Black-Eyed Kids

Don't let them in!

 Starting in the mid-90s, people began to report eerie visitations by children with pale skin and solid black eyes. These children usually appeared in the middle of the night, often in pairs. 

They may knock on your door in the middle of the night, attempt to hitchhike, or tug on your sleeve as you walk past them in the street. Often they wear hoodies with the hoods pulled up, and keep their faces down-turned, to help hide their bizarre eyes.

The children plead for your help. "I'm lost," "I need a ride," "Can I use your phone?" "I need help." They use our own empathy and altruism against us.

There are many theories about the black-eyed kids. Some people think they are extraterrestrials. Others think they are spirits, or demons. Everyone agrees they are up to no good.

Most people notice something amiss and slam the door closed in alarm. But every so often, someone lets them in, and they always end up regretting this decision. Like a woman recently who reported that after letting a pair of black-eyed kids into her house, she experienced a series of terrifying events, and now fears she is dying from an aggressive form of melanoma.

Xbox Kinect ghosts

Can this Xbox peripheral detect spirits?

 I have an Xbox One, but no Kinect. I'm not sure if I'm grateful for that or not, having spent the better part of the afternoon reading and watching people's accounts of their Kinect detecting and responding to invisible presences in the room.

The Kinect uses motion capture technology to detect and analyze people in the room. It can recognize one person from another, and detect the difference between a person who is standing still and (say) a coat rack.

Imagine playing Xbox late at night alone, and the Kinect suddenly registers another person entering the room. Many Xbox owners have experienced exactly that. Some report that the presence even tries to play the game, although this may just be the spirit attempting to wave or communicate. 

Microsoft has declined to comment on this phenomena. However, Xbox experts are unable to rule out these experiences, aside from just writing them off as a glitch in the Kinect.

The Kinect is so sensitive to detecting a presence that many paranormal investigators have made it part of their normal equipment. Most notably the Ghost Adventures crew.

Do you have a Kinect? Has it ever told you someone else was in the room with you? We want to know!

Surgeons find miniature brain and skull growing in a teenager's ovary

So creepy!

A team of surgeons recently found something wildly unexpected when they performed a routine appendectomy on a 16 year old girl. The girl's body was harboring a four inch-wide tumor in her ovary which contained a wad of matted hair, small bone plates, and a very tiny brain.

The girl was suffering from a teratoma, which is a kind of tumor which causes cells to go haywire and start specializing into something they aren't. Perfectly normal muscle cells might, for example, start growing into teeth or bones.

Teratomas often occur in ovarian cells, possibly in immature egg cells. However, they rarely result in structures as intricate as the miniature brain, which had a recognizable cerebellum and brain stem. 

Teratomas are a separate case from parasitic twins, which is what happens when one twin's body becomes absorbed into the other twin's during the pregnancy. The absorbed twin 

A teratoma is typically present from birth, at a rate of approximately 1 teratoma per 500,000 live births. The teratoma continues to develop (albeit usually very slowly) throughout the patient's life.

The Yule log: Greet the return of the sun with a fire ritual

Happy Winter Solstice!

Many of us, particularly those in northern latitudes, greet the winter solstice with a feeling of relief, knowing that the days will finally start getting longer. But the solstice has deeper meaning as well.

In the Old English and pagan tradition, the winter solstice is called Yule, and is celebrated in many cultures with some sort of fire ceremony. From bonfires to the Yule log, people have ushered in the solstice with fire to represent the rebirth of the sun. Echoes of this belief can still be seen today in the modern Western tradition of hanging bright, twinkling lights on everything. 

The Yule log is an English tradition first recorded in the early 1100s, and was no doubt practice earlier still. Many English families still follow the tradition of the Yule log. Originally, it was considered bad luck to buy a Yule log. Instead, the land owner would cut down trees, chop them into logs, and hand them out to all of the tenants on their property. 

The Yule log was a giant chunk of wood which ideally burned continuously for the entire 12 days of Christmas, with a piece left over that could be used to kindle the next year's log. This scorched remnant was kept around the house over the course of the year, and used as a form of kitchen magic to ward off mildew, house fires, toothaches, and other minor mishaps.

Terrifying Ouija board tales!

This one is scarier than most

There are so many scary stories related to Ouija boards, it's remarkable that they are made by Milton-Bradley, and sold as a board game!

The most recent such tale comes from the Traveling Museum of the Paranormal & Occult, which now holds in its possession the planchette from a Ouija board that went horribly wrong.

The story begins in 1995, when a pair of teenage siblings got the board as a gift from their aunt, and promptly began using it to scare each other. They played with it together, and separately took it to their friends' houses to hold seances with the dead.

All well and good, up until the fateful night they got it in their heads to use the Ouija board at a notorious local park and cemetery. Bachelor's Grove Cemetery outside Chicago is an "infamous haunted location." 

What happened at the cemetery was scary enough. So scary, in fact, that the kids forgot to "close the session," which left the Ouija board's gate to the other dimension hanging over. What happened after that night is even scarier! Read the entire story here on The Week in Weird.

Rendlesham Forest Incident survivor comes forward

Britain's Roswell

The incident at Rendlesham Forest is one of the most amazing records in UFO history. The events took place over three nights in 1980 at a Royal Air Force base in rural England. Unexplained lights were seen in the sky, and one serviceman claimed to have discovered an actual alien craft in the woods while he was on patrol. Strange triangular marks were found in the soil near where the lights seemed to have landed. 

