what was that thing... ya know... about... like... stuff...

[justdrew]

a "collective memory only" thread?

A Place to put requests for memory assistance on topics of various obscuriosities.

what's that song where...

what was the movie about...

etc and so forth, describe as best you can maybe someone will know

---

first thing:

I'm looking for any pointer to something I saw on the web probably ten or more years ago. It was a semi long article about a new cross-cultural mythic pantheon invented by poor/immigrant/otherwise-marginalized children in various urban locations. One of the mythic entities was a new mash-up Virgin Mary type, another was a re-imagined Bloody Mary character.

This was long before the selenderman experiment began.

Not much to go on, but maybe someone remembers seeing such a thing?

[seemslikeadream]

I'm looking for the name of the guy who first discovered that networks were broadcasting live signal over satellite even when stations were taking commercial breaks It was a news story back in 2004 I believe. Cause he also wrote a story about this artifact...it was a great story and now I can't find it

[justdrew]

I remember people would use their sat equipment to tap into feeds intended for cable network headends, and also production feeds not intended for public, but it stopped after they all started scrambling or just not transmitting such live feeds. IIRC, there are some clips out there of for instance: Larry King chatting with someone (a bush? jerry falwell?) about cool new kind of sleeping pill he liked. Some other embarrassing moments caught. This goes back to the 70s at l east, though I don't know who made the video available back in the day. I think some of the Kasey Kasem cursing a bluestreak samples came from such interceps too.

but right at the moment I can't find any trace of such events on the net. my google luck is low atm.

---

here's some semi recent info:

How To Hack The Sky
Andy Greenberg, 02.02.10, 2:05 PM ET

ARLINGTON, Va. -

Satellites can bring a digital signal to places where the Internet seems like a miracle: off-the-grid desert solar farms, the Arctic or an aircraft carrier at sea. But in beaming data to and from the world's most remote places, satellite Internet may also offer its signal to a less benign recipient: any digital miscreant within thousands of miles.

In a presentation at the Black Hat security conference in Arlington, Va., Tuesday, Spanish cybersecurity researcher Leonardo Nve presented a variety of tricks for gaining access to and exploiting satellite Internet connections. Using less than $75 in tools, Nve, a researcher with security firm S21Sec, says that he can intercept Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) signals to get free high-speed Internet. And while that's not a particularly new trick--hackers have long been able to intercept satellite TV or other sky-borne signals--Nve also went a step further, describing how he was able to use satellite signals to anonymize his Internet connection, gain access to private networks and even intercept satellite Internet users' requests for Web pages and replace them with spoofed sites.

"What's interesting about this is that it's very, very easy," says Nve. "Anyone can do it: phishers or Chinese hackers … it's like a very big Wi-Fi network that's easy to access."

In a penetration test on a client's network, Nve used a Skystar 2 PCI satellite receiver card, a piece of hardware that can be bought on eBay for $30 or less, along with open source Linux DVB software applications and the network data analysis or "sniffing" tool Wireshark.

Exploiting that signal, Nve says he was able to impersonate any user connecting to the Internet via satellite, effectively creating a high-speed, untraceable anonymous Internet connection that that can be used for nefarious online activities.

Nve also reversed the trick, impersonating Web sites that a satellite user is attempting to visit by intercepting a Domain Name System (DNS) request--a request for an Internet service provider (ISP) to convert a spelled out Web site name into the numerical IP address where it's stored--and sending back an answer faster than the ISP. That allows him to replace a Web site that a user navigates to directly with a site of his choosing, creating the potential for undetectable cybercrime sites that steal passwords or installs malicious software.

In his tests on the client's network, Nve says he was also able to hijack signals using GRE or TCP protocols that enterprises use to communicate between PCs and servers or between offices, using the connections to gain access to a corporation or government agency's local area network.

The Barcelona-based researcher tested his methods on geosynchronous satellites aimed at Europe, Africa and South America. But he says there's little doubt that the same tricks would work on satellites facing North America or anywhere else.

What makes his attacks possible, Nve says, is that DVB signals are usually left unencrypted. That lack of simple security, he says, stems from the logistical and legal complications of scrambling the signal, which might make it harder to share data among companies or agencies and--given that a satellite signal covers many countries--could run into red tape surrounding international use of cryptography. "Each [country] can have its own law for crypto," says Nve. "It's easier not to have encryption at the DVB layer."

Nve isn't the first to show the vulnerability of supposedly secure satellite connections. John Walker, a British satellite enthusiast, told the BBC in 2002 that he could watch unencrypted NATO video feeds from surveillance sorties in the Balkans. And the same lack of encryption allowed insurgents to hack into the video feed of unmanned U.S. drone planes scouting Afghanistan, the Wall Street Journal reported in December.

In fact, the techniques that Nve demonstrated are probably known to other satellite hackers but never publicized, says Jim Geovedi, a satellite security researcher and consultant with the firm Bellua in Indonesia. He compares satellite hacking to early phone hacking or "phreaking," a practice that's not well protected against but performed by only a small number of people worldwide. "This satellite hacking thing is still considered blackbox knowledge," he wrote in an e-mail to Forbes. "I believe there are many people out there who conduct similar research. They may have some cool tricks but have kept them secret for ages."

At last year's Black Hat D.C. conference, British cybersecurity researcher Adam Laurie demonstrated how he intercepts satellite signals with techniques similar to Nve, using a DreamBox satellite receiver and Wireshark. But Nve argues that his method is far cheaper--Laurie's DreamBox setup cost around $750--and that he's the first to demonstrate satellite signal hijacking rather than mere interception.

"I'm not just talking about watching TV," says Nve. "I'm talking about doing some very scary things."

[seemslikeadream]

I remember people would use their sat equipment to tap into feeds intended for cable network headends, and also production feeds not intended for public, but it stopped after they all started scrambling or just not transmitting such live feeds. IIRC, there are some clips out there of for instance: Larry King chatting with someone (a bush? jerry falwell?) about cool new kind of sleeping pill he liked. Some other embarrassing moments caught.

but right at the moment I can't find any trace of such events on the net. my google luck is low atm.

yea I think that Larry King thing was part of the news story I read

[seemslikeadream]

