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R.I.P. Cards: Real Cases Or Fakes?

MrRING

MrRING

Android Futureman
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A while ago, when a comic shop was going out of business, I got for a dollar a group of collectable cards. The deck is called R.I.P.: Real Monsters, Demons & Ghosts. Many of the regular types of cases are covered (Mad Gasser, vampires, mass murderers, even Charles Fort!) but there are a few cases that I had never heard of. Are these just made up, or well-respected cases in the paranormal cannon I had never heard of?

FIRE EYES: in 1986,1987 a family in Horicon, WI move into a house where the kids start to hear whispering voices and the whole family starts to see glowing green eyes. The father continued investigating until he heard the voices one night coming from his garage, he went in and the eyes were there as well as a huge ball of flame - but the fire disappeared and the house was not harmed. They left, and suppedly destroyed the bunk bed, which was causing the disturbance.

SECRET IN THE CEILING: Ellen Wheeler moved into a new house in Oxford, England in 1874, but didn't like the house. She kept waking up with the feeling that something horrible lay over her head. It started destroying her health, worrying about the ceiling, so she left and in her absence, the family looked and found the body of a dead baby, whose neck had been twisted (the assumed cause of death).

DEVIL'S HANDS: According to the San Francisco Weekly Bulletin on December 20, 1872, a Mr. Chase was visited by an entity who sat beside him. The entity said Chases hands were his, and would he kindly burn them off. He held them in the fire for as long as he could, putting some grease on them and put them in again, and when his hands were burned up the entity left. Chase later told his tale in the hospital.

UNSEEN EVIL: This card details mysterious unseen attackers. In 1951 Manilla, a young woman was bitten by an object nobody could see, and people saw the bitemarks appear out of thin air as they rushed her to a hospital. In 1952, a Cheshire England pig farmer was attacked by a cloud in his kitchen, a cloud that produced two "projections" that reached for hsi throat, and that it was dispelled by his turning on a light. This cloud was lineked to something called the Jones Family Poltergeist. The last report is undated, and it says a Wisconsin homeowner was attacked by a grey-cloaked skeleton when it pressed it's thumbs to his head, which knocked him out. When he came to, there wee permanent indentions where the skeleton had pressed his head.

Has anybody heard of these reports elsewhere? The cards were printed by Kitchen Sink Press.
 
The Ellen Wheeler case rings a bell - I think I may have heard it when I was living in Oxford, so poss was told it rather than read it: IIRC she was called Eileen in the version I heard.

I'd heard of the Horicon polt too, but the rest are new to me.
 
MrRING said:
FIRE EYES: in 1986,1987 a family in Horicon, WI move into a house where the kids start to hear whispering voices and the whole family starts to see glowing green eyes. The father continued investigating until he heard the voices one night coming from his garage, he went in and the eyes were there as well as a huge ball of flame - but the fire disappeared and the house was not harmed. They left, and suppedly destroyed the bunk bed, which was causing the disturbance.
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This is the "Tallman X" (X = House; Ghost; Poltergeist; etc.) case. A summary of the case with links to additional online resources can be found at:

https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Tallman_House

There are also multiple newer online articles and video(s) about the incident.
 
MrRING said:
DEVIL'S HANDS: According to the San Francisco Weekly Bulletin on December 20, 1872, a Mr. Chase was visited by an entity who sat beside him. The entity said Chases hands were his, and would he kindly burn them off. He held them in the fire for as long as he could, putting some grease on them and put them in again, and when his hands were burned up the entity left. Chase later told his tale in the hospital.
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This story is mentioned in Fort's notes for 1872.
1872 (Dec 13) / Dec 20 / Burned Self / San Francisco Weekly Bulletin of 20th—An account of a drunkard named Chase, who, at Elco, Cal., had held his hands in a fire and burned them off. He told that a man whose command he could not disobey, had entered his cabin, and had told him to do this. / Copied in Religio-Ph. J, July 22, 1876. [A; 797.1, 797.2. (Religio-Philosophical Journal, 20 (no. 19; July 22, 1876); issue missing at IAPSOP) (San Francisco Weekly Bulletin December 20, 1872.)]
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SOURCE: http://www.resologist.net/notes/1872b.html
 
MrRING said:
UNSEEN EVIL: This card details mysterious unseen attackers. In 1951 Manilla, a young woman was bitten by an object nobody could see, and people saw the bitemarks appear out of thin air as they rushed her to a hospital. ...
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I couldn't locate such a story from 1951, but it bears a remarkable similarity to the possession of Clarita Villanueva reported as occurring in Manila in May 1953.

1953, May 9-19 (ca.): The Invisible Fangs ​

From approximately May 9 to May 18, 1953, a young woman named Clarita Villanueva in Manila, Philippines, was apparently attacked and bitten by two strange beings that only she could see. All initial information on this bizarre event came from just two press releases that hit newspapers worldwide on May 19 and 20 of the same year. The story, as told in this initial release, runs thus:

The Mayor of Manila, Mr. Arsenio Lacson, had heard that an 18-year-old woman being held in the city's jail on vagrancy charges had claimed for the past nine days that she was being attacked by invisible creatures that would bite her. She described her invisible attackers as "a very big dark man with curly hair all over the body" and "a body with an angelic face and a big mustache." On Monday, May 18, the ninth day of Villanueva incarceration, Lacson called to have her brought to his office so he and the chief medical examiner, Mariano Lara, among other observers, could talk to her and see the wounds for themselves. Within 15 minutes of arriving, Villanueva started to scream she was being attacked again, while Mayor Lacson was sitting next to her ...

