Halloween 2013: Urban Legend Week: The Mothman

~by Marie Robinson

The legend of the Mothman starts where all great stories should: in a cemetery. On November 12th, 1966 five gravediggers in West Virginia saw a large, humanoid figure flying low to the ground. This was the first sighting of the mysterious creature now known as The Mothman. 

The Mothman is usually depicted as a man-sized creature with enormous white wings and glowing red eyes. Shortly after the first sighting, a startling number of people in the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Nearly a year 46 people died due to the sudden collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant. There’s a theory that the Mothman was an omen of the disaster, or perhaps even the cause of it. In 1975 author John Keel wrote The Mothman Prophecies, which is his own theories on the Mothman sightings and the Silver Bridge tragedy, suggesting that the Mothman is from outer space.

The Mothman Prophecies

The book was the inspiration for the 2002 film of the same name directed by Mark Pellington. Richard Gere stars as journalist John Klein who begins an investigation of the Mothman after encountering the creature in a car accident that resulted in the death of his wife (Debra Messing).

The Mothman has made appearances on televisions shows such as Syfy’s Unexplained Files, X-Testers, The Lost Tapes, and even an episode of The X-Files. Syfy also had an original movie titled Mothman in 2010, in which the legend, himself, targets a group of friends who accidentally murdered one of their own while exploring the Point Pleasant mythical monster as teens. The Mothman has also been the subject of two documentary pieces, both released in 2011—Eyes of the Mothman and Mothman Country.

As far as non-fiction literature goes, John Keel wrote another book about the Mothman entitled The Eighth Tower, which further explores his radical ideas of the paranormal. Other authors such as Loren Coleman (Mothman and Other Curious Encounters), Gray Barker (The Silver Bridge), Andrew Colvin (The Mothman’s Photographer), Donnie Sergent Jr. (Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend), and even more have explored the “truth” behind the foreboding cryptid. Point Pleasant by Jen Archer Wood, Dark Wings by John J. Rust, and Perverted Communion by Steve Ressel are all examples of novelizations based on the legend of the Mothman.

Point Pleasant has come to embrace their macabre legend; they have a 12-foot stainless steel statue of the beast, a museum, and an annual festival named after the Mothman.

The UK has its own sort of version the Mothman, called the Owlman. However, the first sighting of this winged creature was first seen in 1976, ten years after the original Mothman sighting, therefore solidifying Mothman’s status as O.G.

Halloween 2013: Urban Legend Week: Spider Tales

Here's one that will keep you awake at night.  Imagine if you will, you are lying in bed when you think you feel something crawl across your cheek. Quickly your hand moves up to brush the offending bug away and you notice it's a spider.  After your obligatory freak-out and squashing of the offending arachnid, you settle back under the covers and try not to have a nightmare about the eight-legged freak.

In the morning, you notice a red spot on your cheek.  Hmm, did the spider bite you?  You go to a doctor and he says never fear, it's a tiny bite but it looks fine and you will survive.  Much to your chagrin however, the red spot grows bigger, into a lump. Several days pass as the lump grows bigger and more painful and it eventually sends you back to the doctor.  He decides to lance the offensive boil, and in the process the lump breaks open and hundreds of tiny spiders burst out. Gah!!

The spider bite  is an urban legend that found its way into folklore sometime around the 60's or 70's, and various versions are whispered at slumber parties and around campfires even today.  Sometimes it's a girl on a foreign beach who doesn't even realize she's been bitten until what she thinks is a pimple bursts forth with spider offspring. In other tales the girl with the "zit" is in the bathtub and the warm water and moist atmosphere cause the spider babies to erupt from their temporary nest.

Another intriguing (and disturbing) urban legend about spiders involves a woman who liked to wear her hair up in a bun.  It was a low-maintenance do and all she had to do was spray it with hairspray and away she'd go.  (Similar legends are told about dreadlocks). One day she noticed her hair was extra itchy and continued like that for several days.  She just kept adding hairspray to keep it under control and decided she'd take it down and wash it at the end of the week.  Unfortunately, her roommate found her dead in bed on Thursday, and when an autopsy was performed, they found hundreds of baby spiders had eaten into her brain.

Horror films always depict spiders as the enemy. The film Arachnophobia was one such movie, taking a spider from South America and mating it with an ordinary house spider to produce a deadly variation. These spiders end up in football helmets, slippers, popcorn, cereal boxes, even the shower to wreak havoc on a small community. 

