Bulgaria's Vampire Graveyards

From the Daily Beast:

In a 7,000-year-old town in Bulgaria, over 100 graves have been uncovered, revealing skeletons with stakes through their hearts and mutilated bones. Meet the vampires that almost were. 

Vampires may be greeted with swoons today, but in medieval Eastern Europe they were dealt a metal spike through the chest. 

Last week, Bulgarian archaeologists unearthed an unusual 13th-century grave in an ancient city named Thracian. 

The bones are encrusted in dirt, revealing a bowed, partially crushed skull and a round stake emerging from the left side of the skeleton’s chest. The interred is believed to be a middle-aged man, who was incapacitated post-death—cause unknown—by a two-pound iron rod thrust through his heart and the removal of the lower half of his left leg. Both mutilations were meant to stop the man, who villagers believed was a vampire, from returning to haunt the town and prey upon its inhabitants, researchers say.

Iron was believed to have special properties against the supernatural. Anyway, read the whole thing.

A Prehistoric Zombie Apocalypse?

Hints that our ancestors may have had to fight off the scourge of the undead. From Mother Nature Network:

Archaeologists working in Europe and the Middle East have recently unearthed evidence of a mysterious Stone Age "skull-smashing" culture, according to New Scientist. Human skulls buried underneath an ancient settlement in Syria were found detached from their bodies with their faces smashed in. Eerily, it appears that the skulls were exhumed and detached from their bodies several years after originally being buried. It was then that they were smashed in and reburied separate from their bodies.

 According to Juan José Ibañez of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona, the finding could suggest that these Stone Age "skull-smashers" believed the living were under some kind of threat from the dead. Perhaps they believed that the only way of protecting themselves was to smash in the corpses' faces, detach their heads and rebury them apart from their bodies.

But here's the creepy thing: many of the 10,000-year-old skulls appear to have been separated from their spines long after their bodies had already begun to decompose. Why would this skull-smashing ritual be performed so long after individuals had died? Did they only pose a threat to the living long after their original burial and death?

If it was a ritualistic exercise, it also raises questions about why only select corpses were chosen. All of the smashed skulls were from adult males between the ages of 18 and 30. Furthermore, there was no trace of delicate cutting. It appears that the skulls' faces were simply smashed in using brute force with a stone tool.

Of course, there's almost certain to be a rational explanation for all of this. Then again, it's also fun to consider the possibility that these findings represent evidence for a Stone Age zombie uprising.

Let's consider a few key facets of zombie mythology. Zombies, as we know, are hungry for the flesh of the living, and the only way to stop them is with a head shot. In many zombie movies, this involves shooting them in the cranium. One might surmise that the Stone Age equivalent of this would be to instead smash in their faces with a big rock. Perhaps the lopping off of their heads was then performed to ensure that the job was done.

Perhaps the reason the original dead bodies seemed to be exhumed before their heads were properly smashed in was because the dead had risen from their own graves, under their own power.

Maybe, just maybe, Stone Age Syrians battled against and saved the world from an imminent zombie apocalypse some 10,000 years ago. The theory may not make great fodder for a scientific thesis, but it sets up the plotline for a B-grade horror movie to perfection.

 The archaeologists suggest that the smashing of the faces may have been some ritual means for tribesmen to emotionally separate themselves from the dead, by ridding the dead of the their identity. That would only make sense, however, if it was done upon burial, not much later; and certainly doesn't explain why only corpses were selected for this treatment.

The Rise of R'lyeh?

Okay, this is kinda old, but in August the BBC reported on strange doings in the South Pacific:

A vast "raft" of volcanic rocks covering 10,000 sq miles (26,000 sq km) of ocean has been spotted by a New Zealand military aircraft.

A naval ship was forced to change course in order to avoid the cluster of buoyant rocks, located 1,000 miles off the New Zealand coast.

The unusual phenomenon was probably the result of pumice being released from an underwater volcano, experts said.

One navy officer described it as the "weirdest thing" he had seen at sea.

Lieutenant Tim Oscar told the AFP news agency: "As far ahead as I could observe was a raft of pumice moving up and down with the swell.

"The [top of the] rock looked to be sitting two feet above the surface of the waves and lit up a brilliant white colour. It looked exactly like the edge of an ice shelf," the officer said.

Researchers aboard the ship, HMNZS Canterbury, suggest that the source of the pumice was an underwater volcano (seamount) known as Monowai, located to the north of New Zealand.

The pumice is likely to have been formed when lava from the seamount came into contact with seawater, and as it is less dense than water it quickly rises to the surface of the ocean.

