Tuesday, October 2, 2012

October Haunting - The Screaming Bridge

Screaming Bridge on Maud-Hughes Road between Princeton and Millikin roads in Liberty Township is alleged to have been the site of several deadly and mysterious tales, too numerous to recount here. The bridge spans a railroad mainline that has had several names since the 1870s -- the Short Line, Big Four, New York Central, Penn Central, Conrail and, after June 1, 1999, the Norfolk Southern. No one knows when it was first called the screaming bridge. The unofficial name may have become popular because it sounded like someone screaming when a vehicle passed over the original span, which had grooves in its floor. Others contend the screams are those of people who have died on or near the bridge. The historical basis for the name goes back to a railroad accident in which two men were scalded to death when a locomotive exploded between West Chester and Gano. Strangely, that accident was in West Chester Township (formerly Union Township). The screaming bridge is in Liberty Township. There is no explanation for the discrepancy. Some visitors to the bridge -- especially when the area was less populated -- said they saw ghostly figures beside the road and glowing red balls of light off the roadway.

Another undocumented explanation of the lights is that they are on the caboose of a phantom train. After the 1909 explosion, members of train crews passing the area and residents along the tracks reported seeing the ghost of one or more dead trainmen walking beside the railroad. They appeared to be warning of the dangers lurking on the line.

The 1909 accident killed two engineers and injured three other railroad workers on a northbound Big Four freight Sunday morning, Oct. 24, 1909. One of the dead engineers was off duty, hitching a ride back home to Middletown. While traveling about 40 miles an hour, a steam locomotive exploded. The tender had been loaded with plenty of water before it left Ivorydale in Cincinnati. Unknown to the crew, after a run of only about 11 to 12 miles, a leak had drained much of the water, causing the explosion. The 1909 accident wasn't the only railroad fatality along that stretch of track. June 7, 1976 -- at the Princeton Road overpass in Liberty Township -- a Penn Central employee, a resident of West Chester, was killed when two rails protruding from a southbound work train penetrated the cab of a northbound Penn Central diesel locomotive.

Monday, October 1, 2012

October Haunting - Haunted Bhangarh Fort : The Ghost Town of Rajasthan

Garden at Bhangarh Premises

Bhangarh is a deserted town with some 10000 dwellings established in 1613 by Madho Singh, younger brother of great Mughal general, Man Singh of Amber. Bhangarh was abandoned soon after being built and supposedly after it was cursed by a magician. Bhangarh fort offers an intact view of the medieval past. Apparently, the Bhangarh town had been desolated by an old mughal invasion, and is just reverting back to being habited again.

A Passage through ruined Dwellings

Bhangarh ghosts: Myths, Curse, Devastation and horror stories:

Madho Singh built the town of Bhangarh with the approval of an ascetic Baba Balanath, who meditated there, though Baba Balanath predicted “look my dear chap! The moment the shadow of your palace touches me you are undone. The city shall be no more!” In ignorance Ajab Singh, the grandson of Madho Singh raised the palace to such a height that the shadow reached the forbidden place. Hence the devastation of entire town of Bhangarh happened.

Temple with backdrop of chhatri inside Bhangarh ruins

The another and stronger myth goes as follow: A tantric battle engaged between the gorgeous queen Ratnavati and the wicked sorcerer Singhia Sevra, who was attracted by the queen’s beauty. Desperately, he tried to trap her in his magical ploy, and failed every time, as the queen herself was a master in the tantric art.The last battle took place on the day when the queen losing eventually her temper, transformed a glass bottle containing the massaging oil into a big rock and hurled it towards the hill-top and the rock started rolling towards the wicked tantric. Sensing his looming death, Tantric concentrated all his powers and spatted his dying curse: “I die! But you too, you Ratnavati shall not live here anymore. Neither you, nor your kin and these walls of the city, none shall see the morning sun!” In that night, all the treasure of the Bhangarh was transferred to the new site of Ajabgarh and the next morning everything was leveled to the ground after a severe commotion. And as per the ancient tales, Ratnavati died in the very next year during a battle between Bhangarh and Ajabgarh. Singhia Sevra (Wicked tantric) chhatri can be seen on the top of the hill.