In sticking to the original tale of spiders crawling out of a wound in the skin, I've found three lovely film clips for your enjoyment.  If you are a major arachnophobe, I'd consider skipping these videos.

In the film The Believers, we are subjected to probably one of the most frightening scenes of horror involving spiders ever. In this voodoo creep-fest starring Martin Sheen, a woman races around her apartment, a huge boil pulsating on her face. You know it isn't going to end well, and it certainly doesn't. Tiny spiders eventually burst out of the ruptured sore. And you know you're never going to sleep that night after watching it.
Did you think you wouldn't have to see it? Come on, you know me better than that: 



Also appallingly distressing is the scene from Urban Legends 3:Bloody Mary (2005), in which the same horrifying incident happens, this one perhaps a little closer to the legend and not so much connected to voodoo.  A young woman decides to pop a zit, with shocking (and outrageous) consequences.
If you can take it, here it is: 



And I've got one more for you.  In this scene from The Mist, the group of survivors head to the pharmacy adjacent to their grocery store refuge for some medical supplies when they are transfixed by a gigantic web formation, and are horrified to find some of their friends ensnared in the webs.  But it doesn't end at that...



And I think I'll just leave it at that...

Halloween 2013: Urban Legend Week: The Doppelgänger

"Der Doppelganger" by Cathy Lê Thanh

~by Marie Robinson

Have you ever had someone say to you, “I saw this person the other day that looked JUST like you!”? Or thought they’d seen you somewhere when you weren’t there? My beloved Germans have a word for this—they call it a doppelgänger. Doppelgänger translates to “double-walker” and is most commonly described as being an identical version of someone, like a twin. In folklore, doppelgängers are often believed to be bad luck, and if you see your own it is an omen of death.

Interestingly enough, there are several historical records of deadly doppelgängers. Percy Shelley, husband to Mary Shelley, once wrote of doppelgängers in his 1820 drama Prometheus Unbound. “The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, / Met his own image walking in the garden.” Two years later, Shelley drowned soon after telling his wife that he and others and seen his double. One of my favorite German writers, Goethe, wrote of seeing his doppelgänger in the attire he would wear eight years later as he rode on his last visit to his lover. Even Abraham Lincoln claimed to have seen his double beside his own reflected face in the mirror.

Rhys Wakefield in "+1"

+1 (a.k.a. Plus One) is a 2013 thriller from director Dennis Iliadis (of the 2009 remake of The Last House on the Left) that plays with the idea of doubles. In his film, David (Rhys Wakefield, The Purge) and his friends attend an epic party that turns a bit strange when it is invaded by a second of version of everyone. The only difference is that the doppelgängers act as if the previous 45 minutes have not occurred, running on the same track unless someone interferes, allowing second chances and ensuing mass confusion and carnage.

Another example in film is the 2006 After Dark Horrorfest film The Abandoned. Anastasia Hille stars as Marie, who must return to her homeland of Russia and visit the home of her natural born family. It is there in that haunted place she learns of her family’s dark past and is faced with several deadly doppelgängers.

Alfred Hitchcock loves to play with this theme, more creatively and indirectly. He frequently uses double images of people in his films to signify something about their character, such as split personalities. The best example in my opinion is in Vertigo, where Judy becomes transformed into Madeleine.

An episode of The Twilight Zone entitled, “Mirror Image” a woman in a train station is terrified as she is faced with her double who is waiting for the same train.

TZ's "Mirror Image"

The doppelgänger has made plenty of appearances in literature. Edgar Allan Poe wrote of one in his story “William Wilson”. Other horror writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell (The Poor Clare) and Henry James (“The Jolly Corner”) have also told tales of the ominous double-walker.

Even more esteemed authors, such as Joseph Conrad (“The Secret Sharer”) and Dostoevsky (The Double) have written about the legend.

Whatever incarnation it appears in, there is no doubt that the tale of the doppelgänger is both intriguing and haunting.

Halloween 2013: Urban Legend Week: The Haunted Painting

"The Hands Resist Him"

~by Marie Robinson

Art in its painted medium is one of the oldest and more honest forms of expression. It requires the blood, sweat, and tears of the creator, so it’s easy to imagine that some of the artist is left behind once the painting is finished. How much power does a painting hold?

Have you ever found yourself unsettled by a portrait? The eyes of the subject may seem to follow you as you pass, their gaze may feel a little too real. A particular urban legend takes the unearthliness of a certain piece of art and taking it to the next level—a haunted painting.

