Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

A modern mummy in Detroit

The kinds of things you can find while looking for a new home:

The desiccated corpse was discovered by a man who was house shopping and ventured into the home's garage on Thursday afternoon, spotting the body inside an early 1990s-model Plymouth sedan, police and coroner's officials said.

How long the body had been in the garage and the circumstances of the individual's death remained unknown, said Lloyd Jackson, a spokesman for the Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office.

"It was there for a long period of time," Jackson said. "It's mummified, so it's probably been over a year, at least."

Medical examiners visually inspected the corpse, which was found dressed in a shirt, sweater and pants.

But the advanced state of decomposition, in which exposed tissue has turned brown, taking on the appearance of tanned leather, precludes a conventional autopsy, even obscuring whether the person was male or female, Jackson said.

The article thoughtfully considers one criminal possibility:

The home where the body turned up was being rented by tenants who told police they never used the garage and knew nothing about the body's presence, Detroit police spokesman Dan Donakowski said.

That's the thing about the Gothic.  Everything old can return again.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

Echo device, murder witness

Arkansas police demanded Amazon share recordings from an Echo, which was apparently sole witness to a murder.

Amazon declined to give police any of the information that the Echo logged on its servers, but it did hand over Bates' account details and purchases. Police say they were able to pull data off of the speaker, but it's unclear what info they were able to access. Due to the so-called always on nature of the connected device, the authorities are after any audio the speaker may have picked up that night.

Creepy audio theater: The Stroma Sessions

"The Stroma Sessions" is a new BBC audioplay, and recommended to Infocult readers.

The plot concerns a music group that repairs to a remote island for creative recording work, and how things go ... wrong, and weird.  You might get a Blair Witch vibe from the start, but it goes in interesting directions very quickly.

'The Blackletter Quartet', a new music ensemble, had an idea: to write and record an album on Stroma, an abandoned island off the north coast of Scotland.

Five years after the Quartet's disappearance, 'The Stroma Sessions' - a series of audio files charting the musicians time on the island and the music they created there - were discovered on the internet.

Stroma was abandoned in the early 1960s: its few remaining buildings stand dilapidated, battered by the North Sea. The four musicians sought inspiration in the ruined houses and unforgiving weather. They wanted to make music in a ghost town. The evidence suggests they found what they were looking for.

(via MetaFilter)

More weird undersea sounds

Another new sound has been recorded from the ocean depths. This time it's the Marianas Trench area.

Named the “Western Pacific Biotwang,” the sound is unusual for its complexity and wide frequency range. It could potentially be a previously unheard call of a baleen whale, though many questions remain.

“It’s very distinct, with all these crazy parts,” said Sharon Nieukirk, senior faculty research assistant in marine bioacoustics at Oregon State. “The low-frequency moaning part is typical of baleen whales, and it’s that kind of twangy sound that makes it really unique. We don’t find many new baleen whale calls.”

The researchers describe the sound, which lasts between 2.5 and 3.5 seconds, as a five-part call that “includes deep moans at frequencies as low as 38 hertz and a metallic finale that pushes as high as 8,000 hertz.” The Biotwang sounds something like the so-called “Star Wars” sound made by dwarf minke whales on the Great Barrier Reef

A short version sounds like this.  

More:

Sinkhole kills two cars, one human

Earth's war against the human race reached Texas, where a sinkhole gobbled up two cars and one police officer.

fire department spokesman Joe Arrington said crews responded to a water rescue shortly after 7:30 p.m.

What they found, Arrington said, was a broken 54-inch pipe and a pit measuring 10- to 20-feet deep that stretched the entire width of the road.

The death sounds nasty:

"The pit is full of sewer water," [Robert Puente, president of San Antonio Water System] added. "Until we find an opportunity to look inside will we know what happened."

Hood said [Dora Linda (Solis)] Nishihara's vehicle was 90 percent submerged and he didn't know how long she had been in the water.

But, he added: "There was no way [she was] going to survive. The car was upside down."

Gaea just won't let up.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)