It’s our last post about the surface level of the iceberg–next time, we’re diving into the water!

The Luna Park Ghost Train Fire

I’m going to be honest, this one is so weird, and so comparatively little-known despite how weird it is, that I’m still not entirely sure parts of it aren’t an elaborate hoax, but I don’t have the energy to look into it any further so here’s the internet-friendly spooky version.

On the 9th of June in 1979, a ghost train attraction in a park in New South Wales caught fire and was quickly consumed. Multiple people were killed, including a man named John Godson and both of his children, which tragically meant that his wife Jenny had lost her entire family in one stroke. Some time later Jenny was going through photos from that terrible day and came across the last picture of her son Damien, taken shortly before the fire that killed him. In the photo, Damien is posing next to a tall, muscular man in a creepy-looking bull costume.

Disturbed by the image, which she viewed as “demonic”, Jenny attempted to track down the man’s identity–at which point it was discovered that no one at the park that day knew who he was or recalled seeing him there, either among the visitors or the park’s staff. The whole thing was made more sinister by the fact that an inquest couldn’t find the exact cause of the fire, along with persistent rumours that an organized crime group was involved somehow. Was the horned figure some kind of supernatural omen of death? Was he a gangland arsonist in disguise?

Well, okay, let’s look at this rationally. The organized crime connection has never actually been substantiated, and if someone wanted to set fire to a ride in a crowded public place and get away with it, then surely dressing in a bizarre cow outfit would be a bad way to do that.

Setting aside the supernatural for a moment, there are some obvious explanations for the bull-man’s presence. Maybe he was hired by the owner of the attraction on a casual basis to stand around and attract visitors to the ghost train. Maybe he wasn’t employed by the park at all, and he was just someone hoping to make some money by posing for photos. Maybe he was a busker, like those actors who pretend to be statues.

All of these are perfectly viable explanations…but I keep coming back to that costume. It’s very strange, for a number of reasons. To my mind, the amount of bare hunk-flesh on display seems a little inappropriate for a costume worn by someone who’s going to be posing with children. Based on how you interpret the photo, it’s not clear that the mask has any eye holes to let the person wearing it see out of (the two black splotches on the mask might be eye holes, or they might be part of the cow-skin pattern), which would be extremely odd. And the whole thing is just really creepy in general, even disconnected from the tragic circumstances surrounding it.

As I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, this is one of those cases that’s morphed into something of an urban legend even though it’s based on events that verifiably happened. And as with most urban legends, tellings online have an annoying tendency to leave out important details, like who actually took the photo of Damien and the mysterious figure. I’d love to see if we have a verifiable chain of providence for this photo proving that it is actually of Damien and was taken when and where it’s claimed to have been.

The Man Of The Hole

Most of the world’s remaining uncontacted peoples live in the vast, inaccessible wilderness of the Amazon Rainforest. This stronghold has become increasingly threatened in recent times as deforestation steadily eats away at the Amazon’s borders, and in the latter half of the 20th century outright genocide by Brazilian settlers accelerated the destruction of these remote civilizations.

In the 1970s, miners working illegally in the state of Rondonia massacred a village of uncontacted people and bulldozed the remains of their settlement. One survivor was left alive, a man whose name went unrecorded because no one spoke his language. When the government department responsible for indigenous affairs became aware of his existence, they demarcated the area he was living in as a protected indigenous territory. The man lived out the rest of his life in this protected bubble, occasionally encountered by government workers who left caches of seeds and tools (and also, on at least one known occasion, by armed outsiders who attacked him). He was found dead in 2022, of apparently natural causes.

The Man Of The Hole’s nickname comes from the fact that he dug deep, narrow holes in all of his settlements; similar holes were found in the remains of the village his people had lived in, indicating that this was a cultural practice that he had carried on after his forced isolation. Much speculation has ensued over the purpose of these holes, with some proposing that they were traps or storage pits while others speculating that they may have had some unknown spiritual significance.

There are a surprisingly large number of uncontacted people left in the world; in addition to an estimated 77-84 groups in Brazil alone, there are other civilizations elsewhere in South America, in south-east Asia, the (in)famous North Sentinelese Islanders off the coast of India, and possibly in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Except for perhaps those living on islands, it seems inevitable that all of them will eventually be subsumed into the wider global community–whether peacefully or not–as our industrial society intrudes relentlessly into the last remaining wildernesses on Earth in search of ever-dwindling natural resources.

…Damn that was depressing, let’s do a fun one next.

Living Short-Faced Bears

Back in the day (as in, more than ten thousand years ago) gigantic bears the size of buffalo roamed parts of North America and Russia. Unfortunately they’re now extinct, because all the cool animals died out before humans came along (or, in some cases, as a direct result of humans coming along).

