Although these days we think of Bobby “Boris” Pickett as a one-hit wonder, had you referred to him as one while he was alive, he would have corrected you. “Since I had two hits and a hit album, I exclude myself from that club,” Pickett fired back at a Washington Post reader when asked if he’d ever been to a “one-hit wonder party.”

The brains behind “Monster Mash,” which he wrote when he was just 24, Pickett would spend much of his music career at odds with the Halloween tune’s popularity. Even after recording a handful of chart-topping follow-up singles, raking in 22 acting credits and a feature film writing credit (which, granted, was for a small part of 1995’s Monster Mash: The Movie), he’d still be memorialized as the “Guy Lombardo of Halloween.”

It was an unlikely career trajectory for Pickett, whose real passion had always been acting. Pickett grew up in Somerville, Massachusetts, and as a young boy, he spent much of his time seeing horror movies at the local theater his father managed. After graduating from high school, he served three years in Korea in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Upon his return, Pickett finally made the westbound trek to Hollywood, where he performed in a band called The Cordials and would, from time to time, break into impersonations of famous movie actors. His impersonation of Frankenstein actor Boris Karloff was reportedly a major hit with audiences—and a turning point for Pickett’s career.

That audience response set the events that would lead to “Monster Mash” in motion during the summer of 1962. Cheesy monster movies were all the rage, and bandmate Lenny Capizzi encouraged Pickett to use his Karloff voice to mock them in a new novelty song. Capizzi joined him in the studio and together the two decided to send up yet another red-hot fad: The Mashed Potato dance move (see: Dee Dee Sharp’s chart-topping hit “Mashed Potato Time” from the debut album “It’s Mashed Potato Time”).

The eternal novelty tune took no time at all to create. “The song wrote itself in a half hour and it took less than a half hour to record it,” Pickett told The Washington Post. The accompanying album—simply titled The Original Monster Mash—contained 15 tracks in total and was released through the short-lived label Garpax, named after its producer and musician, Gary S. Paxton.

Though valiant in his efforts, Paxton was turned down by every major label he brought the tracks to. Pickett told Jan Alan Henderson that after this discouraging turn of events, Paxton drove around handing out copies of “Monster Mash” to radio DJs in Ventura and Fresno counties. That’s when things really started to turn around. “By the time Gary got back to Southern California, his phone had been lighting up like a Christmas tree,” Pickett said.

London Records, which had originally shot down Paxton’s guerrilla marketing efforts, eventually helped distribute the album when “Monster Mash” became a ubiquitous force on popular radio. By October 30, The Original Monster Mash had climbed the charts to become the number one hit record in the U.S., where it sold 1 million copies. A happy Halloween treat, indeed.

The rest of Pickett’s music career wouldn’t be quite as fruitful. While quick on his feet to leverage his cultural relevance with the “Monster Mash” follow-ups “Monster’s Holiday” and its B-side, “Monster Motion”—not to mention a couple of appearances on American Bandstand —he remained largely off the grid. He appeared in a slew of television commercials including ads for Lipton Tea, Schlitz beer, and “all the cigarette commercials (which hadn’t been banned yet),” according to Pickett. He also took small acting roles in television shows, including The Beverly Hillbillies (as a lieutenant) in 1967, Bonanza in 1969, and in a little-seen film called Deathmaster—about a vampire who lures in a devout following of hippies—in 1972. He popped up on the music scene again in 1975 with a Star Trek parody called “Star Drek” and, 10 years later, released yet another spin on his debut classic called “Monster Rap.” Neither song would measure up to Pickett’s much-buzzed-about debut hit.

All was not lost, though. Just like the Halloween monsters Pickett lampooned in his songs, “Monster Mash” never truly died. Year after year, that goofy Boris Karloff impression has come back to haunt the world with a new vigor. Nearly a decade after its release, the song inexplicably crept up the charts to the Top 10 (in August, no less). Three years later, in May 1973, it charted again. More recently, Paste reported that, in 2008, it climbed as high as No. 60 on the British charts. To date, the tune has been listened to over a combined 5 million times on Spotify.

“Let’s just say that it has paid the rent for 43 years,” Pickett told The Washington Post when asked whether the royalties from his single would be enough even if he never worked another day in his life. It wasn’t until 1989, under the direction of his longtime manager Stuart Hersh, that Pickett finally licensed the song for film and television use.

As for the secret to the tune’s longevity? The jury’s still out. “What fascinates me about ‘Monster Mash’ is the fact that this record, created to cash in on not one but two then-current fads, managed to transcend them both to stand on its own as a classic of sorts, even as those two fads evaporated into the mists of cultural obscurity,” Grammy-winning producer Steve Greenberg wrote in a Billboard tribute to the Halloween hit.

Hersh disagrees. He tells mental_floss that he believes the only thing dated about “Monster Mash” is the Mashed Potato fad that inspired it.

“There’s nothing in the song itself that’s dated; funny is funny,” Hersh says. “In my opinion, the song was so cute—it wasn’t like [Senator Bobby’s] novelty record, ‘Wild Thing,’ which has been forgotten. It was utilizing Boris Karloff and monsters. The longevity of monster movies and actors like Karloff have helped sustain it.”

Hersh adds that “everyone growing up” goes back to those original movie references, discovers “Monster Mash,” and, in turn, keeps the hit alive.

