The Self-Mummifying Buddhist Monks of Japan

What would you do to be immortalized as a religious relic?

What would you die for? A loved one? A deeply held belief? A heroic act? How about for becoming immortalized as a religious piece of iconography? Buddhist monks in Japan, throughout much of their middle ages and even into the 20th century, would routinely commit a kind of ritualized suicide, death by a slow poisoning, in order to be preserved for posterity as a deified relic to be worshiped as an embodiment of the Buddha. The discipline of the Japanese is legend, from the ritualized code of honor among Samurai in the middle ages, to the incredible loyalty and willingness to give up their life that made it so difficult for our soldiers in World War II. However, all of that pales in comparison to the ritualistic torture that Japanese Buddhist monks would inflict on themselves for their beliefs.

A Buddhist monk already lives a life of austerity and self-denial. They are bound by a religious code that demands that they refuse their bodies all but the most essential needs in order to better commune with the divine. Priests seeking the immortality of ascendance through self-mummification, however, take that principle to an insane degree.

Monks pursuing this end would fast for three years, eating only a diet of nuts and seeds and pursuing a regimen of exercise that stripped their body fat from them. At the end of this three year period the monk would be quite healthy and with an incredibly high metabolism. The next three years the monk would eat only bark and roots and drink only a kind of poisonous tea from sap from a kind of tree used to lacquer bowls. This would cause the monk to vomit and evacuate often, losing bodily fluids and killing off parasites in their bodies that may cause their bodies to decompose. Finally, when the monk was near death, they would lock themselves in a stone tomb only big enough to accommodate their body. In those stone tomb would be an air tube and a bell. Every day the monk would sit within their tube in the lotus position, ringing the bell once to let the monastery above know that they were still alive. When the bell didn’t ring, those above would know that the monk was dead and they would seal the tomb. Years later the tombs would be opened and, if the self-mummification was successful, the monk would be raised to the status of Buddha, put on display, and worshipped as religious relics. These mummies, known as “sokushinbutsu”, still number 28 in Japan, though not all are publicly visible. Many monks, when their tombs were opened, were found to have rotted. Although they were respected for their discipline and endurance, but were not worshipped.

E-Cat: Cold Fusion?

Spoiler alert: NOPE.
Italian "inventor" Andrea Rossi is making big waves this week with reports that his E-Cat invention has been demonstrated for "private corporate interests" who were apparently satisfied that the device did indeed produce free energy as promised.
 
Color me unsurprised.
 
What would surprise me is if the E-Cat had been shown to, you know, scientists. People who have some kind of background or training which qualifies them to determine whether or not a magic black box is producing energy out of thin air without any unpleasant side effects. The fact that the corporate investors were unnamed only makes the whole thing more likely to be a scam.

 
Metafilter user Slap*Happy has a great summary of how this scam works in his comment here. The con is called "salting," and in this case the reported results could easily be obtained by simply putting a battery inside the mystical box.
 
We have a box that Rossi won't let anyone open, reports that some anonymous people agree that it is really cold fusion, and a pile of used nickel powder which Rossi says is the end result of his cold fusion process, but which is indistinguishable from a pile of regular old used nickel powder.
 
Worse still, Rossi has a terrible track record. In the words of this astute commenter to the National Review, he has "a history of questionable behavior" which includes being jailed for tax fraud, a track record of making "grandiose claims" and never following through, and he has created a fake scientific journal which (unsurprisingly) backs up his results.
 
Cold fusion or "zero point energy" is the dream of the future, and has been for decades. Imagine being able to get all the energy you need, for free, without any environmental consequences. No nuclear meltdowns, no coal mining, no more oil spills, no more pollution. 
 
Unfortunately, given the laws of physics as we understand them today, it simply isn't possible. But that hasn't kept a lot of people from trying, bless their hearts. Most zero point energy enthusiasts are simply deluded (or irrationally optimistic). But Andrea Rossi seems to be deliberately committing fraud in order to scam people, which is pretty heinous.
 
I'm not completely unwilling to believe in cold fusion. It would sure be great if we had it. But at this point, given the long history of zero point energy scams, it definitely falls under the heading of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." 

