Why do I feel like someone stuck me in the Overlook with nothing but a TM terminal to keep me company?
U.S. Capitol Said to Be Haunted Building
By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON – Murder, curses and demon cats. Statues descending from their pedestals for midnight minuets. There are scarier things than lawmaking going on inside the U.S. Capitol.
Walk through the Rotunda late at night and the only sound might be the 180-foot-high iron dome creaking in the cool air. But those with sharper ears and broader imaginations might also hear, behind the 850 doorways, the footsteps of the stricken John Quincy Adams or the assassinated James Garfield.
There was plenty of noise Thursday, as authorities closed down the House after guards saw what they thought was a firearm on a security camera at a Capitol office building across the street. It turned out to be a toy, part of a Halloween costume an employee was bringing in.
Halloween or not, the 200-year-old Capitol is said to be one of the most haunted buildings in Washington, says Jim Berard, Democratic communications director for the House Transportation Committee. Berard compiled some of the more famous ghost stories in his recently published “The Capitol Inside & Out,” a history of the nation’s legislative center.
The building got off to a bad start in 1808 when construction superintendent John Lenthall disagreed with architect B. Henry Latrobe over the vaulting in the room now known as the Old Supreme Court Chamber. When Lenthall tried to remove braces from the vaults, the ceiling collapsed and crushed him. In his last breath, legend goes, Lenthall put a curse on the building.
Tragedy struck again in 1848 when John Quincy Adams, who was elected to the House after serving as president, had a stroke on the House floor, now Statuary Hall, while giving a speech against the Mexican War. He died two days later in a room off the floor, and Capitol workers have since reported hearing Adams’ footsteps, or the specter of the old man trying to finish his speech.
Among other spirits spotted in Capitol hallways are James Garfield, a former House member who was shot just four months into his presidency and died two months later, and his hanged assassin, disgruntled office seeker Charles Guiteau.
Washington’s famed city planner, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who died impoverished and embittered by the way Congress had treated him, has also been seen in the subterranean rooms of the Capitol, carrying a roll of parchment and shaking his head, according to John Alexander, author of “Ghosts: Washington Revisited.”
Alexander also relates how late at night, after the politicians have gone home, a pounding gavel has been heard in the house chamber, as Speaker “Uncle Joe” Cannon and his 1911 successor, Champ Clark, continue their feuding.
Disbelieving reporters might avoid a House hallway where in 1890 journalist Charles Kincaid shot and killed Kentucky congressman William Taulbee after an argument. The legend is that black spots on the stairway are Taulbee’s blood, and that Taulbee gets his revenge by tripping up reporters on the stairs.
The spirit of the doughboy who lay in state in the Rotunda in 1921 as the Unknown Soldier from World War I is said to return when others lie in the Rotunda. Civil War general and senator John Logan is also said to return to the old Military Affairs Committee room, with the door to the room quietly opening and the general appearing, surrounded by a blue haze. In the 1930s workmen discovered a sealed-up room containing what many believed was Logan’s stuffed horse.
Then there’s the “killer bathtub,” an ornate Italian marble tub that was one of several enjoyed by 19th century senators. Ulysses S. Grant’s vice president, Henry Wilson, in 1875 fell asleep in the tub, was chilled by the cooling water and died of a stroke in his Senate office that night. Visitors to that office say they can catch a whiff of the scented soap used in the long-abandoned Senate bath.
Berard says the most famous Capitol apparition is the “Demon Cat,” thought to date back to the early days when cats roamed the building to keep the rat population down. The cat, said to appear at times of national crisis, grows to enormous size before suddenly vanishing. Legend has it that one guard fired his gun at it, and another was so frightened he suffered a fatal heart attack.
Some claim that on the night a new president is sworn in the statues in Statuary Hall dismount for their own inaugural ball, and that Civil War foes Grant and Robert E. Lee have been seen meeting for a reconciliatory handshake. The one problem here, Berard noted, is that there are only six statues of women in the National Statuary Hall Collection to dance with 91 men.
Fishermen work on a boat filled with freshly caught dolphins while a diver prepares to submerge in the blood-filled water near the fishing town of Taiji in Wakayama Prefecutre in this photo taken Friday, Oct. 6, 2003 by American anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Fishermen in this western Japanese town regularly conduct dolphin hunts during the October to April season. They’ve caught more than 60 striped dolphins so far this year under the government quota system which allows 22,275 to be caught. The meat is usually canned andsold in supermarkets.(AP Photo/Sea Shepherd Conservation Society)
These silly memes will be the death of me.
Natch.
::|:| more jessica simpson antics |:|::
Funny, until I read the last article I posted about her idiocy, I had no idea who this woman was.
How awful to become notorious for your stupidity.
