Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Clown panic on the high seas

Three years after the Great Clown Panic of '16 the fear of clowns keeps shambling along.  Today's incident involves a British cruise ship visiting Norway.  Inebriated guests were horrified when a clown appeared, and violence ensued.

According to one seagoing reporter, 

One witness, part of a group involved in the trouble, explained to staff that things kicked off when another passenger appeared dressed as a clown. This upset one of their party because they’d specifically booked a cruise with no fancy dress. It led to a violent confrontation.

Panic ensued:

“There was blood everywhere”. Violent late night brawl in the buffet onboard @pocruises Britannia left staff who intervened injured, as passengers used furniture and plates as weapons. Witnesses told me they were so frightened they had to hide, as family groups fought.

The Telegraph characterized the coulrophobic scene thusly:

Families were forced to flee to their cabins or hide as apparently drunken passengers hurled furniture and plates at one another as a buffet descended into violence.

The ship's crew then contained the mayhem:

The buffet area was immediately sealed off as medical teams went to help the injured. Staff told me they’d never experienced anything like it and those behind the violence were confined to a cabin for the last day of the cruise, waiting for police here in Southampton.

Chaos, violence, clowns: and we're just starting the second half of 2019.

(via Naked Capitalism)

Human body part trove discovered in Arizona

Some days we don't need Gothic fiction if we're looking for horror.  Case in point: the FBI raided a human remains business in Arizona, and discovered some irregularities.

Let's start with the top.  An FBI agent's testimony:

An FBI special agent, during a January 2014 raid of the Biological Resource Center, stumbled on what he described as "various unsettling scenes." The agent's grisly eyewitness account of the raid was recently revealed in a civil lawsuit against the business and its owner, Stephen Gore.

(Is his last name really "Gore"?)

Many of the body parts [former Phoenix FBI special agent Mark Cwynar] saw were piled on top of one another with no apparent identification to indicate what bodies they came from or to whom they belonged, he said.

In addition to a "cooler filled with male genitalia," Cwynar testified that he also saw a "large torso with the head removed and replaced with a smaller head sewn together in a 'Frankenstein' manner."

Frankenstein, "cooler filled with male genitalia" - but wait, there's more!

Cwynar said he saw:

• Large male torsos with limbs and genitalia removed.

• Buckets and coolers with various body parts, including a bucket of heads, arms and legs.

• Body parts piled on top of each other throughout the facility, with no apparent identification.

• Steel freezers with frozen body parts inside with no apparent identification.

Very much like a horror film's scene.

(thanks to Peter Naegele)

 

When fake news turns openly Gothic

Made-up or fake news has partaken of the Gothic many times.  In the US we can think of Pizzagate, with its combination of child sex abuse and Satanism.

Today's example comes from Bangladesh, where a government official ends up having to deny a public project requires human remains.

“The opposition party is trying to mislead the people by spreading rumours, having failed in elections and agitations. For what else should such a weird, unbelievable idea that ‘human heads, blood will be needed to construct the Padma Bridge’ be spread on social media?” the Awami League general secretary asked.

Blood is a classic Gothic ingredient for construction.  But why heads?

Related: "Police in Bhola detained a man on Wednesday night on charges of spreading on social media the rumour that 'children were being abducted for sacrifice by beheading.'”

(thanks to Jesse "The Builder" Walker)

Inside the Vatican's tombs

Opening up an ancient tomb is one excellent path to Gothic horror.

Case in point: Vatican officials cracked open not one, but two burial sites within the Holy See.  Then things got strange.

First, the true crime/horror angle: 

Experts probed a burial ground inside the Holy See walls looking for the remains of Emanuela Orlandi, a Vatican clerk's daughter who's been missing since 1983. This morning they opened two tombs to see if her body was hidden there. But both tombs were entirely empty.

Which is disappointing. 

But notice this bit: "They did not even contain the remains of two 19th century princesses supposed to be buried there."  So one possible body was missing, as well as two very likely sets of remains.  Gothic possibilities abound: grave robbing?  The walking dead?  Vampires?  Buried alive and walked away in the 1800s?

Now, continuing in the Gothic vein, another surprise appeared: "Adding to the mystery, one of the tombs led to a large underground room."  Curiously, the story doesn't follow up that line of inquiry.  How large was it?  What was found within the room?

(thanks to Ed "I was upstairs at the time" Webb)

Gaea gnaws on Baltimore

Another sinkhole chewed on America, this time in the city of Baltimore.

A sinkhole near the intersection of Howard and Pratt streets appeared to swallow an elevated platform that allows wheelchair users to access Light Rail trains. 

No casualties, but infrastructure damage has been done.

Gaea's war against the human race continues.

(thanks to Ed "I also have an alibi for this one" Webb)

Today in discovered body parts: severed legs in Pennsylvania

One of the many ways the world turns Gothic is when human body parts appear in surprising areas.

Case in point: a pair of severed legs were found by a road in Pennsylvania.

The legs were found around May 11, 2019, around 10:11 p.m. in the area of the Hepburn Street Pump Station, police said. The legs had been cleanly cut near the knee joints by what investigators believe to be a thin-blade, hand-held saw.

Investigators have said the woman’s toenails were painted pink, and that both feet had white Polo Jeans brand ankle socks on them.

So many mysteries remain:

Lycoming County Coroner Charles E. Kiessling Jr.... is not ready to rule on the manner of death with the few remains he has. Kisseling said Monday that there is a lot of testing still being done on the legs, including DNA testing that could take months or years to get the results of.

(thanks to Ed "I'm not playing Frankenstein" Webb)

Hidden cells

BLDGblog offers a brief and intriguing vision of shadow cells.  

It begins with a 1964 discovery:

The blog then ruminates:

It’s easy to imagine the story of an occult 19th-century architect constructing prisons to contain both a person and their shadow self, or perhaps just a sadistic warden installing secret listening rooms beneath the cells of his prisoners to eavesdrop on the growing sounds of loneliness and remorse crying down through the ceiling.

And goes further:

Or, for that matter, imagine a horror novel about some strange and thoroughly debunked folk-magic architectural theory from the 1800s suggesting that all works of civil infrastructure—prisons, libraries, courts of law—had to have both a positive and a negative version constructed, an aboveground world and its subterranean reflection, and that, over the course of the novel, more and more of these underground spaces are discovered in the humid, history-rich soils of the American east coast. And that it ends well for no one involved.

Infocult: always looking out for subterranean reflections.

(thanks to Jesse "Catacomb Projectionist" Walker)

Bag of bones, Jersey edition

In New Jersey a snack shop's staff made a surprisingly Gothic discovery:

A plastic bag filled with bones of “suspected human remains” was found early Monday hanging on the door of a snack bar at a scenic overlook in North Jersey, the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office announced Monday evening.

Police added swiftly to the story:

The bones found Monday in a plastic bag hanging on the door of a snack bar at a scenic overlook in North Jersey belong to a human, the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office announced late Wednesday.

And: "Investigators located the person who left the bag of bones on door..."

New Jersey: where Gothic horror is everyday decoration.

(thanks to Steven "No, Seriously, I Have An Alibi" Kaye)