Haunted housewares

I don't own many things that are all that old.

I'm referring to human-made objects, of course.  I have a couple of Devonian-age brachiopod fossils that I collected in a nearby creek bed that are around four hundred million years old.  In general, rocks are more unusual if they're really new; I have a piece of basaltic lava rock I brought back from my trip to Iceland a couple of years ago that was part of an active flow only a few years ago.

Human-made things, though, don't usually last very long.  I don't have anything "passed down in my family" that goes back more than two generations.  I have a couple of beautiful old bookcases that belonged to my paternal grandmother, and that's about it.  As far as other antiques, the two oldest things I own are both musical instruments -- my Ivers & Pond piano, which was made in Boston in 1876, and a wooden keyed flute I got (no lie) in a used-goods store in Tallinn, Estonia, which was made in France in around 1880.  Interestingly, I got both of them super cheap.  The flute was unplayable because the middle joint had a crack, which I had repaired when I got back to the States, and the piano I got for free -- it'd been sitting in someone's garage, unplayed, for years -- so the only cost to me was hiring some piano movers, and then getting it tuned once I got it into my house.

Otherwise?  Most everything else we have is pretty recent.  We've been told our home decorating style is an apparently real thing called "Shabby Chic."  I don't know about "chic," but we've definitely got the "shabby" part locked down.  The fact that my wife and I are both Housework Impaired, combined with owning three dogs, makes it unlikely we'll ever be featured in Home Beautiful.

The reason this all comes up is that I just stumbled across a curious Japanese legend called Tsukumogami (つくも神) that says if you own an object that is over a hundred years old, it becomes a Yōkai (妖怪, literally, "strange apparition"), a sentient being imbued with its own spirit.  These spirits can be benevolent or malevolent, or sometimes maybe they just need a hug:

The Lantern Ghost, by Katsushika Hokusai, ca. 1830 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Some of the objects that allegedly became Yōkai include a pair of sandals, a lute, a folding screen, a sake bottle, a gong, a vegetable grater, an umbrella, a mirror, a teakettle, and a clock.  There are lots more, though -- an eighteenth century book called Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro (百器徒然袋 -- literally, "One Hundred Haunted Housewares") describes all kinds of haunted objects, including the terrifying Menreiki (面霊気), a horrible monster composed entirely of masks:

The Menreiki, from Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro [Image is in the Public Domain]

I love masks, and actually collect them, but if they start coming to life and chasing me around, I'm done.

What I find fascinating about stories like this is how specific they are.  It's not just a vague "things going bump in the night" kind of legend; this is a koto (a Japanese zither) suddenly growing a horrible face and lots of extra strings:

Koto-furunushi, from Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro [Image is in the Public Domain]

My reaction to all this is not simply my usual rationalism kicking in, wondering, "Why would people believe this when it so clearly doesn't ever happen?"  It's also considering how scary it must be for people who think the world actually works this way.  Of course, I've had the same thought about fundamentalist Christians, who think that an all-loving and compassionate God would make you burn in agony for all eternity because you occasionally look at naughty pictures on the internet.

So Tsukumogami is an interesting legend, but I'm just as happy it's not real.  If my piano suddenly became self-aware and started playing eerie melodies at one in the morning, I think I'd opt right out.  Or, worse, if it started critiquing my playing.  "Merciful heavens, Debussy would be appalled.  Maybe you should go back to playing 'Chopsticks,' or something."

I'm hard enough on my own self, thanks.  I don't need some possessed musical instrument weighing in.

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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 "what kind of idiot would find something like that and then bring 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 put it mildly.

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 already.

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.

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Going up

Well, it's happened again; a reader has sent me a weird superstition (this one almost amounts to an urban legend) that I'd never heard of before.

You've all heard about the goofy children's game "Bloody Mary," wherein you're supposed to stare into a mirror at night and chant "Bloody Mary" a bunch of times (even those in the know vary the requirement greatly; I've seen everything from twenty to a hundred), and then nothing happens.

So it's a pretty exciting game, as you will no doubt agree.

What's supposed to happen is that the blood-drenched visage of a female ghost will appear in the mirror instead of your own face.  She's supposedly the restless spirit of a woman who killed children.  Which I can sort of sympathize with.  If I was yanked around and forced to appear in mirrors over and over all night long by kids at sleepovers chanting my name, I'd probably want to throttle the little brats, too.

