The Bizarre Report
CASE FILE CLASSIFIED
The Bizarre Report is the weekly profile series from Bizarre Reality Media. One profile goes free on this site each month. The full archive stays Patreon-paid for the Bizarre Society.
Written by Shayn Jones.
Free on this site: The Bizarre Report #01, Classic Movie Monsters and the True Folklore Behind Them and The Bizarre Report #04, The Lead Masks Case: Vintém Hill, 1966.
Teaser Archive
Browse short teasers for every report here. Full reports are on Patreon.
The Bizarre Report #01, Classic Movie Monsters and the True Folklore Behind Them
I am a millennial, so I found the old monsters later, not when they were new, and I did not know then how much older the ideas were than the movies. Hollywood did not invent these creatures. It borrowed them, and in a few cases, rewrote them completely.
Frankenstein's creature was never called Frankenstein. Shelley's 1818 novel is about a creator who walks away, not a grunting movie monster. Dracula borrowed a real name, Vlad III, but Vlad was not a vampire, and folklore never had one fixed vampire rulebook. The real Egyptian dead were never meant to walk. The Wolf Man's silver bullet, pentagram, and full-moon trigger are largely film inventions, not old folklore. The Creature from the Black Lagoon has no fossil record, but Amazon boto folklore and the coelacanth show why river legends persist. The Invisible Man and Jekyll and Hyde ask the same question in different ways: what do we do when no one is watching, or when we lose control?
Read the free full version here. The full profile, with sources, is also on Patreon at patreon.com/bizarrerealitymedia.
The Bizarre Report #02, Samhain and the Origins of Halloween
Look, Halloween did not start with a costume shop. It started more than 2,000 years ago, in Ireland and Scotland, right at the turn from harvest to winter.
That festival was Samhain, on November 1st, with celebrations kicking off the evening of October 31st. Feasts, bonfires, stories about burial mounds opening to the Otherworld. Then came All Saints Day, soul cakes, guising, and turnip lanterns, before pumpkins took over in North America.
Here is the twist most Halloween posts leave out: we have got no contemporary Iron Age account of Samhain. A lot of the popular story was built centuries later, and some of it by 19th century scholars. So how much of Halloween is actually ancient, and how much got added along the way?
Full report on Patreon at patreon.com/bizarrerealitymedia/posts/bizarre-report-2-173825058.
The Bizarre Report #03, Dia de Muertos, The Day of the Dead
Halloween keeps the dead at a distance. Dia de Muertos invites them in.
On November 1st and 2nd, families in Mexico and across the US set an ofrenda, a home altar with photographs, candles, marigolds, water, and the favorite foods of the people they have lost. November 1st is for kids who have died. November 2nd is for adults.
This is not Mexican Halloween. Its roots are Indigenous ancestor traditions, mixed over centuries with Catholic All Saints and All Souls Days, and shaped in the 1900s into a marker of Mexican national identity. UNESCO recognised it in 2008 as Intangible Cultural Heritage.
So how much is ancient Aztec survival, and how much is modern construction? The answer is layered, and way more interesting than either simple version.
Full report on Patreon at patreon.com/bizarrerealitymedia/posts/bizarre-report-3-174069211.
The Bizarre Report #04, The Lead Masks Case: Vintém Hill, 1966
Two men went up a hill in Brazil in 1966 and never came down.
Miguel José Viana and Manoel Pereira da Cruz were electronics technicians. August 17th, 1966, they bought raincoats, water, and a sheet of lead. August 20th, they were found side by side on Vintém Hill, in suits, with solid lead masks over their faces, and a notebook that said: be there at 16:30, take capsules at 18:30, protect metals, wait for the signal, mask.
No trauma. No struggle. No capsules found. No cause of death ever determined.
Read the free full version here. The full profile, with sources, is also on Patreon at patreon.com/bizarrerealitymedia/posts/bizarre-report-4-174634794.
The Bizarre Report #05, The Universe 25 Experiment
A man built a perfect world for mice. Food whenever they wanted it. Water whenever they wanted it. No cats, No cold, and No disease. Room to live, room to breed, room to grow. But what was the conclusion of this experiment?
Every mouse in that perfect utopia died anyway.
Not from hunger or sickness. They died because something in the middle of them broke first, and once it broke, nothing in that perfect little world could fix it.
Full report on Patreon at patreon.com/bizarrerealitymedia/posts/bizarre-report-5-175191546.