ChaoticMusings

Those who watched season 3 of American Horror Story: Coven may be surprised to learn that Kathy Bate’s character, Madame Delphine LaLaurie, is based on a real-life New Orleans tale of horror.

In true-life, Mad Madame Marie Delphine LaLaurie, a prominent New Orleans socialite, was discovered to have caged and savagely tortured her slaves in a small room at the top of her Royal Streetmansion (now considered one of the most haunted places in New Orleans). When the bizarre atrocities were discovered after her mansion caught fire, she reportedly fled to Paris, France where she lived the remaining years of her life in hiding. But in 1924 the plot thickened further after an old cracked copper plate was found in Alley 4 of the St. Louis Cemetery #1. The inscription on the plate read: “Mrs. Marie LaLaurie, born Delphine Macarty, died in Paris on December 7, 1842 at the age of 67”. Had Madame LaLaurie returned to her old haunts, in physical or ghostly form, or did she secretly remain hidden in the city of New Orleans avoiding punishment for her crimes?

 the legend of Charlie No Face is mostly true – it is based on a real man, Raymond Robinson, whose life changed dramatically after a gruesome accident on June 18, 1919.

The story of Raymond Robinson

Raymond Robinson was born on October 29, 1910 in Beaver County, Pennsylvania.  On June 18, 1919, when he was eight years old, Raymond was heading to a local swimming hole with some friends when he stopped to climb up the Morado Bridge, which spans Wallace Run outside of Beaver Falls, to see if a bird’s nest located high on a girder contained any birds or eggs.  It was understood that the bridge, which has since been torn down and replaced, supported an electric trolley cable carrying 22,000 volts of electricity (some say 1,200 volts – there were multiple trolley cables laid across the bridge).  It was also known that another child, Robert Littell, had died after touching the dangerous cable a year earlier. Because of this, the other boys were afraid to climb the girders of the bridge.  But not little Raymond.  As Raymond climbed the bridge trestle, he slipped and fell, touching his face and upper body on the trolley cable as he tumbled to the ground.  The electrical shock he sustained produced a powerful explosion and little Raymond was gravely injured.

Raymond was expected to die from his injures but somehow, Raymond survived.  Unfortunately, his face looked “as if it had been melted with a blow torch”. His eyes were gone. His nose was gone. His lips and ears were terribly disfigured. His left arm was burned off at the elbow and his upper torso was badly scarred. As a result, Robinson spent considerable time in Pittsburgh hospitals after the accident but numerous surgeries, which basically amounted to sewing flaps of skin across the gaping holes where his eyes and nose had been located, did little to improve his appearance.

Raymond continued to live with his family in Koppel, Pennsylvania through adulthood.  He spent his days indoors with relatives making doormats and hand-made leather items to sell for money.money.  Because of his appearance, he rarely ventured out during the day (reports indicate that he would occasionally exchange short conversations with neighbors for a beer or cigarettes). However, at night, he went for long walks along a quiet stretch of State Route 351 between Koppel and New Galilee, feeling his way along the road with a walking stick and shuffling his feet, one on the pavement and the other on the gravel berm. Even at night, he tried to remain in the shadows and often hid when cars approached.  Locals would drive slowly down the highway or gather along the side of the road, hiding in the bushes, in order to take pictures of “Charlie” as he made his way past.  One local resident remembers  

“On Friday nights, especially after football games, it was a parade of cars going out there. There were times when there were policemen there because of the flow of traffic (they issued tickets to anyone who stopped on the road).”

