Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded the gates of the Underworld, stopped the wailing ghosts who wanted to return to the Earth above. As well as the three heads (all dripping with venomous drool), Cerberus had a serpent’s tail, a mane of hissing snakes and lion feet with massive claws.
One of the great hero Heracles’s tasks was to steal him and deliver him to King Eurytheus of Tiryns. Eurystheus was a cowardly man, and as soon as he saw his new pet, he hid in an olive oil jar. Heracles had to take Cerberus all the way back to his master, the dark God Hades. The poisonous aconite flower is said to have grown from Cerberus’s slobber.
12:31 pm • 28 August 2011 • 26 notes
The Scandinavian Goddess of Hel rules the underworld named after herself. Her plate is Hunger and her sliverwear is Famine. Her appearance is described as half-black and half-flesh colored, and as further having a gloomy, down-cast appearance.
12:30 pm • 25 August 2011 • 22 notes
Baba Yaga, known by various other names, is a haggish or witchlike character in Slavic folklore. She flies around on a giant pestle, kidnaps (and presumably eats) small children, and lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs.
According to Russian folklore, Baba Yaga dwells, in the words of the preface to Alexander Pushkin’s fantasy poem Ruslan and Lyudmila, in a “cabin on chicken legs… with no windows and no doors”. Baba Yaga herself usually uses the chimney to fly in and out on her mortar. The door sometimes appears at the other side of the hut; to see it, a hero should say “Hut, O hut, turn your back to the woods, your front to me” and thus force the cabin to turn around and discover the door.
Baba Yaga is sometimes shown as an antagonist, and sometimes as a source of guidance; there are stories in which she helps people with their quests, and stories in which she kidnaps children and threatens to eat them. Seeking out her aid is usually portrayed as a dangerous act. An emphasis is placed on the need for proper preparation and purity of spirit, as well as basic politeness. It is said she ages one year every time she is asked a question, which may explain her reluctance to help. This effect, however, can be reversed with a special blend of tea made with blue roses.
6:00 pm • 23 August 2011 • 140 notes
Genie is the pseudonym for a feral child who spent nearly all of the first thirteen years of her life locked inside a bedroom strapped to a potty chair. She was a victim of one of the most severe cases of social isolation in American history. Genie was discovered by Los Angeles authorities on November 4, 1970.
Genie spent the next 12 years of her life locked in her bedroom. During the day, she was tied to a child’s potty chair in diapers; some nights, when she hadn’t been completely forgotten, she was bound in a sleeping bag and placed in an enclosed crib with a cover made of metal screening. Indications are that Genie’s father beat her with a large stick if she vocalized, and he barked and growled at her like a dog in order to keep her quiet. He also rarely allowed his wife and son to leave the house or even to speak, and he expressly forbade them to speak to Genie. By the age of 13, Genie was almost entirely mute, commanding a vocabulary of about 20 words and a few short phrases (nearly all negative, such as “stop it” and “no more”).
12:30 pm • 14 August 2011 • 1,451 notes
Kevin Cooper had escaped from asylums and prisons 12 times before 4 June, 1983, on the night of which he broke into a random house in Chino Hills, California, where the Ryen family lived. The father, Bill, went there the next day and found the entire family hacked to death all over the house. There was blood on the ceiling. His ex-wife, Peggy, and her husband Franklin, were dead, with as many as 30 stab wounds each, as were their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and Bill’s 11-year-old son, Christopher. The youngest, 8-year-old Joshua Ryen, was still alive, and miraculously survived with a slashed throat and hatchet wound through his skull.
Cooper has sworn his innocence ever since, but DNA evidence says otherwise. The fact that he is attempting to save himself by lying seems to indicate his sanity.
(Source: listverse.com)
12:30 pm • 5 August 2011 • 14 notes
As the picture above illustrates, The Feejee (Fiji) Mermaid did not represent the popular ideal of the mermaid of folklore. Far from being a beautiful fish maiden, The Feejee Mermaid was essentially a disgusting abomination of taxidermy often described as a ‘salmon with sagging breasts’. The face, while moderately human in appearance, carried an indescribable look of horror that terrified many an observer.
