The Paulding Light (also called the Lights of Paulding or the Dog Meadow Light) is a light that appears in a valley that lies outside of Paulding, Michigan.
Reports of the light have appeared since the 1960s, with popular folklore providing such explanations as ghosts, geologic activity, or swamp gas.
In 2010, Syfy Channel’s Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files conducted a paranormal investigation and concluded that the Paulding Light was unexplained.
Charles found the old book when he was 12 years old. It was stuck in behind an old bookcase in the attic of his house. The cover of the book was missing and so were some of the pages inside. It was a book of frightening ghost stories but without the cover, Charles could never been sure if the stories were real or just made up.
Lying in bed at night, Charles would read the stories quietly to himself. They terrified him, but for some reason, he couldn’t stop himself from reading each one again and again. His heart would be pounding and his breath would catch in his throat, yet he still felt unable to put the book down.
There was only one illustration in the book, a solitary strange photograph in the middle pages. Charles could never bear to look at it. Something about the photo unnerved him but he found himself string at it for hours. He never understood why the photograph held such a strange fascination for him.
There was nothing in the picture that should cause him such fear and dread. It merely showed an empty metal staircase leading down into darkness. Could it be the fear of something or someone lurking in the darkness? Perhaps it was the fact that the rusty metal steps looked as if they were covered in blood.
For some reason, the photo terrified him so much that he finally reached breaking point. He ripped it out of the book and threw it in the trash. Charles thought that would be the end of it, but he found that he was unable to get the picture out of his mind.
When he fell asleep at night, he would see the empty metal staircase in his nightmares and he always woke up drenched in a cold sweat. The strange photo haunted him for years. As he got older, he would often be reminded of the photo and then the nightmares would start again. It was as if what he had seen in the photo could never be unseen.
Walking home from college one night, Charles took a shortcut through a dark alleyway and came upon a scene that seemed all too familiar to him. Up ahead, he could see the same rusty metal staircase that had haunted his dreams for so many years.
Charles felt a chill go up his spine and he had the sudden urge to flee. But his curiosity got the better of him. He had to find out why the staircase had disturbed him so much.
Charles approached the staircase cautiously, staring down into the darkness that lay below. In his terror, his mind began to recognize strange shapes in the pitch black. He could hear odd sounds and moans coming from underground.
As Charles stood at the top ofmthe stairs, he began shaking with fear. He was about to turn and leave when he heard something strange. A whisper or a low groan. He looked down and started screaming.
This story concerns a lone taxi driver making his way along a road during the night. Legend goes that a person will suddenly appear from the night darkness and hail the taxi. The person will only ever sit in the back of the car and will ask to be taken to a place the driver has never heard of. When the driver mentions this, he is assured that he will be given directions. The passenger then feeds the driver increasingly complex directions which leads them down streets and alleys, through many towns and even in some instances all the way from the city to the countryside. After traveling this distance and still seeming no closer to any destination, the driver becomes uneasy. He turns around to the back seat to ask the passenger exactly where they are – but he is suddenly shocked to find that the passenger has vanished. The taxi driver turns back to the steering wheel; only to drive off the edge of a cliff.
In Corona, California there once was a road known by most locals as the Never Ending Road. Specifically, the road’s true name was Lester Road. Now, over twenty years later, the landscape of Corona has changed, and the Never Ending Road is no more. However, years ago, Lester Road was an unlit road that people claimed became a never ending road when driven at night. The people who made such a drive were never seen or heard from again.
Well…it has definitely been more than two months since I posted anything here, but we should all be used to my long periods of absence. Anyway, today I make a post about a tunnel.
In my hometown in Iowa, there lies a decaying road of gravel and dust, with cracked concrete and scrawls of graffiti. On both sides of the road there are groves of toppling trees that create a bit of a roof over any that dare go down it, and the further down you go somehow the trees even surround you on all sides but your front.
Eventually the road leads to an ancient tunnel that has been in the town since the early 1900’s, functioning as an important support beam for the railroad tracks above it. When I was a child, my mother would drive through the tunnel and stop the car midway through, honking the horn, releasing a mighty roar that echoed off the scribed walls inside. This became a tradition for our family throughout my childhood.
About a decade ago, a mighty rain storm swept across the area, resulting in most of the road running through the tunnel to be washed away, destroying an hopes of going through to the other side. With it went one of the few family traditions I had.
One day I asked my mother about this tunnel and she told me it was called, “Satan’s Tunnel”. Whenever I asked her way, she never answered, only ignored the question. It was at that moment that I became obsessed with finding out more.
