The notebooks of the Scottish folklore pioneer Alexander Carmichael have been prepared for publication.
It will be the first time Carmichael's work has been available in its entirety.
From 1860, he spent 50 years collecting legends, songs, curses and oral history from Gaelic-speakers.
Read on...
Showing posts with label folklore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label folklore. Show all posts
Friday, June 24, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Banyoles, where Nessie's Spanish cousin lives
http://www.hellomagazine.com/travel/201102014869/banyoles-lake/girona/spain/1/
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Did The Hound of the Baskervilles take its inspiration from the Dales?
By Laurie Whitwell
IT IS a Sherlock Holmes tale remembered as much for its evocative Dartmoor setting as the demonic beast of its title.
But more than a century after The Hound of the Baskervilles was originally published, speculation is growing that a secluded spot in the Yorkshire Dales inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's popular novel instead.
Trollers Gill, a limestone gorge near the village of Appletreewick in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, is, according to legend, haunted by a ghostly dog with saucer-like eyes.
And Holmes expert Professor Francis O'Gorman has now verified claims that this black creature, known as a Barguest, could have provided Conan Doyle with the blueprint for his fearsome hound.
Key to the idea is Conan Doyle's close relationship with his mother, Mary, who lived in Masongill on the west tip of the Dales at the same time the author was penning his 1901 masterpiece.
As a keen teller of folk stories, the suggestion is that Mary could have heard and passed on the tale of Trollers Gill and its spectral dog to her son.
Conan Doyle once wrote of his mother's gift for "sinking her voice to a horror-stricken whisper" when she reached the culminating point of a story.
The official storyline of the novel's origins says that Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who met Conan Doyle while they were both covering the Boer War as journalists, told his friend, after they had returned home, of the mythical black hound which stalked the Devon moors.
A dedication to "Robinson" at the start of the book was seen as evidence that Conan Doyle owed a debt of gratitude to his fellow correspondent.
But four years ago, the Yorkshire Post revealed how the accepted version of events was beginning to be challenged.
Writer Chris Phipps made a documentary on the possibilities of a Yorkshire link and suggested that as Conan Doyle frequently visited his mother at Masongill, it was possible she was the first person he talked to about the concept of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
And now, 80 years after Conan Doyle's death, Professor O'Gorman, the head of the School of English at Leeds University and editor of the 2006 edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles, has given credence to that theory.
"The canonic view of Holmesians (fans of the super sleuth) is that Robinson and Dartmoor were the sparks for the tale," he said.
"There has even been a suggestion that Conan Doyle stole the idea from Robinson – who died mysteriously – and might have felt some pang of guilt at not crediting him more fully with the genesis of the tale.
"But stories of phantom dogs in the English countryside, the black shucks of legend, are widely known staples of folk tales – Robinson hardly deserved credit for passing specialist information to Conan Doyle.
"However, it is suggestive that Conan Doyle's relationship with his mother was significant – they wrote a large volume of letters to each other – and the theory of a link with Yorkshire cannot be entirely overlooked."
Such a view is strengthened by Dr Bryan Charles Waller's role in getting Mary to Masongill.
He lodged with the Doyle family in Edinburgh while studying at the university there, and then persuaded Conan Doyle's mother to move into his cottage in the Dales after her husband, Charles, was committed to an asylum in 1883.
Dr Waller also had influence over Mary's son, convincing Conan Doyle to train as a doctor.
So it seems likely that Conan Doyle was told about the legend of the Trollers Gill Barguest by either Dr Waller or his mother on one of his many trips to the pair's Masongill home.
"Conan Doyle certainly had a wide-ranging knowledge of potentially useful material, and was always imaginatively alert to legend and tales of the supernatural, wherever he
found them," said Prof O'Gorman.
Whatever the genesis of the story, the importance of Yorkshire to the writer is clear.
In 1885, he married Louisa Hawkins at St Oswald's Church in Thornton in Lonsdale, near Ingleton. The marriage certificate still rests there.
IT IS a Sherlock Holmes tale remembered as much for its evocative Dartmoor setting as the demonic beast of its title.
But more than a century after The Hound of the Baskervilles was originally published, speculation is growing that a secluded spot in the Yorkshire Dales inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's popular novel instead.
Trollers Gill, a limestone gorge near the village of Appletreewick in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, is, according to legend, haunted by a ghostly dog with saucer-like eyes.
And Holmes expert Professor Francis O'Gorman has now verified claims that this black creature, known as a Barguest, could have provided Conan Doyle with the blueprint for his fearsome hound.
Key to the idea is Conan Doyle's close relationship with his mother, Mary, who lived in Masongill on the west tip of the Dales at the same time the author was penning his 1901 masterpiece.
As a keen teller of folk stories, the suggestion is that Mary could have heard and passed on the tale of Trollers Gill and its spectral dog to her son.
Conan Doyle once wrote of his mother's gift for "sinking her voice to a horror-stricken whisper" when she reached the culminating point of a story.
The official storyline of the novel's origins says that Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who met Conan Doyle while they were both covering the Boer War as journalists, told his friend, after they had returned home, of the mythical black hound which stalked the Devon moors.
A dedication to "Robinson" at the start of the book was seen as evidence that Conan Doyle owed a debt of gratitude to his fellow correspondent.
But four years ago, the Yorkshire Post revealed how the accepted version of events was beginning to be challenged.
Writer Chris Phipps made a documentary on the possibilities of a Yorkshire link and suggested that as Conan Doyle frequently visited his mother at Masongill, it was possible she was the first person he talked to about the concept of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
And now, 80 years after Conan Doyle's death, Professor O'Gorman, the head of the School of English at Leeds University and editor of the 2006 edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles, has given credence to that theory.
"The canonic view of Holmesians (fans of the super sleuth) is that Robinson and Dartmoor were the sparks for the tale," he said.
"There has even been a suggestion that Conan Doyle stole the idea from Robinson – who died mysteriously – and might have felt some pang of guilt at not crediting him more fully with the genesis of the tale.
"But stories of phantom dogs in the English countryside, the black shucks of legend, are widely known staples of folk tales – Robinson hardly deserved credit for passing specialist information to Conan Doyle.
"However, it is suggestive that Conan Doyle's relationship with his mother was significant – they wrote a large volume of letters to each other – and the theory of a link with Yorkshire cannot be entirely overlooked."
Such a view is strengthened by Dr Bryan Charles Waller's role in getting Mary to Masongill.
He lodged with the Doyle family in Edinburgh while studying at the university there, and then persuaded Conan Doyle's mother to move into his cottage in the Dales after her husband, Charles, was committed to an asylum in 1883.
Dr Waller also had influence over Mary's son, convincing Conan Doyle to train as a doctor.
So it seems likely that Conan Doyle was told about the legend of the Trollers Gill Barguest by either Dr Waller or his mother on one of his many trips to the pair's Masongill home.
"Conan Doyle certainly had a wide-ranging knowledge of potentially useful material, and was always imaginatively alert to legend and tales of the supernatural, wherever he
found them," said Prof O'Gorman.
Whatever the genesis of the story, the importance of Yorkshire to the writer is clear.
In 1885, he married Louisa Hawkins at St Oswald's Church in Thornton in Lonsdale, near Ingleton. The marriage certificate still rests there.
Did The Hound of the Baskervilles take its inspiration from the Dales?
By Laurie Whitwell
IT IS a Sherlock Holmes tale remembered as much for its evocative Dartmoor setting as the demonic beast of its title.
But more than a century after The Hound of the Baskervilles was originally published, speculation is growing that a secluded spot in the Yorkshire Dales inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's popular novel instead.
Trollers Gill, a limestone gorge near the village of Appletreewick in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, is, according to legend, haunted by a ghostly dog with saucer-like eyes.
And Holmes expert Professor Francis O'Gorman has now verified claims that this black creature, known as a Barguest, could have provided Conan Doyle with the blueprint for his fearsome hound.
Key to the idea is Conan Doyle's close relationship with his mother, Mary, who lived in Masongill on the west tip of the Dales at the same time the author was penning his 1901 masterpiece.
As a keen teller of folk stories, the suggestion is that Mary could have heard and passed on the tale of Trollers Gill and its spectral dog to her son.
Conan Doyle once wrote of his mother's gift for "sinking her voice to a horror-stricken whisper" when she reached the culminating point of a story.
The official storyline of the novel's origins says that Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who met Conan Doyle while they were both covering the Boer War as journalists, told his friend, after they had returned home, of the mythical black hound which stalked the Devon moors.
A dedication to "Robinson" at the start of the book was seen as evidence that Conan Doyle owed a debt of gratitude to his fellow correspondent.
But four years ago, the Yorkshire Post revealed how the accepted version of events was beginning to be challenged.
Writer Chris Phipps made a documentary on the possibilities of a Yorkshire link and suggested that as Conan Doyle frequently visited his mother at Masongill, it was possible she was the first person he talked to about the concept of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
And now, 80 years after Conan Doyle's death, Professor O'Gorman, the head of the School of English at Leeds University and editor of the 2006 edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles, has given credence to that theory.
"The canonic view of Holmesians (fans of the super sleuth) is that Robinson and Dartmoor were the sparks for the tale," he said.
"There has even been a suggestion that Conan Doyle stole the idea from Robinson – who died mysteriously – and might have felt some pang of guilt at not crediting him more fully with the genesis of the tale.
"But stories of phantom dogs in the English countryside, the black shucks of legend, are widely known staples of folk tales – Robinson hardly deserved credit for passing specialist information to Conan Doyle.
"However, it is suggestive that Conan Doyle's relationship with his mother was significant – they wrote a large volume of letters to each other – and the theory of a link with Yorkshire cannot be entirely overlooked."
Such a view is strengthened by Dr Bryan Charles Waller's role in getting Mary to Masongill.
He lodged with the Doyle family in Edinburgh while studying at the university there, and then persuaded Conan Doyle's mother to move into his cottage in the Dales after her husband, Charles, was committed to an asylum in 1883.
Dr Waller also had influence over Mary's son, convincing Conan Doyle to train as a doctor.
So it seems likely that Conan Doyle was told about the legend of the Trollers Gill Barguest by either Dr Waller or his mother on one of his many trips to the pair's Masongill home.
"Conan Doyle certainly had a wide-ranging knowledge of potentially useful material, and was always imaginatively alert to legend and tales of the supernatural, wherever he
found them," said Prof O'Gorman.
Whatever the genesis of the story, the importance of Yorkshire to the writer is clear.
In 1885, he married Louisa Hawkins at St Oswald's Church in Thornton in Lonsdale, near Ingleton. The marriage certificate still rests there.
IT IS a Sherlock Holmes tale remembered as much for its evocative Dartmoor setting as the demonic beast of its title.
But more than a century after The Hound of the Baskervilles was originally published, speculation is growing that a secluded spot in the Yorkshire Dales inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's popular novel instead.
Trollers Gill, a limestone gorge near the village of Appletreewick in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, is, according to legend, haunted by a ghostly dog with saucer-like eyes.
And Holmes expert Professor Francis O'Gorman has now verified claims that this black creature, known as a Barguest, could have provided Conan Doyle with the blueprint for his fearsome hound.
Key to the idea is Conan Doyle's close relationship with his mother, Mary, who lived in Masongill on the west tip of the Dales at the same time the author was penning his 1901 masterpiece.
As a keen teller of folk stories, the suggestion is that Mary could have heard and passed on the tale of Trollers Gill and its spectral dog to her son.
