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The Bell Witch Haunting

The Legend of the Bell witch is unique in it's authentication and it's wide acceptance as having truly occured. The activity which the Bell family experienced at the hands of the entity is validated by many witnesses. The Bell Witch is also the only entity known to have taken a life.

Those who witnessed the demonstrations knew that it had a wonderful power of intelligence, possessing great knowledge of men and things; a spirit that could apparently read minds, tell men's secrets, repeat sermons word for word and sing every song in the hymn book. It often assumed a pious character, enjoying religious discussions and quoting scripture with absolute accuracy.

The earliest written account of the happenings at Bell farm is at page 833 in the Goodspeed History of Tennessee, published in 1887 by Goodspeed Publishing.

The most famous account is recorded in what has come to be called the Red Book, the 1894 An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch of Tennessee by Martin Van Buren Ingram, which cites the earlier Richard William Bell's Diary: Our Family Trouble. Richard Williams Bell lists several witnesses, including General (later President) Andrew Jackson. However, no mention of the Bell Witch was ever made by Jackson in any of his letters, journals or papers.




The Black Book was written much later and it told a lot about the Bell Witch, and published in 1934 by Dr. Charles Bailey Bell, great-grandson of John Bell.

It started with John Bell in the 1800 who moved his family to a settlement in Red River, Robertson County,Tenessee. John Bell was a town Elder in the Bapist Church and was a prominent member of the community, owned a large plot of land and house.

One day, John encountered a strange animal in one of his corn fields. It had the body of a large dog, and the head of a rabbit. When he made to shoot it, the creature vanished. Later that night, the Bell family experienced sounds of someone "beating" the walls of their log house from the outside.

These sounds continued each night and became more frenzied and forceful. Although Bell and his sons would rush outside to catch the perpetrator, they would find the land deserted. It was then that Bell's children began to wake in the night, scared by sounds of rats gnawing at their beds, or having their bed covers ripped from their beds and tossed to the ground by an unseen entity.


Things continued to escalate from this point, and the Bell family was tormented by whispering voices behind them when they were alone, and sounds of an old woman singing. Betsy, the youngest daughter would have hand prints on her face and body, and said to have had her hair pulled and slapped by an invisible entity. John went to a neighbour for help, by the name of James Johnston.



The man stayed over at the Bell home with his wife, and in turn experienced the same disturbances.

The entity seemed gather strength over time to the point where it was loud and unmistakeable. It would sing, quote scripture and call out to the family jeering and shouting insults. Eventually the voice could be heard all over the Bell land.



The children could not go to the river, fields or cave to play without being taunted endlessly by the entity.

It continued to express its dislike for John Bell and vowed relentlessly to kill him.

John Bell's health began to rapidly decline. He would have episodes of uncontrollable facial twitching, and difficulty swallowing. By the fall of 1820, John was confined to his house, where the entity would pull of his shoes when he tried to walk or slap his face. Her loud, shrill voice could be heard all over the farm, cursing and chastising "Old Jack Bell," as she often referred to him.

John Bell breathed his last breath on the morning of December 20, 1820. Immediately after his death, the family found a small vial of unidentified liquid in the cupboard. John Bell, Jr. gave some of it to the cat, which died instantly. It was found that this same liquid had been administered to John Bell before his death.



John Bell's funeral was one of the largest ever held in Robertson County, Tennessee. As family and friends began leaving the graveyard, the entity laughed loudly and began singing a song about a bottle of brandy. It is said that her singing didn't stop until the very last person left the graveyard. The entity's presence was almost nonexistent after John Bell's demise, as if its purpose had been fulfilled.



The Entity is said to have promised to visit John Bell’s most direct descendant in 107 years. The year would have been 1935, and the closest living direct descendant of John Bell at that time was Nashville physician, Dr. Charles Bailey Bell. Dr. Bell himself wrote a book about the "Bell Witch," published in 1934. No follow-up was published, and Dr. Bell died in 1945.

To this day unexplainable phenomena occur at the Bell farm.

The faint sounds of people talking and children playing can sometimes be heard in the area, and it's not uncommon to see "candle lights" dance through the dark fields late at night.



