Movie Review: Insidious

I watched Insidious after having heard about it online. This movie is not for the faint of heart, and it's not for people who don't like being scared.

This movie was written by Leigh Whannel and directed by James Wan who, if you recall, were the same magnificent duo that wrote and directed the original Saw movie. The first one. The good one.

Insidious is about a family that moves into a new house. It's a very real environment, and draws you in, and weird things start happening right away. These things are all in the 'minor poltergeist activity' category at first. Books falling off shelves, doors opening. The action ramps up after the oldest son falls into a coma.

The movie plays a game of steady escalation, where you go from seeing things out of the corner of your eyes to jumping when something runs right in front of you. It does make use of jump scares, which I know annoy some people, but they are never the cheap kind of jump scares- the friend jumping out to scare people. You'll feel the jump scare coming and still jump when something happens- I'm not a noisy movie watcher but I screamed a little a couple of times. There are ghosts, a demon, a medium (and a really creepy scene with the medium in a gas mask), and some really heavy moments just full of dread.

Insidious was, for me, like riding a roller coaster of scares. I was frightened and wanted to stack up in line to do it again.

The Little Light

We've kept a flashlight under the table in our bedroom for a long time. It's one of those monster-sized lights for emergencies and on the top of it is a smaller second light. It had been under that table a long time without incident and then one night we realized the little light was on, casting a pale wash of blue light up the wall in that corner. Slightly creepy but not a big deal and we turned it off. The next night it was on again. And the next. At this point we teased each other that our oldest cat, who had passed away that month at the age of 18, was turning it on. As she wasn't usually allowed in the bedroom we thought she would consider it good fun to spend some of her afterlife in there. The light stopped turning on and things were back to normal.

Some time later our second oldest cat passed away (also 18 by then) and within a few days the light was on. The Rational Human Reaction kicked in at that point. Perhaps it had been on more than we realized and we just hadn't noticed it. Perhaps something had changed and we were bumping the table somehow and not realizing it. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. We discovered it turned on a few more times over the next two weeks and then, again, the light stopped turning on. We laughed nervously to ourselves and blamed it on the deceased kitties. But then things were back to normal.

Last week a third kitty passed away, one who came to us in her old age and didn't have an 18 year history with us. Last night the little light was on again.

Creepy Pasta and You

If you haven't searched the internet for creepy stories, you may not have heard of Creepy Pasta. A brief primer on Creepy Pasta: the term is a bastardization for the word copy and paste (which is often called copy pasta) and refers to, generally, anonymous stories that are shared through copy and paste methods.

Those of you who have trawled for Creepy Pasta know that it is largely hit or miss. Some of them are really creepy and stay in your head for a while. Fortunately, the popular ones tend to be the good ones (as these are the ones people want to share).

The eerie thing about Creepy Pasta is the unsettling feeling like some of it is real. Some of them are urban legends, modified, and it's easy to pick those out. Others, though, make you wonder: Is this a good attempt to scare, or a genuine cry for help?

Cowboys and Aliens?

If you haven't had a chance to see the new movie Cowboys and Aliens yet it is an intriguing excursion into the idea of aliens coming to the 19th century Old West of America. The concept of course makes you begin to wonder, "Were there alien sightings then?"According to Unexplained Mysteries and MSNBC the answer is yes.

"About 6 o'clock this morning the early risers of Aurora (Texas) were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing throughout the country. It was traveling due north and sailed over the public square and when it reached the northern part of town it collided with the tower of Judge Proctor's windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground." Dallas Morning News on April 19, 1897

More via Unexplained Mysteries: Were there UFO Sightings in the Old West?

The Mothman

Driving through West Virginia this weekend I was reminded of the Mothman, mostly because once you hit a local gift shop there is always a stack of books about the legend. We first encountered the legend in the 2002 Richard Gere/Laura Linney movie "The Mothman Prophesies." It's odd that we hadn't heard of it before since we spend a good deal of time in West Virginia, but mostly on the east side and the Mothman incidents were on the west side. If you aren't familiar with the legend, it is about a large, winged creature with red eyes that was seen by multiple witnesses around Point Pleasant, West Virginia back in the 60s for about a year before a significant bridge collapse that killed 46 people. Some theorize that the Mothman came to warn the town of the impending danger.

