Vacation: Derry ,Maine

Got a pic of these kids playing with some clown. Wait a minute. The clown was in the picture a second ago......

The Top 5 Scariest Supernatural Clips

Real scares? Naaaaaaaaa but entertaining none the less. Good amateur effort with some creepy results.

Treadmill prisons. Torture?

Getty Images

Exercising on a treadmill often feels like torture, and that’s not exactly a coincidence.

In 1818, an English civil engineer named Sir William Cubitt devised a machine called the “tread-wheel” to reform stubborn and idle convicts. Prisoners would step on the 24 spokes of a large paddle wheel, climbing it like a modern StairMaster. As the spokes turned, the gears were used to pump water or crush grains. (Hence the eventual name treadmill.) In grueling eight-hour shifts, prisoners would climb the equivalent of 7,200 feet. The exertion, combined with poor diets, often led to injury and illness (as well as rock-hard glutes), but that didn’t stop penitentiaries all over Britain and the United States from buying the machines. In 1824, prison guard James Hardie credited the device with taming New York’s more defiant inmates. He wrote that it was the treadmill’s “monotonous steadiness, and not its severity, which constitutes its terror…”

Over the years, American wardens gradually stopped using the treadmill in favor of other backbreaking tasks, such as picking cotton, breaking rocks, or laying bricks. In England, the treadmill persisted until the late 19th century, when it was abandoned for being too cruel. The machine was all but lost to history. But when Dr. Kenneth Cooper demonstrated the health benefits of aerobic exercise in the 1960s, the treadmill made a triumphant return. Today, well-paid personal trainers have happily taken the place of prison wardens.

Grave robbers- Victim, Charlie Chaplin

In one of history’s most famous cases of body-snatching, two men steal the corpse of the revered film actor Sir Charles Chaplin from a cemetery in the Swiss village of Corsier-sur-Vevey, located in the hills above Lake Geneva, near Lausanne, Switzerland, on this day in 1978.

A comic actor who was perhaps most famous for his alter ego, the Little Tramp, Chaplin was also a respected filmmaker whose career spanned Hollywood’s silent film era and the momentous transition to “talkies” in the late 1920s. Chaplin died on Christmas Day in 1977, at the age of 88. Two months later, his body was stolen from the Swiss cemetery, sparking a police investigation and a hunt for the culprits.

After Chaplin’s widow, Oona, received a ransom demand of some $600,000, police began monitoring her phone and watching 200 phone kiosks in the region. Oona had refused to pay the ransom, saying that her husband would have thought the demand “ridiculous.” The callers later made threats against her two youngest children. Oona Chaplin was Charlie’s fourth wife (after Mildred Harris, Lita Grey and Paulette Goddard) and the daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill. She and Chaplin were married in 1943, when she was 18 and he was 54; they had eight children together. 

The family had settled in Switzerland in 1952 after the controversial Chaplin--whom his enemies accused of being a Communist sympathizer--learned he would be denied a reentry visa to the United States en route to the London premiere of his film Limelight.

After a five-week investigation, police arrested two auto mechanics--Roman Wardas, of Poland, and Gantscho Ganev, of Bulgaria--who on May 17 led them to Chaplin’s body, which they had buried in a cornfield about one mile from the Chaplin family’s home in Corsier. 

That December, Wardas and Ganev were convicted of grave robbing and attempted extortion. Political refugees from Eastern Europe, Wardas and Ganev apparently stole Chaplin’s body in an attempt to solve their financial difficulties. Wardas, identified as the mastermind of the plot, was sentenced to four-and-a-half years of hard labor. As he told it, he was inspired by a similar crime that he had read about in an Italian newspaper. Ganev was given an 18-month suspended sentence, as he was believed to have limited responsibility for the crime. As for Chaplin, his family reburied his body in a concrete grave to prevent future theft attempts.

The UAE’s Ghost Town, Jazirat Al Hamra: Beware The Djinn

Added by Alexander McNabb 

We happened to mention Jazirat Al Hamra on the radio yesterday and it caused quite a conversation. The whole thing was triggered by the unlikely news that there is to be a newWaldorf Astoria Hotel* in Ras Al Khaimah.

