Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Gothic car wash

An Ohio establishment improved the car wash experience by adding scary clowns.

(thanks to Thomas "Red Nose" Burkdall)

A sinkhole opens wide in Boston

The Earth continued its campaign of destruction against the human race by opening a large sinkhole in Boston.

Dispatcher Joey Aberle said the water main break created the hole, which he estimated to be approximately 10 and 15 feet across. The pavement was lifted and the water pushed the dirt out, he said.

No casualties reported... yet.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Epidemics of possessed women

The BBC reports on several cases of Malaysian women claiming dark, supernatural experiences.

One teenager describes her experience:

I was at my desk feeling sleepy when I felt a hard, sharp tap on my shoulder.

I turned round to see who it was and the room went dark.

Fear overtook me. I felt a sharp, splitting pain in my back and my head started spinning. I fell to the floor.

Before I knew it, I was looking into the 'otherworld'. Scenes of blood, gore and violence.

The scariest thing I saw was a face of pure evil.

It was haunting me, I couldn't escape. I opened my mouth and tried to scream but no sound came out.

I passed out.

Then other girls suffered related experiences.

Siti's outburst triggered a powerful chain reaction that ripped through the school. Within minutes students in other classrooms started screaming, their frantic cries ricocheting through the halls.

One girl fainted after claiming to have seen the same "dark figure".

Case after case unfolds. Some are quietly chilling:

"All hell broke loose" during a campus singing competition when a female student claimed to have spotted "a smiling Buddhist monk" on top of a nearby dormitory. "She let out a bloodcurdling scream," he recalls.

The BBC then examines different responses from Islamic scholars, folk shamans, psychologists, and others.

(thanks to Jesse "Not Screaming Yet" Walker)

Clowns against fear

While some people fear clowns, apparently others consider clowns to be defensive weapons.   In one New Zealand case, an employee about to be fired turned to a clown for support.

A Kiwi adman has chosen an unusual support person to accompany him to a redundancy meeting.

In lieu of the usual suspects of a friend, colleague or family member, the member of the creative team at FCB hired a professional clown to attend the meeting with him.

An image sent to the Herald overnight shows the staffer, sitting alongside his support clown while he talks to the individuals running the meeting.

The Herald understands that the clown blew up balloons and folded them into a series of animals throughout the meeting.

It's further understood that the clown mimed crying when the redundancy paperwork was handed over to the staffer.

Infocult in HR!

More sinkholes gnawing at human civilization

Mother Earth continued her sinkhole campaign against the human race, this time by collapsing parts of Baltimore's rail line.

[I]n the early hours of the morning, a sinkhole at the corner of Howard and Pratt Streets had emerged and enveloped a wheelchair ramp and platform. Department of Public Works crews rushed to remove the platform and ramp but before they could succeed, they collapsed into the ground.

Ripple effects caused delays throughout the city.

Restaurant declared free of cannibalism

Today's Infocult headline comes from the venerable Washington Post:

Dairy Queen burgers are not made of human flesh, a county coroner is forced to confirm

Here's a screenshot:

The story behind this involves an FBI raid on a South Carolina Dairy Queen - not for long pig, but to bust up a money scheme.  The local DQ manager mentioned something to the press for reasons still unclear, and rumors took off.

Remember, kids: the world is always Gothic in the end.

Creepy dolls in Missouri

Dolls are appearing mysteriously in a Missouri town.

The city of Festus in Jefferson County, Missouri, has had multiple instances in the past week of eerie dolls popping up in random places without any explanation and residents haven't the faintest clue of who put them there.

One was spotted looking like it was crying against a pole, another was laid out on the ground without a head, and another one was found hanging from a light pole on a main road Tuesday. All of this with Halloween still months away.

As usual, the dolls sometimes cross the uncanny valley:

Chief of Police Tim Lewis told NBC affiliate KSDK that the department is investigating after multiple people reported being spooked by the dolls. He added that a person called out of concern that one of the dolls was a child on the side of the road.

Interestingly, the article concludes by referencing the fear of clowns.  Hmmm?

(thanks to Thomas Burkdall)

Today's fearsome headline

Now this is the kind of headline made for Infocult:

Amazon says its facial recognition can now identify fear

The actual article is less Gothic, as it describes ways Amazon claims it can use AI and facial recognition for a wide range of emotional analysis.

 

One video game fear just won't die

Despite years of research, one old video game fear still keeps throbbing along.  It's the idea that computer gaming causes players to act out offline violence.

And it appeared this weekend as an explanation for two mass shootings.

Reason has a good round-up.  Here's one sample:

[Fox News Channel Host Jon Scott] wonders if these guys "raised on a diet of violent video games—if they actually start pulling the trigger of a real weapon and they see real death and they find it's not as satisfying as it was when they're playing on a television screen." He wonders out loud if this is why the alleged shooter, Patrick Crusius, stopped shooting.

Another: "(As I'm writing this blog post, another talking head has come on Fox News Channel to blame it on Fortnite and bad parenting.)"

Have you seen any other examples?

Clown panic on the high seas

Three years after the Great Clown Panic of '16 the fear of clowns keeps shambling along.  Today's incident involves a British cruise ship visiting Norway.  Inebriated guests were horrified when a clown appeared, and violence ensued.

