Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

More disturbing porcelains from Maria Rubinke

Maria Rubinke's terrifying porcelain pieces appear in a new Dangerous Minds article.

Infocult first noted the splendid Rubinke back in 2013.

(thanks to Kevin)

 

Bronze Age caves of doom

New research in Scotland's Sculptor's Cave has found some potentially horrific discoveries.  

Radiocarbon dating found an array of dismembered body parts, including children's heads, were left there more than 3,200 years ago in the late Bronze Age from 12,000 BC...

Classic decapitation was involved.

more recent skulls, dated to 200 to 400AD, showed signs they have been severed, indicating human sacrifice took place in the caves....

"The cervical vertebra upper bone in the necks of all of them have got cut marks indicating decapitation.

"Six individuals had their heads violently removed in the cave itself."

And a curious emphasis on children:

It is believed children's heads were cut off once dead and placed on poles in the entrance as a sign of reverence rather than a warning...

It's a very rich article, full of eerie details like this: "Some of the child skulls had abrasion marks - a sign they may have been polished - as part of the display..."  And "All were attacked in the same way - assaulted from behind with their chin held down to the chest, so more than one person was involved in their execution."

(thanks to Tim Pendry)

The dark side of insurance

We may think of insurance as benevolent, or just dull.  But what about its dark side?  Harvested from Tumblr:

and

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

Dead malls in Ohio

Business Insider has a fine gallery of dead malls in the midwestern state of Ohio.

The photographer observes:

"All has since fallen, and I now wander the enchanting, echoing halls of a place where lives were lived, and jobs were worked," [Johnny] Joo wrote, referring to his journey through the abandoned mall.

(thanks to Shel)

When bears gnaw the dead

Russian Gothic: bears in some northern Russian towns have taken to digging up graveyards, rooting amid coffins, and eating human remains.

The linked article opens with a short horror story:

From a distance it resembled a rather large man in a fur coat, leaning tenderly over the grave of a loved one. But when the two women in the Russian village of Vezhnya Tchova came closer they realised there was a bear in the cemetery eating a body....

The shocked women cried in panic, frightening the bear back into the woods, before they discovered a ghoulish scene with the clothes of the bear's already-dead victim chucked over adjacent tombstones...

Why is this happening?  Could this be another front in Earth's campaign against the human race?

The bears raided graveyards because they offered a supply of easy food, [Masha Vorontsova, Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) in Russia] said, a bit like a giant refrigerator.

After leaving that excellent simile, Vorontsova notes:

"The story is horrible. Nobody wants to think about having a much loved member of their family eaten by a bear."

While we wait for the inevitable Putin meme, we can consider this as another instance of real-life Gothic horror.  Bears attacking the dead draws on our classic anxieties around dead bodies, amplified by the typical horror setting of a cemetery. There's also a regressive fear involved, as historical progress seems undone and humanity thrust back into an earlier, more fragile time.

On that Putin meme: this story can easily feed anti-Russian sentiment in the West.  It can show Russia as a decayed, sad place.  It can also display Russia as a fearsome nation.  

In conclusion, let Nekrogoblikon sing us out:

Buried alive in central America

A Honduran woman apparently suffered that most awful and Gothic of deaths, being buried alive.

Her husband Rudy Gonzales was visiting her grave a day after the funeral when he heard banging and screams coming from inside her concrete tomb...

Footage shows the family desperately breaking open the concrete tomb with a sledgehammer, shouting her name. 

But once she was removed and medically examined it was clear the rescue was futile, and her body was eventually reinterred. 

 

Or so it seems. There is controversy about what actually occurred: 

Whether she was actually alive or not is not quite certain. Family members say that she was still warm, and that rigor mortis had not set in.

'She had scratches on her forehead and bruises on her fingers. It looked like she had tried desperately to get out of the casket and hurt herself," her cousin told Primer Impacto.

Doctors believe she may have suffered a severe panic attack which temporarily stopped her heart.

Another theory is that she suffered a cataplexy attack - a sudden loss of voluntary muscle function in response to a strong emotional stimulus.

Whatever it was, her family firmly believes she was buried alive, and hold the medics responsible for declaring her dead too hastily.

Catalepsy, the old 19th-century agent of live burial stories.

Abandoned houses in Tokyo: spooky story settings to be

An increasing number of Tokyo houses are uninhabited, due to nothing so prosaic as demographics.  An aging population means some homeowners die or otherwise move out, unreplaced by successor generations.

The results suggest settings for horror stories to come.

[S]ome eight million dwellings are now unoccupied, according to a government count. Nearly half of them have been forsaken completely – neither for sale nor for rent, they simply sit there, in varying states of disrepair.

...

“There are empty houses everywhere, places where nobody’s lived for 20 years, and more are cropping up all the time,” said Haneda, 77, complaining that thieves had broken into her neighbor’s house twice and that a typhoon had damaged the roof of the one next to it.

Another German cannibalism case

Cannibalism hasn't appeared on this site for a while, so it's good of Germany to offer another case of humans eating people. A court found a former police officer guilty of preparing a Polish man for meals.  It's a fascinating, sad story, with many details worthy of horror film.

He was accused of cutting the body into small pieces and burying them in his garden, making a macabre home video in the process...

The defence argued that Stempniewicz had a death wish and had already hanged himself in Guenzel's cellar "S&M studio" before he took a knife, then an electric saw, to the gagged-and-bound man.

Investigators have been unable to determine the cause of death definitively because of the poor condition of the corpse.

They have, however, been able to ascertain that the pair had extensive contact online and by telephone before finally arranging their date on 4 November 2013.

The video Guenzel made was played during the trial, at one point showing him covered in blood while mutilating the corpse. "I never thought I would sink so low," he can be heard murmuring.

Infocult first noted German cannibalism starting way back in 2003.

(thanks to Clyde)

 

Tens of thousands of human bones found on Mexican site

Police uncovered an immense stash of human remains at a Mexican site.

At least 31,000 fragments of human bones were found on a ranch in Nuevo Leon, (northern Mexico), which allegedly was used by organized crime to incinerate their victims to dispose of their bodies.

More horrific details: "Apparently heavy rains unearthed the remains... search continues to discover additional bone fragments."

Read the whole article to find similar stories, with awful sequels in local government.

Games of death

A small but growing number of computer games are taking death more seriously. Gabby DaRienzo explores this trend across platforms and genres.

The article touches on permadeath, then goes on to describe games where the afterlife grounds play mechanics, or where the player helps characters cope with impending doom.  Another uses permadeath to block replay ability, but allows the player to play a dead character's descendants.  One game even promises to die when enough of its player-characters die.

Note that DaRienzo is "Also developing my own game #MortuarySimulator", according to her Twitter bio.

(thanks to Todd "Still Alive" Bryant)