Oddtober 2020: The Lonely Doll by Dare Wright

Book: The Lonely Doll

Type of Book: Children’s fiction, photography, inadvertently creepy

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because it’s only odd if you’re a grown-up.

Availability: Initially published in 1957, it went out of print for a while but the copyright was renewed in 1985. I cannot find a publication on my copy but it was published by the Sandpiper division of Houghton Mifflin, and is visually identical to copies you can purchase new:

Comments: When I was bouncing around the idea of trying to get out of my rut and rev my writing engine for Halloween, my friend and PUBLISHER WHO IS STILL PATIENTLY WAITING FOR MY FINISHED WORK ON MANIFESTOS, Chip Smith, mentioned that last year’s foray into children’s books was interesting and made a few suggestions on other works I could pursue. He didn’t mention The Lonely Doll, but his enthusiasm for the topic reassured me I was on the right path. So here we are, discussing this pretty but potentially alarming book.

This book was not a part of my landscape as a child. It wasn’t just that dolls didn’t frighten me – I never set eyes on this book until very recently. I first became aware of the book when actress Famke Janssen filed a police report believing that someone had broken into her apartment and did nothing but leave behind a copy of The Lonely Doll. Police were highly skeptical about her claims, though they never charged her with making a false police report because they believe Janssen believed this happened and was sincere when she made the claims. There were no signs of entry, the security cameras at her apartment never showed a break-in attempt, and inside the book the police found a to-do list that was written by Janssen herself. It was the book that grabbed my attention more than the notion that an actress would make up such a story because regardless of whether or not the break-in really happened, I’m still left wondering about the significance of the book and why anyone, Janssen or an intruder, would feel the book conveyed malice or ill-intent.

The story was not enough to provoke me into purchasing The Lonely Doll, but over the last couple of years, the book has come up on various list sites (Top Ten Sewer Disasters, Five Reasons Why You Personally Are Worse Than Hitler, etc.) when the topic of terrifying things from childhood make their rounds. I’m unsure how all my years in the book arena, from childhood to a year ago, passed without me seeing this book but I suspect it’s the case that I tune out that which is not relevant to my interests. I very quickly passed from picture books with minimal text to books marketed to teens and adults, and when I was still reading books for little kids, I liked drawings more than photos. I also tended toward smaller books, like the Little Golden Books. So the uneasiness this book caused some readers and still causes adults who investigate the book wasn’t something I experienced either as a child or in retrospect as an adult who read this book as a child.

The awkwardness in the final sentence in the above paragraph is intentional because it’s important to narrow down who is upset by this book and why. From what I have seen, children don’t really respond poorly to this book, or at least the children who were the target market for this book during its heyday, and that audience is mostly women who now are between 40 and 70 years old, though younger readers of the book pop up from time to time. I walked an uneasy line when looking into this book because I genuinely don’t want to know much about books, even fluffy picture books, before I look into them for myself but one statement came up so often that it was unavoidable, words to the effect of:

“I didn’t realize how creepy this book was until I found my old copy in a box in the attic and thumbed through it for the first time in decades.”

Though I was terribly interested in what sparked such a retrospective reaction, I managed to stop reading before these (mostly) women explained themselves. I’m glad I did because I was able to see the book through mostly uninfluenced eyes and, in the end, my reaction as an adult who did not read this book as a child is similar to the women who did. When I went back to review their reactions, there one one large commonality that I will discuss in a moment, but mostly we all felt a strange uneasiness that is hard to pin down. And though I feel I must emphasize that this is a book that is despised by the woke among us, the fact is that this is not a wicked or deliberately unpleasant book. It’s a relic of its time and possibly a very useful tool in armchair psychoanalyzing the author, a favorite pastime of mine. Unless one was a child who was very frightened of dolls in general, this book is unlikely to be that upsetting. More modern children may have a negative reaction because of changing mores regarding appropriate discipline for children but much can be said for any book about children written before the 1970s.

Though this is a very well-conceived, well-executed book, it’s an emotionally taxing book for an adult to read.

Little Edith, the Lonely Doll, is terribly lonely, to the point that she begs pigeons to stay and be her friend but all they do is eat the bread crumbs she leaves them and fly away. When Mr. Bear and Little Bear show up, it is literally an answer to this forlorn toy’s prayers, and that it is visually adorable helps draw you in.

The bears and Edith quickly settle into a domestic life that involves lots of playing, mischief and even vacations to the beach. All is right in the world until one rainy day, Edith and Little Bear find themselves at loose ends because it is raining and they cannot go outside. Mr. Bear is not there – running errands one presumes – and the two decide to explore the house, finding a wardrobe full of clothes and shoes and a dressing table covered in cosmetics, perfume and jewelry.

This scene is compelling for little children who enjoy dressing up and especially compelling given the grown-up nature of the items they find on the dressing table, like jewelry and expensive perfume. The two play dress-up until Little Bear dares Edith to put on lipstick. She demures, certain Mr. Bear would be angry if he found out. Little Bear is feeling rebellious and takes the lipstick and writes, with a nod to Christopher Robin, no doubt, “Mr. Bear is just a silly old thing.” He then hands the lipstick to Edith, egging her on. She puts on the lipstick, playing along with Little Bear’s antics. Of course this is when Mr. Bear walks in and is appalled that she is wearing lipstick, something he believes she knows better than to do.

And this is where most people focus their unease with the book. Mr. Bear spanks her.

After her spanking, still defiant, Little Bear still stands by his “silly old thing” comment but Edith breaks down into sobs, terrified that Mr. Bear will leave her and take Little Bear with him if they continue being bad. Little Bear, immediately chastened, soothes Edith and together they clean up the mess and then seek out Mr. Bear for absolution.

Mr Bear, who was reading the newspaper on the couch like a furry Ward Cleaver, was waiting for an apology and willing to forgive them both of the heinous crime of acting like children.

There’s a lot in this book that adult me finds unpleasant. The spanking thing is kind of nasty but let’s bear in mind that in the 1950s spanking was the norm and perhaps being spanked over the knee of a teddy bear isn’t the worst thing that could happen to a pretty, unsupervised doll. But the rest of the book is disturbing outside the realms of relativist parenting techniques.

Like, who the hell does this bear think he is and why does he think he has the right to spank this doll? If Edith is a doll, where is the child who plays with her? Where are the other toys? If she’s a stand-in for a little girl, where are her parents? Why was this doll left utterly alone in this house that she hasn’t even explored enough on her own to discover the dressing room before the bears showed up? These are real toys interacting with real objects, which gives the reader a voyeuristic feeling as they watch photos that maybe shouldn’t be shown to others.

The author of this blog uses The Lonely Doll as a graphic stand-in for the way adults view spanking of children versus the spanking of adults and wonders if people are upset about Edith’s spanking because they are blurring the lines between childish fantasies about the secret lives of toys and their own reactions to past and present spankings in real life. The author finds fault with some of the negative reaction to this book because the adult is viewing the punishment from the lens of receiving it as an adult, and even if I may not agree, I can see the logic. Whether or not there is anything sexual about spanking Edith, and plenty think that there is indeed an erotic element, the fact that spanking children was not taboo when this book was written and photographed is important.

But we also need to ask ourselves what this spanking was meant to convey. I’m deliberately shying away from discussing spanking in media aimed at children because up until the 1970s, most cases of spanking in children’s media at worst were portrayed as a necessary evil and the children receiving such spankings – think of Tom Sawyer and similar – were just fine. There were some rather Dickensian looks at abuse but the wholesale beating of a child was generally not seen as appropriate discipline and was a thing apart from spanking. Moreover, the spankings were not the larger message of such books. They seldom were the actual message of any media that presented spanking. Through the 1980s, media as a whole, including advertising, didn’t shy away from spanking – a trope that seems fairly negative – as they sought to sell their products because the message the ads were conveying was so outrageous as to be culturally understood to be outrageous, or they sought to avoid spanking altogether. Ads featured children and adults alike being spanked. When it was a child receiving the punishment, the message the ads conveyed was that use of their product could avoid discipline issues that led to spanking, which was a thing a good parent would want.

