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Archive for December 2012

CHAMP


Does a sea serpent-like creature live in New York’s Lake Champlain?
champ
The Iroquis told tales of a giant serpent
CASE DETAILS
Tales of a giant serpent living in Lake Champlain date back to the time when Native Americans lived in the area. But over the years, many have come to believe the creature is real. There have been hundreds of reported sightings. The locals have even given it a name, Champ.

 Sandra Mansi grew up near Lake Champlain. When she was a child, her grandfather teased her with scary tales of the legendary sea creature:
Sandra saw Champ

 “Grandfather told us all about Champ, and when we would go fishing, he would say to us, if you don’t sit down and behave in the boat, I’m going to throw you over and Champ’s going to eat you. Of course, we didn’t believe a word of it.

 Then in July of 1977, Sandra, her two children, and her fiancé, Tony, were on vacation near Lake Champlain:

 “We stopped at this one place and the children were down further on the beach, having a great time, and Tony decided to go back to the car and get the camera. And I’m looking out at the lake, and the lake started churning. My first thought was scuba divers. But then it’s too much, it would be too big of a group of scuba divers. But then fish, there’s some very large sturgeon and big walleyes in Champlain, so I thought well, it’s a very, very large school of fish. Then the head and the neck came up out of the water, and then the back.  And I watched it turn its head and neck, and look around. When it first came up, its mouth was open and I could see water coming out of the mouth, and I’m feeling like I shouldn’t be there. Because to me, this thing should have been extinct thirty million years ago. But I’m not frightened. I’m in total awe and very calm. Then Tony came back and he saw it and he got all panicky, screaming and hollering at the kids to get out of the water. He helped me up the bank, and when he did, he handed me the camera, and I turned around, and it’s still there. And I picked up the camera and took one shot.”
The photograph was studied
When Sandra saw the picture she’d taken, she was certain it was Champ. She was equally certain that no one would believe her, so she threw away the negative and kept the photo hidden. Finally, Sandra had the snapshot blown up into an 8 x 10 inch print.  She contacted Joe Zarzynsky, who’d written a book about Champ. Joe sent the print to the University of Arizona to be analyzed. Cryptozoologist Richard Greenwell:

 “We digitized it and ran all sorts of computer enhancement techniques. We were looking for pulleys or ropes or anything like that, superimpositions, but we found no evidence of hoaxing, and we concluded that the object, whatever it is, was there in the lake, at that estimated distance. It wasn’t any sort of superimposition.”

 When the photograph was released, it caused a media sensation. The New York Times and Life Magazine carried the story. Was it really a sea monster? Richard Greenwell wondered if Champ was a prehistoric animal that had somehow managed to survive:

 “The object in the Mansi photograph resembled a plesiosaur, which is an aquatic reptile from the Cretaceous, about 60-70 million years ago.  Long neck and flippers.  It resembles that, but that’s a long time to have survived.”
Could Champ be prehistoric?
Another idea was that Champ might be a zeuglodon, a snake-like whale extinct for twenty million years. Or perhaps Champ was simply a lake sturgeon, which have been known to reach seven feet in length. No matter what it was, ever since the Mansi photograph went public, dozens of eyewitnesses have reported sightings of Champ.

 On July 7, 1988, Walter Tappan, his wife Sandi, and their daughter Heidi, went out on Lake Champlain with a camcorder. They were sure they’d seen “Champ” the previous evening. Walter hoped lightning would strike twice in the same place:

 “It was a quiet night, just as still as glass, like the first night had been, and I was full of anticipation and excitement, but also, not necessarily expecting anything. Then they spotted one not far from the boat. At the most, 50 or 60 feet from the boat.  And then began shooting footage for about twenty or thirty seconds of these humps gliding along, first two, then three, then four, then suddenly five, all in a row, stretching out about twenty feet.” 

 Walter’s wife described what she saw:

 “I had probably, I would say, seven different sightings of them. So I decided to climb up and stand on the sundeck and I just scanned the water like that, and lo and behold, I saw one of those bull humps coming along the water, and then all of a sudden, the neck and the head came up and it looked right at me. I will never forget it. And I was screaming with excitement, which I wish I wasn’t doing, because it went down more rapidly. Came back and then very gracefully, very slowly went back down into the water just like that.”

 Walter said he had no doubt about what he, Sandi, and his daughter had witnessed:

 “There was no time for me to get the camera and refocus. I’d give anything now to have that on footage, because what Sandi saw was, of course, an astounding thing. This creature looking at us and lifting its head out of the water. And what it did was to confirm, absolutely for all of us, that what we had seen was Champ.”

 Scientific opinion is varied, but at least one expert believes that what Walter Tappan photographed was nothing more than a school of fish. But who can explain the Mansi photograph or the hundreds of eyewitness accounts recorded through the centuries?    
For Sandra Mansi, it can be only one thing:

 “Do I believe Champ exists? You’ll never convince me of anything else. You can call it Champ, you can call it a monster, you can call it a zeuglodon, you can call it a plesiosaur, you can call it anything you want.  I’m telling you, in that lake, there is something extraordinary.”

