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Legend: Chanting "Bloody Mary!" thirteen times in front of a candlelit mirror will summon a vengeful spirit.
Variations:
The avenging spirit goes by many names: Bloody Mary, Bloody Bones, Hell Mary, Mary Worth, Mary Worthington, Mary Whales, Mary Johnson, Mary Lou, Mary Jane, Sally, Kathy, Agnes, Black Agnes, Aggie, Svarte Madame.
Summoning Mary requires the right chant. "I believe in Mary Worth" is the key phrase according to one version, but others require the shouting of "Kathy, come out!" or the repetition of "Bloody Mary" into the mirror as many times as the ritual demands. (Sometimes Bloody Mary gets more of a script and is summoned by calls of "Bloody Mary! I killed your baby!")
The precise requirements of the ritual vary. Some specify that the mirror must be illuminated by a single candle; in others, there must be a candle on each side. In some versions, the message to Mary is repeated by just one girl who is either a volunteer or one selected by the others to summon up the mirror-witch. The number of chants needed to fetch Mary also varies.
What the mirror-witch does upon arrival varies too. She may strike her summoner dead, drive her mad, or fiercely scratch her face. She may merely peer malevolently out through the mirror, or she may drag one of the girls back through it to live with her.
Origins: The research into Bloody Mary goes back to 1978, when folklorist Janet Langlois published her essay on the legend. Belief in summoning the mirror-witch was even at that time widespread throughout the U.S.
Mary is summoned whenever squealing girls get together for a sleepover, but boys have been known to call on her too. (The 'Bloody Mary' legend was common when I was a kid in the early 1970s. We typically performed the "ritual" in bathrooms, because the bathrooms of our suburban homes had large mirrors and were easily darkened even during the day since they had no windows. A familiar 'Bloody Mary' story was one about a girl who supposedly ended her incantation with a spiteful "I don't believe in Mary Worth," then tripped over the doorjamb while exiting the bathroom and broke her
hip.)
Mary is said to be a witch who was executed a hundred years ago for plying the black arts, or a woman of more modern times who died in a local car accident in which her face was hideously mutilated.
Some confuse the mirror witch with Mary I of England, whom history remembers as "Bloody Mary." An expanded version of that confusion has it that this murdering British queen killed young girls so she could bathe in their blood to preserve her youthful appearance.
Mary I of England (1553-1558) was anything but a famed beauty terrified of losing her looks -- she was a matronly, fortyish woman who had about as much sense of style as a dust mop. The idea of her bathing in the blood of slaughtered virgins to preserve her loveliness is ludicrous. She came by the moniker "Bloody Mary" because she had a number of Protestants put to death during her reign, as she tried to re-establish Catholicism as the religion of the land after the reigns of her father (Henry VIII, he who married six wives over the course of his lifetime and established himself as the head of a new religion rather than tolerate the Pope's saying he couldn't divorce wife #1 to marry wife #2) and her brother (Edward VI, who ruled after Henry died but passed away himself at the age of 16). Mary was a devoutly religious woman who saw what she was doing as the saving of her subjects' souls from eternal damnation, and in those times � as crazy as this sounds now � the eternal wellbeing of a soul was deemed far more important than the comparatively fleeting life of a person. That bringing the country back to Catholicism would also safeguard her throne was also a major consideration.
Mary I was the half sister of Elizabeth I (1558-1603). Both were daughters of Henry VIII, but Mary's mother was Katherine of Aragon and Elizabeth's mother was Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth I became Queen when Mary died, and she reigned for many years, coming to be called "The Virgin Queen" because she never married.
Some muddlings of this "murdering queen" variant claim that Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1567) is the "bloody Mary" of mirror summonings. Though this Mary was indeed a vain and foolish woman, history does not know her as a murderous one. (Well, okay, she did have a hand in doing away with a husband. But she didn't go after her subjects en masse, as did Mary I of England.)
So, although there was a British queen known as "Bloody Mary," no connection between her and the mirror witch has surfaced, save for their both having the same name. Likewise, the "Mary Worth" appellation of the malevolent apparition doesn't appear to be drawn from the lead character of a popular comic strip of the same name. In lore, as elsewhere, coincidences occur. (The "bathing in blood" detail is traditionally attributed to Elizabeth Bathory, but of course her name was not "Mary.")
Why would otherwise rational youngsters want to risk setting a murderous spirit on the rampage? Gail de Vos offers the following explanation:
So why do children continue to summon Bloody Mary, flirting with danger and possible tragedy? The ages between 9 and 12 are labeled "the Robinson age" by psychologists. This is the period when children need to satisfy their craving for excitement by participating in ritual games and playing in the dark. They are constantly looking for a safe way to extract pleasure and release anxiety and fears.
It's possible these "mirror witch" games have their roots in oldtime divining rituals involving unmarried girls and future husbands. There are a number of variations of these divinations, some involving chanting a rhyme in a darkened room on a special night and then quickly looking in the mirror to catch a glimpse of the bridegroom-to-be.
The concept of mirrors as portals between this world and the realm of spirits shows up in other beliefs, namely those surrounding funerals. It was common practice to cover mirrors in a house where a death had occurred until the body was taken for burial. (Back in the days before funeral homes, corpses were washed by the deceased's relatives, dressed in their funeral finery, and laid out in coffins in the front parlor. Consequently, the dead would be in the house for days.) It was believed if the dear departed caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror, his ghost would remain in the house because the mirror would trap his spirit.
Legend: The protective ghosts of little children killed at a railway crossing push stalled cars off the tracks.
Variations:
Sometimes the handprints appear on the dusty trunk unaided; other times the driver of the stalled vehicle "dusts" for them with baby powder. If the occurrence is said to have happened in the early morning, the handprints will be said to have appeared in the dew on the car.
Origins: This
legend dates to at least the early 1970s. The horrific accident that created the protective ghosts is said to have taken place between a train and a schoolbus stalled on the tracks. According to widely believed lore, spirits of the slain youngsters forever after haunted that location, shoving stalled cars out of harm's way, lest more innocents share their fate. Tiny handprints on the back of the saved vehicles are a motif common to this legend and serve to explain why the stalled vehicles are magically moved. Another version has some form of tame demon assisting the dead kids in their crusade. (Hoofprints, since you asked.)
Although the city of San Antonio has long claimed this folk tale as its own, pointing to the railway crossing where Villamain Road becomes Shane Road where cars seem to behave strangely and a set of nearby streets named after children (Bobbie Allen, Cindy Sue, Laura Lee, Nancy Carole, and Richey Otis), the bus accident took place in Salt Lake City, a city more than a thousand miles away.