As for spanking adults, most of it was tongue-in-cheek, slyly implying that a wife might be a slattern or slipshod in the hopes of receiving an erotic spanking over the knee of her husband.

Sometimes the script was flipped and the man got the spanking but most of those ads were deliberate inversions of previous ads and it was difficult finding an “organic” use of a woman spanking a man. This one comes very close. The man in this ad is not being spanked but her dog bit his ass, ruined his pants, and he ends up humiliated and sprawled over her knee with a pained posterior. The posture of this ad is of submissive acceptance of authoritative dominance and her arm is raised up above her head in a perfect mimic of spanking. Incidentally, this whole ad encapsulates why the seventies was so very awful.

It’s remarkable how many movie posters featured spanking. These ads invariably show how fun spanking a full-grown woman is, especially if there’s at least one person watching as it happens. Spanking was “racy.”

Women evidently wanted to be “tamed” by old screaming men, and, again, it was all in fun, even if the dude looked downright homicidal like John here. This is a nicer version of the poster – another shot has a crowd gathered, presumably to cheer him on as he wrecked this woman for sass or maybe she put on some lipstick, too.

While few modern women will look at these ads and find them wholly amusing, it’s hard to get too worked up over adult women in heels and shellacked hair getting spanked in perfectly posed technicolor.

But mostly these images are deprived of miserable impact because of how fucking stupid they are. Spanking a wife for not “store testing” coffee or implying drug store shampoo will help a modern woman assert disciplinary dominance are on their faces really stupid premises, deliberately stupid, in fact. Spousal abuse was less discussed when these ads ran and physical violence in relationships was a societal ill that still plagues us but the audiences then, as well as now, understand that these ads are hyperbolic, and that only a lunatic would hit their spouse over supermarket coffee and lunatics were not the target audiences for these products or films. Audiences today might see far more violence in these images than a 1960s housewife but within the times these ads ran, the audience understood the message being conveyed – buy fresh coffee, get the right shampoo, we can’t show you pent up perverts penetration on film so spanking will suffice. At no time is the actual message, “Beat your spouse.”

As an aside, I found this image when searching for spanking images.

Our grandparents were absolute madmen. Jesus Christ, the kid is farting so often that his teacher has to get involved, dragging his mom into class and everything. But helpful Ovaltine saves the day, proving that the boy isn’t a bad kid, farting up the place on purpose. No, the problem is with the parents since dad leaves his idiot wife alone to her devices and without him there to instruct her, she evidently feeds her son like a goat at a petting zoo. But as remarkably awful as this ad is, the message is to avoid spanking your kid by reducing his flatulence.

Back to the book. What is the message behind Edith’s spanking? The doll in this book is one of the most emotionally desperate child characters one can find outside of depictions of war. She’s utterly alone, bereft and literally praying for relief from her torment of loneliness. Then two bears – an adult and a peer – arrive and a weird power balance develops wherein Edith is now subject to the will of a masculine parental figure and the whims of her brother-bear can result in this adult bear hitting her (because Little Bear egged that shit on, for sure). For Edith, the power of the spanking is not that she has disappointed her father figure because she engaged in behavior that any loving caretaker would want to correct, but rather the fear that a spanking is the prelude to future abandonment, a fate she will do anything to avoid.

The message can vary but it boils down to variations of a child learning appropriate boundaries and trusting that bad behavior will not result in parental abandonment. These two do not have such a boundary set in place, so shown when Edith is spanked and this resulted in her sobbing from fear of being alone again.

And let’s discuss how she got spanked by a random male doll who showed up one day to live in her home. I do not yet know much about Dare Wright though I hope to have her biography finished today so I can discuss it next, but I guarantee you many young girls whose mothers remarried after divorce or just moved their lovers into the house understand a message very specific to their lives. One day, a male figure whose arrival and possible departure has nothing to do with you or your wants, has physical and social control over you. How many abusive stepfathers were seen as Mr. Bear spanked this emotionally shattered doll? For many adults, childhood is a horror they compartmentalize until they are old enough to cope with it all and I can see very easily how an adult woman can see herself in this doll and remember being a child who was not treated fairly and who feared being left behind more than physical violence.

But you don’t even have to have this specific memory to feel uneasy about a book that features a stand-in for a little girl who begs pigeons to stay with her and talk to her. When confronted with this book, you see dolls interacting in a human environment, standing in for humans. There is a reality to this book that I did not encounter in my Little Golden Books. It is very easy to assign Edith a human role even though she is clearly not a real little girl because the rest of the book is very real. Plus the environment is clean, pretty and the dolls themselves are very cute. A sad little girl is finally given a sort of family and then BOOM! The goddamn big bear is apparently looking right up her dress as he spanks her and she descends into a fit of sobbing despair. That they seem like they’ve mended fences at the end is nice, but that is not the ebb and flow of childhood. It takes a long time to overcome the misery of years of loneliness and fear. The reality of this book mirrors the reality of the unstable nature of childhood itself, where lessons have to be learned over and over and children don’t always spring back.

Dare Wright produced eighteen other books in the Lonely Doll series (one features a kitten and another features Edith kidnapped and tied to a tree), and this book still routinely makes “Best of” lists for children’s books in defiance of how adults may feel about it. Clearly the message children receive from this book, even modern little children, is very different than mine. I don’t know what they see when they read this book but the beautiful photography, cuddly bears, pretty doll, the allure of the make-up and high heels during dress-up all likely play a role in the enduring interest some children have with this book series.

But I still wonder, what message was it that Dare Wright wanted to convey? What caused her to create such a sad, needy character? Did she even realize Edith was needy and miserable? Why did she create a scenario wherein a doll is spanked by another doll in a genuine attempt at discipline? Did she really think Edith deserved a spanking for something so minor? Was the scene a touching look at a father’s attempt to tame an unruly child, or was there something far more malignant that only distance from childhood can show us? Will any of this information help us understand why this book was involved in an actress’s presumably delusional belief someone planted the book in her home?

We’ll find out in my next entry. Until then, share with me any books you read as a child that now as an adult freak you out.

Oddtober 2020: Biblio-Curiosa No. 5 – The Children’s Books Issue

It has been far too long since I have discussed Chris Mikul on this site. When I decided to devote a bit of Oddtober to media for children, I remembered that Mikul had released a Biblio-Curiosa devoted to kid’s books and the authors of said books. As is the case with just about everything Mikul writes, I could write reactions to his articles that are longer than the articles themselves but I will work to restrain myself. In the past, Chris Mikul sent me down a fascinating rabbit hole chasing the memory of the man known as F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, as well as discussing the book that has since become my odd book Holy Grail, The Pepsi-Cola Addict by the surviving Gibbon twin, June, a name likely known more to fans of strange phenomena than to bibliophiles.

His body of work is what I’ve often said I hope OTC can be when it grows up, which it probably won’t. Which is just as well because Mikul’s work approaches being sui generis, and it’s a bad idea to mimic that which is one of a kind, though it’s always nice to have such inspiration. Issue 5 isn’t creepy or Halloween-y in a supernatural way, but all the books he discusses in this issue have some element to them that is strange, eerie or odd. Emphasis on “odd” because, as the title reveals, one the books he covers is actually entitled Odd.

