Friday, November 2, 2007

Illinois Police Station Has A Paranormal History

When police Officer Ken Hoffman was told during his job interview that unexplained things had happened in the Bull Valley police station, he said he laughed out loud. But it took only a couple of weeks on the job before Hoffman experienced what would be a series of strange events in the Stickney House, he said.

The house at 1904 Cherry Valley Road in Bull Valley, which is home to the village police department, clerk, and Village Board meetings, is known for its rounded corners – designed for easier communication with the dead – and association with strange occurrences.

Hoffman said he did not believe in ghosts, but he admitted to experiencing five events in the house in the past two years that he could not explain.

The first happened while he and a police sergeant were talking with Clerk Phyllis Keinz in the clerk’s office. All of a sudden, a drawer on a desk next to where Keinz was sitting began to open slowly. Then, another drawer opened, and the desk began to tip over, Hoffman said.

Hoffman’s first reaction was to find a logical explanation, he said.

“I was thinking, ‘Why is the drawer opening by itself?’ I’m not sure if it was off-kilter or if the floor was not level,” he said.

But strange things kept happening. Just this month, Hoffman and Police Chief Norbert Sauers both saw a woman dressed in white walk past a front window while they were chatting in the chief’s office. When they went outside to see who she was and why she was outside, she had disappeared, Hoffman said.

“I still don’t believe [in ghosts],” he said. “I think there are things that occur that we can’t explain. There probably is a logical explanation. But given the history of the house, it’s kind of cool to be a part of it.”

George Stickney built the two-story yellow brick house between 1849 and 1865 and became one of the first settlers in Nunda Township, according to a history of the house prepared for the village in 1991.

The Stickney family practiced a religion called spiritualism, which held the belief that spirits hid in corners. In order to better communicate with the dead, the Stickneys had the outer walls of the house built with rounded corners.

The house was deeded to the village of Bull Valley as part of an annexation agreement in 1985 and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987, Sauers said.

“What’s unique is that when you drive down the road toward [the Stickney House], you can still visualize a different time period, and we don’t have enough of those [buildings] around anymore,” said Nancy Fike, director of the McHenry County Historical Society.

But to maintain the old house and eventually restore it to its original condition will take a lot more money than is currently available, Sauers said.

The Stickney House Foundation was established in 1991 to collect donations to restore the house so that eventually it can become a museum, said Sauers, who also is the president of the foundation.

Tax money is not used for restoration so that donors can give to the foundation and get a tax deduction, Sauers said.

The foundation has about $61,000 from fundraising events and donations but needs about $50,000 more just to restore the front entrance and balconies, Sauers said.

“There isn’t a house like this in a five-state area, and I think it’s very imperative that we try to keep this house from falling into disrepair and losing its historical value and also the folklore and the legends of this house,” Sauers said.

“This is part of McHenry County from its beginning.”

Sauers said he had not seen a ghost in the house, but he believed that the house had a special energy.

He has heard footsteps and pounding in the walls, seen lights turn on and off, and had more than one of his officers quit after experiencing strange things in the house, he said.

Visitors come to the Stickney House around Halloween every year, hoping to take a look inside and, if they’re lucky, spot a ghost, Sauers said.

Fike said she hoped that someday the visitors would come year-round.

“Maybe sometime when there’s enough money, we won’t just get calls at Halloween time,” Fike said. “It’s a beautiful building, and it deserves preservation.”


West Virginia Officials Attempt To Capture Image Of African Lion

Using a video camera and raw chicken, state officials hope to learn whether the king of the jungle is prowling the woods of West Virginia.

Bow hunter Jim Shortridge believes he saw a full-grown, male African lion weighing between 250 and 300 pounds at the foot of Cold Knob Mountain earlier this month. The state Division of Natural Resources confirmed that at least one other person has reported seeing the lion.

Using a camera normally employed to catch people dumping trash illegally, the state Department of Environmental Protection has joined with Greenbrier County Animal Control Officer Robert McClung and exotic animal expert Jim Forga to see if they can substantiate the sightings.

Twenty pounds of raw chicken left on the site last week were devoured, but McClung said that doesn't prove the lion's existence.

"Anything could have eaten that," he said.

If officials do spot the lion on videotape, they may set a bear trap for the animal. If caught, it would be turned over to Forga, who runs Tiger Mountain Refuge in Rainelle, a shelter for exotic animals.


