Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Tenants have been evicted by their landlords for many reasons, but I’m guessing “Your dead relative is lowering my property values” doesn’t crop up very often.  The “Detroit Free Press,” December 29, 1929:

Berlin, Dec. 28.(U. P.)--There is a landlord in Berlin who absolutely refuses to let tenants bring ghosts with them into his apartments. He has gone to court to ask for permission to eject a family that, he alleges, has been harboring an all too active spirit in their rooms.

According to popular report, not only undenied by the family but actually confirmed by the family pastor, the ghost is that of an uncle of 11-year-old Lucy Regulski, the only person now alive to whom the apparition has appeared.

Other members of the family, however, have heard the noises made by the unearthly fellow during his nocturnal calls upon his niece, and years ago, it is said, Lucy's grandmother was once favored with a visit from her then recently deceased son. 

Family ghosts may be all right in their way, the owner of the building suggests in his petition to the court, but families possessing them should at least have the common courtesy to report the fact before signing leases on new apartments. Sometimes they can be very disturbing, as  apparently they have been in the case of Uncle Regulski.

The landlord argues that the Regulskis must have known of the existence of this ghost before they moved in because it had once called upon the grandmother. It is his contention that its occasional presence in Lucy's bedroom, but more especially the effect that its presence there has had on neighborhood opinion, will result in decreasing, to his financial loss, the desirability of his apartments as living quarters and thus also eventually lower the market value of the building.

Just to play it safe, in the event that there really are no such things as ghosts, he included in his petition another plea in which he asserts that the entire affair is probably a hoax upon the part of the Regulski family, that the ghost has been invented by them for unexplained but nevertheless sinister reasons. In either case, he feels he is being damaged and he wants to dump the Regulskis, ghost and all, out into the street. 

Meanwhile spiritualists and other persons learned in the ways of manes and wraiths have been cooperating with the Regulskis in trying to lay low the secret of this restless uncle.

The judge in the case eventually ruled that as the Regulskis obviously genuinely believed their apartment was haunted, it proved that the family was not intentionally trying to annoy their neighbors or their landlord.  Therefore, they had the legal right to occupy any ghost-infested dwelling they chose.

Which really seems only fair to Uncle Regulski.

Accident, Suicide, or Murder? The Aeileen Conway Riddle

When someone is suddenly, inexplicably murdered, such cases can be very difficult to solve.  When law enforcement is unable to decide if a person’s violent death is a result of murder, accident, or even suicide, you generally have a mystery where finding a solution is virtually impossible.  Such was the tragic case of a seemingly normal housewife.

Fifty-year-old Aeileen Conway lived with her husband of 33 years, Pat, in Lawton, Oklahoma.  Although there is little public information about her personal life, she appeared to have led a quiet, ordinary, peaceable existence, which ended in an extremely shocking way on April 29, 1986.

On that day, a farmer working in his fields just outside of Lawton saw smoke coming from a nearby road.  He notified police, and about twenty minutes later, Oklahoma Highway Patrol officers arrived at the scene.  It was a remote, lonely road that for years had seen little activity.  The officers found that the source of the smoke was a car crashed inside a deserted bridge.  The vehicle was burning so fiercely that it had fused with the metal guardrail.  The officers saw that a body was inside the car, although it proved to be burned beyond recognition.  Skid marks on the road indicated that the car had been going 50 to 60 miles an hour when it smashed into the bridge.  The officers assumed that what they were dealing with was a gruesome, but unremarkable accident.

It was soon learned that the car was registered to Pat Conway, and by the next day, the body was identified as his wife Aeileen.  Case closed?  Not as far as Pat was concerned.  He insisted that some sort of foul play had led to his wife’s brutal death.  He pointed out that when he returned home from work on the day Aeileen died, he found their house in a state of rather sinister disorder.  Aeileen’s purse containing her driver’s license and eyeglasses, which she always carried whenever she left the house, was still there.  A garden hose was on, running water into their swimming pool.  The ironing board was set up, with the iron still on.  A bathtub was full of water, and their phone was off the hook, as though Aeileen had been interrupted while trying to make a call.  Some jewelry was missing from the house.  To Pat and his children, this all screamed that Aeileen’s death was no simple accident.

Pat and Ray Anderson, an investigator from the District Attorney’s office, went to the crash site to conduct their own inquiry.  They found a church bulletin on the ground some distance from the scene.  Pat identified it as one that Aeileen kept on her car’s dashboard.  However, his wife always drove with the windows rolled up, so the bulletin could not have flown out of the car.  To Pat and Ray Anderson, this indicated that the car had been stopped.  They theorized that some unknown person had abducted Aeileen from her house and killed her.  The assailant then drove to the crash site, set the accelerator, put it into drive, and fled, hoping that Aeileen’s death would be dismissed as an accident.  

Anderson’s findings were able to persuade authorities to reclassify Aeileen’s death from “accident” to “unexplained,” particularly since the Oklahoma State Fire Marshall could not rule out arson as the cause of the car catching on fire.  He noted that the car was so destroyed by the blaze, it seemed likely that some accelerant was used.  Additionally, the gas cap was missing.  In most cases where a car burns as a result of arson, the cap was removed.