The fact that the cover is re-enacted in my neighbor’s backyard in no way influenced me where Mikul’s look into this book is concerned. It should also not be surprising that I would be kindly disposed toward a book that features two little girls washing a pig.

This was one of the shorter of the seven articles in this edition, but it struck me as being the most relevant to my interests and as being the story that best illustrates one of the many paths a child can take to becoming an odd adult. Odd tells the story of six-year-old Betty, daughter of an MP and the middle child of five. Her two elder siblings are close in age and her two younger siblings are twins, leaving Betty on her own. She is literally the odd one out. One day Betty accidentally knocks one of her younger brothers down and is locked in a storage room with a Bible (!!) as punishment. Her nanny tells her she cannot come out until she memorizes a Bible passage. And it’s here that the “weird kid” roots begin to take hold. Mikul describes the scene:

Turning its pages, Betty comes to the Book of Revelation and the text “And I came unto him, Sir thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the lamb.” Betty learns the text by heart and becomes obsessed by it. She finds out what tribulation means, and after that asks everyone she meets if they have experienced it yet. She is terribly worried that tribulation is only for grown-ups, and if she dies before experiencing it she won’t go to heaven.

This resonated with me strongly. As a child who grew up in a large city in the American South, I cannot be the only kid who, when confronted with another child’s steadfast opinions regarding baptism and salvation, became convinced that I was going to hell because Southern Baptists didn’t baptize babies (or at least my church didn’t). Luckily I was able to ignore conversations about full body immersion versus top of head christenings and avoid a freakout because I figured that even if the top-of-headers were correct, the top of head got wet in a full body immersion so pretty much everyone would be fine in the end.

So the middle and odd kid’s parents have to go away and in what I feel like is a typically upper-class British manner, the kids are sent to live for six months on a farm their nanny’s brother owns, and are permitted to run amok unsupervised in manner that would likely make the evening news if it happened in my neck of the woods. Betty meets all sorts of grownups, including a church organist, who gives Betty a puppy, which predictably causes Betty to worry about whether or not her dog will go to heaven. Betty develops a friendship with the father of a dead little girl, and genuinely enjoys the company of adults, and in turn the adults in her life don’t mince words or treat her like a foolish little child. They don’t speak to her like an equal, but they also do not shelter her and as a result she takes the slings and arrows of life with more equanimity than many modern adults would. The book ends with a tribulation that involves a mad dog and sacrifice and if this sounds familiar know that Amy le Feuvre’s Odd was published in 1897 and that she handled the way such a plot plays out far better.

In this issue, Mikul also shares the story of E.W. Cole and his astonishing book store in Melbourne, Australia, Cole’s Book Arcade, and his charming picture books that appeared to have a preternaturally Aquarian Age reliance on rainbows. He has me rather interested in finding one of the Wallypug novels by G.E. Farrow, a series of books influenced by but not nearly as smarmy-sounding as Carroll’s Alice books. He also revisits an author he discussed in issue two. Murray Constantine, who wrote Swastika Night in 1937, was actually a lady named Katherine Burdekin and she wrote a book aimed at children in the 1920s called The Children’s Country under the name Kay Burdekin. In retrospect this is a heavy book for children if they are skillful in picking up on subtext. I wonder how modern, woke audiences would feel about Burdekin’s blurred sex/gender lines.

If nothing else, this issue shows how many books for children and young adults were written by women. Amy le Feuvre is clearly a woman’s name but one could be forgiven for assuming Erroll Collins and EE Redknap were men, writing heavy and at times brutal science fiction with a splash of fantasy for young readers. Nope, those were the writing names for Ellen Redknap, whose hardcore militaristic and intensely martial story lines ensured that a reader like me would not have enjoyed her writing when I was her target audience. What makes this writer all the more remarkable is how… girlie she was. Evidently she was known as “Goody” as in goody-two-shoes. Deeply maternal and helpful, she raised her siblings after their mother died, lived as a spinster while offering all sorts of assistance to aspiring writers, all the while writing books aimed at aggressive pre-teens entitled The Black Dwarf of Mongolia and The Hawk of Aurania.

The oddest book Mikul looked at is the utterly bizarre, plot-driven Susie Saucer & Ronnie Rocket by Stella Clair, illustrated by Edward Andrewes. Whew lad, this is one hell of a book and hopefully Mr. OTC adds this to the “need to buy if I come across it” list. Heavily influenced by the 1947 description of “flying saucers” and the horrors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this 1957 children’s book is a synthesis of that which is cute, that which is arcane, and that which is absolutely fucking terrifying.

Honestly, she’s waving a little handkerchief that matches her bloomers. How could something this adorable be so creepy?

Stay with me: Okay, so on Venus, the business men decide to stop making flying saucers and Susie is one of the last ones constructed. Susie is recruited by “Flame,” who is a Lord of Venus, to be his… I don’t know, spaceship ward, and he places her in service on a huge spaceship carrier called Jupiter. On a mission to Earth, Susie meets a rocket, Ronnie, and the two race each other and get up to all kinds of shenanigans but Susie gets stuck in a pond and she and Ronnie are found and taken in to be examined by Earthlings, certain Ronnie and Susie are enemy weaponry. Ronnie gets help, Susie is rescued but Ronnie is caught again and turned into a bomb and the UFOs have to save the day.

This story is full of absolute WTF-ery that make it absolutely mind-boggling, especially given how adorably illustrated it is. Here Mikul is discussing when Susie and Ronnie meet:

They strike up an awkward conversation, with the rocket’s “gorgeous dorsal fin” making Susie’s magnet quiver.

Later, when Susie is captured, the attempts to disassemble her sound very close to rape. It’s a weird little book to be sure.

The part I liked the best about Susie is clearly she was a means by which true believers in UFO-ology were trying to make the topic approachable for children, going so far as to mimic a widely known but disputed photograph of a UFO.

The book benefits greatly from its colourful and charming illustrations by Edward Andrewes. Susie, with her ribbons and polka-dot outfits, must surely be the most feminine flying saucer ever conceived. Andrewes based her closely on the iconic flying saucer Adamski claimed to have photographed in December 1952. This looks like a hubcap (probably because Adamski made it from one) and has three round protuberances at its base (probably light bulbs). In Andrewes illustrations, these become Susie’s three legs, clad in polka-dot material with frills.

I feel like I need to say something here but words sort of escape me.

You know terribly scary and awful Christian cartoons are? Like Davey & Goliath and basically all those weird vegetable and fruit animations? They mean well but they are invariably off-putting at best, nightmare-fuel at worst. It’s good to know ufology attempts to recruit the young suffer from similar shortcomings. I guess dogma marketed to children will be a tough row to hoe, so to speak.

There’s much more to the article than this and I’m holding myself back because this is a “worth the price of admission” article. Actually, every article in this issue is worth the price of admission. If this is the first time you have encountered Chris Mikul’s work on my site, I should apologize for my sloth of late because you really need to be made aware of him annually, if not quarterly. I plan to discuss his most recent book, My Favorite Dictators, here as soon as I reasonably can, and you can have a look through my “Authors A-Z” list and see more of my looks at his work. Also, if you are interested in buying issues of Biblio-Curiosa or Mikul’s equally fascinating Bizarrism, you can contact him at cathob@zip.com.au to get costs and shipping rates.

Mikul’s look at children’s literature was an excellent starting place to discuss media for children that ended up being unintentionally disturbing to children or alarming to adults. And what better time to consider terrifying children than during Oddtober?

Oddtober 2020: Hellebore: The Sacrifice Issue

A couple of weeks ago, a young man who follows me on Instagram recommended a magazine that is dedicated to dark folklore. I want to send him a cookie bouquet or maybe some free healthcare because had he not mentioned Hellebore on his feed, I might not have heard of it at all, let alone found out about it in time to discuss it for Oddtober2020. Living in your own little world has its drawbacks, and basically all the youngsters who follow me on Instagram expose me to all kinds of new media, ensuring I will always have fodder for OTC. The kids are alright and most of the time they have really interesting taste.

