Top 10 Scariest Urban Legends

About.Com-- 1.Aren't You Glad You Didn't Turn on the Light?
After coming home late and getting ready for bed in the dark, a college coed wakes up the next morning to receive the shock of her life.

2. Bloody Mary
The young girls stood in front of the bathroom mirror with the lights out, chanting "Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary." The thirteenth time something strange happened -- a bloody, disfigured face appeared in the mirror. It was a woman. And she was angry...

3. The Boyfriend's Death
Late at night on an isolated country road, a teenage girl waits for her boyfriend to return to the car after going outside to relieve himself. After what seems like an eternity, she is startled by the sound of something scraping across the roof of the vehicle...

4. Buried Alive!
Many years ago before the medical technology we now have for monitoring patients' life signs existed, an elderly woman was pronounced dead and scheduled for burial. Family members literally had to pry her unembalmed body from the clutches of her husband, who protested that she wasn't really dead. Over his objections, her body was lowered into the ground...

5. The Fatal Hairdo
A very stylish teenage girl grew tired of spending hours carefully "ratting" (teasing) and spraying her hair to attain an extreme beehive do. She washed her hair in sugar water, allowing it to harden in the style she wanted. At night, she carefully wrapped a towel around it and slept on a special half-pillow designed to not disturb the hair. One morning, she failed to come down for breakfast...

6. The Hook
A teenage boy drove his date to a dark and deserted Lovers' Lane for a make-out session. After turning on the radio for mood music, he leaned over and began kissing the girl. A short while later, the music suddenly stopped and an announcer's voice came on, warning in an urgent tone that a convicted murderer had just escaped from the state insane asylum...

7. Humans Can Lick, Too
Once there was a a beautiful young girl who lived in a small town just south of Farmersburg. Her parents had to go to town for a while, so they left their daughter home alone, but protected by her dog, which was a very large collie. The parents told the girl to lock all the windows and doors after they had left...

8. The Kidney Thieves
The crime begins when a business traveler goes to a lounge for a drink at the end of the work day. A person in the bar walks up and offers to buy him a drink. The last thing the traveler remembers until he wakes up in a hotel room bathtub, his body submerged up to his neck in ice, is sipping that drink. There is a note taped to the wall instructing him not to move and to call 911...

9. The Killer in the Backseat
One night a woman went out for drinks with her girlfriends. She left the bar fairly late at night, got in her car and onto the deserted highway. She noticed a lone pair of headlights in her rear-view mirror, approaching at a pace just slightly quicker than hers...

10. The Roommate's Death
As she entered the dorm room, she heard her roommate's rocking chair squeaking in the corner, but couldn't see it, not all the lights were on. Must be waiting for me, Sarah thought. Putting her stuff away, she went back into the main room. From the corner came a voice...

Occult Profiles: Nick Pope

Nick Pope is a 25 year serving former employee of the British Government's Ministry of Defence. He is most notable for having served as a regular term between 1991 and 1994 as that agency's official first point of contact and investigator of UFO reports and sightings, in the department then known as Sec(AS)2a (Secretariat of the Air Staff).

During his time at the MOD he held the pay-grade of Senior Executive Officer, a middle rank in the UK Civil Service.

He has also been involved in work on the crises in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He had many different postings and had undertaken a series of jobs within the Department, including work in the Joint Operations Centre during the Gulf War, where he was a briefer in the Air Force Operations Room.

Between 1991 and 1994, he was posted to a division called Secretariat (Air Staff) and was given the designated post of SecA2 the main duties of which were dealings with non-operational Royal Air Force overseas activities and red tape for diplomatic for overseas military flights.

In addition to his main duties he was given the more minor task of documenting the UFO phenomenon, mirroring the work done in the US by the now defunct Project Blue Book. Although most of the cases could be explained as misidentifications of known objects and phenomena, a hard core of sightings defied any conventional explanation.

He was the Ministry of Defence official responsible for researching and investigating UFOs, alien abductions, crop circles, cattle mutilation and other strange phenomena.[citation needed] His involvement in UFO phenomena within the MOD led to his self-description as the "British Fox Mulder" from the hit television series, The X Files.

[Nick Pope Interview]

Documentary: All About Tesla

Tribe denies dorm for former Utah sect

Salt Lake Tribune-- Fort Hall, Idaho » A tribe has denied a request by a Utah religious group to build a dormitory-style building on the Fort Hall Reservation.

