• Category Archives General Weirdness
  • Natural Born Bokors: Nature’s True Zombie Lords

    “Twitter provides us with a wonderful platform to discuss/confront societal problems. We trend Justin Bieber instead.”—Lauren Leto

     

    A few months ago, National Geographic ran an article about parasitic creatures that turn other species into real-life zombies in the animal world. Since this is a busy week for me and many other Americans, I decided to make my life easy and blatantly plagiarize – I mean deftly summarize – that article in my own inimitable style. And as always, I’m sure that I’ll have some observations of my own that I won’t be able to keep to myself – perhaps including my own theory that there is already a species known to do this to humans, although I’m playing fast and loose with the term “species” in this case.

    (Note: Actually, now that I’ve finished this, I think you might want to go read the original article before continuing. It turns out that I had a lot more to say about some of the implications of the research into this topic than I expected. But if you don’t want to, that’s okay. I think I’ve done a fairly decent job of including the most salient points here.)

    The tiny, harmless, adorable little ladybug, with its stunning red body and black polka dots, is probably the most beloved of all bugs. Even most children who would rather eat liver and Brussel sprouts than touch anything with more than four legs will happily let one of these inoffensive little creatures crawl around in their hand. But this charming little creature is, in reality, a fierce and voracious predator, albeit a good one from our perspective. One ladybug can devour thousands of garden-wrecking aphids during its life, so we have more practical reasons than just their cuteness to love these little beetles.

    There is another species that also loves them: the wasps known officially as Dinocampus coccinellae. No bigger than a grain of rice, these nasty little critters manage to lay their eggs inside ladybugs by jabbing their stingers into the ladybug’s belly and injecting them with their egg as well as a mixture of chemicals. Once the egg hatches, the larva feeds on the fluids inside of the ladybug’s body, but remarkably, throughout this ordeal, the ladybug goes on about its business as if nothing is wrong. It keeps on eating aphids while the parasite within feeds on its digested prey. Once the larva grows big enough, it wriggles out of the ladybug’s body, but it’s not done with her yet. That’s when the story gets really interesting as the mind control portion of the saga kicks in.

    Ladybug sitting on wasp cocoonOnce it has left its former host, the wasp larva wraps itself in a cocoon beneath the ladybug, in which state it is completely helpless and an easy meal for other tiny predators. Or at least it would be, if not for the fact that the ladybug not only stays put despite the fact that she is now parasite free, but she will also defend the larva against any potential predators. And there she will remain until about a week later when the wasp emerges from its cocoon and flies away. Shortly thereafter, most of the ladybugs die.

    But the ladybugs aren’t alone in their Hymenopteric exploitation. In Costa Rica, there’s a species of spider whose freewill (or illusion thereof) is usurped by another kind of wasp. At least this wasp is polite enough not to inject its egg into the spider’s body. Instead, she just glues it onto him. It’s her kid who is the ill-mannered little brat, although mom must share some of the blame for being a permissive and enabling parent. After it’s born, the larva proceeds to poke holes in the spider’s body and feeds on its blood. For reasons that are far from clear, the spider allows this to go on for several weeks until the larva is ready to cocoon itself. The spider then does something even more embarrassingly servile. It tears down its web and constructs a new one which allows the cocoon to hang safely from a hole in the middle while being shielded from the elements and any potential predators by curtains of webbing which surround the opening. That degree of dedication to a parasite is both impressive and disturbing.

    We tend to blame mosquitoes for malaria, but the truth is that these rotten little bloodsuckers, while being completely repellant on their own merits, are no more responsible for this deadly disease than ladybugs are for the proliferation of wasps. It is the malaria causing parasite Plasmodium that manipulates the mosquitoes’ behavior and makes them such effective carriers of the disease. Plasmodiums spend the first stage of their lives inside mosquitoes. During this time, the parasite actively suppresses the insects’ desire to suck blood because that sort of behavior can get you swatted. This is a necessary risk for a mosquito, but an unacceptable one for a Plasmodium, which couldn’t care less if its host is starving as long as it doesn’t die. Once the parasite has matured and is ready to begin its second phase of life in a human host, it reverses the mosquito’s behavior, causing it to go on a bloodsucking rampage and bite as many humans as possible. The risk of getting squashed is no longer a concern for the Plasmodium. It most likely will have found a new host long before that happens – probably some poor African kid with limited access to healthcare.