Unfortunately, the investigation into Aeileen’s death virtually ended there.  Law enforcement agreed that it was very possible that Mrs. Conway had been murdered, but who the killer could have been, and why he/she would want Aeileen dead, were questions nobody was able to answer.

Until his death in 2013, Pat Conway devoted his life to trying to solve the mystery of his wife’s horrifying death.  However, although many theories have been proposed, ranging from burglary-gone-wrong to suicide to “it was an accident after all,” we will probably never know for certain just how Aeileen Conway’s seemingly normal day around the house came to such an abruptly violent end.  This is one of those rare cases where it’s been impossible for anyone to stitch all the known facts together into a completely coherent scenario.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

Feel free to join the Strange Company staffers for a stroll around the grounds.

A particularly gruesome (and notorious) murder case.

Does Egypt have a second Sphinx?

15,000 years ago, kids were playing with clay.

How DNA in dirt is a boon for scientists.

Frank Lloyd Wright and the upside-down H.

3/I Atlas has probably been weird for a very, very long time.

It is my great pleasure to inform you that Newcastle upon Tyne has a vampire rabbit.

The mystery of 16 Psyche.

A deadly disaster in a cinema.

The relationship between humans and dogs goes way back.

Pro tip: Stealing antiquities is usually not the best career choice.  Especially if you're a couple of dunderheads.

The mystery of Ohio's Serpent Mound.

A Guatemalan "Atlantis." 

People who took their Easter finery way too seriously.

The legendary Route 66.

A fiendish fumigator.

A "mythical" city turns out to have been very real.

In praise of pedants.

The "Stonehenge of the East."

A medium goes to Harvard.

Vintage photos of the Tower of London.

Why we've always been obsessed with crystals.

So maybe sharks don't exist.

The latest research on how dolphins communicate.

The fishy April Fool's Day.

Scientists are busy pondering why we have chins.

The Island of Leftover Food.

Evidence of an ancient Roman wine ritual.

65,000 years ago, Neanderthals nearly died out.

A gentleman jewel thief.

A prison romance.

A plethora of Dick the Devils.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a woman's extremely puzzling death.  In the meantime, here's, uh, this.  God love ya, 1940s.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Some people could be said to create an “electric atmosphere.”

This is not always a good thing.  The “Wells Journal,” December 9, 1993:

A physicist claimed this week to have come up with evidence which completely exonerates pensioner Frank Pattemore for any involvement in the weird goings on with the electrical system at his home. 

For more than 11 years, Mr Pattemore's Iverson Cottage, at West End, Somerton, has baffled teams of experts as electrical appliances, heavy duty fuses and wiring have been destroyed by unexplained power surges, sometimes up to 12,000 volts. 

The problems are continuing, even though Southern Electricity stripped every piece of wire from the cottage and installed completely new power circuits. 

As recently as August SWEB [South Western Electricity Board] implied the problem was inside the house itself, pointing the finger at Mr Pattemore, aged 83, or his son Nigel, who lives with him, according to physicist Mr Bill Love. 

Mr Love, of Folkestone, Kent, said this week he has evidence that, following the latest rewiring, a Southern Electric sales representative was among the witnesses who saw the Pattemore meter record power being consumed when nothing was being used, and was there when a 100 amp fuse blew--even though the tails were not connected to the outside supply.

Mr Love said SWEB was continually evading the issue. The company kept replying that the meter had been checked and found to be accurate when, in fact, it was not the meter it was concerned about, it was the power system. 

He has asked SWEB at least to exonerate the Pattemores in view of the latest information. 

In a report prepared after several days of investigation at the cottage in 1991, Mr Love said: "There is something very strange happening at Iverson Cottage and it would be very wrong to leave Frank Pattemore and his son to suffer another winter of physical discomfort, the fear of fire and the stress of innuendo and gossip." 

In one of his latest letters to SWEB on behalf of Mr Pattemore, Mr Love said: "It amazes me that SWEB continues to ignore these facts which have been witnessed by qualified people. 

"The main fuse blowing before the tails were connected throws considerable doubt on SWEB's assertion that their supply is normal.

"Could it possibly be that SWEB are taking instructions from higher authority, or are they suggesting that witnesses to these strange events are unreliable?" he asks. 

A SWEB spokesman said a lot of time and energy had been spent trying to get behind the problems at Mr Pattemore's house. 

“Apart from making sure our equipment is as good as it possibly can be, there is not much else we can do. 

"We have not been asked to get involved again recently.  If we were, we would be happy to check the tolerances and specifications of our equipment again," he added. 

"It seems his neighbours have no problems. It is all a mystery.”

A year later, there were a few follow-up stories which indicated that the bizarre electrical manifestations were still occurring.  Bill Love had been continuing to pester SWEB to get to the bottom of the mess, but board members insisted that they could do no further investigations until Pattemore and his son moved out of the house, something the two men were stubbornly refusing to do.

