Archives at Zinester: Conspiracy Journal. Conspiracy Journal. Science & Technology

- Glitches Cited in Early Voting -
- The Scariest Hauntings of All Time -
- Before Roswell, There Was Aurora -
- Dover’s Demon Lives on in Local Lore -
AND - The Beast of Bladenboro -

All these exciting stories and MORE in this week's issue of
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- DON'T LET THEM STEAL YOUR VOTE DEPARTMENT -

Glitches Cited in Early Voting

Early voters are urged to cast their ballots with care following scattered reports of problems with heavily used machines.

After a week of early voting, a handful of glitches with electronic voting machines have drawn the ire of voters, reassurances from elections supervisors -- and a caution against the careless casting of ballots.

Several South Florida voters say the choices they touched on the electronic screens were not the ones that appeared on the review screen -- the final voting step.

Election officials say they aren't aware of any serious voting issues. But in Broward County, for example, they don't know how widespread the machine problems are because there's no process for poll workers to quickly report minor issues and no central database of machine problems.

In Miami-Dade, incidents are logged and reported daily and recorded in a central database. Problem machines are shut down.

''In the past, Miami-Dade County would send someone to correct the machine on site,'' said Lester Sola, county supervisor of elections. Now, he said, ``We close the machine down and put a seal on it.''

Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist.

That's exactly the kind of problem that sends conspiracy theorists into high gear -- especially in South Florida, where a history of problems at the polls have made voters particularly skittish.

A poll worker then helped Rudolf, but it took three tries to get it right, Reed said.

''I'm shocked because I really want . . . to trust that the issues with irregularities with voting machines have been resolved,'' said Reed, a paralegal. "It worries me because the races are so close.''

Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot -- essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.

''It is resolved right there at the early-voting site,'' Cooney said.

Broward poll workers keep a log of all maintenance done on machines at each site. But the Supervisor of Elections office doesn't see that log until the early voting period ends. And a machine isn't taken out of service unless the poll clerk decides it's a chronic poor performer that can't be fixed.

Cooney said no machines have been removed during early voting, and she is not aware of any serious problems.

In Miami-Dade, two machines have been taken out of service during early voting. No votes were lost, Sola said.

Joan Marek, 60, a Democrat from Hollywood, was also stunned to see Charlie Crist on her ballot review page after voting on Thursday. ''Am I on the voting screen again?'' she wondered. "Well, this is too weird."

Marek corrected her ballot and alerted poll workers at the Hollywood satellite courthouse, who she said told her they'd had previous problems with the same machine.

Poll workers did some work on her machine when she finished voting, Marek said. But no report was made to the Supervisor of Elections office and the machine was not removed, Cooney said.

Workers at the Hollywood poll said there had been no voting problems on Friday.

Mauricio Raponi wanted to vote for Democrats across the board at the Lemon City Library in Miami on Thursday. But each time he hit the button next to the candidate, the Republican choice showed up. Raponi, 53, persevered until the machine worked. Then he alerted a poll worker.

Hampering the vote

Polls show Democrats picking up between 20 and 30 House seats, enough to take control of the House. But brace yourself for a very long evening -- that could go on for days.

The Republicans' superior ground operation -- they spend more on targeting voters and getting out the vote -- has received some attention in the press. But far more ominous is the organized effort to suppress voter turnout, directed entirely against groups likely to vote for Democrats.

An exhaustive report, "Voting in 2006: Have We Solved the Problems of 2004?" by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Century Foundation, and Common Cause, catalogs new, sickening assaults on our democracy:

Hurdles to voter registration. Several states, led predictably by Florida and Ohio, have added criminal penalties for voter-registration efforts that violate deliberately complicated rules. In Florida, the Legislature added fines for nonpartisan groups that turn in registration materials late. This put League of Women Voters volunteer efforts in many minority areas out of business.

In Ohio, where the notorious secretary of state, Ken Blackwell, is also the Republican candidate for governor, technical violations of complex voter-registration laws are now felonies. Republicans even tried to disqualify Blackwell's opponent, Ted Strickland, from running, on the ground that he had voted in past years from two different Ohio addresses (where he lived).

Excessive ID requirements. In states that require voter ID, common-sense documentation such as a utility bill or tax receipt has long been accepted. Other states have accepted a signed affidavit or signature match, and experienced no fraud problems. But in several Republican-controlled states, such as Florida, Georgia, and Missouri, photo-ID requirements have been added, disqualifying people -- mostly poor, elderly, minority (and likely to vote for Democrats) -- who lack driver's licenses or passports or special voter cards. In Florida, the requirement could disqualify 300,000 voters.

Impediments to voting. In Arizona, an anti-immigrant ballot initiative passed in 2004 requires voters to bring proof of citizenship. In the first two months after the initiative passed, 70 percent of voter-registration applications in Maricopa County (Phoenix) were rejected for lack of adequate documentation. In Ohio, where voters in heavily Democratic and minority precincts waited for as long as 10 hours and countless gave up because of mysterious shortages of voting machines, the state belatedly required roughly equal allocation of voting machines. This remedy takes effect in 2013!

Polls have Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown leading Republican incumbent Mike DeWine by about eight points. But one Ohio activist told me, "We put the margin of theft at about seven points."

Mechanical manipulation. Immense problems remain with voting machines, most notoriously "touch-screen" machines that leave no paper trail . If you want to be really terrified, check out a nine-minute video produced by three computer scientists at Princeton, which shows how to hack into a Diebold machine to change the recorded vote (See itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting).