Conan Doyle once wrote of his mother's gift for "sinking her voice to a horror-stricken whisper" when she reached the culminating point of a story.
The official storyline of the novel's origins says that Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who met Conan Doyle while they were both covering the Boer War as journalists, told his friend, after they had returned home, of the mythical black hound which stalked the Devon moors.
A dedication to "Robinson" at the start of the book was seen as evidence that Conan Doyle owed a debt of gratitude to his fellow correspondent.
But four years ago, the Yorkshire Post revealed how the accepted version of events was beginning to be challenged.
Writer Chris Phipps made a documentary on the possibilities of a Yorkshire link and suggested that as Conan Doyle frequently visited his mother at Masongill, it was possible she was the first person he talked to about the concept of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
And now, 80 years after Conan Doyle's death, Professor O'Gorman, the head of the School of English at Leeds University and editor of the 2006 edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles, has given credence to that theory.
"The canonic view of Holmesians (fans of the super sleuth) is that Robinson and Dartmoor were the sparks for the tale," he said.
"There has even been a suggestion that Conan Doyle stole the idea from Robinson – who died mysteriously – and might have felt some pang of guilt at not crediting him more fully with the genesis of the tale.
"But stories of phantom dogs in the English countryside, the black shucks of legend, are widely known staples of folk tales – Robinson hardly deserved credit for passing specialist information to Conan Doyle.
"However, it is suggestive that Conan Doyle's relationship with his mother was significant – they wrote a large volume of letters to each other – and the theory of a link with Yorkshire cannot be entirely overlooked."
Such a view is strengthened by Dr Bryan Charles Waller's role in getting Mary to Masongill.
He lodged with the Doyle family in Edinburgh while studying at the university there, and then persuaded Conan Doyle's mother to move into his cottage in the Dales after her husband, Charles, was committed to an asylum in 1883.
Dr Waller also had influence over Mary's son, convincing Conan Doyle to train as a doctor.
So it seems likely that Conan Doyle was told about the legend of the Trollers Gill Barguest by either Dr Waller or his mother on one of his many trips to the pair's Masongill home.
"Conan Doyle certainly had a wide-ranging knowledge of potentially useful material, and was always imaginatively alert to legend and tales of the supernatural, wherever he
found them," said Prof O'Gorman.
Whatever the genesis of the story, the importance of Yorkshire to the writer is clear.
In 1885, he married Louisa Hawkins at St Oswald's Church in Thornton in Lonsdale, near Ingleton. The marriage certificate still rests there.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Museum staging a monster exhibition
Saturday 12th June 2010
TERRIFYING serpents, dragons and gods will be brought to life in an exhibition on the part played by rivers in folklore.
Rivers, Myths and Monsters opens today at the Old Fulling Mill Museum of Archaeology, in Durham City, with art inspired by chilling and exciting tales set in the world’s waterways.
Rivers have inspired myths around the world, from the local legend of the Lambton Worm, with a model of the monstrous serpent decorated by members of the 10th Durham Brownies (St Margaret’s), to pendants and plaques from China which tell the story of river carp that magically transform into dragons.
There are also tales from India, where Krishna battled the many-headed serpent, Kaliya, and Egypt, where figurines and amulets illustrate the story of the search by the goddess Isis for the body of her husband, Osiris, which had been hidden in the Nile by the evil Seth.
Madeline Betts, of Durham University, said: “Down the ages, rivers have inspired myths and monster tales around the globe. This exhibition tells their stories.
“There are games and many ways to interact with the objects on show, most of which have never been on display and are kept in the Oriental Museum’s Store, so this is a fun and engaging place to visit for all the family!”
The exhibition runs until September 5.
The Old Fulling Mill is open from 11am to 4pm daily and admission is £1 for adults, 50p for children and over-60s, or free to students and the underfives.
For more details, visit durham.ac.uk/fullingmill or call 0191-334-1823.
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/local/durham/8216251.Museum_staging_a_monster_exhibition/?ref=rss
TERRIFYING serpents, dragons and gods will be brought to life in an exhibition on the part played by rivers in folklore.
Rivers, Myths and Monsters opens today at the Old Fulling Mill Museum of Archaeology, in Durham City, with art inspired by chilling and exciting tales set in the world’s waterways.
Rivers have inspired myths around the world, from the local legend of the Lambton Worm, with a model of the monstrous serpent decorated by members of the 10th Durham Brownies (St Margaret’s), to pendants and plaques from China which tell the story of river carp that magically transform into dragons.
There are also tales from India, where Krishna battled the many-headed serpent, Kaliya, and Egypt, where figurines and amulets illustrate the story of the search by the goddess Isis for the body of her husband, Osiris, which had been hidden in the Nile by the evil Seth.
Madeline Betts, of Durham University, said: “Down the ages, rivers have inspired myths and monster tales around the globe. This exhibition tells their stories.
“There are games and many ways to interact with the objects on show, most of which have never been on display and are kept in the Oriental Museum’s Store, so this is a fun and engaging place to visit for all the family!”
The exhibition runs until September 5.
The Old Fulling Mill is open from 11am to 4pm daily and admission is £1 for adults, 50p for children and over-60s, or free to students and the underfives.
For more details, visit durham.ac.uk/fullingmill or call 0191-334-1823.
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/local/durham/8216251.Museum_staging_a_monster_exhibition/?ref=rss
Monday, April 5, 2010
Easter is 'croc chase' time in Costa Rica
Agence France-Presse 04/05/2010 1:23 PM
SAN JOSE – Vigils, masses and parades are fine for Easter, but Ortega village in northern Costa Rica sticks to its own tantalizing observance: chasing after crocodiles.
This year, the intrepid croc chase in swim suits and clubs, along the Palma river, ended up in a deep cave, where the prey was cornered: a snarling, five-meter (16-foot) female crocodile.
"After a two-hour struggle... the animal was duly tied down... a big tug on the rope and out the cave came a huge reptile, to the cheers and applause of the crowd," La Nacion daily reported on its website.
The crocodile was captured Friday and will be kept on public display in a village square until Easter Sunday, when he will be released unharmed back into the wild.
The "lagarteada," or croc chase, as the ritual is known, has been observed in Ortega since the 19th century without interruption, despite attempts by animal rights groups to have it outlawed by the constitutional court.
Last year, the chase netted a 3.5-meter (11.4-foot) beauty.
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/classified-odd/04/05/10/easter-croc-chase-time-costa-rica
SAN JOSE – Vigils, masses and parades are fine for Easter, but Ortega village in northern Costa Rica sticks to its own tantalizing observance: chasing after crocodiles.
This year, the intrepid croc chase in swim suits and clubs, along the Palma river, ended up in a deep cave, where the prey was cornered: a snarling, five-meter (16-foot) female crocodile.
"After a two-hour struggle... the animal was duly tied down... a big tug on the rope and out the cave came a huge reptile, to the cheers and applause of the crowd," La Nacion daily reported on its website.
The crocodile was captured Friday and will be kept on public display in a village square until Easter Sunday, when he will be released unharmed back into the wild.
The "lagarteada," or croc chase, as the ritual is known, has been observed in Ortega since the 19th century without interruption, despite attempts by animal rights groups to have it outlawed by the constitutional court.
Last year, the chase netted a 3.5-meter (11.4-foot) beauty.
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/classified-odd/04/05/10/easter-croc-chase-time-costa-rica
Saturday, February 20, 2010
My baby is a snake
TEENAGER CLAIMS A SNAKE FATHERED HER SON
BY FRANCINAH BAAITSE
A bizarre claim by a 17-year-old girl that the father of her two-year-old child is a snake, has left the small village of Tshimoyapula in the Central District in a state of shock and wonder. The teenage mother, who gave birth while at a tender age of 15, has refused to single out the man who fathered the child, and has stuck to the story first peddled by the traditional doctor that her boy child is a snake, because the “father is a snake”. But the villagers swear she has a boyfriend.
The girl (whom because of age would stay anonymous) came to reveal the long kept “secret” to her shocked family last year after a traditional doctor told the family that the baby was not human.
The girl who was unofficially adopted by a Veterinary officer some eight years ago, told her parents that for all that time, she was made to sleep with a snake at the adoptive grandmother's place in the Shorobe cattle post in Maun area.
The girl repeated the same bizarre story to The Voice team at her mother's place in Tshimoyapula on Monday. She said she always hears a male voice calling out her name and asking her to come to Maun and her suspicion is that the snake is calling her. Narrating her nightmares, the tearful teenage mother said:
“I was sleeping one night when suddenly the floor started rising. It was as if the whole house was being uprooted. So I took matches and lit the lamp and was met with a horrifying scene. A huge head of a black snake was peeping out from a crack in the floor. Fear just escaped me and I watched with a bit of shock however.”
She said she left the hut and went to narrate what just happened to the old woman, but instead of coming to investigate, “she screamed back from inside her hut and commanded me to go back to sleep.”
When she returned to her hut, she alleged, the snake was now resting its head on her blankets.
“It looked like a normal snake to me except for the abnormally big eyes. I ignored it and got into the blankets. When I woke up in the middle of the night it was sleeping right next to me but I was not scared and went back to sleep. When I woke up in the morning my underpants were removed and it felt as if I had been sexually used during my sleep,”
The girl explained that in the morning she left the snake sleeping and continued with household chores and cooked breakfast. This, she said, was the beginning of the long affair with the snake.
“It was almost natural. Nobody told me to put the food in the house. I just cooked and put the food in the house and left. I'll return a few minutes later to consume the leftovers. When I complained about the snake the old woman became irate and her children did not believe my story,” she said.
The ritual she said, continued for years until she became pregnant and was taken back home for delivery period.
According to the girl’s mother, Oipoletse Otsile, 53, the child was abnormally born with a fully-grown skull without a soft spot (phogwana). Confused, they took the baby to a traditional healer who then revealed that what they had brought before him was not a human being but a baby snake.
It was then that the girl “confessed” that she did not give birth to an ordinary baby but a son to a snake.
“As the boy grew he started acting like a snake. At time he would lie on his belly and start moving forward in wriggly motion of a snake. When he does that he cries,” explained Otsile.
The family now fear for the child's life, as he is already a discussion point in the village and stigmatised. Even more traumatic is the revelation by the traditional healers and prophets from the African churches have told them that the snake is waiting for the child to grow and it would take him away.
“I believe them because sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and crawls outside. I once saw him standing with the snake, which then retreated into the darkness when it saw me,” pointed out the teenager.
Despite rumours of a boyfriend, the girl's father Kehaletse Tsapaletsile buys his daughter story.
“What we have discovered is that it has turned people’s minds and makes them see him as human although in actual fact he is a snake,” Tsapaletsile said.
He had lodged the case with the customary court and demand that the Veterinarian’s family bring forward the boy who supposedly impregnated his daughter.
“They said they will come back to pay for the damages (tshenyo). They told us they know the man or boy who impregnated her so they have to bring him forward together with his parents so that we talk this thing over,” added the teenage mother’s aunt Shadi Kebonyemotho.
Kgosi Lenkagetse Keipheditse of Tshimoyapula asserted that the case is going to be tricky to handle.
“Superstitions and witchcraft issues are difficult to solve because they do not have solid facts. However, we have spoken to the District Commissioner and we are hoping to bring the parents together and resolve the matter,” revealed the chief.