Be that as it may, we have a tale out of South Korea that is similar in spirit (rimshot), if not in detail, to the Bloody Mary legend.  This one is called "Elevator to Another World," and gives you instructions for using an elevator to access some hitherto unreachable and mysterious place.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Joe Mabel, Hotel Vancouver elevators 01, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Here's what you're supposed to do:

1. Find a building that's at least ten stories tall.  (Nota bene: Through all of the remaining steps except the last one, you're supposed to stay in the elevator.)
2. Go to the tenth floor.
3. Go to the fourth floor.
4. Go to the sixth floor.
5. Go back to the tenth floor.  If you hear voices at this point, don't answer 'em.
6. Go to the fifth floor.  When the door opens, if a woman gets on, don't talk to her.  Which sounds like good advice re: people on elevators in most cases.
7. Press the button for the first floor.  If the elevator goes down, you did something wrong.  What should happen is that the elevator should go back up to the tenth floor.  The woman may shriek at you at this point, but you're supposed to ignore her, even if she shrieks what I would, which would be, "Will you stop playing with the fucking elevator and let me go to my floor?"
8. When the door opens on the tenth floor, get out.  You're in another world.  What you're supposed to do about the woman, I don't know.
9. So after having a nice look-see in the alternate universe, to get back, return to the elevator (it has to be the same one you used for steps #1-8), and do the steps again in that order.  When you press the button for the first floor in step #7 and the elevator begins to ascend, find the "stop" button and halt the elevator, then press the first floor button again.  You should return safely to the first floor, and must exit the building immediately.

What is this "Other World" like, you might be wondering?  From the account linked above, the two most common characteristics reported are that the Other World is (1) dark, and (2) empty.  Which makes it sound rather unappealing.  If I'm going to expend a lot of time and effort, I want to at least end up somewhere sunny, featuring drinks with little umbrellas.  But none of that, apparently.  Some people have mentioned seeing a "red cross" in the distance, but the author of the article says that "it may not be a cross."

Whatever that means.

This all puts me in mind of a wonderful book by Haruki Murakami called Dance Dance Dance, wherein a guy in a Japanese hotel takes an elevator and stumbles on a mysterious floor that is somehow sandwiched in between two other ordinary floors, and therein he meets a weird character called the Sheep Man.  It's weird, surreal fun, and is written with Murakami's signature lucid, simple style -- he has a way of making the oddest things seem as if they're absolutely normal.

I'm not sure if the Korean urban legend inspired Murakami's book, which would be nice because then it'd actually have accomplished something other than making gullible people waste time going up and down on an elevator.  On the other hand, if you want to give it a try, I encourage you to do so and post your results here.

Other than building security telling you to stop playing with the elevator.

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Fox on the run

Seems like for each of the last few years, we've said, "Well, at least next year can't be as bad as this year was!"  Then, somehow, it is.  Or worse.  As a friend of mine put it, "I'd like to find out who started this worldwide game of Jumanji and punch the shit out of him."

And of course, with so many things going wrong, people start casting about for some kind of underlying cause (other than "humans sure can be assholes sometimes").  I wasn't surprised, for example, that the extremely Reverend Pat Robertson said the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was a sign that the End Times were beginning.

Well, "not surprised" isn't exactly accurate, because I honestly thought Pat Robertson was dead.  What is he, like 124 years old?  In any case, once I realized that he's still alive, his reaction wasn't surprising, because he thinks everything is a sign of the End Times.  I have this mental image of him shuffling around his house in his bathrobe and jamming his little toe on the leg of the coffee table, and shouting, "And the Lord sayeth, 'When thou bangest thy toe on the furniture, prepare ye well, for the Four Horsemen are on their way!  Can I get an amen?"

So I suppose it's natural enough to look for a reason when things start going wrong, even though in my opinion, Pat Robertson is nuttier than squirrel shit.  But in any case, now we have another candidate for an explanation besides the End Times as predicted in the Book of Revelation:

The Japanese Killing Stone spontaneously split in half last week.

