myth and folklore. Perhaps not surprisingly the IKGA site doesn’t really go into the more diabolical connotations of the goat that the ChristStory site does.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the more nature attuned religions and myths, be they from the East or from Pagan Europe are the ones that see the goat in a more positive light, and the Christian faith which separates man from the rest of nature see it in a negative light. Believed to be only second to the dog in becoming a domesticated animal, early cultures would have been living in closer proximity to goats than they would many other animals. This closeness would lead them to a greater understanding of the animals temperament and traits, and thus make them more likely to ascribe personality and human qualities to them. This may help explain why they are so common in folklore and myth.

What am I getting at? The mythic persona of the goat is still alive and well today as outlined by these three stories.

A Wisconsin defense attorney received a package outside her office in late August. The package was a severed goats head in a pink bag . Inside the goats mouth was a note with the attorneys name written on it six times, backwards. The attorney didn’t have any idea who could have sent it, but suggested it may have something to do with the full moon, and the paper who reported the story consulted an expert in Voodoo, who said the scenario wasn’t familiar to him, though he did acknowledge that sacrifice of goats can be part of voodoo rituals he didn’t see any parallels. Voodoo must have been the only alternative religion represented at the local university…

Next up we jaunt from Milwaukee, to Kathmandu, Nepal where Nepal’s official state airline, Nepal Airlines sacrificed two goats to the Hindu sky god Akash Bhairab. It seems they had two airplanes that were having persistent mechanical issues and so the goats were sacrificed before the planes in the traditional manner in hopes of appeasing the sky god and getting the planes back in the air. The planes are flying again, and Nepal Airlines has refused to state what the issue had been.

Finally, we make our last stop in Sweden, where every year since 1966 the town of Gavle has erected a 43 foot goat made of straw and wood to mark the beginning of the Christmas season. It has become a bit of sport apparently to burn down the goats when the opportunity arises, and just 10 goat have survived where 22 have fallen to flame some within hours of completion.

So there you have it, the goat has been woven into our collective unconscious and continues to rear its head in mythical ways today, sometimes even at the airport.

– Prof. Gruntsplatter

Witchery, Angry Peasants and Pre-Mortem Burial

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When I initially saw this story, I intended to do a little piece about how I like hearing that there are pockets of the world that still embrace ravenous superstitions. While more often than not it doesn’t serve them well, it is nice to know that that type if life hasn’t been consumed by progress entirely. I stand by that belief, but this story is an excellent example of what can happen if you can’t move beyond that system and I think probably also offers a look back in to the not to distant past for the rest of us.

Papua New Guinea is an isolated South Pacific island off North Australia, in which some tribes had their first contact with the outside world in this lifetime. There are approximately 800 languages spoken among the tribes scattered in pockets across the island. It is one of the last seats of true primitivism that exists on the planet. Papua New Guinea has a vicious HIV crisis, and the public has taken to blaming it on witches. They determine whether one is a witch in some cases based simply on how they walk. Once you have been fingered as a witch the flailing mob takes over and vanquishes the witch in some pretty heinous ways.

This is from a report in the Khaleej Times
 “There are reports of women being tortured for days in efforts to extract confessions,” wrote research fellow Miranda Tobias.

“Women have been beaten, stabbed, cut with knives, sexually assaulted and burnt with hot irons. One woman had her uterus ripped out with a steel hook.

“It is estimated that there have been 500 such attacks in the past year,” the independent think tank said.

Since I read all of this, I’ve seen two additional articles detailing just how bad it is there. A recent report from The Scotsman explains how a former British teacher living in Papau New Guinea had had repeated burglaries into his home there and so turned to “black magic” to protect it… Basically he had a local witchdoctor cast a protection spell on his house. When the locals, who were also the burglars, caught wind that he’d been cavorting with witchdoctors (something apparently quite common) they hacked him to pieces with both a hatchet and a machete.

In addition to all of the witchy shenanigans, fear mongering and violence, the people who are actually stricken with AIDS are being buried alive with the hope it will keep the disease from spreading. Buried Alive. Sick but still very much alive, and often crying out in protest they are thrown in a hole and buried. There was an article on this as well but I forgot to hold onto the link.

So yes, I like knowing that there are corners of the world where the bogeyman is real, but science clearly has its benefits too.

– Prof. Gruntsplatter

Farming Humans

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Two graduate students at MIT have determined that the human energy generated by simply sitting on a stool will power 4 LED lights. They have extrapolated that out to harnessing the energy of concert crowds, commuters and general hustle and bustle of urban life into real life sustainable energy. Calling them “crowd farms,” they see it more as an example of potential than as a genuinely dependable source of power. The process involves pressure sensitive surfaces that use crystals or ceramics to translate that pressure into energy. That energy would be transformed into usable electricity by rotating coils and electromagnets. So the pressure of the stirring masses shuffling over the globe would ultimately be turned into the electricity they needed to power the places they were shuffling off to. The logistics of making something like this work beyond a controlled environment appear to be a long ways off however.

If you were to construct a “crowd farm” that was populated enough to generate a substantial amount of energy, it would seem to me a prison would not only be ideal, it would also be minimally objected to and easier to fly under the radar all together than a stadium, airport or shopping mall might be. It is a densely populated, controlled environment that the general public has little access to, and whose inhabitants lives have already been largely disregarded. There is no question the current prison system is overcrowded and new prisons are needed. The public doesn’t however want that to cost any more than it takes to keep their house from getting robbed or their kids from being shot. An eco friendly, energy efficient prison would be lauded as a grand achievement.

Electromagnetic fields are often pointed to by paranormal researchers as possible explanations for ghost sightings and other unexplained visions or hallucinations. The Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomenon (ASSAP) is researching this very thing. They refer to the magnetic disturbances as Experience Inducing Fields (EIF) and have in early research found them to be quite common in the average house at low levels and have several witnesses reporting the same hallucinations at the site of an allegedly haunted bed at Muncaster Castle in Cumbria that has quantifiably strong EIF activity. What would turning the ground beneath our feet into an active circuit do to the electromagnetic fields around us? Would that lead to mass hallucinations that could be used as a means of control or incapacitation? Self contained environments away from public view turned into warped realities for anyone deemed worthy of incarceration? It is all speculation at this point, even the science, but curious to ponder none the less.

– Prof. Gruntsplatter

Spookatorium 015

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Welcome to the newly renovated Spookatorium. With episode 15 I have expanded the focus beyond music and pulled open the beaten old trunk of the strange and unusual. Each episode will feature a handful of curious tales and the website will be updated frequently with additional content as I find stories of interest.

This trip out features tracks from
PROCER VENEFICUS
COLD NORTHERN VENGEANCE
COIL
DOLORIAN
SPECTRAL LIGHT & MOONSHINE FIREFLY SNAKEOIL JAMBOREE
THE TIGER LILLIES
CHRISTIAN DEATH
TSOL
MYRKR
TRIAL
RWAKE

With background accompaniment from
ANGEL OF DECAY
ANIMA MUNDI

In addition you will hear the moving tale of the death of a vampire peacock struck down in one of the shadowy corners of New York City, and the citizen who would not let its passing go unnoticed. I have a haunted lighthouse to tell you about, and ladies and gentleman, you can buy it for a dollar! I also take a look at the alleged tales of haunting in a remote Michigan town. A small town in Mississippi sees a strange creature on the loose, and doesn’t jump to cryptoid conclusions! An amphibious giant from beneath the sea with a hostile message is made an example of by the Dutch.

Prof. Gruntsplatter’s Spookatorium 015

Cheers,
Prof. Gruntsplatter