    Caterepillar turning to gooThe baculovirus is more direct. It affects the caterpillars of multiple moth and butterfly species, thus depriving the world of more butterflies (awww, that sucks) and moths (oh well). Outwardly, the caterpillars seem fine. They continue munching leaves like the voracious herbivores that they are, but inside, the nutrients are being used to produce more baculoviruses rather than larger caterpillars. When the caterpillar is near death and thus no longer useful, the virus causes it to climb to the top of its tree, which is contrary to their normal instincts since this exposes them to a greater risk of being eaten by airborne predators (aka birds). The virus then releases enzymes that turn the host into a slimy, virus-infested goo which drips down onto the leaves below where it is eaten by more caterpillars.

    I’ve saved what I consider to the most interesting and complex example of this sort of zombie making for last,* mostly because it makes a nice jumping-off point for the next stage of this article’s development. This one also involves a species of wasps (Ampulex compressa, or jewel wasp to you and me), but their victims are even less sympathetic than Costa Rican spiders. They pick on cockroaches, and in a particularly sinister and chilling manner.

    When a jewel wasp is ready to lay its egg, it finds a cockroach, inserts its stinger into its victim’s brain with surgical precision and releases a slew of psychoactive chemicals into two specific locations in the roach’s brain that allow the wasp to first inhibit and then control its movement. Once this is done, the wasp leads the roach by one of its antennas into a burrow that it has prepared. The roach is obviously still capable of movement, but the drugs in the wasp’s sting have robbed it of any capability of acting on its own volition. It is, by the most Haitian of definitions, a zombie.

    Now safely hidden away inside the burrow, the wasp lays her egg on the roach’s abdomen and then leaves to go on about her wasply business. After about three days, the egg hatches and the larva begins feeding on the roach, which still just stands there and takes it. This goes on for four or five days until the larva chews its way into the roach’s abdomen and begins feeding on its organs, but in such a way that makes the roach’s continued survival to the final stage of infestation the most likely – a pretty impressive feat for a week-old larva. Once it reaches the pupal stage, it forms a cocoon inside the roach’s body and remains there until it emerges as a fully grown wasp, albeit one covered in roach guts.

    Jewel wasp stinging roach in the headSo the question that inevitably comes to mind in all of these cases is “How do they know how to do that?” The simple answer can be summed up in one word: instinct (or genetics – they’re pretty much interchangeable in these cases). But that’s just a word. It’s hardly a satisfactory answer for what most of us want to know, which is how these creatures acquired the know-how to perform these complex behaviors. How does the wasp know exactly where in the brain to place its stinger (twice) in order to enslave the roach without killing it? To call that instinct isn’t too far from implying that brain surgery is instinctive. It’s like asking one of us to jam a screwdriver into a cow’s brain two times and hit two specific places without killing it. Saying that we can’t do this because we lack the proper genes sounds like nonsense. We can’t do it because we’re not bovine brain surgeons. And this doesn’t even take into account how the larva “knows” which organs it can eat and still keep the roach alive.

    Nevertheless, this is the evolutionary explanation. Somehow long ago, a wasp stung a roach in the brain at just the right spot (twice) and then noticed that the roach didn’t die but became mentally incapacitated. It then figured out that this roach would make a perfect place to hide its egg while also providing a source of nourishment for the larva when it hatches. That gave this wasp’s offspring a better chance for survival, and this behavior was passed on genetically to them, and then spread and proliferated until now all of these wasps do it. The problem with this (or at least one of them, for there are several) is that wasps don’t “notice” or “figure out” anything. Their brains are far too primitive for that kind of rational thought. The scientific explanation is that it isn’t the wasp’s brain that tells it to do this; it’s the wasp’s genes. They certainly have some good preliminary data to back this up, but that still just pushes the problem of explaining the behavior from one source to another. The question still remains as to how their genes know to do this. Are genes somehow more intelligent than the creatures that they comprise? The implied answer seems to be “Yes, they are,” but a more definitive and satisfactory answer as to how this might be so may be a long time in coming.†

