McShepherd

As humans there’s one thing that bring us all together — we’re scared sh*tless by chanting Bloody Mary into a mirror. It’s become one of the most well-known urban legends of all time. Many a sleepover have been spent chanting her name into a mirror. But few people know where the legend comes from.

Once you have a nickname, it’s hard to shake it off. No one knows that better than Queen Mary I, or as history better remembers her — Bloody Mary.

The name didn’t come out of nowhere. She was responsible for burning nearly 300 Protestants at the stake in her attempts to make England more Catholic.

Unfortunately, the queen that brought so much death into the world was unable to bring any life. She had a frightfully believable false pregnancy. 

Queen Mary I (pronounced “Queen Mary the First”) certainly looked pregnant to everyone around her and even said she could feel the fetus move. When she was a few weeks away from the expected labor she was bedridden and doctors prepared for birth. But the baby never came, and soon Mary’s swollen belly began to recede.

Turned out she was never actually pregnant.

A short time later, in 1558, Mary thought she might be pregnant again. This time, she kept the joyful news quieter. Unfortunately, once again, it was again a false pregnancy. Even more unfortunately, Queen Mary I died in the middle of it.

Besides the fact that she has the name for it, Queen Mary I makes quite a convincing case to be Bloody Mary. Those that believe she’s Bloody Mary say she is searching for her lost children and ready to steal one if she must.

Another theory is that Mary Queen of Scots is the Bloody Mary. 

Unlike the other women on this list, Mary Queen of Scots was not believed to cause much bloodshed, it just *seemed* to happen around her. Her ill-advised marriage to her cousin, the Earl of Darnley, turned sour when he stabbed a man 56 times in front of a pregnant Mary. Following the vicious murder, Darnley died mysteriously. While there was never any proof, fingers at towards Mary — who happened to marry one of the main suspects of Darnley’s murder.

After even more tarnish to her name, Mary scooped up her infant son, John (later to become the King of England) and traveled to her cousin Queen Elizabeth I to beg for protection. Elizabeth feared there would be an uprising for Mary Queen of Scots to take over her throne, so she had her thrown in jail. Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned for 19 years. Due to more conspiracies whispered in Elizabeth’s ear and a few elaborate escape plans on Mary’s part, she was sentenced to death by beheading. Unfortunately, the executioner was unskilled and it took several attempts to kill Mary.

Once she’d been successfully beheaded, the executioner tried to lift up her head and yell “Long Live the Queen.” But he’d only grabbed her red wig, and Queen Mary of Scots’ real hair and head fell to the ground.

It’s possibly this gruesome death and all the bloodshed that seemed to surround her entire life that has made Queen Mary of Scots a strong candidate for Bloody Mary.  

Also, Elizabeth Bathory is considered to be the Bloody Mary.

Okay. Her name isn’t Mary, but I wouldn’t leave Elizabeth Bathory out of the equation.

Actually, I wouldn’t do anything that might upset the spirit of Elizabeth Bathory. Also known as the Blood Countess, Elizabeth Bathory was a Hungarian royal in the 1500s, and remains the most prolific female serial killer in history. She’s thought to be the inspiration behind Dracula. Quite the bloody resume, and believe me — she earned it.

Elizabeth Bathory had an unquenchable thirst for killing, and could get away with it because of her vast wealth (even the king owed her money). Hundreds of girls “disappeared” in her castle. There were reports of cannibalism, beatings, stranglings, stabbings (with needles) and even lacerations from Elizabeth’s own teeth. There is no way to get an official count of how many girls died in the Blood Countess’s castle, but the estimated figure is more than 600.

Annabelle is real.

One of the creepiest parts of the truly scary The Conjuring is the evil possessed doll Annabelle, who makes up the cornerstone of Ed and Lorraine Warren’s spooky museum of trophies. Director James Wan redesigned Annabelle for the movie, giving her a much more disturbing appearance, but in real life Annabelle was just your run of the mill Raggedy Ann doll.