Which is not to say that the earworm has been met with universal praise. Pickett once said that Dick Clark didn’t particularly enjoy his music. “As much as he was amiable and friendly, [he] was not a big fan of the record. He thought it was kind of silly I think,” Pickett said. On several occasions—including during live performances—Pickett also made mention of his most high-profile nemesis: Elvis Presley. According to Pickett, The King called “Monster Mash” “the dumbest thing he’d ever heard.”

Apart from its ubiquity in pop culture (see: Parks and Recreation, Hotel Transylvania 2, Silver Linings Playbook, True Blood, The Office, etc.), “Monster Mash” found new life in the 2000s as political protest. In 2004, Pickett spoke out against President George W. Bush’s environmental policies, renaming the track “Monster Slash.” He gave the lyrics a good retooling, too: “They did the forest slash / (He did the slash)/ It was brutally brash.” His 2005 rendering, “Climate Mash,” was an effort to combat global warming; it was downloaded almost 500,000 times during Halloween 2005 alone, according to The Guardian.

Pickett never stopped performing. His last performance on record was in November 2006, five months before he died of leukemia. But as long as that graveyard smash gets play around Halloween, Pickett’s memory will live on.

Dating sucks. There’s no two ways about it. It sucks even more if you’re a backward snail—unless you happen to have some very dedicated friends. Scientists at the University of Nottingham are asking the public to help them find a very special date for Jeremy the garden snail, whose unique anatomy has so far made mating impossible.

Most garden snails are dextral—that is, their shells spiral to the right, and the rest of their anatomy follows suit. This works out for them when it comes time to get busy; snails are hermaphroditic, possessing both sperm transmitters and receptacles. They mate by lining up face-to-tail like a slow-moving yin-yang, then exchanging fluids. (Fair warning: this is a lot less cute than it sounds. There are projectiles involved.)

In order for this to work, each snail’s part must line up with its partner’s relevant regions. They find each other in the wild and all get down to it.

Well, all except for Jeremy, who was found on a Nottingham compost heap by a former biologist. Jeremy’s body is a mirror image of the average snail’s. His* shell curls to the left, and his parts don’t line up with anyone’s.

To Angus Davison and other snail researchers at the university, Jeremy’s predicament is more than just a sad situation. It’s an opportunity.

“I have been studying snails for more than 20 years, and I have never seen one of these before,” Davison said in a statement. “We are very keen to study the snail’s genetics to find out whether this is a result of a developmental glitch or whether this is a genuine inherited genetic trait.”

Davison has good reason to suspect Jeremy is genetically different. In a study published in February of 2016, Davison and his colleagues reported finding the gene associated with snail-shell spiral direction. They found that the same gene, called Formin, may also affect laterality (sidedness) in frogs and other vertebrates.

The best way to learn about Jeremy’s genes would be to examine his descendants. But, as previously discussed, Jeremy has none.

It’s not that snails can’t reproduce asexually, Davison says. They just don’t like it. “And from our perspective, the genetic data from offspring of two lefty snails would be far richer and more valuable to us.”

Which is where we come in. Davison and his colleagues are hoping to crowd-source a date for Jeremy. They’re asking snail lovers to keep an eye out for another lefty snail—the yin to Jeremy’s yang.

If the sheer generous pleasure of helping a mollusk find a mate is not enough for you, Davison is willing to sweeten the pot with a taste of fame. “There is a chance, because it is such a rare thing, that anyone who can find and identify another one of these snails may even find themselves named as a contributor on a research paper we publish in the future.”

So: keep your eyes peeled. If you think you’ve found one, you can email Davison directly at angus.davison@nottingham.ac.uk, or Tweet your discovery using the hashtag #snaillove.

*Jeremy’s researcher friends use he/him/his pronouns despite the snail’s obvious assemblage of genitalia.
 
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In the 1950s and 1960s, horror movies were making studios huge profits on shoestring budgets. But after the market hit horror overload, directors and studios had to be extra creative to get people to flock to theaters. That’s when a flood of different gimmicks were introduced at movie theaters across the country to make a film stand out from the crowd. From hypnotists to life insurance policies and free vomit bags, here’s a brief history of some of the most memorable horror movie gimmicks.

1. PSYCHO-RAMA // MY WORLD DIES SCREAMING (1958)

In order to truly become a classic, a horror movie can’t just work on the surface; it has to get deep inside of your head. That’s what Psycho-Rama tried to achieve when it was first conceived for My World Dies Screaming, later renamed Terror in the Haunted House. Psycho-Rama introduced audiences to subliminal imagery in order to let the scares sink in more than any traditional film could.

Skulls, snakes, ghoulish faces, and the word “Death” would all appear onscreen for a fraction of a second—not long enough for an audience member to consciously notice it, but it was enough to get them uneasy. Obviously Psycho-Rama didn’t really catch on with the public or the film industry, but horror directors, like William Friedkin in The Exorcist, have since gone on to use this quick imagery technique to enhance their own movies.

2. FRIGHT INSURANCE // MACABRE (1958)

Director William Castle didn’t make a name for himself in the film industry by directing cinematic classics; instead, he relied on shock and shlock to help fill movie theater seats. His movies were full of what audiences craved at the time: horror, gore, terror, suspense, and a heaping helping of camp. But his true genius came from marketing—and the gimmicks he brought to every movie, which have since become legendary amongst horrorphiles.