The Land Use Policy Commission of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes rejected a permit request by Church of the Firstborn and General Assembly of Heaven member Joseph Ahlstrom to build a three-story, 18,000-square-foot building on 3.68 acres of property, the Idaho State Journal reported Friday.

The commission told Ahlstrom in a letter that he was in violation of the laws and regulations of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes because the single-family residence he owns has about 30 people living on the property.

The commission also ordered Ahlstrom to "immediately cease and desist further misuse of the residential property."

Sect members moved to the Fort Hall home from Utah this summer, the Journal has reported.

On its Web site, the Church of the Firstborn said the sect was started by Terrill Dalton, who was excommunicated from the LDS Church.

Geody Harman, one church leader, said members still were looking over the letter and considering their options.

"We haven't made a decision," he said. "We counsel with the Lord in all our doings and we need to do that first."

The group's Web site said Dalton and Harmon translated records from God. Among those records were references to plural marriage and instructions to tithe to Dalton.

The tribe said the group's "beliefs are not consistent with the tribal law definition of what constitutes an immediate family or marriage."

In its decision, the commission noted the property is intended for agricultural use and not to accommodate dozens of people.

Teens Eaten By Satanists

The Sun-- A gang of devil worshippers has killed and eaten four Russian teenagers in a sickening ritual

The Satanists stabbed each of their victims a terrifying 666 times before dismembering their bodies and cooking them on a bonfire.

Russian cops discovered the teenager's limbs, hearts and scalps in a pit in the Yaroslavl region around 300 miles from Moscow, along with the dead body of a small rodent crucified on an upside-down cross.

The victims, three girls and one boy, all aged 16 and 17, disappeared from their homes in June.

But police only discovered the remains of Anya Gorokhova, Olga Pukhova, Varya Kuzmina and Andrei Sorokin last month.

The four pals – described as "Goths" – were lured one by one to a country cottage and were allegedly forced to get drunk before the revolting ritual began.

Hair from the victims was apparently found in the embers of the bonfire.

Cops arrested eight Satan worshippers in connection with the killings after finding out that all four victims had telephoned Nikolai Ogolobyak, the alleged leader of the Satan gang. His apartment lies just 250 metres from where their remains were discovered.

One of the arrested Satanists said: "Satan will help me to avoid responsibility, I made lots of sacrifices to him."

"Taryn Simon photographs secret sites"

http://www.ted.com Taryn Simon exhibits her startling take on photography -- to reveal worlds and people we would never see otherwise. She shares two projects: one documents otherworldly locations typically kept secret from the public, the other involves haunting portraits of men convicted for crimes they did not commit.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts.

A New Ultra-Secret Government Agency

OmbWatch.org -- Legislation is moving in the Senate to create a new government agency to combat bioterrorism that will operate, unlike any other agency before it, under blanket secrecy protection.Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) has introduced the Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005, S1873, that would create a new agency in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to research and develop strategies to combat bioterrorism and natural diseases. While Congress has created several agencies recently in response to homeland security concerns, most notably the Department of Homeland Security, Burr proposes for the first time ever to completely exempt this new agency from all open government laws. The legislation has already passed out of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and is now before the full Senate.

The Act creates the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA) to work on countering bioterrorism and natural diseases. Apparently in an attempt to protect any and all sensitive information on U.S. counter-bioterrorism efforts or vulnerabilities to biological threats, Burrs has included in the legislation the first-ever blanket exemption from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The legislation states that, "Information that relates to the activities, working groups, and advisory boards of the BARDA shall not be subject to disclosure" under FOIA "unless the Secretary [of HHS] or Director [of BARDA] determines that such disclosure would pose no threat to national security."

Neither the CIA nor the Defense Department has such an exemption. Burr’s spokesperson argues that the exemption is necessary to protect national security claiming that "there will be times where for national security reasons certain information would have to be withheld." For instance, the BARDA should not, according to the spokesperson, be required to publicly disclose information pertaining to a deadly virus.

(PARANORMAL SEARCHERS NOTE: This Bill has since passed and the agency formed is now in operation)

[Source]

Project MK-ULTRA

Project MK-ULTRA, or MKULTRA, was the code name for a covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, continuing at least through the late 1960s, and it used United States citizens as its test subjects. The published evidence indicates that Project MK-ULTRA involved the surreptitious use of many types of drugs, as well as other methods, to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function.

