The Occult Section

I’m not a big fan of psychics, in general. Call me crazy, but I just don’t care for people who charge people money to give them vague answers that can’t be verified. Even the non-charging “psychics” usually get things wrong, or get things just right enough so that they’re about on par with the daily newspaper horoscopes. But then there’s Karl Lang. This guy just may be on to something…

A self-styled psychic who persuaded women to strip to enhance their chances of contacting the dead told a client to perform ‘like a porn star’, a court has heard.

Karl Lang is said to have ‘brainwashed’ two victims into believing being naked would increase their spiritual abilities.

One of them, aged 26, told a court she felt ‘embarrassed and ashamed’ that she was fooled into taking part in nude séances.

Giving evidence by live video link to avoid seeing 49-year-old Lang in the dock, she said she had been desperate to make contact with her grandfather. Describing Lang’s alleged method of improving her spiritual power, she said: ‘To get stronger, he told me I had to do things that mankind was afraid of.

‘This meant I had to get naked and perform a bit like a porn star. He said the more outrageous I performed, the stronger I would become.’

The woman, who first visited Lang when she was 19, carried on the sessions for more than three years, during which time she was instructed on reaching higher levels of ability, described in terms of ‘levels’ and ‘colours’.

She said: ‘If you didn’t dance to his tune, all hell would break loose. Bad things would happen. I’d lose my colours if I didn’t do what he wanted.’

The woman continued: ‘Thinking about it now it makes me feel sick. I’m embarrassed and ashamed about what I had to do, but I was completely controlled. He mentally abused me.

‘I met Karl at a very vulnerable stage in my life. He made me feel special. His eyes were warming and he made me feel safe and comfortable. I saw Karl as my saviour.’

She added: ‘After Karl was arrested, he rang me and begged me not to say anything. He said, “I’m big time in the s***, please don’t hang me”.’

Lang, of Newport, South Wales, is accused of tricking the two women into carrying out sexual acts during the séance sessions.

Newport Crown Court has heard they were also told to send him naked pictures of themselves on their phones.

The other victim, now 27, said: ‘The first time I stripped off my clothes he said “Well done! You’ve gone up a level in the spiritual world”. He told me the more outrageous I behaved, the higher level I would get. It was like a reward system.’

On one occasion after obeying his sexually explicit instructions, she told the court: ‘Karl congratulated me by saying: “I didn’t think you had it in you – you really pleased the spirit world”. I felt uncomfortable.’

She added: ‘He asked me to talk about my sexual fantasies during meditations. I would be naked with my eyes closed. He told me to imagine having sex. He said: “Be as outrageous as you want, don’t just have one man, have five”.’

The alleged victim contacted Lang in an attempt to get in touch with her father, who died ten years ago. She later told police she felt ‘brainwashed, manipulated and groomed’.

The court heard that Lang had warned the woman not to tell anyone about his methods because he was the ‘reincarnation of Jesus Christ’.

He told police he was ‘totally shocked’ when one of his alleged victims stripped in one of his sessions. He denied asking them to strip, perform sex acts on themselves and send him explicit photos, describing their evidence as ‘wicked lies’.

He denies 12 counts of causing women to engage in sexual activity without consent. The trial continues.

Now, get as mad as you like at Mr. Lang. What he did – taking advantage of extremely impressionable women who came to him for help – is deplorable. But honestly, when it comes down to it, how completely stupid are these girls for going along with this? Ultimately it doesn’t matter what was going on in their life at the time or how vulnerable they were. At some point, some sort of red flag or alarm bell should have gone off in their heads. While I don’t agree with what Mr. Lang did (ok, maybe I’m a little jealous), these girls were obviously ignoring the gut instinct of self-protection and willingly put themselves in real danger. As a wise, pre-prequel trilogy man once said, “Who’s the more foolish – the fool, or the fool who follows him?”

Technorati Tags: conspiracy theory, cover-up, hoax, media, naked, News, paranormal, people, porn, porn star, psychic, thoughts, UK

It seems like a few times a year, these pointless surveys pop up (Bigfoot, ghosts, the paranormal in general, etc.). I’m not sure what people are out to prove with them, or how they get the time, money and resources to conduct them (except for when it’s for a paranormal “reality” TV show), but here’s another UFO survey.

If you believe in UFOs, you may be in better company than you think.

Thirty-six percent of Americans — about 80 million people if the survey applied to the whole country — believe UFOs exist, and a tenth believe they have spotted one, a new National Geographic poll shows.

Seventeen percent said they did not believe in UFOs, or Unidentified Flying Objects, and nearly half of those surveyed said they were unsure. Perhaps reflective of today’s political climate, there appears to be near-universal skepticism of government — nearly four-fifths of respondents said they believe the government has concealed information about UFOs from the public.

