Bizarre Plants: Gympie, Gympie

Gympie, Gympie
courtesy of Petr Dlouhý

There are plants that eat things, sting things, have exploding seedpods and more. Among these dangerously strange plants is one that goes by many names, but my favorite of them is gympie gympie. Its Latin name is Dendrocnide moroides. It is a stinging shrub that grows in Indonesia, Australia and the Moluccas with some seriously effective defense mechanisms.

Along the entire roughly 3 to 9 foot tall plant are stinging hairs that can embed themselves in your skin. These stingers emit an extremely painful neurotoxin. The sting causes a cluster of red dots that eventually spread until they grow together. The intense pain is known to be strong enough to put people and animals out of their minds. It can go on for months. What is worse, allergic reactions to the plant may get worse with repeated exposure, as with researcher Marine Hurley.

Stings from the gympie gympie can allegedly kill humans and large mammals. That means victims should get the stinging hairs out as soon as possible and seek palliative treatment. You can remove the stingers with a hair removal strip. Most people don't have those lying around while hiking, but being aware of your surroundings and being prepared goes a long way, so start if you know these plants are nearby.

The Bizarre Letter of the Axeman of New Orleans

Sometimes, even serial killers take bizarre to another level. Sure, they are already inherently weird, since most of us just do not go around axing people, but there are those who go above and beyond the standard serial killer oddity. One of these killers, who is presumably a man, but was never caught, is the so-called "Axeman of New Orleans." As mentioned above, him killing people is not exactly strange in the world of serial killers, so we are going to skip that and get straight to a letter purportedly written by him and that gives citizens an odd get out of murder free card.

(If you want to read a detailed account of the Axeman of New Orleans' crimes, there is a thorough one here.)

In a letter dated March 13, 1919, the Axeman of New Orleans or someone purporting to be him wrote a tremendously creepy self-assessment and threat. The self-assessment was predictably grandiose. He was no man. He was Satan's homie, blah, blah, blah. On top of this, he professes his love of jazz music. Okay, so he likes jazz music. Not that strange. He then says he will "visit" the city "next Tuesday night." The date was March 19. Anyone playing jazz music would be spared. Seriously? What kind of serial killer is this?

The Axeman never did kill anyone that day. It was not because the whole city was playing jazz. Many were, but many purposely did not. Maybe he just wimped out. He did kind of set himself up for failure there. Maybe the letter wasn't really written by him. Whatever the case, it was a strange enough story to make it into "American Horror Story: Coven," in case you are interested in seeing an entertaining account of the time.

By the way, speaking of weird, I now have the Beatles' "Taxman" stuck in my head as "Axeman." You're welcome.

A Crappy Christmas Tradition: The Caganer

Traditional Caganer

Hey, it's Christmastime, so I'm just going to go ahead and introduce you to one bizarre, yet funny and less horrible than most things on this blog, holiday tradition. Perhaps we will make our own tradition out of posting this type of article around Christmas. Perhaps we will just get a chuckle out of it this year and then move on. Either way, I found the so-called caganers to be utterly hilarious and hope you do too.

Before we jump into the how, where and exactly what of this Christmas tradition, let's just translate the name for you know whats and giggles. Caganers stands for "the crapper" or a less decorous term, if you can imagine. "The Crapper" is a character in the traditional Catalan nativity scene," which involves the entirety of Bethlehem. For at least the past few hundred years, a crapping peasant can be found among these nativities. Yes, we are talking a figurine with its pants around its knees and poop behind him. No one is quite sure why or how this tradition came about, but there you have it.

Because the nativity scenes in Catalan tradition involve so much more than just the manger, caganers are not the only figures added that Westerners would not typically see. Nonetheless, this little guy remains the most controversial or funny, depending on your view of the thing. Remember, you may have to look for him if you come across a Catalan nativity, as some families like to hide "the crapper" for the kids to find.

The Roden Crater Observatory

We may have not delved into this area of things that are bizarre, but it is possible for something to be so extraordinary as to be bizarre and also be beautiful, amazing and brilliant. Such is the case with the subject of this blog post. One man is so dedicated to that which has inspired him that he has gone ahead and purchased an entire cinder cone crater in order to make his vision come true. That vision - an artistic naked eye observatory in the middle of the San Francisco Volcano Field at 5,400 feet. It is in the Roden Crater, to be precise.

The crater itself is something to behold. If you get the chance, find a shot of it from the sky. The red and black of the cinder cone are rather pretty in the context. Artist James Turrell stands at this location and wants people to have "a sense of standing on the planet" by integrating a structure at the location with the sky. If this sounds a lot like ancient structures like Stonehenge, that is because Turrell used ancient observatories and other monumental construction as inspiration for his project.

