Melon Heads is the name given to legendary beings found in Germany, England, and the long-running urban legends in parts of Michigan,Ohio, and Connecticut. They are described as small humanoids with bulbous heads who occasionally emerge from their hiding places to attack people. Different variations of the legend attribute different origins.
The Mariana UFO incident occurred in August 1950 in Great Falls, Montana. The event garnered national media attention, as the concept ofUFOs and alien invasion was extremely popular amongst Americans at the time. The film footage of the sighting is believed to be among the first ever taken of a UFO.
“Greys” are alleged extraterrestrial beings whose existence is promoted in ufological, paranormal, and New Age communities. Named for their skin color, Greys are most widely associated with the alien abduction phenomenon, wherein claimants allege that Greys are intelligent extraterrestrials who visit Earth and secretly perform medical experiments on humans they have temporarily kidnapped. Mainstream scientists believe that the alien abduction phenomenon is a subjectively real experience with roots in psychology and culture, but that it does not provide credible evidence for the existence of visiting extraterrestrials. Paranormal and pseudoscientific claims involving Greys vary in every respect including their nature (ETs, extradimensionals, demons, or machines), origins, moral dispositions, intentions, and physical appearances (even varying in their eponymous skin color). A composite description derived from overlap in claims would have Greys as small bodied, sexless beings with smooth grey skin, enlarged head and large eyes. The origin of the idea of the Grey is commonly associated with the Betty and Barney Hill abduction claim, although skeptics see precursors in science fiction and earlier paranormal claims.
Mellified man, or human mummy confection, was a legendary medicinal substance created by steeping a human cadaver in honey. The concoction is mentioned only in Chinese sources, most significantly the Bencao Gangmu of the 16th-century Chinese pharmacologist Li Shizhen. Relying on a second-hand account, Li reports a story that some elderly men in Arabia, nearing the end of their lives, would submit themselves to a process of mummification in honey to create a healing confection. This process differed from a simple body donation because of the aspect of self-sacrifice; the mellification process would ideally start before death. The donor would stop eating any food other than honey, going as far as to bathe in the substance. Shortly, his feces (and even his sweat, according to legend) would consist of honey. When this diet finally proved fatal, the donor’s body would be placed in a stone coffin filled with honey. After a century or so, the contents would have turned into a sort of confection reputedly capable of healing broken limbs and other ailments. This confection would then be carefully sold in street markets as a hard to find item with a hefty price.
Palmistry or chiromency (also spelled cheiromancy, Greek cheir (χειρ), “hand”; manteia (μαντεία), “divination”), is the art of characterization and foretelling the future through the study of the palm, also known as palm reading, or chirology. The practice is found all over the world, with numerous cultural variations. Those who practice chiromancy are generally calledpalmists, palm readers, hand readers, hand analysts,or chirologists.
The information outlined below is briefly representative of modern palmistry; there are many ― often conflicting ― interpretations of various lines and palmar features across various schools of palmistry.
Significance of the Left and Right Hand
Though there are debates on which hand is better to read from, both have their own significance. It is custom to assume that the left hands shows potential in an individual, and the right showed realized personality. Some sayings about the significance include “The future is shown in the right, the past in the left”; “The left hand is the one we are born with, and the right is what we have made of it”; “The right hand is read for men, while the left is read for women”; “The left is what the gods give you, the right is what you do with it.” The choice of hand to read is ultimately up to the instinct and experience of the practitioner.
Hand shape
Depending on the type of palmistry practiced, and the type of reading being performed, palmists may look at various qualities of the hand, including the shapes and lines of the palm and fingers; the color and texture of the skin and fingernails; the relative sizes of the palm and fingers; the prominence of the knuckles; and numerous other attributes of the hands.
In most schools of palmistry, hand shapes are divided into four or 10 major types, sometimes corresponding to the Classical elements or temperaments. Hand shape is believed to indicate character traits corresponding to the type indicated (i.e., a “Fire hand” would exhibit high energy, creativity, short temper, ambition, etc. - all qualities believed to be related to the Classical element of Fire).
