It’s easy to discount our Weird Tales icons as being just near-schizophrenic hallucinations; half-waking, half-opium, delusions hung on a thin narrative framework — but with a little research, the turning over of some … well, not forbidden works, but let’s just say unordinary volumes, it’s easy to discover that there are, yes, quite real beasts, substantial monsters hiding out there in the world.

Two of them, in fact, might have given the more nefarious denizens of Providence and its degenerative and hideous outlying spawn the screaming jeebees.

The first of our monsters lives in a domain almost as frightening as its appearance — and its ferocity. Down where the pressure crushes all but the strongest, at depths where even the great whales feel the tons and tons trying to squeeze the life from them, they live — they live and they hunt.

It’s easy to think of our modern world as being solved, that the only real mysteries are those of proportion — “how do we take all the little elements we’ve unearthed in our thousands of years on the earth and use them to our best advantage?” — and so forth. The Nile, charted. The Poles, a subject for television travelogues. The mysteries, we deceive ourselves, are gone.

But they are not — and if we are not careful those same mysteries will suck the marrow from our bones.

Of this reality behind this one mystery, there can be no doubt — enough clues have been left behind: Sperm whales, those powerful hammers of blubber and muscle that prowl through the deep seas fearing nothing — least of all Ahab — have been found, mauled by tremendous battles. Their magnificent hides rippled and torn, they are grotesque testaments to the only thing that would dare attack them, the only creature in the seas that would take on their huge jaws, their crushing strength.

We have no idea how many of those whales, of course, may have lost those battles.

A piece of the puzzle can be found in the nature of those wounds. You can see similar, smaller ones — though not as small as a whine in the ear or too minuscule to be seen without a microscope — on other, more moderate sea creatures. But these other marks, the ones marking the great whales, have a profound difference: scale.

An average squid has suckers maybe only half an inch in diameter, and that is often considered abnormally large for some species. But for the species architeuthis this is more than small — this might even be minuscule for a hatchling.

The kraken is a common myth, a great sea beast that would rise up and tear the fragile ships to splinters, crushing the unfortunate sailors in its constricting tentacles. But as I’ll prove here, those fable-spinners may have had more facts than fables at their disposal, more experience than just conjecture.

We know they live — we have the bits and pieces to prove it. But it’s hard to say what’s the largest specimen of architeuthis ever brought up to our warm, bright world — mainly because every time some intrepid explorer or happenstance fisherman manages to find one the record only stands a short while till something even larger, more monstrous is lifted from the oppressive, frigid depths.

For instance, in one of their favorite territories — the deep waters of the Kaikoura Canyon, some one to three thousand feet deep — the remains of specimens have been found that stretch a modestly tentacled 50 to 60 feet long and could have weighed as much as a ton..

Others, though, have surfaced that made the discovers quake with as much fear as excitement, creatures who may have been as long as 100 feet, with tearing, razor rimmed suckers as much as three inches across. Three inches doesn’t sound like much, even 100 feet doesn’t sound like much — but closing your eyes for a moment and imagining this deep sea wolf blurring out of the oppressive depths, it’s obsidian-black beak ready to rip and bite … well, simple measurements can’t do it justice.

Well, maybe a few more inches, a scant more feet. One of my favorites, more than anything not only because of the size but also the location: It’s easy to dismiss these spawn of the truly deep monsters as hiding in the pressurized canyons, never venturing up to the surface. But these elusive creatures of nightmare have been seen up here, with us. Sometime during World War Two a British ship was steaming off the Indian Ocean’s Maldive Islands when a crewman peered over the side and into the nighttime sea –

– and something peered back at him. As long as the ship, the creature watched him for many minutes before finally, calmly, sinking back into the sea. The sailor reported the giant to be as long as the ship, and with an eye at least eighteen inches across. The ship was one hundred and seventy five feet long.

And if you’ve taken comfort in this calm exchange of glances, here’s a tale from the ‘30s: seems a Royal Norwegian Naval tanker was calmly trawling when it wasn’t looked at, didn’t simply catch sight of, but was — rather — attacked by one of these monsters, that rammed the huge boat and wrapped its great tentacles around the steel hull. In this battle, the beast lost — a victim of the ship’s propellers.

But in other cases … their ship had been sunk, gone to the bottom like many other vessels during the second world war. Lost in a bleak, freezing nighttime sea, they clustered together on their rafts — desperately watching the stars above for movement, any movement, that might signal a search plane.

They expected death from bullets, shells, torpedoes and even at the teeth of sharks, but they could not have anticipated this monster from the sea. With the barest of noises it came up from the primordial depths, an arcing tentacle dotted with razor-sharp suckers and neatly plucked a sailor from the safety of his raft, dragging him screaming down into the black ocean.