Mothman Statue (Point Pleasant, WV)

But I told you all that in order to tell you this: my husband invited the Mothman over to our house. Well, alright, that's not exactly how it went but that's how it worked out. A couple of years ago while driving through West Virginia to a conference we were heading through the West Virginia Parkway and saw the sign for Point Pleasant. My husband pointed it out, we laughed and chatted about the Mothman legend, and that was that. I thought.

After the conference we arrived home late on a dreary, drizzly night. We brought in our bags and tossed them on the bed. Shortly after we arrived I heard something fall in the shower. No big deal, I thought. Sometimes just a little shifting and things fall. Then things fell off the shelf in the closet, at the other end of the master bedroom. It had added up to odd at this point but hardly traumatizing so we shook it off. Then the house plunged into darkness as the power shut off. This had all happened within about ten minutes. Alright, I thought, it's raining so... maybe the power lines got wet... or something. This is when my husband turned to me and said, "Honey, I have to tell you something."

What he had to tell me was that after seeing the sign for Point Pleasant he had started thinking it would be really cool to look up on one of those mountains and see the Mothman. In his own mind he began inviting the Mothman to show himself. And then, on the return trip, had taunted the Mothman for not showing himself. Since this is a man who has encountered ghosts and fae and not particularly enjoyed it, I thought this showed a tremendous lack of wisdom on his part.

We tried resetting the power, no dice. We looked out to see that neighbors on all sides still had power. Hmm. We called the power company and the poor dude had to come out in all that rain to get it going again. Having taken care of the practical, I then focused on the spiritual and began praying and sending out divine light. If we did get the Mothman's attention we didn't have it for long. But definitely be careful who you invite over to your house.

The Dark Figure

More true ghost stories.

One night a young man awoke to the sound of mumbling. Opening his eyes he could see a dark figure at the foot of the bed, leaning over him and speaking in some strange language. Although it seemed foreboding he couldn't stop himself from asking, "What?" The figure paused and then started speaking again. The young man sensed that if he focused he might be able to understand the language but that would be A Very Bad Thing. He buried himself under the covers and prayed.

The next morning he told his friend from across the street about the event and the other young man scoffed. The figure came back for two more nights, and on the third night the young man called out, "Go bother my friend! He doesn't believe in you!" The next morning he met his friend who said, "The weirdest thing happened last night. I woke up to hear something, maybe a squirrel, running around above my room counterclockwise three times. What's weird is that it sounded like it was in the attic, not on the roof, but then it shouldn't have been able to get out onto the eaves and I definitely heard scratching out there."

The friend continued to hear strange noises until he moved out after high school.

Sue London is a writer, blogger, and doodlist who has two ghosts hanging out in her house. She thinks she picked them up at Disney's Haunted Mansion. Her "True Stories" are either personal or related to her by friends and family members over the years. Check out what she's up to by visiting her Sueniverse.

R is for Reptilians

We live in the so called 'enlightened' era. It's the 21st century now and we are just a few short steps away from putting a man on Mars. We're looking at travelling to other stars or, at the very least, at finding better and clearer ways ways to look at them so it may come as a surprise to some of you to learn that, in this 'enlightened' age, there remains a contingent of the human population who actually believe that our planet is infested with alien creatures known as reptilians

According to David Icke, the creator of the reptilian legend, these reptilians came to us from the constellation of 'Draco'. It is not said exactly which star in this system they originated from nor how they came to spontaneously exist as a unified race over such a gargantuan area but it is told that, at some point, they took up residence in a series of tunnels beneath the surface of the earth and have been manipulating mankind since the dawn of civilisation under the auspices of an organisation named the 'Babylonian Brotherhood'. Exactly why and how the reptilians have gone about doing this is unclear. Presumably the reptilians wish to enslave us or perhaps were provide them with a self perpetuating source of tasty snacks. Whatever their motivations the reptilians have pursued them by occupying all the positions of power in our world through interbreeding with humans and, occasionally, eating kittens.

Reptilians conveniently combine all the traits that are so compellingly repulsive in popular mythology. They include elements of the perenially popular dragon and vampire myths and are apparently able to change their shape at will, adding to their fascination and mystique as well as explaining why none of you will have seen anything on CNN about the Earth being invaded by 'lizard people'. They are also conveniently inter-dimensional creatures and capable of deflecting any awkward technical questions by invoking this power which makes them remarkable well suited to politics.

