Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Nov 4, 2009, 10:30 pm
After a long break, the CoC returns with a brief look at some arboreal delights and wonders: Earth's oldest living inhabitant, Methuselah, is a bristlecone pine nearly 3,050m (10,000ft) up in C...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Nov 4, 2009, 1:34 am
As part of the build up to the release of The Men Who Stare at Goats in Blighty The Guardian has published a number of articles including one from Mark Pilkington. He looks at the myths the military h...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Nov 3, 2009, 1:39 am
A strange story emerges from Fiji, where a man has been burning footprints in the grass he walks on (like I do when I step on consecrated ground). However, there is no obvious cause and nothing in the...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Nov 2, 2009, 1:58 am
Well it has been a while since The End is Nigh 3 but here comes TEIN 4, with a lovely cover from Defoe artist Leigh Gallagher: I've got a piece in it on the gathering storm that is global w...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Nov 1, 2009, 1:52 am
Werewolves are one of the most commonly reported phenomena in Britain, of which the Cannock werewolf is the most famous (or is it something weirder?). Now a special Halloween fieldtrip on the Wrexham-...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 31, 2009, 1:00 am
Transubstantiation is one of those core principles of Catholicism - water into wine, that kind of thing. But the Eucharist into heart tissue? Actual heart tissue? It'd certainly put an overly-lite...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 30, 2009, 1:04 am
we have dealt with some weird eating stories but this might take the biscuit, not that this woman would eat it as this is an X-ray of her stomach: A woman obsessed with swallowing spoons and fo...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 29, 2009, 1:39 am
We have looked at two British cases from the early 1940s which would these days be slotted into a flying saucer interpretation but seem much more like visionary experiences. These include one which is...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 28, 2009, 1:29 am
A large crater (27 ft wide and 9ft deep) has appeared in Latvia - which would require a meteor of 3ft slamming into the earth. However, all wasn't what it seemed: A Latvian telecommunications ...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 27, 2009, 1:44 am
Mike Dash has written a fascinating piece on BVM appearances on the CFI blog, a subject we have looked at a number of times from her links to strange clouds/UFO (which I touched on in Darklore 2) to s...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 26, 2009, 1:36 am
I caught the first episode of the Discovery Channel's new season of My Shocking Story, which looked at Ganga and Jamuna Mondal, the Spider Sisters: The 39-year-old pair, who have two heads,...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 25, 2009, 1:36 am
The Dark Monarch is an exhibition at the Tate St. Ives that looks at the strange influence of folklore and the occult on British art (the name comes from the novel by Sven Berlin). Brian Dillon review...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 24, 2009, 1:35 am
China is becoming the main source for human wonders, not too surprising really because they not only have such a vast population but there are also a lot of people living in remote, rural areas where ...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 23, 2009, 1:25 am
We've recently seen a red/green apple and now a rare Welsh apple has turned up with the Welsh Dragon on it: An Anglesey woman had a shock this week when she discovered an image of a Welsh drago...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 22, 2009, 1:03 am
We have looked at one-fingered press-ups before and some startling claims for single digit displays of strength but some of the videos looked a little iffy. Now a man who claims he can replicate such ...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 21, 2009, 1:41 am
With the Heene family balloon hoax in the news (see Chris Knowles' round-up for the stranger aspects of this) attention has turned to previous cases and in particular possibly the earliest one.  ...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 20, 2009, 1:12 am
We have seen people whose skin is so sensitive you can write on them (dermatographia), but news from Dagestan suggests a young boy has gone one better with words appearing spontaneously on him: ...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 19, 2009, 1:05 am
Tis the season for some more comics. This time round I've managed to sneak into 3 of the FutureQuake Press titles (which you can get from their shop). The Sun & Moon series in Dogbreath carries o...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 18, 2009, 1:59 am
Fortean researcher Jody Forest has related the weirdest case he has come across - the strange events at the St. Medard church between 1927 and 1932: They began in May of 1727 with the burial of Fr...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 17, 2009, 1:40 am
We have seen the BVM, Jesus and even Mother Theresa appear on various food items and now it is the turn for... Tommy Cooper. A chip shop owner got a shock as he was about to tuck into a pie - o...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 16, 2009, 1:17 am
I know some of you are big fans of the vegetable lambs and so you'll be heartened by the following news: The "vegetable lamb" plant once believed to bear fruit that ripened into a living baby ...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 15, 2009, 1:51 am
How much is too much? And if it is too much who is to blame? Apparently black magic if this story we missed a few months back from Malaysia is to be believed: Two women have filed for divorce on g...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 14, 2009, 1:09 am
Here we present "Sacred Mushroom" an (in)famous and rarely repeated episode of One Step Beyond which looks at a magic Mexican mushroom that might give extra sensory powers. Hailing from a more innocen...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 13, 2009, 1:56 am
We hear a lot about 2012 and will hear a lot more in the coming years but do the underlying principles stand up? Previously, we looked at a couple of studies which suggested the Mayans might have trac...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 12, 2009, 1:58 am
I am always on the look out for strange clouds and here is a report of a burning ring of clouds from Moscow of a rare formation that has caused awe, so never underestimate the clouds!! In scene...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 11, 2009, 1:57 am
