The Absolutely True Story of the Monster in the Wall

Halloween is here again, when I feel that I should post something that suits the tone of the day, even though it is sometimes hard to think of anything.  This year I’ve come up with something that’s a perfect fit for the occasion.

This account is absolutely true, as best I can remember it (and I have a very good memory).  There was documentation for the story, and I have some of the documentation, although I’m not sure where it is at the moment.  The events described did not occur at Halloween, though they do make a good Halloween story.  

For many years I volunteered at a museum.  One service that the museum provided was identifying natural history specimens for the public.  Someone would come across an unusual bone or rock, and bring it in, or otherwise contact us, to get information; the requests were mostly mundane, though sometimes humorous.  

One day the museum received an e-mail from a man in Delaware.  He had grown up in a three hundred year old house.  When he was ten years old, he had found a secret compartment in the wall of his bedroom.  Inside was the body of a tiny monster.  And it was not some toy or model, but the actual carcass of something that had once been alive.

He attached a photograph with his e-mail.  The photograph showed an entity about a foot tall and seemingly bipedal, indeed almost humanoid.  The thing appeared malevolent, even demonic.  And it looked undeniably authentic, even as it corresponded to no animal known on the Earth.  

The man had held onto the monster throughout his life, but he had begun to think that the monster was bringing him bad luck.  Eventually, not knowing what to do, he took it to his bartender. (It is at this point in the story that people tend to laugh.)  Here my memory becomes fuzzy as to what the exact role of the bartender was in these events, but probably he advised the man on how to find out what the monster was, and what to do with it.  

When the e-mail arrived, I had recently been reading about gaffs, hoaxed taxidermy items such as Fiji mermaids and jackalopes.  I suspected that the monster might be some similar fraudulent creation.  I checked the internet, and determined that the monster was a Jenny Haniver, a very specialized hoax item produced when a specimen of the cartilaginous fish known as a ray is extensively altered to appear as some sort of monster.  Jenny Hanivers have been manufactured for hundreds of years; the name is thought to possibly be derived from the ironic French phrase jeune d'Anvers (meaning “youth of Antwerp”, Antwerp being a prominent location where Jenny Hanivers were made and sold). 

This picture from Wikipedia (by M. Violante) is a pretty good approximation of the way that the Jenny Haniver looked, as far as I can remember.

Finding a monster in the walls of a three hundred year old house would make a great premise for a horror story.

Unfortunately, though, I am not a good storyteller.  

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 7: Frogs

The frog is not an animal which one normally associates with Halloween.  Two different styles are available, however, the first for £3.95 from Mad About Horror.  (It’s also available in the United States, but Mad About Horror had the best picture.)

Whoever designed this skeleton actually did a good job with it.  It has no glaring mistakes, and it even does a nice job depicting a frog’s unusual pelvic structure.  I examined one in a store, and found that it had no lower jaw, but I see that as more of an omission than an outright error.

I cannot, though, give the same praise to this second style of frog skeleton, available for $6.99 from HalloweenCostumes.com.  It shows the frog with a rib cage, which frogs do not have (as one can tell from the first skeleton).

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 6: The Bat

  Bats are a characteristic animal of Halloween, such that rendering one as a skeleton to make it scarier seems unnecessary, even redundant.  Yet we have the bat skeleton, available for $31.45 from DHgate.

It has external ears presented as bony elements of the skull, which is a common problem with plastic Halloween mammal skeletons.  

What’s even stranger is the depiction of the bones that make up the wings.  A real bat has one digit in each wing that is outside the wing membrane, and four more digits that support the wing membrane. This fake bat has only three digits in position to support the wing membrane.  And the metacarpal of the uppermost wing digit has been replaced with what are apparently meant to be a radius and ulna.  (That’s the weird double bone along the top of the wing in the plastic skeleton).  In reality the radius and ulna are part of the arm, and thus closer to the body, although in bats the ulna is greatly reduced.

If you find all of this confusingly technical, you can check out correct bat skeletal structure here. 

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 5: The Home Depot Triceratops

I hadn’t intended to return to this series from last year (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4), but then I was in Home Depot, and I noticed some Triceratops skeletons.  The ones that I saw were lacking at least half of their tails.  And so I thought that it was time to spring back into action critiquing the scientific accuracy of, well, decorative plastic Halloween skeletons.