Chhatri on the hill top on the side of Bhangarh fort
Bhangarh premises are enclosed by a partially ruined wall. Other than dwellings, ruins of Bhangarh also include gardens, havelis, banyan trees and temples of Lord Someshwar, gopinath, mangla devi and Keshava rai. But the enigmatic attraction is a secluded chhatri on the hill top which catches attention of all the travelers. In entirety, the random placement of all these sites within Bhangarh premises may look freighting and mysterious at the same time.

Ajabgarh Fort near Bhangarh

Other Forts near Bhangarh: There are some other forts near Bhangarh those were also built in the same era and share the related history. Ajabgarh is a picturesque garrison fort between Bhangarh and Pratapgarh, with a lovely reservoir nearby. Ajabgarh fort was built by Ajab Singh Rajawat, The grandson of Madho Singh. Ajabgarh fort is in good condition, and offers an incredible panoramic view of the eponymous walled town and the well –preserved, but less visited temple of Shri Raghunath ji and old chhatris, all nearby. Pratapgarh is a remarkable fort situated on hill top which dominates the region. Pratapgarh and its vicinity are famous for its natural surrounding and scenic countryside. Pratapgarh town has two temples and a mosque.

ASI Sign Board at Bhangarh

Bhangarh is an ancient town of archeological importance. During recent excavations different types of tools used by early man have been recovered from the pre-historical site of Bhangarh. The old town of Bhangarh, as the ruins show was surrounded on three sides by elevated hills where wild undergrowth is seen today. There were natural springs and waterfalls there and one such is found near the temple of lord Someshwar. The Archeological survey of India (ASI) has put up a sign board at Bhangarh stating (among others): “Entering the borders of Bhangarh before sunrise and after sunset is strictly prohibited.” Lot of tourists who visit this Bhangarh affirms that there is a strange feeling in the atmosphere of Bhangarh, which causes symptoms of anxiety and restlessness.

DISCLAIMER

The following ghost stories and images in my 'October Haunting' series have been taken from various websites around the web. I, in no way, claim to be the author; I simply like to spread spooky stories and images to my friends and family who happen to read my blog!

Thank you kindly!

Friday, September 28, 2012

Haunting Season is about to begin!

It is that time of year again... Starting Monday and every work day after until October 31st, I will be posting ghoulish true stories and terrifying accounts of the PARANORMAL!

So for now, enjoy various century old photographs of people enjoying this eerie time of the year!

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Nikola Tesla was a Righteous Badass

I did not write this article, but I found it on Badass of the Week. Feel free to peruse other articles of Bad Assery. I think more people should learn about Nikola Tesla.

Pretty much everybody even remotely associated with real-time strategy games has heard the name Tesla before – the Serbian God of Lightning's omnipresent, ever-zapping coils have been ruining the lives of digital Allied soldiers and gibbing U.S. war machines into spare parts since the release of Command & Conquer: Red Alert in 1996 – but surprisingly few people these days are familiar with the life and times of one of humankind's most eccentric, badass, and volumetrically-insane scientific super-geniuses.

First off, Nikola Tesla was brilliant. And not just like Ken Jennings brilliant, either - I mean like, "holy crap my head just exploded (from all the awesome)" brilliant. The Croatian-born engineer spoke eight languages, almost single-handedly developed technology that harnessed the power of electricity for household use, and invented things like electrical generators, FM radio, remote control, robots, spark plugs, fluorescent lights, and giant-ass machines that shoot enormous, brain-frying lightning bolts all over the place like crazy. He had an unyielding, steel-trap photographic memory and an insane ability to visualize even the most complex pieces of machinery – the guy did advanced calculus and physics equations in his damn head, memorized entire books at a time, and successfully pulled off scientific experiments that modern-day technology STILL can't replicate. For instance, in 2007 a group of lesser geniuses at MIT got all pumped up out of their minds because they wirelessly transmitted energy a distance seven feet through the air. Nikola Tesla once lit 200 lightbulbs from a power source 26 miles away, and he did it in 1899 with a machine he built from spare parts in the middle of the god-forsaken desert. To this day, nobody can really figure out how the hell he pulled that shit off, because two-thirds of the schematics only existed in the darkest recesses of Tesla's all-powerful brain.