The Veterinarian (whose names and that of her family members is withheld) said she does not know anything about the snake because after “borrowing” the girl from her mother she passed her on to her sister who stayed with her in Maun.
“But the girl refused to go to school and always went to the cattle post with my parents,” she said.
The Vet’s sister remembers the girl complaining about the snake but insisted that she never said she was having any sexual contact with the snake. “What we know is that she had a boyfriend at the cattle post and she told us he is the one who made her pregnant. We confronted the boy and he admitted that he is the father to the baby,” said the lady whose family is accused of being responsible for the snake affair.
The child is human – Dr Mazonde
The child looks like a normal two-year old boy except for a bit small head. Medical science has a different take.
Dr Patson Mazonde, a paediatrician at Boitekanelo Children's Clinic in Gaborone revealed that it is a normal occurrence for a child to be born with a fully developed skull although it is an unhealthy condition. The condition, he said, is called Craniosynostosis and can be fatal if left untreated.
“They should forget the fear of the snake and take the child for medical attention. Usually children with such a condition have small heads. Because of the hard skull their brains do not develop well and they can die if the skull is not opened up to create space for the development,” he explained.
Furthermore, said Mazonde, it is utterly impossible for a human being to give birth to any other creature than a human being. “It was a human being she slept with,” he corrected.
Craniosynostosis is a condition in which one or more of the fibrous sutures in an infant skull prematurely fuses. This results in restricted skull and brain growth.
Because the brain cannot expand in the direction of the fused suture, it is forced to grow in the direction of the open sutures, often resulting in an abnormal head shape and facial features. Some cases of Craniosynostosis may result in increased pressure on the brain and developmental delays.
It is estimated that Craniosynostosis affects 1 in 2 000 live births. It can be the result of an inherited syndrome or sporadic. In sporadic cases, the cause is unknown.
http://www.thevoicebw.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2263:my-baby-is-a-snake&catid=34:news&Itemid=53
(Submitted by Brian Chapman)
BY FRANCINAH BAAITSE
A bizarre claim by a 17-year-old girl that the father of her two-year-old child is a snake, has left the small village of Tshimoyapula in the Central District in a state of shock and wonder. The teenage mother, who gave birth while at a tender age of 15, has refused to single out the man who fathered the child, and has stuck to the story first peddled by the traditional doctor that her boy child is a snake, because the “father is a snake”. But the villagers swear she has a boyfriend.
The girl (whom because of age would stay anonymous) came to reveal the long kept “secret” to her shocked family last year after a traditional doctor told the family that the baby was not human.
The girl who was unofficially adopted by a Veterinary officer some eight years ago, told her parents that for all that time, she was made to sleep with a snake at the adoptive grandmother's place in the Shorobe cattle post in Maun area.
The girl repeated the same bizarre story to The Voice team at her mother's place in Tshimoyapula on Monday. She said she always hears a male voice calling out her name and asking her to come to Maun and her suspicion is that the snake is calling her. Narrating her nightmares, the tearful teenage mother said:
“I was sleeping one night when suddenly the floor started rising. It was as if the whole house was being uprooted. So I took matches and lit the lamp and was met with a horrifying scene. A huge head of a black snake was peeping out from a crack in the floor. Fear just escaped me and I watched with a bit of shock however.”
She said she left the hut and went to narrate what just happened to the old woman, but instead of coming to investigate, “she screamed back from inside her hut and commanded me to go back to sleep.”
When she returned to her hut, she alleged, the snake was now resting its head on her blankets.
“It looked like a normal snake to me except for the abnormally big eyes. I ignored it and got into the blankets. When I woke up in the middle of the night it was sleeping right next to me but I was not scared and went back to sleep. When I woke up in the morning my underpants were removed and it felt as if I had been sexually used during my sleep,”
The girl explained that in the morning she left the snake sleeping and continued with household chores and cooked breakfast. This, she said, was the beginning of the long affair with the snake.
“It was almost natural. Nobody told me to put the food in the house. I just cooked and put the food in the house and left. I'll return a few minutes later to consume the leftovers. When I complained about the snake the old woman became irate and her children did not believe my story,” she said.
The ritual she said, continued for years until she became pregnant and was taken back home for delivery period.
According to the girl’s mother, Oipoletse Otsile, 53, the child was abnormally born with a fully-grown skull without a soft spot (phogwana). Confused, they took the baby to a traditional healer who then revealed that what they had brought before him was not a human being but a baby snake.
It was then that the girl “confessed” that she did not give birth to an ordinary baby but a son to a snake.
“As the boy grew he started acting like a snake. At time he would lie on his belly and start moving forward in wriggly motion of a snake. When he does that he cries,” explained Otsile.
The family now fear for the child's life, as he is already a discussion point in the village and stigmatised. Even more traumatic is the revelation by the traditional healers and prophets from the African churches have told them that the snake is waiting for the child to grow and it would take him away.
“I believe them because sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and crawls outside. I once saw him standing with the snake, which then retreated into the darkness when it saw me,” pointed out the teenager.
Despite rumours of a boyfriend, the girl's father Kehaletse Tsapaletsile buys his daughter story.
“What we have discovered is that it has turned people’s minds and makes them see him as human although in actual fact he is a snake,” Tsapaletsile said.
He had lodged the case with the customary court and demand that the Veterinarian’s family bring forward the boy who supposedly impregnated his daughter.
“They said they will come back to pay for the damages (tshenyo). They told us they know the man or boy who impregnated her so they have to bring him forward together with his parents so that we talk this thing over,” added the teenage mother’s aunt Shadi Kebonyemotho.
Kgosi Lenkagetse Keipheditse of Tshimoyapula asserted that the case is going to be tricky to handle.
“Superstitions and witchcraft issues are difficult to solve because they do not have solid facts. However, we have spoken to the District Commissioner and we are hoping to bring the parents together and resolve the matter,” revealed the chief.
The Veterinarian (whose names and that of her family members is withheld) said she does not know anything about the snake because after “borrowing” the girl from her mother she passed her on to her sister who stayed with her in Maun.
“But the girl refused to go to school and always went to the cattle post with my parents,” she said.
The Vet’s sister remembers the girl complaining about the snake but insisted that she never said she was having any sexual contact with the snake. “What we know is that she had a boyfriend at the cattle post and she told us he is the one who made her pregnant. We confronted the boy and he admitted that he is the father to the baby,” said the lady whose family is accused of being responsible for the snake affair.
The child is human – Dr Mazonde
The child looks like a normal two-year old boy except for a bit small head. Medical science has a different take.
Dr Patson Mazonde, a paediatrician at Boitekanelo Children's Clinic in Gaborone revealed that it is a normal occurrence for a child to be born with a fully developed skull although it is an unhealthy condition. The condition, he said, is called Craniosynostosis and can be fatal if left untreated.
“They should forget the fear of the snake and take the child for medical attention. Usually children with such a condition have small heads. Because of the hard skull their brains do not develop well and they can die if the skull is not opened up to create space for the development,” he explained.
Furthermore, said Mazonde, it is utterly impossible for a human being to give birth to any other creature than a human being. “It was a human being she slept with,” he corrected.
Craniosynostosis is a condition in which one or more of the fibrous sutures in an infant skull prematurely fuses. This results in restricted skull and brain growth.
Because the brain cannot expand in the direction of the fused suture, it is forced to grow in the direction of the open sutures, often resulting in an abnormal head shape and facial features. Some cases of Craniosynostosis may result in increased pressure on the brain and developmental delays.
It is estimated that Craniosynostosis affects 1 in 2 000 live births. It can be the result of an inherited syndrome or sporadic. In sporadic cases, the cause is unknown.
http://www.thevoicebw.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2263:my-baby-is-a-snake&catid=34:news&Itemid=53
(Submitted by Brian Chapman)
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Coleraine author taps into fascination with mythical beast
Published Date:
16 February 2010
By David Rankin
A Coleraine author's blood-curdling new book on werewolves is taking America by storm.
Dr Bob Curran's Werewolves - A Field Guide to Shapeshifters, Lycanthropes and Man Beasts (New Page Books) reached No1 in the Independent Publishers List and sparked a new frenzy of interest in the mythical beast.
Over the past few months, Dr Curran has appeared on a number of US radio shows along with other supernatural experts to discuss our morbid fascination with werewolves.
In the past week The Wolfman - directed by Joe Johnston and starring Benicio Del Toro, Emily Blunt and Sir Anthony Hopkins - was released in cinemas, much to the delight of horror fans.
"The idea of the werewolf," writes Dr Curran, "may represent an amalgam of a number of deep human fears and perceptions - the separation from nature, the fear of the wild, a horror of cannibalism, and inherent awareness of the savagery and ferocity that often lies under the veneer of human 'civilization.'"
In his best selling book, Dr Curran examines the deep psychological roots that underlie the linking of human and beast.
He reveals that the modern sympathetic vision of a forlorn man-wolf transforming under the moon's rays are very different from, say, the 16th century perspective, when lycanthropy was considered an abominable offshoot of witchcraft and Devil worship. Or from further back, to the Dark Ages, when taking on the mantle of the wolf was seen as a sign of virility, and battle-hardened strength.
The notion of a werewolf as we understand these days appears to spring from a 13th century text entitled "Otia Imperia" (Resurrection of the Emperor) by Mediaeval chronicler Gervase of Tilbury.
Darker aspects of early werewolf ideas included cannibalism. The idea of a foreign 'Manbeast' was a common xenophobic attitude in Christian Europe. Tales told by travellers returning from far away lands would spread rumours of tribes in distant mountains who ate human flesh.
Dr Curran also notes that in medieval Western European tales the werewolf is often perceived as a noble creature. Later, as the West expanded, a more horrific set of tales emerge.
This generated a fear of werewolves that sparked prosecutions of alleged werewolves, particularly in 16th century France. Burning at the stake inevitably followed.
The paranoia and irrational beliefs of the day sit well with the gothic horrors of latter-day fiction, which Bob Curran also explores later in the book.
But there have also been real-life examples of manbeasts. Dr Curran catalogues examples of cannibals, feral children, the psychotically ill, and the Leopard Men cult of Western Africa back in the 1940s.
So why is there a cultural fascination with werewolves?
Dr Curran says that they represented freedom - "the thrill of the hunt together with the absence of the constraints of a more regimented culture.
"It was wildness; it was the exhilaration that civilized men imagined existed within the bestial world. It accorded hidden passions and concealed rages, as it shook off the very trappings of what made mankind 'civilized'."
http://www.colerainetimes.co.uk/news/Coleraine-author-taps-into-fascination.6075277.jp
(Submitted by Caty Bergman)
16 February 2010
By David Rankin
A Coleraine author's blood-curdling new book on werewolves is taking America by storm.
Dr Bob Curran's Werewolves - A Field Guide to Shapeshifters, Lycanthropes and Man Beasts (New Page Books) reached No1 in the Independent Publishers List and sparked a new frenzy of interest in the mythical beast.
Over the past few months, Dr Curran has appeared on a number of US radio shows along with other supernatural experts to discuss our morbid fascination with werewolves.
In the past week The Wolfman - directed by Joe Johnston and starring Benicio Del Toro, Emily Blunt and Sir Anthony Hopkins - was released in cinemas, much to the delight of horror fans.
"The idea of the werewolf," writes Dr Curran, "may represent an amalgam of a number of deep human fears and perceptions - the separation from nature, the fear of the wild, a horror of cannibalism, and inherent awareness of the savagery and ferocity that often lies under the veneer of human 'civilization.'"
