Three of the four stories are true; guess which one is fiction
By Stephen Wagner
CAN YOU TELL when someone is yanking your chain; that is, feeding you a plate of barbecued fibs? When it comes to the paranormal, because it is fantastic by nature, it is often difficult to tell fact from fiction. Is someone telling you about an incredible but true encounter? or is he spinning a tale from his imagination for who knows what reason?
Think you can tell the difference? Here is our little game of ?guess the b.s.? Your task is to read the four stories below and on the following three pages. Three of the stories are true, according to our paranormal sources, but one of them has been completely manufactured by me. You must detect which is the false story and cast your vote accordingly, as you will be instructed.
Good luck!
STORY #1: THE TELEPORTING BOYS
There are several strange stories in the annals of the paranormal that relate instances of people who mysteriously travel great distances in impossibly short lengths of time. One intriguing case took place in the early 20th century and was published in a journal called Occult Review. The time is 1901 and the place is Bari, Italy, a medium-sized city on the Adriatic Sea. The people involved are two young boys, the seven- and eight-year-old sons of Mauro Pansini, an architect. Quite unexpectedly and inexplicably, the boys began to experience some bizarre travel habits.
?One day,? the article in Occult Review stated, ?Alfredo and his brother were at Ruvo, at 9 a.m. and at 9:30 a.m., they were found in the Capuchin Convent, at Malfatti, thirty miles away.? According to a 1901 edition of the Annals of Psychic Science, the boys had arrived in a state of profound hypnosis.
Obviously, modes of transportation fast enough to have moved the boys in that space of time were not available to them, and their family was at a loss to explain how they made the trip. But that was not the only instance. Some time later, the boys quite suddenly and mysteriously appeared in a man?s boat in a Mediterranean harbor. The fisherman was astonished to see the Pansini boys ?flop into his boat,? it was stated.
How and by what mechanism the boys were teleported is unknown. Did they together step into some kind of wormhole or interdimensional portal? If so, they made the paranormal trip without harm.
STORY #2: CITIZEN ABDUCTION
Orson Welles is best known for his classic film, Citizen Kane, often named by critics as the best American film ever made. Welles is also famous for another classic bit of melodrama: his 1938 radio production of H. G. Wells? The War of the Worlds. Adapted and directed by Welles and starring actors of his Mercury Theatre on the Air cast, The War of the Worlds was presented (on Halloween night) as if it were a radio news broadcast of an invasion from Mars, providing on-the-scene descriptions of the huge metal monsters as they began to destroy New Jersey. Even though Welles? show was interrupted by the usual sponsor commercials, there were many who took his fictional drama as fact, sending them into a panic at the news of Earth?s decimation by the Martians.
Welles had several ties to science fiction during his career. He was the voice of radio?s The Shadow, narrated the trailer for The Incredible Shrinking Man, and was even considered by George Lucas as the voice for Darth Vader in Star Wars.
A biography of Orson Welles published in 1982, just two years before his death, described an incident that might explain why he might have been attracted to War of the Worlds and its extraterrestrial invaders from the sky. On a September night in 1937, Welles was driving toward Los Angeles with fellow actors Everett Sloan and Ray Collins. He was to meet his cousin Laura Brinkley at a diner near Lancaster, pick her up, and continue on to Los Angeles.
Welles became concerned when his cousin was not at the diner at the agreed-upon time, however. He was about to call the authorities when he saw Laura walking toward the diner. She seemed disoriented and her coat was muddied. They took her into the diner, and she began to tell them ? in a fashion Welles described as ?dreamlike? ? a bizarre story. She was ?compelled? to wander away from the diner into the darkness, she told them, then saw two bright lights descending toward her from the sky. She remembers the lights getting close and a very ?nervous? feeling in her body, and then she must have passed out because she could recall nothing else.
The owner of the diner, who was listening to the story, told Welles that his cousin had actually originally entered the diner at least a full hour before Welles arrived. He saw her walk out, but did not know why. So apparently there was nearly an hour of unexplained missing time for Laura, a mystery Welles never solved to his satisfaction.
STORY #3: PINKY, THE MYSTERY BEAST
Reports of living dinosaurs have been filtering out of the rain forests of ?darkest Africa? for decades. You have no doubt heard of the Mokele-mbembe, said by natives of the area to resemble what we know as a sauropod, thought to be extinct for many millions of years.
However, you may not have heard of another dinosaur-like creature, affectionately dubbed ?Pinky?, that was seen not in some remote jungle, but in Florida ? the St. Johns River, to be exact. The first reported sighting was in the 1960s by a biology student named Mary Richardson and two of her friends. While bow hunting, they were stunned by the sight of an unknown creature surfacing in the river. They described it as having a short neck and flat head.
This could easily be dismissed as a misidentified known creature, but there were further sightings that are not so easy to dismiss. On May 10, 1975, a fishing party consisting of Charles and Dorothy Abram and three friends, were confronted by the head and neck of some large creature rising out of the water. It was only 20 feet from them, they reported. It turned and looked at them, then submerged after about eight seconds. They described it as pink in color, hence its cute nickname.
The full description the Abrams gave of the creature, however, was far from cute. Aside from its distinctive pink color, its bones appeared to show through its skin, like ?a dinosaur with its skin pulled back, so all the bones were showing... sort of the color of boiled shrimp.?
They further described it as having a head the size of a human?s, with small horns that ended in knobby tips. Its neck was about three feet long and its eyes were dark and slanted. One of the Abrams? friends remarked that it looked to her like a dragon.
The skeptics, of course, have dismissed the sighting as just a tree trunk or a large sturgeon, but the witnesses will remain convinced, I?m sure, that they encountered something much more extraordinary.
STORY #4: THE HAUNTED HIGHWAY
We?re very familiar with haunted houses, haunted castles, haunted libraries and museums, even haunted pubs. But stretches of road and highway also can become haunted, apparently, especially when they are the scenes of some horrific death.
Such may be the case of German Church Road in the Chicago suburb of Willow Springs. In late 1956, this was the site of a still-unsolved crime. Two sisters, Barbara and Patricia Grimes, were murdered and their bodies dumped into a ravine on the side of this road near Devil?s Creek. Since then, ghostly sightings and unexplained sounds have been experienced at this location.
Local police received several common reports from people at the scene of the crime: they hear a car pull up to the location (although none is seen); the sound of a car door open; what sounds like something being dumped on the side of the road; a car door slamming shut; the car driving away. The final actions of the murder, it seems, have been imprinted on the scene.
In at least one instance, the phantom car was actually seen. A woman and some friends who were investigating the haunted site say they saw a car moving up the gravel drive of a nearby house, now only in ruins, that stood when the crime took place. The car?s lights were not on, but it drove quickly past them and around the house before disappearing into the night.
One?s first thought is that it was just another curiosity seeker checking out the haunted highway, but then it was remembered that this gravel drive was closed off by a heavy chain to prevent such intrusions by cars. When checked, the chain was still in place.
You must vote for the false story at:
http://paranormal.about.com/od/trueghos ... 0708_4.htm
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