It appears that few people these days know about Jazirat Al Hamra, the little deserted village south of Ras Al Khaimah town. It’s the ancestral home of the Zaabi family (or tribe) who left Ras Al Khaimah following an ongoing dispute with the ruler and were given housing in Abu Dhabi by Sheikh Zayed. Living in Abu Dhabi, the family still retained title to their houses, which stand today in the middle of the huge Al Hamra tourism and leisure development, surrounded by big hotels, golf courses and man-made lagoons. It’s a sort of Freej moment, the little single-story houses surrounded by towering development.

Jazirat Al Hamra is a delight to wander around, old style coral and adobe houses with their rooms all leading off a central courtyard, often with a henna tree at its centre. When we first went there, you could still find ledgers with grocery entries and three figure telephone numbers, bric a brac and old electrical fittings in the houses, many of which were already descending slowly and elegantly into ruin. There’s an old mosque there, too, its minaret a dumpy little thing in which the muezzin would stand and sing out above the rooftops – but only just, it’s not very high.

The beach at Jazirat Al Hamra, now cut off from the village, used to be one of the few places where, after the first storm of the year, it was possible to find paper nautilus egg-cases, amazingly delicate little pieces of fractal beauty. The village was always on our list of tourist destinations for visitors, a little piece of the UAE’s history and heritage that hadn’t been tarted up, rebuilt, copied or otherwise ‘updated’.

When I was talking about it on Dubai Eye, one listener, a UAE National chap called Rashid, texted in to say that everyone stayed away from Jazirat Al Hamra because of the djinn. We brought him on the phone line to talk a little more about this aspect of the village’s story and he told of how the locals would tell spine-chilling stories, goading each other into a high state of fear and the young men who would stay overnight in the village as a dare. I know of other locations that enjoy a similar reputation – there’s ‘Swiss Cottage’ in Sharjah, just across from the Al Owais Majlis by Green Park. Apparently no local would ever dream of renting the place as it has a rich reputation for housing powerful djinn. Villas here are lit around their boundaries, again apparently part of the same tradition of warding off djinn.

Across the Arab World people wear and own the blue talisman against the evil eye, nazar bonjouk in Turkish, part of a rich and deeply rooted belief in the supernatural around the region. It did rather strike me that the departing Zaabi would have seeded the rumour in their wake to ensure their village was left alone.

You don’t want to mess with djinn, see.

Djinn

Fear one thing in all there is...fear the djinn.

The holy Quran says that God made humans from mud and clay, angels from light, and djinn from smokeless fire. In the western world, many people readily accept the idea of angels and demons, but most have no knowledge of the djinn, called “God’s other people.”

In Arabian lore, djinn (also spelled jinn) are a race of supernaturally empowered beings who have the ability to intervene in the affairs of people. Like the Greekdaimones, djinn are self-propagating and can be either good or evil. They can be conjured in magical rites to perform various tasks and services. A djinni (singular) appears as a wish-granting “genie” in folk tales such as in The Book of 1001 Nights collection of folk tales.

In Western lore djinn are sometimes equated with demons, but they are not the same. They are often portrayed as having a demonic-like appearance, but they can also appear in beautiful, seductive forms. The djinn are masterful shape-shifters, and their favored forms are snakes and black dogs. They also can masquerade as anything: humans, animals, ghosts, cryptids, and other entities such as extraterrestrials, demons, shadow people, fairies, angels and more.

The djinn are not confined to the Middle East, or to the past. They exist in their own realm, probably a parallel dimension, and they have the ability – and the desire – to enter our world and interact with us. The djinn have been among us in antiquity and they are among us now.

According to legend, the djinn were the first inhabitants of this world, where they lived for thousands of years before humanity arrived. In order to make room for humans, angels took the djinn out of this world and placed them in a dimension that parallels our own. There they stay hidden from our view. They have the ability to see and interact with us, but we have difficulty seeing them. They are cloaked in mystery, and it suits their covert purpose.

The goal of most djinn is to retake this world, which they feel rightfully belongs to them. In order to succeed, they must make humanity give up stewardship of this reality. They are accomplishing this by stealth and disguise. They have great powers and plenty of time, for they live for centuries.

Shape-shifting djinn may be responsible for many forms of paranormal phenomena and experience, such as UFOs, shadow people, ghosts, poltergeists, and demonic possession. In such ways, they gain access to us that enables them to steal our life force and information about us, and to manipulate and use us without revealing their true form and purpose. These negative experiences are on the rise.

