Cullan Hudson's Blog, page 16

The Snowman

Daniel ignored the sharp bite as the cold sunk deeper into his bones.  The last of the pale light faded ghostlike beneath the thickening mass of snow laden clouds that triggered the street lights along his quiet street.  He scraped a mitten-covered hand across his red and dripping nose.  Just a little more, he thought as he patted the rotund snow man in his front yard.  He used the nut shells to fashion a wide grinning smile and added his sister’s red checked hat to the head. There, he thought. He looks good!  Daniel stepped back, half turning, to see if his sister had a good sight of the round fellow.  She waved from her chair by the window.  Her leg in a heavy cast, there would be no snow ball fighting for her. Fists on his hips, he surveyed his creation and nodded. He bent to pick up the carrot and add the final touch to his snowman when he saw the neighbor’s yard next door.  The house was dark as always. They never decorated for any holiday, but at Christmas it seemed they turned off even more lights.  Now, in the front yard there was a figure shaped from the fresh snow.  In Daniel’s yard, the bright white snow was fluffy and soft and could easily be rolled into giant balls for his snowman.  Next door, however, the snow appeared darker, silvery.  The neighbor’s snowman wore a black hat slanted down over its icy face and a satin scarf hung down the front. Its two arms were formed by the gnarled black branches of a dead tree.Daniel forced himself to look away; there was something disturbingly compelling about the figure.  He felt so terribly cold, wanting nothing more than to go inside to warm up. But it was weird how he kept finding himself transfixed by the snowman. He twisted around in the snow and stomped up to the front door, willing himself to not look back as he rushed into the warmth and light of his home.At bedtime, the wind wailed as freezing rain peppered the darkness outside his bedroom window.  Throwing back his covers, Daniel crept softly to the window and peered into the dark at his fat, jolly snowman. His sister had loved it and spent most of the night staring at it from the window near the fire.  Something pulled his eyes and thoughts like a dark magnet toward the neighbor’s yard. Daniel jumped and fell back into the room.Heart pounding, he looked out the window again to confirm his initial impression. It was closer.  The dark, icy column with its twisted arms, slanting black hat, and sinuous black scarf that whipped like a serpent in the freezing wind was no longer in the yard next door. It was a foot inside his own. It no longer stared blankly out to the street, but now its frigid face was facing Daniel’s own creation.The wind moaned and roared around the window like the cries of arctic beasts. Outside, ice-laden branches were the cracking bones of their prey. Chilled despite the warmth of the room, Daniel turned away, afraid of this icy intruder. It couldn’t be, he thought. I must have thought it was deeper into the neighbor’s yard that it actually was.  Daniel mustered the courage to peek again into the frigid night. It was closer. Each time Daniel looked away in chilled fear, he would turn back to find the snowman closer, its twisting arms reaching out.  Suddenly, the bright red hat lifted off the head of Daniel’s snowman and fluttered about like a moth in the amber glow of the street lamp. Inches as a time, the dark, silvery column of ice moved closer.  The red hat spun on the breeze and drew up above the black hat of the encroaching figure.  It spun and twisted in the swirling wind until it was a ruddy blur. A black branch shot out from the neighbor’s snowman toward Daniel’s. A sudden icy rattle knocked at the window and the street light went out. Stillness came with the dark. Daniel found the sudden, searching quiet more unsettling than the roaring wind. He felt his heart pound as dared not breath. Daniel stood there in front of the window with the certainty that something crucial was happening outside in that cold, frozen night.  He felt it breathing, he sensed it searching, and he knew it was waiting.Daniel couldn’t say how long he had stood there waiting, but his feet had grown cold. Still, he watched the black outside, searching with horrible anticipation for some sign of what was happening. He waited. He watched.In the pale silver light of dawn, details became manifest. An icy sheen covered every tiny branch and icicles hung like brittle fingers from gutters and roof and phone lines. A buttery sun fought to crawl through the crystalline clouds.  He sought out the alien snowman, but could see no trace of it anywhere.“Danny!!! Oh, thank you Danny!” his sister was yelling from downstairs. She is going to wake Mom and Dad, he thought as he dashed out the room and down the stairs. “Cut it out, will you? You’re gonna get us in trouble.” He said as he came to where her makeshift bed had been made near the window.“Thank you, Danny! How did you do it? Did you go back outside after we went to sleep? Like Santa Claus?” She was pointing and smiling. He turned to look out the window and stumbled back a step at what he saw.  “You are the best big brother in the world!”He walked to the window and pulled the curtains apart to reveal the scene.  The snowman he had created in the middle of the yard now stood just outside the window. He was turned to face toward the window but it seemed he could also look at the yard.  He seemed taller, straighter, and different.  The bright red hat still perched on his head but across his front he held, like a soldier might hold a weapon, a snarled and blackened length of branch.

