Legally haunted

Have you ever heard of the New York Supreme Court Case, Stambovsky v. Ackley?

I hadn't, until yesterday.

This came up because of a link someone sent me to an article called "There’s A House That’s So Terrifying It Was Legally Declared Haunted By New York State."  And my question, of course, was "what does it mean to be 'legally haunted'?"  If a ghost shows up in a house that is not legally declared to be haunted, do you have the right to call the police and have it arrested?  If so, how could you send a ghost to jail, when according to most people, ghosts can pass through walls, not to mention steel bars?

Be that as it may, the story centered around a house owned by a family named Ackley in Nyack, New York, a town on the Hudson River.  Soon after the Ackleys moved in, they began to have odd experiences, the most alarming of which is that family members reported waking up having their beds violently shaken by an invisible entity.  According to the article, they "learned to live with the spirits," which became easier when one of them apparently figured out that all they had to do to stop the sudden awakenings was to ask the ghosts not to shake their beds during the night.

Which I thought was pretty doggone amenable of the spirits, until I read the next part, wherein a young guest showed up to visit the Ackleys and died immediately of a brain aneurysm [emphasis theirs].  So that's not very nice.  There were also footsteps, slamming doors, and "gifts for the children [left] randomly through the house."  So you can see that with gifts on one end of the spectrum and brain aneurysms on the other, the haunting turned out to be quite a mixed bag.

The Ackley House, courtesy of Google Maps

Anyhow, all of this is your ordinary, garden-variety haunted house story until the Ackleys had enough and decided to sell the house.  The buyers, a family named Stambovsky, purchased it, but it turned out that the Ackleys didn't mention the fact that it was haunted by brain-aneurysm-inducing ghosts.  When they found out the house's reputation, the Stambovskys objected, understandably enough, and sued.  The case went all the way to the New York Supreme Court, where the judge sided with the Stambovskys.  The ruling said:

Where, as here, the seller not only takes unfair advantage of the buyer's ignorance but has created and perpetuated a condition about which he is unlikely to even inquire, enforcement of the contract (in whole or in part) is offensive to the court's sense of equity.  Application of the remedy of rescission, within the bounds of the narrow exception to the doctrine of caveat emptor set forth herein, is entirely appropriate to relieve the unwitting purchaser from the consequences of a most unnatural bargain...  Seller who had undertaken to inform the public at large about the existence of poltergeists on the premises to be sold was estopped to deny existence of poltergeists on the premises, so the house was haunted as a matter of law and seller must inform the purchaser of the haunting.

I wondered about how exactly a purchaser could demonstrate that a house was, in fact, haunted.  After all, that's usually what most failure-to-disclose lawsuits usually turn on; you find that the house you just bought has a leaky roof, and show that the previous owners knew about the leaky roof -- but along the way it's incumbent upon you to demonstrate that the roof does, in fact, leak.  How the hell are you going to do that with a ghost?

But upon reading the ruling more carefully, apparently the decision was based upon the fact that the Ackleys themselves had made public the fact that they thought the house was haunted.  So I guess it's their fault for bragging about their ghosts and then deciding not to tell the purchasers before the contract was signed.

You have to wonder, though, if this might be something that should appear on disclosure statements under "Known Pre-existing Conditions," along with leaks, dry rot, damaged windows, broken appliances, and faulty septic systems.  "Ghosts/poltergeists present" -- yes/no/unknown.  "Ghosts that result in death by aneurysm" -- yes/no/unknown.

The article ends by giving us the address of the house in Nyack, but asking us not to go there.  "Respect the current owner’s privacy by admiring it only from your screen," they tell us.  Which does bring up the interesting point of who bought the house after the Supreme Court allowed the Stambovskys to back out of the purchase, and whether the new owners have had any weird experiences or untimely deaths.  The article on the legal case (linked above) said that in 2015 the house sold for $1.77 million -- which was, they said, $600,000 higher than comparable houses in Nyack.

So maybe the Stambovskys should have stuck with it, ghosts and all.  Apparently disembodied spirits of the dead do nothing to diminish home value.  I know I'd happily sell my house for a cool $1.77 million.  I'd even sign a disclosure agreement admitting that it's haunted, and I don't even believe in ghosts.

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The sound of thunder

Last Sunday (April 14) we had a series of thunderstorms roll through the region, kind of unusual for upstate New York at this time of year.  We're not particularly stormy in general, but most of the thunder and lightning we do get comes in the heat of midsummer.  On Sunday, though, a warm front brought in turbulent, moist air, and we got some decent storms and rain for most of the day.

At 11:51 AM (EDT), though, something odd happened.  There was a deep, shuddering rumble that repeated three times within the span of about two or three minutes.  (The first was the strongest.)  I grew up in the Deep South, where thunder is a frequent occurrence, and to my ears this didn't feel or sound like thunder.  Immediately I thought of a mild earthquake -- primed, of course, by the April 6 quake, centered in New Jersey, which was felt over large regions of New York and the neighboring states.

The rumble we experienced preceded the arrival of the strongest of the storms; because of that, and the fact that it "sounded wrong," I was convinced that we'd experienced an earthquake.  That conviction intensified when reports began to pour in that the same noise had been heard at the same time -- in locations separated by fifty kilometers or more.  (Thunder ordinarily can only be heard about fifteen kilometers from the source.)  

My wife, on the other hand, was absolutely sure it was thunder, albeit rather powerful and deep-pitched.

Well, let it never be said that I won't admit it when I'm wrong.

