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DrWalpurgis

Last seen: 3 days ago

Dante is a guy from Metropolis, UK

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There are two types of people in this life; there's the people who divide people into two categories and the people that don't. I'm one of them.
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  • Created Nov 05 •

    Pages From A Doctor's Casebook

    Click on any title;
    Five Seconds Alone With Edward Woodward - Memento Mori - To Oblivion And Beyond.... - Ken Campbell - The Sin Eater - The Adventures of Schroedinger's Cat - The Accidental Nude - The First World War - Astronomy Lecture (False Start) - Astronomy Lecture - Giant Ape Problem - Where Everybody Knows Your Name - Cack Handed Handyman - The Best Medicine - An Empty Life - The Time Machine - The Mayor of Metropolis - Pre-Internet StumbleUpon - Credit Where It's Not Due - Love Song For My Soul(less) Mate - A Dangerous Place To Live

  • DrWalpurgiss reviews - StumbleUpon

    Rated Nov 05 • 60 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com

    Take a couple of these pages every day and if you're no better by the end of the week come and see me again and we'll try you on something else.

  • Created Nov 05 •

    More About Dr.W
    Dr. Walpurgis has a dark sense of humour and a keen interest in arcane medical practices and ephemera. He is also a vampire, (but being a fictional character will only prey on other fictional characters). Being a scientist he has an insatiable thirst for knowledge but does like to use his downtime pursuing his myriad interests. The most unusual thing about him, as a member of the undead, is his belief in social justice and a hatred of bigotry and any kind of intimidation towards vulnerable members of society and will bite the head off anyone found taking part in such activities (quite literally), that and the fact that he bears an uncanny resemblance to Humphrey Bogart. He was born in 1760 in Carpathia

  • http://s215.photobucket.com/albums/cc209/DrWalpurgis?acti...

    Rated Nov 05 • 2 reviews • family album • photobucket.com



    List of contents:

    Metropolis/ Dr. Septimus Walpurgis/ Theodora Walpurgis/

    Maximillian Walpurgis/ Young Dante/ Pilotti Walpurgis/

    Family Portrait/ Cesare Walpurgis/ Xenon Walpurgis/

    Eudoria Walpurgis/ Diechardt Walpurgis/

    Kharis Sinestri/New Addition

    Arachnia Sinestri/Udolfio Sinestri/Edward Hyde/

    Science Finals/"Buster"

    'Click' on any name.

  • Created Nov 03 •

    Tears That Burn


    The late nineteen seventies and the early nineteen eighties in the UK were a boom time for mass produced, over priced tat. People wanted nothing more than to clutter up their homes with things they had seen in other people's homes. The majority of these things, though cheap and nasty in aesthetic terms, were harmless enough. But amongst the jumble of ceramic harlequins, faux porcelain sheperdesses, pottery shire horses and posters of female tennis players scratching their arses it seems that something altogether more sinister was lurking....

    The Crying Boy (2)


    In September 1985 a fire gutted the Rotherham, South Yorkshire home of Ron and May Hall. The fire, starting in a chip pan, ripped through the lower half of the house consuming everything in it's path. The only thing that the inferno left intact was a painting of a crying boy. The painting, a cherub faced, sobbing infant with a hurt and bewildered expression, peered reproachfully through the charred and ruined remains of the Hall residence (though the couple themselves had managed to escape their home unscathed).

    The story then takes a bizarre turn for Ron Hall's brother Peter was, by coincidence, a firefighter stationed in Rotherham and he later informed his brother that a senior colleague of his, one Alan Wilkinson, had informed him of numerous other incidents were prints of 'the crying boy' had emerged undamaged from otherwise fire destroyed homes. The story then came to the attention of Kelvin McKenzie editor of The Sun 'newspaper' who published it in the 4th September edition of the paper and The Curse Of The Crying Boy was born.

    The painting had, up to the curse first being reported, been very popular and fifty thousand (other estimates put the figure as high as quarter of a million) prints of it, signed by the artist G Bragolin, had been sold in the UK. Such was the popularity of The Sun at that time and so many were the numbers of copies of the painting in people's homes that the day after the story was printed the paper's switchboards were jammed by desperate Crying Boy picture owners wanting to know if they too were cursed other callers had their own stories like that of the Hall's.