In December 1938, twenty-six children, aged 12 to 18, lost their lives when the school bus they'd been travelling in stalled on the tracks and was struck by a freight train. No similar accident took place in San Antonio, but in 1938 that city was subjected to about ten days' worth of gruesomely detailed coverage in its local newspaper, memory of which afterwards served to convince later generations the tragedy had taken place locally.
San Antonio's "ghost tracks" are nothing more than an optical illusion. The mysterious movement of vehicles at that crossing is the result of a slight incline at the site, which works to roll vehicles that have been slipped into neutral off the tracks. As for the nearby streets supposedly christened in memoriam to the children who died, they were actually named in honor of a developer's grandchildren.
The "ghosts of schoolkids push vehicle off tracks" group of tales is a subset of a larger group of stories -- Gravity Hill tales. Many Gravity Hill factlets are offered as a "gee whiz" kind of thing with no storyline to them, just that if a car is slipped into neutral at the right place, it'll move as if by magic.
A further subset of Gravity Hill lore involves legends about dead teens. Though we also have cars stalled on train tracks and the onrushing train killing the occupants (thus creating the helpful ghosts), others involve a freeway exit ramp where it is rumored a car stopped on it will roll back uphill. The explanation offered has it that either a carload of teens heading for no particular destination or a girl on her way to the prom die in a horrible accident on that off ramp when their car stalls and is hit from behind or the brakes go and the vehicle is sent flying into the middle of the intersection at the end of the ramp where it collides with a tractor trailer. The mysterious movement of later cars is explained as the ghost(s) of the dead teen(s) attempting to push stalled vehicles out of harm's way.
Black Agnes
Legend: A teenage girl who bets her friends she can spend the night in a cemetery is found dead in the arms of a graveyard statue.
Origins: Told as having happened in various parts of the United States, this legend has been with us for quite a while. The victim is always a teenage girl, and a sorority initiation dare is what usually serves to impel her to sit in the statue's lap. The flourish in the exampled cited above that tells of the girl being related to the man who'd done the ghost wrong is unusual: most versions make no mention of a connection between victim and murderous spirit. (It's probably more frightening that way, because then the victim could very well be anyone.)
Other versions have it that just falling under the statue's malevolent gaze is enough to seal one's fate:
[Collected on the Internet, 1995]
I remember reading a story about a graveyard in the Midwest (Chicago?) with a statue in it called "Black Aggie". It was said that if you fell under her gaze after dark, you would die. They say her eyes glow red at night.
The "killing statue" story is closely related to another venerable legend, that of the girl who accepts a dare to spend a night in the graveyard. (Variations on its basic theme go back to the Middle Ages in Europe.) As part of the dare or prompted by her own disrespect she plunges a knife into a grave. In the morning she's found lying dead across the plot, the knife pinning her skirt to the ground having prevented her from escaping. Died of fright, they say, with a look of terror etched on her face. (One is left to work out whether a ghost had actually killed her, or whether her fear at finding herself held to the grave had done her in.)
[Collected via e-mail, 2004]
My grandmother used to tell this: A young girl had a pajama party with several of her teenage friends attending. Shortly before midnight she told her guests that there was a grave in the edge of the woods behind her house and anyone going there on a full moon and standing to close to the grave would be pulled into the grave by the bony hand of the old man buried there. One 15 year old girl scoffed at the story and after much teasing accepted the challenge of going alone to the grave. As proof she had actually gone all the way she was to stick a fork into the top of the grave for inspection by all the others the next morning. The girl left and did not return. The others mourned her absence until morning - afraid to wake the adults in the house - fearful they were in serious trouble. Next morning they all huddled together and nervously made their way to the grave. There they found their friend lying dead beside the grave with her long night gown pinned to the grave where she had stuck the fork thru her night gown and into the hard clay covering the grave.
We all thought this was a true story until we got older.
Getting back to killer statues, we note the legend of Black Agnes is peculiar to Baltimore, Maryland, and it sprang up around a sculpture that started out as a grave marker in Loudon Park Cemetery. The evocative statue of a seated, mournful figure of indeterminate gender was christened Black Aggie, and fraternity/sorority initiations sprang up around it. In an effort to thwart those rituals, Black Aggie was moved to Druid Hill Park. The problems continued there, so in 1967 the statue was dispatched to the Smithsonian Institution. She now resides at the federal courts building in Washington, D.C., off I Street, in a rear courtyard of the Dolly Madison House.
The statue did once mark a final resting place in Baltimore but not of a woman, as you might suppose. No, the person buried under Aggie was Felix Agnus (1839-1925), a Union Civil War general. Facts be damned though, kids were determined to believe Aggie was the representation of the person in the grave, and further that the dead person had died a heartbroken woman, hence her need to wreak vengeance from the other side. Aggie's eyes were said to burn bright red at midnight, permanently blinding anyone foolish enough to look into them. Lying in her arms was said to be fatal.
Up against that, a Civil War general wouldn't even register. Even if he were one that H.L. Mencken once said had so much lead in him that "he rattled when he walked."
Oddly enough, the statue that started out in Baltimore and ended up in Washington was a copy of one already in Washington. The original can be found in Rock Creek Cemetery, where it marks the graves of Marian and Henry Adams. In 1866, depressed by the death of her father, Marian Adams swallowed potassium cyanide while her husband was paying an emergency Sunday visit to his dentist. Grief-stricken over her loss to the end of his life, Adams commissioned a special monument from the well-known sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The statue has come to be called "Grief," although it never was officially so named either by its creator or its patron. There is no writing to be found on it, so very few know it's actually the grave marker of both Henry and Marian (he joined her underneath there in 1918) and not just a lovely bit of statuary.
It's ironic that the original statue (which is erected over the grave of a grief-stricken woman) never became a target either for fraternity initiation rites or for murdering ghost legends, whereas the Baltimore copy (erected over the grave of Civil War General who'd lived a full and rewarding life) did. Just goes to show that facts never get in the way of a good ghost story.
A number of communities have "killer statue" legends, and Black Agnes is only one of them. Adding to the confusion is the superimposing of one legend onto another. A scary pre-teen belief has it that chanting "Bloody Mary" or "I believe in Mary Worth" a specified number of times in front of a darkened mirror will cause a vengeful spirit to appear. At times this gets crossed up with Black Agnes legends and the chant is rendered as "Black Aggie" or "Black Agnes."
Legend: The limousine Archduke Franz Ferdinand rode to his death in brought a curse upon all those who owned it.