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BIGFOOT


Bigfoot sightings are rampant in the Pacific Northwest.
Artist’s rendering of Bigfoot
Alleged Bigfoot footprint

































































 





CASE DETAILS 



Peter Byrne
Many believe Bigfoot is the missing link between ape and human.  For Peter Byrne, head of the Oregon-based Bigfoot Research Project, finding Bigfoot is a matter of scientific discovery:

“We don’t want to capture it.  We don’t want to shoot it.  The ultimate find, as far as we’re concerned, would be to do something like what Jane Goodall did, in other words, to find one, see if we can communicate, have it lead us to others, and then bring in the right people.  Totally responsible people.  Bring in scientists, and show them what we’ve found and document the whole thing, of course.” 

 Until now, the evidence for Bigfoot has consisted of amateur photographs, plaster casts of large, humanoid footprints and home movies that supposedly show the creature in the wild. But if Bigfoot is real, the one type of evidence that must always be considered is eyewitness accounts.

 Todd Neiss is a sergeant in the Army National Guard.  In 1993, he was on demolition maneuvers with his unit when a distant movement caught his eye:
Oregon wilderness

 “I could distinctly see three large black figures. I would estimate the largest one to be between eight or nine feet. I could very plainly see they were upright on two legs and…during that entire time, all three of them were standing on two legs. Another sergeant walked up to me and said, ‘Neiss, did you see what I saw down at that second rock port?’ And, not to be a fool, I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, what’d you see?’ He followed with, ‘Well lack for a better word, what I saw were three, large, hair-covered, big feet.’”
Peter Byrne believes the creatures are nocturnal:

 “When they’re seen in the daytime, it’s the result of disturbance of some kind.  In this case, there was a National Guard exercise with explosions, and immediately after the explosion, three of these things were seen.”
  
When Elmer Frombach, a part-time prospector from Seattle, Washington, took his family on an outing near the Canadian border, he came home with one of the most amazing Bigfoot sightings on record.    

 Elmer had just begun taking ore samples on a trail near a hillside, when he suddenly realized he was not alone: 

 “I saw a big black hairy mass.  And at that time I kept thinking in my mind I’ve got to find a way to scare it, and I fired a shot above its head, and it turned just slightly, and then proceeded to walk down the trail as though I wasn’t even there.  And as it walked away from me, it took perfect, human-like strides, down the trail, only like a giant man. This thing had crouched down at the end of the trail and it picked up a rock, the size of a basketball, and was using it to bang against the other rocks that again made a slight-sideways turn, just enough to see me out of the corner of it’s eye.  I was scared and I wanted to get out of there.  I kept running down the hillside and the thing was in hot pursuit the whole way.”

 Elmer is confident the creature he saw was Bigfoot:

 “What I saw there was a living creature and not some figment in my imagination.  Modern science hasn’t absolutely proven…that this thing exists.  But I tell you, quite frankly, I’ve seen one.  I know it exists.  And there is no doubt in my mind.”

 However, eyewitness accounts like Elmer’s are not enough evidence to convince skeptics.

 Daris Swindler, a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, wants to see tangible proof of Bigfoot’s existence:

 “I’m amazed that through all the years various people that have been hunting Sasquatch through the years, have not really found any, what we call bone or dental evidence of the creature.  That to me would be very satisfying.”

 Is the Pacific Northwest home to a colony of ape-like creatures?  Eyewitness like Todd Neiss and Elmer Frombach are convinced Bigfoot is real.  There only hope is that the scientific community will soon take notice.

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NOAH’S ARK


Two explorers believe they’ve located the remnants of Noah’s ark in the mountains of Turkey.
Artists rendering of Noah’s ark
Mt. Ararat, Turkey

 CASE DETAILS 

Mount Ararat: according to the Bible, it’s the area where Noah’s Ark came to rest after the great storm. It’s a desolate terrain rising above the headwaters of the Tigris River. In recent years, several expeditions have explored the Ararat Mountains. Incredibly, two separate teams believe they may have found the ark, in two different locations, 17 miles apart.
Ark research team

 One of the sites is on Mount Ararat’s northeast side under a permanent 23-square-mile glacier. A Turkish businessman named George Hagobian said that when he was a young boy in 1906, he saw Noah's Ark wedged in a melted part of the glacier. Hagobian described the vessel to archaeological illustrator Elfred Lee:

 “He said it looked like a long box. It was rectangular and the corners were kind of rounded a little bit. The sides sloped in slightly. The roof, he said, was basically flat with just a slight pitch to it, and there was a stair kind of an apparatus at one end. His uncle hoisted him up onto this ladder, and he walked on up onto the roof. And there, all the way down the middle of the roof, he saw these holes, and he stuck his head in, and it was dark. He shouted, and his voice echoed and re-echoed inside. It was hollow. Hagobian went back a couple years later, saw the same thing, but ice and snow were beginning to cover it up again.”