I started to doubt myself when the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca (only ten miles from my home) reported on Monday morning that despite numerous people calling in to report noise and shaking, their seismometer had not recorded an earthquake.  That seemed pretty unequivocal -- and after all, there had been storms in the area, even though at the time we heard the rumble, the center of the front wouldn't arrive for over an hour.  But if it had been thunder, how had a single thunderclap (or three in rapid succession) been heard over such a great distance?

The answer turns out to be a temperature inversion.  Ordinarily, temperature decreases as you go up in altitude; but this effect competes with the fact that cool air is denser and tends to sink.  (This is why in winter, the greatest risk of frost damage to plants is in isolated valleys.)  So sometimes, a wedge of warm air gets forced up and over a blob of cooler air, meaning that for a while, the temperature rises as you go up in altitude.

This is exactly what happens in a warm front; the warm air, which carries more moisture, rises and forms clouds (and if there's enough moisture and a high enough temperature gradient, thunderclouds).  But this has another effect that is less well known -- at least, by me.

The difference in density of warm and cool air means that they have different indices of refraction -- a measure of how fast a wave can travel in the medium.  A common example of different indices of refraction is the bending of light at the boundary between air and water, which is why a pencil leaning in a glass of water looks kinked at the boundary.  At a shallow enough angle, the wave doesn't cross the boundary at all, but reflects off the surface layer; this causes the heat shimmer you see on hot road surfaces, as light bounces off the layer of hot air right above the asphalt.

Sound waves can also refract, although the effect is less obvious.  But that's exactly what happened on Sunday.  A powerful lightning strike created a roll of thunder, and the sound waves propagated outward at about 343 meters per second; but when they struck the undersurface of the temperature inversion, instead of dispersing upward into the upper atmosphere, they reflected back downward.  This not only drastically increased the distance over which the sound was heard, but amplified it, changing the quality of the sound from the usual booming roll we associate with thunder to something more like an explosion -- or an earthquake.

So despite the jolt and the odd (and startlingly loud) sound, we didn't have an earthquake on Sunday.  I'm kind of disappointed, actually.  I didn't feel the one on April 6 -- although some folks in the area did -- and despite having lived in a tectonically-active part of the country (Seattle, Washington) for ten years, I've never experienced an earthquake.  I'd rather not have my house fall down, or anything, but given that the pinnacle of excitement around here is when the farmer across the road bales his hay, a mild jolt would have been kind of entertaining.

But I guess I can't check that box quite yet.  Thunder, combined with a temperature inversion, was all it was.

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A face in the underpass

As part of my research for Skeptophilia, I spend way too much time perusing questionable websites.

Not that kind of questionable.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  I'm talking about fringe-y sites dealing with Bigfoot, and UFOs, and hauntings, and paranormal phenomena of all sorts.  One of the most useful -- from the standpoint of someone who needs material for six blog posts a week -- is The Anomalist, which acts as a news aggregate for the World of the Weird.  (To his credit, the guy who runs The Anomalist is a pretty good skeptic, and unhesitatingly calls out ridiculous claims for what they are.  He's inclined to give some of them more credence than I would, but I admire his commitment to applying the tools of skeptical logic to claims of the paranormal.)

One of the links that popped up on The Anomalist came from Coast to Coast with George Noory.  Coast to Coast became prominent under the late Art Bell, who interviewed hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of people on the topic of the supernatural, conspiracy theories, and so on.  One of the most famous is the so-called "Frantic Caller" who back in 1998 phoned in to the show and proceeded to tell a fantastic story -- that he was a worker in Area 51 and had found out stuff he shouldn't have, and now the government was chasing him with the intent to silence him permanently.  The guy was either telling the truth or was a hell of an actor; he legitimately sounded terrified.  (Interesting side note: the transmission from Coast to Coast cut out in the middle of the call, and Art Bell acted genuinely baffled as to why.  The whole thing has become a famous story amongst the conspiracy theorists, lo unto this very day.)

But I digress.

Anyhow, a while back I was on The Anomalist, looking for ideas, and I saw one from Coast to Coast about people seeing a spooky face in a pedestrian underpass.  These sorts of things are almost always cases of pareidolia -- the tendency of the human mind to pick up face-like patterns in things like coarse-grained wood, rust patches, and grilled-cheese sandwiches.  But I thought I'd take a look, and when I did, the first thing I noticed was not a face -- in fact, I had a hard time seeing a face in the clip even when I looked for it -- but that the underpass looked awfully familiar to me.

Then, with a sudden shock, I realized that it was a photo from the Cayuga Waterfront Trail, only ten miles from where I live.

I've often complained about the fact that things like UFO and Bigfoot sightings never happen near enough to me to justify a road trip.  So when I found out how close I was to the mysterious face, I thought, "Oh, hell yes. I'm gonna check this one out myself."

So on Saturday I drove down to Cass Park, just north of the underpass in question, and struck off toward it.  I arrived there and started snapping photographs and poking around the place -- and for the record, I didn't see anything even remotely facelike.

After about five minutes of this, I was startled by a voice nearby, and turned to see an obviously stoned guy sitting on the rocks with his back against the cement buttresses of the underpass.  The following conversation ensued:

Stoned guy: Dude.  Why are you taking pictures of that?

 
Me: Because people have been seeing a face up in the I-beams.  I read about it, and thought I'd take a look.

 
*long pause to let that settle in.*

 
Stoned guy: Whoa.

 
Me: I don't see anything, though.  Have you seen anything weird down here?

 
Stoned guy: No, man.  Not a face, anyhow.  But why are you interested in this?

 
Me: I'm a paranormal researcher.  [Yes, I got this phrase out without laughing.]

 
Stoned guy: [reverently] That is so fuckin' cool.  I've never met an actual paranormal researcher.