Hellebore is a fascinating journal. The magazine’s subtitle is “A Summoning of Ancient Terrors” and so it is. When I placed an order, only the first two issues were available. Number one is the “Sacrifice” issue and number two is the “Wild Gods.” It is a biannual magazine, released at Beltane and Samhain, and since I placed my order, the third installment, the “Malifice” issue became available for pre-order. I am sort of bummed that I will not be able to get the third magazine in time for this year’s Oddtober because, of the three issues, it is the one most relevant to my specific interests.

But that’s a very small complaint because the first two issues are definitely worth talking about. But I now know I already have an entry planned for Oddtober 2021. Just sayin’…

It’s been a while since I wallowed in the occult, and what better time to solve that problem? Walloween, my friends.

I’m only going to discuss the first volume, the “Sacrifice” edition, this go around but it should be mentioned that both issues are deeply interesting. At the time of this writing, Hellebore is offering all three in the “Wyrd Sisters” bundle at a reduced price. Definitely worth the purchase and shipping price, but if you’re in the UK or the US also have a look at the stockists list just in case a book store near you carries the magazine.

As is likely obvious, the “Sacrifice” issue handles the topic of sacrifice and how it manifests throughout history, and in this context history is confined mostly to the British Isles and some Northern European locations. Among the eight articles in this 68-page magazine are:

A look at stone circle sites in the UK and discussion regarding their purpose, which was possibly serving as locations for human sacrifice (Druids enter stage left) and larger, megalith sites, like Stonehenge, were possibly mass cremation sites.
An interesting literary discussion about the man who was the inspiration for the creepy and wicked Mr. Abney in M.R. James’ story, “Lost Hearts.”
A brief examination of various types of animal sacrifices throughout history.
A discussion of the perception of English small towns as places where the old gods and old ways reign supreme and the casual visitor may want to bear that in mind if they find themselves wanting to disparage the rural inhabitants of seemingly backward burgs. This article, “From His Blood the Crops Would Spring” by Maria J.Perez Cuervo, was deeply interesting to me. Earlier this week I happened across a channel that is essentially a computer reading some of the creepier threads from 4-chan boards, usually /x/. I had listened to this video on occult happenings in Yorkshire, including what appeared to be wholesale sacrifice of horses as well as possible child sacrifice.* That level of happenstance generally means I will want to talk a topic to death, so to speak, but I don’t know enough about this topic to hold forth at length. I will definitely be sorting through the references Cuervo used for the article because this was a “worth the price of admission” story.

This journal actually has two articles that are worth buying the magazine for – the Cuervo article above and “The Bodies in the Bog” by John Reppion. I’m focusing on Reppion’s article because I know a thing or two about “bog bodies” and because I appreciate Reppion’s scholarly attempt to shed light on how some of these people actually died versus the very salacious assertions of human sacrifice offered up with every newly discovered bog body. What initially looks like a body buried with its limbs severed could very easily be a person whose limbs were cut off by the peat-cutters who discovered the corpse. What appears to be a garotte may just be a leather necklace that shrank over the centuries.

But Reppion is also willing to cede that many bog bodies are, indeed, the results of human sacrifice, or at the very least capital punishment with a disregard for burial customs. He specifically mentions the Haraldskaer Woman, found in 1835 in Jutland, Denmark, so well-preserved that she was initially believed to be a recent murder victim (as are many bog bodies, it must be said). It was believed she was Queen Gunnhild of Norway, who lived between 910-980 AD. In the Jomsvikinga Saga, it is said that she was the wife of Eric Bloodaxe and was the mother of many subsequent kings, but Harald Bluetooth of Denmark had her drowned in the bog on his estate. So certain that they had found the body of this historical heroine, the then-king of Denmark and Norway ordered an elaborate burial casket for the bog woman. When subjected to modern testing, it was revealed that the bog woman was definitely not Gunnhild. The Haraldskaer Woman lived around 500 BC. And if she lived in 500 BC, during a time when cremation was the preferred burial method, it seems rather likely that there was a significant reason why her body was sunk in a bog, with branches placed atop her limbs to hold her in place. A faint groove along her neck points in the direction that she was a victim of human sacrifice.

I love stories of bog bodies. They seem to follow a script. Manual workers find the corpse as they are digging up or cutting into something, they think it is a murder victim, the academics gather and declare the corpse to be a specific type of bog person, only to have academics gather later and declare all the earlier information null and void. I became interested in bog people when I was in college. I read about one for the first time in a Margaret Atwood story that framed the breakup of a student and the older professor who should have known better around the discovery of a bog body. The story, called simply “The Bog Man” was the first time I recall knowing about such things, but I also recall that bog people played a big role in some of Seamus Heaney’s poetry. Regardless, it wasn’t science that sparked such an interest, which probably goes without saying.

I have a favorite bog person – which also probably goes without saying because of course I have a favorite – and it’s the Elling Woman.

The Elling Woman likely had blonde hair, but the tanning process in the bogs renders all lighter hair colors a deep, reddish brown.

She was found in Denmark in 1938, and she’s been overshadowed in bog folk-lore by the discovery of the Tollund Man, found in 1950 about 200 feet away from where her body was discovered. Both bodies were killed by hanging, and the positioning of their bodies indicates they were ritual sacrifice victims rather than people subjected to capital punishment. Initially, it was believed the Elling Woman was a young man, but a later scan of her pelvis revealed her sex.

This is a recreation of both the braid as well as the cloak the Elling Woman was found wearing. You can find tutorials on YouTube that take you through the process of plaiting your hair up like the Elling Woman. And yes, I’ve attempted this braid and sort of got it but I suspect I am just not Nordic enough to pull it off. You need to be very tall and in possession of at least one embroidered dress from the set of Midsommar to wear hair like this without looking a bit odd.

You know the world is a fascinating place when you can read about the disturbing enthusiasm a reclusive Texan has for a charming Dutch woman’s recreation of a hairstyle worn by an Iron Age woman hanged for cultural reasons we will likely never know then stuffed into a bog. But mostly, yeah, I selected the bog men article so I could talk about this specific bog woman because I tried to replicate the hairstyle during a long spell of jittery insomnia. Not even close to the worst reason I’ve chosen a topic for this site.

All in all, Hellebore has proven to be a righteous purchase. In the off-chance my copy of the “Malefice” edition crosses the pond fast enough for me to talk about it for Oddtober2020, I’ll devour it in one sitting and write it up. Otherwise meet me back here next year.

*Beware: Any time missing children are mentioned from anything related to a /chan, you are no more than an Internet inch away from falling down a deep and relentless Q-Anon rabbit hole, which is less a rabbit hole than a gaping chasm in the time-space continuum from which you will not emerge for months, if you’re lucky. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Oddtober 2020: WKCR Interruption and Master Post

I began a discussion about the creepy WKCR broadcast interruption tape last October and I hate to admit that I still haven’t “solved” it. But I have cleared up a bunch of the names in the video, and still think that I, or anyone else who reads here and takes up the mantle of transcribing the tape, can eventually determine its purpose or its creator. I’ve noticed some incoming links from other sites that analyzed the tape and realized I never shared what I discovered since I last wrote about the case. So this will be a master post that has all of my research and I’ll post any new findings in this entry as I find them. If anyone reads this and has information they’d like to share, please comment. I’d love to hear what you think. Also please feel free to take any of my research and run with it.

My first entry beat down a few of the more unfounded conclusions people had regarding this tape interruption, and in the interests of completion, I’ll pull that data over into this entry.

