When Fighting Corruption Lets the Monsters Corrupt Us

The New Orleans Ethics Review Board, which checks the finances of elected officials for signs of bribery or corruption, must now submit to financial review themselves.

Not to sound like a Negative Nancy, but this worries me. I know, I know. I'm the only guy in town who thinks this could be a bad idea. To be fair, if you don't know about the supernatural, why wouldn't you think this was a good idea? "Who watches the watchmen" and all of that.

But think on this:

Can a mobster bribe a city official? Yes
Can a banker bribe a city official? Yes
Can a businessman bribe a city official? Yes
Can a vampire bribe a city official? Yes
Can a demon? Yes
Can a ghost? No.

Strip away the ability to bribe, and we are left only with ways to corrupt a city official that mortals can't do.

Can a mobster mind control a city official? No
Can a banker mind control a city official? No
Can a businessman mind control a city official? No
Can a vampire mind control a city official? Yes
Can a demon? Yes
Can a ghost? Yes.

Granted, those mortals who can't mind control can still blackmail and threaten, but those are against the law and can be easily diffused with, say, surveillance equipment or a bold public confession. But what can you do against mind control?

Holding the Ethics Review Board, while on the surface, seems to curb corruption, really it just curbs mortal corruption. In other words, our politicians are still in someone else's pocket, but they are no longer serving mortal, human masters.

This is something I would like to call the Lex Luthor problem. People see him as the villain for bribing police and what not, but he's just trying to keep people from siding with the alien, to keep control of Metropolis in human hands.

Admittedly, this is a bad analogy because Lex Luthor is evil and Superman is good, and bribery and threats and blackmail and extortion are all evil, but now only one side is allowed to cheat, and that ain't our side.

Honestly, I don't know that anything can be done. We need laws like this to limit corruption. I just wish there were a way to limit supernatural corruption too, since I imagine it's the more insidious and evil.

What do you guys think? How can we stop monsters from controlling our elected officials the way the ERB keeps mortal parties from controlling elected officials?

Stay Strange!
-Steve

Floating City... Perhaps Atop Leng?

A couple of days ago a floating city in the clouds was spotted over China. Conspiracy theorists are quick to blame NASA's Blue Beam Project, but that's a bit far fetched. Scientists claim it's Fata Morgana, but that floating city looks absolutely nothing like anything below, so where would that city come from? Besides, I've never heard of Fata Morgana appearing that high above the horizon. Fata Morgana? Now THAT's crazy talk. Some say it's a temporal vortex revealing the area in a different time. Others that it's a peak through space or even reality to another world.

My theory is much more reasonable, and more in line with the last. I believe we are seeing a glimpse of the very city described atop the evil Plateau of Leng described in H.P. Lovecraft's famed work, At the Mountains of Madness.

According to Lovecraft, the plateau was believed to be in China, and thus the characters were quite surprised to find something fitting its description in Antarctica. If Leng does exist in the Dreamlands, then it stands to reason that it could be found anywhere, though most likely it would be found in China due to their meditative practices making the Dreamlands more easily viewed and discovered their.

The main character sees in the distance in the cloud and fog a sheer cliff face, with distinctly unnatural and angular objects atop it, high off the ground. Buildings.

What do we have here? Distinctly angular buildings, high off the ground, concealed in mists and clouds in Asia, where the plateau was long suspected to be.

For a brief moment, earth and the Dreamlands aligned and opened a path to the famed and feared city of the Elder Things atop the Plateau of Leng. This raises the vital and troublesome question:

Did any shuggoths come through? Unholy Star Spawn or Mi-Go? Or perhaps the horrific unnameable horror that Danforth mad?

If you live in China and should happen to hear cries of "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" warn everyone and run like Hell.

Stay Strange!
-Steve

A Quick Post for My Casual Readers about Conspiracy Theories

Hey Strangers and people who are strange adjacent,

I get a lot of questions in my inbox about conspiracy theories and my take on them. Let me make a couple of things clear.

Firstly, this is a New Orleans and the surrounding area paranormal blog. If it does not have to deal with both of those things, I probably won't post it. If it deals with neither of those things, I definitely won't post it.