Project MK-ULTRA was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-ULTRA files destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms' destruction order.^[4]

Although the CIA insists that MK-ULTRA-type experiments have been abandoned, 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti has stated in various interviews that the CIA routinely conducts disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind control research continued. In a 1977 interview, Marchetti specifically called the CIA claim that MK-ULTRA was abandoned a "cover story."

To this day most specific information regarding Project MKULTRA remains highly classified

Occult Crime: A Law Enforcement Primer

HolySmoke.org-- Occult - the word encourages a myriad of stereotypical images - the snaggle-toothed old hag casting evil spells, the evil heretics worshipping the dark forces of Satan or the hedonist Pagan reveling in nocturnal orgies. The contemporary strength of such stereotypes is the most effective rationale for providing law enforcers with a basic and accurate primer on occult practices as well as their widely misunderstood and diverse belief systems.

Indeed, any officer investigating an alleged occult crime must be armed with a clear definitional understanding of the occult and the wide range of occult activities currently practiced in the United States. He or she must also be able to make a clear distinction between the legal activities of occultists and any illegal crimes committed in conjunction with an occult ritual. Finally, as veteran "occult cop" of the San Francisco Police Department, Sandi Galiant adamantly insists, investigators must "shed their personal and religious prejudices when they deal with the occult" lest they tread upon the foundations of the First Amendment. (Gallant Interview with the author, April 3, 1989.)

These are no easy tasks in the face of widespread allegations about heinous occult crimes. This study was conceived and designed to simplify such tasks for the law enforcer by broadening his or her basic understanding of occult activity and occult crime; explaining the complex controversies that currently surround and confound law enforcement's jurisdiction over occult activity and occult crime; describing useful investigatory techniques shared by "occult cops" (the street jargon for law enforcement investigators of the occult) from departments across the nation; and suggesting a wide variety of resources that may be contacted for further assistance.

The Problem

If you ask the small but experienced group of occult investigators who have worked the occult crime beat throughout the 1980s, most will agree that both occult activity and occult crime are problems for law enforcers across the nation. But that is about all they will agree upon. Disagreement abounds over a myriad of issues surrounding the occult, the first and foremost being the extent of occult crime. Many law enforcers argue that occult criminal activity is widespread and warrants further law enforcement resources; others submit that while people perceive the existence of occult crime, in reality, very little is actually committed.

Thus, the real issue law enforcers must face today is not proving or disproving the extent of occult crime. Instead, law enforcers must deal with the fact that a growing segment of the American population perceives occult activity and occult crime are major problems in society, and this concerned public expects law enforcers To do something about it!" Like it or not, law enforcers will increasingly be drawn into the world of the occult.

What really matters, then, is this perception, this fear that the occult and its various legal and illegal activities have permeated the nation and threaten our social, emotional and spiritual foundations. We need to examine these perceptions by historically and contemporarily defining occult activity, drawing careful distinctions between occult activity and occult crime, learning what motivates some people to become involved in the occult and some occultists to enter the world of criminality, and comprehending the controversies surrounding this emotional topic. Once these perceptions are dissected and understood, law enforcers will have a clearer idea of their roles in relation to occult activity and crime.

Movie Trailer: 2012

Occult Profiles: Societas Magica

The Societas Magica is an organization dedicated to furthering communication and exchange among scholars interested in the study of magic, both in the positive contexts of its expression as an area of necessary knowledge or religious practice (as in early modern occultism and contemporary paganism), and in its negative contexts as the substance of an accusation or condemnation (as in sorcery trials, and many philosophical and theological accounts, both early and late).

The interests of our membership include, but are not limited to, the history and sociology of magic; theological, and intellectual apprehensions of magic; practices and theories of magic; and objects, artifacts and texts either qualified as magical by their creators, or forming the substance of an accusation of magic by others.

The Societas Magica was originally established in 1994 by Richard Kieckhefer, Claire Fanger and Robert Mathiesen for the purpose of sponsoring sessions on the history of magic in the middle ages at the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan. However the activities of the Societas have expanded with its increasingly diverse membership, and our interests are not limited to the medieval period. We continue to sponsor sessions both at the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo and also at other academic conferences as proposed and organized by members.

