Category Archives: Paranormal

A catch-all category for posts about the supernatural, conspiracy theories, weird science, bizarre history, mythology, and so on.

Photo Friday: The Overlook

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I first visited the Stanley Hotel back in 2003. As a horror writer, it’s almost mandatory to drop by and check out the influence for one of the horror genre’s most famous landmarks, Stephen King’s Overlook from The Shining.

The Overlook

The Stanley Hotel: inspiration for terror

It’s a cool place. One of these trips I think I’d actually like to stay there.

The Stanley embraces its reputation, of course. While only the ABC miniseries was shot at the Stanley, there are memorabilia and movie posters from the original film version all over the place, and of course the coffee shop also sells “redrum” chocolates and The Shining t-shirts and accessories. We took a few minutes to eyeball the movie posters for the Kubrick flick posted in the lower level mens room.

There was a wedding reception at the hotel while we were there, so the bride and groom and their guests were having pictures taken in the lobby and out front. That didn’t stop tour groups from going through, but we still took advantage of a quiet moment to take a handful of photos ourselves.

Wrecking Crew

If there are ghosts in the place, they were scared of us

The tours also include night tours and a ghost hunt, as well as a visit to Room 217, where King stayed. I wondered if it made sense to keep a room vacant like that, but I bet they make a lot more money in tours than they’d make on the room. I still have an old-style key to room 217 from my first trip, complete with an Overlook Hotel tag, but I didn’t see any reason to pay for the tour when Michelle Scalise used to work there and took us on a brief tour herself.

In any case, we enjoyed even our brief visit to the place, and it was good to be behind the camera again. I have a couple more sets of photos to upload from the last few months, and then I’ll need to decide if I can salvage the rest of Photo Friday 2012. Things blew up at work, got busy at the dojo, and got a little insane at home. When available time comes down to either working on photography or working on the writing, the writing has to win out every time.

But like the writing, it’s just a matter of developing habit and discipline.

More soon.

About Mike Oliveri

Mike Oliveri is a writer, martial artist, cigar aficionado, motorcyclist, and family man, but not necessarily in that order. His Bram Stoker Award-winning first novel, Deadliest of the Species, was just reprinted by Evileye Books.

Hungry Hungry Aliens

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Just a thought I had today:

The closest star to our planet is 4.2 light years away. Let’s assume life exists there, and they have ships advanced enough to fly ten times the speed of light. That means it would still take them over five months to get here. Even for a four-man (-being?) crew, you’re looking at stocking lots of food and water (or equivalent sustenance) for such a long trip, meaning the ship is going to need a sizable cargo hold (whether for stored goods or a garden). Then you need more space for propulsion unit.

This rules out the small UFOs most people claim to see as alien in nature. If they traveled through wormholes or jump gates, folded space, or traveled via some other sci-fi cliche, how is it we can spot the energy signatures of gamma-ray bursts in remote galaxies, but not something local to our solar system?

Not to mention the time and energy investment involved. They’re going to come all that way to buzz an airfield, make crop circles, probe a redneck, and fly home?

Yeah. Still not buying it.

About Mike Oliveri

Mike Oliveri is a writer, martial artist, cigar aficionado, motorcyclist, and family man, but not necessarily in that order. His Bram Stoker Award-winning first novel, Deadliest of the Species, was just reprinted by Evileye Books.

Your Modern World Kicks Your Balls In

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Two more entries to Your Modern World tonight.

First up, diseases are a common problem in the modern world. Sure, we’ve made many advances and have eliminated things like smallpox, but we still have to deal with the occasional outbreak. Most societies deal with this through immunizations and vaccines, as well as prevent the spread of disease through hygiene, germ cleansers, and in extreme cases, quarantine.

That’s just not good enough in the backwater villages of India. How do they deal with it? They marry their daughters off to frogs. Yeah, that’s going to end well.

Next time I catch pneumonia, I’ll marry the Little Bird off to a hamster. Fix me right up.

In our second entry, we’re drawing closer and closer to the dreaded 2012 apocalypse as predicted by the Maya. There have been books and TV shows devoted to the date, and theories abound as to what the world-destroying event could actually be.

Putting aside the failure to learn a lesson from Y2K hysteria and the fact that the date is just a nice round number in the Mayan calendar (just like 2000 on our Gregorian calendar), has anyone stopped to realize they’re worried about predictions from people who practiced human sacrifice to appease their gods?

They needed rain, they sacrificed people. They needed more crops, they sacrificed people. They needed the sun to come up the next morning, they sacrificed people. I’m just not going to get myself too worked up over the last page of a calender worked out by some assholes who’d cut my heart out as an insurance policy for reaching that last page.

Makes me wonder if we’re really making any progress after all.

About Mike Oliveri

Mike Oliveri is a writer, martial artist, cigar aficionado, motorcyclist, and family man, but not necessarily in that order. His Bram Stoker Award-winning first novel, Deadliest of the Species, was just reprinted by Evileye Books.

Your Modern World Spites Your Face

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In today’s entry of Your Modern World, we find motorcyclists in Nigeria are using dried pumpkin shells as helmets in an attempt to comply with new helmet laws. Many of them are being arrested, yet they still refuse to comply with the law.

The first question a rational human being asks is “why not wear a helmet?” Good question. The first reason is because they’re afraid the helmets will be stolen. This is especially problematic for the motorcyclists who use their bikes as a taxi to get people through the insane Nigerian traffic; the drivers claim they get to the destination and the passenger runs off with the helmet, which costs $29US. That may not sound like a lot, but consider they only make about fifty cents a ride.