The lore behind this tape is that in 1994-1996 – the time frame is never clear but is restricted to these years – a kid who enjoyed taping radio shows and listening to them later accidentally recorded a broadcast hijack in a radio program on WKCR radio, the station for Columbia University. He or she rediscovered this strange recording twenty years later and shared it on 4chan. It’s not as well-known as the bizarre Max Headroom broadcast interruption, but is still discussed on paranormal sites, mystery message boards and similar.

Quick description: In the middle of a radio broadcast, the music was interrupted by a strange recording that began with the sound of breath exhaling and soft feminine moans. It’s fairly creepy to listen to.

Initially you can hear a bit of chatter and eventually the sound of chatter increases enough in volume that you can tell names and dates of deceased people are being recited, along with names of the deceased’s family members. Each person’s information ends with a ringing bell. After the recording ends, there’s a brief moment before the DJ comes back to continue with the show’s format and many people, myself included, think the DJ’s voice is identical to the voice reciting names during the interruption.

Multiple attempts to contact WKCR regarding DJs who worked at the station during this time frame have gone unanswered. In fact, the station stopped broadcasting this year and I suspect there is little to no chance any time soon of finding someone who has the time to search such records. Similarly I cannot find anyone who claims to have heard this broadcast interruption as it happened.

My goal has always been to either find out if there is a link between all these names, or if these names could lead us to the person who performed the interruption. I’ve never felt this was a genuine broadcast interruption. Either the radio DJ staged this as some sort of avant garde experiment or the tape was created by the person who leaked it with the purpose of passing it off as an interrupted broadcast. As I listened to the recording over and over (and over and over…), I picked up on some clues the performer seemed to have laid that might lead to her identity or purpose, but I still don’t have the whole of the tape deciphered.

Before I share my research, I want to emphasize that you should not get hung up on the fact that one of these names is of a student who died in the PanAm 103 flight that Libya shot down over Lockerbie. Also, don’t put too much into the fact that one of these names belonged to a famous physicist who was the brother of the father of the Manhattan Project. Though I have not figured out every name yet, among those I have I cannot find any links to terrorism, plane crashes, or nuclear physics. The connection these people share – if they share any connection – I suspect will be the person behind the interruption, a belief bolstered by the fact that the speaker in the interruption specifically states her relationship to some of the people whose names she recites.

I also want to emphasize that the recording has errors in it, either by design or by accident. If this recording was actually aired between 1994-1996, errors could be chalked up to misremembering dates. It could be deliberate, but I tend to think it wasn’t. If this recording indeed happened more than 20 years ago, it’s not like the woman on the tape could look up information on the Internet. When you have to rely strictly on memory because Find-a-Grave and Ancestry.com weren’t invented yet, you’re gonna make some mistakes. I also am not wholly sure who the “my friend” or “our friend” portions refer to, the deceased or the name that immediately precedes such statements of relationship.

So join me under the cut and see what I’ve come up with. And please share anything you think may help or that I’ve overlooked.

Oddtober 2020: Celador and cellar doors…

Much of what happens on OTC is the result of me falling down a rabbit hole and writing about it, and often if there isn’t a rabbit hole, I’ll dig one, just to cover all the bases. But if you’re new here, hi, sometimes when I consume media, a brain switch gets tripped and I end up worrying the piece of media like a dog with a bone, obsessively gnawing on details until I wear myself out and move on to the next little or sometimes massive obsession. It’s hard to predict what will flip the switch but when it happens I just have to roll with it until the obsession ends and I can move on to something else. My most recent obsession is with a song, and it seems fitting to share it during Odd-tober because while it isn’t wholly Halloweenish, the more I looked into it, the creepier it was. An Odd-session, as it were.

I have to assume that most of you have encountered the often wretched and frequently bizarre recommendations that happen when YouTube algorithms try to predict your tastes. You listen to, say, an acoustic set from a Finnish doom metal band, and helpful YouTube suggests you follow it up with a Halsey video wherein she both spits blood and features Debbie Harry in a random but charming cameo. It’s baffling, and I have no clue what I watched that caused YouTube to throw up the video for “Evil in Your Eye” by a band called Church of the Cosmic Skull. Not complaining – it was a righteous recommendation, and I liked the song enough to look into the band, which led me to a solo project the guitarist and lead male vocalist, Bill Fisher, recently released. (As an aside, this is the golden age of the solo project. All these bands, unable to tour due to Covid-19, restless and waiting…)

I watched the video for Bill Fisher’s song, “Celador,” at three or so in the morning on Saturday and am beginning this entry three days later, having thought about it in my usual spiral of insomnia-laced (un)focus. As soon as I realized I was going to write about Bill Fisher, I stopped opening the emails I got after joining his site. The emails are fun invitations to try and understand the mission behind the album. I almost wish I hadn’t signed up before posting this discussion because just knowing the title of the album Fisher released has probably colored how I look at this video, though I like to think I’d have reached the same conclusions regardless. I really hate knowing too much before diving into a rabbit hole but sometimes you get in your own way, I guess.

You may want to watch the video for “Celador” before I begin.

This particular rabbit hole led me to three small warrens, wherein I considered the reason behind the video concept, Fisher’s use of euphonia and dual meaning, and how I think this song is, in a way, an updated fairy tale. Join me beneath the cut, and let’s gnaw this bone together.

Biblio-sentimentality: The Unlikeliest Positive Vibes

I am still working on my book about manifesto writers. I believe it will come out this year, and I encourage you to pray for my editor and publisher because I have brought my defining trait – unrestrained verbosity – to my discussions of Valerie Solanas, Arthur Bremer, Anders Behring Breivik and others. Keeping me focused and on point is no simple task, so don’t be surprised if I ramp up with more, “Here’s something interesting I’m obsessing about but has no place in my book” entries about the people behind these manifestos, as we pare down the book by the pound rather than by the word.

As I was pulling out notes for the chapter on Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, a small piece of paper fell out. I’d already read and made notes in the book, and I use proper bookmarks these days, so it was kind of weird that what appeared to be a cashier receipt was in my book. It must have been between the last page and back cover because I can’t imagine how else I would have missed it. Maybe I’d spaced while tidying up one day and put a receipt in the book? Dumber things have happened.

A closer look at the receipt showed me that it was indeed part of the book when I purchased it.

Click to see the full size.

Turns out this was not a receipt for goods purchased. It’s a time clock receipt for an employee at a McDonald’s located in Deer Lodge, Montana. I blocked out the names of the manager and the employee because Deer Lodge, which is a little over an hour’s drive from Lincoln, is a small town. Even though this time card slip is dated February 15, 1999, there’s a chance these people would still be easily identifiable. My readers as a group are really cool people but, still, best not to drag anyone into my site or the topic of Ted Kaczynski unless I know they’re sort of okay with it (or are beyond the harms of online harassment.

I mentioned Lincoln above because the mountains and gullies in Lincoln are where Ted Kaczynski retreated in 1972 and was arrested in 1996. That is important information because the book from which this receipt fell, UNABOMBER: The Secret Life of Ted Kaczynski was written by Chris Waits, a longtime Lincoln resident and the person who knew Ted the best while he was occupying that cabin that the FBI literally hauled off for evidence. Chris owned the land that permitted Ted access to gullies where he tested his bomb-making and engaged in the sort of monkey-wrenching that would have given Edward Abbey a hard-on, so Ted had to maintain what seemed, at the time, like a friendly relationship with Waits.

So seeing that the receipt was from Deer Lodge in 1999, when the book was published, was interesting. I began to dig through the book for more clues and I realized that this book was inscribed. Both authors signed this book (Chris’ coauthor was Dave Shors). In my defense, I bought this book used (because it is no longer in print) and it came to me in a flurry of books I’d ordered to help me with this project. No lie, one day 21 books arrived in the mail. But still, overlooking a dual author inscription is unusual for me.

