The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.

“Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”

Continue reading at The New York Times. 

In today’s modern world, bodies are often disposed of in a myriad of ways. For centuries, however, a popular method of choice was to dig a grave, and it served as an important part of how we care for the dead. But what is it like to actually get down into the dirt and carve out a space for a body’s final resting place? Director of Video, Chris Naka, picked up a shovel and joined Ed Bixby, owner and operator of Steelmantown Cemetery in Woodbine, New Jersey, to see what it would be like to actually partake in this practice.

Monticello has a reputation for being the most haunted small town in the American South. It is home to Indian Mounds and many historic buildings, including the Perkins Opera House (now the Monticello Opera House) and the Monticello Old Jail Museum.

Many of these places have a history that ‘haunts’ the present. Many a superstitious tourist, history buff, or supernatural hobbyist have enjoyed the history and haunts of Monticello.

While laying down some water pipes, workers at the U.K. utility company Thames Water had a workday interrupted in a rather macabre fashion when they unearthed what turned out to be the remains of 26 people who had been ritualistically buried in pits in Oxfordshire. One set of remains belonged to a woman who was interred with her feet cut off and placed by her side, and her arms bound behind her head. The bones are believed to be nearly 3,000 years old.

A collection of jars containing human body parts and removed tumors was discovered on the property of the Crescent Hotel in early April, just after an investigation by the Ghost Adventures team on the property. The popular Travel Channel paranormal show referenced the jars, which were undiscovered at the time, in their investigation.

The jars were the property of Norman Baker, a “doctor” who purchased the property in 1937 and turned it into a health resort, claiming he had the cure for cancer. He treated a number of patients, but none were cured of the disease.

Before the spirit trumpet, conversations with ghosts were restricted to more primitive, nonverbal forms of communication, according to Collectors Weekly. Spirits were known to rap on the floor or spell out words in a painfully slow manner, and mediums would speak the entire alphabet out loud until the ghosts stopped them at a certain letter. The advent of the spirit trumpet broke down these linguistic barriers by allowing the dead to speak directly with the living, kind of like a mobile phone for beyond the grave.

The basilisk, which slays its victims with a single glance, seems as fantastical as the scorpion-tailed manticore or the Barnacle Tree, which sprouts goslings like fruit. But there was a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation for the basilisk’s lethal look: the extramission theory of vision.

According to the extramission theory, which was developed by such thinkers as Plato, Galen, Euclid, and Ptolemy, our eyes are more than the passive recipients of images. Rather, they send out eye-beams—feelers made of elemental fire that spread, nerve-like, to create our field of vision. These luminous tendrils stream out from our eyes into the world, apprehending objects in their path and relaying back to us their qualities.

His death was ruled a suicide and he was buried where his body was found. Upon learning of his death, the Tombstone Epitaph published that, “Many friends will mourn him. And many others will take secret delight in learning of his death.” Many have also questioned the circumstances of his demise.

The brains of dead pigs have been somewhat revived by scientists hours after the animals were killed in a slaughterhouse.

The Yale University research team is careful to say that none of the brains regained the kind of organized electrical activity associated with consciousness or awareness. Still, the experiment described Wednesday in the journal Nature showed that a surprising amount of cellular function was either preserved or restored.

The implications of this study have staggered ethicists, as they contemplate how this research should move forward and how it fits into the current understanding of what separates the living from the dead.

The first time Dave Shealy saw a skunk ape, he says, he was ten years old. It was 1974, a few years after his father had come upon a set of footprints left by the creature—an Everglades version of Bigfoot named for its supposedly pungent odor. Dave was out deer hunting with his older brother, Jack, in the swamp behind his house, in what’s now Big Cypress National Preserve, when he encountered the ape incarnate.

“It was walking across the swamp, and my brother spotted it first. But I couldn’t see it over the grass—I wasn’t tall enough,” Shealy says. “My brother picked me up, and I saw it, about 100 yards away. We were just kids, but we’d heard about it, and knew for sure what we were looking at. It looked like a man, but completely covered with hair.”

Continue reading at The Smithsonian.

Hobart's convict history and grand old buildings make for ripper spooky stories, so it is not surprising ghost tours have popped up around Hobart's Battery Point, the Hobart penitentiary, Willow Court Asylum and nearby Port Arthur Historic Site.

An anonymous questioner asked Curious Hobart about the city's most famous ghost stories and haunted houses.

The owner of Ghost Tours of Hobart and Battery Point, Jacques Imbriotis, is convinced Hobart is one of the most haunted places in Australia.

"We have a lot of old buildings that are almost as they were when that person moved on," he said.

"They're the boards that they walked when they were living and they continue to do that when they're dead."

So where are the sites of Hobart's most famous ghost stories?

Continue reading at ABC News Australia.

Police have been called to reports of ghosts, spirits and paranormal activity 66 times over the past five years, new figures suggest.

A Freedom of Information request has revealed that West Midlands Police even had to deal with reports about poltergeists, ghosts and hauntings.

While officers are used to dealing with criminals lurking in the shadows – they may have to up their game to catch the things that go bump in the night.

“Something overcame Bonnie as soon as we approached the bridge,” Ms. Mackinnon said. “At first she froze, but then she became possessed by a strange energy and ran and jumped right off the parapet.”

A bewitched dog lured to leap off a bridge by a malevolent force? It sounds like a preposterous scene straight from an old “Twilight Zone” episode.