If you haven't heard of the Japanese Killing Stone, well, neither had I until I read that it had fallen apart.  Its Japanese name is Sessho-seki (which literally means "killing stone"), and it's near the town of Nasu, Tochigi Prefecture, in central Honshu.  The story is that there was a beautiful woman named Tamamo-no-Mae, who was actually a kitsune (an nine-tailed fox spirit) in disguise.  She was working for an evil daimyo (feudal lord) who was trying to overthrow the Emperor Konoe, but she was exposed as a fox spirit and killed by the warrior Miura-no-Suke, and her body turned into a stone.

But her evil influence didn't end there.  Tamamo-no-Mae's spirit was locked inside the stone but kept its capacity for inflicting harm, and anyone who touched it died.  The site of the stone is cordoned off; the Japanese government says it's because the area is volcanic and there are sulfurous fumes that could be dangerous.

Sessho-seki [Image is in the Public Domain]

To which I respond, "Sure, that's the reason.  Mmm-hmm."  I mean, really.  What am I supposed to believe?  That there are purely natural dangers caused by understood geological processes, or that the spirit of an evil nine-tailed fox woman has been trapped inside a rock that can kill you when you touch it?

I know which one sounds the most plausible to me.

Tamamo-no-Mae and Miura-no-Suke, as depicted by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1849) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So anyway, apparently people are freaking out that the rock spontaneously split in half, despite the authorities saying, "A small crack had appeared naturally some years ago, and grew deeper until finally the stone fell apart."  The idea is now that the Sessho-seki has split, it released the spirit of Tamamo-no-Mae, who will proceed to wreak havoc once again.

My response is: go ahead, Foxy Lady, do your worst.  My guess is anything you could do would pale in comparison to what's already going on in the world.  It'd be kind of an anticlimax, wouldn't it?  You wait for centuries, trapped inside a rock, concocting all sorts of evil plans, and then the rock breaks and releases you, and you explode out and start causing trouble, and... no one notices.  

Tamamo-no-Mae: Ha ha!  I am free!  I shall cause chaos wherever I go!  The weather shall go haywire!  Wars will break out!  The evil shall go unpunished!

Us:  Is that all?

Tamamo-no-Mae:  Um... what do you mean, is that all?  Isn't that bad enough?

Us (laughing bitterly):  Look around you.  You think you can do better than this?

Tamamo-no-Mae (horrified):  Oh.  Oh, my.  Okay... um... do you think you could get some Superglue and help me put this rock back together?

Us:  Yeah, it'd probably be for the best.  Can you take us with you?

Anyhow, if things start getting worse, and you're wondering what's the cause, maybe it's the depredations of an evil nine-tailed fox spirit from Japan.  And after all, the whole "End Times" thing is getting a little hackneyed, don't you think?  Especially since the evangelicals have been predicting the End Times several times a year for hundreds of years, and nothing much has happened.  Not even one Apocalyptic Horseperson, much less four.  So at least this would be a new and different reason as to why everything's so fucked up lately.

Makes as much sense as any other explanation I've heard, although there's still something to be said for "humans sure can be assholes sometimes."

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It's in the palm of your hand

Amongst the downsides of being superstitious is that sometimes, you find out you're in for some bad luck.

A girl I went to college with had a real thing for Tarot cards. And even considering the generally vague, this-could-apply-to-anyone interpretations of most Tarot card spreads, there are a couple of cards that are unequivocally bad.  The Nine of Swords, for example, isn't good news, which you could probably tell just from looking at it:

So, by the laws of chance (not that true believers think that's what's going on here, but still) -- every once in a while, you're going to get a bad spread of cards laid out in front of you by your friendly neighborhood fortuneteller.  And what did my college friend do, when it happened to her?

She picked up all of the cards, shuffled them, and laid them out again, until she got one she liked.

It's a more common response than you'd think.  Numerologists -- people who believe that everything can be converted to numbers, and those numbers control your future -- have been known to go through a legal name change if their names don't add up to a "good number."

Something similar is going on in Japan, where palmistry is all the rage.  You know: the idea that the lines on your palm somehow tell you how long you'll live, whether you'll become wealthy, whether you'll fall in love, and so on.  Now, palm lines aren't going to be so simple to change -- it's not as easy as changing your name, or picking up the cards if you don't like what you see.  So, what do you do if your life-line is short, if your heart line says you'll never find a nice person of whatever gender you favor, and so on?

You have them surgically altered.