 
Me: I've been interested in the paranormal for years.  [That much at least was true.]  When I found out this was happening close by, I figured I'd better check it out.

 
Stoned guy: [suddenly brightening up]  Dude, I haven't seen any faces, but there is some creepy fuckin' graffiti over there.  *points*

I was immediately reminded of the graffiti saying, "Duck, Sally Sparrow!  Duck NOW!" from the brilliant Doctor Who episode "Blink."  So I thought I'd ask the Stoned Guy what he thought.

Me: What does "Don't Go Into the Light" mean?

 
Stoned guy: No idea, man.  All I know is if I see any weird lights, I'm hauling ass right out of here.

 
Me: That sounds like a good idea.  Thanks for your help.

 
Stoned guy: Rock on, dude.  Hope you catch a fuckin' ghost, or whatever.

 
Me: Me too.

So my first opportunity to investigate an actual paranormal claim near where I live kind of was a bust.  Unfortunate, but I suppose it's to be expected.  You can't catch a fuckin' ghost, or whatever, every time.

But it was kind of fun to go check out some place local, and I hope it's not the last.  I'm hereby putting in my request to any aliens, Bigfoots, ghosts, and such-like who may be reading this that I would be much obliged if they'd make an appearance somewhere in, say, a twenty-mile radius of my house.  Because I may be a paranormal researcher, but I'm also kind of a homebody.

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The forest primeval

There are some truly astonishing features of living things that are so familiar we stop even thinking about them, and somewhere near the top of that list are plant roots.

The evolution of true roots, which occurred back in the Silurian Period (444 to 419 million years ago), was a major advance over plants like bryophytes (a modern example is moss) that have only simple, unbranched extensions of the stem to hold them in place.  One of the first vascular plants -- plants with internal plumbing, allowing them to transport materials far more efficiently, and therefore grow much taller -- was Cooksonia, a bizarre-looking leafless plant that was nothing more than a bunch of stems each ending in a bulbous spore-production device.

By the Devonian Period (419 to 359 million years ago), this innovation had spread like wildfire, and plants related to today's ferns, horsetails, and club mosses had pretty much taken over the landscape.  There were still no flowering plants -- those wouldn't show up for another two hundred million years -- but our familiar mental image of prehistoric swamps, thick with giant ferns and conifers, populated by enormous dragonflies and centipedes, isn't so far off from the truth.

The reason this comes up is the recent discovery I learned about from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, of a fossil site near Gilboa, New York, only a couple of hours east of where I live.  Virtually all of the rock in the southern tier region of New York is Devonian in age, mostly fossil-rich shales and limestones, and in an abandoned quarry paleontologists have discovered the fossils of an intricate (and huge) root network from an ancient forest.

The forest was primarily composed of members of two groups: the genus Archaeopteris, which looked a bit like modern Norfolk Island pines, although much more closely related to tree ferns:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Retallack, Archaeopteris reconstruction, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The other were the cladoxylopsids, which look like they were invented by Dr. Seuss:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Falconaumanni, Pseudosporochnales reconstruccion, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The site is being studied by a team led by paleontologists at nearby Binghamton University, who have thus far mapped over three thousand square meters of this forest extremely primeval.  They have speculated that when it was at its height, 386 million years ago, it extended all the way down into what is now northern Pennsylvania.

"It is surprising to see plants which were previously thought to have had mutually exclusive habitat preferences growing together on the ancient Catskill delta," said Chris Berry, of Cardiff University's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, who co-authored the study.  "This would have looked like a fairly open forest with small to moderate sized coniferous-looking trees with individual and clumped tree-fern like plants of possibly smaller size growing between them."

This was toward the end of the Devonian, at which point the Earth was heading into a huge warm-up, leading to the sauna-like climate of the Carboniferous swamps.  During the Carboniferous Period, plants kind of took over the place, leading to oxygen levels of perhaps as high as 35% (compared to our current 21%).  The carbon dioxide sucked from the atmosphere and deposited as coal -- coal we are burning today, returning that primordial carbon to the modern air -- was putting gunpowder in the keg, setting up the biggest cataclysm life ever endured.  All through the Carboniferous and Permian Periods, the coal deposition continued, even as the temperature cooled (because of removal of the carbon dioxide).  Then, at the end of the Permian, one of the largest volcanic eruptions ever, the supervolcano that created the Siberian Traps, poured out an unimaginable four million cubic kilometers of basaltic lava.  That molten rock ripped through enormous swaths of buried Carboniferous and Permian coal, blowing all that carbon back into the atmosphere, along with large quantities of sulfur.

The result?  A sudden and massive jump in temperature, a catastrophic drop in atmospheric oxygen, and widespread oceanic anoxia and acidification.  The Permian-Triassic Extinction ensued, during which an estimated ninety percent of species on Earth went extinct.

But when the quarry site was a thriving, fern-filled forest, that was still all in the future.  What is now the maple and oak woodlands of the Catskills was a swampy, lowland thicket of some very strange-looking trees.  Fascinating that sitting here, 386 million years later, we can get a picture of what life was like back then, when the ecosystem was being shaped by one of the most important developments in plant evolutionary history -- roots.

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The lure of the ocean

We spent a good chunk of last week, including my birthday, in Montauk, New York, at the very eastern tip of Long Island.  I love the ocean, even when it's a cool, stormy, rainy October, and I have to do my beach runs dressed in several layers rather than my typical attire of a pair of shorts, a pair of running shoes, and damn little else.