Not surprisingly, there was little to be found out about this road, both through my family members and the official records building in my town. To many people, it was just a tunnel in a town, but to me it was far more. Interestingly enough, I wasn’t the only one intrigued with this tunnel because as I talked about it more, so did my friends and classmates.
As I grew older, so did the rumors of how the tunnel got its name. Mainly it was the imaginations of my classmates that began spinning tales. One of the legends states that the tunnel got its name from the Devil himself, who would meet at the tunnel at midnight every Halloween to snatch up the souls of any person that wandered about the road at night. Another legends says that about 150 years ago (when the town first was established) a cult of unknown origins gathered at the spot where the tunnel was eventually built and sacrificed the lives of countless children in the name of Satan.
No matter the legend, the tunnel to this day still intrigues me more than anything else about the state of Iowa.
Now it is a decaying structure whose days may be numbered, but every Halloween I go down to the Tunnel in hopes of meeting the Devil himself and asking him whose story I should believe.
My question, to any of those that read this, is this: Does your hometown have any interesting ghost stories our supposadly haunted places? If so, why not like this little post and make a post of your own detailing your story.
The Red Room story is an internet legend about a pop up which appears on the victim’s computer. The image simply shows a red door and a recorded voice asks “Do you like-“. Even if the pop up is closed it will repeatedly reappear until the voice finally completes the question: “Do you like the red room?”. Those who have seen the pop-up are found dead, their walls painted red in their own blood. The legend began with a flash animation of a young boy being cursed after encountering the pop-up, but gained notoriety when it was the schoolgirl who committed theSasebo slashing in 2004 had the video as a bookmark.
Jinmenken are dogs, but with human faces. There have been recorded sightings since the Edo period, but there have also been modern reports. They supposedly appear, at night, in Japanese urban areas and are also known to run along highways at extremely fast speeds. The jinkenmen can also talk, but reports say that they will either be rude or will ask to be left alone. Unlike most Japanese urban legends, the human-faced dog is not widely known to kill those unlucky enough to meet it, though they are suspected to be escaped scientific experiments or the spirits of road crash victims. There is also speculation that witnesses who say they’ve met a jinkenmen have actually come across Japanese macaques, which accounts for the quadpedal movement, dog like fur, human face and the human like noises the jinkenmen can supposedly make.
Bloody Mary in popular culture: Like so many horror legends and traditional ghost stories, “Bloody Mary” has proven a natural for adaptation into popular novels, stories, comic books, movies, and even dolls. Released straight to DVD in 2005, Urban Legends: Bloody Mary was the third film in the execrable series that commenced with Urban Legend in 1998. As you might expect, the plot takes great liberties with the traditional tale.
More notably, horror writer Clive Barker essentially constructed a pseudo-urban legend by appropriating the chanting ritual for a 1992 film entitled Candyman. Various characters in the film summon the ghost of a black slave brutally lynched in the 1800s by repeating the name “Candyman” five times in front of a mirror. Some viewers come away with the misapprehension that Candyman was based on actual folklore, but apart from the borrowed incantation it was mostly a product of Barker’s fertile imagination.
A Bloody Mary Plush Toy available for purchase on the Internet boasts the following “product features”:
- Black hair
- Red blood on face and hands
- Terror of beauty lost
Alas, a mirror is not included.
The Rake is an internet myth still in its infancy, with little more than a widely circulated story and some artists renderings of the creature accounting for the body of work related to it. However, it is still one of the more horrifying reads one can find on the internet due to the chilling authenticity the writer lends to the tale.
According to the story, the Rake has been around for quite some time. The tale is told in part by journal entries from various time periods ranging from the ancient world to today. The Rake is described as a small, shriveled, frighteningly ugly creature with black, hollow eyes. His modus operandi is to haunt his victims in their beds at night for a while before murdering them and those they care about horribly.
The original tale and a discussion of it can be found here.
‘New York White’ : The tale was well known throughout the United States by the late 1960s, when, according to folklorist Richard M. Dorson, it came to be associated with another icon of sewer lore, the mythical “New York White” — an especially potent, albino strain of marijuana growing wild from seeds spilled out of baggies hastily flushed down toilets during drug raids. Not that anyone had ever actually seen the stuff, much less smoked it. It was impossible to harvest, you see, because of all the alligators down there.