A recent report by The New York Times suggests that impediments to voting deter turnout in other ways. They contribute to a why-bother mindset, particularly among black and Hispanic voters.

In GOP-controlled states like Florida, Ohio, Missouri, Arizona, and in hundreds of counties elsewhere in Red America, millions of citizens will show up on Election Day only to be turned away for lack of ID, or to find that their names are not listed on voter rolls. The Help America Vote Act allows these spurned voters to cast provisional ballots. But it will be days before election officials, and in many cases judges, determine which of these ballots count. In many close races, the number of contested ballots will be larger than the election-night margin.

Republicans defend these vote-suppression measures as necessary to combat fraud. Once, big-city Democratic machines made sure people voted "early and often." But the right has been unable to produce evidence of deliberate ballot fraud today.

In Washington State, where Democrat Christine Gregoire won the governorship in 2004 by 133 votes, Republican litigators spent millions seeking improperly cast ballots. All they found were exactly five former felons who had unintentionally neglected the paperwork necessary to restore their franchise.

The real fraud is the theft of our democracy, by deliberate suppression of the right to vote and to have one's vote counted. The popular revulsion against the Bush administration is so powerful that even with these abuses, Democrats are likely to take back the House. Then the recovery of American democracy can begin.

Source: The Miami Herald/Boston Globe
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/politics/elections/15869924.htm
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/10/28/
hampering_the_vote/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+-+Editorial%2FOp-ed+pages

- LET ME HEAR YOU SAY "BOO" DEPARTMENT -

The Scariest Hauntings of All Time

Here are some true and terrifying ghost stories that will keep many night lights burning.

Hollywood creates many spooky films that can be great fun to watch, but there's nothing fun about a real haunting. Unexplained things... unspeakable things... have terrorized homes that were once as quiet and normal as yours or mine. From some unfathomable place, dark and sinister forces have crept into our reality with a mission of disturbance, fright and even violence.
Here are some of the creepiest true accounts of hauntings ever recorded.

The Proctor Haunting

Have you ever spent the night in a house reputed to be haunted? This story could make you reconsider.

It was the autumn of 1834 when the Proctors, a Quaker family, began to notice disturbances in their house near Tyneside in northern England. Every member of the family complained of hearing footsteps and whistling that could not be accounted for. The sound of a clock being wound could not be explained. Over a six-year period, the intensity of the haunting increased. The stomping of angry footsteps echoed throughout the house, contrasted by faint whisperings. And then there were the apparitions. The white figure of a strange woman was seen in a window by a neighbor, and then seen in other rooms of the house by the Proctors. A disembodied white face appeared over a stair railing, seeming to watch the family.

The Proctor's plight was known throughout the area, and then, as now, there were skeptics who were certain they could explain it all away. On July 3, 1840, Edward Drury, a local doctor, volunteered to spend a night in the house with his colleague, T. Hudson, while the Proctors were away. Dr. Drury armed himself with pistols and waited on the third floor landing, unafraid of what he was sure were mundane house noises. Less than an hour into his vigil, Drury began to hear soft footfalls, then a knocking and an echoing cough. Hudson had fallen asleep. But at about 1 a.m., Dr. Drury watched in horror as a closet door slowly swung open out of which floated toward him the ghostly lady in white. Drury screamed and charged the phantom, succeeding only in tripping over his friend Hudson. What next happened the doctor could not recall. "I have since learned," he later wrote, "that I was carried downstairs in an agony of fear and terror."

Some years later the Proctors could stand no more of the unexplained manifestations and vacated the house in 1847. The building was later torn down.

The Freeborn Haunting

If a previous owner has died in the house in which you now reside, you might want to think twice before you redecorate.

After Mrs. Meg Lyons died suddenly in her Bakersfield, California house, it had remained untouched when Mrs. Frances Freeborn moved in during the month of November, 1981. Every piece of Mrs. Lyons' furniture was just as she left it. Her clothes still filled the closets and dressers. Eager to make the house her own, Mrs. Freeborn set about cleaning out the house and refurbishing it to her liking. And that's when the trouble started.

The first unsettling mystery was a loud thumping noise coming from the kitchen area, which Freeborn at first dismissed as noisy plumbing. But then there was other strangeness. Freeborn habitually closed all doors and cabinets before retiring to bed, only to find them wide open in the morning. Lights would be switched on by unseen hands while Freeborn was out of the house. She tried to take these curious occurrences in stride, but was convinced a paranormal force was at play when she tried to hang a particular picture - a triptych (three photos in one frame) of pre-Civil War women. The morning after hanging it, Freeborn was puzzled to find it on the floor, but neatly propped against the wall. Figuring it had merely fallen (and luckily not broken), she re-hung it. In fact, five times she tried to hang the picture, and each time it was taken down and set against the wall. A week or so later, following an impulse, she hung the picture in a spare bedroom much lower on the wall and too close to the light switch than she actually preferred. But this time the picture stayed put. Why? When Luke Cowley, the dead Mrs. Lyon's son-in-law, visited the house, he remarked that Mrs. Lyon had hung a very similar picture in that very spot.

In 1982, as Mrs. Freeborn was preparing to redecorate the master bedroom, the poltergeist activity increased. Throughout the day that she shopped for paint and wallpaper, she was unnerved by the sensation of being watched. That night, crashing noises and loud banging in remote areas of the house kept Freeborn from sleeping. She arose from her bed at about 2 a.m. and walked to the bathroom. She ran some water at the sink to wash her hands. Suddenly, the bathroom window flew open. She closed it, returned to her bed and sat, frightened. Again the bathroom window opened and in the same instant the bedroom window crashed shut. The folding doors of one closet tore open as another closet door slammed closed. Her dog barked frantically at the terrifying spectacle.