I'm not making this up.  Surgeons in Japan are now being asked, with increasing frequency, to use an electric scalpel to burn lines in patients' palms to engrave a pattern that is thought to be lucky.  The surgery costs about a thousand bucks, which of course isn't covered by insurance.

Small price to pay, say true believers, if the outcome will bring money, love, long life, or whatever it is you're after.

"If you try to create a palm line with a laser, it heals, and it won’t leave a clear mark," said Dr. Takaaki Matsuoka, who has already performed five of these surgeries this year, and has another three scheduled soon.  "You have to use the electric scalpel and make a shaky incision on purpose, because palm lines are never completely straight.  If you don’t burn the skin and just use a plain scalpel, the lines don’t form.  It’s not a difficult surgery, but it has to be done right."

Before and after. Can't you just feel the luck radiating from the right-hand photograph?

Matsuoka seems like a believer himself, and not just an opportunist making a quick bunch of yen from the gullible.

"Well, if you’re a single guy trying to pick up a date, knowing palm reading is probably good.  It’s a great excuse to hold a lovely woman’s hands," he said, in an interview.  "Men usually wish to change their business related success lines, such as the fate line, the money-luck line, and the financial line.  The money-luck line is for making profits.  And the financial line is the one that allows you to save what you make.  It’s good to have both.  Because sometimes people make a lot of money, but they quickly lose it as well.  A strong fate line helps ensure you make money and keep it.  These three lines, when they come together just right, create the emperor’s line.  Most men want this."

As for women, Matsuoka says they mostly want to change the lines related to romance and marriage.

How could all of this work?  Matsuoka hedges a little on this question.

"If people think they’ll be lucky, sometimes they become lucky," he said, which makes him sound a little like the Japanese answer to Norman Vincent Peale.  "And it’s not like the palm lines are really written in stone—they’re basically wrinkles.  They do change with time.  Even the way you use your hands can change the lines.  Some palmisters will even suggest that their clients draw the lines on their hands to change their luck.  And this was before palm plastic surgery existed.  However, anecdotally I’ve had some success."

The last bit reminds me of the wonderful sketch by Mitchell & Webb, where a doctor tries to save his patient by extending his life-line with a ball-point pen:

I can't help but think that if any of these superstitious beliefs actually worked, they wouldn't work this way.  If Tarot cards, numbers, or lines on your palm -- or any of the other wacky suggestions you might have heard -- really do control our destiny, then just changing them to a pattern you like is kind of... cheating, isn't it?  You'd think that the mystical powers-that-be wouldn't let that happen.  If I were one of the mystical powers-that-be, I'd be pissed.  I'd probably trip you while you were carrying a full cup of hot coffee.

That'd sure show you.

Of course, a simpler explanation is that all of this is really just unscientific bullshit.  To test that conjecture, I may just break a mirror on purpose today, and cross the path of a black cat, and see if I can find a ladder to walk underneath.  Go ahead, Gods of Bad Luck, do your worst.  I'm guessing that I'll still make it all the way through the day without having a brain aneurysm.

And in any case, no one is getting close to my hands with an electric scalpel.  I have fairly extensive tattoos, so I'm no stranger to people doing ouchy things to my skin, but I draw the line at cutting into the palms of my hands with a laser.  That has gotta hurt like a mofo.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is by an author we've seen here before: the incomparable Jenny Lawson, whose Twitter @TheBloggess is an absolute must-follow.  She blogs and writes on a variety of topics, and a lot of it is screamingly funny, but some of her best writing is her heartfelt discussion of her various physical and mental issues, the latter of which include depression and crippling anxiety.

Regular readers know I've struggled with these two awful conditions my entire life, and right now they're manageable (instead of completely controlling me 24/7 like they used to do).  Still, they wax and wane, for no particularly obvious reason, and I've come to realize that I can try to minimize their effect but I'll never be totally free of them.

Lawson's new book, Broken (In the Best Possible Way) is very much in the spirit of her first two, Let's Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy.  Poignant and hysterically funny, she can have you laughing and crying on the same page.  Sometimes in the same damn paragraph.  It's wonderful stuff, and if you or someone you love suffers from anxiety or depression or both, read this book.  Seeing someone approaching these debilitating conditions with such intelligence and wit is heartening, not least because it says loud and clear: we are not alone.