There have been several theories to what really occured to the Bell family, one is that John Bell was abusing his daughter Betsy, and the legend of the witch was born of her fear and inability to express what was really happening to her. The movie "An American Haunting" is based on this theory.

"The Blair Witch Project" is also loosely based on the legend of the Bell Witch.

Others in Adams Tenessee still blame the Bell Witch for strange events and tauntings in the area.


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Chinese boy born with a 'mask'

The chances are about one in a billion, 14 month old Kang Kang, a Chinese boy, has been born with a very rare transverse facial cleft - his skull has a large horizontal section missing, making him look like he is wearing a mask.

Mother Yi Xilian describes the experience "My family didn't allow me to see my son at the beginning, and I pleaded with my husband to let me have a look. Before they passed me the baby, they told me 'don't be sad, don't be sad', but when I saw my son, I collapsed."
Yi said during pregnancy she had three pregnancy checkups in Xiangxiang City Women and Children's Hospital, but doctors told her that the results were all normal.



Professor Wang said it's the first such case he ever met. "It's different from a cleft lip or cleft palate; it's a facial cleft. Not only his face muscles are cleft, but the inside bones are cleft." Professor Wang said judging from the current situation the boy is only suffering from the facial cleft, and his intelligence should be normal.

Professor Wang said Kang Kang will require reconstructive surgery, two surgeries at the least. The surgeries would sew up the clefts on the surface skin, the deep muscle, and then reconstruct the facial bones.

Professor Wang said they'll try their best to resume a typical look for the baby, but as they have never seen such a case before, the results are unpredictable.
 

 
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The Enigma

Today's post is  on one of of my favourite sideshow geeks, The Enigma. 

He was born Paul Lawrence and was raised in Seattle, he is a sideshow performer,  geek (performers at carnivals who specialize in swallowing various bizarre objects or live animals, live insects, and so forth) actor and musician, who has undergone extensive body modification, including horn implants, ear reshaping, multiple body piercings, and a full-body jigsaw-puzzle tattoo. 

His tattooing process began on December 20, 1992, under the needle of "Katzen the Tiger Lady," the first woman to have an all-over body theme tattoo.  Katzen and the Enigma later married. 

Together they have a six year old daughter, Caitlin. Katzen states, "In The Enigma I found a person who had the same goals in life and the same ambition behind those goals to make something amazing happen. It was the right timing - becoming the tattooed couple."

To date, The Enigma has had more than two hundred tattoo artists work on him, with as many as twenty-three underway at one time.

As a child he taught himself magic tricks from a magic book, and later taught himself how to swallow fire and swords. In 1991, he was a founding member of the Jim Rose Circus, with which he toured until 1998. 

The Enigma then toured with Katzen, playing music and doing sideshow performances under the moniker "Human Marvels." He performed at Universal Studios Orlando's Halloween Horror Nights event in fall 2007, performing various tricks with fire, power tools, and blades.

He currently performs with Serana Rose in their show called Electric Acid Theatre.

The Enigma has appeared in the The X-Files episode "Humbug" (incidentally also the best X-Files episode of all time) where he played a character called "The Conundrum" a geek who will eat anything, living in a community of sideshow freaks. An action figure of the Conundrum was even created as part of a line of X-Files toys.

He has also appeared on Penn & Teller: Bullshit!. The Enigma was featured in the 2005 documentary film Freaky Circus Guy alongside sideshow performers Katzen, Danielle D'Meux, William Darke. In 2004, The Enigma appeared with Mike Patton, Jane Wiedlin, Karen Black and Katzen, in Steve Balderson's film Firecracker.

The Enigma also makes a habit of appearing at various haunted house attractions all over North America. One of his most famous appearances was at Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando, Florida.

Below is an excerpt from interviews with the Enigma and Katzen at the Houston Tattoo Convention (Jan. 18, 1996) and at Northern Ink Xposure, Toronto (June 21, 1999) Transcribed and edited by Steve Gilbert. 

THE ENIGMA:

"My career as a performer actually began when I was six years old. That was when my mom asked me if I wanted to take piano lessons. My brother, who is sixteen and a half months older than me, was taking lessons, and of course I wanted to do what he was doing. 

