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Dead Rabbits, Bowery Boys and the Night of July 4, 1857: How a Corrupt NYC Mayor, a Divided NYPD and an Economic Panic led to a Big Apple Gang War

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By July 4, 1857 New York City had been in a nearly perpetual state of civil unrest for over a month, but on that night, as fireworks exploded overhead and thousands gathered in the city’s densely packed dusty and narrow streets to celebrate America’s independence in the midst of the mid-summer heat and humidity--the Big Apple exploded into an outright gang war. On America’s eighty-first birthday, only a mere three years before secession and then Civil War would tear the nation apart, New York City’s two largest underworld gangs--The Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys--each representing two distinct neighborhoods; two distinct versions of Christianity; and two distinct versions of what each gang believed it meant to be a “real” American, traded gunfire and fought hand to hand with knives and clubs, while Manhattan’s poorest citizens--those recently arrived by the thousands from Ireland, free African-Americans many only recently having escaped bondage in the south and those who could only ...
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The Demon Cat of Washington DC: Stories of the Phantom Feline that has Haunted the US Capitol Building and the White House since 1862

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There are purported to be miles of tunnels, and even an unused burial crypt, deep beneath the United States Capitol Building in Washington D.C..  After Congress passed something called the Residence Act in July of 1790, which decreed that an inauspicious sixty square miles, or so, of swampland on the border between Maryland and Virginia would be rechristened as the District of Columbia and chosen as the Capital city of the brand new United States of America, our founding fathers--congressmen all themselves---set to work and designed this subterranean world. Throughout history many fringe theorists have asserted that the miles of tunnels and rooms beneath our nation’s capital are somehow linked with the mysterious rites of freemasonry and other secret societies for the rich, powerful and well-to-do who hope to keep their activities hidden from the prying eyes of the American public.  But one fact about this underground world is known, and that is that when work began on the b...
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Maryland's Dyer Witch Legend of 1698: Where Folklore and Fact Intersected to Create a Famous Hollywood Horror Film

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  It was a bitterly cold winter’s night in February of 1698.  The wind howled and the ground was frozen solid as she stumbled over tree roots unable to see at all in the dense underbrush; injured and scorned, lost and banished to the woodlands outside of town.   There was no one around to help for miles.   This time of the year, when night came early and darkness fell across the Maryland countryside like an evil pall, all of the settlers huddled around their hearths, indoors, and prayed  so that even if someone had wanted to help her, which they most assuredly did not, they would have been too afraid to come outside on this most inauspicious of winter nights anyway.  Every citizen of nearby Leonardtown was a devout Catholic whose ancestors had immigrated to the safe haven of Maryland in order to escape religious persecution at the hands of Protestants in England and western Europe, or they were recently arrived Puritans whose relatives only a few ...
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Pray for Bourdin Blown to Pieces: The Greenwich Outrage of February 15, 1894 History's First Act of International Terrorism

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  February 15, 1894 was a brisk winter’s day in late-Victorian Era London. At around 5 o'clock in the afternoon a cold hazy setting sun still hung in the sky and glowed--a dull orange orb suspended in air--like the light of a flickering candle about to be extinguished over Greenwich Park just outside the city center and home to the Royal Greenwich Observatory. The Royal Observatory was located on a prominent hill southeast of downtown London in the affluent suburb of Greenwich and overlooked the bustling River Thames--the lifeline of the late 19th century British Empire.  The Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO) founded by King Charles II in 1675 literally split the known world in half.  It is the Prime Meridian; the spot on the planet earth from which longitude and the passing of time are measured and which to this very day gives us Greenwich Mean Time and the dates on our calendars. Today, the RGO is a tourist attraction located in an urban parklike setting that attrac...
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The Mystery of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon Illinois: A Madman on the Loose or a Case of Midwest Mass Hysteria in 1944?

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  On the night of August 31, 1944 in the town of Mattoon, Illinois, Urban Reef, a sheet metal worker, who has lived most of his adult life in the same small ranch-style house located at 1817 Grant Avenue is awakened by a strange and pungent odor. He rises out of his bed to investigate but instantly becomes nauseous and weak in the knees.  He drops to the floor of his bedroom and starts to retch and vomit.  His wife, fearing that she may have accidentally left the stove on after cooking dinner only a few hours before, attempts to get up out of bed to go to the kitchen, but she finds that she is paralyzed from the neck down and unable to get up out of the bed at all.  While her husband vomits on the floor Mrs. Reef feels as if a heavy weight is pressing down on her chest and she is forced to lay there inert and completely immobile. Only a few hours later in the early morning of September 1, 1944, and only a few blocks away from where Mr. and Mrs Reef suffered their...
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