Friday the 13th

Next Friday is the 13th !!!

Why is Friday the 13th considered such an unlucky day?

The reasons why Friday came to be regarded as a day of bad luck have been obscured by the mists of time — some of the more common theories link it to some significant events in Christian tradition said to have taken place on Friday, such as the Crucifixion, Eve's offering the apple to Adam in the Garden of Eden, the beginning of the Great Flood, or the confusion at the Tower of Babel.

The number 13 also has some religious symbolism as there were 13 people at The Last Supper of Jesus, who was incidentally crucified on Good Friday, but no evidence has been found that Friday 13th was considered especially unlucky until the 19th century. The number 13, however, has a long history of association with ill-luck. It has been linked to the fact that a lunisolar calendar must have 13 months in some years, while the solar Gregorian calendar and lunar Islamic calendar always have 12 months in a year.

There is also another theory that Friday the 13th of October 1307 was the day that Philip IV of France arrested and subsequenty tortured and killed hundreds of the French Knights Templar to get their money for the French treasury. One other note which predates all of the aforementioned is that the first Passover seems to have occurred on Friday the 13th. The death of the firstborns of Egypt occurred on a Shabbat on the 14th of Nisan in the evening. But the Jewish calendar counts days from sunset to sunset so this would have been Friday the 13th in terms of the gentile reckoning of the days.

Feminists have argued that because of the lunar year and Friday being named after a goddess in most European pagan calendars, the fear of Friday the 13th is a patriarchal invention, associating femininity with bad luck.

By the way, the fear of Friday the 13th is called paraskevidekatriaphobia.

9/11 Prophecy on $20 bill ?

This info has been circulating on the internet since 2002 but this is the first time I've seen. Kinda cool and creepy at the same time. I guess some people has too much time on their hands to come up with stuff like this.

1. Fold a $20 bill in half so that you see the top half of the reverse side.

2. Fold the left half away from you as shown.

3. Fold the right half so that the burning Pentagon is revealed.

4. Flip the bill over to see the World Trade Center.

PS: As it turns out, folding a series of US bills beginning with $5 and ending with $100 produces what some regard as a chronological vignette of the World Trade Center disaster. See http://www.glennbeck.com/news/05172002.shtml

'Face' on a tree

Miah Majid, 60 years old, found a 'face' on her pinang (or betel nut) tree in Kampung Paya, Kedah last week. The 'face' is imprinted on the frond of the tree. As word about the tree spread, streams of visitors have been flocking to the village to look at the tree, which stands at 7.25m. The image faces east.

“The frond will probably last another two weeks. By then it should shed naturally. So far, nobody has asked to keep the frond,” she added.

Latest I heard was that people are trying to dig up the roots of the tree because they think that it might have some medicinal powers.

Eating aborted foetus in China - truth or urban myth?

Beware: Not for the faint of heart!!!

There's been a lot of articles flying around on the internet about the Chinese people in China eating aborted foetus as health food.

Did anybody see the movie 'Dumpling', starring Mirian Yeung and Tony Leung? It's about the wife of a prominent rich man who buys some special dumplings which will apparently sustain her youth and beauty. What she doesn't know is that the ingredients in the dumplings are made from minced foetus!

A lot of people has claimed that this is only an urban myth. After looking at the following pictures, I'm wondering if the stories are true somehow.

You can alo read more from the following article:
http://www.abortiontv.com/Glitch/AbortedBabiesSoldAsHealthFood.htm

Ghouls may come alive in museum

Not sure how many of you visited the 'Ghost' exhibition at the Shah Alam Museum. I didn't go myself probably because I was too scared :-) Anyway, there's so many articles in the newspapers recently about the exhibition.

The Director of Selangor Museum Board, Mohd Lotfi Nazar claims that 90% or the exhibits are real. Lotfi said he came up with the idea of exhibiting the ghost collection when he was involved in a project in Kuala Selangor. As he had a deep interest in the mystical world, several villagers who were also involved in the project convinced him to visit the Muzium Nurul A'la owned by Safuan Abu Bakar and which has rare items including a ghost collection.

Here are some pictures from the exhibition:



The following article was published in The Star yesterday:

The owner of the supernatural items being exhibited at the Sultan Alam Shah Museum here may finally have the opportunity to bring his “ghouls” to life.

