M.J. Rose

Basements are spooky. Cemeteries are spookier. Put them together and what have you got? Extra spooky. But, beautiful and fascinating, these graves seem particularly safe and sound in their underground lair…

(Halloween is over, but the Halloween posts never really end here at The Museum of Mysteries do they?)

How a Cemetery Ends Up Underground

by Allison Meier (Atlas Obscura)

“There’s no shortage of churches with crypts. However, while these are on the whole designed with the building. there’s one place where something much more unusual happened: the church was built right over a cemetery which it consumed as its crypt.

The Crypt at Center Church on the Green in New Haven, Connecticut, is situated among three churches on the New Haven Green, a grassy area downtown that was part of colonist John Brockett’s Puritan city planning for an ideal spiritual city. The Green was given the right dimensions to hold 144,000 people — the number they believed would be saved in the Second Coming of Christ. Judgment Day still hasn’t arrived, and an economic downturn of recent years makes this area less divine and more downtrodden. But go back to the 17th century, and it was bustling, including as a burial ground.

Yet in true Poltergeist-fashion, when in the 1820s the graveyard was relocated to the new Grove Street Cemetery, only the headstones were moved. By some estimates there are between 5,000 to 10,000 souls still buried below the Green, although one was disturbed during 2012’s Hurricane Sandy when a tree was dislodged from the ground, and a skeleton was found coiled in the roots. Specifically, a skull was spotted just before Halloween with its jaw swung open as if in a silent howl, while a spine and rib cage remained attached.

This is all to say that the Center Church on the Green crypt is just a section of a secret necropolis that’s mostly forgotten. Recently the New York Obscura Society visited the crypt as part of our road trip to New Haven. Entering the church, you see a blazing white interior with fascinating historic details like the pew used by Eli Whitney. Marble engravings above the entrance hint at something more…”

For the complete piece, and many photos, click here.

As it turns out, time travel may be possible. But it will require going really really REALLY fast through outer space…How fast? And how possible? The article below from Gizmodo explains…

Yes, Time Travel Is Possible; Here’s How

(Adam Clark Estes, Gizmodo)

“Time travel’s been one of man’s wildest fantasies for centuries. It’s long been a popular trend in movies and fiction, inspiring everything from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine to the Charlton Heston shrine that is The Planet of the Apes. And with the opening of Interstellar today—n0t to spoil anything—we’re about to fantasize about it even more.

The most fantastic thing? It’s probably possible.

What’s almost impossible –

Let’s start with the bad news. We probably can’t travel back in time and watch the Egyptians build the pyramids. In the last century scientists came up with a number of theories that suggested it is indeed plausible to take a leap into the future; going back in time, unfortunately, is much more complicated. But it’s not necessarily impossible.

Albert Einstein laid the groundwork for much of the theoretical science that governs most time travel research today. Of course, scientists like Galileo and Poincaré that came before him helped, but Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity dramatically changed our understanding of time and space. And it’s because of these well-tested theories that we believe time travel is possible.

One option for would be a wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge. Along with physicist Nathan Rosen, Einstein suggested the existence of wormholes in 1935, and although we’ve yet to discover one, many scientists have contributed their own theories about how wormholes might work. Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne are probably the most well known. Thorne, a theoretical physicist at CalTech, even helped Christopher Nolan with the science behind Interstellar.

So let’s just assume that wormholes do exist. In the late 1980s, Thorne said that a wormhole could be made into a time machine. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a wormhole could act like a bridge though space-time by connecting two distant points with a shortcut. Certain types of wormholes, it’s theorized, could allow for time travel in either direction, if we could accelerate one mouth of the wormhole to near-light speed and then reverse it back to its original position. Meanwhile, the other mouth would remain stationary. The result would be that the moving mouth would age less slowly than the stationary mouth thanks to the effect of time dilation—more on this in a second…”

To find out what’s possible, click here.

HAPPY ALMOST HALLOWEEN!

To get you in the mood…

First, behold the spiritualist era spirit photographs of William Hope, here.

Next, catch up on the history and use of the Ouija board here.

And, did you know that an entire novel “by a deceased Mark Twain” was written entirely via Ouija? —

Yep, and here it is in its entirety.

Also…

Ghostwriter and Ghost: The Strange Case of Pearl Curran & Patience Worth

“In early 20th-century St. Louis, Pearl Curran claimed to have conjured a long-dead New England puritan named Patience Worth through a Ouija board. Although mostly unknown today, the resulting books, poems, and plays that Worth “dictated” to Curran earned great praise at the time. Ed Simon investigates the curious and nearly forgotten literary fruits of a “ghost” and her ghostwriter…”

 

See the rest at the Public Domain Review, here.