The reason we speak of all this as folklore, not fact, is that herpetologists pooh-pooh the very idea of alligators thriving in the New York City sewer system. It’s cold down there most of the time, they point out — freezing cold during the winter — and alligators require a warm environment year-round to survive, much less reproduce and burgeon into colonies. And if the cold didn’t kill them off, the polluted sewer water certainly would.
The Ghost Story: The malevolent spirit called up by the Bloody Mary ritual is always said to be a female — in particular, a female whose face was disfigured as the result of a violent death, usually in an automobile accident. Often, as in the second “Bloody Mary” variant reproduced above, she is said to have been a very beautiful woman in life who was proud of her beauty to the point of self-obsession (hence her ghostly ire at being summoned to appear in a mirror). In some variants she is said to have been a hitchhiker whose spirit has also been seen haunting roadsides and being picked up by unsuspecting drivers before vanishing inexplicably (cf. “The Vanishing Hitchhiker”). In other tellings the character is reminiscent of La Llorona, the “Weeping Woman” of Hispanic folklore who is said to have killed her own children and wanders eternally in penance.
In most versions there is no evident connection between the Bloody Mary whose ghost haunts bathroom mirrors and the historical figure of the same name (though exceptions have been recorded). Her name just happens to be Mary, and she’s bloody because she died in a terrible accident.
Likewise, there is no apparent connection between the Mary Worth of the legend and the Mary Worth of comic strip fame. Essentially a soap opera about the hardships of family life, the comic strip holds up its prim and proper protagonist as the ideal of American motherhood — a far cry from the menacing hag blamed for so many pajama party freak-outs.
Also known as: “The Hook”
Example:
As told by David Emery…A teenage boy drove his date to a dark and deserted Lovers’ Lane for a make-out session. After turning on the radio for mood music, he leaned over and began kissing the girl.
A short while later, the music suddenly stopped and an announcer’s voice came on, warning in an urgent tone that a convicted murderer had just escaped from the state insane asylum — which happened to be located not far from Lovers’ Lane — and that anyone who noticed a strange man lurking about with a hook in place of his right hand should immediately report his whereabouts to the police.
The girl became frightened and asked to be taken home. The boy, feeling bold, locked all the doors instead and, assuring his date they would be safe, attempted to kiss her again. She became frantic and pushed him away, insisting that they leave. Relenting, the boy peevishly jerked the car into gear and spun its wheels as he pulled out of the parking space.
When they arrived at the girl’s house she got out of the car, and, reaching to close the door, began to scream uncontrollably. The boy ran to her side to see what was wrong and there, dangling from the door handle, was a bloody hook.
The Bunny Man is an urban legend from Fairfax County, Virginia, about an axe-wielding man in a bunny suit who is said to haunt the “Bunny Man Bridge” where he supposedly skins his victims and where he died in a shootout with police. Although the specifics of the tale are always varied, it was mainly thought to be a complete urban legend until the Fairfax County Librarian-Historian Brian Conley did some digging into public records, where he discovered two incidents that shed some truth to this myth.
Reported on October 20, 1970, by a cadet and his fiancé, the first “bunny man” incident occurred when they parked their car in a field to talk. As they sat with the car running, they saw something moving in their rear window, right before the passenger window was smashed by a white-clad figure standing outside. As the man screamed at them about trespassing, they drove off, only later noticing the hatchet that he used to break the window lying on the floor. Although the cadet was sure it was a bunny suit and his fiancé swore it was a KKK robe that the man was wearing, in the official Fairfax County police report, it’s stated to be a bunny suit.
The second incident occurred on October 29, 1970, when a construction security guard witnessed the man in the bunny suit sitting on an unfinished porch carrying a long-handled axe. As the security guard approached him, he began chopping at the porch railings, saying, “All you people trespass around here. If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to bust you on the head.” The man then ran into the woods.
For weeks following the incidents (which were later closed by the police due to the lack of evidence) over 50 people reported seeing or having an altercation with the “Bunny Man”. There have been no further police reports as of 1970, but the legend of the axe-wielding crazy man in a bunny suit live on.
The Legend of Mary Hatchet
The story is that in 1978, a girl named Mary Mattock murdered her entire family with a hatchet thus being sentenced to life in the Kings Park Psychiatric Center. Ten years later, she escaped from the large hospital grounds and went on a mad killing spree. Mary was eventually gunned down by police. This night was nicknamed “Blood Night”. And legend has it that on the anniversary of Blood Night her ghost walks the grounds of the now closed asylum. Click here to learn more about the urban legend and her house.
Picture above is Mary Hatchet’s house at Head of the Harbor.
Oh. I live on Long Island.