According to one seagoing reporter, 

One witness, part of a group involved in the trouble, explained to staff that things kicked off when another passenger appeared dressed as a clown. This upset one of their party because they’d specifically booked a cruise with no fancy dress. It led to a violent confrontation.

Panic ensued:

“There was blood everywhere”. Violent late night brawl in the buffet onboard @pocruises Britannia left staff who intervened injured, as passengers used furniture and plates as weapons. Witnesses told me they were so frightened they had to hide, as family groups fought.

The Telegraph characterized the coulrophobic scene thusly:

Families were forced to flee to their cabins or hide as apparently drunken passengers hurled furniture and plates at one another as a buffet descended into violence.

The ship's crew then contained the mayhem:

The buffet area was immediately sealed off as medical teams went to help the injured. Staff told me they’d never experienced anything like it and those behind the violence were confined to a cabin for the last day of the cruise, waiting for police here in Southampton.

Chaos, violence, clowns: and we're just starting the second half of 2019.

(via Naked Capitalism)

Human body part trove discovered in Arizona

Some days we don't need Gothic fiction if we're looking for horror.  Case in point: the FBI raided a human remains business in Arizona, and discovered some irregularities.

Let's start with the top.  An FBI agent's testimony:

An FBI special agent, during a January 2014 raid of the Biological Resource Center, stumbled on what he described as "various unsettling scenes." The agent's grisly eyewitness account of the raid was recently revealed in a civil lawsuit against the business and its owner, Stephen Gore.

(Is his last name really "Gore"?)

Many of the body parts [former Phoenix FBI special agent Mark Cwynar] saw were piled on top of one another with no apparent identification to indicate what bodies they came from or to whom they belonged, he said.

In addition to a "cooler filled with male genitalia," Cwynar testified that he also saw a "large torso with the head removed and replaced with a smaller head sewn together in a 'Frankenstein' manner."

Frankenstein, "cooler filled with male genitalia" - but wait, there's more!

Cwynar said he saw:

• Large male torsos with limbs and genitalia removed.

• Buckets and coolers with various body parts, including a bucket of heads, arms and legs.

• Body parts piled on top of each other throughout the facility, with no apparent identification.

• Steel freezers with frozen body parts inside with no apparent identification.

Very much like a horror film's scene.

(thanks to Peter Naegele)

 

When fake news turns openly Gothic

Made-up or fake news has partaken of the Gothic many times.  In the US we can think of Pizzagate, with its combination of child sex abuse and Satanism.

Today's example comes from Bangladesh, where a government official ends up having to deny a public project requires human remains.

“The opposition party is trying to mislead the people by spreading rumours, having failed in elections and agitations. For what else should such a weird, unbelievable idea that ‘human heads, blood will be needed to construct the Padma Bridge’ be spread on social media?” the Awami League general secretary asked.

Blood is a classic Gothic ingredient for construction.  But why heads?

Related: "Police in Bhola detained a man on Wednesday night on charges of spreading on social media the rumour that 'children were being abducted for sacrifice by beheading.'”

(thanks to Jesse "The Builder" Walker)

Inside the Vatican's tombs

Opening up an ancient tomb is one excellent path to Gothic horror.

Case in point: Vatican officials cracked open not one, but two burial sites within the Holy See.  Then things got strange.

First, the true crime/horror angle: 

Experts probed a burial ground inside the Holy See walls looking for the remains of Emanuela Orlandi, a Vatican clerk's daughter who's been missing since 1983. This morning they opened two tombs to see if her body was hidden there. But both tombs were entirely empty.

Which is disappointing. 

But notice this bit: "They did not even contain the remains of two 19th century princesses supposed to be buried there."  So one possible body was missing, as well as two very likely sets of remains.  Gothic possibilities abound: grave robbing?  The walking dead?  Vampires?  Buried alive and walked away in the 1800s?

Now, continuing in the Gothic vein, another surprise appeared: "Adding to the mystery, one of the tombs led to a large underground room."  Curiously, the story doesn't follow up that line of inquiry.  How large was it?  What was found within the room?

(thanks to Ed "I was upstairs at the time" Webb)

Gaea gnaws on Baltimore

Another sinkhole chewed on America, this time in the city of Baltimore.

A sinkhole near the intersection of Howard and Pratt streets appeared to swallow an elevated platform that allows wheelchair users to access Light Rail trains. 

No casualties, but infrastructure damage has been done.

Gaea's war against the human race continues.

(thanks to Ed "I also have an alibi for this one" Webb)

Today in discovered body parts: severed legs in Pennsylvania

One of the many ways the world turns Gothic is when human body parts appear in surprising areas.

Case in point: a pair of severed legs were found by a road in Pennsylvania.

The legs were found around May 11, 2019, around 10:11 p.m. in the area of the Hepburn Street Pump Station, police said. The legs had been cleanly cut near the knee joints by what investigators believe to be a thin-blade, hand-held saw.

Investigators have said the woman’s toenails were painted pink, and that both feet had white Polo Jeans brand ankle socks on them.

So many mysteries remain:

Lycoming County Coroner Charles E. Kiessling Jr.... is not ready to rule on the manner of death with the few remains he has. Kisseling said Monday that there is a lot of testing still being done on the legs, including DNA testing that could take months or years to get the results of.

(thanks to Ed "I'm not playing Frankenstein" Webb)