The Midnight Train Podcast

88 - The Butterfly People of Joplin, Missouri

Today's ride, while keeping with the theme of the possibly paranormal and cryptid, takes us on a more uplifting ride. While the story is rooted in tragedy, the discussion quickly turned to stories of help and hope. This is something that neither Moody nor myself knew about, and through discussing it with several people, doesn't seem to be a hugely popular topic in these circles. Despite this fact, we found it to be an intriguing topic so we decided to follow up on it. Today we are talking about the Butterfly people of Joplin Missouri. Before we get into what they are, we need to take a look at the incident that spawned the tales. So without further ado… Let's get into it!

 

Between May 21 and May 26, 2011 the Midwestern and southern United States experienced the largest tornado outbreak on record, with a total of 1,894 tornadoes causing 551 fatalities. Most of the tornadoes developed in a corridor from Lake Superior southwest to central Texas; isolated tornadoes occurred in other areas. 

 

        On May 21, a small system of thunderstorms developed in Brown County, Kansas while another system formed to the southeast of Emporia, Kansas. The Brown county system spawned a brief tornado over Topeka, Kansas, causing minor damage. This system also caused significant damage in Oskaloosa, Kansas, and other communities. Meanwhile, the Emporia system spawned an EF3 tornado that struck Reading, Kansas; one person was killed, several others were injured, and at least 20 houses were destroyed. These two systems developed several other tornadoes throughout the evening. A moderate risk of severe weather was issued for much of the Midwest, as well as further south to Oklahoma for May 22. The first tornadic supercell developed in the mid-afternoon hours over the western Twin Cities in Minnesota, and caused moderate damage in the Minneapolis area. Shortly thereafter, an intense tornado crept towards Harmony, Minnesota, prompting the National Weather Service to issue the first tornado emergency of the outbreak. Late that afternoon, a large, intense EF5 multiple-vortex tornado left catastrophic destruction in Joplin, Missouri. This is the tornado that we are looking at in this episode. After the Joplin tornado there would be many more throughout the next few days. In fact the cell would spawn a total of 241 tornadoes total. Out of those 241 only 2 reached EF5 status, the Joplin tornado and one dubbed El Reno. El Reno was actually the more violent of the two, but luckily it landed in a rural area and there were considerably less fatalities. To give you an idea of the strength of these guys, he's an example of some of the damage of the El Reno twister which reached a max velocity of 295 mph!: As it approached and crossed Interstate 40 west of El Reno, it reached its maximum intensity. Three people were killed as two vehicles were tossed more than 1,093 yards from the road and obliterated, the victims being found stripped of clothing 1⁄4 mile from the interstate and left "unrecognizable". Only pieces of the vehicle's frames were reportedly recovered. A nearby 20,000-pound oil tanker truck that was parked at an oil production site near the interstate was thrown approximately one mile  into a wooded gully. Several homes were swept completely away along I-40, trees were completely debarked, and the ground was heavily scoured in some areas. At the nearby Cactus-117 oil rig site, a 1,900,000-pound oil derrick was blown over and rolled three times. That shit is intense! Imagine if that had hit a major city. And that was only a portion of the damage and impact. The El Reno tornado had a 63 mile long path through 4 counties in Oklahoma killing 9 and injuring 161. While that tornado was devastating, we're looking at the Joplin tornado, the one that saw incredible stories of butterfly people helping to save the lives of townspeople. The tornado itself could honestly be an entire episode because of its craziness.

 

The Joplin tornado was a powerful and catastrophic EF5-rated multiple-vortex tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, United States, on the evening of Sunday, May 22, 2011. The tornado initially touched down just east of the Missouri-Kansas state line near the end of 32nd Street at 5:34 pm CDT and tracked due east, downing a few trees at EF0 intensity. Eyewitnesses and storm chasers reported multiple vortices rotating around the parent circulation in that area. Civil defense sirens sounded in Joplin twenty minutes before the tornado struck in response to a tornado warning issued by the National Weather Service (NWS) at 5:17 pm CDT for northwestern Newton and southwestern Jasper counties in Missouri, and southeastern portions of Cherokee County, Kansas, but many Joplin residents did not heed them. The tornado strengthened to EF1 intensity as it continued through rural areas towards Joplin, snapping trees and power poles and damaging outbuildings. Widening, the tornado then tracked into the more densely populated southwest corner of the city near the Twin Hills Country Club. It heavily damaged several homes at a subdivision in this area at EF1 to EF2 strength. The tornado continued to strengthen as it ripped through another subdivision just east of Iron Gates Road. Numerous homes were destroyed at EF2 to EF3 strength at that location, and multiple vehicles were tossed around, some of which were thrown on or rolled into homes. The now massive wedge tornado then crossed S. Schifferdecker Ave., producing its first area of EF4 damage as several small but well-built commercial buildings were flattened. Consistent EF4 to EF5 damage was noted east of S. Schifferdecker Ave. and continued through most of southern Joplin. Numerous homes, businesses, and medical buildings were flattened in this area, with concrete walls collapsed and crushed into the foundations. A large steel-reinforced step and floor structure leading to a completely destroyed medical building was "deflected upward several inches and cracked". Steel trusses from some of the buildings were "rolled up like paper", and deformation/twisting of the main support beams was noted. Multiple vehicles were thrown and mangled or wrapped around trees nearby. Several 300-pound concrete parking stops anchored with rebar were torn from a parking lot in this area and were thrown up to 60 yards away. Iowa State University wind engineer Partha Sarkar was able to calculate the force needed to remove the parking stops and found that winds exceeding 200 mph were needed to tear them from the parking lot. Damage became remarkably widespread and catastrophic at and around the nearby St. John's Regional Medical Center, which lost many windows, interior walls, ceilings, and part of its roof; its life flight helicopter was also blown away and destroyed. Five fatalities were caused by loss of backup power, and the nine-story building was so damaged that it was deemed structurally compromised, and was later torn down. According to the NWS office in Springfield, Missouri, such extreme structural damage to such a large and well-built structure was likely indicative of winds at or exceeding 200 mph. Vehicles in the hospital parking lot were thrown into the air and mangled beyond recognition, including a semi-truck that was tossed 125 yards and wrapped completely around a debarked tree. Wind-rowing of debris was noted in this area, and additional concrete parking stops were removed from the St. John's parking lot as well. Virtually every house near McClelland Boulevard and 26th Street was flattened; some were swept completely away, and trees sustained severe debarking.

As the tornado tracked eastward, it maintained EF5 strength as it crossed Main Street (SR 43) between 20th and 26th Streets. It heavily damaged every business along that stretch and several institutional buildings were virtually destroyed. It tracked just south of downtown, narrowly missing it. Entire neighborhoods were leveled in this area with some more homes swept away, and trees were stripped completely of their bark. At some residences, reinforced concrete porches were deformed, or in some cases completely torn away. Damage to driveways was noted at some residences as well. Numerous vehicles were tossed up to several blocks away from the residences where they originated, and a few homeowners never located their vehicles.  A large church, Greenbriar Nursing Home, Franklin Technology Center, St. Mary's Catholic Church and School, and Joplin High School were all destroyed along this corridor. The Greenbriar Nursing Home was completely leveled, with 21 fatalities occurring there alone.  As the tornado crossed Connecticut Ave further to the east, it destroyed several large apartment buildings, a Dillon's grocery store, and a bank. Only the concrete vault remained at the bank, and a wooden 2x4 was found speared completely through a concrete curb at one location as well. No one was in the high school at the time; the high school graduation ceremonies held about 3 miles (4.8 km) to the north at Missouri Southern State University had concluded shortly before the storm. Pieces of cardboard were found embedded sideways into stucco walls that remained standing at Joplin High School.

 Steel beams and pieces of fencing were deeply embedded into the ground in fields near the high school as well, steel fence posts were bent to the ground in opposite directions, and a school bus was thrown into a nearby bus garage. The tornado then approached Range Line Road, the main commercial strip in the eastern part of Joplin, affecting additional neighborhoods along 20th Street.

 

The now heavily rain-wrapped tornado continued at EF5 intensity as it crossed Range Line Road. In that corridor between about 13th and 32nd Streets, the tornado continued producing catastrophic damage as it was at its widest at this point, being nearly 1 mile (1.6 km) wide. As the tornado hit the Pizza Hut at 1901 South Range Line Road, store manager Christopher Lucas herded four employees and 15 customers into a walk-in freezer. With difficulty closing the door, he wrapped a bungee cable holding the door shut around his arm until he was sucked out and killed by the tornado. The tornado completely destroyed Walmart Supercenter No. 59, a Home Depot, and numerous other businesses and restaurants in this area, many of which were flattened. Numerous metal roof trusses were torn from the Home Depot building and were found broken and mangled in nearby fields. Cars that originated at the Home Depot parking lot were found hundreds of yards away. Asphalt was scoured from parking lots at Walmart and a nearby pizza restaurant, and large tractor-trailers were thrown up to 200 yards away. An Academy Sports + Outdoors store along Range Line sustained major structural damage, and a chair was found impaled legs-first through an exterior stucco wall at that location. A nearby three-story apartment complex was also devastated, and two cell phone towers were found collapsed onto the remains of the apartments. Numerous cars were thrown and piled on top of each other, 100-pound manhole covers were removed from roads and thrown, ground scouring occurred, and a Pepsi distribution plant was completely leveled in this area as well. Additional calculations of the manhole covers in Joplin by Parka Sarkar revealed that winds had to have exceeded 200 mph for the manhole covers to be removed. Many fatalities occurred in this area, and damage was rated as EF5.

Extreme damage continued in the area of Duquesne Road in southeast Joplin. Many houses and industrial and commercial buildings were flattened in this area as well. The industrial park near the corner of 20th and Duquesne was especially hard hit with nearly every building flattened. Several large metal warehouse structures were swept cleanly from their foundations, and several heavy industrial vehicles were thrown up to 400 yards away in this area. One of the many warehouses affected was a Cummins warehouse, a concrete block and steel building that was destroyed. The last area of EF5 damage occurred in the industrial park, and a nearby Fastrip gas station and convenience store was completely destroyed. Many homes were destroyed further to the east at EF3 to EF4 strength in a nearby subdivision, and East Middle School sustained major damage.

 

The tornado then continued on an east to east-southeast trajectory towards Interstate 44 where it weakened; nonetheless, vehicles were blown off the highway and mangled near the U.S. Route 71 interchange. The damage at and around the interchange was rated EF2 to EF3. The weakening tornado continued to track into the rural areas of southeastern Jasper County and northeastern Newton County where damage was generally minor to moderate, with trees, mobile homes, outbuildings, and frame homes damaged mainly at EF0 to EF1 strength. The tornado lifted east of Diamond at 6:12 pm CDT (23:12 UTC) according to aerial surveys. The tornado's total track length was at least 22.1 miles (35.6 km) long. Overall, 6,954 homes were destroyed, 359 homes had major damage and 516 had minor damage, 158 people were killed, and 1,150 others were injured along the path. A separate EF2 tornado touched down near Wentworth from the same supercell about 25 miles (40 km) east-southeast of Joplin.

 

So that's the story of this incredible tornado. But something more came from this. In the aftermath of this devastating event, tales began to emerge of strange beings described as butterfly people, appearing to help and protect the citizens of Joplin. This is why we are talking about this event!

 

What were they? Was it mass hysteria? Was it a cooking mechanism for the many children affected? If they were real, where did they come from? Extraterrestrial? Interdimensional? Let's look at some stories and then explore some theories!

 

So we'll start with some of the stories from the people that were there. One woman, arriving home with her children, ran inside her home with great hurry. Together, they sheltered inside a small closet and the family started praying when, suddenly, the full force of the F5 tornado ripped their home to shreds. Inside the fury of wind and hail, the family thought it was the end. The winds were so fierce even the daughter’s glasses shattered as the roof was ripped off above them. Then, strangely, the son saw something in the sky. Amidst the pain and anguish, there was something above them, amongst the winds. A white woman with wings, hovering over them, as if she was protecting them from harm. Had madness set in? Was it a religious vision? The son  described what he saw as a ‘butterfly woman’, who stayed and stayed, protecting the family from harm. Moreover, the rest of the family also saw the vision. As the tornado passed by, the family were left unharmed. In fact, the closet was the only thing left without damage. The entire rest of the house, everything, was destroyed, yet that humble closet, with no additional protection to the rest of the house, survived. All this served to reinforce the belief for the family that an angel had protected them on that day. Medical aid soon arrived and the search began for the injured and the trapped. Rumours began to circulate amongst the crowds. One nurse, looking rather confused, told the family she saw an angel and when pressed, she described the exact same vision the family had seen. Down to the last detail. The nurse said the ‘butterfly woman’ was larger than the average human, with wings. She wasn’t sure what to make of what she saw, but she didn’t fear it. She said she saw it whilst tending to a man who had been impaled on a wooden stake. She knew he was dying and then she saw it. Something standing nearby. As if it was comforting the man. If this was a religious vision of the dying, then why did the nurse see it?

 

And it wasn’t the only one. Rather than some strange being protecting the town, the nurse said that she saw many. Not a ‘butterfly woman’… butterfly people.

 

Over the following weeks, counsellors spoke to dozens and dozens of traumatised children across the town, none of whom knew each other, and every single one spoke of the Butterfly People, and how they ‘saved them’ on that day. And time and time again, the descriptions matched. Joplin was no longer just the scene of a tragedy. No longer just a war zone steeped in loss and billions of dollars worth of damage. It was now also home to something strange. Something unexplainable.

 

Lage Grigsby was believed to be near death when he arrived at Freeman Hospital West after being pulled from debris in the May 22, 2011, tornado. In fact he was actually taken to the hospital's fucking morgue.

 

Mason Lillard would have died, her surgeon said, if a metal rod driven through her body would have shifted an inch either direction. Despite critical injuries suffered when their grandparents' truck was thrown more than 300 feet across the Home Depot parking lot, the two cousins say they don't think that often about the EF5 twister.

 

"You kind of forget about it unless you look at the scars," said Mason.

 

On the night of the tornado, Mason was rushed to surgery, but Lage had been black tagged — meaning he was thought to be dying.  That same night Freeman Hospital West ER nurse Tracy Dye arrived at the hospital after she heard the tornado had hit St. John's Regional Medical Center. She had considered not going to work because she was watching the storm develop and didn't want to leave her sons. When Dye arrived at the hospital, she was sent down to the morgue. Walking through, she touched Lage's arm and... get this shit..."he let out a scream. I ran and got a doctor and we got him out of there," she said. Dye stayed with him until surgery, which lasted six hours. For him, those actions were lifesaving, Lage reminded the nurse Wednesday.

 

"I owe you my life," he said.

 

Sharon Lillard calls Dye "our angel," adding, "I was at the hospital the other day and I dropped a little gift by for her." According to Mason's account of the storm, Dye was not the only angel on duty that night. She saw them just before the storm hit, Mason said, and after... she felt a touch on her shoulder.

 

"I thought it was Lage, but when I turned I saw two angels in robes, one with brown hair and one with blond hair," she said. "It was kinda calming. I knew God was with us and that he'd take us to be with him, or leave us to do something great." 

 

Elsewhere, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch recounted another story of a mother and daughter. When the storm hit, the mother, holding her little child, ran for shelter. The force of the winds knocked them to the ground. Terrifyingly, the mother looked back to see a car picked up by the tornado and flung right in their direction. She couldn’t escape, she didn’t have the time. So she curled up and cradled her daughter, hoping to protect her from the impact of the car that was literally right above them. But it didn’t hit. She had closed her eyes, but her daughter didn’t. When the seconds passed by turned into minutes, she opened her eyes and the car was nowhere to be seen. “What happened?” she asked her daughter. “Didn’t you see the butterfly people mommy?” Her daughter was sure the Butterfly People were carrying humans through the sky. “They were beautiful”, the little girl said smiling! 

 

Crazy shit! That literally gave me goosebumps as I read it.

 

The stories were mounting up. A grandfather and two young boys trapped outside during the tornado. The grandfather lost his shoes as the tornado passed over them, when the two young boys looked up they saw the ‘Butterfly People’ watching over them. Over the weeks, more and more people came forward, from all over the town. All reporting the same thing. People with wings, always described as butterflies. And most of the time, the reports were coming from children. One little girl with her mother said she wasn’t afraid because the ‘butterfly people were with them’. Another four-year-old boy said two Butterfly People ‘held’ his father’s car to stop it being taken away. And yet another little boy, who was picked up by the winds and flung some six miles through the air, told rescuers that angels caught him and sat him down safely on the ground. 

 

The local hospital was inundated with the injured and soon, every ward, every room, every nurse, every patient, were filled with stories of these “Butterfly People”... angels protecting them during the worst of the storm. And not just there, but in the lines waiting for donated food, all anyone was talking about were the Butterfly People. It was one of the worst tornado strikes in living memory. For the months that followed, people gathered all over town and told their stories. Stories of how they survived and stories of those they lost. And, above all, stories of the Butterfly People.

 

This sounds incredible… But this isn't the first instance of this sort of thing happening. Take a look at the 1978 Freiberg mine disaster. All the miners, every one of them, saw a man standing in front of the mine at Freiberg, Germany. When the workers approached the man, they discovered huge wings covering his body. They stood in shock for a moment when, suddenly, the ‘angel’ let out a series of shrieks described as similar to a train’s emergency brakes. The miner’s fled and around one hour later, the mine exploded. A huge plume of smoke covered Freiberg. For many of the miners, what they saw was an angel, warning them of the danger. If they hadn’t fled, they’d all be dead after all…

 

The same thing happened in 1986 in Chernobyl. Dozens and dozens of people saw winged creatures, which many described as ‘angels’, hovering above the land moments before the disaster, leading many to believe these ‘angels’ were signs that a horrific event was coming. Even as recently as 2001, many people claim to have seen winged creatures around the Twin Towers shortly before the disaster. 

 

So what are they? 

 

Well the obvious first choice is… Angels. Joplin is at the centre of America’s religious heartland. Deep in the religious heartland, people of great faith claim to see an angel before they think they’re about to die. It does happen. Quite a lot, in fact. Near-death experiences often sound strange to those of us who haven’t had them. The one hole in this theory is that they didn’t say ‘angels’. Only a few did, but most people who saw the Butterfly People of Joplin described what they saw as the name implies, ‘butterfly people’ and not angels. Of course, many were children. Maybe the simple answer is that children have a better idea of what a butterfly is than an angel.

 

This leads into another explanation. NDEs, or near death experiences. Now since we know you guys are avid listeners, we know that you've already listened to our episode on NDE. Without getting deep into that subject again, basically some are saying that these people were simply experiencing NDE. Their brains were helping them cope with the fact they were about to die. But that doesn't explain why they all saw the same thing. Or why some that were literally about to die ended up safe. 

 

Another interesting theory is that they were interdimensional beings. The theory basically states that because of the storm being so massive, the electricity in the atmosphere was ramped up considerably. This added to all of the energy of the storm somehow managing to rip open a portal or gateway that allowed these beings to pass through. The thought is that the beings, when confronted with the scene before them, came through the portal to help as many people as they could before the portal closed again. So there's that… Interdimensional beings.

 

With all of the stories it's hard to doubt that something strange truly happened. The people of Joplin stand by what they claim to have seen and with great conviction. During the summer, a mural was painted in downtown Joplin. Public meetings were held to gather ideas for the mural, how the city's history and the tornado should be depicted. While they resisted the inclusion of the butterfly people at first, they eventually decided on including butterflies in the mural. Big, colorful butterflies flutter across the scene, while two small angels can be seen, too. The murals artist said the butterflies represented metamorphosis, how the city is being reborn. The mural was titled "The Butterfly Effect" to represent how the mural could inspire others to do good in this world. It has nothing to do with butterfly people, he said. But everyone wasn't convinced. "Even on that mural," one resident said, "there's butterflies because they've heard of the butterfly people."

 

Butterflies have long held symbolic value. The ancient Greek word "psyche" refers to both butterflies and the human soul. Butterflies are depicted in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, author of the book "On Death and Dying," said her study of death was influenced by a visit to a former Nazi concentration camp in Poland where she saw images of hundreds of butterflies carved into walls by prisoners.

 

So, what did they see? Could it have been mass hysteria? Interdimensional beings that crossed over during one of the most powerful natural events our world can create? Why was it mainly children that saw them? Are children just more susceptible to being able to see spirits? We’ve all seen “The Sixth Sense”, right? The Bruce Willis movie where the little boy is tormented by the ghosts he and ONLY he sees. Well, not to go COMPLETELY off the rails, here are some stories about creepy kids seeing some creepy shit. 

 

The pajama-clad boy

“When we were looking at condos to purchase our first place, Claire was just shy of her third birthday. We brought her with us to all of our showings because we wanted to see how comfortable she was as it would be her home too. When we walked through the door of the place we ultimately bought, the second floor of a 1911 Chicago brick three-flat, we all knew immediately that it was the right place. That evening, I asked Claire if she thought that place would be a good home for her, and her response was, ‘Yes! And the little boy that lives there is really nice too.’

This took me aback, but I tried to remain calm. I asked her what she meant, and she said there was a little boy in his pajamas that she saw in the dining room. She said he had waved at her, he was about her age, and he was only in the dining room. She knew his name (which I don’t remember now) and that he was afraid of water. After she went to bed that night, I looked up ways to clear the energy of a home, how to communicate with a ghost so they don’t bother your family, and anything else I could find to make sure at least I could be comfortable living in this otherwise perfect condo. Claire never talked about him again, not even the next day when I asked her to tell my husband.” —Ashlie M., mom of two

 

The cemetery sighting

Trigger Warning: This next anecdote touches on the subject of the loss of a child and could be potentially triggering for some. Please skip ahead if you feel it might not be for you.

“My son was around 2 at the time. We were driving past the cemetery when he said, ‘Look, mama! Dead people.’ Yes, darling, I responded. ‘Kids!’ he continued, matter-of-factly. And sure enough, we were passing by the children’s section. Curious, I asked if the kids were happy or sad. ‘Happy, mama!’ he said. ‘They are running around that daddy.’ All I saw was a man standing alone with his head dropped. It warmed my heart, honestly.” —Erin T., mom of two

 

The lingering grandmother

“We bought our current house from a man who was married for 40+ years. His wife passed away a couple of years before we bought the house. One evening, while tucking my 2.5-year-old into bed, he said, ‘Mama, night-night to the grandma,’ while pointing to the hallway between his room and mine—what was her room back then.” —Priscilla A., mom of one

 

The ghost friend

“When we moved into our house, Leo (2.5) was seeing a ghost. He would say ‘ghost’ and point to the dining room table. One day, I mentioned ‘Mr. Hutchinson’ to someone while giving a history of the house, and Leo said, ‘Mr. Hutchinson, my ghost friend?’ We confirmed with a house cleanser that someone attached to the home, like a grandfather figure was here, and attracted to Leo’s light and innocence. We have since had our house cleansed twice!” —Amy F., mom of two

 

The midnight playmate

“My then 4-year-old would tell me about a little girl who wanted to play with her. She apparently wanted to play all hours of the day and night. When I was finally able to sort out what was up with my daughter, in the middle of the night, I left this little ghost some toys in an upstairs closet so she could play by herself. She had a stuffed lamb and a stuffed duck, and I used to find them moved most mornings. The 4-year-old shared a room with her sibling, so I know it wasn’t her moving the toys.” —Tracy B., mom of three

 

The door-slammer

“Ender, my 4-year-old, will tell us stories about the little girl who shuts doors and turns off the lights. He can’t tell us what she looks like or where she goes. I don’t talk about ghosts or anything that would give Ender this idea. The last time the little girl was here, I heard the door slam. I ran in and asked him if he had closed it. He told me ‘No, the little girl did because she didn’t want to play.’” —Dee Dee A., mom of two

The visit from grandpa

“My husband’s father passed away several years before my son was born. He died from the flu, and my husband had always felt guilty because he had been the one to share the sickness with him. We never talked to our son about his grandpa, but one morning he woke and said point-blank, ‘Daddy, Papa Don wanted me to tell you he’s doing fine.’ We asked him to describe his grandpa and he did so to a T, despite never having seen a photo of him. He said he was standing by a fast car with a cloud of smoke around him. This made perfect sense because my father-in-law raced sports cars and smoked heavily all his life.” —Michelle K., mom of two

 

So, there ya go! I only have one last question to ask… butterflies can often look like moths, right? Could these sightings have been the one and only Mothman? If you’re not familiar with his (or her) story, go all the way back to episode number five, from June 11, 2019 and listen to the train ride on THE MOTHMAN!

 

Now, it’s everyone’s favorite time! The Movies!

 

In order to keep this episode more uplifting than horrific, we’ve decided to discuss the top movies about kids with powers!

 

15 Exciting Movies About Kids With Powers | ScreenRant

 

 

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87 - The Axeman of New Orleans

Hell, March 13, 1919

Esteemed Mortal of New Orleans:

They have never caught me and they never will. They have never seen me, for I am invisible, even as the ether that surrounds your earth. I am not a human being, but a spirit and a demon from the hottest hell. I am what you Orleanians and your foolish police call the Axeman.

When I see fit, I shall come and claim other victims. I alone know whom they shall be. I shall leave no clue except my bloody axe, besmeared with blood and brains of he whom I have sent below to keep me company.

If you wish you may tell the police to be careful not to rile me. Of course, I am a reasonable spirit. I take no offense at the way they have conducted their investigations in the past. In fact, they have been so utterly stupid as to not only amuse me, but His Satanic Majesty, Francis Josef, etc. But tell them to beware. Let them not try to discover what I am, for it were better that they were never born than to incur the wrath of the Axeman. I don't think there is any need of such a warning, for I feel sure the police will always dodge me, as they have in the past. They are wise and know how to keep away from all harm.

Undoubtedly, you Orleanians think of me as a most horrible murderer, which I am, but I could be much worse if I wanted to. If I wished, I could pay a visit to your city every night. At will I could slay thousands of your best citizens (and the worst), for I am in close relationship with the Angel of Death.

Now, to be exact, at 12:15 (earthly time) on next Tuesday night, I am going to pass over New Orleans. In my infinite mercy, I am going to make a little proposition to you people. Here it is:

I am very fond of jazz music, and I swear by all the devils in the nether regions that every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is in full swing at the time I have just mentioned. If everyone has a jazz band going, well, then, so much the better for you people. One thing is certain and that is that some of your people who do not jazz it out on that specific Tuesday night (if there be any) will get the axe.

Well, as I am cold and crave the warmth of my native Tartarus, and it is about time I leave your earthly home, I will cease my discourse. Hoping that thou wilt publish this, that it may go well with thee, I have been, am and will be the worst spirit that ever existed either in fact or realm of fancy.

--The Axeman

Normally we would put this letter in the timeline where it belongs but we really think it sets the mood for the episode. It is now obvious that we are talking about none other than The Axeman Of New Orleans! This is another unsolved series of murders along the lines of The Cleveland Torso Killer and the Hinterkaifeck murders that we’ve covered. Are you sensing the pattern? Cus there's a pattern. 

 

For over a year, from May 1918 to October 1919, the city of New Orleans, Louisiana was in a frenzied panic over a roaming serial killer dubbed the “Axeman”.  The killer often struck with an axe that was found at the house of the victim. It wasn't always an axe, but it was always brutal. The axeman prayed on italians in New orleans.  Today we will discuss the murders and some of the suspects of this crazy unsolved case. 

 

First Murders:

 

Joseph and Catherine Maggio were italian immigrants who owned an Italian grocery and tavern at the corner of Upperline and Magnolia streets. The couple lived in an apartment behind the store and an adjacent apartment was occupied by Joseph's brothers Jake and Andrew. In the early morning of may 23rd 1918, at about 5 am, Andrew was awakened by loud thuds and moaning coming through the wall of  the connecting apartment. Andrew awoke Jake and told him what he had heard. Andrew pounded on the wall but got no response. The brothers then rushed over to their brothers apartment to see what was happening. When they opened the door to their  brothers room they were greeted by a horrifying sight. The room was covered in blood and the couple lay on the bed in a horrible state. The couple was laid out on the bed covered in blood each with several gashes in their heads. 

In addition their throats were severed. The police arrived and questioned the brothers and searched the apartment. They found that a panel in the door had been removed with a chisel and that was the point of entry. A blood smeared axe was found in the bathtub which was identified by the brothers as Joseph’s. There was a safe that had been opened and rifled through but nothing appeared to be missing.  There was also a box of cash and gems under the bed that had not been touched. Andrew, the younger brother was under suspicion immediately. He was a barber by trade and admitted the straight razor found on the bed, that was used to cut the throats of the victims, was his. Jake had just received his draft notice and spent the night drinking. A neighbor confirmed that he had come home at around 2am, before the killing was thought to have happened.  Both men were taken down to the station. Jake was released soon after but Andrew was held longer in hopes they could build a case against him. With no physical evidence, the police released Andrew a little later in the day. One block from athe murder scene a cryptic message was found written in chalk on the sidewalk. It read:

 

        “ Mrs Maggio is going to sit up tonight just like Mrs. Toney.”

 

What did this mean? Who was Mrs Toney? No one really knew but some thought this may have something to do with the murders of three italian couples killed in much the same way in 1911. The three couples were all italian grocers that were hacked up with axes. The houses were entered by the killer removing door panels. The husband of the last couple murdered had the first name of tony. Could his wife be the “Mrs. Toney” from the message? Oddly enough journalists could find no accounts of these crimes even though they were reported by a retired detective that claimed to have worked the cases. People started thinking this may be mafia related and have something to do with the couple not paying protection money. 

 

It doesn't take long for the killer to strike again. Saturday June 16, 1918, a baker named John Banza arrived for a delivery at a grocery store at the corner of Dorgenois and LaHarpe streets. The grocery is owned by 59 year old Louis Besumer. He lived in an apartment behind the business with his companion, 28 year old Anna Harriet Lowe. As John was making his delivery, he found the front door locked so he went around to the side door and knocked. The door opened and John was shocked when Besumer opened the door and greeted him covered in blood from a large gash on his head. “We were attacked,” Besumer told John. In the bedroom John finds Anna, mutilated and barely clinging to life. There are bloody footprints leading from the bed to a swath of false hair on the floor. Once again entry was through a removed door panel and the weapon was a small rusty hatchet identified by Besumer as his own. Also no money or valuables were missing, just as in the first incident. Besumer couldn't give a description of the assailant and his wounds were not life threatening. Anna lays delirious from her wounds but claims she was attacked by a “mulatto”. Shortly after, a black man who worked at the grocery store had quit just a week prior, was arrested and questioned. He was ultimately exonerated and released. Anna's condition worsened and she began to accuse Besumer, the owner of the store, of the attack and claimed he was a german fuckin’ spy! The u.s. Justice department refutes this claim. The neighbors, obviously, begin to talk, spreading rumors of the two being an estranged couple, that secret government papers were found in the apartment, and even that the two were drug dealers with a secret supply of narcotics. Monday August 5, 1918, Anna died without saying anything else about the attack. When Besumer is released from the hospital he asks police if he could investigate  the murder himself. This only makes the police suspicious and they actually arrest Besumer and try him for murder! He was eventually acquitted after a whopping ten minute...yes ten minute deliberation. Basically the jury took a smoke break and was like fuck it ...not guilty... lets go home. 

On the same day that Anna died, another grisly scene was found. In the suburb of Algiers, just across the Mississippi river from New Orleans, Edward Schnieder was arriving home after working third shift at his job. As he walked into the house, something felt off. The house was way too fuckin quiet. He calls out to his wife but she doesn't answer him back. As he suspiciously walks around, He unexpectedly finds his wife lying on the bed bleeding profusely from several cuts to the head. She is also 8 months pregnant. The police and ambulance arrive and after a search, there is actually little that links this attack to the previous ones. There was no entry by a door panel, the weapon was missing, and they were neither italian nor grocers. So, was it connected or does our killer just NOT have an MO. Which, if you’re up on your serial killer methodology, you’ll recognize that’s not exactly “normal”. According to crimemuseum.org (and all the good true crime researchers and authors), there are three main types of serial killers. 

 

THE MEDICAL KILLER

 

Although this type of killer is very rare, there have been some people who have become involved in the medical industry to carry out their nefarious deeds. This type of killer feels they are shroud because it isn’t uncommon for people to pass in a hospital. They are usually highly intelligent and know how to carefully and cleverly conceal their murders. If it appears that a victim has died a natural death, there will be no reason for anyone to suspect foul play and search for the guilty party. Few doctors in history have managed to kill dozens of people before others began to catch on.