Seventeen years later, Elfred Lee met Ed Davis, who, in 1943, was stationed in Iran with the U.S. Army. According to Lee, Davis also said he had seen the ark:

  “When Ed Davis started talking, the hair on the back of my head just stood up, because I could hear an echo of George Hagobian from years before.”
Artist rendering of possible ark

 Ed Davis' sighting occurred in roughly the same area as George Hagobian's. However, Davis said when he saw what he thought was the ark, it had broken in two:

 “We waited a while, and the fog kind of lifted, and it shone through in the end. You could see in the end of it. And we saw both parts. You stand there with your mouth wide open.”

 Elfred Lee recalled his conversation with Davis:

 “Ed Davis described three decks inside and large cages on the bottom deck, smaller cages on the second deck, and on the roof, a venting system with many holes on it, so you could see how the light and ventilation could go clear to the bottom deck.”
Although Hagobian and Davis weren’t able to pinpoint the exact locations, their stories intrigued Don Shockey, an amateur archaeologist:

 “I can't think of anything more exciting that I could be doing in my lifetime than having a small part in seeing this, whatever it is, verified. And we have good reason to believe there's something there. We’ve got to prove it.”
A second theory
Don Shockey launched an expedition to Mount Ararat after studying classified U.S. satellite photos. Don said that for three days, he and his guides climbed up the mountain’s south side:

 “Our whole goal was to get to this spot, over the top, down the glaciers, to this particular location and verify what the satellite information had told us.”

 The Turkish government prevented them from traveling to the north side, so Ahmet, a Turkish guide, continued on by himself. 

 Ahmet crested Mt. Ararat and started down the north slope. At an elevation of nearly 16,000 feet, he spotted something half-buried in the snow. From a distance of 300 yards, he took a photograph, which seemed to show the end of a rectangular object with a peaked roof: Don Shockey recalled:

 “He came back, and I said, ‘Is anything showing?’ He said, ‘A coop, a coop. Like a chicken coop. It had a pointed top.’ And he said that you could see the outline of it. He said in all of his years, he had never seen anything like it. He said, ‘There's some artifact there.’"

 Don Shockey believed that Ahmet might have glimpsed the remains of Noah's Ark.  Shockey returned to the States and took the photograph to forensic anthropologist Dr. Jim Ebert:

 “It certainly does not look natural. It looks very strikingly man-made to me. What I see when I look at this is something that stands out from the rest of the terrain, and that is what looks like a solid structure. You'll never know until you get up there and can see it and stand next to it.”

 Shockey returned to Mt. Ararat and studied the mountain from the air. Unfortunately, the site was now covered by snow.  Shockey stopped his search but remained convinced that he might have found the resting place of Noah's Ark. Others, like author and ark researcher David Fasold, disagreed:

 “We've been told for years that Noah's Ark is on top of Mt. Ararat because that's what the Bible says. And that's not what the Bible says. The Bible says the ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat, that word is in the plural.”

 David Fasold was a former merchant marine officer and merchant salvage expert. He believed that the ark was buried a full 17 miles south of Mt. Ararat. Fasold said his team searched the site and discovered traces of iron, which don’t appear to be natural deposits:

 “Every 20-30 inches, approximately, we have the remains of an iron fitting or iron pin of sorts that are still there in the soil and discernible.”

 Fasold’s team brought back one of the iron fittings, one of 5,400 he said they found:

 “It’s been cut in half by a diamond saw, scanned by electron microscopes at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and this particular iron fitting is 94.84% man-made wrought iron.”

 Looking at the mound from above, the iron deposits form a distinct pattern of intersecting lines, which Fasold believes is the framework of the ark. Fasold said the boat’s length is 515 feet and the width averages 85 feet, the same measurements recorded in the Bible:

 “Given the shape of the thing and the size of the thing and where they found it, I mean, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, until somebody finds something else, what else could it possibly be but Noah's Ark?”

 Some have suggested that David Fasold found the remains of an ancient Mongol fort. Others say it’s a geological formation. However, the Turkish government has declared the mound the official site where Noah's Ark rests. Fasold said he’s certain of his find:

 “The man who was in charge, Professor Sali Barrak Tutam, who is also a geologist, he says it's Noah's Ark, 200%. It is not a geological anomaly. It's a man-made structure.”

 Has one of mankind's greatest mysteries finally been solved on a remote mountain range?  It’s obvious that there needs to be more exploration before we’ll know the answer.

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OGO POGO


Residents around Canada’s Lake Okanagan believe a creature called Ogo Pogo lurks in its waters.
Witnesses claim they saw Ogo Pogo
There was a media frenzy

CASE DETAILS

For centuries, Lake Okanagan in the Canadian province of British Columbia has been the reputed home of a mysterious water beast that resembles a sea serpent. In the 1700s, local Indians called the beast Naitaka, or Lake Demon. They often sacrificed small animals to appease the creature. Today, 300 years later, many locals still believe that the sea monster is real. They’ve even given it a new name: “Ogo Pogo.” Horace Simpson says he saw Ogo Pogo back in 1937:
The creature had a long snake-like body
“We were facing the lake at the time, and there’s this head of something or other swimming around out there and we were all convinced that it was the Ogo Pogo.”

