The 2009 movie The Haunting in Connecticut appears to be based on the events experienced by the Snedeker family in the 1980s.
The Snedekers moved into a house in Southington, Connecticut in order to live closer to the UConn Health Center, where Carmen’s son was being treated for cancer. The family would later claim that it was plagued by some manner of demonic presence. Mortuary equipment was discovered in the basement, and it was later found that the house had been a funeral home. Carmen described the demons: “One of the demons was very thin, with high cheekbones, long black hair and pitch black eyes. Another had white hair and eyes, wore a pinstriped tuxedo, and his feet were constantly in motion.”
The house was examined by Ed and Lorraine Warren. According to a write-up on the case in 2009 by NBC, the morticians that worked in the mortuary were allegedly involved in necromancy and/or necrophilia with the corpses, and the room where the two youngest children stayed was previously the show room for caskets; down the hall was where bodies were prepared for viewing. Lorraine Warren would later state that, “In the master bedroom, there was a trap door where the coffins were brought up, and during the night, you would hear that chain hoist, as if a coffin were being brought up. But when Ed went to check he found two women down there dancing around in circles and singing; when he walked towards them, they disappeared.” In response to the film, Lorraine would later say the actual case was “much, much scarier than any movie could ever be,” and that the film was “very, very loosely based” on their investigation of the house. Lorraine Warren has told the Associated Press that the house was cleared of any presence after an exorcism conducted in 1988.
Carmen Snedeker’s accounts were covered in episodes of the television series A Haunting and Paranormal Witness.
On January 1st 2005, some Odessa teens decided to spend New Years night partying in the catacombs. However, in the drunken revelry a member of the group, a girl named Masha, became separated and lost in the catacombs. She spent three days wandering in the freezing cold and pitch black before she died of dehydration. It took two years before the police were able to locate her body and retrieve it from the catacombs.
The Odessa Catacombs are a network of estimated 4000 kilometres-long tunnels stretching out under the city and surrounding region of Odessa, Ukraine. The majority of the catacombs are the result of stone mining.Most of the city’s 19th century houses were built of limestone mined nearby. Abandoned mines were later used and widened by local smugglers. This created a gigantic labyrinth of underground tunnels beneath Odessa, known as the “catacombs”. Today, they are a great attraction for extreme tourists, who explore the tunnels despite the dangers involved. Such tours are not officially sanctioned because the catacombs have not been fully mapped and the tunnels themselves are unsafe. There have been incidents of people becoming lost in the tunnel network, and dying of dehydration or rockfalls.
Viktor Sayenko, Igor Suprunyuck, and Alexander Hanzha, collectively known as “The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs”, were a pack of Ukrainian thrill killers who brutally killed dozens of people during a near-four week-long murder spree. Starting on July 25, 2007, with Ekaterina Ilchenko and Roman Tatarevich, Sayenko and Suprunyuck initiated their killing spree, randomly picking pedestrians and then bludgeoning them with blunt objects, such as hammers and steel construction bars, and recording some of the murders. Some of the victims were also robbed of their possessions. Multiple bodies would be found in one day, usually two. Additionally, some victims were killed in not Dnepropetrovsk, but towns located in the surrounding areas. Their spree came to public attention after a survivor, fourteen-year-old Vadim Lyakhov, immediately ran to the police after his friend was murdered by them, and also when a victim, Natalia Mamarchuk, was beaten to death in front of many witnesses. The initiated investigation was kept secret at first, but eventually, sketches were distributed and the victims’ stolen possessions were listed to local pawn shops.
The three were arrested a week after the spree ended, when Suprunyuck tried selling a mobile phone belonging to one of his victims. The phone had to be turned on to ensure it worked, allowing law enforcement agents to find it and trace its location, leading to the arrests of Sayenko and Suprunyuck. Meanwhile, authorities invaded Hanzha’s home and arrested him, but not before he managed to erase the information on numerous stolen mobile phones he attempted to flush down the toilet. Sayenko, Suprunyuck, and Hanzha were all charged for numerous instances of premeditated murder (excluding Hanzha), animal cruelty, robbery, and armed robbery. Sayenko and Suprunyuck’s ghastly videos of their murders received a large amount of attention. One of the videos (titled “3 guys 1 hammer”) managed to find its way into the Internet on December 4, 2008; it is a recording of the brutal murder of Sergei Yatzenko, who was killed on July 27, 2007. The leaking of the video received criticism, but it was later admitted that control over videos posted on the Internet was “virtually impossible”.
Piblokto, also known as Arctic hysteria, is a condition exclusively appearing in Inughuit societies living within the Arctic Circle. Appearing most prevalently in winter, it is considered to be a form of a culture-bound syndrome, although more recent studies question whether it exists at all.
Symptoms can include intense hysteria (screaming, uncontrolled wild behavior), depression, consumption of feces, insensitivity to extreme cold (such as running around in the snow naked), echolalia (senseless repetition of overheard words) and more. This condition is most often seen in Inughuit women. This culture-bound syndrome is possibly linked to vitamin A toxicity. The native Inughuit diet provides rich sources of vitamin A and is possibly the cause or a causative factor. The ingestion of organ meats, particularly the livers of arctic fish and mammals, where the vitamin is stored in toxic quantities, can be fatal.