THANKS!!! You're amazing


I got it

Conversations at the Edge: Brian Springer

Field of Homespun Dreams
Brian Springer Unearths an American Obsession



Why would an audacious underground filmmaker choose the year 2007 to release a highly personal work about the missing memoirs of a nineteenth-century rural anarchist woman and the compulsive diggings of a Korean war veteran obsessed with hidden treasure? Where’s the relation between this allegorical tale and the author’s earlier work with satellite TV? And what’s really buried beneath the tranquil fields of southern Missouri? These are the questions that come to mind upon viewing Brian Springer’s new film, The Disappointment: Or, the Force of Credulity.
Springer is known across the horizons of electronic media art for one good reason: the 1995 documentary Spin. The work is based on 500 hours of raw news feeds, captured with off-the-shelf satellite dishes at a time before the transmissions were encrypted. Springer blew the minds of a generation of media activists by documenting the 1992 US presidential campaign from between the scenes, while the cameras were still rolling during commercial breaks. Live interviews from the sky were new back then, and corporate PR-men were avidly selling advice on how to use them. “This is great, I love these,” confesses Bill Clinton with a puppy-dog grin. “Can we do any more?” he asks his technician between whistle stops on a satellite tour.
Spin pointed to the open window of technological and organizational change at a moment when the scramble for globalized markets left gaping holes in all kinds of security systems. Soon afterwards, activists in disguise like the Yes Men would step through those gaps and create their own public twists on world events, relying on a knowledge of complex networking processes that the corporate powers did not yet fully control. The montage structure of the film allowed Springer to weave an intricate portrait of America’s corrupted democracy just after the first salvos of the Revolution in Military Affairs had exploded in the Persian Gulf, ushering in the “New World Order” that was supposed to replace the outdated certainties of the Cold War. The material from the satellite dishes was seemingly infinite; but closure finally came through a focus on the doctored truths and outright lies of the campaign.
Revelations abound in this unique document, but the most telltale scene is probably the whispered dialogue between Larry King and Bush Senior about their favorite sleeping pills. It was a touchy subject for Bush, after his nightmare episode, deftly censored from the TV broadcasts, of vomiting on the Japanese prime minister while under a sedative. In between rounds of pre-broadcast applause, King explains that his brother has gotten wind of a new tranquilizer coming down the pipe. Bush says “Great” – and that’s all anyone knows about it. As though the much-touted “end of history” in the 1990s had left an unanswered question: What ruffles the chemical haze of the world-makers’ sedated nights? And do phantom spin-doctors whisper their lines to the unlaid ghosts of the American dream?
Tales of Subterranean Gold
The new film takes its name from the earliest American ballad-opera, written in 1767 as a satire on the twin colonial crazes of treasure-hunting and spiritism. The Disappointment was censored before its first performance, due to a climate of popular violence against the theater company. The 2007 version opens with a close-up on a strange syncretic sculpture, at once insect, reptile, amphibian and mammal. A halting, electronic, faintly British-accented female voice reads a database entry on this mysterious artifact. Speaking in the first person, the creature’s electronic voice then explains: “I have been lost for a very long time…”
The hybrid creature introduces us to the Springer family: the mother, Doris; the father, C.W.; and the two sons, Larry and Brian. Their story is a search for a Spanish explorer’s golden treasure and personal diary, supposedly buried in the limestone caves beneath a Missouri farm. But there is another main character: Kate Austin, a friend of Emma Goldman and an unsung heroine of American anarchism, who lived on that same farm in the late nineteenth century. Her personal papers disappeared at her death, leaving an aura of uncertainty around this rare bird, a rural woman anarchist. A satellite image of the Missouri countryside becomes a treasure map. A red dot on the site of the Austin farm connects to three others: the limestone cave, a mysterious hieroglyph carved in a rock, and the spot where the hybrid creature was found in the 1880s, before archaeologists called it a fake and it was “lost by the institutions of history.” With that, all the elements are in place for a plunge into a very personal story, and an excavation of the national unconscious.
Springer works with a marvelously fluid editing technique, layering a wide range of documents into the primary footage of his father and his family in the cave. Amid reflections from Emma Goldman on the willingness of patriots to drop bombs from flying machines and recollections of Ben Franklin’s fears that the craze for treasure-hunting might ruin the country’s fledgling economy, what gradually emerges is the story of an average man, C.W. Springer, who left the United States for one of America’s bloodiest and most thoroughly forgotten wars, the “Korean conflict.” His job was to operate in advance of the front lines, directing the extensive napalm bombing that killed hundreds of thousands and reduced much of the country to violet ash. Upon return from the war he could not speak for weeks; but he gradually came back to life and, as we learn from the distant, almost disbelieving voice of the electronic narrator, he “rose into the middle class, and purchased a home in eastern Kansas.” Years later he would teach the Springer family how to see ghosts, by staring at an image and then brusquely closing your eyes. In the early 1970s, they found that the strongest afterglow was produced by TV news anchors reporting on Vietnam… But then stories about buried treasure led C.W. and his family to Church Hollow in Missouri, the site of the Austin farm. The traumatic memories of Korea faded away into a seemingly endless quest to find the hidden gold.
The film reaches its enigmatic center with re-enactments of the automatic writing seances of Springer’s mother, Doris. She feels that her hand has been mysteriously injured, before realizing that what she can and must do with it is trace out the diaries of a Spanish priest who was killed by Indians in the cave, with the gold of an earlier empire in his possession. This “channeled” diary (the spiritist equivalent of spurious campaign promises?) is described by Springer as “a repressed retelling of her husband’s experience with wartime atrocity.” It becomes the blueprint for an endless, futile and increasingly dangerous quest in the cave, which the movie appears to be trying to exorcise on several levels. But what never does come to the surface are Kate Austin’s vanished writings: a possible blueprint to another political future, outside the nightmare of imperial history from which millions of credulous Americans are now struggling, for the most part unsuccessfully, to wake up in disbelief.
Elusive Closure
Just years before the country’s independence, a ballad-opera called The Disappointment tried to steer Americans away from their obsession with buried treasure. In 2007, an occupying army tries to secure dinosaur wealth beneath the desert sands of Iraq, while the subprime mortgage debacle thrusts the average man’s home-owning dreams into the gaping maw of financial crisis. Spin pointed the way to a decade of grassroots media activism, which would operate through the technological and organizational holes left open amidst the sudden expansion of the capitalist economy. Today, when that openness has become ancient history, the same filmmaker who looked upward at the stars is peering down into the networks of delusion beneath our feet, and asking what timely stories might emerge from them during the run-up to yet another presidential campaign. There are vital clues here for a future cultural activism that will have to deal not only with advanced technology but also with more obscure human motivations, and with the archaeology of an economic order that threatens to collapse into the myriad holes, blind tunnels and architectures of bluff that comprise its very foundations.
Once again, we are faced with a vast range of material; but the closure of the cave-mouth at the end of the film does not solve the larger conundrums, symbolized throughout by the strange, hybrid body and the electronic voice of the unbelievable narrator. Some viewers undoubtedly won’t be able to make any connection between this homespun historical tale and the technological breakthroughs of Spin, and they’ll leave the theater shaking their heads and waxing nostalgic for the good old days of media activism. But others will recognize a formidable underground vein – the kind that pulses with buried life, and that you can only mine deeply, at your own risk.

The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity (70 minutes). Directed, produced, and written by Brian Springer; distributed by the Video Data Bank, http://www.vdb.org.

The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity

viewtopic.php?t=14775&p=327294

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... &plindex=1





http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/1 ... pun-dreams /
Why would an audacious underground filmmaker choose the year 2007 to release a highly personal work about the missing memoirs of a nineteenth-century rural anarchist woman and the compulsive diggings of a Korean war veteran obsessed with hidden treasure? Where’s the relation between this allegorical tale and the author’s earlier work with satellite TV? And what’s really buried beneath the tranquil fields of southern Missouri? These are the questions that come to mind upon viewing Brian Springer’s new film, The Disappointment: Or, the Force of Credulity.

Springer is known across the horizons of electronic media art for one good reason: the 1995 documentary Spin. The work is based on 500 hours of raw news feeds, captured with off-the-shelf satellite dishes at a time before the transmissions were encrypted. Springer blew the minds of a generation of media activists by documenting the 1992 US presidential campaign from between the scenes, while the cameras were still rolling during commercial breaks. Live interviews from the sky were new back then, and corporate PR-men were avidly selling advice on how to use them. “This is great, I love these,” confesses Bill Clinton with a puppy-dog grin. “Can we do any more?” he asks his technician between whistle stops on a satellite tour.

Spin pointed to the open window of technological and organizational change at a moment when the scramble for globalized markets left gaping holes in all kinds of security systems. Soon afterwards, activists in disguise like the Yes Men would step through those gaps and create their own public twists on world events, relying on a knowledge of complex networking processes that the corporate powers did not yet fully control. The montage structure of the film allowed Springer to weave an intricate portrait of America’s corrupted democracy just after the first salvos of the Revolution in Military Affairs had exploded in the Persian Gulf, ushering in the “New World Order” that was supposed to replace the outdated certainties of the Cold War. The material from the satellite dishes was seemingly infinite; but closure finally came through a focus on the doctored truths and outright lies of the campaign.

Revelations abound in this unique document, but the most telltale scene is probably the whispered dialogue between Larry King and Bush Senior about their favorite sleeping pills. It was a touchy subject for Bush, after his nightmare episode, deftly censored from the TV broadcasts, of vomiting on the Japanese prime minister while under a sedative. In between rounds of pre-broadcast applause, King explains that his brother has gotten wind of a new tranquilizer coming down the pipe. Bush says “Great” – and that’s all anyone knows about it. As though the much-touted “end of history” in the 1990s had left an unanswered question: What ruffles the chemical haze of the world-makers’ sedated nights? And do phantom spin-doctors whisper their lines to the unlaid ghosts of the American dream?



