The US government has released 2,800 previously classified files related to the assassination of President John F Kennedy in November 1963. As readers, historians and journalists comb through the thousands of pages of documents, here is what we have found - Read more
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While most colon and rectal cancer patients older than 50 are diagnosed in the early stages of disease, younger patients tend to be diagnosed at advanced ...
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While most colon and rectal cancer patients older than 50 are diagnosed in the early stages of disease, younger patients tend to be diagnosed at advanced ...
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While most colon and rectal cancer patients older than 50 are diagnosed in the early stages of disease, younger patients tend to be diagnosed at advanced ...
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Eating this many walnuts per day could slow cancer growth and even kill off cancerous cells, finds a new study. But that's not all they can do.
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Welcoming our new overlords of any kind is becoming more than just a funny meme … it may be a warning that their arrival could be happening faster than we can perceive, comprehend … or stop. That seems to be the case if the overlords are artificially intelligent robots as the tech news media this week brings stories of AI robots reproducing, evolving and reciting bible verses to humans based on data collected to determine what their spiritual needs at the moment might be. Robots controlling what you pray for? Will they stop you from praying for less robots?
Wired reports this week on research in the field of evolutionary robotics being conducted at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam by computer scientist Gusz Eiben. Ebsen uses simple AI robots with simple “genomes” that define what their color will be. He then has them “mate” via connections and combine their genomes. Like in humans, he programmed the connection and combination to have flaws that can cause mutations in the “offspring.” The end result?
“One parent is fully green, and the other parent is fully blue. Then the child has some modules that are blue and some that are green, but the head is white. That’s not what we put in—it’s a mutation effect.”
Obviously, negative or flawed mutations would not be the goal. Programmers of evolutionary robots would design them to combine their strongest “genes” or characteristics to produce a baby bot with the best of both robot parents. With computers powering their intelligence and decision-making, this “evolution” could result in combinations not foreseen by human engineers. Additionally, what humans may see as genetic flaws may have uses that the AI determines to be valuable.
Everything will be OK as long as humans tightly control the algorithms … right? Research scientist David Howard, who recently published a framework for evolutionary robotics in Nature Machine Intelligence, proposes a scenario where scientists developing robots for exploring jungles do it by sending robots out into jungle to learn for themselves.
“What we’d do is get lots of small robots that are quite simple and cheap to make. We’d send them out, and some of them would do better than others.”
By “do better than others,” Howard means make it back to the lab in one piece. Those that do would be allowed to “mate” and create the next generation of bots to send out into the jungle again and repeat the process. What could possibly go wrong?
Where did every bot-ty go?
“From the Gospel according to Matthew. Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Sage advice, you say? Would you feel the same way if you knew it was an AI robot’s response to your concern? In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Gabriele Trovato, a roboticist and assistant professor at Waseda University in Japan, introduces SanTO, a 17-inch-tall robot equipped with a microphone, sensors and a facial recognition-enabled camera. Trovato developed SanTO with a specific purpose in mind (view photos of SanTO here):
“Religion has evolved through history, from oral tradition to written tradition to press and mass media. So it’s very reasonable to think that AI and robotics will help religion to spread out more.”
Although Trovato was warned by religious officials that SanTO should not offer biblical interpretations, it comes close by making decisions which text to recite by interpreting the needs of the person it is working for based on the questions asked and cues picked up by the facial recognition system. Isn’t that counseling and teaching using biblical quotations?
Robots are reproducing, evolving and “spreading the word” of religious texts. Perhaps when we worry about our eventual takeover by the robot overlords, we should less concerned about the “over” and fret more about the “lord” part.
Or are we too late?
Paul Seaburn (CLICK HERE TO READ AND SEE MORE)
Eating this many walnuts per day could slow cancer growth and even kill off cancerous cells, finds a new study. But that's not all they can do.
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We as a species have always yearned to tame our planet, to understand it and discover its secrets. Since the dawn of mankind we have looked over the horizon and wondered what lie beyond it, and been infused with the desire to penetrate out into the uncharted wildernesses of the world to find out. We have mapped out our world and expanded our understanding of our planet through this innate drive, yet while many of the great explorers have come back from there journeys others have not been as fortunate, going out over that horizon to never return, their fates forever lost to history.
