It Was a Monster Mash...

First bigfoot, now El Chupacabra turns up again in Cuero, Texas?

And the police officers even have dashcam video this time. How fitting for all this during a summer when the new X Files movie hits theaters.

As reported by CNN:

It's Human Nature...

Ann King, staff supervisor of the Denver Parks & Recreation Department, fired three employees and suspended a fourth on what officer Bruce Plotkin called unreasonable grounds. Allegedly, there were "significant errors" in payroll. The workers were ill-trained and overloaded with work.

King, on the other hand, found the time to operate a psychic business on the side. The city authorized King to operate her own small business during her time off of work.

Perhaps she should have offered them a free psychic consultation beforehand... "I see a career change in your immediate future..."

The hearing officer ordered the employees to be given back their jobs. The mystical sideline has been halted voluntarily by King to better concentrate on her duties. The city remains convinced that King was justified in her actions.

And King's hypnosis business still lingers on in Texas. I guess residuals aren't considered a business...

No More Thrill Rides...

With the soaring popularity of investigating hauntings, it seems everyone is trying to jump on the bandwagon. Unfortunately, some people fail to follow any sort of legal procedures.

Five "ghost hunters" in El Paso, Texas, learned their lesson the hard way last week.

Jorge Montoya (17), Carmen Salazar (17), Gerardo Santoyo (18), John Carrillo (20), Rene Nunez (21), and Felipe Ochoa (23) decided to investigate the abandoned Magic Landing Amusement Park on Wednesday night. They ignored the 'No Trespassing' signs placed around the property and wandered around by flashlight, snapping photographs and looking for paranormal activity. A neighbor phoned police after seeing the lights. The quintet fled to their vehicles when police arrived, but couldn't escape the law.

Each was charged with criminal trespassing Thursday morning.

The property owners take the matter very seriously. In April, an arson fire caused $485,000 in damage to the former amusement park. They have since told Sheriff Deputies they will press charges against anyone found on their property without their consent.

Nicknamed "Tragic Landing", the park was only open for four years. Legend states that a boy lost his hand and died at the park; his ghost is said to wander the grounds. In 1985, an 18-year-old employee named Frank Guzman Jr. was killed after his arm was severed by a roller coaster while retrieving a customer's baseball hat from the track. The roller coaster is gone now... it was sold to Bosque Magico in Mexico.

I doubt this is the sort of fame hoped for by the group. Perhaps they should have made a phone call to the owners and saved themselves the trouble of calling a friend or family member to get them out of jail...

Supernatural Spotlight: Dougall Fraser

Is there such a thing as a gay clairvoyant? The answer is yes more often than you may think. And one of the better-known gay psychics is Dougall Fraser.

Fraser lead a very different life from most people. He realized at an early age that what he could see was different than others around him. At the age of 8, he gave his first psychic reading. Over the years, he studied massage, psychology, meditation and healing to build on his abilities. He left New Jersey for Dallas, Texas in hopes of becoming a massage therapist. Those plans fell through, but his psychic work gained momentum. By the time he was 20, he was voted Best Psychic in Dallas.

Being 6'6" tall, overweight, gay, and a psychic made for turbulent teenage years. Yet Fraser learned to cope as many of us do through humor and a positive outlook. In 2005, he wrote down the memoirs of his earlier years in the book But You Knew That Already: What a Psychic Can Teach You About Life. He may not be any older than I am, but from the sound of it, he has lived enough to fill a book!

Fraser now calls Los Angeles home, where he moved with his husband David last year. He is still a popular psychic consultant. He was featured on X Zone Radio in April and will be traveling back to Texas and New York City in the coming months.

Whether or not you believe in psychic ability, he is certainly a fascinating individual. And of course, if you're in the market for a clairvoyant, he's certainly someone worth checking out...

Plots for Potheads...

Three teenagers in Texas were in desperate need of a marijuana fix. Since they didn't happen to have a bong handy, they decided to improvise.

Allegedly, the druggie trio sneaked into an abandoned cemetery in the woods near Humble over a two-day period, dug up the grave of an 11-year-old boy who passed away in 1921, removed the skull from the interred body, and carried the head home to smoke marijuana out of the cranium.

Police were questioning Kevin Wade Jones Jr., 17, on a charge of vehicular burglary when he recounted the tale. The police thought it was merely an attempt to throw them off course.

When they went to the home of Matthew Gonzalez, 17, and asked him about the story, he spit his food out at the dining table.

Police have charged them all with abuse of a corpse. Gonzalez was also charged with misdemeanor theft for the vehicle break-in while Jones and the unnamed third juvenile each face charges of credit card abuse.

And the skull? It's still missing. Authorities are still attempting to locate it in an effort to place it back in the grave.

The cemetery is believed to have been the final resting place for black war veterans and their families.

Jeepers Creepers, Where'd You Get Those Peepers?

Over the past decade or more, stories of particularly strange encounters with not-quite-human people have been whispered around the globe.

The storytellers are very diverse: a bank executive in Sydney, Australia elevator; a couple at a rest area in Michigan; a Portland, Oregon apartment manager; an anonymous Starbucks customer in an undisclosed location; and most-surprisingly a newspaper reporter in Abilene, Texas.

To the casual observer, the individuals they met or saw wouldn't seem very unusual. Though upon closer inspection, they all had one very odd thing in common: their eyes. They were pure blackness, lacking a pupil or iris.

Websites often refer to these people as BEKs (short for "black eyed kids"). Generally, they are children, between 10 and 18, and are entreating entrance. Be it a ride in a car or coming inside a home or apartment to borrow the phone, they generally grow impatient if denied. Witnesses have noticed a strange, uncomfortable feeling around them... even compulsion, as if under hypnosis.

But who are they? Several theories exist, from the mundane "people wearing black contact lenses" to the obscure, more paranormal "alien hybrids", "demons", and "vampires". The fact that they cannot enter a vehicle or dwelling without the owner's permission lends credence to the similarities with vampire legends. Whatever they are, the people who have reported the encounters have been terrified and shaken by their experiences.

Are they real? Many people say that it's simply an urban legend. Indeed, there is no evidence backing up these stories, which makes them difficult to prove. They were all chance encounters, usually without other people present. No photographs were taken. No traces were left behind.

The most credible encounter was that of Brian Bethel, a newspaper reporter who encountered two strange children outside a movie theater in Texas. his 1998 tale has been the cause of much speculation... and even controversy. Some allege that the tale is fiction, while Bethel still stands by his story. And yes, he's even on Blogger.

The only real way to know for sure is to experience one first-hand. After all, seeing is believing...