Journal of the Bizarre

The legend of "The Blue Man of Spring Creek" has been circulating throughout the Ozarks of Douglas County, Missouri, since the times of the Civil War. Those familiar with the legend will note the striking similarities to Bigfoot. However, since the "Blue Man" predates most North American accounts of Bigfoot and Sasquatch, could it be possible that this mysterious creature was the true "missing link"? Might the "Blue Man" possibly be the patriarch of all Bigfoots?

The legend can trace its roots back to the winter of 1865, when a hunter named Sol Collins stood on the ridge between Big North Fork and Spring Creek. Collins, an experienced and expert hunter, was following wild game tracks in the snow and came upon a track he had never seen before. It was similar to that of a bear, but longer and much broader, and imprinted in the snow were marks indicating long, deadly claws.
Assuming he had stumbled across the tracks of the biggest bear in Ozark histo…

It is a widely accepted fact that people from many cultures, from the Aborigines of the Australian Outback to some present-day Native Americans, refuse to be photographed because they believe that a photograph can "steal" a soul, permanently entrapping it within the film. It's easy to scoff at such an idea, dismissing this belief as simple-minded ignorance or fear of a misunderstood technology.
But is there more to this belief than meets the eye?

Whether or not this belief is pure superstition, history records at least one experiment which seems to have uncovered a strange psychic link between a person and his photograph.

This experiment was the brainchild of controversial British scientist, George de la Warr. De la Warr, who was regarded as a luminary in the allegedly pseudoscientific field of radionics, is perhaps most famous for patenting a camera that could supposedly detect and cure disease using energy frequencies. But it was an experiment condicted by de la Warre in…

On March 15, 1892, the schooner Mirabel arrived in Philadelphia after a journey from the Cuban port of Matanzas. When she pulled into port, it was evident that something was wrong. Very wrong. What follows next is a strange, unbelievable, but entirely true tale of the briny deep.

The first indication that something was amiss aboard the Mirabel was that the entire crew, except for the captain, was entirely new. It was not the same crew that had departed from Matanzas on January 20, and Captain Joseph Sims was deluged with questions from those who anxiously waited on the docks for the return of their seafaring husbands and sons.

When the Mirabel had left Cuba, the schooner was manned by thirty experienced sailors, mostly Englishmen. Nearly all of them had served on the Mirabel for a number of years. However, before setting sail for Matanzas several new crewmen had been taken on. Captain Sims was delighted to discover that these new men proved to be capable sailors and hard workers. Excep…

Because of its many greenhouses and thriving floral and plant-growing industries, the central Illinois city of Pana has come to be known as the "City of Roses". Yet, beneath its pleasant veneer, the city of Pana has a dark side and a lurid past. It is home to the infamous Pana Massacre and Riots of 1899, a labor strike that turned deadly on April 10 when a skirmish between African-American miners and strikebreakers left seven dead and several more wounded. The entire black community of Pana was driven out of the city, even though historians agree that the first shot was fired by a white policeman.

Perhaps then it is fitting that, in the years following the massacre, one Pana church seemed to suffer a bizarre fate. Some would call it a curse from God Almighty Himself. This is the true story of St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church or, as some might have believed, the most cursed church in the world.

In 1906 the church's pastor, Father William Weigand, came forward and to…