The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity


Brief Synopsis:

The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity is adocumentary/musical/fairytale that explores the legacyof 19th century U.S. anarchism, treasure hunting andspiritualist folk lore through the story of the Springer family's decades-long search for buried Spanish treasure in the caves of Missouri. The video project grounds the family's personal history of treasure-hunting into an expanded social/post-colonial context by exploring the repressed histories of aseries of atrocities as they reappear transfigured, displaced and disguised in contemporary notions of "discovery." The Disappointment places pressure not just on notions of documentary truth but also on the contested line between legitimated and non-legitimated 'popular' knowledges and beliefs.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... &plindex=1





The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity

The first censored play in American history






I have been lost for a very long time…

[Project Willow]

Oh hell, I couldn't find a thread I was looking for today, a general thread for articles demeaning conspiracy theorists. I found some threads that looked at the issue from specific angles, but nothing general, and I could have sworn there was one. I'm working on too little sleep today.

[justdrew]

Oh hell, I couldn't find a thread I was looking for today, a general thread for articles demeaning conspiracy theorists. I found some threads that looked at the issue from specific angles, but nothing general, and I could have sworn there was one. I'm working on too little sleep today.

I remember such a thread too but am at a loss for any keywords. start a new one it can be merged if we ever find the old one

[Occult Means Hidden]

...And down the memory hole it goes.

[justdrew]

this one maybe..?

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=25744

[semper occultus]

...there's dozens of 'em....as apart from MinM is about the only poster on here who ever engages the search button before posting something & letting threads accrue over time....

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=12831

[MacCruiskeen]

OK, there was a short animated film I saw on TV when I was a small kid and it still haunts me. It featured a very cool, hip, white rabbit singing some kind of cool, hip, jazz song. Can't remember the song! Can't remember the tune! (But it was something fairly well known.) This rabbit was made out of plasticine, I think. He was out strolling nonchalantly on the sidewalk, singing. I think he stood under a lamp-post for a while. He had kind of sleepy eyes and big teeth. I guess this little animated feature was made in the 50s or very early 60s. It was definitely American. And no, it wasn't Bugs Bunny. It was a plasticine (?) white rabbit who was a kind of loose-limbed laid-back lounge-lizard ladykiller-type, ambling down the street, singing lazily. Possibly he wore a tuxedo, but maybe not.

Does anyone have a fecken clue what I'm rabbiting on about here? I would be grateful for any assistance. It would allow me to move on.

[Plutonia]

I'm looking for any pointer to something I saw on the web probably ten or more years ago. It was a semi long article about a new cross-cultural mythic pantheon invented by poor/immigrant/otherwise-marginalized children in various urban locations. One of the mythic entities was a new mash-up Virgin Mary type, another was a re-imagined Bloody Mary character.

This was long before the selenderman experiment began.

Not much to go on, but maybe someone remembers seeing such a thing?

I think you mean Myths over Miami?

Full article for posterity:

Captured on South Beach, Satan later escaped. His demons and the horrible Bloody Mary are now killing people. God has fled. Avenging angels hide out in the Everglades. And other tales from children in Dade's homeless shelters.

By Lynda Edwards Thursday, Jun 5 1997

To homeless children sleeping on the street, neon is as comforting as a night-light. Angels love colored light too. After nightfall in downtown Miami, they nibble on the NationsBank building -- always drenched in a green, pink, or golden glow. "They eat light so they can fly," eight-year-old Andre tells the children sitting on the patio of the Salvation Army's emergency shelter on NW 38th Street. Andre explains that the angels hide in the building while they study battle maps. "There's a lot of killing going on in Miami," he says. "You want to fight, want to learn how to live, you got to learn the secret stories." The small group listens intently to these tales told by homeless children in shelters.

On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack -- a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. "Demons found doors to our world," adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the other children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons' gateways from Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery somewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with "black windows." The demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear.

One demon is feared even by Satan. In Miami shelters, children know her by two names: Bloody Mary and La Llorona (the Crying Woman). She weeps blood or black tears from ghoulish empty sockets and feeds on children's terror. When a child is killed accidentally in gang crossfire or is murdered, she croons with joy. "If you wake at night and see her," a ten-year-old says softly, "her clothes be blowing back, even in a room where there is no wind. And you know she's marked you for killing."

The homeless children's chief ally is a beautiful angel they have nicknamed the Blue Lady. She has pale blue skin and lives in the ocean, but she is hobbled by a spell. "The demons made it so she only has power if you know her secret name," says Andre, whose mother has been through three rehabilitation programs for crack addiction. "If you and your friends on a corner on a street when a car comes shooting bullets and only one child yells out her true name, all will be safe. Even if bullets tearing your skin, the Blue Lady makes them fall on the ground. She can talk to us, even without her name. She says: 'Hold on.'"

A blond six-year-old with a bruise above his eye, swollen huge as a ruby egg and laced with black stitches, nods his head in affirmation. "I've seen her," he murmurs. A rustle of whispered Me toos ripples through the small circle of initiates.

According to the Dade Homeless Trust, approximately 1800 homeless children currently find themselves bounced between the county's various shelters and the streets. For these children, lasting bonds of friendship are impossible; nothing is permanent. A common rule among homeless parents is that everything a child owns must fit into a small plastic bag for fast packing. But during their brief stays in the shelters, children can meet and tell each other stories that get them through the harshest nights.

Folktales are usually an inheritance from family or homeland. But what if you are a child enduring a continual, grueling, dangerous journey? No adult can steel such a child against the outcast's fate: the endless slurs and snubs, the threats, the fear. What these determined children do is snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, TV news, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers, and like birds building a nest from scraps, weave their own myths. The "secret stories" are carefully guarded knowledge, never shared with older siblings or parents for fear of being ridiculed -- or spanked for blasphemy. But their accounts of an exiled God who cannot or will not respond to human pleas as his angels wage war with Hell is, to shelter children, a plausible explanation for having no safe home, and one that engages them in an epic clash.

An astute folklorist can see traces of old legends in all new inventions. For example, Yemana, a Santeria ocean goddess, resembles the Blue Lady; she is compassionate and robed in blue, though she is portrayed with white or tan skin in her worshippers' shrines. And in the Eighties, folklorists noted references to an evil Bloody Mary -- or La Llorona, as children of Mexican migrant workers first named her -- among children of all races and economic classes. Celtic tales of revenants, visitors from the land of the dead sent to console or warn, arrived in America centuries ago. While those myths may have had some influence on shelter folklore, the tales homeless children create among themselves are novel and elaborately detailed. And they are a striking example of "polygenesis," the folklorist's term for the simultaneous appearance of vivid, similar tales in far-flung locales.

The same overarching themes link the myths of 30 homeless children in three Dade County facilities operated by the Salvation Army -- as well as those of 44 other children in Salvation Army emergency shelters in New Orleans, Chicago, and Oakland, California. These children, who ranged in age from six to twelve, were asked what stories, if any, they believed about Heaven and God -- but not what they learned in church. (They drew pictures for their stories with crayons and markers.) Even the parlance in Miami and elsewhere is the same. Children use the biblical term "spirit" for revenants, never "ghost" (says one local nine-year-old scornfully: "That baby word is for Casper in the cartoons, not a real thing like spirits!"). In their lexicon, they always use "demon" to denote wicked spirits.

Their folklore casts them as comrades-in-arms, regardless of ethnicity (the secret stories are told and cherished by white, black, and Latin children), for the homeless youngsters see themselves as allies of the outgunned yet valiant angels in their battle against shared spiritual adversaries. For them the secret stories do more than explain the mystifying universe of the homeless; they impose meaning upon it.

Virginia Hamilton, winner of a National Book Award and three Newberys (the Pulitzer Prize of children's literature), is the only children's author to win a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. Her best-selling books, The People Could Fly and Herstories, trace African-American folklore through the diaspora of slavery. "Folktales are the only work of beauty a displaced people can keep," she explains. "And their power can transcend class and race lines because they address visceral questions: Why side with good when evil is clearly winning? If I am killed, how can I make my life resonate beyond the grave?"

That sense of mission, writes Harvard psychologist Robert Coles in The Spiritual Life of Children, may explain why some children in crisis -- and perhaps the adults they become -- are brave, decent, and imaginative, while others more privileged can be "callous, mean-spirited, and mediocre." The homeless child in Miami and elsewhere lives in a world where violence and death are commonplace, where it's highly advantageous to grovel before the powerful and shun the weak, and where adult rescuers are nowhere to be found. Yet what Coles calls the "ability to grasp onto ideals larger than oneself and exert influence for good" -- a sense of mission -- is nurtured in eerie, beautiful, shelter folktales.