The social organization of the jinn community resembles that of humans; e.g., they have kings, courts of law, weddings, and mourning rituals.
A few traditions (hadith), divide jinn into three classes: those who have wings and fly in the air, those who resemble snakes and dogs, and those who travel about ceaselessly. Other reports claim that ‘Abd Allāh ibn Mas‘ūd (d. 652), who was accompanying Muhammad when the jinn came to hear his recitation of the Qur’an, described them as creatures of different forms; some resembling vultures and snakes, others tall men in white garb. They may even appear as dragons or a number of other animals. In addition to their animal forms, the jinn occasionally assume human form to mislead and destroy their human victims. Certain hadiths have also claimed that the jinn may subsist on bones, which will grow flesh again as soon as they touch them, and that their animals may live on dung, which will revert to grain or grass for the use of the jinn flocks.

Ibn Taymiyyah believed the jinn were generally "ignorant, untruthful, oppressive and treacherous," thus representing the very strict interpretations adhered by the Salafi schools of thought.

Ibn Taymiyyah believes that the jinn account for much of the "magic" perceived by humans, cooperating with magicians to lift items in the air unseen, delivering hidden truths tofortune tellers, and mimicking the voices of deceased humans during seances.


A related belief is that every person is assigned one's own special jinnī, also called a qarīn, of the jinn that whisper to people's souls and tell them to submit to evil desires. The notion of a qarīn is not universally accepted amongst all Muslims, but it is generally accepted that the Devil whispers in human minds, and he is assigned to each human being.

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The Black Dahlia murder

On the morning of January 15, 1947, a housewife named Betty Bersinger was walking down a residential street in central Los Angeles with her 3-year-old daughter when something caught her eye. It was a cold, overcast morning, and she was on her way to pick up a pair of shoes from the cobbler.

At first glance, Bersinger thought the white figure laying a few inches from the sidewalk was a broken store mannequin. But a closer look revealed the hideous truth: It was the body of a woman who'd been cut in half and was laying face-up in the dirt. The woman's arms were raised over her head at 45-degree angles. Her lower of half was positioned a foot over from her torso, the straight legs spread wide open. The body appeared to have been washed clean of blood, and the intestines were tucked neatly under the buttocks. Bersinger shielded her daughter's eyes, then ran with her to a nearby home to call the police.

Black Dahlia's (Elizabeth Short) body found in vacant lot

Two detectives were assigned to the case, Harry Hansen and Finis Brown. By the time the duo arrived at the crime scene — on Norton Avenue between 39th and Coliseum streets in Los Angeles — it was swarming with reporters and gawkers who were carelessly trampling the evidence. The detectives ordered the crowd to back off, then got down to business.

From the lack of blood on the body or in the grass, they determined the victim had been murdered elsewhere and dragged onto the lot, one piece at time. There was dew under the body, so they knew it had been placed there after 2 a.m., when the outside temperature dipped to 38 degrees.

The victim's face was horribly defiled: the murderer had used a knife to slash 3-inch gashes into each corner of her mouth, giving her the death grin of a deranged clown. Rope marks on her wrists and ankles indicated she'd been restrained, and possibly tortured.

LAPD Detectives Harry Hansen and Finis Brown with Elizabeth Short's Body

By measuring the two halves of the corpse, the detectives estimated the victim's height to be 5'6 and her weight to be 115 pounds. Her mousy brown hair had been recently hennaed, and her fingernails were bitten to the quick.

In the Black Dahlia case, detectives gave the Los Angeles Examiner fingerprints lifted from the dead woman and reporters used their "Soundphoto" machine — a precursor to a modern fax machine — to send enlargements of the prints to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.

FBI technicians compared the prints with 104 million fingerprints they had on file, and quickly made a match to one Elizabeth Short. Short's fingerprints were taken for a mail room job she'd had at an army base in California — and for an arrest record for underage drinking in Santa Barbara.

Elizabeth Short embodied the feminine ideal of the 40s, with her meaty legs, full hips and a small, up-turned nose. She was drama personified. She dyed her mousy brown locks raven black, painted her lips blood red and pinned white flowers in her hair. With her alabaster skin and startling light blue eyes, she looked like porcelain doll.