Okay, this is the sort of inscription that causes an obsessive who should be writing her book to spend precious time investigating who “Chief Jay Verdi” was and why he did a good job and why that receipt ended up in his book. I have no idea about the receipt, by the way. Neither names on the receipt come up in regards to Jay Verdi in online searches, but I didn’t spend much time digging, to be honest. Did Chief Verdi stop for coffee in Deer Lodge one day and find some hapless morning shift worker’s time slip and use it as a bookmark in the book inscribed to him? Did he lend this book to a niece or cousin working at McDonald’s and they read it on their break?

Jay Verdi died in 2008, and a cursory look at people associated with him on social media shows how much he is missed. He lived a long time in Lincoln, later moving to Helena, and was an extremely civic-minded man. He worked for FEMA, and he joined the volunteer fire fighters in Lincoln in 1972. He was elected “chief” of the volunteer fire fighters from 1997-1999, hence his title. There’s still a lot of information about him online, and while I can’t find any direct lines between him and the search for the Unabomber, the fact is that the Lincoln emergency services had their work cut out for them given the number of times Kaczynski sabotaged logging machinery, as well as all the time he spent refining his bombing techniques. I don’t feel comfortable reproducing actual photos of him but there are pics of him out there, dressed as Santa and posing with dogs for Christmas, showing off an antique fire engine, and basically just being a dude who lived and worked in Lincoln.

The best story about him I found did, however, involve the Unabomber:

Unabomber file 2: Heard about the Unabomber T-shirts the Lincoln volunteer fire department and ambulance crew is selling (“Home of the Unabomber. The last best place to hide–Lincoln, Montana”)? Jay Verdi, one of the volunteers, wants to thank Illinois and Indiana fire departments for their shirt orders. “We’re over halfway there to raising the $7,200 for a new defibrillator,” he told our source.

I think Chief Jay and I would have had a lot to talk about – I love his decidedly earthy sense of humor and his willingness to do the hard work needed to have a safe community, especially in underfunded emergency services. I don’t know how his copy of the book ended up with the McDonald’s time card tucked away along the back cover, but I suspect his book went the way of all possessions when we die. I get the feeling this book has changed hands a couple of times before it ended up with me because the dealer I bought it from is in Kentucky. I feel lucky I have it now because Jay Verdi seemed like a righteous dude, one who had to deal with the less showy elements of cleaning up after Ted Kaczynski. It’s a weird little piece of terrorist history, and though I seldom get rid of books, I definitely will be holding on to this one. It has good vibes and a good story behind it, and even a little bit of mystery via that McDonald’s time slip. Godspeed, Chief Jay. I’m glad I’ve got your book.

Happy Halloween!

Well, I had intended to follow up yesterday’s entry about the WKCR radio broadcast hijack with some new information I found about the names uttered in the chant in the audio clip. I have, predictably, fallen down a rabbit hole. Like I think maybe I’ve solved the link between the names but need some more time, or I’ve hit the bottom of an empty rabbit warren and need to dig my way out, probably filled with shame at my hubris. We’ll see. Once I know which way it’s going, I’ll post about it.

And that’s kind of a lame way to end Oddtober 2019. But hey, I’ve written about a lot of weird crap over the years and I seldom do revisiting compilations so I feel like maybe I’ll just link to some of my lesser seen odd/creepy/horrific entries and get back to listening to a weird audio recording that reminds me I have tinnitus every time that bell rings.

But anyway, read away and enjoy your day!

Murder/Serial Killers

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths

Thirteen Girls

The Postcard Killer: The True Story of J. Frank Hickey

The Paranormal

Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us

How People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It

Aliens

Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens

The Cryptoterrestrials

Horror or Unsettling Fiction

House of Leaves

Drujika, Contessa of Blood

The Cannibal’s Guide to Ethical Living

Ruthless: An Extreme Shock Horror Collection

Necrophilia Variations

Dust

Horror Films

Only Lovers Left Alive

The Bunny Game

Places and Personal Stories

Ben Thompson’s Grave

Slave Cemeteries

The Liberty Hill Witch Grave

Baby Head Cemetery

The Mom Ghost

WKCR Broadcast Interruption, Part One

Hi, if you’re arriving at this entry via a link from others interested in this recording, I’ve done more research on the names and created a “master post” with all the data I’ve collected. If any of this data is helpful in figuring out the intent of the speaker in the tape, please share. This is a weird and loose collaborative effort, solving this 4chan mystery, with people building on the research others have done. It would delight me if anything I’ve done helps figure out the link between all the names in the audio or the person behind the tape.

And if you’re here just to enjoy the weirdness, both entries are hopefully still readable for those who just want to read something fun and creepy and move on to the next unsolved mystery.

The Abductors, #1 in the Sinful Cinema Series by Doug Brunell

Book: The Abductors: Sinful Series 1

Author: Doug Brunell

Type of Book: Non-fiction, cinema review, film history

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because the film is a huge, steaming pile of horse shit but Brunell’s love and enthusiasm for this type of grindhouse/sexploitation genre actually made me second guess my initial reaction.

Availability: Published by Chaotic Words in 2016, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Jesus Allah fuck, this is a terrible film. I’m not going to say you in particular would hate this film because a lot of you have weird tastes or you wouldn’t be reading here in the first place. Also, if you mute it so that you are not subjected to appalling dialogue delivered by people who probably would have been better used in outright porn, there are some interesting things going on. For example:

–If you are tired of seeing buoyant, surgically enhanced breasts, the natural boobs in this film may be just what the doctor ordered. Additionally, people tired of the PAWG trope will delight in the mostly flat, often saggy butts found on the women (and men) in The Abductors.

–How do you feel about pubic hair? Fans of the bush will love this movie.

–Do you have strong opinions about hairy chests on men lacking even the 1970s Burt Reynolds version of muscles, who look hilarious when they get handcuffed to trees? You are in luck.

–Do you harbor unresolved and unsettling feelings about helicopters, especially when you see them flying low over trees or landing on lakes so small you sense that they received a fine for even trying to land, let alone trying in the dead of night? Take this film to your therapist. It could be key in your recovery.

–Have people told you that if the Olympics had a “cringe” category, your grimaces could bring home a gold medal? Do you need practice covering up second-hand embarrassment so that you can endure your Uncle Jack’s casual sexism as he gets drunk at Christmas dinner? Consider this film your training camp.

So it’s clear that this is a bad, bad film. And that’s okay. Without bad films we wouldn’t have had Mystery Science Theater 3000. The bad film has its charms, and Doug Brunell has such a keen eye and sympathetic take on the genres that bring us terrible films that if you read his books after you watch the films he discusses, you can genuinely find yourself wondering if maybe you got it all completely wrong. To be completely frank, you probably won’t find much in Brunell’s writing that redeems this film, nor does he serve as an apologist for bad cinema (he refers to this film as being part of a “sleaze saga”). Rather, he accepts films as they are, discusses the times that spawn such films and the career arcs of the people involved. He recognizes the film’s many (many, many) flaws, but he also has such a great knowledge of genre, the specific cinematic tropes at work when older schlock was released, and the various ways filmmakers attempted to subvert those tropes, that the background he gives as he discusses the movies is the price of admission for the Sinful Cinema series.