The Roden Crater naked eye observatory is not complete. Turrell, his investors and his team have put a lot of work into preparing the site. Nonetheless, there is still a lot to do and Turrell purchased the cinder cone in 1977! If time and effort are any indication of result, visiting this observatory is going to be a must-do. If you want to see visual representations and photos or donate to the project, go to http://rodencrater.com/about.

The Disappearances of the Corte-Real Brothers

Statue of Gaspar Corte-Real
in Newfoundland 

The story of the Corte-Real brothers is strange, not because they disappeared, but because they both did the exact same thing to end up that way. One could argue that it was the fault of an intense pioneering spirit and the love of family that urged these two men to their assumed doom, but you can also argue that it was a bit of silliness too. Then again, most disappearance stories involving the Northwest Passage do have an element of "I could have told you that would happen." to them.

In 1501, Gaspar Corte-Real went on his second mission to try to find the Northwest Passage. The first time he made it as far as possibly Greenland. This second time around, he made it to what we now think was Canada and then sent two of the three Portuguese sailing ships that went with him on this mission home. One of them carried his brother Miguel Corte-Real. The ship with Gaspar and the man himself were never seen again. The two that were sent home made it there safely.

In an attempt to find his brother, Miguel Corte-Real headed to the Northwest Passage in 1502. He too brought three caravels with him. He too sent two of the three sailing ships home. He too was never seen again. Like his brother's expedition, the two ships that went home made it there just fine. In spite of receding ice and much safer travels in the north these days, no evidence of either of their ships has been found.

Sawney Bean or "The Bizarre Cannibal Patriarch"

Hey, if you're into being freaked out, cannibalism works. Of course, if you're the one getting your bits chewed on by a family of freaky cave dwellers, the coolness factor rapidly drops to zero. Stories, which may be largely fiction, say that Sawney Bean and his family of inbred 14th or 15th century Class A freak shows killed and ate about 1,000 people. Why they didn't bother just growing some carrots or stealing a cow is anyone's guess, but it seems the story starts with dear old dad/granddad.

Sawney Bean, whose name was actually Alexander Bean, was born into a family of simple laborers. If you want to know the meaning behind the Sawney moniker, you will have to look farther than me. Maybe it's Old Scottish for "Eats People." Good old Sawney "Eats People" Bean felt that the life of a 14th or 15th century laborer was not for him and it is hard to blame him. The problem is, what was him was running off with a psycho of the female variety and starting a family in a deep cave.

The Sawney legend says that Bean and his wife had kids, who also had kids together, all in a cave where they went unnoticed due to its depth. It is unclear just who had babies with who, but the story definitely indicates inbreeding, as there some 40 Beans by the time their appetites caught up with them. They lived by robbing, killing and eating travelers on the roads nearby at night. They never left the cave during the day so no one even knew they were there. Apparently, they killed so often that they even had leftovers that went to waste in icky piles outside of their cave. No one noticed that, either, I guess. (Remember, historians think this story is, at the very least, hyperbole.)

Finally, someone fought off a group of the Beans and that led to the whole batch being discovered in their cave. All of them were taken and bled, burned, quartered or hanged to death. None of these deaths has been discovered in records and the same goes for the 1,000 victims of the Beans, but it sure does make the skin crawl. People's ideas of story telling have not changed much in 600 years.

Bizarre Sponge or Bizarre People: The Eltanin Antenna

Eltanin Antenna (1964)
Courtesy of the U.S. Government (Public Domain)

Sometimes, it is not so much a thing that is bizarre, but rather how people react to it, as we have seen often on this blog. Such is the case with the so-called Eltanin Antenna. This object photographed at a depth of 3,904 meters gets its name from the USS Eltanin, which photographed it in 1964. This relatively famous photograph shows a distinctly antenna-like object coming up out of the floor of the ocean. The seemingly unnatural angles of the thing led some to believe it did not belong there.

It is here that we get to the bizarre thing about the Eltanin Antenna. In spite of scientific views doing anything but leaning this way, numerous individuals took the object as alien in origin. Thing with sharp angles at the bottom of the ocean? Aliens. To this day, UFOlogists and other hokey-pokey hobbyists think this device is either extraterrestrial or part of some conspiracy. Too bad reality is nowhere near as interesting.

As few as 7 years before the picture of the Eltanin Antenna was taken (possibly fewer), it was identified as a type of carnivorous sponge by the name of Cladorhiza concrescens. Sure, it is carnivorous, oddly shaped and living in a pretty unforgiving environment, but it is certainly terrestrial as much as anything else that exists on Earth is. Of course, the identification is called into question by die hards, but if you look at the Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Volume 15, you will see that Fig. 541 looks very much like the Eltanin Antenna and this figure was published in 1888.