Journal of the Bizarre

Dowsing, also known as divining, is the ancient practice of locating buried objects with twigs or metal rods. While the mind immediately conjures up old-time treasure hunters searching for buried loot, dowsing has traditionally been used to its greatest extent in the search for underground water. Even today, some utility workers use dowsing rods to locate buried pipes and cables-- much to the eye-rolling of "enlightened" skeptics.

Yes, the overwhelming consensus is that dowsing is a pseudoscience. The art of dowsing has never been shown to work in a controlled scientific experiment, and even famed skeptic James Randi tested the claims of numerous dowsers in the form of his now-defunct One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. Dowsers who participated in the challenge by agreeing to find buried water pipes under highly-controlled circumstances all met with utter failure.

However, there are some educated persons who maintain that dowsing really does work. After all, there are co…

This fascinating story comes from 1893, and features a haunted electric streetcar. According to the story, every time the car passes by Laurel Grove Cemetery, the cries of a child can be heard. The story also points out that the haunted streetcar, "No. 26", had recently struck a killed a child. Spooky!

Pierre Davis made his home in a small hut on the bank of the Canadian River, near the village of Porum in Oklahoma's Muskogee County.  He lived in solitude in this humble abode for thirty years, and during that time he never journeyed more than six miles in any direction, and then only for the most necessary of provisions.  Pierre stood six feet tall, was finely built, and had a commanding presence.  However, it was neither Pierre's hut nor his imposing physique which made him famous throughout Muskogee County; it was his hobby.  Pierre Davis' hobby was prophecy and, from what history records of the hermit, he was pretty darn good at it.

Unlike many prophets, whose predictions are vague and open to interpretation, Pierre had a specialty.  His predictions were limited to floods.  So accurate were Pierre's predictions that railroad workers from the Midland Valley Railroad consulted with the revered recluse before laying tracks and building bridges.  Three times, in the a…

George Flower, a farmer from Indiana who lived during the early 20th century, was a man whose name is little remembered today. He amassed no great fortune, nor did he rise to a position of power. But his little-known story and strange legacy should be remembered as a cautionary tale about what happens when a mere mortal decides to tempt fate.

Flower's troubles began in 1902 after he purchased a strip of land in Sand Ridge, near the city of Vincennes, in order to enlarge his farm. On this strip of land was the oldest cemetery in the area, containing more than three hundred graves. Flower pulled up the headstones, using them to build a foundation for his new home. The unused headstones he threw in the Embarras River. He then plowed up the land and planted melons and potatoes.

Shortly thereafter he noticed that that, while the crops he planted on the rest of the farm flourished, the crops he had planted on the grounds of the old graveyard withered and rotted. Some of the crops were …

The Carrara region of Italy is famous for its marble, which has been used by artists and craftsmen since the days of the ancient Roman Empire. Some of the most famous structures in the world have been built with Carrara marble-- the Pantheon and Trajan's Column, just to name a few-- as well as many of the great artistic works of the Renaissance, such as Michaelangelo's David.

Carrara, as it turns out, may also have been the home of one of the world's greatest practical jokers, as this article from an 1891 newspaper demonstrates.

Ever since April 6, 1909, history books have recorded Robert Edwin Peary as being the first person to reach the North Pole. Some scholars, however, claim that explorer Frederick Cook bested Peary by reaching the North Pole on April 21, 1908. While the Cook-versus-Peary debate has been going back and forth for over a century, it may all be a moot point-- since it's very likely that the first person to reach the North Pole was neither Cook nor Peary, but a little-known French Canadian trapper by the name of Joseph Zotique La Joie.

In the spring of 1900 a French Canadian fur trapper traveled to Washington, D.C. on a mission to prove to the scientific community that he was the first person to reach the North Pole, and had done so in 1894. This man, Joseph Z. La Joie, checked into the Hotel Raleigh on March 14 and entertained some of the world's foremost experts on Arctic exploration. Those who met with La Joie included famed polar explorer Gen. Adolphus Greely and Admiral George …

According to the UK's Daily Mail, sightings of the Loch Ness Monster have hit a record high, with a Michigan woman becoming the ninth person to spot "Nessie" in 2017.

Diana Turner reportedly spotted the mythical cryptid via webcam during a livestream of Loch Ness in the vicinity of Urquhart Castle, which is said to be a hotspot for Nessie sightings.

