Category: Bizarre

I know it’s not unusual to have trouble letting our loved ones go when they pass away, but this seems to be taking it a bit far.

The Indonesian people known as the Toraja have a yearly ritual called MaiNene, translated as “The Ceremony of Cleaning Corpses” where every August families dig up the bodies of their dead relatives, wash them, groom them, put them in fancy new clothes, and walk them around their villages. According to their belief system, a polytheistic animistic religion called aluk, or The Way, they believe that death doesn’t happen suddenly, so much as it is an extended process as the souls gradually work towards the afterlife (Puya). If a person was killed away from home, the family will go to the location they died and walk the corpse all the way back to their village to help as part of their progression towards Puya. The yearly ritual is because they believe once a year the souls must return to their home village…and who wants to wake up in a coffin with the same clothes you’ve been wearing for the past year?

The Toraja have many elaborate rituals involving death, from extensive death feasts (normally just for noblemen) that can last days and attract thousands, to a gigantic water buffalo slaughter (where children catch their spurting blood in bamboo tubes), to elaborate hanging graveyards where colorful corpses decorate the faces of cliffs.

Death is the great mystery and every culture seems to have its own set of rituals (or many different rituals) to honor the passing of their loved ones. The Toraja seem to make us all look overly succinct (except maybe the ancient Egyptians) when it comes to lengthy, elaborate ritualism. To be fair to them, they used to also have lengthy, elaborate life rituals, but they have diminished since non-members of their religion were prohibited from attending the life rituals (but not the death ones) and Dutch missionaries converted a lot of the locals to Christianity.  Which is a whole ‘nuther discussion.

You can go see all of this for yourself. Ever since a National Geographic special covering the funeral of a rich nobleman in 1976 and a museum tour in North America of Torajan art, the area has become a huge tourist attraction for folks who’ve been to Bali and want to see more of the ‘primitive and wild’ Indonesia. There was even a cycling tour through it in 2012. Maybe not as ‘primitive and wild’ as it once was, but Tana Toraja is still unlike anywhere else on Earth.

Come on now. Zombie walks and the like are so 5 years ago. Why not go classic and contact the UK based company Chili Sauce who’ll kit you out in paramilitary gear, give you basic training, and set you and your team up against a crew of bloodthirsty werewolves?

You’ll be placed in the darkened forests of Droitwitch, England and given the premise for your horrific evening:

Deep in the heart of the countryside, near Birmingham, Farmers have reported unusual losses of livestock, and missing person reports are flooding the local papers. Rumors surfaced of a Special Ops team disappearing 24 months ago – the only clues left were a garbled radio message, and a mangled corpse.

An early morning drop off at the location starts your day (if you chose the shorter few hours option) or the long, long evening (if you went for the big werewolf kahuna package). The basic military training course includes being taught how to use automatic weapons, shotguns, explosive booby traps and more: all skills you’ll need to survive the night.

The official page says you’ve got a ‘slim chance of survival’, but hell, you knew that when you accepted the mission. But who knows, maybe you’ll get an easy one.

HAHAHAHA! No, just kidding, you’re totally gonna be werewolf chow.

The Bard’s plays have always been subject to reinterpretation. Both theatrical and film productions have set his works in a variety of different time periods, adapting the material to the new settings appropriately. Even my high school did a performance of “The Taming of the Shrew” set in the 1950’s. But The Drunk Shakespeare Society in NYC have found an angle I’m not sure the bard would have approved of.

The idea is that both the performers and the audience is kinda drunk and the alcohol weaves its way into the storyline, often even involving the audience interactively with the group, getting to change the story, demand the performers all take shots, and even play limited roles themselves. Weirdly, there’s multiple groups doing this now, going from bar to bar and performing famous scenes from Shakespeare with their audience in tow, often baffling patrons at the bars in question with their sudsy renditions.

You can check out a video at the link of one of the groups, Shotspeare, teasing their performance. The shows often feature drinking games with the audience and even karaoke with the performers. Which begs the question: what’s left to do that we haven’t found a way to infuse with drinking? Look for this to appear in other cities soon as well, as it seems to be a big hit in NYC. Can’t believe Austin, TX didn’t come up with it first.

 

Have you ever had a chance to visit The Museum of the Weird? I mean, this is the website for the Austin, TX attraction so if you made it this far, maybe it’s time to plan for a trip. Amongst all our two-headed animals, mummies, haunted skeletons, and oddities of man and nature, we’ve got two genuine shrunken heads on display. And they are indeed a creepy sight to behold.

Head shrinking (not the psychology kind) has been rumored to take place in many places all over the world but so far is only confirmed with a few small tribes in Peru and Ecuador, called there tsantsa. The tribes created them to keep vengeful spirits from being born from their enemies. They also served as a pretty powerful deterrent to other outsiders wandering close to the village. Of course, when it turned out that visiting Westerners had an interest in trading for the heads, the murder rate suddenly went up rather significantly in the region. But what’s the process these grotesqueries are made by?

Check out this great post at mentalfloss.com. They get down to the specifics step-by-step, from decapitation to the stripping of the flesh, the boiling of the remains, to …okay, now even I’m getting a little nauseous. But check it out for yourself. That’s the internet for ya. We’ve even got lifehacks for shrinking human heads. What an age we live in.