In his best selling book, Dr Curran examines the deep psychological roots that underlie the linking of human and beast.
He reveals that the modern sympathetic vision of a forlorn man-wolf transforming under the moon's rays are very different from, say, the 16th century perspective, when lycanthropy was considered an abominable offshoot of witchcraft and Devil worship. Or from further back, to the Dark Ages, when taking on the mantle of the wolf was seen as a sign of virility, and battle-hardened strength.
The notion of a werewolf as we understand these days appears to spring from a 13th century text entitled "Otia Imperia" (Resurrection of the Emperor) by Mediaeval chronicler Gervase of Tilbury.
Darker aspects of early werewolf ideas included cannibalism. The idea of a foreign 'Manbeast' was a common xenophobic attitude in Christian Europe. Tales told by travellers returning from far away lands would spread rumours of tribes in distant mountains who ate human flesh.
Dr Curran also notes that in medieval Western European tales the werewolf is often perceived as a noble creature. Later, as the West expanded, a more horrific set of tales emerge.
This generated a fear of werewolves that sparked prosecutions of alleged werewolves, particularly in 16th century France. Burning at the stake inevitably followed.
The paranoia and irrational beliefs of the day sit well with the gothic horrors of latter-day fiction, which Bob Curran also explores later in the book.
But there have also been real-life examples of manbeasts. Dr Curran catalogues examples of cannibals, feral children, the psychotically ill, and the Leopard Men cult of Western Africa back in the 1940s.
So why is there a cultural fascination with werewolves?
Dr Curran says that they represented freedom - "the thrill of the hunt together with the absence of the constraints of a more regimented culture.
"It was wildness; it was the exhilaration that civilized men imagined existed within the bestial world. It accorded hidden passions and concealed rages, as it shook off the very trappings of what made mankind 'civilized'."
http://www.colerainetimes.co.uk/news/Coleraine-author-taps-into-fascination.6075277.jp
(Submitted by Caty Bergman)
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Not again! Giant Swedish Christmas goat statue gets torched
Wed Dec 23, 2009 3:16pm GMT
Arsonists set fire early on Wednesday to a giant straw statue of the Swedish Yule goat, a forerunner to Santa Claus in Sweden, defying security measures for a third year in a row.
Police in Gavle, north of Stockholm, said an unknown number of attackers had torched the goat in the early morning hours, leaving a blackened skeleton standing in the town square.
"It's a tradition to burn it down," Lofberg said. "It's happened an untold number of times since the 1960s ... it's been burnt down more years than it's survived."
Burning the goat has been a popular, and illegal, tradition in Gavle since the 1960s when an advertising executive first came up with the idea to endow the city with a giant replica of the goat, a Christmas decoration common in many Swedish homes.
There were no witnesses, but a bottle of lighter fluid was found near the goat's frame, which stood about 12 metres tall at the apex of its horns, police told Reuters.
"We have some leads," said Stefan Lofberg, who is leading the investigation for the Gavle police.
Police have tried a range of tactics to stop would-be arsonists, including posting guards near the straw goat, coating it with flame retardant and training security cameras on it.
But vandals have usually found a way around the foils and their assaults have become more elaborate: in recent years the goat has been run over, dragged into a river and attacked by arsonists dressed as Santa Claus and the Ginger Bread Man.
Flame retardant coating thwarted attempts to burn the goat in 2006, but the group sponsoring it then stopped flame-proofing it because of the ugly, brownish tinge its straw took on.
Goats have special meaning in Swedish Christmas tradition. Before Santa Claus became ubiquitous at the turn of the 20th century, men would dress up as goats and hand out presents to well-behaved children. Bad children received lumps of coal.
(Reporting by Nick Vinocur; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE5BM2EH20091223?rpc=401&feedType=RSS&feedName=oddlyEnoughNews&rpc=401
See also: http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/807097-giant-swedish-christmas-goat-that-always-gets-burnt-down-gets-burnt-down
Arsonists set fire early on Wednesday to a giant straw statue of the Swedish Yule goat, a forerunner to Santa Claus in Sweden, defying security measures for a third year in a row.
Police in Gavle, north of Stockholm, said an unknown number of attackers had torched the goat in the early morning hours, leaving a blackened skeleton standing in the town square.
"It's a tradition to burn it down," Lofberg said. "It's happened an untold number of times since the 1960s ... it's been burnt down more years than it's survived."
Burning the goat has been a popular, and illegal, tradition in Gavle since the 1960s when an advertising executive first came up with the idea to endow the city with a giant replica of the goat, a Christmas decoration common in many Swedish homes.
There were no witnesses, but a bottle of lighter fluid was found near the goat's frame, which stood about 12 metres tall at the apex of its horns, police told Reuters.
"We have some leads," said Stefan Lofberg, who is leading the investigation for the Gavle police.
Police have tried a range of tactics to stop would-be arsonists, including posting guards near the straw goat, coating it with flame retardant and training security cameras on it.
But vandals have usually found a way around the foils and their assaults have become more elaborate: in recent years the goat has been run over, dragged into a river and attacked by arsonists dressed as Santa Claus and the Ginger Bread Man.
Flame retardant coating thwarted attempts to burn the goat in 2006, but the group sponsoring it then stopped flame-proofing it because of the ugly, brownish tinge its straw took on.
Goats have special meaning in Swedish Christmas tradition. Before Santa Claus became ubiquitous at the turn of the 20th century, men would dress up as goats and hand out presents to well-behaved children. Bad children received lumps of coal.
(Reporting by Nick Vinocur; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE5BM2EH20091223?rpc=401&feedType=RSS&feedName=oddlyEnoughNews&rpc=401
See also: http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/807097-giant-swedish-christmas-goat-that-always-gets-burnt-down-gets-burnt-down
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Million-dollar reward helps mermaid lure tourists to Kiryat Yam
December 15, 2009It is one of the uglier towns on Israel’s coast: boxes of Soviet-style housing projects jostle close to the shore and tankers plough the shipping lanes, heading for more important destinations to the south.
However, Kiryat Yam, a development town full of Russian and Ethiopian immigrants, has been galvanised by a claim that neither the busy port of Haifa to the south nor the walled crusader city of Acre to the north can match: according to the mayor, it has its own mermaid.
Tourists are stopping here to try to summon the elusive creature by blowing on a ram’s horn, a Jewish relic, and investors have expressed an interest in developing the almost deserted beachfront. Shmuel Sisso, the town’s mayor, has whipped up excitement by offering a $1 million (£615,000) reward for anyone who provides proof of the siren’s existence.
Oleg Borisov, 56, a market-stall holder, believes that he was the first to have contact with the creature a couple of years ago while he and his dog were having a night swim. “I was in up to my head when I felt something moving in the water,” said Mr Borisov, who moved here from Ukraine 20 years ago. “All of a sudden I felt as if somebody was spreading my legs and going right between them. My dog started barking and there was a loud splash on the water. I screamed and fled — I was stuttering I was so scared.”
He has never returned to the water at night. When Mr Sisso built a promenade along the shore this year, and people started reporting strange sightings in the surf, Mr Borisov made the connection. “For sure it was a mermaid,” he said, adding that he believes she must have a message to deliver. “There will come a time when she will appear,” he said. “The Messiah is coming soon, too, in 2012.”
On the jetty, alongside a small fibreglass statuette of a mermaid sprayed with gold paint, Mordechai, 57, a native of Kiryat Yam, prepared for his daily swim. He dismissed the story as nonsense. “I’ve been swimming here every day for 50 years and I didn’t see her,” he said. He conceded, however, that there was mention of sirens in the G’mara, a Jewish holy text. “If you believe in God, you believe anything can be created. And I believe in God.”
In his office, Mr Sisso grinned at all the attention that his mermaid has attracted. He said that at least two witnesses claimed to have seen the creature, and he produced two snapshots from a British amateur photographer showing a yellow discoloration in the surf at sunset. Vince Palmer, from East Sussex, said in an accompanying letter that the pictures proved the mermaid’s existence — and he enclosed, helpfully, a self-addressed envelope for the $1 million cheque. “Before this picture she performed many tricks but I’m afraid I missed these with my camera,” he wrote.
The mayor’s reward offer has sparked the threat of international legal action from an American group called the Mermaid Medical Association. They wrote to Mr Sisso, telling him that they were “shocked about your decision to pay a reward of one million dollars to those who will hunt the mermaid. “Therefore if you don’t declare in a period of ten days that you withdraw from your decision we intend to approach the International Court of Justice and to ask for its interference,” said the group’s director, Jeff Lerman.
Mr Sisso was not intimidated. Nor has he been forced so far to come up with the reward money: he is too busy dreaming up mermaid-themed costume parades and more hotels to worry about such trivialities.
Fishy tales
Mermaids are mentioned in One Thousand and One Nights in tales including Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman, in which a fisherman discovers a society under the ocean
A Cornish legend tells of the Mermaid of Zennor, who was entranced by the singing of Matthew Trewhella, a local man — so much so that she walked on land to seduce him and took him back with her into the sea
A mummified object was put on show around the United States in the 1840s by the showman P. T. Barnum. The creature is believed to have been made from the tail of a fish, the torso of a baby orang-utan and the head of a monkey. It convinced thousands oe people that mermaids were real
In 1967 ferry passengers in British Columbia, Canada, reported seeing a mermaid sitting on rocks at the entrance to Active Pass, Victoria. She was blonde with the lower body of a porpoise
Milagros Cerrón, 5, was nicknamed Peru’s Little Mermaid when she was born with the rare condition sirenomalia (mermaid syndrome) in which the legs are fused and the feet form a V. Doctors performed risky surgery to separate her legs so that she could walk
Source: British Columbia Folklore Society
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6956546.ece
(Submitted by Lindsay Selby)
Million-dollar reward helps mermaid lure tourists to Kiryat Yam
December 15, 2009It is one of the uglier towns on Israel’s coast: boxes of Soviet-style housing projects jostle close to the shore and tankers plough the shipping lanes, heading for more important destinations to the south.
However, Kiryat Yam, a development town full of Russian and Ethiopian immigrants, has been galvanised by a claim that neither the busy port of Haifa to the south nor the walled crusader city of Acre to the north can match: according to the mayor, it has its own mermaid.
Tourists are stopping here to try to summon the elusive creature by blowing on a ram’s horn, a Jewish relic, and investors have expressed an interest in developing the almost deserted beachfront. Shmuel Sisso, the town’s mayor, has whipped up excitement by offering a $1 million (£615,000) reward for anyone who provides proof of the siren’s existence.
Oleg Borisov, 56, a market-stall holder, believes that he was the first to have contact with the creature a couple of years ago while he and his dog were having a night swim. “I was in up to my head when I felt something moving in the water,” said Mr Borisov, who moved here from Ukraine 20 years ago. “All of a sudden I felt as if somebody was spreading my legs and going right between them. My dog started barking and there was a loud splash on the water. I screamed and fled — I was stuttering I was so scared.”
He has never returned to the water at night. When Mr Sisso built a promenade along the shore this year, and people started reporting strange sightings in the surf, Mr Borisov made the connection. “For sure it was a mermaid,” he said, adding that he believes she must have a message to deliver. “There will come a time when she will appear,” he said. “The Messiah is coming soon, too, in 2012.”