There's something about the ocean that I find magnetic.  The crashing of the waves, keening of the gulls, smell of salt... it's magical.  There's also the overwhelming sense of power and immensity I get from it.  Staring out across the wind-tossed sea toward the misty horizon, there was literally nothing between me and the west coast of Africa except for salt water.  We sometimes see the ocean as willful and dangerous, but I think of it more as wielding a power so much greater than ours that we're simply inconsequential by comparison.  I'm reminded of the quote from H. P. Lovecraft that captures that sense of awe:

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.  Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.  All my days have I watched it and listened to it, and I know it well.  At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and in time.  Sometimes at twilight the grey vapours of the horizon have parted to grant me glimpses of the ways beyond; and sometimes at night the deep waters of the sea have grown clear and phosphorescent, to grant me glimpses of the ways beneath.  And these glimpses have been as often of the ways that were and the ways that might be, as of the ways that are; for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of time.

The mystique has captured the human imagination for as far back as we have cultural memory, and because of it we have always linked the ocean to strange and uncanny tales.  Mermaids and sirens and water kelpies and the ningen and the kraken and the shape-shifting seal/human selkies only scratch the surface of lore that reaches into our very distant past. 

It's no wonder that even some of our modern lore associates the ocean and oceanside land as being uncanny.  Shortly after our arrival, Carol mentioned the "Montauk Project" -- something I'd heard of but really didn't know much about.

Turns out, the legend is centered around Camp Hero, a state park that is at the site of the decommissioned Montauk Air Force Station.  What's left behind is distinctly eerie, and includes a decrepit radar antenna mounted on the top of a building:

I find the sign on the fence a little puzzling.  Where do the falling objects originate, is what I wonder.  The whole place is a gentle, grassy hill with a few trees.  Do they drop objects from helicopters or something, so as to discourage trespassers?

Then there are the concrete bunkers that were the site of giant gun emplacements dating back to World War II.  They're still there, locked securely and with threatening signs discouraging visitors from trying to get inside:

The whole place has a distinctly sinister air, and it was no surprise to me that the conspiracy theorists think the place is still being used for secret experiments, possibly involving psychological warfare, extraterrestrial weaponry, and time travel.  In fact, the series Stranger Things was inspired by Camp Hero -- the original proposed name for the series was Montauk -- but the decision was made to site it instead in the heartland of Indiana, believing that putting the evil research station trying to reach into the Upside Down in the middle of Small Town America made the series a lot more scary.  (I think they're right, actually.)

But there's no doubt that there's an uncanny feeling about Camp Hero.  I kept expecting guys to drive up in black cars and demand that I give them my phone.  That feeling wasn't improved any when, as we were leaving the area, our car got buzzed by a drone -- that followed us for about a hundred feet, then zoomed away.

The odd ambience of the Montauk area was helped considerably in 2008 when the "Montauk monster" washed ashore -- a strange-looking carcass that immediately made people think of a hideous mutant escapee from the Plum Island Animal Disease Center.  Plum Island is fifteen miles offshore and on a clear day can be seen, low on the horizon -- about all you'll ever get to see of it, because it is entirely owned by the United States government and access is severely restricted, ostensibly to prevent the spread of animal diseases (and the potential for bioweapon development by hostile nations).  As it turns out, the "Montauk monster" had nothing to do with Plum Island and almost certainly was a decomposing carcass of a raccoon, but try to convince the conspiracy theorists of that.

Anyhow, the place was well worth a visit (Montauk, not Plum Island).  We only had one afternoon of sunny weather -- by a fortunate happenstance, the afternoon we went to Camp Hero, when I took the above photos -- and the rest was mostly rainy, windy, and gray.  But it was a lovely place to spend my sixtieth birthday.  Many (well-bundled) beach walks were taken, much seafood was eaten, and much wine enjoyed.

And, happily, I didn't get abducted by the Men in Black.

But here I am, back safe and sound in my little village in upstate New York.  Much as I loved Montauk, I don't think I could live there.  For one thing, the housing prices are absurd; Carol found an advertisement for a single-wide trailer on a half-acre of land going for $845,000.  For another, the traffic is terrible, even considering that we were there during the off season.  Plus, you have to wonder what climate change and sea level rise is going to do; Long Island is basically a giant sandbar, the terminal moraine of the last (Wisconsin) Continental Glaciation, that retreated about twenty thousand years ago after having shoved unsorted rocks and sand ahead of it like a plow, leaving behind a low ridge as it retreated.  The average elevation in Montauk is about ten meters; it wouldn't take much of a rise in sea level to swamp some of the lower-lying areas.

So I'll stay right where I am, frigid winters and all.  Great place to visit, though.  Getting up in the morning and going for a run on the beach, listening to the roar of the waves and the whistling of the wind through the dune grass, is a magical experience -- looking out to sea, sensing the restless, surging immensity before you, and feeling very, very small.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about one of the deepest mysteries in science: the origin of time.

Most physical processes are time-reversible.  If you looked at a video of a ball bouncing off a wall, then looked at the same video clip in reverse, it would be really difficult to tell which was the forward one and which the backwards one.  Down to the subatomic level, physical processes tend to make no distinction based upon the "arrow of time."

And yet our experience of time is very, very different.  We remember the past and don't know anything about the future.  Cause and effect proceed in that order, always.  Time only flows one direction, and most reputable physicists believe that real time travel is fundamentally impossible.  You can alter the rate at which time flows -- differences in duration in different reference frames are a hallmark of the theory of relativity -- but its direction seems to be unchanging and eternal.

Why?  This doesn't arise naturally from any known theory.  Truly, it is still a mystery, although today we're finally beginning to pry open the door a little, and peek at what is going on in this oddest of physical processes.