NatGeo Traveler's Ghost Story

My advice would have been two-fold: 1) Ghosts can't hurt you, and 2) try to get some video!
National Geographic Traveler Andrew Evans who posts his missives under the "Digital Nomad" banner was apparently something of a skeptic when it came to ghosts. Right up until the night that he spent alone in a huge, empty, haunted home (now a bed and breakfast) in Louisiana. This is an amazing story, well-written, concise, forthright, and fascinating.
 
The first sign of trouble comes when Evans learns that he will be staying in the giant mansion alone. "As long as you say it's not haunted," he jokes, but the housekeeper responds by looking "a little concerned." She says it's not haunted, and then she says there are stories but no one has seen anything, and then finally she says that SHE has not seen anything. 

(Later she mentions that she once attended a Halloween party dressed as the ghost which is said to haunt the house. Which is pretty far from where she started, with the "not haunted" bit. I would have been pretty annoyed with her, if I had been Evans.)
 
Well of course not - she doesn't spend the night there. And you have to wonder if that's just the arrangement, or if maybe she used to live at the mansion but moved out because she couldn't handle it. In fact, far from the breezy appearance she tries to put on, it eventually turns out that she is completely terrified of ghosts. (As is her son, who has refused to set foot on the property ever since an incident there that he won't talk about.)
 
In the case of this property, the ghost is said to be that of a little girl who was once forced to live in the small cupboard beneath the stairs. Evans' experience seems to bear this out, because the activity he experienced definitely sounds like the work of a mischievous child. He spent the night wide awake, Twittering and Facebooking with his social circle, listening to the sound of feet running down the hallway and plates being rattled.
 
In my opinion, the only thing worse than being kept up all night terrified of a ghost would be listening to the well-intentioned advice and opinions of random internet strangers on the matter. If you have ever heard footsteps where there should not have been footsteps, you know full well that it isn't the sound of the house settling. 
 
(Perhaps worse were those who believed him, and who urged him to get out or call the police!)
 
My advice would have been two-fold: 1) Ghosts can't hurt you, and 2) try to get some video!
 

Foreclosure Mummies

Disturbing tales of mummified bodies left behind in forclosed homes.
Here's a phenomena that is ever so "of the moment," and which seems to be happening more and more often. Stop me if you've heard this one before: a homeowner stops paying their mortgage. The bank forecloses. Someone comes along and buys the foreclosed home, often at auction without having seen the property in person first. Apparently no one (either the bank, the inspector, or the new homeowner) inspected it very closely, because the new homeowner discovers the old owner's mummified corpse inside.
 
This story is as sad as it is disturbingly common. It used to be that if you suddenly stopped making payments on your home, things would happen. A bank officer might stop by. They might phone your emergency contact and ask for more information. Someone from the Sheriff's department would stop by and take a look around.

 
These days? Please. The banks are flooded with foreclosures. They don't even have time to list all the foreclosed homes for sale, much less the resources to check up on each home. And so many people are walking away from their mortgages, who can blame the banks from assuming that's what happened this time, too?
 
A timeline:
 
The seaside air in the coastal town of Roses, Spain helped preserve the body of a childless woman in her mid-50s who died in her home in 2001. Six years later a man named Jordi Giro bought the home at auction, sight unseen. When he entered the home a week later, he found her "mummified body sitting on the living room couch."
 
Only hours before a North Hollywood home was going to revert to the bank, a mortgage broker contacted police for a welfare check. Inside, police found 30 years' worth of garbage, plus a mummified body which they tentatively identified as 86 year-old Barbara Hunt.
 
A man buys a two-story stucco home at foreclosure auction. In the garage, he finds the mummified body of former homeowner Kathryn Norris inside her locked car. 
 
The case of Norris is particularly interesting, not just because of the amazing and heartbreaking article in the St. Petersburg Times, but because she should have been discovered at several points. After her disappearance, her nephew called local police and asked them to do a welfare check. The police reported that her home seemed to be empty. Later, bank employees twice performed a "diligent search" and certified the home unoccupied.