Thursday, November 1, 2007

Seems Those 'Snake Oil' Salesmen Were On To Something

Throughout the 19th century salesmen traveled the U.S. peddling solutions to all medical ills. As depicted in numerous Westerns and in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the "doctor" was aided by a shill in the crowd who would, at the appropriate moment, call out that this medicament, ointment or tincture had solved his woes. Once the unsuspecting public had purchased the con artists' wares, both would quickly depart before the townspeople discovered the worthlessness of the claims.

One of the most common cure-alls was snake oil, and its less than sterling efficacy soon lent its name as a generic to all such fraudulent hoaxes. The epithet endures: A quick search for "snake oil" on the Internet reveals that it still refers almost exclusively to something worthless and fake. But some of those original itinerant salesmen may have peddled actual Chinese snake oil, and those who did may not have been fraudulent after all.

For centuries snake oil has been a folk remedy in Chinese medicine, used primarily to treat joint pain such as arthritis and bursitis. Its introduction to the U.S. most likely occurred with the arrival of Chinese laborers who came to build the Transcontinental Railroad in the mid 1800s. They may have offered snake oil to fellow workers as relief for suffering long days of physical toil.

Richard Kunin, a California psychiatrist with a background in neurophysiology research, became intrigued with the idea of snake oil in the 1980s. He had been following early research on the importance of omega-3 fatty acids for health and it dawned on him that the much maligned snake oil might be a particularly rich source. Omega-3's proliferate in cold-blooded creatures that live primarily in cooler environments because the fats don't harden in chilly water like omega-6 fatty acids do (hence, the high level of omega-3's in cold-water fish such as salmon). "Snakes and fish share one thing, they're both cold-blooded animals," Kunin says.

Kunin visited San Francisco's Chinatown to buy such snake oil and analyze it. He also acquired two live rattlesnakes and extracted their fat sacks. According to his 1989 analysis published in the Western Journal of Medicine, Chinese water-snake oil contains 20 percent eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), one of the two types of omega-3 fatty acids most readily used by our bodies. In comparison, the rattlesnakes had only 8.5 percent EPA. And salmon, one of the most popular food sources of omega-3's, contains a maximum of 18 percent EPA, lower than that of snake oil.

Research since the 1980s has demonstrated the necessity—and efficacy—of omega-3 fatty acids. These acids not only reduce inflammation, such as arthritis pain, but also improve cognitive function and reduce blood pressure, cholesterol and even depression. "Because of their chemical structure, omega-3's behave very differently in cell membranes than any other fat," says Susan Allport, author of The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and What We Can Do To Replace Them. "They're much more dynamic, they move around much more, so they allow a lot to happen in the cell membranes. And that's where enzymes do their work. So these fats allow enzymes to work."

Recently in Japan, a group of scientists at the Japanese National Food Research Institute led by Nobuya Shirai turned their attention to snake oil as well. In 2002, in Fisheries Science, they evaluated the composition of oil from the Erabu sea snake—the source of snake oil in traditional Chinese medicine. They analyzed such snakes caught in both the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea and determined that the amount of beneficial omega-3s in sea snakes does not vary depending on their capture location.

In a series of later papers, the most recent published in the Annals of Nutrition & Metabolism in July 2007, Shirai and his team evaluated the effects of Erabu sea-snake oil on a number of outcomes in mice, including maze-learning ability and swimming endurance. In both cases, snake oil significantly improved the ability of the mice in comparison with those fed lard.

Despite Shirai and Kunin's analyses, snake oil retains its fraudulent feel in the U.S., perhaps because the Japanese research is not widely known and we were only beginning to understand the need for omega-3's when Kunin published his analysis. "That study came out at the time that we were beginning to appreciate that we did indeed require omega-3's," Allport says. "The first medical reason people were looking at omega-3's was for arthritis…. [But] all of our cells in our bodies have a certain amount of omega-3's in them. Now we concentrate [research] on the brain and the heart because those are organs that have a higher concentration. But all our cells need these fats in them."

Of course, most 19th-century snake oil salesmen did not, in fact, sell this particular product. Even those hucksters who did sell actual snake oil would likely have sold the rattlesnake variety, nearly useless for any ache-relieving medicinal purpose. But the original Chinese purveyors of snake oil offered something that probably did exactly what they claimed it would do: help fellow workers relieve the pain of their labors.


CIA Documents Reveal Alien Invasion Always Considered Major Threat

A raft of newly unclassified CIA documents reveal that the remote possibility of alien invasion elicited greater fear than a Soviet nuclear attack.

