Macabre Grimoire

Past life regression is a technique that uses hypnosis to recover what practitioners believe are memories of past lives or incarnations. The practice is widely considered discredited and unscientific by medical practitioners, and experts generally regard claims of recovered memories of past lives as fantasies or delusions or a type of confabulation. It’s typically undertaken either in pursuit of a spiritual experience, or in a psychotherapeutic setting. Most advocates loosely adhere to beliefs about reincarnation, though religious traditions that incorporate reincarnation generally do not include the idea of repressed memories of past lives.

This week we explore the ghost ship Ourang Medan. One of the strangest Ghost Ship stories of all time. But did it happen and why was CIA leadership so interested in it?

In 1896 and 1897, hundreds of western American newspapers reported mass sightings of fantastic, winged airships performing maneuvers years ahead of the technology of the time. In some cases, the airships landed,  and their pilots talked to witnesses. Most Americans assumed a secret inventor would soon take credit for the sightings,  but no one who did so could prove ownership of a functional flying machine. The “mystery airships” remain unidentified, constituting an early wave of UFOs before flying saucers, and almost before flight itself.

Aliens, Spies, Snipers, and Trolls Oh My!  No this isn’t the premise of Netflix movie, this is a real life story from the internet that has grown way beyond it’s joke page origins to become the talk of the web.  But is what has started as a joke turning into a national security issue? Maybe even another Russian internet psy-op? This week we’re looking at the “Let’s Storm Area 51” Facebook gag event that took over the internet.

The gang catches up on what we’ve been up to, Travis shares some of the times he’s been hurt doing magic, and we cover some performers who weren’t as “Lucky.”

“Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.” – From Propaganda, by Edward Bernays, 1928

Traditional playing cards were first seen in Europe around 1375, having been brought over from the Islamic societies where they had been used for centuries before that. The concept of playing cards have been around for much longer, but it’s important to mention that the origin of the Tarot isn’t exactly known. What we do know is that once playing cards came to Europe in 1375, it wasn’t until 1440 that Tarot cards were first mentioned.

Macabre Grimoire Chapter 23 Strange Skies Past and Present

In 1922, six people were killed at a remote German farmstead at Hinterkaifeck. They were bludgeoned in their bedclothes, but were their deaths the result of a manic serial killing, out-of-control family feud, or something else?

In the mid-1950s two families in rural Kentucky made headlines across the country when they told police that their home had been approached by small metallic creatures that could not be killed or scared away. The media coverage of the incident helped draw attention to neglected reports of UFO landings and entity encounters and the strange goblin-like creatures excited the public imagination. At the same time however hostile and sensationalized reporting on the incident served to discredit stories of contact with anomalous entities and help direct the veil of ridicule that now surrounds them.

The Real Life Doctor Strange and “The Founding Mother of the Occult in America” — Kurt Vaughnagan

Macabre Grimoire Chapter 18 Live from SiouxperCon 2018 featuring Patrick Doyle from Ghost Mine

Hosts Ari Show, Robert Mehling, and Travis Nye

Voice Over by Dave Holly

Opening Theme Enhance Your Starry Night by Mouthful of Bees

Patrick Doyle, author of the Edgar Font children’s book series, star of Ghost Mine and film actor.

https://www.theghostdidit.com/

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5459432/

“16:30 be at the agreed place.  18:30 swallow capsules, after effect, protect metals wait for mask sign.”

The Knocker, Knacker, Bwca (Welsh), Bucca (Cornish) or Tommyknocker (US) is a mythical creature in Welsh, Cornish and Devon folklore. They are the equivalent of Irish leprechauns and English and Scottish brownies. The Cornish described these creatures as little people who were two feet tall, had big heads, long arms, wrinkled faces, and white whiskers. They wear tiny versions of standard miner’s garb and commit random mischief, such as stealing miners’ unattended tools and food.

The Toynbee tiles (also called Toynbee plaques) are messages of unknown origin found embedded in the asphalt of streets in about two dozen major cities in the United States and four South American cities. Since the 1980s, several hundred tiles have been discovered. They are generally about the size of an American license plate, but sometimes considerably larger. They contain some variation of the following inscription:

TOYNBEE IDEA

IN MOViE `2001

RESURRECT DEAD

ON PLANET JUPITER

Peter Madsen, the Danish submarine inventor at the center of the mysterious death of Swedish freelance journalist Kim Wall, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for killing and dismembering Wall in a macabre case that has drawn international attention.

The Cecil Hotel is a budget hotel in Downtown Los Angeles, opened in 1927. Since 1931, it has gained a reputation for suicides and other violent deaths. Its name has since been changed to “Stay on Main” in an effort to distance itself from its tragic past.

Tom DeLonge is the co-founder, President and interim CEO of To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science. As President of the company’s subsidiary, To The Stars Inc., since 2015, he was primarily engaged within the entertainment sector. His career spans over two decades, selling over 25 million records worldwide with the bands he co-founded, Blink182 and Angels & Airwaves. Prior to forming the TTS Academy, Mr. DeLonge co-founded Really Likeable People, Inc. (“RLP”), the parent company of international consumer lifestyle brands including Atticus Clothing and Macbeth Footwear, and the technology monetization platform, Modlife. Mr. DeLonge has taken his award-winning creative content that spans music, books, and film and built To The Stars Inc. as a vertically integrated entertainment business that develops, produces and distributes multi-media and merchandise world-wide.