    Instinctive behaviors are a hard concept for most people to wrap their heads around because humans seem to have so few of them. We tend not to notice the ones that we do have because, well, they’re instinctive. We just don’t think about them. What kind of idiot questions why parents love their children? But the explanation, from a purely evolutionary perspective, is that taking care of children and making sure that they survive to an age where they are capable of reproducing themselves is a lot of work. We wouldn’t put ourselves through this if we didn’t love them, and so without that love, our offspring, and therefore our genes, wouldn’t survive. But loving our children is such a natural part of us, we just don’t think of it in those terms. Most parents would probably find the idea that they only love and care for their children in order to pass on their genetic material to be offensive and distasteful, which I find to be one of the few endearing things about humans. So I’ll give you another, less objectionable example.

    There probably isn’t one of us alive who hasn’t seen another person yawn and then yawned ourselves. Why do we do this? The answer is that it’s instinctive, aka genetic. The better question to ask ourselves is “What biological purpose does this serve?” The best explanation for this so far Chimp yawningis that it promotes empathy and social bonding, although I have my doubts about that. Usually when I yawn, people tell me to knock it off because I’m making them sleepy. Not a lot of empathy or social bonding going on there. In case you’re interested, only humans, chimps and maybe dogs do this, and dogs probably picked it up from being around us. By way of evidence, researchers point out that people with autism are less susceptible to the contagious yawn, probably due to their generally lower levels of empathy and ability to read social cues. If this is true, I don’t hold it against them.

    We could also add to this the fact that many of us sleep better when it’s raining because our ancestors knew that the nocturnal predators who were a danger to them at night were too busy taking shelter from the weather at these times to worry about hunting. This serves no useful purpose for most of us today, but old genetic habits die hard.

    As far as parasites are concerned, there’s no conclusive evidence that any of the more common ones affect humans to any large extent. We have lots of viruses and bacterial infections and such that are contagious, but none of them compel us to any significant degree to behave in self-destructive or antisocial ways in order to protect themselves and/or pass themselves along. So if you go into work with the flu and infect half of your coworkers, that’s on you.

    There are exceptions to this, but they’re pretty rare. The best example would probably be rabies, which left untreated will cause its host to start trying to bite everyone it meets. This is covered in much more detail in my characteristically lighthearted piece on potential zombie viruses (one of my better efforts if I do say so myself…and I do), so there’s no need to rehash all of that here.

    I would rather spend the final portion of this article addressing the unrecognized parasitic “virus” that does afflict millions: nearly 300,000,000 to be precise. I’m talking of course about Twitter. It lures its victims in under the guise of allowing them to connect with their favorite actors, athletes, musicians, etc. But once the victim is in, they find themselves bombarded by a storm of worthless minutiae from these people’s lives as well as carefully placed advertisements. The negative effect on the victim is that it wastes countless hours of what could otherwise be productive time. Meanwhile, the parasite gorges itself on ad revenues at its victim’s expense. It maintains this predatory relationship by continuing to give the victim the illusion of connectedness with the revered individual while simultaneously lowering their ability to recognize the damaging nature of its influence by using its constant barrage of mindless drivel to mentally incapacitate the habitual user.

    ominous blue sultureAnd yes, I know it’s pretty hypocritical for me to say this when I have a Twitter account and a “share” button just a few centimeters down the page, but such is the world in which we live. Little nobodies like me have to use behemoth social media outlets to the best of our ability in order to try to attract victims – I mean an audience – of our own. I also only send out about one tweet a week, which in my opinion is about all most people should. The irony is that this would likely make the virus a benevolent one, but probably wouldn’t be enough to keep it alive. Like it or not, it’s a predatory world.

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    *Although it’s certainly not the last example of this sort of phenomenon.