Scared out of her wits, Freeborn's solitary thought was to get out of that house. She picked up her dog and fled the bedroom into the hallway and ran smack into some unseen force. "There was a zone of pressure," she later related, "a mass out in the hall, as if something ominous and ugly was concentrated there. I realized I had to get out of the house or I would die."

Three distinct forces were in that hallway, she insisted - one to each side of her and one blocking her way out. Gathering all her courage, she shouted, "Get out of my way!" and forced her way past the dark presences. Somehow she sensed that the two entities at her sides her "surprised" that she was able to do this, and she felt that the entity in front of her was knocked back. She ran out the back door and sped away in her car... still wearing her nightgown.

The Old Woman Haunting

Some teenagers think it's fun or cool to go traipsing around disrespectfully in cemeteries on Halloween. If you've considered such an outing, consider too that you might be disturbing those who rest there... and something might even follow you home.

A 17-year-old British girl made that mistake. It wasn't Halloween, but the Spring of 1978 when a girl, identified only as Miss A by the Society of Psychical Research, and several of her friends decided to make their way through a local graveyard, trampling graves as they laughed and joked. Only Miss A and her family was to pay the price for that prank, however. Several nights later, Miss A awoke to see the apparition of an old woman sitting in a chair near her bed. The spirit was not transparent, and Miss A did not sense any harm from it. In the morning, she wrote off the experience as a weird dream.

But it wasn't. For several weeks following, Miss A repeatedly saw the ghost of the old woman - sometimes in broad daylight. It would follow Miss A from room to room, hovering less than a foot above the floor. At times it watched Miss A's every move, following her, and would freeze in place whenever she turned to confront it. And soon the encounters became more threatening.

While making tea one day, she felt an unseen force grab the tea kettle - filled with boiling water - and twist it in her hands. Miss A felt that the entity was trying to scald her. Finally, Miss A told her mother of these bizarre experiences. Mrs. A was skeptical at first - until she too saw the old woman drift across the downstairs hall and disappear into a room. The entity continued to make its presence felt. On one occasion it wrenched the vacuum cleaner from Mrs. A's hands. It would sometimes push or pull against doors that family members were trying to open or close. Miss A's father - the most diehard skeptic of the group - was even forced to believe when loud rapping noises awakened the entire household, and later when he could not explain water incessantly dripping from the kitchen ceiling. A plumber could find no leak.

The poltergeist activity escalated. Loud banging, unexplained snoring sounds, objects moved about. Then, it seemed, the entity attempted to make its identity known. Miss A was sitting with her father one day when she suddenly fell into a trance. She began to speak of another life - as the daughter of a French doctor in the 1800s. After this incident, Miss A's behavior changed noticeably and she appeared to be endowed with unexplained psychic powers: she could bend the tines of a fork just by brushing them with her fingers. Doctors and other investigators could find no rational explanation for what was happening to the A family. But they could endure no more. Miss A and her family moved out of their home of 11 years.

But the ghost was to give Miss A one last life-threatening scare. Out of a nagging curiosity, Miss A returned to the empty house one day. She found the back door broken and open. She went in. She picked up the telephone to see if it was working. Suddenly, something grabbed her by the throat. Icy, unseen fingers had grabbed Miss A by the neck and were choking her. Terrified, she managed to pull herself away and ran out the front door. Needless to say, she never returned.

The Mackie Haunting

By now it must be clear to you that not all hauntings are benign. They can sometimes - although rarely - be far more physical and threatening than a fleeting shadow drawn by Casper the Friendly Ghost.

What took place at the Mackie farmhouse beginning in February, 1695, for example, is one of the most active and violent poltergeist cases on record. I was also well documented, having been witnessed and experienced by more than a dozen upstanding members of this Scottish community. Andrew Mackie, described by neighbors as "honest, civil and harmless," lived in the modest farmhouse with his wife and children. The property had been known to be haunted, but the Mackies experienced nothing out of the ordinary there... until that February.

The attack on the Mackies began with an assault of stones and other objects, thrown by some invisible force. Several family members were struck and injured by the missiles. The family sought the counsel of Alexander Telfair, the parish minister, who upon arrival experienced first-hand the bewildering phenomena. Whatever the entity was, it "molested me mightily," Telfair said, "threw stones and divers other things at me, and beat me several times on the Shoulders and Sides with a great Staff, so that those who were present heard the noise of the Blows."

The hateful presence was unrelenting. The Mackies testified that it attacked their children one night in their beds, delivering forceful spankings. More than once "it would drag People about their House by their Clothes," an investigation described. A blacksmith narrowly escaped death when a trough and plowshare were hurled at him. Small buildings on the property spontaneously burst into flames and burned to cinders. During a family prayer meeting, chunks of flaming peat pelted them. A human shape, seemingly made out of cloth, appeared, groaning, "Hush... hush."

This being the late 17th century, the Mackies were quick to attribute the phenomena to demons. On April 9, Andrew Mackie enlisted no less than five ministers to exorcize the farmhouse of the demonic spirits. But the ministers were to have their hands full throughout the ritual. Stones hailed down on them. A few of the minister, including Telfair, claimed that something had grabbed them by the legs or feet and lifted them into the air. The clergymen were not willing to yield victory to the entity, however, continuing their exorcism efforts for more than two weeks. Then on Friday, April 26, a voice from the invisible specter declared to them, "Thou shalt be troubled 'till Tuesday."