And to be blunt, there is charm to schlock. For interior designers, it’s the Memphis Group. For bibliophiles, it’s the “so bad it’s good” that writers like Richard Laymon and VC Andrews bring to the table. What would bad music discussions be without The Shaggs and Jandek? When you read Brunell’s take on schlock films, you see the charm. Whether or not the charm works on you is subjective. But when you read Brunell’s work, objectively you see how one bad movie’s reach can extend into cinema you’d never expect from a sexploitation film. Brunell sees how it is that the worst can be a link to the best, or maybe just a link to something that isn’t quite as bad. His knowledge and love of the topic are infectious, so much so that I actually sat through the whole of The Abductors so I would be assured I could follow his book about the film.

Quick synopsis: This film is the second in the “Ginger” trilogy but if Doug Brunell doesn’t write a book about the other two films I’ll be damned if I watch them. So the plot is simple: White slavers are kidnapping women to sell to men who can blow $100k in 1970s money on cheerleaders taken hostage and “trained” to be excellent companions for really old men who wear Sansabelt slacks and live in a split-level home with orange shag carpet. After a convertible with three witless cheerleaders is run off the road, the three women kidnapped, a private investigator calls in Ginger, a woman who may be a spy, may be a detective, but never wears a bra, to help him.

(Honest to god, the first time we see her in street clothes, she is wearing a cropped denim vest with no buttons or zipper and no top underneath. Later when she tries to seduce a bad man who unties her bizarre top that looks like the old Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders’ tie uniform but as imagined by Fredrick’s of Hollywood and made by a hippie who learned to crochet in rehab, she takes forever to retie it and when she does, she ties it with her boobs outside of the fabric. She spends a lot of time topless or naked. Oh, and I remember this most clearly: the credits say “Chantilly Place” provided Cheri Caffaro, the lady who played Ginger, with all her “knits.”)

Together Jason, the private eye, and Ginger manage to track down the slavers by recruiting a pretty private eye and having her swallow a pill of some sort that allows them to track her for up to 25 miles. But before this happens, Ginger gets involved with a pudgy dude who looks like Steve Majors but isn’t (the scene where he dances with Ginger in what appears to be the courtyard of a rest home for geriatric hotel band members is cringe-gold – she’s actually got maracas). Pretty private eye gets kidnapped by slavers, Ginger watches her be relocated on a helicopter on pontoons, and is so upset she befouls a white shag carpet with like-Steve-Majors-but-isn’t and dun-dun-DUN, afterward he takes her hostage because SPOILER ALERT: he’s the head slaver.

Predictable stuff happens – all the men involved are dumb and will spill any number of beans if you show them boobs or grab their dick. Sex is had atop a pool table. An enormous henchman who “trains” the girls gets kicked in the crotch by a girl and then kicks her in the crotch in response (his name is weird and I cannot recall it now but Mr. OTC and I called him “Jablowme”). A woman gets gut punched, sexual torture is implied, but it all ends well when Ginger escapes and gets all the information she needs out of like-Steve-Majors-but-isn’t by, and I shit you not, restraining him in a shower, spraying him with water from the shower head and soaping him up. He is utterly undone by the water spray, begging her not to spray his chest anymore. Brunel actually manages to discuss this scene in a thoughtful manner that never would have occurred to me.

The three kidnapped girls end up really liking the men who bought them and stay with them. Ginger and Jason are nearly shot by a banker’s desk guns, but good prevails, the end.

The biggest problem with the film is that no one can act. Ginger speaks only in double entendres and they are delivered with a flat, smirking dullness. The men are all dumb or speak in gangster-ese. Every man seems like he’s dressed like a leisure-suit Harlequin, all the women have their nipples exposed at all times, and what is represented as the height of luxurious domestic decadence would need to be fumigated to qualify as a modern Motel 6. The abducted girls only speak when they are introduced to the used car salesmen who purchased them, asking them innocent questions over dinner, wondering how they will be able to explain to the neighbors that they are sex slaves. But the plot, oh the stupid plot, and the acting, tend to make all the excellent cheese turn into something that is merely cheesy.

Most notable is how difficult it will be for modern audiences to stomach this film.

This 90 minute film is sometimes a chore to watch. Bad acting, inexplicable costume and hair changes in the middle of a driving scene, and the idea that all women need is either a skilled lover or to be raped in order to “break” them all work to erode the average viewer’s patience, tolerance and sanity. Watching young women’s breasts be groped and twisted as they are told they are about to be tested for their sexual skills is something rarely seen in current non-pornographic, semi-mainstream or mainstream films, though it was a bit more common place in the daring ’70s.

But applying current mores to an old film should only be done when one is comparing the changes, not condemning that which is outdated for being outdated. Brunell doesn’t do that and his refusal to condemn these films for their lack of PC content is refreshing. He actually reproduces a couple of lines from an Amazon review that remarks that this film is an affront to all that is politically correct. But placing the film in the context of the time when it was made, Brunell points out that while the film is sexist, even as it tries to make Ginger into a badass investigator/spy who can kick ass and suck cock and always solve the case, it is notably lacking in the casual racism that was part and parcel of the sexploitation and grindhouse film industry.

And because he has watched all three Ginger films, Brunell can sincerely explain how this film is an improvement upon the first, that Ginger has a character arc that was as important to the filmmaker as showing her boobs in every scene. I think that’s important to know, that underneath it all, goals were set and achieved and that some people may have actually improved their acting chops. This was someone’s artistic vision – they were trying very hard to make a good movie.

The best part of Brunell’s examinations of these films is his look at the people in the films and where they ended up. He has an interview with Jeramie Rain, who played “Jane,” one of the three abducted cheerleaders (she’s the one with the short dark hair, which naturally means she’s the one who was best suited to be a dominatrix, hilariously beating the bed next to her new owner with a double-coiled black whip). Rain is very notable for her role in The Last House on the Left, the Wes Craven film that fucked me up so badly that I will never forget Mari’s near-pre-Raphaelite death scene, her hair spreading out into the water as she dies. Rain plays Sadie, the psychopathic moll who delights in the violence her male friends inflict on the girls they abduct. Rain has some interesting stories about the film.

Brunell also notes that future porn actor Harry Reems, from Deep Throat, has a role in this film of the “blink and you’ll miss it variety.” Best of all, he shows the direct line from the director of this sleazy and unintentionally hilarious film to a lucrative Disney franchise. The cast info at the end of Brunell’s books never fail to surface some WTF details that show how small the entertainment world really is.

So what I am trying to say here is that this is a terrible film and you should only watch it in conjunction with Brunell’s Sinful Cinema series. The worst film has to offer is often swallowed easier when you have someone who is knowledgeable in the genre, both sympathetic to and willing to discuss with humor the film’s many flaws, and able to write about it all in books that inevitably are better than the films that Brunell examines. I highly recommend you check out Brunell’s work.

And yeah, this is more Odd than October, but maybe if you watch The Abductors, you’ll find the perfect Halloween costume. Seventies banker, hot pants cheerleader, plaid-suited sex lord, or maybe you can just walk around naked like Ginger did. All you’ll need is a platinum wig!

God Entered the Body of Bob Hickman, As a Body. Same Size by Bob Hickman

Book: God Entered the Body of Bob Hickman, As a Body. Same Size: Worlds [sic] Only Holy Ghost Filled Man

Author: Bob Hickman

Type of Book: Non-fiction, possession, unusual theology

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, Bob thinks he is possessed by the Christian trinity, and he feels it is a very bad thing. From his possession Bob has come to the conclusion that God treats mankind very poorly and he has tried to communicate this perspective the best he can.

Availability: You can get any number of books Bob Hickman wrote on Amazon. Here’s the link to the one I purchased:

Bob has a bunch of books under his name on Amazon, many of them with names similar to this book. I don’t recommend that you order any of them unless you have a special affinity for or find yourself absorbed by reading word salad. Bob’s book is actually a bit worse than word salad because the print versions have html tags littered throughout.