His most famous stunt was the life insurance policy he purchased for every member of an audience that paid to see Macabre. This was a real policy backed by Lloyd’s of London, so if you died of fright in your seat, your family would receive $1000. Now who wouldn’t want to roll the dice on that type of deal? Of course, the policy didn’t cover anyone with a preexisting medical condition or an audience member who committed suicide during the screening. Lloyd’s had to draw the line somewhere, right?

3. HYPNO-VISTA // HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959)

How do you make your routine horror movie stand out from the crowd? Hypnotize your audience, of course. Thus Hypno-Vista was born. For this gimmick, James Nicholson, president of American International Pictures, suggested that a lecture by a hypnotist, Dr. Emile Franchel, should precede Horrors of the Black Museum, which had a plot focusing on a hypnotizing killer.

For 13 minutes, Dr. Franchel talked to the audience about the science behind hypnotism, before attempting to hypnotize them himself in order to feel more immersed in the story. Nowadays it comes off as overlong and dry, but it was a gimmick that got people into theaters back in 1959. Plus, writer Herman Cohen said that eventually the lecture had to be removed whenever the movie re-aired on TV because it did, in fact, hypnotize some people.

4. NO LATE ADMISSION // PSYCHO (1960)

Though this isn’t the most gimmickiest of gimmicks, Alfred Hitchcock’s insistence that no audience member be admitted into Psycho once the movie started got a lot of publicity at the time. The Master of Suspense’s reasoning is less about drumming up publicity and more about audience satisfaction, though. Because Janet Leigh gets killed so early into the movie, he didn’t want people to miss her part and feel misled by the movie’s marketing.

This publicity tactic wasn’t completely novel, though, as the groundbreaking French horror movie Les Diaboliques (1955) had a similar policy in place. This was at a time when people would simply stroll into movie screenings whenever they wanted, so to see a director—especially one so masterful at the art of publicity—that was adamant about showing up on time was a great way to pique some interest.

5. FRIGHT BREAK // HOMICIDAL (1961)

Another classic William Castle gimmick was the “fright break” he offered to audience members during his 1961 movie, Homicidal. Here, a timer would appear on the screen just as the film was hurtling toward its gruesome climax. Frightened audience members had 45 seconds to leave the theater and still get a full refund on their ticket. There was a catch, though.

Frightened audience members who decided to take the easy way out were shamed into the “coward’s corner,” which was a yellow cardboard booth supervised by some poor sap theater employee. Then, they were forced to sign a paper reading “I’m a bona-fide coward,” before getting their money back. Obviously, at the risk of such humiliation, most people decided to just grit their teeth and experience the horror on the screen instead.

6. THE PUNISHMENT POLL // MR. SARDONICUS (1961)

The most interactive of William Castle’s schlocky horror gimmicks put the fate of the film itself into the hands of the audience. Dubbed the “punishment poll,” Castle devised a way to let viewers vote on the fate of the characters in the movie Mr. Sardonicus. Upon entering the theater, people were given a card with a picture of a thumb on it that would glow when a special light was placed on it. “Thumbs up” meant that Mr. Sardonicus would be given mercy, and “thumbs down” meant … well, you get the idea.

Apparently audiences never gave ol’ Sardonicus the thumbs up, despite Castle’s claims that the happier ending was filmed and ready to go. However, no alternative ending has ever surfaced, leaving many to doubt his claims. Chances are, there was only one way out for Mr. Sardonicus.

7. FREE VOMIT BAGS // MARK OF THE DEVIL (1970)

Horror fans are mostly masochists at heart. They don’t want to be entertained—they want to be terrified. So when the folks behind 1970’s Mark of the Devil gave out free vomit bags to the audience due to the film’s grotesque nature, how could any self-respecting horror fan not be intrigued? It wasn’t just the bags that the studio was advertising; it also claimed the film was rated V, for violence—and maybe some vomit?

8. DUO-VISION // WICKED, WICKED (1973)

Duo-Vision was hyped as the new storytelling technique in cinema—offering two times the terror for the price of one ticket. Of course Duo-Vision is just fancy marketing lingo for split-screen, meaning audiences see a film from two completely different perspectives side-by-side. In the 1973 horror film Wicked, Wicked, that meant watching the movie from the points of view of both the killer and his victims.

Seems like a perfect concept for the horror genre, right? Well, Duo-Vision wasn’t just employed during the movie’s most horrific moments; it was used for the movie’s entire 95-minute runtime. The technique had been used sparingly in other films—most notably in Brian De Palma’s much better film Sisters (1973)—but it had never been implemented to this extent. A little bit of Duo-Vision apparently goes a long way, because it fell out of favor soon after.

After uncovering a cauldron containing 14 liters of alcohol from an Iron Age tomb, it’s normal to have some questions. One of the thoughts pestering University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee archaeologist Bettina Arnold was, “I wonder what this tasted like?” With some help from a Milwaukee brewery, she now has the answer. As NPR reports, Arnold collaborated with the Lakefront Brewery to recreate the 2500-year-old brew from scratch.