Vicky Hards from the British Geological Survey said the raft of volcanic rocks on this scale was a "relatively unusual occurrence".

No reports, though, of people having strange dreams, or mysterious shafts of light shooting up into the night.

Mysterious Meteor Trail Over Australia

That people saw the trail is not what is unusual. What is in unusual is that the trail was visible for 20 minutes. (Full story here).

"Vampire" Skeletons Unearthed in Bulgaria

From the Daily Mail:

Archaeologists in Bulgaria have unearthed two skeletons from the Middle Ages pierced through the chest with iron rods to keep them from turning into the undead.

They are the latest in a succession of finds across western and central Europe which shed new light on just how seriously people took the threat of vampires and how those beliefs transformed into the modern myth. The two skeletons, believed to be around 800 years old, were discovered during an archaeological dig near a monastery in the Bulgarian Black Sea town of Sozopol.Bulgaria's national history museum chief Bozhidar Dimitrov said: 'These two skeletons stabbed with rods illustrate a practice which was common in some Bulgarian villages up until the first decade of the 20th century.'

According to pagan beliefs, people who were considered bad during their lifetimes might turn into vampires after death unless stabbed in the chest with an iron or wooden rod before being buried.

People believed the rod would also pin them down in their graves to prevent them from leaving at midnight and terrorising the living, the historian explained.

According to Mr Dimitrov over 100 buried people whose corpses were stabbed to prevent them from becoming vampires have been discovered across Bulgaria over the years.

He added: 'I do not know why an ordinary discovery like that became so popular. Perhaps because of the mysteriousness of the word "vampire".

'These people were believed to be evil while they were alive, and it was believed that they would become vampires once they are dead, continuing to torment people.'

According to Dimitrov, 'vampires' were often aristocrats and clerics.

He added: 'The curious thing is that there are no women among them. They were not afraid of witches.'

* * *

The succession of plagues which ravaged Europe between 1300 and 1700 fostered the belief in vampires, mainly because the decomposition of corpses was not well understood, Borrini said.

Gravediggers reopening mass graves would sometimes come across bodies bloated by gas, with hair still growing, and blood seeping from their mouths and believe them to be still alive.

The shrouds used to cover the faces of the dead were often decayed by bacteria in the mouth, revealing the corpse's teeth, and vampires became known as 'shroud-eaters.'

According to medieval medical and religious texts, the 'undead' were believed to spread pestilence in order to suck the remaining life from corpses until they acquired the strength to return to the streets again.

Idaho Students Claim to Have Captured Bigfoot on Video

I can always rely on the Daily News for interesting articles, and they have produced once again:

A group of high school students believe they may have stumbled upon Bigfoot while in the Idaho wilderness for a class project.

The teenagers were in the woods near Mink Creek in Franklin County when they said they noticed a dark creature watching them from a ridge.

One of the students managed to grab his camera to film the large figure retreating between the trees.

The group then raced to the point they had seen the creature, and said they found a large foot imprint in the dirt and took a photograph of it.

'It just didn't look human-like,' the student who recorded the footage and who does not wish to be identified told Local News 8.'I don’t know what that is, it’s not a bear, it’s not a moose or anything. It was big and bulky and black.'

He went on: 'I'm not going to say yes it was a Bigfoot or no it wasn’t, because I don’t know, and nobody knows.'

Video at the link.

Mutant Fish

Shakespeare wrote:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

That is certainly the case here. The Daily Mail reports:

Most anglers’ tales revolve around the improbable size of their catch – but this specimen really does look fishy.

Mark Sawyer, 53, hooked the bizarre creature while fishing for carp in a lake.

At first he thought it was a common brown goldfish but on closer inspection he realised it appeared to have the head of a roach, the body and tail of a brown goldfish and the rear fin of a bream.

Those who fear falling hook, line and sinker for a hoax should bear in mind Mr Sawyer is the tackle editor of the Angling Times with a reputation to protect.

And experts who have seen images of the ‘Frankenfish’ agree it is the offspring of more than one species.

Hmm. Mutants + Zombies = Mutant zombies!!!

New Bigfoot Research

Scientists hope to use DNA testing to confirm or disprove whether Bigfoot exits.

Rumors of the hairy humanoid known variously as the yeti, bigfoot and sasquatch have persisted for decades, despite little hard evidence beyond grainy photographs and plaster casts of giant footprints. Now scientists are hoping to make more of a case for the creature -- with the help of genetic testing, Reuters reported.

The Lausanne Museum of Zoology in Switzerland together with prestigious Oxford University said Tuesday, May 22, that they will together use DNA testing to examine organic remains that some claim belong to the beast.