Origins: The following marvelous tale was sent to me by Damion Dishart of the U.K. He found it in Blundell and Hall's Marvels and Mysteries of the Unexplained. Other than confirming that the car does now indeed reside in a Viennese museum and turning up an earlier version of the tale, I've yet to confirm any of the rest of this. I present it here because it's a damned good story. Thank you, Damion, for sharing it with us.
Of all things jinxed, few can have bestowed more misery than a motor car owned by the Hapsburg dynasty of imperial Austria. The open-topped limousine was given to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the troubled throne. He rode in it in July 1914 on a state visit to Sarajevo. Sarajevo then was in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a state recently annexed by the imperial court of Vienna. In the car with the Archduke on this ill-fated day were his wife, General Potiorek of the Austrian army and three other dignitaries, plus a driver.
A fervent young nationalist called Gavrilo Princip stepped in front of the vehicle on its official tour of the city and shot the Archduke and his wife, the Archduchess Sophie. More catastrophic still, this event was to trigger the First World War.
General Potiorek became the next owner of the car. Several weeks into the war his armies suffered a rout at the hands of the ill-organised army of Serbia. The General was summoned back to Vienna by the Emperor Franz Josef I. And there in Vienna, his reputation ruined, his sanity destroyed, he died.
[Another version adds the detail of Potiorek becoming an impoverished lunatic who eventually died in the almshouse.]
A captain of Potiorek's staff took charge of the jinxed vehicle; nine days later in a terrible accident he killed two peasants on the road before swerving into a tree and killing himself.
After the war, the governor of newly independent Yugoslavia took charge of the car. He endured a succession of terrible accidents, one of which cost him his left arm. [Four accidents in four months, according to another source.] The car was then sold to a doctor, who was crushed to death when he overturned it into a ditch. [He had the car six months before it "turned" on him.] The next owner was Simon Mantharides, a diamond dealer. He fell to his death from a precipice. [The other version gives a slightly different sequence of events. According to it, the car passed from the crushed doctor to a wealthy unnamed jeweler who enjoyed it for all of a year before commiting suicide. Its next owner was yet another doctor, one whose patients deserted him out of fear for his cursed car.]
The car passed into the hands of a Swiss racing driver who was later killed in an accident in it. [Thrown over a stone wall to his death, says another source.] A Serbian farmer, who paid a fantastic sum for the car which had acquired great historical value, was the next owner and victim. He cadged a tow from a horse and cart one morning because the engine would not turn over. He forgot to switch off the ignition and the engine caught suddenly. The car lurched forward into the horse and cart, and overturned, killing the farmer.
Finally, a garage owner lost his life in the car returning from a wedding. He tried to overtake a long line of vehicles and was killed as the car spun out of control. [On his way to the wedding, says the other version. And the spin out killed both him and four of the six friends with him.]
The car now rests harmlessly in a Viennese museum. It is never taken out on the road.
Legend: A man turns to bid his unusual hitchhiker goodbye and discovers that she has disappeared from the car. He later learns that his mysterious passenger had died several years earlier.
Variations:
The teller usually cites specific local streets where the driver picks up the spectral hitchhiker.
Sometimes the ghost leaves a book or scarf in the car, which the bereaved parents then identify as belonging to their lost daughter. Sometimes the driver spies the hitchhiker's photograph on the family piano, wearing the party dress in which she died (and which she was wearing when he picked her up).
In versions where the hitchhiker disappears when the vehicle drives past a graveyard, the driver discovers the coat he lent his passenger draped over the tombstone of a girl who'd died in a car accident a few years earlier.
Origins: Vanishing hitchhiker stories as we now tell them date to the turn of the century, but their predecessors go back centuries before that. As time rolled on, the wagons and horses of older times transformed into the cars of today.
According to folklorist Jan Brunvand, the legend of the vanishing hitchhiker evolved from earlier European stories, usually about travelers on horseback. In Hawaii, the hitchhiker became associated with the ancient volcano goddess Pele. A prototype of the story shows up in the New Testament (Acts 8:26-39), in which an Ethiopian driving a chariot picks up the Apostle Philip, who baptizes him and then disappears.
The most common version of the legend involves a driver who stops for a strange girl on a highway, then during the course of the ride realizes his hitchhiker has disappeared. Upon arriving at the address the girl had mentioned, the driver learns from her relatives that she has been dead for years.
Another popular version stars a hitchhiker who makes a prophesy before vanishing in front of the driver's eyes. Good crops, the end of a war, a natural catastrophe about to strike, or the imminent coming of Jesus have been predicted by these vanishing prophets. At the completion of some of these tales, the driver seeks out the police to report the incident and is told he's the fourth person this has happened to this week.
Vanishing prophets who predict catastrophes are often said to look like Jesus. This form of the legend often surfaces in the wake of a natural disaster, with the encounter said to have happened maybe all of a week before things went to hell in a handbasket.
The vanishing prophet set of stories contains a smaller subset in which the prediction of one future event is bolstered by the prediction of a second, equally unbelievable, event which subsequently comes true. The hitchhiker sometimes vanishes after making the predictions:
[Jacobson, 1948]
In the wake of the anxiety rumors that swept the nation immediately after Pearl Harbor came a pipe-dream rumor which was undoubtedly the most popular of all: the weird tale of the man who picked up a strange woman in his car. Arriving at her destination, his passenger allegedly offered to pay the man for the gas he had used. But the man refused to accept the money, so the woman offered to tell his fortune. And, as the rumor went, mysteriously she told him, "There will be a dead body in your car before you get home, and Hitler will be dead in six months." Supposedly, then, on the way home the man had seen a serious automobile wreck and had taken one of the victims into his car to rush him to the hospital. But the injured person died en route, which left the hopeful implication that Hitler would therefore be dead within the following six months.
Although this pipe dream sounds foolish, it nevertheless spread throughout the country rapidly. It appeared in widely circulated gossip columns, and a lot of Americans took it seriously. Yet this same rumor, in the setting of the period, to be sure, had appeared in every military conflict since the Napoleonic Wars. And it has been said that the rumor probably goes back into the Middle Ages.
The appeal of vanishing hitchhiker stories lies in the nature of the encounter -- an interaction with a ghost occurs not because the main character went looking for the supernatural, but because it came to him. Such tales underscore the belief that representatives from the spirit world can be encountered at any time and by anyone. Adding to the horror factor is the spectre's passing for a living person. That the driver does not recognize it as a ghost during their time together makes it all that more easy to believe we won't recognize a ghost when we meet one, either.
Claim: The Titanic was sent to a watery grave because it carried a cursed mummy in its hold.
Origins: Sends chills down your spine, doesn't it? Ah, but it's only a ghost story -- there never was a mummy (cursed or otherwise) on the RMS Titanic.