Donna got Annabelle from her mother in 1970; mom bought the used doll at a hobby store. Donna was a college student at the time, and living with a roommate named Angie, and at first neither thought the doll was anything special. But over time they noticed Annabelle seemed to move on her own; at first it was really subtle, just changes in position, the kinds of things that could be written off as the doll being jostled. But the movement increased, and within a few weeks it seemed to become fully mobile. The girls would leave the apartment with Annabelle on Donna’s bed and return home to find it on the couch.

Their friend Lou hated the doll. He thought there was something deeply wrong with it, something evil, but the girls were modern women and didn’t believe that sort of thing. There must be an explanation, they reasoned. But soon Annabelle’s actions got even weirder - Donna began to find pieces of parchment paper in the house with messages written on it. “Help us,” they would say, or “Help Lou.” Just to make the whole thing that much creepier nobody in the house had parchment paper. Where the hell was it coming from?

The escalation continued. One night Donna returned home to find Annabelle in her bed, with blood on her hands. The blood - or some sort of red liquid - seemed to be coming from the doll itself. That was enough; Donna finally agreed to bring in a medium. The sensitive sat with the doll and told the girls that long before their apartment complex had been built there had been a field on that property. A seven year old girl named Annabelle Higgins had been found dead in that field. Her spirit remained, and when the doll came into the house the girl latched on to it. She found Donna and Angie to be trustworthy. She just wanted to stay with them. She wanted to be safe with them.

Being sweet, nurturing types - they were both nursing students - Donna and Angie agreed to let Annabelle stay with them. And that’s when all hell broke loose.

Lou started having bad dreams, dreams where Annabelle was in his bed, climbing up his leg as he lay frozen, sliding up his chest to his neck and closing her stuffed hands around his throat, choking him out. He would wake up terrified, head pounding like all blood had been cut off to his brain. He was freaking out. He was worried about the girls.

A few days later he and Angie were hanging out, planning a road trip, when they heard someone moving around in Donna’s room. They froze - was it a break in? Was there an intruder in the apartment? Lou crept over to the door, listening to rustling within. He threw open the door and everything was as it should be - except Annabelle was off the bed and sitting in a corner. As he approached the doll Lou was consumed with that feeling, a burning on the back of the neck that indicates someone was staring at you and he spun around. Nobody was there. The room was empty. And then sudden pain on his chest. He looked in his shirt and saw a series of raking claw marks, rough ditches in his flesh that burned. He knew Annabelle had done it.

The weird claw marks began healing almost immediately. They were totally gone in two days. They were like no wounds any of them had ever seen before. They knew they needed more help, and they turned to an Episcopalian priest, who in turned called in Ed and Lorraine Warren.

It didn’t take the Warrens long to come to their conclusion: there was no ghost in this case. There was an inhuman spirit - a demon - attached to the doll. But they warned that the doll wasn’t possessed; demons don’t possess things, only people. It was clinging to the doll, manipulating it, in order to give the impression of a haunting. The target was really Donna’s soul.

A priest performed an exorcism on the apartment and the Warrens took possession of the doll. They put it in a bag and began the long drive home; Ed agreed to stay off the highways because there was a concern that the demon might fuck with the car, and at 65 miles an hour that would be disastrous. And sure enough, as they drove on the back roads, the engine kept cutting out, the power steering kept failing and even the brakes gave them trouble. Ed opened the bag, sprinkled the doll with holy water and the disturbances stopped… for the moment.

Ed left the doll next to his desk; it began levitating. That happened a couple of times and then it seemed to just quit, finally laying quiet. But in a couple of weeks Annabelle was back to her old tricks; she started appearing in different rooms in the Warren home. Sensing that the doll was ramping back up the Warrens called in a Catholic priest to exorcise Annabelle. The priest didn’t take it seriously, telling Annabelle “You’re just a doll. You can’t hurt anyone!” Big mistake: on his way home the priest’s brakes failed, and his car was totaled in a horrible accident. He survived.

Since the first movie was released in the 1980s, the Child’s Play franchise and its cursed doll Chucky have become horror-movie classics.