In The Order of Time, by physicist Carlo Rovelli (author of the wonderful Seven Brief Lectures in Physics), we learn what's at the cutting edge of theory and research into this unexplained, but everyday and ubiquitous, experience.  It is a fascinating read -- well worth the time it will take you to ponder the questions it raises.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A face in the underpass

As part of my research for Skeptophilia, I spend way too much time perusing questionable websites.

Not that kind of questionable.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  I'm talking about fringe-y sites dealing with Bigfoot, and UFOs, and hauntings, and paranormal phenomena of all sorts.  One of the most useful -- from the standpoint of someone who needs material for six blog posts a week -- is The Anomalist, which acts as a news aggregate for the World of the Weird.  (To his credit, the guy who runs The Anomalist is a pretty good skeptic, and unhesitatingly calls out ridiculous claims for what they are.  He's inclined to give some of them more credence than I would, but I admire his commitment to applying at least some of the tools of skeptical logic to claims of the paranormal.)

One of the links that popped up on The Anomalist last week came from Coast to Coast with George Noory.  Coast to Coast became prominent under the late Art Bell, who interviewed hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of people on the topic of the supernatural, conspiracy theories, and so on.  One of the most famous is the so-called "Frantic Caller" who back in 1998 phoned in to the show and proceeded to tell a fantastic story -- that he was a worker in Area 51 and had found out stuff he shouldn't have, and now the government was chasing him with the intent to silence him permanently.  The guy was either telling the truth or was a hell of an actor -- he legitimately sounded terrified.  (Interesting side note: the transmission from Coast to Coast cut out in the middle of the call, and Art Bell acted genuinely baffled as to why.  The whole thing has become a famous story amongst the conspiracy theorists, lo unto this very day.)

But I digress.

Anyhow, I was on The Anomalist, looking for ideas, and I saw one from Coast to Coast about people seeing a spooky face in a pedestrian underpass.  These sorts of things are almost always cases of pareidolia -- the tendency of the human mind to pick up face-like patterns in things like coarse-grained wood, rust patches, and grilled-cheese sandwiches.  But I thought I'd take a look, and when I did, the first thing I noticed was not a face -- in fact, I'm having a hard time seeing a face in the clip even when I look for it -- but that the underpass looked awfully familiar to me.

Then, with a sudden shock, I realized that it was a photo from the Cayuga Waterfront Trail, only ten miles from where I live.

I've often complained about the fact that things like UFO and Bigfoot sightings never happen near enough to me to justify a road trip.  So when I found out how close I was to the mysterious face, I thought, "Oh, hell yes.  I'm gonna check this one out myself."

So on Saturday I drove down to Cass Park, just north of the underpass in question, and struck off toward it.  I arrived there and started snapping photographs and poking around the place -- and for the record, I didn't see anything even remotely facelike.

After about five minutes of this, I was startled by a voice nearby, and turned to see an obviously stoned guy sitting on the rocks with his back against the cement buttresses of the underpass.  The following conversation ensued:

Stoned guy:  Dude.  Why are you taking pictures of that? 

Me:  Because people have been seeing a face up in the I-beams.  I read about it, and thought I'd take a look. 

*long pause to let that settle in.*  

Stoned guy:  Whoa. 

Me:  I don't see anything, though.  Have you seen anything weird down here? 

Stoned guy:  No, man.  Not a face, anyhow.  But why are you interested in this? 

Me:  I'm a paranormal researcher.  [Yes, I got this phrase out without laughing.] 

Stoned guy: [reverently]  That is so fuckin' cool.  I've never met an actual paranormal researcher. 

Me:  I've been interested in the paranormal for years.  [That much at least was true.]  When I found out this was happening close by, I figured I'd better check it out. 

Stoned guy:  [suddenly brightening up]  Dude, I haven't seen any faces, but there is some creepy fuckin' graffiti over there.  *points*

I was immediately reminded of the graffiti saying, "Duck, Sally Sparrow!  Duck NOW!" from the brilliant Dr. Who episode "Blink."  So I thought I'd ask the Stoned Guy what he thought.

Me:  What does "Don't Go Into the Light" mean? 

Stoned guy:  No idea, man.  All I know is if I see any weird lights, I'm hauling ass right out of here. 

Me:  That sounds like a good idea.  Thanks for your help. 

Stoned guy:  Rock on, dude.  Hope you catch a fuckin' ghost, or whatever. 

Me:  Me too.

So my first opportunity to investigate an actual paranormal claim near where I live kind of was a bust.  Unfortunate, but I suppose it's to be expected.

But it was kind of fun to go check out some place local, and I hope it's not the last.  I'm hereby putting in my request to any aliens, Bigfoots, ghosts, and such-like who may be reading this that I would be much obliged if they'd make an appearance somewhere in, say, a twenty-mile radius of my house.  Because I may be a paranormal researcher, but I also like staying close to home.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side; Jared Diamond's riveting book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  Starting with societies that sowed the seeds of their own destruction -- such as the Easter Islanders, whose denuding of the landscape led to island-wide ecological collapse -- he focuses the lens on the United States and western Europe, whose rampant resource use, apparent disregard for curbing pollution, and choice of short-term expediency over long-term wisdom seem to be pushing us in the direction of disaster.

It's not a cheerful book, but it's a very necessary one, and is even more pertinent now than when it was written in 2005.  Diamond highlights the problems we face, and warns of that threshold we're approaching toward catastrophe -- a threshold that is so subtle that we may well not notice it until it's too late to reverse course.

[If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Duplicating the crone

A pretty common belief in many different cultures is that inanimate objects can have, or can be imbued with, supernatural powers.

It's not like I haven't dealt with this topic before, here at Skeptophilia.  We've had posts about do-it-yourself voodoo dolls, a haunted wine cabinet, a cellphone that received texts from Satan, and a child's doll named "Robert" which shifts positions by itself, not to mention "giggling maniacally."