Pundits of the reptilian conspiracy to enslave mankind claim that reptilians have permeated almost every aspect of human society and culture by parasitically inhabiting the forms of a variety of influential people ranging in importance and influence from Queen Elizabeth II to Kris Kristofferson. This may come as a shock to those of you who have seen the movie 'Convoy', I for one will never be able to watch it again without wondering if 'Rubber Duck' was some kind of obscure code-word for the commencement of the Babylonian Brotherhoods' undoubtedly nefarious yet entirely obscure designs for the future of our world.

Jimmy Blonde is a science fiction writer with an understandable interest in UFOs. The only problem is we're never quite sure when he's kidding. He also wonders where all the rum's gone...

W is for Wicca

Wicca is a religion that was developed towards the middle of last century in England, right around when a big spirtualism/medium revival was happening. The word itself came into common usage in the 1960's. While there may be ideas and rituals that date from far previously, the religion itself is relatively young.

There are many many different ways to be Wiccan, there are several different main traditions (which is like a denomination) and of course many covens have their very own tradition. Gardnerian and Alexandrian are two of the very first and are sometimes both referred to as British Traditional Wicca, they both are the two original branches of Wicca. In addition to these there are, of course, many many more traditions.

Wicca is one of those things where the only rule is that there are no rules- there aren't many overreaching Wiccan beliefs, rituals, or teachings. There is the Wiccan Rede, which varies in wording but generally goes something like: If it harm none, do what you will. The interpretation of this can vary from person to person, coven to coven, Tradition to Tradition.

Most Traditions worship both a god and a goddess- sometimes personified by a diety from some ancient pantheon or other, sometimes just the aspects of God and Goddess. There are some Traditions and Covens who put emphasis on one over the other (generally the goddess, as Wicca tends towards women). It's generally a religion about nature and balance.

There are no strict religious texts for Wiccans to follow, there are plenty of directions to go. While there are covens to join, there are also plenty of solo practitioners. It's a modular type of religion that many people can interpret to their own comfort and sensibilities, and it's become a more accepted religion as time goes on.

S is for Slender Man

Slender Man resembles an extremely (inhumanly) tall and thin 'man' who appears to be wearing a suit. Sometimes he appears to have an excessive number of arms, although this varies from sighting to sighting. According to legend (more on this later) he generally targets children, and makes them disappear. He's not opposed to attacking adults and will sometimes leaving their corpses hanging in trees, devoid of internal organs.

He is also, completely, a product of the internet. It's possible to read the very first post Slender Man ever appeared in, and the thread through which his legend grew. MarbleHornets (which I recommend if you really like getting the pants scared off of you) was born in the same thread.

But setting aside all the terrifying fiction, what makes Slender Man really fascinating is that since his inception there are people who have been claiming to see him. Some people believe that this is just people scaring themselves silly, which is possible. However, there are some people who believe that Slender Man may have been willed into being. That enough fear and work and creative energy has gone into him that he actually now exists.

There is definitely something to the Slender Man, he taps into some primal fear that effects nearly everyone. The imagery and stories that go around about him are creepy and dark and scary, and they rarely end well. There's something impressive about an image so powerful that even though he's provably invented, people still claims he's real, and to have seen him.




Photos are courtesy of Victor Surge, who can be found on his Deviant Art with many more Slender Man photos. He may or may not be working on a book about Slender Man.

O is for Ouija

The Ouija Board (also known as a Spirit Board or Talking Board) has it's roots in spirit writing, when the medium and spiritual craze heated up in the late 19th and early 20th century. The planchette originally had two rolling casters and a pencil for a tip, which could be used to inscribe messages by the dead (or a crafty medium). The messages were too long and laborious to write, and sometimes were difficult to read. In other words, they were a crowd killer, and soon the practice of using the planchette this way was dropped in favor of the medium directly channeling the spirit in question.

While there were a few complicated dial based contraptions for contacting the spirits, they were expensive and over-engineered. When someone had the admittedly brilliant idea to put the alphabet on the board and have the planchette point to the letter in question, it was an idea that was both marketable and accessible. While it was generally accepted that anybody could make their own alphabet board, planchettes of all varieties were sold to anybody willing to buy.

You can make your own Ouija board, using a large sheet of paper with the alphabet written on it (adding common phrases for politeness and ease). A glass tumbler of the correct size will work as a planchette, so long as it can be touched by all parties involved and slides easily across the surface of the paper. Parchment or wax paper have very little drag and can be found in most kitchens.

