Bizarre bathroom reader, p.4
Bizarre Bathroom Reader, page 4
On December 19, 1975, the Lutz family moved into their dream home in Amityville, Long Island. Twenty-eight days later they ran from it, never to return. Their story has been immortalized and magnified ever since, and it’s time to separate fact from fiction.
1. At 3:00 a.m., on November 13, 1974, the five-bedroom, Dutch Colonial–style waterfront house with a heated swimming pool (and two quarter-round windows on the third floor, long since removed, which made the house look like a jack o’ lantern) on 112 Ocean Avenue, became the scene of a gruesome crime.
2. Then twenty-three-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr. (1951–2021) shot his sleeping parents (Ronald DeFeo Sr. and Louise DeFeo) and his four younger siblings (Dawn, Allison, Marc, and John Matthew) with a .35 caliber rifle, in a paranoid fit of drug-induced rage. For this heinous crime, DeFeo Jr. would remain behind bars for the rest of his life, finally passing on March 12, 2021.
3. Despite this, the property price dropping to a mere $80,000 (with the DeFeo family furniture thrown in for another $400) was hard to resist for George L. Lutz (1947–2006) and his wife Kathy Lutz (1946–2004), who knowingly bought the house, moving into it with Kathy’s three children in tow.
4. According to the Lutzes, there were strange odors and sounds, such as the front door slamming in the middle of the night. They also felt chills around the place, and suffered from night terrors that woke them at 3:15 a.m. every night (around the same time the DeFeo murders took place) . . . and that’s basically it.
5. Granted, the above would be enough for any family to panic and flee such a place. The Lutzes certainly never deviated from this core version of the events, but it would seem the plague of flies, the green slime–oozing walls, the cloven hoof marks on the snow, the devil pig, the fire bats, and Kathy turning into an old levitating woman all came after the fact; embellishments first written by Jay Anson (1921–1980), to whom they originally sold their story rights (alongside a number of tape recordings they made at the house), and the many other authors who followed in the latter’s footsteps.
6. Named as “Father Mancuso” in the Anson book, Reverend Ralph J. Pecoraro (1935–1987) in particular was adamant to declare that, other than the Lutzes calling him on the phone one time, he never even set foot on the property. Hence, it stands to reason that the story of the blessing, the hellish voice yelling at him to get out, and the hand blisters were all fabrications, but fabrications do sell books and movies.
7. Well-ingrained into America’s folklore via pop-culture, Amityville would become a money-making machine through a series of novels and almost thirty movies. An “all-you-can-eat buffet of occult bullshit” according to horror writer Grady Hendrix (Paperbacks from Hell, p.108, 2017), fed and promoted by George Lutz himself. But the family that purchased, renovated, and lived in the property at 112 Ocean Avenue during the following decade stated they never experienced anything of the sort.
8. The Lutzes ended up reaching California, where the trauma resulting from a story they never backed down from, coupled with the pressures of newfound celebrity eventually split the marriage of George and Kathy up. The ensuing family feud over the franchise proceeds wasn’t any kinder to them, and left Kathy’s second son, Christopher Quaratino (b.1968) estranged from his stepfather whom, he later claimed, used to dabble in the occult and may have had a hand in what happened at the house.
BONUS QUOTES
“I would love to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.”
—George Bernard Shaw
“The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his chest.”
—Roseanne Barr
GRAVE OLD WORLD
Across the pond, a relatively small town located twenty-seven miles northwest of central London appears to concentrate the most haunting reports in all of the United Kingdom: Amersham!
1. Originally known as Agmodesham, this market town has been sitting on the River Misbourne valley, deep within the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire County, since pre-Anglo-Saxon times (in fact, archeological evidence of Roman presence has also been found), where it’s thrived for millennia.
2. In the 1500s the Amersham Martyrs of the Lollard revolt, a Proto-Protestant movement, were imprisoned, tried, and brutally executed by both Church and state, in and around town landmarks now rife with paranormal activity.
3. Currently haunted public establishments include the Crown Hotel, a former Elizabethan inn populated by seven ghostly residents; the quaintly named Saracens Head Inn with two spectral patrons still in attendance; and The George and Dragon Hotel, where the disembodied footsteps of a local folk legend, “The White Lady,” can still be heard.
