Tag: #History
-
Why I Don’t Believe in Coincidence
Synchronicity Is What You Felt I don’t believe in coincidence. I haven’t for as long as I can remember. Other people say it all the time. That can’t just be a coincidence. You can hear it in their voice when they say it, a small pause right before the sentence, like they’ve bumped into something…
-
Who Is the Grim Reaper?
How a Medieval Image Still Scares Modern Brains Just picture this for a second. You’re sick enough to need the ER, not dying, just sick enough that toughing it out at home stopped feeling smart. You park, you walk toward the doors, half thinking about your symptoms, half thinking about the wait. Then you look…
-
What People Get Wrong About the Word Nightmare
Nightmare Isn’t a Bad Dream. It’s a Demon on Your Chest. It’s three in the morning. You wake with a start, and something is sitting on your chest. You try to move and you can’t. If that has ever happened to you, you now know what a real nightmare is. Most people don’t. They think…
-
Maybe The Voynich Manuscript Was Never Meant to Be Solved
Six Hundred Gold Ducats for a Book No One Could Read Rudolf II kept his most prized possessions close. Astrolabes. Alchemical texts. A menagerie of exotic animals most of Europe had never seen. Sometime during Rudolf II’s reign, according to a letter written decades later, he added something stranger to the collection: a manuscript written…
-
Fake News Is Older Than You Think and Devon Proved It in 1855
The Word Is New. The Lie Isn’t On the night of February 8, 1855, something walked across Devon, England, for a hundred miles. It crossed rooftops without breaking stride. Haystacks and stone walls fourteen feet high did nothing to slow it, and the snow on top stayed untouched. Even the River Exe couldn’t stop it,…
-
How High Strangeness Became a Catchall for Everything Weird
What Hynek Actually Meant by “High Strangeness” I was halfway through writing the Spottsville Monster episode of 4Ever Paranormal when I caught myself doing something I should have known better than to do. I’d gotten to the part where the neighbor, alone in that abandoned barn, heard something tell him not to be afraid. It…
-
What High School Biology Owes to Frankenstein
Frankenstein Wasn’t a Nightmare, It Was a Lab Report In 1803, a crowd in London paid to watch a dead man’s face move. His name was George Forster, hanged that morning for murder. A scientist named Giovanni Aldini wired electricity into his corpse, and the jaw clenched, one eye opened, and a hand curled into…
-
The Bermuda Triangle: Almost None of It Is True.
The Mystery Was Manufactured I spent this past weekend at NC Crypticon, working a booth where I was selling books and talking up our 4Ever Paranormal podcast. Between signing books, answering questions about cryptids, and talking about folklore, the conversation kept drifting back to the same stretch of ocean. Different people. Different ages. The same…
-
Judas Iscariot Didn’t Betray Jesus. He Obeyed Him.
The Lost Gospel That Turns History’s Worst Villain Into Its Most Loyal Disciple Almost everyone has betrayed someone else at some point, whether they’d call it that or not. Sometimes it’s telling a friend a truth they didn’t want to hear. Sometimes it’s ending a relationship someone else wasn’t ready to let go of. Sometimes…
-
The Rocket Scientist Who Tried to Open a Portal Under Pasadena
What Jack Parsons Summoned at Devil’s Gate Dam Jack Parsons co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL is the NASA-affiliated research center that built the technology behind America’s rocket program and, decades later, the Mars rovers. Parsons was one of the men who made that program possible in the first place. He was not a fringe…