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

Writing's on the wall

I was chatting with my friend, author and all-around cool person K. D. McCrite, a couple of days ago about superstitions.

It probably won't come as any surprise that I'm not superstitious.  About the only time that particular irrationality raises its ugly head is in my occasional conviction -- usually when I'm already in a foul mood -- that inanimate objects are conspiring to get in my way, fall out of my hand, break, or otherwise further fuck up my day.  My logical brain tells me that this is probably because I'm in a bad temper and more prone to being careless and rough with handling things, but sometimes it really does seem like the various objects around me have decided to infuriate me out of nothing but pure malice.

Other than that, though, I'm inclined to consider superstitions so bizarre that it's incomprehensible that anyone would have come up with them in the first place.  K. D. mentioned that growing up in rural Missouri, she used to hear that if you dropped a dishrag, company was coming.  Same thing, apparently, if your nose itches; but only a few states south, where I grew up in southern Louisiana, your nose itching means you're going to kiss a fool.  We didn't have one for company coming, at least not that I recall; but if you've got company and you want them to leave, all you have to do is stand a broom up in the corner near the front door.

Of course, my guess is that if your company knows the superstition, and they see you standing a broom up in the corner, they'll get pissed off and leave.  So this might fall into the "self-fulfilling prophecy" department.

Spurred by that discussion, I started looking into various superstitions in different cultures, and man, there are some weird ones, making the bad luck brought by black cats, broken mirrors, and walking under ladders sound positively normal.  Here are a few I came across:

• If you wear red, you're more likely to be struck by lightning.  (Philippines)
• If you say "rabbit rabbit" as your first words after you wake up on the first day of the month, you'll prosper.  (northern England)
• If you're out drinking with friends, and you're ready to leave, don't say "this is my last drink."  If you do, you'll die soon, and it really will have been your last drink.  (Cuba)
• Running a fan in a closed room while you sleep will kill you.  (South Korea)
• Don't toast someone with water, or you're cursing them with bad luck.  (Germany)
• Whistling indoors will summon a demon.  (Lithuania)
• Standing chopsticks upright in your rice bowl is extremely rude, because the crossed chopsticks look like the Japanese character for the number four, which is supposed to represent death.  (Japan)
• Don't shake hands or kiss across a threshold, or you will eventually fall out.  (Russia)
• Having two mirrors facing each other on opposite walls opens a door for Satan.  (Mexico)
• If you're giving a knife or something else sharp as a gift, it can sever the relationship; so the recipient is supposed to give you a penny in return, so that it's a purchase, not a gift.  (Denmark)
• If you walk backwards, it's bad luck, because you're showing the devil which way you were going.  (Portugal)
• Stepping in dog shit is good luck, but only if you do so with your left foot.  (France)
• You should always enter a room with your right foot.  Especially if you've just come from France.  (Spain)

(My sources for the above, if you're curious, are here, here, and here.)

I wonder how the hell these superstitions started.  I know that for some superstitions, the origin is in the religious beliefs of the culture; the practice of throwing spilled salt over the left shoulder actually dates from Roman times, where salt was a valuable commodity -- in fact, the English word salary comes from the Latin word meaning salt -- and spilling it was considered careless and wasteful.  To make up for it you were supposed to give a pinch of it to the household spirits, the Lares and Penates, who hovered around behind you watching you eating dinner.

Because that's not creepy at all.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar / CC BY-SA 3.0, Saleros - 5394, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But for some of them, it's hard to imagine any events that could have led to the conviction that they were true.  I mean, "rabbit rabbit?"  Did people in medieval England try various animal names every day until they found a combination of animal and day of the month that preceded their having a good day?  And I'm sorry, stepping in dog shit is not in any sense auspicious.

I own two dogs and I know whereof I speak.

It does bear mention that there are a few completely bizarre-sounding superstitions that have at least semi-logical origins.  In northern Germany, for example, there's an old belief that when a baby is born, the grandma is supposed to kiss the baby's forehead, and if she tastes salt, the baby will be sickly and die young.  This seems ridiculous -- until you find out that northern Germany has the world's highest incidence of the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis, which has as one of its symptoms extremely salty sweat.

Another one that has a genetic origin is the old prohibition amongst the Basques -- especially the women -- against marrying non-Basques.  While on the surface this seems like the usual insularity and cultural/ethnic purity nonsense, there's more to it.  Similar to the German belief, the superstition here is that a Basque woman marrying a non-Basque man will be cursed to have their children die in infancy.