Of course, much like many other eccentric giga-geniuses and diabolical masterminds, Tesla was also completely insane. He was prone to nervous breakdowns, claimed to receive weird visions in the middle of the night, spoke to pigeons, and occasionally thought he was receiving electromagnetic signals from extraterrestrials on Mars. He was also obsessive-compulsive and hated round objects, human hair, jewelry, and anything that wasn't divisible by three. He was also asexual and celibate for his entire life. Basically, Nikola Tesla was the ultimate mad scientist, which is seriously awesome.

Another sweet thing about Tesla is that he conducted the sort of crazy experiments that generally result in hordes of angry villagers breaking down the door to your lab with torches and pitchforks. One time, while he was working on magnetic resonance, he discovered the resonant frequency of the Earth and caused an earthquake so powerful that it almost obliterated the 5th Avenue New York building that housed his Frankenstein Castle of a laboratory. Stuff was flying off the walls, the drywall was breaking apart, the cops were coming after him, and Tesla had to smash his device with a sledge hammer to keep it from demolishing an entire city block. Later, he boasted that he could have built a device powerful enough to split the Earth in two. Nobody dared him to prove it.

Tesla also ordered the construction of the Wardenclyffe Tesla Tower, a giant building shaped like an erect penis that would have housed the largest Tesla coil ever built. The massive structure, ostensibly designed to wirelessly transmit power, has been cited as a potential cause of the mysterious 1908 Tunguska Event – a ten-megaton blast that detonated in the wastelands above central Russia that completely obliterated and deforested everything unlucky enough to be located within a several hundred mile radius. While nothing has ever successfully proven Tesla's involvement in the ass-destroyingly huge explosion, it's pretty awesome that this guy could potentially have detonated a weapon 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, and have done it back before they'd even invented the submachine gun.

During his adventures blinding half of the world with science, Nikola Tesla harnessed the power of Niagara Falls into the first hydroelectric power plant, constructed a bath designed to cleanse the human body of germs using nothing but electricity, and created a 130-foot long bolt of lightning from one of his massive coils (a feat which to this day remains the world record for man-made lightning), but perhaps his most badass invention was his face-melting, tank-destroying, super-secret Atomic Death Ray. In the 1920s he claimed to be working on a tower that could potentially have spewed forth a gigantic beam of ionized particles capable of disintegrating aircraft from 200 miles away and blinking most men out of existence like something out of a Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers comic. His weapon, known as the "Teleforce Beam", allegedly shot ball lightning at 60 million volts, liquefying its targets with enough power to vaporize steel, and, while it could shoot further than 200 miles, its effectiveness beyond that range was limited only by the curvature of the Earth. Luckily for all humans, this crazy insanity never came to fruition – most of the schematics and plans existed only in Tesla's head, and when he died of heart failure in 1943, little hard data on the project existed. Still, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI confiscated all his personal stuff and locked it away anyways, just to be safe.

Despite being incredibly popular during his day, now Tesla remains largely overlooked among lists of the greatest inventors and scientists of the modern era. Thomas Edison gets all the glory for discovering the lightbulb, but it was his one-time assistant and life-long arch-nemesis, Nikola Tesla, who made the breakthroughs in alternating-current technology that allowed for people to cheaply use electricity to power appliances and lighting in their homes. They constantly fought about whether to use alternating or direct-currents (their bitter blood feud resulted in both men being snubbed by the Nobel Prize committee), but ultimately Tesla was the one who delivered the fatal kick-to-the-crotch that ended the battle – at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, his AC generators illuminated the entire experience, marking the first time that an event of that magnitude had ever taken place under the glow of artificial light. Today, all homes and applicances run on Tesla's AC current.

Nikola Tesla was one of those super-genius badasses whose intellect placed him dangerously on the precipice between "great scientific mind" and "utter madness". He held 700 patents at the time of his death, made groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of physics, robotics, steam turbine engineering, and magnetism, and once melted one of his assistants' hands by overloading it with X-rays - which isn't really scientific, but is still pretty cool. And honestly, if there were one man on this planet who was ever capable of single-handedly destroying the entire planet through his insane scientific discoveries, it was Tesla. That alone should qualify him as a pretty righteous badass.