 

THE ORGANIZED KILLER

 

This type of serial killer is the most difficult to identify and capture. They are usually highly intelligent and well organized to the point of being meticulous. Every detail of the crime is planned out well in advance, and the killer takes every precaution to make sure they leave no incriminating evidence behind. It is common for this type of psychopath to watch potential victims for several days to find someone they consider to be a good target. Once the victim is chosen, the killer will kidnap them, often through some sort of ploy designed to gain their sympathy and take them to another location to commit the murder. Once the person has been killed, the perpetrator will usually take precautions to ensure the body is not found until they want it to be. A criminal like this usually takes great pride in what they consider to be their “work” and tend to pay close attention to news stories about their deeds. One of their motivating factors may be to stump the law enforcement officers who are trying to solve their crime.

 

THE DISORGANIZED KILLER

 

These individuals rarely plan out the deaths of their victims in any way. Most often, the people they kill are in the wrong place at the wrong time. This type of serial killer appears to strike at random whenever an opportunity arises. They take no steps to cover up any signs of their crime and tend to move regularly to avoid being captured. Disorganized killers usually have low IQ’s and are extremely antisocial. They rarely have close friends or family, and do not like to stay in one place for too long. These killers are prone to have no recollection of their deeds, or to confess that they were motivated by voices in their heads or some other imaginary source.

Ok so on Saturday August 10, 1918, Pauline and Mary Bruno, age 18 and 13 are awakened in the middle of the night. They live behind a grocery store at the corner of Gravier and Tonti streets with their uncle Joseph Romano, age 30.  He is a barber and Italian immigrant. The girls are awoken by sounds of a struggle coming from their uncles room. They sat up to see a large hulking figure looming in the doorway, and no… it wasn’t Mr. Moody. The girls screamed and the figure took off running. Their uncle staggered into the room and said something had happened, as the girls followed him into the kitchen. He was covered in blood. “My head hurts, call an ambulance!” he said. He then lapsed into unconsciousness and was taken to the hospital where he died a short time later. Pauline would say that Joseph was a good man with no enemies. The murder weapon was again the victims own axe which was taken from his shed and found covered in blood on the kitchen floor. 

 

By now the italian community is undoubtedly on edge. And for obvious and good reason... They were all wondering who would be next. In an in depth and profound statement, the Police Superintendent said:

                         “I am of the belief that the murderer is a depraved killer with no regard for human life.” 

Really? What the fuck made you assume that ? Brilliant….absolutely brilliant! Fly off and save someone else, captain obvious!

 

Sales of rifles, pistols, and shotguns increased, as did the addition of bars, grates, and grills on windows. Police are inundated with calls about suspicious people, findings of axes and chisels discarde on the street, and at least four incidents of grocers finding evidence that someone had tried to gain entry into their buildings using a chisel on the back door. In these cases the doors were too thick for the chisel to get through and whoever was trying to get in just gave up. There was even a report of a man that heard scraping sounds at his back door so he fired his shotgun at the door and saw someone hauling ass away from the house.

 One man said an entry attempt was foiled by a case of tomatoes blocking the back door on the inside. That's one lazy killer, seriously, that is lame. Oddly enough, the range of victims and dates seem completely random. Police had pretty much no leads. The only things they knew for sure were that the killer entered by chiseling out door panels and attached brutally with axes and hatchets found at the scene of the crime. There was a lack of much more evidence. There were no clear finger or foot prints at the scenes. The city was in a panic. And of course there was no shortage of people bringing up the Jack the ripper comparisons. Since were also postulating that the killer may be a jekyll and hyde type personality. A normal well mannered person that may have some impulse take over that turns then into a killer with a blood lust… Which we suppose is like many serial killers.

 

Well as the summer went by and the year was coming to an end, things died down on the axe murderer front. The war ended and people rejoiced and the murders started to fade from the public consciousness. By the new year most were not talking about the murders anymore and many had let their guard down. Then in March of 1919 it all came rushing back.

Charles Cortimiglia, an italian immigrant, his wife Rose and the couple's two year old daughter May, live behind their store at the corner of 2nd and Jefferson streets in  the suburb of Gretna. On the morning of March 9, 1919, a neighbor, Hazel Johnson, went to the store to find it locked up. This struck her as odd as Charles was known for his reliability. He had the store open at 5am every day including Sundays without fail.  Hazel knocked but received no answer. She went around to the side of the building and peered into the bedroom window but it was so dark, she couldn’t see anything inside. She went around the back and saw that a panel had been removed. And so, for some stupid ass reason she decided to go inside…all of these people wandering into other people's homes are just asking for it honestly… Who does that?! You know it's gonna be bad… Call the fucking cops. 

At any rate, once inside she of course, found a disturbingly brutal scene. She found Rose bleeding profusely from deep gashes on her head and holding the body of her dead daughter. Her husband lay on the bed beside them with several severe injuries to his head as well. Clinging to life the couple was taken across the river to Charity Hospital. Rose suffered a few severe injuries to her head but was expected to survive. Her husband had his skull crushed during the attack and was not expected to live.  In the hospital, as Rose was recovering she was able to recall waking up in the night to her husband struggling with an intruder who was brandishing an axe. After disabling the husband the intruder came after her and her daughter. Incredibly she claims she was able to identify her attacker! She named 17 year old Frank Jordano, son of their neighbor iorlando Jordano. The Jordanos owned a competing grocery store on the same block. According to locals there had been bad blood between the families for a little while now. The Cortimiglias had worked for the Jordanos managing their grocery store. The Jordanos decided to take over managing the grocery themselves putting the Cortimiglias out of work. The Cortimiglias then opened their own grocery just a few doors down. The Jordanos vehemently deny any wrongdoing and claim the relationship with the Cortimiglias has been cordial. Also standing at 6ft tall and weighing over 200 lbs, they say there's no way their son could have squeezed his big ass through the removed door panel. A few days later, surprising everyone, Charles regains consciousness. He says that in fact it was not the neighbor that attacked him but it was an unknown assailant. Despite this, Frank and his father are placed under arrest for the murder of Mary Cortimiglia.

 

This brings us to Friday March 14, 1919. The newspaper in New Orleans, the Times-Picayune, publishes the letter that we read at the opening of the show. A mocking letter full of cryptic statements. Again, the letter states that the following Tuesday, the axeman will spare anyone playing jazz as he is a jazz aficionado. The following Wednesday would be St. Joseph's day, a day off celebrating within the Italian community. Accordingly, Tuesday night there was all kinds of shit  going on around the city. Jazz clubs were packed with people. Axeman parties were in full swing at people's houses. Even homeless people along the riverfront improvised their own instruments to play jazz all night. True to his word, the axeman did not cometh. Not one was attacked that night… And they probably had a ton of fun not getting killed, but THAT would NOT be the end of the axeman's reign of terror.

 

Wednesday May 21st sees the trial of Frank and iorlando Jordano. Despite overwhelming evidence to their innocence and the refusal of Charles Cortimiglia to identify either of them as the attacker, the jury convicts the two men based solely on the accusations of Rose. The judge sentences Frank to death and his father to life in prison. Everyone was hopeful that the axeman's run was over, however on Sunday August 10, 1919… The axeman would strike again. 

 

On this morning, Stephen Boca, you guessed it, an italian immigrant grocer, SHOCKER, came stumbling out of his apartment that was, yes… Connected to his grocery store on elysian fields Ave. He stumbled down the street bleeding profusely from several severe head wounds, making his way to a friend's house. His friend Frank helped him in, treated his wounds and called for help. The police investigated the scene and found all the axeman trademarks including the chiseled door panel and another, you guessed it, a bloody axe in the kitchen.

 

On Tuesday September 2, 1919 a druggist named William Carlson hears a suspicious noise outside of his back door. He fires several shots through the door at the would be intruder. The figure runs off leaving behind a what? Yep! An axe!

 

Wednesday September 3rd 1919 a young woman named Sarah Laumann is attacked in her bed by a man with a DUN DUN DUN… axe. She sustains several head wounds but recovers at the hospital. She claimed the man came after her in the dark with an axe, yet she could offer no description of the attacker. A bloody axe was found in the yard but that's possibly the only similarity at the crime scene. Entry was gained through a window not a chiseled door panel. And she was young, not italian and not a grocer. Was this the work of the axeman, or maybe a copy cat killer?

 

Mike and Rose Pepitone were italian immigrants who ran a grocery store at the corner of Ulloa and South Scott streets. They shared the residence with their 6 children ages 2-12. In the early morning of Monday October 27 1919, a man named Ben Corcoran, a sheriff's deputy, happened to be walking by the store. As he passed by, the Pepitone's 11 year old daughter came running out screaming at him for help. Inside the home he found a horrific scene. Mike Pepitone lay on the bed with his skull smashed in from several smashes with a blunt object. He was still alive…but barely. He was rushed to the hospital where he would die a short time later. His wife and children were all unharmed. Rose claims that around 2am she was startled  by her husband's screams. She saw two shadows retreating towards the children's room. That's right… She said she saw TWO shadows. She turned to the kids room but the attackers had dipped out the back door. Police include this in the axeman  murders, despite a couple of significant differences. First, entry was made via a window that was broken enough to unlatch and open it. Second the murder weapon was a pipe with a large nut at the end. it was found that there was no axe on hand at the house so they think the killer used whatever they found. Also the obvious claim of there being two attackers. Police noted that Rose did not seem to be upset over the incident and did not cry or show any emotion when answering questions. We'll get back to Rose Pepitone in a bit.

 

The residents didn't know it yet but this would be the last axeman killing. And just as abruptly as it started, it was over… no more axeman. So who was it… Were there suspects? Let's take a look.

 

First off, whatever happened to Frank and his father that were convicted in the killing of 2 year old Mary Cortimiglia? Well on December 6 1920, Rose Cortimiglia recanted her statement and claimed she only accused the men because of her jealousy stemming from the feud between the families...a family feud if you will…SURVEY SAYS!! No? Ah whatever fuck you if you don't think that's funny. Anyway, The men were given full pardons and set free.

 

Crime writer Colin Wilson speculates the Axeman could have been Joseph Momfre, a man shot to death in Los Angeles in December 1920 by the widow of Mike Pepitone, the Axeman's last known victim. Wilson's theory has been widely repeated in other true crime books and websites. However, true crime writer Michael Newton searched New Orleans and Los Angeles public, police and court records as well as newspaper archives, and failed to find any evidence of a man with the name "Joseph Momfre" (or a similar name) having been assaulted or killed in Los Angeles.

 

Newton was also not able to find any information that Mrs. Pepitone (identified in some sources as Esther Albano, and in others simply as a "woman who claimed to be Pepitone's widow") was arrested, tried or convicted for such a crime, or indeed had been in California. Newton notes that "Momfre" was not an unusual surname in New Orleans at the time of the crimes. It appears that there actually may have been an individual named Joseph Momfre or Mumfre in New Orleans who had a criminal history, and who may have been connected with organized crime; however, local records for the period are not extensive enough to allow confirmation of this, or to positively identify the individual. Wilson's explanation is an urban legend, and there is no more evidence now on the identity of the killer than there was at the time of the crimes.

 

Two of the alleged "early" victims of the Axeman, an Italian couple named Schiambra, were shot by an intruder in their Lower Ninth Ward home in the early morning hours of May 16, 1912. The male Schiambra survived while his wife died. In newspaper accounts, the prime suspect is referred to by the name of "Momfre" more than once. While radically different than the Axeman's usual modus operandi, if Joseph Momfre was indeed the Axeman, the Schiambras may well have been early victims of the future serial killer.

 

Ok, so let’s talk about THE BLACK HAND…

 

Since the majority of the Axeman’s attacks were on Italian-American grocers, it has led some to believe that they were all victims of an early form of Mafia, called the Black Hand. Black Hand crime was a name given to an extortion method used in Italian neighbourhoods at this time, therefore the murders could be linked to unpaid extortion debts. However, the Axeman frequently left suspects alive, which many Mafia experts believe would not have been the case if they’d have been true Black Hand attacks.

 

In a similar vein, many Sicilian immigrants to American at that time had a deep distrust of the authorities, which led them to take disputes into their own hands and settle them the old-fashioned way, otherwise known as the ‘vendetta’. The vendetta could well have been the reason behind a number of the attacks. The good ol “sleep with the fishes, see! Meh!”

 

COPYCAT KILLERS

Although the Axeman had a very distinct M.O., not all of the killings followed it to the letter, leading some to believe the Axeman was, in fact, several people who may or may not have been working together to terrorise the community. Looking at some of the crimes there were definitely differences to the norm. Whether it be the murder weapon or the mode of entry, even the number of assailants. This tends to be a pretty popular theory in a lot of circles. 

 

UNGODLY DEMON

His ability to appear in people’s houses in the middle of the night and vanish just as easily, have some believing the Axeman was indeed what he said he was in his letter to the press - ‘the worst spirit that ever existed either in fact or realm of fancy.’ People point to the fact that whomever it was, was able to fit through tiny openings in the doors lending to the claim that it was a shape shifting demon. Combined with the wording in the infamous letter, since people who are easily led down that path believe wholeheartedly that this was truly the work of evil incarnate. 

 

Other than those theories there doesn't  seem to be  much else in the way of suspects although during the investigation of the murder of the first victims, the Maggios, a crazy side story emerged, it goes as follows:

 

The killing of Joseph and Katherine Maggio was never solved. But the case did take up another phase the next day, just hours after Andrew Maggio's release from jail. At 3 a.m. on May 26, Dodson and Obitz, the detectives who discovered the writing in chalk on the sidewalk a block from where Joseph and Katherine Maggio had been killed, were sitting on a stoop at Baronne and Calliope streets while investigating a series of robberies in the neighborhood. A man approached them. Dodson and Obitz "accosted" him, according to news reports about the incident, and a gunbattle began. Obitz, 38, was shot through the heart and died.

In the aftermath, two innocent men who were mistakenly identified as having been the man confronted at Baronne and Calliope were shot dead by police, who faced no legal consequences for the killings. STREET JUSTICE! FUCK YEAH! Four days after the fatal shooting of Obitz, a teenager named Frank Bailey was arrested as a suspect at a house at the corner of Liberty and Perdido streets.

 

"Will the death of Detective Theodore Obitz handicap the police in their pursuit of evidence upon which to lay a foundation for disclosing the murderer or murderers of Joseph Maggio and his wife, who were hacked to death with an axe last Thursday morning in their bedroom of Magnolia and Upperline streets?" the States asked in a front-page story published on May 28. "Obitz was one of the most active of the investigators in the Maggio mystery, and is said to have possessed some information that might lead to its solution."

Bailey confessed to several robberies and to shooting Obitz, though at trial he changed his story and said he had falsely admitted to the killing of the officer because he was being tortured by police. He didn't deny firing his gun in the shootout. But Obitz, Bailey said at trial, had actually been shot by Dodson, the other officer. You hear that? The other COP shot him! Hhmmm suspicious much?!

 

The jury didn't buy it, however. Frank Bailey was convicted of murder in the death of Theodore Obitz and sentenced to die at the old Parish Prison. He was executed just over two years later, on Aug. 13, 1920. He was 18 years old.

 

Before going to the gallows, Bailey angrily denounced the prosecution.

 

"Detective Harry Dodson, partner of Obitz, was the man who killed him," Bailey told the States in a jailhouse interview published the day before he was hanged. "One of the bullets fired by Dodson struck Obitz in the head as he was shooting at me. I fired three shots as I ran, but I am sure none of them took effect. I fired as I ran and could not take aim.

"But if I am to die for the murder of Obitz, who is going to pay the penalty for the deaths of Louis Johnson and Abraham Price, two innocent negroes who were shot down while they were hunting me?

 

"When I have been executed, nothing will have been taken out of this world Friday. Most persons who hang are expected to make a last request. I will make none; not to the people of Louisiana. But I will make it to God. He hears; the public do not. I am going to walk to the gallows without a whimper. If there is such a thing as a spirit coming back to earth, I do not want to come back."

 

Wow… So that's another crazy arm of this case that, while not directly related to the axe murders, produced more craziness and death.

 

There were some later attacks too that might possibly have been the Axeman – Joseph Spero and his daughter in December 1920, in the city of Alexandria in central Louisiana, Giovanni Orlando of DeRiddler in western Louisiana a month later, in January 1921, and Frank Scalisi of nearby Lake Charles in April of the same year. Opinion is divided on whether these later attacks were the work of the Axeman or not. Some researchers do not even attribute the Pepitone murder to him. 

 

We’re very unlikely to ever know for sure. The Axeman was never caught, and there are a number of potential suspects, all of whom are problematic in one way or another. 

Top horror movies that take place in New Orleans, Louisiana.

 

https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=louisiana&genres=Horror&title_type=moviein or are about New Orleans.

 

https://www.ranker.com/list/best-movies-about-new-orleans/ranker-film

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OUR YOUTUBE

86 - Tim Burton (Your Passenger Request)

"Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?"

-Tim Burton

 

Today's episode comes to you as per YOUR recommendation, passengers! Nope! It’s not another haunted tale about a murderous house or Another far fetched story about Moody having his colon cleansed by an alien with a shop vac! We asked who you wanted to hear about and you answered pretty much unanimously! You sexy sumbitches wanted to hear about none other than Mr. Burton! So today we are going to discuss all things related to the fantastic thrill ride known as BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA! That’s right! Jack Burton! 

Kurt Russel and his big rig crushing through.. um... wait… 

hold on a second.

Ok, that’s my bad… 

 

it’s actually the OTHER Mr. Burton of importance, TIM BURTON!

 

Tim Burton was born Timothy Walter Burton on August 25, 1958 in Burbank, California. His mother was Jean Burton, later the owner of a cat-themed gift shop, lending to the notion that she, too, was quirky before quirky became fashionable.

"I don't know about that," Burton frowns today. "I found it more horrific than quirky but that's my opinion. Opening a cat store in Burbank was just a very strange idea. I don't think it did very well." His father was William "Bill" Burton, a former minor league baseball player who was working for the Burbank Parks and Recreation Department. Tim's younger brother, Daniel, was born in 1961.

 

Although he grew up in a typical American family in a typical American suburb, Tim did not have a typical, happy childhood. He recalls that he was a sad child who kept to himself. He didn’t even feel close to his family. His father wanted him to play sports and his mother tried to get him interested in playing the clarinet, but Tim resisted both. Although he did admit to playing baseball for a bit. 

     

"I played baseball," he reluctantly admits. "My dad was a baseball player. He had been a professional athlete, and so it's easy for me to relate to that sort of dynamic with parents and kids, pushing and pulling them one way or the other."

 

       He spent a great deal of his time in his room or watching TV. In talking of his strange childhood he recounts a story of his parents almost literally walling him in: 

 

           "When I was younger, I had these two windows in my room, nice windows that looked out onto the lawn, and for some reason my parents walled them up and gave me this little slit-window that I had to climb up on a desk to see out of. I never did ask them why.

 

"But my parents are dead now, so I guess the answer will remain unanswered as to why they sealed me in a room. I guess they just didn't want me to escape."

 

When he was ten years old, Tim went to live with his grandmother. She allowed him to spend even more time by himself, which he appreciated. He did not have many friends. Unlike other kids his age, he was not interested in after-school activities, sports, or popular music. He felt like he did not fit in, especially at school, where he was not a good student. Rumor has it that he attempted to burn the place down with everyone in it. 

 

That rumor was actually started by ME, at this exact moment and of course it’s horse shit. 

 

Although he felt alone in his world, Tim did find one thing that made him feel at home: monster movies. He spent many hours watching these movies on TV and in theaters. He identified with Frankenstein, Godzilla, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Tim felt that the creatures in the movies were not evil, rather, they were just misunderstood. In his mind, it was the people trying to destroy the creatures who were the real monsters. In the book Burton on Burton, he says, "I've always loved monsters and monster movies. I was never terrified of them, I just loved them from as early as I can remember."  Feeling more empathy for the monsters in the popular horror movies of the day than he did with the adults in his life, he says: "I don't know why but I always related to characters like Frankenstein. I think a lot of kids do; it's easier to relate to the monster in the sense of he's alone. Growing up, you could feel those feelings and the way you felt about your neighbours is like they're the angry villagers.”

"I was never scared of monster movies. I could happily watch a monster movie but if I had one of my relatives come over, you'd be terrified."

 

Those same basic facts are always trotted out about Burton's childhood. 

 

  The young Burton won a poster-designing competition when in the ninth grade, and his anti-litter design adorned the sides of Burbank's garbage trucks for a year;  he rarely mentions his younger brother; he wanted to be the actor who plays Godzilla; he played sports, but has since described himself as 'pushed' into this, he produced a number of Super-8 home movies that have since been lost. Those are the rest of the basics that you'll always find when looking for info about his childhood.

 

In many ways, this is unsurprising. Burton himself has gone on record about the uneventful nature of his early life saying, “it's weird, but the only experiences I remember from childhood are the ones which had a major impact: fearful things, like from a scary movie." Going through numerous interviews, it does indeed seem that the only things from this time that actually stuck with him are scary movies and the odd cult TV show, be it The Prisoner or Gilligan's Island. Only when he's asked by interviewers to explain the origins of his images of a bleak, bland suffocating suburbia (like Frankenweenie, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood or, pretty much every movie he’s ever been a part of.), alienated children (Vincent, Beetlejuice, Batman Returns, Mars Attacks! The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy or… any…uh.. other movie… he’s, uh… ever been a part of), or heroes who seem 'weird' to the people around them (ya’ know… like pretty much ALL of his films) Only at these times does Burton, seemingly bored by such a line of questioning, roll out the usual anecdotes that seem to be accepted as representative of his childhood.

 

When pressed, Burton's most regular description of his youth is to state something along the lines of, “if you didn't speak well, if you didn't hang out with the other children or didn't play sports, if you liked monster movies, you were strange.”? To the young Mr. Burton though, this outside status had advantages. The very fact that they categorised him this way allowed him to see the world from an external point of view. 

 

"That meant my perception of normality was strange. For me, reality is bizarre."

 

However, Burton clearly didn't see this aspect of his childhood as unique, nor did he consider that he was a special, isolated case. “Every time I looked around... it looked like everyone had their own private world. You didn't see too many people... paying attention. They were in their own special worlds." This was an idea that he would soon be able to explore in his short film, Vincent.

 

It could be said that Burton has reshaped his own experiences in childhood to suit his later media image - that of the shy yet talented young artist and has now come to rely on them, maybe even believe them, exactly as another imaginative young man comes to believe his fantasies in Burton's first film to receive any kind of commercial release, “Vincent”. As Burton's friend and frequent collaborator Glenn Shadix put it, "the magazine idea of Tim is this weird, wigged-out, crazy person, and he's not like that, there's something very solid about him - yes, I think he always felt like a fish out of water growing up, but that doesn't mean his creativity is fuelled by pain or anger." Caroline Thompson, again both a friend and a collaborator, feels the same. For her, Burton's work has a "real affection for neighbourhood life... although he perpetuates this perception of himself as ... damaged, from my perspective it's just the opposite... he's escaped some fundamental damage that shuts most people down." Burton's life begins to be better documented from the time he first moved into the film world, having won a scholarship to the Disney-backed California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1976. One of his short film projects while at CalArts, Stalk of the Celery Monster was soon deemed good enough by Disney to warrant offering him a job as an animator, and he shifted base to Disney's Burbank lot.

 

Despite not being credited on the films, Burton’s initial tenure at Disney saw him working on both The Fox and the Hound and Tron.

 

His work was enough to get him recognized by a couple of Disney executives, who allotted him a small sum of cash to develop a short film of his own based on a poem he had written. This came to be known as Vincent, a short stop-animation film that followed a boy named Vincent that wants nothing more than to BE Vincent Price, narrated by Price himself. Which is amazing because, well… it’s Vincent fuckin Price.

 

While not anywhere close to what would be considered “Disney material” for the time, the short film was still a strong first effort from Burton as a director. “Vincent”, the short film, received accolades and awards, because it’s VINCENT FUCKING PRICE...and Burton would frequently reference it in his future works.

 

Despite Vincent’s relative success, the short film only saw a small, limited release in a single Los Angeles movie theatre before being locked away into the Disney Vault.

 

However, Burton’s effort on the film was not overlooked. He was given additional work as both an animator and a concept artist for Disney’s next feature animated film, “The Black Cauldron”.

 

Not-so-affectionately known as the “black sheep of Disney films,” The Black Cauldron suffered a number of issues during production. 

 

Creative differences between personnel led to animators leaving the project. After a screening of the film in 1984, Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg marched down to the editing room and started to cut the “scarier” scenes himself- It wasn’t until Disney CEO Michael Eisner stepped in that Katzenberg relented. Still, over 12 minutes of footage ended up being cut from the film. Dick move, Katzy… dick move.

 

The Black Cauldron was a commercial and critical flop, with critics citing flat characters, scary visuals, and sloppy jumps in the animation as key reasons for the film’s failure. Probably because ol Katzy went in all willy nilly just chopping shit up. Again, I say… Dick move, Katzy… dick move.

 

However, while production on The Black Cauldron was wrapping up, Burton was already hard at work on a project of his own. 

 

While the troubled production wrapped up on The Black Cauldron in 1984, Tim Burton had managed to secure a budget for another short film through Disney. 

 

Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie clocks in at just under half an hour and the cast included Shelley Duvall (The Shining), Sofia Coppola (Director, Lost in Translation), and Daniel Stern! Yes, THAT Daniel Stern. Marv from Home Alone and the narrator of the 80’s television hit show, “The Wonder Years”, which most of you are probably too young to know or remember and... you should be ashamed of yourselves.

 

Anyway, Frankenweenie follows the story of a young Victor Frankenstein living in a picturesque white-picket-fence suburban neighborhood.

 

All is well until his dog, Sparky, is struck by a car,  right in front of him. Ugh! 

 

As characters named Frankenstein often tend to do, he sneaks out in the night to raid the grave of his former friend and straps the corpse to a table hooked up to a number of improvised electronic instruments. 

 

One bolt of lightning later... and Victor’s pal is back to wagging his tail just as he did before the accident, just with a few more stitches (and from the looks of things, pieces of other people’s dogs). 

 

From there, the film plays just as any other Frankenstein’s Monster story would, but instead of angry villagers, you have paranoid neighbors. Instead of a fearsome, misunderstood monster, there’s a spry, happy, reanimated pup.

 

While the film is a call back to the golden age of the silver screen both in style and substance, Disney executives weren’t as impressed with the final product. FUCKIN’ KATZY! You know that scene chopping sonofabitch was involved.

 

     Frankenweenie was meant to accompany the theatrical re-releases of The Jungle Book and Pinocchio, but after reviewing the film, the execs deemed that it was far too scary for the children that would be filling the theaters. Kids are pussies, just saying.

 

The film was shelved, placed into the Disney vault alongside Vincent, and Burton was accused of “wasting money” on a kid’s film too scary to actually be seen by kids.

 

Tim Burton was then fired from Disney after completing the film, stating that “It was a ‘thank you very much, but you go your way, and we’ll go our way’ kind of thing.” KATZY! You prick!

 

Given that Frankenweenie was completed just after the disastrous 1984 screening of The Black Cauldron, it’s no surprise that Disney would want to distance themselves from yet another film that was “too scary.”

 

Although Frankenweenie was not released to the public, it was shown in private screenings. Comedian Paul Reubens was at one of these screenings When he saw the film, and while NOT masterbating into a bucket of popcorn...this time, Reubens knew that Burton was the perfect person to bring his character, Pee-Wee Mother fucking Herman, to the big screen.

 

Burton was twenty-six when he met Reubens. By then Reubens's character of Pee-Wee Herman was well developed. If you’ve been hog tied in someone’s basement for the last 30 years, Pee-Wee Herman was a grown man, but his bizarre and often immature behavior made him seem more like a spoiled child. He always dressed in a gray suit with a red bow tie. He had a large collection of toys, including his most prized possession: a shiny red bicycle. Which would inevitably be stolen by that fat fuck, Francis… I KNOW YOU ARE BUT WHAT AM I!!!???

 

Sorry.

 

Ol TB (That’s Mr. Burton to you passengers) was thrilled when a representative from Warner Brothers Studios asked him to direct the movie Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. He liked the material and he needed another project since he had quit his job at Disney after finishing Frankenweenie. Or was asked to leave… or was shit canned… Either way He also felt that he understood the Pee-Wee Herman character. Ac- cording to Burton. "The Pee-Wee character was just into what he was doing. It was nice that he didn't really care about how he was perceived. He operated in his own world and there's something I find very admirable about that.” Like jerkin it in movie theaters… that really happened, passengers… look it up.

 

In the movie, Pee-Wee's beloved bicycle is stolen. BY FUCKING FRANCIS! UGH! He goes on a Cross-Country trek to get it back, and on the way meets many interesting characters. Burton was careful to not put too many of his own ideas into the film. He understood that although he was the director it was really Reuben’s movie But Burton was still able to add some of his own personal touches. For example, there are two parts that feature stop-motion animation. Burton used this technique to animate a scene in which Pee Wee dreams his bicycle is being eaten by a tyrannosaurus rex. He also used stop motion to animate a truck driver named Large Marge. Many people think that Large Marge's distorting head is one of the funniest parts of the movie. “TELL EM LARGE MARGE SENT YA!

 

Cool side story, the same group that animated the large marge scene also did the stop motion animation for the Wil Ferrel film, Elf. You know, the part where Buddy was heading off to NY to see his dad and the narwhal says “Bye Buddy! I hope you find your dad!” Yeah, that was the Chiodos Brothers. Even deeper, Jon Favreau, the director of Elf… and Iron Man… and the Avengers… he voiced the narwhal. Ok…. sorry… I’m a nerd.

 

ANYWAY! Another way that Burton enhanced the movie was with his unexpected choice of composer for the musical score. Burton hired Danny Elfman, lead singer of the pop band Oingo Boingo, who’s song was our drink pop tune for this episode, to create music for the movie. Although Elfman had never scored a movie before, and literally almost said “NO” to the offer, the circus-like music he wrote turned out to be perfect for Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. The film was the first of many that Elfman would score for Burton. Ya know… like DAMN NEAR EVERY FILM HE’S EVER DONE!

    The next film that Burton would direct would be none other than Beetlejuice! For those of you who for some ridiculous reason don't know, The plot revolves around a recently deceased couple who become ghosts haunting their former home, and an obnoxious, devious poltergeist named Beetlejuice from the Netherworld tries to scare away the new inhabitants. Beetlejuice's budget was US$15 million, with just US$1 million given over to visual effects work. Considering the scale and scope of the effects, which included stop motion, replacement animation, prosthetic makeup, puppetry and blue screen, it was always Burton's intention to make the style similar to the B movies he grew up with as a child. "I wanted to make them look cheap and purposely fake-looking", Burton remarked. The test screenings were met with positive feedback and prompted Burton to film an epilogue featuring Betelgeuse foolishly angering a witch doctor. Warner Bros. disliked the title Beetlejuice and wanted to call the film House Ghosts. As a joke, Burton suggested the name Scared Sheetless and was horrified when the studio actually considered using it. Which is fucking amazing.

 

While working on Beetlejuice, warner bros approached Burton about working on Batman. Yes, Batman. One of the reasons that Burton wanted to direct Batman was that he felt that he understood the Batman character. He says, "I loved Batman, the split personality, the hidden person. It's a character I could relate to. Having those two sides, a light side and a dark one and not being able to resolve them."

 

 It is important for Burton to connect to the characters he directs. Many observers believe this is why he tends to do movies about dark characters, who, like himself, have trouble fitting in with the people around them.

 

Even though he is a well-known director, Burton often feels like an outsider. He has suffered frequent bouts of depression and has a reputation for being short-tempered and moody. In his twenties he had a hard time communicating with people and rarely made eye contact. Burton usually prefers to be alone rather than with other people. Even his appearance is unusual -he has pale skin, droopy eyes, and an unruly mop of dark hair. He dresses only in black. Sounds like me but with hair...

 

Despite his reputation, Burton does have a few close friends. He’s also had three long-term relationships. The first was with German artist Lena Gieseke, whom he met while filming Batman. The two were married in 1989,

 

During the first year of his marriage to Gieseke, Burton worked on Batman, a much bigger movie than anything he had worked on before. The production budget for Beetlejuice was $15 million. For Batman, it was $40 million. Burton filmed the movie at Pinewood Studios in Great Britain, where his sets took up most of the 95-acre backlot and seventeen soundstages

 

Burton faced several challenges working on Batman. One of the first problems he encountered was resistance to his choice for the lead role. Burton cast the infamous Michael Keaton as the star of his movie. Many people doubted that Keaton would make a good Batman. Those people are what we at the train station like to call “dumbasses”. He did not have a muscular build and was not considered to be an action-adventure actor. Angry assholes wrote hundreds of letters to Warner Brothers demanding that the part be recast. But Burton stood by his decision. He told interviewer Alan Jones. "I looked at actors that were more the fan image of Batman, but I felt it was such an uninteresting way to go."

 

Another challenge Burton faced was that the writers kept rewriting parts of the script during filming. The writers got new ideas or realized that certain parts of the script would not work as well as they had originally thought. The constant changes were confusing and frustrating for Burton. He struggled to make the movie flow smoothly and to be sure that the plot was not too hard to follow. He told Jones, "It was tough from the point of having no time to regroup after the script revisions: I never had time to think about them. I always felt like I was catching up.”

