Month: October 2016

The latter part of the last century was rife with paranormal activity. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, supposed supernatural incidents occurred in homes (and a hotel) across the globe and led to novels being written and filmmakers adapting those ghost stories into hit films. Though all of these stories have been debunked, there are those who still want to believe that these events really did happen. Regardless of which side you stand on, they make for some spooky tales. Here are the true stories behind six haunted house movies.

1. THE AMITYVILLE HORROR (1979)

The 1979 film, starring Margot Kidder and James Brolin, was based on a book that chronicled the real-life paranormal activities of a Long Island home. After moving into the house, the Lutz family discovered that, a year prior, previous occupant Ronald DeFeo Jr. had killed six members of his family (including his parents) in the home. Some disturbances they experienced were: swarms of flies in the winter, strange odors of perfume wafting throughout the house, and sounds of the front door slamming. The Lutzes moved a month later, though successive residents of 112 Ocean Avenue have not reported anything abnormal. Several more books were published about the happenings, along with sequels to the film and a 2005 remake. Want to find out for yourself? The home, which is now officially 108 Ocean Avenue (a previous owner worked to have the infamous address changed), is currently on the market for $850,000.

2. THE CONJURING (2013)

One of the highest-grossing supernatural films of all time, James Wan’s The Conjuring depicted the true story of the Perron family, who lived in a demon-filled Rhode Island farmhouse. Akin to the Amityville house, real-life paranormalists Ed and Lorraine Warren (depicted by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga in the film) visited the home and interviewed the family. Despite activity such as a séance causing the mom, Carolyn, to become possessed and speak a strange language, the family tolerated the home until 1980. Andrea, one of the daughters, published a book on the phenomenon, and told USA Today, “People are free to believe whatever they want to believe. But I know what we experienced.”

3. THE CONJURING 2 (2016)

This 2016 sequel exchanges New England for Brimsdown, Enfield, England, where the Warrens investigate a case known as the Enfield Poltergeist. Peggy Hodgson’s daughters claimed they saw a chest of drawers slide and heard knocking, but experts think they made it up. Guy Lyon Playfair published a book on the matter in 1980 called This House is Haunted: The Amazing Inside Story of the Enfield Poltergeist.

4. WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT (2012)

Director Pat Holden’s 2012 British film about the Maynard family is based on his family’s story. His aunt, Jean Pritchard, and her family—who lived at 30 East Drive, Pontefract, West Yorkshire, England in 1966—experienced a poltergeist in their home that looked like a monk, a.k.a The Black Monk of Pontefract; they named it “Fred.” The not-so-friendly ghost smashed eggs, made banging noises, and dragged Holden’s cousin up the stairs. He was too young to visit the house, which is one reason he wanted to make the film.

“I’ve always had this feeling of never quite being in the zeitgeist,” Holden told The Guardian. “And I think it was a little bit like that with the ghost. My sister was allowed to see it. My mum got to see it. My dad wasn’t that interested. I felt like I’d missed out.” Recently, a resident at the same house captured a photo of what’s believed to be the Black Monk. 

5. THE ENTITY (1982)

In The Entity (based on Frank De Felitta’s novel of the same name), Barbara Hershey plays Carla Moran, a fictionalized version of Doris Bither, a woman who claimed the spirits of three Asian men repeatedly assaulted her. The real-life events supposedly happened in Culver City, California, in 1974. Paranormal investigators Dr. Barry Taff and Kerry Gaynor visited Bither’s house, which had been condemned twice. At the house, the doctors witnessed “a green mist that formed the body of a man” and orbs over Bither’s body when photographed. Bither moved out of the house and claimed the entity continued to follow her around.

6. THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT (2009)

In 2009, the film version of the Snedeker family’s harrowing haunting was released, but according to Lorraine Warren, “The movie is very, very loosely based on the actual investigation.” Both the film and the true story involve a family in the 1980s who had a son stricken with cancer, so they moved into a house near the University of Connecticut hospital—but didn’t know that the house was a former mortuary.

While the family resided there, kids levitated and rosary beads pulled apart on their own. The Warrens invited priests over and held mass, but that wasn’t enough. Finally, an exorcist stopped by, and that seemed to calm the place. In 1992, Ray Garton wrote a book about the haunting, In a Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting. But the book and the events have come under fire as being hoaxes.