Merry Krampusmas!

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Sylvia Browne Crosses Over

Psychic Celebrity Sylvia Browne Has Passed Away, TMZ Reports

Puerto Rican Bigfoot

Recently at Mysterious Universe, Nick Redfern wrote about what he has learned of the oft-neglected legends of a hirsute hominid roaming the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, which is to say not much. To be fair, there isn't much on this strange and elusive creature. Fortunately, I spent several years there talking to locals and researching the island's many tales and can give you what little more I have learned on the topic.

Comecogollos (roughly translated as one who eats the hearts of edible plants) is the term applied to the fabled bipedal primates similar to Bigfoot that are known to destroy guinea (a small, sweet type of banana) crops by devouring the top portion of the tree - hence the name.

Ironically, however, witnesses say that the creature is after the sap found in the trunk and not the guineas themselves. Witnesses have described this creature as hirsute, short, and bipedal with a quick step. It has been witnessed in areas of increased UFO activities such as the El Yunque National Rainforest.

This fabled cryptid is little known in the annals of cryptzoology and, I dare say, is known to few outside Puerto Rico. Frankly, many long-time Puerto Ricans have never heard the legend.

As I mentioned, I lived there for three years and spent that time researching the island's myriad accounts of UFOs, chupacabras, the Moca Vampire, and other strange beasts. Of all those stories, the tale of the comegollos has to be the rarest and most insubstantial. What few reports and analyses exist on the topic have been mostly documented by local researchers publishing in Spanish language media.

One investigator presented the image above as photographic evidence of this strange beast. I have juxtaposed it against another image that will better elucidate my concerns over the authenticity of this Comecogollos photo.

The image above of the "creature" standing higher than the surrounding vegetation in the El Yunque National Rainforest is at odds with the dimensions described by witnesses. For this image to be true, this creature would have to stand between 40 and 60 feet tall, as can be seen when we use the tower image [left inset above] for scale reference. This tower stands approximately 60 feet high. So, it gives us a good scale for the average height of the surrounding (and quite ubiquitous) vegetation. The same trees you see by the tower, are the same you'll see on the mountain in the Comecogollos image. In fact, I dare say the Comecogollos image was probably shot from the vantage point of this tower since landmarks visible from it are clearly in frame here as well.

In many respects, this image reminds me of the many images of Sasquatch that depict these animals protruding well above a mountainside covered with pine trees towering more than 100 feet. It is the (willing) mind taking indistinct blobs of light and shadow in a photograph and seeing what it is they wish to see.

With so little documentation of the Comecogollos, and virtually no trace evidence, it is hard to accept the legend as anything more than a delightful folktale - one of many surrounding the mysterious El Yunque Rainforest.
____________________________
Gracias a Herminio Salgado por todo su ayuda! This was originally posted on my blog The Island in January 2008. --CH

The Accursed Ashley-Alexander House

The Ashley-Alexander House outside Little Rock is an unassuming historic treasure with a ghostly legend and a curse.

Originally dubbed the Ashley Mill Plantation, the home was built around 1835 near Scott, Arkansas (12 miles from Little Rock) by Chester Ashley, a wealthy landowner and a prominent man in the annals of that state who served as US Senator from 1844 to 1848. Ashley died in 1848.

Afterward, Watt Worthen took possession of the plantation for another ten years until Arthur L. Alexander arrived in Arkansas in 1883 with his three cousins. The family first settled in Scott and Arthur began work as a bookkeeper at Fred Bryson's plantation. In 1897, he married Otelia George and they moved into the Ashley Mill Plantation in December the following year despite not having much money. But Otelia was a driven women and the two soon made a successful pair in the region. Arthur Lee Alexander died in December 1938.

It is through Otelia that we know of the home's haunting and of the curse she says has been placed upon it.