Going far back through the veil of history, back in the early days of ocean exploration we have the famous Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, more commonly known by his English name, John Cabot. He is credited as being the first European to discover the coast of North America since the Vikings, when he made the groundbreaking achievement during a voyage in 1478. Cabot had several notable voyages, the first of which he undertook in order to find the legendary lost island of Hy-Brasil, where he believed he would find a vast trove of rare dyes and other treasures but which he was never able to locate. His second voyage was a success in that he would not only discover the coastline of North America, but would also manage to claim Cape Bonavista in Newfoundland as a territory of the British Empire, and spend some amount of time exploring the rugged coastline. It was a voyage that would truly make a name for Cabot, and he received no small amount of money and fame for his grand achievement. This would lead up to his final journey, when in 1498 he departed from the great seaport of Bristol with a fleet of five ships under his command, their target being northern Canada, where they were hoping to establish trade with the Native tribes.
John Cabot
Little is known of what happened next, but there was reportedly a storm that claimed one of the ships, while the other four, along with Cabot, continued on undaunted, going on to apparently just sail off the face of the earth to never be heard from again. In the centuries after this vanishing there have been many theories as to what happened to john Cabot’s final voyage. One is that the whole expedition was simply lost at sea, but some modern historians have disputed this, with one theory being that they likely did reach their destination and just decided to stay and make a settlement. In another idea, historian Alwyn Ruddock has claimed that not only did the expedition reach Canada, but that they had then managed to make it back to England in 1500, going on to have a very successful exploration career after that making journeys to North America and the Caribbean. The theory that they made it back to England is partially supported by evidence that one of the scheduled members of the expedition was documented as living in London in 1501. Ruddock has also claimed that Cabot was able to successfully found the first Christian mission in North American history. However, to this date no incontrovertible evidence has been found for any one theory, and the fate of John Cabot remains a perplexing mystery shrouded in the mists of time.
Coming into the 17th century we have the tragic story of the famous British explorer Henry Hudson. He was best known for his intrepid, nearly obsessive quest for the fabled Northwest Passage, which was at the time a mythical ice free route that would theoretically allow ships to pass through the typically impassable waters through the Russian Arctic in order to have a faster way to reach the Indies, as well as another such route called the Northeast Passage. Hudson mounted several unsuccessful expeditions in search of these legendary passages, and when winds proved an obstacle on one of these voyages he ended up heading to North America, where he would explore the river which now bears his name.
Henry Hudson
In 1610 he managed to get backing for another try at the Northwest Passage, and this time embarked upon a state-of-the-art ship called the Discovery. Well-equipped and ready to go, Hudson was confident that this time he would find what he had been looking for so long. This time they entered the strait and bay which would later be named after Hudson, and things looked promising at first, but frigid weather and thick ice flows quickly dashed any hopes they had of ever finding the passage. Dissent began to seed amongst the crew, with many of the men wanting to get out of there before they became irrevocably trapped.
Hudson did his best to quell the arguments and allay the fears of his men, but venomous rumors began to spread like an infection. Whispered among the crew were stories that Hudson was playing favorites with his men, and this graduated into unsubstantiated tales that he was hoarding food and other supplies for himself. Anger simmered, then boiled over into a full on revolt and mutiny in 1611. In the end, Hudson, his son, and seven others were put upon a tiny boat and abandoned there in Hudson Bay. The last time anyone would see Hudson was that little boat and its castaways furiously rowing after the Discovery and ultimately falling into the distance and off the face of the earth. It is completely unknown what happened to Henry Hudson and that exiled group after this, and they simply have vanished into history, their bodies and boat never found.
In the 20th century we have several other lost explorers. Perhaps one of the most famous of all was the Norwegian Arctic explorer Roald Amundsen. Instrumental to exploration of these frozen wastelands, and was part of the first team to ever reach the South Pole in 1911 and part of the first expedition confirmed to have reached the North Pole in 1926, and he took part in numerous journeys through the polar regions of the world. He is also known for his unsolved vanishing.
Roald Amundsen
On June 18, 1928, Amundsen, Norwegian pilot Leif Dietrichson, French pilot René Guilbaud, and three more French crew took off in a Latham 47 flying boat on a rescue mission to save the crew of an airship that had crashed in the Arctic near the Barents Sea. They never returned. A search was launched, but all that could be found were a wing float and a gasoline can from the plane bobbing about in the icy water, with no trace at all of the missing men. The Norwegian government scoured the entire area, but were unable to locate the rest of the plane or the men, and the search was called off. It would not be until 2004 and again in 2009 when the Royal Norwegian Navy would reopen the search, meticulously combing a 40-square-mile area of the seafloor using advanced unmanned subs, but no sign of the wreckage or the bodies of the missing men were found, and the ultimate fate of Roald Amundsen is a mystery to this day.