Although variations abound, the most common classifications used by modern palmists:
The number and quality of lines can also be included in the hand shape analysis; in some traditions of palmistry, Earth and Water hands tend to have fewer, deeper lines, while Air and Fire hands are more likely to show more lines with less clear definition.
The Licked Hand, known sometimes as The Doggy Lick, is an urban legend popular among teenagers. Like all urban legends, The Licked Hand has several versions including a story told in Indiana.
Plot
A young girl is left home alone with only her dog to protect her. On the news that night, they announced there was a serial killer on the loose in the local area. Before she goes to bed, she locks all the doors and tries to lock all the windows, but the one in the basement won’t close. She decides to leave it open, but locks the basement door and goes to bed. Her dog takes its customary place under her bed. In the deep of night she awakens to a dripping sound coming from the bathroom. The girl is too scared to go check so she reaches her hand under the bed. She feels a reassuring lick from her dog and falls back to sleep. She reawakens to the dripping sound, reaches her hand down to the dog where she feels the reassuring lick and falls back to sleep. Once more, she awakens to the dripping sound. She reaches her hand down and feels the lick of her dog. Now curious about the dripping sound, she gets up and slowly walks towards the bathroom, the dripping sound getting louder as she approaches. She reaches the bathroom and turns on the light. She is greeted by a horrific sight; hanging from the shower nozzle is her dog with its throat slit open and its blood dripping into the bathtub. Something on the bathroom mirror catches her eye; she turns around. Written on the wall in her dog’s blood are the words “HUMANS CAN LICK TOO”. She sees the killer jump out from under the bed, and he either kills her, or escapes out the window, or by the time she gets back to her room the killer is gone and there’s nothing under the bed. An alternate version has her parents dead in her closet. She then attempts to call the police but is unable to (sometimes because of the phone line being dead) She then looks downstairs and sees the killer. Another version of the story is there is a man and his dog. The man and the dog go hiking. Soon it is nighttime and the man goes to sleep. He wakes up and the dog is agitated. The dog licks his hand. Then the man falls asleep. The dog licks his hand again, but the mans eyes are closed. He feels something warm next to him and thinks it is the body warmers, then he falls asleep. The dog keeps licking the man’s hand. When the man wakes up his dog is gone and in the snow, it says: Humans can lick hands too.
The Devil’s Tramping Ground is a barren circle in the forest in the Harper’s Crossroad community near Bennett, North Carolina. It is the subject of some of North Carolina’s oldest legends. For at least the last hundred years, nothing has grown within the 40 foot ring and the phenomenon is thus far unexplained. A United States Geological Survey team could uncover no scientific explanation for the lack of growth within the ring. Stories about the ring are well known in local communities. These include the disappearance of objects left within the ring overnight, dogs yipping and howling not wanting to go near it, and strange events occurring to those brave enough to spend the night within its boundaries. Legend says that this is the very place the devil himself can rise from the depths of fiery hell, and come to earth. It’s at this place, the devil walks in circles on certain nights and brings his evil into this world. John William Harden (1903-1985) of Greensboro, N.C., journalist, newspaper editor, author, advisor to North Carolina governors and textile executives, and founder of the state’s first full-service public relations company had this to say of the ‘Devil’s Tramping Ground:’ The Devil’s Tramping Ground, the Chatham natives say. And the story is that the Devil goes there to walk in circles as he thinks up new means of causing trouble for humanity. There, sometimes during the dark of night, the Majesty of the Underworld of Evil silently tramps around that bare circle— thinking, plotting, and planning against good, and in behalf of wrong. So far as is known, no person has ever spent the night there to disprove this is what happens…” (Harden, 1949)
Electronic voice phenomena (EVP) are electronically generated noises that resemble speech, but are not the result of intentional voice recordings or renderings. Common sources of EVP include static, stray radio transmissions, and background noise. Interest in the subject normally surrounds claims that EVP are of paranormal origin, though there are natural explanations such as apophenia (finding significane in insignificant phenomena), auditory pareidolia (interpreting random sounds as voices in their own language), equipment artefacts, or simple hoaxes which are offered to explain them. Recordings of EVP are often created from background sound by increasing the gain (i.e. sensitivity) of the recording equipment.
Parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive, who popularized the idea, described EVP as typically brief, usually the length of a word or short phrase.