The strange goings-on manifested early. Shortly after moving in, Otelia spotted a black woman in the reflection of her mirror. However, as she spun to face the woman, the new owner was startled to see the apparition suddenly vanish. Frightened, she asked the staff who the woman was and found out that one of the previous owners had bore a child with a slave. The owner then sent the woman and child way, which angered the new mother who placed a curse on the home. Every five years, they say, some tragedy would befall the owners and occupants of the house.

Balking at such superstitious nonsense, Otelia plowed on as she always had. "Don't think for a moment that I believe in ghosts," she was once reported as saying in a newspaper article from 1949. Still, she couldn't deny the uncanny occurrence of marked tragedies every five years for the next fifty: deaths, fires, floods, financial problems. Each seemed to come about five years apart.

When You Love Music - Nothing Keeps You Away

Recently in a Norman at one small remote night spot customers listening to live music and a glass of vino were amazed as the back door opened.  Not unusual, you say, but there was no one there and as it opened about three feet all eyes were drawn to the aperture.
 Then, our witness noted, all the eyes in the room got round and a little spooked as it paused and then pushed further open as if it was being pushed open to allow someone to enter. The band leader made a laughing remark, "come on in ghost" and finished the number.  People laughed and returned to the conversations and fun of the evening.  Taking a picture to "remember to tell my friends the story" one of the customers was startled to find in the benign image of the doorway - an orb. Now, most will agree that an orb is usually dust (and surely dust was blown in by the opening door) but the fact of its placement in the image right in front of the door  with the orb being about head tall was a little disconcerting...   But, maybe, it was just a music lover out for a good night....

More Haunted Portland

Portland is an incredible and incredibly haunted city. This is my last post of that town's haunts and happenings--and I haven't even covered them all. But I am including those places I actually visited. I urge you to check out some of the literature on the subject for fun or if you plan to travel that way.

An old Mediterranean style school building from 1915 known as the Kennedy School is now an hip, upscale boutique hotel, cafe and restaurant. Only apparently not all the students have matriculated. A few have stayed behind and reports of a little girl with bows on her shoes is a popular one. Some have said the girl is a suicide, others a victim of witchcraft. All classic tropes, for sure. The place is super cool nonetheless. In fact, the bar is the building's old boiler room!

Crystal HotelThe Crystal Hotel, owned by the same McMenamin brothers (a pair committed to preserving Portland history) who own the Kennedy School and The White Eagle Inn and Saloon, has its own stories. As does the Crystal Ballroom across the street. Staff of the ballroom have reported sounds of dancing and music when no one is there. The hotel was built in 1911 as the Alma and housed a number of different establishments over the years, such as Club Mecca, The Desert Room (the subject of a Senate hearing on vice) as well as a gay bath and bar known as the Silverado. Several strange apparitions and occurrences have been reported in both the Zeus bar downstairs as well as the rooms themselves.

Hobo'sNina, the prostitute that haunts the Shanghai Tunnels, has also been spotted above ground in the restaurants that now call that spot home, such as Hobo's and Old Town Pizza. Nina, who apparently met her demise when she crossed the wrong people (she was pushed down an elevator shaft), has been spotted by workers and guests alike. A janitor felt unseen hands grab him once at Old Time Pizza. A manager at that establishment spotted a woman in a long dress before the restaurant was supposed to be open. He ran after her, but she vanished when she went into the basement.

Benson HotelThe Benson hotel opened its doors in 1913. Originally the New Oregon Hotel, the stately pile is rife with ghostly legends, although management discourages them. At least, they attempt to. The ghost of an unknown man stalks the second floor mezzanine that overlooks the lobby. Sometimes he is spotted descending the grand staircase. The ninth floor has its own ghosts, an emaciated looking youn
g boy has been reported by witnesses. They say he appears at your bedside, much as a sleepless child would, and touches you softly. Others mention the 12th and 7th floors have activity as well as the London Grill restaurant where a man in coveralls and a plaid shirt has been spotted by staff.

The Pittock mansion, which overlooks the city from a towering hill that gives the stately home a perfect view of Mt Hood, is said to be haunted by the Pittock's themselves. Henry and Georgiana's haunting is a genial one, as they tend to look after guests and the home.

Pittock Mansion and its view of the city with Mt Hood in the distance.If you're curious, there are gobs more haunted places in Portland--many chronicled by John Chilson, blogger at Lost Oregon.