Hauntings Not Covered By Homeowner's Insurance

These policies cover "named perils such as wind, fire, and theft." Not ghosts.
I really have to applaud this article by InsuranceQuotes.com blogger Gina Roberts-Grey. It may have started out as a "capitalize on Halloween by writing something sensationalistic and silly" project. But it turned into an interesting and thought-provoking article about, of all things, the intersection between paranormal activity and homeowner's insurance.
 
Something most of us may not have considered is that ghostly activity is not covered by most homeowner's insurance policies. These policies cover "named perils such as wind, fire, and theft." Not ghosts. 
 
A woman who lives in a haunted house found this out the hard way, when her insurance failed to cover an item of art that fell and broke "moments before" her mother passed away. Live and learn: if this happens to you, maybe you should consider blaming the wind instead of the paranormal!

 
People living in a haunted home can incur a surprising amount of damage. Woodwork and trim can be scratched, scorch marks can appear, water damage, and broken household items aplenty. Most of this is small stuff that most people would probably never even consider filing an insurance claim over. But I hear about a lot of cases where an upstairs tap will mysteriously turn itself on. What happens if no one's around, and that open tap floods the floor?
 
As Roberts-Grey points out, you can add an endorsement to your coverage for "special personal property." This all-risk coverage costs quite a bit more than a standard insurance policy, but it will also cover any damage caused by spirits. It's probably only worth it if A) you have observed physical damage being caused by your haunts (i.e. not just sounds like shuffling feet or shadow play) and B) you have a lot of expensive stuff. 
 
For most people, just putting aside the difference between the two policies in a bank account to use as self-insurance is probably enough. I once lived in a home that had a slate floor in the kitchen. It was beautiful, but if you dropped anything, it would absolutely explode. I lost a lot of good coffee cups and Pyrex dishes in that home, but I just mentally wrote it off as part of the cost of living in an interesting home. Damage caused by ghosts: chalk it up the same way!
 
This article also reminds me that I have heard a lot of rumors that the famous Amityville haunting was all basically one big case of insurance and real estate fraud. 
 
Homeowner's insurance: more relevant to the paranormal than you might think!

Grey Appears in Amazon Rainforest

 

It's been a while since we had ourselves a decent grey. They were all over the place in the '80s, appearing in both personal anecdotes from supposed encounters and in the film adaptations of those encounters. These days I feel like we're more concerned with dead chimeras washing up on beaches than the classic humanoid sightings, but now Brazil seems to be bringing back the classic blurry alien shot.

That's right--this one's actually a photo, not just a secondhand story of a midnight sighting. Well, technically, it's a video still from footage taken (allegedly) by two British tourists during their trip to the Mamaus region of the Amazon rainforest. Yes, we're finally getting an overseas alien, just in case you were wondering why 90% of all alien activity seems to be centered on the United States. Looks like they pop up in jungles, too.

The still focuses on the group of indigenous children in its foreground, but it's the background that caught the eye of paranormal expert Michael Cohen, who supposedly received the footage from the tourists once they realized what they were looking at. There's a bright portal of light, a little galactic smear in between the trees. And about 15 feet away from it stands a little human-shaped creature.

It's a pretty perfect image of a grey with its oversized head and distended torso. It's blurry, of course, but what paranormal creature isn't? You have to wonder, though--if this little dude emerged from a portal of light in plain sight of numerous tourists, wouldn't one of them have noticed? Maybe the greys have mastered psychic cloaking that doesn't work on cameras. Who knows. The region where the footage was taken is, apparently, known for multiple UFO sightings, which were covertly investigated by the Brazilian government under Operation Prato. They denied the investigations at first, as all government entities are wont to do when suspected of researching alien activity, but later 'fessed up and even released a whole bunch of files proving their studies. So maybe the little dudes are back. Or maybe Michael Cohen knows how to use Photoshop. Either way, Hollywood thinks it can profit off the finding. Cohen has already been approached with questions about a new screenplay based on the extraterrestrial findings deep in the South American jungle. I suppose the genre could do with a new backdrop--we've seen far too much of American metropolises and Area 51--so that could have some interesting results.  

The Taman Shud Murder Case

The Taman Shud Case is one of the great enduring crime mysteries, up there with the identity of the Zodiac Killer and the mystery of Jack the Ripper. It all begins with a body found on Somerton Beach in Australia on December 1, 1948. To quote Wikipedia, this is a murder case which involves "the use of an undetectable poison, lack of identification, the possibility of unrequited love, and the involvement of a secret code in a very rare book."
 
