It opened in December 1930 and at the time was a cutting edge facility, doctors had cottages and dedicated staff to treat their mentally-ill patient. Patients were able to contribute to the facility by growing crops and gaining work skills. In 1939 this changed, the Manteno Madness struck. It was typhoid fever and the administrators were slow to respond. By the time it was contained it had sadly caused 49 patient deaths.
During the 1940’s and 1950’s the population swelled, it was designed for 3,600 patients and 760 staff but by 1953 they had 5,300 patients. The staff had been halved and the overcrowding continued, this and underfunding led to treatable diseases becoming lethal, it led to the premature death of thousands of patients.
Manteno became a testing ground for government scientists and psychiatrists in the 1950’s, the government used the patients for testing the effects of Malaria and uncontrolled STD’s. The area still contains ice-baths used for schizophrenics to break their fits. Marteno also became a TB facility with a very bad reputation.
In 1985 the facility was closed and converted into a veterans’ home. The state hospital cemetery, located nearby, has the remains of 4,000 patients who died at the hospital.
Consequently the place is rumoured to be haunted, and is located in Kankakee County around 90 minutes away from Chicago. The locals don’t seem to happy about people wandering around so be polite and respectful. The only cottage not used for business now is the Morgan Cottage. The Morgan Cottage is at the corner of Juniper Street and West Evergreen Street.
The cottage is said to be in a bad shape and it is best to go during the day, with company. It is out in the middle of the fields and so very quiet, good for investigations but do not go to the main hospital unless you want to encounter the security who will call the police.
It is a small limestone tunnel, located in the northwest corner of Niagra Fall, Ontario, Canada. Whilst cited as a railway tunnel it was built for drainage, it was for water to be removed from the farmlands. Farmers also used it to transport goods and animals safely underneath a busy road. The tunnel was also used in the Stephen King film, The Dead Zone (1983).
Local legends say it is haunted by a young girl; she escaped a burning farmhouse with her clothes ablaze, saying she died within its walls. Another variation also says an enraged father set her ablaze after loosing custody in a nasty divorce. More sinister ones say that a girl was raped and burnt to hide the evidence and all of them say that lighting a match in the tunnel will produce the sounds of dying screams.
Most likely this is an urban legend, what I could confirm is that there is a terrible smell from the flooding and natural decay. Near it is a natural sulphur spring that bubbles accounting for some more of the smells and probably the sounds. Most of the details don’t really lead me to think this is anything more than urban legend.
“Wiktionary – A reanimated corpse in Chinese legend, which moves around by hopping with its arms outstretched, and kills living creatures to absorb their life force.”
The “stiff corpse” is a vampiric monster from Chinese folklore, often attributed to having died a violent or unnatural death. They are more often depicted wearing the funerary robes of the Qing Dynasty. There are numerous articles about them recounting either similar details or going through slightly more in-depth looks, so I have decided that they are interesting enough for this blogger too.
How are they created?
It seems that whilst I popped a summary up top there are varying reasons or methods, so it seems that the most common are said to be a violent death, a sudden death, being struck by lightning or if an animal considered to be a black omen hopped over the dead body. There are also suggestions of a third party creating them, so I would assume some form of bad magic would be employed.
The18th Century scholar, Ji Xiaolan identified two types of Jiangshi and said that one of them is recently returned to life or those long buried but had not decomposed. Ji Xiaolan writes that violent death, suicide, spirit possession of a body, or an absorption of qi (life energy) may bring one back to life or if a funeral had taken place for them but the body for some reason was not buried.
How can you tell if you are in the presence of a Jiangshi?
They have pale skin, they hate the sun and only tend to appear at night, in some cases they might have green skin due to a fungus that grows on corpses.
They are said to be blind and detect the living from their breathing.
The body does not compose, the hair and nails continue to grow after death.
They can appear at first glance to look like a normal person, or they can be obviously rotting corpses.
The rumours of blood drinking may well be down to Western influence creeping in as they are said to feed on the life force (qi) of a person.
Being bitten by a Jiangshi will also lead to the inevitable turn of the victim into another one.
How can you defend against a Jiangshi?
Taoist Monks use various spells to work against them.
Writing a spell in chicken blood on yellow paper and putting it on the corpse’s forehead is said to stop one moving.
A Jiangshi is terrified of its own reflection.
They are afraid of mirrors. An 8-sided mirror is used, also know as a Feng Shui mirror. The Bagua is the sign of the eight triagrams and so a mirror with this used is thought to be very effective.
They are afraid of peach wood.
They are afraid of jujube seeds.
To banish on you can throw sticky rice at it, it will absorb the evil.
Where do they come from?
The origins appear to come from folklore and the practise of moving corpses/travelling corpses. This was(is?) known as Xiangxi ganshi because it seems it was most well used in the Xiangxi region. I’m going to put in some summary information and then give some other source information, but the gist is this:
In the post low-income families would not have been able to afford the cost of transporting a dead body from a place far away to their own region. They would in turn hire Taoist priests to transport the bodies home on their behest. The priests would move them at night and would ring bells to let the villagers know they were coming through. It was thought that the souls of those who died away from home would be homesick, so it was best to get them back and perform the correct funerary rites. The movement took place at night to avoid people coming into contact with the dead and the lower temperature was better for transporting the dead.