First of all, the tale is logically inconsistent. One of the few names quoted in this piece is that of Helena Blavatsky, a well-known occultist of the period. We're told the dreaded Princess of Amen-Ra was purchased in Luxor, Egypt, by four foolish young Englishmen "in the late 1890s," yet later in the same piece we're informed of Helena Blavatsky's dire pronouncements made to the private collector who supposedly had possession of the mummy right before it was shipped on the Titanic. These claims cannot both be true, because Helena Blavatsky died of influenza in 1891, but the Titanic's first and only voyage didn't take place until 1912.
As for the facts of the matter, in 1985, Charles Haas, president of the national Titanic Historical Society, gained access to the ship's cargo manifest and cargo diagrams. Though the cargo included raw feathers, linen, straw, hatter's fur, tissue, auto parts, leather, rabbit hair, elastics, hair nets and refrigerating apparatus, not so much as one mummy was listed. Speaking to the legend that a cursed mummy was on board, Haas said, "The cargo manifest throws those myths right out the window." Other experts have come to the same conclusion: no mummy -- least of all one "of the vengeful Princess of Amen-Ra" -- was shipped aboard the Titanic. (Of course, the fact that the ship's manifest listed no gold and no insurance claims were filed for valuable gems hasn't stopped people from believing that those objects went down with the Titanic as well.) Note that "Amen-Ra" isn't the name of a place; it's the name of an Egyptian god, one whose name means "the hidden one". He was seen as the creator of all things and, with his consort Mut and their son the moon-god Khonshu, was worshipped in the great temples of Luxor and Karnak.
In fact, the mummy to which this story refers (which was actually just the coffin lid, not the mummy, of the Priestess of Amun) never left the British Museum, and it is still there to this day. So how did this fanciful tale begin?
Apparently, this ghost story was originally concocted around the turn of the century by two Englishmen named William Stead and Douglas Murray. Stead was a well-known journalist and editor who crusaded on behalf of liberal causes and created a national scandal when he published an article entitled "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon," describing how he was able to purchase the services of a thirteen-year-old prostitute for . Stead was also a believer in mysticism and spiritualism who consulted mediums, investigated psychic phenomena, and published a related periodical. We don't know much about Murray -- he's been described as an "Egyptologist" and as the man who shipped the mummy in question to London in the first place, although he was probably neither.
Stead and Murray crafted an elaborate horror story about a mummy that was brought to England and set up in the drawing room of an acquaintance of theirs. The morning after the mummy arrived, they claimed, everything breakable in the room was destroyed. The mummy was moved from room to room within the house, but each move resulted in the same destruction of all the breakable objects at hand. Wherever the mummy went, it brought sickness, death, and destruction to its owner. Sometime after Stead and Murray invented their mummy tale, they were visiting the First Egyptian Room of the British Museum and noticed the coffin lid of the Priestess of Amun. They concocted yet another story that the look of terror and anguish in the face depicted on the coffin lid indicated that the coffin's original occupant was a tormented soul, and her evil spirit was now loose in the world. Stead and Murray told their fanciful tale to eager newspaper reporters who -- then as now -- weren't about to let the truth get in the way of a sensationally good story. The two stories were conflated into one and spread widely, and the Priestess of Amun came to be identified as the mummy whose mortal remains wreaked havoc wherever they were stored.
This ghost story made the leap from London to the Titanic after William Stead went down with the ill-fated ship on 15 April 1912. Stead was travelling to American at President Taft's request to address a peace conference, and he took delight in relating his "cursed mummy" tale to Titanic passengers. He reportedly defied superstition by starting his narrative at a dinner party on Friday, the 12th of April, and drew it out so that he concluded the tale just after midnight on the 13th. A few days after the Titanic's sinking, one of the survivors recounted Stead's "cursed mummy" tale in an interview with the New York World, and eventually the ghost story Stead and Murray invented, Stead's presence aboard the Titanic, and reports of Stead's having related the mummy tale to Titanic passengers became jumbled together, producing a new legend about an actual mummy aboard the Titanic.
The modified legend told of a cursed mummy the British Museum was so anxious to be rid of that they sold it to an American, who naturally sought to ship it back home via the Titanic. The presence of the cursed mummy (which had escalated the expressions of its wrath from breaking cups and saucers and making people ill to sinking passenger liners) in the Titanic's hold came to be whispered as the cause of the most famous maritime disaster in history. In an even more elaborate version of the legend, the mummy's American owner paid a bribe to have the mummy placed in one of the Titanic's lifeboats; it was then smuggled aboard the Carpathia when that ship picked up the Titanic's survivors and secretly landed in New York. When the mummy continued to wreak havoc at its new home, its new owner had it taken to Canada in preparation for shipping it back to England. The mummy was placed aboard the liner Empress of Ireland, which, while on its way from Quebec City to Liverpool on 29 May 1914, was struck by a Norwegian coal ship. The Empress of Ireland sank so quickly that only 7 of her 40 lifeboats could be launched, and 840 passengers went down with her.
As to how widespread this "curse of the mummy" stuff is, some of the crew members on a failed 1980 expedition to locate the sunken Titanic spoke darkly of the famous mummy that was allegedly on board her, saying it transferred the curse of all who disturbed its grave to the vessel's maiden voyage and to all subsequent search efforts. (Yeah. Like it couldn't have been plain bad luck. And what was the mummy doing back on the Titanic after having sailed on the Empress of Ireland?)
In looking to blame their bad luck on an outside force they couldn't possibly have hoped to defeat, those crew members weren't all that unusual. They merely brought into play a standard avoidance technique employed to keep us from ever confronting what a scary, random world this place can be. In the wake of any disaster, there's a strong urge to explain away the tragedy by ascribing it to some dark power beyond our control. As inconceivable as this might seem at first blush, it's easier for many people to accept that a cursed mummy was the cause of a great loss of life than it is to co-exist with the knowledge that sometimes even unthinkable accidents will happen. Being at the mercy of the God of Random Chance is far more frightening a reality to face than any old vengeful mummy will ever be.
Ghost stories like this one reaffirm our faith in the world being a predictable (and therefore safe) place. If a great tragedy such as the sinking of the Titanic can be explained away as the direct result of the evil forces of the supernatural's being stirred up, we can again feel safe about placing our faith in the inherent safety of great ships, airplanes or even automobiles.
Beyond the reassurance factor, such tales also make darned good storytelling. That too lies at the heart of their appeal.
In case you're curious (and have some vacation time to spare), the coffin lid of the Priestess of Amun is still on display at the British Museum, just as it was when Stead and Murray created their infamous "cursed mummy" tale a century ago. Look for exhibit BM No. 22542, in the Second Egyptian Room.