But did you know Chucky is based on an actual voodoo doll? The real thing is so much creepier than the Hollywood version. It even looks creepier. 

Key West artist and author Robert Eugene (Gene) Otto was given the homemade “Robert the Doll” in 1906, when he was six years old. One of his family’s Bahamian servants made the spooky-looking thing out of a wire frame, cloth, straw, and hair from Gene’s own head. This same servant was apparently mistreated by the family, had recently lost her own child when she was ordered to take care of Gene, and was skilled in black magic and voodoo. Of course she was. If you’re going to mistreat a servant, maybe choose one who doesn’t know voodoo. Or at least don’t let her use your child’s own hair on a doll.

Gene loved his creepy new friend, and his parents didn’t think much of it when their son began chattering away to the doll. However, it did give them pause when the doll answered back–in a completely different voice.

Robert the Doll was apparently the jealous type, and soon Gene’s other toys were mutilated. Neighbors reportedly saw the doll watching them from different windows when the family was known to be away from the house.

As Robert’s hold over the family grew stronger, Gene’s parents heard the doll giggle. They caught glimpses of it moving through the house. (This maybe would have been a good time to get rid of the doll.) When their son screamed in the middle of the night, they would rush to his room, only to find furniture knocked over and Gene terrified. Of course Robert the Doll was blamed for the destruction.

Soon people outside the family learned that Robert was not an ordinary doll. A plumber fled the house after it snickered at him. Other visitors swore the doll blinked and its expression changed.

Robert’s influence didn’t end when Gene grew up. Once Gene’s parents died, he moved back to his childhood home with his wife Anne, and was soon reacquainted with his old fiend. Anne took an instant dislike to the doll, swearing she had seen its expression change.

When the doll was confined to the attic, guests heard unexplained footsteps, laughter, and movement upstairs, even though no one was there. Pedestrians saw the doll staring at them from the home’s windows, and children began crossing to the other side of the street as they approached the house. Some kids claimed the doll taunted them. Gene found Robert in a rocking chair on the main floor time and time again. He kept putting the doll back in the attic, but it always returned to the chair.

Gene died in 1974 and his house was sold, along with Robert the Doll, who was in a trunk in the attic. The new family’s ten-year-old daughter claimed the ugly thing as her own, but soon regretted it. Her other dolls were mutilated, and it wasn’t long before she began having night terrors. She claimed that Robert moved about the room and had even attempted to attack her on multiple occasions.  When the family discovered their dog tied tightly with cord, they returned the doll to the attic.  As an adult, the girl still insisted that Robert the Doll was alive – and evil.

Wes Craven’s

A Nightmare on Elm Street

will celebrate its 30th anniversary on November 9… the day the original opened up in theaters and introduced sleepy teens to the terror that is, was and forever shall be Freddy Krueger. 

In preparation for the milestone, Craven has been sharing a ton of information about the creation – and impact – of his incredibly influential horror franchise, including how he came up with the idea in the first place.When he wasn’t busy sharing vital Nightmare on Elm Street information on Twitter, Wes Craven was taking part in a comprehensive oral history of Elm Street for Vulture. 

The primary players behind the film open up in great detail about what went in to the hiring of the cast, the creation of Freddy, and the landscape of horror in the early 1980s. With Craven coming off of Swamp Thing and The Hills Have Eyes Part II at the time, he needed to find something that was truly terrifying. And he found it in real life, so to speak.

The way Wes Craven describes it, he came up with the idea for A Nightmare on Elm Street after reading an L.A. Times article about a family that had survived the Killing Fields in Cambodia. They made it to the United States, but a young boy in the family still found himself haunted by terrible nightmares while he slept. Craven says:

He told his parents he was afraid that if he slept, the thing chasing him would get him, so he tried to stay awake for days at a time. When he finally fell asleep, his parents thought this crisis was over. Then they heard screams in the middle of the night. By the time they got to him, he was dead. He died in the middle of a nightmare. Here was a youngster having a vision of a horror that everyone older was denying. That became the central line of Nightmare on Elm Street.“

The origin of Freddy Krueger? That’s awesome. And far more psychologically chilling than the parental vendetta that led to the birth of the on-screen Krueger – which also is explained in greater detail in the Vulture oral history. Burning the neighborhood child murderer in the boiler room of the local school? Vicious. The 1980s were a different time, man.