More interesting still, the CIA documents show that despite decades of repeated public denials, behind the scenes there raged a series of inter-agency feuds which implicated the highest levels of the US government.

The subject of UFOs and dabbling in psychological warfare techniques not only focused the attention of the US elite levels for 50 years but some of the greatest scientific and military minds of the era were involved in the effort.

A Herald investigation, to be published on Saturday, shows that throughout the 1950s, CIA files clearly document an explosion of activity by US intelligence and military bodies concerned with studying every possible implication for the US, and Western democracies, of UFOs.

The phenomenon, so adored by the cinematic world - from mind control and space travel to extra-terrestrial life - was reflected in the CIA's fixations. Indeed, while highly educated CIA employees experimented by giving each other surprise LSD trips in 1953, there were others, in other parts of the agency, dealing with a huge flood of UFO reports.

Significantly, however, after a burst of intense scrutiny in the early '50s, the available documents effectively go cold. Why?

The quintessential Kafkaesque explanation provided is that few files were kept because these would only confirm that the CIA was investigating UFOs. But the wildly eclectic UFO files in fact cover everything from ``flying saucers over Belgian Congo uranium mines'' to Nazi ``flying saucers''.

When The New York Times reported in 1979 that the CIA had investigated UFOs,the news report is said to have so upset the then-CIA director Stansfield Turner that he reportedly asked his staff: ``Are we in UFOs?''

The answer then was yes - since the late 1940s apparently. But exactly how, what, when, why and who remained layered in mystery, leaving infinite grist for the conspiracy mill.


49 Ft. Python, World's Largest Snake, On Display

Indonesian villagers claim to have captured a python that is almost 49 feet long and weighs nearly 990 pounds, a local official said.

If confirmed, it would be the largest snake ever kept in captivity.

Hundreds of people have flocked to see the snake at a primitive zoo in Curugsewu village on the country’s main island of Java.

Local government official Rachmat said the reticulated python measured 48 feet 8 inches and weighed in at 983 pounds.

The Guinness Book of World Records lists the longest ever captured snake to be 32 feet. The heaviest — a Burmese Python kept in Gurnee, Ill. — weighs 402 pounds, the book said on its Web site.

The Indonesian newspaper Republika said the snake, which was caught last year but only recently put on public display, eats three or four dogs a month.

Reticulated pythons are the world’s longest snakes. They are capable of eating animals as large as sheep, and have been known to attack and consume humans.

The species is native to the swamps and jungles of Southeast Asia.


Over-Acting Paranormalist Outed By Criss Angel On Live TV


Criss Angel is proud to be an illusionist: he doesn't pretend that he's doing magic tricks, and he's not a believer in the paranormal. He loves a good illusion, but it's his intention on "Phenomenon" to call out anyone who claims their work is being done through supernatural means.

That person arrived on the show in the form of Michael Callahan, who uses automatic writing to divine secrets like "what's in this box?" Uri Geller of course loves the act, and Criss Angel thinks it's absurd. He pulls out an envelope and asks Callahan what's in it, offering him a million dollars if he can guess it. Obviously, they can't. Callahan and Angel nearly come to blows.

This video ends with some criticism of Criss Angel, calling him a hypocrite for having a "supernatural" show but refusing to believe anyone else's paranormal displays. That's kind of silly, because like I said earlier, Angel makes it pretty clear that his performances have perfectly normal explanations. The best part, in my opinion, is seeing the paranormalist get humiliated.

Note: Though I truly believe in the paranormal, I can respect Criss Angel's opinion. When charlatans used dramatics and foolishness to make themselves seem to connect with the supernatural world, then they need to be outed and ridiculed.


Fallen Soldiers Still Haunt Culloden Battlefield


Scottish Paranormal investigators, the country's own take on the Ghostbusters, say they have unearthed unexplained phenomena at the site where staff say visitors have reported hearing battle cries and marching, some 261 years after the bloody battle where Govenment forces defeated Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobite army.

And now the team, whose poltergeist probes are in greater demand at Hallowe'en, is already planning follow-up visits to the scene of the bloody battle because "spirits are not performing seals" and they want to build up more evidence of any ghostly goings-on.

It would lend weight to the numbers of people, both local and visitors, who have told of strange noises or apparitions at creepy Culloden moor.

Culloden Battlefield visitor centre manager Deirdre Smyth said residents have reported seeing a large ghostly bird that apparently inhabits the area and was first sighted on the eve of the battle on April 15, 1746, by Lord George Murray who was the Jacobite commander. Described as a huge black bird, it is called the Great Scree of Culloden Moor and legend has it that anyone who sees the Great Scree will have bad luck.

