BYE

I'm formally announcing that this shall be the last post on The End of Summer. I opened this blog a million years ago back in July of 2011 (my first post was a review of Insidious, if you're curious) and since then have done my best to provide you with insights on every horror-related thing I could conjure. Now, nearly four years later, I've said everything I have to say and am looking forward to seeing what else may be out there for me to pursue. This blog has allowed me to "meet" a wonderful array of people, some of whom whose contributions to horror cinema I've respected for way longer than I've been blogging for TEOS, whereas other people I've met I now consider to be my friends. 

TEOS itself isn't going anywhere - it will remain upright and fully-stocked for your late night reading; though I did my best to provide you with daily updates of constant oddness, think more of the blog as an archive of the creepy and the morbid for you to scroll through at your midnight leisure. 

For anyone who ever stumbled upon TEOS at random and decided to check in from time to time, I thank you. For anyone who ever bookmarked TEOS with the intention of checking in every day, or "followed" the blog for that same reason, I thank you more. 

If it's midnight, stop by. You never know what you'll find.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ANTONIO BAY

For those who have stuck with me over the years, you know that The End of Summer goes all out every year on April 21st (at midnight) in honor of John Carpenter's The Fog.

Sorry to tell you: I don't have anything planned for this year. Instead, please enjoy one or all of the following celebrations from previous years:

FLIGHT

In 1930s Detroit, a man named Joseph Figlock was to become an amazing figure in a young (and, apparently, incredibly careless) mother’s life. As Figlock was walking down the street, the mother’s baby fell from a high window onto Figlock. The baby’s fall was broken and Figlock and the baby were unharmed. A year later, the same baby fell from the same window, again falling onto Mr. Figlock as he was passing beneath. Once again, both of them survived the event.

FREESTYLE FRED

TAKE YOUR CHILD TO WORK DAY

Run fast.

CRAPPYPASTA: THE THING THAT LIVES IN YOUR MIND

The thing that lives in your mind

A young girl stares at her reflection in the mirror. A voice in her head talks to her slowly, in words she can understand.

“Who are you?” She asks the voice slowly.

“I am your friend.” the voice replies. “I can play with you when you get lonely.”

“But what’s your name?”

“My name? I am the Un-you. I live in everyone.”

“How do you do that?” The little girl asks slowly?

“Would you like to see me?” The voice asked.

“Sure.”

The girls reflection began to move.

 

Run!

Crappypasta.

LUNGE

OLD MIKE

“Old Mike put to rest after 64 years,” the front-page headline in the now-defunct Nevada County Picayune trumpeted after the burial. Even though no one knew Old Mike’s real name or much of anything about him, his burial was big news — it had been a long time coming. Old Mike died Aug. 21, 1911, his death bringing with it notoriety he likely would never have experienced while living. Actually, what happened after he died accounted for his macabre celebrity status.

For 64 years, Old Mike’s embalmed body was on public display at Cornish Mortuary in Prescott, the wizened figure in its glass case becoming a fixture in the Nevada County seat as townspeople and tourists alike gawked and speculated. Some said Old Mike — a name bestowed upon the corpse by the mortuary staff — had been a traveling salesman who hawked pencils and other small items. Others thought he was a man down on his luck, who had been forced into the life of a hobo. Whatever his profession or origin, this man no one really knew was found leaning against an oak tree in the Prescott City Park with nothing on him offering information about who or what he was.

More.

MADAME

"Contemporary sources mention the death of the young slave girl who hurled herself from the roof and confirm the discovery of seven chained and maltreated slaves in quarters near Lalaurie's kitchen, but confirm none of the more lurid allegations regarding buckets of genitalia, makeshift sex-change operations, brains stirred with sticks, women nailed to floors by their intestines, tongues sewn together, mouths stuffed with excrement and stitched up, females flayed to resemble caterpillars, suits of human skin, sliced penises, 'human crabs,' bottles of blood or 'grand gore chambers'; nor do they detail scores of victims, no evidence for which can be traced in accounts published at the time."