On the jetty, alongside a small fibreglass statuette of a mermaid sprayed with gold paint, Mordechai, 57, a native of Kiryat Yam, prepared for his daily swim. He dismissed the story as nonsense. “I’ve been swimming here every day for 50 years and I didn’t see her,” he said. He conceded, however, that there was mention of sirens in the G’mara, a Jewish holy text. “If you believe in God, you believe anything can be created. And I believe in God.”
In his office, Mr Sisso grinned at all the attention that his mermaid has attracted. He said that at least two witnesses claimed to have seen the creature, and he produced two snapshots from a British amateur photographer showing a yellow discoloration in the surf at sunset. Vince Palmer, from East Sussex, said in an accompanying letter that the pictures proved the mermaid’s existence — and he enclosed, helpfully, a self-addressed envelope for the $1 million cheque. “Before this picture she performed many tricks but I’m afraid I missed these with my camera,” he wrote.
The mayor’s reward offer has sparked the threat of international legal action from an American group called the Mermaid Medical Association. They wrote to Mr Sisso, telling him that they were “shocked about your decision to pay a reward of one million dollars to those who will hunt the mermaid. “Therefore if you don’t declare in a period of ten days that you withdraw from your decision we intend to approach the International Court of Justice and to ask for its interference,” said the group’s director, Jeff Lerman.
Mr Sisso was not intimidated. Nor has he been forced so far to come up with the reward money: he is too busy dreaming up mermaid-themed costume parades and more hotels to worry about such trivialities.
Fishy tales
Mermaids are mentioned in One Thousand and One Nights in tales including Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman, in which a fisherman discovers a society under the ocean
A Cornish legend tells of the Mermaid of Zennor, who was entranced by the singing of Matthew Trewhella, a local man — so much so that she walked on land to seduce him and took him back with her into the sea
A mummified object was put on show around the United States in the 1840s by the showman P. T. Barnum. The creature is believed to have been made from the tail of a fish, the torso of a baby orang-utan and the head of a monkey. It convinced thousands oe people that mermaids were real
In 1967 ferry passengers in British Columbia, Canada, reported seeing a mermaid sitting on rocks at the entrance to Active Pass, Victoria. She was blonde with the lower body of a porpoise
Milagros Cerrón, 5, was nicknamed Peru’s Little Mermaid when she was born with the rare condition sirenomalia (mermaid syndrome) in which the legs are fused and the feet form a V. Doctors performed risky surgery to separate her legs so that she could walk
Source: British Columbia Folklore Society
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6956546.ece
(Submitted by Lindsay Selby)
Monday, December 14, 2009
Full moon brings out inner werewolf, scientists say
Some people are more violent and exhibit tendencies comparable to werewolves during a full moon, according to Australian scientists.
Published: 7:30AM GMT 14 Dec 2009
A study conducted at the Calvary Mater Newcastle Hospital, north of Sydney, found that in the year to July, 91 emergency patients with violent, acute disturbances comparable to werewolves were admitted.
And a quarter of these occurred on the night of a full moon, double the number for other lunar phases, according to Leonie Calver, a clinical research nurse in toxicology.
"Some of these patients attacked the staff like animals, biting, spitting and scratching," she said. The patients had to be sedated and physically restrained to protect themselves.
Miss Calver's study, reported in the Medical Journal of Australia, said: "One might compare them with the werewolves of the past, who are said to have also appeared during the full moon."
Werewolf mythology, she pointed out, included reports of people rubbing "magic ointment" on to their skin or inhaling vapours to induce the transformation from man to beast.
The main ingredients of the ointment, said Miss Calver, were belladonna and nightshade - substances that could produce delirium, hallucinations and delusions of metamorphosis.
However the "modern day werewolf" used a different 'potion' - more than 60 per cent of the patients reviewed in her study were under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
"Our findings support the premise that individuals with violent and acute behavioural disturbances are more likely to present to the emergency department during full moon," she said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6806151/Full-moon-brings-out-inner-werewolf-scientists-say.html
Published: 7:30AM GMT 14 Dec 2009
A study conducted at the Calvary Mater Newcastle Hospital, north of Sydney, found that in the year to July, 91 emergency patients with violent, acute disturbances comparable to werewolves were admitted.
And a quarter of these occurred on the night of a full moon, double the number for other lunar phases, according to Leonie Calver, a clinical research nurse in toxicology.
"Some of these patients attacked the staff like animals, biting, spitting and scratching," she said. The patients had to be sedated and physically restrained to protect themselves.
Miss Calver's study, reported in the Medical Journal of Australia, said: "One might compare them with the werewolves of the past, who are said to have also appeared during the full moon."
Werewolf mythology, she pointed out, included reports of people rubbing "magic ointment" on to their skin or inhaling vapours to induce the transformation from man to beast.
The main ingredients of the ointment, said Miss Calver, were belladonna and nightshade - substances that could produce delirium, hallucinations and delusions of metamorphosis.
However the "modern day werewolf" used a different 'potion' - more than 60 per cent of the patients reviewed in her study were under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
"Our findings support the premise that individuals with violent and acute behavioural disturbances are more likely to present to the emergency department during full moon," she said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6806151/Full-moon-brings-out-inner-werewolf-scientists-say.html
Full moon brings out inner werewolf, scientists say
Some people are more violent and exhibit tendencies comparable to werewolves during a full moon, according to Australian scientists.
Published: 7:30AM GMT 14 Dec 2009
A study conducted at the Calvary Mater Newcastle Hospital, north of Sydney, found that in the year to July, 91 emergency patients with violent, acute disturbances comparable to werewolves were admitted.
And a quarter of these occurred on the night of a full moon, double the number for other lunar phases, according to Leonie Calver, a clinical research nurse in toxicology.
"Some of these patients attacked the staff like animals, biting, spitting and scratching," she said. The patients had to be sedated and physically restrained to protect themselves.
Miss Calver's study, reported in the Medical Journal of Australia, said: "One might compare them with the werewolves of the past, who are said to have also appeared during the full moon."
Werewolf mythology, she pointed out, included reports of people rubbing "magic ointment" on to their skin or inhaling vapours to induce the transformation from man to beast.
The main ingredients of the ointment, said Miss Calver, were belladonna and nightshade - substances that could produce delirium, hallucinations and delusions of metamorphosis.
However the "modern day werewolf" used a different 'potion' - more than 60 per cent of the patients reviewed in her study were under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
"Our findings support the premise that individuals with violent and acute behavioural disturbances are more likely to present to the emergency department during full moon," she said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6806151/Full-moon-brings-out-inner-werewolf-scientists-say.html
Published: 7:30AM GMT 14 Dec 2009
A study conducted at the Calvary Mater Newcastle Hospital, north of Sydney, found that in the year to July, 91 emergency patients with violent, acute disturbances comparable to werewolves were admitted.
And a quarter of these occurred on the night of a full moon, double the number for other lunar phases, according to Leonie Calver, a clinical research nurse in toxicology.
"Some of these patients attacked the staff like animals, biting, spitting and scratching," she said. The patients had to be sedated and physically restrained to protect themselves.
Miss Calver's study, reported in the Medical Journal of Australia, said: "One might compare them with the werewolves of the past, who are said to have also appeared during the full moon."
Werewolf mythology, she pointed out, included reports of people rubbing "magic ointment" on to their skin or inhaling vapours to induce the transformation from man to beast.
The main ingredients of the ointment, said Miss Calver, were belladonna and nightshade - substances that could produce delirium, hallucinations and delusions of metamorphosis.
However the "modern day werewolf" used a different 'potion' - more than 60 per cent of the patients reviewed in her study were under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
"Our findings support the premise that individuals with violent and acute behavioural disturbances are more likely to present to the emergency department during full moon," she said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6806151/Full-moon-brings-out-inner-werewolf-scientists-say.html
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Animal slaughter for the World Cup?
Fri Oct 23, 2009
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South African traditional leaders plan to perform ritual animal slaughters to bless stadiums for the 2010 World Cup tournament ahead of the start of the showcase event next June, they said on Friday.
Zolani Mkiva, chairman of the Makhonya Royal Trust, a grouping responsible for co-ordinating cultural activities, said the tournament, the first to be held in Africa, needed to be blessed in true "African style."
"We must have a cultural ceremony of some sort, where we are going to slaughter a beast (cow)," said Mkiva.
"We sacrifice the cow for this great achievement and we call on our ancestors to bless, to grace, to ensure that all goes well. It's all about calling for the divinity to prevail for a fantastic atmosphere."
South Africa is set to host the World Cup -- the world's most watched sports spectacle -- in less than eight months, with the tournament expected to attract about 500,000 foreign tourists.
Mkiva said the Trust has sent letters to the chief executive and chairman of the World Cup Local Organizing Committee (LOC), proposing traditional ceremonies to be performed at each of the 10 stadiums that are going to be used for the event.
The officials have yet to respond to the request.
"We believe that from the start we've got to do things in accordance with our own traditions," Mkiva said.
(Reporting by Alison Raymond, editing by Justin Palmer)
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE59M3OI20091023?rpc=401
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South African traditional leaders plan to perform ritual animal slaughters to bless stadiums for the 2010 World Cup tournament ahead of the start of the showcase event next June, they said on Friday.
Zolani Mkiva, chairman of the Makhonya Royal Trust, a grouping responsible for co-ordinating cultural activities, said the tournament, the first to be held in Africa, needed to be blessed in true "African style."
"We must have a cultural ceremony of some sort, where we are going to slaughter a beast (cow)," said Mkiva.
"We sacrifice the cow for this great achievement and we call on our ancestors to bless, to grace, to ensure that all goes well. It's all about calling for the divinity to prevail for a fantastic atmosphere."
South Africa is set to host the World Cup -- the world's most watched sports spectacle -- in less than eight months, with the tournament expected to attract about 500,000 foreign tourists.
Mkiva said the Trust has sent letters to the chief executive and chairman of the World Cup Local Organizing Committee (LOC), proposing traditional ceremonies to be performed at each of the 10 stadiums that are going to be used for the event.
The officials have yet to respond to the request.
"We believe that from the start we've got to do things in accordance with our own traditions," Mkiva said.
(Reporting by Alison Raymond, editing by Justin Palmer)
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE59M3OI20091023?rpc=401
Animal slaughter for the World Cup?
Fri Oct 23, 2009
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South African traditional leaders plan to perform ritual animal slaughters to bless stadiums for the 2010 World Cup tournament ahead of the start of the showcase event next June, they said on Friday.
Zolani Mkiva, chairman of the Makhonya Royal Trust, a grouping responsible for co-ordinating cultural activities, said the tournament, the first to be held in Africa, needed to be blessed in true "African style."
"We must have a cultural ceremony of some sort, where we are going to slaughter a beast (cow)," said Mkiva.
"We sacrifice the cow for this great achievement and we call on our ancestors to bless, to grace, to ensure that all goes well. It's all about calling for the divinity to prevail for a fantastic atmosphere."
South Africa is set to host the World Cup -- the world's most watched sports spectacle -- in less than eight months, with the tournament expected to attract about 500,000 foreign tourists.
Mkiva said the Trust has sent letters to the chief executive and chairman of the World Cup Local Organizing Committee (LOC), proposing traditional ceremonies to be performed at each of the 10 stadiums that are going to be used for the event.
The officials have yet to respond to the request.
"We believe that from the start we've got to do things in accordance with our own traditions," Mkiva said.
(Reporting by Alison Raymond, editing by Justin Palmer)
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE59M3OI20091023?rpc=401
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South African traditional leaders plan to perform ritual animal slaughters to bless stadiums for the 2010 World Cup tournament ahead of the start of the showcase event next June, they said on Friday.