"The sighting lasted about two minutes and other than a boat in the distance, she saw no other traffic on the loch," said Gary Campbell, who maintains the official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register. Campbell has recorded over 1,080 various Nessie sightings during his career.

Turner's recording of Loch Ness was made on September 29, states the Daily Mail article.



Interestingly, while the Daily Mail considers this to be a "record year" for Nessie sightings, the very same article states that there were 17 documented sightings in 1996, and several years with 20-plus sightings during the 1960s and 1930s…

Located in north Texas, not far from the Oklahoma border, is the tiny rural village of Valley View. The village was born in the early 1870s when eighteen families decided to settle there, and eventually blossomed into a town complete with a post office, a couple of gristmills and churches, a hotel, and a connection to the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway. By the close of the 19th century Valley View boasted five hundred inhabitants. Although the village and the surrounding environs might have appeared quaint and charming to visitors, this sparsely-populated part of Cooke County also harbored a dark secret and a ghastly history.

About three miles west of the village stands a grove once known to the locals as Hangman's Grove. In spite of its name, the location doesn't appear as dreary as one might imagine; birds flitter cheerfully among the branches of stunted elm and walnut trees, while the soothing babbling of Indian Creek evokes a sense of serenity as it meanders toward Sp…

We came across the following article in the November 8, 1907 edition of the Pittsburgh Press and enjoyed the writer's first-person account of a spectacular haunting so much that we decided to reprint the original article.


Galveston, Tex., November 8.-- Thirty years ago, when the writer first visited the Allen Bayou country in the Chickasaw Nation it was as lonely a spot as a man would wish to see. The nearest habitation to our hunting grounds was nine miles distant, the home of an old hunter, Joseph Bozarth, who has long since passed to the happy hunting grounds.

About two miles distant from our cabin was a place said to be haunted. It was a shack without doors, without windows, and the chimney had fallen down. The cabin was situated in dense woods, cut off from any public road. There was an old cow path, but even that had been obliterated by the dense underbrush. A more admirable place for a haunted house could not be conceived of. To stumble on this place in the gloaming was enoug…

It seems that either something fishy is afoot, or that the survivors of the October 1 Las Vegas shooting are some of the unluckiest folks to ever walk the earth. First there was Kymberley Suchomel, the 28-year-old who passed away suddenly earlier this month in Apple Valley after fleeing the scene of the massacre. Suchomel, who had attended the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival, posted several detailed paragraphs of the shooting to her Facebook page on Oct. 4.

"I kept looking back expecting to see the gunmen- and I say MEN because there was more than one person. There was more than one gun firing. 100% more than one," she wrote, just days before she was found dead in her bed by her grandmother.

And then there was Danny Contreras, whose body was recently found inside an empty Las Vegas house with multiple gunshot wounds. He was found after a neighbor who called 911 after hearing the sound of a man groaning from inside a building on the 5800 block of East Carey Avenue. According…

"I am Charles Mark Brandon, duly authorized representative of the dead, and I am going to prove it!"
These are the words of a man who, from his nondescript modern apartment in Brooklyn, has produced scores of videos and photographs purporting to show evidence of the supernatural. Hundreds of these videos appear on his YouTube channel, "A Brooklyn Haunting", where the viewer comments run the gamut from "Wow, that's really weird" to the "Dude, what are you smoking?" variety.

In most of Charles' videos, the camera is fixated upon bathroom mirrors which allegedly reflect the faces of the dead, although some may speculate the faces are nothing more than a simple case of pareidolia caused by the combination of reflections of textured bathroom tiles, foggy glass and camera angles. Charles refutes this explanation, of course. "If I see faces, you see faces, someone else see faces, a bunch of people see faces, then how can it be this?" h…

A strange report from the Philadelphia Inquirer from April 26, 1902.

Jesus Campos, a.k.a. "The Vanishing Mandalay Bay Security Guard" finally emerged from hiding to give a highly-anticipated television interview. Being that he holds the key to solving the riddle of the ever-changing official timeline of events, Campos was sought out by journalists and television personalities throughout the country. He disappeared without warning, bailing on 5 scheduled television interviews, and emerged this week to appear on the Wednesday edition of Ellen DeGeneres' show.

