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Indian police arrest 67 women in death of barber suspected of black magic
Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 12:46 pm
Indian police arrest 67 women in death of barber suspected of black magic
From: CNEWS.canoe.ca
HYDERABAD, India (AP) - Indian police arrested 67 women on Wednesday after a mob killed a barber suspected of practising black magic, an official said. Dozens more women were being sought by authorities.
The arrests came after the mob of about 150 women from the south Indian village of Muddireddypalli attacked the shop of a barber named Parvathalu on Tuesday, beating him and locking him inside before setting the building on fire, said C. Satyanarayana, a district official.
The villagers suspected he was practising black magic and held him responsible for the large number of deaths in the village in the past year, he said.
The attack was prompted by the death of another woman earlier this week, the official said.
The barber was suspected of sorcery because “he was seen throwing lemons here and there,” Satyanarayana said.
He gave no details, but many villagers in this part of India believe lemons are used in black magic.
Police planned to arrest all the women involved in the attack, but most had fled their homes to avoid arrest, Satyanarayana said.
Muddireddypalli is about 100 kilometres south of Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh state.
Mahbubnagar, the district where the village is located, is a rural area with high levels of illiteracy and poverty. Many villagers are superstitious.
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Etched into crops, the outlines of Bronze Age burial mounds surround a roughly 190-foot (57-meter) circular Stone Age temple site about 15 miles (24 kilometers) from Stonehenge in southern England in an undated aerial photo. Discovered during a routine aerial survey by English Heritage, the U.K. government’s historic-preservation agency, the “crop circles” are the results of buried archaeological structures interfering with plant growth. True crop circles are vast designs created by flattening crops. The features are part of a newfound 500-acre (200-hectare) prehistoric ceremonial site which was unknown until the aerial survey, archaeologists announced in June 2009. Photograph by Damian Grady/ English Heritage (via Photo: Huge Pre-Stonehenge Complex Found via “Crop Circles”)
Photo reblogged from Suicide Blonde with 31 notes
Specter of Newby Church
This photograph was taken in 1963 by Reverend K. F. Lord at Newby Church in North Yorkshire, England. It has been a controversial photo because it is just too good. The shrouded face and the way it is looking directly into the camera makes it look like it was posed – a clever double exposure. Yet supposedly the photo has been scrutinized by photo experts who say the image is not the result of a double exposure.
The Reverend Lord has said of the photo that nothing was visible to the naked eye when he took the snapshot of his altar. Yet when the film was developed, standing there was this strange cowled figure.
I would just like to add that I would dare myself to look at this picture in the Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown books and it would scare the living shit out of me when I was little.
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The Brown Lady
This portrait of “The Brown Lady” ghost is arguably the most famous and well-regarded ghost photograph ever taken. The ghost is thought to be that of Lady Dorothy Townshend, wife of Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount of Raynham, residents of Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England in the early 1700s. It was rumored that Dorothy, before her marriage to Charles, had been the mistress of Lord Wharton. Charles suspected Dorothy of infidelity. Although according to legal records she died and was buried in 1726, it was suspected that the funeral was a sham and that Charles had locked his wife away in a remote corner of the house until her death many years later.
Dorothy’s ghost is said to haunt the oak staircase and other areas of Raynham Hall. In the early 1800s, King George IV, while staying at Raynham, saw the figure of a woman in a brown dress standing beside his bed. She was seen again standing in the hall in 1835 by Colonel Loftus, who was visiting for the Christmas holidays. He saw her again a week later and described her as wearing a brown satin dress, her skin glowing with a pale luminescence. It also seemed to him that her eyes had been gouged out. A few years later, Captain Frederick Marryat and two friends saw “the Brown Lady” gliding along an upstairs hallway, carrying a lantern. As she passed, Marryat said, she grinned at the men in a “diabolical manner.” Marryat fired a pistol at the apparition, but the bullet simply passed through.
This famous photo was taken in September, 1936 by Captain Provand and Indre Shira, two photographers who were assigned to photograph Raynham Hall for Country Life magazine. Upon developing the film, the image of The Brown Lady ghost was seen for the first time. It was published in the December 16, 1936 issue of Country Life. The ghost has been seen occasionally since.
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Tulip Staircase Ghost
Rev. Ralph Hardy, a retired clergyman from White Rock, British Columbia, took this now-famous photograph in 1966. He intended merely to photograph the elegant spiral staircase (known as the “Tulip Staircase”) in the Queen’s House section of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. Upon development, however, the photo revealed a shrouded figure climbing the stairs, seeming to hold the railing with both hands. Experts, including some from Kodak, who examined the original negative concluded that it had not been tampered with. It’s been said that unexplained figures have been seen on occasion in the vicinity of the staircase, and unexplained footsteps have also been heard.
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A team of researchers in the US has discovered traces of a medicinal alcoholic drink in bottles that are more than 5,000 years old. The scientists extracted wine compounds and plant-derived ingredients from a jar taken from the tomb of one of the first pharaohs of Egypt, Scorpion I. This is the earliest sample of a human-made medicine. (via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Ancient medicines were alcoholic)
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This close-up of a statue of the Virgin (in this case, Our Lady of Sorrows), shows the great detail that goes into depictions of the holy. Processions in Valencia, Spain are particularly elaborate; sacred “imagenes” of the Passion of the Christ serve as the centerpieces of several key parades. (via Semana Santa - Photo Essays - TIME
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The Heart of Holy Week Dating back to the 4th century, Semana Santa commemorates events in the days leading up to the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday. Celebrated all over Latin America, the observance has its unofficial home base in Spain where penitents hold hundreds of processions around the clock. During marches — like this one in Mallorca which honors Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem — members of cofradías, or brotherhoods, often wear what is called a nazareno or robe consisting of a tunic and a pointed hood to hide their identities as they repent of their sins. The robes were maliciously co-opted in the U.S. by the Ku Klux Klan, which is virulently anti-Catholic. (via Semana Santa - Photo Essays - TIME
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A SKELETON exhumed from a grave in Venice is being claimed as the first known example of the “vampires” widely referred to in contemporary documents. Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence in Italy found the skeleton of a woman with a small brick in her mouth (see right) while excavating mass graves of plague victims from the Middle Ages on Lazzaretto Nuovo Island in Venice (see second image here). At the time the woman died, many people believed that the plague was spread by “vampires” which, rather than drinking people’s blood, spread disease by chewing on their shrouds after dying. Grave-diggers put bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires to stop them doing this, Borrini says. The belief in vampires probably arose because blood is sometimes expelled from the mouths of the dead, causing the shroud to sink inwards and tear. Borrini, who presented his findings at a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Denver, Colorado, last week, claims this might be the first such vampire to have been forensically examined. The skeleton was removed from a mass grave of victims of the Venetian plague of 1576. However, Peer Moore-Jansen of Wichita State University in Kansas says he has found similar skeletons in Poland and that while Borrini’s finding is exciting, “claiming it as the first vampire is a little ridiculous”. Borrini says his study details the earliest grave to show archaeological “exorcism evidence against vampires”. (via ‘Vampire’ discovered in mass grave - science-in-society - 06 March 2009 - New Scientist)
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