When that day arrived, the witnesses watched in astonishment as a dark, cloud-like shape formed in the corner of the Mackies' barn. As they stared, the cloud grew larger and blacker until it nearly filled the entire building. Blobs of mud flew out of the cloud into the faces of the witnesses. Some were gripped by some vice-like force. And then... it vanished, just as it promised it would.

Source: paranormal.about.com
http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa102802a.htm

- AIR-RAISING STORIES DEPARTMENT -

13 Air Travel Stories that are Plane Spooky

Coincidences, bizarre occurences, other incidences that will give you shivers.

With the celebration of Halloween comes the telling of ghost stories. They usually contain bizarre, unexplained and the oftentimes unbelievable coincidences that send shivers up one’s spine. Mine concern the spooky happenings in the realm of air travel, and while I can’t confirm every one of the stories, all are very much alive in the world of flight crews.

I got the idea for this column while I was working an all-nighter last Halloween. The crew gathered in the back galley and told air travel ghost stories. We dimmed the lights and kept our voices low so the sleeping passengers wouldn’t hear us. The following are the top 13 spooky stories. Trick or treat!

    * A 72-year-old flight attendant (yes, she really was 72) always insisted that someday she would die on a layover in Italy. One day she arrived at the terminal to work her usual flight to Rome, but she was sent home because the flight had been canceled. She passed away the very next day. You see, canceled flights can ruin a flight attendant’s plans, too.

    * An especially bizarre story involves a young flight attendant whose family persuaded her to retire after the Lockerbie tragedy. It seems her mother had dreamed her daughter would die in an airplane disaster. The young woman became an accountant, and after years of promotions went to work for a firm in New York. Her office was in the World Trade Center, and she perished on 9/11.

    * When a pair of elderly newlyweds went to Europe for their honeymoon, the husband had a heart attack and died. The wife arranged to have his body brought back in a casket to their new home in Florida. She made the connecting flight but the casket did not; in fact, the airline could not locate it for five days. When the casket was finally found, at the deceased’s hometown airport, it was … empty! One way or another, that man got cold feet.

    * A flight to Europe took off with a crew of four pilots and landed with only three. During a break, one of the pilots wandered off and was never heard from again. The authorities took apart the plane but have yet to solve the case. Authorities determined that the pilot had been suffering from depression and was behind on his alimony payments; they surmised he had slipped off the airplane disguised as a passenger in hopes of starting a new life. But there is no record of him going through customs or immigration, and his bags were all still on board.

    * Many tales of 9/11 coincidences seem to be in circulation these days. The one I find a bit uncanny tells of a father who discussed fears of dying with his son the day before his son was scheduled to fly. His son died on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the western side of the Pentagon, where, incredibly enough, the father worked (that very side). The father survived. He had taken a rare day off to play a game of golf.

    * Several years ago, a flight crashed shortly after take-off. When authorities recovered the black box, they found that the pilots’ last conversation was about the dating habits of the flight attendants working that day. A few years later, two pilots and an off-duty crew member were talking about the details of that tragedy in the cockpit of their own flight just before take-off. They remarked on how hard it must be for families to hear those final words. Shortly after take-off, their own flight crashed, leaving no survivors. The last sentence was, “So we had better make our conversations good for our families.” I listened to the black box audio of that flight on the Internet, and am sorry now that I did, as it has haunted me ever since.

    * What about the flight attendant who discovered that her husband, a pilot, was cheating with countless co-workers? The husband mysteriously disappeared, but the investigation was not highly publicized, perhaps because of this unsavory coincidence: The pilot’s body was never found, but the flight attendant was famous for bringing homemade sandwiches to work, then generously handing them out to passengers and crew when there was no scheduled meal service. Talk about getting rid of the evidence!

    * I once flew a 767 with an all-male crew of nine flight attendants. Remarkably, all the flight attendants were heterosexual and married. What made this so weird was that both of the male pilots were gay. If you know the airline business, you know that this is truly a one in a million chance.

    * Quite a few years back, before my time, a man shot his gun into the air signaling the end of duck season. The shot pierced a commercial airplane flying overhead, and some pellets hit a passenger in the bottom. The investigation revealed that the victim was, unbelievably, the brother of the man who fired the gun. This story is hard to believe, I grant you.

    * I also remember the story about a superstitious flight attendant who followed strict rules of numerology. She would seldom trade her trips, not wanting to alter fate, and she never went against her readings. So, when offered a trade for one December flight, she declined, even though it would suit her Christmas schedule better. Sadly, that was her last flight: Pan Am Flight 103, which crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland.

    * Two male pilots lost their jobs for flying naked. Apparently, they were playing a joke on one of the flight attendants and it backfired when the wrong crew member entered the cockpit. This may not qualify as the spookiest story, but the mental image is haunting enough.

    * Not telling her husband that she was joining him on his European layover, this pilot’s wife took Seat 1A in first class as a romantic surprise. What she didn’t know was that sitting next to her in 1B was her husband’s mistress. After take-off, he saw them both, and you should have seen his expression. I hear that the wife and the mistress became good friends. I also hear the pilot is paying a lot in alimony.