There are two such real-life examples I am familiar with. The first concerns a painting by artist Bill Stoneham originally done in 1972. The painting, called The Hands Resist Him, features two figures standing in front of a glass door. The two figures are a young boy and a life-size doll with a dry cell battery and a stringy mass of wires clenched in her hands. Pressed against the glass door behind them are a dozen disembodied hands. To be honest, the piece is pretty creepy on its own, even without being dubbed, “the eBay Haunted Painting”.

The legend starts with the painting being purchased by actor John Marley (The Godfather). After his death the painting was found by a couple in an old brewery. The couple later decides to sell the painting on eBay, claiming that the artwork is cursed. In their product description the couple goes on to tell that the characters in the haunted painting moved about at night, and sometimes even stepped out of the frame into the room. People claimed that they felt sick or uncomfortable when they viewed the painting and eventually sold for $1,025. Nothing strange was reported after that.

"The Crying Boy"

Another “haunted” painting is actually a series of different versions of pieces by artist Bruno Amadio that are all recognized as The Crying Boy. The legend of the paintings being cursed comes from a British reporter claiming that copies of The Crying Boy  were often found at the sites of burned houses, the painting remaining unscathed by the flames. He went on to write of fires of people who owned a copy of the painting in their home. The rumor became so believed that readers of The Sun would send in their copy of the painting to be included in mass bonfires.

The 2007 Vietnamese horror film Muoi: The Legend of a Portrait is about Yun-hee (Jo An), a writer who is looking for the topic of her next book. She discovers the legend of a girl named Muoi who was betrayed in life and murdered. Now her vengeful spirit haunts her portrait. As Yun-hee delves deeper and deeper into the legend, she finds the story bleeding into her own life.

Dorian Gray

Perhaps the most famous example of a haunted portrait is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Although it has been made into dozens of adaptations, the basic Faustian core of the story always remains the same. A young and beautiful man, Dorian Gray, has his portrait painted by the artist Basil Hallward. Convinced that beauty and indulgence are the only things worth living for, Gray sells his soul so that the picture may age while he remains young. The first film adaptation of Dorian Gray dates back to 1910, the most recent being the 2009 film by Oliver Parker (who has acted in a few of Clive Barker’s films), starring Ben Barnes, Colin Firth, and Rebecca Hall.

And we mustn’t forget about Ghostbusters II (1989), which involves the haunted painting of Vigo the Carpathian, who possesses Dr. Janosz Poha (Peter MacNicol) so that he may obtain Dana’s (Sigourney Weaver) baby and regain life.

So next time you stop by your local art gallery, look a little deeper into the eyes of a portrait and see if someone stares back out at you.

Halloween 2013: Urban Legend Week : The Legend Of Cropsey

 Cropsey is a distinctive urban legend that comes from the state of New York and is more or less a cautionary tale of a boogeyman that haunts the Hudson Valley and Staten Island area.  The name became synonymous with murderer for all intents and purposes and has been the cause of many a night's lost sleep, I'm sure.

 Parents warned children about a maniacal killer that preys upon children - and perhaps it was all just conjecture and fiction - but it grew to be such an infamous story that even the true story of a real-life child killer became intertwined with the legend.

The Staten Island killer Andre Rand was convicted back in 1988 of the kidnapping of Jennifer Schweiger. It's unfortunate that the jury was not able to find him guilty of the girl's murder, as he most certainly was the killer. He'd already been arrested previously for sexual assault and been accused of rape and other sexually deviant behavior.

Schweiger was not his only victim, as several girls went missing in the Staten Island area over the course of several years, but she may have been the most recognized casualty of Rand's demented tenure. She went out for a walk and when she didn't come home, the young girl (who had Down syndrome) became the center of a search party that lasted 35 days before they found her body in a shallow grave.

Rand worked as a janitor at the infamous Willowbrook State School (where Geraldo Rivera did a damning expose about the horrific conditions at the school for the mentally challenged), and after the school was closed Rand was known to have been prowling in the surrounding woods, which surely added to his macabre legacy.  It's easy to see why his name became associated with the Cropsey legend, as he was as close to a true monster as you can get.

In 2009, a documentary entitled (aptly) Cropsey, Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio brought the story of the urban legend to life, linking it with the real-life murderer Rand.  The film is seriously one of the most interesting documentaries I've seen, and just watching the writer/directors tramp around the Staten Island area and Willowbrook is enough to creep me out more than most horror films. 