4. The Hellfire Caves, a man-made network of tunnels excavated in the outskirts of town during the eighteenth century at the behest of Baron Francis Dashwood (1708–1781), co-founder of the Hellfire Club, is said to be haunted by Hellfire Club Secretary Paul Whitehead (1710–1774), who supposedly asked for his heart to be put on display at the caves upon his passing. The theft of the urn containing it, however, caused his spirit to wander around ever since. A girl named “Sukie,” supposedly stoned to death by an angry mob, has also been seen floating around.
5. Amersham’s strangeness seems to radiate to nearby Chiltern towns and landmarks too, including the Standard Pub (Beaconsfield) parking lot, where the beating drum of a boy executed there during the English Civil War can still be heard; the graveyard of St. Bartholomew Church (Fingest) where an apparition dressed as a gamekeeper engages with visitors; and the understated Ickenham London Underground subway station, where a woman in a red scarf continues to replay her tragic fall onto the tracks, which happened back in the 1950s.
6. Perhaps the area’s continued association to the supernatural stems from its own Spiritualist group that used to gather at Lyon’s Tearoom on Church Street, in High Wycombe, which later coalesced into the Wycombe Spiritualist Church, and by 2017 had been reborn as the Wycombe Spiritualist Centre.
7. Sixty miles to the south from Amersham, in Sussex, another eerie British town garners not ghosts but fringe cults (more on those later): East Grinstead. This real-life “Twin Peaks” is populated by Rosicrucians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and Mormons—all pretty innocuous compared to their neighboring branches of the Anthroposophical Society, Opus Dei (a Catholic sect with a BDSM fetish), and the Church of Scientology!
BONUS FACTS
Despite its dramatic name, the Exploding Head Syndrome (EHS) doesn’t cause people’s noggin to burst like a piñata, but rather endure unusual, and still-unexplained, loud noises and flashes of light which, while frightening, are basically painless.
Convicted Mormon forger and murderer Mark William Hofmann (b.1954) counterfeited documents related to the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and then car-bombed two people to cover his tracks in 1985.
As reported by The Royal Gazette in 1975: “Erskine Ebbin and his brother Neville were killed almost exactly a year apart after being involved in collision with the same taxi, driven by the same driver [a Willard Manders] and carrying the same passenger.”
I DON’T WANNA BE BURIED IN A . . .
Ever since Siberian hunter-gatherers buried their newly domesticated companions—dogs!—with tokens of affection, mankind has found ways to memorialize the special bond we share with animals.
1. As the mummified remains of their pets attest, the ancient Egyptian culture believed they would keep their deceased company in the afterlife. Cats, of course, were the most popular (to the point of considering them deities), but dogs, mongooses, monkeys, gazelles, and birds also held the special affection of households, where the process of mourning them included wailing and the shaving of eyebrows.
2. Perhaps as a counterpoint to the cat-obsessed culture which enslaved them, ancient Israelis loved their dogs so much they created the very first dog cemetery around 500 BC. Overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, in what is now the Ashkelon National Park, the Ashkelon Pet Cemetery was the largest known cemetery of this kind in the ancient world, where thousands of carefully buried remains from what appear to be ancestors of the modern Canaan Dog breed have been found, including puppies.
3. Informally, beginning with the burial of pet dog Cherry at the park’s gatekeeper's garden in 1881, the Hyde Park Pet Cemetery (also known as The Secret Pet Cemetery of Hyde Park) became the first, if informal, pet cemetery of the modern era. One thousand burials (mostly of dogs, but also cats, monkeys, and birds) later, in 1903, it was officially closed, but pets continued to be intermittently interred there until 1976. Maintained as a memorial, guided visits are occasionally allowed by the Royal Parks administration.
4. On the other hand, the first officially established modern pet cemetery is the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery of Westchester County, New York. Founded in 1896 by veterinarian Dr. Samuel Johnson (1854–1937) in his own apple orchard, it was soon filled with little headstones, flowers, and all the accoutrements usually applied to departed humans. “The Peaceable Kingdom” currently provides resting grounds for more than eighty thousand pets of many species (and hundreds of their owners too), including those belonging to Diana Ross (b.1944) and Mariah Carey (b.1969).