Another of these was the American artist, poet, and writer named Everett Ruess, who was just as known for his extensive exploration of the most remote and uncharted areas of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, as well as the California coast, the High Sierra, and the Yosemite and Sequoia national parks, selling landscape paintings along the way to raise money for his excursions, as he was for his writings. He began his journey in 1931, and during his myriad adventures he travelled by whatever means were at his disposal, including on foot, on horseback, and even at some points riding cattle, and he ingratiated himself with the Natives of the regions he explored, learning to speak fluent Navajo and a bit of Hopi, and he was also instrumental in helping with some archeological digs.
In November of 1934, Ruess headed out into the badlands of Utah along with some pack animals, telling his family that he would be gone for two months. This turned into three months, then four, and his concerned family organized a search party to look for him. While two of the missing man’s burros were found, as well as a makeshift corral Ruess had made and a cryptic inscription that read “NEMO Nov 1934,” of Ruess himself no trace was found. In later years his disappearance has been attributed to dying out in the wilderness, to being washed away by a flash flood, to running away to start a new life with the Natives, to murder, but no one really knows, and his body has never been found. In 2009 remains were found in the same general area that were thought to be his, but DNA tests confirmed that they were of Native American origin, and so the vanishing of Everett Ruess and the meaning of his enigmatic last inscription remain an unsolved mystery. Within his last letter to his family is a haunting passage that was perhaps prophetic in a way, which reads:
As to when I shall revisit civilization, it will not be soon. … I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and the star-sprinkled sky to the roof, the obscure and difficult trail leading into the unknown to any paved highway, the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.
Everett Ruess
Perhaps Ruess ended up exactly where he wanted to be. Also in the 20th century we come to our last vanished explorer, the Japanese mountaineer Naomi Uemura. He was a major force in mountain exploration in the 1970s and 80s, part of the first Japanese team to ever successfully climb Mt. Everest and the first person to ever reach the North Pole alone, as well as the first to raft the Amazon River solo. In 1984 he set his sights on a new conquest, that of Alaska’s Mt. McKinley, the highest mountain in North America.
Uemura set out on his journey alone, and adding to the hardship was that he aimed to be the first man to climb the peak in the winter, which was completely insane but it was thought that if anyone could do it, then it was this seasoned, experienced mountaineer. Indeed, despite the forbidding weather and inhospitable terrain he actually did pull it off, reaching the peak and radioing that he was on his way down. This would be the last anyone ever heard of the intrepid adventurer. A search for Uemura turned up his ski poles and a diary carrying the last entry, “I wish I could sleep in a warm sleeping bag. No matter what happens I am going to climb McKinley.” Although he did fulfill this dream, Naomi Uemura’s body has never been found, and no one has the slightest idea of what happened to him.
Here we have looked at but a few of the great explorers and wanderers of our planet who have made the ultimate sacrifice in their quest for understanding. What happened to these great adventurers and what did they see in those last hours? It is sad to think that many of these people have become just as known for their mysterious vanishings as for their discoveries in life, but whatever happened to them, their achievements will remain inedlibly imprinted upon the history of exploration for generations to come.
Brent Swancer (CLICK HERE TO READ AND SEE MORE)
Archaeologists have discovered over 100 ancient inscriptions that were carved into the rock at Wadi el-Hudi, which is where the Egyptians mined amethysts in ancient times. They also found 14 stele (which are inscriptions that are carved on a slab of stone or pillar) and 45 ostraca (which are inscriptions that are written on pottery pieces).
While tests are currently being conducted on the findings, archaeologists have already concluded that several of the inscriptions were from approximately 3,900 years ago (a time period known as the “Middle Kingdom”), and several of the ostraca were from around 2,000 years ago (approximately the same time that Egypt was taken over by Rome).
Egypt
During the Middle Kingdom time period in Egypt, the pharaohs discovered that Wadi el-Hudi was an excellent source for amethysts and started mining it. “They were bringing it back and making it into jewelry and doling it out to their elite and their princesses,” Kate Liszka, who is the director of the Wadi el-Hudi expedition, told Live Science.
