Tales of the Strange Kind

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...

As generations come and go, folklore combines with further sightings to propel urban myth and its monsters into our collective histories. However this is not true with the Dover Demon. Three sightings in the late '70's are all it took to make this “animal,” legend, though the creature has not been seen since. On April 21 st , 1977, at 10 o' clock in the evening. Young teenage Dover resident, Bill Bartlett was driving along Farm Street in his with two of his friends, Mike Mazzocca and Andy Brodie, all three only seventeen. It was spring break and they were out for a night on the town, but something strange happened that evening that Bartlett would never forget – probably because local media and fans of the unexplained just wont let him. “I do remember it was around ten o' clock at night, My friends and I were out hunting around looking for people to hang out with – you know, looking for the party. We couldn't find anybody, so we were heading back toward ...