 Another witness, Beverly Harder, described Ogo Pogo as:

 “Very big.  It was very scary.” 
Ernest Girou says he got a good look at the creature:

 “About two feet out of the water came the head. The head itself was round, and then a kind of a neck part went down into the water and it had a great big long tail.”

 Hundreds of sightings of Ogo Pogo have been reported. But no film footage was captured until 1968. That year, Art Folden and his wife were driving next to the lake when they noticed something strange:

 “We saw something in the lake near the shore, and I said, ‘Hey, look!’ Just jokingly.  ‘There’s Ogo Pogo.’  I said, ‘I want to stop and see if I can get a picture.’ I stopped filming every time it dove under the water. And as it reappeared I began filming again. The film shows a dark object diving, reappearing, in a sequence of moves that indicates that it’s moving out from shallow water into deeper water.”
The creature is estimated to be forty feet long

 The dark mass in Art’s film is estimated to be forty feet long.
In 1980, twelve years after the Folden film was made, a group of vacationers thought they, too, had seen Ogo Pogo. One of them, Larry Thal, had a home movie camera:

 “I was taking pictures of the kids and the wife, and bingo!  All of a sudden the Ogo Pogo, supposedly, whatever it may have been, appeared on Lake Okanagan, and I was right there with my camera. It was a strange sight in the water.”

 According to Arlene Gaal, an Ogo Pogo author and researcher, Larry’s footage revealed intriguing details:

 “Larry’s film shows how the animal swims. It shows the speed and the massive waves that it creates. It actually shows that it has some sort of appendage that seems to pop up every now and then. But the interesting thing is that the animal that Art Folden shot and the animal that Larry Thal shot, they’re basically the same size. They’re very large creatures. And in Larry’s film, we’re seeing a creature at least 40 to sixty feet from head to tail. No doubt. No doubt.”
Witnesses said the creature had an appendage
Nine years later, on July 18th, 1989, 78-year-old Clem Chaplin showed his son, Ken, an inlet where he thought he had seen Ogo Pogo. Ken took his video camera and staked out the area. It paid off. What Ken taped was a creature that appeared to be hairless, greenish in color, spotted, and about fifteen feet long, less than half the size measured in the Folden and Thal films. Ken is clear about what he saw:

 “I saw its features as being snake or lizard-like. No fur or hair. And you can see the body thrashing behind it. And then it brought its tail section out of the water. Dad and I were stunned into silence. And then Dad turned to me and he said, ‘You know if that tail hit a man it’d probably kill him.’ And I agreed. That was our impression as to size. He had appeared swimming parallel to the shore and swam right past us, at maybe sixty to seventy five feet away.”

 Ken’s video made headlines. Time Magazine and many newspapers carried the story of what appeared to be a new “Loch Ness-type” monster.  Experts were called in to analyze the video. One of them was regional wildlife biologist Robert Lincoln:

 “It was not a hoax. There was nothing in there that gave us the impression this was fabricated in any way. It was a live, living animal. The discussion revolved around the two species most likely, and that is a river otter and a beaver. Ogo Pogo could exist elsewhere in Okanagan Lake, but in our view, this particular video was of a beaver.”

 Ken Chaplin says the creature he saw was too large to be a beaver:

 “The largest recorded beaver in the interior is four and a half feet long. Now at seventy five to a hundred feet away, I just can’t see Dad and I being very impressed.”

 Robert Lincoln compared a video frame from Ken’s Ogo Pogo footage, with a photograph of a beaver about to slap its tail on the surface of the water. He contends that they are mirror images of each other.  Ken disagrees. He says the creature he saw was fifteen feet long, not four feet like a beaver.

 “I’ve asked myself thousands of times, ‘Is there a possibility I could be mistaken?’ And I just can’t see where I could be.”

 Ogo Pogo researcher, Arlene Gaal, responds to the naysayers: 

 “For those who want to call it a beaver? I’ll say, no way.  An otter? I can’t buy it.  A miniature Ogo Pogo? In all probability.”

 Experts may disagree about Ken’s footage, but there’s still no explanation for the 40-foot-long creature seen in Art Folden’s film, or the similar one churning up a wake in the Larry Thal footage. And hundreds of other sightings attest to the presence of something unusual in Lake Okanagan. Robert Lincoln offered some advice for would-be Ogo Pogo hunters:

 “I would be delighted to find that Ogo Pogo really existed in Okanagan Lake. And I would encourage everybody to keep, not only their minds open, but their eyes open, when they’re in the Okanagan. Who knows what really exciting wildlife encounter that they may enjoy?”