People forget how terrifying the original Nightmare on Elm Street actually was. Because over the years, Freddy became more of a huckster, or a punchline, and the Elm Street sequels went for laughs as much as they went for scares. Now’s a good time to go back and revisit Wes Craven’s film, to remember why it became a classic in the first place.

In the late 1970s to the mid 80s, more than 110 men died in their sleep. Until their quiet final moments, they were young and healthy. Their families were stunned. Investigators were bewildered. With the victims all being Asian, medical authorities named the sleep scourge “Asian Death Syndrome.” Witnesses and families called it the night terror.

The first case was reported in California’s Orange County in 1977. By the summer of 1981, 20 people had fallen victim to the night terror. Authorities and medical responders were powerless as men across the country went to sleep and never woke up. 

The exotic morbidity of the night terror caught the media’s attention, with the Los Angeles Times running a string of stories on the “medical mystery” in 1981. The New York Times and newspapers in Connecticut, Florida and elsewhere devoted column inches to the sleep deaths.

Freddy Krueger’s real-life victims weren’t white, middle-class teens, as played by Heather Langenkamp and Johnny Depp in A Nightmare on Elm Street. They didn’t talk in mall slang, excessively blow dry their hair or dress in early 80s-style pastels. They were mostly male and were uniformly Asian. They were refugees with poor English skills who had fled their homeland to escape a nearly genocidal conflict.

They were the Hmong, a largely pre-literate or non-literate nomadic people from the mountains of Southeast Asia. Originally from southern China, they fled what had been their homeland for thousands of years in the mid-19th century, when the Manchu dynasty labeled them barbarians. They escaped to neighboring countries, notably Vietnam and Laos.

For the Hmong who relocated to Laos, their struggle continued first under French Colonial rule before settling down for the decades of Laotian royal power. When the Vietnam War spread to Laos and Cambodia, the American supported Royal Lao government recruited the Hmong to fight the Communist Pathet Lao troops.

The Hmong gained a reputation as fierce fighters, but the war devastated their people. An estimated one-third of the Hmong population in Laos was wiped out in the conflict. Following the 1975 Communist takeover, about 100,000 Hmong fled Laos to seek asylum in Thailand. Of the Hmongs who remained in Laos, thousands were detained in reeducation camps.

Away from their home, the Hmong struggled to adapt. They were mountain farmers and warriors with a unique religion centered on animals and spirits. They farmed by growing opium and cleared fields with fire. Their written language only came into being in the 20th century; many couldn’t read it anyway.

Then they came to America and began dying in their sleep.

The first modern recorded victim of the so-called “Asian Death Syndrome” was Ly Houa, of Orange County. Before his sudden 1977 death, he had acclimated to American life and worked as a medic. An Orange County social worker who knew him told the L.A. Times said she was shocked to hear of his passing. Houa was in robust physical condition, she said, and health-conscious through his professional expertise.

By the summer of 1981, the L.A. Times reported, 20 Hmong men living in America died under the same circumstances. All were young and showed no signs of ill health until death took them in their sleep. Their families said most didn’t smoke or drink. Some witnesses said they heard troubled breathings and groans right before the death.

Only about 35,000 Hmong lived in America at the time. For the communities scattered throughout the states, the deaths were more than morbid curiosities. They were a seeming existential threat to their people. The ratio of victims to total Hmongs in the country equalled all five leading causes of death for other American men in their age group. Orange County Medical Examiner Tom Prendergast told a reporter that the mysterious incidents accounted for half of all deaths among the Hmong in America during that period.

The deaths prompted an inquiry by the Federal Center for Disease Control. They tried to contain the unexplained horror of the sleep death in the dry wording of “Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome,” or SUNDS.

