Creative History

  Robert Dudley, known as Lord Dudley, or the 1st Earl of Leicester is a prominent courtier and English statesman, renowned across continental Europe for his tact and diplomacy.  He is said to be one of Queen Elizabeth’s favorites and for years now he is rumored to have sought not only the Queen’s affections, but also her hand in marriage. Residing in the County of Derbyshire, Lord Dudley is considered one of the wealthiest men in the English midlands, and between the cities of Leicester and Manchester, his word is law and second to only that of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth I. Sometime in the late 1580’s Dudley has his mind set on a decidedly different mission than wooing the Queen or negotiating a settlement over a trade dispute with a competing royal court.  He is determined to send a man down to the bottom of Eldon Hole and put to rest, once and for all, the persistent rumors that a portal to Hell itself is located right in his own backyard. Eldon Hole is situated ...

  On the day before Halloween in 1948, a Saturday, in the early afternoon the Donora Pennsylvania High School football team was defeated on its home turf, Legion Field,  by local rival Monongahela High School.  The final score was Monongahela 27 Donora 7. Not a single pass was thrown during the entire game by either team.  But there was something far more odd, sinister and tragic than erratic play on the gridiron that both literally and figuratively overshadowed the field and the one hundred and fifty or so players and spectators who had gathered together that afternoon at Legion Field in suburban western Pennsylvania. The Smog. Speaking sixty-years later in 2008 to reporters from the Pittsburgh Gazette local resident Sam Jackson, who played in the football game for Monongahela High School remembered, “The smog was like a big cloud of yellowish mist hanging over the players.” Donora resident Paul Brown, who had left work early from the U.S. Steel Company Mill...

  No light.   No air.   No water.   Temperatures in excess of one-hundred and fifty degrees.  The smell of excrement and piss.  Hundreds of filthy, naked and sweaty men with only room to sit cross legged on the floor.  No room to lie down.  Not enough room to stand up. If heat exhaustion and dehydration don’t kill you then you may be lucky enough to lose your mind and go insane and into a blissful oblivion before someone strangles you, or bashes your head against the metal walls just to get you to shut up.   And then there are the beatings and the periodic executions, performed for sport by your sadistic captors on deck who will blindfold you, have you kneel and then slice off your head at the neck with the curved blades of their samurai swords and then laugh as your severed head rolls off the deck and floats out into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. Maybe, just maybe you’ll be “lucky” enough to live through the be...