In any group that generates its own legends -- whether in a corporate office or a remote Amazonian village -- the most articulate member becomes the semiofficial teller of the tales. The same thing happens in homeless shelters, even though the population is so transient. The most verbally skilled children -- such as Andre -- impart the secret stories to new arrivals. Ensuring that their truths survive regardless of their own fate is a duty felt deeply by these children, including one ten-year-old Miami girl who, after confiding and illustrating secret stories, created a self-portrait for a visitor. She chose a gray crayon to draw a gravestone carefully inscribed with her own name and the year 1998.

Here is what the secret stories say about the rules of spirit behavior: Spirits appear just as they looked when alive, even wearing favorite clothes, but they are surrounded by faint, colored light. When newly dead, the spirits' lips move but no sound is heard. They must learn to speak across the chasm between the living and the dead. For shelter children, spirits have a unique function: providing war dispatches from the fighting angels. And like demons, once spirits have seen your face, they can always find you.

Nine-year-old Phatt is living for a month in a Salvation Army shelter in northwest Dade. He and his mother became homeless after his father was arrested for drug-dealing and his mother couldn't pay the rent with her custodial job at a fast-food restaurant. (Phatt is his nickname. The first names of all other children in this article have been used with the consent of their parents or guardians.) "There's a river that runs through Miami. One side, called Bad Streets, the demons took over," Phatt recounts as he sits with four homeless friends in the shelter's playroom, which is decorated with pictures the children have drawn of homes, kittens, and hearts. "The other side the demons call Good Streets. Rich people live by a beach there. They wear diamonds and gold chains when they swim."

He explains that Satan harbors a special hatred of Miami owing to a humiliation he suffered while on an Ocean Drive reconnaissance mission. He was hunting for gateways for his demons and was scouting for nasty emotions to feed them. Satan's trip began with an exhilarating start; he moved undetected among high-rolling South Beach clubhoppers despite the fact that his skin was, as Phatt's friend Victoria explains, covered with scales like a "gold and silver snake."

Why didn't the rich people notice? Eight-year-old Victoria scrunches up her face, pondering. "Well, I think maybe sometimes they're real stupid so they get tricked," she replies. Plus, she adds, the Devil was "wearing all that Tommy Hilfiger and smoking Newports and drinking wine that cost maybe three dollars for a big glass." He found a large Hell door under the Colony Hotel, and just as he was offering the owner ten Mercedes-Benzes for use of the portal, he was captured by angels.

"The rich people said: 'Why are you taking our friend who buys us drinks?'" Phatt continues. "The angels tied him under the river and said: 'See what happens when the water touch him. Just see!'"

Phatt insists that his beloved cousin (and only father figure) Ronnie, who joined the U.S. Army to escape Liberty City and was killed last year in another city, warned him about what happened next at the river. (Ronnie was gunned down on Valentine's Day while bringing cupcakes to a party at the school where his girlfriend taught. He appeared to Phatt after that -- to congratulate him on winning a shelter spelling bee, and to show him a shortcut to his elementary school devoid of sidewalk drunks.)

One night this year Phatt and his mother made a bed out of plastic grocery bags in a Miami park where junkies congregate. It was his turn to stand guard against what he calls "screamers," packs of roaming addicts, while his mother slept. Suddenly Ronnie stood before him, dressed in his army uniform. "The Devil got loose from under the river!" Ronnie said. "The rich people didn't stop him! The angels need soldiers."

Phatt says his dead cousin told him that as soon as water touched the Devil's skin, it turned deep burgundy and horns grew from his head. The river itself turned to blood; ghostly screams and bones of children he had murdered floated from its depths. Just when the angels thought they had convinced Good Streets' denizens that they were in as much danger as those in Bad Streets, Satan vanished through a secret gateway beneath the river. "Now he's coming your way," Ronnie warned. "You'll need to learn how to fight." Ronnie nodded toward the dog-eared math and spelling workbooks Phatt carries even when he can't attend school. "Study hard," he implored. "Stay strong and smart so's you count on yourself, no one else. Never stop watching. Bloody Mary is coming with Satan. And she's seen your face."

Given what the secret stories of shelter children say about the afterlife, it isn't surprising that Ronnie appeared in his military uniform. There is no Heaven in the stories, though the children believe that dead loved ones might make it to an angels' encampment hidden in a beautiful jungle somewhere beyond Miami. To ensure that they find it, a fresh green palm leaf (to be used as an entrance ticket) must be dropped on the beloved's grave.

This bit of folklore became an obsession for eight-year-old Miguel. His father, a Nicaraguan immigrant, worked the overnight shift at a Miami gas station. Miguel always walked down the street by himself to bring his dad a soda right before the child's bedtime, and they'd chat. Then one night his father was murdered while on the job. Recalls Miguel: "The police say the robbers put lit matches all over him before they killed him."

Miguel's mother speaks no English and is illiterate. She was often paid less than two dollars per hour for the temporary jobs she could find in Little Havana (mopping shop floors, washing dishes in restaurants). After her husband's death, she lost her apartment. No matter where Miguel's family of three subsequently slept (a church pew, a shelter bed, a sidewalk), his father's spirit appeared, bloodied and burning all over with tiny flames. Miguel's teachers would catch him running out of his school in central Miami, his small fists filled with green palm leaves, determined to find his father's grave. A social worker finally took him to the cemetery, though Miguel refused to offer her any explanation. "I need my daddy to find the fighter angels," Miguel says from a Salvation Army facility located near Liberty City. "I'll go there when I'm killed."

The secret stories say the angel army hides in a child's version of an ethereal Everglades: A clear river of cold, drinkable water winds among emerald palms and grass as soft as a bed. Gigantic alligators guard the compound, promptly eating the uninvited. Says Phatt: "But they take care of a dead child's spirit while he learns to fight. I never seen it, but yes! I know it's out there" -- he sweeps his hand past the collapsing row of seedy motels lining the street on which the shelter is located -- "and when I do good, it makes their fighting easier. I know it! I know!"

All the Miami shelter children who participated in this story were passionate in defending this myth. It is the most necessary fiction of the hopelessly abandoned -- that somewhere a distant, honorable troop is risking everything to come to the rescue, and that somehow your bravery counts.

By the time homeless children reach the age of twelve, more or less, they realize that the secret stories are losing some of their power to inspire. They sadly admit there is less and less in which to believe. Twelve-year-old Leon, who often visits a Hialeah day-care center serving the homeless, has bruised-looking bags under his eyes seen normally on middle-aged faces. He has been homeless for six years. Even the shelters are not safe for him because his mother, who is mentally unstable, often insists on returning to the streets on a whim, her child in tow.

"I don't think any more that things happen for some great, good God plan, or for any reason," he says. "And I don't know if any angels are still fighting for us." He pauses and looks dreamily at the twilight sky above the day-care center. "I do think a person can dream the moment of his death. Sometimes I dream that when I die soon, I'll be in some high, great place where people have time to conversate. And even if there's no God or Heaven, it won't be too bad for me to be there."

Research by Harvard's Robert Coles indicates that children in crisis -- with a deathly ill parent or living in poverty -- often view God as a kind, empyrean doctor too swamped with emergencies to help. But homeless children are in straits so dire they see God as having simply disappeared. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam embrace the premise that good will triumph over evil in the end; in that respect, shelter tales are more bleakly sophisticated. "One thing I don't believe," says a seven-year-old who attends shelter chapels regularly, "is Judgment Day." Not one child could imagine a God with the strength to force evildoers to face some final reckoning. Yet even though they feel that wickedness may prevail, they want to be on the side of the angels.

When seven-year-old Maria is asked about the Blue Lady, she pauses. "When grownups talk about her, I think she get all upset," Maria slowly replies. She considers a gamble, then takes a chance and leans forward, beaming: "She's a magic lady, nice and pretty and smart! She live in the ocean and comes just to kids."

