The cemetery Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh, Scotland, was established in the 1560s. That has given it plenty of time to gather restless spirits, legends, paranormal sightings, and famous residents. It's the home of the MacKenzie Poltergeist, the supposed spirit of George MacKenzie, whose tomb was broken into in 1999. They say he has wandered the graveyard ever since. The cemetery butts up against a prison to which 1200 would-be revolutionaries were incarcerated in 1679. Only 257 of them came out alive. Even today, visitors to the cemetery report strange phenomena, including attacks by ghosts. But what may surprise you the most is the link between JK Rowling's fantasy world of Harry Potter and Greyfriars Kirkyard. Read all about this haunted cemetery at The Daily Beast. -via Digg
The legend of the werewolf has evolved over centuries, but its genesis is the wolf. Only a couple of hundred years ago, wolves were plentiful in Europe and posed a real danger to the people who lived there. In the rural area of Gévaudan, France, wolves attacked and killed people sporadically for almost 100 years (1674 to 1767), causing the citizenry to live in terror lest they, too, be eaten by a wolf. Over a hundred people were killed and eaten before the horror finally ended (however, many more wolves were killed).
In some places, the terrifying and uncontrollable attacks were explained by accusing people of making deals with the devil in return for being turned into an animal themselves -although why anyone would want to do that is never fully explored. Atlas Obscura has a rundown of the history of wolf attacks and werewolves. Curiously, the same area of France where the Beast of Gévaudan once killed citizens left and right now has a wolf sanctuary where wolves can roam free and protected.
I guess we should be able to recognize Sir Patrick Stewart out and about tonight for the Halloween festivities! He posted this just this afternoon. Wouldn't it be great to run into him at a seafood restaurant dressed like this?
Ready to carve your pumpkin just in time to put it on the porch before the trick or treaters show up? Then perhaps these 14 great geeky pumpkins on Make Us Of can provide you with a good source of inspiration. They have everything from comic book characters to Minecraft creepers to the Death Star blowing up. I'm a particularly big fan of this Guy Fawkes pumpkin that would make any member of Annonymous proud.
Of course, if you aren't much of an artist (I'm not either) then perhaps a V like the one from V is for Vendetta would be a little easier.
After a summer of watermelon and popsicles, today we enter the season of candy holidays: Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Easter (and someday they will figure out how to sell lots of candy for Thanksgiving). For kids, Halloween is all about the candy, since there isn't much about the holiday for them outside of trick-or-treating. But parents worry about that big bag of candy their children will haul home tonight. That many sweets can't be good for a child, right?
Many parents restrict the amount of sugar available to their kids as an ongoing habit, and are tempted to confiscate or ration trick-or-treat candy. But unless your child has an underlying medical condition such as diabetes, a once-a-year binge will cause no lasting damage. And science says that restricting your kids' goodies may make them crave them even more.
This idea isn’t just based on speculation. In a 1999 study, Penn State researchers identified three types of snacks—wheat crackers, cheese fish-shaped crackers, and pretzel fish-shaped crackers—that a group of 4- to 6-year-olds found equally tasty. Then they split the kids into groups and seated them around tables. They allowed all of the kids as many wheat crackers as they wanted but put either the cheese fish-shaped crackers or pretzel fish-shaped crackers in a clear container in the middle of the table and told the kids they couldn’t have them. After several minutes, a bell rang and the groups were each allowed to eat as many of the formerly banned crackers as they wanted in addition to the wheat crackers. The researchers found that the kids talked positively about, asked for, and ate whichever type of cracker they had been denied—far more than the always available wheat crackers. Interestingly, the kids who became most preoccupied with the forbidden crackers were those who had parents who restricted certain foods at home.
Further experiments show that restrictions will even increase a child's desire for treats they don't even particularly like! Of course, any child can excitedly overindulge on trick-or-treat candy and become sick, but that's temporary and they might even learn a lesson. As kids mature, they learn to respect their own limits, but only if they get an occasional chance to test those limits. Read more about the science behind candy craving at Slate.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Few men (or women) in any field of human endeavor rise to become the unequivocal, undisputed, unquestioned "top dog" #1 person in that field. Shakespeare. Babe Ruth. Michael Jordan. Thomas Edison. Fred Astaire. The list is a very short one.