The study, commissioned in anticipation of National Geographic Channel’s “Chasing UFOs” series premiering Friday night, was not all serious, said Brad Dancer, National Geographic’s senior vice president for audience and business development. Respondents were asked whether President Barack Obama or Republican challenger Mitt Romney would handle an alien invasion better (Obama won 65 percent in that contest) and which superhero they would call in to fight off the attack (the Hulk beat out Batman and Spider-Man).

“We were trying to have a little fun and see if pop culture references have had an impact on people’s beliefs,” Dancer said. “It’s intended as a fun survey of public opinion.”

Hollywood, he added, may have contributed to the belief — held by 55 percent of Americans, according to the study — that Men in Black-style agents threaten people who report UFO sightings. As movies portraying aliens become increasingly convincing, they may subconsciously affect people’s attitudes, he said.

A growing number of Americans have come to believe that Earth is not the only planet in the universe hosting life, he said. The study showed that 77 percent of Americans believe there are signs that aliens have visited Earth.

While the study may be used as ammunition by the vocal minority of UFO enthusiasts, Dancer said that it leaves open the precise definition of the term UFO.

“UFO doesn’t necessarily mean alien spacecraft,” he said. “There are things that are unexplained. They’re interesting because they’re unknown. People love a mystery.”

The study, conducted by the polling firm Kelton Research, found that more Americans believe “The X-Files” best represented what would happen if aliens invaded Earth than any other movie.

The study, in which a random sample of 1,114 Americans 18 and over was surveyed, also asked what respondents would do if aliens visited Earth. Nearly a quarter said they would try to befriend the extraterrestrials, 13 percent said they would lock themselves indoors, and just one in 20 said they would “try to inflict bodily harm.”

Those numbers did not surprise longtime UFO investigator David MacDonald, director of the non-profit Mutual UFO Network, who said the idea of contact with extraterrestrials has become commonplace in the last few decades.

“We have grown up with ‘Star Trek,’ ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Battlestar Galactica,’” MacDonald said. “We’re at the point where we’d say ‘What planet are you from? Oh well, let’s have a beer.’”

The funniest line to me in this story is “UFO doesn’t necessarily mean alien spacecraft,” he said. “There are things that are unexplained. They’re interesting because they’re unknown. People love a mystery.” Yes, the “U” in UFO stands for “unidentified,” and one could make a point that anything in the sky that is not immediately identified is a UFO. But does he really expect anyone asked a question about UFOs to not immediately think extraterrestrial spacecraft? Especially when they are trying to prove the point that Hollywood has fostered said belief?

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If you’ve been watching the news lately, you’ve no doubt noticed story after story of students being abused by teachers. Teachers bullying children with autism, male teachers putting cameras in the girl’s bathrooms, and even female teachers sleeping with underage male students. What does any of this have to do with the paranormal? Read on…

“Hey, at least I’m not sending ‘I luv u’ texts to your 14 year old son!”

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – Danielle Harkins, 35, was arrested Tuesday after police said she cut a child to ‘remove an evil tick,’ and then performed a ritualistic burning to ‘expel evil spirits.’

In an arrest affidavit, a St. Petersburg Police officer claims Harkins pressured the victim to allow her to cut the child’s back to “get rid of an evil tick” in a “demonic” ritual performed on Saturday.

She then poured perfume on the child’s hand, and lit it on fire to “prevent any more evil spirits from entering” the child.

Bond has been set at $50,000.

I’m really starting to wonder what the screening process is for teachers these days, not just here in New York City where teachers seem to be getting into trouble left and right, but nationwide. Potential police officers must go through a very thorough psychological screening process. I’d say it’s about time teachers were held to the same standards.

Technorati Tags: Danielle Harkins, demon, demonic, florida, ghost, ghost hunters, ghost hunting, ghosts, haunted, rituals, st. petersburg, teacher

I love when skeptics try to debunk phenomena by putting forth equally ridiculous explanations for said phenomena. I blogged a while back about how Benjamin Radford stated that he believed the chupacabra mystery sprang entirely from the movie “Species.” I am not one to even believe in the chupacabra, but even I felt like that explanation was a little too neat and tidy, and a stretch at best. Mr. Radford is once again trying to disprove the existence of a cryptozoological creature, this time Bigfoot.

Perhaps Kong is to blame for all the Bigfoot sightings out there?

More than a quarter of Americans believe in Bigfoot, a recent poll found. They claim this legendary bipedal ape, a “long lost relative” of humans, evades detection in remote woodland areas. Although it may seem strange to think a 7-foot-tall land mammal could go unnoticed for so long, the notion is actually widespread.