A 2013 sequel to The Haunting in Connecticut, The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia, is also based on a real event—a child named Heidi Wyrick attracted spirits in her home in Georgia, not Connecticut.

Using only a crochet hook and lots of brown yarn, Stephanie Pokorny of Mentor, Ohio, created a one-of-a-kind, E.T.-inspired Halloween costume entirely by hand, The Huffington Post reports. The get-up might be referencing a 34-year-old movie, but it was custom-made for a much younger wearer: the crafter’s toddler.

Each fall, Pokorny—who describes herself to mental_floss as a “self-proclaimed Halloween addict”—teams up with family members to make a unique costume from scratch. “We live in Ohio and sometimes we have snow on Halloween, so it’s the perfect time to bust out the yarn,” said Pokorny, whose grandmother taught her to crochet when she was a teenager.

Pokorny’s past Halloween projects have included costumes for her son Jack, who turns two in November. She’s crocheted him a Alice in Wonderland-inspired caterpillar outfit and a Clint Eastwood costume, but this year, the crafty mom took a cue from her favorite decade, the 1980s, and knitted the toddler a snug, one-piece ensemble inspired by the titular alien from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).

The entire project took Pokorny four days, and she didn’t use a pattern. “I began on a Friday and finished Monday evening, weaving in the last end just before I took and posted the photos [on social media] that night,” she told mental_floss. Check out more of Pokorny’s crochet costumes on Facebook and on her Crochetverse site.

[h/t The Huffington Post]

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This paper rolls up into an adjustable flashlight https://t.co/fkawMMlslt @engadget pic.twitter.com/dHvOJEsVdf

— Deloitte Digital (@DeloitteDigital) October 17, 2016

Takeo has been producing fine paper in Japan since it was established in 1899, but the manufacturer recently embarked on a project that veered away from its traditional roots: As engadget reports, the company teamed up with the printable circuits start-up AgIC to create a sheet of paper that doubles as an adjustable flashlight.

The Paper Torch is the most recent capsule collection from the product development platform Design of Things. The project uses printed circuits to achieve the simple and unique design. When the sheet is rolled up the circuits appear to react, creating shortcuts and delivering more power to the light bulb. The amount of light dispersed varies based on how tightly the torch is rolled.

Printed circuits have been used to create paper-thin lights in the past: In July we highlighted a bookmark produced by another Japanese design firm that transforms into a reading light when bent. The Paper Torch looks like it produces a lot more illuminating power, but consumers will have to wait a while before getting their hands on one. A crowdfunding campaign for the concept is set to launch in Japan in mid-November.

[h/t engadget]

All images: Twitter

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Who says that listening to vinyl has to be old school? Holographic records and vertical players have shown us that the medium can be remixed to feel downright futuristic. The latest product to follow this trend is MAG-LEV Audio, a “levitating” turntable first spotted by the Vinyl Factory.

The project, currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, uses magnetic levitation to bring the far-out concept to life. According to the Slovenian design team behind MAG-LEV, the hovering platter serves more than just an aesthetic purpose. As they write on their Kickstarter page, “Air is the smoothest medium with [the] least amount of friction, which further elevates this project into a truly unique listening experience.”

With more than $250,000 raised so far and over a month left to go, the campaign is well on its way to meeting its $300,000 goal. The MAG-LEV Audio is expected to retail for $1390 to $1490, but vinyl enthusiasts can reserve a levitating turntable for their collection today for a pledge of $880 or more. Delivery is estimated for September of next year.

[h/t Vinyl Factory]

All images courtesy of MAG-LEV Audio
 
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Why do chimpanzees have such wrinkled faces?

Suzanne Sadedin:

It’s not just chimps. Other apes and their babies are wrinkly, too. And baby monkeys. You know who else has a lot of wrinkles? Premature human babies. During the last month of gestation, babies don’t develop much neurologically or physiologically. They just fatten up. Even full-term babies are still kinda wrinkly, but within a few months, they get nice and chubby.

