This is the very first cartoon appearance of Casper the Friendly Ghost, from 1945. Lonely Caspar doesn't want to scare people like his fellow ghosts, and he wanders off to make friends. It takes quite a while to find anyone who's not terrified of him. Poor Caspar!
Friday, October 30, 2026
The Friendly Ghost
The Witch They Call Black Annis
Black Annis is an English witch who supposedly ate children, which is always a good story to keep your kids from wandering in the woods at night. A written account from 300 years ago said she lived in a cave, was raised by wolves, had sharp claws, and wore a skirt made from human skin. We know the specific area the legend came from, but where is the cave? Could the story of Black Annis come from that of a 15th-century nun named Agnes who lived alone outside her convent? A woman hermit was very unusual, but Agnes seems to have been respected and even revered. However, a couple of hundred years separated those stories, and intervening events may have changed the details greatly to fit new religious narratives. There are alternate theories on the origins of the legend, and Dr. Emily Zarka goes through them to judge their accuracy.
Miss Cellania's Links
Hot Halloween is officially over. ‘You can be hot any day of the year – why not take the opportunity to be scary?’ (via Fark)
A gruesome true crime Halloween story.
Ghost stories don’t just scare us – they remind us of historical injustices.
The struggles of a wannabe Halloween cat.
My mother donated her body to science. I really wasn’t prepared for what came next. (via Damn Interesting)
People with celebrity names made headlines long ago. And another couple dozen. (via kottke)
Flocken Elektrowagen: The Electric Vehicle That Arrived Before Its Time.
Elon Musk and His Doge Pals hunt down the threat to Western Civilization. The latest from Tom the Dancing Bug.
30 Then-And-Now Pictures Showing How Familiar Places Changed Over Time.
Dead Man's Bones
Every Halloween needs a dancing skeleton! Comedian Nathan Barnatt dances all over dressed as the bones of a dead man, accompanied by the 2009 song "Dead Man's Bones" by the group Dead Man's Bones. His lanky, creepy moves are just as you'd imagine a skeleton would dance -if that skeleton were a decent dancer! (via Buzzfeed)
Thursday, October 29, 2026
An Entertaining and Effective Ad
This ad is short, engaging, and the payoff is priceless. I don't know whether it's a real advertisement, or someone trying to get hired at a creative agency. If the latter, I hope they got the job.
It’s a Wonderful Night of the Living Dead
The Bell Brother remixed It's a Wonderful Life with Night of the Living Dead. It works, because if you recall, It's a Wonderful Life was rather depressing, tense, and downright scary in the first couple of hours. (via Damn Interesting)
Pumpkins Should Have Gone Extinct
Plants that produce fruit want to be eaten, because that's how they disperse their seeds. Long, long ago, the ancient ancestor of pumpkins evolved to be eaten by megafauna like mastodons. They were too bitter and toxic for creatures like humans. Besides, they had a really hard rind. Only those large animals could open the fruit, tolerate the taste, and properly spread the undigested seeds around with some handy manure for fertilizer.
Then around 12,000 years ago, humans wiped out the mastodons, giant sloths, mammoths, giant bears, and other animals that ate those proto-pumpkins. Those bitter pumpkins weren't appealing to other mammals, so how did they survive to today? They are an evolutionary anachronism, a species that should no longer exist. You might not be surprised to learn that it was because of humans, who do weird things. PBS Eons explains how we got pumpkins even though they should have died out thousands of years ago. (via Laughing Squid)
Bert & Ernie's Pumpkin Painting Challenge
Bert and Ernie dip their toes (or would if they had any) into the world of internet DIY tutorials. Bert has started a series called Backyard with Bert, and the first episode is about painting pumpkins for Halloween. It may also be the last episode, as things got off to a rocky start. See, Ernie has some ideas of his own, and that complicates things immensely for Bert. I now wonder how well mineral spirits will remove paint from a pumpkin. (via Laughing Squid)
Wednesday, October 28, 2026
The Terror
1963. Directed by Roger Korman, starring Jack Nicholson and Boris Karloff. From IMDB:
France, 18th century. Lieutenant Andre Duvalier has been accidentally separated from his regiment. He is wandering near the coast when he sees a young woman. He asks the road to Coldon, where he hopes to rejoin his regiment. But the woman doesn't answer, doesn't even greet him and walks away. Eventually she takes him to the sea, where she disappears in rough water. Andre loses conscience when he is trying to following her, and is attacked by a bird. He awakes in a house with an old woman and a numb man. She claims to never have seen the woman. After he leaves, he sees her again and when trying to follow her is saved by a man from certain death. He learns that to help the girl, he must go to castle of Baron Van Leppe. When he arrives, Andre sees the woman looking from a window. Baron Van Leppe is old and seems reluctant to let André in however. He claims there's no woman in the castle, but shows André a painting which does indeed portray her. Andre learns that she is the baroness, who died twenty years ago.
A Nuclear Bomb in the Mariana Trench
We've done underground nuclear tests, and we've done underwater nuclear tests. We found out that they work, and they did some nasty environmental damage. But what if we were to take those tests to an even deeper, more remote location, like, say, the Mariana Trench? And let's make it a big bomb, like the Tsar Bomba! That's the question in the latest episode of What If? from Randall Monroe and Henry Reich.
They take these questions seriously, so we find out what would happen. However, the world's largest nuclear bomb is no match for the deepest part of the ocean. That's not very fun, so our guys came up with a new scenario in which the bomb is equivalent to the Chicxulub impactor (which is fun to Google). That gives us results more in line with what we expect from the What If? series.
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