Poveglia: Island of Terror
Poveglia is a small island located between Venice and Lido in the Venetian Lagoon, northern Italy. A small canal divides the island into two parts. It is absolutely off-limits to visitors and while some tourists make attempts to visit from time to time, most locals refuse to take them to the island. The island first came to be referenced in chronicles in 421 AD, when people from Padua and Este fled there to escape the barbaric invasions. In the 9th century the island started to be intensely populated, and in the following centuries its importance grew steadily, until it was governed by a dedicated Podestà.
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Aokigahara: The Sad Sea of Trees
Aokigahara, also known as the Sea of Trees, is a 35 km2 forest that lies at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan. The forest contains a number of rocky, icy caverns, a few of which are popular tourist destinations. The forest, which has a historic association with demons in Japanese mythology, is a popular place for suicides; in 2002, 78 bodies were found, despite numerous signs, in Japanese and English, urging people to reconsider their actions.
Due to the wind-blocking density of the trees, and an absence of wildlife, the forest is known for being eerily quiet.
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Bizarre Feet Appearing Anomaly
Since August 2007, seven disarticulated (i.e. legless) human feet have been discovered in coastal British Columbia, Canada, and an eighth in nearby Washington, United States. The feet belong to five men and one woman, the two left feet having been matched with two of the six right feet. As of August 2008, only one foot has been identified; it is not known to whom the rest of the feet belong. In addition, a hoax “foot” was planted on Vancouver Island. The first foot was discovered on August 20, 2007, on Jedediah Island, by a girl visiting from Washington. The girl found the foot when she picked up a shoe and opened the sock, finding the foot.
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Carl Tanzler: Unrequited Love
Carl Tanzler or sometimes Count Carl von Cosel (February 8, 1877 – July 23, 1952) was a German-born radiologist at the United States Marine Hospital in Key West, Florida who developed a morbid obsession for a young Cuban-American tuberculosis patient, Elena Milagro “Helen” de Hoyos (July 31, 1909 – October 25, 1931), that carried on well after Hoyos died. In 1933, almost two years after her death, Tanzler removed Hoyos’ body from its tomb, and lived with the corpse at his home for seven years until its discovery by Hoyos’ relatives and authorities in 1940.
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The Chase Vault is a burial vault in the cemetery of the Christ Church Parish Church in Oistins, Christ Church, Barbados. It is best known for a series of unexplained incidents in the early 19th century involving the coffins within the vault. Each time when the vault was opened to bury a family member, all coffins but one had changed position. When this had happened several times without explanation over a number of years, the vault was eventually abandoned.
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Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter
The Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter is an alleged close encounter with aliens. But it is not like every other encounter. The Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter is one of the most well documented cases in the history of UFO incidents and it is a chilling tale. There were dozens of eyewitnesses including state troopers, and policemen and was so notorious that it was officially investigated by the US Air Force. The incidents began on the evening of August 21, 1955 and continued through to the dawn of the next morning. The incident occurred mostly around a rural farmhouse at the time belonging to the Sutton family, which was located near the small town of Kelly and the small city of Hopkinsville, both in Christian County, Kentucky, United States.
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Atlantis: The Lost City
The story of Atlantis begins quite literally with two of Plato’s dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. These accounts are the only known written records which refer specifcally to a lost civilization called Atlantis. Many people believe the tale to be complete fiction, the creation of a philosopher’s imagination used to illustrate an argument. Others believe that the story was inspired by catastrophic events which may have destroyed the Minoan civilization on Crete and Thera. Still others maintain that the story is an accurate representation of a long lost and almost completely forgotten land.
While little known during the Middle Ages, the story of Atlantis was rediscovered by Humanists in the Early Modern period. Plato’s description inspired the utopian works of several Renaissance writers, like Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis”. Atlantis inspires today’s literature, from science fiction to comic books to films, its name having become a byword for any and all supposed advanced prehistoric lost civilizations.
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The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious, undeciphered illustrated book. It is thought to have been written in the 15th or 16th century. The author, script, and language of the manuscript remain unknown. Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decrypt any portion of the text).This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax—a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols.
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Wendigo Psychosis: Monstrous Men
The term “Wendigo psychosis” refers to a condition in which sufferers developed an insatiable desire to eat human flesh even when other food sources were readily available, often as a result of prior famine cannibalism; Wendigo psychosis is identified by Western psychologists as a culture-bound syndrome, though members of the aboriginal communities in which it existed believed cases literally involved individuals turning into Wendigos. Such individuals generally recognized these symptoms as meaning that they were turning into Wendigos, and often requested to be executed before they could harm others. The most common response when someone began suffering from Wendigo psychosis was curing attempts by traditional native healers or Western doctors. In the unusual cases when these attempts failed, and the Wendigo began either to threaten those around them or to act violently or anti-socially, they were then generally executed. Cases of Wendigo psychosis, though real, were relatively rare, and it was even rarer for them to actually culminate in the execution of the sufferer.
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[WARNING: Contains graphic images] Sky burial or ritual dissection was once a common funerary practice in Tibet wherein a human corpse is cut in specific locations and placed on a mountaintop, exposing it to the elements or the mahabhuta and animals – especially to birds of prey. In Tibetan the practice is known as jhator, which literally means, “giving alms to the birds.” The majority of Tibetans adhere to Buddhism, which teaches rebirth. There is no need to preserve the body, as it is now an empty vessel. Birds may eat it, or nature may let it decompose. So the function of the sky burial is simply the disposal of the remains. In much of Tibet the ground is too hard and rocky to dig a grave, and with fuel and timber scarce, a sky burial is often more practical than cremation. Sky burial is not considered suitable for children who are less than 18, pregnant women, or those who have died of infectious disease or accident. The origin of sky burial remains largely hidden in Tibetan mystery.
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Cogitz 