    †This is one of the reasons why some call evolution an adult fairy tale, although most of the people who call it that are creationists, and those people have a hell of a lot of nerve calling anyone else’s beliefs a fairy tale.

    and all the devils are here

     

     

     

     

     

     

     


  • Between the Devil and the Holy See

    “I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as…animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us.”—Lankester Merrin

     

    On the day after Christmas of 1973, what is widely regarded to be the scariest movie of all time was released in the U.S. The buzz it immediately created had people standing in lines for hours to see it in some places. Theaters brought in paramedics and ambulances to treat those who fainted or were overcome with emotion. People reported being unable to sleep for weeks due to the fear and horrific nightmares that this film inspired.

    Th Exorcist movie posterHonestly, I think that a lot of this was the result of suggestible people buying into the hype and allowing themselves to be scared silly to the point of stupidity. I remember all of the furor created by this film from when I was a little kid, and even then I didn’t understand how a movie could so unravel so many people. I didn’t see it myself until I was in high school. I watched it with a group of maybe seven or eight friends. Some of them probably had nightmares, but none of us were overcome by anything. I just thought it was a really good horror movie, and those are few and far between, at least for those of us who don’t like slasher flicks or gore for the sake of gore.

    What most people didn’t know then and still don’t know now is that The Exorcist was based on a true story. As is almost always the case with “based on a true story” horror films, to say that it is only loosely based on actual events is a gigantic understatement of an understatement. Nobody turned their head backwards or projectile vomited green slime on anyone.

    Robbie Mannheim (aka Roland Doe) was a 13-year-old boy who lived with his parents in Cottage City, Maryland, a suburb of Washington DC. In 1949, his Aunt Harriet got him interested in the ouija board during a visit. The two of them would use it together, although we have no way of knowing what sorts of results they obtained.* Robbie reportedly continued to use the board on his own after his aunt left, and the first sign of something unusual began shortly thereafter. The family started to hear the sound of water dripping from somewhere in the house at night, even though no source for it could be found.

    Just a few weeks later, on January 26, 1949, Aunt Harriet died suddenly. Soon after this, the Mannheim home was beset with poltergeist-like activity. Furniture began moving around on its own and objects in the home would hover in the air or fly across the room. It was exactly one month after Harriet’s death on February 26 that strange welts or scratches (sources vary on the details) started to appear on Robbie’s body. The family seems to have believed that all of this was connected to Aunt Harriet and thought that she was trying to communicate with them from beyond the grave. They tried to contact her via Robbie’s ouija board, but apparently she was unavailable for comment. Having struck out with the board, they decided to consult their Lutheran minister, Luther Schulze. By then, they had noticed that all of these unusual occurrences seemed to be somehow connected to Robbie, and they had just about convinced themselves that their son had become the target of an atack by the forces of evil.

    After spending some time with the boy and witnessing some of the paranormal activity that occurred around him, Pastor Schulze decided that this was out of his league and recommended that they consult a Catholic priest. They were supposed to be the experts at this sort of thing, even though your run-of-the-mill priest probably knows about as much about demonic possession and performing an exorcism as the average person on the street.

    Although most sources just skim over exactly how the next phase of our story came about, it seems that Robbie was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital, a Catholic run facility, where a Father Edward Hughes attempted an exorcism. By some accounts, the boy managed to slip one of his hands out of its restraint, tore a spring from the bed and used it to badly injure Father Hughes on the arm during the ritual, bringing it to a screeching halt. Other sources say only that the exorcism failed.

    Either way, what is known for certain is that the family abruptly relocated, at least temporarily, to St. Louis. Since they stayed with a relative there who was Catholic, the most reasonable explanation for this sudden move is the one that claims that they did it because this cousin knew a certain priest there who she believed would know more about this sort of thing than most.† If this was the case, she was wrong. Father Raymond Bishop (possibly one of the best names ever for a priest) didn’t know any more about demons and exorcisms than any other priest. That being the case, he contacted his colleague, Father William Bowdern, in the hope that he could help to shed some light on the situation. It turned out that he couldn’t. Neither of them knew anything more about demons or exorcisms than Father Hughes, but they ultimately decided to take a shot at it anyway.

    Upon their initial visit to examine Robbie, they supposedly witnessed his bed shaking and objects flying around the room. Robbie spoke to them in a harsh, gravelly voice. He also reacted with hostility toward holy objects, prayers and religious recitations. This was enough to convince them that the boy was possessed, and after obtaining permission from their bishop, they began their attempt to cast the Devil out of him at the house where he was staying on March 16, 1949. In addition to themselves, they brought in Fathers William Van Roo and Walter Halloran, who was the youngest of the bunch by far and whose main duty was to hold Robbie down during the proceedings.

