Wild West Photo Friday: Have you seen. . .The Thing?

One of the many signs advertising The Thing. Photo courtesy C. G. P. Grey.

OK, this is actually a modern subject, but who says the West isn't still wild? If you've ever driven along I-10 between Phoenix and El Paso, you've seen the signs about The Thing. Yup, both words capitalized. Every time. It may be the most advertised roadside attraction in the United States, with around 250 billboards hyping The Thing stretched across more than 200 miles of interstate.

I love roadside attractions. It's a dying bit of Americana that I hope never disappears. The Thing is in the tiny town of Douglas, Arizona, and features a roadside diner, shop, and of course the mysterious museum. I used to love going there when I lived in Tucson.

The museum is filled with displays "said to have been" owned by famous people. The Million Dollar Museum in Carlsbad, New Mexico, used a similar tactic to make dusty old things take on a new shine. Photo courtesy C. G. P. Grey.

The museum consists of three large steel sheds jam packed with dusty old exhibits--old guns, saddles, driftwood carved into weird shapes, and a large display of torture instruments. It all looks a bit tattered, but that's a part of its charm. There's no slick presentation like you'd get in a modern theme park.

On the walls hang garish yellow signs that proclaim the uniqueness and incalculable value of the displays. This is straight out of the carny handbook--hype up an attraction and once the crowd is in, hype it up some more so they don't have buyer's remorse.

The museum is filled with creepy folk art. There's even a whole room displaying of medieval torture techniques. Photo courtesy C. G. P. Grey.

As you make your way through the museum, you follow a trail of monster footprints leading to the final display--The Thing itself! Jump the cut to see what it is. If you're planning on going yourself, you might want to skip this spoiler.

Old West Photo Friday: Cowboy Riding Jackalope

Here's an old postcard showing a cowboy riding the fabled Jackalope. While most Jackalopes are rabbit sized, sometimes they get big enough for cowboys to saddle them up and hop around the plains. A Jackalope, of course, is a cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope.

You can read about Jackalopes and a lot of other weird stuff in my new booklet out by Charles River Editors, The Weird Wild West: Tall Tales and Legends about the Frontier. There was a free giveaway on Amazon for the past couple of days, but since I was traveling up to Oxford I didn't get a chance to tell all of you. Sorry about that! I think a lot of people will be reaidng about Jackalopes this week because it made it to #271 on Amazon!

Charles River has come out with a second booklet of mine on The Trench Warfare of World War I. It got up to #338 on Amazon during the free giveaway. Sadly, that's also over. I should really get a Smartphone and start obsessively checking the Internet like everyone else. On second thought, I think I'll stay in the real world. That's where the Jackalopes live!


Photo courtesy Jackalope postcards, which has an amazing collection online. Seeing is believing!

Photo Friday: The Globster

It's the end of a long week and I'm feeling frivolous, so this Photo Friday is dedicated to one of my favorite mystery beasts--the globster!

What's a globster, you ask? It's an unidentified blob of flesh washed up on the beach. It's smelly, decaying, and generally nasty. People used to think they were some type of sea monster or unidentified species of giant squid or octopus. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for globsters. Perhaps it's the name, or their irresistible cuteness. Perhaps it's because I always root for the underdog, and you can't get much lower than being a rotting hunk of unidentifiable meat on the beach being gawked at by local yokels.

The above photo is of the St. Augustine Monster, which washed ashore near St. Augustine, Florida, in 1896. Needless to say it caused quite a stir. A scientist who say it thought it was an octopus because of the arm-like appendages you can see here. Journalists, of course, immediately labeled it a sea monster.

Maybe the journalists were right for once. Maybe in the unexplored depths of the ocean there are colonies of globsters, perhaps with a highly evolved civilization to hide themselves from our advancing technology. They're only spotted when one dies and floats to the surface!

Alas, I've never seen a globster. My closest brush with the unknown was "seeing" the infamous Thunderbird photo. I have to be content reading about them at Globhome.

This photo is of the Chilean Blob. It washed up on the shore of Chile back in 2003. At first it couldn't be identified, but then some party poopers at a biological laboratory checked the DNA and found it came from a sperm whale. Part of the blubber layer separated from the rest of the decaying animal and eventually made it to the beach and into the newspapers. The researchers theorize that most or all globster may also be whale blubber.

But hey, DNA samples can be wrong, just ask anyone on death row! There's still a chance that the Lost Civilization of the Globsters will rise from the deep to reclaim their dead. . .

[Photos of the St. Augustine Monster and Chilean Blob courtesy Wikimedia Commons]