Although other scholars previously surveyed Wadi el-Hudi, many of the inscriptions were overlooked. “The site is just so full of inscriptions behind every boulder and around every wall that they missed a lot of them,” Liszka stated. In order to find new inscriptions, the team is using 3D modeling, photogrammetry, and reflectance transformation imaging (RTI).
The team hopes that the inscriptions will answer many of the mysteries surrounding Wadi el-Hudi, such as whether or not the miners were being forced to work against their free will. “I don’t know if I’m excavating a legitimate settlement where people were treated well or if I’m excavating a prison camp,” explained Liszka.
Amethyst
Some of the inscriptions indicate that there were groups of soldiers who were staring down at the miners while they worked, which makes researchers wonder whether the soldiers were keeping a watchful eye on the miners to make sure they were working hard, or if they were just protecting them.
Click here to see one of the many inscriptions discovered in Wadi el-Hudi.
Another unanswered question is how the miners got access to water since the closest well was 1.9 miles away from them. And since it’s very possible that the well wasn’t even in use at that time, the Nile River was around 18.6 miles away.
Researchers also found a 3,400-year-old stela which had the name Usersatet written on it, who was viceroy of Kush in southern Egypt. What’s so mysterious about the finding is that no mining was being conducted at Wadi el-Hudi during that time, leaving it completely abandoned, so why did someone bring it 18.6 miles throughout the desert in order to leave it there? Hopefully with more research being done there, some of these questions may eventually be answered.
Jocelyne LeBlanc (CLICK HERE TO READ AND SEE MORE)
In the last decade or so, popular culture seems to have caught up with what many of us have known for a long time: there’s something altogether not right about Garfield. Maybe it’s because the comic strip was created completely devoid of any substance whatsoever that looking too long at Garfield is like opening a door into the abyss. Take the webcomic garfield minus garfield for example. It’s just Garfield comic strips with the character of Garfield removed. It’s terrifying. Removing the fat orange cat takes it from a hokey newspaper comic to a level of fear and dread usually reserved for French existentialist novels real fast.
Speaking of France, Garfield, and searching for meaning in a chaotic and uncaring universe, the residents of France’s Iroise Coast know the fat orange menace all to well. For almost 40 years, Garfield telephones have been regularly appearing on the picturesque beaches, seemingly out of nowhere. In 2018 alone, there were over 200 Garfield parts found on the shore. Is there anything quite as disturbing as plastic Garfield phones continuously appearing? No matter how many the residents pick up and throw away, they just keep coming. That smug smile all cracked and weathered with it’s unblinking, unrelenting gaze. It’s like a cheap 20th century version of Poe’s The Raven, and I salute the people of France for not having been driven to madness.
Garfield, He Who Would Devour Time.
But now, at long last, the mystery of the mysterious Garfield phones has been solved.
The novelty phones have been such a staple of the beaches on the Iroise coast, that the Ar Viltansou anti-litter group made them a symbol for their beach cleaning campaign. Once the pictures of the phones had been plastered all over the area, a local farmer named René Morvan came forward to say he saw one of the first Garfield phones wash ashore in the early ’80s. And he knew where they were coming from.
Vous vous souvenez des téléphones #Garfield ? Après le premier article de @CaBelingard pour #AlertePollution, les langues se sont déliées et un agriculteur a permis de retrouver le conteneur échoué https://t.co/ru7MDssTCY (avec le bon @ cette fois-ci
) pic.twitter.com/q2wtgyXQKX
— Thomas Baïetto (@ThomasBaietto) March 26, 2019
It had been suspected that a shipping container, perhaps lost in a storm, or perhaps stowed away like pirate’s booty by a rabid Garfield fan, was to blame for plastic pollution. But there was no proof and no way to track down the hypothetical shipping container. And then René Morvan confessed the dark secret he’d been harboring all these years: he knew the source of the Garfields. He’d always known the source of the Garfields. They were, in fact, coming from a shipping container. The container had been wedged into a deep grotto, only accessible at low tide. Morvan says:
“We had to really know the area. We found a container that was stranded in a fault, it was open, a lot of things were gone, but there was a stock of phones. At the time, there were a lot of things that came to us from the sea.”
Whether Google Translate is making that quote sound more ominous than necessary is unknown.
Members of the beach cleaning team and a group of journalists went searching for the shipping container and eventually they spotted more and more intact Garfield phones, signaling that their long war against Garfield was finally coming to a close. Or was it?