5. A historic monument since 1987, the Parisian Cimetiére des Chiens et Autres Animaux Domestiques (Cemetery of Dogs and Other Domestic Animals) in Asnières-sur-Seine, has been housing dog, cat, horse, lion, fish, and monkey remains since 1899, making it the world’s second-oldest pet cemetery, and one of the best regarded. Notably, the tomb of Hollywood star, German shepherd Rin Tin Tin (rescued from a trench in French territory during World War I) can be found there.
6. The fifth-oldest pet cemetery still in operation in the United States, the Aspin Hill Memorial Park (Aspen Hill, Maryland) was originally founded in 1920 by Boston terrier breeders Richard C. Birney and his wife Bertha and is currently run by the Montgomery County Humane Society. It contains fifty thousand pet burials—and fifty human ones— including several dogs owned by legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972).
7. The Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park in Calabasas, California, was founded by Hollywood veterinarian Dr. Eugene C. Jones in 1928 to supplement his thriving pet hospital business. True to its showbiz roots, it became the burial grounds of celebrity pets, including Kabar (Rudolph Valentino’s dog), Jiggs (“Cheetah” in the Tarzan movies), Topper (Hopalong Cassidy’s horse), Droopy (Humphrey Bogart’s dog), Boots (Charlie Chaplin’s cat), Scout (Tonto’s horse from The Lone Ranger), Petey (the dog from Our Gang), Spot (the Little Rascals’ dog), and Elmer (Steven Spielberg’s dog, who appeared in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941, and Jaws).
8. One of the most curious pet cemeteries in America, the Key Underwood Coon Dog Memorial Graveyard, has been serving as a coon hound–exclusive burial ground in rural Colbert County, Alabama, since 1937, when local huntsman Key Underwood informally buried his coon dog Troop in an old hunting camp. When other hunters followed his example, the cemetery as it is known today, with its mismatching gravestones and concrete pillar (representing two coonhounds treeing a raccoon) guarding the gate, slowly came to be.
9. In modern times, the lack of a common religious belief concerning the afterdeath fate of animals has seen some owners embrace the “New Agey” concept of a “Rainbow Bridge,” where they will be reunited with their pets. For those not wanting to wait nor circumvent the various American and international legalities of human-pet burial, in 2010 the English hamlet of Stainton by Langworth (Lincolnshire) became the first, and so far, the only place in the United Kingdom where owners may be legally buried alongside their pets, in a sanctioned “green burial” plot.
10. Harmless and wholesome, especially when compared to their human counterparts, pet cemeteries got a more sinister rep in the last forty years, in large part due to a work of fiction, the 1983 novel Pet Sematary by Stephen King (b.1947). In it, an ancient Native American burial ground brings the dead back to life, only now possessed by murderous evil spirits! Adapted for the silver screen twice, its very author has claimed that, out of all his other horror books, this particular story scared him the most. It certainly continues to spook us.
HELLHOLE
At some point in history mankind started opting out of executing and burying its worst of the worst, instead choosing to lock it away from society. Having long since abandoned any rehabilitation pretense, these prisons have come the closest to hell on Earth.
Tacumbú Prison: Incorrectly labeled “The Most Dangerous Prison on Earth” by the Netflix show Inside the World's Toughest Prisons, this facility in Asunción, Paraguay, was built for eight hundred prisoners back in 1956, but currently holds 4,231, watched over by just forty untrained guards. About seven thousand uninspected visitors are also legally allowed in four times a week, which means prisoners are regularly fed, especially in the Adventist and Catholic wings, but drugs and weapons circulate unhindered elsewhere, fueling bloody gang wars every other month. Though hardly the most dangerous prison on this list, it still makes places like Rikers and Attica look like frozen yogurt shops.