    Saint Vincent's HospitalAfter a week without success, they moved Robbie to St. Vincent’s Hospital, a Catholic mental hospital at the time and currently the Castle Park Apartments, where I’m guessing rent is relatively cheap, unless a lot of people want to live in former mental institutions where a famous case of demonic possession occurred. Over the next four weeks, the ritual of exorcism was performed on an almost nightly basis. By day, Robbie seems to have been fine. It was at night during the exorcisms that he would slip into trance-like seizures and thrash about wildly while cursing at the priests. He also sometimes spoke Latin, although Father Halloran would later say that the Latin the boy spoke seemed to be more of what he had picked up from them than any sudden, supernatural ability to speak a previously unknown language.

    Robbie’s fits were so violent that his strength was said to be superhuman. It sometimes took three men to hold him down, which seems very impressive on the surface, but for those of us who have had to restrain a violent and/or hysterical person, this really doesn’t sound like that big of a deal at all. Trying to subdue someone who is losing their mind and couldn’t care less whether or not they hurt you while you’re doing everything in your power to try to restrain them without hurting them is a tricky business. It’s not like a fight where two people are trying to hurt each other. It’s even more difficult if they also have a penchant for hurting themselves. In that case, you’ve got three things to worry about, not even counting trying not to get hurt yourself. Father Halloran suffered a broken nose during one of these fits, but so did a guy I used to work with. No one there thought that the kid who did that to him was possessed. Lucky for us, the kid who did think that he was possessed wasn’t violent at all, but I digress.

    During the thirty or so times that the ritual of exorcism was performed, the bed was said to shake violently while Robbie cursed and spat at the priests. Most of the insults are said to have been rather childish and pornographic, usually having to do with their genitalia and masturbation. Words were also reported to have appeared scratched into his body, including “hell” and “evil.” By some accounts, “hello” appeared on Robbie’s chest during Bowdern’s first attempt to cast out the demon. Toward the end, the word “exit” appeared carved vertically down his chest. Shortly after this, the demon (claiming to be the actual Devil) spoke through Robbie and told them that “He has to say but one word, but he’ll never say it.” This was taken to mean that if Robbie said this word, the demon would leave. According to Father Halloran, the priests later decided that the word was “Lord,” but he didn’t elaborate on how they came to that conclusion. Apparently, he never did say it, but it turned out not to matter, because a bigger fish was about to enter the fray.

    On April 19, the final day of the ordeal, Robbie said that he saw a vision of the Archangel Michael, who spoke to the Devil through him, saying “Satan! I am Saint Michael! I command you to leave this body now!” In his vision, Robbie claimed that he saw the angel Michael fighting a demon at the mouth of a fiery cave. Michael then threw the demon into the cave, and Robbie was instantly cured, which was awfully convenient. A final note in Bowdern’s journal says that a few minutes later, there was a loud bang that was heard by people hundreds of feet away, but there were no concussive side effects, like windows rattling. He took this as a sign that the demon had departed. According to Father Halloran, Robbie went on to lead a normal life with a wife and kids and grandchildren.

    The Roman RitualsSo was Robbie really possessed? I’ve said before that I’ve never found a credible, verifiable, convincing case of demonic possession, and this is definitely not one. No matter how true any or all of these claims of paranormal phenomena are, none of them are outside of the range of typical poltergeist activity, with the exception of Robbie claiming to be possessed. Even words scrawled in people’s skin have been reported in multiple cases. In fact, the only difference between most reported cases of demonic possession and some particularly nasty poltergeist disturbances is one of perspective. Whatever the root cause, poltergeist activity is almost always centered around one person. If that person is told or believes that they are under attack by the Devil, then they call it possession. Otherwise, it’s thought to be some sort of spirit related or psychic phenomenon.

