The underwater wax museum

Sunny slopes, shady stories

Below this place they call Heavenly, hell awaits those who double-cross the Mob.

Around here, urban legend has lake fishermen reeling in human ears and human hands. They say that far below all that fluffy powder snow and those perfectly spaced pine trees and all that sunshine; and way down below the surface of the huge alpine lake the Indians call Lake of the Sky, lies an underwater wax museum of perfectly preserved Mafia gangsters with bullet holes in the middle of their foreheads.

Locals say it's just part of the charm of South Lake Tahoe and Heavenly Ski Resort. […]

There are apres-ski huts perfect for catching the sunshine and the red and white fir trees give this place its reputation as having the best tree runs in North America. The runs are long and challenging, the snow is deep and dry and the mountain huts are solid log timber.

Then the sun sets and the night turns Heavenly into another kind of place altogether.

There's a gruesome side to Heavenly; it's as I walk by Lake Tahoe in the growing dark that I think of those bodies.

Steve, a ski instructor at Heavenly who shares some local legends with me over a beer, tells me famous marine explorer Jacques Cousteau once tried to bring a submarine into Lake Tahoe but local casino bosses of the day refused to allow it. Then there's the story Cousteau did go down with a film crew but Mob bosses confiscated his footage; and then there's the story that Cousteau decided himself that the world wasn't ready to see what lay beneath the waters of Lake Tahoe.

Geological surveys have so far failed to find any bodies, neither have modern fishermen with advanced fish-finding technology, but still the locals hold on to their legends. "They don't find bodies around here," Steve tells me. "They sink to the bottom; you go in there, you don't come out."

It's the near-freezing water, many say, that prevents the creation of gases that would otherwise bloat and float a corpse to the surface. Locals maintain there are hundreds of bodies down there, perfectly preserved. Fishermen even call an area of it The Grave. That's where, the story goes, a fisherman jagged something huge just offshore but whatever it was broke free. When he reeled in the line, a human ear was still on the hook. Then there's the story of renowned gangster Three-Fingered Tony who met an untimely demise nearby, his hand reeled in later by another unlucky fishermen.

Craig Tansley, Sydney Morning Herald travel section, 21 November 2010

The Gown Man

As recalled by Cyril Neville (of the Neville Brothers):

"If our mother wanted to keep us home, she'd tell us about the Gown Man. He was this big white guy in a hospital gown, and he'd snatch you off the street, put you under his arm, and take you over to the dissection room at Tulane University medical school. They'd pull off your skin and you'd get chopped up by medical students, practicing their autopsies."

And as recalled by his brother Aaron Neville:

"They had the Needle Man, too. Supposed to shove a six-inch needle in your eye, suck your brain out right from the socket."

Mark Jacobson, The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), p. 209

Snake babies in the Solomon Islands

Snake Baby Rumours Not True

The National Referral Hospital has denied any knowledge of any baby born at the hospital with parts of it resembling a snake.

Rumours circulating around Honiara in the past week and days were of a local mother who gave birth to a baby with strange features at the National Referral Hospital.

But the Medical Superintendent of the National Referral Hospital Doctor Douglas Pickacha told SIBC this afternoon that he is not aware of any baby being born at the hospital with such features.

He says he has not received any reports of that nature from the Labour ward.

Meanwhile, checks by SIBC News on You-tube revealed that the video-clips and pictures circulated in town were in fact uploaded to the web by someone from Jordan.

The snake baby was said to resemble the picture above,
circulated widely on the web.

Another search on the web has also found that a snake-like baby, similar to the one being circulated in Honiara was born on September 28th, 2010 in Nepal.

Reports say the so-called 'Snake Baby' was born after 14 months in the mother's womb.

It says the mother died when she saw her baby, adding that even a Doctor was unconscious for half an hour.

It says the snake child drank 10 litres of milk as soon as he was fed.

The reports say the baby's body looks like a snake and face of a human, with long hair.

Source: Solomon Times Online, 12th October 2010

Dream porridge from Dalsland (western Sweden)

If you wanted to know who you were going to marry, you could prepare and eat some dream porridge. The porridge had to be prepared by three girls. It was important that the greatest silence be observed throughout the procedure. When the water began to boil, each girl would throw in a handful of salt and a handful of flour. When the porridge was ready it would be divided into three equal portions, and each girl would eat one portion, without adding any milk. Then they would go to bed, still in total silence, without having anything to drink. The dream porridge would be prepared and eaten three nights in a row, and on the third night the girls would see their future husbands in their dreams. He would be bringing water to quench their thirst.

From the Norwegian foodways website Tradisjoner
Thanks to Emma Lundenmark for drawing it to our attention.

Sex latent in commodities

The Huli strongly believe that public spaces should not be defiled by polluting substances and words, and pasinja meri [lit. 'passenger woman', a peripatetic woman who engages in multiple-partner, sometimes-paid, sex] often defy this norm. They have their own pseudocode in which the names of desirable consumable commodities are acronyms that stand for something salacious. Fanta, the soft drink, for example, stands for 'Fuck And Never Think Again'; Pepsi, for 'Plis Em Pen, Sutim Isi' (which is Tok Pisin for 'Please that hurts; thrust more gently'); Cambridge, a brand of cigarette, stands for 'Come Along My Boy; Remember, I Don't Get Enough'. Sometimes pasinja meri will simply shout out the names of these items while sitting at market with other people and then burst into laughter, glancing around to see who 'gets it' or not.

- quoted from Holly Wardlow, 'Headless Ghosts and Roving Women: Specters of Modernity in Papua New Guinea', American Ethnologist, 29.1 (2002), 22

Human beings turned into goats (or possibly vice versa) in Nigeria

Yesterday morning, rumours spread like bush fire in the harmattan in Ojo, and other neighbouring towns in Lagos and Ogun States that seven human beings were turned to goats through esoteric means . The rumour also had it that the goats were detained in Ojo Police station. A motley crowd besieged the police station to witness the bizarre development. Everybody struggled to catch a glimpse of the human beings –turned goats. The police found it difficult to control the crowd.

This led to traffic gridlock on the Ojo Road, leading to the Alaba International Market. The Divisional Police Officer, Isaac Ogbogbo, a Chief Superintendent of Police, brought his experience to bear in controlling the crowd that was desperate to see the goats. After satisfying their curiosity, they dispersed one after the other.

From one source to another, the story kept magnifying. It first started with a human being turning to a goat until it became seven goats turning to seven human beings. It was the subject of discussion at bus stops, inside commercial vehicles and markets with each source presenting different versions of the story. […]



From the Daily Sun, Nigeria, 7 July 2010

The promised future

WC2, 31st May 2008