Ripley Entertainment Inc.'s Blog, page 383
October 17, 2017
October 16, 2017
Last Stop on the London Necropolis Railway
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
The end of the line for thousands of Londoners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a railway dedicated to transporting corpses from the capital to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. The London Necropolis Railway opened in 1854, in response to chronic overcrowding in cemeteries where the same graves were being used over and over again for fresh internments. The previous occupants’ bones were often left scattered on the ground or sold to local bone mills to be ground up as fertilizer.
Conducting Funerals
Mourners and deceased alike were divided into three classes, as was the custom on Britain’s railways at the time. The dearly departed whose family had paid for them to travel first-class were treated with greater care, which explains why third-class mourners were not even allowed to watch the loading and unloading of their particular coffins.
The funeral line was expected to prove highly profitable, but the opening of 32 new cemeteries hit business hard and by 1930 it was only operating one or two funeral trains a week. Ironically, the final nail in its coffin was the terrifying Blitz launched on London by Germany on the night of April 16, 1941, when over 1,000 Londoners were killed. Far from being good for trade, the bombing reduced the London Necropolis Railway to rubble. When the war ended, it was deemed too costly to rebuild.
October 15, 2017
October 14, 2017
October 13, 2017
Flight 666 to HEL on Friday the 13th
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
[October 8-14, 2017] Flushing gold down toilets, using drones to smell whales, and flying to HEL on Friday the 13th.
5. Swiss Toilets Flush With Gold
You might remember the fatberg lurking in London’s sewers, but in Switzerland, they have something else strange showing up underground. Researchers at waste treatment plants detected 6,600 pounds of silver and almost 100 pounds of gold in sewage. That’s about $3 million flushed down toilets a year! Despite the potential value, the scientists also reckoned it would cost many times the rare metals’ value to extricate them from the sludge.
4. Seinfeld Door Alarm
Evan Genuise, a freshman at Northern Arizona University, rigged his dorm room door with a sensor that plays the bass riff from Seinfeld. Geniuse says he plans to keep the door alarm up forever, and constantly annoy his friends with expectations of Kramer-like antics.
I build a door sensor for my dorm pic.twitter.com/veNXFobzPC
— evan
The Mysterious and Strange Mandela Effect
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
If movie quotes aren’t how you remember them, logos have slightly different spellings than you noticed before, or you suspect quantum forces have changed the spelling of your favorite childhood books from the Berenstein Bears to the Berenstain Bears, then you most certainly have been victim to the mass hysteria that is the Mandela Effect.
October 12, 2017
Or Not: Hair and Nails Grow After Death
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Or Not
In today’s world many misconceptions have been perpetuated—becoming modern day “facts”—when, in reality, myths and hearsay have taken over. Sorry to burst your bubble, but in this weekly column, Ripley’s puts those delusions to the test, turning your world upside down, because you can’t always…Believe It!
Today: Post-Mortem Hair and Nail Growth
Follicle Putrefaction
Everyone wonders what happens to them when they die, and while we like to ignore the more gruesome parts of putrefaction, there has long been the rumor that your hair and nails continue to grow after death. Accounts of this urban legend have been going around as far back as 1929 when writer Erich Remarque described the process:
“It strikes me that these nails will continue to grow like lean fantastic cellar-plants long after Kemmerich breathes no more. I see the picture before me. They twist themselves into corkscrews and grow and grow, and with them the hair on the decaying skull, just like grass in a good soil, just like grass, how can it be possible?”—from All Quiet on the Western Front
The Stages Of Death
Once someone dies, their body stops supplying oxygen to the cells in their body. Without oxygen, your body stops producing glucose, which is the “food” cells rely on. This is where some of the pseudo-science for this myth comes from. People know that nails and hair are made of dead tissue and that after death, there’s a surplus of the stuff.
While it is true that your hair and nails are composed of lifeless keratin, the process to make them requires activity from the germinal matrix, which produces the keratin. Without life, the matrix cannot produce any more nail. The same goes for hair, which is also made from non-living keratin and is produced by a living matrix.
The matrix requires blood to produce the keratin.
That said, there is some room for technicality here. After brain activity ceases—and a person is declared dead—it can take several minutes for the rest of the cells in the body to die. Nerve cells die the quickest—in just 7 minutes—but other cellular processes do carry on. If you take the average nail and hair growth of a person in a day, about 0.1 millimeters for nails and 0.5 millimeters for hair, then adjust for old age—hair and nail growth slows with age—you could figure that the hair and nails of a deceased person grow about 3 micrometers. For reference, a single human hair is usually 100 micrometers thick.
