Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Children, phones, and death

One cartoon tells a strange and disturbing story, involving children, phones, and.... death by COVID-19?

A book which kills

Shadows From the Walls of Death is a terrific book title.  It suggests a cross between Lovecraftian horror and black metal music.

It's also a very real and extremely scarce book, one which can sicken or kill readers.  Because that was the intent.  The author wanted to warn people about the dangers of arsenic in wallpapers, so created a book which consists almost entirely of samples thereof.

As part of his campaign to raise awareness about poison papers, Kedzie produced 100 copies of Shadows and sent them out to public libraries across Michigan. Each one is a slim volume, containing few words—just a title page, a short preface, and a note from the Board of Health explaining the purpose of the book and advising librarians not to let children handle it. The macabre title page reproduces a quote from the Biblical book of Leviticus: “And behold if the plague be in the walls of the house, with hollow streaks, greenish or reddish, then the priest…shall cause the house to be scraped within round about, and they shall pour out the dust that they scrape off without the city into an unclean place.” The remaining pages, 86 in full, consist of wallpaper samples taken from common merchants.

Before you imagine a book-driven wave of 19th century deaths, know that librarians have your back, as always:

Of the original 100 copies, only four remain. Most libraries, concerned about poisoning their patrons, destroyed their volumes. Two of the surviving books remain in Michigan—one at MSU and the other at the University of Michigan. MSU’s copy rests on an unassuming shelf in the library’s Special Collections division, housed in an appropriately green box. Each page is individually encapsulated in plastic so that researchers and the curious can handle it without fear.

Like so:

Here's the title page, from an NIH scan.  Enjoy the tint:

One edition is available via Amazon, with this description:

This version of ‘Shadows from the Walls of Death’ is a tribute to Robert Clark Kedzie, who produced the originals of which there are now only two left in existence. They are located at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. The originals are approximately 22 x 30 inches containing a title page and an 8 page preface followed by 86 samples cut from rolls of arsenic impregnated wallpaper. The book is sealed in a protective container and each individual page is encapsulated. This particular edition does not actually contain any arsenic. Further to that the content of this volume including both text and images are for entertainment purposes.

PS: interesting Google result, under "People also search for...":

(thanks to Jamie Townsend)

Horror via Snapchat

"Snap" is a very short (4 min) horror video based on someone being terrorized via Snapchat.

 

A few quick thoughts:

• It's a quarantine story.  There's only one person and no hope of anyone else arriving.
• Very claustrophobic. We rarely get a wide view.
• Note how the haunting sneaks in amidst other conversation.

 

A nice haunted media short video

"Pictures" is about someone's smartphone and its camera.  Don't read any more - just click:

A couple of notes, afterwards:

• A nice combination of time travel/prophecy with other threats: monster, the dummy.
• Good twist (ahem) at the end.
• So many YouTube horror shorts are set in really empty and/or clean apartments.

Fearsome photo filters

"Fear Filter" is a very short video that plays with digital image software. 

 

 

giant death blades out of the ground

A Washington, D.C. street became a site of urban Gothic this week, as a construction crew's glitch presented a dire threat:

The explanation is prosaic: "A construction crew was trying to cut a hole, and their blades got stuck."  Which makes sense.  But until the crew extracts the blades, they remain a clear image of urban horror.

Please scream inside your heart

Today's Gothic story comes from Japan, where people are rethinking personal behavior on rollercoasters in light of COVID-19.

A Wall Street Journal article about this is mostly behind a paywall, but it leads in the open with an awesome phrasee:

"A video showed the two executives, both clad in masks, sternly riding the coaster in complete silence. It ended with a message: 'Please scream inside your heart.'"

A YouTube clip demonstrates:

 

"Please scream inside your heart" may be a great description for the year 2020, and Infocult hereby approves.

(thanks to Tom Haymes for the video)

Another day, another human head found

It is apparently "Human Heads Found" week in the United States.  Yesterday we noted a Florida story about a jogger coming across a head.

Today's story involved half a human skull which turned up in a Michigan fireplace.

The homeowners, who recently had purchased the property, found "half of a human skull, and bone fragments" in a fire pit, said Todd Scheffler, Trenton's chief of police.