"It's an area that any serious academic ventures into with a deal of trepidation ... it's full of eccentric and downright misleading reports," Bryan Sykes at Oxford's Wolfson College told Reuters.

Lausanne has an archive of such organic material assembled by researcher Bernard Heuvelmans, the news agency reported. Heuvelmans sought the yeti for over 50 years until his death in 2001.

"There have been DNA tests done on alleged yetis and other such things but since then the testing techniques, particularly on hair, have improved a lot due to advances in forensic science," Sykes said.

Despite the lack of hard evidence, Bigfoot believers are steadfast in their conviction that somewhere out there lurks a giant hominoid that simply has eluded all efforts to track it down.

"I have been immersed in Sasquatch research for a number of years, and I can tell you in my mind a mountain of evidence supports the existence of these creatures," Ken Gerhard, a San Antonio cryptozoologist who co-wrote "Monsters of Texas," recently told the Houston Chronicle.

I used to watch Monsterquest, a cryptozoology show on the History Channel, that used scientific tests and approaches to determine the truth about various monsters. Most of the time, the show disproved the sightings. However, there were a few that were inconclusive, including Bigfoot.

Did Mermaids Exist?

A little off topic, but the scientist in this article theorizes that mermaids may have actually existed:

In the two-hour CGI Special “Mermaids: The Body Found,” Animal Planet dives deep into the idea that mermaids may have been real, and, even better -- related to humans!

“It’s a very radical theory on human evolution, but we have approached an age-old myth and really chased its origins,” Animal Planet honcho Charlie Foley told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column. “It has been compiled in a way that is very compelling, making us think that mermaids might not just be mythical creatures.”

The show unravels mysterious underwater sound recordings and presents a bone-chilling argument for the Aquatic Ape Theory, which suggests that during the transition from apes to hominid, some humans went through an aquatic stage. This stage is argued to have resulted in “aquatic ape-like” creatures.

“There are striking differences between us and other primates, yet [there are] many features we share with marine mammals, like the webbing between our fingers, which other primates don’t have, a layer of subcutaneous fat, and a loss of body hair,” Foley explained. “We also have an instinctive ability to swim, and control over breath. Humans can hold breath up to 20 minutes, longer than any other terrestrial animal.”

“Mermaids: The Body Found” ponders the concept that coastal flooding millions of years ago turned some of our ancestors inland, while another group branched off into the deep water out of necessity and for food.

Of course, this raises the possibility of zombie mermaids and mermen. For those of you thinking of riding out the zombie apocalypse in a boat or on an island, this is something you might want to research further.

The Sea Beast of Cincinnati

Fox News reports:

The collective brainpower of several dozen scientists was unable to unravel the mystery of a strange beast nearly half a billion years old, tentatively nicknamed “Godzillus.”

Ron Fine, an amateur paleontologist from Dayton, Ohio, hoped the supersmart group of scientists at a regional meeting of the Geological Society of America could help explain the baffling find he made recently: the fossil of a very large, very mysterious "monster" that lived near Cincinnati 450 million years ago.

Unfortunately, the sea beast of Cincinnati had them scratching their heads, too.

“Everybody else was just as puzzled as we are -- and personally, I think that’s pretty awesome,” Fine told FoxNews.com.

He found the fossilized specimen last summer, a roughly elliptical shape with multiple lobes totaling almost 7 feet in length. It dates from almost half a billion years ago, when a shallow sea covered Cincinnati.

And despite its size, no one has ever found a fossil of this “monster” until its discovery by the amateur paleontologist last year.

But neither Fine nor the other members of the Dry Dredgers, an association of amateur paleontologists based at the University of Cincinnati that has a long history of collaborating with professional scientists, could explain what it is.

“We all have a theory, that’s the problem! We’re considering both animal and plant,” Fine told FoxNews.com. “We know it’s a fossil, something that was alive. But it’s so different than anything else, we can’t tell if it's animal or plant.”

450 Million years old; approximately 7 feet tall; neither plant nor animal. Only one thing it could be...

 

(Source: ghostsandmurder.com)

 

... one of the "Old Ones" (aka, Elder Ones or Elder Things), described as:

Starfish-like entities which are part animal and part plant. They lived on our planet in ancient times, and warred with both the mi-go and the spawn of Cthulhu. The Elder Things were great scientists, and created humanity as food or a joke. They eventually abandoned their Antarctic city to live underwater, and it is unknown whether they have become extinct.