And if the event takes place, Safuan Abu Bakar will be doing it at an annual paranormal conference held in Britain.

Bob Rickard, founding editor of a British paranormal magazine, who visited the exhibition recently, said he would source for sponsors to send Safuan as well as his team and exhibits to Britain.

“I will speak to my publisher as well as others who may be interested in seeing Safuan bring his exhibits to life,” said Rickard who founded the monthly magazine Fortean Times more than 30 years ago.

Rickard who visited the exhibition after reading about it in The Star also had a lengthy discussion with Safuan at the museum.

Sufi master Safuan had claimed that he could bring some of the supernatural items such as langsuir (vampire) to life to prove that they were genuine.

However, he said he would respect the wishes of the religious authorities, which prohibited him from doing so on grounds that the action would contravene Islamic norms.

“I won’t do it in Malaysia but if Bob (Rickard) manages to get me sponsorship to do it in Britain, I will do it there as part of a paranormal experiment,” he said.

Meanwhile, Rickard described the exhibits as some of the best that he had seen.

“I have gone to many exhibitions highlighting similar items but they are nothing near to what I’ve seen here,” said Rickard.

He praised the museum authorities for organising the exhibition to give the Malaysian public a glimpse into their cultural heritage.

“It is an excellent effort by the museum to bring this topic into discussion as well as to open the people’s eyes to their own historical and cultural identity,” said Rickard.

For me,I think it's all just a big publicity stunt to pull in the crowds. What do you guys think?

Photo of Ghost Girl

This photograph was taken by amateur photographer Tony O'Rahilly on 19th November 1995, as Wem Town Hall, Shropshire, England, burned to the ground. When O'Rahilly took the photo, neither he, nor other onlookers, saw the little girl in the doorway. The picture was taken with a 200mm lens from across the road because O'Rahilly and other onlookers were prevented by police and fire personnel from approaching the burning structure.

After the image was developed, O'Rahilly submitted it to the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena. They, in turn, sent the picture and the negative to photographic expert Dr. Vernon Harrison, former president of the Royal Photographic Society. Dr. Harrison analyzed the print and negative and reported that he was satisfied that the picture is genuine. "The negative is a straight forward piece of black-&-white work and shows no sign of having been tampered with," said Harrison.

A fire ravaged the town hall once before in 1677. The historical record indicates that the 1677 fire was caused by a young girl named Jane Churm, who had been careless with a candle and set the thatched roof of her home on fire. Many people of the town have reported seeing her ghost in the years since 1677, and many residents believe this photo to be her.

Despite the international publicity and visits from teams of 'ghostbusters', the image of the girl in the photo has never been properly explained.

Skeptics, including Dr. Harrison, have claimed the child is nothing more than the convenient arrangement of smoke, flame, light, and shadow at the moment of exposure. But what are the odds of smoke, flame, light, and shadow randomly forming the shape of a girl in the doorway of a building allegedly haunted by a girl, at the very moment a photographer took this picture?

Ghostly image in car park

Footage taken from CCTV in a car park. Scary man!!

Sea-Monster or Shark

On the 25th of April 1977, a Japanese trawler named Zuiyo Maru was trawling for mackerel about 30 miles east of Christchurch, New Zealand when it caught a strange, unknown creature in its net. The creature was thirty-three feet long and weighed about four thousand pounds. It had a one and a half meter long neck, four large, reddish fins and a tail about two meters long (which sort of resembles the Loch Ness monster).

The crew was convinced it was an unidentified creature, but despite the potential biological significance of the curious discovery, the captain decided to dump the carcass into the ocean again so not to risk spoiling the caught fish. However, before that, some photos and sketches were taken of the creature, measurements were taken and some samples of skeleton, skin and fins were collected for further analysis by experts in Japan.

The discovery resulted in immense commotion in Japan. Professor Tokio Shimaka from Yokohama University was convinced that the remains was of a supposedly extinct plesiousaur (or prehistoric 'sea-monster'). However, other scientists were more skeptical.

So was this a great basking shark or was it a relic from the past, a dinosaur or some other imcredible creature that may still live in our oceans today, trawling the depths of the only last undiscovered country on the planet. Other scientists have argued that it was actually a decayed basking shark.