Zolani Mkiva, chairman of the Makhonya Royal Trust, a grouping responsible for co-ordinating cultural activities, said the tournament, the first to be held in Africa, needed to be blessed in true "African style."
"We must have a cultural ceremony of some sort, where we are going to slaughter a beast (cow)," said Mkiva.
"We sacrifice the cow for this great achievement and we call on our ancestors to bless, to grace, to ensure that all goes well. It's all about calling for the divinity to prevail for a fantastic atmosphere."
South Africa is set to host the World Cup -- the world's most watched sports spectacle -- in less than eight months, with the tournament expected to attract about 500,000 foreign tourists.
Mkiva said the Trust has sent letters to the chief executive and chairman of the World Cup Local Organizing Committee (LOC), proposing traditional ceremonies to be performed at each of the 10 stadiums that are going to be used for the event.
The officials have yet to respond to the request.
"We believe that from the start we've got to do things in accordance with our own traditions," Mkiva said.
(Reporting by Alison Raymond, editing by Justin Palmer)
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE59M3OI20091023?rpc=401
Friday, October 23, 2009
Alaskan creature stories
Port Chatham left to spirits
‘Nantiinaq’ sightings and spirits led to desertion of Alaska village
By Naomi Klouda
Homer Tribune
Malania Helen Kehl, Nanwalek’s eldest resident, is frequently called upon around the village to impart her memories of how life used to be on this southern-most tip of the Kenai Peninsula.
Among her remembrances are medicines used to heal the sick and ways of preserving sea lion meat in barrels for winter. She also is one of the last to tell the ghostly story of how the village of Port Chatham came to be deserted; why the abandoned town was shunned, and those who once lived there vowed never to return.
Malania was born Jan. 25, 1934 at Port Chatham, then a small village founded at the edge of a peaceful moorage. The village once offered shelter for many people, including Capt. Nathaniel Portlock’s ship on his 1786 Alaska expedition. But when Malania was a baby, the family abruptly moved away from Chatham, leaving the house and every board of its frame behind.
What frightening situation caused John and Helen Romanoff to take their children and flee to Nanwalek?
“We left our houses and the school, and started all new here,” Malania said in a recent interview, speaking in her traditional Sugt’stun through translator Sally Ash. “There was plentiful land here for gardening and people. My parents built a house on the beach.”
What had frightened Malania’s parents hadn’t been a single event. Over a “long period of time,” a nantiinaq (Nan-te-nuk) – or big hairy creature – was reportedly terrorizing villagers. And Malania also told of the spirit of a woman dressed in draping black clothes that would come out of the cliffs.
“Her dress was so long she would drag it,” Malania said. “She had a very white face and would disappear back into the cliffs.”
The goose-bumped terror felt when people encountered these spirits was nothing compared to what happened to Malania’s godfather, Andrew Kamluck. He was logging in 1931, when someone or something hit him over the head with a piece of log-moving equipment. The blow reportedly killed him instantly.
Malania isn’t the only one to tell of strange events at Port Chatham. Port Graham Elder, Simeon Kvasnikoff, said he remembers when nantiinaq was blamed for the disappearance of a gold miner.
“This one guy over there had a little place where he was digging for gold,” Kvasnikoff said. “He went up there one time and never came back. No one found any sign of him.”
Another story recounted the experience of a sawmill owner named Tom Larsen, who had a job cutting wood for the old fish traps. He told of spotting nantiinaq on the beach once. After going back to his house to get his gun, he returned to the beach and “the thing looked at him,” Kvasnikoff said. For some reason, Larsen decided against firing a shot.
In an April 15, 1973 issue of the Anchorage Daily News, a feature article told of the abandoned cannery town of Portlock near Port Chatham. The writer had learned the story during an evening spent with the school teacher and his wife at English Bay (Nanwalek) while on a boat trip.
The story is told:
“Portlock began its existence sometime after the turn of the century as a cannery town. In 1921, a post office was established there, and for a time the residents, mostly natives of Russian-Aleut mix, lived in peace with their picturesque mountain-and-sea setting.”
According to the ADN story, sometime in the beginning years of World War II, rumors began to seep along the Kenai Peninsula that things were not right in Portlock. Men from the cannery town would reportedly go up into the hills to hunt Dall sheep and bear, and never return. Worse yet, sometimes stories would circulate about mutilated bodies that were swept down into the lagoon, torn and dismembered in a way that bears could not, or would not, do.
“Tales were told of villagers tracking moose over soft ground. They would find giant, man-like tracks over 18 inches in length closing upon those of the moose, the signs of a short struggle where the grass had been matted down, then only the deep tracks of the manlike animal departing toward the high, fog-shrouded mountains...”
The article goes on to tell how the fed-up townfolk decided to move en masse, and by 1950, the U.S. Post office had closed there.
Even into more recent times, nantiinaq reports haven’t stopped entirely. A man who prefers to remain anonymous tells his story online at http://strangestate.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html
“In 1990, while I was working as a paramedic in Anchorage, we got called out on an alarm for a man having a heart attack at the state jail in Eagle River. He was a Native man in his 70s, and after I got him stabilized with IVs, O2 and cardiac drugs, my partner and I began to transport him to the Native Hospital in Anchorage.”
En route to the hospital, the paramedic and the Native man, an “Aleut” from Port Graham, talked about hunting. The paramedic had been to Dog Fish Bay and was once weathered in there.
“This old man sat up on the gurney and grabbed me by the front of my shirt. He got right up to my face and said, ‘Did it bother you?’ Well, with that question, the hair just stood up on the back of my head. I said, ‘Yes.’ “Did you see it?” was his next question. I said “No... Did you see it?” He said “No, but my brother seen it. It chased him.”
In August of 1973, Ed and two others were bowhunting for goats and black bear when a storm forced them to take shelter in Dogfish Bay Lagoon.
“We beached our skiff and let the tide run her dry. After a dinner of broiled salmon we turned in to our tent. Back in those days, the best tent I had was a dark green canvas job with a center pole and no windows or floor. We left the fire burning and cleaned the pots and pans so as not to attract bears during the night and turned in,” Ed wrote.
The sky was clear, but the wind was howling through the old growth timber that lined the shore. Sometime around 2 a.m., Dennis woke Ed after hearing what sounded like footsteps outside the tent. It wasn’t a bear. Ed said the walking – or rather creeping – continued until it half circled the tent.
“In August, there is still some light in the sky until about 10 or 11. I recall that we all were embarrassed about being afraid about the coming night. We had a flashlight and the rifle in the tent between us, locked and loaded. I finally dosed off but woke right up when Dennis squeezed my leg. The illuminated hands of my watch showed it was 2:30. Joe was already sitting up and had the rifle in hand. I heard the first step, not more than about 10 feet from the back of the tent. Slowly. Then another and another. Whatever this was, it sounded like it was walking on two feet.
It made the same semi-circle around the tent. When we finally got enough courage to crawl out of the tent and turn the flashlight on, we saw nothing. No tracks, nothing. The third night we decided if it bothered us again, we would come out of the tent shooting. We were actually scared. It never came back the third night and the following day we had a break in the weather and got the heck out of there.”
Though Sasquatches became something of a popular phenomenon in the 1960s and ‘70s in the Lower 48, the nantiinaq in Sugt’stun culture has been around for a long time. According to the culture, he might be a different kind of creature, a tragic half-man, half-beast who wasn’t always in this condition. He perhaps used to be fully human.
Elder Nick Tanape said he doesn’t discredit the stories about nantiinaq, but says he’s never seen one.
“I think there’s something to them,” he said.
Malania said that, once her family moved to Nanwalek, the nantiinaq stayed far away and left them in peace. It didn’t follow them, and for that they were grateful. She grew up, raised 13 children and remains one of the few regional elders who can pass on the old traditions.
Malania – a favorite among the young people of Nanwalek, especially when she tells stories – learned many things from her grandmother, who was a traditional healer.
http://homertribune.com/2009/10/port-chatham-left-to-spirits/
(Submitted by Chad Arment)
‘Nantiinaq’ sightings and spirits led to desertion of Alaska village
By Naomi Klouda
Homer Tribune
Malania Helen Kehl, Nanwalek’s eldest resident, is frequently called upon around the village to impart her memories of how life used to be on this southern-most tip of the Kenai Peninsula.
Among her remembrances are medicines used to heal the sick and ways of preserving sea lion meat in barrels for winter. She also is one of the last to tell the ghostly story of how the village of Port Chatham came to be deserted; why the abandoned town was shunned, and those who once lived there vowed never to return.
Malania was born Jan. 25, 1934 at Port Chatham, then a small village founded at the edge of a peaceful moorage. The village once offered shelter for many people, including Capt. Nathaniel Portlock’s ship on his 1786 Alaska expedition. But when Malania was a baby, the family abruptly moved away from Chatham, leaving the house and every board of its frame behind.
What frightening situation caused John and Helen Romanoff to take their children and flee to Nanwalek?
“We left our houses and the school, and started all new here,” Malania said in a recent interview, speaking in her traditional Sugt’stun through translator Sally Ash. “There was plentiful land here for gardening and people. My parents built a house on the beach.”
What had frightened Malania’s parents hadn’t been a single event. Over a “long period of time,” a nantiinaq (Nan-te-nuk) – or big hairy creature – was reportedly terrorizing villagers. And Malania also told of the spirit of a woman dressed in draping black clothes that would come out of the cliffs.
“Her dress was so long she would drag it,” Malania said. “She had a very white face and would disappear back into the cliffs.”
The goose-bumped terror felt when people encountered these spirits was nothing compared to what happened to Malania’s godfather, Andrew Kamluck. He was logging in 1931, when someone or something hit him over the head with a piece of log-moving equipment. The blow reportedly killed him instantly.
Malania isn’t the only one to tell of strange events at Port Chatham. Port Graham Elder, Simeon Kvasnikoff, said he remembers when nantiinaq was blamed for the disappearance of a gold miner.
“This one guy over there had a little place where he was digging for gold,” Kvasnikoff said. “He went up there one time and never came back. No one found any sign of him.”
Another story recounted the experience of a sawmill owner named Tom Larsen, who had a job cutting wood for the old fish traps. He told of spotting nantiinaq on the beach once. After going back to his house to get his gun, he returned to the beach and “the thing looked at him,” Kvasnikoff said. For some reason, Larsen decided against firing a shot.
In an April 15, 1973 issue of the Anchorage Daily News, a feature article told of the abandoned cannery town of Portlock near Port Chatham. The writer had learned the story during an evening spent with the school teacher and his wife at English Bay (Nanwalek) while on a boat trip.
The story is told:
“Portlock began its existence sometime after the turn of the century as a cannery town. In 1921, a post office was established there, and for a time the residents, mostly natives of Russian-Aleut mix, lived in peace with their picturesque mountain-and-sea setting.”
According to the ADN story, sometime in the beginning years of World War II, rumors began to seep along the Kenai Peninsula that things were not right in Portlock. Men from the cannery town would reportedly go up into the hills to hunt Dall sheep and bear, and never return. Worse yet, sometimes stories would circulate about mutilated bodies that were swept down into the lagoon, torn and dismembered in a way that bears could not, or would not, do.
“Tales were told of villagers tracking moose over soft ground. They would find giant, man-like tracks over 18 inches in length closing upon those of the moose, the signs of a short struggle where the grass had been matted down, then only the deep tracks of the manlike animal departing toward the high, fog-shrouded mountains...”
