M.J. Rose

Prediction: These photographs are going to be an elixir for your imagination for the the entire day at least…

From Design You Can Trust,

Bodies Of Strange Creatures Were Found In The Basement Of An Old House In London

“In 1960 in London at the time of clearing the site for construction of a new residential neighborhood, the old long-abandoned mansion belonged to Thomas Theodore Merlin was sent for demolition. In the basement of the home builders have discovered several thousand small wooden boxes tightly sealed. Imagine their surprise when they began to find inside the bodies of strange mythical creatures, which seemed to have been living only in fairy tales.

Thomas Theodore Merrylin was known as Crypto-naturalist, Fringe Zoologist and Xeno-Archeologist. Creatures and artifacts thought to be nothing more than myth. It is a mystery that challenges our understanding of biology, chemistry and the very laws of physics. But this is no fairytale, for he was a scientist, and empirical evidence and rational thought hold sway here. There is a lot to see and read, so please take your time to peruse the website (The Merrylin Cryptid Museum)…”

For more, click here.

As all sleep paralysis or night terror sufferers will tell you, there’s nothing more real than their nightmares…

From Buzzfeed, an excellent piece on the mystery and the terror:

Can You Die From A Nightmare?

by Doree Shafrir

“It is the middle of the night, and there is something very wrong in my apartment. I leap up from my bed and rush to the closet and crouch down and throw aside my shoes, which are arranged on a rack on the floor. I know I must work quickly; I am breathing fast and hard. There?—?there, behind the shoes, I see it: I don’t know what it is, but it needs to come out, or I am going to die. I pull and pull and finally get it out.

But something is still wrong. I am now completely panicked, and I jump back onto my bed and lean over the half-wall that my bed is up against, overlooking the hallway. There, I see what’s causing all the problems, and I push it downward and off the wall with all my might. It shatters loudly, glass flying everywhere.

Then, finally, I wake up. My two dogs are cowering in the corner, and I put on shoes to sweep up the glass. I am confused and embarrassed, though there is no one besides the dogs there to see that I just pushed a framed poster off a wall and broke it. I clean up the glass and go back to sleep, and it is not until the morning, when I see my shoes scattered everywhere, that I look into the closet and realize that I have also ripped the TV cable completely out of the back wall of my closet.

These brief but incredibly vivid nightmares happen for years: they’re never quite so violent as that first one, which happened around 2003, but almost always as scary. I don’t know what to call them, but they become a familiar part of bedtime, and there are times when I am afraid to go to bed because I know that just as I start to fall asleep, I will be jolted aware in a state of sheer terror. Then, just as suddenly as they start, they ebb for a time, and I wonder if I’ve gotten better. But they always come back.

Here are some other things I’ve believed in the middle of the night:

They are monitoring my breathing. If I don’t hold my breath and stay completely still, I am going to die. I am not allowed to move at all, or they will know, and they will kill me…”

For the rest, click here.

As a follow-up to our recent post about a missing 1940’s Bennington student, here is a bit more on the mysteries of the “Vermont Triangle” —

The Vanished Town of Glastenbury and The Bennington Triangle
By Chad Abramovich

“Those who know me know that I’m a huge cartography buff. That love really perpetuated when I was 10, when my mother bought me a DeLorme atlas of Vermont, and I became enthralled with it, thoroughly memorizing every detail I could. But what is it about maps that are so irresistible to me?

Maybe because of their limitless potential, and their ability to unlock the mysteries of our world. Maps tell us how things in this world relate to one another, they take data and turn it into something tangible, something understandable, and maybe something that provokes thought or feelings. Several different types of information can be conveyed at the same time, melding several different ideas into a united idea. Lines to convey topography, more lines to convey boundaries between rock layers, towns, states and countries. More lines for faults, colors for bodies of water, forest land and types of climates. Maybe it’s because maps provide some sort of order, putting everything where it needs to be. Or just the opposite. They’ve always helped me make sense of my thoughts and ideas, and even draw ideas from things that haven’t been categorized or plotted yet.

I loved getting to know the great state I lived in. But one place really stood out to me.

A perfect square, that yellow dotted line indicating it was the boundary of a town, with the word “Glastenbury” printed inside. But inside the square, there was nothing but contour lines, indicating several mountains and rugged wilderness. I was enthralled by the fact that this town apparently had nothing in it. In the very top left corner, in small print, was the word “Fayville”, plotted on a dotted line that seemed to be a secondary road, meandering its way from Shaftsbury deep into the hills, and ending in the middle of nowhere. Even for rural Vermont standards, this was pretty desolate. I knew there was something different about this place, it challenged my young and naive view of the world. Why wasn’t there anything in Glastenbury like other towns around it?

It had a mystery to it, and I wanted to know more….”

For the rest, click here.