Damien Galeone

There is no better way to enjoy a Sunday morning than to drink coffee while you read a story featuring a ghost, a werewolf or a German dictator. And if you can’t get any of those, you can look at Wikipedia’s page on people who have recently become dead.

Though grisly in some – all – people’s eyes, my interest in the Recent Deaths page is that it’s usually a springboard for interesting and totally random reading. Today is no different.

It all starts with Yuri Yudin, who was an unfortunate addition to Wiki Deaths and whose claim to fame was that he was the sole survivor of the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Now, if you’re a nerd and a doom and gloom loving fool, you know that no phrase in the English language arouses your morbid side like ‘Sole Survivor.’

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The Dyaltov Pass incident involved the deaths of nine Russian skiers in a remote part of the Ural Mountains. Their corpses were discovered in various places around and in the crevice nearby their tents. They had ripped open their tents from the inside and run into a snow storm in their underwear and barefoot, a thing most people try not to do in the winter in Russia. This was odd. Odder still were the facts that while some of them had frozen to death, some had died from unusual fractures that seemed to come from inside their bodies, as opposed to those coming from an outside element. To this day, nobody knows what happened.

At the base of the page: Mysteries. I get more coffee.

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Oh, so many to choose from.

I go with the Baltic Sea Anomaly and then instantly wish I hadn’t. The Baltic Sea Anomaly is a raised structure 60 meters in diameter and 4 meters in height that resides at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Nobody really knows what it is and some people deny its existence even though it appears on sonar imaging. Still, there are lots of hilariously terrifying theories. UFO landing device, Atlantis, a storage container for Michael Bay’s ego, etc…I think it’s the doorway to Hell. I mean, it’s got to be somewhere, and Detroit is overcrowded as it is, right?

There is a half pot of coffee left, my paranoia is only partially stimulated – windows are still open, cat isn’t mediating F Scott Fitzgerald’s voice yet – so I continue my Wikipedia search.

And after a brief visit to a fictional lost continent called Mu (Yep, just like the cow says) I end up at the Solway Firth space man. So one day in 1964, this British fireman took three pictures of his daughter and when he had them developed what appeared to be a space man was standing behind her in one of them. The spaceman had not been there when he took the picture and he wasn’t in either of the other two. The fireman was somewhat unnerved by the spaceman and authorities blew him off, probably mocking him for being photo bombed by astronauts, which was a new profession and probably didn’t even have a dental plan yet. He left frustrated and didn’t feel any better until The Grudge was made forty years later and he realized that being photo bombed by a space man was much better than a dead Japanese woman hell-bent on revenge. Then he probably had pudding.

Windows closed. While I don’t mind spacemen in general, I don’t want one emerging from the Baltic Sea, the Urals, or Mu, to sit behind me while I chat with my mom on Skype.

So, there’s this other thing. It seems that there is a place in British Columbia where eleven human feet have washed up on shore over a four year period. Again, eleven human feet, only the feet, washed up on shore, the same shore, between 2007-2011.

Eleven.

Feet.

Still, I don’t stop there.

And then, as though it has been waiting for me all day, there is a link on Wiki called ‘The Kentucky Meat Shower.’ The Coelacanth of Wikipedia entries.

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So it seems that one day in 1876, a small town in Kentucky experienced a storm of red meat. Yes, if you just became aroused, then you are sick, twisted and me.

The meat was tested and judged to be either ‘meat from the lung of a horse or a human infant,’ because evidently these two meats are exceptionally similar. No matter the meat, it rained on the residents, some of whom found the meat to ‘taste like venison or mutton.’ Because why not? There’s Manna from Heaven and sometimes it rains men, so why not Heavenly baby lung meat?  

The most likely theory for this phenomenon is that a pack of buzzards had just feasted on a couple of horse corpses and was flying overhead when one of them spontaneously ‘disgorged’ himself, (yes, just like you ‘disgorged’ your hermelín and eight tequila shots last Saturday). Anyway, the others followed suit and now I am left thinking of buzzards at the end of Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. Wafer thin, you say?

My paranoia being complete, I hide my phone, shut off the evil Internet, and crawl into bed for an afternoon of reading non-terrifying works of literature. If I’m lucky, the cat will read me This Side of Paradise.

And who knows, maybe later I’ll step outside with a hamburger bun and see if something fills it.