The ‘human’ portion of the mermaid was determined to be the body of an orangutan and the bottom belonged to a large salmon. While the taxidermy appeared to be quite gruesome, it was actually masterfully done and no seams were visible to the naked eye.
(Source: thehumanmarvels.com)
12:30 pm • 4 August 2011 • 70 notes
The Monster Study was a stuttering experiment on 22 orphan children in Davenport, Iowa, in 1939 conducted by Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa. Johnson chose one of his graduate students, Mary Tudor, to conduct the experiment and he supervised her research. After placing the children in control and experimental groups, Tudor gave positive speech therapy to half of the children, praising the fluency of their speech, and negative speech therapy to the other half, belittling the children for every speech imperfection and telling them they were stutterers. Many of the normal speaking orphan children who received negative therapy in the experiment suffered negative psychological effects and some retained speech problems during the course of their life. Dubbed “The Monster Study” by some of Johnson’s peers who were horrified that he would experiment on orphan children to prove a theory, the experiment was kept hidden for fear Johnson’s reputation would be tarnished in the wake of human experiments conducted by the Nazis during World War II. The University of Iowa publicly apologized for the Monster Study in 2001.
(Source: listverse.com)
12:30 pm • 3 August 2011 • 49 notes
Ichthyosis finds its etymological origins in the Greek term for ‘fish’, however the majority of human exhibits afflicted with the skin condition often adopted an Alligator-themed epithet. Susi’s skin, however, was particularly coarse and cracked and the title of ‘elephant-skinned’ seemed more appropriate and illustrative.
While accounts do vary Susi was likely born in 1909 as Charlotte in the western district of Berlin. In early childhood Susi’s ichthyosis manifested aggressively and her skin quickly thickened, turned grey and cracked to visually elephantine properties. Due to the severity of her condition, Susi endured daily physical pain. Her pain was further amplified by multiple infections and illnesses as bacteria invaded the major cracks formed in her skin from even her most subtle movements. During her early years, Susi couldn’t even blink her eyes without risking life-threatening cracks.
In addition to the physical pain, Susi also endured emotional pain as she was the subject of ridicule and segregation from her peers. During the hot summer days, while the other children frolicked in the water, Susi rubbed ice over her arms in an effort to cool down as her skin condition left her unable to sweat. As the children pointed and laughed at her she would not shed a single tear. Her condition had robbed her of that ability as well.
Susi’s parents, in an effort to improve the quality of her life and to prevent infection opportunities, lathered Susi with generous amounts of oil and moisturizer on a daily basis. Susi’s parents were also highly concerned with her general appearance and took to peeling the skin from her face on a nightly basis. Both practices did wonders as her skin became suppler and her facial complexion cleared to reveal an attractive face. Susi would, however, need to repeat the daily procedures for the rest of her life.
By all accounts Susi was a shy, introverted and quiet woman who preferred to keep a low profile and exhibit sparingly. She exhibited herself more or less locally until her manager passed away in the late 1960’s. With his death, Susi’s career and heart for the business died as well. Her last confirmed public appearance was at the Great Allentown Fair in Pennsylvania as a single attraction billed as ‘The Swamp Girl’.
12:31 pm • 2 August 2011 • 38 notes
Adolf Eichmann was the organizational talent that orchestrated the mass deportation of Jews from their countries into waiting ghettos and extermination camps. A prodigy of Heydrich, he is sometimes referred to as “the architect of the Holocaust”. He learned Hebrew and studied all things Jewish in order to manipulate Jews, through his power of coercion, to leave their occupied territories and possessions in favor of a better life in the ghettos. At the end of the war, he was doing the same to Hungarian Jews and, if it wasn’t for the intervention of Raoul Wallenberg, the number of victims of the holocaust would have been much higher. He fled Germany at the end of the war via a ratline to south America, and was captured by the Mossad in Argentina. He was extradited to Israel and executed by hanging in 1962, after a highly publicized trial.
(Source: listverse.com)
10:00 pm • 1 August 2011 • 24 notes
