M.J. Rose

This is one of the more compelling reincarnation stories we’ve encountered. Like many of our favorites, it involves the memories of a young child and includes incredible verifications that defy logic.

Is this child actually remembering a previous life?

10-Year-Old Boy Remembers Past Life as 1930’s Hollywood Actor

by Daniel Nussbaum

“Mom, I have something I need to tell you. I used to be somebody else.”

Those were the words that five-year-old Ryan Hammons told his mother as he was being tucked into bed five years ago, according to NBC News’s Today.

Ryan reportedly began having vivid nightmares at age four. The next year, Ryan told his mother he wanted to “go home” to Hollywood, and related stories about meeting actress Rita Hayworth, taking trips to Paris, and dancing on Broadway. The boy said he had once lived on a street with the word “rock” in it.

“His stories were so detailed and they were so extensive, that it just wasn’t like a child could have made it up,” the boy’s mother, Cyndi Hammons, told Today. “Then we found the picture, and it changed everything.”

Hammons had gone to the library to investigate her son’s claims when she happened upon a book that contained a still photo of two men from the 1932 film Night After Night, starring Mae West.

“She turns to the page in the book, and I say ‘that’s me, that’s who I was,’” now ten-year-old Ryan told Today…”

Click here for the rest.

Beauty is skin deep – but sometimes the treatments seep in…

One Of The Hazards Of The 1700s Was Death By Rouge

by Esther Inglis-Arkell (http://io9.com)

“The late 1700s were not known for their long life-expectancy. One of the many sources of death, at the time, was a nasty little thing with the incongruously pleasant name of “cinnabar.” We’ll show you how fashion trends combined with chemistry to kill people off.

No one puts on make-up for their health. In the 2000s, fashion regimes involve injecting poison into the face. In the early 1900s, make-up would sometimes blind women and occasionally cover them with radium. In the 1800s, arsenic-based make-up and tonics would shrink down women’s capillaries and, at times, poison them.

It was in the 1700s that people really went to town. The standards of the day were different. Women liked dark lashes and eyebrows, so they’d darken their facial hair with soot. Other than that, they wore very little eye make-up. They also didn’t go overboard with the lips. It was the skin that they concentrated on. If you’ve ever seen horror movies involving creepy porcelain dolls with chalk-white skin and dark red splotches on their cheeks, you’ve seen the last remnant of the fashion of the 1700s. Women painted their faces pure white with Venetian ceruse, which was made by mixing lead with vinegar. Because make-up was expensive, and washing wasn’t considered healthy, they wore this lead until it wore off, sometimes for weeks. (Some ladies at this time also came up with the pre-cursor to botox, an enamel-like coating that stiffened parts of their faces and didn’t allow their skin to wrinkle.)…”

For the rest, click here.

We think an entire novel could be written around such an intriguing object!

Thou’rt poisoned with that book

from the delightful blog: Shakespeare’s England: Everyday Life In Seventeenth Century England

“I wanted to share this fascinating object which I stumbled upon on Friday. It is a bible dating to 1600 which contains a secret arsenal of poison. Given its nature, one might assume it was used by travelling assassins, or kept hidden in the library of a large house to dispatch unwanted guests. It was for auction at the Hermann Historica auction house in Germany, and is described, in translation, as follows:

Original book cover in 1600 with finely embossed parchment-related covers. Close book intact, the pages glued to a solid block, and cut out rectangular. Inside, finely crafted device with eleven different sized drawers and an open compartment. The individual drawers with colored paper glued on, the front frame and knobs flame strips of silver and ebonised wood. Handwritten paper labels with the Latin names for various poisonous plants…”

Click here to visit the original post at Shakespeare’s England, Everyday Life In Seventeenth Century England. (Several more beautiful photos of this object are to be found.)