Storage Containers of Gore

Fans of Storage Wars know that you never know what you’ll find in abandoned units, but no one expects to find body parts. A  recent discovery in Pensacola, Florida of an entire unit full of human organs in varying states of decomposition is enough to shock even the most seasoned horror fan.  According to the article:

A man reported horrible smells emanating from the unit after winning its contents during an auction. Further examination revealed  a ghoulish collection of human organs in various states of decomposition, all stored in makeshift containers including 32 oz. soda cups and plastic storage containers. The former examiner, Dr. Michael Berkland, was relieved of his official duties in 2003, but had conducted a number of private autopsies during his time in the area. Authorities are unclear who the organs belong to or why they were in the storage unit. 

Read the full article here: Storage Unit Yields Gruesome Discovery
Naturally this reminds me of one of my favorite-of-all-time stories from The Book of the Bizarre: 

In 2007, in Maiden, North Carolina, a man bought a smoker at a police auction of abandoned items from a storage facility. When he opened up the smoker, he discovered what he thought was wood wrapped up in paper. The bundle instead turned out to be a human leg that had been amputated at just above the knee. Police contacted the owners of the storage facility. It turned out that the owner’s son had had his leg amputated after a plane crash and kept the leg for “religious reasons.” She and her son drove some thirty-five miles to retrieve it from the man who had bought the smoker.

It gets better, though! I love this story and I’ve told it on radio interviews a number of times when asked what my favorite “shocking” story from the book is. During an interview with a radio station in North Carolina I received a follow-up to the story from one of the show hosts. They said that not only did they remember the story but it actually didn’t end there. Apparently the amputee didn’t get his limb back without a fight. The now-owner refused to give it up, saying it was his property. So the “original” owner of the leg had to go to court to get his limb back. But wait, that’s not all! They went to COURT TV!!!! And guess what? The amputee had to pay $5000 to win his leg back. That’ll teach him!

Ah, you just can’t make stuff up anymore bizarre than real life.

The Man in the Moon: Lunar Facts on Huffington Post

“Fly me to the moon and let me swing among those stars/Let me see what Spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.”–Bart Howard, Fly Me to the Moon, made famous by Frank Sinatra

Well you might have thought I didn’t have a sentimental side but the recent passing of Neil Armstrong brought it out. At the risk of disappointing you, I’m not always about spooky and creepy (though I do prefer it). I also have had a long-standing obsession with the moon, like so many of us, and thought I should pay a small tribute to Neil Armstrong with a post about lunar facts. You can read the post on Huffington Post by clicking the link below:

Neil Armstrong by Varla Ventura

 

Who’s That Knocking on my Coffin Lid? Vampires, Magical Creatures Part Three

Lovers of True Blood, Dracula devotees, and Twilight tweens: I offer you the ancient vamps of my Magical Creatures series!

These are the stories that Stephenie Meyer and Anne Rice read when they were but wee babes, suckling on their mothers (or the  neck of their mother). These are the groundwork stories about vampirism, both horrific, romantic, and psychic.

Currently available exclusively as e-books, these are found volumes of forgotten lore (many a quaint and curious tale!) and cover the realm of such creepy and cool beings as goblins, werewolves, vampires, banshees, mermaids, and phookas, to name but a few.

(If the response is positive on these little e-beasts, I’ll be expanding them into book form!!)

Horror devotees will recall the story of the infamous gathering at a lake house outside of Geneva, Switzerland in the summer of 1816 where a small party celebrated the settling darkness by reading ghost stories aloud to one another. Present were the host, Lord Byron, and his guests: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (Shelley) and her sister, and Lord Byron’s physician—John William Polidori. At the prompting of Byron, pens were set to paper to write ghost stories of their own. Here the groundwork was laid for what would become Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a Modern Prometheus. Shelley himself wrote Fragments of a Ghost Story, and Byron wrote something called Fragment of a Novel. This “fragment” became the basis for Polidori’s The Vampyre, A Tale—the first vampire novel published in English, some seventy years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Also in the vampire collection, are two lesser known tales by Bram Stoker: Burial of the Rats and Dracula’s Guest. Both were part of a collection of stories that Stoker had been working on but never published. After his death, his widow decided they were fit for print and submitted them to his publisher in 1914. And Théophile Gautier’s Clarimonde is by far one of the most controversial vampire stories from the early 19th Century. A would-be priest begins to doubt his path and his God when he meets (by chance?) fair Clarimonde. I won’t give it all away but this is some necromantic romance at its best! And finally, George Sylvester Viereck’s 1907 short story The House of the Vampire was the first novel to introduce psychic vampires.

You can purchase these little digital gems following the links below:

The Vampyre: A Tale by Varla Ventura and John William Polidori (Amazon) (B&N)

The Burial of the Rats by Varla Ventura and Bram Stoker (Amazon) (B&N)

Dracula’s Guest by Varla Ventura and Bram Stoker (Amazon) (B&N)

Clarimonde by Varla Ventura and Théophile Gautier (Amazon)

The House of the Vampire by Varla Ventura and George Sylvester Viereck (Amazon) (B&N)

I Scream, You Scream, We all Scream Like Banshees! Magical Creatures Part Two

When I asked readers of The Blog of the Bizarre to comment on their favorite magical creatures, a surprising number of you said banshee! Well, I have to admit the banshee is most certainly my favorite magical creature and with competition from the likes of werewolves and vampires that is saying something.