I get the collector’s instinct. Oh boy, do I. My house is absolutely filled with comics, action figures, and 15 bookshelves of movies and TV shows. Yes, somehow I’m even in a successful relationship. But my lady probably wouldn’t be quite so keen if my collection was cast off-pieces of my own body.

This is Richard Gibson, a 59 year old man who decided back in 1978 that he was going to save all his toenail clippings. Originally born of just curiosity, wondering how long it would take to fill up a small box, Richard just kept going. And going. And going. “I have no idea how many nails are in the jar,” Gibson said. “It’s well into the thousands.”

Richard wasn’t exactly proud of his hobby. He’s kept it hidden both from his ex-wife and friends for years. But now that Ripley’s Believe it or Not is interested, Richard is coming out in the open with his odd and pretty gross collection. It’s featured in Ripley’s new book “Reality Shock”. “This is the first time I’ve made it into one of the books,” he said. “It’s not like winning the Oscar, but I’m proud.” 

 

Feeling lonely? Wish you had someone to cuddle up with? Well, a British furniture designer might have just the solution for you (that won’t involve getting an account on Match.com). Introducing from Studio 9191, “A Body of Skin” line…

These seats aren’t made out of real human flesh, they’re just leather, but the fleshiest leather you ever sank into. Their creator, Gigi Barker, didn’t want the odd shapes of her meat seats to conjure what the experience of sitting in them would, but everything else did, “That made the viewers question how to interact with the shapes and to form their own conclusion”.

Gigi created the chairs by tracing a man’s midriff and then, “abstracted the shapes of his form so as to remove some of the immediacy of such a literal representation and allow the viewer to form their own conclusions”. She sculpted the models in clay, then created the seats themselves out of silicone because it “reacts to our bodies, matching our body temperature as well”. She implanted pheromones and aftershave in the seats and then covered them with molding leather with the suede section facing out to complete the effect.

Your choices for purchase are a two-part seat ($2500) or a smaller seat ($750) but more are on the way. Gigi even made and wore a dress out of the material for the opening night of her show. “Work regarding the human body is very personal and we all have a very immediate reaction to it so the reactions have reflected this. I have my own personal relationship with it, which is based on my own personal history. Just as someone else will. I think this project is more about the people and the bodies rather than the skin itself,” said Gigi.

This seems like a pretty niche market for seats…until you think about Japan. Have you seen the full body pillows of the girls from anime they’ve got now…

I’m just saying…million dollar idea. You can write me a check later, Gigi. I’ll just try not to picture anyone actually ENJOYING one. Creepy.

You never know where you’re going to find the weirdos. Generally speaking, those with Ed Gein-ish tastes for digging up corpses and decorating their home with them don’t hold PHDs in Celtic Studies and are thought of as well-respected authors and academics. However, such is the case with Russia’s Anatoly Moskvin, who was discovered with the bodies and pieces of bodies from perhaps as many as 29 corpses in his house.

Police found inside his home, among stacks of books and other brick-a-brac, a gruesome and distressingly adorable collection of graveyard remains. Anatoly had many of the all-female corpses mummified, dressed in cutesy, frilly doll dresses, and some even had implanted recording devices. “When we were transferring one of the mummies, it startled us by starting to play the song, ‘Bear enjoys his honey.’ It took us some time to figure out that the mechanism inside reacts to touching,” said one policeman. All the corpses had their faces covered or painted and one even had the head of a stuffed animal.

In an interview with a journalist years back, Anatoly had said he became fascinated with cemeteries as a teenager. “When I was a pioneer in 1979, by pure accident, I took part in an occult ceremony that took place in a cemetery. I have been strongly drawn to these places ever since,” he said, adding that he had visited 752 cemeteries.

Thankfully, he doesn’t appear to have stole bodies from all of them, but according to police, for the past 15 years at least, he had been making late night raids to claim both the bodies, pieces of bodies, and clothing from the bodies of women aged 12 to 30. Along with the ‘dolls’ police found piles of gravestone plaques, bones, skulls and a foot dressed in a lacy stocking.

It hasn’t been made clear yet how the police identified Anatoly; one story has it that his visiting parents found him decorating a doll and turned him in, but apparently the evidence is pretty overwhelming. I mean, even if you were to go with the ‘someone broke into my apartment and put all these here’ defense, police still found his fingerprints and footprints all over the desecrated graves. Anatoly stands to serve from a fine to 3 years in prison for each of the more than a dozen charges currently leveled against him. At least we can be glad he never graduated, the way our own infamous Ed Gein did, to killing to get fresher bodies. That we know of…

Cities in India can be pretty crowded places. There’s not always a lot of room to expand your business, even if it’s doing well, so sometimes you’ve just got to incorporate previously existing structures into your theme. Such was the case for Krishan Kutti Nair whose business, The New Lucky Restaurant, in Ahmedabad, India, started out as a tea stall outside of a Muslim cemetery. The business was doing so great, it started to encroach on, then circle, and eventually be part of the gravesite.

The customers certainly don’t seem to mind, as morning through night they come in for their milk tea and buttery rolls, and neither does Kirshan, who wipes the graves down every morning and puts fresh flowers by them. ”The graveyard is good luck. Our business is better because of it”.