The Ouija board mechanics are simple- everyone places a finger on the planchette, and they ask an agreed upon question. Some groups will do incantations or other exercises first in order to prevent any nasty activity or the wrong entity from 'coming through' on the Ouija board, but mostly people dive right into it. Someone is generally the secretary, and records the questions and the responses, remaining only an observer. Sometimes nothing happens, but there are some hair raising stories about what happens when the spirits get really motivated to answer.

Be careful, though, you never know who might want to talk!

N is for Necronomicon

The Necronomicon, originally titled Kitab al-Azif, is a book of eldritch lore concerning the Elder Gods written in 730 A.D. by the 'Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred while he was in Damascus. The book details the history of the great Old Ones and how they may be summoned. To read the book is to invite madness, because the learning contained within its pages is not meant for human minds, and will drive them insane. The knowledge contained within the Necronomicon's pages will not only drive the reader mad, but will imperil their very life. Alhazared suffered a horrible fate as a result of his temerity in committing the book to paper: reports variously claim he was either seized by an invisible demon in broad daylight and rent to shreds before horrified onlookers (in 731 A.D.), or abducted by the fanatical minions of Hastur the Unspeakable and then tortured, blinded, had his tongue cut out, and finally executed (in 738 A.D.).

Alhazared's original Arabic manuscript appears to have been lost to the mists of time as no known copies appear to remain in existence. The book was translated into Greek in the 10^h century by the Constantinople-based scholar Theodorus Philetas, or into Latin in the 15^th century by the Dominican priest Olaus Wormius (who was later condemned and burned as a heretic), and thus preserved. Even so, the book has been suppressed numerous times as authorities have repeatedly tried to round up and destroy all existent copies. Each attempt has failed. It seems that it was translated into English in the 14th century by John Dee, although it seems that only fragmentary versions of that translation have survived. Though it is possible that other copies are in circulation, it is believed that copies may be held by the British Museum in London, England, The National Library of France, Widener Library of Harvard University, The University of Buenos Aires, and the Miskatonic University Library on Arkham, Massachusetts. These are only rumors, however, as any copies that are located are inevitably either stolen by servants of the dark Elder Gods or destroyed by religious authorities.

Okay, did you get all that? Understand how completely dangerous this book truly is? Good. Because it is all a complete fabrication. The Necronomicon was invented out of whole cloth by H.P. Lovecraft in his 1924 short story The Hound. He later fabricated the history of the Necronomicon in other stories, inventing the Mad Arab Abdul Alharazif, the subsequent translations, the putative locations and so on. This has not prevented fundamentalist preachers, wild-eyed with hysteria, from swearing that the book is a real source of ancient arcane and forbidden knowledge before proclaiming the book to be a dangerous menace to all right-thinking people. Of course, these are often the same people who hold forth the idea that the Harry Potter books are a dangerous gateway to real witchcraft, so one can't take them too seriously. Nevertheless, many people often form the mistaken impression that it is a real book: librarians report getting apparently sincere requests for the book (along with a host of requests in jest), publishers have come out with numerous versions of the book (one of which consisted of ten pages of gibberish repeated over and over again), and a card for it was reportedly snuck into the Yale University card catalogue at least once, although the book was always supposedly listed as being checked out to A. Alharazed. Websites can be found detailing (tongue in cheek) the "real" history of the Neconomicon. The book has lent its name to science fiction, fantasy, and horror conventions, and it  has crept into widespread consciousness in cult films like Army of Darkness, where it was the object of Bruce Campbell's quest.

The Necronomicon was not the only fictional book of dangerous arcane lore that Lovecraft fabricated for his stories. He also created and referenced the nonexistent Book of Eibon, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Cultes des Goules of Comte d'Erlette, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and De Vermis Mysteriis. But none of his other creations captured the public imagination like the Necronomicon. Lovecraft was interested in making his horror stories more effective as tales of terror. To this end, he shared his ideas about his invented mythology, including the Necronomicon with fellow authors like August Derleth and Clark Ashton Smith and invited them to use them in their own fiction and the book's often self-contradictory fictional history stems from the fact that multiple authors used it semi-independently in their own works. Lovecraft understood that horror is enhanced by a shared base of mythological references which is probably a major reason why horror writers always seem to go back to the same ground: Lucifer, demons, angels, vampires, and so on. Lovecraft was cognizant of this fact, and had greater ambitions, which led to his idea of sharing his literary creations in order to give them an existence beyond his own fiction. And, as one can readily see, he succeeded beyond his wildest imagination and the Necronomicon has taken root in popular culture with a life of its own. That doesn't change the fact that it was all made up by a guy from Rhode Island in the early part of the twentieth century.