So the question shouldn’t be, why are chimps so wrinkly? That’s easy: they have lots of facial muscles for signaling complex expressions. The question should be: why are humans so strangely smooth? And the obvious answer is: fat. We have a layer of soft, pillowy subcutaneous fat which billows under our skin, making us pleasantly smooth and rounded and hiding our facial muscles.

Compared with other apes, we store a huge amount of fat and have small muscles. The average female chimp has ~3.6 percent body fat; a newborn human infant has ~13 percent, and the average woman has 24 to 31 percent. The sheer amount of fat we store is astonishing; in particular, no other mammal has such chubby babies. Fat storage is thought to be an adaptation that supports our brains. Brains are hugely expensive to build and run. As infant brain development passes through some critical stages, it’s vital that they have enough stored fat to support their growing brains even if their family goes through a temporary food shortage.

But we also store our fat differently. Apes keep their fat internally, mostly beneath the muscles in their torso, so all you can see externally are their big scary muscles. But we humans store a layer of blubber right under our skin. The other mammals who do this are mostly marine mammals trying to keep warm, a fact that led some researchers to speculate that our lineage went through an aquatic phase. However, most researchers don’t think this is likely.

So why do we store fat on our faces? It’s most likely a scam.

If you’re storing fat, you have more food than you need. That probably means you and your family are healthy and good at procuring and using resources. Importantly, you have nutritional resources to support brain development and maintenance. Our big brains are remarkably costly, metabolically. You’re likely to survive the next famine, and maybe, since you obviously have so much bounty, you’ll share some with your friends. And you’re likely to be fertile: up to a point, fat stores are highly attractive in women. In short, having some stored fat means you’re probably a good social partner. The more our evolution revolved around egalitarian social partnerships instead of ape-like dominance hierarchies, the less we needed big muscles to scare our enemies, and the more we needed fat stores to impress our friends.

Once people started looking at fat as a social cue, it would have made sense for evolution to shift the storage location. Instead of hiding our fat beneath bulging muscles, we started to hide our muscles beneath prominent fat stores. When we lost our body hair, our fat stores became even more visible.

Human facial fat in particular overtly advertises good health. It’s highly visible, and impossible to fake. Hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed, bony-faced, gaunt, wasted, haggard, shrunken, or emaciated—all these terms suggest chronic illness resulting in loss of facial fat stores.

Indeed, it appears fetuses spend the final month of gestation simply preparing for their grand debut. They consume more resources than ever, but instead of maturing during this time, they just get fatter and fatter. Then after birth, they pile on even more fat in the most visible way possible. They’re saying, “Look, mom, my metabolism is awesome! Invest in me!” and “Look, everybody, my family is awesome! Cultivate social ties with us!”

Since we’ve co-evolved with our babies trying to convince us to invest in them via highly-visible facial fat, we respond quite automatically with kindly and nurturing feelings toward chubby-faced entities. We can’t help it. It’s cute. Even older children and adult females retain high levels of facial fat, again eliciting gentleness and empathy from potentially dangerous adversaries. Actually, our whole species shows a suspicious trend toward neoteny, which some researchers have described as a self-domestication process. So much for survival of the fittest: we got survival of the sweetest, cutest, chubbiest munchkins.

And thus evolution, in addition to all the other awful things it’s done, can be blamed for the blobbiness of emojis.

This post originally appeared on Quora. Click here to view.

Every incarnation of the titular character on the BBC’s long-running Doctor Who has had their own fashion sense, from bow ties to leather jackets to the occasional fez. No accessory has been more memorable, however, than the seemingly endless scarf sported by fourth doctor Tom Baker from 1974 to 1981.

Naturally, kids wanted one of their own—and apparently wrote in to the network with enough regularity that the BBC decided to strike up a standard memo in order to have something to send them.

An image on Deviant Art—via Open Culture—reveals the company’s response to a fan’s plea for knitting instructions for the scarf, likely sent off in the early 1980s. Reflecting the majestic appearance of the warmer (which even has its own fan page), the sheet calls for 26 balls of wool in seven different colors, knitted in a very specific order, and of course, a precise needle gauge. While you can buy replica scarves anywhere, Who fans with some knitting skill might now be tempted to craft their own. Just try not to trip on it.

[h/t Open Culture]
 
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