Secondly, I'm not some nutcase. I'm not a birther. I don't believe the moon landing was faked. I don't think 9/11 was an inside job. Jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel. No, but it can weaken a structure, especially when combined with the sudden impact of a passenger jet. It's like a soda can. You can stand on one no problem. It doesn't collapse until you compromise the structure by giving the side even the tiniest trap.  But the building feel straight down! Why didn't it topple over?  Because that's how sky scrapers are designed, to collapse straight down on themselves when the structure fails. Otherwise it falls over and hits the next building which falls into the next like a tragic game of dominoes that wipes out half of Manhattan. Do I think the government could keep a secret that big? Sure. Do I think they can pull off a job that well? No. The government can't even decide whether or not it should pay the bills each month. Get two politicians in a room and you'll have a three way argument. They could never coordinate something like that, especially not right after an election when they are still finding out where the bathrooms are.

That being said, and I will only go into this once because it isn't New Orleans related and I know it will open a can of worms, I do think Benghazi was a cover up, but not for the reasons they make out on TV. I think monsters got involved. I think monsters were caught on camera being monsters and they couldn't let the footage and the unscrubbed reports get out or there would be a global panic and literal witch hunts.

Here's the thing. I agree with the government's plan to hide the truth. I think at this point if they just came out and told the public monsters were real, I think there would be some real chaos. Anarchy. Violent mobs. Suicides. The average person couldn't take it. But they let my blog continue for two reasons.

First, you guys are smarter than the average person. You can handle it. You know the monsters out there have always been there, whether the president tells you or not. If the government announced it, you wouldn't panic because you know the world hasn't changed. It's the same as it always was.

Second, they know the best way to wake up is gradually. If you startle a person awake, there is a good chance someone will get punched or something will get broken. But if you wake up slowly, the reaction is much less violent. You are alert and prepared for the day instead of scared and reactionary. My blog is allowed to exist because, much though it pains me to admit it, I don't have a very wide reach. I allow America to wake up slowly to the truth. I tell you and you tell your friends and one by one, we all become aware of the truth without the panic of sudden realization. If this little site ever gets too big, though, and suddenly the government starts to discredit me on the news, that's how I'll know I've done my job well keeping you informed, because I'm waking America up too fast and they are worried my truth will cause a panic.

I hope that answers those questions I keep getting. Now let's keep things local from now on?

Stay Strange!
-Steve

Rest in Peace, Chef Paul

A New Orleans icon passed away today. Paul Prudhomme, a chef who helped put New Orleans cuisine on the map, is no longer with us. Without him, I have a hard time imagining Tony Chachere's or Zataran's becoming national brands. We wouldn't know who Emeril Lagasse was, probably. Well, we in the South would, but no one else.

So I'm going to just say a few things:
1) If he was killed by a supernatural being, be warned, monster. I will hunt you down and kill you and serve your heart up Creole style with a side of fried okra.
2) If he was turned into a vampire or a zombie, I will hold off on killing him long enough to see if he still can whip up a mean blackened redfish dish. If he can, I'll be tempted to spare him.
3) If he's a ghost, he can haunt my kitchen any day.
4) If he's lucky enough to be resting in peace, here's to tasting your savory magic spice in Heaven some day.

So let's all raise a locally sourced blackened redfish mufaletta in his honor.

Stay hungry, Strangers, and stay strange!
-Steve

Rosemary ' Baby Daddy? Supernatural Scarface? Faust of the Marigny

Trigger warning: this post focuses on rape and demons. Read at your own risk.

I was reading the news this morning when a couple of stories caught my eye. The first was about a series of rapes and robberies around the Marigny. There have been several instances of a masked man breaking into homes (squeezing through burglar bars at that, which seems to me should require supernatural assistance, given how close those things are to each other) and raping the occupants and robbing them. I won't go into much detail out of respect for the victims, but I will point out that though there have been several similar events in recent weeks, the police and media haven't really touched on it and when they do, they deny the connection. Why? It's no big secret that the police are under Mayor Landrieu's influence. Probably the media too. So why would be want to keep this hushed?

Demons.

Allow me to explain.

These break-ins are being covered up, so probably something supernatural or paranormal in nature is happening. Likely it's demons, given that the hush may be coming from city hall and given the mayor and his family's recent rise to power and influence from humble beginnings, I'm going to assume it's a deal with the devil. The Landrieu family made a deal with the devil for power and influence and that same demon is making a pact with someone else.  Someone whose actions may either draw attention to the demon connection and take down the Landrieu family or would draw the attentions of exorcists, who would send the demon back to Hrll, and take with it the Landrieu's source of power.

So what does our mystery demon summoner want that connects him to the rapes and Landrieu? What do most people want? Love and money. But this is a demon we are talking about here. Demons are corruptors by nature. What is corrupted love and money? Rape and theft. In making a pact with a demon a man has already damned himself but this allows the demon to introduce additional misery and tragedy into the world. The sort of horror that that makes good people, people like the victims, lose faith in the goodness in the world. Makes good people fear, makes them mistrust, makes them hate. Those who deal with demons have their own damnation coming by virtue of giving demons power over our world for selfish reasons. But with that power, demons increase misery which turns goods people bad. Turns love and plenty to rape and theft.