The article goes on to tell how the fed-up townfolk decided to move en masse, and by 1950, the U.S. Post office had closed there.
Even into more recent times, nantiinaq reports haven’t stopped entirely. A man who prefers to remain anonymous tells his story online at http://strangestate.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html
“In 1990, while I was working as a paramedic in Anchorage, we got called out on an alarm for a man having a heart attack at the state jail in Eagle River. He was a Native man in his 70s, and after I got him stabilized with IVs, O2 and cardiac drugs, my partner and I began to transport him to the Native Hospital in Anchorage.”
En route to the hospital, the paramedic and the Native man, an “Aleut” from Port Graham, talked about hunting. The paramedic had been to Dog Fish Bay and was once weathered in there.
“This old man sat up on the gurney and grabbed me by the front of my shirt. He got right up to my face and said, ‘Did it bother you?’ Well, with that question, the hair just stood up on the back of my head. I said, ‘Yes.’ “Did you see it?” was his next question. I said “No... Did you see it?” He said “No, but my brother seen it. It chased him.”
In August of 1973, Ed and two others were bowhunting for goats and black bear when a storm forced them to take shelter in Dogfish Bay Lagoon.
“We beached our skiff and let the tide run her dry. After a dinner of broiled salmon we turned in to our tent. Back in those days, the best tent I had was a dark green canvas job with a center pole and no windows or floor. We left the fire burning and cleaned the pots and pans so as not to attract bears during the night and turned in,” Ed wrote.
The sky was clear, but the wind was howling through the old growth timber that lined the shore. Sometime around 2 a.m., Dennis woke Ed after hearing what sounded like footsteps outside the tent. It wasn’t a bear. Ed said the walking – or rather creeping – continued until it half circled the tent.
“In August, there is still some light in the sky until about 10 or 11. I recall that we all were embarrassed about being afraid about the coming night. We had a flashlight and the rifle in the tent between us, locked and loaded. I finally dosed off but woke right up when Dennis squeezed my leg. The illuminated hands of my watch showed it was 2:30. Joe was already sitting up and had the rifle in hand. I heard the first step, not more than about 10 feet from the back of the tent. Slowly. Then another and another. Whatever this was, it sounded like it was walking on two feet.
It made the same semi-circle around the tent. When we finally got enough courage to crawl out of the tent and turn the flashlight on, we saw nothing. No tracks, nothing. The third night we decided if it bothered us again, we would come out of the tent shooting. We were actually scared. It never came back the third night and the following day we had a break in the weather and got the heck out of there.”
Though Sasquatches became something of a popular phenomenon in the 1960s and ‘70s in the Lower 48, the nantiinaq in Sugt’stun culture has been around for a long time. According to the culture, he might be a different kind of creature, a tragic half-man, half-beast who wasn’t always in this condition. He perhaps used to be fully human.
Elder Nick Tanape said he doesn’t discredit the stories about nantiinaq, but says he’s never seen one.
“I think there’s something to them,” he said.
Malania said that, once her family moved to Nanwalek, the nantiinaq stayed far away and left them in peace. It didn’t follow them, and for that they were grateful. She grew up, raised 13 children and remains one of the few regional elders who can pass on the old traditions.
Malania – a favorite among the young people of Nanwalek, especially when she tells stories – learned many things from her grandmother, who was a traditional healer.
http://homertribune.com/2009/10/port-chatham-left-to-spirits/
(Submitted by Chad Arment)
Alaskan creature stories
Port Chatham left to spirits
‘Nantiinaq’ sightings and spirits led to desertion of Alaska village
By Naomi Klouda
Homer Tribune
Malania Helen Kehl, Nanwalek’s eldest resident, is frequently called upon around the village to impart her memories of how life used to be on this southern-most tip of the Kenai Peninsula.
Among her remembrances are medicines used to heal the sick and ways of preserving sea lion meat in barrels for winter. She also is one of the last to tell the ghostly story of how the village of Port Chatham came to be deserted; why the abandoned town was shunned, and those who once lived there vowed never to return.
Malania was born Jan. 25, 1934 at Port Chatham, then a small village founded at the edge of a peaceful moorage. The village once offered shelter for many people, including Capt. Nathaniel Portlock’s ship on his 1786 Alaska expedition. But when Malania was a baby, the family abruptly moved away from Chatham, leaving the house and every board of its frame behind.
What frightening situation caused John and Helen Romanoff to take their children and flee to Nanwalek?
“We left our houses and the school, and started all new here,” Malania said in a recent interview, speaking in her traditional Sugt’stun through translator Sally Ash. “There was plentiful land here for gardening and people. My parents built a house on the beach.”
What had frightened Malania’s parents hadn’t been a single event. Over a “long period of time,” a nantiinaq (Nan-te-nuk) – or big hairy creature – was reportedly terrorizing villagers. And Malania also told of the spirit of a woman dressed in draping black clothes that would come out of the cliffs.
“Her dress was so long she would drag it,” Malania said. “She had a very white face and would disappear back into the cliffs.”
The goose-bumped terror felt when people encountered these spirits was nothing compared to what happened to Malania’s godfather, Andrew Kamluck. He was logging in 1931, when someone or something hit him over the head with a piece of log-moving equipment. The blow reportedly killed him instantly.
Malania isn’t the only one to tell of strange events at Port Chatham. Port Graham Elder, Simeon Kvasnikoff, said he remembers when nantiinaq was blamed for the disappearance of a gold miner.
“This one guy over there had a little place where he was digging for gold,” Kvasnikoff said. “He went up there one time and never came back. No one found any sign of him.”
Another story recounted the experience of a sawmill owner named Tom Larsen, who had a job cutting wood for the old fish traps. He told of spotting nantiinaq on the beach once. After going back to his house to get his gun, he returned to the beach and “the thing looked at him,” Kvasnikoff said. For some reason, Larsen decided against firing a shot.
In an April 15, 1973 issue of the Anchorage Daily News, a feature article told of the abandoned cannery town of Portlock near Port Chatham. The writer had learned the story during an evening spent with the school teacher and his wife at English Bay (Nanwalek) while on a boat trip.
The story is told:
“Portlock began its existence sometime after the turn of the century as a cannery town. In 1921, a post office was established there, and for a time the residents, mostly natives of Russian-Aleut mix, lived in peace with their picturesque mountain-and-sea setting.”
According to the ADN story, sometime in the beginning years of World War II, rumors began to seep along the Kenai Peninsula that things were not right in Portlock. Men from the cannery town would reportedly go up into the hills to hunt Dall sheep and bear, and never return. Worse yet, sometimes stories would circulate about mutilated bodies that were swept down into the lagoon, torn and dismembered in a way that bears could not, or would not, do.
“Tales were told of villagers tracking moose over soft ground. They would find giant, man-like tracks over 18 inches in length closing upon those of the moose, the signs of a short struggle where the grass had been matted down, then only the deep tracks of the manlike animal departing toward the high, fog-shrouded mountains...”
The article goes on to tell how the fed-up townfolk decided to move en masse, and by 1950, the U.S. Post office had closed there.
Even into more recent times, nantiinaq reports haven’t stopped entirely. A man who prefers to remain anonymous tells his story online at http://strangestate.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html
“In 1990, while I was working as a paramedic in Anchorage, we got called out on an alarm for a man having a heart attack at the state jail in Eagle River. He was a Native man in his 70s, and after I got him stabilized with IVs, O2 and cardiac drugs, my partner and I began to transport him to the Native Hospital in Anchorage.”
En route to the hospital, the paramedic and the Native man, an “Aleut” from Port Graham, talked about hunting. The paramedic had been to Dog Fish Bay and was once weathered in there.
“This old man sat up on the gurney and grabbed me by the front of my shirt. He got right up to my face and said, ‘Did it bother you?’ Well, with that question, the hair just stood up on the back of my head. I said, ‘Yes.’ “Did you see it?” was his next question. I said “No... Did you see it?” He said “No, but my brother seen it. It chased him.”
In August of 1973, Ed and two others were bowhunting for goats and black bear when a storm forced them to take shelter in Dogfish Bay Lagoon.
“We beached our skiff and let the tide run her dry. After a dinner of broiled salmon we turned in to our tent. Back in those days, the best tent I had was a dark green canvas job with a center pole and no windows or floor. We left the fire burning and cleaned the pots and pans so as not to attract bears during the night and turned in,” Ed wrote.
The sky was clear, but the wind was howling through the old growth timber that lined the shore. Sometime around 2 a.m., Dennis woke Ed after hearing what sounded like footsteps outside the tent. It wasn’t a bear. Ed said the walking – or rather creeping – continued until it half circled the tent.
“In August, there is still some light in the sky until about 10 or 11. I recall that we all were embarrassed about being afraid about the coming night. We had a flashlight and the rifle in the tent between us, locked and loaded. I finally dosed off but woke right up when Dennis squeezed my leg. The illuminated hands of my watch showed it was 2:30. Joe was already sitting up and had the rifle in hand. I heard the first step, not more than about 10 feet from the back of the tent. Slowly. Then another and another. Whatever this was, it sounded like it was walking on two feet.
It made the same semi-circle around the tent. When we finally got enough courage to crawl out of the tent and turn the flashlight on, we saw nothing. No tracks, nothing. The third night we decided if it bothered us again, we would come out of the tent shooting. We were actually scared. It never came back the third night and the following day we had a break in the weather and got the heck out of there.”
Though Sasquatches became something of a popular phenomenon in the 1960s and ‘70s in the Lower 48, the nantiinaq in Sugt’stun culture has been around for a long time. According to the culture, he might be a different kind of creature, a tragic half-man, half-beast who wasn’t always in this condition. He perhaps used to be fully human.
Elder Nick Tanape said he doesn’t discredit the stories about nantiinaq, but says he’s never seen one.
“I think there’s something to them,” he said.
Malania said that, once her family moved to Nanwalek, the nantiinaq stayed far away and left them in peace. It didn’t follow them, and for that they were grateful. She grew up, raised 13 children and remains one of the few regional elders who can pass on the old traditions.
Malania – a favorite among the young people of Nanwalek, especially when she tells stories – learned many things from her grandmother, who was a traditional healer.
http://homertribune.com/2009/10/port-chatham-left-to-spirits/
(Submitted by Chad Arment)
‘Nantiinaq’ sightings and spirits led to desertion of Alaska village
By Naomi Klouda
Homer Tribune
Malania Helen Kehl, Nanwalek’s eldest resident, is frequently called upon around the village to impart her memories of how life used to be on this southern-most tip of the Kenai Peninsula.
Among her remembrances are medicines used to heal the sick and ways of preserving sea lion meat in barrels for winter. She also is one of the last to tell the ghostly story of how the village of Port Chatham came to be deserted; why the abandoned town was shunned, and those who once lived there vowed never to return.
Malania was born Jan. 25, 1934 at Port Chatham, then a small village founded at the edge of a peaceful moorage. The village once offered shelter for many people, including Capt. Nathaniel Portlock’s ship on his 1786 Alaska expedition. But when Malania was a baby, the family abruptly moved away from Chatham, leaving the house and every board of its frame behind.
What frightening situation caused John and Helen Romanoff to take their children and flee to Nanwalek?
“We left our houses and the school, and started all new here,” Malania said in a recent interview, speaking in her traditional Sugt’stun through translator Sally Ash. “There was plentiful land here for gardening and people. My parents built a house on the beach.”
