Tales of the Strange Kind

Art Bell hosted a nightly AM radio talk show, which eventually became Coast to Coast AM, syndicated on hundreds of radio stations across the United States. On February 21, 1997, he had a guest who identified himself as Mel Waters. Mel told Art Bell and several million listeners that he lived near Ellensburg and that there was a bottomless hole on his property. Before Mel had purchased the property, many people would use this hole as a dumping ground for garbage, old appliances, dead animals and even the occasional car. Needless to say this hole was large and deep enough that even years of dumping trash never caused it to overflow. It was nine and a half feet wide and had a rock retaining the wall around it with a metal cover. Mel mentioned that rumors spread around by locals would claim to see a black beam of light shine out of the hole when opened. He also said that a hunter had thrown his dead dog into the hole, only for Mel to see it alive in the woods a few days later. L...

Before I begin, it may be prudent to provide a little geography lesson before I start. Vashon Island as the name suggests, is a large Island to the south-west of Seattle in the Puget sound. From there, there is a little islet connected from Vashon called Maury Island. They are so closely connected with one another that there is a small road that crosses the thin strand of land keeping them together. The 1947 Maury Island incident is one of the lesser known UFO account, but from personal opinion, it is one that should be better known for several reasons. This is the first time a witness claimed that a “man in black” intimidated them into silence, and although it took place before the famed UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, there were many similarities between the two. Moreover, both of the military intelligence officer investigating the sighting died in a tragic air crash before they could complete their investigation. Unfortunately, the two principal witnesses, Harold Dahl and...

The question of whether or not spontaneous human combustion, a living human being suddenly bursting into flames, really happens is a rather old one. Hollywood has written stories of people in flames as a consequence of God's wrath on sinners, scholars have witnessed or described dramatic, though perhaps less supernatural, examples of the phenomenon. Hoquiam Washington has had at least one instance of what might have been a clear case spontaneous human combustion – with a twist: the victim being already dead. On the night of December 6th, 1973, Betty and Sam Satlow were closing up the tavern they owned. Sam told his wife Betty that she could go home, perhaps because she had been drinking heavily that evening and was not much help. Around five A.M. The next morning, Sam finally went home, where he found Betty unconscious at the wheel of her car, which was parked in the garage. He called paramedics, who tried unsuccessfully to revive her. An autopsy later showed that she died of carb...

On June 24th 1947 Kenneth Arnold of Boise Idaho was flying his own personal airplane over the Washington Cascades. He was looking for a missing marine airplane, hoping for the $10,000 reward posted for its discovery. At 2:50 pm as he was traveling east over the mountains toward Mount Adams, he saw nine large metallic flying objects. These crafts were about twenty-five miles away from his current location in the sky, at an elevation of ten thousand feet, travelin g very, very fast. He noticed that they did not fly in straight lines like ordinary airplanes or make wide turns. Instead they dipped and swerved, following the mountain peaks all the way from Mount Rainier to Mount Adams. Arnold started the stopwatch on his airplane control panel. And calculating based on the distance between the two mountains (45 miles) and the time it took the objects to travel it, he concluded that they were flying at around 1,200 miles an hour. Once the strange crafts vanished in the distan...

The community of Olalla is just across the Puget Sound from Seattle. Olalla means “berry” in the local tribal language, and the area is well known for its strawberries, which are celebrated in festivals during which people enjoy strawberry dishes of every variety. This same community was also once the place where people came to starve for their “health” – and sometimes to their death. All from a self-proclaimed doctor named Linda Burfield Hazzard. Hazzard turned her Olalla cottage into the “Wilderness Heights Sanitarium”, and from the 1890’s to 1912 she would rent out her attic space to patients who had come to experience her “cure.” She was not a medical doctor, but practiced a form of homeopathy. She wrote a book, titled Fasting for the cure of Disease , in which she declared that her treatment would cure everything from cancer to constipation. The treatment? Patients ate one bowl of tomato or asparagus soup daily, for over forty days. Long walks, enemas, and vigorous massages...

“There are such beings as vampires, some of us have evidence that they exist. Even had we not the proof of our own unhappy experience, the teachings and the records of the past give proof enough for sane peoples.” ~ Dr. Seward, Bram Stokers Dracula. Bram Stoker may have immortalized vampires as creatures that prey on the necks of their victims, but real vampires from folklore aren't so romanticized. In fact, they're simply the walking dead. And one of these horrible creatures is said to reside in Plymouth. During the 1800's, pulmonary tuberculosis would result in 1 out of 4 deaths. It was a bacterial infection that destroyed the tissue in the lungs and could be transmitted through the air from an infected individual either by coughing or sneezing near the uninfected. However, to the early settlers of New England, medicine and science had not even touched on the origin of the disease or even come to understand what it was, how it was caused or how one could pre...