M.J. Rose

A ghost story from a faraway land.

The waterline from the March 11 tsunami is left on the wall at the barber shop in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan on April 16, 2011. (AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev)

Taxi Drivers Say They’ve Picked Up Ghosts of 2011 Tsunami Victims in Japan
By Zachary Stieber, Epoch Times

In Beyond Science, Epoch Times explores research and accounts related to phenomena and theories that challenge our current knowledge. We delve into ideas that stimulate the imagination and open up new possibilities. Share your thoughts with us on these sometimes controversial topics in the comments section below.

“Taxi drivers in Japan say they’ve picked up ghosts of victims of the 2011 tsunami.

At least seven drivers claim passengers have entered their vehicle only to vanish into thin air before they reach their destination.

One driver described a young woman dressed in a coat climbing into his cab near Ishinomaki Station and telling him: “Please go to the Minamihama (district).”

In response, the driver noted that the area was “almost empty,” and asked her if she was sure she wanted to go there, reported the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

The woman replied in a trembling voice: “Have I died?”

When the driver turned around to look at her, no one was there…”

For the rest, click here.

If you needed one more good reason to visit Prague, here it is!

From Dangerous Minds,

Of Man, myth and magic: Prague’s creepy alchemy museum

“In 1576, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II chose Prague to be his home. More than any other person, Rudolf made Prague a hotbed of alchemical interest. Rudolf lived in the Prague Castle, where he welcomed not only astrologers and magicians but also scientists, musicians, and artists. In addition to noted alchemists Edward Kelley and John Dee, Prague was also home to the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, the painter Arcimboldo, the poet Elizabeth Jane Weston, among others. Rudolf arguably spawned the most intense period of occult activity in history.

If you want to know more about the reign of Rudolf II, you could do a lot worse than Peter Marshall’s The Magic Circle of Rudolf II: Alchemy and Astrology in Renaissance Prague.

Celebrating this alchemical contributions of Rudolf II is the Museum of Alchemists and Magicians of Old Prague, located at Jansky Vrsek 8 on the western side of the Vltava. The museum consists of two levels of displays and tableaux that document Rudolf’s alchemists in Prague, especially Kelley. (There is a sister museum called the Speculum Alchemiae Museum, but that’s on the other side of the river, at Hastalska 1.)

Quoting Altas Obscura,

The main floor has displays and replica artifacts of the trade alongside such fantastical scenes as a failed magician being stolen up into the ceiling by the Devil while cackling sorcerers huddle around the glowing runes beneath. The second floor, which claims to be the actual tower where the real Kelley performed his esoteric experiments if decked out like an alchemists lab, all aged scrolls and stacked grimoires, complete with a half-completed homunculus, the ultimate alchemical achievement. The museum is more than a little sensational in its presentation, but to be fair these alchemists were likely more than a little bit showmen themselves. What better way to remember and learn about their arcane history than with a little bit of magical realism?

Here’s a peek at some of the treasures within…”

For the rest, and many bizarre pictures, click here.

A 19th century exploration into “forces unrecognized by our senses” —

Detail from a depiction of thought-transference, the man behind dictating the movement of the other, from Magnetismus und Hypnotismus (1895) by Gustav Wilhelm Gessmann

From The Public Domain Review,

Worlds Without End
“At the end of the 19th century, inspired by radical advances in technology, physicists asserted the reality of invisible worlds — an idea through which they sought to address not only psychic phenomena such as telepathy, but also spiritual questions around the soul and immortality. Philip Ball explores this fascinating history, and how in this turn to the unseen in the face of mystery there exists a parallel to quantum physics today.

William Barrett was puzzled by flames. As the young assistant of the eminent John Tyndall at the Royal Institution in London in the 1860s, he noticed that flames seemed to be sensitive to high-pitched sounds. They would become flattened and crescent-shaped, as Barrett put it, like a “sensitive, nervous person uneasily starting and twitching at every little noise”. He was convinced that this “unseen connection” was mediated by some immaterial intangible influence — it was, he admitted, an effect “more appropriate for a conjuror’s stage than a scientific lecture table”.

Certain people, Barrett decided, were analogues of the sensitive flame, exquisitely attuned to vibrations that others could not perceive, to “forces unrecognized by our senses”. He considered these persons able to receive messages from super-normal spirit-beings existing in an intermediate state between the physical and the spiritual — a phenomenon that might account for telepathy…”

For the rest, click here.