This museum is located in Monroe, Connecticut and the creators of the museum, Ed and Lorraine Warren, are buried nearby. The Warrens were some of the prolific paranormal investigators in American history. Their real escapades inspired one of the highest grossing fictional horror franchises, The Conjuring Universe. The pair of devout Catholics also ran the Occult Museum for many years.
Ed claimed to be a demonologist, while his wife Lorraine was a self-professed medium a clairvoyant. Together, they traveled the country, investigating infamous cases such as the Enfield poltergeist, an alleged instance of possession that formed the basis for The Conjuring 2, and Amityville Horror, a prominent 1975 case in which a couple claimed that a demonic presence haunted their home, and a 1968 case of a haunted Raggedy Ann that inspired the cinematic murder doll, Annabelle.
Artist Niki de Saint Phalle has created a magnificent Tarot Garden with mosaic sculptures that represent the Major Arcana.
Situated in the Italian village of Capalbio, it started in the late nineteen-seventies when Saint Phalle had a vision to create mosaic representations of the tarot. What Saint Phalle, who died in 2002, left behind in Tuscany is, according to the New Yorker magazine, "dazzling or deranged, transcendent or tawdry, depending on whom you ask. Amid peaceful olive groves and ochre fields grazed by horses and sheep sits a house-size sculpture of a sphinx, with mirrored blue hair and a bright-red crown, a flower blooming on one of her breasts and a lavender heart on the nipple of the other. The interior is covered in shards of mirror, as if a colossal disco ball had been turned inside out. (During the two decades that Saint Phalle worked on the garden, her bedroom was inside one breast, her kitchen in the other.) A sprawling, fantastical castle, with a rainbow mosaic tower, sits near a blue head some fifty feet high, sprouting a second, mirrored head crowned by a huge hand. Downhill, the Devil stands amid some shrubs, a rainbow-winged hermaphrodite with a sweet face, womanly hips, and three gold penises. It is as if a psychedelic bomb had exploded in the most picturesque part of Tuscany."
This report by Atlas Obscuradescribes Ireland's ring forts which are associated with the supernatural. Here is an excerpt:
Deep in western Ireland’s rugged landscape, in the sleepy town of Kilmaine, two brothers decided to build a house. But first, John and Tom Mooney had to find construction materials. According to a story passed down for generations, John came upon an old, forgotten lios, a medieval ring fort made, conveniently, of suitable stones. The next day, the brothers started pulling out the bushes that grew along the fort’s walls. As they cleared the overgrowth, they thought they heard the echo of someone crying, but shrugged it off and kept working. When a local priest noticed what they were doing, he warned them to leave the fort alone—but the brothers were undeterred. As dusk gave way to evening, the brothers finally stopped their work and returned home. By morning, both John and Tom Mooney were dead. A week later, as he was walking past the fort, the priest fell and broke his leg. Locals knew the tragic events were no accident—the fairies were to blame.
In the 1930s, young Paddy Gannon contributed the Mooneys’ story to the Schools’ Collection, where more than 50,000 schoolchildren compiled folktales from parents, neighbors, and grandparents. With some 32,000 ring forts, or “fairy forts,” scattered across Ireland, it’s perhaps not surprising that many of those folktales are set in these curious structures. “It’s a very standard set of stories,” says archaeologist Matthew Stout, author of The Irish Ringfort. Many of the stories share a similar plot: Someone disrupts a fairy fort and then falls ill, loses a limb, or dies—as the Mooney brothers did. “Whether fairies turn into rabbits, or whether they’re making shoes, or there’s gold inside the fort, everything happens inside of a fort,” says Stout.
Over the span of time, abandoned ring forts became associated with the supernatural. In Gerald of Wales’s 1189 Conquest of Ireland, the first history written about the island, the medieval priest-historian recounted that when invading troops camped “in a certain old fortification” one night, a ghostly army of “spectral appearances” descended upon them; many of the soldiers fled in terror and hid in the surrounding woods and marshes.
When the forts became associated with fairies in particular is less clear. According to Irish studies scholar Patrick McCafferty of the University of Leipzig, the association of fairies and ring forts was “quite well-developed” by the 1850s, when folklorists began documenting tales that had been passed down orally for centuries.