So was this a great basking shark or was it a prehistoric sea-monster?

'Merman' mystery unfolds

A day after I posted the 'Merman' story on my blog, David Emery (who writes for Urban Legends and Folklore in About.com) wrote about the same story and his insight into the so-called mystery.

As I mentioned, the pictures were first posted in eBay by a seller who calls himself 'seamystery'. Apparently, 'seamystery' has auctioned off items like this before, including one specimen billed as a Feejee Mermaid which incidentally was also up on sale on the website of a taxidermy artist Juan Cabana. If you go to his website http://www.thefeejeemermaid.com/ you will see a picture of the 'merman' there.

David Emery wrote to Juan Cabana and asked, "Is this one of your creations?" To which he replied, "I got that photo from a fan of my site so I put it up. Never saw it before in my life. Looks real to me."

Emery points out that while Juan Cabana is well known among aficionados of "gaff art" (the construction of sideshow artifacts) and has even been publicly lauded for the quality of his work, he customarily pretends that the artifacts were discovered, not made. It's the "performance" aspect of the art, you might say. From time to time he does take credit for fabricating the objects, however, as when he appeared on George Noory's "Coast to Coast" radio show, for example, to discuss his "fantastic creations made from such elements as fish & animal remains, steel and fiberglass." And what should appear next to Cabana's name on the "Coast to Coast" Web site but a picture of the "merman" himself!

'Merman' found in Teluk Bahang

Photos of a 'merman' has been circulating on the Internet recently. It was supposedly caught by a fisherman in Teluk Bahang beach in Penang. The 6 photos of the creature, taken from various angles, were attached to an email titled "Teluk Bahang Fisherman Found This! Newspaper Not Allowed To Publish?" When a reader forwarded the email to a local Chinese newspaper, the Department of Fisheries was contacted to find out more about the creature. An official from the department said that they had not received any reports about the odd catch, nor had they ever heard anything about such a creature. He requested that the photos of the creature's body be forwarded to his department so they could verify the incident.

The creature is vaguely humanoid in shape, its body is roughly the length of an adult man, with two long fins that resemble large ears on its head. It also has two arm-like projections, and is covered in gleaming scales. Did this creature really turn up in Teluk Bahang, or is this just a clever hoax? The photos certainly look real. If they are fakes, then a lot of skill and effort must have gone into making them.

Footnote: After searching through the internet, I found out that the pictures were actually from eBay. The seller in eBay claims that the creature was found in Fort Desoto Beach in Florida. The seller's id is seamystery. The bid was closed on July 06. The circulation of the pictures in Malaysia only started in August. So this explains that the creature was never found in Teluk Bahang. However, the question still lies as in whether the creature is real or fake. The winning bidder is mysterymuseum. His feedback on eBay was "REAL GOLDEN Mermaid - A Million Dollar Attraction - MYSTERYMUSEUM.COM-A++++"

What is Forteana?

Everybody loves a good mystery. From conspiracy theories and paranormal phenomenas to ghost stories and urban legends, people have always been fascinated by the unknown and the unexplained.

Forteana (or Fortean phenomena), named after Charles Fort, refers to the strange and anomalous phenomena which are rejected by mainstream science. Charles Fort (1874 - 1932) was an American writer and researcher into unexplained phenomena. For over thirty years, Fort sat in the libraries of New York and London trying to find reports of what are now popularly called “anomalies,” things that aren’t what they are supposed to be…especially in the eyes of science. By 1930 he had collected “some 60,000” of them, mostly jotted down on scraps of butcher’s paper. Fort was sceptical of scientific explanations, observing how scientists argued according to their own beliefs rather than the rules of evidence and that inconvenient data was ignored, suppressed, discreditedor explained away. Fort is considered by many as the father of modern paranormalism, not only because of his interest in strange phenomena, but because of his "modern" attitude towards religion, 19th century spiritualism, and scientific dogma.

Even though I do not believe in all the stories that I read and hear, I still keep an open mind on them and am very fascinated by them. I read and collect as much information about these subjects as I can as a hobby. I don't make assumptions about the information or draw any conclusions. I hope my friends and readers will share their experiences with me on this blog as well.