There is no escape. There will never be an escape.
The remains of the shipping container are now inaccessible, buried deep in a submerged cave. Near the area, large quantities of broken novelty plastic and electronics remain between in rocks and tangled beneath the water. Despite how funny it is, it’s an absolute ecological nightmare. And it seems that there’s not much more that environmental group can do except pick up the pieces of Garfield as they find them. They have solved the mystery, but Garfield yet remains.
Sequoyah Kennedy (CLICK HERE TO READ AND SEE MORE)
A woman with a rare sleeping disorder called Kleine-Levin or “Sleeping Beauty” Syndrome can spend weeks of her life sleeping up to 22 hours each day. 21-year-old Rhoda Rodriguez-Diaz suffers from episodes where she gets extremely tired, causing her to sleep almost continuously for up to three weeks straight, except for briefly waking up to use the bathroom and to eat.
She described this unusual disorder by saying, “Life goes on whilst I’m sleeping. Reality hits me when I wake up and realize I’ve missed like a week of my life.” She said that it’s like a major setback in her life when it happens, “I miss out on so much. That’s the hardest part of it.”
Woman sleeping (not Rhoda Rodriguez-Diaz)
Her disorder caused her to miss her exams and she ended up having to drop out of the courses she was taking last year, but she has re-enrolled hoping that this time may be different. “It’s hard to explain to people where I have been,” she said, “Because it’s so rare a lot of people struggle to understand. It’s really annoying when people call me lazy.”
Even though there isn’t any known cure to the sleep disorder, some people who have suffered from it eventually grew out of it. Rhoda says she’s now more aware of the disorder and can tell when she’s about to have an episode, “It used to feel like I was in a dream. It’s such a surreal feeling. It feels like you’re not really there. This is just a hiccup in my life and I am just waiting until it fades out. I want to be taken serious in life and this isn’t helping.”
So what exactly is Kleine-Levin Syndrome? It’s a neurological disorder that causes recurring periods of excessive amounts of sleep, changes in behavior, and a limited understanding of the world around them. While it normally affects adolescents, younger children and adults can also suffer from it. People with this disorder can suffer from it for ten years or even longer.
Woman sleeping (not Rhoda Rodriguez-Diaz)
In addition to the person sleeping for excessive amounts of time, their demeanor can also appear to be “spacey” or childlike. When the person is awake, he or she can be disoriented, confused, have no energy, show very little emotion, and they can be very sensitive to noise and light. While some patients can go for weeks, months, or years without an episode, the symptoms can reappear with hardly any warning. What causes Kleine-Levin Syndrome is not yet known.
Jocelyne LeBlanc (CLICK HERE TO READ AND SEE MORE)
This past weekend saw a jaw-dropping alien video go viral; and by “alien” we mean the fearsome “Xenomorph” of the Alien cinematic universe. The Drama Club of New Jersey’s North Bergen High School recently staged a hugely ambitious production inspired by Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror masterpiece. On a shoestring budget, the school managed to create elaborate sets, costumes and even a Xenomorph that wouldn’t look out of place on the big screen. The students’ enthusiasm for their project was clearly reflected in its execution, and a video of the stage play has spread far and wide in just a few short days. So far and wide, in fact, that it’s even caught the attention of Ridley Scott himself, not to mention the real Ellen Ripley, a.k.a, Hollywood legend Sigourney Weaver, both of whom this week have extended their heartfelt congratulations to the staff and students of North Bergen High.
In a video tweeted out by the official Alien account, Weaver heaps praise on the amateur production, both from herself, and from another Alien maestro, a certain Mr. James Cameron. “I saw a bit of your production of Alien, and it looked incredible,” Weaver remarks in her video. “You put so much heart and soul into that. I just wanted to send our compliments. Not only from me but from James Cameron and the original screenwriter, Walter Hill. We all want to say bravo. Well done.”
Ridley Scott was so impressed by the high school production that he wrote a letter to the Drama Club thanking and congratulating all those involved. The iconic director even went so far as to offer financial support to the club to help fund “an encore performance.” You can read Scott’s letter in full below, and be sure to check out the clip of the play itself. With such tremendous time and effort poured into this endeavour, it’s a good thing the final product didn’t turn out to be a stinker. After all, in a school drama hall, everyone can hear you scream…
Ridley Scott’s letter to the Drama Club of North Bergen High School.