Since "Ellen" is hardly synonymous with hard-hitting investigative journalism, Campos' decision to discuss the Oct. 1 Las Vegas shooting with DeGeneres left many people scratching their heads.
However, once you see how the threads of MGM and Ellen DeGeneres interweave, it's easy to put the pieces of the puzzle together and see why Campos agreed to appear on 'Ellen'.

First, in case you missed the interview, here's the summary.

During the interview, DeGener…

Jesus Campos, the security guard reportedly shot in the leg by Stephen Paddock at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on October 1, has received a ton of media scrutiny for his sudden disappearance and his strange behavior ever since the Las Vegas massacre, leading many conspiracy theorists to believe that Campos may have played the role of accomplice in the deadly event (thus far, no credible evidence has been found to support this theory).

Earlier today Fox News attempted to clear up some of the mystery surrounding Jesus Campos. According to David Hickey, labor boss of the Security, Police, and Fire Professionals of America (SPFPA), Campos was taken to a UMC Quick Care facility. Hickey told Fox News that Campos was looking forward to "telling his side of the story" and that it was Campos himself who requested permission to "go public".

But all that changed when Campos decided to bail on five scheduled television interviews, including one with Sean Hannity of Fox Ne…

On September 8 James Murren, CEO of MGM Resorts International-- owners of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino-- sold over 80% of his stock shares. Just three weeks later, the deadliest mass shooting in the modern history of the United States would unfold from within a room on the hotel's 32nd floor.

Was it a mere coincidence? ESP? Or is there a more sinister explanation?

According to the Ledger Gazette, Murren dumped 294,150 shares of MGM Resorts International stock on Friday, September 8, at a price of $34.08 per share. Murren pocketed $10,024,632 from the deal, while holding onto 71,442 shares of the company. Prior to the October 1 massacre, those shares had a combined value of $2,434,743. As of today, those same shares are now worth a mere $29.44 each.

In other words, if Murren had not dumped his stock shortly before Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers from inside his room at Mandalay Bay, he would've stood to lose approximately $1.7 million dollars. But he …

The conspiracy surrounding the Las Vegas shooting intensified deeply over the past 24 hours, first with the unexplained disappearance of Jesus Campos, the Mandalay Bay security guard who was set to give five television interviews. As we reported earlier, Campos' home had been under guard by armed private security while shooter Stephen Paddock's inexplicably unguarded Reno home-- part of a criminal investigation by the FBI-- was burglarized by unknown persons.

Next came the bizarre press conference just a few short hours ago in which Sheriff Lombardo and the LVPD banned conservative independent journalists Laura Loomer and Mike Tokes from attending and asking questions (it was Loomer and Tokes who first broke the story about the armed private security guard at the Campos home).

And now comes perhaps the most startling development in the case of the Las Vegas shooting-- the sudden death of a seemingly healthy 28-year-old witness who went on record claiming that there were multipl…

Yesterday we delved into the mystery surrounding the Las Vegas shooting and the unanswered questions surrounding Mandalay Bay security guard Jesus Campos, such as his peculiar GoFundMe page and the fact that his home is being protected by a private armed security guard. Independent investigative journalists have revealed that the company protecting Campos-- identified as "On Scene Investigation & Security, Inc."-- is a Las Vegas-based company whose business license expired in January of 2017.

Also adding fuel to the conspiracy theories was the report by investigative journalist Laura Loomer claiming that Campos' name has been "scrubbed" from the casino's employee database.

It was also reported earlier this week that gunman Stephen Paddock's Reno home was broken into.

But things have just taken a new bizarre twist. Gateway Pundit just announced that Jesus Campos is missing.

Campos was scheduled to appear on Sean Hannity's show on Fox News but, a…

Our regular readers have probably noticed that we don't delve into conspiracy theories as much as we used to, the reason being that it's not a lot of fun receiving angry emails threatening us with violence or lawsuits. A few months back we wrote an article about Seth Rich and it only took about 45 minutes before the death threats came rolling in (someone eventually flagged our article and those First Amendment-loving patriots at Google forced us to remove the piece). We also wrote several articles about Sandy Hook, only to be threatened with legal action by no less than four parties related to the victims (which seemed strange, since we never definitively concluded that Sandy Hook was a hoax, false flag or cover-up. In fact, we debunked quite a few claims made by some prominent Sandy Hook "Truthers"). When it comes to conspiracy theories, apparently you can't please everyone.
But the recent developments in the Las Vegas shooting case has forced us to once again q…