 

 Delphine LaLaurie.

THE UNKNOWN LAND

Edmund Blair Leighton (1852-1922): The Unknown Land

THE FIGURE

The house I grew up in was built in the 1880's and my family lived there until 2004 or so. At the time of the first experience(that I'm aware of), I was only about 3 or 4 months old and my parents were in the middle of a kitchen remodel. My dad says he woke up in the middle of the night from a dead sleep and had an overwhelming sensation that someone was in the house. So he grabbed his .357 from his night stand and took our lab and did a perimeter check of the house. Nothing was out of place and everything seemed to be in order. But our dog would not go into our basement. My dad tried pushing him down but it still wouldn't budge. So my dad picked him up and carried him down and soon as he put him down he ran back up the stairs. SO my dad cleared the basement by himself. After realizing everything was fine, he grabbed a drink and decided to go back to bed. As my dad was walking back up the stairs to the second story, he looked up and saw the figure of an elderly man standing at the top of the stairs looking at him. My dad said he was close enough where he tried to grab the figure thinking it was an intruder but it simply vanished. A few weeks after that, my dad had another experience. Again he woke up and felt a presence that had the hairs on his neck standing up. He rolled over and looked through the doorway and saw the same figure staring at him from the hallway. My went to reach for his .357 and when he looked back the figure was gone. He checked the house out for an signs of a break in and could not find anything.

My dad never told my mom about what he had been seeing until my mom had an experience for herself. My dad was gone on a business in Kentucky and she was home alone with me. She woke up in the middle of the night and felt something heavy on the end of the bed. She looked up and saw a figure fitting the same description sitting on the bed looking at her. She quickly turned on the light and the figure was nowhere to be seen. She called my dad panic stricken around 3 in the morning and told him what she had saw. He played it off as a dream and there was nothing to be afraid of. After my dad returned, he told her what he had seen.

We never did figure out what the figure was. My parents have two theories on who the figure might be. One is that it is the original owner of the house not pleased with his house being worked on and the other theory is the figure being my grandfather, who passed away before I was born, checking on his son's first child. After the work was completed the figure was never seen again but every once and awhile you get the feeling like you were being watched. Especially in the basement.

The house is now abandoned and condemned. The local dump bought the house and tried renting the property but had trouble keeping tenants. The next door neighbor who I still deer hunt with said one group of renters said the house was haunted. One winter they did not winterize the house while it was empty and the pipes burst and the basement filled with water. Evidently water was coming out of the basement windows. Now the house is filled with mold and is scheduled to be demolished soon.

Source.

HAUNTED MANSION

CURSE

In 1893, Henry Ziegland ended a relationship with his girlfriend. She didn’t take it so well and ended up killing herself. Her brother blamed him for her death and went to Henry’s house and tried to shoot him. Henry was lucky and the bullet only grazed his cheek and embedded itself inside a tree nearby. In 1913, Henry decided to use dynamite to uproot a tree in his garden. The explosion propelled the embedded bullet from the tree straight into Henry’s head, killing him on the spot.

BUY ME THIS: MICKEY MASKS

FRANKENSTEEP

Get it?

SCREAM

PERMANENT SHADOWS

In Hiroshima, there are permanent shadows caused by the intensity of the blast from the bomb that was dropped. Nuclear bombs emit electromagnetic radiation, which was absorbed by the people or objects that were in front of the radiation. If they were far enough away from the blast, they wouldn’t have been incinerated, but still would have cast a shadow.

Since thermal radiation is light, and since light travels from a central point, everything in its path is burned, except when there is something blocking it, so it creates this shadow effect. The surfaces behind the matter received much less radiation bleaching, so there is a visible difference.