 

Burton also felt the pressure of working on a big-budget picture. Studio executives had high hopes for the film. They had put a lot of money into it and expected it to make a lot of money back for them. In addition, millions of Batman fans were waiting to see how Burton would portray the beloved comic book character. This was also the first time that Burton had worked with a major star. Jack Nicholson, who played The Joker, was a superstar in Hollywood at this time.

 

Burton met these challenges, and when Batman came out in 1989 it was a huge success. Most of the fans liked the darker Batman that Burton created. However, Burton himself was not happy with the film. He felt that he let the script unravel, which resulted in a confusing plot with holes and inconsistencies. Burton eventually agreed to make the sequel, Batman Returns, because he wanted to correct these mistakes. But before working on the second Batman movie, Burton did a project of his own.

 

Between the two Batman movies, Burton wrote, produced, and directed Edward Scissorhands. The idea for the movie came from one of his many drawings. Burton drew constantly, both on and off the set. The drawing that inspired the movie was of a young man who had large, razor-sharp scissors instead of hands,

 

In the movie, which has been described as a modern-day fairy tale. Edward is the creation of an inventor (played by Vincent fucking Price), who died before he could give Edward human hands. An unusually shy and gentle man, Edward is left to go through life unable to touch anyone without hurting them. He is taken in by a kind woman played by Winona Ryder, who later went on to be Will’s mom in stranger things, and for a while is welcomed by her neighbors, who are thrilled with his ability to sculpt shrubs and cut hair. But affection soon turns to fear! There is a violent confrontation, after which Edward is exiled from the suburbs.

 

Burton cast Johnny Depp to play the part of Edward scissorhands. Burton felt that Depp had an innocent quality that was key to Edwards' character. He also thought that Depp had expressive eyes, which was important because the character does not speak very much. Burton and Depp worked well together and went on to become good friends. Though not a blockbuster, the movie did well. Most of the reviews from critics were positive, praising Burton's imaginative style. Many reviewers also noted that the movie was obviously a very personal one for Burton. In it, Burton's own feelings and life experiences are strong themes.

 

Like Edward, Burton felt he did not fit in with his surroundings, especially when he was young. He talks about this in an interview with Kristine McKenna: "School is your first taste of categorization and you don't have to do much to be put in a weird category. I felt very lonely in school, and Edward Scissorhands was based on the loneliness I experienced as a kid."

 

Burton may have felt lonely as a child, but by the time Edward Scissorhands was released, he was very much in demand. With four successful major motion pictures to his credit. Burton was one of the hottest directors in Hollywood. 

 

Soon after Edward Scissorhands was released in 1990, Burton Began working on Batman Returns. Although the movie did very well at the box office, some critics felt that the character of Batman was even darker in this movie than in the first one. Burton agrees. He believes that the problems he was having in his personal life influenced how he directed the movie. His marriage to Gieseke came to an end during the filming, and a close friend committed suicide. Burton was depressed and struggled more than usual to relate to other people. His reputation for being inconsiderate and difficult to work with worsened.

 

Burton's life improved dramatically on New Year's Eve in 1991 when he met model Lisa Marie. The two fell in love, and friends say that the relationship changed Burton's life. He became more focused and easier to work with, and even started dressing better! 

 

During this time Burton was also working on The Nightmare Before Christmas. Burton had proposed this project to Disney ten years earlier. At that time Disney executives were not interested in producing the project. However, Disney still retained the rights to the project, and by 1991, the studio was eager to work with Burton, by then one of the most successful directors in Hollywood,

 

Burton produced Nightmare, but most people don’t know that he did not direct it! Mainly because he was still working on Batman Returns. He also created the characters, wrote the script, and made sure that the crew stayed focused on his vision. The movie was done using stop-motion animation, a process that took so long that only about seventy seconds of film was shot each week. As a result, the movie took three years to complete.

 

In the film, once again, Burton's main character is misunderstood by the people around him. Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloweentown, decides that he wants to take over Christmas. But he does not quite understand the holiday. After kidnapping Santa Claus, Jack delivers strange and scary toys made by the spooky residents of Halloweentown. Children are terrified, and Jack's version of Christmas is a failure.

 

The movie, however, was not. Well, at first it kind of was. Once again, Burton was praised for his originality. Although some parents thought the movie was too scary for children, Burton disagreed. He believes that children should decide for themselves if something is too scary and that adults should give them the freedom to make those choices. Disney initially pulled their name from the movie, releasing it on Touchstone pictures and simply calling it “Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas”. Well, the movie took on a life of its own and on a trip to China, one of the guys who had worked on the movie noticed that the characters were HUGE there and brought it to everyone's attention. Obviously, Disney took notice, because… money. That’s why. When you see it now, it’s got the “Disney” name all over it. It’s even on Disney plus…

 

Oh. And Burton once put his foot through a wall because he didn’t like one of the scenes from The Nightmare Before Christmas. 

  

        In 1994, Burton and frequent co-producer Denise Di Novi produced the 1994 fantasy-comedy Cabin Boy, starring comedian Chris Elliott and directed/written by Adam Resnick. Burton was originally supposed to direct the film after seeing Elliott perform on Get a Life, but he handed the directing responsibility to Resnick once he was offered Ed Wood. Burton's next film, Ed Wood (1994), was of a much smaller scale, depicting the life of infamous director Ed Wood. Starring Johnny Depp in the title role, the film is an homage to the low-budget science fiction and horror films of Burton's childhood and handles its comical protagonist and his motley band of collaborators with surprising fondness and sensitivity. Owing to creative squabbles during the making of The Nightmare Before Christmas, Danny Elfman declined to score Ed Wood, and the assignment went to Howard Shore. While a commercial failure at the time of its release, Ed Wood was well received by critics. Martin Landau received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Bela Lugosi, and the film received the Academy Award for Best Makeup.

 

        In 1996, Burton and Selick reunited for the musical fantasy James and the Giant Peach, based on the book by Roald Dahl which contains magical elements and references to drugs and alcohol. The film, a combination of live action and stop motion footage, starred Richard Dreyfuss, Susan Sarandon, David Thewlis, Simon Callow and Jane Leeves among others, with Burton producing and Selick directing. The film was mostly praised by critics and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Musical or Comedy Score (by Randy Newman).

 

Elfman and Burton reunited for Mars Attacks! (1996). Based on a popular science-fiction trading card series, the film was a hybrid of 1950s science fiction and 1970s all-star disaster films. Coincidence made it an inadvertent spoof of the blockbuster Independence Day, which had been released five months earlier. 

 

Sleepy Hollow, released in late 1999, had a supernatural setting and starred Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane, a detective with an interest in forensic science rather than the schoolteacher of Washington Irving's original tale. With Sleepy Hollow, Burton paid homage to the horror films of the English company Hammer Films. Christopher Lee, one of Hammer's stars, was given a cameo role. Mostly well received by critics, and with a special mention to Elfman's gothic score, the film won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction, as well as two BAFTAs for Best Costume Design and Best Production Design. A box office success, Sleepy Hollow was also a turning point for Burton. Along with change in his personal life (separation from actress Lisa Marie), Burton changed radically in style for his next project, leaving the haunted forests and colorful outcasts behind to go on to directing Planet of the Apes which, as Burton had repeatedly noted, was "not a remake" of the earlier film.

 

Planet of the Apes did not do as well at the box office as the studio had expected, and it received mixed reviews. Many critics felt that the story was too slow and the plot contained too many holes. But most agreed that the movie was visually stunning. The ape world that Burton created is dark, filled with creeping vines and cavelike rooms. The apes that live in this world are also quite amazing, due to their elaborate costumes and makeup. Critics also praised the performance of Helena Bonham Carter, who had a starring role as an ape who tries to help the humans,

 

Burton was also pleased with Carter's performance. The two struck up a friendship that quickly turned romantic. Shortly after the movie came out in 2001, Burton broke up with Lisa Marie. He began dating Carter and the two were soon engaged. Despite Planet of the Apes' disappointing reviews, Burton remained a sought after director. No matter what kind of reviews his movies received, the films were never boring, Burton was admired for his unique style and willingness to take chances. 

 

Roald Dahl's classic book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was made into a movie over thirty years ago with one of my favorite actors, Gene Wilder. Although many people loved the movie, Burton did not. He thought it was sappy. He also did not like the ways in which the movie was different from the book. He especially felt that the character of Willy Wonka was not portrayed as Dahl had written him. Burton wanted his version of the book to stick more closely to Dahl's original story

 

Chocolate and Corpses

 

Burton was given a budget of $150 million for Charlie and the Chocolate factory. A lot of the money for the movie went into building the elaborate sets and creating the amazing special effects that were needed to bring Dahl's story to life. In the story, Charlie Bucket and four other children find golden tickets in Wonka chocolate bars that allow them to visit Willy Wonkas mysterious chocolate factory. During the tour of the bizarre, amazing, and sometimes scary factory, each of the children except Charlie manages to get into serious trouble

 

Burton cast Johnny Depp in the important role of Willy Wonka. Like many of Burton's characters, Wonka is depicted as a strange man who has issues with his family and who does not know how to relate to other people.

 

One of the most incredible scenes in the movie is when Willy Wonka brings the five lucky children into the Chocolate Room. Rather than using computer-generated images (CGI) to create this room, Burton chose to build the entire set. The set takes up 45,000 square feet (13,716 sq m.) The landscape was all made to look edible and includes nearly seventy different kinds of plants, 30-foot (9m) trees, and a chocolate river with a 70-foot (21m) chocolate falls. Burton explains. ”We felt it was important to be in the environment and make it as textural as possible to give it as much reality as possible.... We spent months trying to find the right consistency to make the chocolate, to give it the weight so it didn't look like brown water." Burton needed nearly 250,000 gallons of the fake chocolate to make his river. One of the challenges of working with the gooey liquid, which is called Nutrisol, was that after a couple of weeks it started to smell really awful.

 

It is in the Chocolate Room that the children first encounter the Oompa-Loompas, the little people who work in the factory. The Oompa-Loompas also perform four elaborate song-and-dance numbers. Although there are hundreds of them in the movie, they were all played by only one actor-a 4-foot (1.2m) dwarf named Deep Roy. Burton used several kinds of special effects to multiply the Oompa-Loompas. Remote-controlled robots were used when the Oompa-Loompas were shot at a distance and when they did not need to do anything too complicated Burton also used camera tricks to multiply Roys image. For these scenes, Roy was filmed hundreds of times from many different angles. In addition, Burton used CGI for some of the trickier Oompa-Loompa scenes

 

Some of the same special effects were used in the scene in which forty squirrels shell walnuts and attack one of the children. Although some of the squirrels were robots or CGIS, most of them were real. Burton had them trained to sit on stools, crack nuts, and put the nuts on a conveyor belt. It took four months to train the squirrels because these animals are very difficult to work with. To learn the behavior, each squirrel had to repeat it about two thousand times. Although the scene was difficult and expensive to film, Burton was pleased with the result.

 

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was well received by audiences both young and old. People loved the spectacular world of the chocolate factory that Burton created, as well as the interesting characters.

 

While filming Charlie and the chocolate factory, Burton, Carter, and Depp were also starting work on Corpse Bride. Corpse Bride (also known as Tim Burton's Corpse Bride) is a 2005 stop-motion animated musical fantasy film.  The film is based on a 19th-century Russian-Jewish folktale, which Joe Ranft introduced to Burton while they were finishing The Nightmare Before Christmas. The film began production in November 2003. Co-director Mike Johnson spoke about how they took a more organic approach to directing the film, saying: "In a co-directing situation, one director usually handles one sequence while the other handles another. Our approach was more organic. Tim knew where he wanted the film to go as far as the emotional tone and story points to hit. My job was to work with the crew on a daily basis and get the footage as close as possible to how I thought he wanted it." Corpse Bride received positive reviews from critics. The film was nominated for the 78th Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, but lost to Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which also starred Helena Bonham Carter. In 2008, the American Film Institute nominated this film for its Top 10 Animation Films list. 

 

2007 saw Burton put out his version of the Sweeney Todd tale. The film retells the Victorian melodramatic tale of Sweeney Todd, an English barber and serial killer who murders his customers with a straight razor and, with the help of his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, processes their corpses into meat pies. The film stars Johnny Depp as the title character and Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett. Grossing over $150 million worldwide, the film was praised for the performances of the cast, musical numbers, costume and set design, and its faithfulness to the 1979 musical. It was chosen by National Board of Review as one of the top ten films of 2007 and won numerous awards, including Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and Best Actor – Musical or Comedy, as well as the Academy Award for Best Art Direction. Bonham Carter was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, and Depp received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Although the film was not an outstanding financial success in North America, it performed well worldwide.

 

In 2010 Burton released his Version of Alice in Wonderland. Loosely inspired by Lewis Carroll's fantasy novels, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and Walt Disney's 1951 animated film of the same name, the film tells the story of a nineteen-year-old Alice Kingsleigh, who is told that she can restore the White Queen to her throne, with the help of the Mad Hatter. She is the only one who can slay the Jabberwocky, a dragon-like creature that is controlled by the Red Queen and terrorizes Underland's inhabitants. In this situation, Alice fights against the Red Queen to protect the world. Alice in Wonderland received mixed reviews from critics upon release; although praised for its visual style, costumes, production values, musical score, and visual effects, the film was criticized for its lack of narrative coherence and sombre tone. 

 

Dark Shadows is a 2012 American fantasy horror comedy film based on the gothic television soap opera of the same name.The film performed poorly at the U.S. box office, but did well in foreign markets. The film received mixed reviews; critics praised its visual style and consistent humor but felt it lacked a focused or substantial plot and developed characters. The film was produced by Richard D. Zanuck, who died two months after its release. It featured the final appearance of original series actor Jonathan Frid, who died shortly before its release. It was the 200th film appearance of actor Christopher Lee, who you all know as Saruman from the Lord of the Rings movies and Count Fuckin Dooku from The shitty Star Wars movies. Dark shadows was Lee’s fifth and final appearance in a Burton film.

 

Burton then remade his 1984 short film Frankenweenie as a feature-length stop motion film, distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. Burton has said, "The film is based on a memory that I had when I was growing up and with my relationship with a dog that I had." The film was released on October 5, 2012, and met with positive reviews.

 

Burton directed the 2014 biographical drama film Big Eyes about American artist Margaret Keane (Amy Adams), whose work was fraudulently claimed in the 1950s and 1960s by her then-husband, Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), and their heated divorce trial after Margaret accused Walter of stealing credit for her paintings. The script was written by the screenwriters behind Burton's Ed Wood, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Filming began in Vancouver, British Columbia, in mid-2013. The film was distributed by The Weinstein Company and released in U.S. theaters on December 25, 2014. It received generally positive reviews from critics. 

 

Next up was Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. It is based on a contemporary fantasy debut novel by American author Ransom Riggs. Who may quite possibly have the coolest name in Hollywood. The story is told through a combination of narrative and a mix of vernacular and found photography from the personal archives of collectors listed by the author. 

 

2019 saw Burton put out a live action adaptation of the Disney classic Dumbo. Yep! Burton was behind the new Dumbo movie. Plans for a live-action film adaptation of Dumbo were announced in 2014, and Burton was confirmed as director in March 2015. Most of the cast signed on for the feature in March 2017 and principal photography began in July 2017 in England, lasting until November. It was the first of four remakes of prior animated films that Disney released in 2019. I, personally, can’t stand these live action remakes and wish these hacks would come up with something original. LIKE SHIT EATING ROBOTS KNOWN AS THE FECAL FIGHTERS!!

 

Anyway. The film grossed $353 million worldwide against a $170 million budget, which was not as commercially successful as Aladdin or The Lion King. Fuck those movies.

Dumbo received mixed reviews from critics, who praised its ambition but said it did not live up to its predecessor.  Reviews were mixed for the movie. while audiences gave the film an average of an A- grade, critics were not as convinced, giving the movie an average of 3 out of 5 stars. 

 

As for his personal life, as we mentioned, Burton was married to Lena Gieseke, a German-born artist. Their marriage ended in 1991 after four years. He went on to live with model and actress Lisa Marie; she acted in the films he made during their relationship from 1992 to 2001, most notably in Sleepy Hollow, Ed Wood, and Mars Attacks!. Burton developed a romantic relationship with English actress Helena Bonham Carter, whom he met while filming Planet of the Apes. Marie responded in 2005 by holding an auction of personal belongings that Burton had left behind, much to his dismay. Which is fucking hilarious and why we had to mention her again.

 

Burton and Bonham Carter have two children: a son, William Raymond, named after his and Bonham Carter's fathers, born in 2003; and a daughter, Nell, born in 2007. Bonham Carter's representative said in December 2014 that she and Burton had broken up amicably earlier that year. It is unclear whether or not they were married; Bonham Carter has used the word divorce when discussing the end of their relationship while other news outlets state that they never married.

 

In a 2005 interview with the Evening Standard, Bonham Carter speculated that Burton might have traits of Asperger syndrome.

On March 15, 2010, Burton received the insignia of Chevalier of Arts and Letters from then-Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand. The same year, Burton was the President of the Jury for the 63rd annual Cannes Film Festival, held from May 12 to 24 in Cannes, France.

 

Burton's next big project — 'The Addams Family' series — is slated to release via Netflix in 2022, confirms Deadline. And as rumor has it, Burton wants Depp to portray Gomez Addams. Multiple 'sources' have hinted that Tim Burton has explicitly said he thinks Depp would be perfect as Gomez, and fans agree.

 

Tim Burton directed movies ranked!

https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/all-tim-burton-movies-ranked/

 

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OUR YOUTUBE

85 - The Winchester Mansion (Sarah Winchester Was A Bad Ass!)

  Today's episode examines the life of an eccentric, possibly mentally ill woman and the incredible house she built. We‘ll talk about possible hauntings, impossible architecture and the delusion of a heart broken woman. We are discussing Sarah Winchester and what some less than creative people have dubbed The Winchester Mystery House!

      Her birth name was Sarah Lockwood Pardee. She was the fifth of seven children born to Leonard Pardee and Sarah Burns. There are no existing records or any other form of factual information to establish Sarah’s date of birth—even the year remains unknown. The scarce information that survives from the historical record indicates her birth must have occurred somewhere between 1835 and 1845.

 

At the time of Sarah’s birth, the Pardee’s were a respectable, upper middle class New Haven family. Her father Leonard was a joiner by trade whose shrewd sense of business found him moving up the ladder of polite society as a successful carriage manufacturer. Later, during the Civil War, he made a fortune supplying ambulances to the Union Army.

 

Young Sarah’s most distinguishing characteristic was that she was everything but ordinary. She was a child prodigy… a fire starter. Ok, no… By all accounts, she was also considered to be quite beautiful. By the age of twelve, Sarah was already fluent in the Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian languages. Furthermore, her knowledge of the classics (most notably Homer… no, not Simpson, and Shakespeare) along with a remarkable talent as a musician was well noticed. It is no wonder that New Haven Society would eventually dub her “The Belle of New Haven.”

 

In addition to Sarah’s brilliance and respectable place in society, there were several factors about New Haven that presented a unique influence on her upbringing. To begin, there was Yale University (originally known as Yale College). From its inception, Yale (and New Haven) was a hub of progressive, Freemasonic-Rosicrucian thinking and activity. By the way, we’ll most definitely be taking a train ride on the Freemasons. 

As a result, Sarah was raised and educated in an environment ripe with Freemasonic and Rosicrucian philosophy. Several of Sarah’s uncles and cousins were Freemasons. But more importantly, at an early age, she was admitted to Yale’s only female scholastic institution known as the “Young Ladies Collegiate Institute.” Two of the school’s most influential administrators and professors, Judson A. Root and his brother N.W. Taylor Root were both Rose Croix Freemasons. In addition to the liberal arts, the Roots set forth a strict curriculum consisting of the sciences and mathematics. Sounds super fucking boring.

 

Furthermore, two of Sarah’s schoolmates Susan and Rebecca Bacon were the daughters of New Haven’s highly respected Reverend Dr. Leonard Woolsey Bacon (no relation to Francis Bacon, who was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and as Lord Chancellor of England. His works are credited with developing the scientific method and remained influential through the scientific revolution, just in case you nerds were wondering.). While Sarah and the Bacon girls were attending the school, Dr. Bacon’s sister Delia, also a New Haven resident, attracted considerable fame and attention for writing her famous treatise that Sir Francis Bacon (with the aid of a circle of the finest literary minds of the Elizabethan-Jacobean Age) was the actual author, editor, and publisher of the original works of Shakespeare. Ah ha! See! 

Her work was sponsored by the author Nathaniel Hawthorne and was later supported by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain! Good ol Samuel Clemens. 

In addition to her writing, Delia Bacon gave numerous public lectures to the citizens of New Haven; thus, New Haven, Connecticut was the actual birthplace of the “Bacon is Shakespeare” doctrine. We’re here to learn ya, folks!

 

Given her direct exposure to the Baconian Doctrine, along with her passion for the Shakespearean works, it was inevitable that Sarah was drawn like an irresistible force to a more than passing interest in the new theorem. Moreover, the Baconian-Masonic preoccupation with secret encryption techniques using numbered cipher systems most certainly influenced young Sarah’s world view. This unique backdrop to Sarah’s early development played a crucial role which, in essence, defined what would become her life’s work. So much smarts!

 

As we’ll see, the Belle of New Haven became a staunch Baconian for the rest of her life. She just LOOOVED HER BACON! BLTs, Canadian bacon, pancetta… she loved it all! A completely strict diet of fucking bacon! Except turkey bacon. Fuck that fake shit. 

No, but seriously, She also acquired a vast and uncanny knowledge of Masonic-Rosicrucian ritual and symbolism… SSSYMBOLISM. Additionally, she gravitated to Theosophy. 

Theosophy is a religion established in the United States during the late nineteenth century. It was founded primarily by the Russian immigrant Helena Blavatsky and draws its teachings predominantly from Blavatsky's writings.

Author and historian Ralph Rambo (who actually knew Sarah and is a direct descendant of American bad ass and war hero John J Rambo) wrote “it is believed that Mrs. Winchester was a Theosophist.” Rambo didn’t elaborate on the matter, making him and his statement one of the more boring we’ve heard, but since he was close to Sarah he was certainly in a position to know some things about her. It should be noted that most Rosicrucians are theosophists.

 

Sarah adhered both to Bacon’s Kabbalistic theosophy, which is the eternal belief in the Mortal Kombat franchise no matter how bad their movies are… ok, that was stupid. Anyway, she was also super into the theosophical perspective held by Rudolph Steiner (1861- 1925). Steiner viewed the universe as a vast, living organism in which all things are likened to individually evolving units or cells that comprise a greater universal, synergistic body that is “ever building.” As we shall further see, the “ever building” theme was at the core of Sarah’s methodology.

 

William Wirt Winchester was born in Baltimore, MD on July 22, 1837. He was the only son of Oliver Fisher Winchester and Jane Ellen Hope. In keeping with a popular trend of the day, he was named after William Wirt, the highly popular and longest serving Attorney General of the United States .

 

Soon after William’s arrival, the Winchesters moved to New Haven where the enterprising Oliver, along with his partner John Davies, founded a successful clothing manufacturing company. Gradually, the Winchester patriarch amassed a considerable fortune. Later, Oliver channeled his efforts into a firearms manufacturing venture that eventually (1866) evolved into the famous Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Fuckin’ Winchester! Woo!!

 

According to historical documents, the Winchesters and the Pardees were well acquainted, particularly through the auspices of New Haven’s First Baptist Church. Additionally, Sarah Pardee and William’s sister Annie were classmates at the Young Ladies Collegiate Institute.

 

Not far away, William attended New Haven’s Collegiate and Commercial Institute—another arm of Yale College. Here, William’s teachers included N.W. Taylor Root (one of Sarah’s instructors) and Henry E. Pardee who was another of Sarah’s cousins. Thus, Young Sarah and William found themselves studying virtually the same curriculum under very similar circumstances. Moreover, like the Pardees, the Winchester family was not lacking in members who were Freemasons.

 

Sarah and William were married on September 30, 1862. Their only child, Annie Pardee Winchester came into the world on July 12, 1866. Unfortunately, due to an infantile decease known as Marasmus (a severe form of malnutrition due to the body’s inability to metabolize proteins), Annie died 40 days later.

 

In 1880, Ol Oliver Fisher Winchester died, leaving the succession of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company to his only son. One year later, William died of fucking Tuberculosis at the age of 43. Dammit, TB! The double loss of Annie and William was a staggering blow to Sarah. However, the loss did leave the widow Winchester with an inheritance of 20 million dollars (510 million today) plus nearly 50% of the Winchester Arms stock—which, in turn earned her approximately $1,000 dollars per day (25,000 today)  in royalties for the rest of her life—the result of which made her one of the wealthiest women in the world. Get it, girl! 

 

According to Ralph Rambo, john j rambo’s great great uncle, Sarah went on a three year world tour with her new band “Rifles and Posies”, who sold 3 million records worldwide and had a huge hit with their single “fuck tuberculosis” before settling in California in 1884. 

 

 “The New Haven Register,” dated 1886, lists Sarah as having been “removed to Europe.” No other information has survived to tell us exactly where Mrs. Winchester went during those years or what her activities consisted of. But we can project some well educated theories.

 

Although Freemasonry has traditionally barred women from its membership, there are numerous documented cases in which some head-strong women have gained admittance into liberal, Masonic Lodges as far back as the 18th Century. A movement in France called Co-Freemasonry, which allows for male and female membership was already underway when Sarah arrived in that country. Given her social status, a predilection towards Freemasonic tenets, and a mastery of the European languages, Sarah could easily have been admitted into any of the permissive French Masonic lodges.

 

Another possible scenario involving Mrs. Winchester’s activities while abroad could well have included visits to esoteric, architectural landmarks such as the French Cathedral of Chartres. Sarah’s Masonic-Rosicrucian interest in labyrinths would have drawn her to Chartres with its 11 circuit labyrinth, a puzzle-like feature that stresses the discipline of the initiatic tradition of the ancient mystery schools. Likewise, she would also have found inspiration in the Freemasonic symbolism and the mysterious structure (including a staircase that leads nowhere) of Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland .

 

In 1884, Sarah took up residence in the San Francisco Bay area—eventually moving inland to the Santa Clara Valley (now San Jose) to buy an eight room farmhouse from one Dr. Robert Caldwell. Her apparent motive for the move was to live in close proximity to her numerous Pardee relatives, most of whom had come to California during the 1849 Gold Rush, and were scattered from Sacramento to the Bay area.

 

One of these Pardee relatives, Enoch H. Pardee, had become a highly respected physician and politician while living in Oakland. Later his son George C. Pardee followed in his father’s footsteps rising to the office of Governor of California (1903- 1907.

 

It is interesting that Wikipedia makes particular note of Enoch Pardee having been “a prominent occultist.” Most likely the occult reference has to do with the fact that both Enoch and his son George were members of the highly secretive and mysterious ( California based) Bohemian Club which was an offshoot of Yale’s Skull and Bones Society. Moreover, Enoch and George were Knights Templar Freemasons.

 

Also interesting, is the fact that President Theodore Roosevelt (another member of the Bohemian Club) came to California in 1903 to ask Governor Pardee to run as his Vice Presidential candidate in the 1904 national election. The offer was turned down. During the same trip, Roosevelt attempted to visit Sarah Pardee Winchester. Again, Roosevelt’s offer was turned down. 

 

THE STORY BEHIND THE HOUSE 

 

       The story goes that after the death of her child and her husband she moved to California and bought the 8 room farmhouse and began building. It is said once construction started it was a continuous process. Workers in the area would work in shifts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  We're going to explore the stories about her mental state,  the construction of the house, and the reports of ghosts and spooky stuff. 

 

   The story supposedly starts like this: 

There was no plan – no official blueprints were drawn up, no architectural vision was created, and yet a once-unfinished house took shape on a sprawling lot in the heart of San Jose, California. Inside, staircases ascended through several levels before ending abruptly, doorways opened to blank walls, and corners rounded to dead ends.

 

The house was the brainchild of Sarah Winchester, heir by marriage to the Winchester firearms fortune, and since the project began in 1884 rumors have swirled about the construction, the inhabitants, and the seemingly endless maze that sits at 525 South Winchester Blvd.

Today, the house is known as the Winchester Mystery House, but at the time of its construction, it was simply Sarah Winchester’s House.

 

Newly in possession of a massive fortune and struggling with the loss of her husband and daughter, she sought the advice of a medium. She hoped, perhaps, to get advice from the beyond as to how to spend her fortune or what to do with her life.

 

Though the exact specifics remain between Sarah Winchester and her medium, the story goes that the medium was able to channel dearly departed William, who advised Sarah to leave her home in New Haven, Connecticut, and head west to California. As far as what to do with her money, William answered that too; she was to use the fortune to build a home for the spirits of those who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles, lest she be haunted by them for the rest of her life.

 

So there's that… Spirits from beyond told her to build!

 

After this is when she ended up in San Jose and purchased the farm house.

 

Winchester hired carpenters to work around the clock, expanding the small house into a seven-story mansion. The construction of the House was an “ever building” enterprise in which rotating shifts of workers labored 24 hours per day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. the House gradually mushroomed outward and upward,By the turn of the century, Sarah Winchester had her ghost house: an oddly laid out mansion, with seven stories, 161 rooms, 47 fireplaces, 10,000 panes of glass, two basements, three elevators, and a mysterious fun-house-like interior. It was built at a price tag of the $5 million dollars in 1923 or $71 million today. Due to the lack of a plan and the presence of an architect, the house was constructed haphazardly; rooms were added onto exterior walls resulting in windows overlooking other rooms. Multiple staircases would be added, all with different sized risers, giving each staircase a distorted look.

 

Gold and silver chandeliers hung from the ceilings above hand-inlaid parquet flooring. Dozens of artful stained-glass windows created by Tiffany & Co. dotted the walls, including some designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany himself. One window, in particular, was intended to create a prismatic rainbow effect on the floor when light flowed through it – of course, the window ended up on an interior wall, and thus the effect was never achieved. Even more luxurious than the fixtures was the plumbing an electrical work. Rare for the time, the Winchester Mystery House boasted indoor plumbing, including coveted hot running water, and push-button gas lighting available throughout the home. Additionally, forced-air heating flowed throughout the house.

 

Adding further to the mysterious features, the prime numbers 7, 11, and 13 are repeatedly displayed in various ways throughout the House—the number 13 being most prominent. These numbers consistently show up in the number of windows in many of the rooms, or the number of stairs in the staircases, or the number of rails in the railings, or the number of panels in the floors and walls, or the number of lights in a chandelier, etc. Unquestionably, these three prime numbers were extremely important to Sarah.

 

In 1906 something happened that would change the landscape of california and the Winchester house. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18 with an estimated moment magnitude of 7.9 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme). High-intensity shaking was felt from Eureka on the North Coast to the Salinas Valley, an agricultural region to the south of the San Francisco Bay Area. Devastating fires soon broke out in the city and lasted for several days. More than 3,000 people died. Over 80% of the city of San Francisco was destroyed. The events are remembered as one of the worst and deadliest earthquakes in the history of the United States. The death toll remains the greatest loss of life from a natural disaster in California's history and high on the lists of American disasters. Although The impact of the earthquake on San Francisco was the most famous, the earthquake also inflicted considerable damage on several other cities. These include San Jose and Santa Rosa, the entire downtown of which was essentially destroyed. Since if the damage in San Jose was located at, you guessed it, the Winchester house. Standing 7 stories at the time, the house was damaged badly and the top three floors were essentially reduced and the house said at for stories from then on due to the damage. 

 

Aside from its immense size and Victorian style architecture, the House has a number of unique characteristics. To begin, it is undeniably a labyrinth. There are literally miles of maze-like corridors and twisting hallways, some of which have dead ends—forcing the traveler to turn around and back-up. There are also some centrally located passages and stairways that serve as shortcuts allowing a virtual leap from one side of the House to the other. Traversing the labyrinth is truly dizzying and disorienting to one’s sensibilities.

 

The House abounds in oddities and anomalous features. There are rooms within rooms. There is a staircase that leads nowhere, abruptly halting at the ceiling. In another place, there is a door which opens into a solid wall. Some of the House’s 47 chimneys have an overhead ceiling—while, in some places, there are skylights covered by a roof—and some skylights are covered by another skylight—and, in one place, there is a skylight built into the floor. There are tiny doors leading into large spaces, and large doors that lead into very small spaces. In another part of the House, a second story door opens outward to a sheer drop to the ground below. Moreover, upside-down pillars can be found all about the House. Many visitors to the Winchester mansion have justifiably compared its strange design to the work of the late Dutch artist M.C. Escher.