    * Stopped by the police for speeding on the way to the airport, a woman missed her flight. The airplane crashed and there were no survivors. What makes this story really strange is that the standby passenger who took her place was related to the police officer who gave the woman the ticket. It does have a romantic ending, however, as the police officer and the lucky lady were married two years later. That is one relationship that fate definitely had a hand in.

Some luck is just plane spooky.

Source: MSNBC
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15497228/

- A BIT OF UFO HISTORY DEPARTMENT -

Before Roswell, There Was Aurora

AURORA — A spectacular UFO crash witnessed by locals and the military, an alien’s small body recovered and then a fantastic cover-up.

Roswell, N.M., in 1947, right? Nope. Aurora, Texas. In 1897.

The compelling story was first reported by the Dallas Morning News on April 17 of that year and is all the more intriguing because there was little aloft in the skies over Texas in these years before the Wright Brothers’ initial 1903 flight.

Reporter S.E. Hayden wrote:

“Aurora, Wise County, Texas, — About 6 o’clock this morning the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing throughout the country.

“It sailed directly over the public square, and when it reached the north part of town, collided with the tower of Judge Proctor’s windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge’s flower garden.

“The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one aboard, and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.”

More than a century later, this dramatic story brought a TV crew from The History Channel to Texas, led by producer-writer John Greenewald Jr., who produced the show “UFO Files: Texas’ Roswell.”

Greenewald, a former on-the-air interviewer, went behind the camera to direct interviews of UFO experts and Aurora residents.

“It is a town legend, but I’m curious if there is any truth to it,” Greenewald said. “We talked to the experts — some very intelligent people who are convinced that it happened.”

He added that Aurorians were more forthcoming about their belief in the early UFO on the phone, but that they often softened their stories once the camera lights were on.

He noted that there were many reported sightings of mysterious airships across the Midwest in 1897.

“The town is (now) so adamant that the event wasn’t real,” Greenwald said. “But the (UFO) investigators are so adamant that it was real.”

He said that the program would air again on cable, but that the next date is uncertain.

The TV folks said they were denied access to the cemetery, where they had hoped to scan for alien remains. They were also unsuccessful in getting permission to examine Proctor’s water well, which was purportedly used as a disposal site for scraps of metal from the crashed vessel.

Village lore has it that the next owner of the property blamed his bad health on drinking water from the contaminated well.

Texan Derrel Sims, who bills himself as the Alien Hunter and claims to be a former CIA agent, had fewer reservations.

“I have put together one of the most compelling ideas on why Aurora might have happened,” Sims said. “It is most interesting is whether an alien is buried in Aurora — or whether someone may have picked up the little bugger and taken him away.”

The History Channel production and many other sources do report the commonly accepted theory that all the fuss was the result of a sympathetic reporter and local collaborators drumming up interest in the town.

Aurora, it seems, was thought to be facing doom. Not from the sky, but rather from railway plans to bypass it, effectively removing it from the map of 19th century economics.

So the next time someone mentions Roswell, N.M., you might remind them that historic accounts put Texas a half century ahead of their little green men.

Source: The Galveston County Daily News
http://news.galvestondailynews.com/story.lasso?ewcd=9db74dc564d3279e

- STRANGE CREATURES FROM TIME AND SPACE DEPARTMENT -

Dover’s Demon Lives on in Local Lore

DOVER --Twenty-nine years later, William Bartlett stands by his story of what he saw on Farm Street that night. It was an eerie human-like creature, he said, about 4 feet tall with glowing orange eyes and no nose or mouth in a watermelon-shaped head.

‘‘I have no idea what it was,’’ Bartlett, now a 46-year-old artist living in Needham, said in a recent interview. ‘‘I definitely know I saw something.’’

The ‘‘Dover Demon’’ that Bartlett and two other teenagers reported seeing over a two-day span in April 1977 has since gained worldwide attention, not unlike Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and the Latin American goat-sucker, the chupacabra.

Internet pages are devoted to the Dover Demon. You can play a video game featuring the creature, or buy a figurine of it as far away as Japan.

‘‘In a lot of ways it’s kind of embarrassing to me,’’ said Bartlett. ‘‘I definitely saw something. It was definitely weird. I didn’t make it up. Sometimes I wish I had.’’

He has made a career as a painter, his work displayed in galleries on both coasts, but a Google search on ‘‘Bill Bartlett,’’ he noted, invariably turns up his teenage encounter with the unknown. Once, his wife, Gwen, browsing the horror section of a bookstore, flipped open an encyclopedia of monsters — and there was an entry about her husband and the Dover Demon.

x ‘‘It’s a thing that’s been following me for years,’’ Bartlett said. ‘‘Not the creature — the story. Sometimes I dread every Halloween getting calls about it.’’

On April 21, 1977, Bartlett, then 17, was driving along Farm Street at around 10 p.m. when, he said, he saw the creature atop a broken stone wall. Two hours later, according to news accounts from that time, John Baxter, 15, was walking home from his girl8friend’s house when he got within 15 feet of the creature along a creek in a heavily wooded area along Miller Hill Road.

At midnight the next night, Abby Brabham, 15, was driving home with her boyfriend when she spotted the creature sitting upright on Springdale Avenue.

A drawing made by Baxter showed a humanoid figure with large eyes standing by a tree. Bartlett’s large-eyed creature crawled with tendril-like fingers across a stone wall. ‘‘I, Bill Bartlett, swear on a stack of Bible’s that I saw this creature,’’ he wrote on the sketch.

The locations of the sightings, plotted on a map, lay in a straight line over 2Æ miles. All the sightings were made in the vicinity of water.