What’s great about this terror is the mystery — yeah, we think we’ve seen it all, walked everywhere on this globe, but the fact remains that there ARE mysteries, horrors we can’t even comprehend. Those measurements you see, are just pieces of the puzzle, fragments of the whole. No giant squid has even been captured, or even seen. They are like dreams … no, fever dreams, nightmares, schizophrenic monsters living down in the deepest, darkest parts of our world. They live, they hunt, they … wait.

Maybe, when they feel its time, they’ll let us see them. But, by then, it’ll be too late.

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The last little avenue on this Lovecraftian trip is short, kind of innocent, but with an angle that I’m sure the Great Old Ones would appreciate.

It starts with an innocent question: What is the largest single organism alive on the earth?

Alive rules out the thunder lizards — which were creatures of nightmare all on their own. The obvious answers, quickly: not elephants, not sperm whales, not blue whales. In fact, according to some, the largest organism on this planet doesn’t live in the seas at all.

It lives in Michigan.

Under the dark, warm soil, slowly moving, expanding outwards, it lives. Patience isn’t something that humans really understand — for us it’s waiting a day, maybe a week, sometimes years. But for this creature of the loam, of the deep, primeval forest, patience is measured on a scale that shatters our childish time frame.

Numbers again — but in this case delivering more than hyperbole ever could: it weighs something like 200,000 pounds and covers more than 1.6 million square feet of dark, wooded forest. Living just a few inches under the surface, it methodically expands outward, one tiny part at a time. This single huge fungus, this lattice of the third kingdom, understands patience — this monstrous mushroom comprehends the real way a battle is fought.

Both of them hide, hiding in the dark — with shimmering eyes or glacial progress. Meanwhile we hustle and bustle, deluded into thinking we are masters of this globe.

Yes, both of them lurk — waiting ….

Like said, I can project … a smidgen. Let’s all whine for the writer — when I get a bad cold I get neuralgia, a pressure on my teeth. Feels like a bad toothache. A very bad toothache. I have this fantasy when the throbbing starts and I know I’m in for two or three days of throb, throb, throb — I go through it, slowly in my mind: getting out the pliers, wrapping the jaws with electrical tape so they won’t bite too sharply and to better grip my smooth enamel, carefully squeezing them into my mouth, hunting for the one tooth that happens to be driving me insane, getting a good grip, rocking it back and forth, feeling the gums loosen with sharp squelching noises, and then the tooth sucking free … naturally when I have the sniffles I hide the toolbox — but I still have the urge.

But despite my little self-mutilation fantasy I just can’t quite wrap my … head around Dr. Bart Hughes. Okay, what he preaches isn’t all that new, after all there’s evidence that a lot of cultures have felt the same way. Though, since all we have are the … afters, it’s impossible to say exactly how successful they were. Still, even with historical precedent is pretty fucking tough to see why anyone would want to drill a big hole in their head.

Technically it’s called trepanation, or trepanning. While those old skulls with their neat little squares or circles cut out of them show that this not a new practice, Dr. Hughes brought this ancient rite/healing practice up-to-date. Considered by those in the know as the guru of head-boring, in 1962 Dr. Hughes reported some ground-breaking discoveries. Consciousness, he said, is directly related to the amount of blood in the brain. Evolution, he mused, had caused an overabundance of that liquid red stuff in the brain. Solutions: Drugs? Sometimes. Meditation? Only occasionally. Yoga? Not really.

Drill a hole in the head? Bingo! Want to permanently develop a more enlightened consciousness, an expanded mind, a broadened range of vision? Well, friends and followers, take yee up thy holey (sorry) implement of cutting and … well, hand yourself a piece of your own mind.

If you think that this theory is a bit … unusual, then rest assured that the immanent Dutch thinker did spend a spell in a crazy bin. But weird ideas have a habit of lasting — even developing followers. Symbolically having a piece of bread and some wine turn into the blood (yech!) and flesh (blech!) of someone who died 1999 years ago? Who ever would have thought of that!

Slowly, Dr. Hughes gathered himself a loyal little following. His biggest was Joseph Mellen, who would later write the text book on skull-punching, _Bore Hole_. By far the most erudite and moving work on the subject, _Bore Hole_ is one man’s trip on the road to mind expansion, or, as Mellen describes it in his opening line: ‘This is the story of how I came to drill a hole in my skull to get permanently high.’

By far, though, the best part of _Bore Hole_ concerns the time he was flat-sitting for fellow trepanation fan, Amanda Feilding in London. Realizing that while theorizing and postulating are fine and dandy, Mellen was struck by the maxims “practice what you preach” and “no time like the present.”