Perhaps bizarrely, the 1981 genre film The Burning   takes the legend of Cropsey (pre-Andre Rand) and runs with it, making the urban legend that was told around campfires and at slumber parties come to life.  In it, a summer camp caretaker named Cropsy is the victim of a kid's prank gone bad.  The young campers place a skull lit with candles beside Cropsy's bed, and upon waking he knocks it over in fear, lighting his sheets and bedspread on fire.  Furthering the flames, he accidentally knocks over a gas tank and the entire cabin engulfs.

Witnessing this horror are the campers, realizing the prank has gone completely awry.  They watch in shock as Cropsy makes his way out of the cabin and falls into the river. Naturally, as is the case in most of these movies, our villain isn't dead. He reemerges five years later with vengeance on the mind and garden shears in his hands. He heads straight to Camp Stonewater, close by to the scene of the years-ago crime to take his revenge against the sexually repressed (and some not so repressed!) teens that disfigured him and made his life a living hell. 

What is most scary I think, about the legend of Cropsey, is that most cities (and suburbia as well) has some kind of disconcerting tale about a murderer, child molester, pervert, etc. that menaces their town. Most of these people are seemingly normal until the shit hits the fan.  Think of the small mid-west town of Plainfield. Do you think anyone knew that Ed Gein was digging up graves and making furniture out of his murder victims? No. And that is what is so disturbing.  Gein himself was significant in his own right, being a strong influence to folks like Robert Bloch (author of Psycho), Thomas Harris (author of The Silence of the Lambs) and Tobe Hooper - who gave us The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  All of which starred small town, ostensibly normal folks who became legends. And in Cropsey's case, the truth (in this case the horrifying Rand case) is truly more frightening than fiction.

Halloween 2013: Urban Legend Week : The Wild Hunt

~by Marie Robinson

Imagine it’s a crisp, autumn night—which hopefully isn’t so hard to imagine. An uneasy feeling comes over you and is personified by the frantic baying of dogs, distantly, at first, but drawing nearer. Soon, the air is ringing with their howls and accompanied by the beating of hooves. Take that as your warning to hurry inside, for if you lay your eyes on the spectral procession sure to occur, you won’t last the night.

The legend of the Wild Hunt has its roots in Norse mythology but versions of it occur all through Europe. It is a ghostly troupe of dead men, atop their horses with a pack of dogs racing alongside them, which appears flying overhead. Several historical figures have been said to ride out the Wild Hunt, and they are always lead by a “Huntsman”, who has been assigned as several different characters as well; sometimes as the Norse god Odin, and other times the Devil, himself. And as I mentioned before, if you witness the hunters swooping through the sky, you’ll perish and be forced to join them.

The Wild Hunt was featured in an issue of
 Mike Mignolia's Hellboy comics

It’s no surprise such a rich myth has inspired an abundance of artists to incorporate the legend into their various mediums. Film, for example.

The 2011 British found-footage film A Night in the Woods draws heavily from this myth. Brody (Scoot McNairy) has planned a camping trip for himself and his girlfriend, Kerry (Anna Skellern), in Dartmoor. Specifically, the Oakwood forest of Wistman’s Wood, an area so swirling with folkloric mystery it’s very name translates to “eerie” and “haunted”. Wistman’s Wood is a famous location of the Wild Hunt. Stopping in at a pub on the way to the forest, the couple (and their third wheel, Leo, played by Andrew Hawley) are warned by locals of the danger of staying in the Wood at night. They tell cautionary tales of a demon huntsman who marks sinners with a cross and hangs them from the moss-carpeted oaks. The trio dismisses it as old wives’ tales but when night falls in the woods, Kerry finds herself being stalked. Is it just one of the boys playing a cruel prank on her, or is it the Huntsman?

The Wild Hunt also appears in a number of role-playing games in a number of mediums, such as Magic: The Gathering (trading card game), Dungeons & Dragons, the Elder Scrolls games for Xbox and PC, and many others. Speaking of role-playing games…

The 2009 Canadian horror film The Wild Hunt concerns a group of passionate LARP-ers (that stands for Live Action Role Playing) who have built a miniature medieval kingdom out in the woods. There they have gathered to stage the Wild Hunt, but the line between fantasy and reality is crossed with a savage outcome.