It has been reported that Robinson’s family never understood what drew the crowds. They hated his nightly walks, which sometimes kept him away from home all night, resented the derogatory nicknames that the public had given Raymond, and particularly disliked the fact that people gave him booze as a reward for talking with them (alcohol was never consumed in the Robinson house). Raymond would occasionally get drunk and lose his way home. One time his family found him laying on the side of the road. He had spent the night in woods and crawled to the roadside following the sounds of the automobile traffic. Another time, they found him curled up in a farm field and on several occasions  Raymond was struck by passing cars. The incidents only served to increase their worry. And the gawkers – they drove the family crazy. People would pull up to the house at all hours of the night and honk their horns, shouting, “We want to see Charlie!” One time, during a carnival in Koppel, one of the carnival owners came to see whether he could hire Robinson for the freak show. It is said that people came from as far away as Chicago to catch a glimpse of Charlie No Face. But none of the encounters deterred Robinson from taking his long, nightly walks.

Over the years, local residents passed on tales about him to their children and grandchildren and the story grew to mythic proportions. Robinson stopped his long walks during the last years of his life, and retired to the Beaver County Geriatric Center (now named Friendship Ridge), where he died on June 11, 1985 from natural causes – but the legend of the travels of “Charlie No Face” along Route 351 live on.

Raymond Robinson is buried in Grandview Cemetery, overlooking the site of the old Wallace Run trolley bridge near the spot where he was injured.

Robert Littell, the Beaver Falls boy who was fatally burned on the bridge nine months before Robinson, is also buried there.

The Death of Elisa Lam

Elisa Lam was last seen on January 31, 2013 in the lobby of the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. She was vacationing through the West Coast, documenting the trip on her blog, and checking in with her parents every day. On January 31 those calls stopped. Lam had vanished. Soon the police were involved and her parents arrived to help with the search.

They had nothing. That February, LAPD released elevator surveillance footage of Lam before her disappearance. The footage shows Lam behaving strangely in the elevator, appearing to talk with invisible people, peering around the corner of the door, crouching in the corner, and opening and closing the door. But what exactly is going on in this video raises more questions than answers. Theories range from psychotic episodes, to demonic possession, to unknown assailants just out of the camera's view:

Around that time, hotel guests started reported weird things happening with the Cecil Hotel water supply. As CNN reports:

"The shower was awful," said Sabina Baugh, who spent eight days there during the investigation. "When you turned the tap on, the water was coming black first for two seconds and then it was going back to normal."

The tap water "tasted horrible," Baugh said. "It had a very funny, sweety, disgusting taste. It's a very strange taste. I can barely describe it."

But for a week, they never complained. "We never thought anything of it," she said. "We thought it was just the way it was here."

On the morning of February 19, a hotel employee climbed to the roof and used a ladder to investigate the hotel's water storage tanks. That's where authorities found the decomposing, naked body of Lam, whose personal items were found nearby. After an autopsy, her death was labeled accidental. NBC Los Angeles reported at the time about the strange circumstances in the hotel's past:

The tank has a metal latch that can be opened, but authorities said access to the roof is secured with an alarm and lock.
The single-room-occupancy hotel has an unusual history. "Night Stalker" Richard Ramirez, who was found guilty of 14 slayings in the 1980s, lived on the 14th floor for several months in 1985. And international serial killer Jack Unterweger is suspected of murdering three prostitutes during the time he lived there in 1991. He killed himself in jail in 1994.
In 1962, a female occupant jumped out of one the hotel's windows, killing herself and a pedestrian on whom she landed.

The Dakota Building, New York

The Dakota, an apartment building in New York City, has been home to many rich and famous residents since it opened back in 1884. John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved into the building in 1973, and John was also assassinated outside the structure on December 8, 1980. Before his death, John claimed he saw a "crying lady ghost" roaming the halls. Then, after John died, Yoko, who still lives in the building, said she witnessed John's ghost sitting at his piano. Yoko says John told her: "Don't be afraid. I am still with you."