Quick note, I’ll elaborate later.
Ted and I are in dire need of an artist for our comic. The artist that we were working with… well, to put it bluntly, he flaked.
This makes the THIRD FLAKE ARTIST we’ve dealt with.
If you have talent, creativity, and can actually meet deadlines, then please email me — cupcake @ papow . com, or post here in LJ.
Cross-posted wherever I can think to cross-post.
I have a 7-day workweek (one double shift included), so I snuck out of the office this morning to get my dreads retightened. I was starting to look like a derelict… lack of time means lack of motivation to take care of my usually grossly vain self. It took 3 hours, but it was time well spent. Andrew (my Cosmetological Knight in Shining Armor) is so unbelievably fun to talk to… and he’s a genius with dread maintenance. He put in a handful of pink, purple and fuchsia synth dreads in… I am a happy girl.
I still need to finish my commentary on the DuQuette seminar. Lordy, I love that man.
On a bad note, chaos reigns supreme at the office, the USPS is up to it’s old tricks, and my garden looks like someone took a spray bottle of boric acid to it.
I need to get back to returning emails. Enough lollygagging.
I can’t seem to reply to anyone right now. Odd.
– – –
Plato Treasure Map Leads Atlantis Hunter to Cyprus
By Michele Kambas and Jean Christou
MOUNT OLYMPUS, Cyprus (Reuters) – Some say it is in the Aegean, others in the Azores, off the Celtic Ridge of Britain or even as far as the South China Sea, but an American researcher says everyone has been looking in the wrong place.
Atlantis was in Cyprus and ancient philosopher Plato is about to be vindicated, according to Robert Sarmast.
“The island of Cyprus was, or is, part of Atlantis — a mountaintop,” Sarmast said from his home in Los Angeles. “This region is at the heart of the ancient world.”
Drawn from accounts by the ancient Athenian lawmaker Solon, Plato’s description of a powerful civilization destroyed by the wrath of God has fired the dreams of explorers for centuries.
Of late, it has inspired fantasies of webbed-limbed people living in glass bubbles on the sea bed; of old, it was thought by some to be the Garden of Eden, where mankind fell from God’s grace.
Geologists say the land mass of Cyprus’s central mountain range once formed the ocean floor. Sarmast says the mountainous island was the tip of the civilization submerged in a devastating earthquake (news – web sites) and flood thousands of years ago.
Using deep-sea imagery, simulations of the sea bed, and following some 50 clues found in Plato’s Critias and Timaeus Dialogues, Sarmast said he has discovered a sunken rectangular land mass stretching northeast from Cyprus, toward Syria.
“Everything matches the descriptions in the dialogues of Atlantis to an uncanny degree,” said Sarmast.
Using scientific data collected a decade ago, Sarmast said he came up with detailed three-dimensional maps and simulated models of the eastern Mediterranean basin.
“We lowered the sea level by 1,600 meters (5,250 feet) and an island popped up,” he said.
Having written a book about his discovery, Sarmast now hopes to organize an expedition to the region for further research.
SCHOLARS SKEPTICAL
His theory has been challenged by archeologists, who say the Atlantis story is a myth.
Sarmast, however, says the sheer volume of detail found in the dialogues is proof enough that something is lurking in the watery deep. The dialogues read like a treasure map,” he said.
Although theories on where Atlantis was are many and varied, most believers agree the ancient city was probably destroyed in the biblical flood, which has its parallel in the history of the Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Egyptians and South Americans.
Plato describes a series of worldwide floods culminating in the deluge of the Deucalion, dated by Greek historians to the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 BC.
According to those ancient texts, Atlantis was a powerful nation whose residents became so corrupted by greed and power that Zeus, the king of the gods, destroyed it.
Cypriot scholars are skeptical of Sarmast’s conclusions.
“The possibility of Cyprus being Atlantis is next to zero,” said Plato scholar Sofronis Sofroniou.
“Cyprus is mentioned by Homer and other people and there is no mention of that.
“If Cyprus was Atlantis, it would probably have been mentioned. There is absolutely no basis for this theory.”
Sophocles Hadjisavvas, director of the Antiquities Department, agrees. “This is mere speculation and has nothing to do with reality,” he said.
“Atlantis is mythology, but even mythology speaks of Atlantis being outside the Gates of Hercules in the Atlantic,” he said, referring to the Straits of Gibraltar.
“But it is good for Cyprus tourism,” he added.
Sarmast won’t be swayed. “Heinrich Schliemann discovered Troy by following clues in Homer’s Iliad,” he said, referring to the German explorer who found what he thought was the ancient city of Troy in 1873. “Before that archeologists said it was a myth. It wasn’t, and nor is Atlantis.”