So I started taking lessons and I've been playing ever since. In addition to the piano, my mother kept my brother and me busy with all kinds of other lessons: singing, flute, tap dancing, ballet. The full spectrum. In grade school I was quite an outsider, but treated to talent. I got picked on pretty severely by the other kids. 

I was also always interested in magic. I was in a local magic club. And then when I was sixteen a friend of mine who was also a magician introduced me to a book called Thrilling Magic which had instructions for doing all kinds of strange things. And one of them was swallowing a sword. I said: "That's cool. I gotta do that." And so I taught myself how to swallow swords and eat fire just by reading the book.

At the same time I was playing in bands. So I figured I'd do the sword swallowing and fire eating in between songs and that would be the gimmick that would hook people to listen to my music. I didn't think it would be the other way around. In Seattle, where I grew up, they had these little festivals near the Space Needle, where I would perform for free. I also did street fairs on University Avenue. This was in 1991. One day I was doing a show and a friend said "Have you ever heard of Jim Rose? He does weird stuff like that. You might think he's kind of cool. He's performing at a place called Ali Baba's."

So I went up the street to Ali Baba's and there he was, doing his bed of nails. And he was doing the razor blade trick that Harry Houdini always used to do with needles. You put the razor blades in your mouth and pull them out on a string. It's an old magic trick. I laughed, of course, because having a background in magic, I understood the trick. Everybody was falling for it. But I swallow swords. This is the real thing

We just did these shows for nothing. And then we did more shows, and got bigger. After one of these shows, Jim Rose handed each of us $20 and said: "I'm going to Venice Beach. Don't do anything till I get back. I'll be back in a month or two." So he left, and we were all trading phone numbers during this time. Asking a performer not to perform is like telling someone "don't masturbate." 

So we did our show together anyway. We called ourselves "The Mannix Depressives." Dan Mannix was a guy who wrote a book called Step Right Up. It also appeared under the title Memoirs of a Sword Swallower. It's a very important book.

 

But as soon as Jim Rose got back to town he was furious. He was going to throttle everybody because we were doing stuff without him. He was the guy who got us all together. 

He was the guy who was going to take us to Japan. He made all these phone calls to us from California with promises like that to keep us from doing anything without him. 

We didn't want to work with Jim because he was such a businessman and we didn't want someone who was going to beat us up on doing this stuff. 

And so we did another show on our own. But it just ended up on Jim's plate anyway, because no one was strong enough to say "No, I'm not going to work for you." Everyone kind of wanted to go and do things and see Japan. Jim was good at dangling carrots.

In fact, before that, in the winter of '91, during the time that Jim was gone, I had improved my act to include lifting weights with my eyeballs and eating insects. Slugs in particular. To lift weights with my eyeballs I would drill holes in quarters and then, with a string attached to glass balls, I would put the quarters in my eyeballs, close my eyes really tight, so that the quarters would actually go underneath my eyeballs inside the skull, and then I would pull up on the weights. Totally original. 

Everybody had a stage name: The Torture King, The Tube, Lifto. I decided to call myself Slug, since I ate slugs. It was a very Northwest kind of thing. I told the Torture King I was going to eat a slug and he said, "No way! That's gross!" And so then of course I had to do it.

I even called the Poison Control Center and said, "My son ate a slug. What should I do?"

They said, "Oh, don't worry about it. He'll be okay." 

So based on that information, which was next to none, I started eating slugs. During the winter of 1991 I thought of another way to improve my act. Here I had a job pressing shirts at a dry cleaner's! I thought: I guess I could be a different color. That's a good idea. Or maybe even like a pattern. I could be all plaid, or....I know! Spiderman battles this guy called "The Jigsaw," but he doesn't even look like a jigsaw. If I had a jigsaw pattern, that would really be cool. I could fill it in piece by piece."