Banshees straddle the world of ghosts and magical beings, fairyland and nighttime haunts. They are beautiful, mournful, horrible things. And I’ll bet we’ve all encountered one or two in our lifetime, perhaps without knowing it.

Surely you’ve spent a lonesome night listening listening with trepidation to the howl of the wind. To the rattle of the windowpane and the thump upon the porch we say “’Tis only the wind!” To the squeak of the floorboards and the bang on the roof we declare, “This old house is settling!” But deep inside, and we have all likely felt it at one time or another, there is an uneasy understanding that something very supernatural is afoot.

And the odds are this feeling of uneasiness is very likely accurate.

Perhaps it wasn’t a banshee thought. There are many, many things out there clawing in the night, snarling in the shadows. Sinister beasts that make the sad Irish Banshee look friendly.

They possess a certain dangerous quality that make the humble phooka or hyper goblin look positively friendly. Some tales recount that banshees are the ghosts of women who have died in childbirth; others say they are the restless spirits of unrequited lovers.  They are almost always women, and they can and will invoke your sympathies when you hear their wailing. You could easily be lured into the dark of night, hoping to help the pathetic creature who sounds as if she is in mourning.

One of my favorite bands as a young, surly teen was Siouxsie and the Banshees, whose front-woman Siouxsie Sioux is a gothic chantress who howled like a mythological siren—luring you with her tales of travel and woe. So when I came upon Elliot O’Donnell’s works about banshees I simply had to dust off the old vinyl (for you youngins’ whose main experience with vinyl is the sheath you keep your iPod Touch in, I am referring to a vinyl record) and paint on some heavy eyeliner so I could have a good ol’ fashion Banshee Bash.

Elliot O’ Donnell was an Irish author who wrote more than forty books on ghosts, paranormal encounters, and creatures of the fairy race. Unlike so many authors of his time who conducted psychic experiments and who often take the skeptical or sensational point-of-view, O’ Donnell had a more authentic approach to ghost stories. He claimed to have numerous encounters himself, including with a ghost when he was five years old. He also reported having been strangled by a phantom somewhere in Dublin. He said, “I have investigated, sometimes alone, and sometimes with other people and the press, many cases of reputed haunting. I believe in ghosts but am not a spiritualist.”

Enjoy these selections of O’Donnell’s best works on banshees, as part of Magical Creatures collection. And let me know your own banshee tales! I expect there is enough material out there for several volumes.

The Malevolent Banshee by Varla Ventura and Elliot O’Donnell Amazon or B&N

Alleged Counterparts of the Banshee by Varla Ventura and Elliot O’Donnell (Currently available only on Amazon)

What Big Eyes You Have: Werewolves, Magical Creatures Part One

For those of you who love a good scare and those of you who can’t quite shake that feeling that those creatures of myth and folklore are simply imaginary, I offer you my Magical Creatures series. Currently available exclusively as e-books, these are found volumes of forgotten lore (many a quaint and curious tale!) and cover the realm of such creepy and cool beings as goblins, werewolves, vampires, banshees, mermaids, and phookas, to name but a few.

If the response is positive on these little e-beasts, I’ll be expanding them into book form. And so let me begin my series of Magical Creature posts with one of my super-faves. The werewolf!

It seems that unlike the mindless zombie or the ancient mummy, or event the licentious vampire, we don’t fear the werewolf so much as feel sorry for the werewolf. It is a wild beast caught in a trap. We worry for him, we wish it could be another way. We don’t want to become werewolves the way we want super powers or immortality. We want the werewolf to be free of the curse that binds him. Free to be either beast or man, not tragically stuck being both.

Here are a few interesting facts about werewolves you may not know:

• Werewolves are not always mean: In medieval romances, such as Guillaume de Palerme, the werewolf is not the terrifying creature of more modern tales, but rather benign, appearing more like a victim and less like the enemy. (True also of Harold in Eugene Field’s story).
• Werewolves are not always male: The 1588 story from the mountains of Auvergne tells the tale of a she-wolf whose paw was cut off by a hunter. When he opened the bag where he had placed his prized paw he discovered instead a woman’s hand. It didn’t take long to figure out who was missing the hand (a nobleman’s wife) and she was burnt at the stake. That’s one way to end a marriage…
• Werewolves are not always wolves: Were-creatures can be in the form of many beasts. In variations of lore from around the world we find examples of were-cats, were-sharks, were-bears, and even a were-dolphin.
• Werewolves are not always fictional: There is a rare but very real disease now called clinical lycanthropy. Those diagnosed believe themselves to able to transform into a non-human animal, specifically a wolf.

For those of you who aren’t such fans of the werewolf you will want to avoid the darkest of woods at night, especially any woods that looks much like the one described above—full of ravens, vampires, and serpents—and you should never, ever go out on a full moon. You may fare well, as the heroine of our story does, but to hedge your bets you might want to keep a little satchel with you full of silver bullets (you’ll need a gun to fire them) on hand, or a silver dagger if you can’t get a gun. If you are a dead-mark a bow and arrow might do, but it is very risky. Oh, and make sure to stock up on wolfsbane. It will ward off wolves but it can also be an antidote to wolf bite, if taken within a few hours of contact.

Want more? Check out these e-books in my series on Werewolves:

The Werewolf by Varla Ventura and Eugene Field  (Amazon) (B&N)

Natural Causes of Lycanthropy by Varla Ventura and Sabine-Baring Gould (Amazon) (B&N)

The Werewolf of the North by Varla Ventura and Sabine Baring-Gould (Amazon) (B&N)