But Ms. Mackinnon’s dog is one of hundreds that Scots insist have suddenly been compelled to throw themselves off the gothic stone structure since the 1950s. Many have ended up dead on the jagged rocks in the deep valley bed below.

Full article available at The New York Times. 

Everglades National Park (Florida)

Everglades National Park is in the southern-most point within the United States. This park is known for its tropical wetlands and is infested with some of the most dangerous reptiles (alligators, cottonmouths, coral snakes, and Burmese pythons), animals (panthers, wild boars, and black bears) and insects (mosquitoes, kissing bugs, fire ants, and deadly spiders) on the planet. The Calusa Indians had called these forbidden swamplands home until the Spaniards arrived in the year 1513. It isn't just the wildlife, quicksand, and hurricanes that visitors need to worry about in this park—paranormal activity also abounds. It should come as no surprise that since the Calusa Indians lived and died in these swamps, the area is one large, watery grave.

Many people live near the Everglades. In 1969, a fourteen-year-old boy and his family lived next to the park, and the boy loved to explore the swamps. One day he stumbled upon an old grave that held the remains of one of the area's original inhabitants, a Native American. The remains had been buried with a gold medallion, and the boy decided to removed the necklace from the skeleton and take it home with him. Soon after the medallion entered the home, the family began to suffer from terrifying nightmares. Then, the once-happy young boy committed suicide by hanging himself. The family believed that when the boy took the medallion from the grave, he unleashed a deadly curse. However, instead of returning the medallion back to its original burial spot, the family sold it. Every person who owned it after the young boy fell to its curse. It is unknown where the medallion is today.

Ed Watson was known to his neighbors as Bloody Ed. In 1896, Ed Watson (known to his neighbors as, "Bloody Ed") moved onto Chokoloskee Island in the Everglades to start a sugarcane plantation. His neighbors stayed far away from him, as Watson was not a friendly man. Case in point: one day, two men were squatting on one of the islands, called Lost Key. Watson did not own this island, but he still killed the men for trespassing. To run his sugarcane crop, Watson would find workers, but would only hire people that were not from that area, and his neighbors noticed that he was going through employees like a revolving door. One day, some men from Chokoloskee were in the swamplands doing some work when they discovered a woman's dead body floating in the water, and recognized her as one of Watsons employees. The people in the town believed that Watson was murdering his hired hands so he didn't have to pay them. When Watson came into the town for supplies, he was confronted by the people in the town, who informed him that they knew he was killing his employees. When Watson tried to defend himself, the vigilantes pulled out their guns and riddled Watson with bullets; they then took his body out to Rabbit Key and buried him. The area around the island where Bloody Ed lived is supposedly haunted by his many victims. It is believed that Ed Watson himself had actually been possessed by evil spirits and his ghost still haunts the area.

In 2009, a young man reported that while he and his family went canoeing through the swamps of the Everglades, he looked into the shallow, murky, alligator-infested waters and saw a boy around thirteen-years-old that seemed to be floating under their canoe. When the two boys locked eyes, the boy in the canoe was terrified—he saw that the whatever he was looking at under the water had bright red eyes and the look of pure hate. It then swam away. The young man let out a gasp, which made his mother ask him if he was alright. He didn't want to worry everyone, so he said that he thought he saw something in the water but had been mistaken. A few minutes later, the boy saw the ghost boy again watching him, but this time on the land behind some trees. Out of nowhere, a strong wind blew in and knocked his female cousin out of the canoe and into the water. Thankfully, the young boy was able to pull his cousin out of the water and back into the canoe. The family quickly paddled to dry land, where the young girl started claiming her back was hurting her. Lifting her shirt up the family was shocked to see that the girl's back was covered in bruises. Several weeks later the young man became obsessed with finding out who the evil spirit might be. His research paid off when he discovered that a young boy drowned decades earlier in the same area that he encountered the ghost. It has been widely known that for many years the Everglades has been used by criminals to dispose of their victims bodies and that the chance of any remains being found in these swamplands is slim to none.

Full article available at Llewellyn Worldwide. 

The witness, Lorenzo Venegas (currently an evangelical Methodist Pastor) was 5-years of age at the time, lived in a large house with a swing set in the back yard. According to Lorenzo there were rumors that his father was a practicing ‘Warlock’ but he did not believe it. But at times strange things would happen in the house.

He remembers playing with his brothers and being visited by a woman dressed all in white with braided hair and with eyes that were completely black. For some reason the youngster felt no fear of her. When they told their parents they were not believed and their parents would laugh. Apparently his parents were not able to see the lady, only the young children could see her.

Continue reading at Nexus. 

In the late 1970s, Josephson’s work took a turn that was looked upon unfavorably by some peers. He began to focus on the human brain and links between quantum physics and parapsychological or paranormal phenomena such as telepathy and extra-sensory perception.

[...]

He told an interviewer from the Physics World journal in 2002 that, “physicists have an emotional response when they hear anything connected with parapsychology. Their opinion of parapsychology research is not based on evaluation of the evidence but on a dogmatic belief that all research in this field is false.”

Full article available at Cosmos Magazine.

Through different phases of technology and change, the opera house has never closed its doors since opening. It’s withstood television, automobiles and now online streaming services.

After about a year of working at the opera house, Shriver met Eric Glosser, a ghost hunter who came to go on a hunt at the building.

Glosser experienced so much paranormal activity from the building that he told Shriver he should consider making a business out of the paranormalities of the opera house.

For the full article, visit The Post, Athens.