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The Manitowoc Sun-Messenger, Wisconsin, November 13, 1942

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Cult of Tanis Paul has joined the chat

I love you guys but I think a lot of you are the kind of people who are susceptible to falling in with a cult.

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Handmade Voodoo doll

Source

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The Beal Ciphers

More than a hundred years ago, a small pamphlet was published titled “The Beale Papers,” which contained three cipher texts. The mysterious codes supposedly gave directions to a treasure buried in a secret location in Bedford County, Virginia in the 1820s.

According to the story in that pamphlet a man by the name of Thomas J. Beale and 30 other men came across  treasure in a mine located to the north of Santa Fe.They transported the treasure to Bedford County, and buried it in a secure location. Beale then wrote three encoded letters: one giving the exact location of the treasure, a second giving its detailed description, and a third giving the names and contact information of the 30 partners. He placed them in an iron box and gave them to a trusted friend (he was instructed to only open the box if Beal and his friends were unable to return from a journey they had set out on) —the local innkeeper named Robert Morriss —before disappearing, never to be seen again.

2 out of the 3 ciphers remain un-cracked to this day. Morriss tried to decode the ciphers but was unsuccessful so he passed it onto a friend (un-named) who spent years working on them. He was only able to decode one of them using The Declaration of Independence as a key. The decoded cipher read:

“The first deposit consisted of ten hundred and fourteen pounds of gold, and thirty-eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver, deposited Nov. eighteen nineteen. The second was made Dec. eighteen twenty-one, and consisted of nineteen hundred and seven pounds of gold, and twelve hundred and eighty-eight of silver; also jewels, obtained in St. Louis in exchange for silver to save transportation, and valued at thirteen thousand dollars.”

2 of the ciphers remain un-cracked.They have been published as “The Beal Papers” so anyone who wants can try to decode them. While some will never be swayed in their resolve to find the treasure, some experts consider the Beale ciphers to be an elaborate hoax.

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The Wormwood Star (1956) - short film by Curtis Harrington The Wormwood Star is a 10-minute study of the occult art and witchy persona of Harrington’s friend Marjorie Cameron (1922–1995), best known these days for her memorable incarnation as the Scarlet Woman in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), a film in which Harrington also appeared. In The Wormwood Star, Harrington ramps up the mystique with oblique shots and at least half the running time given to Cameron’s strange drawings and paintings. The subtitle, “Concerning the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel” harks back to the 1940s and her husband, Jack Parsons, a rocket researcher and, for a time, the American head of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis. Harrington later gave Cameron a wordless role as the “Water Witch” in his low-budget horror film, Night Tide (1961), where she drifts around Venice Beach looking suitably mysterious. Night Tide is out-of-copyright so can be watched in full at YouTube.

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The Universal Dream Book or Dreams and their interpretation by Zadkiel, The Great Astrologer London W Nicholson & Sons - 

no date c1890?

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There are believed to be hundreds more skeletons in Roopkund Lake waiting to be discovered and the Indian government has banned all but scientific travel to it.

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This is a Chinese pigeon-whistle flute, which gets attached to the tail feathers of a pigeon and makes a sound as they fly through the air! Even though it’s used for pigeons, we think that it looks a bit like a spider from this angle! It was made before 1886 and is made of eight bamboo pipes set into a gourd wind chamber.

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[A white fortune cookie paper with black text on the front reading: Do something unusual tomorrow.]

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Lake Natron, located in northern Tanzania, is considered one of the world’s most dangerous lakes. The lake is 80 degrees, sometimes even as high as 140 degrees. The lake is so hot and caustic that it kills any animals that aren’t adapted to it. When animals come into contact with the lake and die, they turn into mummified corpses and look as if they have turned to stone. The alkalinity in the lake comes from the sodium carbonate that flows from the surrounding hills. Even though the lake is extremely dangerous to most animals - and humans, of course - it does support a thriving ecosystem of salt marshes, freshwater wetlands, tilapia, flamingo and other wetland birds.

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Kowloon Walled City, also known as the City of Darkness. The Walled City’s reputation always preceded it: a place outside the law where policemen feared to tread; a place controlled by rival Triad gangs, where every manner of vice was available; a place where outsiders entered at their peril, risking robbery, kidnapping or worse. For the most part there was enough truth in the received wisdom to keep outsiders away.

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The weirdness of roadside America. Photographs (mostly from the late 70s/early 80s) by John Margolies of various roadside attractions and unusual architecture. These are just the tip of the iceberg.

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Twilight, Patrick Joust

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“He told me to never have blind faith in anything, but to always have wonder. There is endless strength in wonder, he said. There is immense power in wanting to know, and even more power in admitting that you don’t know.”

TANIS (s4, e8)