The story gets better when you realize that the previous owner had a colorful experience in that house:

The home on Wilson, Scheffler noted, was formerly owned by Mark Eberly, who was killed in a shootout late last month with a Tennessee police officer who was trying to conduct a welfare check on him.

Infocult: your guide to the uncanny persistence of human remains.

Severed head on the road

In Florida - of course - a jogger came across a severed human head.

Police believe the incident occurred in the last 48 hours because the jogger told them she ran in the same area on Sunday and saw nothing unusual. The head was spotted in a grassy area under an overpass around 7 a.m., police said, adding that no video surveillance exists nearby.

And that's where the story ends.  There isn't any active crime, nor any clues, as far as media accounts reveal.

Infocult: always scanning for real-life Gothic horror.

The latest real cannibalism story

Today's real-world Gothic horror story comes from California, and combines cannibalism with a family plot:

According to police, the suspect, identified as Dwayne Wallick, 37, was caught in the act of eating Ruby Wallick, his 90-year-old grandmother, on Monday.

Caught in the act indeed:

At around 2 p.m., Richmond officers responded to a 911 call reporting a man standing over a woman’s body on the 1200 block of Club Court, a residential area near the Hilltop Plaza. Upon entering the home, where both Dwayne and Ruby are reported to live, the officers said they found the suspect cannibalizing the woman.

(Why not say "eating the woman"?)

Another local source added a resonant phrase:

Officers arrived at the residence to find 37-year-old Dwayne Wallick standing over 90-year-old Ruby Wallick, his grandmother, and digging in her flesh. [emphases added]

Ah.  A touch of Gothic flair in that account.

(thanks to Steven "loves his BBQ" Kaye)

Don't reboot the router

One man had a problem rebooting his router.  Things got... interesting.

Keep reading.  It... evolves.

(via MetaFilter)

Creepy museum object competition

Today's Gothic COVID-19 story concerns a creepy object competition.  

What’s a museum social media manager to do with no exhibitions on the horizon? The Yorkshire Museum recently put out a call on Twitter asking for museum experts to submit pictures of the creepiest objects in their collections. And things got weird—fast. 

There's a nice plague mask:

And another mask, either for execution or for public humiliation:

And, naturally, one creepy doll:

Museum professionals around the world responded with a series of esoterica that would make the creative director for a B-level horror movie jealous: a petrified sheep’s heart punctuated by nails, a blood-soaked doll with a missing eye, a severed leg turned into a deformed creature in desperate need of an orthodontist.

(thanks to Thomas Burkdall!)

Creepy TikTok

It was inevitable as link rot that fearsome stories would appear about TikTok.  

So far there isn't a social panic (yet), but at least one chilling story has appeared.  A British tabloid shares this tale:

A TikTok dancer's video has gone viral after a figure was spotted lurking in the background, despite the dancer claiming he was home alone...

But terrified viewers were focusing on something other than his dance moves, as they spotted a dark figure hiding in the background.  

Here's a screenshot:

That doesn't really do it justice.  Watch the video carefully.

Was it an animal who snuck inside?  A human thief?  Did the dancer stage this?

Reuben, who has more than 54,000 followers on TikTok, later uploaded an update following his original post to thank everyone for their concern.

He said: 'I'm kinda stomach sick right now and I was in and out of sleep all last night.'

He added another post saying 'i need answers!' 

Telling those watching he was going to try and sleep, he promised he would return to answer questions in the comments later. 

Fearing the mobile: cartoon edition

"Phone Addiction Is Real -- And So Are Its Mental Health Risks" is a short cartoon that aims to horrify the viewer into not using mobile devices so much.

It draws on the classic mixture of gore and violence that so many classic and modern cartoons relished.  It's also like a series of Rube Goldberg machines, with distracted people doing stupid things that then kick off more stupid things, and so on:

 

 

Note the bent-head cyclops nature of humans. The devices have mutated us physically, not only mentally and ethically.

(via R/PhonesAreBad)

Creepy COVID-19 storytelling

From Tiktok, what may be the first Gothic fiction about the COVID-19 pandemic.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)