Kamiti Maximum Security Prison: One of the worst prisons in all of Africa, this facility located in Nairobi, Kenya, is infamous for its abundance of brutality, and its lack of a reliable water supply (no showers, nor any sewage system), food (only two rations a day: porridge for breakfast, and a bowl of soup for lunch), and no health care, which means Cholera regularly claims the lives of dozens of inmates packed in one-hundred-square-foot cells. Kamiti is best-known, however, as a prison where rape is aggressively practiced among prisoners.
Miguel Castro Castro Prison: This infamous penitentiary located in San Juan de Lurigancho, a district of Lima, Peru, keeps 11,500 criminals within its rotting walls (originally erected to hold only 2,500). Manned by a skeleton crew of 150 corrupt guards, with no segregation possible (which means hardened criminals “mingle” with younger offenders) the only way of keeping it from exploding is letting drugs, prostitution, and rape run rampant. Cockfights too! Ironically, guards also need to be bribed to let in the raw materials needed by the pottery workshop run on the premises by a Catholic nonprofit. In fact, a particular inmate got so crafty with clay, he managed to bury his girlfriend’s corpse under the floor of his own cell, where it stayed undetected for weeks.
San Francisco de Yare Prison: The worst Venezuelan prison among several other horribly overcrowded prisons (including former Maracaibo National Prison, “La Sabaneta,” which closed in 2013) in that dystopia of a country everybody wants to escape from, the Prisión de Yare holds 44,500 criminals, hundreds of which die regularly on account of starvation, STDs, and violent clashes between armed drug gangs.
Bang Kwang Central Prison: Nicknamed “Big Tiger” on account of the many who lose their lives within its walls, or the more jocular “Bangkok Hilton,” this prison at Thailand’s Nonthaburi Province keeps over eight thousand death row and long-sentence inmates (in a space made for three thousand) behind bars. The difference between the two being that the latter only have to wear welded leg iron chains for the first three months of their sentence, while the former will keep them on until execution day. It offers only one meal per day—a bowl of maggot-infested rice and soup—per prisoner, which means those who cannot afford to buy from the prison canteen have to “work” for other prisoners in order to eat, a horrifying prospect not uncommon to most prisons around the world.
Camp 22: Kwan-li-so (“penal labor colony”) No. 22, better known as the Hoeryong concentration camp, is a maximum-security camp located in North Korea. While supposedly closed in 2012, satellite imagery taken in 2017 revealed it remains operational and has even been partly refurbished. A Nazi wet dream, its estimated fifty thousand emaciated prisoners (including their entire family and close friends, all deemed “guilty by association” according to the State) never leave its grounds alive. Meanwhile, they will be made to long for death as they are subjected to various forms of torture and forced labor. Fed only 6.3 ounces of corn per meal twice a day, inmates will need to hunt for insects, rats, and snakes, or even resort to cannibalism (the reason many lack a limb or two) if they intend to survive. Children, of course, don’t last very long, and neither do the elderly.
Penal de Ciudad Barrios: A maximum security joint originally built by the Salvadorean government to keep arrested members of the powerful MS13 gang (La Mara Salvatrucha) apart from other gangs, its 2,500 prisoners now run the prison as their very own “members-only” headquarters, from which they direct various criminal operations and impart their own brand of justice. No guards are allowed inside, and it is so dangerous the military ended up guarding the prison perimeter, only to prevent these nefarious criminals from physically escaping to the outside world, while their power and influence rot the beautiful country from the inside out.
Gitarama Central Prison: Fairly labeled as the world’s deadliest prison, this Rwandan facility, found thirty-seven miles southeast of the capital Kigali, was built for four hundred prisoners but currently keeps almost seven thousand incarcerated. Stacked together like cattle all day long, inmates stand shoeless on floors so deplorably filthy (there is no sanitation) dozens die every day while attempting to cut off their gangrene-infected limbs. Others are simply killed and eaten by other prisoners (there’s no food either).
The observant reader will find “supermax” prisons like ADX Florence (Florence, Colorado), and the infamous “Black Dolphin”(Penal Colony No. 6, in Orenburg, Russia) absent from this list, but the truth of the matter is that, while the very dangerous criminals (including terrorists and serial killers) they hold have to endure harsh isolation, these facilities at the very least provide sanitation, running water, health care, dental care, and regular meals. They also are neither overcrowded, nor under-guarded, and present no institutionalized cases of predatory sodomy that we know of.
