He’s Not A Ghost—Though He Could Be A Demon

In fact, Slender Man is no more and no less than the good, old boogeyman. He’s just been refurbished a bit for the internet culture.

Dating back no further than 2009, the Slender Man myth involves a supernatural being who follows in the well-worn phantom footsteps of solitary, ghoulish, and predatory characters produced in cultures throughout time, and across the world. Wherever they’ve originated, these outskirts-dwelling fiends invariably kidnap and feast on children—in fact their very purpose among many groups is to scare kids into behaving.

In some countries, the local Slender Man/boogeyman-like legend is called the “Sack Man” because of his habit of stuffing children into a cloth bag in order to drag them away. Europe is full of Sack Men—though they also occur on other continents. A man who grew up in Arizona’s Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community during the early 1900s once told us that adults there used to frighten children with tales of a witch who would remove their heads and gather them into a sack if they misbehaved at night. [Read more…] about SLENDER MAN

Seen A Ghost? Who You Gonna Call?

So, you’ve seen a ghost—you’re sure of it. And you’re dying to talk about it, but you’re afraid people will just laugh. Worse, they might think you’re off your rocker. How can you get someone to just listen?

Fortunately, as with so many things, the internet holds the answer. The popular website Your Ghost Stories really wants to hear about your real-life interactions with spooks. Right at the top of their home page you’ll find the following friendly invitation:

“Your Ghost Stories is a place where you can find all kinds of resources regarding real ghosts and true hauntings cases, but more importantly, it is a site for publishing, sharing and reading real ghosts experiences from real people like you. It has come to our attention that many people have had this kind of unexplained experiences, and it makes for wonderful readings, maybe at times disturbing, but most often, leaving you wondering what is happening on the other side of material life and our physical senses.” [Read more…] about HOW TO REPORT A GHOST

Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian Ghost Story On Canvas

French post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin worked in Tahiti from 1891 to 1893 and then returned to Paris with a trove of canvases. Among them was The Spirit of the Dead Watching, or The Spirit of the Dead Keep Watch, which was inspired by an uncanny event Gauguin said he experienced with his 14-year-old Tahitian mistress. According to the artist, he came home late one night to find the girl nearly out of her mind with fright at what she believed to be the presence of a ghost in their house. Afterward, Gauguin decided to paint the scene more or less as his lover had described it, with the greenish spirit of an old woman sitting woodenly nearby as the girl lay on the bed, petrified with fright.

Gauguin reported that he chose his colors specifically to recreate the girl’s feeling of dread: Purple on the wall for its unsettling effect, the glowing yellow of the bedclothes and the eyes of the ghost for its eeriness, and of course the ghastly, unnatural complexion of the uninvited spirit. [Read more…] about THE SPIRIT OF THE DEAD WATCHING

I Didn’t See Her. I Saw Proof Of The Fear She Caused.

In the Peruvian rain forest, while working as a travel journalist the late 1980s, I saw vivid, concrete evidence of the power with which the ghostly had gripped the hearts and imaginations of a community whose members still lived by the rhythms of their most distant ancestors. I was ascending the Amazon River by paddlewheel boat from Leticia, Colombia to Iquitos, Peru in the company of a small group of other American writers, all of us traveling at the invitation of a Peruvian adventure-tour operator. From time to time the boat would pull to the riverbank and we would disembark either to search for wildlife or to visit villages on or near the edges of the river. Some of these villages belonged to native groups that only a few decades previously had experienced their first contact with Europeanized Peruvians.

One afternoon, as our boat churned toward the landing for an Indian village set farther back in the jungle, our Peruvian guides pointed out an unusual and disturbing sight: Wispy columns of gray smoke were rising from the forest canopy directly above the place where they knew the village to be—much more smoke than a few cooking fires ever would produce. Also strange was that, even after the crew had dropped the aluminum ramp down which we all trooped to shore, not a soul came to greet us. The forest before us was dead quiet. [Read more…] about MY OWN PERSONAL GHOST STORY