But then I found the item pictured online (available for $19.98), and it has an almost complete tail, except for the smallest vertebrae at the end, which might be too fragile for something like this.

Other than missing some bones in the pelvic region (and of course the LED-illuminated eyes) this Triceratops skeleton is actually pretty accurate.  

I therefore assume that the ones that I saw in the store were broken.  

Or perhaps they had their tails severed in combat with the Home Depot Tyrannosaurus.

The Dream That Came Undreamed

Ever since my childhood, I have wanted to write fiction.  And, specifically, I have wanted to write in the field of science fiction and fantasy.  People tell me that I am a good writer.  Unfortunately, though, I am not a good storyteller.  Successful fiction writers are filled with story ideas just waiting to burst out.  I almost never get any ideas for stories, and on the rare occasions that I do get ideas they are often more suited to a visual medium like television than to the written word.  Thus, although I would like to write, I generally have nothing to write.  

The one exception to this problem comes from my dreams.  Every so often I will have a dream that arranges itself into a narrative, or suggestions of a narrative.  

Years ago, perhaps fifteen or more years ago, I had one such dream.  In the dream, I was in eighth grade.  Another boy and I decided to skip class and go to Las Vegas, which was conveniently located next to the school.  There we saw a sign saying that on New Year’s Eve, a spacecraft high above the city would release two million ears of corn, which would burn up in the atmosphere, creating an artificial meteor shower.

An artificial meteor shower lighting up the Las Vegas sky on New Year’s Eve seemed like a good basis for a science fiction story.  I carried the concept around in my head for a long time, and a few years ago I started trying to develop a narrative around the concept.  (One immediate change that I made was to turn the ears of corn to grains of sand.)  But since I had a lot of other things to do, and very little self-discipline, I never got very far with the story.  

Then about a year ago I came upon an article on the internet reporting that a Japanese company is planning to implement an artificial meteor shower in the Hiroshima area in early 2019.  (A more recent account places the meteor shower in early 2020.)  Instead of ears of corn or grains of sand, specially-concocted pellets will be used to provide multiple colors.  

Normally one considers a dream coming true to be a good thing.  But in this case, my dream is robbed of its prescience, and thus of its effectiveness as a science fiction story. 

And so ideas become rarer still.

Harvestmen Eating Blueberry Muffins

I went camping a few weeks ago with some friends from high school. (We were at Burke Lake in Fairfax County, so it wasn’t exactly the deep wilderness.)  When night fell, our campsite was swarmed by harvestmen.  The next morning, we found dozens of them crawling over our tents.  But what was even odder was that during the night harvestmen were crawling over the picnic table, apparently looking to eat our leftovers.  

(I should note here that harvestmen are arachnids of the order Opiliones.  They differ from spiders in lacking a constriction between the two body segments, and having one pair of eyes rather than three or four  pairs.  An alternate, and probably more common, name is “daddy longlegs”.  I am using “harvestmen” here, because it is simpler, and because I am unsure of the plural form for “daddy longlegs”.  Is it just “daddy longlegs”, or “daddy longlegses”, or is it “daddies longlegs”, in the tradition of “courts-martial” and the Latin “patresfamilias”?) 

The harvestmen seemed particularly to like the blueberry muffins.  

Here are some pictures.

Harvestmen are known to be omnivores and scavengers, which would leave them well-suited to consume human-produced foodstuffs.  My casual internet searching provided two mentions of harvestmen eating human food, here (“One in a terrarium will survive on tidbits of bread, butter and fatty meat as well.”) and here (“A harvestman will eat little ants on a crumb of bread and then eat part of the crumb.“).  I have to wonder if the reason that harvestmen were common at the campsite was that they had become accustomed to scavenging the remains of campers’ meals.  

The Maize Maze

Autumn is the time for corn mazes, at least in areas that, unlike this one, still have agriculture.  This prompted me to think that if corn mazes were planted in countries where corn (Zea mays) is known as “maize”, then corn mazes would be “maize mazes”.  

And I thought that maybe I could write a short blog entry about that. 

But then I did a little very basic research (i. e. Wikipedia) and discovered that corn mazes in the United Kingdom are indeed known as “maize mazes”, which surprised me, because I had assumed that corn mazes were a uniquely American phenomenon.  

At this point, I can only remark that if British Prime Minister Theresa May were to construct her own corn maze, it would be May’s maize maze.