Legend: A woman is taken ill while travelling in a foreign country with her daughter. While the mother lies in her hotel bed, the daughter makes a trip across town to pick up a needed prescription. When she returns, she finds that her mother has disappeared without a trace, their hotel room does not exist, and no one remembers having seen either her or her mother.
Variations:
The locale varies, although the usual setting of the story is Paris (during the Exposition of 1889 or 1900), where the woman and her daughter have just travelled from India. Sometimes the two women in the story aren't mother and daughter; they're travelling companions of roughly the same age. On rare occasions, both the searcher and the one sought after are male. But by far the most common tellings feature a misplaced mother and an increasingly frantic daughter.
In some versions the daughter has difficulty communicating with the doctor and hotel clerk because she does not speak the local language; in others there is no difficulty because the clerk and doctor are fluent in English.
When the daughter returns to the hotel, in some tellings she finds that the desk clerk and doctor are different from the people she dealt with earlier; in others, they are the same people, but they swear they have never seen her or her mother before.
The reasons for the delay in the daughter's retrieving the prescription are numerous. In most cases she has to travel all the way across town and back through a city crowded with traffic. (The Paris versions take place when the city is full of tourists come for the Exhibition.) Some versions require that she travel to the doctor's house to pick up special medicine from his wife. The daughter is held up by a slow-moving chemist (or doctor's wife), and language difficulties sometimes compound the delay.
The story has varying denouements. The "classic" horror version leaves off with the daughter's never seeing her mother again or finding out what happened to her. In other versions the intrepid daughter (sometimes assisted by a stranger or friend) doggedly pursues all leads until she discovers the truth: Her mother had contracted the plague, and the hotel (and the city), fearful of having to shut down and lose millions in tourist revenue if the truth about the mother's illness were revealed, had hastily removed the mother (who may or may not already have died) and secretly refurbished the hotel room while the daughter was sent on a wild goose chase to get her out of the way.
Origins: This tale is based on a classic "paranoia" horror plot: the protagonist finds that all traces of his life have seemingly been erased, and he must struggle against those who insist he is mentally ill and attempt to regain his identity. In most cases, some sinister force or conspiracy has deliberately and carefully done the erasing in order to drive the victim insane or prevent him from discovering a dark secret.
There are two key elements that set this particular tale apart from all others in which someone vanishs and those involved deny the one who has gone missing was ever there to begin with. They are the refurbishment of the hotel room and the reason for the deception (contagious disease). (Though often pointed to as examples of this legend, both the 1957 film Bunny Lake is Missing and the 1938 film The Lady Vanishes lack these elements.)
Although this tale is the stuff of classic horror fiction, it has also circulated as a true story for about a century now. The most prominent version of the vanishing hotel room was related in Alexander Woollcott's While Rome Burns in 1934. Woollcott claimed the story had appeared in a Detroit newspaper in 1889, but no such article has yet been located.
Claim: The movie The Blair Witch Project is based on footage shot by three student filmmakers who mysteriously disappeared while making a documentary about the legend of the Blair Witch.
Origins: It sounds like one of the spookiest movies ever. As the ads for the film The Blair Witch Project state:
In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary.
A year later their footage was found
The official
web site for The Blair Witch Project explains the mythology behind the Blair Witch legend that these students were supposedly investigating: In 1785, a woman accused of witchcraft is banished from the village of Blair, Maryland, and a year later, her accusers and half of Blair's children vanish. The town of Burkittsville is established at the site of the abandoned village about forty years later, and over the next 150 years a series of child murders and mutilations takes place. In 1994, three students decide to travel to Burkittsville to film interviews with locals about the Blair Witch legend as a class project, and a couple of days later they disappear in nearby woods. No trace of them is found until the footage they shot is discovered under an old cabin a year later.
Scary, isn't it? And early reports of the film indicate that it lives up to its chilling reputation. We hate to spoil something so deliciously horrific, but the truth is that the film isn't really what it's described to be.
First of all, the "facts" behind the Blair Witch legend are apocryphal. The rare 1809 book The Blair Witch Cult, which is "commonly considered fiction" and "tells of an entire town cursed by an outcast witch," isn't real. (As the web site informs us, only one copy of the book exists, conveniently in the hands of an unnamed private collector.) A hermit who allegedly "ritualistically murdered and disemboweled" seven children in 1940-41 at the behest of "an old woman ghost who occupied the woods near his house" was "quickly convicted and hanged," yet none of the area newspapers apparently saw fit to cover this sensational story. When the three student filmmakers allegedly disappeared in 1994, the Maryland State Police reportedly spent ten days and "33,000 man hours" employing dogs, helicopters, a hundred men, and even a "fly over by a Department of Defense Satellite" to locate them, but once again media coverage of this sensational, newsworthy event was completely non-existent. (The citizens of Burkittsville and the Frederick County Sheriff's Department are happy to confirm the fictionality of these events.)
So what's the film all about?
The legend of the Blair Witch was invented by the film's writer/directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo nchez. Myrick and nchez hired three young actors (Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard), explained the outline of the film's story to them, gave them advice about the characters they were to play, then turned them loose in the woods with film equipment to shoot movie footage. The actors received notes and supplies left for them and carried a Global Positioning System (GPS) device with them for tracking purposes, but they didn't know exactly what was going to happen once they embarked on their movie-making venture -- thus the film has the feel of a documentary that captures events genuinely surprising to the filmmakers. (If you're still convinced the movie's premise is real, perhaps the fact that the "dead" film students are giving interviews -- such as the one in Salon -- will dissuade you.) Adding to the movie's pre-release build-up was the airing on the Sci-Fi Channel of a fictional documentary, The Curse of the Blair Witch, about the putative Blair Witch legend and the making of the related film.
Legend: A menacing dream prevents a woman from being killed in a crash.
Origins: The "dream warning" legend has been kicking around since 1912, and a well-known version of it surfaces in Bennett Cerf's 1944 Famous Ghost Stories. Though the stores where the elevator falls change from telling to telling, the eerie coachman remains a constant element of the tale, as does the falling elevator car. Sometimes the warned woman recognizes the vehicle her midnight coachman shows up in as a hearse, but sometimes she sees only an unremarkable coach and is left puzzled by why she is so unsettled by the driver's appearance and invitation.
On 10 February 1961, the television series The Twilight Zone aired "Twenty-Two," an episode inspired by this legend. A dancer is hospitalized due to fatigue. She endures recurring visions of following a nurse to Room 22, which turns out to be the hospital's morgue. When they get there, the nurse always says, "Room for one more, honey."