Classification: Scholars
Threat: Non

La Santisima Muerte: Inside the Death Cult

KRGV NEWS Channel 5-- WESLACO – The worship of Santa Muerte, the Mexican grim reaper, has exploded in the Rio Grande Valley.Although, it is also showing up in other parts of the country too (click here)

She’s considered a saint by some, satanic by others. The U.S. government's labeled the religious movement as a "death cult."

NEWSCHANNEL 5 went undercover to learn the truth behind Sante Muerte, the saint of death.

We visited an herb shop in Brownsville Texas, and found her image everywhere. It was on candles, statues, and book.

A man behind the counter calls himself "maestro," which means teacher. He tells us the Santa Muerte has the power to grant lifesaving miracles and bring defeat to your enemies.

During our hour-long stay in the shop, the phone rings at least four times. Customers are calling to get the Santa Muerte to help them.The "teacher" describes the process of killing a man. He tells us he needs a full-body photo of the man. He says he’ll bury it in seven different cemeteries.

In Spanish, he explains, "This is a black job that I'm going to do. I will work with the saint of death."

Anthony Hudgins is a card reader who says he's ordained in witchcraft. He claims to know of many people who worship Mexico's grim reaper.

"They call her La Nina, Santa Muerte, La Santa," he says.

Hudgins tells us people who worship her are "mainly people in desperation…. criminals, drug dealers."

"They feel they have no other help," he says.

NEWSCHANNEL 5 met a woman selling Santa Muerte candles offering protection.

She explains, "You have to keep lighting the candle because the saint of death is very jealous."

The woman mentioned different candles do different things. One of them had a label with the words "Law Stay Away."

A U.S. Army intelligence web site describes La Santisima Muerte as "the death cult of the drug lords."

Foreign Military Studies Office's report: The Death Cult of the Drug Lords Mexico’s Patron Saint of Crime, Criminals, and the Dispossessed

[Related articles on the Cult of Holy Death]

Exorcism in Russia

About.com- A sixteen-year-old girl sits in a chair in a Russian Orthodox Church. She is being held down by her mother. Light filters in from high windows and the air is thick with tension and the smell of holy incense. A priest stands over her reading the rite of exorcism. The girl squirms in her mother’s arms, groaning and growling as if the priest’s words were a torment to her mind and soul. The girl struggles violently, her groans becoming inhuman howls and deep, guttural moans of psychological pain. Then she lashes out at the priest, and in a voice that seems not to be her own, spits words of defiance.

This is not a scene from a Hollywood production. This is a partial description of an actual exorcism that took place in a Russian parish on May 1, 2004.

• You can hear an actual recorded excerpt from this exorcism here (Windows MediaPlayer required). (WARNING: Do not listen if you are easily upset or disturbed by such things. Although there is no foul language, in English anyway, the sounds may be disturbing to some.)

This recording was made by Eugene Safronov, who is an assistant to one of the exorcists in the Russian Orthodox Church. Although he did not assist in this particular case, he was a witness, and has assisted another priest in many other instances.

Movie Trailer: Paranormal Activity

Ghost Photo: Shropshire England

About.com -- On November 19, 1995, Wem Town Hall in Shropshire, England burned to the ground. Many spectators gathered to watch the old building, built in 1905, as it was being consumed by the flames. Tony O'Rahilly, a local resident, was one of those onlookers and took photos of the spectacle with a 200mm telephoto lens from across the street. One of those photos shows what looks like a small, partially transparent girl standing in the doorway. Nether O'Rahilly nor any of the other onlookers or firefighters recalled seeing the girl there.

O'Rahilly submitted the photo to the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena which, in turn, presented it for analysis to Dr. Vernon Harrison, a photographic expert and former president of the Royal Photographic Society. Harrison carefully examined both the print and the original negative, and concluded that it was genuine. "The negative is a straightforward piece of black-and-white work and shows no sign of having been tampered with," Harrison said.

But who is the little girl? Wem, a quiet market town in northern Shropshire, had been ravaged by fire in the past. In 1677, historical records note, a fire destroyed many of the town's old timber houses. A young girl named Jane Churm, the legends say, accidentally set fire to a thatched roof with a candle. Many believed her ghost haunted the area and had been seen on a few other occasions.