1. At 3:00 a.m., on November 13, 1974, the five-bedroom, Dutch Colonial–style waterfront house with a heated swimming pool (and two quarter-round windows on the third floor, long since removed, which made the house look like a jack o’ lantern) on 112 Ocean Avenue, became the scene of a gruesome crime.
2. Then twenty-three-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr. (1951–2021) shot his sleeping parents (Ronald DeFeo Sr. and Louise DeFeo) and his four younger siblings (Dawn, Allison, Marc, and John Matthew) with a .35 caliber rifle, in a paranoid fit of drug-induced rage. For this heinous crime, DeFeo Jr. would remain behind bars for the rest of his life, finally passing on March 12, 2021.
3. Despite this, the property price dropping to a mere $80,000 (with the DeFeo family furniture thrown in for another $400) was hard to resist for George L. Lutz (1947–2006) and his wife Kathy Lutz (1946–2004), who knowingly bought the house, moving into it with Kathy’s three children in tow.
4. According to the Lutzes, there were strange odors and sounds, such as the front door slamming in the middle of the night. They also felt chills around the place, and suffered from night terrors that woke them at 3:15 a.m. every night (around the same time the DeFeo murders took place) . . . and that’s basically it.
5. Granted, the above would be enough for any family to panic and flee such a place. The Lutzes certainly never deviated from this core version of the events, but it would seem the plague of flies, the green slime–oozing walls, the cloven hoof marks on the snow, the devil pig, the fire bats, and Kathy turning into an old levitating woman all came after the fact; embellishments first written by Jay Anson (1921–1980), to whom they originally sold their story rights (alongside a number of tape recordings they made at the house), and the many other authors who followed in the latter’s footsteps.
6. Named as “Father Mancuso” in the Anson book, Reverend Ralph J. Pecoraro (1935–1987) in particular was adamant to declare that, other than the Lutzes calling him on the phone one time, he never even set foot on the property. Hence, it stands to reason that the story of the blessing, the hellish voice yelling at him to get out, and the hand blisters were all fabrications, but fabrications do sell books and movies.
7. Well-ingrained into America’s folklore via pop-culture, Amityville would become a money-making machine through a series of novels and almost thirty movies. An “all-you-can-eat buffet of occult bullshit” according to horror writer Grady Hendrix (Paperbacks from Hell, p.108, 2017), fed and promoted by George Lutz himself. But the family that purchased, renovated, and lived in the property at 112 Ocean Avenue during the following decade stated they never experienced anything of the sort.
8. The Lutzes ended up reaching California, where the trauma resulting from a story they never backed down from, coupled with the pressures of newfound celebrity eventually split the marriage of George and Kathy up. The ensuing family feud over the franchise proceeds wasn’t any kinder to them, and left Kathy’s second son, Christopher Quaratino (b.1968) estranged from his stepfather whom, he later claimed, used to dabble in the occult and may have had a hand in what happened at the house.
BONUS QUOTES
“I would love to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.”
—George Bernard Shaw
“The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his chest.”
—Roseanne Barr
GRAVE OLD WORLD
Across the pond, a relatively small town located twenty-seven miles northwest of central London appears to concentrate the most haunting reports in all of the United Kingdom: Amersham!
1. Originally known as Agmodesham, this market town has been sitting on the River Misbourne valley, deep within the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire County, since pre-Anglo-Saxon times (in fact, archeological evidence of Roman presence has also been found), where it’s thrived for millennia.
2. In the 1500s the Amersham Martyrs of the Lollard revolt, a Proto-Protestant movement, were imprisoned, tried, and brutally executed by both Church and state, in and around town landmarks now rife with paranormal activity.
3. Currently haunted public establishments include the Crown Hotel, a former Elizabethan inn populated by seven ghostly residents; the quaintly named Saracens Head Inn with two spectral patrons still in attendance; and The George and Dragon Hotel, where the disembodied footsteps of a local folk legend, “The White Lady,” can still be heard.