Which brings us to the article that brought all of this to my attention: an unidentified man recently has been reported as breaking into homes and stealing copper pipes. Big deal. People steal copper all the time. It's valuable. But get this. He's been doing it at about the same time as the rapist. And he's been acting nearby. Even has a similar physical description. So is he stealing the copper for the money? After all, I mentioned or perpetrator was into demons for love and money, right?

Not this copper.  No. Copper historically had been viewed as a symbol/charm for love, wealth, and prosperity. Love and money. See the connection now? Most people don't realize this, but the kinds of demons who make deals aren't all-powerful. They are limited in what they know and what they can do. If you summon the wrong demon, you either won't get good results on what you want because they don't know what they are doing, or you will pay a lot more because the demon needs to broker a favor with another demon to get the job done,  driving up the price.

Our demon summoner is smart (or at least thinks he is. If he were smart, he wouldn't be summoning demons). He used copper in his summoning to ensure he got a demon who worked with love and money. He must have low balled the demon or given a pretty nasty insult, because of how badly the demon seems to have twisted his wish, usually pretty bad business to so blatantly undermine the customer's intent. Djinn don't even twist wishes that badly. I wouldn't be surprised to learn the guy wished for kids and this is the demon's cruel joke. Arrested, disgraced, and hated by mother and child. Or perhaps the demon is doing some of his own business on the side, using this guy's twisted wish to bring literal demon spawn into the world should any of these assault victims bear children.

Meanwhile, Landrieu plays it all like it's nothing to concern ourselves about because he knows when the demon goes, so does his power base.

So be mindful if you are out in the Marigny. There's a devil on the loose out there and a powerful man who doesn't want anyone to know about it.

Stay safe and Stay Strange!
-Steve

Halloween Haunt Too Haunted?

So, supposedly someone built a room sized alleged Devil's Toybox as an attraction that's driving people to madness and suicide. According to the article, it's just a few hours away from here.

A Devil's Toybox, for those who don't know, is a mirror cube with all the cubes facing inward. It's called a Devil's Toybox because of long standing superstitions about devils and mirrors and having that many mirrors facing each other draws out the devil I guess.

A reader sent the link to me to get my thoughts on it, and much though I'm afraid of monsters in the dark, I'm not too worried about this one. While I do believe that the phenomena of a Devil's Toybox is real, I followed the links in the article, and the one telling the story of the one built in 2014 as a Halloween attraction reads a lot like creepypasta, urban legends that are made up on message boards either just to see who can come up with the scariest, most plausible story and/or who can convince the most people that it's real. The account is a little too well written and structured for me to think it's real. Plus, it doesn't name the town, and also the guy who wrote it, Joel Farrelly, though he is a character in the tale, has also written a bunch of other horror stories and published a book of creepy horror stories, so either he's cursed to be plagued by the supernatural (entirely possible) or he's just a pretty clever aspiring horror author (much more probable).

That being said, ideas are infections, like viruses, and I wouldn't be shocked if someone felt inspired by this work of likely fiction and created built a room-sized Devil's Toybox.

Keep eyes out there, Strangers, for anything you might think is supernatural in nature, and if anyone happens to know of that little Louisiana town that actually does (or did) have a full sized Devil's Toybox, let me know.

Stay Strange!
-Steve

Mysteries Solved to the Highest Bidder!

So, this isn't macabre or anything. A lot of older people die with old, valuable items in their possession that they don't know the true value of. So yes, I read obituaries because it leads to estate sales which might lead to little nuggets like this auction listing from an estate sale:

"A series of private letters sent anonymously and without return address to a Mister Richard A. Hadley in New Orleans in the autumn of 1883. With the location of Mr. Hadley yet unknown and the letters undelivered, per instructions accompanying the letters, should the letters be undelivered by 1893, they were to be opened and published in the Weekly Pelican, an African American newspaper which ran from 1886 to 1889. With the indicated publication defunct, ownership of the letters passed to the then current owner of 1215 Royal Street, Ms. Henrietta James. The letters were presumed lost, not found again until 2015, with the passing of Ms. James’s great grandniece, Justine Lareaux. As items from her estate were sorted and cataloged for an estate auction, the letters were discovered behind a dresser in the attic, still sealed.