Okay, fair enough. What else?

I know some bikers who don’t wear helmets, and their arguments include: helmets restrict vision; helmets dampen hearing; helmets are uncomfortable; you don’t get to feel the wind in the face; forcing helmets on us hampers personal freedom.

Not a big deal in Nigeria. No, it’s their next concern that makes them a prime candidate for a Your Modern World entry:

Stories have also appeared in the local papers highlighting passengers’ fears that the helmets could be used by motorcyclists to cast spells on their clients, making it easy for them to be robbed.

“Some people can put juju inside the helmets and when they are worn the victim can either lose consciousness or be struck dumb,” passenger Kolawole Aremu told the Daily Trust newspaper.

Yes, you read that right: they’re afraid of magic!

I would kill to see ABATE present that argument to the state legislature.

About Mike Oliveri

Mike Oliveri is a writer, martial artist, cigar aficionado, motorcyclist, and family man, but not necessarily in that order. His Bram Stoker Award-winning first novel, Deadliest of the Species, was just reprinted by Evileye Books.

Son of Your Modern World

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I just read that albinos are being murdered in Tanzania for the alleged magical properties of their limbs and organs.

We’ve split the atom, condensed the sum total of human knowledge onto silicon chips, and have shot satellites into the depths of space, yet a significant portion of the world’s population is still living in the Dark Ages. There may be parts of some cities I wouldn’t walk through at night, but at least I don’t have to live in fear of marauders hacking my legs off with machetes because they want to mix up some potion or another.

Yeah, I’m glad most of us have put superstition and magic behind us. Modern societies just don’t have room for — oh, wait… never mind.

About Mike Oliveri

Mike Oliveri is a writer, martial artist, cigar aficionado, motorcyclist, and family man, but not necessarily in that order. His Bram Stoker Award-winning first novel, Deadliest of the Species, was just reprinted by Evileye Books.

This is Still Your Modern World

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There’s a Czechoslovakian man who believes aliens are trying to assassinate him. Meteorites have struck his house five times in the past several months, and because this defies the odds, he’s concluded it must be aliens.

Now, I can understand the thought popping into his head. I once heard a thunk in my car and thought it might be a bomb (which, 13 years later, still amuses my wife to no end). How, though, do you hold on to this thought for more than a few seconds and not laugh about it? Let’s just assume for a moment that the aliens are out there. What does this guy do for a living that might make him a target? What could he possibly have done that could rouse their ire? Maybe they’re just doing it for the giggles, like some cosmic meatspace version of the Flying Spaghetti Monster game.

Even better is he’s reinforced the roof of his house to protect himself. Does this mean he thinks he’s safe if he’s having a beer at the local pub? Or if he checks into a hotel room every time it rains? Rather than spend all that money, why not just move? If the meteorites follow him to his new house, then it might be worth entertaining the notion of intelligent guidance behind the meteorites.

I can’t help but laugh at the image of him hiding under a table every time it rains. It makes me wonder what else he’s doing about it, like holding a rifle across his lap and shooting back when a new meteorite hits. We should put him in touch with Troy Hurtubise so they can turn the Angel Light into a superweapon and mount it on an Ursus Bearsuit to battle the aliens. Or at the very least he should file a grievance with the Vogons.

Shifting from the extraterrestrial to the divine, there’s a story in India about a girl born with two faces. Obviously that means she’s a reincarnated goddess. People from neighboring villages are already worshiping her as such, and the parents will not allow doctors to give the girl a CT scan.

I love it. When a goat is born with two faces or a cat is born with one eye, it’s a deformity. At the very least, superstitious or religious (pick your poison) folk will call it a curse or a bad omen. When it happens to a child, though? She’s a goddess! Can’t go tying bad mojo to our precious little babies! “Misfortune and mutation my ass, it’s a blessing!” As with all things religious, it’s all so arbitrary and convenient.

Taken together, these are a good example of how quickly people turn to paranormal or supernatural explanations for things they don’t understand. It doesn’t matter that one guy lives in a modern culture and the others in a Third World village; they both jump to extreme conclusions.

Welcome to your modern world.

About Mike Oliveri

Mike Oliveri is a writer, martial artist, cigar aficionado, motorcyclist, and family man, but not necessarily in that order. His Bram Stoker Award-winning first novel, Deadliest of the Species, was just reprinted by Evileye Books.

Poltergeist Children

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In what I’m sure is an April Fool’s prank, New Scientist is reporting Italian scientists are speculating psychic emanations from children going through puberty is responsible for poltergeist activity.

Brovetto and Maxia hypothesise that the changes in the brain that occur at puberty involve fluctuations in electron activity that, in rare cases, can create disturbances up to a few metres around the outside of the brain.

These disturbances would be similar in character to the quantum mechanical fluctuations that physicists believe occur in the vacuum, in which “virtual” particle and antiparticle pairs pop up for a fleeting moment, before they annihilate each other and disappear again.

Brovetto and Maxia believe that the extra fluctuations triggered by the pubescent brain would substantially enhance the presence of the virtual particles surrounding the person. This could slowly increase the pressure of air around them, moving objects and even sending them hurtling across the room.

I love it! Straight out of comic book science. If this were real, these guys would take the top spot on my crackpot list.

About Mike Oliveri

Mike Oliveri is a writer, martial artist, cigar aficionado, motorcyclist, and family man, but not necessarily in that order. His Bram Stoker Award-winning first novel, Deadliest of the Species, was just reprinted by Evileye Books.