The provenance of her nickname is unclear. Some say her friends started calling her the "Black Dahlia" because of her fondness for the color black and in reference to a 1946 movie called "The Blue Dahlia." Whatever its genesis, the press ran with it, and doing so, made Elizabeth Short a legend.

Phoebe Short (left) with Beth

The FBI also sent the paper Short's government application photo. When reporters saw how attractive the 22-year-old victim was, they knew they had a sensational tale on their hands.

This was news noir at its best. To juice up the story, Examiner reporters resorted to an unethical ploy; they called her mother, Phoebe Short, and told her that her daughter had won a beauty contest. After prying as much personal information about Elizabeth from Mrs. Short as possible, they informed her that that her daughter was actually dead.

Suspects

The LAPD has refrained from speculating on the identity of killer. The truth is that Elizabeth Short's killer is most likely dead if not of disease, of old age and will never be brought to justice. This fact hasn't stopped a large group of amateur sleuths from picking up the torch in an attempt to solve the case. Their conclusions range from fanciful to downright risible:

• Mary Pacios pins the blame, incredibly, on movie director Orson Welles, who once did a magic act where he "sawed" a woman in half.
• In another book, "Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer," a public relations specialist named Janice Knowlton blames her father for the murder. She writes that therapy helped her recover childhood memories of her father forcing her to watch him torture, murder and hack up Short. Knowlton goes on to accuse her father of nine such killings, including that of a son he engendered with her. Her book was a flop, but Knowlton harassed anyone writing about the case who did not support her claims until she committed suicide in 2004 with a drug overdose.�

Book cover: Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer

�

Here are some of the suspects who've topped the list as the could-haves the last 60 years:

• Robert Manley
  Manly was the last known person to see Short alive. He was initially booked as a suspect, but released after he passed a polygraph test. Beset by a long history of mental health problems, in 1954, his wife committed him to a psychiatric hospital after he told her he was hearing voices. That same year, doctors gave him a shot of sodium pentothal aka the "truth serum" in another attempt to glean information about the Black Dahlia murder from him. He was absolved a second time. He died in 1986, 39 years to the day after he left Short at the Biltmore. The coroner attributed his death to an accidental fall.
• Mark Hansen
  Hansen's name was embossed on the address book that was mailed to the Examiner; it's unclear how the item fell into Short's hands. The 55-year-old Denmark native was the manager of the Florentine Gardens, a sleazy Hollywood nightclub featuring burlesque acts. Many of the young women working for Hansen lived at his home, which was located behind the club. Short was his guest�for several months in 1946, and the aging lothario is rumored to have tried to bed her - unsuccessfully.
• George Hodel
  In 2003, a retired LAPD detective named Steve Hodel published another daddy-did-it tract, but this one became a national bestseller.� According to the "Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder" Hodel Jr. depicts his dad as a tyrant and misogynistic pervert who held orgies at the family home and was put on trial for raping own his 14-year-old daughter (he was acquitted). After his father died in 1999, Steve Hodel acquired his father's private photo album, which contained two snapshots of a dark-haired woman. Hodel claims the woman was Short, but Short's family has refuted his claims.

Steve Hodel and book cover: Black Dahlia Avenger

• Jack Anderson Wilson
  In "Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder," actor-cum-crime writer John Gilmore fingers an alcoholic drifter named Jack Anderson Wilson. When Gilmore interviewed him in the early 80s, Wilson purportedly divulged details about the murder that only the killer would have known, including knowledge a supposed vaginal defect which would have prevented Short from having sexual intercourse. A few days before his pending arrest, Wilson died in a hotel fire. The book's validity has been questioned by other Dahlia devotees who have failed to track down many of Gilmore's primary sources - leading them to question the sources' very existence.

Jack Anderson Wilson

• Walter Alonzo Bayley
  In 1997, a Los Angeles Times writer named Larry Harnisch suggested yet another suspect: Dr. Walter Alonzo Bayley, a surgeon whose house was located one block south of the lot where Short's body was found. Bayley's daughter was a friend of Short's sister Virginia. Harnisch theorizes that Bayley suffered from a degenerative brain disease that made him kill Short. While the police believe Short's killer was affiliated with a cutting profession a surgeon or butcher, say Bayley was 67 at the time of the murder and had no known record of violence or crime. Neither is it known whether he ever met Short.

None of these suspects have been endorsed by the LAPD.