Aaron is not actually a vampire, but he seems to be up all night every night anyway using all the extra time garnered by not sleeping to review science fiction and fantasy books, movies, and television shows. And role-playing games. You can read his musings on science fiction, fantasy, and pretty much anything else that pops into his slightly twisted mind at Dreaming About Other Worlds.

Lock Up the Children They Might Roll Dice!

Sitting at a table rolling handfuls of polyhedral dice while pretending to be Conan, Aragorn, or Elric is, according to many on the lunatic fringe of religious thinking, a gateway to the occult. Rule books full of esoteric tables of numbers and lists of fictional attributes are, somehow, the very directions to how to summon real demons and use black magic. What I'm talking about here is occult based hysteria, and Dungeons & Dragons.

Back in the 1970s, Gary Gygax and David Arneson, inspired by the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert A. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, and others as well as their own experience playing historical miniatures wargames, created the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. Playing the game involves creating characters detailed by intricate and obscure rules who then set out on adventures, usually with the idea of becoming mighty heroes like the protagonists in the many hundreds of fantasy novels in circulation. Players generally sit around a dining room table for hours with books, maps, dice, piles of paper, and little painted metal figurines, and from the perspective of most observers do almost nothing at all. I've played Dungeons & Dragons for years and I find watching other people play the game to be intensely boring. For someone unfamiliar with the game, watching must be an utterly mystifying experience.

And in the 1980s, this mystification seems to have turned into wild hysteria about Dungeons & Dragons and its links to the occult, most often, with Satanism. In the minds of some people, the fact that Dungeons & Dragons had spell-casting wizards, and the Monster Manual detailed the attributes of demons and devils (as antagonists for the mighty heroes) meant that the game was clearly a recruiting tool for the vast horde of Satanic covens that a particular brand of Christian imagines is to be found plotting their next human sacrifice at the corner drugstore. A sad story about a socially inept young man named Dallas Egbert was sensationally fictionalized by Ronda Jaffe into the 1981 book Mazes and Monsters. This books was later made into a movie by the same name in 1982 (starring Tom Hanks no less), which was so laughably bad that it became a cult hit among actual role-playing gamers. The Dallas story was also milked by unscrupulous private investigator William Dear with his book The Dungeon Master, who touted the connection between Dallas' playing of the game and his suicide nearly a year after he gave it up. Also in 1981, John Coyne put out Hobgoblin, which was inspired very (very, very) slightly by Dallas' experiences.

One of the most prominent purveyors of the connection between Dungeons & Dragons and the occult was Pat Pulling, the founder of the now-defunct Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (B.A.D.D.), an organization of which she was often the sole member. After her son "Bink" killed himself, Pat decided that his love of role-playing games was to blame and unsuccessfully sued anyone she could connect with her son's gaming, and then puffed herself up into an "expert" on gaming and went on a crusade. Along with an impressive laundry list of mundane criminal activity, In her book The Devil's Web, Pulling associated Dungeons & Dragons  with a host of occult practices: demonology, Wicca, voodoo, Satanism, summoning malevolent spirits, necromancy, and Satanic divination (one would think that this would just fall under "Satanic practices", but Pulling seems to have liked to double dip when she made lists). She was also somewhat obsessed with the idea that to play Dungeons & Dragons one would roll three six-sided dice six times to obtain the basic ability scores for a character - making much hay over the fact that a "perfect" ability score was an "18", which could only be obtained by rolling a "6", "6", and "6".  I suppose one should add "Satanic numerology" to the list of practices that Pulling would associate with Dungeons & Dragons. Needless to say, Pulling's grasp on reality was somewhat tenuous - for example, in her public statements she asserted that eight percent of the population of Richmond (where she lived) was engaged in Satanism, stating that she arrived at that figure by adding four percent of the adults and four percent of the children together. One can spot the inherent problem in her assertion immediately, but I have always wondered where she got her four percent figures to begin with. I suspect that the answer is "her own ass", but since she never gave a source, we'll never know.