 

"I met Katzen at Lollapalooza '92 and she had done a few tattoos by hand. I told her about my idea and she said she would be willing to do it, and so in December of 92 I sent her money to buy machines and a plane ticket. She flew up from Georgia and during January of 93 she did all the lines. It was a hard month. There were a lot of intense feelings. I had to move out of my mom's house because, you know, mom probably wouldn't have approved of what was going on."

KATZEN: "To me, the best high is a natural high, endorphin highs. Throughout time people have been taking drugs to induce inspiring visions but I know there are other ways to achieve inspiration. For instance, I think that tattooing is one of the ways people can get to self-knowledge. I think that there are several ways to get to spiritual knowledge and pain and pleasure are definitely keys to it.

A person who goes in for a lot of tattooing, and especially facial tattooing, has to have a strong sense of self . I have to be stubborn in a way, stubborn enough to know that I can accomplish painful goals I set out for myself . I can't walk outside without people asking me "who are you?" I walk with confidence and approachability. The tattooing never stopped me in any way, because I know the route I want to go for. I never once had doubts about it, only obstacles to tackle. It's opened so many doors for me. Good things happen in time. My tattoos have taught me patience. Great things bloom sometimes late, for those with patience to wait." 

Katzen.

Sources: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Madame Talbot's Spectacular Sideshow Emporium!

I now have proof that God really does listen and he cares, because he has brought me Madam Talbots Victorian Lowbrow Emporium. 

Madame Talbot has amassed a truly impressive collection of vintage medical paraphernalia, sideshow trinkets, curios, and gorgeous hand drawn posters by Madame Talbot herself! 

All pictures and item descriptions below taken from Madame Talbot's emporium. 

Among the many items available for purchase at this venerable establishment are:

• Mephitic vapours collected from fetid graves.
  

• Real Human Heart Night Light Curio

 

• Foetal Skull in Framed Curio (30th week of pregnancy) resting on a vintage pink satin heart shaped pillow. Above the foetal skull is a lovely spray of vintage paper roses.  Below on the satin heart-shaped pillow, is a Victorian stamped brass funeral plague with heavy patina which reads: "Our Darling."
  

 

•    A 1/4 inch thick Real human Brain Slice from ice pick Lobotomy Framed Curio. The brain is flanked by vintage lobotomy instruments. This slice of brain was removed by doctor Walter Freeman in the 1950s, at Danver's State Hospital in Massachusetts.

•  Vintage Real Shrunken Head

• A Victorian era framed real taxidermied monkey paw, tightly sealed behind glass as Madame Talbot "does not want to be held responsible for any consequences that may arise from bad wishing techniques."

 "Disclaimer: Beware To Those Who Wish!
The door of this Monkey Paw Framed Curio Exhibit has been glued shut as we do not want to be held responsible for any consequences that may arise from bad wishing techniques. Although the greatest care was taken in preparing this Monkey Paw Framed Curio Exhibit, the possibility remains at all times that consequences may arise from those who want to make their three wishes."

• Vintage Circus Sideshow Giant Ring belonging to the Viking Giant, Johann K. Petursson, who in 1913 was the Tallest Man in the World. 

• On the back of the postcard reads "Parents, 8 Sisters and Brothers all normal size. My Weight -- 9 lbs. at birth. By the age of twenty I was 8'8". Weight -- 425 lbs. Shoe size 24. All clothes made to order. P.S. Except handkerchief."

• Victorian Down Bros. Brass Ear Syringe from an outstanding private collection. 10 inches long with plunger shut.

•  Framed real Bloodsucking Leech Curio. This is an actual wet specimen of a soaked leech nestled inside a Victorian wood box, surrounded by vintage red velvet drapery and gold metal bullion trim.

• A 30 week old foetal skeleton dressed in babies clothes, resting on a bed of black fabric roses surrounded by a lovely spray of white calla lilies. Above the foetal skull is a Victorian stamped brass funeral plague with heavy patina which reads: "Our Darling."

•  Till Death Us do Part Curio, with a real human skull which has been cut in half and placed side by side, this is a personal favourite!

•  BLACK DEATH PLAGUE DOCTOR POSTER by Madame Talbot.

For many more curious attractions presented for your consideration, Visit Madame Talbot's emporium today!

http://www.madametalbot.com/10contact.htm