Everyone dismisses her visions as nothing more than bad dreams brought about by her condition. Upon discharge from the hospital, she's about to board Flight 22 to Miami when the flight attendant on duty at the door to the plane -- a dead ringer for the nurse in her visions -- greets her with "Room for one more, honey." The overwrought dancer runs screaming back into the airport lounge, as if madness has finally overtaken her. Meanwhile, the plane explodes just after takeoff.
Legend: Horrified onlookers notice that the enthralling stranger dancing with a pretty girl from the village has cloven hooves.
Origins: This legend is quite well known in the Southwestern United States, but is almost unheard of in any other part of the U.S. It shows up in any number of other cultures, though.
Numerous venerable legends describe encounters with witches or other diabolical beings whose identities are realized only once onlookers catch sight of the dancers' horse-like hooves or chicken feet. (According to lore, the only part of himself the Devil cannot transform when he takes human shape are his feet.)
This legend has updated itself with the times, with the setting shifting from a fiesta or town dance to a dance club or disco. Sometimes even the name of the dance specified. A version making specific mention of the Lambada surfaced in 1992.
The "mysterious stranger revealed to be the Devil" motif is common to many legends. Here's another.
[Collected on the Internet, 2000]
In an old cabin several men were playing poker by the light of a kerosene lantern. Money was lost and won, liquor flowed, but everyone was in a good mood and there were no fights. There was a knock at the door so one of the men answered it; the visitor was a tall dark stranger who asked if he could come in for the night. The men welcomed him and he started playing cards with them but soon they noticed he was winning all their money.
One of the men dropped a card on the floor and bent down to pick it up. As he did this he glanced under the table -- and saw that the stranger's feet were cloven hooves! In a panic he lunged up, knocking over the table and the kerosene lantern. The cabin caught fire and the men rushed out the door -- all except for the stranger. Terrified, the men huddled under a tree until dawn. As the sun came up, they regained their courage and approached the cabin -- and they discovered their silver money melted in the shape of an upside down cross.
Legend: The ghost of a woman killed in a car crash directs rescuers to the wreck to save her still-living baby, who is trapped within.
Origins: Whetherone ascribes "ghostly intervention" stories to God or to earthly ties so strong they empower the deceased to reach back from the grave, this legend type is hugely popular because it confirms one's personal belief system (i.e., that God is all powerful and will engineer a miracle to save an innocent, or that the love of a parent will overpower death itself if the child is in danger). Comfort is also found in legends of this ilk due to the implied promise that parental protection will outlast the lives of the caregivers themselves, and that Mother and Father will still always be there in times of need. For folks desperately trying to come to terms with the loss (or projected loss) of a parent, this reassurance is most welcome.
In the world of folklore, ghosts have been fetching help for the still living almost since time began. Observe this example harvested by Brunvand from an 1890 newspaper:
[Brunvand, 1981]
There is a story going about town that is worthy of attention. The only question is whether it is true, and to what extent. The other day, somewhere on Sergievskaya Street, or near it, a priest carrying the holy sacraments came to a certain apartment after mass. A young man answered the door.
"I was asked to come here and give the sacraments to a sick man," said the priest.
"You must have made a mistake. Nobody lives here except me."
"No, a lady came up to me today and gave me this very address and asked me to give the sacraments to the man who lives here."
The young apartment dweller was perplexed.
"Why look, that is the very woman who asked me to come," said the priest, pointing to a woman's portrait hanging on the wall.
"That is the portrait of my dead mother."
Awe, fear, terror seized hold of the young man. Under the impression of all this he took communion.
That evening he lay dead.
Such is the story.
Versions of the story quoted immediately above were part of oral lore at least as far back as 1890 in at least three countries (Russia, England and Canada). The "summoned help" is either a doctor or a member of the clergy. Such tales of loved ones fetching help and only afterwards being identified as deceased via their being identified through their portraits continue to circulate:
[Collected on the Internet, 2004]
There came a frantic knock
At the doctor's office door,
A knock, more urgent than
he had ever heard before.
"Come in, Come in,"
the impatient doctor said,
"Come in, Come in,
before you wake the dead."
In walked a frightened little girl,
a child no more than nine,
It was plain for all to see,
she had troubles on her mind.
"Oh doctor, I beg you,
please come with me,
My mother is surely dying,
she's as sick as she can be."
"I don't make house calls,
bring your mother here,"
"But she's too sick,
so you must come or she will die I fear."
The doctor, touched by her devotion,
decided he would go,
She said he would be blessed,
more than he could know.
She led him to her house
where her mother lay in bed,
Her mother was so very sick
she couldn't raise her head.
But her eyes cried out for help
and help her the doctor did,
She would have died that very night
had it not been for her kid.
The doctor got her fever down
and she lived through the night,
And morning brought the doctor signs,
that she would be all right.
The doctor said he had to leave
but would return again by two,
And later he came back to check,
just like he said he'd do.
The mother praised the doctor
for all the things he'd done,
He told her she would have died,
were it not for her little one.
"How proud you must be
of your wonderful little girl,
It was her pleading that made me come,
she is really quite a pearl!
"But doctor, my daughter died
over three years ago,
Is the picture on the wall
of the little girl you know?"
The doctors legs went limp
for the picture on the wall,
Was the same little girl
for whom he'd made this call.
The doctor stood motionless,
for quite a little while,
And then his solemn face,
was broken by his smile.
He was thinking of that frantic knock
heard at his office door,
And of the beautiful little angel
that had walked across his floor.
These days, we tend to envision crises worthy of summoning ghostly parents back to do their duty as involving life-threatening physical danger to the child, so in modern tellings of this legend, the parent returns to direct rescuers to a trapped youngster who might otherwise have been overlooked or to scoop up the injured tot herself and bring it to a doctor or nearby hospital. But in older versions, the crisis that would kickstart a deceased parent to intervene was spiritual, not physical. In the example quoted above, the ghost mom fetches help not to save the life of her child, but its soul.
Claim: Image shows dead woman who collects the souls of people who don't forward a chain e-mail message.
Origins: Responding to readers who forward us photos purportedly showing ghosts is always problematic those who don't believe in ghosts need no reassurance that such pictures are phony, while believers demand proof that ghosts don't exist, a standard impossible to meet.
Suffice it to say that the October 2004 item reproduced above is nothing more than a common type of chain letter (the "luck" or "prayer" letter), a form that has been around since at least the 19th century and promises dire consequences (or at least bad luck) to recipients who fail to forward the message to the requisite number of people. (Such letters often include anecdotes explaining the disastrous fates that supposedly befell some recipients who didn't heed the enclosed warning and unwisely broke the chain.) That such a letter is now disseminated through e-mail rather than the postal service and includes a fabricated photograph of an "avenging spirit" doesn't make it any different than century-old versions only the style has changed, not the substance.
