Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Sinkhole attacks Baltimore

Earth's campaign against the human race extended as far as Baltimore, where a giant sinkhole chewed up some cars.

colleagues flooded out of the three-floor agency with the slow realization that the cars parked along 26th Street weren't there.

“The building shock almost like the earthquake but not quite as bad. … I came out and the street was gone. Just like that,” Bob Leffler, founder and president of the agency, said. Residents told ABC2 News reporter Brian Kuebler that the collapse took about 15 seconds and sounded like the dull roar of thunder.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

More fine Lovecraftian audio from 19 Nocturne Blvd

Julie Hoverson is back with another fine podcasting of an HP Lovecraft story. Her crew of voice actors doing horror characters addresses an Infocult favorite, "The Haunter of the Dark" (1936).  Enjoy.

I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim—
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge or lustre or name.
—Nemesis.

Exploding corpse in Florida

Florida offered another bit of real-life Gothic this week, as bad things happened around a dead body.

It begins with one of those sad stories about neglected people dying alone:

The deceased elderly woman, who apparently passed away from natural causes, lived alone with her dogs. After she died, her body went undiscovered for two weeks before a noxious odor began to fill the adjacent units.

Then some body-eating by beloved animals:

After complaints from neighbors, maintenance workers entered the apartment and found that the dogs had eaten her remains, according to Courthouse News.

Then, well, the exploding corpse:

The undiscovered body went through its normal decaying process and eventually bloated to the point that the gasses inside the corpse built enough pressure that it caused its abdomen to burst. This released gases and fluids, which is what leaked down into Rodrigo's apartment.

Followed by a Florida-style legal battle:

"The plain meaning of the term 'explosion' does not include a decomposing body's cells explosively expanding, causing leakage of bodily fluids," they court stated, per the New York Post.

The court went on to say that Rodrigo failed to establish that the woman's corpse was "tantamount to an explosion."

Florida: Infocult needs only observe to share the horror.

(link via Naked Capitalism; photo by Kevin Dooley)

Wasps build a human

A wasp colony built a nest on top of a wooden sculpture, apparently.  The result is a wasp's view of humans, gorgeous and terrifying.

An abandoned hornet's nest my dad found in his shed that he hadn't been in for a couple years. The head is apart of a wooden statue it fused with.

(thanks to Clyde)

Death in Venice

A Venetian island is up for sale, and has a fine Gothic past.

Poveglia has medical horror:

Doctors from across Europe supposedly had license to come and try out experimental surgeries from lobotomies to literal brain drains using crude instruments like hand drills and butcher hooks, according to the legend...

[I]t was twice a quarantine posting where plague victims were shuttered up and left to die, first in the 1700s and again in the 1800s. Infected ships were docked and left to rot. The victims’ bodies were burned in piles all over the island, and some Venetians still call an unpleasant odor a “Poveglia draft,” referring to the legend of the stench of burning carcasses wafting across the lagoon.

And it has great stories:

[L]ocal fishermen avoid the island out of fear they’ll catch the bones of the dead in their nets...

[T]here is the supposed fact that the island’s thick, dark, sticky soil is reportedly made up of more than 50 percent human remains from the victims who were burned there.

When the asylum’s head doctor started seeing the ghosts too, he supposedly jumped from the bell tower to do himself in. According to a nurse who watched the event, but who has never been quoted by name, the evil doctor survived the fall, but was enveloped by a “thick white mist” that suffocated him. 

We should hold an Infocult conference there.

(thanks to Steven Kaye for the link, and Jean-Pierre Dalbéra for the photo)

Japanese ghost stories, blogged

The Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai blog does a fine job of posting Japanese ghost stories and related creepy tales.

(thanks to Randy McCall)

Spiders invading cars: mystery solved

Loyal Infocult readers will recall our 2013 observation about Mazda cars plagued by spiders.  Arachnophobes and -philes can now rest easy, as scientists have revealed the cause of that automotive infestation.

Petrol-sniffing spiders have forced Mazda to issue a voluntary recall notice so it can apply a software fix to its cars.

The yellow sac spider is attracted to the smell of petrol, and will weave its web in engines, causing a blockage and build-up of pressure.

Freakish creatures, these Cheiracanthiums:

(thanks to Jamie Townsend!)

Serial murder, or high tech vs low

This NBC story about a recent murder spree starts off in classic haunted media style:

An X-Box, a Nintendo Wii and a Sony Playstation, along with dozens of games and gaming paraphernalia, an iPod, an iPad and three computers were taken from the home of the Pennsylvania high school stabbing suspect, according to an affidavit released Monday.

We might expect some classic associations of digital tech with horror from this.  But then the article veers off:

But the most ominous thing on the list is a common kitchen item: A Chicago Cutlery wooden block knife holder with two knives missing.

Well done, NBC!

(thanks to Brenda Landis)

Triumph of the murder machines

This article presents an Infocult-ish look at American car culture.  It starts off by referring to cars as "murder machines", then romps through automotive death in all kinds of fascinating ways.

Some people were terrified of cars and their death-dealing powers:

Notes one scholar:

“If you look at newspapers from American cities in the 1910s and ’20s, you’ll find a lot of anger at cars and drivers... My impression is that you’d find more caricatures of the Grim Reaper driving a car over innocent children than you would images of Uncle Sam.”

Joy riding came in for particularly Gothic attention:

Mobile phones from a watery grave

Gizmodo offers an intriguingly Infocultish possibility for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight 370.  What if regional phone networks have saved signals from passengers' phones up until the moment of termination?

Like recovering the diaries of a lost ship's crew in some Victorian novel of letters, MH370's 21st-century mystery suddenly becomes almost unnervingly humanist, holding hundreds of untold stories, viewpoints, and interpretations, with notes, prayers, or frantic messages written, saved, yet never delivered until the right analytic equipment comes along to find them.

(thanks to Annette)