 

Practically a small town unto itself, the Winchester estate was virtually self sufficient with its own carpenter and plumber’s workshops along with an on-premise water and electrical supply, and a sewage drainage system.

 

On September 5, 1922, she died in her sleep of heart failure. A service was held in Palo Alto, California, and her remains lay at Alta Mesa Cemetery until they were transferred, along with those of her sister, to New Haven, Connecticut.  She was buried next to her husband and their infant child in Evergreen Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut. She left a will written in thirteen sections, which she signed thirteen times. 

 

In accordance with her will Sarah had her entire estate divided up in generous portions to be distributed among a number of charities and those people who had faithfully spent years in her service. Her favorite niece and secretary, Marian Marriott, oversaw the removal and sale of all of Sarah’s furnishings and personal property. Roy Lieb, Mrs. Winchester’s attorney of many years, had been named in her will as executor to her estate. He sold the House to the people who, in 1933, preserved it as a “living” museum—today, it is known as the Winchester Mystery House also known as California Historical Landmark #868. Although no mention has ever surfaced as to any specific guidelines or special instructions by which Mr. Lieb would select a buyer for the property, one gets the distinct impression that Sarah wanted the House to stand intact and perpetually preserved… and so it does.

 

SOME OF THE FOLKLORE

 

Some of this stuff we've touched on already but here's a rundown of the folklore behind the house. 

 

Despite the fact that Sarah Winchester was extremely secretive about herself, nearly all of what the public thinks it knows about her reads like a mish-mash of gossip out “The National Enquirer.” some refer to this body of misinformation as “The Folklore.” Indeed, on a research visits to the Winchester Mystery House, a senior tour guide informed one writer that “in the old days, the tour guides were encouraged to make up stuff just to give some spice to the story.”

 

The Folklore about Sarah says that, after William’s death in 1881, the highly distraught Mrs. Winchester sought the advice of the then famous Boston medium Adam Coons. During a séance with Coons, Sarah was told that because of the many people who had been slain by the Winchester Rifle, she was cursed by the Winchester fortune. Coons further instructed Sarah that the angry spirits demanded that she move to California and build them a house.

 

Upon her arrival in California, Sarah began holding her own séances every midnight so that she could receive the next day’s building instructions from the spirits. Her séances allegedly involved the use of a Ouija board and planchette, and 13 various colored robes she would ritualistically wear each night (for the edification of the spirits) within the confines of her “Séance Room.”

 

To further appease the angry spirits, Mrs. Winchester made sure the construction of the House went on, nonstop, 24 / 7, 365 days a year for fear that should the building ever stop, she would die.

 

For some inexplicable reason, however, Mrs. Winchester took precautions in the building design so as to incorporate all of the strange features of the House to “confuse the evil spirits.” Moreover, she would ring her alarm bell every night at midnight to signal the spirits that it was séance time, and then again at 2:00 am, signaling the spirits that it was time to depart. Which begs the question “who was in charge of whom?” And, why would spirits’ have an inability or need to keep track of time?

 

Whenever people make mention of Sarah Winchester the typical response you get from people is “Oh yeah…wasn’t she the crazy lady who built that weird house because she was afraid the spirits would kill her?” Many of these people have never been to the Winchester House. Their source is usually television. “ America ’s Most Haunted Places” tops the list of TV shows that grossly reinforces the Folklore of the house.

 

The misinformation is further compounded by the “Haunted House” tour business thriving in San Jose as the commercial enterprise known as the “Winchester Mystery House” which profits by perpetuating the Folklore myth. In fairness to the management of the “WMH,” they try to present Mrs. Winchester in a positive light. However, their Halloween flashlight tours, along with booklets, postcards, coffee mugs and other sundry items being sold in the WMH souvenir shop displaying the title “The Mansion Designed By Spirits” only enhances the Folklore version of Sarah Winchester’s life. You’ve got to hand it to them, they’ve created a highly effective marketing strategy for a very lucrative commercial enterprise. These are good people who mean well—but this is hardly the legacy Sarah wanted to leave to posterity.  Even in more recent times the house keeps giving up secrets. In 2016, a secret attic was discovered. Inside the attic were a pump organ, a Victorian-era couch, a dress form, a sewing machine, and various paintings. There was a rumour that Sarah had a secrecy room full of undisplayed treasures and large amounts of cash, it was thought this attic may have been that room but there is no concrete proof of this. 

 

So these are the stories about Sarah Winchester and her house, now comes the sad news, most of what you think you know, and most of what you've just heard, are myths. Stories that have grown over the years about the woman and the house.

 

Early on we talked about president roosevelt trying to visit Sarah and the house. If you forgot, the story goes that Theodore Roosevelt attempted to visit Sarah at home in 1903, but was turned away. This is used as an example of her alleged weirdness. It is said the rumors likely started about Sarah because in life she was extremely private, refused to address gossip and did not engage much in the community.  This infamous presidential visit never occurred. Eyewitness accounts state that the President's carriage never stopped at the Winchester place. Furthermore, Winchester had rented a house near San Francisco that year to prepare for the wedding of her niece. She was not at home.

 

There is another myth that Sarah would spy on her employees. It is said that some employees believed Sarah could walk through walls and closed doors. The claims are that Sarah had elaborate spying features built into the house. There is no evidence she spied on her workers. Would a suspicious employer retain the same workers for decades? Would she name them in her will? Would she buy them homes? Would they name children after her? All these things happened. In short, there is no evidence that she ever spied on her employees.

 

Then there is the fascination with the number 13 and several other numbers. Since websites detail the occurrences of 13 in the house: 13 robe hooks in the seance room, 13 panes of glass in several windows, a stairway with 13 steps, just to name a few. These facts are used as evidence to prove the woman was ruled by superstition. References to the number 13 were added after Sarah's death, according to workers at the time. The 13 hooks were added not long ago. 

 

Then we have some of the crazy architecture. The story goes that she built crazy things like hallways to nowhere, stairs to nowhere, doors that lead to walls, and doors that lead to several story drops, to confuse spirits. Some websites make much of the architectural "oddities" of the house, such as doors and flights of stairs leading into walls, and how they were supposedly built to confuse vengeful ghosts. Some say there is a more natural explanation—the 1906 earthquake.  Research uncovered the fact that there was massive damage to the house in the trembler and that Sarah never fully repaired it. The stairs and doors that lead to "nowhere" are merely where damage has been sealed off or where landings have fallen away. After the earthquake she moved to another house. She did not want to make the necessary repairs—it had nothing to do with spirits. Not to mention she herself admitted that with her being the architect and having no formal training, things often did not go as planned. "I am constantly having to make an upheaval for some reason,” Winchester wrote to her sister-in-law in 1898. “For instance, my upper hall which leads to the sleeping apartment was rendered so unexpectedly dark by a little addition that after a number of people had missed their footing on the stairs I decided that safety demanded something to be done." Far from an exercise in spiritualism, Winchester’s labyrinth arose because she made mistakes — and had the disposable income to carry on making them. It didn’t help her reputation that she was naturally reserved. While most Bay Area millionaires were out in society, attending galas and loudly donating to charities, Winchester preferred a quiet life with the close family who occasionally lived with her. In the absence of her own voice, locals began to gossip.

 

One of the biggest myths however is the stories of how construction started and kept in going 24-7. There were actually many instances of Sarah sending workers away. Many times in the summer months she would send them away for a couple months because it got too hot. And in the winter she would send them away for a little break for everyone. This has been uncovered in Sarah's own writings. The Feb. 24, 1895 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article that almost single-handedly laid the foundation for the Winchester Mystery House legend.

"The sound of the hammer is never hushed,” it reported. “... The reason for it is in Mrs. Winchester's belief that when the house is entirely finished she will die."

 

So aside from appeasing spirits with the continued building this article states that she believes that if she ever finished the house that's when she would die, so that's why she kept building. 

 

"Whether she had discovered the secret of eternal youth and will live as long as the building material, saws and hammers last, or is doomed to disappointment as great as Ponce de Leon in his search for the fountain of life, is a question for time to solve,” the story concludes.

 

Some modern-day historians speculate one of the reasons Winchester kept building was because of the economic climate. By continuing construction, she was able to keep locals employed. In her unusual way, it was an act of kindness.

 

"She had a social conscience and she did try to give back," Winchester Mystery House historian Janan Boehme told the Los Angeles Times in 2017. "This house, in itself, was her biggest social work of all."

 

As far as all of the supernatural talk, most of it started after her death. The famed Winchester mansion fell into the hands of John H. Brown, a theme park worker who designed roller coasters.

 

One of his inventions, the Backety-Back coaster in Canada, killed a woman who was thrown from a car. After her death, the Browns moved to California. When the Winchester house went up for rent, Brown and his wife Mayme jumped at the chance and quickly began playing up the home’s strangeness.

 

Less than two years after Sarah Winchester’s death, newspapers were suddenly beginning to write about the mansion’s supernatural powers.

 

“The seance room, dedicated to the spirit world in which Mrs. Winchester had such faith, is magnificently done in heavy velvet of many colors,” the Healdsburg Tribune wrote in 1924. “... Here are hundreds of clothes hooks, upon which hang many costumes. Mrs. Winchester, it is said, believed that she could don any of these costumes and speak to the spirits of the characters of the area represented by the clothing.”

 

(It is worth noting here: There are no contemporary accounts of Winchester holding seances in the home, and “Ghostland” writes that the “seance room” was actually a gardener’s private quarters.)

 

The myth took hold, though, and the home, with its dead ends and tight turns, is easy to imagine as haunted. Although the spirits are fun, the ghosts shroud the real life of a fascinating, creative woman. Winchester was "as sane and clear headed a woman as I have ever known,” her lawyer Samuel Leib said after her death. “She had a better grasp of business and financial affairs than most men."

 

Speaking of supernatural, let's get into the haunted history. Dozens of psychics have visited the house over the years and most have come away convinced, or claim to be convinced, that spirits still wander the place. It was even named one of the “Most Haunted Places in the World” by Time magazine. Here are just a few tales, courtesy of Winchester tour manager Janan Boehme.

 

The Case of the Ghostly Handyman

 

Some of Sarah Winchester’s loyal workmen and house servants may still be looking after the place, according to sightings of figures or the “feeling of a presence” reported many times over the years, by tour guides and visitors alike. One frequent apparition is a man with jet-black hair believed to have been a former handyman. He’s been seen repairing the fireplace in the ballroom, or pushing an equally spectral wheelbarrow – if wheelbarrows indeed linger in the beyond — down a long, dark hallway.

 

The Secret of the Invisible Hand

Several years ago, a man working on one of the many restoration projects in the mansion started his day early in a section with several fireplaces, known as the Hall of Fires. The house was dead quiet before tours got underway, and he was working up on a ladder when he felt someone tap him on the back. He turned to ask what the person wanted. No one was there.

 

Reassuring himself he’d just imagined the sensation, he went back to his work, only to experience what felt like someone pushing against his back. That was enough. He hurried down the ladder, crossed the estate and started on another project, figuring that someone — or something — didn’t want him working in the Hall of Fires that day.

 

The Sign of the Heavy Sigh

A tour guide named Samantha recently led visitors to the room the Daisy Bedroom, where Sarah Winchester was trapped during the 1906 quake. Samantha was about to begin her spiel when a very clear “sigh” came from the small hallway outside the bedroom door. Thinking one of her guests had merely fallen behind, Samantha turned to call the person into the room but saw no one. Then, as her eyes adjusted to the darkened hallway, she did see something. The form of a small, dark person slowly emerged, gliding around a corner. Samantha quickly stepped around the corner and again saw nothing but heard yet another deep sigh. She felt sure it was the tiny form of Sarah Winchester herself, perhaps peeved to find people in her favorite bedroom.

 

You can find a surveillance video that seems to show a ghost or something moving around in a balcony late ate night on the fourth floor. Just as unexpected things turn up on video, the same is true of photographs. The Winchester Mystery House's own Public Relations Coordinator reports that he took several photos of the mansion in 2015. When he downloaded the photos he deleted what he didn't need. But, one caught his eye. In one window of the house, Tim O'Day spotted something. Was it a shadow? A reflection of a cloud? Or something else?

 

Visitors to the Winchester Mystery House also report taking photos with strange shapes in the windows. A few even shared their snapshots on Facebook. If you visit, study all photos carefully before hitting the delete button. You never know what you will find!

 

Top haunted house movies from ranker.com

 

https://www.ranker.com/list/the-best-haunted-house-movies/ranker-film?ref=collections_btm&l=367358&collectionId=2164

84 - Black Eyed Children

Ep. 84

Black Eyed

Children

 

In a snowy town, within the middle of nowhere of Vermont, an elderly couple heard the sound of three loud knocks on their door. They opened the door and saw two children, a boy and a girl. "Parents will be here soon, may we come in?" The children did not make eye contact and just stood there in the doorway. The elderly couple were hesitant but after a while, they let the boy and girl inside.

The kids settled on the couch while the wife made some hot cocoa and the husband asked them questions that went unanswered. The wife returned and noticed that her cat was scared and angry with the children. "May we please use the restroom?"

 

The wife looked at the kids and she finally saw them. The children's eyes were as black as a starless universe. She directed them to the bathroom and returned to her husband who was covering his face with his hand. "Did you see their eyes?" the husband then shows her his hand full of blood from a nosebleed. 

 

The power suddenly went out and the house turned as dark as the kids' eyes. The wife headed to the restroom and was confronted by the voice of the kids at the end of the hall uttering, "Our parents are here." The kids then exited the house leaving the door wide open. The wife then noticed that there were two men at the end of the driveway. The men were very tall and slender; the wife waved but did not receive the same friendly gesture. The two men and children then drove away together in one car.

 

The power then came back on a little later after the kids left. Throughout the next week, weird things happened in the house; three out of four cats went missing and the fourth had been found dead in the pool of its blood. The husband continued to have nosebleeds and finally went to the doctor, where he was diagnosed with very aggressive skin cancer.

 

That is one of the first stories to be related about today's subjects.  That story gained much attention in the paranormal circles and with alien enthusiasts. So exactly what are black eyed kids, Aliens, vampires, demonically possessed children, some other worldly entities? The black-eyed children are paranormal creatures that resemble children around the ages 6 to 16 who have pale skin and pitch black eyes and are completely soulless. Additionally, people who have been in close proximity to black eyed kids report a feeling of “unease” that washed over them. While nothing about the children’s appearance (aside from the eyes) genuinely frightened the people, they still reported feelings ranging from anxiety to terror at their presence.

Some people have also reported seeing black eyed kids that have “talons” for feet or other demonic attributes, but most sightings are of seemingly normal children.

Black eyed kids are also commonly described as wearing dated clothing or dressing in a manner that is not typical of a normal child of their age.

 

The strange thing about the black eyed children mythos is that it's a fairly recent phenomena.Some people claim that these children have existed since the 1980s, however, most sources say that the legend actually originated in 1996 by Brian Bethel, a journalist from Abilene Texas. The following is his account of his original encounter as he recalled it in the Abilene Reporter News:

  

       " Near as I can figure, this happened in 1996. I’ve managed to pin down the date that far. I feel like it happened in the spring or summer, since I remember wearing a pair of shorts, but one of my great regrets is not recording the actual date of the event.

 

After you hear the story, you’d think it would be something you’d never forget. But given enough time between, not the case. My memory, while good, isn’t quite eidetic.

 

I had gone down to the former site of Camalott Communications, one of the area’s original Internet providers, to pay my bill. At the time, Camalott was located on North 1st Street, near the movie theater, in the shadow of what is now Chase, then Bank One.

 

I was using the light of the theater’s marquee to write out my check, which I planned to put in Camalott’s night drop-slot. Involved in my work, I never heard them approach.

 

There was a knock on my driver’s side window. Two young boys, somewhere between nine to 12 years old and dressed in hooded pullovers, stood outside.

 

I cracked the window a bit, anticipating a spiel for money, but I was immediately gripped by an incomprehensible, soul-wracking fear. I had no idea why.

 

A conversation ensued between one boy, a somewhat suave, olive-skinned, curly-headed young man, and myself. The other, a redheaded, pale-skinned, freckled young man, stayed in the background.

 

The “spokesman,” as I’ve come to think of him, told me that he and his companion needed a ride. They wanted to see a movie, “Mortal Kombat,” but they had left their money at their mother’s house. Could I give them a ride?

 

Plausible enough. But all throughout this exchange, the irrational fear continued and grew. I had no reason to be frightened of these two boys, but I was. Terribly.

 

After a bit more conversation, I looked up at the theater marquee and down at the digital clock display in my car.

 

Mortal Kombat’s last show of the night had already started. By the time I could have driven the boys anywhere and back, it would practically have been over.

 

All the while, the spokesman uttered assurances:

 

It wouldn’t take long.

 

They were just two little kids.

 

They didn’t have a gun or anything.

 

The last part was a bit unnerving.

 

I noticed that my hand had strayed toward the lock on my door. I pulled it away, perhaps a bit too violently.

 

In the short time I had broken the gaze of the spokesman, something had changed, and my mind exploded in a vortex of all-consuming terror.

 

Both boys stared at me with coal-black eyes. The sort of eyes one sees these days on aliens or bargain-basement vampires on late night television. Soulless orbs like two great swathes of starless night.

 

I did what I feel any rational person would do. I full-on freaked out inside while trying to appear completely sane and calm.

 

I apologized to the kids. I made whatever excuses came to mind, all of them designed to get me the hell out of there. Fast. The aura of fear was now a palpable, black-hanging thing, almost as if reality itself was warping around me.

 

I wrapped my hand around the gearshift, threw the car into reverse and began to roll up the window, apologizing all the while.

 

My fear must have been evident. The boy in the back wore a look of confusion. The spokesman banged sharply on the window as I rolled it up. His words, full of anger, echo in my mind even today:

 

“We can’t come in unless you tell us it’s OK. Let us in!”

 

I drove out of the parking lot in blind fear, and I’m surprised I didn’t sideswipe a car or two along the way. I stole a quick look in my rearview mirror before peeling out into the night. The boys were gone. Even if they had run, I don’t believe there was a place they could have hidden from view that quickly."

 

This is widely considered to be the earliest written account of an encounter with the black eyed kids. Creepy for sure. 

 

There are many theories as to what black eyed kids actually are. One of the more interesting theories we've found is the following, it was listed as a psychic answer to what they are, it also involves religious overtones: 

 

          "Black-eyed Children are elementals called CHILDES. They are, & have always been, agents of God. In earlier periods, they wore the local costume or dress of human children. North & South of the equator, they now wear 19th century children's clothing: Dark-haired boy wears black velvet blazer & knee britches, wide lace-edged collar, lacy ruffles down front of white shirt, lacy sleeves. Girl wears white ankle-length satin dress with white sash at waist; a large white satin bow in her dark hair tilts to one side. Both are pale with dark circles around eyes. Distinctive giggling laughter as if playing a game together.

 

Children who ascend (cross over to become angels) like to serve as CHILDES. Serving briefly as elementals helps all angels move up the ranks of the angelic hierarchy. But their soul evolution is halted if they are used in a hex (curse or spell). RED EYES indicate a CHILDE who is caught in a curse & needs help "going home" to the Light (5th dimension or higher).

 

CHILDE have nothing to do with blood or vampirism. The VAMPIRE legend lumps two or three kinds of elementals together: The VIPER (its victims have two tiny bite marks like a Tazer gun), the BACHALU (bat-winged cat), & the BLESSED=BLOOD= a pale, caped humanoid elemental who can help humans by giving them a complete cleansing of all their blood (like a medical blood replacement/ transfusion by machine).

 

CHILDE participate in official hauntings. (See my other Comments re sick houses with DHEBRO, a.k.a. Hat Man.) CHILDE are also sent to deliver the Common Cold -- mild Cold symptoms... all the way up to intense fever & CHILLS=CHILDES.

 

Anyone who sees a CHILDE with RED EYES should ask Archangel Michael for protection."

 

Interesting….

 

So another theory was briefly mentioned in that last theory. There is a thought that black eyed kids are actually vampires! There are several reasons that people like this theory. First the kids seem to be a nighttime phenomena. Every story we've uncovered takes place at night and who comes out at night… Boom vampires. Couple that with the uneasy soulless looks and pale skin and you're on your way to a vampire. Another reason people think they could be vampires is the fact that they always ask permission to get into your house or car. If you are currently up on your vampire lore you know that vampires must be granted permission to enter your house. Now another twist on this theory is the psychic vampire theory. If you are not familiar with psychic vampires here a brief synopsis. A psychic vampire (or energy vampire) is a fictional and religious creature said to feed off the "life force" of other living creatures. The term can also be used to describe a person who gets increased energy around other people, but leaves those other people exhausted or "drained" of energy. Psychic vampires are represented in the occult beliefs of various cultures and in fiction. Some people believe that BEKs are actually psychic vampires due to many people feeling drained and tired after their experiences with them.

 

Another theory is that of demonic possession. As found in an article about signs of demonic possession The eyes play a big part in determining possession. Since the eyes are the window to the soul, physical changes can affect the eyes of the person in question also. 

Eye color (such as just the irises) can change to different but natural colors. Another way eyes can be a major sign of possession is when the entire eye itself becomes infected by black almost like a shark's eyes. Alterations in other physical colorings are possible through the changing of hair tones. Not only that another sign of possession is changes in the voice of the person affected. Many times in tales of BEKs the kids will have deeper than normal voices or voices of adults when they speak. In another article about possession it states Telepathic powers where the person in question knows what you are feeling or thinking without any indication from you can be a possible sign as well. Many people report that during an experience with BEKs they feel like the kids are using kind of mind control or telepathy to try and get the people to agree to let them into a house or car. Another thing that has led to the demonic possession theory involves the night time. As stated in the vampire theory, these stories always happen at night. According to many this starts online with demonic possession as the mind is most vulnerable at night therefore increasing possession activity leading to these encounters being at night. 

 

So we have weird elementals, vampires, and demonic children. What else could there be? Oh yes, aliens, of course, how could we forget.

 

This one's gonna be fun.

 

The theory here is that BEKs are actually humanoid alien hybrids. The hybrids are not really aliens, but a mixed breed between the greys and humans. They came about when the greys started doing gene DNA manipulation many years ago starting in at least biblical times supposedly to replenish their own thinning gene pool after centuries of over cloning. Another theory as to why the grays started cloning is more cynical, being that they started to place the alien hybrids into Earth's society to help them overthrow the Government and take over from the inside rather than a full-fledged attack. Some even speculate that many of the alien hybrids on Earth don't know that they are of mixed nature and are like terrorist cells that can, and will be activated when the time is right for the master alien races (The greys and the reptilians). Alien hybrids have different looks depending on how their DNA was mixed by the grays and for what purpose they are being used for. These are the possible known alien hybrids from abduction accounts from around the world. One of the main differences is the eyes. We're sure you're all well aware of what aliens look like supposedly. Especially the greys. They have big black eyes.  So the alien theory begins there. Some believe there are several classes of alien human hybrids. Some believe BEKs belong to one of these hybrid classes. They are the ones that are here on Earth and pose as humans. They are possibly everywhere and it can be impossible to tell them apart without DNA testing, and even then the grays do a great job of hiding the differences. They may be presidents, teachers, kings, the working class, or really anyone in power or not. They have been said to be put here for numerous reasons from research on humans and other life on Earth to control and the slow take over of the planet.

 

Some of the humanoid mixed breeds don't even know that they are a mixed alien breed and are being controlled without their knowledge. You can think of them as terrorist cells that will be activated when the time is right for invasion, the new world order, and the take over of Earth and its people. 

 

That's a lot to unpack… We get it… But essentially… Prior are staying that the BEKs are alien human hybrids, which if you remember back to the very first encounter we read…it definitely has that vibe.  The other thing that may tie into Aliens is that some believe there's a man in black connection. According to some, the description of the BEKs is astoundingly close to descriptions of the men in black. We couldn't find a ton of stuff on this theory, but again looking back to the first tale, the couple described the children's "parents" as two males and that both were very tall. 

 

There are of course the rational explanations as well. And while they aren't as fun, we suppose we should talk about them. One is that the first initial report by Brian Bethel is indeed fabricated and more of a creepy pasta type story generated for gaining attention. The rest of the stories are just the same and follow the pattern of evolving into urban legend status. Stemming from this there's the possibility that since people have actually seen BEKs but that they are just hoaxes. With the availability of contacts that make your whole eye black, it's not crazy to think there are people out there having fun at others' expense. 

 

There may also be a physical explanation by way of a condition known as aniridia. Aniridia is marked by partial or complete absence of the iris of the eye. Vision is preserved in some patients with mild cases of aniridia. This condition occurs when the iris fails to develop normally before birth in one or both eyes. Typically, aniridia can be seen from birth. Aniridia can occur as a single abnormality or can be one of many symptoms in an underlying condition. While aniridia did not make the entire eye black one could understand that encountering someone, especially a child, late at night with this condition could definitely give off some creepy vibes.

 

So now you know what they are and the theories behind them, how about a couple more creepy tales of BEKs to unsettle you the rest of the way. 

 

             "On March 17, 2008 I had my one and only encounter with a black eyed kid. Before my experience I had never heard of anything having to do with the black eyed kids. I was 12. I was sitting outside of a hairdressers in an old Chevy pickup waiting for my mom to get her hair cut. About 15 minutes had passed and I saw some kid walking back and forth along the sidewalk in front of my parked car. At first I thought I recognized him as one of my friends from school so I banged on the front windshield until he looked my way. It was not anyone I knew. At this point I was not scared at all. Not yet. The boy walked over to the side of my car and just stared. I think it will let me get a good look at his eyes. To freak me out. Let me tell you.. If you have never seen a black eyed kid.. you have no idea what to imagine. Pupils black as the night sky. The boy whispers “You must let me in” and then I locked the car doors and ducked down into the space below the seats. Five minutes later he was gone. When my mother got into the car she told me a boy with black eyes had come into the hairdressers had insisted for my mother to give him the keys to the car. She refused……thank God she did."

 

Well maybe they just wanted to play...or kill? Who knows!

 

      "Trick or treat?

This really freaked me out… Yesterday I noticed my neighbor hadn’t put out all his Halloween decorations/lights/etc. The past two years I’ve lived next to him he’s gone all out for Halloween. I don’t know him well, he’s younger, single, but I know he likes kids (not in a creepy way). His brother and sister-in-law and their kids are always visiting him and he plays with his three young nieces and nephews out in the yard. So anyway, I got home from work and was walking up my driveway and I saw him outside and said something like “Hey man, you better get your Halloween stuff up or that house up the street is going to beat you for best decorations.” He kind of smiles sheepishly and says that he’s actually going to keep his house dark this year and just put candy out. I asked if he was going out of town, but he said no, something happened last year that really scared him.

 

Now I was concerned for my own safety if some weirdos were coming around our neighborhood (which is a pretty safe neighborhood with tons of young families living here), so I asked him what happened. He said last year he had his brother’s family over so they could trick-or-treat in the neighborhood since they live in an apartment complex that doesn’t do much for Halloween. He had a bunch of kids come to the door like always. His family took off around 10:30 and there were only a few older trick-or-treaters, but by 11:30 they were pretty much done. So he was inside, watching TV and the doorbell rings. He grabs the candy bowl and heads over, noticing that it’s a little past midnight and that’s pretty rude for trick-or-treaters to still be out, but then notices he hasn’t turned off all his decoration lights yet, so his house is still a beacon. He swings the door open and is about to yell “BOO!” or something to freak them out, but stops dead when he sees the kids at the door.

 

He said one was probably around 13-14 and the other around 16-17 (both boys). They weren’t dressed up, but he remembers the older one was wearing a flannel checkered shirt. He was immediately overcome with uneasiness, like opening the door was a huge mistake. They just stared at him and he noticed they had really big irises and dilated pupils. He couldn’t even see the whites of their eyes, so he figured they were contact lenses. He was frozen there holding the candy bowl, like he couldn’t slam the door in their face as much as he wanted to. So he nervously tried to smile at them hoping they would “break character” and ask for candy or something. The younger one said they had gotten lost and needed to come in and use his phone. That was when he closed the door more than halfway on them and said “No, sorry” and the older one said something like “Can we just wait in your house until our parents come get us?” but by then he was convinced that his life was in danger and these kids must be high on something or intending to rob him and he just kept mumbling “No, sorry, goodnight” as he inched the door closed and locked it.

 

He told me he was so fucking scared at that point that they were going to try to break in through one of his windows or something, but he looked through the peephole and they had turned to leave. He watched TV with the volume really low so he could hear any sounds at all and he said he stayed up till like 5 am because he was too scared to go to bed and drop his guard. The whole time he’s telling me this I’m thinking oh my god, this sounds so familiar, just like the Black-eyed kids urban legend. Then I thought hey, maybe this dude is trying to scare me because after all, he does have the Halloween spirit…so I’m looking at him incredulously but trying not to seem too gullible. So I’m like “Man, that is really crazy, sounds like the Black-eye kids.” He just looks at me blankly, “The what, is that a movie or something?” and I said no, but told him to go look it up online.

 

Like an hour later I get a knock on my door (and admittedly, almost jump out of my skin thinking it’s a demon child). It was my neighbor and his eyes were freaking huge. He swears to me up and down that he had never heard of the BEKs before and it’s so similar to what happened to him. So we talked a while longer and I told him that quite a few people probably know about that urban legend and it’s possible it was just teenagers with black scleral contacts trying to freak people out on Halloween (which would be genius, by the way). But he said the fear he felt was so primal and came over him the second he opened the door for them.

 

Well… Happy Halloween to him I guess!

 

     A gas station attendant in northeast Louisiana had a terrifying encounter in November 2012. The gas station was creepy enough to begin with at 3 am, but then the power went out. Led by the light of his cell phone, the attendant was able to get the generators going, but the backup lighting was dim and only lit up certain areas, like the cash area and the parking lot, while the rest of the isolated establishment was cloaked in black. Out in that darkness, he noticed movement: three children on bikes were heading his way.

 

They stood at the door and stared at the attendant. He felt creeped out, but they were just kids and it was way too late for them to be out. He opened the door and asked if they were okay. The young girl asked to use a phone, but as he handed his cell over to her, he realized her eyes were all black. “No, I need the real one!” She pointed at the landline inside. The thought of letting her inside sent chills up his spine. He shouted at all of them to leave as he slammed and locked the door.

 

The children stood there a bit longer, silently staring at him through the glass with their solid black eyes. Then, they got back on their bikes and disappeared back into the darkness. The next morning, the attendant was eager to go through the surveillance footage. Unfortunately, the power outage cut the cameras off and they didn’t boot back up with the generator. He had nothing to prove the events of the night before took place

 

So there's a couple more stories. Are they real? That's for you to decide. I suppose the best way to end this episode is with words from the man who brought the BEKs to light for everyone. The following are the weeks of Brian Bethel about his experience :

 

            "I’ve never wanted the Reporter-News to be a venue for this story. It’s easy enough to find online, as I said. And call it a weakness, or maybe common sense, but I prefer to keep my encounters with the paranormal (ask me sometime about the ghost that haunted our newsroom back in college) separate from my award-winning journalism career.

 

But one of the provisions my bosses at the paper made in exchange for me potentially making a fool of myself on TV was for me to tell the story here. And so, I have.

 

Do I expect you to believe me blindly?

 

Of course not. I might not believe it myself if I heard such a story from someone else.

 

What did I see?

 

Your guess is literally as good as anyone’s. I’ve had everything from vampires to demons to ghosts to aliens to a somewhat-detailed hallucination posited as possibilities.

 

I do feel like I can say this with some authority: This was back in the day when freaky coal-black contacts weren’t widely available to a couple of kids in Abilene, Texas, for anything under a small fortune.

 

And there wasn’t enough time to even put such things on in the short time I broke the spokesman’s gaze, if they could afford them.

 

Will I ever know for certain what I saw?

 

Probably not.

 

Do I ever care to see them again?

 

Hell, no.

 

As much as I still don’t know about what happened that night and why, here’s one thing that I do know. It’s a gut feeling, but one that rises to a level of almost certainty.

 

If I had given the spokesman and his friend a ride on that long-ago evening, I don’t think I would be here to type this now.

 

End of story."

 

Whew… So there you have it. Blacked eyes kids! What do you all think? 

 

There seems to only be a couple movies specifically about black eyed kids, so we're going with the top movies involving evil children! 

 

Top movies involving evil children

 

https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=evil-child&ref_=kw_ref_typ&sort=user_rating,desc&mode=detail&page=1&title_type=movie&genres=Horror

 

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83 - The Cecil Hotel, LA California. (What Happened To Elisa Lam?)