Bloody Bones is a boogeyman feared by children, and is sometimes called Rawhead and Bloody-Bones, Tommy Rawhead, or “Rawhead”. The term was used “to awe children, and keep them in subjection”, as recorded by John Locke in 1693.The stories originated in Great Britain where they were particularly common in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and spread toNorth America, where the stories were common in the Southern USA.The Oxford English Dictionary cites 1550 as the earliest written appearance as “Hobgoblin, Rawhed, and Bloody-bone”.
Bloody-Bones is usually said to live near ponds, but according to Ruth Tongue in Somerset Folklore, “lived in a dark cupboard, usually under the stairs. If you were heroic enough to peep through a crack you would get a glimpse of the dreadful, crouching creature, with blood running down his face, seated waiting on a pile of raw bones that had belonged to children who told lies or said bad words.”
Alien hand syndrome (also known as anarchic hand or Dr. Strangelove syndrome) is a neurological disorder in which one of the hands of people who have it appears to take on a mind of its own. Alien hand syndrome is best documented in cases where a person has had the two hemispheres of their brain surgically separated, a procedure sometimes used to relieve the symptoms of extreme cases of epilepsy. It also occurs in some cases after other brain surgery, strokes, or infections.
Symptoms
A person with alien hand syndrome can feel normal sensation in the hand and leg, but believes that the hand, while still being a part of their body, behaves in a manner that is totally distinct from the sufferer’s normal behavior. They lose the ‘sense of agency’ associated with the purposeful movement of the limb while retaining a sense of ‘ownership’ of the limb. They feel that they have no control over the movements of the ‘alien’ hand, but that, instead, the hand has the capability of acting autonomously — i.e., independent of their voluntary control. The hand effectively has ‘a will of its own.’ “Alien behavior” can be distinguished from reflexive behavior in that the former is flexibly purposive while the latter is obligatory. Sometimes the sufferer will not be aware of what the alien hand is doing until it is brought to his or her attention, or until the hand does something that draws their attention to its behavior.
A related syndrome described by the French neurologist François Lhermitte involves the release through disinhibition of a tendency to compulsively utilize objects that present themselves in the surrounding environment around the patient (Lhermitte 1983; Lhermitte et al. 1986). The behavior of the patient is, in a sense, obligatorily linked to the “affordances”(using terminology introduced by the American ecological psychologist, James J. Gibson) presented by objects that are located within the immediate peri-personal environment. This condition, termed “utilization behavior”, is most often associated with extensive bilateral frontal lobe damage and might actually be thought of as “bilateral” alien hand syndrome in which the patient is compulsively directed by external environmental contingencies (e.g., the presence of a hairbrush on the table in front of them elicits the act of brushing the hair) and has no capacity to “hold back” and inhibit pre-potent motor programs that are obligatorily linked to the presence of specific external objects in the peri-personal space of the patient. When the frontal lobe damage is bilateral and generally more extensive, the patient completely loses the ability to act in a self-directed manner and becomes totally dependent upon the surrounding environmental indicators to guide his behavior in a general social context, a condition also identified by Lhermitte (1986), and referred to as “Environmental Dependency Syndrome”.
Sufferers of alien hand will often personify the rogue limb, for example believing it to be “possessed” by some intelligent or alien spirit or an entity that they may name or identify. There is a clear distinction between the behaviors of the two hands in which the affected hand is viewed as “wayward” and sometimes “disobedient” and generally out of the realm of their own voluntary control, while the unaffected hand is under normal volitional control. At times, particularly in patients who have sustained damage to the corpus callosum that connects the two cerebral hemispheres (see also split-brain), the hands appear to be acting in opposition to each other. For example, one patient was observed putting a cigarette into her mouth with her intact, ‘controlled’ hand (her right, dominant hand), following which her alien, non-dominant, left hand came up to grasp the cigarette, pull the cigarette out of her mouth, and toss it away before it could be lit by the controlled, dominant, right hand. The patient then surmised that “I guess ‘he’ doesn’t want me to smoke that cigarette.” This type of problem has been termed “intermanual conflict” or “diagonistic Ideomotor apraxia.”