Officials suspected cardiac failure, but were otherwise baffled. Many blamed the stress of culture shock for refugees moving to the U.S. Minnesota Medical Examiner Dr. Michael McGee told the New York Times he thought Hmong victims in St. Paul may have been frightened to death. Hang Pao, a former Laotian general and a political leader for the Hmong, publically attributed the deaths to wartime gassing attacks. Pao, eager to turn public opinion against the Hmong’s old communists foes, said the nighttime seizures were delayed reactions to the chemical toxins the Pathet Lao used to poison villages.

No definite cause emerged. The mystery deaths peaked in 1981, when 26 men, mostly Hmong refugees from Laos, died in their sleep. A few victims of the seizures who were immediately treated by CPR survived.

While the sudden sleep death hit the American Hmong refugees the hardest, the mystery illness wasn’t limited to their people alone. The sleeping death was striking Asian men across the globe.

The disease had a long history in Asia, even in countries with no Hmong population. In 1983, the Associate Press reported that Japanese and Filipinos were dying from similar unexplained deaths. Researchers estimated that between 500 and 1,000 Japanese men, described in their 20s and 30s and healthy, died in their sleep of the condition known in Japan as “Pokkuri,” wordplay slang for death that occurs in a “snap.”

Recently uncovered research indicated it wasn’t new. CDC official Roy Baron and forensic pathologist Robert Kirscher published a report saying the attacks predated the Hmong arrival in America.

As researchers dug into the cultures with histories of SUNDS, they found something surprising. Freddy Krueger wasn’t the only killer stalking its victims through their dreams. According to Asian folklore, monsters had been preying on sleepers for years.

Hmong traditional beliefs revolve around nature spirits and ancestor worship. Among the most feared spirits is a nightmare monster known as the Dab Tsog. When Hmong fail to perform religious rituals properly, their ancestor and village spirits stop guarding them, leaving them vulnerable to the Tsog Tsuam, the crushing attack the Dab Tsog uses to press the life out of its victims.

Shelley Adler, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, conducted dozens of field interviews among the Hmong population while researching her 2011 book Sleep Paralysis. She found people who survived SUNDS, who related tales of dream visitations from dark creatures. One interviewee said a large, hairy monster, which he likened to an American stuffed animal, accosted him in his dream. As the oversized creature set on him with claws and teeth, the dreamer was paralyzed but still able to hear voices in his home.

The Dab Tsog doesn’t haunt the dreams of Asian men alone. In the Philippines, where 43 people out of 100,000 die from SUNDS per year, the death was known as Bangungut, a Tagalog word meaning “to rise and moan during sleep.”

Filipino folklore holds that malevolent spirits called Batibat are behind Bangungut. The Batibat have the appearance of ugly, obese women and live in trees. They infest houses when the trees they live in are used to build a home. Enraged by their displacement, they wait until the homeowners are asleep they kill them in the style of the Tsog Tsaum, sitting on their victim’s chest and face to force out their life force like air from a balloon.

By the time A Nightmare on Elm Street was released in 1984, the Hmong SUNDS was slowing to a halt after its 1981 peak. It hadn’t been cured, but after taking the lives of 116 healthy young men, the night terror shuffled back into whatever dark dream it came from.

As Freddy Krueger grew increasingly cartoonish and prone to one-liners in his follow-up films, the real-life sleep deaths became less deadly. Officials like Kirschner took an optimistic assessment, postulating that stress from American culture shock caused the previous attacks. With the Hmong more used to life in the states, Kirschner said, the stress was reduced and the danger was over.

The same year, SUNDS researchers made a breakthrough. After studying the medical histories of three survivors of the attacks, medical examiners were able to identify ventricular arrhythmias as the cause of the fatal cardiac arrests. The cause of the arrhythmias wasn’t yet known, but medical authorities now knew what happened to the heart before the SUNDS deaths. In 1988, CDC pathologist Roy Gibson Parrish published a study proposing that SUNDS victims were likely carriers of hereditary defects that affected tissues that conduct electric signals. While in most cases the defects wouldn’t be a problem, they could become fatal in a body undergoing stress.