Ep. 83

Cecil hotel/ Stay On Main Hotel

 

Welcome my friends to the first episode of 2021! We hope you all enjoyed our last episode of 2020, we did! We hope you all made it to the new year safe and sound. We're alive and well and we're going to take a much needed vacation. Where are we headed you may ask? Well we are going to head to sunny Los Angeles! Hopefully you passengers hang on and come with! Los Angeles, the city of angels, and tons of weird people and rich movie types that are better than we are...eh… Fuck em. We're not headed there for a tour of stars' homes, we're not headed there to further Jeff's acting career with casting couch auctions in some seedy office with a casting couch, no my friends were heading specifically to 640 south main street l.a. california! What sits at that address you may be wondering. Well it's none other than The Cecil hotel, aka The hotel Cecil, aka The Cecil, aka The stay On Main Hotel, aka whatever the fuck the next name is gonna be. That's right, the famous, or maybe infamous Cecil hotel. If this sounds familiar but you can't quite place it, well get to what's most recently made this place famous in a bit. But first buckle up cus here we go!

 

The Cecil was built in 1924 by hotelier William Banks Hanner with partners Charles L. Dix and Robert H. Schops. It was supposed to be a destination hotel for international businessmen and social elites. Designed by Loy Lester Smith in the Beaux Arts style, and constructed by W. W. Paden[7] the hotel cost $1.5 million to complete and boasted an opulent marble lobby with stained-glass windows, potted palms, and alabaster statuary. The three hoteliers invested about $2.5 million knowing several other similar hotels had been constructed and opened in the area. They had the utmost confidence in their venture. Unfortunately for them, only a few years after opening the hotel disaster would strike. Not only would it strike the three hoteliers, but the nation as a whole. The country was plunged into the great depression. The Great Depression started in the United States after a major fall in stock prices that began around September 4, 1929, and became worldwide news with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, (known as Black Tuesday). Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell by an estimated 15%. By comparison, worldwide GDP fell by less than 1% from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession.[4] Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. However, in many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of World War II.

 

The Great Depression had devastating effects in both rich and poor countries. Personal income, tax revenue, profits and prices dropped, while international trade fell by more than 50%. Unemployment in the U.S. rose to 23% and in some countries rose as high as 33%

 

While this was happening the Hotel hung on as best it could to it's roots of being a destination for wealthy socialites, unfortunately those were heard to come by at that point. As the depression wore on, the area around the hotel became the infamous Skid Row. Now we're not talking the Sebastian bach fronted band that had so many great jams back in the day. To give you an idea of the area that the hotel was in and had to deal with while trying to keep clientele, here's a brief history: 

 

   At the end of the 19th century, a number of residential hotels opened in the area as it became home to a transient population of seasonal laborers.[13] By the 1930s, Skid Row was home to as many as 10,000 homeless people, alcoholics, and others on the margins of society.[12] It supported saloons, residential hotels, and social services, which drew people from the populations they served to congregate in the area.[14]

 

In June 1947, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) chief Clemence B. Horrall ordered what he called a "blockade raid" of the whole Skid Row area. Over 350 people were arrested. Assistant Chief Joseph Reed, who claimed that "at least 50 percent of all the crime in Los Angeles originates in the Skid Row area," stated that there had been no "strong arm robberies" on Skid Row as late as one week after the raid. Long time residents, however, were skeptical that the changes would last.[15]

 

In 1956, the city of Los Angeles was in the midst of a program to "rehabilitate" Skid Row[16] through the clearance of decaying buildings.[17] The program was presented to property owners in the area as an economy measure. Gilbert Morris, then superintendent of building, said that at that point the provision of free social services to the approximately one square mile of Skid Row cost the city over $5 million per year as opposed to the city average of $110,000 per square mile annually.[16] The city used administrative hearings to compel the destruction of nuisance properties at the expense of the owner. By July 1960, the clearance program was said to be 87% complete in the Skid Row area.[17] With increased building codes during the '60s, owners of residential hotels found demolition to be more cost-effective than adhering to repairs. The total number of these buildings is estimated to have dropped from 15,000 to 7,500 over the following decade.[18] Many residents of the area found themselves homeless with the loss of half of the affordable housing provided by hotels.[18]

 

1970s through present Edit

Skid Row was established by city officials in 1976 as an unofficial "containment zone", where shelters and services for homeless people would be tolerated.[19]

 

During the 1970s, two Catholic Workers — Catherine Morris, a former nun, and her husband, Jeff Dietrich — founded the "Hippie Kitchen" in the back of a van. Over forty years later, in March 2019, aged 84 and 72, they remained active in their work feeding Skid Row residents.[20]

 

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, many veterans of the Vietnam War found themselves drawn to Skid Row, due to the services and missions already in place there, and feeling outcast from other areas. Like those after World War II, many of them ended up on the streets. It was around this time that the demographics of Skid Row shifted from predominantly white and elderly to those here today

 

Now that only takes us through the 70s but we can tell you, it didn't get any better after that.  The reason we went through a small history of Skid Row is to show how the area had changed and the type of people that inhabited the area. The reason to show this will become evident…. Right… about… Now!

 

By  the 50s the hotel had become a place known to house transients and drug dealers and many unsavory types. This would lead to a history of murder, suicide and other tragedy. That would ultimately lead to takes of the hotel being haunted. The hotel would more recently become the location of a story that would capture the attention of the world due to its strangeness. So without further ado let's get into the craziness!

 

Murders and murderers at the Cecil:

 

One of several noteworthy guests of the hotel was Elizabeth Short, who you may know as the “Black Dahlia” after her 1947 murder in Los Angeles.

 

She reportedly stayed at the hotel just before her mutilation, which remains unsolved. What connection her death may have had to the Cecil is not known, but what is known is that she was found on a street not far away on the morning of January 15 with her mouth carved ear to ear and her body cut in two. Some people say that this sorry of Short staying or being seen at the hotel are untrue but we like to think there's a connection, however we cannot confirm nor deny the validity of this claim and there is much conflicting reporting on this. There are some reports of sorry saying at a nearby hotel and just doing into the Cecil bar from time to time. 

 

Next up a confirmed and also unsolved murder at the Cecil. Georgina "pigeon" Goldie Osgood. On June 4th a 79 year old retired telemarketer named Goldie Osgood was found in her hotel room dead. The autopsy showed that she was beaten, stabbed and choked with a rag. Her hotel room was ransacked. Friends say they talked her merely minutes before her death.

 

She was known for feeding pigeons at a nearby park and that’s how she earned her nickname “Pigeon Goldie”. She was staying at the Cecil hotel, where she was very liked and was a long time residence.

 

Not much information can be found about her death. Only that a man named Jacques B. Ehlinger was arrested a few hours after her body was found. He had been seen walking in the same area Ms. Osgood would feed pigeons. He was covered in blood, but was later released due to lack of evidence.

 

Several serial killers have called the Cecil home as well. Chief among them… good ol Richard Ramirez, the fucking Night Stalker. Now if you're listening to this podcast and you don't know who Ramirez is, we question why you're here! But as a refresher: 

 

         Ramirez was a Satanist and a particularly awful human, even for a serial killer: He seemed to have no M.O. except to be as sadistic as possible.

His victims — men, women, children — were chosen randomly and killed in a variety of ways, with whatever weapon was handy, often after a sexual assault. Most reports suggest that he influenced as a teenager by his cousin Mike, a Green Beret who bragged of committing horrific acts in Vietnam, and who later shot his wife to death in front of Ramirez.

The Night Stalker was ultimately caught after a rape victim who’d been left alive got a look at his getaway car, a stolen Toyota that was found abandoned and connected to Ramirez by a single fingerprint. Once they had a suspect, police broadcast his name and face widely and Ramirez was recognized and beaten by a mob in East Los Angeles.

He was convicted in 1989 of 13 counts of murder, five counts of attempted murder, 11 sexual assaults, and 14 burglaries, and sentenced to death. To which he said: “No big deal. Death always comes with the territory. I’ll see you in Disneyland.”

Ramirez spent the next 23 years on Death Row at San Quentin, but died of Lymphoma in 2013. He was 53.

 

“The Cecil and the Alexandria and the Twin Rosslyn hotels just become these giant coral reefs of the worst people in the world,” says Richard Schave, who runs Esotouric bus tours with his partner Kim Cooper, and makes the Cecil a featured stop on the “Hotel Horrors and Main Street Vice” package. “By 1990, the LAPD won’t go into [t hese places]. It was like, ‘If we’re called we’ll go in. But we’re not patrolling.’”

That’s how a guy like the Night Stalker could operate there. Ramirez would return to the Cecil after a killing and ditch his blood-soaked clothes in the dumpsters out back, then walk into the hotel either naked or maybe in his underwear, none of which would have raised an eyebrow since the Cecil in the 1980s, as Schave put t, “was total, unmitigated chaos.”

After all, that dumpster probably contained far worse things, and it wouldn’t have been weird to see a half-naked man wandering around a hotel renowned for vice and where the police rarely ventured. Drug dealers worked openly inside. The bodies of overdosed residents could linger in the hall for days. “No one wanted to be the person who called the cops,” Schave says.

 

Another serial killer was known to live at the Cecil. In 1991, six years after Ramirez was caught and sentenced to death, a 41-year-old Austrian journalist named Jack Unterweger checked into the Cecil while he worked on a story about crime in L.A. for an Austrian magazine. Unterweger used his reporting work to secure ride-alongs with LAPD vice cops and those trips were revealed as scouting missions when it was later discovered that Unterweger was also a serial killer with a penchant for strangling prostitutes. It is suspected (but was never proven) that he chose the Cecil because of its connection to Ramirez.

When Austrian police connected the strangulation deaths of three L.A. sex workers with a series of six unsolved murders back home — all of them prostitutes who’d been sexually assaulted and strangled with their own bras, using a distinct ligature — Unterweger fled and was arrested in Miami in February of 1992. Unterweger, it turns out, had started abusing prostitutes in his youth, and at age 24 he was convicted of strangling an 18-year-old German woman with her own bra, and sentenced to life in prison.

Behind bars, Unterweger had been a model inmate, publishing poems, plays, and an autobiography that became a movie and his popularity made him a cause célèbre in the European arts community, which began to lobby passionately for his release. In 1990, after serving 15 years, Unterweger was granted parole, and almost overnight became a popular TV host and journalist. Within a year, he was in California, killing women again.

In June 1994, an Austrian court convicted Unterweger of 11 murders and sentenced him to life with no chance of parole. That night, he killed himself in his cell — with a poetic twist. “He tied the ligature,” Schave said. “The signature ligature by which he killed all the prostitutes in Los Angeles and Vienna. That was his confession.”

 

So those are murders and murderers connected and possibly connected to the Cecil. But the tragedy doesn't end there. There are many other crazy deaths from the Cecil. Mostly all suicides. During the Great Depression. Tens of thousands of Americans took their own lives during the late 1930s, creating the highest-recorded level ever—more than 150 per one million annually in 1937 and 1938, and In the 30s the Cecil had its share of suicides. 

 

In 1931, a guest, W.K. Norton, 46, was found dead in his room after eating poison capsules. A week prior, he had checked into the Cecil under the name "James Willys" from Chicago.  This seems to be the earliest case of suicide at the Cecil. The following year, 25-year-old Benjamin Dodich was found by a maid in a room, dead by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. In 1934, former Army Medical Corps sergeant Louis D. Borden was found with his throat slashed—he had written several notes about suicide while in the room including one that cited poor health as a reason for the suicide.

 

In 1937, the body of Grace E. Magro was discovered wrapped in the telephone wires around the hotel. She later died at the now-demolished Georgia Street Receiving Hospital. Police were unable to determine whether Magro's death was the result of an accident or suicide.  A year later, the body of 35-year-old US Marine Roy Thompson was found on the skylight of a nearby building after he also jumped from his room. He had been staying at the hotel for several weeks.  In 1939, Navy officer Erwin C. Neblett was found dead after ingesting poison; he was 39 years old.

 

Moving past the thirties we find more craziness and fuckery. 

 

    In January 1940, teacher Dorothy Sceiger, 45, ingested poison while staying at the Cecil and was reported by the Los Angeles Times to be "near death." No further reports were published about her condition.

 

    In 1944, one of the youngest victims at Cecil Hotel had their life taken from them. Dorothy Jean Purcell, 19 years old, was staying as a guest at the hotel when she threw her newborn son from a window. Purcell did not know she was pregnant and woke in the middle of the night with stomach pains when she was sleeping next to her partner, 38-year-old shoe salesman Ben Levine. Not wanting to wake Levine, she went to the bathroom and delivered the baby herself.

 

Purcell believed the boy was dead, and that’s when she got rid of the body from a great height. The lifeless baby was found on a roof adjacent to the building. Purcell was arrested, but after psychologists determined she was “mentally confused,” she was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity.

 

In November 1947, Robert Smith, 35, died after jumping from one of Cecil's seventh-floor windows.

 

On October 22, 1954, San Francisco stationery firm employee Helen Gurnee, 55, jumped from the window of her seventh-floor room and landed on top of Cecil's marquee. One week prior, she had registered at the hotel under the name "Margaret Brown."

 

On February 11, 1962, Julia Frances Moore, 50, jumped from the window of her eighth-floor room. We found the newspaper clipping announcing her death, it reads as follows: 

 

     "A woman leaped to her death from an eighth-floor window of the Cecil Hotel, 640 S Main St., early Sunday morning, her body landing on a second-floor roof in the light well of the building.

 

Police identified her from a hotel registration card and papers in her purse as Julia Frances Moore, about 50.

 

Det. Sgt. Paul LePage said the woman, who left no notes, had registered at the hotel on Wednesday. Her purse and a small over night bag were found in the room.

 

Although the purse contained only 59 cents, a bank book showed she had nearly c $1,800(around $15,000 today) in a Springfield (II.) bank. 

Sgt. LePage said he also found a bus ticket stub in dicating she had come here from St. Louis. Other papers I containing two home ad dresses in St. Louis were also found.

 

The officer said he would contact St. Louis police in a an effort to locate the woman's relatives."

 

Also in 1962, October to be exact, another strange death occurred. On October 12, two bodies were found dead on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. One of the bodies was that of Pauline Otton. She was staying on the 9th floor of the hotel. She was 27 years old and had just had an argument with her estranged husband Dewey. The other body was not that of Dewey. It was the body of 65 year old George Gianinni. Initially police suspected the pair jumped together. After some investigation however there found that Ol George has his haha on his pockets and his shoes were still on. They said that if he had jumped his shoes would have fallen off during the fall or when he landed, also who jumps with their hands in their pockets? Well turns out that after her argument Pauline decided it wasn't worth living any more and jumped from the window of her room on the 9th floor. George however was just walking by the hotel about to have the worst, and last, day off his life. Pauline jumped and landed on George as he strolled by killing him. 

Talk about your bad luck, no wonder some people think the place is cursed.

 

On December 20, 1975, a still-unidentified woman, approximately 23 years old, jumped from her twelfth-floor window onto the Cecil's second-floor roof. She had registered at the hotel on December 16 under the name "Alison Lowell" and was staying in room 327.

 

On September 1, 1992, a man was found deceased in the alley behind the Cecil. Authorities believe the decedent either fell from, jumped from, or was pushed from the hotel's fifteenth floor. At the time of his death, the decedent was five feet, nine inches tall and weighed around 185 pounds. He was wearing blue sweatpants and a black sweatshirt over a gray t-shirt. The Los Angeles County Coroner's Office placed the decedent's age at twenty to thirty-two years. The decedent's true identity has never been established.

 

On June 13, 2015, the body of a 28-year-old man was found outside the hotel. Some conjectured he may have committed suicide by jumping from the hotel, although a spokesperson for the county coroner informed the Los Angeles Times that the cause of death had not been determined.

 

Now in between those last two there was another incident. This incident is probably the most well known one. Thanks to the internet the incident spread fast and there is tons of discussion and speculation about what really happened. The official cause of death was listed as accidental drowning although most people don't by that. If you haven't figured it out already we are talking about the death of Elisa Lam. Wwe could probably do an entire episode on this story so we'll just give you the basics and maybe hit the story a little harder in a bonus for our patreon. 

 

 On Jan. 26, 2013, Elisa Lam arrived in LA. She had just come by Amtrak train from San Diego and was headed to Santa Cruz as part of her solo trip around the West Coast. The trip was supposed to be a getaway from her studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she was originally from.

 

Her family had been wary of her traveling by herself but the young student was determined to go at it alone. As a compromise, Lam made sure to check in with her parents every day of the trip to let them know that she was safe.

 

That’s why it struck her parents as unusual when they didn’t hear from their daughter on Jan. 31, the day she was scheduled to check out of her LA hotel, the Cecil. The Lams eventually contacted the Los Angeles Police Department. The police searched the premises of the Cecil but couldn’t find her.

 

Police soon released surveillance footage taken from the cameras at the Cecil Hotel on their website. This is where things took a turn into the truly bizarre.

 

The hotel video showed Elisa Lam in one of its elevators on the date of her disappearance acting rather strangely. In the pixelated footage, Lam can be seen stepping into the elevator and pushing all the floor buttons. She steps in and out of the elevator, poking her head out sideways toward the hotel’s hallways in between. She peers out of the elevator another few times before stepping out of the elevator entirely. The last minutes of the video show Lam standing by the left side of the door, moving her hands in random gestures. Nobody else was captured on the video, except Lam.

 

On Feb. 19, two weeks after the video was published by authorities, maintenance worker Santiago Lopez found Elisa Lam’s dead body floating in one of the hotel water tanks. Lopez made the discovery after responding to complaints from hotel patrons about low water pressure and a weird taste coming from the tap water.

 

According to a statement by the chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, the tank in which Lam’s body was found had to be drained completely and then cut open from the side to remove her five-foot-four frame.

 

Nobody knows how Lam’s corpse — floating lifelessly next to the same clothes she wore in the surveillance video — ended up in the hotel’s water tank or who else might have been involved. Hotel staff told authorities that Lam was always seen by herself around the hotel premises.

 

At a nearby shop, eerily named The Last Bookstore, owner Katie Orphan was among the last to see Elisa Lam alive. Orphan remembered the college student buying books and music for her family back in Vancouver.

 

When the autopsy results for Lam’s case came out, it only served to ignite more questions. The toxicology report confirmed that Lam had consumed a number of medical drugs, likely to be medication for her bipolar disorder. But there were no indications of alcohol or illegal substances in her body. Soon after the toxicology report came out, amateur sleuths began poring over any information they could find in hopes of solving the mystery behind the death of Elisa Lam. One person noted that she seemed to not be taking her medicine previous to her death. It is an important finding to note given that the use of antidepressants to treat bipolar disorder can risk inducing manic side effects if done without caution. Some sleuths have understandably latched onto this detail and suggested it was a likely explanation behind Lam’s strange behavior in the elevator.

 

Hotel manager Amy Price’s statements in court strongly support this theory. During Lam’s stay at the Cecil Hotel, Price said that Lam was originally booked in a hostel-style shared room with others. However, complaints of “odd behavior” from Lam’s roommates forced Lam to be moved to a private room by herself.

 

David and Yinna Lam filed a wrongful death suit against the Cecil Hotel several months after their daughter’s death was uncovered. The Lams’ attorney stated that the hotel had a duty to “inspect and seek out hazards in the hotel that presented an unreasonable risk of danger to [Lam] and other hotel guests.”

 

The hotel fought back against the suit, filing a motion to dismiss it. The hotel’s lawyer argued that the hotel had no reason to think that someone would be able to get into one of their water tanks.

 

Based on court statements from the hotel’s maintenance staff, the hotel’s argument is not entirely far-fetched. Santiago Lopez, who was the first to find Lam’s body, described in detail how much effort he had to exert just to find her body.

 

Lopez said that he took the elevator to the 15th floor of the hotel before walking up the staircase to the roof. Then, he had to first turn off the rooftop alarm and climb up on the platform where the hotel’s four water tanks were located. Finally, he had to climb another ladder to get to the top of the main tank. Only after all that did he notice something unusual.

 

“I noticed the hatch to the main water tank was open and looked inside and saw an Asian woman lying face-up in the water approximately twelve inches from the top of the tank,” Lopez said, as reported by LAist. Lopez’s testimony suggested that it would have been difficult for Lam to make it to the top of the water tank on her own. At least, not without anyone noticing.

 

The hotel’s Chief Engineer Pedro Tovar also made it clear that it would be difficult for anyone to access the rooftop, where the hotel water tanks were located, without triggering the alarms. Only hotel employees would be able to deactivate the alarm properly. If it was triggered, the sound of the alarm would reach the front desk as well as the entire top two floors of the hotel.

 

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Howard Halm ruled that the death of Elisa Lam was “unforseeable” because it had happened in an area that guests were not allowed to access, so the lawsuit was dismissed.

 

All of the talk of the difficulty on even getting to the water tanks, especially the fact that no alarms were triggered only fueled more conspiracies and speculation. We may never know what really happened and it's another feather in the crazy creepy cap of the Cecil!

 

There are  stories of cold spots and shadowy figures. A news story went around a couple years ago of a ghost photograph, showing a shadowy figure outside of a window of the Cecil Hotel, looking like it was about to jump.

There are stories of people saying that they see a woman who looks like Elizabeth Short and feeling like they’re being watched in the hotel. It’s a creepy place even though there are renovations and rebranding (the Cecil Hotel was renamed the Stay on Main), but, well, it’s hard to shake the sort of stories of the Cecil. Also early in 2021 the discovery channel is kicking off it's streaming service with a new episode of everyone's favorite… Ghost Adventures… Those idiots are at it again.  

 

The hotel and the Elisa Lam footage was the inspiration for the Hotel season of American horror story. It was also the inspiration behind the movie Barton Fink starring John Goodman and Johnathan Turturro. 

 

The hotel can also be seen in two popular music videos. The streets have no name by U2, where the brand performs on the roof of a building next to the Cecil. And in Blink 182 video for The Rock Show. The band is shown throwing money off of a single story building next to the Cecil, which may or may not be the same building u2 played on… Probably was though.

 

Top hotel horror movies

https://www.ranker.com/list/best-horror-movies-about-hotels/ranker-film

82 - The Hatfields & McCoys' New Years Massacre

     This here episode marks the last episode of a very tumultuous year. At Least we gave you the super upbeat story of the Dozier School For Boys for your Christmas listening. This week we are going out with a bang! You may think you know the story, you probably know the names, you didn't know that Moody's wife is directly related to both families, and lastly you probably want us to get to the point. So here it is…. This week we celebrate the new year by talking about none other than the Hatfields and the McCoys...and the new years day massacre. 

 

       The patriarchs of each family during the majority of the feud were William Anderson Hatfield and Randolph McCoy.

 

Hatfield was born September 9, 1839, in western Virginia (now Logan, West Virginia), the son of Ephraim and Nancy (Vance) Hatfield. His nickname "Devil Anse" has a variety of supposed origins: it was given to him by his mother; by Randolph McCoy; earned from his bravery during battle in the American Civil War; or as contrast to his good-tempered cousin, Anderson "Preacher Anse" Hatfield.

A Southern sympathizer, Hatfield enlisted in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. He was commissioned a First Lieutenant of Cavalry in the Virginia State Line in 1862, a group made to protect the territory along the Kentucky-Virginia border where resident loyalties to the North and South were mixed. The Virginia State Line eventually disbanded in 1863 and Hatfield enlisted as a private in the newly formed 45th Battalion Virginia Infantry, before being appointed first lieutenant and later captain of Company B. His unit spent most of its time patrolling the border area against bushwhackers sympathetic to the Union as well as engaging in guerrilla warfare against Union soldiers. Devil Anse himself has been connected to battles and killings of several Union fighters, including trackers Ax and Fleming Hurley in 1863.

Devil Anse and his uncle Jim Vance later formed a Confederate guerrilla fighting unit called the "Logan Wildcats." One of the group's victims was Union General Bill France; killed in revenge for losing one of their members to France's unit.[ In 1865, he was suspected of having been involved in the murder of his rival Asa Harmon McCoy, who had fought for the Union Army and was waylaid by The Wildcats on his return home. Hatfield had been home ill at the time of the killing, which was probably committed at the instigation of his uncle, Jim Vance. This may have sparked the beginning of the notorious feud between the two families that claimed many lives on both sides.

Devil Anse was the patriarch leader during the Hatfield-McCoy feud. His family and Randolph McCoy's fought in one of the bloodiest and most well-known feuds in American history. He was instrumental during the execution of McCoy boys Tolbert, Pharmer and Bud, as well as being present during the Battle of Grapevine Creek before most of his sons and friends were arrested for the murder of the McCoys.

Hatfield was baptized on September 23, 1911 in Island Creek by William Dyke "Uncle Dyke" Garrett and converted to Christianity (he had maintained a largely agnostic or anti-institutional view of religion prior to this conversion). He went on to found a Church of Christ congregation in West Virginia. He was an uncle of the eventual Governor of West Virginia, and United States Senator, Henry D. Hatfield. 

 

       Randolph "Randall"(or sometimes Ol’ Ran’ll) McCoy grew up in the Tug River Valley, which marked the boundary between Kentucky and West Virginia. He was born on the Kentucky side of the valley, one of 13 children. There he learned to hunt and farm, two main ways people living in this part of Appalachia supported themselves. McCoy grew up in poverty. His father, Daniel, had little interest in work, so his mother, Margaret, had to struggle to care for, feed and clothe the family.

 

In 1849, McCoy married his first cousin, Sarah "Sally" McCoy. Sally inherited land from her father a few years after they married. They settled on this 300-acre spread in Pike County, Kentucky, where they had 16 children together.

 

 

During the Civil War, McCoy served as a soldier for the Confederacy. He may have even been a part of the same local militia as his later nemesis, William Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield. 

 

The Family trees of these men are huge. There are many descendants around to this day. This also made keeping track of some of the issues tricky. Lots of people involved. First cousin marriage. Romeo and juliet type relationships between the families...crazy shit. 

 

 

       The Hatfield–McCoy feud, also described by journalists as the Hatfield–McCoy war, involved two rural American families of the West Virginia–Kentucky area along the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River in the years 1863–1891. The McCoy family lived mostly on the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork; the Hatfields lived mostly on the West Virginia side. The majority of the Hatfields, although living in Mingo County (then part of Logan County) fought for the Confederacy in the American Civil War; most McCoys also fought for the Confederates, with the exception of Asa Harmon McCoy, who fought for the Union.  

 

 The Hatfields were more affluent than the McCoys and were well-connected politically. Anse's timbering operation was a source of wealth for his family, while the McCoys were more of a lower-middle-class family. Ole Ran'l owned a 300-acre farm. Both families had also been involved in the manufacturing and selling of illegal moonshine, a popular commodity at the time. The first event in the decades-long feud was the 1865 murder of Randolph’s brother, Asa Harmon McCoy, by the Logan Wildcats, a local militia group that counted Devil Anse and other Hatfields among its members. Many people—even members of his own family—regarded Asa Harmon, who had served in the Union Army during the American Civil War, as a traitor. At the time of his capture, he was recovering from a gunshot wound to the chest. During the early months of the Civil War, Asa joined a company of the Pike County Home Guards, under the command of Uriah Runyon, and it is thought he sustained the wound while serving in this unit. Asa's Company E was mustered out on December 24, 1864, in Ashland. He was killed near his home on January 7, 1865, just thirteen days after leaving the Union Army. A group of Confederate guerillas took credit for the killing and his wife's pension application states that he was "killed by Rebels". There are no existing records pertaining to his death and no warrants were issued in connection with the murder. McCoy family tradition points to James "Jim" Vance, an uncle of Anse and a member of a West Virginia Militia group, as the culprit. 

 

       Relations between the two families continued to sour over the next decade before flaring again over a seemingly small matter: a dispute over a single hog. In 1878 Randolph McCoy accused Floyd Hatfield, a cousin of Devil Anse, of stealing one of his pigs, a valuable commodity in the poor region. Floyd Hatfields’s trial took place in McCoy territory but was presided over by a cousin of Devil Anse. It hinged on the testimony of star witness Bill Staton, a McCoy relative married to a Hatfield. Staton testified in Floyd Hatfield’s favor, and the McCoys were infuriated when Floyd was cleared of the charges against him. Two years later, Staton was violently killed in a fracas with Sam and Paris McCoy, nephews of Randolph. Sam stood trial for the murder but was acquitted for self-defense reasons.

 

Within months of Staton’s murder, a heated affair of a different sort was set ablaze. At a local election day gathering in 1880, Johnse Hatfield, the 18-year-old son of Devil Anse, encountered Roseanna McCoy, Randolph’s daughter. According to accounts, Johnse and Roseanna hit it off, disappearing together for hours. Supposedly fearing retaliation from her family for mingling with the Hatfields, Roseanna stayed at the Hatfield residence for a period of time, drawing the ire of the McCoys.

 

Although they certainly shared a romance, it rapidly became clear that Johnse was not about to settle down with Roseanna. Several months later he abandoned the pregnant Roseanna and quickly moved on. In May 1881 he married Nancy McCoy, Roseanna’s cousin. According to the romanticized legend, Roseanna was heartbroken by these events and never recovered emotionally.

 

The real turning point in the feud, according to most historical accounts, occurred on another local election day in August 1882. Three of Randolph McCoy’s sons ended up in a violent dispute with two brothers of Devil Anse. The fight soon snowballed into chaos as one of the McCoy brothers stabbed Ellison Hatfield multiple times and then shot him in the back. Authorities soon apprehended the McCoys, but the Hatfields interceded, spiriting the men to Hatfield territory. After receiving word that Ellison had died, they bound the McCoys to some pawpaw bushes. Within minutes, they fired more than 50 shots, killing all three brothers.

 

Though the Hatfields might have felt their revenge was warranted, the law felt otherwise, quickly returning indictments against 20 men, including Devil Anse and his sons. Despite the charges, the Hatfields eluded arrest, leaving the McCoys boiling with anger about the murders and outraged that the Hatfields walked free. Their cause was taken up by Perry Cline, an attorney who was married to Martha McCoy, the widow of Randolph’s brother Asa Harmon. Years earlier Cline had lost a lawsuit against Devil Anse over the deed for thousands of acres of land, and many historians believe this left him looking for his own form of revenge. Using his political connections, Cline had the charges against the Hatfields reinstated. He announced rewards for the arrest of the Hatfields, including Devil Anse.

 

        The media started to report on the feud in 1887. In their accounts, the Hatfields were often portrayed as violent backwoods hillbillies who roamed the mountains stirring up violence. The sensationalist coverage planted the seed for the rivalry to become cemented in the American imagination. What had been a local story was becoming a national legend.

 

The Hatfields may or may not have been paying attention to these stories, but they were certainly paying attention to the bounty on their heads. In an effort to end the commotion once and for all, a group of the Hatfields and their supporters hatched a plan to attack Randolph McCoy and his family. This attack would become known as the New Year's Day Massacre. 

 

     Ever on the offensive, the Hatfields staged a sneak attack on the McCoy homestad. On New Year's Day 1888, they set fire to the McCoy home in what was eventually dubbed the New Year's Night Massacre. According to some accounts, the fire was set while the family was still in the house, asleep, as a means of forcing Randolph McCoy to come outside where a Hatfield ambush awaited him. As the flames grew, the Hatfields opened fire on the house. 

 

McCoy did come out, but managed to escape into the woods along with some children, who suffered frostbite. Other members of the McCoy clan weren't so lucky. Two of his children were killed during the blaze, and his wife was beaten so badly she was permanently disabled. With his house burning, Randolph and his remaining family members were able to escape to the woods; his children, unprepared for the elements, suffered frostbite. The remaining McCoys moved to Pikeville to escape the West Virginia raiding parties. 

 

During the 1888 New Year's Night Massacre, the Hatfields set fire to the McCoy homestead in hopes of flushing the family out in the open. During the mayhem, Randolph McCoy's wife, Sarah, was so badly beaten her skull was crushed. His son Calvin and daughter Alifair were killed in the crossfire

 

Sarah McCoy had never participated in the violence of the feud, so beating her almost to death served no purpose other than sending a message. And send a message it did – to the local authorities. Sarah McCoy's gruesome beating, and the murder of her children, brought about the murder trial that judicially ended the feud between the warring families. 

 

This incident led to the last great skirmish of the feud as tensions were at an all time high! After the murders and the burning of the house there was an outcry for the Hatfields to be brought to justice. This led to the battle of grapevine creek. On January 19 Devil Anse and a large party of his supporters faced off with Frank Phillips and his men in a large gun battle which entered local lore and the legend of the feud as the Battle of Grapevine Creek. Despite involving a large number of men, and despite being the single biggest engagement of the entire feud only two were killed in the battle, though a deputy who supported the Hatfields was executed by Phillips after the battle. Following the engagement Phillips withdrew to Kentucky, having succeeded in rounding up nine members of the Hatfield clan. Once there he learned that another Governor, E. Willis Wilson of West Virginia, had entered the fray, and at least to all appearances on the side of the Hatfields. Wilson demanded that the illegally taken prisoners be returned to West Virginia.

