I remember reading as a kid about Benjamin Bathurst, David Lang and Oliver Larch. All three have strange stories of inexplicable disappearance. There are no accounts of UFO’s carrying them off, no portals to other dimensions, and no murderous intrigues. They simply were there one moment, and gone another. I recently revisited these stories with a skeptical eye to see what I could come up with.

It was the night of November 25, 1809. The world was at war with Napoleon Bonaparte and uncertain frantic alliances were being formed across Europe to counter him. Vienna had fallen, and Britain’s diplomat in the area, Benjamin Bathurst, was on his way north to Hamburg to return to Britain. Read more

What are the chances? A look at extraterrestrial life in our solar system:

Life, at least on our world, is an extraordinarily resilient and hearty thing. You can go miles into the earth’s crust and find living microbes. You can journey to the frozen poles – that in some ways mimic the harsh conditions on some of the other world’s in our solar system – and you’ll find life thriving. Even if our world were to undergo almost every natural or manmade cataclysm in the book, some form of life would likely survive. Only the eventual death of our sun seems to be a surefire way of life on earth giving up the ghost. So what are the chances of life outside of the earth in our solar system? Read more

On October 19, 1865 the Missouri Democrat newspaper printed a truly extraordinary article. Not prone to exaggeration, this paper would spend the next few decades as the flagship conservative newspaper for the St. Louis area, before merging with another paper and becoming the famed St. Louis Globe-Democrat, one of the nation’s foremost papers until ceasing operations in 1986, but not before launching the career of a young Pat Buchanan in the early 1960′s. Read more

In the west, we tend to categorize everything. We try to come up with rules and regulations that define what something is, sometimes to desperate lengths and great frustration when something just doesn’t fit. Mythical creatures are no exception. We view the vampire as a blood drinking undead human, and a werewolf as a living human that can take a wolf-like form and ravage the population like an animal. In Eastern Europe, the homeland of most folklore relating to the vampire and werewolf, these lines can become hopelessly blurred, and the creatures can become almost the same. Read more

The world has been ending for thousands of years. Early Christians believed the end would happen in their lifetime and that the Roman Empire represented the last gasp of humanity. As it turns out, it was one of the first gasps in the birth of the modern world in which we live. In the year 1000, medieval millenialists nervously wondered if the addition of a digit to the way we count our years would herald the end. It would seem it didn’t. A thousand years later people wondered if the change in that digit would result in a mass computer failure that would reverberate around the world and cause a major disruption of society to the point of the world regressing to the stone age. Didn’t quite happen that way.

Read more

This week seemed an apt time to ponder our nation’s political ghosts. We all know Abraham Lincoln haunts the White House along with Andrew Jackson and a host of first ladies, Woodrow Wilson is seen in a rocking chair at Blair House, and a great many ghosts are associated with the other federal government buildings in Washington. But one ghost is known to be seen in at least two places always heralding disaster for the nation.

Read more

On September 22, 1979 an aging satellite named Vela 6911 detected two very distinct flashes in the vicinity of the Indian or South Atlantic oceans that supposedly could be only one thing: a nuclear detonation. The Carter administration held an emergency meeting, other satellites were enlisted to see if they saw the detonation, which they did not, and utter pandemonium ensued for a short time as the US government scrambled to see who or what had set off a nuclear weapon that day.

It was a small explosion, estimated at only three kilotons, and while the Soviets, Chinese, French and British are unlikely as the originators, the finger was tentatively pointed at Israel or South Africa for testing a weapon. Problem is, the whole thing made no sense.

Read more

We’ve all seen “The Exorcist”, the infamous film based on William Peter Blatty’s equally infamous book. We also know that Blatty based his story on something that really happened, the exorcism of a boy in 1949 that took place at no less than four different places during the months-long exorcism. For years it was thought that a house in Mt. Rainier, Maryland was where it all started. Problem is, it wasn’t the place. For years the Mt. Rainier house sat vacant, presumably in part because of its “history”, where it was frequently broke into by teenagers who were undoubtedly scared out of their wits and the place became the brunt of god knows how many ghost stories. Ultimately, the local fire department burned the home in an exercise and that should have been the end of the story.

It wasn’t. In 1998 writer Mark Opsasnick determined in an article for Strange Magazine that this home wasn’t just the wrong house, it was in the wrong city. The actual case began in a home located in Cottage City, Maryland. I am uncertain as to whether or not this house is still standing, but the other places associated with the exorcism are not. After moving the boy from Maryland to St. Louis, three places have gained notoriety for their involvement with the story. Read more