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)
In Greenbrier County, West Virginia during 1897 a young woman was murdered. She had initially been declared dead via natural causes but the court later ruled that she had been murdered. The victims mother spoke out about it being the husband that had murdered the woman and she claimed that her daughters spirit had been the reason she was able to find out.
The victim’s name was Elva Zona Heaster and she was born around 1873, not a lot is known about her apart from she had a child out of wedlock in 1895 and then met a drifter. The drifter was Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shue and he moved to the county in search of a new life, he gained employment as a blacksmith. She found work in the shop of James Crookshanks and soon after Heaster declared that Shue and her were to marry. Her mother, Mary Jane Heaster, had taken a dislike to him and placed an open objection to her daughter, but she was in love and they married anyway.
23rd January, 1897 and Zona’s body was found at her home by a young boy who had been sent there by Shue on an errand. Zona was found at the bottom of the stairs, stretched out with her feet together and one hand on her stomach. The boy ran to his mother and the authorities were called in, it took them over an hour to get there.
By this time Shue had moved his wife to the upstairs bedroom and laid her on the bed, in modern terms this would be a direct infringement because the evidence was already tampered with and would arouse immediate suspicion I am sure. He dressed the corpse himself, he washed her down this was unusual as it would normally have been done by the women of the community.
He would not leave his wife’s side, he dressed her in a high collar with a veil over her head and when the doctor attempted to examine her Shue’s reaction was so violent that Dr Knapp left the house. All of this was seen to be part of the terrible grief he was suffering, his crying and refusal to leave her were put down to the belief that he had suffered such a loss. The resulting investigation was that her death was down to her fainting or perhaps complications with “female troubles” although it is not clear if she was pregnant or not. Her mother declared that the “devil” had killed her when notified about the tragedy.
24th January 1897 Zona was buried in Soule Chapel Methodist Church Cemetery, he kept a vigil by the body at the head of the open coffin. Soon the aggressive behaviour aroused suspicion, during the wake his moods moved from grief or sadness to energetic. He would let no one get too close, especially when he was putting a pillow on one side of her head and then a rolled up sheet on the other. He told people it was to help her rest easier, and he had a scarf around her neck saying it was her favourite one. When the corpse was moved later for the service several people noted that her head seemed to be quite loose.
Mrs Heaster was still not convinced by the whole thing and was sure he had been responsible for her death. She removed the sheet from the coffin afterwards and attempted to have it returned. He refused to accept it and she also noted that the sheet had a strange odour to it, she decided to get it washed and when it was put into water the sheet turned red. The sheet turned pink and then the water went clear and she was unable to remove the stain. She took this as a sign that Zona had been murdered and began to pray for her to come and tell her what really happened.
Zona is said to have appeared four weeks after the funeral, she told her mother that Shue had been an abusive and cruel man who went into a fit of rage when she had no cooked meat for dinner. He broke her neck, and the ghost turned her head to show her until it was facing backwards. She originally turned up as a bright light and then finally arrived with a chill in the room, and she visited her for four nights after that.
Mrs Heaster then visited the local prosecutor, John Alfred Preston, and spent several hours convincing him about the matter of her daughter’s death. It’s not sure if he took credence about her haunting but he agreed to reopen the case, it is possible he also took into consideration that locals were talking about her death being a murder too.
Dr Knapp was asked about the body examination, he explained he was not able to view her or arrange a proper investigation and so it was ordered that she be exhumed. An inquest jury was formed and an autopsy ordered. Zona’s body was exhumed and the autopsy took place 22nd February, 1897 and Shue complained vigorously about it, he responded that he was bound to be arrested even if they could not prove any guilt.
The autopsy took three hours and concluded that she indeed had a broken neck and she had a crushed windpipe. Based on the evidence and his behaviour at the inquest Shue was indeed arrested. Shue had been found to have had two prior marriages with the first ending in divorce. His second wife died under mysterious circumstance and even during his marriage to Zona spoke of wanting to marry several women. He even spoke about this in jail, assured he would be free with so little evidence against him.
During the trial his defence tried to undermine the case by talking about the ghost and trying to get Mrs Heaster into a fluster but she never wavered. July 11th 1897 he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. A mob tried to get him from the jail to hang him but they were dispersed and four of them later faced charges for the disruption. In the end he was moved to West Virginia State Penitentiary and died in 1900 and buried in an unmarked grave there.
Mrs Heaster never changed the story about her daughter’s ghost and died in September 1916. She had seen the death of her daughter and the First World War, and Zona’s ghost had never been heard of again since the original visits; presumably because she had completed the job of identifying her murderer and could rest in peace.
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 