Fourteen liters of the ancient beverage were discovered in a bronze cauldron during Arnold’s excavation of a burial plot in Germany, and date to between 400 and 450 BCE. As is often the case today, ancient cadavers weren’t always sent to their graves alone. They were sometimes buried with objects from life—like a supply of booze. “It’s a BYOB afterlife, you know?” Arnold told NPR. “You have to be able to sort of throw a party when you get there.”

A paleobotanist analyzed the contents of the liquid concoction and made an educated guess as to the original recipe. The drink was likely braggot: an alcoholic beverage made from barley and honey. The tests also indicated the presence of mint and meadowsweet.

From there, cellarmaster Chad Sheridan and the rest of the team at Lakefront Brewery took over the project. After brewing for seven hours and fermenting for two weeks, the libation brought back from the dead was finally ready to be tasted.

According to NPR’s Bonnie North, the flavor was reminiscent of a “dry port, but with a minty, herbal tinge to it.” Unfortunately, the product won’t be getting a commercial launch—mainly because the brewery isn’t convinced there would be much interest in it—but Arnold hopes it’ll lead to similar projects in future. She plans to develop a course at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where students can whip up ancient brews based on archaeological finds. One team in Israel has demonstrated how this concept can be taken even further: Earlier this year, the Herzl Beer brewery made a batch of beer from a 2000-year-old wheat strain.

2,500 years ago, this brew was buried with the dead. A brewery has revived it: https://t.co/UDdNOiQPno pic.twitter.com/4ExTxsTifH

— 90.5 WESA (@905wesa) October 24, 2016

[h/t NPR]
 
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On Halloween, witches and werewolves, ghosts and ghouls, and demons and devils stalk the streets for tricks or treats. But the real tricks and treats—at least for the horror-loving word nerds among us—might just be the strange and far-flung origins of these monster names.

1. WITCH

The word witch flies in from Old English. The earliest record, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), refers to a male practitioner of sorcery and magic—wicca, also the source of the neopagan religion of the same name. Wicca is derived from wiccian, “to practice witchcraft.” The deeper roots of this verb are obscure, though etymologists have speculated on its relationship to Germanic words meaning holy or awaken. Over the centuries, witch’s masculine applications melted away, thanks in no small part to the historical persecution of many women believed to be witches.

2. WEREWOLF

Werewolf is another lexical beastie that prowled Old English. While the OED can date it back to 1000, the dictionary also notes the word was never in much use, except for among some Scottish speakers, until modern folklore scholarship revived it. Werewolves, we know, are men that turn into wolves—and that’s exactly what the word means. Were comes from an Old English word for man and is distantly related to the same Latin vir (man) which gives us words like virile and virtue. It’s not only wolves that could wear were. Some have told tales of werebears, weretigers, werefoxes, and even werehyenas.

3. FRANKENSTEIN

Yeah, yeah, Frankenstein isn’t the name of the monster: It’s the name of his creator, Victor, in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. Shelley was inspired by travels in Germany, which took her near Frankenstein Castle. Frankenstein is German surname and place-name, roughly meaning “stone of the Franks.” The Franks, or “freemen,” were a Germanic tribe whose name also survives in frank, and French.

4. VAMPIRE

They say vampires can live forever, but the word is relatively young as far as the English language is concerned. It doesn’t come out of the dark until the early 1700s, borrowed from the French vampire, itself taken from a Slavonic source by way of Hungary. But the etymological flight of vampire may not be over: One Eastern European linguist has argued vampire ultimately comes from a northern Turkish word, uber, meaning witch. (Any connection to the transportation company is coincidental.) And the name of that most famous vampire, Dracula, is actually related to another mythical creature: the dragon.

5. MUMMY

Back in the 1400s, mummy referred to a bituminous substance (think asphalt). This sounds far from ghastly until you consider that the specific material was used as a medicine prepared from mummified human flesh. Its French (mommie) and Latin (mumia) sources also named a substance used to embalm corpses. Latin directly borrowed (via Salerno, the leading medieval school of medicine located in Italy) its mumia from the Arabic mumiya, “bitumen.” The Arabic is said to, er, preserve a Persian root meaning wax. It wasn’t until the 1600s that mummy, used for Egyptian mummification, actually named those de-organed, embalmed corpses. And it wasn’t until 1930s Hollywood that Boris Karloff gives us the monster, The Mummy.

6. GHOUL

It may not be too surprising that mummy comes from Arabic, what with Ancient Egypt and all. But ghoul? Yes, this word also comes from the Middle East. In Arabic mythology, a ghoul, or ghul, robbed graves and ate corpses. The root is a verb that means, appropriately, “to seize.” The word started marauding English thanks to a 1780s translation of an Arabic tale.

7. GOBLIN

Where there are ghouls there are goblins, at least if the Halloween stock phrase is any measure. This name of this mischievous, ugly folk creature might come from the Greek kobalos, a kind of scoundrel. According to this etymological theory, kobalos passed into Latin and then French, where Gobelinus is documented as the name for a spirit haunting the city of Evreux in the Middle Ages. Goblin enters English by the 1320s. A hobgoblin, a related impish creature, features hob, which comes from a shortened nickname for Robert, as it is for Robin Goodfellow, an English puck many will know from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

8. DEMON

Demon is another word from Ancient Greek. In that tongue, a daimon variously signified a god, divinity, attendant spirit, or even the force of fate itself. The base of this daimon is a Greek verb meaning “to divide.” The ancients envisioned the Fates divvying out people’s lots in life. Demon went to the dark side when Greek authors used it to translate Hebrew terms for baddies in the Old Testament.

