Lobster Family

Grady Franklin Stiles, Jr., was born in Pittsburgh on July 18, 1937, the sixth in a long line of lobster-men (preceded by William Stiles, 1805-1888; Jacob Stiles, 1843-1932; Elisha Stiles, 1880-1935; and finally Grady Stiles, Sr., 1912-1988). Grady could not walk and used a wheelchair in public, but could crawl around on his incredibly powerful arms and could perform nearly any task using his "claws". He was married twice to Mary Teresa Herzog and once to Barbara Browning and had four children, two of whom, a boy and a girl, also had lobster-hands. When his eldest daughter Donna was engaged to marry a boy of whom Grady disapproved, Grady shot and killed the boy.
However, Grady escaped a prison sentence on the grounds that no prison was equipped to handle his disability. He was given fifteen years probation, and soon after the trial re-married Mary Teresa and continued to physically abuse his family. In 1992 Mary Teresa mentioned to Grady's son-in-law, a circus employee, that "something" needed to be done about Grady's abusive behavior. On November 29, 1992, he was shot to death while watching television in the family's trailer home. The killer was a neighbor, hired by Grady's son-in-law.
The surviving Stiles family members still call Gibsonton home. Cathy is married to carnival worker Tyrill Berry and is the mother of Misty, born in the early 1990s, who also has the lobster-claw condition (ectrodactyly). Grady III has a daughter, Sara, who does not have ectrodactyly. Cathy, Grady III and Misty still perform occasionally. Cathy has appeared in the films Sisters (1973), Tim Burton's Big Fish (2003) and Firecracker (2004) as well as in an episode of the series Carnivale.
Ectrodactyly literally means "monstrous fingers" and is generally a highly hereditary condition, as evidenced by the Stiles family, although it can occur spontaneously. The Bell family of Scotland has exhibited the trait for several centuries, supposedly as divine punishment for their ancestor's involvement in the execution of two innocent women accused of witchcraft. Accounts from Africa tell of an entire tribe, known as the Vadoma, who possess ectrodactyl or "ostrich" feet; however, these stories are very likely exaggerated and the "tribe" in question is but a single family. A contemporary celebrity with ectrodactyly is Bree Walker, a newscaster from California who appeared as the Scorpion Queen in the HBO series Carnivale.

Bosnian beast - unidentified animal found in 2001 in Bosnia.

In a case that seems more like an episode of the X Files than actual fact in the Balkans, former soccer player and trainer Damir Bradarac hit an animal with his car early Wednesday near the centre of Zenica, but when he got out of the car to look at what he had hit, it was like nothing he had ever seen before.
"It's about 21 inches long. On the ends of its legs it has amphibious palms with five fingers, very similar to humans, unusually long legs which veterinarians believe can serve for jumping, a long neck, keen eyes, a flat head," read the description in Jutarnje Novine Friday. The picture on the front page showed the strange creature's razory teeth to advantage as well.
Bradarac took the animal's body to veterinarians in Zenica, who were confused and told him nothing like it had ever been seen in the area. Zenica citizens were also concerned, because a "carnivorous animal" had been found in the centre of town. A Jutarnje team volunteered to take the corpse to Dr Rizah Avdić at the Veterinarian-Anatomy Department in Sarajevo. "When we came to the Veterinary Department, the porter at the entrance already knew we were coming. He only asked, 'Is that it?'" wrote one of the reporters.
Dr Avdić told the paper that the animal was male and that it could possibly be related to domesticated cats. "I can't say now what exactly it does, but I can say that I saw a similar animal before and that they live in our forests," he said. "Everything will be known tomorrow after the autopsy."
As for Bradarac, the discoverer of the animal, which he dubbed "the little dinosaur," he said he was curious to find out what it was. "I want to find out the truth... [so] that we know what kind of monsters are roaming our streets," he said. "I can't understand why the [respective] authorised institutions are not interested in this case." Bosnian paranormal phenomena.

