Spookatorium 018

Welcome to episode 18, some of the little improvements I have been hoping to do for awhile finally got taken care of, so hopefully you’ll like those.

This time out we look at the legacy of Mary Toft, she was involved in a hoax in 1726 that drew the attention of the King of England and inspired perhaps the most famous of any trick in a magicians repertoire. Her story is outlined further in the book “The Girl Who Gave Birth To Rabbits: A True Medical Mystery,” which I am hoping to check out before too long.

Next we take a trip down south to check in on a couple of mysterious creature sightings. One is believed to be a possible Skunk Ape and the other dubbed the Beast of Bolivia, is killing dogs in South Carolina. In addition LiveScience.com ran a recent article on the possibility of using hi resolution satellite imagery to search for elusive breeding colonies of various cryptids.

Finally we take a look at the theory of palingenesy, the alchemical idea inspired by the work of Greek philosopher Lucretious that sought to explain ghosts and apparitions chemically, rather than metaphysically. The thought was that a body’s form resided in its salts, and by applying heat to those salts, you could regenerate the form of a dead or destroyed plant or animal as an apparition. This one is pretty interesting and I have been meaning to cover it for a few weeks so I hope you find it curious.

The sounds this time around are supplied by…

DISHARMONIC ORCHESTRA
DAZZLINGKILLMEN
MISSING FOUNDATION
SNOG
BLANCHE
CLAN OF XYMOX
DESCENDENTS
NAVICON TORTURE TECHNOLOGIES
VO.I.D
FLUISTERWOUD
TODAY IS THE DAY
THE JESUS & MARY CHAIN
BRUTE FORCE
CHARNEL VALLEY

With background accompaniment from
NAJ
CORPOPARASSITA

Thanks as always for checking out the show…

Professor Gruntsplatter’s Spookatorium 018

– Prof. Gruntsplatter

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Crypto Happenings

This story has made the rounds for a bit, but I was sort of holding off to see if anything new came out of it. In July of 2007 in Cuero, Texas, two curious creatures were hit by cars in the area. Some believe them to be chupacabra, others a disheveled coyote. The linked article is from Earthfiles.com, and includes some investigation, photos and an interview with the rancher who was most involved. I had two other articles from a local paper and an AP feed that I wanted to include here for a bit of balance and I sat on it too long and they are no longer available.

Looking at the photos, the front legs look like they have been broken severely and healed poorly. In that situation a feral animal would learn to move with it’s hind legs, I’ve seen domestic animals do the same thing. So the anatomy of shorter front legs when compared to the chupa-mythos on this animal leaves a little to be desired for me. It’s certainly a curious specimen, and the interview is intriguing, but it seems a lot of potential research wasn’t done for what may or may not be legitimate reasons.

Here’s another one that is a bit more amusing than anything else….

Reported on the 18th of October out of Charleston, South Carolina a woman called 911 to report that she may have just hit a giraffe… in South Carolina. The caller says there were two crossing the road, she tried to avoid them and struck one damaging the side mirror of her car. She believed it to be a giraffe because it was “”bigger than a horse.” Police who spoke to the woman felt it “may have been a large deer,” the caller did not want to file an official report. There is an audio clip of the 911 call with the article. It is highly unlikely that there were two giraffe roaming along the highway in South Carolina that day, the eye witness reports it was larger than a horse, and the police admit all they have to go on is the witness account. I haven’t seen any follow up on this, or even if the police did investigate what she may or may not have run into.