Creative History

  A few weeks before Easter in the year 1512 alarming reports began to reach Pope Julius II in Rome.  Reports of a strange and monstrous creature--a true demon (it was said) brought to life--near the Adriatic coast in the historic and holy city of Ravenna, only about two-hundred miles as the crow flies, north of the Vatican. This creature, what Vatican officials labelled as the spawn of Satan, was said to have been the illicit offspring of a secret sexual liaison between a nun and a monk.  In reality, if that was the case, then the so-called “Monster of Ravenna” never stood a chance of acceptance into Renaissance Italian society no matter what it looked like from the moment that it was born. This “monstrous” being would have been banished to the wilderness from infancy, shunned and pushed away to the margins of Renaissance society, only able to sustain a subsistence life if it were lucky, merely for having been the product of such a sinful sexual encounter. When Pop...

  In September and October of 1903 the small rural Iowa farming community of Van Meter was terrorized for five nights by an unknown winged creature that many described as being both half-bat and half human and, that some say, emitted beams of light from its forehead not unlike those of a coal miner's headlamp.  The creature was said to bounce from rooftop to rooftop, cackling and screaming like a banshee while emitting a foul smelling odor like sulphur or rotten eggs--an odor so awful that many witnesses became faint and passed out from terror and the overpowering stench.   Each and every night for an entire week during October of 1903 the odiferous humanoid cackling creature, or creatures, appeared to terrorize the residents of Van Meter, Iowa who dubbed their cryptid the “Van Meter Visitor”.  And then, after a posse of local men armed with shotguns and revolvers chased the creature into the shaft of an abandoned coal mine on the outskirts of town, the Van Me...

  “You must dig up their bodies,” they implore.  “All must be exhumed.” Warily, George Brown stares at them.  He refuses their requests.  “I cannot desecrate the bodies of my wife and daughters.” “But you must,” the local villagers beg.  Even a local doctor, Harold Metcalf of nearby Wickford, Rhode Island, is among them.  “We must find out who among your wife and daughters is one of the undead.” For weeks the pressure on George Brown has been building.  Not only is he forced to watch his son Edwin, aged twenty years old, wasting away from the pain and suffering of tuberculosis each day right before his very own eyes, but he also faces the fear and suspicion of every person in town. Everyday his neighbors from Exeter, Rhode Island, stop by the home of local farmer Geroge Brown and they reiterate their demand.  They must dig up the bodies of his dead relatives and create an elixir from the ashes of their organs to stop the spread of the di...

            The night of January 3, 1804 is bitterly cold and moonless.  The residents of the borough of Hammersmith on the western outskirts of London are ill at ease and on edge as a still winter’s darkness descends over their neighborhood. Since early November of the previous year the people of this working class suburb have been reporting sightings of a white, sometimes formless almost translucent spectre floating through the air.  Some, especially those that have the misfortune of having to pass by the Hammersmith churchyard after nightfall on their way home from work, have even claimed to have been groped or attacked by the shrouded spirit. Speculation in the neighborhood has been running rampant.  Many believe that the so-called “Hammersmith Ghost” is the disembodied spirit of a man who hung himself the previous year and was buried in the consecrated ground of the churchyard.  According to English law, up until the year...