 Is Ogo Pogo real?  The Canadian Government seems to think so. They’ve issued a postage stamp depicting an artist’s rendition of Ogo Pogo.

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YETI


Does a creature called the Yeti prowl the Himalayas? 


Does the Yeti really exist?
Himalayan Mountains

CASE DETAILS

The Himalayas are home to the world’s highest mountain and one of its most intriguing mysteries. For centuries, the Sherpa people, native to the Himalayas, have told frightening tales of a strange half-man, half-ape called the Yeti.
A footprint 13” long & 8” wide … made by Yeti?

 Yeti is also known as the abominable snowman.  To the Sherpas, Yeti has always been very real and very much alive.  Some Western explorers have found convincing evidence that the Sherpas may be right.

 Several expeditions have uncovered mystifying stories of strange human-like creatures who live in the Himalayas.  In 1951, Eric Shipton, a world-famous mountaineer, came across a curious set of tracks.  This was the first clear evidence that the Yeti might, in fact, be real.

 Author Loren Coleman comments on the photograph Shipton took of the tracks:

 “The photograph … is a very big peace of evidence because it showed toes, individual toes.  It showed a squat, square footprint, which a lot of the other expeditions had found, but not had good photographic equipment with them.”
The footprint was 13 inches long and 8 inches wide.  It didn’t look like it was made by a man or an ape.
Plaster mockup of footprint
In 1957, a Texas oilman named Tom Slick and explorer Peter Byrne set off for the Arun Valley in northeastern Nepal in search of Yeti.

 Peter Byrne tells how he came to believe the Yeti are real:

 “Tom Slick’s interest in the beginning was to find out if the Yeti were really there, and that’s the reason he came on the first reconnaissance.  I had been hearing about the Yeti for years, ever since I was a child.  But I think that what eventually convinced me that they were there, was meeting with the Sherpas and talk with them face to face. The Sherpas viewed the Yeti as a real living creature.  Not as a mythical creature.  They called him “hairy man” that lived out there separate from them. On the first expeditions we took along with us 8 by 10 pictures of a chimpanzee, a gorilla, primitive man and so on. And they used to point to the primitive man and say, that’s the Yeti. In fact, they thought we had a picture of the Yeti when they saw that. The Sherpas described the Yeti to us always as being man-like in form, and about 5-foot-6, 5-foot-7, 5-foot-8, not very large and covered with hair, totally covered with hair, walking upright. The face was bare of hair, the palms of the hands, that sort of thing.”
Slick and Byrne decided to split up to cover a wider search area.  As Peter Byrne tells it, each made his own startling discovery:

 “We’d started out from our camp in the early morning and we simply chose a mountain and I came across a line of footprints.”

 Byrne took pictures of the tracks.

 In another part of the valley, Tom Slick and his Sherpa guides discovered a similar set of tracks. Peter Byrne thinks the tracks are important:

 “The significance of the prints that Tom Slick found was is that they were in mud, and whereas snow will distort with heat and with wind and so on, mud will not. He only saw two or three because it’s very hard to track in that stuff, in fact he was lucky to find them.”

 A plaster cast of the footprint was shipped to the United States to be analyzed.  The print measured 10 inches long and 7 inches wide. 

 According to anthropologist Dr. George Agogino, it was similar to the footprint discovered by Eric Shipton six years earlier:
Sherpa drawing of Yeti

 “It was a short, squat, almost square type of footprint.  And I sent it to the various physical anthropology experts around the country and usually the terminology that came back was, ‘Unique, but we don’t know what it is.’”

 In February of 1958, Peter Byrne embarked on another expedition.  On this trip, he met a Buddhist monk who had an amazing story to tell:

 “He liked Scotch, this old man.  And one evening while we were sitting there having a drink and talking, he said to me, he whispered, he said, ‘You know that up in the temple, we have a hand. Would you like to see it?’  And I said yes. So we went back up to the temple.  We went into the top part of the temple and he showed me this hand about the size of a human hand, cut off at the wrist.  I considered it very significant and I took some pictures of it immediately, some flash pictures.  I asked the lama, of course, could I have it and he said no, he said it must never leave the temple here. If it leaves the temple various calamities will befall the temple and the community and so on.  I asked him if I could have a part of it and he said no.”

 The photographs of the Yeti hand were unlike anything scientists had seen before.  Was it human?  Was it ape?  Or was it an entirely new species?  They needed the actual hand, or at least a piece of it, to find out.

 The next year, Peter Byrne returned to the monastery with another bottle of Scotch for the monk and an outrageous plan:

 “I cut the finger off and I replaced it with the human finger.  It took quite a long time to wire the whole thing together and put it all back together and put it back in the box.  And nobody ever knew anything about it.  And everything, everybody actually was perfectly happy.  They still had the hand, it still had its fingers.”

 The finger was brought back to London and sent to Dr. George Agogino for examination:

 “I sent it to 20 experts which I thought should look at the hand, and they were about equally divided whether it was human or whether it was some type of primate known or unknown.”