AND THE BAND PLAYED ON

The Nazis were truly sadistic when it came to psychological torture, and they were even able to turn music into a weapon of misery. The moment an inmate arrived at the camp, an orchestra (usually comprised of prisoners) would play obscenely upbeat music, which inmates had to sing and march to as they walked toward their death. The music continued even while people were being gassed; however, even with a full orchestra, they were rarely able to drown out the screaming.The guilt of doing this haunted survivors for decades after the war.

Story and image source.

DEEP DARK FEARS

EMACIATED

Below is not a still from any horror movie, but an actual photograph of a woman who was held captive in her room for 25 years.

Mademoiselle Blanche fell in love with a lawyer (who wasn’t very wealthy) and her mother did not approve. Her mother decided to trap her in a room upstairs. The police got an anonymous letter which led them to Blanche.

Police arrived at the home, forced open the door, and found an emaciated Blanche Monnier lying in a pool of feces and food debris on a bed in an upstairs room. Her head hidden under the covers, the 49-year-old woman, who now weighed a mere 55 pounds, was naked, scared and deranged. She hadn’t seen the sun in 24 years. A witness to the event described how Blanche was discovered:

"We immediately gave the order to open the casement window. This was done with great difficulty, for the old dark-colored curtains fell down in a heavy shower of dust. To open the shutters, it was necessary to remove them from their right hinges. As soon as light entered the room, we noticed, in the back, lying on a bed, her head and body covered by a repulsively filthy blanket, a woman identified as Mademoiselle Blanche Monnier. The unfortunate woman was lying completely naked on a rotten straw mattress. All around her was formed a sort of crust made from excrement, fragments of meat, vegetables, fish, and rotten bread. We also saw oyster shells and bugs running across Mademoiselle Monnier’s bed. The air was so unbreathable, the odor given off by the room was so rank, that it was impossible for us to stay any longer to proceed with our investigation."

Blanche’s mother, Madame Monnier Demarconnay, was arrested the next day and imprisoned at around six o’clock in the evening. Despite the precautions of the police, a surging crowd gathered at the prison with shouts of hatred and revenge. Madame Monnier Demarconnay was immediately placed in the infirmary (she suffered from heart disease) where she unexpectedly died 15 days later. It was said that her last words were spoken to doctors who entered the room just moments before she died. They recalled that she cried out, “Ah, my poor Blanche!”

Her brother, Marcel, stood trial alone, accused of being his mother’s accomplice. The trial opened on October 7, 1901. Four days later, Marcel was found guilty and sentenced to 15 months in prison. The judgment on October 11 raised applause in the courtroom and outside on the Palace Square, the crowd showed their approval, screaming and shouting hostile threats at the convicted man. Marcel immediately appealed the verdict and in a judgment announced on November 20, 1901, the court of appeal found that he had exercised no violence on the woman and hence, he was acquitted and released from jail.

Although Blanche Monnier did put on some weight over time, she never regained her sanity. She died in a Blois psychiatric hospital in 1913, 12 years after she was discovered captive in her room.

IN THE WILD

Taken from the article,"25 Hikers And Backpackers Reveal The Creepiest, Scariest Things They’ve Found In The Wild."

This one gave me the creepiest creeps:

Took my young children to a cave not far from the house. Popular spot, but we had the place to ourselves. You can walk through it in about 30 minutes without too much difficulty. It has a tiny exit at the opposite end. It was pretty muddy, so we decided to turn around and head back to the entrance. Halfway back, there was a lit candle sitting about eight feet up one side. It was definitely not there on the first trip. I went into full-on protective-dad-mode knowing there was likely someone hiding in the dark while we walked the rest of the way out.

Read the rest.

UNKNOWN

This is a picture my late great-grandfather Henry had in a collection of photos he took from an African hunting trip in 1932. According to my dad, who heard the story behind the photo, this animal was said to be about the size of a calf and had a long neck and long, beak-like snout. I showed the picture to a zoologist, who was unable to identify the animal. No one seems to know what it is.

