by Maledicta | Nov 25, 2018 | Oddities and Curiosities
Back in the 1920s, inventor Helene Adelaide Shelby was pretty sure you would. Criminal justice might be a whole different ballgame if law enforcement officials had heeded the advice of one Helene Adelaide Shelby of Oakland, California. Savor the genius of...
by Maledicta | May 28, 2018 | Oddities and Curiosities, Weird Tourism
For centuries, the ghost of Marie-Josephte Corriveau has been haunting the cultural consciousness of Quebec, Canada. To many, the legend of “La Corriveau” is a ghost story, of a woman hanged for murder, her corpse put on display as a gruesome warning. But the...
by Maledicta | May 21, 2018 | Halloween 365, Oddities and Curiosities
The Odd Fellows, like many fraternal organizations, are shrouded in secrecy and steeped in esoteric symbolism. Though they were a charitable staple of many communities throughout America for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, whose purpose was to “visit the...
by Maledicta | Feb 5, 2018 | Halloween 365, Oddities and Curiosities
Most skeletons studied by doctors, anatomists, and medical students are made of plastic these days. But it wasn’t so long ago that every skeleton had once been a living person. It was never easy and seldom legal to acquire human skeletons. But as it also became...
by Maledicta | Oct 16, 2017 | Halloween 365
The Saturday Night Live writers who invented David S. Pumpkins and his dancing skeletons were tapping into an image with a very long history: the Danse Macabre, a medieval allegory about the inevitability of death. Click here to read the rest of the article at...
