Exciting, New Feature!

Blogs are often soapboxes for their authors’ viewpoints. While there is nothing inherently wrong with that, the blog may become little more than navel-gazing, the sound of one hand clapping, if the author is not careful.

My intention in this blog has been to bring to my readers new information about metaphysical locations from all around the world. While I will continue down that path, I have decided to also branch out onto other paths, exploring metaphysical practices and beliefs; personalities and events. To make sure that I cover these areas effectively, I will be hosting guest blogs on this site in addition to my own. I hope you find this new approach to be an interesting one; leave a comment and let me know what you think.

I am pleased to report that C.M. Mayo will be my first guest blogger. I have known her and her work for many years and I’m sure her blog will fascinate you. Here’s a little bit about her:

C.M. Mayo is the author of the novel The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, which was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by Library Journal. She is also author of the widely-lauded travel memoir, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico, and Sky Over El Nido (one of my favorite books), which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.

Founding editor of Tameme, the bilingual Spanish/English) chapbook press, Mayo is also a translator of contemporary Mexican poetry and fiction. Her anthology of Mexican fiction in translation, Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion, was published by Whereabouts Press in March 2006.

I could fill this blog with all of C.M. Mayo’s awards and accomplishments but instead, I’ll refer you to her Website at www.cmmayo.com  where you can read it all for yourself.

Without revealing too much about her upcoming blog on this site, I can say that C.M. has recently translated Francisco I. Madero’s Spiritist Manual from Spanish into English. Madero was the leader of Mexico’s Revolution of1910 and became that country’s president. But he also had a life-long fascination with Spiritism.

Table-tipping anyone? Stay tuned for C.M. Mayo’s intriguing blog!

The Dudleytown Curse - Part II

My first visit to Dudleytown occurred at least twenty years ago, in a time when cameras were still using something called “film.” I had gone there to do some research on an historical piece I was writing. Jay Baca, a frequent visitor to Dudleytown, served as my guide. We were the only two people on the mountain. Although it was a beautiful and sunny summer day, the deep woods cast cool shadows over the crumbling stone walls and cellar holes of ruined houses. The woods were eerily quiet; not a single bird sang.

I took many pictures of the old walls, cellars and wells, all overgrown with thick vegetation. In one cellar hole I discovered a broken Ouija board and felt a shiver course through my spine. I left the board there.

After I returned home and developed my film, I was shocked to discover what looked like a face peering at me from one of the cellar holes. Colored like the vegetation, it resembled a “Green Man.” Thinking I was looking at a pattern of leaves and bushes that just happened to resemble a face, I enlarged the photo. The face became only more distinct. That’s when I called Ed and Lorraine Warren—America’s godfather and godmother of ghost hunting—and told them what I had found.

I lived in the same Connecticut town as the Warrens and they invited me to bring my photos to their home. They examined the photos and said that I had captured some kind of anomaly, but they were not all surprised and proceeded to haul out a collection of scores of photos they had taken at Dudleytown, each of them marked by unrecognizable streaks, blurs, and various colors, all of which they said had paranormal origins.

Over the years many people have explored Dudleytown and have felt unexplainable chills and cold spots and have captured photographic anomalies. There have also been reports of satanic rituals taking place there, although that has not been verified (but I do wonder about that Ouija board I found there so long ago).

Dudleytown is located on private property and the police routinely roust out trespassers so it’s not an easy place to visit today. Still, its legends—and maybe its ghosts—still linger. Sharp in my mind, their stories are the inspiration behind my paranormal novella, Dark Entry, available as an e-book on Amazon.com. Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Entry-ebook/dp/B008OZEWTS/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1346003398&sr=1-1&keywords=dark+entry

The Dudleytown Curse - Part I

Tucked up in the hills of northwestern Connecticut is a ghost town called Dudleytown. Settled in the eighteenth-century the hamlet’s history is rife with stories of Indian massacres, murder, suicide, fatal accidents, disappearances, and insanity. So much mysterious calamity plagued Dudleytown—also nicknamed Dark Entry—that by the nineteenth-century the settlement had been abandoned. Today, all that remains of Dudleytown are crumbling stone walls, cellar holes and a few foundations, all hidden in the deep, dark woods.