    Sensing that the story had 'legs'(meaning it could run and run) jounalists were dispatched to find the answer to the question everyone was asking 'What is it about this painting and fires?' (bypassing, to my mind, the rather more obvious one of 'Why would anyone want to possess a painting of a boy crying in the first place?', but I digress). In the meantime more and more victims of the curse were reported in The Sun, more and more accounts of that sad little boy's face peering out from blackened ruins whilst only his likeness emerged, not only untouched but without even a scorch mark. One such correspondent was Dora Mann who, six months after buying a print of the picture, lost her home to a fire and gave the added claim that all of her paintings were destroyed apart from the one of a crying boy. CONTD.

  • Created Nov 03 •

    Tears That Burn - Part Two




    When approached by journalists the secretary of the Folklore Society put forward the theory that the artist who painted the original may have mistreated his young model and that the curse was the boy's revenge on those who had made his tormentor rich. But this threw up even more questions; who was this crying boy? and who was this artist G Bragolin? A researcher claimed that the answer came from noted occult investigator and retired schoolmaster George Mallory. Mallory discovered that G Bragolin was in fact an old Spanish portrait artist who's real name was Bruno Amadio (aside from Giovanni Bragolin Amadio used many psuedonym's including Franchot Seville) through this discovery Mallory began to piece together the story of the crying boy.

    The Crying Boy(1)


    On a hot, dusty day in Madrid in 1969 Amadio was finishing a portrait when from the streets below he heard sobbing. Looking down from his balcony he saw an urchin dressed in rags sat outside the local tavern weeping uncontrollably. He called down to the boy asking him what the matter was. The boy, still sobbing, looked up but didn't reply. Taking pity on the lad Amadio took him to his studio, fed him and then painted his portrait. The boy visited him many times after this and he painted his portrait on many occasions but the boy never stopped weeping and he never uttered a word. A short time after his first encounter with the boy Amadio was visited by the local priest who was in a state of great anxiety. The priest had seen the boy's picture and told him that the boy's name was Don Bonillo and that he had ran away after he had witnessed his parents being burnt to death in a house fire. He went on to say that Amadio should have no more to do with the child because wherever he went fires would mysteriously break out. Amadio was appalled that a man of god should tell him to turn his back on a vulnerable orphan. Ignoring the advice of the clergyman he adopted the boy soon after.

    This decision seemed to be validated in the coming months by the fact that copies of his portrait of the boy sold far and wide across the whole of Europe and he became quite wealthy. The painter and his ward were now living comfortably off the success of the painting and all was going well until one day on returning from a trip to a gallery Amadio came home to find his house and studio razed to the ground. The artist was ruined. The finger of suspicion pointed at Don Bonillo and the painter accused him of arson. In floods of tears young Bonillo fled the house, never to be seen again. Amadio didn't hear of the boy again. Then one day in 1976 news came of a horrendous car crash on the outskirts of Barcelona. It seems that the vehicle had smashed into a wall at high speed and had turned into a ball of fire. Inside the twisted wreckage the driver's corpse had been burnt beyond identification. His driver's licence in the glove compartment, however, was only partially burnt. The driver was a 19 year old youth by the name of Don Bonillo. Soon after the crash reports of mysterious house fires from all over Europe started to appear in news items. The houses all had one thing in common, amongst the smouldering rubble were undamaged portraits of a crying boy.

    And that was the origin of the curse of the crying boy...except it wasn't. CONTD

  • Created Nov 03 •

    Tears That Burn - Part Three


    Curiously there are no records in Barcelona of the death of a youth named Don Bonillo in a horrific car accident. Nor indeed in Madrid of an artist who's house burnt down by the name of Bruno Amadio or Giovanni Bragolin or even Franchot Seville. This part of the story was uncovered by the researcher who contacted the distinguished occult investigator and Devon based retired schoolmaster George Mallory. Is it possible that such a celebrated and respected figure as Mallory would risk his reputation by inventing such a tale? The answer has to be an emphatic no if for no other reason than there is not and has never been any evidence of an occult investigator of that name ever living in Devon, or anywhere else for that matter. The answer lies with the 'researcher' a publisher of ghost story anthologies by the name of Tom Slemen who revived the story of the curse in one of his 'Haunted Liverpool' series of books some fifteen years after the original Sun reports of the incendiary occurences. The inclusion of such a national phenomenon in a provincial anthology was due to a mysterious house explosion in Heswall which left behind one of the pictures in it's usual pristine state. Heswall is situated on the other side of the River Mersey to Liverpool and is nearer to the city of Birkenhead but Slemen must have figured that was close enough for it to be included.