9. DEVIL

Like daimon, the Greek diabolos was a biblical Greek translation of the Hebrew word satan in the Old Testament. The Hebrew satan means an adversary, literally an “obstructor” or “plotter-against.” The Greek diabolos, a slanderer or accuser, picks up on this idea, as it literally means “one who throws something across the path of another.” The words symbol and ballistics share a root with it. Old English rendered diabolos a deofol.

10. ZOMBIE

Like mummies, zombies are also corpses brought back to life. But unlike mummy, zombie was brought into English not from the Middle East but from West Africa. The Kikongo language spoken around the Congo has nzambi (god) and zumbi (fetish), with zombie originally the name of a snake deity in voodoo religion. Via the slave trade, the word made its way to Haiti, where folklore told of corpses magically raised from the dead. Zombie wanders into English in the 1810s. Other scholars have speculated, though, that zombie might be a Louisiana Creole word from the Spanish sombra, a shade or ghost.

11. GHOST

Speaking of ghosts, they’ve been long haunting English. The Old English gast meant spirit, including good ones, bad ones, and, well, holy ones. (The h creeped in thanks to Dutch and Flemish cognates.) Forms of ghost are indeed found throughout the Germanic languages, possibly all coming from an Indo-European root referring to fear or amazement. Ghost settles into its modern meaning—an apparition of a dead person—in the 14th century.

12. SASQUATCH

One place you can genuinely catch sight of this large, hairy hominid is out on the streets during Halloween. Americans named him Bigfoot, Canadians Sasquatch. Sasquatch comes from the Halkomelem language, spoken by a First Nations people in the Pacific Northwest, a region whose mountains the saesq’ec, or “hairy mountain man,” is believed to roam. Sasquatch has been sighted in the English language since 1929.

13. YETI

Finally, the Sasquatch’s snowy counterpart is the Yeti, said to trek the Himalayan mountains. Yeti comes from the Tibetan yeh-teh, a little man-like animal, even though the creature looms much larger in our imaginations. Yeh-teh might more literally be rendered as “rocky bear.” And thanks to a 1921 journalist reporting on a Mt. Everest expedition, we have the Abominable Snowman. The journalist translated the Tibetan metoh kangmi, another name for the Yeti, as “abominable snowman”; it more closely means “filthy snowman.”

They say streaks are meant to be broken. But what about curses? On Saturday night, before a raucous Wrigley crowd, the Chicago Cubs clinched their first World Series berth in 71 years. To put things in perspective, the last time this team made it to MLB’s big dance, Harry Truman was in the White House, World War II had just concluded, and Jackie Robinson’s major league debut was still a year and a half away.

Why did the Cubbies take so long to return to the World Series? And, for that matter, why hasn’t the franchise won it since 1908? On the North Side of Chicago, many fans chalk their team’s woes up to supernatural forces. A curse of unparalleled longevity is said to hang over the club. At 108 years old, this hex makes the Boston Red Sox’s 86-year championship drought look like a mere inconvenience. Those who believe in the Cubs curse have offered plenty of theories about how it came to be and why it’s persisted for so long. Here are five things they’ve blamed over the years.

1. THE BILLY GOAT OF WILLIAM SIANIS

Earlier this month, Ghostbusters star and lifelong Cubs fan Bill Murray showed up at Wrigley in a t-shirt that read “I ain’t afraid of no goats.” If you don’t follow baseball (or watch ’80s comedies), this might seem like a fairly strange thing to print on an article of clothing. But for decades, goats have inspired apprehension and terror in the hearts of Cubs devotees.

It all dates back to 1934, when William Sianis, an immigrant from Greece, bought a tavern on Chicago’s West Madison Street for $205. One day, a goat jumped off a passing truck and wandered into his bar. Sianis was charmed by the animal and adopted him. Before long, the hoofed mammal became the tavern’s de facto mascot, and Sianis renamed his establishment The Billy Goat Tavern. (After moving to its current place in 1964, the watering hole has turned into a popular Chicago institution, with six locations across town, as well as one in O’Hare Airport, one in Lombard, Illinois—and another all the way off in Washington, D.C.)

Sianis was a canny businessman with a flair for promotional stunts. When the Republican National Convention came to Chicago in 1944, he shrewdly put up a sign reading “No Republicans Allowed.” Right on cue, outraged GOP bar-goers crowded the place, insisting that they be served. Free publicity generated by his stunt translated into huge profits for Sianis, who quickly became one of Chicago’s most recognizable figures.

A year later, the Cubs clinched a World Series berth against the American League’s Detroit Tigers. To celebrate the occasion, Sianis’s bearded pet was cloaked in a banner that boldly declared “We Got Detroit’s Goat.” The outfit was to be the centerpiece of a great new promotional gimmick. Sianis bought up a pair of tickets to Game 4 of the Series at Wrigley Field. He then showed up at the ballpark with his goat in tow. It’s sometimes reported that Sianis and the animal were turned away at the stadium gate by Cubs President P.K. Wrigley, who allegedly complained of the animal’s smell. According to other sources, the entrepreneur and his horned companion were admitted into the ballpark, but were kicked out by ushers in short order. Regardless of why they were kicked out, according to the Tavern’s website, an incensed Sianis “threw up his arms and exclaimed, ‘The Cubs ain’t gonna win no more. The Cubs will never win a World Series so long as the goat is not allowed in Wrigley Field.” Furthermore, when Chicago ultimately lost the ’45 series to Detroit in seven games, Sianis supposedly telegrammed P.K. Wrigley and asked “Who stinks now?”

