"...we should pass over all biographies of 'the good and the great,' while we search carefully the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows."
~Edgar Allan Poe

Friday, May 14, 2021

Weekend Link Dump

"The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan Mandijn



Yes, it's time for yet another Link Dump.

Let's get the show started!



The murder of Alice Sterling.

The Los Angeles alley that made film history.

The theft of the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London.

The last WWII German holdouts...were by the North Pole.

Before the Wright brothers, there was Aerodrome No. 5.

Murders that were allegedly carried out by a voodoo cult.

A Vesuvius first responder.

A Yorkshire ghost plane.

Keeping time in ancient Rome.

A look at Spitalfields City Farm.

Telly Savalas gets paranormal.

One really merry widow.

The tomb of a very unfortunate family.

One of the more unusual theories about Marilyn Monroe's death.

A cursed town in Alaska.

A case of accidental arsenic poisoning.

Bring on the Mesopotamian demons!

A thief who really liked undies.

A 19th century shower of frogs.

The aqueduct of Constantinople.

A big book of monsters.

The fuzzy line between life and death.

A single-minded 18th century woman.

A gun-toting Bible.

The mystery of the placebo effect.

The many adventures of a corpse.

Body-snatching and Scotland's most haunted road.

How our gut bacteria has changed over the centuries.

Stalin's WWII gambit.

The 18th century origins of horror films.

More proof that we really know little about human evolution.

Important things that are (probably) lost forever.

How we hear sound.

The Hickleton Skulls.

A "message in a bottle" that might be from a Titanic victim.

One really weird map.

The Bloomer Ball does not end well.

The eclecticism of contemporary paranormal investigations.

The development of the mug shot.

It's never a good idea to steal cursed statues.

The debasement of Tudor currency.

And let's end with some 19th century comic relief.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll have a particularly eerie little ghost story.  In the meantime, here's some '70s soul.


5 comments:

  1. The story about Marilyn Monroe's death hinges on the assumption that both Kennedy brothers shared the most sensitive information in the country with Monroe - but never states why on Earth they would do that.

    I found the story about the alley in Los Anegeles more interesting. I imagine real-location filming was rare then. I wonder what prompted the use of a real location, rather than the use of one of the many sets that must have been available, and were used often.

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    Replies
    1. I've read that the early films preferred to shoot outdoors, because the cameras they used then needed very strong lighting. Also, I imagine it was much cheaper than putting together indoor sets.

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    2. The lighting - and the amount of it they had in southern California - must have been one of the reasons the American film industry set up there in the first place. I can't think of many other advantages at the time.

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    3. Exactly. New York was the original American film capital, but most companies soon moved to Southern California, simply because it was the best climate in the country to do outdoor filming.

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  2. Avoiding royalty payments on newly patented filming technologies was one advantage enjoyed by the Movie industry from their relocation to California.

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