She first appeared to Maria at the deserted Freedom Tower in downtown Miami, which Maria calls "the pink haunted house." A fierce storm was pounding Miami that night. Other homeless people who had broken in milled about the building's interior, illuminated only by lightning. Her father was drunk. Her mother tried to stop him from eating the family's last food: a box of saltines. "He kept hitting her and the crazy people started laughing. When I try to help her, he hit me here" -- Maria points to her forehead. "I tried to sleep so my head and stomach would stop hurting, but they kept hurting." A blast of wind and rain shattered a window. "I was so scared. I pray out loud: Please, God, don't punish me no more!"

An older boy curled up nearby on a scrap of towel tried to soothe her. "Hurricanes ain't God," he said gently. "It's Blue Lady bringing rain for the flowers." When Maria awoke late in the night, she saw the angel with pale blue skin, blue eyes, and dark hair standing by the broken window. Her arms dripped with pink, gold, and white flowers. "She smiled," Maria says, her dark eyes wide with amazement. "My head was hurting, but she touched it and her hand was cool like ice. She say she's my friend always. That's why she learned me the hard song." The song is complex and strange for such a young child; its theme is the mystery of destiny and will. When Maria heard a church choir sing it, she loved it, but the words were too complicated. "Then the Blue Lady sang it to me," she recalls. "She said it'll help me grow up good, not like daddy."

Maria's voice begins shakily, then becomes more assured: "If you believe within your heart you'll know/that no one can change the path that you must go./ Believe what you feel and you'll know you're right because/when love finally comes around, you can say it's yours./ Believe you can change what you see!/ Believe you can act, not just feel!/You have a brain!/You have a heart!/You have the courage to last your life!/Please believe in yourself as I believe in you!"

As she soars to a finish, Maria suddenly realizes how much that she's revealed to a stranger: "I told the secret story and the Blue Lady isn't mad!" She's awash with relief. "Even if my mom say we sleep in the bus station when we leave the shelter, Blue Lady will find us. She's seen my face."

Shelter children often depict the Blue Lady in their drawings as blasting demons and gangbangers with a pistol. But the secret stories say that she cannot take action unless her real name -- which no one knows -- is called out. The children accept that. What they count on her for is love, though they fear that abstract love won't be enough to withstand an evil they believe is relentless and real. The evil is like a dark ocean waiting to engulf them, as illustrated by a secret story related by three different girls in separate Miami homeless facilities. It is a story told only by and to homeless girls, and it explains how the dreaded Bloody Mary can invade souls.

Ten-year-old Otius, dressed in a pink flowered dress, leads a visitor by the hand away from four small boys who are sitting in a shelter dining room snacking on pizza and fruit juice. "Every girl in the shelters knows if you tell this story to a boy, your best friend will die!" she says with a shiver. When the boys try to sneak up behind her, she refuses to speak until they return to their places.

She begins: "Some girls with no home feel claws scratching under the skin on their arms. Their hand looks like red fire. It's Bloody Mary dragging them in for slaves -- to be in gangs, be crackheads. But every 1000 girls with no home, is a Special One. When Bloody Mary comes, the girl is so smart and brave, a strange thing happens." Bloody Mary disappears, she says, then a pretty, luminous face glows for a moment in the dark. The girl has glimpsed what Bloody Mary looked like before she became wicked. "The Special One," Otius continues, "is somebody Bloody Mary is scared of because she be so good, people watch her for what to do. And if she dies, she will die good.

"Boys always brag what they can do, but this is the job of girls and -- I wish maybe I were a Special One," Otius says wistfully. "Maybe one of my friends from the shelters are now. I'll never see them again -- so's I guess I never know."

Her name was first spoken in hushed tones among children all over America nearly twenty years ago. Even in Sweden folklorists reported Bloody Mary's fame. Children of all races and classes told of the hideous demon conjured by chanting her name before a mirror in a pitch-dark room. (In Miami shelters, the mirror must be coated with ocean water, a theft from the Blue Lady's domain.) And when she crashes through the glass, she mutilates children before killing them. Bloody Mary is depicted in Miami kids' drawings with a red rosary that, the secret stories say, she uses as a weapon, striking children across the face.

Folklorists were so mystified by the Bloody Mary polygenesis, and the common element of using a mirror to conjure her, that they consulted medical literature for clues. Bill Ellis, a folklorist and professor of American studies at Penn State University, puzzled over a 1968 Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease article describing an experiment testing the theory that schizophrenics are prone to see hallucinations in reflected surfaces. The research showed that the control group of nonpsychotic people reported seeing vague, horrible faces in a mirror after staring at it for twenty minutes in a dim room. But that optical trick the brain plays was merely a partial explanation for the children's legend.

"Whenever you ask children where they first heard one of their myths, you get answers that are impossible clues: 'A friend's friend read it in a paper; a third cousin told me,'" says Ellis, an authority on children's folklore, particularly that concerning the supernatural. As president of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, he's become an expert on polygenesis. "When a child says he got the story from the spirit world, as homeless children do, you've hit the ultimate non sequitur."

Folklorists have not discovered a detailed explanation for Bloody Mary's ravenous hatred of children, or her true identity. Today, however, shelter children say they've discovered her secret mission, as well as her true name. All of the secret stories about her enclose hints.

In Chicago shelters, children tell of her role in the death of eleven-year-old Robert Sandifer, who shot an innocent fourteen-year-old schoolgirl he mistook for an enemy. Cops combed the streets, shaking down gangbangers. In desperation Sandifer's gang turned to the one who could save them from justice. They sat in a dark room before a mirror and chanted, "Bloody Mary." The wall glowed like flames. A female demon weeping black tears appeared. Without speaking, she communicated a strategy.

That night, realizing his gang was going to kill him, Sandifer ran through his neighborhood, knocking on doors. "Like baby Jesus in Bethlehem -- except he was bad," explained an eleven-year-old at a Chicago homeless shelter. The next morning police found Sandifer's body, shot through the head, in a tunnel. According to the eleven-year-old, the boy was "lying on a bed of broken glass."

Bloody Mary commands legions. She can insinuate herself into the heart of whomever children trust most: a parent or a best friend. Miami shelter children say they learned about that from television. Salvation Army shelters offer parlors with couches, magazines, and a television. While their mothers play cards and do each other's hair, the children carefully study the TV news. They know how four-year-old Kendia Lockhart died in North Dade, allegedly beaten to death and burned by her father. Bloody Mary was hunting Kendia, shelter children agree. "Gangsters say that God stories are like Chinese fairy tales," observes twelve-year-old Deion at a downtown Miami Salvation Army shelter. "But even gangs think Bloody Mary is real."

This is the secret story shelter children will tell only in hushed voices, for it reveals Bloody Mary's mystery: God's final days before his disappearance were a waking dream. There were so many crises on Earth that he never slept. Angels reported rumors of Bloody Mary's pact with Satan: She had killed her own child and had made a secret vow to kill all human children. All night God listened as frantic prayers bombarded him. Images of earthly lives flowed across his palace wall like shadows while he heard gunfire, music, laughing, crying from all over Earth. And then one night Bloody Mary roared over the walls of Heaven with an army from Hell. God didn't just flee from the demons, he went crazy with grief over who led them. Bloody Mary, some homeless children say the spirits have told them, was Jesus Christ's mother.

"No one believe us! But it's true! It's true!" cries Andre at the Salvation Army shelter on NW 38th Street. "It mean there's no one left in the sky watching us but demons." His friends sitting on the shelter patio chime in with Bloody Mary sightings: She flew shrieking over Charles Drew Elementary School. She stalks through Little Haiti, invisible to police cars. "I know a boy who learned to sleep with his eyes open, but she burned through a shelter wall to get him!" a seven-year-old boy says. "When the people found him, he was all red with blood. Don't matter if you're good, don't matter if you're smart. You got to be careful! If she see you, she can hunt you forever. She's in Miami! And she knows our face.

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/1997-06-05 ... iami/full/

[justdrew]

holy shit Plutonia, that's it!

amazing!

How did you find it? Just memory?
years ago I was able to find no followup, I suppose there still has been none

ahh, now that I have a keyword, I see there's been some writing about this over the years.

and I see brainpanhandler posted a link to it back in 2009 in the "is Florida the most evil state" thread.