Travels In Strange Lands: Oregon and Washington

Tracks and sightings have been
witnessed around Oregon's Mt.
Hood. I found this guy on the
road up to the mountain.Some of the other places of paranormal note that I visited while in Oregon and Washington, include some rather famous locales in the annals of the anomalous...
While mainly I enjoyed a tour (and copious samples) from the factory of the eponymous brand of cheese in Tillamook, OR, I also took note of the fact that this area was also the setting for an encounter in 1981 with a foul-smelling Bigfoot that followed a couple up a hill.

Further up the storied Highway 101 (aka Pacific Coast Highway), at Tillamook Head, a UFO plunged into the Pacific several miles off shore in early January 1965.


Washington's Mount St. Helens may be most famously known as the volcano that destructively blew its top in 1980, but far earlier than that it was known for the strange events at an innocuous canyon on its eastern slope. In July 1924, prospectors were assaulted by "mountain devils' that hurled rocks at the cabin in which they sought refuge. The men fired upon the creatures (whose descriptions clearly match that of what we term Sasquatch), injuring one. As dawn arrived, the men were startled to find giant footprints in the ground--footprints that were still there when reporters from the Portland Oregonian arrived later. Since that incident, this innocuous fold on the mountain has been named "Ape Canyon".

One legend, as recounted by William Halliday of the Western Speleological Survey in his 1983 pamphlet "Ape Cave and the Mount Saint Helens Apes," says that YMCA counselors at Camp Meehan at nearby Spirit Lake would bring their young charges to the edge of the canyon where they would throw small stones (clearly before the advent of TV). The story, which became a Camp Meehan oral tradition, said the miners would look up only to see silhouetted figures throwing stones at their cabin. But the tale told by Fred Beck, the last surviving miner, is one of a far more intense and exhaustive encounter, which resulted in footprints witnessed by others. It seems the YMCA story might just be a camp fire tale, perhaps to titilate and the assuage nascent fears any camper would have about the Bigfoot legends in the area.

And the legends go back. Way back.

 Me with a 20' biggyat the famous buriedA-frame house on theroad to Mt St HelensIn the spring of 1847, western artist Paul Kane wrote in his journal: "When we arrived at the mouth of the Kattle-Poutal River (Lewis River) twenty-six miles from Fort Vancouver, I stopped to make a sketch of the volcano, Mount St. Helens, distant, I suppose, about thirty or forty miles.  This mountain has never been visited by either whites or Indians, the latter assert that it is inhabited by a race of beings of a different species, who are cannibals, and whom they hold in great dread.  They also say that there is a lake at its base with a very extraordinary kind of fish in it, with a head more resembling that of a bear than any other animal. These superstitions are taken from the statement of a man who, they say, went to the mountain with another and escaped the fate of his companion, who was eaten by the(se) "Skookums or evil genii.  I offered a considerable bribe to any other INdian who would accompany me in its exploration, but could not find one hard enough to venture."

Rocque Ducheney, a trader and mountain man once employed with the Hudson's Bay Co., told stories of his frontier west days. He daughter, Agnes Louise Ducheney-Eliot was quoted in Told by the Pioneers that "Grandpa Ducheney firmly believed the story of the huge apes near St. Helens Mountain. He went there to hunt once and one of these apemen beckoned to him. He just turned and ran and ran until he reached home." The date for that encounter is hard to pin down but she does also not that General Grant had stayed with the Ducheneys, putting the timeframe at circa 1852.

Back to the Portland area, John Green writes in his Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us of an encounter several fishermen had at a lake in the mountains southeast of the city. Two of the three men spotted a seven-foot creature "like a bear on its hind legs, hairy but almost human" circle their companion who lay asleep on the shore.

More Weird Portland Stories

Although these didn't transpire while I was there, they are nonetheless remarkable.

A poltergeist outbreak occurred in the fall of 1909. Reports of mysteriously moving furniture seem centered on a young boy named Elwin March. However, he is later discovered to be faking the phenomenon by Dr. Gilbert and Mr. Thatcher, investigators for the American Society for Psychical Research.

In Fortean circles, a "fall" is anything the plummets from the sky that probably shouldn't: toads, nails, fish...

During a thunderstorm on July 21, 1920 fragments of what were described as china fell to the ground in Portland, OR.

Could some updraft have lifted copious amounts of dinnerware into the sky only to send them hurtling back down on the citizens of that city? Seems impossible, but details are scant and it isn't clear as to whether any of the debris survived to this day.