WEAPONIZED ANIMALS OF WWII

Anti-Tank Dogs

Anti-tank dogs were dogs that were taught to carry explosives to tanks, armored vehicles and other military targets. They were intensively trained and developed by Russian military forces from as early as 1930...The intended targets became just tanks and instead of releasing the bombs and running to safety, the dogs would now have fixed bombs attached to them which would detonate as a lever was pushed while crawling under the vehicle. The resulting explosion would kill the dog, effectively making them suicide bombers.

Bat Bombs

At the time, most dwellings in Japan were still made out of wood, bamboo, and paper in the traditional style, and were therefore highly combustible. In 1942, a dental surgeon by the name of Lytle S. Adams considered this potential weakness and contacted the White House with the idea of strapping small explosive devices to bats and dropping them over a wide area. According to the plan, the idea was for millions of bats, specifically the plentiful and easily obtainable Mexican Free-tailed Bat, to parachute toward earth in an egg shaped container carrying small incendiary devices strapped to them. At the designated time, the container would open and the flying mammals would disperse to find their way deep into the attics of barns, homes, and factories, where they would rest until the charges they were carrying exploded.

Pigeon-Guided Missiles

During World War II, the U.S. began developing a missile guidance system under the code name Project Pigeon, which later became known as Project Orcon, for “Organic Control.”... In the plan, the pigeon would ride in a compartment aboard an unpowered, gliding missile as a screen was displayed in front of the bird showing the target. The pigeon would be trained to peck at the target on the touch sensitive screen and the missiles flight control systems would adjust according to where on the screen the pigeon pecked. This was a one way trip for the pigeons but they were seen as cheap, plentiful and fairly easy to train. 

Rat Bombs

The British Special Operation Executive developed a method of delivering explosives that involved the use of dead rats. The rat carcasses were to be filled with plastic explosives and left in targeted locations, namely factories, where it was speculated that stokers tending boilers would dispose of their revolting find in the furnace, thereby detonating the bomb and destroying the factory. 

Read the entire fascinating article.

PAJAMA GIRL

On 1 September, 1934, the badly burnt body of a young woman, viciously battered about the head and wearing only pajamas, was found in a road culvert in the township of Albury on the New South Wales-Victoria border in rural Australia. Although Sydney police reconstructed the dead woman’s features and made composite drawings of what she may have looked like in life, they also took the extraordinary step of preserving the body in a formalin bath. 

During the next decade, tens of thousands of people viewed the ghastly remains at the University of Sydney, and later Sydney police headquarters, before it was positively identified in 1944. When the body was examined, the victim, dressed in canary yellow and white pajamas, was determined to be between 25 and 30 years old. Her head had been protected from fire damage because it was wrapped in a towel, and she had a large laceration on the forehead and a puncture mark - most likely from a small-caliber bullet  - under her right eye. Her skull was fractured on the left side, but it was not until later that a local GP located the bullet with the use of an X-ray. The fact that the woman had been shot was not revealed to the public until the inquest in 1938. 

The dead woman was identified as Linda Agostini and it was her husband, Tony Agostini, who confessed to murdering her by accident. He was found guilty of manslaughter and served three years and nine months in prison.

Story and image source.

CURIOUS

MUMMY MIA!

Instead of decomposing normally, bodies buried in the tombs beneath the cathedral in Venzone, Italy were perfectly preserved and still recognizable even after many decades. Townspeople periodically retrieved and commune dwith their dead loved ones. In modern times, scientists finally traced the source of this wonder to Hypha tombicina, a microscopic, parasitic fungus that rapidly dehydrates the bodies before decomposition can even begin.

THAT'S ONE PROACTIVE GRANDMA

Sorry!

HE SMILED AT ME!

“What’s one less person on the face of the earth, anyway?”

BOOGEYMAN

AUDITORY HALLUCINATION

This is designed to provide the listener with some understanding of what it might be like to experience auditory hallucinations. Content in this presentation is based on things our clients tell us they hear through my experience as a mental health outreach worker.

