Tag: #Psychology
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The Two Session Method That Might Let You Talk to the Dead
Standing at the Edge of Something I’m Not Ready to Try I have spent years talking to the dead. Scrying in a dark room, staring into a black mirror until my eyes ached. Tarot spread across a table, reading the cards for anyone who asked, myself included. I still do both, though rarely now. Most…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The Sound of Thunder
I don’t spend much time looking backward, but one story about rain brought my grandmother back to me. When Kateryna Fedotova tagged me in her rain-writing challenge, I expected to enjoy reading her story and then move on with my day. Instead, I found myself thinking about someone I haven’t thought about in a very…
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Did a Pope Just Hate Cats?
What One Papal Bull Reveals About Where Our Superstitions Actually Come From You knock on wood without thinking about it. You toss salt over your shoulder if you spill it, or you know someone who does. You’ve watched a friend refuse to walk under a ladder, not because they believe in curses exactly, but because,…
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I’ve Been Questioning Monsters Since I Was a Child
The Black Dog with Red Eyes Coming Down the Hall I don’t remember exactly how old I was. I only remember the dog that night. My bed looked straight down the hall in our house. It was walking from the far end of the hallway towards my bedroom. It was black with red eyes. Smoke…
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Okay, It Was Only a Movie, But God Said What?
Skeptics and Believers Are Lying to Themselves the Same Way There’s a scene late in the movie Disclosure Day where a former novitiate named Jane corners her old mentor, a nun named Sister Maura, with a question dressed up as a statement. Genesis, she says, tells us humanity is God’s supreme creation. Sister Maura doesn’t…
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They Kept the Story. They Lost the Point
Folklore didn’t survive because it was true. It survived because it was useful It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are in life. You already know what it feels like to have a story told about you that was never true. Maybe it followed you anyway. Maybe people believed it because it was…