Some people think that Dudleytown’s trials and tribulations could be directly tied to a curse that followed the Dudley family. Before any Dudleys came to America, two of them had already lost their heads to the executioner’s axe in Merry Old England. Edmund Dudley was executed in 1510 for supporting a plot to overthrow King Henry VIII—who seemed to be quite fond of beheading people. Like father, like son, as John, Edmund’s son, also went to the chopping block years later for again trying to overthrow the crown. Finally getting the message, John Dudley’s son Robert fled England. Eventually, the Dudleys arrived in America. Joseph Dudley was born in Saybrook, Connecticut in 1674 and it was three of his sons that brought property in the hills of Cornwall that became known as Dudleytown.

Other settlers followed the Dudleys into the woods and it wasn’t long before tragedies began falling upon them like autumn leaves. Some Dudleytown residents died at the hands of Indians during the French and Indian War. In 1774, an epidemic wiped out an entire family named Carter. Another Carter family, relatives, moved to upstate New York, devastated by the loss of their kin. There, Indians tomahawked to death the head of the family, Nathaniel Carter, as well as his wife and infant; the Indians kidnapped the other three Carter children and brought them to Canada.

In 1804, a Revolutionary War veteran, General Herman Swift, went insane when lightning struck and killed his wife Sarah as she stood on their front porch. In 1872, Mary Cheney, the wife of the famous journalist Horace Greely, killed herself; she had been born in Dudleytown.

Toward the end of the nineteenth-century few residents remained in Dudleytown, but the curse of the Dudleys was still at work. After John Brophy’s wife died of consumption (tuberculosis), his two children disappeared into the woods. Brophy then set fire to his house, burning it to the ground, and walked away from Dudleytown; he was never heard from again.

In 1920, Dr.William Clark from New York City built a summer home in the now abandoned Dudleytown. With some friends he established the Dark Entry Forest Association with the intent of maintaining the former settlement and woods as a nature preserve. A few years later, Dr. Clark was called to the city on an emergency, leaving his wife alone at their house in Dudleytown. When he returned home, he found his wife cowering in a corner. She had gone insane and spent the rest of her life in a mental asylum. No one knows what happened to her but some people say that “something” from the forest attacked her.

Today, Dudleytown remains part of the Dark Entry preserve. It is private property and trespassers are prosecuted. Yet, the curious continue to sneak into the woods to find evidence of the Dudleytown curse . . . or worse.

Stay tuned to find out what they have discovered. 

Ggantija Temple - Malta

Ġgantija Temple

A few years ago I had the pleasure of visiting Malta for two months. One of the world’s tiniest countries, it was easy to visit its celebrated historic sites. The Ggantija Temples sits on the island of Gozo’s Xagħra plateau. On cliffs high above the azure Mediterranean Sea, they face south-east, in the direction of the rising sun.

The day I visited the temple was cloudless blue with a refreshing breeze rising up from the sea. Tall palm trees nodded on the wind. There were only a handful of visitors to the site—a tour bus full of Japanese tourists arrived just as I was leaving the site—and other than the gulls crying in the air and the surf pounding far below the cliffs all was silent. 

The Ggantija Temple is actually two connected megalithic structures from the Neolithic period erected sometime between 3600 – 3500 BC. They are the oldest free-standing buildings in the world, older even than the Pyramids of Egypt or England’s Stonehenge. The temple was possibly the site of a fertility cult; archeologists believe that the numerous figurines and statues found on site are connected with that cult. According to local Gozitan folktales, giantesses built these temples and used them as places of worship.