Glowing Whale Size Object Falls Into Conn. Lake

Here is an interesting story:

A state trooper and a motorist reported a large object falling out of the sky in Litchfield, Conn. -- a green, glowing, whale-sized object that plunged into Litchfield Lake. State authorities said no go; they failed to locate anything mysterious.

The Republican-American of Waterbury reports that a person driving in Litchfield at about 2 a.m. Tuesday reported that an object the size of a whale fell from the sky and crashed into Bantam Lake. Officials say that at about the same time, a state trooper 10 miles away in Warren called dispatchers to report that something fell out of the sky and landed near Bantam or Morris.

Morris fighters made several passes up and down the lake in a boat looking for a possible plane crash, but didn't find any debris.

Authorities called off the search, leaving the mystery unsolved.

But science may have the answer: According to the National Weather Service, there was a meteor shower that morning, WTNH.com reported.

Perhaps the whale-sized object was simply a meteor?

Nice theory except for one very large problem. A meteor that big striking the earth would do a little more than simply disappear into a lake. Ergo:

(Meteor Crater, AZ). Wikipedia notes:

Meteor Crater lies at an elevation of about 1,740 m (5,709 ft) above sea level. It is about 1,200 m (4,000 ft) in diameter, some 170 m deep (570 ft), and is surrounded by a rim that rises 45 m (150 ft) above the surrounding plains. The center of the crater is filled with 210–240 m (700–800 ft) of rubble lying above crater bedrock.

* * *

The object that excavated the crater was a nickel-iron meteorite about 50 meters (54 yards) across, which impacted the plain at a speed of several kilometers per second. Impact energy has been estimated at about 10 megatons. The speed of the impact has been a subject of some debate. Modeling initially suggested that the meteorite struck at a speed of up to 20 kilometers per second (45,000 mph), but more recent research suggests the impact was substantially slower, at 12.8 kilometers per second (28,600 mph). It is believed that about half of the impactor's 300,000 metric tons (330,000 short tons) bulk was vaporized during its descent, before it hit the ground.

Mysterious Booms Rattle Wisconsin Town

From MSNBC:

Since Sunday evening, mysterious sounds have been jolting the city awake, and no one can explain where they're coming from.

"People describe them as booming, thunder-like noises -- vibrating, shaking," Lisa Kuss, Clintonville city administrator, told msnbc.com. "The most extreme one I experienced was at 10 p.m. Monday night in our utilities room, and it was a bam."

That night, city officials received nearly 100 calls about the unexplained shaking. Alarmed, city officials tested gas levels, investigated sewer systems and landfills, and checked on city dams. Everything came back normal.

 In more recent reports, the USGS states that the booms were caused by minor earthquakes that are magnified by the bedrock on the area. (Story here).

Of course, this isn't the first time an area has been plagued by mysterious booms. For instance, in 1983, parts of Arkansas suffered mysterious booms. Areas off the coast of the Carolinas also experienced mysterious booms in the 70's and early 80's. Anyway, there are numerous other examples of this phenomena.

Man Claims Chupacabra Killed 35 Sheep

The chupacabra keeps racking up kills, according to this story.

When farmers in Mexico found 35 of their sheep slaughtered with significant claw and tooth marks around their necks, they had one creature to blame – the legendary chupacabra.

One man tending to the sheep overnight in the small Mexican town of Paracuaro said he saw animals with sharp fangs and wings kill the livestock.

Dubbed the ‘Bigfoot of Latin culture,’ the chupacabra is a legendary four-legged creature that many think is responsible for attacking and killing livestock.

Photos, and a brief history of chupacabra sightings at the link.

More On the Lake Vostok Expedition

By now you have undoubtedly heard that contact had been reestablished with the Russian scientist near the South Pole at Lake Vostock, and that they've successfully bored a hole into the subsurface lake.

Academics say they have found ‘the only giant super-clean water system on the planet’. They forecast the extraordinary 5,400 cubic kilometres of pristine water will be ‘twice cleaner than double-distilled water’, and any life will have developed in total isolation.

‘We're not talking a new Loch Ness Monster - though we actually cannot really predict what to expect,' an expedition source told Ria Novosti. ‘The lake water is a moving body, and despite being almost 4 km under the ice, there is an oxygen supply, and microorganisms have already been found in the ice drilled from close to the roof of Lake Vostok.’

Professor John Priscu told usnews.com in an email that the crews had been working ‘round the clock’ to finish the project before the Antarctic summer ended, which meant no planes could fly from the remote Vostok Station, where temperatures are currently around minus 66C.

'If they were successful, their efforts will transform the way we do science in Antarctica and provide us with an entirely new view of what exists under the vast Antarctic ice sheet,' he said.