The body in question is that of a middle-aged man in excellent physical condition. He was dressed in clothing which was high-quality and fashionable at the time, although somewhat out of season. Although the weather had been quite hot (since December 1 is the peak of summer in Australia) he was wearing a sweater over a button-down cotton shirt, and a double-breasted wool jacket.

 
He had no distinguishing marks, his dental records were not on file, his pockets contained no ID, and all of the labels had been cut out of his clothing. An autopsy showed signs consistent with a fatal poisoning, although toxicology reports at the time were unable to detect any unusual chemicals in his system. (Recent analysis is that digitalis was the most likely culprit.)
 
In the days which followed, he was also linked to a brown suitcase. And eventually coroners found a tiny scrap of paper with the words "taman shud" rolled up and tucked deep into a small pocket in the man's pants. The phrase means "ended," and police eventually tracked it down to the last sentence of an incredibly rare copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which had been left in the back seat of a stranger's unlocked car.
 
In the back of the book, police found a bunch of scribbled letters which are presumably a code. It also included the phone number of a woman who served as a nurse during WWII. She had a meaningful connection to the Rubaiyat, and to a young soldier named Boxall, but Boxall was later found unharmed and with his copy of the Rubaiyat undamaged. 
 
The nurse (who goes by the name "Jestyn") claimed no knowledge of the dead man. However, she had given birth to a son who was 18 months old at the time the man died. 
 
The dead man had two extremely unusual genetic conditions: a dental condition causing him to lack both lateral incisors, and a quirk in the shape of his ears. In 2010 a researcher analyzed a picture of Jestyn's son (who died in 2009) and found that he has the same genetic abnormalities. An unlikely coincidence, to say the least! But as with so many other elements of the case, it only brings up more questions. This is one mystery which is not likely to be solved any time soon!

Vestigial Human Tails

 

In the earliest stages of development of a human embryo, it has a little tail. This tail measures about 1/6th the size of the entire length of the embryo (the equivalent of a 12-inch tail on a 6-foot man). But as the fetus develops, the tail is absorbed. Enzymes dissolve the bones, and the entire structure retracts into the fetus's body.
 
 
Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, a baby is born with its vestigial tail still attached. According to the National Institute of Health, "There have been 23 vestigial tails reported in the literature since 1884," or approximately one baby born with a tail every 5 ½ years.

 
In most cases, the tail is just a small little tag sticking out from the base of the spine. But in some remarkable cases, the tail can be unusually long, or the owner may have motor control over it. One of the most surprising cases of a human vestigial tail belongs to a tea plantation worker in West Bengal, India named Chandre Oram, who has a tail that is 13 inches long and covered with dense hair. 
 
He is regarded locally as an incarnation of Hanuman, the monkey god. Locals report that their ailments have been miraculously healed after they touched his tail. Unfortunately, Oram remains single, despite his search for a wife. Approximately twenty women have so far rejected his marriage proposals, because they refuse to accept his tail.
 
Many medical professionals regard Chandre Oram's tail as not being a true tail, but instead being an extremely rare form of spina bifida. Spina bifida is a birth defect (often caused by a lack of folic acid during conception and the early stages of pregnancy) where the spinal tube does not close properly. This causes spinal fluid to bulge out, and a small fleshy pouch sometimes forms.
 
This second kind of tail (caused by spina bifida, and not by a genetic abnormality which keeps the fetal tail from being reabsorbed) is considered more common. One tip-off that a human tail has been caused by spina bifida is the tail's location. 
 
A true tail will project out from the very bottom of the spinal column, being an extension of the coccyx or tailbone. A tail caused by spina bifida will be attached somewhere higher on the back. In the case of Chandre Oram, the tail appears to be attached in his lumbar region, well above his coccyx. Other tails caused by spina bifida can happen even higher, all the way up to the base of the neck.

Evidence of Intelligent Mythical Squid In ”Mollusk’s Macaroni Illustration”

The mythical Kraken, a giant hyper-intelligent squid from mythology, has long been a fascination of scientists…but not solid scientific fact.

