Spooky places: Rehmeyers Hollow

 

In November 1928, under the malicious advice of a woman named Emma Knopp (more commonly known as Nellie Noll due to a work of fiction), John Blymire believed that he had been cursed by Nelson Rehmeyer, a practitioner of powwow. On November 27, 1928, Blymire and his accomplices called on Rehmeyer at his home hoping to find his copy of the powwow book the Long Lost Friendand also get a lock of his hair. Knopp advised him to burn the book and bury the lock of hair eight feet underground.

Blymire and his fellow conspirators John Curry and Wilbert Hess (who likewise felt victimized by Rehmeyer) demanded Rehmeyer hand over the book and lock of hair. When he refused, they killed and mutilated him in hopes that this would lift the curse. The three men also set fire to the body, hoping the body and house would burn completely, thus destroying any evidence of the murder.

However, the house did not burn down as they had hoped. Rehmeyer's charred corpse was discovered a couple days later on November 29, Thanksgiving Day of that year. Some people believed Rehmeyer's alleged powers prevented the house from burning. The three killers were brought to trial in January 1929, which caused a media sensation

Ancient books: The Egyptian Book of the Dead

The Book of the Dead is the name given to an ancient Egyptian funerary text generally written on papyrus and used from the beginning of the New Kingdom (around 1550 BC) to around 50 BC.^[1] "Book" is the closest term to describe the loose collection of texts^[2] consisting of a number of magic spells intended to assist a dead person's journey through the Duat, or underworld, and into the afterlife and written by many priests over a period of about 1,000 years. In 1842, the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius introduced for these texts the German name Todtenbuch(modern spelling Totenbuch), translated to English as 'Book of the Dead'. The original Egyptian name for the text, transliterated rw nw prt m hrw,^[3] is translated as Spells of Coming Forth by Day.^[4]

The Book of the Dead, which was placed in the coffin or burial chamber of the deceased, was part of a tradition of funerary texts which includes the earlier Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts, which were painted onto objects, not written on papyrus. Some of the spells included in the book were drawn from these older works and date to the 3rd millennium BC. Other spells were composed later in Egyptian history, dating to the Third Intermediate Period of Egypt (11th to 7th centuries BC). A number of the spells which make up the Book continued to be separately inscribed on tomb walls and sarcophagi, as the spells from which they originated always had been.

There was no single or canonical Book of the Dead. The surviving papyri contain a varying selection of religious and magical texts and vary considerably in their illustration. Some people seem to have commissioned their own copies of the Book of the Dead, perhaps choosing the spells they thought most vital in their own progression to the afterlife. The Book of the Deadwas most commonly written in hieroglyphic or hieratic script on a papyrus scroll, and often illustrated with vignettes depicting the deceased and their journey into the afterlife.

The finest extant example of the Egyptian in antiquity is the Papyrus of Ani. Ani was an Egyptian scribe. It was discovered in Luxor in 1888 by Egyptians trading in illegal antiquities. It was acquired by E. A. Wallis Budge, as described in his autobiography By Nile and Tigris in 1888 and was taken to the British Museum, where it remains.

Source: Wikipedia 

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