Claim: The Amityville Horror is based on a true story.
Origins: Some horrors just won't die, and The Amityville Horror is a case in point. The tale of a reportedly demon-infested house in Amityville, New York, became a best-selling novel in 1977 and a hit horror film starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder in 1979. Several inferior movie sequels followed in its wake (including a 3-D version), and 15 April 2005 saw the debut of a remake, this one starring Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George.
Scary films are a dime a dozen, but what initially drew the public's interest to the original version of The Amityville Horror was the claim that it was based on real events. The producers of the 2005 remake were also intrigued by the Amityville case not so much due to the horror film's scary details, but because the tale was allegedly true. "We were looking for truth in horror," co-producer Andrew Form told Fangoria magazine. "I grew up in Long Island, so I was familiar with this when I was a kid. I remember going by that house and how scary it was."
Co-star Melissa George was attracted to the role because, she said, "If you're going to do a scary movie, you might as well do The Amityville Horror, a true story, a famous book, a well-known moment in American history." A famous book, yes. A moment in American history, perhaps. But a true story? Not.
The history of The Amityville Horror, as with The Exorcist, began with a best-selling novel. A book entitled The Amityville Horror: A True Story, written by Jay Anson, was published in 1977 and quickly scaled the sales charts. Anson was not a resident of the infamous possessed house, but a professional writer hired to pen a book based on supposedly "true events" that had taken place there several years earlier.
The story behind the story began on 13 November 1974, when six members of an Amityville, New York, family were killed. The parents, Ronald and Louise DeFeo, were shot in bed while they slept, along with their two sons and two daughters. The sole remaining family member, Ronald Jr. ("Butch"), was arrested for the crime, convicted, and sentenced to prison. With the family dead (and Butch in no position to inherit the place), the house went up for sale. The horrific nature of the massacre unnerved the otherwise quiet Long Island neighborhood, though no supernatural activity was associated with the house at 112 Ocean Avenue.
The following year, a new family, the Lutzes, moved into the house. George and Kathy Lutz, along with their three children, said that shortly after they moved in, their six-bedroom abode became a Hell house. It seemed that perhaps the demons that drove Butch to slaughter his family were not in his head but in the house. An unseen force ripped doors from hinges and slammed cabinets closed, noxious green slime oozed from the ceilings, a biblical-scale swarm of insects attacked the family, and a demonic face with glowing red eyes peered into their house at night, leaving cloven-hoofed footprints in the morning snow. A priest called upon to bless the house was driven back with painful blisters on his hands, famously told by a demonic voice to "Get out!" And so on.
A local television crew did a segment on the house, bringing in several self-styled "ghost hunters" (including Ed and Lorraine Warren) and other alleged psychics. All agreed that a demonic spirit was in the house, and that an exorcism would be needed to stop the activity. The Lutzes left the house and took their terrifying tale with them, collaborating with Anson on the book The Amityville Horror. And, as William Peter Blatty did when he promoted The Exorcist, Anson vouched for the truthfulness of his fantastic tale: "There is simply too much independent corroboration of their narrative to support the speculation that [the Lutzes] either imagined or fabricated these events."
Many people expressed doubts about the events in the house. Researcher Rick Moran, for example, compiled a list of more than a hundred factual errors and discrepancies between Anson's "true story" and the truth. The 2005 remake promises to mine Anson's book more deeply than did the previous screenplays, including background about early Indians (whose vengeful spirits may lurk nearby) and devil-worshipping early settlers of the area. Yet, Moran explains, "Experts told me that the tribe mentioned was not from the Amityville area at all (actually, they had inhabited the eastern tip of Long Island, 70 miles away) and that the settlers mentioned were never local residents either. Anson's tactic was clear when strapped for good material for a book, pad it with quasi-factoids." And Father Pecoraro, the priest who was driven from the house by demons? According to Moran, who interviewed Pecoraro, "He said he never saw anything in the house."
Joe Nickell, author of Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings (and who personally visited Amityville and interviewed later owners of the notorious house), also found numerous holes in the Amityville story. A few examples of these discrepancies:
The Lutzes could not have found the demonic hoofprint in the snow when they said they did, because weather records showed there had been no snowfall to leave prints in.
Though the book details extensive damage to the home's doors and hardware, the original locks, doorknobs, and hinges were actually untouched.
The book and film show police being called to the house, but, Nickell writes, "During the 28-day 'siege' that drove [the Lutz family] from the house, they never once called the police."
Over and over, both big claims and small details were refuted by eyewitnesses, investigations, and forensic evidence. Still, the Lutzes stuck to their story, reaping tens of thousands of dollars from the book and film rights.
The truth behind The Amityville Horror was finally revealed when Butch DeFeo's lawyer, William Weber, admitted that he, along with the Lutzes, "created this horror story over many bottles of wine." The house was never really haunted; the horrific experiences they had claimed were simply made up. Jay Anson further embellished the tale for his book, and by the time the film's screenwriters had adapted it, any grains of truth that might have been there were long gone. While the Lutzes profited handsomely from their story, Weber had planned to use the haunting to gain a new trial for his client. George Lutz reportedly still claims that the events are mostly true, but has offered no evidence to back up his claim.
The Lutzes account was likely influenced by another fictionalized story, that of The Exorcist. In fact, it is not much of a stretch to suggest that The Exorcist strongly influenced The Amityville Story: Recall that The Exorcist came out in December 1973, and demonic possession and hauntings were very much in the public's mind when the Lutzes spun their stories of diabolic activity a year or two later. The revelation that the story was based on a hoax has led to embarrassment, especially among the handful of "paranormal experts" who "verified" the fictional tale. The Lutzes must have had a good laugh at the expense of the mystery-mongering ghost hunters and self-proclaimed psychics who reported their terrifying visions and verified the house's (non-existent) demonic residents.