No sightings have been reported since, though Bartlett says a weird experience a year later left him wondering if he had had a return visit from the creature.

The following year, he said, he was in a parked car with his girlfriend when he heard a thump on the car. He made out a small figure leaving the scene. He remains unsure who — or what — banged the car, he said, though it could have been a youngster playing a prank.

Farm Street on a recent evening could have been a modern-day Sleepy Hollow, with woods lining the fieldstone walls, and what little light there was coming from the moon. Since at least the 17th century, the vicinity of the second-oldest road in Dover has been associated with strange occurrences.

In his 1914 town history, ‘‘Dover Farms,’’ Frank Smith writes of Farm Street:

‘‘In early times this road went around by the picturesque Polka rock [on the farm of George Battelle] which was called for a man by that name, of whom it is remembered, that amid the superstitions of the age he thought he saw his Satanic Majesty as he was riding on horseback by this secluded spot.

‘‘The location has long been looked upon as one in which treasures are hid, but why anyone should go so far inland to hide treasures has never been told; however, there has been at times unmistakable evidence of considerable digging in the immediate vicinity of this rock.’’

Loren Coleman of Portland, Maine, a well-known cryptozoologist, or researcher of ‘‘hidden animals,’’ from Sasquatch to sea serpents, led the original investigations into the Dover Demon, whose name he coined.

Studying Dover’s history, Coleman said in a telephone interview, he was struck by the fact that the area in which the Demon was sighted had a tradition of unexplained activity.

‘‘In the same area you had three major legends going on,’’ he said, citing the apparition of the devil on horseback, the tales of buried treasure, and then the Dover Demon. ‘‘I think it certainly says something. It’s almost as if there are certain areas that ‘collect’ sightings, almost in a magnetic way.’’

Coleman theorized that the large geologic outcropping in the woods off Farm Street that historian Smith called the ‘‘Polka stone might actually have been called the Pooka stone, after the fairy folk of Celtic folklore.

When the Dover Demon was sighted in 1977, it might not have been the first time a strange creature was spotted in the woods by local teenagers.

Mark Sennott of Sherborn, who was buying a bagel and coffee at Isabella’s Groceria in Dover Center on a recent Saturday morning, said there was talk at Dover-Sherborn High School in the early 1970s of strange things seen in the woods.

In fact, Sennott said, he and his friends might have seen a ‘‘demon’’ themselves at Channing Pond on Springdale Avenue in 1972.

‘‘I don’t know if we really saw something,’’ he said. ‘‘We thought we did. ..... We saw a small figure, deep in the woods, moving at the edge of the pond. We could see it moving in the headlights. We didn’t know — it could have been an animal.’’ Sennott said the group told police, who investigated, but ‘‘nothing came of it.’’

When Bartlett saw his creature five years later, he said, he was driving with two friends on Farm Street near Bridge Street on the way to Sherborn about 10 p.m. They hadn’t had any beer: ‘‘We were probably looking for it,’’ he said, ‘‘but we didn’t have any that night.’’

Bartlett said the car was traveling maybe 35 to 40 miles per hour when he saw the thing ‘‘standing on a wall, its eyes glowing’’ in the headlights. ‘‘It was not a dog or a cat,’’ he said. ‘‘It had no tail. It had an egg-shaped head.’’ He said he saw it from about 10 feet away, over the duration it took the car to travel from one utility pole to the next. His two friends did not report seeing the creature.

He grew up around animals, and had seen the odd mangy fox, Bartlett said. ‘‘This definitely wasn’t,’’ he said. ‘‘It was some kind of creature,’’ with ‘‘long thin fingers’’ and ‘‘more human-like in its form than animal.’’ Its shape reminded him of ‘‘kids with distended bellies,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ve always tried to guess what it was. I never had any idea.’’

This was no prank, Bartlett said. ‘‘I wasn’t trying to be funny. People who know me know I didn’t make this up.’’

Coleman, who began an investigation within days of the sightings in 1977 and spotlights the Dover Demon case in the 2001 edition of his book ‘‘Mysterious America,’’ believes Bartlett.

‘‘We have a credible case, over 25 hours, by individuals who saw something,’’ said Coleman, who interviewed all three teens within a week of the reported sightings and said he was convinced they had not concocted a hoax.

Nothing quite like the Demon has been reported seen before or since, he said. The Dover creature does not match the descriptions of the chupacabra, or of Roswell aliens, or of the bat-eared goblins said to have attacked a family in Hopkinsville, Ky., in 1955.

‘‘It doesn’t really fit any place,’’ Coleman said. ‘‘It’s extremely unique. It has no real connections to any other inexplicable phenomena.’’

Is it possible the teens actually saw a foal, or perhaps a moose calf, as some have suggested? Coleman said he canvassed local horse owners after the incident and none reported missing a horse. Moreover, it was not foaling season, he said.

As for the moose theory, only two moose were reported in Massachusetts in 1977 and 1978, both of them in Central Massachusetts, he said. A yearling moose by that time in April would weigh more than 600 pounds and be ‘‘bigger than the Volkswagen Bartlett was in,’’ said Coleman.

‘‘To have a bipedal moose with long fingers and orange skin and no hair and no nose would be more of a phenomenon than the Dover Demon,’’ he said.

So what did those teens see? ‘‘It’s OK to say we don’t know,’’ said Coleman.

‘‘I think the Dover Demon’s mystery lives on. It’s an unknown phenomenon whose fame has stretched worldwide, and I think Dover should be very proud.’’