A few baseball historians doubt the legitimacy of this story. The standard revisionist argument is that it never even occurred to Sianis to put any sort of hex on the Cubs. For one thing, while two different newspapers ran stories about the Wrigley Field goat incident in 1945, neither account says anything about a curse. So when did the idea originate? If modern curse deniers are to be believed, the Chicago media dreamed up this billy goat jinx at some point in the 1940s. After the ’45 World Series (and an OK ’46 season), the Cubs started floundering and would bungle their way through 16 consecutive losing seasons from 1947 to 1962, including a tied season in 1952. Remembering the Wrigley Field goat incident, sportswriters began to wonder if Sianis had vindictively jinxed the team. “Sianis played along,” Cubs historian Jack Bales writes.

According to a 1969 Chicago Tribune article, Wrigley wrote a letter apologizing for the snub in 1950, to little effect. (According to the same article, Sianis then put a more obscure curse on the Cubs. After learning that he wouldn’t be able to raise a Greek flag at his bar’s new location near the Wrigley Building, he wrote to Wrigley “The Greek flag will fly from your plaza before another pennant flies at Wrigley field.”) Sianis passed away on October 22, 1970, but the legend of his jinx lived on. Early in 1984, Cubs manager Dallas Green swung by the Billy Goat Tavern and tried to make peace with Sianis’s nephew, Sam. “All is forgiven,” Green said. At the manager’s invitation, Sam showed up at Wrigley Field on opening day with a goat. In a pregame ceremony, the duo ascended the pitcher’s mound and formally revoked the curse.

Members of the Sianis family have since walked goats in or around the stadium on two other occasions. Also, in an attempt to better the Cubs’ fortunes, five competitive eaters gobbled up an entire 40-pound goat in one sitting at a Chicago restaurant in September 2015—a feat that took just 14 minutes.

2. FRED MERKLE’S WRONG TURN

In the early 20th century, baseball knew no bigger rivalry than the blood feud that raged between the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants. In 1908, these two legendary teams were entwined in a pennant race for the ages. On September 23, the Cubs—who’d won their first World Series title a year earlier—played the Giants at Manhattan’s historic Polo Grounds. At the onset, Chicago stood just slightly behind New York in the National League standings. With the end of the season fast approaching, the stakes were sky-high (at the time, the winner of the pennant was the team with the best record at the end of the season).

Under normal circumstances, Giants veteran Fred Tenney would have been playing first base. But due to a back-related ailment, he was replaced by a 19-year-old rookie named Fred Merkle. Little did this Wisconsin-born teenager know that he’d soon secure his place in history—for all the wrong reasons.

With two outs at the bottom of the ninth inning and outfielder Moose McCormick biding his time on first base, the score was tied 1-1. That’s when Merkle singled, sending McCormick to third. Then along came shortstop Al Bridwell, who hit a single of his own to right center field.

Here’s where things get weird: Bridwell’s hit allowed McCormick to run across home plate and seemingly win the game. Rather than touch second base, Merkle proceeded to make a beeline towards the Giants’ clubhouse in center field. Why would he do such a thing? Well, in those days, fans would often pour out onto the field after a home team victory. Therefore, it was customary for a player in Merkle’s situation to forego advancing to second so that he could steer clear of the oncoming mob.

However, although it was common practice, Major League Baseball’s official rulebook didn’t recognize this little custom. Merkle technically should have touched second—and when he failed to do so, Chicago took notice. Although the field was obscured by a torrent of fans, the Cubs managed to find a ball and get it to their second baseman, Johnny Evers. Following a chat with the Chicago infielder, umpire Hank O’Day called Merkle out, meaning that McCormick’s run was suddenly rendered void. At that point, the game should have gone into extra innings, but those interfering fans and impending darkness rendered such an outcome impossible—so O’Day declared the game to be a 1-1 tie.

At season’s end, the Giants and Cubs had tied for first place. A one-game playoff was arranged, which the Cubs handily won en route to claiming their final World Series championship. Meanwhile, Fred Merkle’s reputation would never recover. The events of September 23 earned him the nickname “Bonehead” and from that day onward, fans taunted him by shouting “Don’t forget to touch second!” (Reportedly, Merkle feared that someone would scrawl “bonehead” onto his tombstone.)

Still, Merkle has had his share of defenders over the years. Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem once denounced O’Day’s fateful call in that Cubs-Giants game as “the rottenest decision in the history of baseball.” Some historians and commentators even believe that this controversial ruling triggered the Chicago Cubs curse. “[Merkle] was the first player on whom the rule was ever enforced and he never lived it down,” longtime sportscaster Keith Olbermann told ESPN. “The goat story is still easier, and more compelling, than the story of the poor rookie victimized by a rule that was never enforced… I’ve never believed the Cubs didn’t curse themselves by playing that rule on poor Fred.” In 2008, a monument to the first baseman was erected in Merkle’s hometown of Watertown, Wisconsin. Its construction was spearheaded by local baseball buff David Stalker, who concurs with Olbermann’s assessment. “Sometimes,” Stalker said, “it looks like the Cubs and Merkle got jinxed at the same time.”