And while the Hmong were moving past their twin traumas of warfare and displacement, the night terror was attacking displaced Asian elsewhere in the globe. In 1990, two Thai men working construction in Singapore died in their sleep on the same night.

There are people that seem very trustworthy. You know, the kind of people you would let babysit or keep an eye on your kid while you’re away. But what happens when these people seem like angels only to turn out to hide the devil in them? The plot of  ‘The Girl Next Door’, a movie released in 2007 and directed by Gregory Wilson, seems so twisted and makes you feel so uncomfortable that you just don’t want to believe that it happened in reality. Unfortunately, it did.

Carnival workers Lester Likens and Elizabeth “Betty” Grimes had 5 kids together. Sylvia (16) was the “middle” child, born between 2 sets of twins. She was given the nickname “Cookie”,had a good sense of humor and loved The Beatles.

Between the late 40s and 60s the parents had to travel a lot following the carnival around in order to make a living, which resulted in leaving their kids behind, most of the time under the care of relatives in Indiana. Their marriage was not ideal, with minor and major problems leading to divorce.

After the divorce, Sylvia went with her sister Jenny (polio patient) to live with her mother who was later arrested for shoplifting. The girls had to return to their father who was not able to take care of them at the moment. That is why he decided after talking to Gertrude Baniszewski, a neighbor with 7 kids of her own, to let them under her care while he was away for the price of 20$ per week. Lester did not inspect the house before “surrendering” the girls. 

Gertrude’s house was not an ideal environment for kids. Gertrude’s 7 kids, Paula(17), Stefanie(15), John(13), Marie(11), Shirley(10), James(8)and baby Dennis along with the Likens girls had to get used to the fact that there was no stove but only a hot plate available to make food for everyone. They also had to share 3 spoons since these were the only cutlery available in the house.

The first week at Gertrude’s home went by uneventfully. Then Lester forgot to pay on time and the torture started. The girls were taken down at the basement and were beaten up with a paddle. The 20$ arrived the next day but the damage was already done. Gertrude realized her power and focused her anger onto Sylvia.  She started acting tough towards the poor girl accusing her of being promiscuous and stealing from grocery stores. She would beat her up for no reason and even encouraged her kids, neighborhood youngsters and on occasions even her own sister (Jenny) to mistreat her. 

One time, Gertrude took Sylvia down the basement and using a hot needle that one of her daughters assisted on heating up, carved “I am a prostitute and proud of it” on her stomach. Another of Gertrude’s sick “rituals” against Sylvia included locking her up in the basement for days, starving her, and denying her bathroom access. One of the most disturbing things that happened at that time is when Sylvia was forced to insert a glass bottle of Coke into her vagina for the “entertainment” of the kids. After multiple tortures Sylvia eventually died from internal bleeding, shock and malnutrition. 

Gertrude tried to cover up Sylvia’s murder by showing to the police officers a fake letter from Sylvia stating that she went out and had sex with a bunch of boys who were the ones to blame for all the tortures she suffered. When the police was ready to leave the house, Sylvia’s sister Jenny approached an officer and informed him that there are more things they need to know about the case, starting a massive investigation.

Gertrude pleaded “Not Guilty” by reason of insanity but in the end was convicted of first degree murder and got life imprisonment along with her older daughter who was convicted of second degree murder. John Baniszewski with 2 neighborhood kids that constantly assisted in the beating and torturing of Sylvia were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 2-21 year terms. The charges towards the younger members of the family were dropped.

Gertrude was released several years later (1985) despite the public’s outcry for justice, and changed her name to Nadine Van Fossan. She died in 1990 from lung cancer. Paula was released in 1971 after she pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter during her second trial. The boys were released two years after their incarceration.

Gertrude never showed any remorse for the murder of Sylvia even after she took full responsibility for whatever happened to Sylvia. She allegedly stated that “Sylvia needed to be taught a lesson”.