Depending on the source this seems to have happened in two ways:
On a bamboo stretcher where the body was laid out, where the canes would create a creaking nose and the body would jerk stiffly in time with the movements of the priests carrying them.
Liao Yiwu’s book The Corpse Walker has oral accounts and one of them is of how there would be a two man team to move the body. One man would have the body on his back and adorn a large robe to cover them both with a mourners masks on. The other would walk ahead with a lantern to warn the carrier of obstacles ahead.
Did they ever exist?
Well according to “Split Words and Interesting Poems”, Hu Yanhong and subsequent speculation maybe they were never really true? The practise of moving corpses is visited and describes an ancient story where soldiers and villagers watched two sorcerers of the ‘Chenjou Talisman’s’ who led a procession of shuffling corpses. The scene of this method of transportation was so unnerving that soldiers and civilians alike screamed and retreated. However, what if this was just a clever way of using people to hide contraband? The idea that they would do this and then use bits of decaying flesh from other soldiers would indeed make the sight and smell of the dead men walking rather unnerving to say the least!
What about the Jiangshi in the modern era?
Well the practise of corpse walking/travelling was not seen as a good thing in the modern China and it’s move to communism. At the end of the Chinese Civil War, 1949, many of those who were employed in the trade found their livelihoods (and lives) under threat. Attachment to the dead may well be seen as a bourgeois decadency for the weak and the poor.
In the 1980’s a move to make the Jiangshi a more comical creature appears to have moved through the cinema scene. In 1985, “Mr Zombie” directed by Liu Guanwei was released, it made 20 million HKD and ranked 7th in the charts that year.
A more modern film about them is Rigor Mortis, 2014, a Hong Kong horror movie but doesn’t hold the same sort of overall silly vibe of Mr Zombie or Mr Vampire.
What do you think about the story of Jiangshi? I found this very interesting indeed.
Myself as Chisune with my friend on the now defunct Sword of Legends online – Edgar is taking down the Jiangshi 🙂
Example of the mirror.
Sources – maayot.com
Wikipedia
Libowen.tripod/history/t-cadavar.htm
En.chinaculture.org
Historydefined.net
Liao Yiwu’s book The Corpse Walker (Amazon sells translated copies)
Black Aggie is the folkloric name given to a statue that was formerly on the grave of General Fenix Agnus, located in the Druid Ridge Cemetery, Pikesville, Maryland. The statue was created by Edward Ludwig Albert Pausch, it’s an unauthorized replica of a sculpture called Grief, of a somber figure in a shroud.
It was installed around 1926 and from the beginning became the subject of urban legends and rumours, if you sat in the lap at night you would be haunted by the ghosts of the buried inhabitants. There was no grass around the statue where there was a shadow over it during the sunlight (quite natural me thinks), and then rumours that the statue would animate itself at night and had glowing red eyes.
A lot of unwelcome attention was brought to the statue and many people were caught in the act of breaking into the cemetery. The Agnus family donated the statue to the Smithsonian in 1967 to avoid further vandalism to it. It then sat in storage for many years at the National Museum of American Art, where an authorised recasting of the statue sits.
Black Aggie was then moved from the museum to a courtyard behind the Dolley Madison House, Lafyette Square, Washington DC. The blank pedestal remains over General Fenix Agnus’ grave who wanted the copy there, even at the point it was installed the rumours started and the local papers covered the issue probably adding to the sensation. The problem with it is that some of them sounded truly damning, such as a local rumour that if a ghost there passed through a pregnant woman she would suffer a miscarriage.
A man recounted that he does believe some merit in it, he had been out with this friend there and met with two girls. They thought it would be funny to stub out their smokes on her hand; the rumour was if you put a coin in her hand the coin would bring good luck, seemingly Frank thinks that their disrespect might have caused his friend a problem. Ten years later the other man was found shot in the back of the head, mafia-style and he wondered if the statue had already marked him that night.
It seems strange to me that a copy of a statue could bring such rumours, but what I can say is that the humble work of art, all be a copy, is probably now worth far more because of it.
The tunnel is in Tennessee, USA you can find it located just off Big Elm Road in Kingsport and sadly sits in a sorry state these days. It was built in the 1920’s and was named after the person that owned the land, Edward Sansabaugh. He also features in the local legend too.
In the nice version Old Ed let in a homeless man to stay, an act of charity that went wrong when the guest tried to steal jewellery and Ed then confronted him with a shotgun. The homeless man then grabbed the family’s baby and ran, using the child as a human shield before escaping and drowning the baby in the tunnel.
The other version omits the homeless thief and goes straight to the more nefarious plot that Old Ed went mad and killed his family, throwing their bodies into the tunnel; either way the story results in the dead baby and this is the one that’s said to still be there.
If you turn off your lights off and switch off your car engine in the middle of the tunnel it will then not turn back on again. You can hear the cries of the baby and hear Old Ed’s footsteps, presumably as he comes to find out why you are there?
The Southern States Paranormal Research Society found that there might be more information to the local legend, for instance he lived into quite a ripe old age and not in the 1950’s. There are no records about children in the family dying and by the time he had grown old it was a hotspot for the local youths, meaning vandals and hormonal teens. Would you want those kids in your tunnel if you lived nearby? Probably not… He used to use his talent for mimicking animal cries to scare them off and this is perhaps where the legend started.
Investigations into the unknown and weird 