But maybe they’re not! Maybe these large bois still roam the wilderness in isolated pockets, sparking Bigfoot sightings when they lumber out of the woods in front of a startled hiker.

…I mean probably not, because it’s hard to believe anything this huge could have survived in large numbers without being noticed more, but isn’t it fun to imagine? Apparently some of the areas the Short-Faced Bear is rumored to inhabit do have long-standing folk stories about giant bears, including the delightful “Booger Bear” of the US and Canada, so the whole thing hasn’t entirely been cooked up by the fevered imaginations of armchair crypotzoologists.

The Toynbee Tiles

Now here’s a classic, old-school mystery, the sort of thing I used to love reading about as a teenager. I can smell the overheating Pentium CPU already.

From the mid 1980s, mysterious art installations have appeared in numerous American and South American cities. Seemingly made out of linoleum and an asphalt patching material, the tiles are either embedded into the surfaces of roads with tar, or affixed with cement. The contents of the tiles has varied over time, but most contain some variation of the following text:

TOYNBEE IDEA

IN MOViE 2001

RESURRECT DEAD

ON PLANET JUPiTER

What the fuck does that mean? The second, third and fourth lines are clearly references to the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which involves a mission to Jupiter and whose protagonist undergoes a kind of transformation that could be described as resurrection. “Toynbee idea” has been interpreted as either having something to do with a British historian named Toynbee, or a Ray Bradbury short story called The Toynbee Convector, which would make sense given that the rest of the text is a sci-fi reference. What exactly this Toynbee idea is and how it relates to the plot of 2001 is unknown.

Areas that have been graced with Toynbee tiles will sometimes also host smaller tiles by (presumably) the same creator, which contain a range of more straightforward conspiracy theory topics likes the FBI, the Soviet Union, corrupt politicians and, of course, The Jews, all delivered in an incoherent Time Cube-esque manner.

The creator of the tiles is unknown, although it’s speculated that the original designer may be from Philadelphia based on the large number of tiles found there and a reference to a Philadelphia address in a South American tile. The huge geographical distribution of the tiles has lead to speculation that a group of people may be behind them; similarly, some have speculated that at least some of the tiles placed in more recent times could be the work of copycats.

The Toynbee Tiles are today widely recognized as a kind of outsider art. The fact that many of them haven't been preserved except in photos means that finding a physical tile is something of an achievement. For a long time there was a sizeable community of Toynbee enthusiasts tracking and hunting down new tiles, although I don’t know if it’s still active today.

Kaz II

No, it’s not the sequel to Kaz I.

Kaz II is the name of a famous ghost yacht found drifting off the coast of Australia in 2007. Its crew, consisting of three middle-aged friends out for a holiday, were nowhere to be found. No evidence of what happened to them has ever been uncovered.

This is probably a case with a mundane explanation–one of the men falls overboard while the ship is under power, one of the others jumps in to help him and gets into trouble himself, the third one jumps in to try to rescue both of them, the ship sails off without them–but the classic “abandoned ship found drifting” scenario just lends itself so strongly to spookier ideas.

I prefer to see it more as a cautionary tale of how easy it is to get into trouble on the water if you’re unprepared. All three of the men on board the ship were inexperienced sailors, and a video recording recovered from the ship showed that none of them were wearing life jackets. Inexperience, choppy water and no life jackets are a recipe for disaster.

Rebecca Coriam

This is another disappearance from a cruise ship, and like the previous case it probably has a sadder, more mundane explanation than many people are theorizing.

Rebecca Coriam vanished from a Disney cruise ship in 2011. She was last spotted on CCTV having a phone conversation in what appeared to be a distraught emotional state, and was wearing oversized clothes that didn’t seem to be her own. Just as in the case of Amy Lynn Bradley, a penumbra of odd little details were supposedly found in the wake of the disappearance: Disney higher-ups not cooperating with the investigation, flowers left at a location that Rebecca might have been spotted before she disappeared, whispers among crew of a cover-up.

Given the circumstances of her last confirmed sighting, many people speculate that Rebecca may have been the victim of a sexual assault, after which she took her life by jumping overboard. This unfortunately seems like a pretty likely scenario to me. What’s shakier are the accusations of a cover-up by shadowy Disney higher-ups, the idea being that the Maus Haus didn’t want it getting out that something so heinous had occurred on one of their cruise ships.

I guess that’s not outside the realm of possibility, but I find it kind of hard to believe, especially since the disappearance has become so infamous in the meantime. I think what we’re seeing here is the unfortunately common reaction where the family of a missing person who might have committed suicide prefer to believe that something else happened.