Southern Illinois is a strange place. Those of us descended from the early settlers come from an anti-social stock. They were those who pushed into the Appalachians from the early colonies, only to find those remote regions too crowded. The pushed on through the passes and gaps, settled for a few years then noticed there […]
The Legends and Myths of Sweet Hollow and Mount Misery … a Long Island mystery
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This website started from wandering the hills known as Mount Misery and of course, Sweet Hollow below. Over time my thoughts changed on the subject, and I went from believer to hard core skeptic. Something happened there, absolutely, but I’ll be damned if anyone can figure out what. Having been gone from there […]
The Legends and Myths of Sweet Hollow and Mount Misery: Part II, The Mothman and the Thunderbird of native American myths
Where you stand on mysteries such as the the Mount Misery Mothman comes down to belief. Are you a skeptic? Most people are, and the trend is growing with each passing year. As religion, and particularly the mysteries associated with religion fade into the past, superstition fades along with it. And yet interest in the […]
Stranger Things in the nighttime sky … In the sixties, a little boy sees a rocket in the sky over Carmi, Illinois that shouldn’t be there
It was the sixties in small town Illinois, I was a little boy, and was walking to my Granny Bert’s house. She lived a block away, I wasn’t quite halfway there, in front of the Duvall’s house. I used to walk barefoot, till one day I stepped on a dead squirrel’s skull. I still walked […]
A strange account of the monster rattlesnake Big Jim, who from his lair on Rattlesnake Bluff terrorized the Skillet Fork and Wabash river valleys … (or Snakes on a Plain)
Rattlesnake bluff, home of the legendary rattlesnake Big Jim is a heavily wooded bluff overlooking the Skillet Fork River, in White County, Illinois. I’d figured that much out by poring over Google Earth for some time, trying to match up the satellite images with the historical record. Or what little record I had, and I […]
The Legends and Myths of Sweet Hollow and Mount Misery: Part III, Research on the asylums of Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow
Legends abound on Mount Misery, perhaps none so popular as those of the asylums which supposedly stood there in the past. Take a look at the facts and decide for yourself, the truth behind one of Long Island’s most famous urban legends, from the Gothic Curiosity Cabinet.
