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The New England Grimpendium

"A travelogue for those who revel in the glory of their nightmares." —Max Weinstein, Fangoria

"I've read a dozen books about New England ghosties and weirdnesses, and this one is my favorite. It's also one of the few that actually came up with stuff I didn't already know about." —Rick Broussard, Executive Editor, New Hampshire Magazine

Winner of a 2011 Lowell Thomas Silver Award from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation.

Every place has its dark side, but New England’s often seems a few shades darker than most. The region is full of the grim, the gruesome, and the ghastly…and all of it worth visiting for the traveler who dares. The New England Grimpendium catalogs hundreds of macabre sites, attractions, and artifacts, all drawn from the firsthand experiences of J.W. Ocker, who covered 7,000 miles of New England roadway in venturing to these eerie locations.

From a visit to the private collection of a demonologist to a midnight jaunt at an insane asylum cemetery to an overnight stay at a murder scene, Ocker leaves no gravestone unturned in his quest to chronicle the dark heart of New England. This morbid travelogue includes locations connected to legendary personalities of the macabre; infamous crimes and tragedies; horror movies; classic monsters; and notable cemeteries, tombs, and memento mori. So if you find your nightmares a bit undernourished or your day trips a bit too sunny, The New England Grimpendium is the guide for you.

Buy the book.

and visit: HERE

Kindred Spirits: Generosity (1847)

Philanthropy as Politics in Indian Territory

by David Nichols

By a happy coincidence, the scholarly community has just provided a thoughtful, well-researched explanation of a historical anomaly reported in last year's press. In the spring of 2015 the Irish Examiner announced that Alex Pentek was working on a monument to those Cherokees and Choctaws who, in 1847, sent $800 in famine relief to the beleaguered Irish. The monument, a stainless-steel sculpture of nine massive feathers fashioned into a crown, is entitled “Kindred Spirits,” and will adorn Bailic Park in Midleton, Ireland. The Examiner, and other journalists, commented on the exceptional generosity displayed by impoverished, displaced Native Americans who nonetheless gave their mite to help strangers 5,000 miles away. Now, in the latest (Winter 2015) issue of the Journal of the Early Republic,* historian Analise Shrout offers a detailed explanation of these Indian philanthropists' motives.

Drawing on nineteenth-century newspapers, southeastern Indians' correspondence, and theoretical literature, Shrout argues that the 1847 donations reflected the Choctaws' and Cherokees' traditions of generosity. Giving gifts allowed the donors to say, with their money if not their words, “We hold to our traditions; we are still Indian.” Charity also let the world know that the southeastern Indians had recovered their economic self-sufficiency and their ability to act independently of the United States government, whose Indian policy typecast Native peoples as recipients rather than donors of aid. Finally, as Pentek indicates in the title of his sculpture, gift-giving established a bond between distant peoples and identitied them as part of a Trans-Atlantic community of suffering. The Cherokees and Choctaws wanted to remind Euro-Americans that they, like the Irish, were no strangers to hunger and dispossession. In claiming this shared experience, Indians implicitly compared Britain's policy toward the Irish with the United States' policy toward Indians. Suffering always has a cause, and when that cause is human, acknowledging and alleviating that hardship becomes a political act.

Not surprisingly, white journalists who reported on the Choctaws' and Cherokees' generosity missed their implied critique of American imperialism. Indeed, at least one American newspaper, the American Flag, castigated Britain for its anti-Irish imperialism without acknowledging the huge imperial land grab, namely the Mexican War, that Americans were concurrently undertaking. Ironically, the American Flag operated out of the U.S.-occupied city of Matamoros, Mexico, within the new American zone of conquest.

White Americans preferred to focus their attention on the crimes of another empire, and it remained for political outsiders, like the southeastern Indians, to remind us of the aggressions of the “empire of liberty.”

* Shrout, “A 'Voice of Benevolence from the Western Wilderness:' The Politics of Native Philanthropy in the Trans-Mississippi West,” Journal of the Early Republic 35 (Winter 2015), 553-78

skull racks?

Yup, AZTEC SKULL RACKS

An illustration of Skull racks or tzompantli is shown

Skull racks were used to display the heads of sacrificed human victims.

They were called tzompantli in Nahuatl - the language of the Aztecs.

Sometimes this structure was made of stone with carved human skulls.

Those displaying real skulls comprised a wooden framework supporting skulls skewered on horizontal poles run through holes drilled through the temples.

Tzompantlis were first described by Spanish conquistadors and missionary friars in the Sixteenth Century.

The Aztecs used skull racks to display prowess in war; in obtaining captives to be offered up to their gods.

They also used them to terrorize subjugated populations.

At the Great Temple of the Aztecs (their most important temple) archaeologists found a skull rack with at least 240 carved skulls.

They had a layer of stucco and were originally painted in red.

KEEP READING if you dare

say this more

think, decondition, don't believe

“My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.” – Terence McKenna

“It’s clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it’s not easy.” – Terence McKenna

Here’s What Happens When You Color Instead of Watch TV for a Week

read HERE

How did this happen?

In 1639, this island in what is now New York State was settled by a man named Lion Gardiner. The island was made a proprietary colony, granted via a royal decree by Charles I that gave Gardiner “the right to possess the land forever.”

As far as forever goes, that remains to be seen. But the descendants of Lion Gardiner still hold the 3,300-acre island, making Gardiners Island the oldest estate in the United States and the only royal grant from the English Crown still intact in the country.

Over the last 400 years, the island has been embroiled in a series of contemporary flashpoints. In 1657, Gardiner’s first daughter Elizabeth would initiate the first witch hunt in an American colony when, at 15, her accusations of witchcraft led to the arrest and persecution of a farmhand's wife. In 1699, pirate Captain Kidd buried $30,000 worth of treasure—in rubies, diamonds, and bars of silver—on the island. He was kind enough to ask permission to do so but also threatened to murder the family if the treasure wasn’t still there when he returned. Mrs. Gardiner, the island's proprietor at the time, was later ordered to deliver the booty to the court in Boston where Kidd sat trial. It was pretty compelling evidence for piracy—Kidd was executed.

In more recent years, the island has primarily made headlines for its strict no-trespassing policy and a contentious legal battle between two possible heirs. As of now, the island is unilaterally owned by Gardiner-descendant Alexandra Creel Goelet, who intends, predictably, to keep it in the family.

Submitted by Atlas Obscura contributor The Minx.

For more on Gardiners Island, visit Atlas Obscura!