Along with that sizeable minority of Americans, an Angus Reid Public Opinion poll found that 21 percent of Canadians also believe in an undiscovered hairy humanoid, which they prefer to call Sasquatch. In Russia, belief in a similar creature, called the Yeti, is so common that local branches of the Russian government have funded Yeti expeditions, and the country has even considered founding an entire institute devoted to the study of Yetis.

The Yeti is also said to roam the Himalayas, sometimes going by the name of Meh-Teh, or the “Abominable Snowman.” Not to be outdone, Australia has the Yowie, and South America, a mythical beast called Mapinguari. Malaysians, meanwhile, fear the orang minyak, or “oily man” monster.

Why do so many disparate cultures have their own version of a “wild man”?

Although no one knows for certain how the various legends got started, they appear to have arisen independently in each culture rather than being spread by travelers or through trade, said Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine and author of three books on myths and mysteries, including “Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries” (Rhombus, 2010). [The Best Bigfoot Hunting Expeditions]

Most of the myths trace back much further than the 1950s, when the explorer Eric Shipton photographed what he took to be “Abominable Snowman” footprints on Mount Everest. “While the famous Abominable Snowman snow track photographs … led to worldwide interest in the creature, they didn’t create the beast but instead for the first time offered tantalizing, tangible evidence of a regional legend,” Radford told Life’s Little Mysteries.

But the existence of so many separate “wild man” myths don’t necessarily count as mounting evidence that we really do have feral cousins out there in the woods. Instead, the myths may all stem from the same aspect of the human psyche: the desire for and fascination with an “other.”

Radford said, “The idea of a wild, man-like ‘other’ creature co-existing with us but just beyond our understanding is heavily rooted in mythology.”

So the evidence shows that all of these primitive, independent cultures all had a version of Bigfoot, without spreading the legend by word of mouth, and that is somehow evidence that the creature doesn’t exist? And let’s say for a moment that I buy into this concept of the psyche called the “other.” How do you explain people actually seeing these creatures for hundreds if not thousands of years? There are photographs, video, footprints, and excellent eyewitness testimony. And despite what the media would have us believe, many witnesses are extremely credible. Seasoned hunters, police officers, doctors, lawyers, have all been Bigfoot witnesses. It’s usually not some hillbilly, as skeptics would have you believe. Dragons were deep rooted in mythology, yet nobody claims to see them in the woods. I’m not saying Bigfoot exists. But I feel like there is more evidence supporting the possible existence of Bigfoot than this vague concept of the “other.” Myths don’t leave footprints.

Technorati Tags: benjamin radford, bigfoot, cryptozoology, debunking, media, myth, News, paranormal, people, sasquatch, skeptic, thoughts

I almost hate giving this story any attention, since I wouldn’t be surprised to see “pyschics” charging for spirit weddings in the near future. Just another way to cleanse your wallet your home. And why didn’t the psychics see this coming? Oh yeah, they’re not really psychic. And what do the Republicans think of “ghost marriage?” And why do I keep asking questions?

I wonder what the divorce rate is for ghosts?

You could call it complete bunkum. But families in Barkur village and surrounding areas, and those in far-off places too, believe that by marrying off the ghosts in their families their problems would be solved.

The marriages are between ghosts of two families and are like any other marriage of living beings with proper rituals and exchange of coconuts at the Kodli Sri Janardhana Temple in the village.

On Tuesday, eight pairs of “spirits”, of the unmarried boys and girls who died years ago got married here on Tuesday!

Such marriages of ‘unmarried spirits,’ (mostly of the youngsters who had accidental deaths) are held regularly on every amavasya (New Moon Day) in this temple. In the last one year, around 100 such weddings have taken place here.

The belief is that if an unmarried boy or a girl dies, the spirit does not get “moksha”, and may start troubling the family members. To provide ‘pitrutva’ from ‘pretatva’ such weddings are held and the spirits are given the salvation. Though such weddings normally take place on Sarvapitru Amavasye or Aashada Amavasye in other places, at Sri Janardhana Temple at Barakuru, they are held on every New Moon Day.

In some cases, when families face difficulties, astrologers or soothsayers tell the family members trace the problem to an unmarried spirit in the family.

The families arrange for marriages to appease these souls. The family which has lost a boy has to find a spirit of a girl. Once the wedding is fixed, the families come to the temple and get the two spirits married.

The marriage ceremony is simple. At first, the spirits are invited into two coconuts. Later, a Tila Homa is held and the families exchange the dress of the bride and the groom. The areca nut flower placed on the coconut is exchanged, marking the wedding ceremony.

This sounds like a very sweet ceremony, and the intentions seem good. But for most people, the best escape from marriage is death. I say let these poor souls enjoy the afterlife.

Technorati Tags: Barkur, ghost, ghost hunters, ghost hunting, ghosts, haunted, haunted house, humor, marriage, married, News, paranormal, people, supernatural, wedding