 Dr. Agogino put a tissue sample from the bone fragment in an envelope in his desk.  It remained there for more than thirty years.

 When Unsolved Mysteries learned of the bone fragment in Dr. Agogino’s desk drawer, we asked the University of California to analyze it.  The results were inconclusive, but seemed to indicate that the tissue probably came from a human hand.

 Professor of Nuclear Medicine Dr. Jerry Lowenstein analyzed the fragment:

 “The problem with something as vague as the Yeti is that almost any result you have can be fitted into the theory.  So I’m sure that most believers will say, ‘Well this is great, this proves that the Yeti is some sort of sub-human species.’”

 Peter Byrne says the results confirm his own suspicions:

 “I think that’s what we’ve always thought, that it wasn’t an animal, that it wasn’t an upright walking ape, because apes don’t’ walk upright anywhere. That it was a hominid.  A human form of some kind.”

 Meanwhile, the sightings of Yeti continued.

 Photographer Kurt Fritler shares his own unnerving encounter:

 “I had made camp at 16,500 feet, when out of the darkness a very loud piercing call began that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before.  It moved around.  It circled our campsite, it would get closer, it would get farther away.  It would call intermittently and the call was always very loud and very piercing and very frightening.”

 Reinhold Messner says he got a good look at the creature from about 30 feet away:

 “It was my impression it’s bigger than me.  It was quite hairy and strong with short legs.  The body was quite dark, dark brown, black hair, long, long hairs.  And has quite a lot of hairs on the head.”

 Dr. George Agogino is still split over whether the Yeti exists:

 “I have to leave it open that I do not know what the abominable snowman is.  But I feel there is a very good chance, probably 50/50, that something resembling the thing they are looking for does exist.”

 Perhaps the Himalayas are home to an elusive, half-human species.  Or perhaps Yeti is just a myth.  Either way, it’s important to remember that a new species is discovered almost every year.

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BLACK HOPE CURSE


Homes built on top of a cemetery may be cursed.

The Black Hope Cemetery
Human remains were found in the backyard

CASE DETAILS 

Just outside of Houston, Texas, is a neighborhood filled with upscale homes and manicured lawns. In the early 1980s, Sam and Judith Haney settled in at the far western edge of the development. Sam described it as their dream home:

 “When we bought the house in Newport, it was the house that we had always been looking for. So, it was the house that we intended to stay at for a long period of time.”
The Haneys re-buried the remains
But there was a morbid secret about the Haney’s perfect home, one that soon turned their lives into a never-ending nightmare. Sam said it all began when a mysterious old man showed up at their door with an ominous warning:

 “This elderly man told me that he had noticed that we were putting a swimming pool in our backyard and that there was something about our backyard that I needed to know about.  So I followed him around to my backyard and he pointed at the ground and said that there are some graves right here. And he marked a spot on the ground where they were. And I really didn’t know how to react to that. I didn’t know if he was just joking. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to joke about something like that.”

 Using a backhoe, Sam decided to see if the man’s alarming claims were true. Sam says it wasn’t long before he hit something:

 “And at that point, we stopped with the backhoe and we got down into the hole and continued digging by hand. There were pine boards. When we lifted up the first board, we could see an indentation of a skeleton form. It didn’t take long to figure out that it was  actual human remains.”
Sam immediately called the Sheriff and county coroner who conducted an official exhumation.  Most of the bones had turned to powder.  But 25 fragments were found, some so brittle that they disintegrated when touched.
The Williams’ discovered they had graves too
A second coffin, located alongside the first, hadn’t been disturbed. Inside, two wedding rings were discovered on the frail index finger of the exposed skeleton. Judith Haney was mortified by the discovery:

 “They handed me the rings and it was sickening to think that I had desecrated somebody’s grave.”

 Wanting desperately to do the right thing, the Haneys decided to find out whose remains were buried in their backyard.  The search led them to a longtime resident named Jasper Norton. 

 Years earlier, Norton had dug several graves in the area. He told the Haneys that their home and a dozen others were built on top of an old African American cemetery called Black Hope. The deceased were mainly former slaves. The last burial was in 1939, and as many as 60 people were interred there in paupers’ graves.
The two people buried in the Haney’s backyard were Betty and Charlie Thomas. They died during the 1930s and their graves were eventually forgotten.

 Judith and Sam Haney made an extraordinary decision.  They reburied Betty and Charlie in their yard, and prayed their spirits would rest in peace.  But, according to Judith, peace was not forthcoming:

 “There was a clock in my bedroom and one night it started sparking and putting out a sort of blue glow.”
Jean decided to dig for the bodies

 When Judith checked the clock, she found that it was unplugged. That was only the beginning of the Haneys’ ordeal. On another evening, Sam went to work the night shift, leaving Judith alone:

 “I heard the sliding glass door open and I heard what I thought was Sam saying, ‘What you doing?’ Everything was quiet, the sliding glass doors were locked, and I thought, ‘Well, you know, you must be losing your mind.  This really must be getting to you.’ But much to my amazement that’s not where the story ended. In the morning I awoke, went in my closet to get my red shoes, and I could not find them anywhere.”