In the July 2003 issue of "Fortean Times," Love wrote a detailed account of his investigations into Iverson Cottage, including some very strange peripheral details, such as Nigel Pattemore being followed by--yes!--two "Men in Black," after which he was briefly jailed (for "causing criminal damage to SWEB property at his home,") while police searched the cottage under warrant.  Love and the Pattemores seemed to suspect that the military was somehow involved in the mystery, but they were unable to come to any definite conclusions.  Love closed his "FT" article by stating that there were now "more unanswered questions" than when he began his research, and that "remnants of the phenomena exist to this day."

The Bird-Beasts of Var

When reading about UFO sightings, one gets a bit bored of encounters with the usual saucer-eyed little green men, so it’s always welcome when extraterrestrials think outside of the box and offer us humans a more novel spectacle.  In the November/December 1968 issue of “Flying Saucer Review,” a French UFO researcher named Lyonel Trigano presented a striking case which had been brought to his attention.  It was related by a businessman named only as “Mr. S.” who ran a successful garage in Herault.  Trigano described him as “a solidly-built man in his fifties, who is quite the opposite of an impressionable person!”  “Mr. S.” told him:

“One evening in November 1962 I was driving along a minor departmental road in Var.  It was a dark night, and raining in torrents, so that I was driving with my lights full on.  Rounding a bend, I saw, 80 metres ahead, a group of figures clustered in the middle of the road.  I slowed down to avoid the group, and at the same moment it split into two parts, suddenly and jerkily.  My window was down and I leaned my head out slightly to see what was the matter; it was then that I saw beasts, some kind of bizarre animals, with the heads of birds, and covered in some sort of plumage, which were hurling themselves from two sides towards my car.

“Terrified, I wound up the window, accelerated like a madman, and then stopped 150 metres further on.  I turned round and saw these things, these beasts, these nightmarish sort of beings, which were heading, with a sort of flapping of wings, towards a luminous dark-blue object which hung in the air over a field on the other side of the road.  It resembled two plates upside down, and placed on one another.  On reaching it, these ‘birds’ were literally sucked into the underpart of the machine as if by a whirlwind.  Then I heard a dull sound (clac!) and the object flew off at a prodigious speed and finally disappeared.”

Trigano added that “Mr. S," out of the not-unreasonable fear of appearing to be barking mad, had told this story to very few people.  At the time of this incident, “S” had never heard of UFOs, and had not thought to connect it to extraterrestrial visitations until some time afterward.

Whatever you think of “Mr. S” and his story, you have to admit that it’s not the sort of thing you hear every day.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

Our host for this Friday is the handsome mascot (name unknown) of the S.S. Custodian, a cargo ship that was active during the first half of the 20th century.

New research into the Battle of Hastings.

The wonders of Mayan astronomy.

The importance of horses in the Mughal Empire.

A famous film of Bigfoot is probably a hoax.  I know, shocker.

What it was like to be a steerage passenger in the 19th century.  (Spoiler: It wasn't a lot of fun.)

What it's like to be trapped inside a tornado.  (Spoiler: It's even less fun than being a steerage passenger.)

That time when Gloucester was visited by a sea serpent.

A judge faces One-Eyed Joan and her fairies.

Be nice to crows.  They won't forget it.

A look at the Red Book of Bath.

The "liveliest corpse in the world."

Norway's most expensive book.

A brief history of egg rolling.

Why nature is not very violet.

The 22 ways that 3I/Atlas was weird.

Cucumbers really get around.

The theory that Romans were in the Americas pre-Columbus.

Some strange ways that people wound up in Kensal Green Cemetery.

A ruined mansion that is spooky even without the ghosts.

A murder with plenty of suspects, but no conviction.

Allow me to introduce you to a 2 billion year old nuclear reactor.

That urban legend about William Howard Taft's unfortunate relationship with bathtubs.

The well-traveled Mona Lisa.

A brief history of counting sheep.

The life of Catherine of Bourbon.

When you go looking for asparagus, but get a Roman tombstone instead.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll meet some flying extraterrestrials.  Or something.  In the meantime, here's Tom Petty.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

I've shared stories about ghosts.  I've shared stories about witches.  It's not often that you see the two combined.   The "Glasgow Daily Record," September 10, 1928:

The "ghost" of an old woman, reputed to be a witch, who died two years ago, is said to have been seen by many people in the Cambridgeshire village of Horseheath, and, in consequence, women and children are afraid to leave their homes after dark. 

While she lived in Horseheath, " Mother Redcap," as the "witch" was known, had a sinister reputation, and the ghost seems determined to live up to this record. The apparition is said to have shaken its fist in the faces of villagers whom it has met at night, and generally to have behaved in a very menacing manner.

Remarkable tales are told in the village about the old woman. 

"She was employed at a farm," a villager stated. "One day a black man called, produced a book, and asked her to sign her name in it." 

The woman signed the book, and then the mysterious stranger told her that she would be the mistress of five imps who would carry out her orders.

Shortly afterwards the woman was seen out accompanied by a rat, a cat, a toad, a ferret. and a mouse. When she died, her "imps" were killed, it is said, and buried with her in her coffin.

I couldn't find much more about "Mother Redcap," but apparently Horseheath was a village with a strong tradition of witchcraft that lasted well into the 20th century.  It may still exist, for all I know.