And that's just scratching the surface.  If you start asking people you'll find everything from the common and fairly innocuous belief in good luck charms (or in items that bring bad luck), all the way up to belief that there are objects that are cursed and/or inhabited by evil spirits capable of serious damage.

So far, nothing too unusual, although still examples of magical thinking that it'd be nice for the human race to jettison.  But just recently, there's been a technological twist added to all of this medieval superstition.

What if someone used a 3-D printer to make a perfect replica of a cursed object?

Of course, it opens up the question of "why would you want to?", but as we've seen over and over, asking that is not sufficient to dissuade people from doing something.

Brent Swancer, over at Mysterious Universe, tells us about some people who decided to copy a cursed object that's been nicknamed "the Crone of the Catskills."  Here's how Swancer describes the object:

[The Crone is] a strange hand-carved statue supposedly found by some hikers stashed away and abandoned, quite possibly hidden, in a dim cave somewhere in the Catskill Mountains of New York.  The doll is creepy to say the least, with a length of filthy cord wrapped around its neck and rusty nails driven into its eyes, and it seems like the sort of thing most people would cringe at and leave lying where it was, but in this case the hikers took it home with them.

According to Swancer, the unnamed hikers lived to regret bringing it back with them, as immediately bad stuff began to happen, like bumps, thuds, and bangs, a feeling of being watched, and worst of all, "odd smells such as that of stagnant water or decay."

If you're thinking "why the hell would they have brought it home?" it bears mention that I did something kind of similar a few years back.  My wife and I were hiking in the Finger Lakes National Forest not too far away from our home, and were a good ways off the beaten path, when I stepped over a log, and noticed that on the end of the log was...

... a Mardi Gras mask.

It was in perfect condition, and in fact looked like it had been placed there only moments before.  It was in October, the weather was cool, and we hadn't seen anyone else in the woods during our entire hike, so it's not like this was exactly a well-traveled part of the National Forest.  So it was pretty bizarre, to say the least.

I said, "Hey, Carol, come take a look at this."

I picked up the mask, and put it over my face.  She regarded me with a raised eyebrow and said, "You do realize that if you were a character in one of your own novels, you'd be about to die right now?"

Undaunted, I brought it home, and hung it on the wall in my office.  I did have a bit of a turn the next morning, when I walked into the room and found the mask in the middle of the floor.

Turned out the elastic loop had come loose.  So I reconnected it, and it's remained there quietly ever since.  No bumps, thuds, or bangs, and the only bad smells are when my dog decides to roll in Eau de Dead Squirrel and then comes to take a nap in my office.

Anyhow, all of this is just to say that if I'd found the Crone of the Catskills, I'd probably have taken it home, too.  The hikers who found her donated the Crone to the Traveling Museum of the Paranormal and Occult, and even afterwards it continued to do spooky stuff.  The Museum's owners, Dana Matthews and Greg Newkirk, report that after the Crone was obtained, furniture was found knocked over, there was the "smell of fetid pond water," and more than once they opened the place up in the morning to find small muddy footprints on the floor leading to and from the case the Crone occupied.

The Crone of the Catskills

So far, so good.  But the next thing that happened I have to admit I find a little baffling.  A pair of paranormal researchers, Karl Pfeiffer and Connor Randal, decided that it'd be a good idea to use a 3-D printer to make a replica of the Crone.

Havoc ensued.  The printer malfunctioned and a part of it "melted."  Other equipment broke down, or went missing entirely.  People in the room with the replica reported "a sense of dread" coming from the thing, and a "burning sensation" from touching it.

So apparently, the 3-D printer hadn't just copied the Crone's appearance, it had also copied its ghostly hanger-on.

Now, as a diehard skeptic, it's to be expected that I think this sounds a little silly.  But allow me to ask any true believers in the studio audience: how exactly could this work?

I mean, even if you accept that an object can be imbued with a "force" (whatever that means), isn't the usually accepted explanation that it's tied to the object itself?  If you made a copy of the object, you wouldn't expect a piece of the "force" to get knocked loose and attach itself to the replica.  Or at least, I wouldn't.  I didn't think that 3-D printers could make copies of ghosts, you know?

Which, honestly, is a good thing.  Just think of what would happen if you put a 3-D printer in a haunted house, and the ghosts got a hold of it and started duplicating themselves.  In short order, you'd have what paranormal researchers call "a shitload of ghosts."  It'd be a catastrophe, much like what happened in the Lost in Space episode "The Space Destructors," wherein Dr. Smith created an android who then began to create more androids, which was especially awful because the machine was programmed to make them look like Dr. Smith, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.

So it'd be unfortunate if the 3-D printer did make a copy of the evil spirit haunting the Crone of the Catskills.  That being said, if Pfeiffer and Randal have any extra copies of the Crone hanging around, I'd love to have one.  I've got a nice space on the shelf in my office where she could reside.  Also, if all she does is push furniture around and leave muddy footprints on the floor, my dog pretty much has that covered as well.

I might even see if I can make a replica of my mysterious Mardi Gras mask, and we can do a swap.  I have to warn you, though, that the mask's antics are even less impressive than the Crone's.  "Falling on the floor once in four years" is really not that much of a superpower.

The haunted pub

Last week my wife and I did some hiking along beautiful Skaneateles Lake, and decided to stop for a pint and some chow at Wayside Irish Pub in the village of Elbridge.  The food, beer, and atmosphere were all great, and we also got a chance to check out a place that has a well-established reputation for being haunted.