The Myth
So if we know hair and nails can’t grow without living structures to produce them, why do people think they do? While your cells die and the decomposition process begins, one of the first thing that starts to happen is dehydration. Without the ability to maintain tissue maintenance, the water evaporates from your body, drying out your skin. As your body dries, it shrinks, all except for that keratin protein that was dry already. So instead of your nails growing out, the skin on your fingers is actually pulling in, leaving more hard nail exposed. The same is true for your hair.
Morticians sometimes have to apply large amounts of moisturizing cream to human bodies to keep this from becoming obvious even just days after death. Men with beards, especially require ample moisture to keep the shrinkage at a minimum. Keeping this in mind, it’s easy to imagine early and isolated communities opening recently dug graves to see shrunken faces with long beards and nails, and think something sinister and supernatural could be afoot!
Society of the Supernatural Comes to Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Believe it or not, we’re inviting paranormal researchers from the Society of the Supernatural to our Odditorium in Ocean City, Maryland!
On October 21st you can meet the experienced investigators one-on-one as they reveal some terrifying findings of previous investigations they’ve conducted at our Odditoriums. The Society of the Supernatural has completed extensive research since 1986! They’ve investigated places like Lucedio Monastery in northern Italy and Monroe House in Hartford City, Indiana.
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to investigate the unknown? Then you won’t want to miss your opportunity to ask these experts your questions. Not only will the team be sharing their experiences, but they will also be hosting a meet-and-greet and book signing. Join us as they investigate our Ocean City Odditorium yet again. We promise you, you won’t want to miss it. Supernatural fans, if you’re unable to make it, don’t worry! You can view a live streaming of the SOS investigation on their YouTube Channel.
Members of the Society of the Supernatural
Have you Heard of these other 4 supernatural places?
1. La Isla de las Muñecas
Here at Ripley’s, we’ve encountered some strange and bizarre places such as La Isla de las Muñecas (Island of The Dolls). The abandoned island embellished with hundreds of decaying dolls—some decapitated, others amputated—is located just south of Mexico City. According to legend, around 1950 Don Julian Santana abandoned his wife and child to live reclusively on Teshuilo Lake in the Xochimilco canals. Upon his arrival, he found a young girl that drowned accompanied by her floating doll.
CC Wa17gs via Wikimedia Commons
To honor her spirit, Santana began to transform the island into a shrine, collecting hundreds of dolls from the canals around him as well as in the trash for 50 years. Eventually, word got out, and people began to flock to the island, and for a small price, he began showing visitors his land.
Maybe the Society of the Supernatural will give this island an investigation? We sure hope so!
2. The Winchester Mystery House
For 38 years, Sarah Winchester dedicated her life to building the Winchester Mystery House, a humble abode for the many spirits that haunted her.
The Winchester Mystery House is a home where stairs end abruptly at the ceilings, doors open onto brick walls, and glittered stained glass windows are adorned with spider web designs. Sarah held séances every night at midnight so the spirits could tell her what to build next!
The door that leads to nowhere. CC Spiel via Wikimedia Commons
3. The Waverly Hills
The Waverly Hills Sanatorium is the kind of place nightmares are made of, or so people say…The Waverly Hills Sanatorium continues to garner so much attention due to the paranormal manifestations people have claimed to have witnessed and felt. One of the most haunted places? The body chute. People say they see apparitions, shadows that seem to guard and haunt the tunnels, and, specifically, doctors opening and draining their patients. Yikes!
A hallway in the hospital with water on the floor at Waverly Hills Sanatorium. CC Lwp Kommunikáció
4. Russel House Hostilary
The Ripley’s Odditorium in Key West, Florida occupies what was once known as the Russel House Hostilary. In the 1800s, a well-known newsman was slain by a baker. Officially, a judge resolved the case by asserting the baker had died, but the baker actually escaped to South America. Ripley’s has since heard many tales of paranormal activity in the old hostilary and though Ripley’s cannot verify these accounts of paranormal activity, you can read the accounts we’ve heard below.
Let us know in the comments below if you’ve visited any of these creepy destinations!
Source: Society of the Supernatural Comes to Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
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