Creepy and Sometimes Nasty Halloween Spook Thread

Some creepy pickin's!

* The Watcher. If you haven't read it yet, set time aside to read this creepy real-life story of an unknown and malignant person spying on a family and sending threatening letters, the writer declaring himself "The Watcher" of the property and deeming the family living there unfit.

They never found "The Watcher." The family had paid over a million for the house, and then spent $300,000 for renovations, but had to flee the house because of The Watcher's threatening letters and mentions that the house needed "blood."

They eventually sold at a big loss.

* 8 Creepy Recordings. Skip to #2, a suspected distress call from a female Soviet cosmonaut who died during re-entry but whose death was never acknowledged by the government, then to #5, Operation Wandering Soul, a US Army operation to Scooby-Doo Vietcong troops, and #6, the internet-famous Number Stations.

Here's more of the most famous Number Station, called "Swedish Rhapsody."

* This Creepy Video.

The video went sort of viral. Curious viewers tried to figure out who'd made it, and why. This video explains the background and the hunt for the video's maker.

* Ciccadia 3310.

This one you've probably heard of -- Ciccadia 3301. It's famous enough that a barely-disguised version of it was featured in an episode of Person of Interest, and I think Elementary featured their version of the game too.

It's a game which requires increasingly-difficult code-breaking skills to lead to the next breadcrumb. At the end of the game, you're finally rewarded with contact information for a secretive group which intends to do.., something.

The Person of Interest episode postulated that the game was a viral recruiting tool used by the NSA or other super-secretive cryptographic organization, a way to find hidden talent.

If you want to know how each of the puzzles was solved, here's part one of a four part series.

Apparently there really is a secret group -- previous winners have come forward to talk about it.

Unfortunately... these reports say the group is not as interesting as you might hope. They assign computer programming projects which might have some kind of moderate impact if they are ever finished, but nothing earth-changing.

* Kepther E. Here's an "Alternative Reality Game" called "Kepther E."
Alternate reality games are blogs, websites, and FaceBook pages which are actually of fictitious people, telling fictitious stories. Often people have to find clues and solve puzzles to find hidden videos and messages which tell the story further.

These types of "games" usually involve stories about murder and occultism and generally weird happenings, and Kepther E is one of those.

* True Crime Horrors.

I'm not sure I should post these, because they're horrifying rather than merely creepy.

Serious content warning, especially regards the first story, which is about a child. It's the single most horrible crime story I've heard of. Worse than the Black Dahlia.

This one is deeply upsetting.

Warning thus given,

Wikipedia states the basics of the 1927 kidnapping and gruesome murder of 12-year-old Marion Parker.

Here's a brief narration about the crime, with some pictures.

The crime was so shocking that songs were written about it, such as this one.

It's a curious footnote that the killer was the first to attempt to escape justice through California's then-new Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity plea. The jury rejected it.

Everyone knows about Jack the Ripper, but starting before the Ripper murders, and continuing long after them, an even more gruesome series of murders -- with women dismembered and their parts scattered, for who knows what reason, up down the Thames -- were the "Whitehall Mysteries" or "Thames Torso Murders" or "Embankment Mysteries."

Body parts wrapped and hidden like prizes in a scavenger hunt.

This image from a newspaper at the time should give you a sense of the horror.

More from that newspaper image.

Why these are not just as infamous as the Ripper killings, I don't know. These are worse.

And who knows, they might also be Ripper murders.

These murders are also unsolved.

I am absolutely baffled why everyone knows even the names of the five canonical Ripper victims but very few people know about the equally-unsolved, even-more-gruesome Whitehall Mysteries.

Is the chief difference in notoriety due only to the letters "Jack" wrote to the police, only one of which is likely to have even come from the killer? (And the one that dubbed the killer "Jack the Ripper" is one of the suspected hoax letters-- so the killer didn't even give himself that name. A hoaxster did.)

More on the various Thames dismemberment "Mysteries" here.

Here's a more recent true crime horror -- the "Toy Box Killer" of New Mexico, who operated in nearby states. He kidnapped, raped, and tortured victims in his soundproofed trailer, which he called his "Toy Box."

He's suspected of being a serial killer responsible for the disapperances of several women but they never found the bodies and he never confessed to those. He was acquitted by one jury, then copped a plea to kidnapping, rape, and torture.

He had a tape recording he made of himself reading a prepared speech to each of his victims. He would play this when he first abducted them. He called it the "initiation" tape.

You can listen to that here.

Or here's the chase music:

Here's that full soundtrack, and here's two hours of just the main theme repeated over and over.

Or maybe The Exorcist is more your jam.

Speaking of creepy movies, I just bought the Edgar-winning 1973 mystery (co-written by Steven Sondheim and... Anthony "Psycho" Perkins) on Amazon. I think it was four dollars.

It's a murder mystery, not a horror movie per se, but I usually find murder mysteries just as creepy as purpose-built horror movies.

Very recommended.

Avoid reading the title of this clip from the movie (as it gives it away) and see if you can identify this young actor, as a much, much older actor who came to prominence in really just the last ten years.

If you know this actor now, as an old man, you're going to be pretty surprised to see that he was once young. Really young.

posted by Ace of Spades at 08:01 PM

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