The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories (46 page)

In January of 2008, an eighty-one-year-old Chilean man woke up at his own funeral. His family dressed him in his finest suit and laid him out for a proper wake, only to witness him opening his eyes mid-mourning. Upon waking he simply asked for a glass of water. The family was overjoyed.

CORPSES ON CAMPUS

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, medical schools in the United States used to routinely get their cadavers for dissection by grave robbing; faculty members and students themselves made midnight raids on local graveyards. It became the custom among grieving survivors in university towns to place iron bars on new graves and hire armed guards for two weeks until the body had time to putrefy enough to make it unusable for research. Between 1752 and 1852, there were at least thirteen riots by citizens against grave-robbing medical schools, including one in 1788 in New York City that killed eight people and injured scores of others.

HAUNTED CAMPUSES ACROSS THE U.S.A.

• University of Washington, Seattle: The College Inn Pub is haunted by a centuries-old murder victim.
  
• Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut: Woolsey Hall has hosted more than a dozen phantom concerts near its old organ.
  
• University of California, Berkeley: The school's Sather Tower is haunted by the ghost of a student who leapt from the tower in the 1960s.
  
• University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee: Students over the years have reported a horrifying headless apparition at various locations across the campus. The ghost is seen in a traditional gown and is believed to be the spirit of a student who wore such a gown and was decapitated in a car accident.
  

ZOMBIE WALK

Do you like to walk with the dead? Prefer the moans of animated corpses to conversations with mortals? Well, you should probably join or organize a Zombie Walk. A Zombie Walk or Zombie March is an organized public gathering of two or more people who dress as zombies and wander around, limping their way in an organized route to a public center or cemetery. What a stress reliever!

RUN TO THE LIGHT, CAROL ANNE!

Poltergeists—noisy, active ghosts with the ability to control matter—were originally thought to be mischievous spirits. More modern beliefs target troubled teens as the source of alleged poltergeist activities; many psychics believe activity attributed to poltergeists is actually caused by adolescents unwittingly
performing psychokinesis. Signs of poltergeist hauntings include:

• Objects being thrown about,
  
• Knockings, tappings, and rappings of unknown origins and generally very disruptive,
  
• An adolescent or teenager living in the home and experiencing emotional turmoil,
  
• Paranormal activity that stops when the teen is absent,
  
• Apparitions that are not usually seen.
  

VENETIAN FAIRIES

Spirits who dress in white and appear most often during the enchanting Venetian nights are said to be the
fade
, or fairies. They are thought to be the spirits of women who died in childbirth. They appear to be beautiful young ladies but are in fact treacherous. They have deformed feet—sometimes goat feet.

SECRET SPOOKY MESSAGES