The Irish fairies in these tales are no Tinkerbells. The wingless, human-sized mythical beings are also, for the most part, better left alone. They can be helpful, bestowing favor and good fortune. Or they can be vindictive, destroying property, abducting loved ones, or even taking lives.
John Duncan’s Riders of the Sidhe (1911) depicts highly stylized fairies in the Irish tradition. Public Domain
According to Irish folklore, fairies were once a god-like race of people known as the Tuatha Dé Danann (“people of the goddess Danu”) or the Tuath Dé (“tribe of god”). The Tuatha Dé Danann ruled ancient Ireland, were immune to aging and sickness, and possessed magical powers. They were able to control the weather and shape-shift, sometimes appearing as birds and other animals to test various heroic figures in Irish mythology.
According to myth, the ancestors of modern Irish people defeated the Tuatha Dé Danann and drove them underground, at which point they became known as the Sidhe or Aos sí. McCafferty says, “they go into another world or underworld, linked with places like Newgrange,” Ireland’s most famous prehistoric tomb, and other abandoned ancient places, including ring forts. Sidhe literally means “mound,” and so the Tuatha Dé Danann became “people of the mound.” In other tellings, the Sidhe are fallen angels or spirits of the dead.
Superstitions about fairies have saved many ring forts from destruction; it’s why thousands still dot the Irish landscape.
For ancient Greeks, Delphi was the center of the world: a site sacred to the god Apollo, where all Greeks united to worship. But at its heart was a dark, strange place: the mysterious sanctuary where the priestess of Apollo prophesied.
The priestess, called the Pythia, sat above a chasm in the earth, which belched forth fumes. She breathed deeply – some believe that the fumes possessed hallucinogenic properties - and slipped into semi-consciousness. Her prophecies were opaque, often frantic. This was the Oracle of Delphi: the Greeks’ most famous and most feared window into the will of the gods. It lay in “a cavern hollowed down in the depths” of the hillside, as the historian Strabo reported, underneath the great Temple of Apollo.
Today, the ruins of the Temple sit on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. It was destroyed by the Emperor Theodosius I, in 390 CE, in an attempt to eradicate the old pagan beliefs. Few traces of the Oracle remain, but the site is still an eerie one: mist clings to the hills, and you can almost hear the ghosts of Croesus, Nero, and Alexander.
I just found out about this annual UFO festival in Exeter, New Hampshire on September 3 and 4. Maybe next year?
Norman Muscarello was hitchhiking back from his girlfriend’s house near Exeter, New Hampshire in the early morning of September 3, 1965, when he saw pulsating lights in the sky. The US Navy enlistee froze in his tracks beside the Dining family farm on rural Route 150 as the lights hovered overhead, disappeared, then returned in throbbing red bursts. “There was absolutely no sound, other than the fact that I heard horses in Dinings’ field raising holy hell, kicking the barn. Crickets just seemed to quit,” he recalled in a 1980 interview. Petrified, Muscarello ran across the street and hid. A few minutes later, the lights zoomed away, leaving the 18-year-old alone on the road.
The Incident at Exeter, as it’s now known, is the force behind the annual Exeter UFO Festival. Following a pandemic-fueled hiatus, the celebration is back for its 10th anniversary on September 3 and 4, 2022. The entire commercial district of Exeter—population 16,000, with a quaint downtown lined with historic architecture clustered along the Squamscott River—gets in on the action. The Town Hall hosts a variety of talks and other-wordly swag tables. There are costume contests, kids’ activities, and even trolley rides that transport you to the site where it all began.
What makes the Incident at Exeter such an enduring example of UFO phenomenon, Blumenthal says, is that multiple people observed it. After Muscarello reported the sighting to the police, he and two police officers, David Hunt and Eugene Bertrand Jr., returned to the scene, where they all witnessed it simultaneously. Earlier in the evening, a woman reported to Bertrand that she had been followed in her car on a nearby road by a large object in the sky with flashing red lights. Similar sightings in the region the following day have led to the Incident at Exeter becoming one of the best-documented UFO sightings in American history.