Deirdre told the Highland News: "We have had stories of people seeing or hearing strange things. Whether they really have or not I don't know, but it is a very atmospheric place, especially when it's misty.

"Local people have also reported seeing a giant bird rising from the field – it's called the Great Scree of Culloden. Others have also said that when they were kids they wouldn't walk in the field at night."

Scottish Paranormal, which carries out its ghoul hunting on a voluntary basis, recently descended on Culloden to see if the ground of the final clash between the Jacobites and the Hanoverians in the 1745 Jacobite rising, left a supernatural presence in their wake.

Although it was just a preliminary visit, the team was satisfied that there was enough unexplained activity to warrant further investigations after the New Year.

Andrea Byrne, Scottish Paranormal's administration and PR manager, told the Highland News: "All of us are Scottish and we have a passion about being Scottish and have an interest in its history.

"So as well as monitoring private houses and other places such as Mary King's Close in Edinburgh, we like to carry out projects at historical sites, and that's why we went to Culloden.

"The majority of hauntings are classed as what's called residual energy. This is where a traumatic experience or battle happened in a particular area and that trauma or that experience is embedded on that area and like a record, it repeats itself again and again.

"In Culloden, there was a seriously traumatic event which saw a lot of deaths.

"While there, we spoke to the staff and they told us that sometimes visitors had heard the battle cries and the marching of the soldiers. It is as if the march and the battle is getting played over and over again. This happens more towards the anniversary of the battle which lends credence to it being residual energy."

The team, the majority of whom are based in Fife, measured activity at Culloden with a selection of monitoring equipment. This included digital voice recorders that look for any audible phenomena such as white noise or electronic voice phenomena; temperature data loggers looking for any unusual fluctuations in temperature; temperature probes to locate and confirm cold spots; electro-magentic field detectors used due to the belief that paranormal entities emit an electromagnetic field; and digital camcorders to record any incidents.

Temperatures jumped over soldier graves

During the investigation, the team noticed signs they normally connect with a paranormal activity Andrea Byrne said: "One of the anomalies we found was the temperature and humidity. When we were walking along the main path to locations, we were getting a regular temperature, and the humidity was staying the same. But the moment we got to where the English or Scottish soldiers were buried the temperature changed dramatically, and was not consistent with the weather. It was fluctuating up and down.

"We could not come up with a logical explanation for a change in the temperature. So there could have possibly been paranormal reason behind it."

She went on to add they used dowsing rods to see if there were any "energy lines", also known as ley lines, which are of interest to paranormal investigators.

One was found to exist at a 56-degree angle at the Well of the Dead, which Andrea described as "extremely interesting" because if the line is drawn on a map and extended in a line at 56 degrees, it would meet the Cumberland's Stone 1.5 miles away. This stone was from where the Duke of Cumberland, nicknamed the Butcher of Culloden, commanded the battle.

However, Andrea said that the dowsing rods may have moved at this location because there may be water underneath the well.

The group then went on to nearby Clava Cairns to carry out more investigations, but they did not find much there of an untoward nature. They had also not heard any paranormal stories relating to the location.

The investigation team, which has recently added Elgin woman Rachel Atkinson to its fold, is now due to return to Culloden Battlefield in the New Year.

She added: "We find a single visit to a location does not build up enough evidence to say there is paranormal activity going on or not. Spirits are not performing seals, they don't just appear when you want them to or when you happen to be there. We have go back to locations to build up the evidence."

As well as checking out historic sites, the investigators who include a medium and describe themselves as being "highly skilled" in the field, are called in to probe private homes whose residents believe are haunted.

And when they can't find a logical explanation for the ghoulish activity, they set out to prove it is the supernatural making things go bump in the night. They have even discovered a poltergeist or two in their time.

Andrea explained: "In general, we carry out these investigations because we have got a belief in life after death and in proving that or otherwise.

"Because we have got knowledge in the field, we go out to private houses and help the public to understand what's going on. We always look for the logical explanation first, and if we can't find one then we look for proof of anything paranormal."

She claims they recently stumbled upon a poltergeist in a private house in Craigmillar, Edinburgh.

"The majority of poltergeists we find are in private houses", she explained. So far, we have not carried out any investigations in private houses in the North. However, we hope that will change as we now have a new investigator based outside Elgin and she is contacting housing associations and other organisations in the area to let them know we are here if people are experiencing anything unusual in their homes."


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