There is a curious and pervasive phenomenon can be seen across a wide range of cultures worldwide. From one corner of the earth to the other, there seems to have always been a mother telling her child to watch out for what lurks in the night, waiting to prey on those who have been bad or misbehaved. Such tales know no cultural boundaries, taking on myriad forms but always coming down to one basic concept- that of the foul monster in the shadows waiting to strike out at wicked children from the dimness. There is not always any consistent form that these monsters might take, but they are often called collectively the “Boogeyman,” which is derived from the word bogge, meaning “something scary” or “hobgoblin” in Middle English. Other than that, it might be the thing in your closet, hiding in the basement, or tucked away under your bed. It is a formless avatar of terror for children far and wide, depending on the culture merely scaring kids or taking them away to devour, and it can take countless physical forms, but it is always completely terrifying.
Whatever form it may take, there have been numerous reports from terrified witnesses who think that they have witnessed what they describe as some form of Boogeyman. One from True Ghost Tales comes from a witness who calls herself “Charmaine,” and who says that this happened to her when she was just 7 years old. She claims that she began seeing a dwarf-like creature she says “had sharp yellowish teeth, had red eyes and it’s fingers looked like they were sharpened.” This little beast would often appear lurking in the shadows just to stare at her, often right in her own room, and sometimes it would smile “the evilest smile I had ever seen.” She says of her harrowing experience with this thing:
I tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t go away. I was so scared to go to bed at night. It would appear each night, when the lights were turned off and my parents were sleeping. They never believed me when I told them about the ‘thing’. After a few months I ignored it and it didn’t like that, he started to scratch the under side of my bed, I still ignored it… until one night that it jumped on my bed and scratched me. I screamed and my parents came, and told me I had a bad dream. The next morning there were scratches on my arm. This continued for over 6 years. I got fed up with it and one night I looked it in the eyes and told it to go away and it did.
I never saw it again, but felt it’s presence one more time. I was 16 at the time. I was visiting my friend and it was late so I decided to sleep there, we were sharing a bed (me, her and her boyfriend). I woke up because her boyfriend was freaking out and said that the boogeyman was here. I sat up and I could feel the ‘thing’, but didn’t see it. I ran to put the lights on and when we looked at her boyfriends arm there were scratches on it. He told me what he saw… he describe exactly the same thing that I saw years ago. I went cold and the fear came back. I told him that I faced my fears and told it to go away and it did. This thing lives on fear.
Whatever this thing was, it certainly fits the mold of the traditional Boogeyman, flitting about in the dark to scare young children, maybe even preying on that fear. In another report from Your Ghost Stories, a witness from South Africa says she was 13 years old at the time of her experience, and that it began with waking up at all hours overcome with a sick, thick sense of dread and fear. At first she never did see what it was that could conjure up such emotions of pure terror, and it seemed to come in waves out of absolutely nowhere, until one night she finally got a glimpse of her unseen tormentor, dragged into the light in all of its hideous glory. She says:
I then woke up again, with the same fear and panic, I looked around my room again and that’s when I saw it. It was sitting on my desk in front of my bed. It was small, like a garden gnome, it had yellow eyes, sharp little teeth and pointed fingers. It just stared at me. I never felt so scared in my life. I screamed and my dad came to my room. As soon as he put the light on the creature was gone. My dad didn’t believe me when I told him what I have seen, he thought it was just a bad dream. It felt so real, I know I was awake and I know I saw it and it saw me. I slept in my parents room for the rest of the night. I was now scared to go to bed, to be alone in my room at night. I could always feel it watching me. It also started to scratch the underside of my bed at nights. I once again woke up and saw the creature sitting on my desk, he stared at me and smiled.
This apparently went on for several more years, this strange intruder making sporadic visits to this frightened child’s room. She tried to tell her parents what was going on, but they simply wrote it all off as a child’s ramblings and overactive imagination. Unfortunately for her, things would begin to escalate quite spectacularly. She says:
Whenever I saw the creature I just covered my face with my duvet. Prayed and hoped I will fall asleep quickly. It seemed like it didn’t like that I ignored it and things got worse. I saw him sitting on my desk again, I just closed my eyes and covered my face, I knew he was still there, I could feel him watching me. I then felt him jump onto my bed. I didn’t dare move, I have never been this scared in my life. I didn’t dare look, I just laid there. I could feel him scratching my arm and I screamed. My dad came and put the light on and the creature was gone. I slept in my parents room again. The next morning I saw the four scratches on my arm, but my parents said I must have done it in my sleep.