Which turns out to have a kernel of truth.  The Basques have the highest incidence in the world of the Rh negative blood allele, a recessive gene that causes people who are homozygous (who inherited a copy from each parent) to lack a particular protein in the blood.  This causes no health effects for the person; but if a Rh-negative woman conceives an Rh-positive child, there's a good chance of Rh incompatibility syndrome, where the mother's immune system recognizes the blood protein in the child to be foreign, and proceeds to destroy the baby's blood cells.  And this is only possible if the father is Rh-positive -- meaning (probably) non-Basque.

So unlike just about every other prohibition against marrying outside of your culture, this one does have a basis in reality.

But the majority of superstitions admit of no easy explanation other than accident and confirmation bias.  And you'd think all it would take is one or two counterexamples -- people who slept soundly in a closed room with a fan running and woke up perfectly healthy, for example -- to make people say, "Oh.  I guess that's not true, then.  What goobers we are."

For some reason, though, that doesn't seem to happen, and I'm at a loss to explain why.

In any case, these beliefs are interesting from an anthropological standpoint, even if they're a bit maddening to the skeptics of the world.  There are about a million others I didn't mention (further supporting the Senegalese maxim that "there are forty different kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense).  If you know any especially funny, weird, or cool ones, leave a note in the comments.  But now, I need to go fix myself some breakfast.  I hope the coffee maker and the microwave aren't in cahoots again.  They don't like me, for some reason.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is pure fun, and a great gift for any of your friends who are cryptid fanciers: Graham Roumieu's hilarious Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir.

In this short but hysterically funny book, we find out from the Big Guy's own mouth how hard it is to have the reputation for being huge, hairy, and bad-smelling.  Okay, even he admits he doesn't smell great, but it's not his fault, as showers aren't common out in the wilderness.  And think about the effect this has on his self-image, not to mention his success rate of advertising in the "Personals" section of the newspaper.

So read this first-person account of the struggles of this hirsute Everyman, and maybe even next time you're out hiking, bring along a little something for our australopithecene distant cousin.

He's very fond of peach schnapps.

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

Oarfish, earthquakes, and shadow people

I'm perpetually astonished at how little it takes to get the woo-woos going.

I suppose, though, that's the definition of confirmation bias -- taking thin evidence (or skimpy anecdote) as incontrovertible support for what you already believed.  Me, I try to approach stuff with more caution -- I'm not perfect, but I do my best when confronted with a strange or intriguing story to stop and think, "Wait a moment, how do I know this is true... and means what people are saying it means?"

I ran into two particularly good examples of that yesterday.  In the first, we have people saying that the appearance of three dead oarfish in coastal Japan is indicative that they're in for a major undersea earthquake and tsunami.  Now, there's no doubt that seeing an oarfish would make you sit up and take notice; they live in deep waters and are usually only seen when they're dead or dying, and can get up to eleven meters long.  (Yes, I double-checked that statistic, and it's correct.)

American servicemen displaying a dead oarfish they found off the coast of California in 1996 [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I suppose it's no wonder that people stop and say, "Okay, that's weird," when they see one.  But oarfish are not uncommon, despite seldom being seen; and there are lots of cases of dead oarfish washing up on shore that were not followed by geological catastrophes.   "I have around twenty specimens of this fish in my collection so it’s not a very rare species, but I believe these fish tend to rise to the surface when their physical condition is poor, rising on water currents, which is why they are so often dead when they are found," said Hiroyuki Motomura, professor of ichthyology at Kagoshima University.  "The link to reports of seismic activity goes back many, many years, but there is no scientific evidence of a connection so I don’t think people need to worry."

Which, of course, will have precisely zero effect on the woo-woos.  What the hell does some silly scientist know about, um, science?  There will be an earthquake, you'll see!  (Of course, it helps that the oarfish were found on the coast of Japan, because Japan is -- stick with me, here -- a freakin' earthquake zone.)

The other story comes from a perusal of some twelve million documents that were declassified two years ago by the CIA.  This started all the conspiracy theorists sifting through them, because of course if the CIA wanted to keep an evil conspiracy secret, the first thing they'd do is declassify all the files surrounding it.  But even the wooiest woo-woo takes a while to go through twelve million files, so it was only a couple of weeks ago that we found out that in the files were photographs of...

