Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

Recession Gothic in LA, or foreclosure and torture

Another real-life Gothic horror story related to the Great Recession has appeared.  Some folks in LA weren't happy with the foreclosure process:

[A] couple hit by foreclosure are charged with torturing two loan-modification agents they suspected of fraud, authorities said on Monday.

The couple, Daniel Weston and Mary Ann Parmelee, and three other people are accused of luring their two victims to an office where the men were tied up, held for hours and beaten, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney said.

Police were called after one of the victims managed to escape, said the spokeswoman, Shiara Davila-Morales. 

(thanks to my grimly-minded wife)

Listening to the haunted sky

"Voices of long-dead stars haunt the galaxy," says The New Scientist, in a Gothic mood.

Thirteen unexplained radio blips have turned up in radio telescope observations since the 1980s. They emerged in spots where there are no stars or galaxies to be seen, last anywhere from hours to days, and do not seem to repeat. The blips could be traces of a vast population of stellar corpses – neutron stars that roam the universe largely unseen...

(via Paul McAuley)

Giant jellyfish successfully attack trawler

A swarm of enormous jellyfish attacked and capsized a Japanese trawler.  Monster movie fans around the world must be fantasizing about what kind of toys can capture this real-life pulp story, thinking about the sheer size of these things:

Each of the jellyfish can weigh up to 200 kg... the species can grow up to 2 meters in diameter.

Keep that in mind as you reread this horrible bit:

The crew of the fishing boat was thrown into the sea when the vessel capsized, but the three men were rescued by another trawler...

Imagine splashing into the sea, with these lovely nightmares bobbing all around you.

Also from the monster movie playbook comes this setup:

Relatively little is known about Nomura's jellyfish, such as why some years see thousands of the creatures floating across the Sea of Japan on the Tsushima Current, but last year there were virtually no sightings. In 2007, there were 15,500 reports of damage to fishing equipment caused by the creatures.

(via Slashdot)

CNN Gothic Halloween special

CNN keeps up the Gothic style, looking for Halloween in real life:

CNN has been increasingly Gothic of late.  Is this tabloidization, or a unique twist on trying to boost market share?

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

Ohio Gothic: corpse house raided, and the internet must be involved

Ohio Gothic came back to life this week when police found a half-dozen decomposing bodies in a Cleveland house.  All had been murdered.

How long had the house's living occupant lived with the dead?  Good question.

Ohio ex-con Anthony Sowell allegedly strangled a series of women in his three-story house over a period of months - or even years.

Rotting bodies were found in upstairs bedrooms, the living room, a crawl space, a shallow grave in the backyard and another grave in the basement, police said.

Somehow, we can find a link to the internet.  CBS News finds that the alleged killer and hoarder was cruising for BDSM on Alt.com.  Or, as they put it in the restrained way mainstream journalism prefers,

Rapist Anthony Sowell Cruised Sex Fetish Site While Dead Bodies Rotted in His Cleveland Home

Back in the analog world, the story wins bonus points for having the classic serial killer ignorant/enabling neighbor option.  Besides the alleged perpetrator being a registered sex offender, and in regular contact with the police, there's worse:

Neighbors knew something was off about Sowell, who smelled so terrible their eyes would water.

"He came into my store last week and reeked so bad, I had to open the front and back doors," convenience store owner Eli Tayeh told the Los Angeles Times.

"I asked why he stunk. He shrugged, bought his beer and walked out."

But people blamed backed up sewers or Ray's Sausage company, housed in an adjacent building.

"We kept away from him and he kept away from us," said neighbor Tamica Pierceton, 26. "We should have said something to someone. I wish I had."

(thanks to Peter Naegele, master of macabre Ohio, for the reminder)

Real Gothic murder uses Gothic fiction trope

An awful crime was illuminated by a twist right out of Gothic literature.  A parent tried to murder all of her children, then blame the killings on a mysterious stranger.  She did this by writing a note, which purported to describe events nearly in real time.

The note detailed how a man broke into the car when the family stopped at a gas station and forced them to the area where the van was found. Kehoe tried to fight him off with pepper spray but he knocked her unconscious, the note said, according to the prosecutor.

Police said Kehoe later told them she had written the note in the midst of the attack to explain what had happened to those who would find the scene, according to the prosecutor.

Shades of Lovecraft:

"And the note, which you'll see, ends with, 'Oh no, here he comes again...' " Prosser told the jury.

(thanks to my lovely wife)

Zombies or flesh puppets: Gothic animal horror

Animals puppeteering other animals, animals shambling like zombies: Scientific American covers Gothic parasites.   Parasites doing mind control, critters killing critters in staggeringly horrible ways, and other ways to make the circle of life look more like The Ring:

(thanks to Jesse Walker and other gleeful scouts)

Canada continues its morbid obsession with severed feet

Yet another severed human foot has appeared in Canada.  Back in the Vancouver area,

two men walking on the beach located what appeared to be a foot in a size eight and a half white Nike running shoe...
The remains were turned over to the B.C. Coroners Service, where a forensic autopsy was conducted and it was confirmed they were human, RCMP said.

What's the current theory in the Great White North?  Is this a crime style thing, the fashion in executions and/or terror?

(thanks to Randy McCall and the foot-crazed Canadian hordes via email and Twitter)

Greenhaunting the Cold War

Drawing a green line down the Cold War's European frontier is the aim of Green Belt Initiative.

Listen to one commentator brood on the old military haunting morphing through time:

the initiative aims to thicken and de-civilize that political line, so that the ghostly trace of a militarized landscape becomes a feral and wild preserve, land sacrificed willingly not to Ares but to biodiversity. The line would crawl through “old-growth boreal forests” at the Finno-Russian border, across the western margin of the east Eurasian taiga, and past “airfields, missile bases, and [military] training sites” ...

(via Warren Ellis)

Dick Cheney, vampire

Bush administration Gothic continues, even after Cheney and W. exit the main stage:

The undisclosed location is where the coffins are, eh?

(thanks to Charles Cameron!)