The world of literature has produced its own fair amount of stories inspired by this myth. William Butler Yeats, a man who, like myself, shared a passion for folklore describes a Celtic version of the Wild Hunt in verse in his poem, “The Hosting of the Sidhe”, invokes characters from Gaelic folklore Niamh (pronounced neev) and Caoilte (keel-cha). Read it below:

"Åsgårdsreien" (1872) by Peter Nicolai Arbo

The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare;
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving our eyes are agleam,
Our arms are waving our lips are apart;
And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.
The host is rushing 'twixt night and day,
And where is there hope or deed as fair?
                                                                                               Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
                                                                                               And Niamh calling Away, come away.

Halloween 2013: Urban Legend Week: THE HOOK

Welcome to Urban Legends Week here on FWF!

 Marie and I are utterly fascinated by these tales that we have all grown up with, be it the story about the dreaded ghostly hitchhiker or the legend of the drugged-out babysitter who puts the baby in the oven instead of the turkey.  These tales have all been passed down from generation to generation, some of which you will swear are true! After all, didn't you hear it from a friend of a friend? Or around the campfire at summer camp? Or at that slumber party you went to with your sister?

There is a comfy little niche in American folklore that these urban tales fit into, and whether or not you believe they actually happened (because some of them you'll swear are true) is part of the stigma of the legends in the first place.  And the horror genre has taken many of these stories and turned them into feature-length films. That is where our focus lies here, on the movies that are directly related to urban legends.

First up, one of the most familiar urban legends known. The Hook.

The story goes like this: A boy and his girl are out parking late at night in a remote location. They are just starting to get busy when the music on the radio stops and a radio announcer comes on with a desperate warning about an escaped convict from a local asylum possibly being in the area. His most distinguishing feature is the fact that he has a hook for a hand.  Naturally the girl freaks out and wants to go home, and despite many kisses and much urging to stay, the boy reluctantly takes the girl home. Upon dropping her off, she gets out of the car and starts screaming. When the boy runs to her side of the car what does he see?  A bloody hook dangling from the door handle! 

There are a lot of adaptations with this story, one of which also involves a couple parking and an escaped, hook-handed lunatic on the prowl, only this time the car won't start and the boy decides to go for help. While waiting, the girl hears a tree branch scraping along the roof, back and forth...back and forth... until she has been waiting so long she begins to worry. She gets out of the car and to her horror discovers her boyfriend hanging from a tree, gutted like a fish by said hook. It's his shoes that make the scraping noise on the roof. 

Whatever incarnation you may have heard, one thing is clear: the villain is demented man with a hook for a hand. When we look to horror films to find the story of the hook-handed murderer, we needn't look too far.

 In the 1997 film, I Know What You Did Last Summer, a group of teens are menaced by a vengeful fisherman in a dark slicker with a hook for a weapon.  While he does not have the hook for a hand, another film puts a more literal spin on the urban legend: Candyman. 

Candyman moves the hook-handed antagonist out of back-roads suburbia and into the land of urban decay. Clive Barker weaves an entire twisted story around our anti-hero, making Candyman the victim of a horrible crime of bigotry and racial violence.  Candyman grew up the son of a former slave who had made his fortune and by all accounts was an aspiring painter with a bright future. But money and societal privilege meant nothing when he got a rich white man's daughter pregnant. The girl's father and his friends tortured Candyman, cutting off his painting hand and shoving a hook in its place. They then covered him in honey and set forth hundreds of bees to sting him to death. Not a pleasant end. And a perfect reason to come back from the dead for bloody revenge. 

The kills in Candyman are gut-wrenching, as for most he just rips his hook through the victim's innards and takes care of business quickly.  The bloody stump from which the hook protrudes is the stuff of nightmares, and its easy to see where Barker possibly got his inspiration...the legend of the hook-man, realized in film.

But let's remember we don't even have to stay in the horror genre to have a hook-handed villain. In J.M. Barrie's 1911 novel, Peter Pan: or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, we have ourselves a scoundrel of the highest proportions, one Captain Hook.  A terrible pirate who lost his hand to a crocodile and replaced it with a frightful hook. And to think that story was written for children!  But to this day, many a Halloween Costume turns out to be within the pirate theme, complete with that nasty hook.

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events book series also has a hook-handed villain named Fernald, albeit he is missing both his hands and has hooks to replace them. So it's obvious that the hook-handed villains have been around a very long time.

On a side note, Candyman very efficiently uses yet another urban legend, the tale of Bloody Mary, in which a ghost will appear in a mirror if its name is said the required amount of times. In Candyman's case, it is five. Say his name five times and he will appear behind you in the mirror, his bloody stump at hand (sorry, couldn't resist).