4. The Hellfire Caves, a man-made network of tunnels excavated in the outskirts of town during the eighteenth century at the behest of Baron Francis Dashwood (1708–1781), co-founder of the Hellfire Club, is said to be haunted by Hellfire Club Secretary Paul Whitehead (1710–1774), who supposedly asked for his heart to be put on display at the caves upon his passing. The theft of the urn containing it, however, caused his spirit to wander around ever since. A girl named “Sukie,” supposedly stoned to death by an angry mob, has also been seen floating around.
5. Amersham’s strangeness seems to radiate to nearby Chiltern towns and landmarks too, including the Standard Pub (Beaconsfield) parking lot, where the beating drum of a boy executed there during the English Civil War can still be heard; the graveyard of St. Bartholomew Church (Fingest) where an apparition dressed as a gamekeeper engages with visitors; and the understated Ickenham London Underground subway station, where a woman in a red scarf continues to replay her tragic fall onto the tracks, which happened back in the 1950s.
6. Perhaps the area’s continued association to the supernatural stems from its own Spiritualist group that used to gather at Lyon’s Tearoom on Church Street, in High Wycombe, which later coalesced into the Wycombe Spiritualist Church, and by 2017 had been reborn as the Wycombe Spiritualist Centre.
7. Sixty miles to the south from Amersham, in Sussex, another eerie British town garners not ghosts but fringe cults (more on those later): East Grinstead. This real-life “Twin Peaks” is populated by Rosicrucians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and Mormons—all pretty innocuous compared to their neighboring branches of the Anthroposophical Society, Opus Dei (a Catholic sect with a BDSM fetish), and the Church of Scientology!
BONUS FACTS
Despite its dramatic name, the Exploding Head Syndrome (EHS) doesn’t cause people’s noggin to burst like a piñata, but rather endure unusual, and still-unexplained, loud noises and flashes of light which, while frightening, are basically painless.
Convicted Mormon forger and murderer Mark William Hofmann (b.1954) counterfeited documents related to the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and then car-bombed two people to cover his tracks in 1985.
As reported by The Royal Gazette in 1975: “Erskine Ebbin and his brother Neville were killed almost exactly a year apart after being involved in collision with the same taxi, driven by the same driver [a Willard Manders] and carrying the same passenger.”
I DON’T WANNA BE BURIED IN A . . .
Ever since Siberian hunter-gatherers buried their newly domesticated companions—dogs!—with tokens of affection, mankind has found ways to memorialize the special bond we share with animals.
1. As the mummified remains of their pets attest, the ancient Egyptian culture believed they would keep their deceased company in the afterlife. Cats, of course, were the most popular (to the point of considering them deities), but dogs, mongooses, monkeys, gazelles, and birds also held the special affection of households, where the process of mourning them included wailing and the shaving of eyebrows.
2. Perhaps as a counterpoint to the cat-obsessed culture which enslaved them, ancient Israelis loved their dogs so much they created the very first dog cemetery around 500 BC. Overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, in what is now the Ashkelon National Park, the Ashkelon Pet Cemetery was the largest known cemetery of this kind in the ancient world, where thousands of carefully buried remains from what appear to be ancestors of the modern Canaan Dog breed have been found, including puppies.
3. Informally, beginning with the burial of pet dog Cherry at the park’s gatekeeper's garden in 1881, the Hyde Park Pet Cemetery (also known as The Secret Pet Cemetery of Hyde Park) became the first, if informal, pet cemetery of the modern era. One thousand burials (mostly of dogs, but also cats, monkeys, and birds) later, in 1903, it was officially closed, but pets continued to be intermittently interred there until 1976. Maintained as a memorial, guided visits are occasionally allowed by the Royal Parks administration.
4. On the other hand, the first officially established modern pet cemetery is the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery of Westchester County, New York. Founded in 1896 by veterinarian Dr. Samuel Johnson (1854–1937) in his own apple orchard, it was soon filled with little headstones, flowers, and all the accoutrements usually applied to departed humans. “The Peaceable Kingdom” currently provides resting grounds for more than eighty thousand pets of many species (and hundreds of their owners too), including those belonging to Diana Ross (b.1944) and Mariah Carey (b.1969).