Wilson expressed outrage to both governor Buckner and to the federal government, sued the government of Kentucky for the illegal arrest of the nine prisoners being held there, and demanded reparations for the raids into his state. He also ordered the West Virginia Guard to mobilize and move units to the border with Kentucky to prevent further incursions into the state. In response, Buckner dispatched units of Kentucky’s guard to the border area as protection against retaliatory raids by either West Virginia troops or supporters of the Hatfields. Only two decades after the end of the Civil War the military assets of two states were facing each other over their shared border, as a result of the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

Among the nine men taken to Kentucky to stand trial for the murder of Alifair McCoy and others was Valentine Hatfield, known as Wall and a man with some connections in the government of West Virginia. Through his ministrations, Governor Wilson demanded the return of the prisoners by arguing that they had been denied due process and had been illegally extradited by Kentucky. Kentucky argued that the prisoners were in custody, under indictment, and that the state had no obligation to release them to West Virginia or any other entity, regardless of the circumstances of their arrest. In April the case was appealed by Governor Wilson to the Supreme Court of the United States.

 

The Court issued no finding regarding the legality or illegality of the arrest, but agreed with Kentucky in their argument that no federal law existed which would prohibit the prisoners from being tried for the crimes committed in Kentucky, regardless of the nature of events which resulted with them being in custody. The finding was 7-2 in favor of Kentucky. With the nine men in custody pending trial the feud was effectively over, at least as pertains to violence against the other family. But several questions over the feud itself and the many participants arose in the aftermath of the arrests. Devil Anse was not among the prisoners, and neither West Virginia nor Kentucky authorities sought his arrest, despite his physical location being well known. Nor was Cap Hatfield in custody. One of the prisoners taken to Kentucky for trial was Valentine Hatfield, and at his trial he was convicted of involvement in the murders of the McCoy children and sentenced to life in prison. Wall Hatfield may not have been involved in the attack for which he was charged, in 2014 his great-grandson, an Episcopal priest, told the Bluefield (West Virginia) Daily Telegraph that family lore was that Wall surrendered voluntarily and that he hadn’t been guilty of the crime for which he had been charged. He also recounted a story of another relative visiting the Kentucky State Prison to review the records of his great-grandfather and learning of a different cause of death than that recorded by most historians.

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According to most accounts of the feud, once he was convicted Wall communicated with his brothers, asking for their assistance in getting him out of jail, but they refused over fears of being arrested. Wall died in prison under circumstances which remain officially unknown. According to his great-grandson, an official of the Kentucky prison system reviewed the records at the request of a relative of the Hatfields, and reported to her that he was placed in a cellblock alongside several convicted members of the McCoy clan, who killed Wall Hatfield in prison. The cause of death and the location of his grave were never released officially to the Hatfield family, who still question the nature of his role in the feud. 

    According to the accounts of several historians regarding the feud, Kentucky Special Officer Frank Phillips captured a deputy named Bill Dempsey who had been supporting the Hatfields, and executed him on the spot, an act of outright murder, though he was not held accountable for the crime. Other accounts have Phillips similarly executing Uncle Jim Vance rather than taking him into custody. Phillips referred to himself as “Bad Frank”, and claimed to have ridden at one time with the James-Younger Gang. Whether or not true, he did name one of his sons Jesse James Phillips, and he was indicted at various times in several jurisdictions. 

MORE ON THE FUED

Going back to Perry Cline, Whether Perry Cline instigated the feud, using Randolph McCoy and his family as a red flag to enrage Devil Anse, has been debated by many over the years. The story of Anse using the courts to deprive Cline of a significant section of valuable land has been cited as the motive for Cline to try to damage the Hatfield clan. Some writers and historians have laid the blame for the feud at the feet of Perry Cline, using his many instances of arousing the anger of the McCoy’s against the Hatfields as evidence that he manipulated the feud, and inflamed it during its several periods of near-dormancy. But other aspects of Cline’s character and his achievements in Pike County call this judgment into question in many ways.

There is little doubt that the McCoy family and their supporters suffered more deaths and the destruction of property over the course of the feud, and Randolph McCoy’s frustrations were elevated by his failures to obtain justice in the courts. Cline may have just been using his influence and political connections to help the McCoy family. Cline was well respected in Pike County and its environs; he started the first school for black children in the county and was elected to the state legislature, where he exhibited significant political skills. The theory that Cline incited the feud to get back at Devil Anse also falls flat when it is considered that Anse’s business remained intact and profitable in the feud’s aftermath, and if anything his influence in Logan County was enhanced.

One of the motivating factors for the Hatfield attack on Randolph McCoy’s home was the bounty placed on the heads of several members of the clan, including a $500 bounty on Devil Anse, the recognized leader of the Hatfield’s and their supporters. Anse has gone down in history as the undisputed leader of the West Virginia Hatfield clan, despite the fact that he was not arrested and was never tried for any of the multitude of violent crimes he supposedly directed. While some have ascribed his eluding prosecution to his political connections in West Virginia, it has been noted that his brother Wall held similar connections, which did not preclude him from being tried, convicted, and imprisoned in Kentucky, where he died.

 

Anse was never, except when attempting to outmaneuver Frank Phillips and his posse of vigilantes, on the run; his whereabouts were well-known to both members of the Hatfield clan and the McCoy faction attempting to bring him to justice. Court records also demonstrate that Anse was prone to using the courts, both in Logan County and in Pike County, to resolve differences, as indicated by the incident with the stolen hog. Nor was he present during the attack on the McCoy home. He was part of the murder of the three McCoy brothers following the murder of his own brother, an incident which much of the Tug Valley found to be justified. If he was in fact the leader of the Hatfield clan, as most accounts claim, he nonetheless escaped legal retribution, and attempts to exact justice upon him ended with the trial of the Hatfield’s in Kentucky.

 

Cap Hatfield was the second son of Devil Anse, a man known to have a violent streak and a quarrelsome nature throughout the Tug River region. Cap was the type of man who preferred fighting to discussion and believed that vengeance was a duty of the offended. Cap was one of many of the feud’s participants of which there are conflicting accounts, some say he was arrested by Frank Phillips on the same day that the latter killed Uncle Jim Vance, others recount that he escaped Phillips on that day. At one point he was in the Logan County (later Mingo County) Jail, from which he reportedly escaped and eluded justice, probably with the help of his father. Cap was never brought to justice.

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During the trial which led to the sentencing of Ellison Mounts to death, eyewitness testimony from Randolph McCoy was that it was Cap Hatfield who had killed Alifair McCoy, testimony which conflicted with the confession offered by Mounts. As Cap frequently sided with his mentor, Jim Vance, who consistently recommended violent solutions to perceived slights, it seems likely that he was present during the attack, probably leading it along with his uncle. Cap escaped the feud and the pursuit of the vigilantes and vanished. In 1930, he died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, one of the last survivors of the feud. His death was described in the New York Times as being the result of a brain ailment.

James Vance was well-known in both Logan and Pike Counties, referred to as Crazy Jim Vance by the McCoy family and as Uncle Jim Vance to the Hatfield clan. The McCoys liked to point out that his father, Abner Vance, had been hanged and had never been married to Jim’s mother. A guerrilla fighter in Logan and Pike Counties during the Civil War, Vance was widely believed to have been the killer of Asa Harmon McCoy in 1865. Vance was accused by the McCoy’s of being the leader of the assault on the McCoy home during the New Year’s attack, and there was testimony that it was he who had severely beaten Sarah McCoy with a rifle butt as she attempted to reach her wounded daughter.

Vance has been portrayed down the years as a psychopathic killer, one of the leading proponents of the violence which marked the feud. Following his death and the disappearance of Cap Hatfield, the violence of the feud subsided, despite Devil Anse, the presumed leader of the Hatfield clan, remaining at large. Some historians believe that Cap Hatfield witnessed the execution of the wounded Jim Vance at the hands of Frank Phillips, which led to Cap’s decision to flee the region. Despite his criminal history, Vance at one point served as a constable, though many of the Hatfield’s did so in Logan County, despite being considered outlaws in Pike County, so Vance’s service with the law cannot be a consideration when evaluating his true character.

    Throughout the twentieth century, the Hatfield and McCoy feud grew in legend. It became sensationalized in newspapers and magazines, fictionalized in periodicals and film, satirized in vaudeville, and trivialized in cartoons and comics. Portions of the feud were presented as romantic drama, as in the film Roseanna McCoy, released in 1949, which approached the feud from the perspective of star-crossed lovers of the Romeo and Juliet type. Mark Twain was one of the first to use the feud as a basis for one of his tales, describing the feud between the Grangerfords and the Sheperdsons in his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Even Betty Boop appeared in the cartoon with a feud as a backdrop.

On June 14, 2003, in Pikeville, Kentucky, the McCoy cousins partnered with Reo Hatfield of Waynesboro, Virginia, to declare an official truce between the families. Reo Hatfield said that he wanted to show that if the two families could reach an accord, others could also. He had said that he wanted to send a broader message to the world that when national security is at risk, Americans put their differences aside and stand united: "We're not saying you don't have to fight because sometimes you do have to fight," he said. "But you don't have to fight forever." Signed by more than sixty descendants during the fourth Hatfield–McCoy Festival, the truce was touted as a proclamation of peace, saying "We ask by God's grace and love that we be forever remembered as those that bound together the hearts of two families to form a family of freedom in America." Governor Paul E. Patton of Kentucky and Governor Bob Wise of West Virginia signed proclamations declaring June 14 Hatfield and McCoy Reconciliation Day. Ron McCoy, one of the festival's founders, said it is unknown where the three signed proclamations will be exhibited and that "the Hatfields and McCoys symbolize violence and feuding and fighting, but by signing this, hopefully people will realize that's not the final chapter.

the Hatfield and McCoy Reunion Festival and Marathon are held annually in June on a three-day weekend. The events take place in Pikeville, Kentucky, Matewan, West Virginia, and Williamson, West Virginia. The festival commemorates the famed feud and includes a marathon and half-marathon (the motto is "no feudin', just runnin'"), in addition to an ATV ride in all three towns. There is also a tug-of-war across the Tug Fork tributary near which the feuding families lived, a live re-enactment of scenes from their most famous fight, a motorcycle ride, live entertainment, Hatfield–McCoy landmark tours, a cornbread contest, pancake breakfast, arts, crafts, and dancing. Launched in 2000, the festival typically attracts thousands with more than 300 runners taking part in the races.[29]

Statue honoring Randolph McCoy at the McCoy Homeplace in Hardy, KY

In August 2015 members of both families helped archeologists dig for ruins at a site where they believe Randolph McCoy's house was burned

In September 2018, a wooden statue, standing over 8 feet tall, was erected in honor of Randolph McCoy at the McCoy homeplace in Hardy, Kentucky. Carved by chainsaw carver Travis Williams and donated to the property, this statue had been commissioned by McCoy property owner and Hatfield descendant Bob Scott. The statue was unveiled during Hatfield-McCoy Heritage Days in Pike County, Kentucky, an event that occurs every September that brings Hatfield and McCoy descendants back to Pike County to celebrate the long-standing peace between the families. The McCoy homeplace, like many others associated with the feud, is open to tourists year-round

 

Top horror movies set in kentucky...there is only 4 apparently…

Films set in Kentucky - IMDb

 

Horror movies set in west virginia

Films set in West Virginia - IMDb

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81 - Dozier School For Boys (WTF!)

Ep. 81

Dozier school for boys

On our train ride today we are heading to sunny Florida. This is much more than a "Florida man" story. This is a crazy story of one of the worst boys schools ever to exist. There were many of these return schools around the country but this place has a reputation as one of the worst. It's been known by several names over the years but most people know it as the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys . We're gonna talk about the history and atrocities that happened at this school that opened January 1, 1900 and just closed on June 30, 2011. A 111 year reign of terror! Here we go!

 

The school was located in Marianna Florida and covered 1400 acres. A second campus was opened in the town of Okeechobee in 1955.  The school was first organized under an 1897 act of the legislature and began operations on the Marianna campus on January 1, 1900, as the Florida State Reform School. It was overseen by five commissioners appointed by the governor William Dunnington Bloxham, who were to operate the school and make biennial reports to the legislature. Some time thereafter, the commissioners were replaced by the governor and cabinet of Florida, acting as the Board of Commissioners of State Institutions. In 1914, the name was changed to the Florida Industrial School for Boys and in 1957 to the Florida School for Boys. In 1955, the Okeechobee campus opened. In 1967, the name of the Marianna campus was changed to the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, in honor of a former superintendent of the school.The Marianna site was originally divided into north and south sides. South side was known as "Number 1" and was for white students only, while the North side was"number 2" and for black students only. The school remained segregated until 1966. Boot Hill cemetery was located on the north side. In 1929, an 11-room concrete block detention building, also containing two cells (one for white, and one for black students), was constructed to house incorrigible or violent students, the site at the time not being fenced. Students called it "The White House".  In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the site of most beatings of students. After corporal punishment at the school was abolished in 1967, the building was used for storage. Shortly before the facility was closed, Dozier was a fenced, 159-acre "high-risk" residential facility for 104 boys aged 13 to 21 who had been committed there by a court; their average length of stay at Dozier was nine to twelve months. They lived in several cottages, with each boy having an unlocked room.

 

In 1903 an inspection uncovered that children at the school were commonly kept in leg irons. After this the school was investigated 6 times in its first 13 years. In 1914 there was a fire in one of the dorms. The fire killed six students and two staff members.  During the spanish flu epidemic in 1918 it was recorded that eleven students died but they were not named and documented in the recorded burials of the Boot Hill Cemetery. A 13 year old boy was sent there in 1934 and died 38 days later. There's no record of what caused his death. In 1968, Florida Governor Claude Kirk said, after a visit to the school where he found overcrowding and poor conditions, that "somebody should have blown the whistle a long time ago." At this time, the school housed 564 boys, some for offenses as minor as school truancy, running away from home, or "incorrigibility", including cigarette smoking. They ranged in age from ten to sixteen years old. The White House was closed in 1967. Officially, corporal punishment at the school was banned in August 1968.

 

In 1969, as part of a governmental reorganization, the school came under the management of the Division of Youth Services of the newly created Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. There were 81 school-related deaths of students from 1911 to 1973. Thirty-one of these boys were said to be buried on the school grounds, with other bodies "shipped home to families or buried in unknown locations." There are 31 simple crosses as grave markers at the cemetery, installed in the 1960s and 1990s, but they have been found not to correspond to specific burials.

 

An inspection done in 1982 revealed that boys were hogtied and kept in isolation for weeks at a time! A lawsuit was filed by the ACLU over this issue and several other issues at this facility and three other juvenile facilities in Florida. At this point the school was housing 105 students aged 13-21. In 1985, the media reported that young ex-students of the school, sentenced to jail terms for crimes committed at Dozier, had subsequently been the victims of torture by guards at the Jackson County jail. The teens were usually hanged but handcuffs to the bars of their cells usually for an hour at a time. The guards said that this practice was approved by their superiors.

 

In 1994, the school was placed under the management of the newly created Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, which operated the school until its closure in 2011. By this time, the school had facilities to house 135 inmates. Many of the boys sent there had been convicted of rape or of committing "lewd acts on other children". On September 16, 1998, a resident of the school lost his right arm in a washing machine. A lawsuit was filed against the institution and the plaintiff was awarded an undisclosed amount in 2003.

 

In April 2007, the acting superintendent of the school and one other employee were fired following allegations of abuse of inmates.[24] The state officially acknowledged that abuses had taken place there; the White House Boys, a growing group of adult survivors who had been held there in the 1950s and 1960s, were speaking out to the press. In October 2008, several of them attended a ceremony to install a historic plaque at the White House that acknowledged that past. The news was carried nationwide.[14]

 

In late 2009, the school failed its annual inspection. Among other problems, the inspection found that the school failed to deal properly with the numerous complaints by the boys held there, including allegations of continued mistreatment by the guards. State Representative Darryl Rouson said the system was struggling to move on from a longstanding "culture of violence and abuse".[16]

 

The U.S. Department of Justice conducted a survey of 195 US facilities, including the Florida School For Boys. According to its 2010 report, 11.3% of boys surveyed at the school reported that they had been subject to sexual abuse by staff using force in the last twelve months, and 10.3% reported that they had been subject to it without the use of force. 2.2% reported sexual victimization by another inmate. DOJ said these percentages meant the home was deemed to have neither "high" nor "low" rates of sexual victimization compared with the other institutions assessed in the survey.[25]

 

In July 2010, the state announced its plan to merge Dozier with JJOC, creating a single new facility, the North Florida Youth Development Center, with an open campus and a closed campus. However, the following year, claiming "budgetary limitations," the state decided to close both facilities on June 30, 2011. Remaining students were sent to other juvenile justice facilities around the state.[4]

 

After Hurricane Michael, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office was given the property, now known as ‘Endeavor’, to relocate from their damaged offices.

 

So there you have a condensed history of the school and the site. Now we're going to get into the crazy shit that went on there. First we have the story of Willy Haynes and his experience with the school and the infamous Whitehouse. The story comes from an incredible article from the Tampa Bay Times. In the late 1950s, a 13-year-old kid who slicked back his long hair like Elvis stood in front of a judge in Tampa. A car had been stolen from the neighborhood. Someone said they saw Willy Haynes driving it. Willy didn't know how to drive, but the judge didn't know that. Here was a boy who grew up in a little house off Columbus Avenue, in Six Mile Creek, a scrappy neighborhood on Tampa's eastern edge, where a poor kid learned early how to protect himself. When the judge warned the boy to behave or he'd be sent to reform school in Marianna, Willy surprised the court.

 

Why can't I go now?

 

He had heard the Florida School for Boys had a band and a football team and maybe even Boy Scouts, and it didn't cost a penny to participate. He kissed his mother goodbye at the courthouse and left Tampa in the back of a state cruiser. Big, beautiful, oblivious Florida blurred by outside the window. Willy wasn't scared as the state car pulled onto the gravel road that led to the state's only boys' juvenile reformatory, the Florida School for Boys.

 

No fences. Manicured lawns. Tall pines and stately buildings. It looked like college. It had to be better than home.

 

Inside, he signed a ledger.

 

William Haynes Jr.

 

April 11, 1958.

 

A boy escorted Willy Haynes to Tyler Cottage and told him to keep his belongings in Locker No. 252. He was given a toothbrush and pajamas and his own military bunk. The poor kid from Tampa felt like he was finally home.

 

He was there barely a week when it happened. Some bullies caught him outside the showers, and the next thing he knew he was in the middle of a tangle of feet and fists. Willy knew how to fight, and he was choking one of his attackers in a headlock when a cottage father busted in.

 

The school's disciplinarian, R.W. Hatton, asked Willy who he had been fighting, but the boy would not give up the names. Better to be punished than be branded a puke.

 

You're going down, Hatton told him.

 

They dragged him across that manicured campus, toward the squat concrete building called the White House. They dragged him through the door. Willy Haynes, who had asked the judge to send him here, who had wanted to throw a football under the pines. Over 18 months, the men dragged Willy into the White House again and again.

 

Lay down. Hold the rail. Don't make a sound.

 

He could hear the strap coming. It started with the pivot, the shuffle of boots on concrete. The strap hit the wall, then the ceiling, then thighs and buttocks and back, and it felt like an explosion. When he got back to the cottage, Willy stood in the shower and let the cold water wash bits of underwear from his lacerations, as his blood ran toward the drain.  

 

Many others suffered the same horrors as Willy. As the boys grew up the memories stayed with them as they became men. Many sporting both physical and mental scars. Some of these men gathered at the Florida School for Boys on Oct. 21, 2008. Again from the Tampa Bay Times article:

 

       "The last time they had stepped on this sprawling campus, they were fresh-faced punks with the world before them. Now their hair was gray and their faces sagged. Their backs ached from a night in motel beds. They carried pictures of children and grandchildren in their wallets.

 

Dick Colon had flown in from Baltimore, where he owns an electrical contracting company. The 65-year-old was tormented by the memory of seeing a boy being stuffed into an industrial dryer. Next to him stood Michael O'McCarthy, a writer and political activist from Costa Rica, who was beaten so badly he was treated at the school infirmary. To his left was Roger Kiser, a Chicken Soup for the Soul contributor who had driven down from Brunswick, Ga., bent on retribution. On the end was a quiet man named Robert Straley, who sells glow lights and carnival novelties. He drove up from Clearwater. He had been having recurring nightmares of a man sitting on his bed.

 

Then there was Willy Haynes. He was 65 and went by Bill now. A tall, broad man, Haynes had worked for 30 years for the Alabama Department of Corrections. Haynes didn't feel good. There were plenty of places he'd rather be. But he knew he had to do this."

 

The men now called themselves the White House Boys.  According to the article The men remember the same things: 

 

        "blood on the walls, bits of lip or tongue on the pillow, the smell of urine and whiskey, the way the bed springs sang with each blow. The way they cried out for Jesus or mama. The grinding of the old fan that muffled their cries. The one-armed man who swung the strap. They remember walking into the dark little building on the campus of the Florida School for Boys, in bare feet and white pajamas, afraid they'd never walk out."

 

According the the men boys were dragged to the White House in ones and twos and threes, and sometimes there was a line outside, and sometimes a white dog kept watch."

 

The white house boys are former students who had been held at the school in the 1950s and 1960s began to share accounts of abuses that they had suffered or observed against students.  By the early 2000s, there were about 400 members, survivors of this school from the 1950s and 1960s. Since the early 2000s, members of the group began to speak publicly about their experiences to the media, and to challenge the state to investigate practices and personnel at the school. More than 300 men have publicly recounted abuse and torture at the school. The survivors have had some internal struggles and set up more than one website. 

 

In 2009, the Florida School for Boys was the subject of an extensive special report. Allegations focusing on the 1960s included claims that one room was used for whipping white boys and another for black boys. The whippings were carried out by guards using a 3-foot-long belt made of leather and metal and were so severe that the victim's underwear could become embedded in his skin. One former student said that he had seen a boy trapped in a running laundry dryer at the school and suspected the boy was killed. One former student stated he was punished in the White House eleven times, receiving a total of more than 250 lashes. Others alleged they were whipped until they lost consciousness and that the punishments were made harsher for boys who cried. Some alumni also stated there was a "rape room" at the school, where boys were sexually abused by guards. The complainants said some of the victims were as young as nine years old.

 

In February 2010, the White House Boys filed a class action suit for damages against the state government, but it was dismissed by a judge in Leon County, Florida, because the statute of limitations had run out for such a suit. A bill introduced in the 2012 session of the Florida Legislature to provide compensation to victims of abuse at the school failed to pass.

 

There have been many positions throughout the years but no real investigations until 2008. On December 9, 2008, Florida Governor Charlie Crist directed the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) to investigate the allegations of abuse, torture, and murder recounted by the White House Boys and their law firm. It took two years for the findings to be released. 

 

The FDLE conducted more than one hundred interviews of former students, family members of former students, and former staff members of the school during the 15-month investigation, but no concrete evidence was found linking any of the student deaths to the actions of school staff, or that there had been attempts by staff to conceal deaths. None of the graves were opened during the investigation.(The investigation determined that the thirty-one graves at the facility had been dug between 1914 and 1952.)

 

A forensic examination of the "White House" was conducted. No trace evidence of blood on the walls was found. Some former Dozier students told investigators that they felt they had "needed the discipline." Troy Tidwell, who was a staff member at the school during that period, said that punishments in the White House were not excessive. He said staff used the leather strap because they were concerned that spankings with wooden paddles, as had previously taken place, might injure the boys.

 

Department of Justice, 2011

 

In its December 2011 report of its investigation at the Dozier School, the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice made the following findings about staff at the school, who were cited for use of excessive force, inappropriate isolation, and extension of confinement:

 

The youth confined at Dozier and at JJOC were subjected to conditions that placed them at serious risk of avoidable harm in violation of their rights protected by the Constitution of the United States. During our investigation, we received credible reports of misconduct by staff members to youth within their custody. The allegations revealed systemic, egregious, and dangerous practices exacerbated by a lack of accountability and controls. . . . These systemic deficiencies exist because State policies and generally accepted juvenile justice procedures were not being followed. We found that . . . staff did not receive minimally adequate training. We also found that proper supervision and accountablity measures were limited and did not suffice to prevent undue restraints and punishments. Staff failed to report allegations of abuse to the State, supervisors, and administrators. Staff members often failed to accurately describe use of force incidents and properly record use of mechanical restraints.

 

 The University of South Florida 2012-2014: 

Dr. Erin Kimmerle is a forensic anthropologist and University of South Florida Associate Professor who had led a USF team of anthropologists, biologists, and archaeologists exploring the Marianna campus in a project authorized by the state. The stories of the White House Boys piqued her interest, as she had worked with international groups to identify remains and burials in areas of warfare. She thought the specialists at her university could aid the state in identifying undocumented areas of burial by using current technology and scientific techniques. She was especially curious why there are no records of the locations of the burials, as is customary at state prisons, hospitals and similar institutions.In 2012, the team used ground-penetrating radar and some excavation to identify where bodies are buried. However, in order to determine if the cause of death was from injury, illness, or murder, the bodies must be exhumed. Given the long history of reported violence at the school, many people believe that some students died because of abuse. Under existing law, exhumations can be done only at the request of a family member. But many of the burials are of students who were here in the early 20th century, and records make it difficult to identify their families.

 

By December 2012, the researchers indicated that they had located 55 graves on the grounds. Given that they had documented nearly 100 deaths at the school, the team believed that a second cemetery was likely to exist.

 

Thomas Varnadoe was sent to the Florida School for Boys in 1934 and died there a month later. His nephew, Glen Varnadoe, came forward in 2012 saying that he wanted to have his uncle's remains exhumed for reinterment at his family's cemetery near Lakeland. He had visited Dozier School in the 1990s, and a staff member showed him where his uncle might be buried. That location was not the same as the area where the most recent burials were found. The state originally limited the USF team to searching the existing, delineated cemetery grounds, saying they did not have the authority to order exhumation of graves. Researchers discuss work revealed that using the remains they did find on site, they made seven DNA identifications and 14 other presumptive matches. Many of the unmarked burial sites studied are thought to be of black students, who were segregated at the school. The team found that three times as many black students died and were buried at Dozier than white students, and that some of those boys were incarcerated for non-criminal charges like running away and incorrigibility. Black boys were less likely to be named in historical records, as well, reflecting the grim realities of reform school life in the segregated South. They eventually uncovered a students family had actually been sent a coffin filled with planks of wood after a boy named Thomas Curry died there under "Suspicious Circumstances while escaping". The ledger entry at the Dozier school said he was “killed on RR Bridge Chattahoochee, Fla.” Another document at Old Cathedral Cemetery in Philadelphia says he was “killed by train.” No one from Dozier ever reported his death to the state. He was returned in a casket to his family, who, in turn, buried him in Philadelphia. Or so the family thought. It wasn’t until a state investigation beginning in 2008 that Curry’s death certificate was found at Dozier. It said he died of a crushed skull from an “unknown cause.”  And it wasn’t until 2014, when University of South Florida anthropologists who have been working to unearth and identify remains on the former campus visited Philadelphia with Pennsylvania authorities, that the family learned Curry wasn’t in the casket – no bones, no clothing, no sign of him at all.

 

“Wood. Layers of pieces of wood,” said anthropologist Erin Kimmerle, explaining what she and her team found in the casket. “It was completely filled with wooden planks.”

 

At first, the team thought they had the wrong grave, but then they found Curry’s great-grandparents beneath the wood-filled casket…

 

Definitely some weird shit going on here.

 

In January 2016, the USF team issued their final report. They had made a total of seven DNA matches and 14 presumptive identifications from the 51 remains found at the site. A total of 55 burials were identified, but only 13 were made within the cemetery grounds, and "the rest of the graves were outside... in the woods, including under a roadway, brush, and a large mulberry tree." While they had documented 98 deaths at the site, they were unable to identify any more burials on the grounds. Some bodies may have been sent home to students' families. The USF team will continue to work with other organizations and families on DNA and other means of identification of the remains that were found. They created computer facial approximations from remains to help with identification. A number of families, including the Glen Varnadoe family, have filed requests to have the remains of their children or relatives repatriated.

 

In March 2014, Governor Rick Scott signed a bill authorizing up to $7500 per burial for those families who wanted to reinter the remains of relatives identified in unmarked graves at the Florida School for Boys. This followed the University of South Florida's report in January, which said they had been able to make matches of 21 sets of remains to known families. In addition, the bill proposes creating a task force to establish a memorial, "as well as deciding how to handle the remains of bodies that have yet to be identified or claimed by families. 

 

The white house boys also fought to have the bodies of orphans and those that were unidentified to be reinterred far away from the ground at Dozier.

 

In as late as 2019 they are still finding what could possibly be unmarked graves. Dr. Erin Kimmerle again began an investigation of 27 "anomalies" discovered by an engineering firm hired by the state's Department of Environmental Protection to help clean-up following Hurricane Michael, according to Florida's Department of State.

 

Though the 27 anomalies discovered by radar are "consistent with possible graves," according to Governor Ron DeSantis, only fieldwork will determine whether human remains are present at the site.

 

The 27 "anomalies" are located less than 200 yards from a section on the Dozier school property known as Boot Hill Cemetery, where, previously, USF researchers found 55 graves.

 

Unfortunately in an update we found it turns out Kimmerle's team said those anomalies were mostly roots from pine trees moved from the area years ago.

 

Survivor Charlie Fudge and friend Rachel McCoy pleaded to be allowed on the property during future surveys.

 

Fudge said he remembers a graveyard being on the east side of a set of buildings on the property, near Old Air Base Road. 

 

"I could sit on my cottage bench and see that cemetery," Fudge said. "My mind at 12 years old remembers that cemetery."

 

Kimmerle said her team did not find anything abnormal in that area, but nearby there is an established, fenced-in historic cemetery. 

 

McCoy, who attended the presentation with Fudge, said letting the men on the property to assist is "what they need."

 

Fudge said he hopes the White House does not get bulldozed over when the property is cleaned up in the future.

 

"That's very meaningful to me and the other men," he said. "I'm just an old guy, who went there 60 years ago, and went through hell."

 

John Bell, who spent eight months at the school, also spoke and said the school was managed by "corrupt officials of the state of Florida" and "it's been going on for way too long."

 

In 2017, the state formally apologized to the survivors and families for the abuses and deaths that happened at Dozier. More than 500 former Dozier students have come forward over the years to report physical, sexual and mental abuse at the hands of those who worked there.

On June 29th 2020, Neil Davis, the oldest member of The White house boys passed away in a nursing home. He never told most of his family, including his children, that he had been at Dozier and what he'd gone through. 

 

The white house boys vow to keep fighting for the rights of the victims. 

 

    "There are still 180 people not accounted for," she said. "We could lay it to rest. They're not just public, they were there. Let them walk the property." Fudge said

 

"We the White House boys; we know what has happened in that school," he said. "It's not going to be over until we say it's over."

 

There are some really great news articles used for this episode. There was a really great series of articles from The St Pete Times that were reprinted by the Tampa Bay Times that we recommend checking out. Also NPR has a ton of good info as well. 

 

Imdb list of 15 horror movies about school

 

https://m.imdb.com/list/ls022490849/

 

 

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OUR YOUTUBE

#80 - Creepy Canada (Sorry, eh!)

"Canadians have an abiding interest in surprising those Americans who have historically made little effort to learn about their neighbour to the North."

Peter Jennings

 

     It is these words that define today's episode! We are all going to be surprised and learn about some of the creepiest, craziest, weirdest things our neighbors to the North have to offer. If you're not from the U.S. the Canadians may not be your neighbors to the North but they'll offer you some Tim Hortons and be extremely polite to you anyways! Most people only know a few things about Canada: they are polite, they love hockey, it's cold as fuck, and they say eh. But we're going to learn you all a few more things, and we're gonna do it the Midnight Train way, by telling you about the creepy side of Canada! So without further ado jump on your moose, grab your hockey stick, throw on your toque, and let's ride!