In Dover, a quiet community dotted with horse farms and one of the richest towns in the state, people are still not quite sure what to make of the story.

‘‘That thing has haunted me for 29 years,’’ said Carl Sheridan, a former police chief. ‘‘I knew the kids involved. They were good kids ..... pretty reliable kids.

‘‘God only knows’’ what they saw, Sheridan said. ‘‘I still don’t know. Strange things have happened. The whole thing was unusual.’’

He got calls from all over the world when the case made the news, the former chief said, and he still does, from time to time. ‘‘The thing will not die,’’ Sheridan said. ‘‘I’m telling you, the thing will not go away.’’

In Town Clerk Barrie Clough’s office at Town Hall, municipal reports share shelf space with a file of materials related to the Dover Demon case, including a book titled, ‘‘Weird New England,’’ and a newspaper clipping headlined, ‘‘Bizarre four-foot creature with orange skin and glowing eyes stalking a town.’’

‘‘Every once in a while people will come in and ask about it,’’ said Clough. ‘‘I have no idea if it’s true or untrue.’’

Downtown Dover was decorated recently with pumpkins as children arrived for a Halloween fair, and a steady stream of regulars bought coffee and newspapers at Isabella’s. Located in the old Dover Pharmacy, now with an Italian deli counter added to the old soda fountain, the grocery remains a town hub.

Behind the counter at Isabella’s, Scott Bielski, 17, of Dover, a senior at Dover-Sherborn High, said the demon gives his small town a unique claim to fame. ‘‘.‘Home of the Dover Demon’ has a nice ring to it,’’ he said with a smile. As far as he knows, the creature had never stopped in to the soda fountain. ‘‘Let us know if he wants anything,’’ he said.

A customer who gave his name as Jimmy said he has lived in town for four years but has yet to see the demon. ‘‘Maybe I will some day,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m one of those realists — if I don’t see it, I don’t believe it.’’

Customer Ed Tourtellotte of Dover said: ‘‘I think it’s probably as real as the Easter Bunny, but it’s fun.’’

Nearly three decades after seeing something very strange on Farm Street, Bartlett has decidedly mixed feelings about the experience. ‘‘It was my 15 minutes of fame, without wanting it,’’ he said. ‘‘It was little embarrassing. It still is.’’

He said he hasn’t talked much to his two children, 8 and 5 years old, about the creature: ‘‘I don’t want to scare them.’’ And the professional artist has never drawn another picture of the thing he saw. ‘‘I don’t have enough memory of it,’’ he said. ‘‘I haven’t wanted to. I’m a serious fine-arts painter. I don’t want people to think I’m some freak.

‘‘I don’t usually tell anybody. I shouldn’t be embarrassed, but you see these people on TV and they’re made to look like idiots,’’ he said. ‘‘I really do wish that I had made it up. I might have profited from it. It’s a great story.

‘‘I wish it was seen again so everyone would know it was true.’’

Source: Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/10/29
/dover146s_demon_lives_on_in_local_lore/

- ALL THINGS DARK AND SCARY DEPARTMENT -

The Beast of Bladenboro

In 1954, a savage killer kept a small North Carolina town in a grip of terror. He left big tracks, a bloody trail and a hair-raising legend. Was it a bear? A vampire-cat? To this day, the creature remains a mystery.

The two butchers at the Dublin IGA grocery store are a little confused about what exactly “the Beast of Bladenboro” was. A Revolutionary War tale, one says. The other jokes that he knows what it is: His daddy.

Just up N.C. 410, in Bladenboro, a man with a graying five o’clock shadow pays the gas station attendant for a bottle of Sun-Drop. He notices someone not from around town and strikes up a conversation.

“Yeah,” he says of the beast, “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know what it is.”

These folks shouldn’t feel too bad. To this day, nobody really knows what, in 1954, went around killing dogs, goats, hogs and small cows in the most unusual way – breaking their jaws, crushing their heads flat and sucking the blood from their bodies, according to local newspaper reports.

It was downright gruesome. Women and children stayed locked in their homes. Men dared not walk outside without some kind of firearm. Big-game hunters from around the country infiltrated Bladenboro, a town about 60 miles west of Wilmington.

The Beast of Bladenboro was big news then, but today, the story is buried in clumsy rolls of microfiche. Local headlines only give sensational clues: “Mysterious Beast is Still At Large,” “Vampire Tendencies Found In Bladenboro’s ‘Monster,’” and “Guns, Dogs Circle Blood-Lusty Beast.”

Only a few people who experienced the fear are still kicking around Bladenboro. Ask the people at Town Hall if they know anybody who was around when the beast roamed, and you’ll get a pretty good chuckle. But you’ll also get a file of newspaper stories kept in the town vault. And Delane Jackson, town manager, will direct you to Tater Shaw, a man who saw the carnage first-hand.

In 1954, witnesses gave conflicting descriptions of the beast to Bladenboro police. We turned over a summary of the characteristics to Gary Longordo, a local law enforcement sketch artist, and asked him to draw up a rendering of the beast.

* Four and a half feet long, bushy and resembling either a bear or a panther
* 150 pounds, with a footprint like a dog’s
* A 90-100 pound lion
* Three feet long, 20 inches high with a tail about 14 inches long. Dark in color, with a face like * a cat
* Gray in color – not vampire-like or vicious, but “strange”
* Four feet long, two feet high, with a long tail. A large head with “runty-looking ears.” Brownish and tabby, indicating a furry appearance.