Terrifying, certainly. And remember that this was the height of the Cold War, when tensions on both sides were running high. 

Now, 36 years later, a retired U.S. Air Force officer who claims he was at Rendlesham Forest during the events has come forward. Steve Longero, who served as a police sergeant on the base, was guarding a weapons storage area at the time of the events. 

According to Longero, when the alarm system went off, he looked up and saw bright lights over the treetops. Longero says the lights looked like colored fluorescent lights, "red and green glowing lights," hovering over the forest canopy.

Longero was told not to talk about what he saw, partly because at the time, the base was secretly storing nuclear weapons.

The Atacama desert "alien mummy"

When truth is stranger than fiction

Chile's Atacama Desert is one of the most amazing places on the planet. This plateau is a 600 mile-long strip of land wedged between the Andes mountains and the Chilean coastal range, and is one of the driest places on Earth. It has a near-total lack of precipitation, with rain only falling every few years, with an overall average of half an inch of rainfall per year. 

Parts of the desert are, at 10,000 feet with extremes of heat and cold every day, remarkably similar to Mars. In fact, NASA comes here to test its rovers before deploying them to the Martian surface.

The Atacama Desert has been like this for millions of years. The Chinchorro people, who lived on the edge of the Pacific Ocean from 7,000 to 1,500 BC, lived as fishermen and built sophisticated towns on the beach. And when their people died, their bodies were mummified and taken into the Atacama Desert for preservation.

The Chinchorro culture lasted for thousands of years, and many of their mummies predate the more famous Egyptian mummies. And unlike the Egyptians, who only preserved their royalty, the Chinchorro mummified each person who died, from the elderly to miscarried fetuses.

After a person died, the Chinchorro removed all of the internal organs. The body was positioned with sticks, and the skin was stuffed with straw. Some mummies were also coated with clay. Each mummy received a clay mask over its face. The body was then wrapped in reeds and left outside to dry.

A recent find set the internet ablaze. This small mummified corpse was approximately six inches long, with a cone-shaped head, and was said to have markers of being a child that was 6-8 years old, based on bone density. 

Many people jumped to the conclusion that it was the mummy of an alien. It certainly looks quite alien, to be sure! However, expert analysis has since concluded that this is the mummy of a fetus, perhaps one which was illegally aborted by the mother, and then disposed of in the desert. (Chilean abortion laws are very strict.)

Prophetess Baba Vanga has bad news for Trump

Predicted that America's 44th President (Obama) will be its last

Baba Vanga is a famed Bulgarian clairvoyant who died in 1996 at the age of 85. Before then, she made a whole host of predictions, many of which came true. But could one of her predictions spell doom for Donald trump?

Baba Vanga was mysteriously blinded during a tornado at the age of 12, which lifted her into the air and threw her into the middle of a field. Her family found her close to death, several days after the tornado hit, with her injured eyes sealed shut. After she recovered, although she had lost her vision for life, she had developed the power of prophecy.

Among the events that Baba Vanga is said to have predicted:

* The breakup of the Soviet Union.
* The Chernobyl disaster.
* The September 11 attacks.
* Brexit.

One of Baba Vanga's final prophecies was that America's 44th president (Barack Obama) would be its last. (Incidentally, she also correctly predicted that this final president would be African-American.)

There is a lot of room for interpretation here. Will Trump be assassinated before he is sworn into office? Will he die under mysterious circumstances? Or will the United States be destroyed by some still-unknown Armageddon?

Hard to say, but it's a chilling thought! 
 

Santa Muerte, the fastest-growing new religion

Mexico's "folk saint of death"

The cult of Santa Muerte has grown exponentially in the last 15 years, seemingly out of nowhere. Santa Muerte is often lumped into the same category as santeria or voodoo, but this folk religion is very different. Although Santa Muerte is indeed the saint of death, she is also the patron saint of criminals, underdogs, LGBT people, and the disenfranchised.

Usually depicted as a skeleton holding a scythe, Santa Muerte has become the unofficial saint of the drug cartels. But she is also passionately worshiped by the  unemployed and working class in Mexico.

A prostitute might feel uncomfortable petitioning the Virgin Mary for help. Most Catholic saints can seem very judgmental. But Santa Muerte doesn't judge, and she doesn't discriminate, and that is perhaps her biggest draw. Whether you need a saint to help ensure the delivery of your drug shipment, or protect your children from street violence, Santa Muerte's got your back.

Santa Muerte is not an official Catholic saint. In fact, the Catholic church has specifically disavowed Santa Muerte as blasphemy. Although worship of Santa Muerte involves many trappings of the Catholic church (including candles, flowers, and rosaries), and despite the fact that she does bear a resemblance to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The 10 cities least likely to survive a zombie apocalypse

Did your town make the cut?

According to a recent "totally practical and 100 percent feasible" study by CareerBuilder, 53 of the United States' biggest metropolitan areas were ranked by their ability to survive a zombie apocalypse.

The study took into account the city's ability to:

* Defend itself against the zombie hordes.
* Contain the outbreak.
* Research and distribute a cure.
* Stockpile and manage food supplies.

The nation's largest cities were ranked in the 10 Worst, including Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The 10 Best includes Seattle, Denver, Hartford CT, and Minneapolis. 

Boston was rated the best city to ride out the zombie apocalypse, with a high score on defense, containment, and cure (although it ranked low on food). New York City is the worst, with low scores across the board.

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