Geothermal heat under the ice keeps the lake liquid, and its conditions are often described as 'alien' because they are thought to be akin to the subterranean lakes on Jupiter's moon Europa.

'I think we'll find unique organisms,' Professor Priscu, a microbiologist at the University of Montana, and a veteran Antarctic researcher who is on the trip told Scientific American.

But this is not all, according to the article.

But it was revealed this may not be the only surprise from sub-glacial Lake Vostok, a body of water as large as Lake Ontario.

As scientists began the search for new life, a state-run news agency in Russia claimed that an extraordinary cache of Hitler's archives may be buried in a secret Nazi ice bunker near the spot where yesterday's breakthrough was made.

‘It is thought that towards the end of the Second World War, the Nazis moved to the South Pole and started constructing a base at Lake Vostok,’ claimed RIA Novosti, the Russian state news agency.

It cited Admiral Karl Dontiz in 1943 saying ‘Germany's submarine fleet is proud that it created an unassailable fortress for the Fuehrer on the other end of the world’, in Antarctica.

According to German naval archives, months after the Nazis surrendered to the Allies in April 1945, a U-530 submarine arrived at the South Pole from the Port of Kiel.

The crew are rumoured to have constructed a still undiscovered ice cave ‘and supposedly stored several boxes of relics from the Third Reich, including Hitler's secret files’.

A later claim was that a U-977 submarine delivered remains of Hitler and Eva Braun to Antarctica in the hope they could be cloned from their DNA. The submariners then went to Argentina to surrender, it was claimed.

Zombie George Washington?

From the Daily Mail:

When George Washington died in December 14, 1799, the nation mourned the loss of the war hero who led the United States to independence.

But architect William Thornton believed America's first president was too important to leave the country so soon. He concocted a mad scheme to reanimate Washington's body and bring him back from the dead.

The tale of zombie George Washington, revealed by the science fiction blog io9, is reminiscent of the best selling book 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,' which recast the 16th president as a combat-hardened vampire slayer. Except Washington's story is true.

[Snip]

Thornton was also a trained doctor who had a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh. He had become entranced by the workings of the human body and the new concept of blood transfusion.

He wanted to thaw George Washington's body by the fire and rub it with blankets to warm him back up.

Then, Thornton would insert a fire bellows into his trachea to pump air back into his lungs.

The final, and most important step, would be giving him a transfusion of lamb's blood.

Scientists and doctors of the day believed lamb's blood has special properties.

[Snip]

According to io9, Thornton thought the blood transfusion would give Washington's circulatory system 'a spark of vitality' that would bring him back to life.

Ultimately, Martha Washington declined Thornton's offer to reanimate her husband, but not because it seemed too crazy to her.

Instead, she believed that after leading the Continental Army to victory over the British Empire and shepherding the nation through it's nascent years, he deserved a rest, io9 says.

Whoa, Buddy! You're Not Even A Zombie Yet!

A few days ago I posted about an article discussing the similarities between criminals and zombies. The similarity is a little too close in this case:

A Florida man has been arrested for allegedly hacking to death a Connecticut man and eating the victim’s eye and part of his brain, police said Wednesday.

Tyree Lincoln Smith, 35, was arrested Tuesday night on a Connecticut warrant for murder, according to police in Lynn Haven, Fla.

A property inspector discovered the body of Angel L. Gonzalez on Friday on the third floor of an abandoned home in Bridgeport, Conn., according to that city’s police department. A medical examiner determined that the cause of death was blunt head trauma and ruled Gonzalez’s death a homicide.

On Monday a cousin of Smith’s in Connecticut contacted the Bridgeport police about Gonzalez’s death. She told detectives that Smith had arrived at her house Dec. 15 and said he wanted to “get blood on his hands” before going to a park and then to the abandoned home, where he used to live, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

The next day, Smith returned to the cousin’s house with blood on his pants, hands and an axe, the affidavit said. Smith’s cousin said he told her that he was sleeping on a porch at the abandoned home when we was awakened by a Hispanic man and invited inside. Then Smith described beating the man’s face and head with the axe and collecting one of his eyes, a piece of his skull some of his brain matter, which he consumed in a nearby cemetery, the affidavit said.

5 Creepy Unsolved Mysteries (Updated)

Okay, I'm a sucker for strange mysteries. From Cracked.com: "There are unsolved crimes, and then there are the kind of creepy, 'What the hell could possibly be going on here' capers that keep the cops, and anyone who hears about them, up at night."

Update: Found another short article on the Lead Mask Mystery.