3. PEOPLE, PLACES, AND ANIMALS NAMED “MURPHY”

You might call it a second “Murphy’s Law.” Superstitious Cubbies fans have pointed out that several of the most disappointing collapses in franchise history involved something named Murphy. In 1969, Chicago looked poised to win the National League’s eastern division. For 155 days, the mighty Cubs stood in first place. On August 16, they’d amassed a nine-game lead over the second-place New York Mets, an upstart team which, incidentally, was only in its eighth year of existence. (Although the Cardinals had more wins, their win-loss percentage was lower.) “We started out great, and I really felt that year was going to be our year,” third baseman Ron Santo would say in retrospect.

But then the Mets got hot. Under general manager Johnny Murphy, the New York squad won 39 of their last 50 games. And as Gotham’s lovable losers upped their game, the Cubs started unraveling. Of their final 25 games, Santo’s team ended up dropping 17. The most infamous stretch of this downward skid came in September, when Chicago visited Shea Stadium for a two-date series with the Mets. Surging New York swept the failing Cubbies by a combined score of 10 runs to three. The second game is particularly well-known because, at one point, a black cat trotted out in front of the Cubs dugout. “I saw that cat coming out of the stands, and I knew right away we were in trouble,” Santo said. Sure enough, the so-called Miracle Mets won their division en route to an improbable World Series victory.

Forty-six years later, the Mets once again dashed Chicago’s World Series hopes. This time, New York swept the heavily-favored Cubs in the National League Championship Series. After disposing of their Second City rivals, a Mets player named Daniel Murphy was chosen as the NLCS Most Valuable Player. Given the fact that he’d put up four homers, six runs scored, and six runs batted in during the series, Murphy certainly warranted the distinction.

Not every Cubs playoff collapse was engineered by the Mets, though. In 1984, Dallas Green’s squad secured an NL East crown, but lost the ensuing league championship series. This time, Chicago was eliminated by the San Diego Padres, who snatched the pennant by winning three straight games on their home turf, a venue called Jack Murphy Stadium.

Oh, and by the way, William Sianis’s goat had a name. He called it Murphy.

4. THE (POSSIBLY FIXED) 1918 WORLD SERIES

Chicago’s other team, the White Sox, is still haunted by a scandal that rocked the country over nine decades ago. In 1919, this South Side club famously threw the World Series, deliberately losing the best-of-nine contest after gamblers paid some key players to engineer five losses. Shortly thereafter, rumors of a backroom deal began circulating. These mutterings culminated in a highly publicized trial of several of the team’s players. Although they were acquitted, MLB Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis permanently banned all of the players from the majors.

Known as the Black Sox Scandal, this ordeal is regarded as the darkest chapter in the history of baseball. And yet, one co-conspirator alleged that it was merely the sequel to an earlier transgression. Pitcher Eddie “Knuckles” Cicotte was the first White Sock to confess his role in rigging the 1919 World Series. At Chi-Town’s Cook County Courthouse, he spilled the beans before a grand jury.

During his testimony, he happened to bring up the White Sox’s crosstown rivals. Cicotte mentioned an eastbound train ride that he’d taken with his teammates in the 1919 regular season. Onboard, the conversation inevitably turned to baseball—and money. “The ball players were talking about somebody trying to fix the National League ball players or something like that,” Cicotte stated.

Here, he was referring to the 1918 World Series, which the Cubs had lost to Babe Ruth’s Red Sox. As Cicotte’s confession unfolded, he revealed that “there was some talk about [gamblers] offering $10,000 or something to throw the Cubs in the Boston series.” Hearing this, a player on the train supposedly joked that if the White Sox won the pennant, they should follow the Cubs’ lead and drop the ensuing World Series.

Did the Cubbies purposefully let Boston win it all in 1918? John Thorn, MLB’s official historian, thinks that so far as conspiracy theories go, this one isn’t too far-fetched. “It seems more likely that there would have been a fix than there would not have been,” he told The New York Times. “At that time, the connection between baseball players and gamblers was … strong.” Moreover, as sportswriter Sean Deveny notes, player salaries cratered in the midst of World War I. “They didn’t make much money,” he says. Under the circumstances, the temptation to take bribes would have been strong. In 2009, Deveny published a book about shady background dealings that allegedly tainted the 1918 series. Its title? The Original Curse.

5. WRIGLEY FIELD’S DAY GAME “DISADVANTAGE”

To Cubs faithful, the team’s home turf is nothing less than an ivy-walled cathedral. Built in 1914, it’s regarded as one of Chicago’s most iconic landmarks, right up there with Willis (formerly Sears) Tower and Millennium Park’s Cloud Gate statue (a.k.a. “The Bean”). But playing at Wrigley presents some unique challenges to professional athletes. For starters, city regulations force the Cubs to play more day games than any other team in the majors.

Prior to 1988, the Cubbies never played night games at Wrigley. Then, in that pivotal year, the stadium was fitted with the necessary lights that allowed Chicago’s National League club to take the field after sundown. But at the behest of residents who live in a nearby neighborhood, the Windy City has enforced some severe restrictions on the number of night games that Wrigley can host.