While enjoying our drinks and pub grub, we struck up a conversation with a woman down the bar who was apparently an off-duty bartender (we never quite established what her connection to the pub was except that she works there, but that's what I think she was).  And it turned out that she is quite certain she has had more than one encounter with the pub's spectral residents.

The story is a curious one, if you compare it to other alleged hauntings, for its lack of information.  Most haunted places have a definite story they claim is behind it all; murders and suicides are the most commonly-cited causes of ghostly presences, and any information about the identity of the spirit and how (s)he ended up there is quickly forthcoming, often along with considerable embellishment.

Here, though, the story is that there are two spirits at Wayside, a man and a woman, and nothing more is known about them.  Many people have had spooky experiences there, including some folks that beforehand were staunch disbelievers.  The woman we were chatting with said she's seen wine glasses fly off the rack over the bar, and once on the second floor kept having someone touch her neck when no one was there.  She told me I was welcome to wander around, and recommended checking out the staircase between the first and second floors, which is apparently is one of the most common places for people to have creepy experiences:

But I didn't see anything or anyone.  I was hoping that when I got home there'd be a translucent figure in the middle of my photo of the staircase, but no such luck.

I was encouraged to go up to the second floor, which was currently not being used, so I did.  It was quite atmospheric.  There's a room done up completely in red:

A hallway that certainly seems like it needs a ghost:

And a banquet room that looks like it should be at the Overlook Hotel:

But despite wandering around there by myself for some time (my wife preferred to stay downstairs and continue the conversation with the off-duty bartender), I saw nothing untoward.

What I find most interesting about this is how completely matter-of-fact the woman was in telling us about her experiences.  She told us about the flying glasses as if it was just something that happens sometimes, although she admitted that the touch on the neck "scared her pretty good."  And what struck me was that she had no particular reason to make stuff up; it wasn't (frankly) that good a story, just a couple of strange things with no explanation and no follow-up.  I know eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable even when they're trying to recall things accurately, but all I can say is that this woman spoke with the ring of truth.

Still, I can't say I was turned into a believer, or anything even close.  I was hoping I'd given the ghosts plenty of opportunity to blow in my ear or untie my shoelaces or whatever, but nothing happened.  Maybe they were napping or something, I dunno, but I sure wish that if there is some odd presence at Wayside Irish Pub, it'd have shown itself.  After all, I really do want to believe, even if so far I haven't been given any particular reason to.

Anyhow, it was worth going.  After a long day's hiking the cold pint was wonderful, and I can definitely recommend the nachos.  If you're ever near Skaneateles and don't mind a twenty minute drive farther north, give it a visit.  Bring along your camera.  Maybe you'll have better luck photographing the pub's ghostly residents than I did.

Legally haunted

Have you ever heard of the New York Supreme Court Case, Stambovsky v. Ackley?

I hadn't, until yesterday.

This came up because of a link someone sent me to an article called "There’s A House That’s So Terrifying It Was Legally Declared Haunted By New York State."  And my question, of course, was "what does it mean to be 'legally haunted'?"  If a ghost shows up in a house that is not legally declared to be haunted, do you have the right to call the police and have it arrested?  If so, how could you send a ghost to jail, when according to most people, ghosts can pass through walls, not to mention steel bars?

Be that as it may, the story centered around a house owned by a family named Ackley in Nyack, New York, a town on the Hudson River.  Soon after the Ackleys moved in, they began to have odd experiences, the most alarming of which is that family members reported waking up having their beds violently shaken by an invisible entity.  According to the article, they "learned to live with the spirits," which became easier when one of them apparently figured out that all they had to do to stop the sudden awakenings was to ask the ghosts not to shake their beds during the night.

Which I thought was pretty doggone amenable of the spirits, until I read the next part, wherein a young guest showed up to visit the Ackleys and died immediately of a brain aneurysm [emphasis theirs].  So that's not very nice.  There were also footsteps, slamming doors, and "gifts for the children [left] randomly through the house."  So you can see that with gifts on one end of the spectrum and brain aneurysms on the other, the haunting turned out to be quite a mixed bag.

The Ackley House, courtesy of Google Maps

Anyhow, all of this is your ordinary, garden-variety haunted house story until the Ackleys had enough and decided to sell the house.  The buyers, a family named Stambovsky, purchased it, but it turned out that the Ackleys didn't mention the fact that it was haunted by brain-aneurysm-inducing ghosts.  When they found out the house's reputation, the Stambovskys objected, understandably enough, and sued.  The case went all the way to the New York Supreme Court, where the judge sided with the Stambovskys.  The ruling said:

Where, as here, the seller not only takes unfair advantage of the buyer's ignorance but has created and perpetuated a condition about which he is unlikely to even inquire, enforcement of the contract (in whole or in part) is offensive to the court's sense of equity.  Application of the remedy of rescission, within the bounds of the narrow exception to the doctrine of caveat emptor set forth herein, is entirely appropriate to relieve the unwitting purchaser from the consequences of a most unnatural bargain...  Seller who had undertaken to inform the public at large about the existence of poltergeists on the premises to be sold was estopped to deny existence of poltergeists on the premises, so the house was haunted as a matter of law and seller must inform the purchaser of the haunting.

I wondered about how exactly a purchaser could demonstrate that a house was, in fact, haunted.  After all, that's usually what most failure-to-disclose lawsuits usually turn on; you find that the house you just bought has a leaky roof, and show that the previous owners knew about the leaky roof -- but along the way it's incumbent upon you to demonstrate that the roof does, in fact, leak.  How are you going to do that with a ghost?

But upon reading the ruling more carefully, apparently the decision was based upon the fact that the Ackleys themselves had made public the fact that they thought the house was haunted.  So I guess it's their fault for bragging about their ghosts and then deciding not to tell the purchasers before the contract was signed.