The gravestone path

The winter was a long and hard one in the Britain of 1970, before the days of global warming, January would signify cold weather right across the country. Early one morning I had cleared a patch of snow in my tiny garden to put down food for the wildlife, an urgent knocking on my door showed and anxious looking old lady with a tiny Yorkshire terrier held tightly within her coat, and demanding to see the Exorcist.Inviting her into the warm, and asking her over a welcome hot cup of tea for her story,she began to pour out this amazing story.Her son was a parish gravedigger, these are a special breed of men who are often shunned for the work they do, yet their knowledge of the outdoors the changing seasons and who lives below ground in their graveyards, can be priceless to ghost hunters.The old lady told me that the little churchyard, where her son worked had sold off a part of the large old graveyard for a road widening scheme and for a small housing development.As the old defunct gravestones were cleared away, he had brought a load home and laid them down as her garden path, and on a visit there sure enough, you could read all the names of the long deceased all down the garden path to her washing line, the trouble was when you move these things about, you can disturb the dead, and they were expressing their anger in very strange ways.Since the laying of the pathway with the unwanted gravestones, she would hear strange noises, things would get moved and Trixie the Yorkshire terrier would be very unsettled at night.Now old people who live alone can report all these things, and they are actually more normal than paranormal, but in this instance I felt some examination was necessary, and was glad I did, because there were indeed memory traces and psychic residues from some long dead personalities, who were unhappy to have been disturbed,both in the garden and now in the home.The first thing was to call out a list of the names on the stones in prayer, consecrate the new ground for the stones, and to call for Gods blessings.This used to be called “a holding at bay ceremony”. Electrical problems have been documented in psychic movement right back to the complete system failures in Cairo at the death of Lord Caernarvon, but here were some baffling phenomena such as lights coming on and off all through the night, music coming from the player, the heating packing up, the doorbell ringing when no one was there and her reading glasses going missing and being found all over the house; she said this was all driving her potty.The next door neighbour’s said she was batty anyway, so it was difficult to assess how much was genuine, but I believe the general thrust of what she said, and asked if I could bring in a few spiritual colleagues in what is called a “rescue circle” and round up these lost souls and help them to their proper place, this is expert work and must not be attempted without expert training.But in the meantime however she went to the church and told the Vicar there about the ghostly goings on, and he was furious she had sought help from someone such as myself.In the old days people who thought for themselves were murdered by the Christian hierarchy, and even today freelance exorcists were not seen in a pleasant light,But the need for them has only been because of Church attitude that only regular church goers can get church help or use church facilities.The Vicar was not very knowledgeable or helpful and kept insisting that“This would not have happened if she had kept up her regular church going and bible reading class” but did pray with her in the house.Over the coming weeks the strange phenomena did die down,And trixie the terrier went back to sleeping in her basket, but I am convinced the situation existed which could have got a lot worse, with the souls of the dead getting increasingly angry.Flash photographs taken at night show several paranormal streaks and shapes which could possibly be spirit,and I accept this is open to interpretation.But for me there really were a lot of dead people in that house, who I am pleased to say are now back at rest.

Synchronicity today

Synchronicity was the term coined by Carl Jung (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung) for what he termed “meaningful co-incidences”. This wonderful story appeared in the British press on October 28 2005. 87 year old Bob Michie was out for a drive in his 1954 “R” type Bentley saloon on a lonely country road, when for the first time the motorcar which has done 120,000 miles broke down. The car was towed to the nearest garage where mechanics diagnosed a broken rotor arm, which supplies the spark to the distributor. No-one had any idea where another could be obtained, then amazingly the mechanic flagged down an A.A patrol van, the mechanic joked to the patrol van driver, “you would not have a rotor arm for a 1954 Bentley in there would you mate” ? Incredibly the driver had had one on board for 28 years and within minutes the 51 year old Bentley was back on the road. Psychologist Carl Jung ( 1875-1961) believed there were no such thing as co-incidence and that at some level all things are linked, students of occultism, and Jung was one, use everyday signs and objects as signposts to information outside of the normal ranges of perception.Although most modern schools of psychology pooh-hooh these theories, primitive man and societies where man is in touch with the natural world, have always used these abilities to good effect. APOPHENIA this is the term for explaining away that there is nothing other than random circumstance at work, and that to suggest so is perhaps a signpost of mental illness, Some say that creativity and psychosis are linked, and dismiss the 3 primary categories of synchronicity, as developed by Jung and now used in every single divinatory school. AUGERY. No where is this more visible that in the science of Augury, where biblical prophets would read from the flight of birds, carrion crows and similar were seen as unlucky and dubbed “birds of ill omen” The prophet would section of a piece of sky to be read, by holding out his arms and meditating for birds to fly through this area, in Rome the Latin name of this section was “templum” from where we derive the term “template” And when worship moved into fixed buildings these became known as “temples”. Before a battle, only the army commander was allowed to predict the outcome.From the Latin terms, avis Bird and speciosee, we get the word “auspicious” and expert Graeme Donald tells us that “ a junior officers victory was said to have occurred- “under the generals auspices.” I will often demonstrate how this technique was used in medieval palmistry, and its application in modern psychology to the hand-print. Today synchronicity is around us all the time, emotionally, physically intellectually, In fact in every part of our lives, and we must make doubly sure we have time to look, and absorb its meanings.

