Journal of the Bizarre

A baseball executive, a sex-crazed playboy, and a wealthy doctor all suffer strange fates courtesy of the "evil eye".



The year was 1905, and fate seemed to be smiling upon three close friends who had all managed to achieve enormous success in the prime of their youth. Harry Clay Pulliam, at the age of thirty-six, was already in his third year as president of the wildly popular National League. It was Pulliam who, in 1899, convinced a young shortstop named Honus Wagner to leave the Louisville Colonels and play in Pittsburgh, where Pulliam served as team president. Pulliam's close friend, a young Pittsburgh doctor named Walter S. Bingaman, was one of the most prominent physicians in the Steel City. Both men were also friends with Harry Kendall Thaw, the raconteuring heir to a multi-million dollar railroad fortune. In the early 20th century, these three inseperable friends were the lords of the Allegheny, the kings of Pittsburgh.

In just a few short years their empires woul…

The Twitterverse has been exploding in recent hours with allegations being made that the mugshot of Sandra Bland, who authorities claim hanged herself inside her jail cell after a controversial arrest in Texas on July 20, is not really a mugshot at all- but was taken after she was murdered by police. Many proponents of this theory allege that Bland's corpse was "posed", and then digitally manipulated or enhanced to make it appear as though she were alive.

Unfortunately, this conspiracy is difficult to debunk or confirm with so little that is presently known about Bland's death (which was ruled a suicide after her autopsy). What's worse is that very few "sources" in regards to the mugshot photo are unbiased, with those denying the conspiracy being labeled as racists, and those alleging a conspiracy labeled as race-baiters. Since we have no political or social biases when it comes to investigating the strange and unusual, we've decided to throw our ha…

I've been a sucker for ghost stories my entire life, but my favorite type of ghost stories are those in which the apparition of somebody who just died appears before a witness who didn't even know the other person was dead. It kinda adds a certain touch of credibility to the story, and lends credence to the possibility of life after death. Now that I think about it, maybe that's why so many of us are fascinated by ghosts; maybe the fascination stems from the fact that we're subconsciously looking for answers to questions about our own mortality.

The following incident took place in Cleveland in 1886.