I told a friend what was happening and luckily he believed me. He told me this thing thrives on fear and that I should sleep with a bible under my pillow and tell it to go away. I did just that, I could still feel him sometimes watching me, but never saw him again. I was 16 at the time. This is when it got even creeper, I was doing much better, 2 years had passed without any incident, I was 18 at the time. I stayed over at a friends house, we all slept in front of the TV. Her boyfriend screamed in the early hours, I woke up and I could feel the creature looking at us, I knew it was there.
There are quite a few of more of these creepy tales floating around out there. On Reddit there is a witness who claims that when he was younger his family moved to a large and very old wooden house that did not sit well with him from the very beginning. He was apparently often left at home alone in that spooky place while his parents were away out at work, and it was on one of these days being alone in this creaky old building that he had his own brush with something very reminiscent of some sort of Boogeyman. He explains:
One early evening when I came home the house was still dark. I called out, “Mum?” and heard her sing song voice say “Yeeeeees?” from upstairs. I called her again as I climbed the stairs to see which room she was in, and again got the same “Yeeeeees?” reply. We were decorating at the time, and I didn’t know my way around the maze of rooms but she was in one of the far ones, right down the hall. I felt uneasy, but I figured that was only natural so I rushed forward to see my mum, knowing that her presence would calm my fears, as a mother’s presence always does.
Just as I reached for the handle of the door to let myself in to the room I heard the front door downstairs open and my mother call “Sweetie, are you home?” in a cheery voice. I jumped back, startled and ran down the stairs to her, but as I glanced back from the top of the stairs, the door to the room slowly opened a crack. For a brief moment, I saw something strange in there, and I don’t know what it was, but it was staring at me.
In another account the witness says she was around 7 years ld at the time when she was jolted awake by a piercing pain in her ear. The pain was intense enough that she got out of bed to go tell her mom and stepfather, but something kept her from completing her journey to their room. She says that as she crept through the living room, she was suddenly, alarmingly aware of someone sitting there in the murk in one of the chairs. She says of what happened next:
The person looked strange (the face was just kind of distorted) but it was dark and I couldn’t see well. “Mom?” I asked. The person shook their head, and I started getting scared. “Mike?”. The person shook their head again. I decided the best course of option was to go back to bed so I wouldn’t have to walk past this…person. I climbed in bed, and closed my eyes for a second, before opening them and seeing the person standing in my doorway, smiling madly and nodding furiously. I screamed at the top of my lungs and closed my eyes. My step dad came running out of his room in his underwear with a baseball bat (that was a scary sight in itself). There was nothing there, but clothes my mom had folded and put on the chair where strewn about the living room. For the longest time I told myself it was my cat, sitting on the clothes.
It is not even always just the children who sees these things, and some reports indicate that parents have stepped in to see something they were perhaps not meant to. One Reddit witness says that his 2-year-old child would often wake up screaming uncontrollably, and that when he went to provide comfort his young son would simple babble “Bad man. Bad man.” One night things graduated to full on bizarreness when he says:
Heard him whimpering one night and saw a freakishly tall figure in the baby monitor. Nearly shat myself, grabbed my pistol, and ran to his room to find my son locked in the closet and the figure nowhere to be found. The door can only be locked from the outside. There was a grey wool scarf on the floor of his room that I had never seen before. Cops came and filed a B&E report, but there was no signs of forced entry or anything. We’re planning on moving in a few months.
Was this an regular human intruder or something else? Why was it there and where did it go? It is interesting to note that across so many cultures we still get these stories of something mysterious terrorizing children, and it does make one wonder if this is all just a child’s way to deal with the fear of the unknown or something more? This is a universal feature, these tales to terrify kids, as well as the many children calling for their parents in the middle of the night as something they cannot fathom looms there in the dark. Could it possibly be that the phenomenon has spurred on the stories rather than the other way around? Could these be some form of entity that feeds on the potent fear of the very young, harvesting their terror? Or is it just stories, folklore, and an unchanging archetype upon the human psyche, cautionary tales used to keep children in check? Whatever you may think, kids across the world will probably keep on being scared by these perceived threats, whether real or not.
Brent Swancer (CLICK HERE TO READ AND SEE MORE)