ELEVATOR

In the apartment complex where I now live, there’s a story about a girl who lived in one of the buildings. She lived on the 7th floor and used to go home late, because she was working on her thesis and her school was a bit far from her place. The story goes that every time she would take the elevator, it would stall on the 4th floor. The slide doors wouldn’t open or anything, but there’d be this feeling of pressure on the elevator, as if someone would step in and join her.

Do you know the feeling of having someone stand next to you and stare at you, even though you couldn’t see them? Apparently, this would happen to her each time. In fact, it got so bad that one particular night, she asked her mother if she could wait for her in the lobby and accompany her upstairs. Her mom, of course, agreed.

The girl arrived home later than usual that night, say around, 3am. Thankfully, her mother was at the lobby, waiting for her like she promised. They entered the elevator together, and when the elevator paused on the 4th floor, the girl looked to her mother and said, “See what I mean? It always happens!”

The older woman, in an effort to comfort her daughter, wrapped an arm around her shoulder and leaned in, right before whispering, “Do I really look like your mother?”

The next day, they found the slumped form of the girl in the elevator, alone. She was dead. There were no marks on her body, and on her face was a look of pure horror.

DISAPPEARANCE

Little Pauline Picard, aged two, disappeared from her family’s farm in Brittany, France in April 1922. An exhaustive search failed to find her, but several days later, police received news that a little girl who matched Pauline’s description was found wandering in the town of Cherbourg, about 320 kilometers (200 mi) away from the Picard farm. Pauline’s parents arrived to examine the girl and announced that she was indeed their missing Pauline.

A few unusual facts stood out about the otherwise happy reunion. First, the girl did not seem to recognize her parents. Second, she did not respond to them when they spoke to her in their native Breton. Dismissing these peculiarities, Pauline’s parents took her back to the farm, where the neighbors quickly affirmed that she was Pauline, and the whole ordeal seemed to end on a happy note.

About a month later, a neighboring farmer walking near the Picard farm stumbled upon something horrifying: the mutilated and decomposing body of a young girl next to her neatly folded clothes. He alerted the authorities, who arrived at the gruesome scene along with the town’s inhabitants, among them Pauline’s parents. Although the young girl’s face could not be identified, the Picards made an unsettling realization: the folded clothes were exactly what Pauline had been wearing on the day she disappeared.

The area where the remains were found had been searched thoroughly when Pauline first disappeared, which suggested to detectives that someone had placed the body there fairly recently. The case became even more perplexing when the skull of an adult male was discovered next to Pauline’s body, adding a second potential victim to the case.

Early reports from the investigation indicated that there was one possible suspect. A few days prior to the discovery of the body, a middle-aged farmer visited the Picard farm and asked them whether they were sure that the girl from Cherbourg was really Pauline. He then stated “God forgive me, I am guilty,” erupted into hysterical laughter, and was hauled off to an insane asylum.

Even so, a myriad of questions still baffled officials and Pauline’s parents. If the body in the woods was Pauline, as the evidence suggested, then what had happened to her? Was the laughing man the killer? How was the unidentified skull related to Pauline’s murder? And who was the little girl from Cherbourg who had been living with the Picards for a month? It remains unclear whether these questions were ever answered: No definitive records exist of a resolution to this story.

Story source.

SURF BOARD CAM

LOST OASIS

LUNGE

LIKE A ROCK

Pyura chilensis is a creature that not only looks like a rock, but is also completely immobile like one, too. It eats by sucking in water and filtering out micro-organisms. Its blood also produces a rare element called vanadium.

It is born male, but becomes hermaphroditic at puberty. It also reproduces by tossing clouds of sperm and eggs into the surrounding water and hoping they knock together.

Locals of Chile or Peru (where it's found) eat it raw or in stews. They say it tastes “soapy” and "bitter."

MOTHER'S DAY GIFT IDEA

Frog purses!