5. A historic monument since 1987, the Parisian Cimetiére des Chiens et Autres Animaux Domestiques (Cemetery of Dogs and Other Domestic Animals) in Asnières-sur-Seine, has been housing dog, cat, horse, lion, fish, and monkey remains since 1899, making it the world’s second-oldest pet cemetery, and one of the best regarded. Notably, the tomb of Hollywood star, German shepherd Rin Tin Tin (rescued from a trench in French territory during World War I) can be found there.
6. The fifth-oldest pet cemetery still in operation in the United States, the Aspin Hill Memorial Park (Aspen Hill, Maryland) was originally founded in 1920 by Boston terrier breeders Richard C. Birney and his wife Bertha and is currently run by the Montgomery County Humane Society. It contains fifty thousand pet burials—and fifty human ones— including several dogs owned by legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972).
7. The Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park in Calabasas, California, was founded by Hollywood veterinarian Dr. Eugene C. Jones in 1928 to supplement his thriving pet hospital business. True to its showbiz roots, it became the burial grounds of celebrity pets, including Kabar (Rudolph Valentino’s dog), Jiggs (“Cheetah” in the Tarzan movies), Topper (Hopalong Cassidy’s horse), Droopy (Humphrey Bogart’s dog), Boots (Charlie Chaplin’s cat), Scout (Tonto’s horse from The Lone Ranger), Petey (the dog from Our Gang), Spot (the Little Rascals’ dog), and Elmer (Steven Spielberg’s dog, who appeared in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941, and Jaws).
8. One of the most curious pet cemeteries in America, the Key Underwood Coon Dog Memorial Graveyard, has been serving as a coon hound–exclusive burial ground in rural Colbert County, Alabama, since 1937, when local huntsman Key Underwood informally buried his coon dog Troop in an old hunting camp. When other hunters followed his example, the cemetery as it is known today, with its mismatching gravestones and concrete pillar (representing two coonhounds treeing a raccoon) guarding the gate, slowly came to be.
9. In modern times, the lack of a common religious belief concerning the afterdeath fate of animals has seen some owners embrace the “New Agey” concept of a “Rainbow Bridge,” where they will be reunited with their pets. For those not wanting to wait nor circumvent the various American and international legalities of human-pet burial, in 2010 the English hamlet of Stainton by Langworth (Lincolnshire) became the first, and so far, the only place in the United Kingdom where owners may be legally buried alongside their pets, in a sanctioned “green burial” plot.
10. Harmless and wholesome, especially when compared to their human counterparts, pet cemeteries got a more sinister rep in the last forty years, in large part due to a work of fiction, the 1983 novel Pet Sematary by Stephen King (b.1947). In it, an ancient Native American burial ground brings the dead back to life, only now possessed by murderous evil spirits! Adapted for the silver screen twice, its very author has claimed that, out of all his other horror books, this particular story scared him the most. It certainly continues to spook us.
HELLHOLE
At some point in history mankind started opting out of executing and burying its worst of the worst, instead choosing to lock it away from society. Having long since abandoned any rehabilitation pretense, these prisons have come the closest to hell on Earth.
Tacumbú Prison: Incorrectly labeled “The Most Dangerous Prison on Earth” by the Netflix show Inside the World's Toughest Prisons, this facility in Asunción, Paraguay, was built for eight hundred prisoners back in 1956, but currently holds 4,231, watched over by just forty untrained guards. About seven thousand uninspected visitors are also legally allowed in four times a week, which means prisoners are regularly fed, especially in the Adventist and Catholic wings, but drugs and weapons circulate unhindered elsewhere, fueling bloody gang wars every other month. Though hardly the most dangerous prison on this list, it still makes places like Rikers and Attica look like frozen yogurt shops.
Kamiti Maximum Security Prison: One of the worst prisons in all of Africa, this facility located in Nairobi, Kenya, is infamous for its abundance of brutality, and its lack of a reliable water supply (no showers, nor any sewage system), food (only two rations a day: porridge for breakfast, and a bowl of soup for lunch), and no health care, which means Cholera regularly claims the lives of dozens of inmates packed in one-hundred-square-foot cells. Kamiti is best-known, however, as a prison where rape is aggressively practiced among prisoners.