    Even if there was such a person as Don Bonillo and even if he was the model for a picture of a crying boy that still doesn't answer any of the questions surrounding the curse. Those of you who have read this far will have noticed that the two portraits used to illustrate the piece are of two different boys, Bonillo could have been either of them or indeed any of these....

    cryingboys(2)

    Or maybe he's amongst this equally lachrymose collection of little monsters....

    cryingnboys(1)

    I could go on because the fact is that there are thought to be twenty eight different pictures all referred to as the crying boy picture.

    So the subject of the picture could not have been the cause of the fires but this didn't stop the popularity of the story from spreading like the flames themselves into the twenty first century, mostly thanks to the internet. Stories of crying boy fires started appearing from as far afield as Brazil and Japan. In 2006 a group of Dutch students even started a crying boy fan club their aim was to collect copies of all twenty eight of the known pictures and put them on display. They even set up a web site but sadly this is all that remains of it and no one seems to know what became of them. So now they too will probably be incorporated into the legend of the curse even though they probably just grew up and found more worthwhile things to do.

    But what of the curse? For that we have to go back to the initial reports in The Sun. As usual with tabloids the use of the word curse came about through the paper itself and not the phenomena. CONTD.

  • Created Nov 03 •

    Tears That Burn - Part Four



    The reason they picked up on the story was because Station Officer Alan Wilkinson of the Rotherham Fire Brigade (remember him?) had said that they had heard of many incidents of house fires where a picture of a crying boy was left undamaged when all about it was destroyed. At no time did he mention the word curse nor did any other representative of the fire brigade interviewed by The Sun. Fire Chief Mick Taylor issued a statement that fires were not caused by pictures or curses but by carelessness and negligence. In all of the crying boy fires the reasons for them were the usual, mundane ones; cigarettes not extinguished properly, electric fires to close to bedding, electric blankets left on etc. All of these things led to terrible consequences but not one of them involved the supernatural in origin. As to the weirdness of the presence of a picture of a crying boy at so many of these incidents well that can be explained by the hundreds of house fires attended to on a daily basis by the UK fire brigade that don't make the headlines and the fact that at the time of the initial reports there were somewhere between fifty thousand and a quarter of a million copies of the crying boy pictures owned throughout the country. It would be more amazing if there were no fires were one wasn't present.

    Of course this was useless to a man who wanted to sell newspapers and that was when McKenzie sent forth his minions to find facts to fit the supernatural element he'd dreamt up for the story. This culminated in the quote from the Secretary of The Folklore Society, he and it do exist by the way his name is Roy Vickery. Omitted from the reports was the fact that prior to him they had spoke to Georgina Boyes, herself a respected member of the same society, who dismissed the hypothesis out of hand.

    As for the fact that the paintings always emerged unscathed from the embers of the fires well that's more to do with how they are made. Unlike convential paintings mass produced prints need to be made onto something sturdy enough to take the rigours of the factory process. In the case of the crying boys (and many similar pieces) this is made from compressed hardboard a material which most fire brigade officials agree is extremely difficult to ignite. That's not to say impossible as the staff of The Sun knew only to well when at the culmination of the crying boy campaign they offered to destroy any copy of the pictures people wished to dispose of. The initial plan was to do this on the roof of their offices in Bouverie Street on Halloween 1985. Unfortunately they had to abandon that idea when they couldn't elicit the co-operation of either the London or Thames Valley Fire Brigade who decided that their time would be better spent saving people's lives rather than taking part in a cheap publicity stunt for a newspaper. Undeterred they transferred to a field outside Reading and proceeded to incinerate two and a half thousand copies of the picture.

    So after proving that the pictures do burn and when the presence of the picture at the scene has been explained and when the only part of the story of Don Bonillo and Bruno Amadio that can be verified is that Spain has a city called Madrid and another one called Barcelona then the only thing left of the story of The Curse of The Crying Boy is just a handful of ashes.


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  • Sometimes We Get Through To Your Dimension.

    Created Oct 30 •

    Forteana

  • elledarks reviews - StumbleUpon

    Rated Oct 25 • 2 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com

    Has anyone seen Sarah?? I remember Elle you asked me this once before...and you were correct there were aliens controlling SU and snatching souls back then. But you can rest easy now for the aliens have all gone....we ate them....and Sarah..and now we're coming for you! (VV)