If there’s anything more tedious than an alleged haunting, it’s an alleged poltergeist. Unlike your standard-issue Victorian ghost — the sad lady in white, the mournful child clutching a toy drum nobody asked for — poltergeists don’t bother with melodramatic sob stories or half-hearted spectral appearances. They just throw things, slam doors, knock over bookshelves, … Read more
Catfish Jack’s bills itself as “the most haunted watering hole on the Mississippi.” Based on the smell alone, that seems entirely plausible. When I visited, the building looked like it had been condemned twice and then lost the paperwork. Faded neon signs buzzed half-heartedly in the cracked windows, and the floor inside had the sticky … Read more
Of all the charming invitations extended to me over the years — psychic conventions, ghost hunts, aura detox seminars — few sounded more ludicrously promising than an overnight stay at Ironford Penitentiary, one of New England’s most notoriously “haunted” abandoned prisons. A place where, according to the marketing brochure, “the walls still remember the screams.” … Read more
Somewhere in the misty foothills of questionably named Mystic Valley, you’ll find the Crystal Caverns Healing Grotto — a site proudly advertised as “a rare confluence of natural energies, sacred vibrations, and ancient cosmic alignments.” What it actually offers is a damp cave, a thinly veiled gift shop, and an excellent opportunity to question your … Read more
The Mandela Effect is one of the saddest monuments to collective human ego in modern history. It’s the phenomenon where a large group of people misremembers something — and instead of accepting that memory is a squishy, unreliable mess, they decide they’ve stumbled into evidence of alternate dimensions. Because clearly, it’s more plausible that the … Read more
There is a special place in my cold, shriveled heart reserved for the Moon landing hoax crowd — the true believers who, against all available evidence and common sense, have convinced themselves that humanity’s single greatest technological achievement was faked on a soundstage somewhere in the desert by Stanley Kubrick, the CIA, or whichever shadowy … Read more