But ask almost anyone on the planet to name a famous magician and take the proverbial "dollars to doughnuts" wager that they'll say "Houdini!" The Houdini legend persists, and indeed, seems to grow larger with each passing year. This fact stems, at least partly, from a hugely popular 1953 film called Houdini starring Tony Curtis. This very successful film was a largely fictional account of the life of the great Houdini (even the fact of the magician's physical appearance was untruthful).
Houdini himself looked nothing like the Greek god-looking Curtis. The magician was actually a squat, fairly severe-looking Jewish fellow. Other facts are ignored or omitted in the movie.
Houdini, in his storied life, was also a moderately successful movie actor (he appeared in several silent shorts) and was also a highly successful airplane pilot -he made the first successful, sustained, powered flight in the continent of Australia. Be that as it may, the legend of Houdini the magician/escapologist lives on, and if Harry Houdini (born Erich Weiss), the most famous magician/escapologist of all time, lives on as legend fodder to each passing generation, his death has become a key part of that legend.
The story runs like this: Houdini was in Montreal, in his dressing room after a show, when a young American student named J. Gordon Whitehead was shown into his dressing room. After they chatted, Whitehead asked Houdini if it was true that punches in his stomach didn't hurt him. Houdini replied in the affirmative, and Whitehead promptly asked if he could punch him in his gut.
If your dog is not going to be a monster for Halloween, she might as well be a badass monster-fighting warrior! Nadine Gilden's pug Pixel is all dressed for Halloween as Michonne from The Walking Dead, complete with her katana and her pet zombies trailing along! Pixel won the Scariest Costume prize at the NYC Pug Meetup Halloween Bash, which happened on the same date as the season premiere of The Walking Dead. Pixel is also a contestant in a photo contest sponsored by Petco.
The art that advertises a movie is crucial to getting people in the theater seats. However, we've all noticed the trend in the past twenty years or so for all movie poster art to combine the same elements in the same order -only the names and faces change. Still, some posters are works of art, and the art of horror can instill a terrible sense of dread that will make people buy movie tickets.
As in all such lists, the choices are subjective. But I think you will enjoy looking at these horror posters. As several posters are usually done for a theatrical release, you may not have seen these at all in a theater near you. And be aware that some are from outside the US, and some contain nudity. See all fifty posters at Film.com. -via mental_floss
College Humor has a set of Google Maps-style directions for negotiating Halloween. The "early childhood" panel shown here is only the first: there are also directions for late childhood (in which you are the older sibling), the teenage years, college, and the adult years. The adult version is my favorite, for more than the obvious reason. It took a real genius to come up with the scheme of putting an empty candy bowl on the porch, since every trick-or-treater will just assume the kids in front of him took all the candy! You can pretend that it was an unintentional slip, but we know better. Check them all out!
We've seen plenty of elaborately carved pumpkins before, but never a set of pumpkins that make up one image so large -or so delightfully geeky as a dinosaur skeletion. It's like a Halloween version of a natural history museum.
October 30th is National Candy Corn Day, as if we didn't have a candy holiday already scheduled for the next day. National Candy Corn Day is a creation of the National Confectioners Association, as a way of reminding everyone to go buy some. In honor of the occasion, Time Newsfeed presents An Oral History of Candy Corn, which they call "the most polarizing confection of them all." I guess that's true, because everyone seems to either love candy corn or despise it. My household goes through tons of it every October, but as soon as it's gone, we don't think about it for another year. Hey, those Halloween shelves in the stores empty out to make room for Christmas candy, after all! -via Digg
Every Halloween needs a dancing skeleton (or more than one). Comedian Nathan Barnatt (previously at Neatorama) dances all over dressed as the bones of a dead man, accompanied by the 2009 song "Dead Man's Bones" by the group Dead Man's Bones. His lanky, creepy moves are just as you'd imagine a skeleton would dance -if that skeleton were a decent dancer! -via Buzzfeed
You might think some of the candy offerings for children available now are unappetizing (cough*Nerds*cough), but imagine finding a Whiz and a Plopp in your trick-or-treat bag! These are just two of the unfortunately-named candies from the past in a gallery at Collectors Weekly. Some are unappetizing, some are racist, and some were packaged to resemble dangerous stuff, like the candy you might mistake for a kitchen-cleaning pad. What were they thinking?