Setting out, Mellen scoured the city until he managed to acquire an auger. Not some high-tech, new-fangled gizmo for Mellen. No, he felt that such a modern convenience would not allow him the sensitivity to accurately perform the operation. So, hand-cranked implement at the ready, this intrepid explorer in the field of deep-mind drilling set to work.

You might have a like gizmos in your local hardware store — a central point surrounded by a saw-edged band. The spike was to get an accurate point, while those saw teeth did the cutting. Sometimes wood, sometimes metal, in this case — Mellen’s own skull.

To say that this first attempt didn’t go well you be a slight understatement. His first problem was that he didn’t have the gear to anesthetize himself and so had to resort to (you may moan) LSD to try and dull the pain. As anyone who has dropped can tell you, it’s hard enough to tie your shoelaces let alone drill a hole in your own skull. First cutting a bit of the skin away, Mellen next tried to hold the hand-cranked gizmo steady, Mellen didn’t execute his perfect cut — rather he just grazed over his own bleeding scalp, scoring deep groves in his skull.

Calling for help, Mellen tried to get Dr. Hughes to make a trip to the UK to assist him with his next attempt at air-conditioning his skull. Hughes was more than eager (and one can almost see him packing for the trip: ‘Towel, toothbrush, change of underwear, drill to cut into human skull’ ….) but those damned conservative Brits wouldn’t let the esteemed doctor into the country.

Luckily for the world of enlightenment through head-boring, Amanda saw the necessity for this ground (and skull) breaking practice and so volunteered to help Mr. Mellen with this important step. Once more into the breach, Joseph popped some windowpane, and started to saw into his own skull. Alas, even drilling a sizable hunk out of his own headbone seemed too much for poor Mellen as he passed out before completing this important act. Recognizing — perhaps because he was bleeding from a huge scalp wound — that he needed some expert care, Amanda got him to hospital, where those fuddy-duddy doctors and their quackery medicine told him that he had come very close to loosing a good, and rather important, piece of his gray-matter. Though you have to wonder, in Mellen’s case, if any of his gray stuff was working well enough to matter.

The funny stuff is that after this botched second attempt (and a run-in with the law) Mellen became rather annoyed that people were … interested … in the fact that he had cut out a nice hunk of his skull when he hadn’t. So, faced with being famous for something he didn’t do, Mellen did what any self-respecting member of a new and burgeoning spiritual and surgical practice would have done … and no, he didn’t say, “this is fucking stupid” he went right ahead (bravo!) and tried it again.

I quote verbatim from Mellen’s book, _Bore Hole_: ‘After some time there was an ominous sounding schlurp and the sound of bubbling. I drew the trepan out and the gurgling continued. It sounded like air bubbles running under the skull as they were pressed out. I looked at the trepan and there was a bit of bone in it. At last! On closer inspection I saw that the disc of bone was much deeper on one side than on the other. Obviously the trepan had not been straight and had gone through at one point only, then the piece of bone had snapped off and come out. I was reluctant to start drilling again for fear of damaging the brain membranes with the deeper part while I was cutting through the rest or of breaking off a splinter. If only I had an electric drill it would have been so much simpler. Amanda was sure I was through. There seemed no other explanation for the schlurping noises. I decided to call it a day. At the time I thought that any hole would do, no matter what size. I bandaged up my head and cleared away the mess.’

I’ll wait, give you a chance to sprint to the toilet. There, feeling better? Well, you’d better be, because this gets even better. See Mellen wasn’t all that assured that he’d done the job correctly — even with the wet, squishy evidence that he had, indeed, drilled a damned big hole in his skull. So, later, totally alone, Mellen gave it another shot — this time with an electric drill. Nothing like modern convenience for an ancient, and psychotic, practice.

In something what can only be described as dark comedy (insert laugh track here), this time Mellen was confounded in his attempt to drill a hole in his head by a mechanical failure (hahahaha) after trying for thirty minutes. But, luckily, a downstairs neighbor was able to tinker the gizmo into working again, and the next day our intrepid explored in the field of mind … well, I wouldn’t call it ‘expansion’, how about ‘penetration’? — started to drill (hahahaha) into his own forehead again.

Here he is again, in his own words: “This time I was not in any doubt. The drill head went at least an inch deep through the hole. A great gush of blood followed my withdrawal of the drill. In the mirror I could see the blood in the hole rising and falling with the pulsation of the brain.”

I’m sure you’ve heard this joke. Guy walks into a doctor’s office with bruises on his head. The doctor asks him why they are there. ‘It’s from hitting myself with a rock, doc,’ the guy says. ‘Why the fuck do you do that?’ the doc responds. ‘Because,’ he responds, ‘it feels so damned nice when I stop.’

