The Mystery Spot at Santa Cruz
An attraction in the woods above Santa Cruz, opened in 1939: inside a leaning cabin balls roll uphill along a board, people change height standing on one plank, and nobody can stand straight. The owners explain it with carbon dioxide from a buried spacecraft and a break in gravity. The cabin is built at about twenty degrees and dug into the hillside, and its windows and doorframes are skewed so that not one true vertical is visible anywhere. The brain takes the walls of the room as vertical rather than the plumb line, and every effect — the uphill ball, the difference in height — reproduces in any of the dozens of such buildings around the world, including one in the next county.
Brookfield: The Devil Made Me Do It
On 16 February 1981 in Brookfield, nineteen-year-old Arne Cheyenne Johnson stabbed his landlord Alan Bono to death. The defence, supported by Ed and Lorraine Warren, argued that Johnson was possessed by a demon passed to him from eleven-year-old David Glatzel — the first attempt in American legal history to enter possession as a defence. Judge Robert Callahan refused to admit it: it cannot be proved and the law has no such ground. Johnson was convicted of manslaughter. The boy's older brother Carl Glatzel later sued the Warrens, calling the whole affair an invention got up for a book contract.
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