 

 Off to our first stop! With one hand in our pockets, we head to the home of Alanis Morissette, Ottawa! We're taking a quick trip to the Ottawa Jail Hostel. This hostel has a bit of a history. As the name implies this was one a jail!  The jail was built next to the courthouse in 1862 and was the main jail in Ottawa for over a century! There's a tunnel that connects the jail to the courthouse. Only three official executions took place in the jail. The most famous being that of Patrick J. Whalen. Whalen assassinated a man by the name of Thomas D'Arcy Etienne Grace Hughes McGee, wow. McGee was an Irish-Canadian politician, Catholic spokesman, journalist, poet, and a Father of Canadian Confederation. The young McGee was a Catholic Irishman who opposed British rule of Ireland, and worked for a peasant revolution to overthrow British rule and secure Irish independence. He escaped arrest and fled to the United States in 1848, where he reversed his political beliefs. He became disgusted with American republicanism and democracy, and became intensely conservative in his politics and in his religious support for the Pope. Over 5,000 people witnessed Whelan's hanging, which was a large number considering the size of Ottawa at the time. The third (official) and final execution at the jail took place on March 27, 1946, when Eugène Larment, who had killed an Ottawa police detective, was hanged. The building remained in use as a jail until 1972 when the outdated facility was closed. The original gallows, however, are intact and remain fully functional. There’s also what appears to be an ‘unofficial’ gallows over a back staircase, so it’s hard to say how many prisoners were executed at the jail. So you know… Don't piss off the people in the next room. While the jail was in use, prisoners were held under very inhumane conditions. Up to 150 prisoners, consisting of men, women, and children, would be forced to share 60 small cells (1x3 meters) and 30 larger cells (2x3 meters); as well as six solitary confinement units. The windows were open to the elements early on and offered no protection from the freezing Ottawa winters and got summers. Inmates included murderers, the mentally ill, or those incarcerated for minor infractions such as drunk and disorderly conduct. Modern excavations have unearthed numerous unmarked graves. It's no wonder this hostel is considered a haunted creepy place. Most guests convey a heavy creepy feeling while staying there. Here's a few of the things people report about the place! The Ghost of Patrick Whelan: Arguably the hostel’s most famous spook, you’ll see Patrick Whelan walking the halls toward the gallows where he was hanged. His restless spirit is said to be caused by an undignified burial after his execution.

The Hole: Also known as solitary confinement, this area of the jail is filled with an ominous, negative energy. Visitors report overwhelming feelings of despair in this cramped, lightless space.

The Gallows: The jail’s preferred method of execution is still standing and functional. Hotel guests have heard footsteps, disembodied voices and other baffling sounds coming from the execution chamber.

The Lounge: The hostel’s lounge was once used to house women and children prisoners, echoes of whom can still be heard today. Visitors claim to hear sounds of children crying and screaming, as well as knocking on doors and footsteps in the empty room. 

Assistant Manager Jeff Delgado recounts a particularly memorable experience when a woman had checked herself into the old Warden’s office for the night. They became suspicious when she didn’t check out on time the following day, and when he went to check on the woman, she was still in bed. Jeff says: “The front desk agent shook the woman and she woke up very frightened and hysterical. According to her, there was a small girl that appeared to her in her sleep in the office surroundings, and wrapped her arms around her so that she would not be able to wake up. The girl was also supposedly trying to whisper something in her ear, from which the guest could only make out the word ‘help’.

 

“Although the story might seem outlandish, the guest was unaware that the particular room she was staying in was indeed the old Warden’s office. She was also able to describe in detail the surroundings of an office and the physical description of the little girl.”

 

On the plus side of you make it through the night without getting scared off… There's a free continental breakfast… So there's that.

 

Next up we are going to play "informer" in the land of "Snow". Heading to Shag Harbor, Nova Scotia. We're not talking about ghosts or cryptids, we're talking about aliens! Shag Harbor was the sight of a supposed UFO crash in 1967. Oh hell… We are gonna say it was definitely a ufo crash! 

In the Air

At approximately 7:15pm, Air Canada Flight 305 pilots Captain Pierre Charbonneau and First Officer Robert Ralph were flying above Quebec, about 180 miles west of Nova Scotia. Everything was perfectly routine until they noticed something trailing their plane. They witnessed a massive, rectangular-shaped object, orange in color, gliding through the skies. Trailing the rectangle were small, orange orbs that seemed almost like a tail to this main object.

The pilots watched with growing concern for several minutes when, suddenly, there was some sort of explosion near the rectangle. A large white cloud was left behind, sporadically changing colors from red to blue. Two minutes later, another explosion occurred leaving behind a similar cloud of colors. The pilots watched in amazement as the small orbs swarmed around the rectangle and, along with it, descended in to a thick cloud cover and disappeared out of sight. Both pilots, visibly shaken, reported the incident when they finally landed.

 

Meanwhile, back on the ground, residents of Shag Harbour would report seeing four orange lights in tight formation flashing in rapid sequence across the night sky. A group of teens that were out fishing noticed that the lights were making a brisk descent towards the water. But instead of disappearing into the murky depths, the lights seemed to float effortlessly on the surface before disappearing into the water. Because of this, the teens believed it to be an airplane that had crashed a half mile from the shore. Another young man who had been fishing quickly phoned the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) to report the crash of an aircraft. The police dispatcher brushed off the young man, believing him to have been inebriated, but soon, over a dozen other calls flooded the station. Police immediately went out to investigate.

 

Unbeknownst to the RCMP, Constable Ron Pound was patrolling an area near the alleged incident. He witnessed the four orange lights moving at tremendous speed. As he sped up his vehicle, he believed the four lights to all be connected to a single aircraft and estimated it to be about sixty feet in length. He reached the shoreline where he was soon joined by fellow officers, Police Corporal Victor Werbieki, and Constable Ron O’Brien. Along with over thirty other witnesses, they all watched as the orange lights slowly changed to a yellowish tint, and it moved eerily slow across the surface of the water, leaving a similar yellowish colored foam in its wake. Some witnesses claimed to have seen the actual structure of the object, reporting it as “dome-shaped.” Due to the exhaustive dedication by investigators, Chris Styles and Don Ledger, they were able to compile a list of first-hand witnesses, and individuals involved with the search and recovery efforts.

When the object was reported to crash-land in the water, and it began to sink into the ice-cold waters, a loud “whooshing” sound could be heard by several witnesses. The Canadian Coast Guard was called to the scene, but before they could arrive, two RCMP officers had already secured local fishermen’s boats and headed towards the area for a possible search and rescue mission.

The lights were no longer visible, but the yellow foam remained. The officers and fisherman who assisted, all said that the foam was like no sea foam they had ever seen, much thicker than anything that could be caused naturally. They had to cut their way through it just to look for survivors of the supposed crash.

After several hours of searching, nothing could be found. The RCMP, along with The Coast Guard, contacted their local NORAD station and the Rescue Coordination Center, asking if there had been any reports that evening of a missing aircraft either civilian or military. They had nothing.

The following morning of October 5th, the Canadian Forces Headquarters sent out specially trained divers from the Navy and RCMP to systematically search the seabed in the alleged area where the crash had occurred. They searched for several days and found absolutely nothing.

Local newspapers began to circulate speculative theories of a Russian spacecraft, submarine, or spy satellite being the enigmatic culprit. There were also rumors that the United States had launched their own investigation into the incident. Slowly, the headlines made their way to the back of the newspapers and soon faded into obscurity as most UFO cases often do. In 2018, it was announced that Celine Cousteau and Fabian Cousteau, grandchildren of Jacques Cousteau, were heading to Nova Scotia to investigate the incident. As part of their visit, their investigative team would carry out an underwater search to try to locate the craft that could possibly still sit at the bottom of water.

While their deep sea investigation did not yield a craft or materials, anomalous activity was recorded between their radio transmissions while underwater when in proximity to where the craft was said to have submerged. Perhaps the most compelling developments in the Shag Harbour incident are its striking resemblance to the now famous “Tic Tac UFO” incident. But we can find similarities with actions taken by the Tic Tac UFO and the object witnessed in Shag Harbour in 1967.

In fact, the event in Nova Scotia meets at least one of the traits laid out by the former director of the once secret Pentagon UFO program, Luis Elizondo. Under AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program), Elizondo compiled a list of incredible capabilities commonly associated with UFO sightings. He called these traits the “Five Observables.” As stated on the TTSA website, they include:

-Sudden and instantaneous acceleration

-Hypersonic velocities without signatures

-Low observability

-Trans-medium travel

-Positive lift

If we are to observe the actions of the Shag Harbour object(s), it most certainly hits #4, Trans-Medium Travel. According to the AATIP criteria, this involves:

Objects that have the ability to travel easily in various environments and conditions seemingly without any change in performance capabilities. Our current understanding of physics requires vehicles to be designed specifically according to their application. For this reason, there are stark differences between those vehicles that orbit in space, fly in the atmosphere, and travel in the sea. Objects that can travel in all three mediums using the same design and without compromising performance or degrading lift remains an enigma.

This, and several other observables, make the Shag Harbour object most certainly an enigma. And while its performance may have in fact been compromised that day in the skies and eventually, in the waters of Nova Scotia, it begs for continued investigation. The extraordinary testimonies given to Styles and Ledger, were said to be highly credible individuals. However, their names remained confidential to protect them from possible threat or security oaths.

Therefore, the aforementioned information, just like most witness testimony by military and authority figures, was given “off the record.”

No matter the case, something extremely strange occurred in Shag Harbor on that dark, cold night, and even stretched southward towards the United States.

It remains one of the most compelling UFO cases of all-time, only bringing forth more questions than answers. It’s left even the most skeptical minds scratching their heads.

It could be best summarized with a quote from an October 14th editorial from The Chronicle-Herald :

“Imagination and/or natural phenomena seem to be the weakest of explanations. It has been a tough week for skeptics.”

 

Next up we head to the birthplace of one of the worlds most beloved musicians. A man who will the ladies love and every man want to be. A man who helped write the greatest musical anthems of all time. That's right… Chad Kroeger of Nickelback! We're heading to Alberta! And may we be the first to say… Fuck you Alberta for that whole fiasco. Any rate that's not what we're talking about here… That dude is way scarier than our next creepy Canadian tale! We're heading more specifically to Fort Kent, Alberta. We're going from aliens to evil spirits… But not ghosts, we're talking  Wendigo! The tale of the fort Kent Wendigo is pretty crazy. 

The Wendigo is a mythological creature part of Algonquin legend that speaks of an evil spirit that could possess the minds of men mad with grief and despair, driving them to commit gruesome acts of murder and cannibalism.

 

Such a creature is alleged to exist somewhere around Fort Kent, with a chilling legend that goes back nearly 100 years ago.

 

Thomas Burton was a young doctor that arrived in Fort Kent from England in 1921 when it was but a humble colony. Burton came to Fort Kent with his wife to treat an outbreak of small pox that had befallen the small community, allegedly on the backs of rats.

Burton also hoped that by leaving England, he would leave behind the horrible memories he had of World War I.

 

Initially the young doctor was successful in fighting the disease, and the townsfolk embraced him and his wife as miracle workers, but the disease’s spread suddenly became uncontrollable, and Burton became overwhelmed with the sick and dying.

 

It wasn’t long before his wife too fell ill, and when she succumbed to the sickness, Burton locked himself in his house with her dead body.

 

In the following days, Burton went mad with grief, and according to legend was possessed by the Wendigo.

 

Under the evil spirit’s influence, he ate his wife’s flesh.

 

When he was done with her, Burton turned his attention to the residents of Fort Kent, and allegedly went on a killing spree for the next three days with few spared, said to be some of the grisliest murders in Canadian history.

 

At the end of the third day, it is said Burton disappeared into the woods around Fort Kent, and was never seen or heard from again.

 

When he and his wife had arrived, there were 150 people in Fort Kent — 11 were all that remained, at least according to the legend.

 

Burton’s was not the first high-profile case of Wendigo possession in Western Canada — the first official hanging to take place in the region was also attributed to a man possessed by the evil spirit.

 

Swift Runner, a Plains Cree trapper, was arrested after he admitted to killing and eating his wife and children during the winter of 1878, 25 miles from a Hudson’s Bay Company outpost stocked with emergency supplies.

 

Because he committed such a heinous crime while help was so close by, he was believed to be possessed by the Wendigo

 

After he confessed to the crime, Swift Runner was hung in Fort Saskatchewan.

 

Today the community we know as Fort Kent no longer sits at the location Burton’s terrible murders were committed, but residents sometimes report strange cries resembling that of a coyote coming from the tree line, and children are warned not to be in the fields too long past dark, lest they be taken by the Wendigo. Sounds like a pleasant place!

 

As you all know Tom Cochran once told us all via song that life is a highway and we're gonna ride it all night long to where he's from… Manitoba Canada! Now if you follow your cryptids, like you should you have probably heard of Ogopogo, a lake monster in british columbia but some people are not aware of another pretty famous lake monster in Manitoba. This one is somewhat named after Ogopogo, it's called Manipogo, get it… Cus Manitoba...Mani...pogo… well whatever. In Canadian folklore, the Manipogo is a lake monster said to live in Lake Manitoba, Manitoba, Canada. There is also a Lake Winnipegosis sea monster called Winnepogo, thought possibly to be the same creature as the lakes are connected. Not very creative with the names but… You know… Canada? The monster is described as being from 4 to 15 meters long. It is described as "A long muddy-brown body with humps that show above the water, and a sheep-like head." People have claimed to have seen the lake monster since the 1800s. The name was created by Tom Locke, a land inspector in charge of planning the provincial government's program for public playgrounds and recreational parks. On Aug. 10, 1960, he and 16 others said they saw three creatures swimming near the area of Toutes Aides, a community 245 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, on the shore of Lake Manitoba. First Nations stories of Manipogo go back centuries, while the first documented sighting by a white settler came in 1909, when Hudson's Bay Company fur trader Valentine McKay claimed to see a huge creature in Cedar Lake. Timber inspector C.F. Ross and a friend were next, saying they saw a single-horned creature that looked like a dinosaur in 1935. And in 1948, C.P. Alric claimed to see something rise up from Lake Manitoba and let out a "prehistoric type of dinosaur cry." Here are some of the stories of sightings:

1957: Louis Belcher and Eddie Nipanik say they saw a giant serpent-like creature in the lake.

Aug. 12, 1962: Two fishermen, Richard Vincent and John Konefall, claim to have seen a large creature, like a serpent or giant snake from their boat on Lake Manitoba near the mouth of the Waterhen River.

1960s: A couple say they saw a "reptile-like beast" surfacing about 10 metres from their boat.

1989: Sean Smith and family, visiting from Minneapolis on a camping trip, stayed at Shallow Point Campground, off Highway 6 on Lake Manitoba. He described seeing "many humps" in the lake, about 25 metres offshore.

1997: Several reports by cross-country campers from Quebec staying at the Lundar Beach Campground describe what appeared to be a large reptile head rising and falling in the water, more than 100 metres offshore. Swimmers were asked to leave the water, but the "head" only appeared one time. It was dismissed as a floating log, but no log was seen afterward.

2004: Commercial fisherman Keith Haden, originally from Newfoundland and Labrador, reported that several of his fishing nets on Lake Manitoba near the narrows were torn up by what seemed like an ocean shark or killer whale. The fish that were in the nets were not nibbled on, but actually torn in half, he said, by what seemed like huge bites.

2009: Several residents at Twin Lakes Beach reported seeing several humps a few hundred metres from their lakefront cottages. No photos were taken.

2011: Many sightings of several humps emerging and then submerging, seen from offshore, were reported at locations like Marshy Point, Scotch Bay, and Laurentia Beach by security personal patrolling flooded cottage and home areas.

Aug. 9, 2012: A report claimed that just offshore of the outlet at Twin Beach Road, something surfaced twice, showing a scaled/sawtooth jagged back, like that of a giant sturgeon. 

Sounds like a good time to me! Let's roll!

 

Where are we rolling too? Well hopefully we'll run into Rain Maida of Our Lady Peace cus we're heading to a town near St. Catherine's Ontario. We're actually heading to Thorold Ontario and we're gonna check out the Blue Ghost Tunnel! The Merritton Tunnel, also known as the Blue Ghost Tunnel and the Grand Trunk Railway Tunnel, is an abandoned railway tunnel in Thorold, Ontario. The decision to build the tunnel came from the need for a more durable and less interrupted way to cross the new canal situated directly above it via vehicles. Constructed in 1875, Completed in 1876, and Opened in 1887. The tunnel is located between locks 18 and 19 of the former third Welland Canal and was built using Queenston limestone, spanning a total length of 713 feet when including the winged stone work at either end. Hundreds of men armed with picks and shovels, as well as several horses were used in the excavation of the tunnel. The tunnel was used periodically until 1915, when Harry Eastwood was the last official engineer to pilot a train through the tunnel. Following that, the tunnel was used only occasionally by farmers to transport cattle or as a safe passage from the weather. Several fatal accidents occurred during the construction and use of the tunnel and the railway running through it. In 1875, a 14-year-old was killed when he was crushed under a large rock. On January 3, 1903 at 7:03 AM, Engine Number 4 and Engine Number 975 met in a head-on collision approximately a third of a mile from the western entrance of the tunnel. The trains were moving at approximately 22 miles per hour when they crashed, and the firemen of both trains, Charles Horning of Engine Number 4 and Abraham Desult from Engine Number 975, died as a result of their injuries. Charles Horning, the fireman on the express train was gruesomely pinned between the flaming hot boiler and the tentler. During his attempted rescue, the engineers and post-guards tried to pull his mangled body free, which resulted in his arms and legs being messily severed from his body.  

 

One train worker even reported that Horning’s watch still ticked on his severed arm. His body would never be fully recovered from the remains of the train.  

 

The fireman for the Mogul train, Abraham Desult, was flung into the boiler resulting in burns over 90 percent of his body. He was rushed to the hospital and died five hours later. 

 

For the Blue Ghost Tunnel, stories include people seeing blue wisps that are said to be the spirits of the Firemen. Alternate versions claim a blue mist haunts the tunnel and a ghost dog prowls the area at night. 

 

Some say the wisps do not belong to the Firemen, but to the souls of those whose nearby graves were flooded in the 1920’s. At that time, St. Peter’s Cemetery was flooded over to make way for a canal reservoir. Some families removed their beloved’s bones from the Lutheran burial ground before the flooding occurred but many graves remained. In 2009, a man found human remains in the area after water levels sank to a low level. 

 

Since people talk about feeling a shove, hearing footsteps and voices that don't belong to anyone. There are reports of blue balls of light to go asking with the most as well. There are many skeptics however and there have been a few paranormal investigators that have claimed they didn't find any proof of the tunnel being haunted. But hey… What do they know!

 

Ok we already made a Nickelback joke about Alberta… But now we're turning it lose and working for the weekend in the home of fucking Loverboy! While they're not from our next location exactly, they are from Calgary which from what the internet says it's about an hour and a half away… Close fucking enough.  We're not headed to Calgary as I said… We're headed to Banff! Banff is a resort town and one of Canada's most popular tourist destinations. Known for its mountainous surroundings and hot springs, it is a destination for outdoor sports and features extensive hiking, biking, scrambling and skiing destinations within the area. Sunshine Village, Ski Norquay and Lake Louise Ski Resort are the three nearby ski resorts located within the national park. We're not here for a sight seeing visit though… At least not a ski weekend. We're here to check out the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel. Since it opened to the public in 1888, the Banff Springs Hotel has seen history, celebrity, and rebuilds, but it’s also seen tragedy. Millions of guests have checked in, but a few have never checked out. Some even believe that they still roam the halls of the iconic concrete castle in the Rockies, today. In 132 years, the popular Alberta vacation spot has allegedly set the scene for horrific murders, suicides, and terrible accidents. Rooms have been boarded up, and the paranormal are frequently recorded.

 

Some are skeptical, but many claim to have seen it with their own eyes. The bride of the Banff Springs is perhaps the most ‘active’ shadow of the hotel, even appearing on collector’s stamps and coins. Like many ghost stories, retold hundreds of times, the details have become embellished and no one is quite sure who or what happened to the elusive women in white.

 

The most popular theory, dating back to 1920, was that a bride had fallen down a flight of stairs after she tripped on the hem of her dress. She’s typically reported, veiled and dancing throughout the grand ballroom.

 

Other unexplained apparitions and heavy activity have been recorded in room 873. Unfortunately, for adrenaline junkies or Shining fans looking to get a 5-star spook, the room doesn’t actually exist anymore. Apparently, after years of people claiming that they were terrorized in the suite, the hotel decided to permanently seal the room. Guests in the room have reported being awakened by screaming. When they turned on the lights, they would see bloody hand prints on the mirror. Depending on who tells the story, the hand prints either disappeared before hotel staff had a chance to clean them or wouldn’t come off at all. Although hotel staff claims that no such crime ever took place, the room is believed to be the place where a man killed his wife and daughter before taking his own life.

 

Stories of Sam McCAuley, a genial old Scotsman who was head bellman during the sixties and seventies, have been circulating around the hotel since his passing in 1975. Supposedly, Sam is a helpful sort of spirit, and most stories involving him mention some service he’s provided to staff or guests. One incident involved two elderly women calling the bell desk for assistance after they found their key would not work. The regular bellman was occupied with other duties and didn’t respond for 15 minutes. By the time he arrived at their door, it was unlocked. One of the women said an older bellman in a plaid jacket, matching Sam’s description exactly, had helped them. Other stories including guests seeing Sam haunting his old office (now a guest room) on the mezzanine floor as well as seeing apparitions and feeling cold spots on the sixth, seventh or ninth floors of the hotel. 

 

While they’d rather not mention room numbers, there are specific rooms that staff say are haunted aside from 873 Guests have reported having the pillows yanked out from under their heads while they slept or even being pushed off the bed by some unseen entity. Whatever spirits haunt this room, it’s safe to say that if they can’t rest in peace, they want to make sure you won’t either. 

 

Next up we roll up like today's Tom sawyer and live in the limelight with rush in Toronto! We are gonna check out the gibraltar point lighthouse. The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse is a lighthouse located on the Toronto Islands in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Begun in 1808, it is the oldest existing lighthouse on the Great Lakes, and one of Toronto's oldest buildings. The lighthouse is perhaps best known for the demise of its first keeper, German-born John Paul Radelmüller, whose 1815 murder forms the basis of Toronto's most enduring ghost story. Recent research has verified many aspects of the traditional tale of his death and identified the soldiers charged with but ultimately acquitted of the crime. A local legend is that the lighthouse is haunted by its first keeper John Paul Radelmüller. Rademuller disappeared under mysterious circumstances on January 2, 1815. The story goes that he was murdered by two soldiers who had been enjoying his home-brewed beer. Versions of the story differ slightly (one version told in the mid-2000s was that Rademuller was killed after the soldiers bought the beer, but saw it freeze on the cold winter night and assumed that the alcohol content was so low that the lighthouse keeper was trying to rip them off). But most agree that Rademuller was killed that night and dismembered by his killers, who buried his body in a few graves near the lighthouse. His ghost is said to still haunt the site.

The story was recorded by John Ross Robertson in 1908 in Landmarks of Toronto and has become a staple of spooky local lore ever since. Even in his telling, Robertson raises skepticism that the murder ever occurred, but he writes that he heard the story from the current lighthouse keeper, George Durnan, who had apparently gone looking for a body and had dug up a coffin with a jawbone. The plaque at the lighthouse mentions the ghost story and the jawbone, although this was a somewhat controversial decision. People report seeing the apparition of a man wandering the grounds. Some say it is Radelmüller looking for his lost limbs! Since nights bring unexplained meaning sounds and an unexplained mist forming. Inside the tower there's unexplained thumping, banging, and echos. There's also reports of footsteps and what sounds like something being dragged. Creepy lighthouse… Fun stuff!

 

You fuckers hungry? I'm sure Moody is. At any rate at our next stop maybe we'll hunt some orcs with 3 inches of blood or pet a skinny puppy, drink some beer with The Real McKenzies or get a shitty hair cut with Devin Townshend. Or maybe we can head down to the old spaghetti factory in Vancouver and go ghost hunting! The first Old Spaghetti Factory restaurant opened at this location in Gastown in 1970. Located in what was once the headquarters of W.H. Malkin Co. Ltd. (grocery wholesalers).

 

The Old Spaghetti Factory has four ghosts in residence. The first and best known is the spirit of a tram conductor. He frequents the old trolley car that’s parked inside the restaurant and contains dining tables. The trolley, Number 53, was once a part of the British Columbia Electric Railway Company’s fleet of electric trams. Built in nearby New Westminster in 1904, it served as a public transit trolley in and around Vancouver for many years. In 1957, it and dozens of other trolley cars were decommissioned in favour of the electric and diesel buses that are commonplace in the city today.

 

The trolley car was installed in the building in 1969, during the set-up of the restaurant. It’s up for debate whether the conductor’s ghost came with the trolley or not. Some say he died in a collision on an underground rail line below the restaurant. But this is unlikely because Vancouver’s trolley cars all ran at street level. And as the building has no historical connection with the B.C. Electric Railway Co., the ghost probably came with the tram car.

 

Tram Car 53Regardless of his origin, various staff members have seen the ghost of the uniformed conductor. He always appears seated at the same dining table inside the streetcar late at night, after closing. Also, place settings are moved by unseen hands, and inexplicable cold spots are experienced inside the car.

 

The second ghost at The Old Spaghetti Factory is a small, mischievous spirit with a ruddy face and bright red hair. Simply known as the Little Red Man or Looky-loo, he calls out to staff members by name and strolls through the kitchen. His favourite prank is to surprise female customers in the ladies’ washroom. On one particular occasion, two ladies saw the dwarfish man leave one of the cubicles, dressed in a red shirt and red long johns. After looking at them and laughing mischievously, he left through the washroom door. To their surprise, nobody else had seen the unmistakable man leave the washroom. It’s said that one of the women took a picture of the ghost. But when the film was developed, he appeared as a blur.

 

Nobody knows who the little red man is or why he haunts the restaurant. One thing’s for certain, however — he’s a devilish little fellow.

 

The restaurant’s third ghost is that of a young boy. In early 2012, this ghost gave a female server a terrible fright. She was in the back section of the restaurant, helping to close up for the night. While she was busy resetting some tables, a boy ran past her towards the very back. With it being so late and no customers left in the restaurant, she thought it was strange that a boy was running around. So she followed him. The boy ran under a table alongside the back wall, turned around and looked up at her. When she looked at his face, she saw that his eye sockets were empty. Terrified, she ran to the front of the restaurant to tell the manager about what she’d seen. She told him that she couldn’t work at the restaurant any longer and resigned on the spot.

 

A psychic visited the restaurant and identified the ghost of the little boy as Edward. She also pointed out that there’s a vortex located at the back of the premises. (A vortex is a supposed portal to other dimensions that enables spirits to come into our world. Some also believe that vortexes are linked to the Earth’s electromagnetic field. This influences where and when these portals open and close.) She also claimed that several small artifacts that decorate the restaurant have spirits attached to them.

 

The boy ghost is thought to be responsible for bending cutlery on tables in the back of the restaurant. One night during closing hours, a staff member walked through the back area to check that place settings had been properly laid out. He was stunned to see that each cutlery item was bent upwards on one of the tables. Other staff members saw the bent cutlery, too. But by the time they brought the restaurant manager over to see, it was all back to normal. In addition, the ghost sometimes places a dining chair on top of a table in the back section, which the staff find in the morning.

 

In 2015, another server had an encounter with Edward. After closing, she saw the boy dressed in a flat cap, wool jacket and corduroy pants run towards the back of the restaurant. She chased him and, as he’s done before, he ducked under a table. She ran to the front of the restaurant to take the manager back with her to see the boy. But when they got there he was gone. And then they noticed that the place settings had been disturbed — the cutlery was all in a pile in the middle of the tabletop.

 

On another occasion, a customer sat in a row of booths behind the entrance to the restaurant. She saw the boy reflected in a mirror on the back wall. He was using an arm to spin around a narrow column behind the front desk. When she turned around to look at the boy, he’d vanished.

 

The fourth ghost in the Old Spaghetti Factory is of a little girl who appears at a table in the front window. She sits and holds a balloon. Nobody knows who she is. Once, a friend of the restaurant’s general manager had a conversation with her that lasted several minutes. The little girl explained to him that she was looking for her mother. When he returned to the table after telling the manager about her, she’d disappeared. Dinner and a ghost show sounds pretty awesome.

 

Next up we're not going to hell but we'll still be in good company with The Dead With In Regina, Saskatchewan. And maybe we'll win some money and see a ghost or two! Casino Regina is a casino located on Saskatchewan Drive — (formerly South Railway Street) — in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. It operates in the city's former union station, a Tyndall and ashlar stone structure completed in 1912. The Beaux-Arts style Union Station was constructed in 1911-12 and was actually Regina's third train station; the first is now a museum in Broadview, Saskatchewan. The station was completed the same year the deadly "Regina Cyclone" struck the city, tearing through Wascana Park and gutting part of the downtown area. The building underwent a major expansion in 1931, and the original façade was redone in a simpler Art Deco style with Tyndall stone. As well, terrazzo floors, marble support columns and plaster molded ceilings where added to the interior.[1]

 

In the early 1990s, cutbacks to rail services throughout Canada lead to the closure of Regina's Union Station. The Station had been an important part of Regina's history and heritage since its opening in 1912. After the station's closure, its fate remained unknown for several years. Union Station was designated as an official heritage site in 1991.

 

By 1995, a $37 million construction project began to convert the vacant station into the province's second casino. In 1996, Casino Regina opened. The first recorded supernatural encounter occurred in the 1930s, when a ghostly image of a woman was captured in a photograph, even though the room was empty. To this day the photo haha in the casino! Below the Casino the mystery continues in one of the former holding cells. Rumour has it that one prisoner was so determined to avoid jail time that he committed suicide by hanging himself. His ghost is felt so often that many staff members refuse to even go into his cell, even though it is now used for storage. Not to many places you can gamble and see ghosts at the same time!

 

Next up we are heading to new brunswick… Look... apparently there is not one band or musician that most of you people would know from new brunswick so we got nothing here. The only one that any of us have heard of is Stompin Tom Connors, he sings a song called The Hockey Song which I guarantee you've heard of you've attended a hockey game.  Well with that dumb shit behind us let's head to the Dungarvon River. A young cook by the name of Ryan hired himself out to work in a lumber camp near the Dungarvon River.  When he arrived at camp, he brought all his worldly possessions with him.  Around his waist was fastened a money belt stuffed with coins and large bills.  Nobody knew where he got the money, but the young cook made no secret of the fact that there was plenty of it.

 

Ryan was a handsome fellow, tall and strong with ruddy cheeks and black, curly hair.  He was well liked and could whoop and holler better than anyone in the camp; and a good strong shout was an accomplishment much valued among woodsmen.

 

Every morning Ryan was the first one up so as to prepare breakfast and fill the lunch pails with bread and salt pork.  Then he would let out a tremendous ear-splitting whoop to get everyone up.  After breakfast the men would go off to work leaving young Ryan alone.

 

It was an unlucky day for Ryan, for on this particular morning, the camp boss decided to remain with the young cook.  The boss was a stranger, but he was respected and his orders were obeyed.

 

When the men returned late in the afternoon, they found young Ryan lying lifeless on the floor.  He was dead and his money belt was gone.

 

When asked what had happened, the boss said the young cook had taken sick suddenly and died.  None dared question him further but the woodsmen were suspicious.  Where was the money belt?

 

That night a raging storm swept upon the camp making it impossible to leave so the men had to bury the poor cook in a shallow grave in the forest.  As they trudged back to the camp they stopped dead in their tracks, for above the howling and moaning of the wind came the most dreadful whoops and screams anyone has ever heard.  It continued all that night and all the next day driving the men crazy with fear.  They left camp never to return.

 

For years the haunting sounds continued until Father Murdock, a priest from Renous, was asked to put the poor spirit to rest.

 

From over the wilderness grave Father Murdock read some holy words from the Bible and made a sign of the cross.

 

Some say Father Murdock succeeded in quieting the ghost but others declare the fearful cries of Ryan can be heard to this very day.

Next we are taking a long journey up to the Yukon Territory. There's a dude who's production and writing credits include Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Kendrick Lamar… Whatever… Fuck that guy… we are headed there to check it an old hotel and bar. The Caribou Hotel is one of the oldest buildings in the Southern Lakes Region and is one of the last two historic three-storey frame commercial buildings in Yukon dating from the early 20th century. This landmark structure stands in its original location and is one of the first properties recognized when entering Carcross. Its size, massing and historic character provide an anchor to Dawson Charlie Street, one of the last Yukon streets composed entirely of historic buildings relatively unchanged since 1910. The Caribou Hotel has housed one of Yukon's longest continuously operating food and lodging businesses. In Carcross, the hotel prospered under several owners including Dawson Charlie, who had made a fortune from his Klondike gold claims. But Dawson Charlie died on January 26, 1908, when he fell of the rail bridge at Carcross.

 

Edwin and Bessie Gideon then rented the hotel from his estate.

 

But the building burned to the ground on Christmas Eve in 1909. So the Gideons built a new hotel on the same spot, using wood from a building that had been torn down in nearby Conrad City.

 

The Caribou’s interesting history continued when, in 1918, Polly the Parrot moved in. Captain James Alexander, owner of Engineer Mine, had asked the Gideons to take care of the Parrot while he went outside. Alexander drowned when the Princess Sophia sank in 1918. Polly stayed with the Gideons who continued to operate the hotel. When Edwin Gideon died in 1925, Bessie ran it until she died in the hotel on October 27, 1933.

 

Since then, strange things have been seen at the Caribou. The hotel is said to be haunted by Bessie's ghost, considered a shy spirit. A story is told of the figure of a woman who often stands near a third floor window and bangs on the floorboards. She is thought to be the ghost of Bessie, described as a spirit that is neither friendly nor unfriendly.