Loch Ness Monster

One of the most famous paranormal Cryptids in history, the Loch Ness Monster, has intrigued both the general public and experts alike for decades. Loch Ness (http://www.visitlochness.net/) is the largest freshwater lake in the UK, at over 24 miles long and containing more water than all the other lakes in the rest of the British Isles combined. It is an enigmatic place, made more so by the considerable number of sightings over the years of what people describe as a large creature in the Loch. These descriptions vary, from a long snake like animal with humps, to a long-necked dinosaur like creature resembling a Plesiosaur. The aim of this article is to try and dispel some of the most common misconceptions regarding the Loch Ness Monster. It is not intended however at dispelling the idea that an unknown creature exists in Loch Ness, that determination will be left up to you.Myth: Nessie is a solitary animal, one of a kindIf the Loch Ness Monster exists, it cannot be alone. Any species requires a viable population in order to survive, a single animal could not have survived alone in the Loch for all this time, and sightings date back hundreds of years.Myth: Nessie was trapped in the Loch since prehistoric timesDuring the last ice age, Scotland was totally covered by a giant glacier. No large animal could survive being frozen in ice for thousands of years, if the Loch Ness Monster exists it certainly didn't get there this way.Myth: Nessie hides in a series of underground caverns beneath the LochNo maze of underground caverns have ever been found. In a recent BBC documentary about Loch Ness it was revealed that the type of rock which makes up the sides of the Loch is a type in which caves should not be able to form. It is highly unlikely that there is a large maze of caves under the Loch.Myth: Nessie is a PlesiosaurThis is a common theory put forward to explain what type of creature the Loch Ness Monster could be. The main problem with this idea is that Plesiosaurs breath air. If there was one in Loch Ness it would have to come to the surface every few minutes to breath. The frequency of sightings does not support this, if it were surfacing as much as this then it would be very easy to see on a regular basis. There's also the small problem that Plesiosaurs apparantly became extinct millions of years ago, and if by some miracle some have survived to the present day there would need to be a sizable population of them. Such a population of large air-breathing sea creatures would not have gone unnoticed.Myth: In 1934, a surgeon took the most convincing ever photograph of the monsterColonel Robert Wilson did indeed claim to have photographed the creature in 1934. His photograph was the most convincing ever of the monster, and remained so until quite recently. In 1993 however,it was revealed that the object in the water was actually a plastic head mounted on the top of a toy submarine. He certainly took the photograph, but what it shows is not the Loch Ness Monster.Will any of this stop people believing in the Loch Ness Monster ? Of course not, because whether or not it exists the legend of Nessie is world famous, and no matter what the skeptics say it won't stop the next visitor from glancing out over the Loch to see if they can catch a glimpse of that elusive creature.

Final your work.. post-mortem

Most ghosts are hopelessly vague, so much so that one wonders if you can accomplish anything at all in the afterlife. They appear and disappear transiently, leave us muffled and hard to understand EVPs, and for the life of them can't do anything on demand or repeatable to prove their existance beyond all shadow of a doubt. Of course, there are paranormal exceptions.Two resounding examples come in the form of mediums who have made contact with dead novelists and composers. This in itself isn't out of the ordinary, famous people are allegedly channeled all the time. But this duet of cases stands above the crowd in that actual artistic work resulted from the contact in such a way that the medium should not have been capable of faking.The first is the famous Mrs. Rosemary Brown (http://www.adam.com.au/bstett/PaBrown104.htm) who died in 2001. Early in life she had been visited by the ghost of Franz Liszt (http://www.d-vista.com/OTHER/franzliszt.html). At the time she had no idea who this white haired man in the flowing black cassock was until she saw a picture of him years later. At the age of seven he told her that he would make her a famous musician one day, before dissappearing for decades. He showed back up unexpectedly in 1964, and literally began releasing new compositions through her. He was soon joined by the spirits of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Chopin and others. Some of them dictated notes directly to her, others controlled her hands on the piano and she wrote the notes down. Often, she couldn't even play the compositions as they were beyond her skills as a musician, but as she got older her piano playing markedly improved. She claimed this was because Brahms, Rachmaninoff and Liszt had been tutoring her on the piano! The consensus from the music world was, mostly, that the compositions bore a strong resemblance to the works of the composers. Some even stated that the compositions couldn't be faked without years of training, which she clearly never had. Some of the pieces were simple, but others were apparently very complex. In any case, Mrs. Brown was either a very talented composer herself, or she really was in contact with the spirits of a host of deceased composers.The other outstanding example is that of Mrs. J. H. Curran of St. Louis, Missouri who in 1913 made contact through a ouija board with a spirit calling herself Patience Worth. Claiming to have lived in 17th century America and killed by indians, the spirit of Patiences Worth dictated to Mrs. Curran a number of novels from a variety of different historical periods in multiple different literary styles. From a period novel written in medieval English, which Mrs. Curran had no way of studying, to her novel "Hope Trueblood" set in the 19th century which recieved critical acclaim even from reviewers that had no idea that the novel had been dictated by a spirit.