Given that her own son committed suicide, Pulling was somewhat obsessed with the idea of Dungeons & Dragons causing suicide, a connection which has never been demonstrated.* And if there was a connection, wouldn't that make it a lousy recruiting tool for occultists given that their fresh recruits would apparently be offing themselves in droves? Pulling's claims were systematically exposed as the baseless hysteria that they are in Game Hysteria and the Truth written by Michael J. Stackpole, much of which was later included in a more specific version dealing with Mrs. Pulling titled The Pulling Report.

One of the most famous, and most frequently lampooned, examples of hysteria linking Dungeons & Dragons to the occult is the Jack Chick track Dark Dungeons, of which a thorough analysis can be found on The Escapist website. For anyone not familiar with Jack Chick, he's something of a loon who sees demons lurking behind every door. So it really isn't a wonder that he decided that Dungeons & Dragons is laden with occult dangers, since he pretty much thinks everything (including Santa Claus) is laden with occult dangers. In Chick's version of reality, the main concern is that people who play the Dark Dungeons game (the thinly fictionalized version of Dungeons & Dragons used in the comic strip) will learn "real spells" and practice black magic, or as one of the characters in the comic strip states "I want to learn the real power!" I always wonder why role-playing gamers are such a fringe element if we are supposed to have access to actual spells that work. On the plus side, he did give generations of gamers the catch phrase "No! Not Blackleaf!"

Jack Chick's star pupil William Schnoebelen, who claims in his web article "Straight Talk on Dungeons and Dragons" (no, I won't link to it and give his inanity hits) to have been a "witch high priest" in the 1970s and early 1980s before he saw the light and converted to crazy radical fundamentalist Christianity, and who also claims that TSR employees consulted him and other members of his coven to make sure the spells in the game were "accurate" (whatever that means, given the fact that magic isn't actually real). Now, anyone who has cracked open a Player's Handbook (of any edition) knows just how silly this assertion is. That is, until you read Schoenbelen's explanation that simply saying "I'm invisible" is actually using magic. One wonders why anyone would need to check a coven for accuracy in that case. Anything qualifies as occult magic using that standard, even saying "I'm a pink pony with silver hooves". The occult, it seems, in the minds of people like Schnoebelen, is to be found in common everyday statements. One senses the smell of desperation in his attempts to convince others of the dangers of sitting around and rolling funny shaped dice.

Of course, one has to question Schnoebelen's grasp on reality**, as he repeatedly asserts that the Necronomicon is a real book of occult lore and that the various Elder Gods created by H.P. Lovecraft such as Cthulhu are real as well. I suppose that Schnoebelen thinks that saying "Hastur, Hastur, Hastur" is also going to summon a vast octopoid creature of unspeakable power. Given that just about every adolescent boy who played Dungeons & Dragons did this at least once (and in my case a couple dozen times) one wonders why we don't have numerous giant octopoid sightings on the regular basis. It is somewhat ironic that someone whose ability to differentiate fantasy from reality is so tenuous so frequently characterizes people who don't heed his warnings and still play those evil role-playing games as having a "magical world view". Umm, we aren't the ones saying that you can actually summon demons with game books.

Also highly touted by some organizations trying to draw a connection between Dungeons & Dragons and the occult is a letter written by convicted murderer Darren Molitor in 1985. Lest one think this attempted connection had grown stale, it is prominently displayed on the Logos Communications Consortium website and forms the core of their baleful warnings about the dire evils of Dungeons & Dragons. The Molitor letter is rambling, incoherent, and makes pretty clear that Molitor's obsession with the occult was only very tangentially related to his interest in role-playing games.

One element that stands out in this litany of occult charges laid at the feet of Dungeons & Dragons is just how dated the sources are. Yes, Schoenbelen's ludicrous silliness is sitting on the Jack Chick website today (and he even has a 2001 "response" to questions supposedly sent to him in the years since his original letter about Dungeons & Dragons was posted), but all of his information comes from an experience he supposedly had in the 1970s when he was practicing at three mutually exclusive religions at once. Darren Molitor's letter dates from 1985. Pat Pulling passed away in 1997, and B.A.D.D., which had atrophied from ones of other people down to her as the sole member, died along with her. More importantly, the common thread that runs through these attempts to connect Dungeons & Dragons with the occult is that those attempting to do the connecting seem to be simply incapable of separating fantasy from reality. One gets the impression that many claims about the occult are only kept alive because the very fringe religious elements keep them that way. While fantasy role-playing games make fantastic fiction, confusing the minutia of what is basically codified rules for literate people to play make-believe for "real" magic and occult training is to enter the realm of delusional thinking.