    Most skeptics think that the whole episode was just one of an emotionally disturbed child faking a rather bizarre affliction to get attention. They also say that there were no alleged paranormal feats that couldn’t be pulled off relatively easily by such a boy. As usual, they’re full of crap. I don’t know how many of the various things reported in the numerous accounts are accurate, but I’m pretty sure that making things levitate and fly around the room isn’t something that most boys his age could manage. I’m more inclined to believe that this was a poltergeist case with one rather unusual component: a willing human accomplice.

    Almost all cases of poltergeists center around a teenager. Although it’s usually a girl, it sometimes happens to boys. These disturbances also frequently follow a traumatic event, or at least a very unpleasant situation. We’re two for two in that regard, as Robbie was said to have been very close to his aunt and was very upset when she died. We should also factor in the family’s experimentation with the ouija board. I’ve never personally had any unpleasant results in my limited experience with them, but I know people who have. Taken all together, this sounds to me like a pretty solid argument for the sudden appearance of a mischievous spirit.

    So what about Robbie’s claim that he was possessed? Why would he do that? It’s unlikely that we’ll ever know for sure (see footnote below), but we do have some definite clues that he was putting everyone on, and perhaps even himself a little. First, there’s the Latin that even Father Halloran said he thinks was just Robbie mimicking them. A real demon should be able to speak fluent Latin, or so one would think. There is also the matter of the rather juvenile insults that Robbie hurled at the priests. They were supposedly the words of the demon, but they sound suspiciously like the sorts of obscenities that one would expect from a boy in his early teens playing pretend. As far as the messages scratched into his body are concerned, I have no way of knowing whether they appeared spontaneously or if Robbie made them in advance when no one was looking, although I suspect the latter. In either case, they’re all rather banal. “Hello” seems almost friendly, or at least polite, and “evil,” “hell,” and “exit” are all pretty generic. They don’t convey any sort of information at all. William Peter Blatty passed on all of these and had “help me” appear on Regan in The Exorcist, which is much more direct and chilling. One might think that such messages in a real case of demonic possession would be equally disturbing.

    One major problem in trying to piece together the facts of this story is that it happened decades before it got any real interest from investigators. Even the book considered by many to be the most authoritative look at the case wasn’t published until 1993, a full 44 years after the fact. While both Fathers Bowdern and Bishop were still alive at the time of the release of the movie based on their exorcism, there’s no evidence that I can find that they ever spoke to anyone about it, at least not on the record. The same goes for the Mannheim family. Almost everything that we know comes from two sources: Father Bowdern’s journal of the events and Father Halloran’s personal accounts.

    I’ve never been able to find a copy of Bowdern’s journal (which makes me a little suspicious about its actual existence), but I have seen and read several interviews with Father Halloran. His noncommittal answers to some questions have always made him seem to me like a man stuck in a very precarious situation (hence the title of this article). On the one hand, if he had admitted that he didn’t believe that this boy was possessed, he would have been admitting that he thought the Catholic Church had sanctioned and performed a very lengthy exorcism on a mentally ill and/or emotionally unstable teenager. On the other, if he had said that he did believe that the boy was possessed when he really didn’t, he would not only have been lying about this one particular case; he would also have been tacitly endorsing a belief in something that he may not have thought was real. That’s a serious offense for a man who is supposed to be a servant of the Lord. Obviously I didn’t know the man, but he always struck me as someone who cared about things like honesty and Father Halloranintegrity, as well as loyalty. Sometimes it’s not easy to balance those qualities.

    One final note: Halloran volunteered for chaplain duty in the army in 1966, and he spent two years in Vietnam from ’69 to ’71. He later said that he saw more evil there than he ever did during Robbie Mannheim’s exorcism. Make of that what you will. What I make of it is that humans are capable of being far more evil than any demon, real or imagined.

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    *People who later managed to track Robbie down with the intention of asking him about his ordeal either got hung up on or had the door slammed in their face, so his version of the story remains a mystery. I haven’t even been able to find out if he’s still alive.

    †According to a couple of sources, “Saint Louis” was spelled out in welts on Robbie’s chest during the exorcism attempt by Father Hughes. His Aunt Harriet died in St. Louis, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that this cousin was her daughter, but I haven’t found any sources that state this definitively.

    and all the devils are here