Of Mr. Hadley, little is known. City records indicate no one of that name ever owning that home, though journals belonging to the Saunders family, who lived in the home through June 1887, reference a visiting friend named R. Alfred, presumably Richard A. Hadley. Journals indicate he left New Orleans to visit Europe in the summer of 1887, though no ships’ manifests indicate any passenger named Hadley. The identity of Mr. Hadley, nor even his existence, has ever been confirmed, the letter serving as the sole known evidence of his presence in New Orleans.
Bidding starts at $100."

Sure, to most people, it's just a bunch of letters. To local historians, possibly the answer to a trivial sort of mystery. I confess, I hadn't really heard anything about Mister Hadley as a local urban legend. This stranger with no connection to anything receives letters that are to be published if he can't be found. Why wouldn't they be able to find him, and why would the sender 1) expect he wouldn't be found, 2) feel that the contents of the letters were so important that they should be published, and 3) request said letters be published in a paper that wasn't even founded at the time the letters were sent? Was the letter writer part of the group that put the paper together, expecting the paper to start its run sooner and run longer?

And why the Weekly Pelican? Was it that influential? And such a limited run to a small audience. Those African Americans lucky enough to be living in the South in the 1880s with access to education and money enough to purchase newspapers? Clearly not a large enough audience to be profitable, as the paper only ran for four years. What secrets did these contain that needed to be shared publicly with only a few people? Why not the Times-Picayune, or as it was known then, the Daily Picayune?

And who sent them? 

Letters from an unknown sender to a non-existent recipient with instructions to be printed a decade later in an obscure paper if the recipient is missing? Crazy. Could it be a list of all the monsters in the city? Or perhaps the true history of New Orleans, to be published only after the anonymous sender has a chance to get out of town before all the ghouls, bloodsuckers, and voodoo queens can punish him for releasing their secrets into the light of day? Arcane secrets? Prophecy? A warning too late for Mr. Hadley, but one that was meant to reach the public if he couldn't be reached to save the day? OR maybe blackmail that chased Mr. Hadley out of town? What if Mr. Hadley isn't an individual, but a code word for a group of individuals working together under a shroud of secrecy, hence why he wasn't able to be located. It could be anything. And the only way to ensure I find the answers is to get my hands on those letters.

So... anybody got a couple hundred bucks they can lend me?

Share your theories (and money) in the comments, and as always...

Stay Strange!

- Steve


UPDATE (October 4):

Last night, I was able to pull together a few hundred bucks (Thanks, DeadNotSleeping), but alas. I was outbid. I didn't stand a chance, really. I thought I would be able to come in and snap them up from any local historians with a passing interest, but apparently the interest was a lot bigger than I would have guessed. It came down to three people by the time I realized it was well out of my reach and left. I kinda wish I had stuck around. If these papers were that interesting and valuable, it would have been good to know who they were and why they wanted it.

There were three people. A dark skinned woman with braids, a pale dude with red hair, and a middle eastern dude with medium length hair and a really nice suit. I tried speaking with the auction house to get details, but they weren't having any of it. Apparently after a soul jar they auctioned off last month got stolen from the buyer, they are extra tight lipped about that sort of thing. I still don't have any leads on who those people were or what the letters contained, but I'm definitely certain it's something rare and powerful. Man, I wish I could have been in the room when the wax seals were broken and those letters were read for the first time.

If I hear anything else, I'll let you guys know.

Stay strange!
-Steve

Shotgun Robber "Suspect" Caught?

Police think they may have caught the shotgun park robber I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. It seems they found evidence (phones, clothes, and other items) at his place that matched six other robberies including the three teens earlier.

Sounds suspicious to me. Earlier they said it was a man. This is a sixteen year old. Witnesses said the robber had a shotgun. This kid had a lever action rifle. It doesn't add up.

They mentioned they pulled in a suspect a while ago, but that they later released him after determining he wasn't the guilty party. Remember that mind control I was talking about in the previous post? They pull in a guy who seems to have strolled around town with a shotgun without drawing any notice. They let him go and arrest a teen with a rifle instead. I guess the eye witnesses were wrong. I mean, makes sense. What would the victims know about what happened to them?

My guess is they caught the guy and he used the same vampire hypnotism on the cops that he used on the teens in the park, causing the police to go after someone who doesn't fit the description at all.

What can you even do about that kind of thing? How is a vampire hunter supposed to take him on? He'll just do his mind juju on the hunter and convince the poor would-be Van Helsing that his mom is the vampire instead. As many awful murders as there have been lately, I wouldn't be surprised.

Be on the look out, and be wary of strangers trying to hold eye contact with you. It's probably a vampire.

Stay strange!
- Steve