“Vampire lust”
Shaw lives in a nursing home not too far from Town Hall. On a recent October morning, the 87-year-old man, with his perfectly combed hair and neat long-sleeved gray shirt, sits in the commons area, people using walkers and canes clunking all around him.

“You want to know about the beast?” he says, throwing his hand up as if to shoe away someone. “Oh, you don’t want to talk about that. I’ve told that story before.”

It takes a little encouragement, but before long, he guides his electric wheelchair down the long, waxed linoleum corridor toward his room. You know you’ve reached it when you see a plaque on the door, “Tater’s Place” burnt into the wood.

Inside, bright family portraits and black-and-white World War II navy photos hang on the wall. Shaw glides over to a small table and pulls out a three-ring binder with typed pages out of the drawer. Years ago, a friend of his wrote a screenplay about the beast and based a character on Shaw. He seems quite proud of that.

Then, after shutting the book, Shaw gets comfortable in his wheelchair and says, “It started out one morning.”

Shaw, then the 35-year-old owner of a gas station, had heard about a goat killed on a fellow’s farm out on the edge of town. He’d been told there was something mighty odd about how it died. Curious, he decided to go see for himself.

“His head was flat as a fritter,” he says. “It had a great big ol’ track . . . It was weird.”

Shaw spreads four fingers of his right hand and places them on his left palm, simulating the size of the paw. Then he looks up and says the beast killed small cows, too, and “two or three” hogs.

Those details are missing from newspaper accounts of the time, though the Wilmington Morning Star (what is now the Star-News) and the Wilmington News, as well as others, thrived off the story for a good part of January 1954.

The stories start Jan. 4, 1954, with the deaths of three dogs, their “skulls crushed in and chewed.” There’s no mention of a goat, but then there’s a lot about this beast that is only uncovered with time.

People were already getting distressed enough to cause Police Chief Roy Fores to go out hunting for the killer with three coonhounds. The “dogs refused to follow the trail.”

Maybe they were smarter than their master. The next day, the chief released a chilling detail. Fores called it the “vampire aspect of the animal.”

The story in the Morning Star on Jan. 5 began, “This nervous town chewed its collective nails today, dreading the pitch of night that might bring a return visit by a mystery killer-beast with vampire lust... (Fores) said a dog found killed last night ‘was opened up today. And there wasn’t more than two or three drops of blood in him.’ In all three cases, the victims’ bottom lip had been broken open and his jawbone smashed back.”

People gettin’ crazy
Shaw remembers the fear. “Everybody was scared,” Shaw said. “Everybody, near ‘bout, that had a gun was carrying it.”

Irrationality began to set in. Locals claimed to have seen the beast, described it, then retracted their statements.

Another resident got trigger happy. He heard his dogs barking one night, looked through a window and saw a shadow. Grabbing his shotgun, he rushed outside, blasting away. On closer inspection, he found his child’s bicycle “crumpled to the ground with the tires in shreds and the seat ripped with buckshot.”

Witness accounts of the beast conflicted. Some said it was about 90 pounds, others said 100 or even 150 pounds. Some claimed it was black, or brown, or tabby, or just “dark in color.” Most people agreed it was a cat, but one veterinarian said it could be a big dog.

The sound is about the only thing people halfway agreed on. They described it as like either a baby or a woman crying, only louder and blood curdling.

“Anyhow, it was getting so bad, it was getting in the newspapers and the radio,” Shaw said. “There came hunters from all over, I mean big hunters.”

At the height of the hunt, according to newspaper accounts, 1,000 men armed with pistols, shotguns and rifles divided into posses and combed about 400 acres of swamp. Some were fraternity boys from UNC Chapel Hill looking for a good time; others were professional hunters accustomed to killing lions and tigers.

Bladenboro only had about 1,000 residents at the time. It only has about 1,700 now. You’d think that if anything was out there, somebody would’ve stepped on it.

Many of these hunters would stop by Shaw’s gas station on their way to the Green Swamp and brag about how they were the ones who were going to kill the beast. Those same men usually stopped back by after the hunt – and always empty-handed.

A friend of Shaw’s, Jabe Frink, also owned a gas station during this time. Frink lives in a brick house just a couple miles from the nursing home. He’s 82 and doesn’t mind talking about beast at all. Frink remembers one group of hunters who brought trained “bear dogs” to turn loose in the swamp. “They said they gonna ‘catch that vampire,’ but they never did,” he said.

Mostly, Frink remembers how terrified everyone was. “It kept snowballing and snowballing. It got so nobody would walk out on the street at night,” he said. “There was a dog that scared that lady on her porch, though.”

Frink is referring to a 21-year-old mother named Mrs. C.E. Kinlaw. She apparently walked out onto her front porch at about 7:30 p.m. January 6, 1954. She was minding her own business when she looked up and saw the “beast” stalking toward her. It was only about 20 feet away, she told the Morning Star.

Kinlaw screamed and ran into the house. Her husband, Charles Kinlaw, grabbed his shotgun and ran outside but only found cat-like paw prints all around his yard.

Everyone’s worst fears seemed to be confirmed. The beast had shown interest in a human.

Not long after that, S.W. Garrett, an experienced hunter from Wilmington, warned women and children to stay indoors. Residents were also advised to keep dogs, “whose nighttime howling reportedly grows more piteous nightly,” locked up indoors.

Source: Wilmington Star
http://www.wilmingtonstar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061029/NEWS/61027007/1051