... "shadow people."

We're told about how spooky and eerie these photographs are, and how they could be aliens or ghosts, or connected to MKUltra or the Illuminati or god alone knows what else.  "The silhouettes are composed of visual noise, almost like television static," we're told, "and have empty voids where their faces should be."  There were two of them, we find out, and each silhouette has a number on it -- 1569 on one, 1572 on the other.

I thought, "Okay, that does sound pretty creepy."  And naturally, I wanted to see the images myself.  So I clicked the link, and here's what I saw:

And I said -- this is a direct quote -- "You have got to be fucking kidding me right now."

This isn't a photograph, it's a drawing.  And not even a very good one.  (In the interest of rigorous research, I looked at the other one, which is identical except for saying "1572" and facing the other direction.)  It is mildly curious that these would be in CIA files, although I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that the CIA people stuck 'em in there when they declassified the files in order to watch the woo-woos leap about and make excited little squeaking noises.

Which is exactly what happened.

The universe is a wonderful, complex, intriguing, mysterious place.  There is plenty to investigate, plenty to be amazed at, without making shit up or stretching pieces of observable evidence to the snapping point.  So let's all calm down a little, okay?  I'm sure Japan will eventually have another major earthquake (cf. my previous comment about earthquake zones), and I'm also sure there'll be weird random things in the CIA files, whether or not my surmise about people sticking them in deliberately to stir the pot turns out to be true.  But grabbing those little pieces of data and running off the cliff with them is not advisable.

Confirmation bias, unfortunately, makes a terrible parachute.

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A particularly disturbing field in biology is parasitology, because parasites are (let's face it) icky.  But it's not just the critters that get into you and try to eat you for dinner that are awful; because some parasites have evolved even more sinister tricks.

There's the jewel wasp, that turns parasitized cockroaches into zombies while their larvae eat the roach from the inside out.  There's the fungus that makes caterpillars go to the highest branch of a tree and then explode, showering their friends and relatives with spores.   Mice whose brains are parasitized by Toxoplasma gondii become completely unafraid, and actually attracted to the scent of cat pee -- making them more likely to be eaten and pass the microbe on to a feline host.

Not dinnertime reading, but fascinating nonetheless, is Matt Simon's investigation of such phenomena in his book Plight of the Living Dead.  It may make you reluctant to leave your house, but trust me, you will not be able to put it down.

Going up

Well, it's happened again; a reader has sent me a weird superstition (this one almost amounts to an urban legend) that I'd never heard of before.

You've all heard about the goofy children's game "Bloody Mary," wherein you're supposed to stare into a mirror at night and chant "Bloody Mary" a bunch of times (even those in the know vary the requirement greatly; I've seen everything from twenty to a hundred), and then... nothing happens.

So it's a pretty exciting game, as you will no doubt agree.

What's supposed to happen is that the blood-drenched visage of a female ghost will appear in the mirror instead of your own face.  She's supposedly the restless spirit of a woman who killed children.  Which I can sort of sympathize with.  If I was yanked around and forced to appear in mirrors over and over all night long by kids at sleepovers chanting my name, I'd probably want to throttle the little brats, too.

Be that as it may, we have a tale out of Korea that is similar in spirit (rimshot), if not in detail, to the Bloody Mary legend.  This one is called "Elevator to Another World," and gives you instructions for using an elevator to access some hitherto unreachable and mysterious place.

[image courtesy of photographer Joe Mabel and the Wikimedia Commons]

Here's what you're supposed to do:

1. Find a building that's at least ten stories tall.  (Nota bene: Through all of the remaining steps except the last one, you're supposed to stay in the elevator.)
2. Go to the tenth floor.
3. Go to the fourth floor.
4. Go to the sixth floor.
5. Go back to the tenth floor.  If you hear voices at this point, don't answer 'em.
6. Go to the fifth floor.  When the door opens, if a woman gets on, don't talk to her.  Which sounds like good advice re: people on elevators in most cases.
7. Press the button for the first floor.  If the elevator goes down, you did something wrong.  What should happen is that the elevator should go back up to the tenth floor.  The woman may shriek at you at this point, but you're supposed to ignore her, even if she shrieks what I would, which would be, "Will you stop playing with the fucking elevator and let me go to my floor?"
8. When the door opens on the tenth floor, get out.  You're in another world.  What you're supposed to do about the woman, I don't know.