In 1952 five children were playing football in a small town called Flatwoods, WV when a strange object appeared above them. Streaking across the sky, they watched it crest a nearby hill, slow and then descend just over the top of the ridge. What followed after their sighting has become one of the most infamous local legends ever recorded. That night, seven area residents encountered a hovering, mechanical monstrosity that was described by area newspapers as “glowing” “Frankenstein-like” and breathing fire. The event helped shepherd in the 50s obsession with flying saucers and alien lifeforms and the “Green Monster” (one of three named given to the creature) has become a pop-culture figure in the decades to follow.

Coral Castle has been featured on Leonard Nimoy’s program “In Search of…” and been the subject of speculation for decades.  It’s been the film set for nudist films and campy 60’s sci-fi. But we still don’t know how it was built. This week we explore the strange origin of Coral Castle: “Florida’s Stonehenge.”  Latvian immigrant Edward Leedskalnin claims he built it using magnets and perpetual motion aka psychic powers. That seems far-fetched but if that’s not how he moved all that stone, how did a single man with no equipment or help move 1,100 Tons of rock?

“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause.” – William Shakespeare Hamlet

“There was another display of Arora last night, so brilliant that at about one o’clock (AM) ordinary print could be read by the light.  The effect continued through this forenoon, considerably affecting the working of telegraph lines. The Aurora’s currents were so regular from east to west that operators on eastern lines were able to hold communications and transmit messages over the line between the city (Boston) and Portland, the batteries being discontinued from the wire.” — The New York Times, September 3rd 1859.

Chung Ling Soo was the stage name of the American magician William Ellsworth Robinson, who is mostly remembered today for his death after a bullet catch trick went wrong.

WHAT IS A GAFF?

Taxidermists refer to their made-up creations as gaffs because they are meant to hook someone’s attention and make them wonder.

Macabre Grimoire Chapter 5 D B Cooper.  It remains one of the greatest mysteries in the United States, a startling crime that captured the American imagination, inspiring songs, movies, TV shows, and books.

“When a man’s soul is certainly in hell, his body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb however costly; some time or other the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred garments of the grave.”

— Scottish poet Robert Louis Stevenson referencing George MacKenzie in his 1879 book “Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes,”

Dream interpretation is the process of assigning meaning to dreams. In many ancient societies, such as those of Egypt and Greece, dreaming was considered a supernatural communication or a means of divine intervention, whose message could be interpreted by people with these associated spiritual powers.

The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system. The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), and it may have been composed in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance. The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912.

Macabre Grimoire Chapter 2 Voynich Manuscript

Hosts Ari Show, Robert Mehling, and Travis Nye

Produced by Robert Mehling and TheSiouxEmpire.com

Voice Over by Dave Holly

Opening Theme Enhance Your Starry Night by Mouthful of Bees

The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. No one has yet demonstrably deciphered the text, and it has become a famous case in the history of cryptography. The mystery of the meaning and origin of the manuscript has excited the popular imagination, making the document the subject of novels and speculation. None of the many hypotheses proposed over the last hundred years has yet been independently verified.

The ink and parchment have been analyzed extensively and are all consistent with a book created in the 1400s.  The cover of the codex was replaced at some point in the last 200 years as well as the binding. This is not uncommon for manuscripts of the era.  The colored paint of the book was likely added at a later date.

Every page in the manuscript contains text, mostly in an unknown language, but some have extraneous writing in Latin script. The bulk of the text in the 240-page codex is written in an unknown script, running left to the right. Most of the characters are composed of one or two simple pen strokes. Some dispute exists as to whether individual characters are distinct, but a script of 20–25 characters would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each. There is no apparent punctuation.

The manuscript’s diagrams include breakdowns of plant biology while others are based on astronomy or astrology.  One series of 12 sketches depicts conventional symbols for the zodiacal constellations (two fish for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a hunter with a crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each of these has 30 female figures arranged in two or more concentric bands. Most of the females are at least partly nude, and each holds what appears to be a labeled star or is shown with the star attached to either arm by what could be a tether or cord of some kind. The last two pages of this section were lost (Aquarius and Capricornus, roughly January and February), while Aries and Taurus are split into four paired diagrams with 15 women and 15 stars each.

The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript is that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book’s origin.

The first confirmed owner was Georg Baresch (1585–1662), an obscure alchemist from Prague. Baresch was apparently just as puzzled as modern scientists about this “Sphynx” that had been “taking up space uselessly in his library” for many years. He learned that Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) from the Collegio Romano had published a Coptic (Egyptian) dictionary and claimed to have deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs; Baresch twice sent a sample copy of the script to Kircher in Rome, asking for clues. His 1639 letter to Kircher is the earliest confirmed mention of the manuscript that has been found to date.

“I have been far away all this time, and I haven’t left the room…It was clear to me that it was because I was a spirit that I had so vividly ‘seen’ and felt a place a thousand miles away. Space was nothing to spirit!” – Helen Keller in her book My Religion in 1927

Welcome to Macabre Grimoire, the podcast of paranormal exploration and weird history.  In our first episode, we meet the team. Medium Ari Show, Magician Travis Nye, and History Nerd with an internet connection Robert Mehling briefly explore each other’s background and then move into our first topic, astral projection.