Despite the restorative work that was going on at the time, I was able to wander through the complex. The plan of the temple incorporates five large apses with traces of the plaster that once covered the irregular wall still clinging between the blocks. The temples are built in the typical clover-leaf shape (some think the shape resembles the womb, which would seem appropriate for a fertility cult) with inner facing blocks marking the shape which was then filled in with rubble. This led to the construction of a series of semi-circular apses connected with a central passage.  The apses were originally covered by roofing. The structures are all the more impressive for having been constructed at a time when no metal tools were available to the natives of the Maltese islands, and when the wheel had not yet been introduced. Small, spherical stones have been discovered. They are believed to have been used as ball bearings to transport the enormous stone blocks required for the temple’s construction.

I slowly walked through the temple, the hot sun beating down upon me, and wondered what kinds of rites were practiced here. There was some evidence of animal sacrifice but the exact nature of the sacred rituals of these prehistoric Maltese remains a mystery to us. It is clear, though, that sacred sites such as these leave some imprint upon the environment, a spiritual essence that the sensitive visitor can still feel after so many thousands of years. It should come as no surprise that even today worshippers of the goddess find their way to the Ġgantija Temple to practice their modern-day rites.

Mea cupla, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! It's been awhile since I've last posted and, no doubt, you've noticed. Starting this blog has taught me one thing. . . they are difficult to keep current. I could cite the fact that over the last few months I've been busy with new books, or that I was a speaker at Ohioana Library Festival, Mid-Ohio Paranormal Conference, and Paracon on the Lakeshore II, or that I've been traveling throughout the U.S. to visit family and friends, as reasons for my absence. All that is true, but no excuse for not posting new material.

So, okay, I apologize and promise to do better in the future. Stick with me, please, and you'll see.

John

Thai Ghost Clip

I just couldn't resist posting this Thai commercial. It's all about traditional Thai ghosts . . . and funny. Take a peek.

Serpent Mound - Adams County, Ohio

On a plateau overlooking Brush Creek in southern Ohio’s Adams County stands Serpent Mound, a beautiful and mysterious prehistoric effigy. Built by Native Americans around 1070, the earthen effigy takes the form of a giant, undulating serpent. At nearly one-quarter mile in length, it is the largest effigy mound in the world. The serpent winds along the ground at a height of about three feet and consists of seven coils, a triple-coiled tail, and a head whose jaws are open in the process of swallowing a 120 ft. hollow oval that might represent the sun, an egg, or perhaps a frog.

No one knows why the mound was built. While various Native American cultures in Ohio built mounds, there is only one other mound in the shape of an animal (an alligator); the others are simple conical structures, often serving as burial mounds. But Serpent Mound was not a burial mound. So what purpose did it serve?

There may be astronomical purposes behind its construction since the serpent’s coils are aligned with the two solstice and two equinox events occurring each year. In addition, some researchers believe that Serpent Mound was designed in accordance with the pattern of stars that make up the constellation Draco. If that is true, then the effigy may have been constructed as long as 5,000 years ago.

The head of the serpent comes to rest atop a cliff that overlooks the Serpent Mound Crater, a large impact site almost four miles in diameter caused by a meteorite slamming into the earth about 248 to 286 million years ago. Is it only by chance that the mound builders placed their effigy alongside the crater (badly eroded today with much of it submerged) or was it by design? And, if by design, why?

I visited Serpent Mound on a warm, sunny day. There were only a few people at the site—now a National Historical Landmark—and once I headed down the path that runs beside the effigy, I found myself alone. Quiet and peaceful, the grassy coils of the gigantic serpent unwound beside me. It was easy to imagine the Uktena—in Cherokee stories, the giant serpent endowed with supernatural powers—coming to life right here on the plateau above the creek. There is no doubt that the site was sacred to Native peoples—it exudes a spiritual aura to this day—and it is often frequented by people seeking a metaphysical experience.

If you’ve visited Serpent Mound, feel free to post a comment about your experiences there.