I'm looking for any pointer to something I saw on the web probably ten or more years ago. It was a semi long article about a new cross-cultural mythic pantheon invented by poor/immigrant/otherwise-marginalized children in various urban locations. One of the mythic entities was a new mash-up Virgin Mary type, another was a re-imagined Bloody Mary character.

This was long before the selenderman experiment began.

Not much to go on, but maybe someone remembers seeing such a thing?

I think you mean Myths over Miami?

Full article for posterity:

Captured on South Beach, Satan later escaped. His demons and the horrible Bloody Mary are now killing people. God has fled. Avenging angels hide out in the Everglades. And other tales from children in Dade's homeless shelters.

By Lynda Edwards Thursday, Jun 5 1997

To homeless children sleeping on the street, neon is as comforting as a night-light. Angels love colored light too. After nightfall in downtown Miami, they nibble on the NationsBank building -- always drenched in a green, pink, or golden glow. "They eat light so they can fly," eight-year-old Andre tells the children sitting on the patio of the Salvation Army's emergency shelter on NW 38th Street. Andre explains that the angels hide in the building while they study battle maps. "There's a lot of killing going on in Miami," he says. "You want to fight, want to learn how to live, you got to learn the secret stories." The small group listens intently to these tales told by homeless children in shelters.

On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack -- a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. "Demons found doors to our world," adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the other children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons' gateways from Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery somewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with "black windows." The demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear.

One demon is feared even by Satan. In Miami shelters, children know her by two names: Bloody Mary and La Llorona (the Crying Woman). She weeps blood or black tears from ghoulish empty sockets and feeds on children's terror. When a child is killed accidentally in gang crossfire or is murdered, she croons with joy. "If you wake at night and see her," a ten-year-old says softly, "her clothes be blowing back, even in a room where there is no wind. And you know she's marked you for killing."

The homeless children's chief ally is a beautiful angel they have nicknamed the Blue Lady. She has pale blue skin and lives in the ocean, but she is hobbled by a spell. "The demons made it so she only has power if you know her secret name," says Andre, whose mother has been through three rehabilitation programs for crack addiction. "If you and your friends on a corner on a street when a car comes shooting bullets and only one child yells out her true name, all will be safe. Even if bullets tearing your skin, the Blue Lady makes them fall on the ground. She can talk to us, even without her name. She says: 'Hold on.'"

A blond six-year-old with a bruise above his eye, swollen huge as a ruby egg and laced with black stitches, nods his head in affirmation. "I've seen her," he murmurs. A rustle of whispered Me toos ripples through the small circle of initiates.

According to the Dade Homeless Trust, approximately 1800 homeless children currently find themselves bounced between the county's various shelters and the streets. For these children, lasting bonds of friendship are impossible; nothing is permanent. A common rule among homeless parents is that everything a child owns must fit into a small plastic bag for fast packing. But during their brief stays in the shelters, children can meet and tell each other stories that get them through the harshest nights.

Folktales are usually an inheritance from family or homeland. But what if you are a child enduring a continual, grueling, dangerous journey? No adult can steel such a child against the outcast's fate: the endless slurs and snubs, the threats, the fear. What these determined children do is snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, TV news, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers, and like birds building a nest from scraps, weave their own myths. The "secret stories" are carefully guarded knowledge, never shared with older siblings or parents for fear of being ridiculed -- or spanked for blasphemy. But their accounts of an exiled God who cannot or will not respond to human pleas as his angels wage war with Hell is, to shelter children, a plausible explanation for having no safe home, and one that engages them in an epic clash.

An astute folklorist can see traces of old legends in all new inventions. For example, Yemana, a Santeria ocean goddess, resembles the Blue Lady; she is compassionate and robed in blue, though she is portrayed with white or tan skin in her worshippers' shrines. And in the Eighties, folklorists noted references to an evil Bloody Mary -- or La Llorona, as children of Mexican migrant workers first named her -- among children of all races and economic classes. Celtic tales of revenants, visitors from the land of the dead sent to console or warn, arrived in America centuries ago. While those myths may have had some influence on shelter folklore, the tales homeless children create among themselves are novel and elaborately detailed. And they are a striking example of "polygenesis," the folklorist's term for the simultaneous appearance of vivid, similar tales in far-flung locales.

The same overarching themes link the myths of 30 homeless children in three Dade County facilities operated by the Salvation Army -- as well as those of 44 other children in Salvation Army emergency shelters in New Orleans, Chicago, and Oakland, California. These children, who ranged in age from six to twelve, were asked what stories, if any, they believed about Heaven and God -- but not what they learned in church. (They drew pictures for their stories with crayons and markers.) Even the parlance in Miami and elsewhere is the same. Children use the biblical term "spirit" for revenants, never "ghost" (says one local nine-year-old scornfully: "That baby word is for Casper in the cartoons, not a real thing like spirits!"). In their lexicon, they always use "demon" to denote wicked spirits.

Their folklore casts them as comrades-in-arms, regardless of ethnicity (the secret stories are told and cherished by white, black, and Latin children), for the homeless youngsters see themselves as allies of the outgunned yet valiant angels in their battle against shared spiritual adversaries. For them the secret stories do more than explain the mystifying universe of the homeless; they impose meaning upon it.

Virginia Hamilton, winner of a National Book Award and three Newberys (the Pulitzer Prize of children's literature), is the only children's author to win a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. Her best-selling books, The People Could Fly and Herstories, trace African-American folklore through the diaspora of slavery. "Folktales are the only work of beauty a displaced people can keep," she explains. "And their power can transcend class and race lines because they address visceral questions: Why side with good when evil is clearly winning? If I am killed, how can I make my life resonate beyond the grave?"

That sense of mission, writes Harvard psychologist Robert Coles in The Spiritual Life of Children, may explain why some children in crisis -- and perhaps the adults they become -- are brave, decent, and imaginative, while others more privileged can be "callous, mean-spirited, and mediocre." The homeless child in Miami and elsewhere lives in a world where violence and death are commonplace, where it's highly advantageous to grovel before the powerful and shun the weak, and where adult rescuers are nowhere to be found. Yet what Coles calls the "ability to grasp onto ideals larger than oneself and exert influence for good" -- a sense of mission -- is nurtured in eerie, beautiful, shelter folktales.

In any group that generates its own legends -- whether in a corporate office or a remote Amazonian village -- the most articulate member becomes the semiofficial teller of the tales. The same thing happens in homeless shelters, even though the population is so transient. The most verbally skilled children -- such as Andre -- impart the secret stories to new arrivals. Ensuring that their truths survive regardless of their own fate is a duty felt deeply by these children, including one ten-year-old Miami girl who, after confiding and illustrating secret stories, created a self-portrait for a visitor. She chose a gray crayon to draw a gravestone carefully inscribed with her own name and the year 1998.

Here is what the secret stories say about the rules of spirit behavior: Spirits appear just as they looked when alive, even wearing favorite clothes, but they are surrounded by faint, colored light. When newly dead, the spirits' lips move but no sound is heard. They must learn to speak across the chasm between the living and the dead. For shelter children, spirits have a unique function: providing war dispatches from the fighting angels. And like demons, once spirits have seen your face, they can always find you.

Nine-year-old Phatt is living for a month in a Salvation Army shelter in northwest Dade. He and his mother became homeless after his father was arrested for drug-dealing and his mother couldn't pay the rent with her custodial job at a fast-food restaurant. (Phatt is his nickname. The first names of all other children in this article have been used with the consent of their parents or guardians.) "There's a river that runs through Miami. One side, called Bad Streets, the demons took over," Phatt recounts as he sits with four homeless friends in the shelter's playroom, which is decorated with pictures the children have drawn of homes, kittens, and hearts. "The other side the demons call Good Streets. Rich people live by a beach there. They wear diamonds and gold chains when they swim."

He explains that Satan harbors a special hatred of Miami owing to a humiliation he suffered while on an Ocean Drive reconnaissance mission. He was hunting for gateways for his demons and was scouting for nasty emotions to feed them. Satan's trip began with an exhilarating start; he moved undetected among high-rolling South Beach clubhoppers despite the fact that his skin was, as Phatt's friend Victoria explains, covered with scales like a "gold and silver snake."