ONE - Metallica 1989

Although Metallica were underground trendsetters for the early half of the Eighties, they broke into mainstream consciousness in 1989 with "One," a single about a quadriplegic solider asking to die. "When we were writing the Master of Puppets album, James [Hetfield] came up the idea – what it would be like if you were in this situation where you were sort of a living consciousness, like a basket case, where you couldn't reach out and communicate with anyone around you," Lars Ulrich once said. "You had no arms, no legs, couldn't obviously see, hear or speak." They revisited the idea in the fall of 1987, when their managers turned them onto Dalton Trumbo's antiwar novel and movie Johnny Got His Gun, which recounted the agony of a patriotic American soldier, Joe Bonham, in World War I who awakens one day to find a landmine had stripped him of his limbs, eyes, ears and most of his mouth – yet he could still think and feel. He eventually head bangs Morse code on his pillow, asking his doctors to kill him. For Metallica, that story – set against machine-gun thrash riffs for nearly eight minutes – made for an unlikely Top 40 hit, an unforgettable music video using footage from the movie and a Grammy win.

Digger wrote:

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Though the Amityville house is most famously linked to the Ronald DeFeao killings in November of 1974, it was originally used to house Native Americans that were insane, sick or withering. Those Indians were buried on the property, obviously from less than peaceful circumstances. Did these Indians, buried on unconsecrated ground, lend to the later strange tragedy that would make this house so famous?

Ịn the early morning hours of November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeao fatally shot his father, two brothers and his sister. All were found in their beds, face down, and despite the neighbors’ houses being close together, no one heard screams or noises. Mr. DeFeao claimed that ghosts were present during the events and had goaded him into eliminating his siblings though his original intent was just to executing his father.

The home at 112 Ocean Avenue eventually went up for sale and was later purchased by George and Kathy Lutz for $80,000. Though they were told by the realtor about the tragedy, the Lutz’s were so enamored with the home, pool, garage and 4,000 square feet of waterfront that they immediately made an offer.

The next 28 days are the events that inspired the book and movie, Amityville Horror.

 

 

 

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https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-amityville-horror/

https://skepticalinquirer.org/newsletter/poltergeist-at-amityville/

John Doe wrote:

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Plenty more links than those above, the Lutz's certainly made a lot of money out of the hoax - which was the whole point of course.

Edit - whenever I send a link on her it does not work Digs - been like this for a few days now. :(

-- Edited by John Doe on Sunday 6th of September 2020 08:43:08 PM

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 It's obvious that the Lutz's were full  of shit.

Digger wrote:

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Sean Robinson’s grandmother stored this creepy painting in her attic for twenty-five years, claiming it was haunted by the artist who created it, who reportedly used his own blood as pigment and then committed suicide. Sean’s grandmother further claimed to hear voices and crying sounds emanating from the attic–and the woman swore she once saw a shadowy figure of a man in her house that she felt to be the spirit of the artist himself. It was for these reasons that she had kept “The Anguished Man” locked in the attic for lo those many years.

After his grandmother died, Sean inherited the painting  and took it to his home, where he lived with his wife and son. Immediately, Sean began reporting strange activity that was eerily similar to the stories from his grandmother–crying sounds and visions of a shadow man. The activity escalated to the point where his wife began to feel that something was stroking her hair. After his son inexplicably ‘fell’ down the stairs (the boy claims a presence pushed him), Robinson set up a camera overnight to try to capture the paranormal activity. One of Robinson’s YouTube videos shows slamming doors, rising smoke, and the painting falling from a wall.

 

 

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 I've seen this painting up close and personal.  It's fucking horrible.

John Doe wrote:

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Digger wrote:

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John Doe wrote:

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Plenty more links than those above, the Lutz's certainly made a lot of money out of the hoax - which was the whole point of course.

Edit - whenever I send a link on her it does not work Digs - been like this for a few days now. :(

-- Edited by John Doe on Sunday 6th of September 2020 08:43:08 PM

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 The links won't work if you use the quick post facility.   I've told you all that before.  

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 I never use that only the advanced. 

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 Me too....some links work some don't, I cant get on the quiz either.

It may be due to how your laptop is set up, which browser you use, the time of day or what you had for tea last night....but something stops the links working for some of us.