Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

Beaten to the desired grave: a dead doppelganger in Ohio

More Ohio Gothic: a man examining his intended burial site found it already occupied by a dead body.  Which is a fine idea for a scary story, the reverse of fears about missing bodies.

The story also has fine doppelganger and Oedipal themes:

David L. Bingham says someone who shares his name has taken over his would-be final resting place. He says he hadn't visited his mother's grave since 2005 and was surprised to find someone had been buried next to her in 2006.

(thanks to dark-eyed Barbara Sawhill!)

Unusual location for missing person

A missing Greek girl was located... inside her twin sister's stomach.  Today's Gothic-in-real-life story combines body horror, anxiety about dead bodies, and doppelgangers.

Doctors at Larissa General Hospital examined the girl and surgically removed a growth they later discovered was an embryo more than two inches long.
...
Andreas Markou, head of the hospital's pediatric department, said the embryo was a formed fetus with a head, hair and eyes, but no brain or umbilical cord.

(thanks to Neal Grigsby for reminding me)

The Times really stretches to find fearsome internet

A London-based girl gang apparently blew up a house by pouring a liquid explosive into its mail slot.  Which is Gothic enough, or at least pulp-ish.  But trust The Times to hunt for an internet connection, no matter how slight, or simply hypothetical.  Their report begins with this:

A gang of girls may have used the internet to make a bomb that killed a man and destroyed three homes in their feud with another teenager. [emphasis added]

Or maybe they didn't.  There's no proof, which doesn't stop anyone from lunging at cyberfear.

Put another way: "A gang of girls may have gone to the library to make a bomb."  Or "A gang of girls may have driven a car to get to a shop where they bought bomb supplies."  Doesn't have quite the same ring, eh? 

The article helpfully lists likely ingredients for such a liquid explosive, should the reader be so inclined.  And if you read that on the Web, then maybe you really have used teh internets to make the b0mb.

After those strong opening moves, the article, or the police officers it cites, reaches even further, stretching towards that classic internet-terrorism meme:

“We have seen with recent terrorism trials that there are plenty of things on the web but it would obviously be a disturbing development if a girl gang has decided to settle a dispute in such a dramatic and tragic way.”

(thanks to CoriS, via Twitter)

Spying robots invade English town, or "Skynet-upon-the-Green"

The British military has invited mad scientists to inflict their robotic creations upon the English village of Copehill Down, Wiltshire.  It's a Ministry of Defense contest to spur development of spybots.

Not only will the robots strut their stuff, but they'll engage in Terminator-like wargames:

The robots must find snipers, armed vehicles, armed foot soldiers, and improvised explosive devices hidden around the village, and relay a real-time picture of what is happening back to a command post.

This is the technoGothic future.

Extra Cold War Gothic bonus points: Copehill Down was "built for urban warfare training during the Cold War."  The bots will intrude upon old structures of war and power.

(thanks to Jesse "Karla" Walker)

I will show you species death in a handful of single-celled organisms

Here's one fearful look at the search for extraterrestrial intelligence:

if we discovered the fossils of some very complex life-form, such as a ­vertebrate-­like creature, we would have to conclude that this hypothesis is very improbable indeed. It would be by far the worst news ever printed
....
I'm hoping that our space probes will discover dead rocks and lifeless sands on Mars, on Jupiter's moon Europa, and everywhere else our astronomers look. It would keep alive the hope of a great future for humanity.

Why?  The author elaborates on the theme of The Great Filter of life, and why it would be best for it to be behind us.  Read on.

Austrian horror: hey, it could have been worse

The alleged Gothic monster of Austria offered press statements today.  One stands out:

“I am no monster,” Fritzl said though his lawyer Rudolf Mayer, according to the German tabloid newspaper Bild.

“I could have killed all of them, and no one would have known. No one would have ever found about it.”

A bit hard to square such calculating logic with his impending insanity claim.  And a pretty chilling thought.

Previous Infocult postings on this story: 1, 2, 3.  Bonus Mitteleuropean Gothic: here.

(thanks again to Morticia)

Austrian horror continues; no internets involved

The Austrian true-life Gothic story gets worse and worse.

And so far there is no mention of digital technology.  I've been waiting for it, for the father to have maintained a blog, or for the children to have coordinated escape by MySpace. 

Imagine if this story were told from the point of view of a typical fearsome internet account.
    "Incest father's secret basement: blueprints were involved."
    "Small town says nothing.  Can a village be a real community?"
    "Father bought food from a grocery story; grocer offers no comment."

Instead of frozen pizza, frozen babies: today's middle European Gothic

Shifting the real-life Gothic gaze away from Austria, we find today's horror story in northwestern Germany.  The bodies of three babies were found in a Westphalian freezer.  But it's not just what was found that's awful, but also who found them, and how:

The children discovered the frozen babies on Saturday afternoon while their parents were away for the weekend, investigator Martin Feldmann said.

The 18-year-old and his sister had been looking for a frozen pizza and came across a lot of expired food so decided to clean out the freezer.

The teenager then found three identical packets on the bottom of the freezer and opened one and saw the head and arm of an infant that was wrapped in a hand towel, police said.

(thanks to my wife)

Beware the Entity

From the plots of horror stories comes this news blotter account of women victimized by succubi.  Succubi with technology, no less:

At 4:02 p.m. April 10, two women went into the Federal Way police station claiming that over the past two years, a paranormal person has been placing sensors on their bodies and visiting them in their house at 28600 block of 25th Place South. They said that the ghost has been having sexual intercourse with them.

(thanks to Andrew Connell)

Austrian Gothic, continued

Follow-up news reports on the Austrian dungeon story just expand the Gothic horror of the whole thing.  Accounts of the underground chambers, for example, read like something out of Matthew Lewis:.

Fritzl, an electrical engineer, had built a series of connected chambers, less than six feet high, behind a concealed door at the house.

The chambers had areas for sleeping, cooking and washing. Investigators said the basement labyrinth even contained a padded cell.

It keeps getting worse. About the children's lives:

[daughter] Elisabeth became pregnant seven times as a result of the incestuous abuse by her father.

Three of the children remained in the dank, cramped cellar with her, never seeing daylight or the outside world.

The father, Josef Fritzl, threatened to kill the whole family with poison gas, if "something happened to him".

"It may have just been an empty threat to intimidate his daughter Elisabeth and the children he fathered into not trying to overpower him," [police spokesman] Greiner said.

The technicians "are trying to ascertain whether there really was a mechanism that would allow gas to be pumped in."

Here's the entrance to the subterranean world:

As one person who rented a room from the family (!) put it:

One [tenant], interviewed in a German magazine, said she had seen Fritzl carry shopping into the cellar after dark. "Now, I realise why we weren't allowed to rent cellar space," she said.

The Daily Mail quietly broods about what we noticed a few days ago, this agonizing, novelistic problem:

Police are now trying to discover how Fritzl managed to keep his daughter as a sex slave without the apparent knowledge of his 60-year-old wife Rosemarie at the three-storey house...

One possible answer: accomplices.  As one writer snarls, "it takes a village."

Amidst the spiraling media frenzy, trying to wrap my mind around this, I keep coming back to the father's storied face:

(AFP)