Why didn't the rich people notice? Eight-year-old Victoria scrunches up her face, pondering. "Well, I think maybe sometimes they're real stupid so they get tricked," she replies. Plus, she adds, the Devil was "wearing all that Tommy Hilfiger and smoking Newports and drinking wine that cost maybe three dollars for a big glass." He found a large Hell door under the Colony Hotel, and just as he was offering the owner ten Mercedes-Benzes for use of the portal, he was captured by angels.

"The rich people said: 'Why are you taking our friend who buys us drinks?'" Phatt continues. "The angels tied him under the river and said: 'See what happens when the water touch him. Just see!'"

Phatt insists that his beloved cousin (and only father figure) Ronnie, who joined the U.S. Army to escape Liberty City and was killed last year in another city, warned him about what happened next at the river. (Ronnie was gunned down on Valentine's Day while bringing cupcakes to a party at the school where his girlfriend taught. He appeared to Phatt after that -- to congratulate him on winning a shelter spelling bee, and to show him a shortcut to his elementary school devoid of sidewalk drunks.)

One night this year Phatt and his mother made a bed out of plastic grocery bags in a Miami park where junkies congregate. It was his turn to stand guard against what he calls "screamers," packs of roaming addicts, while his mother slept. Suddenly Ronnie stood before him, dressed in his army uniform. "The Devil got loose from under the river!" Ronnie said. "The rich people didn't stop him! The angels need soldiers."

Phatt says his dead cousin told him that as soon as water touched the Devil's skin, it turned deep burgundy and horns grew from his head. The river itself turned to blood; ghostly screams and bones of children he had murdered floated from its depths. Just when the angels thought they had convinced Good Streets' denizens that they were in as much danger as those in Bad Streets, Satan vanished through a secret gateway beneath the river. "Now he's coming your way," Ronnie warned. "You'll need to learn how to fight." Ronnie nodded toward the dog-eared math and spelling workbooks Phatt carries even when he can't attend school. "Study hard," he implored. "Stay strong and smart so's you count on yourself, no one else. Never stop watching. Bloody Mary is coming with Satan. And she's seen your face."

Given what the secret stories of shelter children say about the afterlife, it isn't surprising that Ronnie appeared in his military uniform. There is no Heaven in the stories, though the children believe that dead loved ones might make it to an angels' encampment hidden in a beautiful jungle somewhere beyond Miami. To ensure that they find it, a fresh green palm leaf (to be used as an entrance ticket) must be dropped on the beloved's grave.

This bit of folklore became an obsession for eight-year-old Miguel. His father, a Nicaraguan immigrant, worked the overnight shift at a Miami gas station. Miguel always walked down the street by himself to bring his dad a soda right before the child's bedtime, and they'd chat. Then one night his father was murdered while on the job. Recalls Miguel: "The police say the robbers put lit matches all over him before they killed him."

Miguel's mother speaks no English and is illiterate. She was often paid less than two dollars per hour for the temporary jobs she could find in Little Havana (mopping shop floors, washing dishes in restaurants). After her husband's death, she lost her apartment. No matter where Miguel's family of three subsequently slept (a church pew, a shelter bed, a sidewalk), his father's spirit appeared, bloodied and burning all over with tiny flames. Miguel's teachers would catch him running out of his school in central Miami, his small fists filled with green palm leaves, determined to find his father's grave. A social worker finally took him to the cemetery, though Miguel refused to offer her any explanation. "I need my daddy to find the fighter angels," Miguel says from a Salvation Army facility located near Liberty City. "I'll go there when I'm killed."

The secret stories say the angel army hides in a child's version of an ethereal Everglades: A clear river of cold, drinkable water winds among emerald palms and grass as soft as a bed. Gigantic alligators guard the compound, promptly eating the uninvited. Says Phatt: "But they take care of a dead child's spirit while he learns to fight. I never seen it, but yes! I know it's out there" -- he sweeps his hand past the collapsing row of seedy motels lining the street on which the shelter is located -- "and when I do good, it makes their fighting easier. I know it! I know!"

All the Miami shelter children who participated in this story were passionate in defending this myth. It is the most necessary fiction of the hopelessly abandoned -- that somewhere a distant, honorable troop is risking everything to come to the rescue, and that somehow your bravery counts.

By the time homeless children reach the age of twelve, more or less, they realize that the secret stories are losing some of their power to inspire. They sadly admit there is less and less in which to believe. Twelve-year-old Leon, who often visits a Hialeah day-care center serving the homeless, has bruised-looking bags under his eyes seen normally on middle-aged faces. He has been homeless for six years. Even the shelters are not safe for him because his mother, who is mentally unstable, often insists on returning to the streets on a whim, her child in tow.

"I don't think any more that things happen for some great, good God plan, or for any reason," he says. "And I don't know if any angels are still fighting for us." He pauses and looks dreamily at the twilight sky above the day-care center. "I do think a person can dream the moment of his death. Sometimes I dream that when I die soon, I'll be in some high, great place where people have time to conversate. And even if there's no God or Heaven, it won't be too bad for me to be there."

Research by Harvard's Robert Coles indicates that children in crisis -- with a deathly ill parent or living in poverty -- often view God as a kind, empyrean doctor too swamped with emergencies to help. But homeless children are in straits so dire they see God as having simply disappeared. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam embrace the premise that good will triumph over evil in the end; in that respect, shelter tales are more bleakly sophisticated. "One thing I don't believe," says a seven-year-old who attends shelter chapels regularly, "is Judgment Day." Not one child could imagine a God with the strength to force evildoers to face some final reckoning. Yet even though they feel that wickedness may prevail, they want to be on the side of the angels.

When seven-year-old Maria is asked about the Blue Lady, she pauses. "When grownups talk about her, I think she get all upset," Maria slowly replies. She considers a gamble, then takes a chance and leans forward, beaming: "She's a magic lady, nice and pretty and smart! She live in the ocean and comes just to kids."

She first appeared to Maria at the deserted Freedom Tower in downtown Miami, which Maria calls "the pink haunted house." A fierce storm was pounding Miami that night. Other homeless people who had broken in milled about the building's interior, illuminated only by lightning. Her father was drunk. Her mother tried to stop him from eating the family's last food: a box of saltines. "He kept hitting her and the crazy people started laughing. When I try to help her, he hit me here" -- Maria points to her forehead. "I tried to sleep so my head and stomach would stop hurting, but they kept hurting." A blast of wind and rain shattered a window. "I was so scared. I pray out loud: Please, God, don't punish me no more!"

An older boy curled up nearby on a scrap of towel tried to soothe her. "Hurricanes ain't God," he said gently. "It's Blue Lady bringing rain for the flowers." When Maria awoke late in the night, she saw the angel with pale blue skin, blue eyes, and dark hair standing by the broken window. Her arms dripped with pink, gold, and white flowers. "She smiled," Maria says, her dark eyes wide with amazement. "My head was hurting, but she touched it and her hand was cool like ice. She say she's my friend always. That's why she learned me the hard song." The song is complex and strange for such a young child; its theme is the mystery of destiny and will. When Maria heard a church choir sing it, she loved it, but the words were too complicated. "Then the Blue Lady sang it to me," she recalls. "She said it'll help me grow up good, not like daddy."

Maria's voice begins shakily, then becomes more assured: "If you believe within your heart you'll know/that no one can change the path that you must go./ Believe what you feel and you'll know you're right because/when love finally comes around, you can say it's yours./ Believe you can change what you see!/ Believe you can act, not just feel!/You have a brain!/You have a heart!/You have the courage to last your life!/Please believe in yourself as I believe in you!"

As she soars to a finish, Maria suddenly realizes how much that she's revealed to a stranger: "I told the secret story and the Blue Lady isn't mad!" She's awash with relief. "Even if my mom say we sleep in the bus station when we leave the shelter, Blue Lady will find us. She's seen my face."