What had frightened Malania’s parents hadn’t been a single event. Over a “long period of time,” a nantiinaq (Nan-te-nuk) – or big hairy creature – was reportedly terrorizing villagers. And Malania also told of the spirit of a woman dressed in draping black clothes that would come out of the cliffs.
“Her dress was so long she would drag it,” Malania said. “She had a very white face and would disappear back into the cliffs.”
The goose-bumped terror felt when people encountered these spirits was nothing compared to what happened to Malania’s godfather, Andrew Kamluck. He was logging in 1931, when someone or something hit him over the head with a piece of log-moving equipment. The blow reportedly killed him instantly.
Malania isn’t the only one to tell of strange events at Port Chatham. Port Graham Elder, Simeon Kvasnikoff, said he remembers when nantiinaq was blamed for the disappearance of a gold miner.
“This one guy over there had a little place where he was digging for gold,” Kvasnikoff said. “He went up there one time and never came back. No one found any sign of him.”
Another story recounted the experience of a sawmill owner named Tom Larsen, who had a job cutting wood for the old fish traps. He told of spotting nantiinaq on the beach once. After going back to his house to get his gun, he returned to the beach and “the thing looked at him,” Kvasnikoff said. For some reason, Larsen decided against firing a shot.
In an April 15, 1973 issue of the Anchorage Daily News, a feature article told of the abandoned cannery town of Portlock near Port Chatham. The writer had learned the story during an evening spent with the school teacher and his wife at English Bay (Nanwalek) while on a boat trip.
The story is told:
“Portlock began its existence sometime after the turn of the century as a cannery town. In 1921, a post office was established there, and for a time the residents, mostly natives of Russian-Aleut mix, lived in peace with their picturesque mountain-and-sea setting.”
According to the ADN story, sometime in the beginning years of World War II, rumors began to seep along the Kenai Peninsula that things were not right in Portlock. Men from the cannery town would reportedly go up into the hills to hunt Dall sheep and bear, and never return. Worse yet, sometimes stories would circulate about mutilated bodies that were swept down into the lagoon, torn and dismembered in a way that bears could not, or would not, do.
“Tales were told of villagers tracking moose over soft ground. They would find giant, man-like tracks over 18 inches in length closing upon those of the moose, the signs of a short struggle where the grass had been matted down, then only the deep tracks of the manlike animal departing toward the high, fog-shrouded mountains...”
The article goes on to tell how the fed-up townfolk decided to move en masse, and by 1950, the U.S. Post office had closed there.
Even into more recent times, nantiinaq reports haven’t stopped entirely. A man who prefers to remain anonymous tells his story online at http://strangestate.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html
“In 1990, while I was working as a paramedic in Anchorage, we got called out on an alarm for a man having a heart attack at the state jail in Eagle River. He was a Native man in his 70s, and after I got him stabilized with IVs, O2 and cardiac drugs, my partner and I began to transport him to the Native Hospital in Anchorage.”
En route to the hospital, the paramedic and the Native man, an “Aleut” from Port Graham, talked about hunting. The paramedic had been to Dog Fish Bay and was once weathered in there.
“This old man sat up on the gurney and grabbed me by the front of my shirt. He got right up to my face and said, ‘Did it bother you?’ Well, with that question, the hair just stood up on the back of my head. I said, ‘Yes.’ “Did you see it?” was his next question. I said “No... Did you see it?” He said “No, but my brother seen it. It chased him.”
In August of 1973, Ed and two others were bowhunting for goats and black bear when a storm forced them to take shelter in Dogfish Bay Lagoon.
“We beached our skiff and let the tide run her dry. After a dinner of broiled salmon we turned in to our tent. Back in those days, the best tent I had was a dark green canvas job with a center pole and no windows or floor. We left the fire burning and cleaned the pots and pans so as not to attract bears during the night and turned in,” Ed wrote.
The sky was clear, but the wind was howling through the old growth timber that lined the shore. Sometime around 2 a.m., Dennis woke Ed after hearing what sounded like footsteps outside the tent. It wasn’t a bear. Ed said the walking – or rather creeping – continued until it half circled the tent.
“In August, there is still some light in the sky until about 10 or 11. I recall that we all were embarrassed about being afraid about the coming night. We had a flashlight and the rifle in the tent between us, locked and loaded. I finally dosed off but woke right up when Dennis squeezed my leg. The illuminated hands of my watch showed it was 2:30. Joe was already sitting up and had the rifle in hand. I heard the first step, not more than about 10 feet from the back of the tent. Slowly. Then another and another. Whatever this was, it sounded like it was walking on two feet.
It made the same semi-circle around the tent. When we finally got enough courage to crawl out of the tent and turn the flashlight on, we saw nothing. No tracks, nothing. The third night we decided if it bothered us again, we would come out of the tent shooting. We were actually scared. It never came back the third night and the following day we had a break in the weather and got the heck out of there.”
Though Sasquatches became something of a popular phenomenon in the 1960s and ‘70s in the Lower 48, the nantiinaq in Sugt’stun culture has been around for a long time. According to the culture, he might be a different kind of creature, a tragic half-man, half-beast who wasn’t always in this condition. He perhaps used to be fully human.
Elder Nick Tanape said he doesn’t discredit the stories about nantiinaq, but says he’s never seen one.
“I think there’s something to them,” he said.
Malania said that, once her family moved to Nanwalek, the nantiinaq stayed far away and left them in peace. It didn’t follow them, and for that they were grateful. She grew up, raised 13 children and remains one of the few regional elders who can pass on the old traditions.
Malania – a favorite among the young people of Nanwalek, especially when she tells stories – learned many things from her grandmother, who was a traditional healer.
http://homertribune.com/2009/10/port-chatham-left-to-spirits/
(Submitted by Chad Arment)
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Mythical beast is ‘spotted’ in Windermere
15:19, Wednesday, 23 September 2009TALES of a mythical creature rumoured to be lurking in the depths of South Lakeland waters have been causing a stir.
Click here to see the footage
The so-called “Bownessie” is fast becoming part of modern Lake District folklore, as reported sightings of the fabled creature continue to be made.
Footage that some people believe appears to show the creature causing ripples in the surface of Windermere was shot by Lakes TV cameraman John McKeown on Saturday.
It has since appeared on Sky News on Sunday evening and American TV network giant CBS is also interested in the story.
People in Windermere are not convinced Bownessie actually exists.
But they believe it could be good for the town’s tourist economy if the legend can capture the imagination of visitors in a similar way to the Loch Ness monster.
Councillor Bill Smith, mayor of Windermere, said: “If they believe it’s actually there, I’m sure it will attract them to come and see.
“Anything that draws interest and awareness to the Lake District has to be a positive opportunity.
“I don’t think the term monster is the best expression of an animal living in the lake that could be of interest.
“It suggests something nasty, not something that could be attractive and positive.
“Bownessie conjures up something that’s a bit more cute.
“The people that have seen it believe genuinely they have seen something, even if there is no real proof yet.
“But let’s be honest, it’s far better for Loch Ness that they’ve never located it because it helps perpetuate the belief.”
Paul Holdsworth, Windermere town centre manager, says the Bownessie phenomenon is the latest in a long line of Lake District mythologies.
He said: “Probably the longest standing one is Tizzie Wizzie, which was first spotted by a Bowness boatman around 1900 and he used to tell stories of this extraordinary creature.
“It was said to have the body of a hedgehog, tail of a squirrel and a pair of bee-like wings and was a shy, water-loving creature.
“So, for the sceptics who think Bownessie is something to get the tourists in, this tale has already been around for over a hundred years. There is nothing new under the sun perhaps.”
Jacqui O’Connor, press officer for Windermere Lakes Cruises, said: “Our vessels sail up and down the lake 364 days a year and we have never seen anything unusual.
“However, our skippers remain alert as always.”
Windermere myth and legend
GYLPIN’S wild boar – A wild boar is said to have terrorised pilgrims who entered the woods between Kendal and Windermere in the 12th century.
Richard de Gylpin killed the boar and was rewarded with the manor of Kentmere.The white horse of Windermere – It is said a ghostly white horse walks on the water from shore to shore when harm is about to come to the homes around the lake.
The Crier of Claife – Centuries ago, ferrymen at Ferry Nab often heard strange calls for the boat to come across the water, but were too afraid to go. A monk exorcised the ghost and confined it to the quarry and woods. But there are still tales of walkers being followed by a hooded figure at Claife.
http://www.nwemail.co.uk/news/mythical_beast_is_spotted_in_lake_windermere_1_614951?referrerPath=news
Mythical beast is ‘spotted’ in Windermere
15:19, Wednesday, 23 September 2009TALES of a mythical creature rumoured to be lurking in the depths of South Lakeland waters have been causing a stir.
Click here to see the footage
The so-called “Bownessie” is fast becoming part of modern Lake District folklore, as reported sightings of the fabled creature continue to be made.
Footage that some people believe appears to show the creature causing ripples in the surface of Windermere was shot by Lakes TV cameraman John McKeown on Saturday.
It has since appeared on Sky News on Sunday evening and American TV network giant CBS is also interested in the story.
People in Windermere are not convinced Bownessie actually exists.
But they believe it could be good for the town’s tourist economy if the legend can capture the imagination of visitors in a similar way to the Loch Ness monster.
Councillor Bill Smith, mayor of Windermere, said: “If they believe it’s actually there, I’m sure it will attract them to come and see.
“Anything that draws interest and awareness to the Lake District has to be a positive opportunity.
“I don’t think the term monster is the best expression of an animal living in the lake that could be of interest.
“It suggests something nasty, not something that could be attractive and positive.
“Bownessie conjures up something that’s a bit more cute.
“The people that have seen it believe genuinely they have seen something, even if there is no real proof yet.
“But let’s be honest, it’s far better for Loch Ness that they’ve never located it because it helps perpetuate the belief.”
Paul Holdsworth, Windermere town centre manager, says the Bownessie phenomenon is the latest in a long line of Lake District mythologies.
He said: “Probably the longest standing one is Tizzie Wizzie, which was first spotted by a Bowness boatman around 1900 and he used to tell stories of this extraordinary creature.
“It was said to have the body of a hedgehog, tail of a squirrel and a pair of bee-like wings and was a shy, water-loving creature.
“So, for the sceptics who think Bownessie is something to get the tourists in, this tale has already been around for over a hundred years. There is nothing new under the sun perhaps.”
Jacqui O’Connor, press officer for Windermere Lakes Cruises, said: “Our vessels sail up and down the lake 364 days a year and we have never seen anything unusual.
“However, our skippers remain alert as always.”
Windermere myth and legend
GYLPIN’S wild boar – A wild boar is said to have terrorised pilgrims who entered the woods between Kendal and Windermere in the 12th century.
Richard de Gylpin killed the boar and was rewarded with the manor of Kentmere.The white horse of Windermere – It is said a ghostly white horse walks on the water from shore to shore when harm is about to come to the homes around the lake.
The Crier of Claife – Centuries ago, ferrymen at Ferry Nab often heard strange calls for the boat to come across the water, but were too afraid to go. A monk exorcised the ghost and confined it to the quarry and woods. But there are still tales of walkers being followed by a hooded figure at Claife.
http://www.nwemail.co.uk/news/mythical_beast_is_spotted_in_lake_windermere_1_614951?referrerPath=news
Friday, May 15, 2009
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