 Sam backed up Judith’s story:

 “So, of course, I started looking for them and went through all of her closets where she normally puts things. And we just couldn’t find them. We had walked just a short distance from where the gravesites were and I could see something on the grave. And they were both side-by-side like someone had just picked them up and carried them over and laid them down on the gravesite.”

 Even more disturbing to Sam was the realization that this was Betty Thomas’ birthday:

 “And I kinda got the feeling that it was like Charlie was giving Betty a birthday present.”

 Judith felt she knew what was going on:

 “I began to come to the realization that this was not all in my mind and that this had to have some relationship to Betty and Charlie’s graves being disturbed. Their spirits were saying, ‘This isn’t right.’”

 The Haneys were not alone. A dozen of their neighbors also reported lights, televisions and water faucets turning on and off, and unearthly sounds and supernatural apparitions. Worse, these bizarre events were becoming malicious.

 Like the Haneys, Ben and Jean Williams thought that they had found their suburban paradise when they moved into the same neighborhood. But Jean said she never felt at peace in the house:

 “After we moved, in everything changed. When I tried to plant new plants, they just would not live no matter what I did. You know, fertilizer or whatever, they still would not live.  And I constantly had a foreboding feeling, a feeling of things are not right or something bad is about to happen.”

 The Williams said that near their flowerbed, sinkholes appeared in the unmistakable shape of a coffin. The Williams would fill them in, only to have them reappear a few days later.  The Williams also felt their ideal home was being invaded by a menacing presence. Random shadows slid along the walls, followed by whispered words and a putrid smell. 

 At the time, the Williams’ granddaughter, Carli, lived with the couple. During the blazing heat of summer, Carli said she would stumble into bone-chilling pockets of ice-cold air:

 “It would be very, very chilly and you’d have this feeling of foreboding, or just, you know, like something wasn’t right. Anywhere in the house you’d have a feeling that you were not alone. Somebody was watching you. It terrified me to be in the house by myself. The toilets used to flush on their own. As the water went down I could hear, it was almost like conversations. You could hear people murmuring to themselves. It was a presence or spirit or something there. Something that wanted to be heard. Wanted me to know that it was there.”

 Jean Williams had no doubt as to the source of the disturbances:

 “I absolutely believe that all of these things happened to us because we were on the graveyard, and that we were simply going to be tormented until we left there.”

 Ben said he and Jean debated what to do next:

 “Me and Jean, we talked it over. And she said, ‘Well what can we do? Walk off and leave it?’  She said, ‘We ain’t got enough money to pay down on another home.’  I said, ‘We’ve always been fighters. We’re gonna stay right here and fight it and try to beat it.’”

 According to Ben, it wasn’t long before he got his chance:

 “I came home from work around ten after twelve from the midnight shift, and I walked straight to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and that’s when I seen these two ghostly figures.  And they went straight backwards into the den.  And then they started heading right down the hall to Jean’s. And it was standing right about a foot and a half from the end of the bed. The only thing I really thought of was, ‘They ain’t messing with me wife.’  As I dove through it, I felt a sticky cold sensation in my body.”

 Down the street at the Haney’s, Judith said the disturbances caused her life to unravel:

 “I was crying all the time. I was frightened. I was scared of doing my daily routine in my own home.”

 The Haneys decided to fight back in court. They sued the builder for not disclosing that their home was built over a cemetery, in part, so that everyone would know what was happening at their subdivision. A jury awarded them $142,000 for mental anguish. But a reversal ruled on legal grounds that the developers were not liable. The verdict was thrown out and the Haneys were ordered to pay $50,000 in court costs. Sam Haney recounted the total cost of their ordeal:  
  
“At that point we decided to file bankruptcy. All in all, we ended up losing the case, losing the money, losing the house.”

 The Williams also explored legal recourse. But they say that they were told that without definitive proof of a cemetery on their property, nothing could be done. It was then that Jean made a decision that she will forever regret: 

 “That was the last straw. You want a body? I’ll show you a body. So, I thought to myself, I can dig about two feet a day and I knew I would reach a body.”

 But soon after she started digging, Jean felt ill. Her adult daughter, Tina, volunteered to finish the job. After digging for a half hour, Tina also fell ill. Carli Karluk was there that day:

 “I remember her saying that she was, that she felt funny. She was getting dizzy as well. She put the shovel down and she went back inside. And she just laid down on the couch.  She’s like mom, daddy, I don’t feel right. There’s something wrong. The last thing I remember her saying was, ‘Mommy, take care of my baby, take care of my baby.’ And she looked so scared.”