Lacson was shocked to see what appeared to be human bite marks that he knew Villanueva had not made herself, one on her neck, and one on her index finger that appeared while Lacson was holding her hand; his palm was covering the digit when the wound appeared. Lacson later stated that Lara, who was not a superstitious man, was scared stiff by the events. A photo that was run in just a few papers reporting the event appears to have been taken by newsmen who were present for the examination ...
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FULL STORY (With Photo): http://anomalyinfo.com/Stories/1953-may-9-19-ca-clarita-villanueva-attacked-invisible-fangs
 
The 1952 pig farmer attack story seems to be a follow-on event related to poltergeist activity in Runcorn. This Facebook presentation about a paranormal book provides the following clues ...
A PARANORMAL researcher has linked two weird tales from Halton’s history in his latest book.

Jeffrey Pearson’s Haunted Places Of Cheshire contains strange stories of spirits rising from the dead across the county.

One tale records the furore over a ‘spectacularly malicious’ poltergeist at Byron Street, Runcorn, in 1952, and the ghost’s possible links to a mysterious ‘killer cloud’ that murdered pigs and attacked a farmer. ...

Jeffrey said there was an unusual twist in the tale when 53 pigs were reported to have been slaughtered by a ‘floating black cloud with two protruding prongs’ at Crowther’s Farm by Victoria Road.

Days later the farmer’s wife claimed he had been attacked by a seven foot-tall black cloud that vanished when a light was turned on.

The farmer also said he saw the cloud follow the poltergeist’s original victim John Glynn down the road. ...
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SOURCE: https://www.facebook.com/daviedoy15...eist-and-crothwers-farm-pig-/366437870227880/
 
This extended article:

The Pig Killing Poltergeist Of Runcorn
Steven Tucker
Phenomena, Issue 43 (November 2012), pp. 2 - 5

... provides a detailed overview of the Byron Street / Jones poltergeist incident and the Crowther's Farm pig incident. It's an edited extract from Tucker's book Paranormal Merseyside.

Here are some passages focused on the pig farm / farmer bit. John Glynn and his grandfather Sam Jones were the central figures in the Byron Street events.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

However, there are some further sensational events associated with the case, which we have not so far mentioned, that only make the true story even harder to fathom. Sam Jones was a farm-labourer, and worked for a certain Harold Crowther of Pool Farm, on nearby Heath Road. This farm, too, was haunted, just like the house in Byron Street was – and the events there had broken out around the same time, too, namely on August 10th, when Crowther saw a ghostly figure, resembling his wife’s dead father, wandering around the place. Not long afterwards, he found that three of his pedigree pigs, for no apparent reason, had simply lain down and died.

Within a fortnight, all of Harold Crowther’s pigs were dead – 53 of them in total. Five vets examined the bodies, and could discern no plausible cause of death. Had a ghost killed them? Crowther soon saw something which led him to believe that this was indeed the case. It was, he says, “a large black cloud about seven feet in height, shapeless except for two prongs sticking out at the back” which he saw floating around outside, by the pigsties. Three days later, Crowther’s wife witnessed the same thing. A few weeks afterwards, Harold Crowther saw it again; this time in his kitchen. He claims that he rushed past it heading for the light switch, when he felt its two prongs, which were “solid, like blunt sticks”, going for his throat. As soon as he switched the light on, however, the thing disappeared – just as the spook at Byron Street did whenever the lights went on.

Indeed, remarkably, according to Crowther, this black cloud then showed up at Byron Street itself, where it was seen (by Crowther) hovering above John Glynn’s bed. Crowther said that he had seen the thing for the last time on December 13th 1952, when he let his two farm-dogs loose on it. They jumped up, snapping and snarling, as it rose into the air and simply disintegrated. This time, it was lighter in colour and much smaller than it had been upon the previous times he had observed it. Apparently, this sighting of the cloud coincided with the concluding trick of the poltergeist at Byron Street which, we are told, announced its final departure by folding up the carpet in the bedroom.
However, it does seem slightly suspicious that seemingly all of the most remarkable incidents in the Runcorn case were witnessed only by Crowther. If he was telling the truth about these matters, then we might almost be justified in suspecting that Crowther was the poltergeist focus – the technical name given to the person around whom the ghost’s activities most frequently occur – in this case as opposed to young John Glynn, as most commentators have traditionally supposed. ...
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FULL STORY (MAGAZINE ISSUE; PDF):
http://www.noufors.com/Documents/Books, Manuals and Published Papers/Specialty UFO Publications/British UFO Publications/Phenomena/Issue 043 - 2012 11 - November.pdf
 
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