THE MIDNIGHT ASSASSIN S05EP09 SYNOPSIS In 1885 a terrifying string of attacks in Austin, Texas erupted through the city, preying on the servant class. An unknown attacker, or band of attackers, broke into the residences of servants across the city, striki ...
In 1953, a strange story crept out of the Philippines, when newspapers began reporting on the Dracula Girl, a young, Filipino vagrant, who had been arrested for prostitution and who now appeared to be facing even darker powers, as she battled with a pair of tormentors, collectively known as The Thing. For over two weeks, doctors, reporters, prison guards and inmates watched over the strange behaviour of the young girl, completely at a loss for what to do, until eventually, in stepped a Protestant Pastor with a penchant for evangelism and a conviction that he knew exactly what to do in the situation.
The end of the 18th Century saw the birth of a long line of religious movements focused on the end of days and the biblical second coming. Central to this string of beliefs was an unimposing domestic servant who began to have visions in her mid-life, which she claimed were divine in nature, eventually leading to her insistence that she was a prophetess and at the young age of 64, was pregnant with the new messiah. Far from fading away after the holy childs due date came and went, the movement continued under several different guises for hundreds of years, culminating with the belief in a holy book of dinner etiquette and a mysterious wooden box, the contents of which were lying in wait until called upon to rescue Britain from its catastrophic end.
In the late Spring of 1937, the murder of a young Italian immigrant stormed the paris headlines. The first murder to have taken place on the Metro, it was a baffling affair with no witnesses and a murder of unusual precision. As the country mired in political turmoil, newspapers filled their columns with rumours of the victims life, quickly filling the information void with sensational stories of divey music halls, gangsters and allusions to sordid affairs. The truth, however, would turn out to be far more bombastic than even the most spurious rumours, leading to the slow unravelling of a story of clandestine intelligence, assassinations and a plot to overthrow the government.
“In war, one of our great protections against the dangers of air attack after nightfall will be the “blackout”. On the outbreak of hostilities all external lights and street lighting would be totally extinguished so as to give hostile aircraft no indication as to their whereabouts. But this will not be fully effective unless you do your part, and see to it that no lighting in the house where you live is visible from the outside. The motto for safety will be ‘Keep it dark!’”
So read the opening paragraph from Public Information Leaflet No.2, published in England on the eve of war, 1939. What may have kept people safe from German bombs, however, had its own disadvantages. Criminality thrived in the gloomy, empty streets. In 1942, as the German bombs began to fall less frequently, a new threat opened up on the streets of London, altogether more silent, emerging from the shadows with a rye smile and unrelenting charm.
In the winter of 1896, a spate of airship sightings spread out from California, stampeding across the United States until, in the Spring of 1897, they hit a wall in the midwest, after a brief flirtation on the East Coast. The sightings totalled in their tens of thousands and many included fantastical descriptions of both the ship and the people riding it. As the ships flew from state to state, the stories often grew bolder in their claims until they were heavily dovetailing with the science fiction of the day. With airships still incapable of sustained flight in 1896, were any of the sightings true? Or were the witnesses seeing something else in the sky? Are some of the more outrageous stories, actually far closer to the truth than they may at first seem, or was the whole affair just one big medley of lies, hoax and misidentifications?
Haunted human remains are a trope popular in modern horror, from the twisted ivory puppet in the House on Haunted Hill to the skeletal corpses, floating in the swimming pool of Poltergeist, human bones have long held a place of fear, worship and power throughout history and cultures, eventually manifesting within the horror genre of the 20th Century. At the time of the English Civil War, the whisperings of an emergent folk tradition seeded its place in the popular imagination, when stories of skulls with seemingly supernatural powers began to seep from the large, rural manor houses throughout Britain. Screaming Skulls, as they became known, were kept in farm houses, rectories and family estates both for protection and through fear of what might happen if they were mistreated, a situation which sent stories spinning through the local vicinity.
WIth a long and winding path through history from ancient times, to the renaissance and beyond, Alchemy was a vast subject with a multitude of practitioners, from the legendary and mythical to established medical gentry and scholarly clergy. In fact and fiction, they were men and women obsessed by the magical bending of the laws of nature to their will, creating gold, the elixir of life, stones that shone like the sun or offered immortality. Another sect of the sprawling tradition, however, found its interest in a far stranger creation, that of the homunculus, or “the little man”. Their writings can today be seen as some of the strangest works to exist in the history of scientific advancement and have far more in line with the publications of Gothic Horror that would eventually follow, centuries later.
WILLIAM DOVE & THE WIZARDS05EP01SYNOPSISThe mid 19th Century newspaper headlines saw no shortage of cases involving poison. Unsurprisingly, given the relative ease of obtaining such deadly materials, a long narrative of death, whether by accident or d ...