 

Though she was said to have been buried in Carcross, a cemetery survey has been unable to find Bessie Gideon’s grave, but Polly the Parrot, who died in the hotel in 1972, is buried in the cemetery. The Caribou Hotel is now a Yukon historic site, soon to reopen under new management and - legend has it - still haunted. 

 

Well that's gonna do it for our first trip to creepy Canada. You politely mortified us and showed us a good time and we will definitely be back to run another train through creepy Canada! There's tons of crazy hotels and buildings with ghost stories. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the ones we picked and hopefully we did them some sort of justice. If there's some wrong info blame the fucking internet.

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#79 Guillermo Del Toro (director extraordinario)

“I cannot pontificate about it, but by the time I'm done, I will have done one movie, and it's all the movies I want.

People say, you know, "I like your Spanish movies more than I like your English-language movies because they are not as personal", and I go "Fuck, you're wrong!" Hellboy is as personal to me as Pan's Labyrinth. They're tonally different, and yes, of course you can like one more than the other – the other one may seem banal or whatever it is that you don't like. But it really is part of the same movie. You make one movie.

 

Hitchcock did one movie, all his life.”

 

—Guillermo del Toro, Twitch Film, January 15, 2013

 

Ok, passengers! First off, if you don’t know who Guermillo Del Toro is, press pause on this show, smack yourself in the mouth and then go watch Pan’s Labrynth, Hellboy or even Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and then come back to finish. Go on… git! We’ll wait!

 

Del Toro was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, the son of Guadalupe Gómez and Federico del Toro Torres, an automotive entrepreneur. Both of whom are of Spanish descent. He was raised in a strict Catholic household. Del Toro studied at the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Cinematográficos, at the University of Guadalajara. Having a taste for the macabre at an early age, del Toro decorated his family home with decidedly spooky elements. Del Toro loves monsters. . He claims that monsters used to crowd into his room at night, and he made a pact with them: If they let him go to the washroom, he’d be their friend for life. It worked, and del Toro says, “To this day, monsters are the thing I love most.” Del Toro liked monsters so much as a child that his Catholic grandmother, fearing for his soul, performed a real-life exorcism on him, and when that didn’t work, she actually performed a second one. Del Toro considers himself a book-person first and foremost, and there were two books that shaped his universe as a child. One was an encyclopedia of health (which led to an obsession with anatomy), and the other an encyclopedia of art.

 

When del Toro was about eight years old, he began experimenting with his father's Super 8 camera, making short films with Planet of the Apes toys and other objects. One short focused on a "serial killer potato" with ambitions of world domination; it murdered del Toro's mother and brothers before stepping outside and being crushed by a car.  Del Toro made about 10 short films before his first feature, including one titled Matilde, but only the last two, Doña Lupe and Geometria, have been made available.  He wrote four episodes and directed five episodes of the cult series La Hora Marcada, along with other Mexican filmmakers such as Emmanuel Lubezki and Alfonso Cuarón.Del Toro got his first big break when he made Cronos in 1993.The movie, about the effects of a device that confers immortality, won nine Ariel Awards from the Mexican Academy of Film—including best picture, best director, best screenplay, and best original story—and also received the International Critics’ Week grand prize at the Cannes film festival. 

 

Del Toro studied special effects and make-up with special-effects artist Dick Smith. Dick Smith had been a huge influence on del Toro throughout his life. He bought Smith’s make-up kit when The Exorcist came out in 1973, and applied for his make-up course in New York in 1987.  He spent 10 years as a special-effects make-up designer and formed his own company, Necropia. He also co-founded the Guadalajara International Film Festival. Later in his directing career, he formed his own production company, the Tequila Gang.

 

In 1997, at the age of 33, Guillermo was given a $30 million budget from Miramax Films to shoot another film, Mimic. After turning in a draft of his screenplay for Mimic to Miramax, the studio was not happy with how little was explained about the creatures at the centre of the story, and decided to commission a number of rewrites. One of these drafts was written by none other than Steven Soderbergh, but almost none of his work ended up in the film. Del Toro is not a fan of second unit work, and for his director’s cut of Mimic he managed to excise the majority of the second unit footage. Robert Rodriguez was one of the second unit directors on the film. Mimic was a very troubled production, and del Toro claims that his experience butting heads with studio execs at Miramax was actually more traumatic than his father’s kidnapping( which we'll discuss in a bit): “What was happening to me and the movie was far more illogical than kidnapping, which is brutal, but at least there are rules.” He was ultimately unhappy with the way Miramax had treated him during production, which led to his friend James Cameron almost coming to blows with Miramax co-founder and owner Harvey Weinstein during the 70th Academy Awards.

 

In 2001 Del toro made The Devil's backbone. The Devil’s Backbone, was produced by renowned Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar. Almodovar afforded del Toro a level of creative freedom that he’d never experienced up to that point, and the eternally grateful del Toro has tried to pay this gesture forward as a producer for many directors’ films. The film was an international co-production between Spain and Mexico. Del Toro wrote the first draft before writing his debut film Cronos. This "very different" version was set in the Mexican Revolution and focused not on a child's ghost but a "Christ with three arms". According to del Toro, and as drawn in his notebooks, there were many iterations of the story, some of which included antagonists who were a "doddering ... old man with a needle," a "desiccated" ghost with black eyes as a caretaker (instead of the living Jacinto who terrorizes the orphans), and "beings who are red from head to foot."

 

As to motivation for the villain, according to the actor who portrayed him (Eduardo Noriega), Jacinto "suffered a lot when he was a child at this orphanage. Somebody probably treated him wickedly: this is his heritage. And then there is the brutalizing effect of the War." Noriega further notes that "What Guillermo did was to write a biography of Jacinto (which went into Jacinto's parents, what they did in life, and more) and gave it to me."

 

DDT Studios in Barcelona created the final version of the crying ghost (victim and avenger) Santi, with his temple that resembled cracked, aged porcelain. The response was overwhelmingly positive, though it did not receive the critical success that Pan's Labyrinth would in 2006. Del Toro considers The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth to be companion pieces, and claims that they reveal “symmetries and reflections” if watched together.

 

His next film was on 2002, Blade 2. directed by Guillermo Del Toro and written by David S. Goyer, it is a sequel to the first film and the second part of the Blade film series, followed by Blade: Trinity. Guillermo del Toro was hired to direct Blade II by New Line production president Michael De Luca after Stephen Norrington turned down the offer to direct the sequel. Del Toro chose not to alter the script too much from the ideas created by Goyer and Snipes. "I wanted the movie to have a feeling of both a comic book and Japanese animation", said the director. "I resurrected those sources and viewed them again. I dissected most of the dailies from the first movie; I literally grabbed about four boxes of tapes and one by one saw every single tape from beginning to end until I perfectly understood where the language of the first film came from. I studied the style of the first one and I think Norrington used a tremendous narrative style. His work is very elegant". Blade II was released on March 22, 2002. This was during a period of the year (months March and April) considered to be a bad time for sequels to be released. Despite this, the film became the highest-grossing film of the Blade series, making $80 million in the United States and $150 million worldwide. 

 

Hellboy is a 2004 supernatural superhero film written and directed by Guillermo del Toro from a story by Del Toro and Peter Briggs. It is based on the Dark Horse Comics graphic novel Hellboy: Seed of Destruction by Mike Mignola. Del Toro and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola envisioned the film as a Ray Harryhausen film. The film was shopped and rejected by various studios for years due to studios disliking the title, script, and the fact that Perlman was cast as Hellboy.[7][8] Del Toro invited Harryhausen to teach the film's animators what made his effects techniques unique but he declined, feeling that modern films were too violent. While writing the script, Del Toro researched occult Nazi philosophies and used them as a reference for the film's opening scene. In an early version of the script, the gyroscope portal was described being made out of rails that formed into pentagrams, hexagrams, and inverted stars to illustrate the film's magic and occult elements. Del Toro chose to alter the origin from the comic to give main characters interconnected origins. Aside from working with Perlman before, Del Toro chose him for the title role because he felt Perlman can deliver subtlety and nuance with makeup.[23] Del Toro assigned his real life friend, Santiago Segura, to play the train driver who assaults Hellboy. The film was shot 6 days a week for 130 days, Mondays through Saturdays without a second unit. Sundays were reserved for editing.  Del Toro noted that the film could have commenced filming in 1998, however, the film had difficulty finding a committed studio due to the stigma Hollywood associated superhero and comic book films with, at the time. The action scenes were staged after Harryhausen films with little to no camera movement using wide shots. The cemetery sequence was filmed in a real cemetery in Prague.

 

Pan's labyrinth is a  2006 dark fantasy film written and directed by Guillermo del Toro. The film is  a Spanish-Mexican co-production. Del Toro stated that he considers the story to be a parable, influenced by fairy tales, and that it addresses and continues themes related to his earlier film The Devil's Backbone, to which Pan's Labyrinth is a spiritual successor, according to del Toro in his director's DVD commentary. The idea for Pan's Labyrinth came from Guillermo del Toro's notebooks, which he says are filled with "doodles, ideas, drawings and plot bits". He had been keeping these notebooks for twenty years. At one point during production, he left the notebook in a taxi in London and was distraught, but the cabbie returned it to him two days later. Though he originally wrote a story about a pregnant woman who falls in love with a faun,[12] Sergi López said that del Toro described the final version of the plot a year and a half before filming. Lopez said that "for two hours and a half he explained to me all the movie, but with all the details, it was incredible, and when he finished I said, 'You have a script?' He said, 'No, nothing is written'". López agreed to act in the movie and received the script one year later; he said that "it was exactly the same, it was incredible. In his little head he had all the history with a lot of little detail, a lot of characters, like now when you look at the movie, it was exactly what he had in his head". 

 

Del Toro got the idea of the faun from childhood experiences with "lucid dreaming". He stated on The Charlie Rose Show that every midnight, he would wake up, and a faun would gradually step out from behind the grandfather's clock. Originally, the faun was supposed to be a classic half-man, half-goat faun fraught with beauty. But in the end, the faun was altered into a goat-faced creature almost completely made out of earth, moss, vines, and tree bark. Some of the  works he drew on for inspiration include Lewis Carroll's Alice books, Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones, Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan and The White People, Lord Dunsany's The Blessing of Pan, Algernon Blackwood's Pan's Garden and Francisco Goya's works. In 2004, del Toro said: "Pan is an original story. Some of my favourite writers (Borges, Blackwood, Machen, Dunsany) have explored the figure of the god Pan and the symbol of the labyrinth. These are things that I find very compelling and I am trying to mix them and play with them." It was also influenced by the illustrations of Arthur Rackham.There are differing ideas about the film's religious influences. Del Toro himself has said that he considers Pan's Labyrinth "a truly profane film, a layman's riff on Catholic dogma", but that his friend Alejandro González Iñárritu described it as "a truly Catholic film". Del Toro's explanation is "once a Catholic, always a Catholic," however he also admits that the Pale Man's preference for children rather than the feast in front of him is intended as a criticism of the Catholic Church. Additionally, the priest's words during the torture scene were taken as a direct quote from a priest who offered communion to political prisoners during the Spanish Civil War: "Remember my sons, you should confess what you know because God doesn't care what happens to your bodies; He already saved your souls."

 

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a 2008 American superhero film based on the fictional character Hellboy created by Mike Mignola. The film was written and directed by  del Toro and is a sequel to the 2004 film Hellboy, which del Toro also directed. Ron Perlman reprises his starring role as the eponymous character. Hellboy II: The Golden Army was released by Universal Pictures.The director sought to create a film trilogy with the first sequel anticipated for release in 2006. Revolution Studios planned to produce the film and distribute it through a deal with Columbia Pictures, but by 2006, their distribution deal wasn't renewed and Revolution began refocusing on exploiting their film library. In August 2006, Universal Pictures acquired the project with the intent to finance and distribute the sequel, which was newly scheduled to be released in summer of 2008. Production was scheduled to begin in April 2007 in Etyek, Hungary (near Budapest) and London, England. del Toro explored several concepts for the sequel, initially planning to recreate the classic versions of Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolf Man. He and comic book creator Mike Mignola also spent a few days adapting the Almost Colossus story, featuring Roger the Homunculus. They then found it easier to create an original story based on folklore, because del Toro was planning Pan's Labyrinth, and Mignola's comics were becoming increasingly based on mythology. Later, del Toro pitched a premise to Revolution Studios that involved four Titans from the four corners of Earth—Wind, Water, Fire, and Earth—before he replaced the Titans with a Golden Army. Mignola described the theme of the sequel, "The focus is more on the folklore and fairy tale aspect of Hellboy. It's not Nazis, machines and mad scientists but the old gods and characters who have been kind of shoved out of our world."

 

Pacific Rim is a 2013 science-fiction monster film directed by del Toro. In February 2006, it was reported that Guillermo del Toro would direct Travis Beacham's fantasy screenplay, Killing on Carnival Row, but the project never materialized.[48] Beacham conceived Pacific Rim the following year. While walking on the beach near Santa Monica Pier, the screenwriter imagined a giant robot and a giant monster fighting to the death. "They just sort of materialized out of the fog, these vast, godlike things." He later conceived the idea that each robot had two pilots, asking "what happens when one of those people dies?" Deciding this would be "a story about loss, moving on after loss, and dealing with survivor's guilt", Beacham commenced writing the film. On May 28, 2010, it was reported that Legendary Pictures had purchased Beacham's detailed 25-page film treatment, now titled Pacific Rim.

 

On July 28, 2010, it was reported that del Toro would next direct an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness for Universal Studios, with James Cameron producing.[51] When del Toro met with Legendary Pictures to discuss the possibility of collaborating with them on a film, he was intrigued by Beacham's treatment—still a "very small pitch" at this point. Del Toro struck a deal with Legendary: while directing At the Mountains of Madness, he would produce and co-write Pacific Rim; because of the films' conflicting production schedules, he would direct Pacific Rim only if At the Mountains of Madness were cancelled. Tom Cruise was attached to star in the Lovecraft adaptation. On March 7, 2011, it was reported that Universal would not proceed with At the Mountains of Madness because del Toro was unwilling to compromise on the $150 million budget and R rating. The director later reflected, "When it happened, this has never happened to me, but I actually cried that weekend a lot. I don't want to sound like a puny soul, but I really was devastated. I was weeping for the movie." The project collapsed on a Friday, and del Toro signed to direct Pacific Rim the following Monday. Del Toro spent a year working with Beacham on the screenplay, and is credited as co-writer. He introduced ideas he had always wished to see in the genre, such as a Kaiju birth and a Kaiju attack seen from a child's perspective. The film was shot using Red Epic cameras.[65] At first Guillermo del Toro decided not to shoot or convert the film to 3D, as the effect would not work due to the sheer size of the film's robots and monsters, explaining

 

I didn't want to make the movie 3D because when you have things that big ... the thing that happens naturally, you're looking at two buildings lets say at 300 feet [away], if you move there is no parallax. They're so big that, in 3D, you barely notice anything no matter how fast you move ... To force the 3D effects for robots and monsters that are supposed to be big you are making their [perspective] miniaturized, making them human scale.

 

It was later announced that the film would be converted to 3D, with the conversion taking 40 weeks longer than most. Del Toro said: "What can I tell you? I changed my mind. I'm not running for office. I can do a Romney." 

 

Del Toro envisioned Pacific Rim as an earnest, colorful adventure story, with an "incredibly airy and light feel", in contrast to the "super-brooding, super-dark, cynical summer movie". The director focused on "big, beautiful, sophisticated visuals" and action that would satisfy an adult audience, but has stated his "real hope" is to introduce the Kaiju and mecha genres to a generation of children. While the film draws heavily on these genres, it avoids direct references to previous works. Del Toro intended to create something original but "madly in love" with its influences, instilled with "epic beauty" and "operatic grandeur". The film was to honor the Kaiju and mecha genres while creating an original stand-alone film, something "conscious of the heritage, but not a pastiche or an homage or a greatest hits of everything". 

The director made a point of starting from scratch, without emulating or referencing any previous examples of those genres. He cautioned his designers not to turn to films like Gamera, Godzilla, or The War of the Gargantuas for inspiration, stating: "I didn't want to be postmodern, or referential, or just belong to a genre. I really wanted to create something new, something madly in love with those things. I tried to bring epic beauty to it, and drama and operatic grandeur."

 

Crimson Peak is a 2015 gothic romance film directed by  del Toro and written by del Toro and Matthew Robbins. The story, set in Victorian era England, follows an aspiring author who travels to a remote Gothic mansion in the English hills with her new husband and his sister. There, she must decipher the mystery behind the ghostly visions that haunt her new home. Del Toro and Robbins wrote the original spec script after the release of Pan's Labyrinth in 2006. It was sold quietly to Donna Langley at Universal. Del Toro planned to direct the film, but postponed the project to make Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and then again to work on The Hobbit films. Langley suggested that del Toro produce the film for another director, but he could not find one he deemed suitable. While directing Pacific Rim, del Toro developed a good working relationship with Legendary Pictures' Thomas Tull and Jon Jashni, who asked what he wanted to do next. Del Toro sent them his screenplays for a film adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness, a Western adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, and Crimson Peak. The producers deemed the last of these "the best project for us, just the right size". Universal allowed del Toro to move the project to Legendary, with the caveat that they could put up money for a stake in the film.

 

Del Toro called the film a "ghost story and gothic romance". He has described it as "a very set-oriented, classical but at the same time modern take on the ghost story", and said that it would allow him to play with the genres' conventions while subverting their rules. He stated, "I think people are getting used to horror subjects done as found footage or B-value budgets. I wanted this to feel like a throwback."

 

Del Toro wanted the film to honor the "grand dames" of the haunted house genre, namely Robert Wise's The Haunting and Jack Clayton's The Innocents. The director intended to make a large-scale horror film in the tradition of those he grew up watching, such as The Omen, The Exorcist, and The Shining. He cited the latter as "another Mount Everest of the haunted house movie", praising the high production values and Stanley Kubrick's control over the large sets.

 

British playwright Lucinda Coxon was enlisted to rewrite the script with del Toro, in hopes of bringing it a "proper degree of perversity and intelligence", but she is not credited on the finished film.

 

The Shape of Water is a 2017 romantic fantasy drama film directed del Toro and written by del Toro and Vanessa Taylor. Set in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1962, the story follows a mute cleaner at a high-security government laboratory who falls in love with a captured humanoid amphibian creature. Filming took place in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, between August and November 2016.  The idea for The Shape of Water formed during del Toro's breakfast with Daniel Kraus in 2011, with whom he later co-wrote the novel Trollhunters. It shows similarities to the 2015 short film The Space Between Us. It was also primarily inspired by del Toro's childhood memories of seeing Creature from the Black Lagoon and wanting to see the Gill-man and Kay Lawrence (played by Julie Adams) succeed in their romance. When del Toro was in talks with Universal to direct a remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon, he tried pitching a version focused more on the creature's perspective, where the Creature ended up together with the female lead, but the studio executives rejected the concept.

 

Del Toro set the film during the 1960s Cold War era to counteract today's heightened tensions:

 

"if I say once upon a time in 1962, it becomes a fairy tale for troubled times. People can lower their guard a little bit more and listen to the story and listen to the characters and talk about the issues, rather than the circumstances of the issues".  In an interview with IndieWire about the film, del Toro said:

 

This movie is a healing movie for me. ... For nine movies I rephrased the fears of my childhood, the dreams of my childhood, and this is the first time I speak as an adult, about something that worries me as an adult. I speak about trust, otherness, sex, love, where we're going. These are not concerns that I had when I was nine or seven."

 

The Shape of Water grossed $63.9 million in the United States and Canada, and $131.4 million in other countries, for a total of $195.2 million. The film had received a universally favorable response from critics and audiences. 

 

Pinocchio is an upcoming stop-motion animated musical dark fantasy film co-written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, based on Gris Grimly’s design from his 2002 edition of the 1883 Italian novel The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. It was written from a screenplay by del Toro, Gris Grimly, Patrick McHale and Matthew Robbins and a story by del Toro and Robbins. The film marks the animated feature film directorial debut of Guillermo del Toro. In 2008, Guillermo del Toro announced that his next project, a darker adaptation of the Italian novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, was in development. He has called Pinocchio his passion project, stating that: "no art form has influenced my life and my work more than animation and no single character in history has had as deep of a personal connection to me as Pinocchio", and "I've wanted to make this movie for as long as I can remember". On February 17, 2011, it was announced that Gris Grimly and Mark Gustafson would co-direct a stop motion animated Pinocchio film written by Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins based by Grimly's designs, with del Toro producing along with The Jim Henson Company and Pathé. On May 17, 2012, del Toro took over for Grimly. On February 2012, Del Toro released some concept arts with the designs of Pinocchio, Geppetto, the Talking Cricket, Mangiafuoco and the Fox and the Cat. On July 30, 2012, it was announced that the film would be produced and animated by ShadowMachine.

 

On January 23, 2017, Patrick McHale was announced to co-write the script with del Toro. On August 31, 2017, del Toro told IndieWire and at the 74th Venice International Film Festival that the film need a budget increase of $35 million more dollars or it would be cancelled. On November 8, 2017, he reported that the project was not happening, because no studios were willing to finance it.[9] At one point, Matthew Robbins considered making the movie as a 2D-animated film with French artist Joann Sfar to bring the costs down, but del Toro eventually decided that it had to be stop-motion, even if the higher budget made it harder get greenlighted. However, on October 22, 2018, it was announced that the film had been revived, with Netflix acquiring it. 

 

So that's his  film history as a director let's get into some other aspects of his life!!

He was married to Lorenza Newton, cousin of Mexican singer Guadalupe Pineda. They have two children. He started dating Lorenza when both were studying at the Instituto de Ciencias in Guadalajara. Del Toro and Newton separated in early 2017, and divorced in September of the same year. He maintains residences in Toronto and Los Angeles, and returns to Guadalajara every six weeks to visit his family.

 

He also owns two houses devoted exclusively to his collection of books, poster artwork and other belongings pertaining to his work. He explains, "As a kid, I dreamed of having a house with secret passages and a room where it rained 24 hours a day. The point of being over 40 is to fulfill the desires you've been harboring since you were 7."

 

Politics Edit

In a 2007 interview, del Toro described his political position as "a little too liberal". He pointed out that the villains in most of his films, such as the industrialist in Cronos, the Nazis in Hellboy, and the Francoists in Pan's Labyrinth, are united by the common attribute of authoritarianism. "I hate structure. I'm completely anti-structural in terms of believing in institutions. I hate them. I hate any institutionalised social, religious, or economic holding."

 

Religion Edit

Del Toro was raised Roman Catholic. In a 2009 interview with Charlie Rose, he described his upbringing as excessively "morbid," saying, "I mercifully lapsed as a Catholic ... but as Buñuel used to say, 'I'm an atheist, thank God.'" Though insisting that he is spiritually "not with Buñuel" and that "once a Catholic, always a Catholic, in a way." He concluded, "I believe in Man. I believe in mankind, as the worst and the best that has happened to this world." He has also responded to the observation that he views his art as his religion by saying, "It is. To me, art and storytelling serve primal, spiritual functions in my daily life. Whether I'm telling a bedtime story to my kids or trying to mount a movie or write a short story or a novel, I take it very seriously." Nevertheless, he became a "raging atheist" after seeing a pile of human fetuses while volunteering at a Mexican hospital. He has claimed to be horrified by the way the Catholic Church complied with Francoist Spain, down to having a character in his film quote what actual priests would say to Republican faction members in concentration camps.[66] Upon discovering the religious beliefs of C.S. Lewis, Del Toro has stated that he no longer feels comfortable enjoying his work, despite having done so beforehand. He describes Lewis as "too Catholic" for him, despite the fact that Lewis was never a Catholic.

 

However, Del Toro isn't entirely disparaging of Catholicism, and his background continues to influence his work. While discussing The Shape of Water, Del Toro discussed the Catholic influence on the film, stating, "A very Catholic notion is the humble force, or the force of humility, that gets revealed as a god-like figure toward the end. It's also used in fairy tales. In fairy tales, in fact, there is an entire strand of tales that would be encompassed by the title 'The Magical Fish.' And [it's] not exactly a secret that a fish is a Christian symbol." In the same interview, he still maintained that he does not believe in an afterlife, stating "I don't think there is life beyond death, I don't. But I do believe that we get this clarity in the last minute of our life. The titles we achieved, the honors we managed, they all vanish. You are left alone with you and your deeds and the things you didn't do. And that moment of clarity gives you either peace or the most tremendous fear, because you finally have no cover, and you finally realize exactly who you are."

 

In 2010, del Toro revealed that he was a fan of video games, describing them as "the comic books of our time" and "a medium that gains no respect among the intelligentsia". He has stated that he considers Ico and Shadow of the Colossus to be masterpieces.

 

He has cited Gadget Invention, Travel, & Adventure, Cosmology of Kyoto, Asteroids and Galaga as his favorite games.

 

Del Toro's favorite film monsters are Frankenstein's monster, the Alien, Gill-man, Godzilla, and the Thing. Frankenstein in particular has a special meaning for him, in both film and literature, as he claims he has a "Frankenstein fetish to a degree that is unhealthy", and that it's "the most important book of my life, so you know if I get to it, whenever I get to it, it will be the right way". He has Brazil, Nosferatu, Freaks and Bram Stoker's Dracula listed among his favourite films.

 

Del Toro is also highly interested in Victorian culture. He said: "I have a room of my library at home called 'The Dickens room'. It has every work by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and many other Victorian novelists, plus hundreds of works about Victorian London and its customs, etiquette, architecture. I'm a Jack the Ripper aficionado, too. My museum-slash-home has a huge amount of Ripperology in it".

 

Father's 1997 kidnapping Edit

Around 1997, del Toro's father, Federico del Toro Torres, was kidnapped in Guadalajara. Del Toro's family had to pay twice the amount originally asked for as a ransom; immediately after learning of the kidnapping, fellow filmmaker James Cameron, a friend of Del Toro since they met during the production of 1993's Cronos, withdrew over $1 million in cash from his bank account and gave it to Del Toro to help pay the ransom. After the ransom was paid, Federico was released, having spent 72 days kidnapped; the culprits were never apprehended, and the money of both Cameron and Del Toro's family was never recovered. The event prompted del Toro, his parents, and his siblings to move abroad. In a 2008 interview with Time magazine, he said this about the kidnapping of his father: "Every day, every week, something happens that reminds me that I am in involuntary exile [from my country]."

 

Del Toro has directed a wide variety of films, from comic book adaptations (Blade II, Hellboy) to historical fantasy and horror films, two of which are set in Spain in the context of the Spanish Civil War under the authoritarian rule of Francisco Franco. These two films, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, are among his most critically acclaimed works. They share similar settings, protagonists and themes with the 1973 Spanish film The Spirit of the Beehive, widely considered to be the finest Spanish film of the 1970s.

 

Del Toro views the horror genre as inherently political, explaining, "Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution, which is the most reprehensible type of fairy tale: Don't wander into the woods, and always obey your parents. The other type of fairy tale is completely anarchic and antiestablishment."

 

He is close friends with two other prominent and critically praised Mexican filmmakers Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu. The three often influence each other's directorial decisions, and have been interviewed together by Charlie Rose. Cuarón was one of the producers of Pan's Labyrinth, while Iñárritu assisted in editing the film. The three filmmakers, referred to as the "Three Amigos" founded the production company Cha Cha Cha Films, whose first release was 2008's Rudo y Cursi.

 

Del Toro has also contributed to the web series Trailers from Hell.

 

In April 2008, del Toro was hired by Peter Jackson to direct the live-action film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. On May 30, 2010, del Toro left the project due to extended delays brought on by MGM's financial troubles. Although he did not direct the films, he is credited as co-writer in An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies.

 

On December 1, 2008, del Toro expressed interest in a stop-motion remake to Roald Dahl's novel The Witches, collaborating with Alfonso Cuarón. On June 19, 2018 it was announced that Del Toro and Cuarón would instead be attached as Executive Producers on the remake with Robert Zemeckis helming the project as Director and Screenwriter.

 

On June 2, 2009, del Toro's first novel, The Strain, was released. It is the first part of an apocalyptic vampire trilogy co-authored by del Toro and Chuck Hogan. The second volume, The Fall, was released on September 21, 2010. The final installment, The Night Eternal, followed in October 2011. Del Toro cites writings of Antoine Augustin Calmet, Montague Summers and Bernhardt J. Hurwood among his favourites in the non-literary form about vampires.

 

On December 9, 2010, del Toro launched Mirada Studios with his long-time cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, director Mathew Cullen and executive producer Javier Jimenez. Mirada was formed in Los Angeles, California to be a collaborative space where they and other filmmakers can work with Mirada's artists to create and produce projects that span digital production and content for film, television, advertising, interactive and other media. Mirada launched as a sister company to production company Motion Theory.

 

Del Toro directed Pacific Rim, a science fiction film based on a screenplay by del Toro and Travis Beacham. In the film, giant monsters rise from the Pacific Ocean and attack major cities, leading humans to retaliate with gigantic mecha suits called Jaegers. Del Toro commented, "This is my most un-modest film, this has everything. The scale is enormous and I'm just a big kid having fun." The film was released on July 12, 2013 and grossed $411 million at the box office.

 

Del Toro directed "Night Zero", the pilot episode of The Strain, a vampire horror television series based on the novel trilogy of the same name by del Toro and Chuck Hogan. FX has commissioned the pilot episode, which del Toro scripted with Hogan and was filmed in Toronto in September 2013. FX ordered a thirteen-episode first season for the series on November 19, 2013, and series premiered on July 13, 2014.

 

After The Strain's pilot episode, del Toro directed Crimson Peak, a gothic horror film he co-wrote with Matthew Robbins and Lucinda Cox. Del Toro has described the film as "a very set-oriented, classical but at the same time modern take on the ghost story", citing The Omen, The Exorcist and The Shining as influences. Del Toro also stated, "I think people are getting used to horror subjects done as found footage or B-value budgets. I wanted this to feel like a throwback." Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska, and Charlie Hunnam starred in the film. Production began February 2014 in Toronto, with an April 2015 release date initially planned. The studio later pushed the date back to October 2015, to coincide with the Halloween season.

 

He was selected to be on the jury for the main competition section of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

 

Del Toro directed the Cold War drama film The Shape of Water, starring Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, and Michael Shannon.

 

Filming began on August 15, 2016 in Toronto, and wrapped twelve weeks later.

 

On August 31, 2017, the film premiered in the main competition section of the 74th Venice International Film Festival, where it was awarded the Golden Lion for best film, making Del Toro the first Mexican director to win the award. The film became a critical and commercial success and would go on to win multiple accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Picture, with del Toro winning the Academy Award for Best Director.

 

Del Toro collaborated with Japanese video game designer Hideo Kojima to produce P.T., a video game intended to be a "playable trailer" for the ninth Silent Hill game, which was cancelled. The demo was also removed from the PlayStation Network.

 

At the D23 Expo in 2009, his Double Dare You production company and Disney announced a production deal for a line of darker animated films. The label was announced with one original animated project, Trollhunters. However, del Toro moved his deal to DreamWorks in late 2010. From 2016 to 2018, Trollhunters was released to great acclaim on Netflix and "is tracking to be its most-watched kids original ever".

 

In 2017, Del Toro had an exhibition of work at the Minneapolis Institute of Art titled Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters, featuring his collection of paintings, drawings, maquettes, artifacts, and concept film art. The exhibition ran from March 5, 2017, to May 28, 2017.

 

In 2019, del Toro appeared in Hideo Kojima's video game Death Stranding, providing his likeness for the character Deadman.

 

Upcoming projects Edit

In 2008, del Toro announced Pinocchio, a dark stop-motion film based on the Italian novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, co-directed by Adam Parrish King, with The Jim Henson Company as production company, and music by Nick Cave. The project had been in development for over a decade. The pre-production was begun by the studio ShadowMachine. In 2017, del Toro announced that Patrick McHale is co-writing the script of the film. In the same year, del Toro revealed at the 74th Venice International Film Festival that the film will be reimagined during the rise of Benito Mussolini, and that he would need $35 million to make it. In November 2017, it was reported that del Toro had cancelled the project because no studios were willing to finance it. In October 2018, it was announced that the film had been revived, with Netflix backing the project. Netflix had previously collaborated with del Toro on Trollhunters. Many of the same details of the project remain the same, but with Mark Gustafson now co-directing rather than Adam Parrish King.

 

In December 2017, Searchlight Pictures announced that del Toro would direct a new adaptation of the 1946 novel Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham, the screenplay of which he co-wrote with Kim Morgan. In 2019, it was reported that Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette and Rooney Mara had closed deals to star in the film, which went into production in January 2020.

 

https://aznmodern.com/2017/10/10/13-facts-guillermo-del-toro-may-not-know/

 

https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/all-guillermo-del-toro-movies-ranked-by-tomatometer/

 

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