‘Bottled Ghosts’ Sold in New Zealand Auction
Via BBC News:
Two glass phials said to contain the ghosts of an old man and a young girl have sold for NZ $2,000 (U.S. $1,395 / £935) in an online auction in New Zealand. The auction attracted more than 200,000 page views on the Trade Me website.
Avie Woodbury said the ghosts had been captured in her Christchurch house by an exorcist and stored in holy water. The top bidder, an electronic cigarette company, said it was looking for ideas on what to do with the ghosts.
Ms Woodbury told bidders she had experienced “bizarre activity” in her home.
“I would get things like the jug boiling itself, touching on the back of my neck, voices from other rooms, and items going missing then turning up in weird places,” she said.
Polanski and Kubrick: Two Occult Tales
Jacques Vallee writes on BoingBoing:
In our age of rational science the occult has never been more in demand: Angels and demons are popular, the Da Vinci code and lost symbols fascinate audiences worldwide and Hollywood is eager to turn out more movies with a paranormal theme.
So why is it that so many of these stories seem flat, and fail to reach the level of insight into hidden structures of the world true esoteric adventures are supposed to promise?
Perhaps the answer has to do with the failure of gifted directors to come to grips with the enormity of the unknown issues of human destiny, or to pose the fundamental questions their esoteric subject would demand.
We go away charmed by artistic visions, dazzled by the pageantry of cardinals in red capes and…
Halloween and (Black and Orange) Magic
“Not pagan Samhain celebrations or the like,” to quote Chiropteran, “but bright-orange, screaming-pumpkin, Trick-or-Treating Halloween.” It’s all about doing magic with the wild, pop mystery explosion that Halloween has become. The Universal Monsters (Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein, Mummy) as the spirits of the North, South, East, and West; invocations of Jack Skellington; Jack-o-lanterns as the undead spirit servants we all carve every year to protect our homes from evil.
Halloween and Black (and Orange) Magick
Chiropteran – Well, yesterday was October 1st, the official opening day (by my reckoning) of the Halloween season.
This year, as part of my overarching goal to get my magickal butt in gear, I’ve decided to do a nightly meditation/devotion/working to hammer my Halloween Magick system into shape.
(I don’t know if anyone’s interested in the particulars, but here goes anyway,…
Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown
A chronicle of the life, work and mind that created the Cthulhu mythos. Featuring interviews with Guillermo Del Toro, Neil Gaiman, John Carpenter, Peter Straub, Stuart Gordon, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Ramsey Campbell, S.T. Joshi, Andrew Migliore and Robert M. Price. (Official site)
Image at left: An interpretation of Cthulhu in the sunken city of R’lyeh via Wikimedia Commons.
