Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

"movement inside the torso"

Horror stories often concern death or dead bodies.  Today's real life horror story comes from a Philadelphia hospital, where a corpse turned out to have a surprise.

Unzipping the body bag, a handful of forensic examiners in the room saw something they’d never seen before.

Something was moving around in the torso of the rotting, still-clothed cadaver with a “decent-sized cavity” where the chest and internal organs once resided. 

Think of the examiners' mental state at that point.  Then:

“One of the techs saw movement inside the torso,” according to a source, who heard about the case later that day directly from someone in the examination room. “They quickly and correctly ascertained that one of our town’s prolific Norway rats was living ... in that semi-exposed torso cavity.”

Which has bad enough, but things ramified:

the group brainstormed how best to remove the rat, which had apparently developed a taste for human flesh and organs...

From the way the body was decomposed, the flesh decomposed, the body hollowed out, it looked as if the rat had been in there for a little while.

Again, imagine the participants' minds once they realized this.

One had a definitive response:

Someone from Vector proceeded to yank the animal from the body by hand and – after being asked “you’re not going to kill it, are you?” – stomp it with a boot. This move, while brutal, helped stave off public-health concerns about a rat roaming the city with bloodlust coursing through its veins.

“The rat had to be terminated,” said the eyewitness...

Philadelphia Gothic, or just medical horror?

(thanks to Jesse "Nom Nom Nom" Walker)

Sinkhole versus zoo

Gaia continued her campaign against human civilization by opening a sinkhole under a Kentucky zoo.

It was pretty large: "roughly 50 feet deep and almost the size of a football field."

No casualties, either animal or human, so this was probably just an exploratory probe.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

Digging into Momo

Sam Kriss offers a lyrical version of the Momo urban legend.  He riffs on the stories, building his own and turning them into eerie, short horror tales.

For example,

Another child died in southern Germany. Investigators opened up her phone, and found it was three inches wide, six inches high, and infinitely deep. In those black depths, in that tunnel that bore through invisible dimensions, it was the nest of endless screaming crows.

Some are funny:

The Guardian has started adding a brief message to the end of its online articles. Every time a reader like you makes a contribution to The Guardian, no matter how big or small, it goes directly into funding our journalism. I can’t stop hearing it in Momo’s voice, that hoarse scratching black-feathered croak.

And others are just surreal:

I didn’t notice, at first, what the things I read online were really saying. Democratic lawmakers fired back against the President’s claims on social media, urging you to UNBURDEN YOURSELF OF YOUR SKIN AND DISCOVER THE SHINING MINERAL LIFE INSIDE.

Thanks to Tim Pendry for sharing it.

PS: here's Snopes on just how fake the Momo story is.