Claim: Ghosts of two murdered teen girls return to kill and skin parents who failed to tell their subsequent son of the girls' existence.
girl meets a boy on her yahoo messenger.
crazy1 86:hey baby!!!
h0tNsPiCy91: whos dis???
crazy1 86:ur secret admirer!!!!!
h0tNsPiCy91: o really.... quite lyin! whos dis???
crazy1 86:i loved u the first time a stared in your eyes...
crazy1 86:i think about u everyday... you are my dream come true.
crazy1 86: we met once! i dont think u remember tho.
crazy1 86: i cut myself because the pain takes away my feelings of u.
crazy1 86: tonight u will see me some time tonight....
h0tNsPiCy91: ..WHO IS THIS!?!?!?
crazy1 86:dont worry.... ill take very good care of you...
crazy1 86 had signed off.
the girl was so scared she locked alll her doors and windows. she made sure her room was secured. she was so scared if it was a joke or for real. she didnt know when he was going to come. the girl was frighten so she decided to sleep with her little sister. the girl dozed off quikly. then she heards a knock on the window. the girl slowly walked to the window. it started knocking louder. the girl looked through the windows and saw nothing. just some of the tree branches. the girl went back to bed with her sister. the bed was wet and a pretty smells horrid. maybe her sister wet the bed... the girl checked and found blood everywhere. the girl panick. she didnt know what to do. she ran and hid in the closet incase the guy was their for her. while looking through the cracks of the closet the girl saw a shadow. it was dark so she couldnt figure out who it was. she started to get more frighten. the man crept closer to the closet. the girl closed her eyes as if it was a dream. then suddenly he open the closet door and pulled her out. her parents found her dead. she was skinned all the way and was hunged in her sisters closet.
PART 2...
2 years after the the sisters deaths, the her parents got pregnant with a baby boy the girls room became a guest bedroom and the little sisters room where the murder took place became the babys room. the baby grew up to be a secessful kid. one night he was on the computer and got a instant messege.
h0tNsPiCy91:hey lil bro!!!
2seXay4u: who the f is this?
h0tNsPiCy91: its your big sis.
2seXay4u: i never had a sister. im an only child.
2seXay4u:this is some kinda joke huh?
h0tNsPiCy91: mom and dad never told you?
h0tNsPiCy91: i died 15 years ago with your other older sister.
h0tNsPiCy91:we were murdered in your room which was once my little sisters room. she was killed in bed when i was sleeping and i was killed in the closet and skinned to death.
2seXay4u:quite lying. i never had a sister. if i did my parents would tell me. whatever. your stupid.
h0tNsPiCy91: you dont believe me? well if you wanna look in your closet floor.
h0tNsPiCy91: i carved my name, time and date i was being murdered. then i carved my little sister name.
h0tNsPiCy91: if you dont believe me little brother check the internet. type in 'smith sisters murdered anonymously'.
h0tNsPiCy91: i gtg little brother. i love you. and mom and dad soo much. i cant believe they kept us a secret from you. they should burn in hell.
the boy checked the closet. he saw the carvings. was it true? he surfed the internet and everything was their about the anonymous murder in the house. the next morning the boy went downstairs. it was so queit. maybe mom and dad was sleeping.. hours later the boy found his parents in their closets skinned and hung. then he found more carvings on the ground. it says ' I TOLD YOU I WASNT LYING. LITTLE BROTHER, I LOVED MOM AND DAD.... BUT THEY KEPT ME A SECRET. I CANT BELIVE IT. WELL IM FREE FROM THIS COLD WORLD. I WONT HURT YOU LIKE HOW THEY DIED. I LOVE YOU!
- LISA SMITH '
this is a death chain. if you dont send this in the next hour the parents will kill you at night. they will kill you
DONT BELEIVE ME? LOOK IT UP N GOOGLE
Origins: We began encountering this tale in our inbox in late June 2005. Almost two months later, near the end of August 2005, versions mailed to us began including this coda:
ps guys..i looked it up on google and it really happened. creepy eh? i dont normally do these..but this one kind of bothered me a little bit. heres the article.
"Smith sisters murdered anonymously
In 1993, two sisters were brutally murdered in the small-town community of Plainfield, wisconsin. Lisa Smith, 19; and her sister, Sarah Smith, 15; were attacked in their parent's home on the night of November 17th, around 1:30AM. Sarah was found stabbed and strangled in the bed where she had been sleeping. Her sister Lisa was found hanging in her sister's closet, skinned alive. Police conducted an extensive investigation, but to no avail. The motives for the attack were never discovered, nor was the attacker ever found. The only lead athorities had was a log found in Lisa's computer, showing a series of threatening messages sent through an Internet Relay Chat service. The case was closed in October of 2000."
Plainfield, Wisconsin, is a community of less than a thousand people located in central Wisconsin. As its one claim to fame, it was the birthplace of Ed Gein, a farmer who was convicted of murdering one woman in 1957 and confessed to having killed another in 1954. His notoriety came, however, from his use of dead bodies: he mutilated the corpses of women, cutting off a variety of their body parts and fashioning these into macabre items.
As one might suspect, murder in Plainfield is relatively rare. As one might further suspect, no two teen girls named Lisa and Sarah Smith were murdered in that town in 1993, nor their parents a number of years later. The story is fiction, plain and simple, just another example of the 'bad things will happen to you if you don't forward this chain letter' genre. (The concept is stated explicitly in its text: "this is a death chain. if you dont send this in the next hour the parents will kill you at night.") We discuss another example of this type of chain letter one that uses a photo to tell its chilling tale in our "Bed Reckoning"
article.
Numerous inconsistencies in the Internet-circulated story provide enough clues to its being fiction that even those lacking access to online news archives should be able to dismiss it as an attempt to yank their chains:
The younger sister is murdered while the older girl is either sleeping beside or going to the window to check on an odd sound, yet the older sibling hears nothing happening in the room and is alerted to something's being amiss only because the bed is wet and ill-smelling upon her return to it.
Rather than scream for help or run from the room, the older girl hides in the closet.
The older sister is pulled from the closet by her murderer and her body is returned there to be hung for her parents to discover, yet while she's in this closed space before her killer takes her from it, she carves hers and her sister's names and the time and date. If she had something with which to gouge messages into the floorboards or onto the walls, why didn't she use it to stab at her attacker and escape his clutches? Also, wasn't it thoughtful of her murderer to afford her time to finish her woodworking escapades before coming for her?
The parents (who we presume are sleeping in the same house, since the story doesn't mention their being absent that night) hear nothing of their two daughters being murdered.
The son (who we work out from the story is 12 years old: "15 years ago" less "2 years after the the sisters deaths" less a nine-month gestation period) lives those twelve years in the murder room yet never once notices the message carved in the closet.
The girls were murdered "In 1993" yet the IM'ing ghost of one of them informs her brother she died "15 years ago." Our calendar says it's 2005, not 2008.
Instant message capability didn't become an online reality until 1997 when AOL introduced its Instant Messenger service. Yahoo Messenger (which the narrative tells us was used by the murderer to contact one of the sisters prior to his killing her) began in 1999. However, while IM didn't exist in 1993, chat rooms did IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was most certainly part of the cyber world at least as far back as 1993, else I retain rather vivid yet baseless false memories of what I was doing with a great many of my nights back then.