Miguel Castro Castro Prison: This infamous penitentiary located in San Juan de Lurigancho, a district of Lima, Peru, keeps 11,500 criminals within its rotting walls (originally erected to hold only 2,500). Manned by a skeleton crew of 150 corrupt guards, with no segregation possible (which means hardened criminals “mingle” with younger offenders) the only way of keeping it from exploding is letting drugs, prostitution, and rape run rampant. Cockfights too! Ironically, guards also need to be bribed to let in the raw materials needed by the pottery workshop run on the premises by a Catholic nonprofit. In fact, a particular inmate got so crafty with clay, he managed to bury his girlfriend’s corpse under the floor of his own cell, where it stayed undetected for weeks.
San Francisco de Yare Prison: The worst Venezuelan prison among several other horribly overcrowded prisons (including former Maracaibo National Prison, “La Sabaneta,” which closed in 2013) in that dystopia of a country everybody wants to escape from, the Prisión de Yare holds 44,500 criminals, hundreds of which die regularly on account of starvation, STDs, and violent clashes between armed drug gangs.
Bang Kwang Central Prison: Nicknamed “Big Tiger” on account of the many who lose their lives within its walls, or the more jocular “Bangkok Hilton,” this prison at Thailand’s Nonthaburi Province keeps over eight thousand death row and long-sentence inmates (in a space made for three thousand) behind bars. The difference between the two being that the latter only have to wear welded leg iron chains for the first three months of their sentence, while the former will keep them on until execution day. It offers only one meal per day—a bowl of maggot-infested rice and soup—per prisoner, which means those who cannot afford to buy from the prison canteen have to “work” for other prisoners in order to eat, a horrifying prospect not uncommon to most prisons around the world.
Camp 22: Kwan-li-so (“penal labor colony”) No. 22, better known as the Hoeryong concentration camp, is a maximum-security camp located in North Korea. While supposedly closed in 2012, satellite imagery taken in 2017 revealed it remains operational and has even been partly refurbished. A Nazi wet dream, its estimated fifty thousand emaciated prisoners (including their entire family and close friends, all deemed “guilty by association” according to the State) never leave its grounds alive. Meanwhile, they will be made to long for death as they are subjected to various forms of torture and forced labor. Fed only 6.3 ounces of corn per meal twice a day, inmates will need to hunt for insects, rats, and snakes, or even resort to cannibalism (the reason many lack a limb or two) if they intend to survive. Children, of course, don’t last very long, and neither do the elderly.
Penal de Ciudad Barrios: A maximum security joint originally built by the Salvadorean government to keep arrested members of the powerful MS13 gang (La Mara Salvatrucha) apart from other gangs, its 2,500 prisoners now run the prison as their very own “members-only” headquarters, from which they direct various criminal operations and impart their own brand of justice. No guards are allowed inside, and it is so dangerous the military ended up guarding the prison perimeter, only to prevent these nefarious criminals from physically escaping to the outside world, while their power and influence rot the beautiful country from the inside out.
Gitarama Central Prison: Fairly labeled as the world’s deadliest prison, this Rwandan facility, found thirty-seven miles southeast of the capital Kigali, was built for four hundred prisoners but currently keeps almost seven thousand incarcerated. Stacked together like cattle all day long, inmates stand shoeless on floors so deplorably filthy (there is no sanitation) dozens die every day while attempting to cut off their gangrene-infected limbs. Others are simply killed and eaten by other prisoners (there’s no food either).
The observant reader will find “supermax” prisons like ADX Florence (Florence, Colorado), and the infamous “Black Dolphin”(Penal Colony No. 6, in Orenburg, Russia) absent from this list, but the truth of the matter is that, while the very dangerous criminals (including terrorists and serial killers) they hold have to endure harsh isolation, these facilities at the very least provide sanitation, running water, health care, dental care, and regular meals. They also are neither overcrowded, nor under-guarded, and present no institutionalized cases of predatory sodomy that we know of.