Aaron is not actually a vampire, but he seems to be up all night every night anyway using all the extra time garnered by not sleeping to review science fiction and fantasy books, movies, and television shows. And role-playing games. You can read his musings on science fiction, fantasy, and pretty much anything else that pops into his slightly twisted mind at Dreaming About Other Worlds.

*Schnoebelen tries to keep this connection alive in his 1989 letter and 2001 follow-up claiming that those like Stackpole who dismiss the connection between Dungeons & Dragons and suicide are misusing statistics to come to that conclusion, citing his own training as a counselor and the "graduate level statistics course" he took to obtain it (apparently a Masters degree in counseling from Liberty University, I leave the reader to draw their own conclusions concerning the likely rigor of that program). What he fails to reveal is that the American Association of Suicidology, the Centers for Disease Control and the Canadian Health & Welfare service have all looked into the issue and concluded that there is no causal link between fantasy role-playing games and suicide. I suppose the researchers at the CDC need Schnoebelen to help them brush up on statistics, or maybe they are part of the vast Satanic conspiracy.

**Schnoebelen is a fairly objectionable character. He is an anti-Catholic, anti-Mason, anti-Mormon, and anti-Wiccan, as well as being an anti-Satanist. According to his own self-promotion, he is an ex-member of all of these organizations as well. When one adds up all of the years he claims he was a member of these organizations, he was apparently simultaneously a Wiccan, a Mason, a Catholic, and a Satanist for five years, and a Mormon as well for one of those years. In addition to having some serious commitment issues, it seems one could do a study across a broad swath of occult lore just restricting oneself to the organizations he claims to have been a practicing member of.

H is for Horoscopes

Almost everyone loves to read their "horoscope" in the local paper. But based on the way astrology works, knowing your sun sign isn't much more specific than in biology identifying that you're a human, in that it rules out a lot of things - not an elephant, not an ant - but there are certainly a lot of details that we think make us much more unique than that.

Symbol for Cancer

If you're curious about your detailed horoscope you can get a free account at astro.com. They have some detailed interpretations available for fees, but you can also run a chart and see some basic interpretations for free. You just need to know when (to the minute) and where (city) you were born.

Graphic Wheel

What you will find is that although a sun sign is important (kind of like saying you're a human is very defining in some ways), there are a myriad of other things going on. What sign is each of your planets in? What house (slice of the pie on the wheel) is each planet in? What sign falls on each house? What are the "aspects" of how the planets are organized around the wheel? Then, taking all those things into account, what are the overarching themes?

For instance, my chart illustrates a friction between the rather serious influence of strong Capricorn/Scorpio positions and the absolute foolishness of my Moon (emotional core) in Sagittarius (the lucky gypsy) in the 11th house (the home of the iconoclast). What are the patterns in your horoscope?

Sue London is a writer, blogger, and doodlist who knows more about astrology than any normal human. A long time ago she wrote this poem about it. Check out what she's up to by visiting her Sueniverse.

Blog post for the April A to Z blogging challenge.

G is for Ghosts

What do Charles Dickens and Grant Wilson have in common? Ghost hunting, of course! Dickens was a member of London's "The Ghost Club" and Grant is part of the famous Ghost Hunters duo on SyFy.

Ghost Hunting Kit

Across cultures and history there has been a strong belief that some part of us lives on after we die - our spirit, essence, financial debt - something. While some people claim they can see ghosts, still others of us believe there could be ghosts but are reliant on equipment like cameras, audio recorders, and other sensors in our attempt to pick something up from the afterlife.

It's hard to say, though, where the truth ends and the human love of a good story begins. Who hasn't
spent a long, dark night with friends telling ghost stories to each other? Sometimes we feel a need, or at a desire, to scare the bejeezus out of ourselves and others. We flock to horror movies, keep Stephen King living in style, and pour billions of dollars into Halloween. We WANT to be scared.

But just because we want the thrill of fear doesn't mean that ghosts don't exist. It is harder to discount ghosts when you have either had a haunting experience yourself or know someone who has a detailed and rational account. So, have a story to share?

Sue London is a writer, blogger, and doodlist who has two ghosts hanging out in her house. She thinks she picked them up at Disney's Haunted Mansion. Check out what she's up to by visiting her Sueniverse.

Blog post for the April A to Z blogging challenge.