I don’t know why, but reading difficult texts on e-readers doesn’t work for me. Paper books make it easier, somehow, for me to take in extremely strange writing. But a physical book was of no help here, especially since the writing and format degenerated as the page count increased. I asked Mr. OTC to scan any two random pages to illustrate what I found when I opened the book. Click on either to see what I mean.

It may be easier for those who want to know more about Bob Hickman to click some of the information links I will include at the end of this article.

Interestingly, I bought a second Bob Hickman title because it had higher ratings, seemed like it might be coherent enough to give me a better idea of what is happening to Bob, but hilariously, even though they are both self-published books on occult topics written by white men with a ballpark similarity in appearance, they are not the same person. I will set Messages from Rose by Bob Hickman, A Psychic on the Edge of the Etheric aside for another time I feel compelled to delve into occult messages from non-planetary entities.

Comments: Hopefully it is clear that I intended to read Bob’s book about being possessed by the Holy Spirit but there’s no sense in it because he’s very likely suffering from some form of mental illness that causes him to process and express reality in a manner one would need a trained mental health professional to understand. I’ve said in the past that I often approach certain non-fiction books or manifestos from the perspective of someone who analyzes literary characters. On a very basic level, if you’ve been trained to detect literary quirks and signs of mental illness in fictional characters, you can sometimes do the same with memoirs and similarly autobiographical writings. But such approaches only work when the non-fiction work is constructed by someone who, though possibly mentally ill or afflicted with some sort of strange personality, is still grounded to what the consensus labels reality. Bob is not grounded to a reality I recognize and therefore I cannot dissect his words.

His book is over 100 pages of strangely punctuated stream-of-consciousness, margin to margin, in eight point font, with lots of html tags that push even the most dedicated observer of the unusual too far. After five pages I gave up and all I can say from those five pages is that when he was a young man in Indianapolis, Bob was lonely, and in search of purpose he went to a church and was baptized. After that baptism Jesus began to appear to him to tell him to write down certain things and release them in books. The things Jesus asked Bob to do caused Bob to become isolated from his fellow man and he does his best to remain tethered to us while sincerely trying to do what the spirit in him wants him to do because he feels that doing so is the best way to alert mankind to the real horrors of what the Trinity are going to do to us.

Some think Bob is a scammer, but if he is, this is a long-term scam that has very little social or financial payoff. Those more sympathetic to Bob think he is a paranoid schizophrenic, and they may be right. His wall of text, stream of consciousness writings don’t fall completely into what I have come to expect from unmedicated severe schizophrenics, but he comes close. Had Bob started reaching out with his messages from Jesus in the 1980s, his missives and tracts would not have looked that different from paranoid musings I’ve received from people who had very unique ideas about the Kennedy assassination, the suppression of free energy and perpetual motion, and interesting theories about how the Bilderbergers were going to genetically mutate corn to turn us all into slaves. Bob is able to make internal sense in what he is trying to convey, but his narrative skips from one idea to the next too quickly, so quickly even dedicated readers will not be able to keep up. Worse, one has to have an extremely open world view to be able to give much credence to what Bob has to say about being infested by the divine.

Being possessed by the Holy Spirit has been a decidedly negative experience for Bob. On his Facebook group, he wrote the following:

if you didnt feel the spirit of god come into your body, you are still lost. dont feel bad. God attacks me. god is tearing my face and mouth corners all day, by moving my face in different directions, from inside me, ripping and tearing my face. god shoots into my mouth, disease. gum disease is gods best weapon against his people. take their teeth, god told me, and they will want to die. like needles being shot into mouth, coming in continuously. these needles stick in gums, and stick thru long ways, and spew out poison. filling my gums with disease. I put salt in mouth to kill this disease. God fondles me. yes thats right, God plays with, caresses, touches, squeezes, pulls on my dick, and sometimes it feels like a tube inside my dick, and electric tube, moving side to side. Jesus christ appears and laughs and tells me to go back out into the world and commit sin in front of those you witness to, to be abased. theres a warning in the bible, it promises God will betray you. it says God will make it rain on just and unjust. this means give god all and then he will throw you away like he did to satan. but this time, God has a problem. me. God attacked the wrong motherfucker this time. God wanted me to fall and look like a fool, but this time, God will be the one brought down, by a five foot tall man.

Okay, a long paragraph of this is remarkable. An entire book with no paragraph indentation and font so small I needed reading glasses and a magnifying glass to read? Yeah, curse these human eyes.

I felt like Bob and his possession by God Himself were in their sad way the perfect inversion of Friday’s look at the world’s sincerest and least dramatic demon exorcism. Placid, kind people drove a spirit out of a young woman I sense was a con-woman and it affirmed their faith in God. Bob feels occupied by the Trinity and they torture him, revealing to him their nasty plans for mankind, sexually abusing him, making him sick, humiliating him and he hopes to take them down by documenting all they are doing to him and planning for us.

Interest in Bob waxes and wanes, depending on various online factors, and sometimes tricksters online make it hard to know when one is genuinely dealing with Bob, who may have a form of hypergraphia if he is indeed writing across all the platforms I’ve found. Bob is known for sending out texts to various people with the same message (which is a mantra he repeats often in speech):

God has entered into my body, like a body my same size, like me floating into you or you floating into me.

Generally people don’t respond but some have, one asking if Bob is okay. Bob mostly does not respond to replies. It was these messages that made people think this is a scam, that Bob is sending bizarre messages to verify if phone numbers are real and selling that data to marketers. Those texts also caused some to think that Bob is a part of an ARG (alternate reality game). The notion it is an ARG is also fueled by Bob’s unique van that has become a sort of game for people in his area to identify, but those who approached Bob in his truck, thinking he would give them the next clue in the game quickly realized that this is not a game. But mostly his messages disturb and freak out people and the internet is littered with people asking alarmed questions on Reddit or wondering if they being stalked.

The further you dig, the more you realize this possession really is something Bob believes in and that he really does not enjoy the experience. He frequently does very self-destructive things, like rubbing sandpaper on his face in an attempt to alter his body so that God will no longer consider it a perfect size and leave. He also claims God hits him and he keeps records of all of this on his YouTube channel. By the way, if you search for Bob Hickman on YouTube, you’ll find the etheric psychic, too, so bear that in mind.

The latest upsetting thing I’ve stumbled across is a Blogger account that leads to links of Bob’s work plastered across nation specific Blogspots. Posting as late as October of this year, across around 75 blogspots hosted in different countries, Bob is offering to sell himself for any sexual purpose because “god has the morals of an ally cat” and is a randy God, apparently. Please note that if you click on any of the language specific links, you will be taken to photos of Bob in the nude. So don’t click at work unless your boss is cool with seeing what appears to be a naked Amish man posing seductively in an attic. In fact, just Googling his name brings up so many nudes. Surf safely, friends.

I hope no one tries to buy him. I worry he’s trying to fuck God out of him but may be surprised that the God in his body isn’t run off that easily. But it is undeniable that this whatever is happening to Bob has taken a disturbing left turn down an unsettling sexual road. His YouTube account is a very mixed bag, with videos ranting about Nancy Pelosi, a short video on his stereo system, Q&A sessions with God, and descriptions about how God is essentially raping him.

Shit. This is sort of awful beyond just being awful, you know? If you track Bob down online, be kind to him because regardless of what is genuinely happening to him, he is suffering. I almost wish I could introduce him to the kind Rev. Conn from The Devil Called Collect. Bob needs a decent man of the cloth in his corner.

Below are some links to a couple of interesting analysis videos about Bob. There are enough Reddit threads about Bob that you could spend many hours wading through his antics over the years. Bob is a rabbit hole so only begin to explore if you have hours of time to spend.

Odd Things Considered

Author: anitadalton