You have to wonder, though, if this might be something that should appear on disclosure statements under "Known Pre-existing Conditions," along with leaks, dry rot, damaged windows, broken appliances, and faulty septic systems.  "Ghosts/poltergeists present" -- yes/no/unknown.  "Ghosts that result in death by aneurysm" -- yes/no/unknown.

The article ends by giving us the address of the house in Nyack, but asking us not to go there. "Respect the current owner’s privacy by admiring it only from your screen," they tell us.  Which does bring up the interesting point of who bought the house after the Supreme Court allowed the Stambovskys to back out of the purchase, and whether the new owners have had any weird experiences or untimely deaths.  The article on the legal case (linked above) said that in 2015 the house sold for $1.77 million -- which was, they said, $600,000 higher than comparable houses in Nyack.

So maybe the Stambovskys should have stuck with it, ghosts and all.  Apparently disembodied spirits of the dead do nothing to diminish home value.  I know I'd happily sell my house for a cool $1.77 million.  I'd even sign a disclosure agreement admitting that it's haunted, and I don't even believe in ghosts.

Blaming the victims

I would like, just once, to be able to read the news without being outraged.

Lately that wish has been a losing proposition.  Every other news story these days provides enough material to fuel thermonuclear-level fury in anyone who has a shred of sensibility and compassion.  It's reached the point where I'm thinking of avoiding the news altogether.  It seems preferable to remain ignorant than dying of a self-induced aneurysm.

Today's contribution from the Fountains of Rage Department hearkens back to the story of Brock Turner, the Stanford student who raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster and got a slap-on-the-wrist six month jail sentence.  To add to the injustice, Turner's father and friends rose to his defense, never once mentioning the victim; the father expressed grief over his son's having to pay such a price for "twenty minutes of action."

At least in this case the victim found her voice, writing a letter to her attacker that was so poignant and powerful that it brought me to tears.  The judge in the case, Aaron Persky, has been the target of a well-deserved backlash because of his caving to white male privilege and victim blaming, and in fact was removed from another sexual assault case by Santa Clara county district attorney Jeff Rosen. "After ... the recent turn of events, we lack confidence that Judge Persky can fairly participate in this upcoming hearing in which a male nurse sexually assaulted an anesthetized female patient," Rosen said.

Well, yeah.  And it'd be nice if this kind of retribution were served around more generally.  Instead, we have two news stories that illustrate that even this level of justice is far from the rule.

First, we have a case in England where a wealthy Eton student who was found in possession of 1,185 images of child pornography was allowed to be tried under a false name in order to "protect his family's reputation."  In addition, he received no jail time -- he was given an eighteen-month suspended sentence.

The student, who was tried under the name of Andrew Picard, would probably have remained comfortably anonymous if it hadn't been for an article in The Daily Mirror that slipped up and revealed his true identity as Andrew Boeckman, son of Phillip J. Boeckman, a wealthy lawyer whose clients have included Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan.  The article vanished from the internet -- "mysteriously," says Summer Winterbottom in Evolve Politics -- but is still available in a cached copy, the link to which is in the article cited above.

Andrew Boeckman ("Andrew Picard") [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The judge in the case, Peter Ross, seemed more sympathetic with Boeckman and his family than he did with the victims, some of whom were toddlers.  "Your family didn’t deserve that (suffering) but it is a consequence of this sort of offending," Ross said during the trial.  "Inevitably your privileged background and where you were going to school added a degree of frisson to the reporting."

Story #2 comes from my home state of New York, where a bill to help the survivors of child abuse was killed in the State Assembly by passing the deadline without coming to a vote.  The bill, sponsored by Assemblywoman Margaret Markey, would have increased the time a sexual abuse case could be pursued by five years, created a six-month window to revive old cases, and treated public and private entities identically in cases of sexual abuse.  The Assembly, however, saw fit to let the bill fail rather than allowing it to come to a vote.

Angry yet?  Just wait.  Because Catholic League President Bill Donohue crowed about the demise of the Child Victims Act, saying that Markey is a "principle enemy of the church" and that the act was a "sham."

Then he made the following statement, which I had to read three times before I could honestly believe my eyes: "This was a vindictive bill pushed by lawyers and activists out to rape the Catholic Church."

I beg your pardon?  Curious choice of words, given that what you're gloating about is protecting rapists.  But not content even with that outrageous statement, Donohue had the following to say in addition:

If the statute of limitations were lifted on offenses involving the sexual abuse of minors, the only winners would be greedy and bigoted lawyers out to line their pockets in a rash of settlements.  The big losers would be the poor, about whom the attorneys and activists care little: When money is funneled from parishioners to lawyers, services to the needy suffer.  The Catholic League is proud of its role in this victory.

How about the "big losers" now, who are the victims of predators who use their position of power and authority to inflict harm on children?   Donohue, and the members of the New York State Assembly who were complicit in this decision, have chosen to protect a powerful and wealthy institution rather than giving aid to the victims of sexual abuse.

Bill Donohue [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But that's what people like Donohue, and British Judge Peter Ross, and California Judge Aaron Persky excel at; swiveling the blame around so that the victims become somehow culpable in their own injury.

The bottom line is that no institution, family, or individual should be above the law, regardless of their wealth, power, or self-perception of holiness.  The first priority in these cases should be the welfare of the victims, and seeking justice for the damage that has been inflicted upon them.  And the fact that people like Ross, Persky, and Donohue are in a position to deflect our attention from that priority makes them guilty of perpetuating a culture in which rape victims, however young, are to blame for their own suffering.