So after having a nice look-see in the alternate universe, to get back, return to the elevator (it has to be the same one you used for steps #1-8), and do the steps again in that order.  When you press the button for the first floor in step #7 and the elevator begins to ascend, find the "stop" button and halt the elevator, then press the first floor button again.  You should return safely to the first floor, and must exit the building immediately.

What is this "Other World" like, you might be wondering?  From the account linked above, the two most common characteristics reported are that the Other World is (1) dark, and (2) empty. Which makes it sound rather unappealing. If I'm going to expend a lot of time and effort, I want to at least end up somewhere sunny, featuring drinks with little umbrellas.  But none of that, apparently.  Some people have mentioned seeing a "red cross" in the distance, but the author of the article says that "it may not be a cross."

Whatever that means.

This all puts me in mind of a wonderful book by Haruki Murakami called Dance Dance Dance, wherein a guy in a Japanese hotel takes an elevator and stumbles on a mysterious floor that is somehow sandwiched in between two other ordinary floors, and therein he meets a weird character called the Sheep Man.  It's weird, surreal fun, and is written with Murakami's signature lucid, simple style -- he has a way of making the oddest things seem as if they're absolutely normal.

I'm not sure if the Korean urban legend inspired Murakami's book, which would be nice because then it'd actually have accomplished something other than making gullible people waste time going up and down on an elevator.  On the other hand, if you want to give it a try, I encourage you to do so and post your results here.  

Other than building security telling you to stop playing with the elevator.

We've got your number

Today's question is: how far should you go in accommodating people's irrational superstitions?

The whole question comes up because last week, town councillors in Richmond Hill, Ontario voted to ban the number four from any new street addresses.  "The number 4 in different Chinese cultures," councillor Greg Beros said in an interview, "the Asian culture, in their language it sounds like the word death, and that has a very bad connotation for them."

Notwithstanding that Mr. Beros seems to be confused on the difference between "Chinese" and "Asian," not to mention the fact that "Asian" is not a language, he is correct that in traditional Chinese folklore the number four does have bad associations.  And the town had already set a precedent in this direction by previously outlawing addresses containing the number 13.

My reaction, predictably, is: seriously?

At what point do you just have to say, "I'm sorry, that's ridiculous?"  Now, don't get me wrong; I'm all for treating people with respect, and that includes granting them the right to believe whatever they want to.  But that respect of their right to belief does not extend to a requirement that I respect the belief itself.  You are perfectly free to believe that the letter "S" is unlucky, and to refuse to buy a house with an address containing an "S."  It is also within your rights to refuse even to drive past 767 South Sissinghurst Street.  But it is well within my rights to consider your belief superstitious nonsense, and there is no reason in the world that town governments should feel obliged to act as if your claim has any basis in reality.

Oh, I know a lot of this has to do with money.  Town councillors are concerned with economics, and a lot of economics has to do with selling real estate.  If a significant fraction of the houses aren't going to sell (as would be the case in my "letter S" example, assuming a large number of people believed that), the town governors' actions would be simple pragmatism.  But in Richmond Hill, it's just two numbers -- 4 and 13 -- that are outlawed.  (Councillor Beros emphasized that house numbers containing 4s were okay, such as 14, 24, and so on -- it was only the single-digit number 4 that was verboten.)  So we're not denying the majority of the housing to a substantial proportion of the population, here.  The solution is simple: if you don't want a house with the number 4, then don't buy one.

Of course, I recognize that this is a losing battle.  Because of the weirdness associated with the number 13, many airplanes have no 13th row, and skyscrapers no 13th floor.  (If you're curious, the origin of the "unlucky 13" myth isn't certain, but may have started because there were thirteen people present at the Last Supper, an event that certainly didn't end well.)

Superstition, unfortunately, is still rampant in the world.  As I mentioned in a post last week,  the list of beliefs in lucky and unlucky actions is long (and bizarre).  But rational people need to be unafraid to identify those beliefs as what they are (i.e. untrue), and there's no reason in the world anyone should have to cater to the silly demands of someone who wants us to treat their mythology as if it were fact.