One of the CFZ's representatives in Country Durham had an odd encounter which sounds like something part way between an air kraken and strange clouds: We saw a Thing the other night. Not sure ...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 10, 2009, 1:56 am
The story of Sayyed Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah did the rounds this time last year, but as we missed it back then, so its resurfacing now allows us to catch up, and it is certainly a wild tale of dozens o...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 9, 2009, 1:49 am
It seems a bad time to be a witch and, as there doesn't seem to be much evidence of witchcraft, it really seems it is a bad time to be an elderly woman (as well as an albino or a hunchback, in fac...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 8, 2009, 1:55 am
Another of nature's wonders - the circular rainbow, which is very much like the glory we looked at a couple of years ago. A rare image of a circular rainbow has been taken from the window o...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 7, 2009, 1:58 am
No, not Desmond Tutu. A bona fide alien dressed as a ballerina (well as bona fide as those tutu-wearing ETs get). We have dealt with some odd encounters before and this is up there with them: W...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 6, 2009, 1:09 am
As with the previous editions of Darklore, three of the articles from Darklore 4 have been made available on the Darklore site for free as PDF "Beyond the Apocalypse", by Greg Taylor, you can also rea...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 5, 2009, 1:32 am
We can't resist BVM miracles and news reaches of a wild one from Ireland involving living, crying statutes and lights in the sky: Visitors to a remote grotto have claimed a statue wept and cro...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 4, 2009, 1:43 am
Athanasius Kircher was a fascinating figure: called the last polymath his interests range from religion to the occult to to technology to the natural sciences, which coalesced in his creation of wunde...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 3, 2009, 1:40 am
We have looked at the craziness at Cannock Chase more times than I shake an pet-eating, underground-dwelling troglodyte's femur at and now another story whistles down the newspipe, one which seems...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 2, 2009, 1:44 am
Most aliens are embarrassingly mundane - like actors in suits or just fancy make-up. The worrying suspicion is that this reflects the state of special effects in the middle of the 20th Century. This m...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Oct 1, 2009, 1:04 am
We often deal with wonders of the animal kingdom but occasionally prodigies of the vegetable world crop up: Fruit grower Ken Morrish was left stunned when he found a golden delicious apple on h...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Sep 30, 2009, 1:51 am
John Dee is a fascinating character - he was Elizabeth I's spymaster and the original 007 but it his magickal work that has got the main focus in recent years, inspiring the likes of Aleister Crow...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Sep 29, 2009, 1:35 am
The ever-reliable Reverend has apparently done a wide-ranging survey of the UK which might throw some light on the patterns of strangeness across the country and it might help us tell if Hotspots of H...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Sep 28, 2009, 1:54 am
Alrighty, Greg has just announced that  the next volume of Darklore is now out and you can get the full list of contents over on the Open Library. Here is the lovely cover: As I have mentioned...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Sep 27, 2009, 1:48 am
Get your head around that one. We have covered the first man to get pregnant (kinda), a woman who was pregnant for 60 years, men pregnant with puppies (or so they thought), a woman who gave birth to c...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Sep 26, 2009, 1:56 am
We first met Yu Zhenhuan, the previous hairiest man in the world, in his search for love. Now we catch up with him again in his quest for fame and fortune, the first step on this road seems to be to s...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Sep 25, 2009, 1:48 am
Over in the fair nation of Kazakhstan unusual geoglyphs have been found which are which is getting some people talking more about ancient visitors from the stars and less of Borat (oops I mentioned th...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Sep 24, 2009, 1:16 am
The vampire myth spread across Europe from Serbia in the 1720s thanks to the Habsburg army's occupation of the region (the spread being close to mass hysteria) and, with the staking of Slobodan Mi...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Sep 23, 2009, 1:01 am
Dede the Indonesian Tree Man really hit the news with his strange tree-like growths, something we've looked at a couple of times. It appears it was a case of extreme, out-of-control warts and, whi...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Sep 22, 2009, 1:51 am
We have dealt with Malaysian madness before and now we come across news of the attack of the Orang Minyak,the "Oily Man" or a very randy ghost if you prefer: A horny orang minyak, which is suppose...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Sep 21, 2009, 1:15 am
When Alfred Watkins first devised ley lines they were, as his book says on the cover, the old straight tracks (a copy of which I can see from here). The idea being that ancient artificial landmarks cr...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Sep 20, 2009, 1:53 am
One of the TED talks recently released online is by Oliver Sacks* discussing hallucinations, in particular Charles Bonnett syndrome (CBS), and how they throw light on the way our mind works. M...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Sep 19, 2009, 1:25 am
Previously, I mentioned the Timewatch documentary "The Bog Bodies" and when nosing around for another post I stumbled on the full video online and it is well worth watching as it is an impressive demo...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Sep 18, 2009, 1:57 am
In a story we missed a few months back, Gautam Sapkota set an impressive record for the number of bird calls he can muster (see below) and was doing good work using this platform to launch a message a...
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Q ~. posted an article on Cabinet of Wonders - Sep 17, 2009, 1:48 am
We have seen beasties with extra legs before here but not one that started with none, but that is what seems to have happened here: An elderly Chinese woman who discovered a snake with a clawed ha...
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