Shelter children often depict the Blue Lady in their drawings as blasting demons and gangbangers with a pistol. But the secret stories say that she cannot take action unless her real name -- which no one knows -- is called out. The children accept that. What they count on her for is love, though they fear that abstract love won't be enough to withstand an evil they believe is relentless and real. The evil is like a dark ocean waiting to engulf them, as illustrated by a secret story related by three different girls in separate Miami homeless facilities. It is a story told only by and to homeless girls, and it explains how the dreaded Bloody Mary can invade souls.

Ten-year-old Otius, dressed in a pink flowered dress, leads a visitor by the hand away from four small boys who are sitting in a shelter dining room snacking on pizza and fruit juice. "Every girl in the shelters knows if you tell this story to a boy, your best friend will die!" she says with a shiver. When the boys try to sneak up behind her, she refuses to speak until they return to their places.

She begins: "Some girls with no home feel claws scratching under the skin on their arms. Their hand looks like red fire. It's Bloody Mary dragging them in for slaves -- to be in gangs, be crackheads. But every 1000 girls with no home, is a Special One. When Bloody Mary comes, the girl is so smart and brave, a strange thing happens." Bloody Mary disappears, she says, then a pretty, luminous face glows for a moment in the dark. The girl has glimpsed what Bloody Mary looked like before she became wicked. "The Special One," Otius continues, "is somebody Bloody Mary is scared of because she be so good, people watch her for what to do. And if she dies, she will die good.

"Boys always brag what they can do, but this is the job of girls and -- I wish maybe I were a Special One," Otius says wistfully. "Maybe one of my friends from the shelters are now. I'll never see them again -- so's I guess I never know."

Her name was first spoken in hushed tones among children all over America nearly twenty years ago. Even in Sweden folklorists reported Bloody Mary's fame. Children of all races and classes told of the hideous demon conjured by chanting her name before a mirror in a pitch-dark room. (In Miami shelters, the mirror must be coated with ocean water, a theft from the Blue Lady's domain.) And when she crashes through the glass, she mutilates children before killing them. Bloody Mary is depicted in Miami kids' drawings with a red rosary that, the secret stories say, she uses as a weapon, striking children across the face.

Folklorists were so mystified by the Bloody Mary polygenesis, and the common element of using a mirror to conjure her, that they consulted medical literature for clues. Bill Ellis, a folklorist and professor of American studies at Penn State University, puzzled over a 1968 Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease article describing an experiment testing the theory that schizophrenics are prone to see hallucinations in reflected surfaces. The research showed that the control group of nonpsychotic people reported seeing vague, horrible faces in a mirror after staring at it for twenty minutes in a dim room. But that optical trick the brain plays was merely a partial explanation for the children's legend.

"Whenever you ask children where they first heard one of their myths, you get answers that are impossible clues: 'A friend's friend read it in a paper; a third cousin told me,'" says Ellis, an authority on children's folklore, particularly that concerning the supernatural. As president of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, he's become an expert on polygenesis. "When a child says he got the story from the spirit world, as homeless children do, you've hit the ultimate non sequitur."

Folklorists have not discovered a detailed explanation for Bloody Mary's ravenous hatred of children, or her true identity. Today, however, shelter children say they've discovered her secret mission, as well as her true name. All of the secret stories about her enclose hints.

In Chicago shelters, children tell of her role in the death of eleven-year-old Robert Sandifer, who shot an innocent fourteen-year-old schoolgirl he mistook for an enemy. Cops combed the streets, shaking down gangbangers. In desperation Sandifer's gang turned to the one who could save them from justice. They sat in a dark room before a mirror and chanted, "Bloody Mary." The wall glowed like flames. A female demon weeping black tears appeared. Without speaking, she communicated a strategy.

That night, realizing his gang was going to kill him, Sandifer ran through his neighborhood, knocking on doors. "Like baby Jesus in Bethlehem -- except he was bad," explained an eleven-year-old at a Chicago homeless shelter. The next morning police found Sandifer's body, shot through the head, in a tunnel. According to the eleven-year-old, the boy was "lying on a bed of broken glass."

Bloody Mary commands legions. She can insinuate herself into the heart of whomever children trust most: a parent or a best friend. Miami shelter children say they learned about that from television. Salvation Army shelters offer parlors with couches, magazines, and a television. While their mothers play cards and do each other's hair, the children carefully study the TV news. They know how four-year-old Kendia Lockhart died in North Dade, allegedly beaten to death and burned by her father. Bloody Mary was hunting Kendia, shelter children agree. "Gangsters say that God stories are like Chinese fairy tales," observes twelve-year-old Deion at a downtown Miami Salvation Army shelter. "But even gangs think Bloody Mary is real."

This is the secret story shelter children will tell only in hushed voices, for it reveals Bloody Mary's mystery: God's final days before his disappearance were a waking dream. There were so many crises on Earth that he never slept. Angels reported rumors of Bloody Mary's pact with Satan: She had killed her own child and had made a secret vow to kill all human children. All night God listened as frantic prayers bombarded him. Images of earthly lives flowed across his palace wall like shadows while he heard gunfire, music, laughing, crying from all over Earth. And then one night Bloody Mary roared over the walls of Heaven with an army from Hell. God didn't just flee from the demons, he went crazy with grief over who led them. Bloody Mary, some homeless children say the spirits have told them, was Jesus Christ's mother.

"No one believe us! But it's true! It's true!" cries Andre at the Salvation Army shelter on NW 38th Street. "It mean there's no one left in the sky watching us but demons." His friends sitting on the shelter patio chime in with Bloody Mary sightings: She flew shrieking over Charles Drew Elementary School. She stalks through Little Haiti, invisible to police cars. "I know a boy who learned to sleep with his eyes open, but she burned through a shelter wall to get him!" a seven-year-old boy says. "When the people found him, he was all red with blood. Don't matter if you're good, don't matter if you're smart. You got to be careful! If she see you, she can hunt you forever. She's in Miami! And she knows our face.

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/1997-06-05 ... iami/full/

[justdrew]

OK, there was a short animated film I saw on TV when I was a small kid and it still haunts me. It featured a very cool, hip, white rabbit singing some kind of cool, hip, jazz song. Can't remember the song! Can't remember the tune! (But it was something fairly well known.) This rabbit was made out of plasticine, I think. He was out strolling nonchalantly on the sidewalk, singing. I think he stood under a lamp-post for a while. He had kind of sleepy eyes and big teeth. I guess this little animated feature was made in the 50s or very early 60s. It was definitely American. And no, it wasn't Bugs Bunny. It was a plasticine (?) white rabbit who was a kind of loose-limbed laid-back lounge-lizard ladykiller-type, ambling down the street, singing lazily. Possibly he wore a tuxedo, but maybe not.

Does anyone have a fecken clue what I'm rabbiting on about here? I would be grateful for any assistance. It would allow me to move on.

could it be... Here Comes Peter Cottontail ?


Speed Demon by Michael Jackson ?


"Alice In Wonderland" (Lou Bunin, 1949)


you're sure it's claymation?
Fritz the Cat has a somewhat white rabbit in it...

[Plutonia]

N.P Drew.

It's a highly memorable article that I have saved on my hard drive.

...God's final days before his disappearance were a waking dream. There were so many crises on Earth that he never slept. Angels reported rumors of Bloody Mary's pact with Satan: She had killed her own child and had made a secret vow to kill all human children. All night God listened as frantic prayers bombarded him. Images of earthly lives flowed across his palace wall like shadows while he heard gunfire, music, laughing, crying from all over Earth. And then one night Bloody Mary roared over the walls of Heaven with an army from Hell. God didn't just flee from the demons, he went crazy with grief over who led them. Bloody Mary, some homeless children say the spirits have told them, was Jesus Christ's mother.

"No one believe us! But it's true! It's true!" cries Andre at the Salvation Army shelter on NW 38th Street. "It mean there's no one left in the sky watching us but demons." His friends sitting on the shelter patio chime in with Bloody Mary sightings: She flew shrieking over Charles Drew Elementary School. She stalks through Little Haiti, invisible to police cars. "I know a boy who learned to sleep with his eyes open, but she burned through a shelter wall to get him!" a seven-year-old boy says. "When the people found him, he was all red with blood. Don't matter if you're good, don't matter if you're smart. You got to be careful! If she see you, she can hunt you forever. She's in Miami! And she knows our face.

Wow.