In this video, we have four kids wandering around looking for a ghost in an abandoned school in Iraq (one description says India, but since they’re speaking Arabic we’ll go with Iraq). The boys are kind of wandering aimlessly through stairwells and empty classrooms for a solid two minutes, which would arouse suspicion under our “Why is anyone filming this?” rule if not for the fact that we know they are explicitly waiting for the lights to suddenly dim and for a hallway full of disembodied 19th century clothes to start doing the Monster Mash. That doesn’t happen. What happens is much creepier. A headless goddamned ghost appears right in goddamned front of them. You literally see it materialize on camera. As they swing the camera lazily through the room, the ghost just walks very purposefully toward them like it’s delivering a pizza, while a long, low moan emanates from its phantom lungs.
YouTube commenters seem to think the ghost is simply one of the boys who went to go look out the window; that the bright light coming through obscures his head and gives him a washed-out ghostly look for the camera. But again, watch the video — when the camera sweeps across the floor a few seconds earlier, nobody is standing there.
If this is all an accident of the lighting and their shitty cell-phone cameras, then it was a lucky damned accident, considering they were specifically there to hunt ghosts in what they thought was a haunted abandoned building. If they doctored the video with effects later, then this is a remarkably subtle job. These are giggling teenagers goofing around, and we’re pretty sure they gave us a creepier ghost effect than any of the Paranormal Activity movies. So good job, guys — you successfully creeped us out, one way or another.
Roopkund (Skeleton Lake) is a glacial lake in Uttarakhand state of India famous due to more than five hundred human skeletons found at the edge of the lake. The location is uninhabited and is located in Himalaya at an altitude of about 5,029 metres (16,499 feet). The human skeletons were rediscovered in 1942 by a Nanda Devi game reserve ranger H. K. Madhwal, although there are reports about these bones from late 19th century. Earlier it was believed by specialists that the people died from an epidemic, landslide or blizzard. The carbon dating from samples collected in the 1960s vaguely indicated that the people were from the 12th century to the 15th century. After studying fractures in the skulls, the scientists in Hyderabad, Pune and London determined that the people died not of disease, but of a sudden hailstorm. The hailstones were as large as cricket balls, and with no shelter in the open Himalayas, many, or possibly all of them, perished. Furthermore, with the rarefied air and icy conditions, many bodies were well preserved.
What is not determined was where the group was headed to. There is no historical evidence of any trade routes to Tibet in the area.
Indeed, for medical students, it is the pathological samples on display at the Mütter Museum of Human Pathology in Philadelphia, PA that are the most fascinating, for example, the late stages of a disease like a tumor. Luckily such things are quite rare to see in real life, or even in a doctor’s lifetime, so those interested have to visit specialized museums like the Mütter for an in-depth look.
(Above: The cankers of syphilis.)
According to the guidelines of the 18th century when the Academy of Physicians was founded, Christians could not donate their bodies in the name of science. Thus, the doctors of the time had to find unwilling “volunteers” among those who had no choice: murderers, robbers, thieves, deserters, prostitutes, gypsies and others. Ironically, those once living on the fringes of society got preserved for eternity.
In 1865, a St. Louis newspaper reported that a trapper named James Lumley was working late in the mountains, much like the dudes from Fire in the Sky, when he spotted a “bright, luminous body in the heavens,” followed by an explosion. Instead of sticking around to get picked up by it, though, he kept his distance, and the next day he found a large stonelike object with “curious hieroglyphics” carved into it, broken glass, and traces of a dark liquid. But perhaps the most amazing story of old-timey UFOs is the one that took place in Aurora, Texas, in 1897: As reported by the Dallas Morning News, a mysterious “airship” crashed down on the small town, and when the authorities examined the remains of the pilot inside, they found him to be “not an inhabitant of this world.” The pilot was buried in the local cemetery, and supposedly his grave is still there, although unmarked.
We’re not saying it was a real spaceship; we’re just pointing out that even this story predates The War of the Worlds. The sci-fi tropes that this seems to be referencing didn’t even exist yet.
The Keddie Murders is an unsolved 1981 American quadruple murder that took place in Keddie, a former resort town in the foothills of Northern California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. Glenna “Sue” Sharp, 36, and her five children had been renting the cabin since November 1980. On the night of April 11, 1981, Sue was home with her daughter, Tina, her two youngest boys, and a young friend of the boys, Justin, who was staying the night. Her oldest son, John, and his friend Dana Wingate, had spent the day in nearby Quincy and were also going to stay the night at cabin 28. John and Dana were last seen hitchhiking from Quincy to Keddie. The crime may already have been in progress when they arrived at the cabin. At approximately 8 am on the morning of April 12, Sheila Sharp, upon returning from the sleepover next door, discovered the bodies of Sue, John and Dana in the cabin’s living room. All three victims had been bound with medical tape and electrical appliance wire.
Examination of the bodies determined that each of the victims had been bludgeoned with a claw hammer, and Sue and John had been stabbed repeatedly, including both being stabbed once in the throat. An inexpensive steak knife discovered at the scene had been used so forcefully that the blade had bent approximately 25 degrees. In 1984 the cranium portion of Tina Sharp’s skull was recovered near Camp Eighteen, a geodesic distance of roughly 29 miles from Keddie. Months later, after an anonymous caller to the Butte County Sheriff’s office claimed the skull was Tina’s, the Camp Eighteen area was searched again for several hours over a period of days. The jawbone and dozens of other bones were found, along with other potential evidence. From these discoveries, no new information regarding the crime surfaced in the media. The murders remain unsolved to this day.