A recent report from Boulder, Colorado’s Mount Holyoke University,

published by the Geological Society of America, claims to have found evidence of the existence of the mythical Kraken. According to legends, the Kraken was an enormous squid that would hunt the equally enormous ichthyosauruses, a school-bus-sized sea creature that look a bit like a reptilian needle-nosed dolphin. According to the report, the kraken, whose name has been borrowed from Greek myths, would hunt down the ichthyosaurus, breaking its back and dragging it down to its lair on the ocean’s floor where it would devour it. Then, in a well-fed bout of inspiration, it would arrange the creatures bones in symmetrical designs on the floor of its lair. These designs, according to Mark McMenamin, the paleontologist who claims to have discovered evidence of the kraken’s existence, is what alerted him to the now extinct squid’s lair.

McMenamin’s find comes from the Berlin-Ichthyoraur State Park in Nevada, where as many as nine intact 45-foot long ichthyosaur skeletons have been unearthed in the last 50 years. McMenamin points to a well-documented enigma around the site, wherein prominent paleontologists are unable to explain exactly how the remains came to be located here. Also, their remains seem be arranged in concentric patterns, not the natural haphazard arrangement of a typical death. McMenamin began to look for contemporary precedents for this kind of behavior, and modern octopi often will arrange their prey’s remains in patterns. What is there was a very large cephalopod, like the Kraken of Greek myth? "I think that these things were captured by the kraken and taken to the midden and the cephalopod would take them apart.”

The issue with McMenamin’s theories is that the evidence is largely circumstantial, and the hypothesis completely relies on speculation. In other words, there’s no solid scientific evidence to support his claims. Reported in Discover, many paleontologists are skeptical of McMenamin’s work and so-called evidence. Despite that, a number of online and print news outlets, even mainstream news media, have run the story as irrefutable proof (a lamentation toward the degradation of “science news”). Still, Cyriaque Lamar of iO9, has addressed the find thus, “But the possibility of finding that which is essentially a gargantuan mollusk’s macaroni illustration?” he wrote, “That’s the kind of glorious crazy you hope is reality.” It does seem to be primarily hope and the selective acceptance of circumstance that allows so many professionals in the science news field to report on such invalidated findings.

Did Mikey Welsh Predict His Own Death?

 

Tragic news last Sunday, as we learned that the former Weezer bassist and successful painter Mikey Welsh apparently died in his sleep at the Raffaelo Hotel in Chicago. But the news turned strange when people started pointing out two messages Welsh Tweeted on September 26th. 
 
In the first message, Welsh says "dreamt I died in Chicago next weekend (heart attack in my sleep). Need to write my will today." He then followed it up with "correction - the weekend after next." Which was in fact the weekend that Welsh died.

 
Welsh was discovered when he failed to check out of the hotel by the 1PM check-out time. Hotel staff checked his room and found him "unconscious and not breathing." The cause of death is as yet undetermined, but police say that foul play is not suspected.
 
This leaves three possibilities: an accidental self-inflicted death (a drug overdose, for example), suicide, or the heart attack that Welsh dreamed about two weeks prior.
 
Personally I wonder if Welsh actually did end up writing his will. Whether or not he did so might shed light onto the situation. At the very least, it would help determine whether or not Welsh was taking his dream seriously, or if he was just being flip about it.
 
According to TMZ - hardly the most legitimate news source but still - the authorities say that "narcotics are suspected as the cause of death." However, toxicology reports have not been completed. And even if his death turns out to have been a drug overdose, that still leaves us with the same three possibilities.
 
Welsh, who replaced the band's original bassist Matt Sharp, had attempted suicide by drug overdose at least once before. In 2001 at the end of a three-month European tour with Weezer, Welsh suffered a "nervous breakdown" and overdosed on heroin. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed with PTSD and borderline personality disorder. 
 
After his departure from Weezer and finally receiving the psychiatric help that he needed, Welsh's life appeared to improve. He became a successful  and highly acclaimed artist, returning to the painting that was his passion before he became a musician, and moved to Vermont with his wife and son. 
 
If you feel that you are at risk for committing suicide, please reach out and seek help. In the United States you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline toll-free at 1-800-273-8255.

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