A few months ago a friend of mine, who is an up-and-coming nature photographer, decided to spend a day and night alone in the woods outside of our town. She wanted to get photos of the woods and wildlife as naturally as she could for her portfolio. She wasn’t afraid of being alone, as she had camped by herself many times before. She set up a tent in the middle of a small clearing and spent the day taking pictures. She filled up four rolls of film on that trip, but when she went and got them developed she saw four pictures that unsettled her, these four pictures were taken from inside the tent, of her, asleep in the middle of the night.

A hidebehind is a nocturnal fearsome critter from American folklore that preys upon humans that wander the woods, and was credited for the disappearances of early colonial loggers when they failed to return to camp. As its name suggests, the hidebehind is noted for its ability to conceal itself. When an observer attempts to look directly at it, the creature hides again behind an object or the observer and therefore can’t be directly seen; a feat it accomplishes by sucking in its stomach to a point where it is so slender that it can easily cover itself behind the trunk of any tree. The hidebehind uses this ability to stalk human prey without being observed and to attack without warning. Their victims, including lumberjacks who frequent the forests, are dragged back to the creature’s lair to be devoured. The creature subsists chiefly upon the intestines of its victim, and has a severe aversion to alcohol, which is considered a sufficient repellent. Tales of the hidebehind may have helped explain strange noises in the forest at night. Early accounts describe hidebehinds as large, powerful animals, despite the fact that no one was able to see them.

“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.

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.”

The Starchild skull is an abnormal human skull allegedly found in Mexico. It is primarily notable due to claims by paranormal researchers that it is the product of extraterrestrial-human breeding. DNA recovered from the skull establishes it as human.

Numbers stations (or number stations) are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. In the 1950s, Time magazine reported that the numbers stations first appeared shortly after the war (WW2) and were using a format that had been used to send weather data during that war.

Numbers stations generally broadcast artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters (sometimes using a spelling alphabet), tunes or Morse code. They are in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually female, although sometimes men’s or children’s voices are used.

Evidence supports popular assumptions that the broadcasts are used to send messages to spies. This usage has not been publicly acknowledged by any government that may operate a numbers station, although two QSLs have been received from numbers stations by SWLers that had sent them reception reports.

In 2001, the United States tried the Cuban Five on the charge of spying for Cuba. That group had received and decoded messages that had been broadcast from a Cuban numbers station. Also in 2001, Ana Belen Montes, a senior US Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, was arrested and charged with espionage. The federal prosecutors stated: “Montes communicated with the Cuban Intelligence Service through encrypted messages and received her instructions through encrypted shortwave transmissions from Cuba”. In 2006, Carlos Alvarez and his wife, Elsa, were arrested and charged with espionage. The U.S. District Court Florida stated: “defendants would receive assignments via shortwave radio transmissions”.

In June 2009, the United States similarly charged Walter Kendall Myers with conspiracy to spy for Cuba and receiving and decoding messages broadcast from a numbers station operated by the Cuban Intelligence Service to further that conspiracy.

It has been reported that the United States uses numbers stations to communicate encoded information to persons in other countries. The state department operated several stations, such as KKN50, that broadcast similar “numbers” messages.

Numbers stations appear and disappear over time (although some follow regular schedules), and their overall activity has decreased since the early 1990s.