These days, around 70 percent of Major League games take place at night. Twenty-nine MLB franchises now play the majority of their contests under the stars. The Chicago Cubs are the lone outlier. Whereas many teams play around 55 night games at home every year, the Cubbies are limited to 35 (which can be increased to 43 if necessary, if the MLB changes a day game to night for TV rights) night games in any one regular season. For the players, this scheduling quirk can be a real pain. “Through the years, I’ve talked to a lot of friends of mine that have played for the Cubs,” Red Sox great David Ortiz said in 2014. “The one thing that everyone talked about was the schedule in Chicago … it kind of mentally wears you down.”

Ortiz argued that the frequent day games at Wrigley don’t give the Cubs enough time to prepare themselves for road games, which mostly take place at night. “You play day games for about a week and the next thing you know you have to go into a city and play night games,” he says, “then … you have to go to the West Coast and adjust to the time there, then you have to come back home and start playing day games.” This erratic sleep schedule, Ortiz says, is simply “too hard for baseball [players].”

Some former Cub players and managers have made similar statements. As Dallas Green once told the Chicago Tribune, “What we found was that you live in the airport when you play day baseball and everyone else plays night baseball.” He went on to explain that a Cub who plays a night game in St. Louis couldn’t expect to return to his Chicago home “until 2 or 3 in the morning.” Afterwards, said player would have to “get up at 9 a.m.” in order to arrive at Wrigley on time for the next day’s home game. “Your rest is affected,” Green concluded.

Still, not everyone is convinced that Wrigley’s partiality for day games puts the Cubbies at a disadvantage. “I definitely prefer day games here,” former Cubs infielder Gary Gaetti opined. While he allowed that a schedule with more nighttime contests would give the players more rest time, Gaetti didn’t see the status quo as a handicap. “You get used to having it this way,” he said.

For kids with food allergies and their parents, trick-or-treating can be the scariest part of Halloween. Many candies contain common allergens like nuts, milk, eggs, soy, and wheat, and all it takes is the tiniest trace to set off a life-threatening reaction. Adding to the horror: the fun-sized versions of these snacks are often packaged without ingredient lists, forcing many families to sit out the Halloween festivities all together. Nonprofit organization Food Allergy Research and Education hopes to change that by encouraging houses to paint their pumpkins teal this year.

The Teal Pumpkin Project aims to raise awareness of food allergies and make Halloween inclusive for the one in 13 American children who are afflicted. Households can join the initiative this Halloween by painting a pumpkin teal and placing it outside their homes, indicating to families with allergies that they are handing out allergen-friendly, non-edible “treats” like small toys. A spokesperson for the initiative recommends stocking up on goodies like glow sticks, bouncy balls, bubbles, spider rings, and stickers as alternatives to candy.

When the project launched in 2014, teal pumpkins were placed outside households in seven countries and all 50 states. In 2015, the number of participating countries doubled. You can take part by signing the online pledge and sharing your pumpkin on social media using the hashtag #tealpumpkinproject. 

Craft Your Way to the Perfect Teal Pumpkin: DIY Tutorial #tealpumpkinproject http://t.co/JyFzTxylnk pic.twitter.com/sX9r5S3fF7

— FARE (@FoodAllergy) October 4, 2015

@FoodAllergy Teal pumpkins are decorated and ready to be purchased at the Bettendorf Hy-Vee! #tealpumpkinproject pic.twitter.com/iD34LN0W1A

— Kim Denman, RD, LD (@BettDietitian) September 28, 2015

[h/t: Mashable]

Explorers have exhaustively mapped the world’s landmasses, but the ocean floor is still largely a mystery. According to one estimate, we’ve canvassed less than 5 percent of its depths. But recently, New Scientist reports, marine experts discovered an intriguing new feature off America’s western seaboard: 500 bubbling methane vents, which about doubles the known number of such vents found along the continental margins of the United States.

Robert Ballard, of RMS Titanic fame, made the discovery while conducting summer expeditions on his ship, Nautilus. “It appears that the entire coast off Washington, Oregon, and California is a giant methane seep,” said Ballard, who serves as the founder and director of the Ocean Exploration Trust in Connecticut, in a news release.

Experts are still trying to figure out precisely what the bubbles are made of, and are analyzing them to determine which gases they contain. Similar sites have yielded methane, but Robert Embley, chief scientist on the Nautilus, said there’s a chance that methane hydrate, which is made from water and methane, could also be present.

As the methane vents reveal clues about our mysterious oceans, they might also tell us more about climate change. Methane traps heat 40 times more efficiently than carbon dioxide, so scientists want to find out how much of it is seeping from the vents, making its way into the atmosphere, and having an impact on global warming.

“This is an area ripe for discovery,” said Nicole Raineault, director of science operations with Ballard’s Ocean Exploration Trust, in a statement. “We do not know how many seeps exist, even in U.S. waters, how long they have been active, how persistent they are, what activated them or how much methane, if any, makes it into the atmosphere.”

The researchers plan to present the discovery this week at the National Ocean Exploration Forum—and after that, they want to find out how much methane is coming from the seafloor. They also hope to find more vents off the East Coast and map them to broaden their existing knowledge of the sites. You can watch the vents spew in the video below, filmed by the Nautilus.

[h/t New Scientist]
 
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