 While waiting for paramedics to arrive, Jean tried to keep her daughter conscious:

 “Almost immediately her eyes started glazing over. And I was talking to her, trying to talk her out of dying.  ‘Please Tina, talk to me.’  And all this time her eyes were changing until they got to the point where I knew that she wasn’t responding at all.”
  
Tina had suffered a massive heart attack. Two days later she died.  Jean burdened the blame:

 “I realize that I had desecrated another grave and now I’m paying. I told Ben, ‘We have to get out of here. It doesn’t matter what we lose, what we had.’ And I knew that if we didn’t, that I was not going to make it, because my fight was gone. I could fight no more.”

 The Williams escaped to Montana and later moved back to another house and another neighborhood in Texas. Today they are a happily growing family, no longer plagued by mysterious noises, horrific apparitions or heart-breaking tragedies.

 Back in their old neighborhood, none of the current residents have reported any paranormal activity.  No one has ever been able to explain what happened to the Williams or the Haneys. 

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THE QUEEN MARY


Reports of ghosts, poltergeists, and apparitions aboard the Queen Mary.
THE QUEEN MARY
Ghostly figures have gone unexplained

CASE DETAILS

The famous transatlantic liner the Queen Mary is now permanently docked in Long Beach, California. On her decks and in her corridors, people have seen ghostly figures and heard mysterious sounds they just can’t explain. Server Carol Leyden had such an encounter:
“I’d been here about 14 years when I first had the first experience of actually seeing what I thought to be a ghost. I was in the work area, and for some reason I picked up a cup of coffee, went out to the tables, and there was a lady sitting there. I was so fascinated by her dress. She appeared to be in a late afternoon cocktail-type dress from the 40s.  She had dark hair, rolled at the sides, no makeup on, she seemed to be very pale, but I never saw her move. I left the table, went up about ten feet, turned around because I wanted to take another look, and there was nothing there.”
Queen Mary was converted for WWII
Former ship tour guide, Nancy Anne, once described herself as a hardened skeptic. Not anymore:

 “One day I was standing on the stairs of the pool, and out of the corner of my right eye I saw a woman, probably in her 60s or 70s, in black and white. So I went down the stairs and around the pillar, expecting to find her standing there, but she wasn’t anywhere to be found.  It was only a matter of seconds… she couldn’t have gone anywhere.”


 Some say that one way or another, all places are haunted, that they hold on to memories of past events. Perhaps that explains the ghostly apparitions and unexplained sounds that haunt the Queen Mary.

 The Queen Mary took her maiden voyage in 1936.  During the five day trip across the Atlantic, she was a floating party, a symbol of luxury travel in a gilded age. After her arrival in Long Beach in 1967, one of the first people to work on board was marine engineer John Smith. Several times over a two-month period, John heard something unusual in the ship’s bow where there should only have been silence. According to John:
John Pedder died in shaft alley
“I could hear the sound of metal tearing, water rushing. And then, men screaming. It sounded like there had been a rupture of the ship’s hull. It was frightful. I went up to the extreme bow section of the ship. The sound was there, but there was no water and nothing to cause it. I don’t believe in supernatural things, but in all my experiences as a marine engineer, I’d never seen anything like this.”
Years later, John read about a tragedy dating from World War II. After being converted into a troop ship, the Queen Mary accidentally collided with a British cruiser named the Curacoa. Over 300 men were killed. The Queen Mary’s bow sliced the Curacoa in half.  
It all made sense to John:

 “After I read that article, I was so shook up and so overwhelmed, the very area where I heard that mysterious water rushing was the exact same area that was damaged when the ship hit the Curacoa. I said, ‘This is what it would have sounded and felt like if I had been in that compartment at the time.’  But I knew it couldn’t be.”

 Dozens of other sightings have been reported. Late one night, in the pool area, a maintenance supervisor, Kathy Love, and her co-worker heard mysterious sounds. As Kathy tells it:

 “We came into the pool and I heard giggling. The sound of a little girl playing in the area. And at that point, I noticed there was splashing. The splashing stopped, the giggling continued, and we observed the wet footprints of a small child walking across into the locker room.  I know that I saw what I saw. I’m not sure exactly why I saw it. But I know it was there.”
Several other encounters have occurred in what’s called shaft alley, deep within the ship, near the engine room. Here, during a routine fire drill in 1966, a man named John Pedder was crushed to death by a watertight door. While some believe Pedder still haunts the area, Nancy Anne said she’s sure he does:
What other ghosts haunt these halls?

 “I was working in the capacity of a lead guide, which meant my job was to close down the tour route and make sure that there weren’t any stragglers behind. And I don’t know why I turned around, but I turned around and standing right behind me on the step was a man. He had on blue overalls and they were dirty. When I stepped aside to let him go by, he wasn’t there. He was gone. I don’t necessarily believe any other ghost stories that other people have come up with. I only know what I saw, and I only believe what I saw, with my own eyes.”

 There’s nothing like actually seeing a ghost turn a skeptic into a believer. And judging from the recurring stories, if you want to become a believer, the Queen Mary is a good place to start.

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