The Midnight Society likes their books a little bloody, but other bloody things are tantalizing, too. There’s something so enticing about the shiny, red liquid. Which is why, in a field of torn apart trees, I was recently kneeling to take photos. Amidst all the destruction, I had spotted blood on the ground. The ground was covered in fresh mulch and leaves. The forest had been shredded to bits. Stumps were pulled from the ground, black soil drying in clumps on their exposed roots. Devil's Tooth fungus (Hydnellum peckii) grows under forests, its myceliu[...]
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Real life creepy places
2 I grew up celebrating Thanksgiving on the edge of a Florida swamp. Our cabin was perched in the crook of a bend of the Little Withlacoochee River. It stood on eight-foot posts because sometimes the blackwater river would come out of its banks and spread through the swamp. You’d have to wade to the cabin then, shuffling to find the hidden logs, your legs lost in the dark water. It was pretty great. Thanksgiving Day was spent fishing, exploring the woods and making holiday crafts my mother devised. One year, we traced each other’s outlines on butcher paper. E[...]
Hi everyone. I'm back to Real Life Creepy Places, after having two papers due today that I just sent off (talk about real life horror). Ladies and gentlemen, good news! Today's Real Life Creepy Place is for sale! Everyone get their credit cards ready, the starting bid is just under $500, 000 US (or the price of a modest duplex in a moderately crappy Montreal neighborhood.) And this is no duplex, this is a paradisaical island in Italy. Check out this view! So what gives? Well, it might be the thousands and thousands of dead bodies that make up half the island[...]
It’s Bat Fest this weekend in Austin, Texas. Austinites celebrate everything by having a music festival, and last night’s 10th Annual Bat Fest got both the locals and plenty of visitors out for the musical attractions. However, the main event was not the bands, or the costumes, or an excuse to party in the street. The real show happened at sundown-- when the bats came out. Flashback, August, 1980: A new ribbon-cutting ceremony has just reopened the Congress Avenue bridge over Town Lake. For the last six years, the bridge has been closed because of damage. Bu[...]
Hello all! In the last few weeks, I’ve been on an Eastern European kick. Now it’s time for some creepiness much closer to home—at least my home. So I present to you not one, not two… but three real life creepy places right here in Montreal. Montreal is one of the first European settlements in North America. For two thousand years prior, the territory was inhabited by Algonquin, Huron and Iroquois tribes; in 1535, a French guy named Jacques Cartier arrived on the scene, named the St-Lawrence River, founded what would later be Quebec City, and then moved d[...]
Saint-Petersburg is a city with a unique and oftentimes macabre history. It’s one of the “younger” Russian cities, founded in the eighteenth century (compared to Moscow, for example, which is more than 800 years old). It was built to be the new capital, then stripped of the title and re-baptized after the October Revolution in the early 20th century. It was one of the cities to suffer the most under a long and grueling siege during World War II. These days, the city regained its original name (after its founder the Tsar Peter I), but legends still suggest[...]
Pripyat was an unremarkable small town in the Ukraine, founded in 1970, with a population of about 49,000. Until April 1986, when an explosion at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant contaminated the city and a large chunk of the surrounding territory with radioactive particles. The town, originally built to house the workers of the nuclear power plant and their families, was so close to the plant you could see the fire from the roofs of the buildings. The residents of Pripyat were not alerted of the deadly disaster that had occurred just a few miles away. T[...]