To this day — and, yes, you may feel quite shocked that Mellen even HAD a ‘next day’ after taking an electric drill to his own forehead and punching at least an inch into his gray matter — Mellen reports a feeling of well-being and serenity. I bet that’s because he stopped doing it.

Ah, but the story doesn’t stop there — because if it did this would just be about this poor crazy schmo and his head boring fetish. No, sir, there is even more to this tale of headbone penetration and erstwhile mind expansion. See Amanda really liked what she saw in her pal Joey (maybe it was the really nice hole he’d punched in his skull) and so she decided that this was something she had to do as well.

Not only that, but to the edification of really twisted movie buffs everywhere, Amanda had the whole procedure filmed. Yes, friends, you too can share in the experience of one lovely young British lass punching a whole in her skull. Hear the whine of the drill! See the flowing blood! On a screen near you, “Heartbeat in the Brain” (available from http://www.xemu.com/maddogfilms) — Amanda Feilding’s personal cinematic demonstration of her belief that punching holes in your skull is good for you.

The film is simple but powerful: Amanda smiling in front of the camera. Amanda cutting her scalp. Amanda putting a drill to her skull. Blood pumping out of Amanda’s skull. Amanda’s blissed-out smile — all intercut with scenes of her pet bird. Birds and holes in the head … a two-some that just makes me shudder.

Ah, but trepanation doesn’t stop with a film that regularly shows up on bills opposite _Faces of Death_. See Amanda was so taken with her new-found feelings of exaltation and calm that she realized that this wonderful transcendental experience should be available to anyone who wanted it. So, say you wake up one day — blues around you like a hot, wet blanket — and determine, yessiree Bob, that what you need is a nice little ol’ hole in your skull to cheer you up. But then you realize that you’re damned broke. What to do? Well, Amanda had a solution, and even ran for Parliament twice on her special platform: Trepanations to anyone who wanted them! A car in every garage, a chicken in every pot, and a hole in … well, you get the idea.

If you think that this unusual practice is limited to those distant and exotic shores (i.e. Britain) then you’re sadly mistaken — but just be grateful that this extreme form of Body Modification never quite caught on with much of a vengeance over here. Still, trepanation does have its international and US supporters.

Peter Halvorson, for instance, who drilled his own hole in the ‘70’s described the experience: “I could hear a gurgling, and I could feel the shifting of volume in the brain water.” About four hours later, this new addition to the holey order of trephanators was feelin’ fine and groovy, though one has to wonder if a little Prozac might have done the same thing, and made less of a mess.

And, like any other group that has at least three members, there is a International Trepanation Advocacy Group out there (http://www.trepan.com), who have a mission to ventilate skulls for the betterment of mankind. And while you’re waiting to have your own skull drilled out, you might want to visit the gift shop, where you can pick up many fine trepanation -related items, such as T-shirts, copies of pro-trepanation books, and — one has to wonder why no one’s thought of it yet — decorator plugs for your own mental health hole.

Like I said, it hovers just on the other side of understanding. Migraine sufferers I know have pondered it in the middle of a bad attack, and I know at least three or four freaks who have so exhausted the facial piercing thing that the idea of piercing your head-bone has become strangely attractive.

Still, understanding can only be pushed so far — and drilling a hole in your own skull is just one of those things that just kind of escapes rationality. But then I might not be one to judge — after all, the only holes I have in my head are the ones I was born with.

There is no escape. Already entire towns have fallen to the green hell, this floral anaconda. Emerald ghosts of buildings, fences, telephone poles, cars — at first invisible against the verdant wave, but after a point their forms become obvious, the horror present: nothing has escaped, everything is being slowly buried, methodically consumed by its tendrils, their deadly chlorophyll embrace.

Like something from a 50’s B&W late-night horror-fest, the initial intentions were good, the betterment of mankind and all that. Inaccurate, but not by that much: well-intentioned scientist seeking to end world hunger, soil erosion, or something same, develops something that Man Was Not Meant To Know and, before the second act or a commercial for some car dealership or other, the terror reaches from it’s soil to strangle him with cheap special effects, his over-acting as humorous as it is terrifying.

In the case of this horror, though, it wasn’t one but rather several scientists and some well-meaning agricultural agencies — and it wasn’t something plucked from some atomic pile, but rather the natural environment of Japan. Though if you feel the overwhelming need to have something atomic, you can pretend that the reason for this green horror being so all-pervasive and ecologically devastating could be due to some Godzilla-sized atomic shenanigans … but only if you have that need for a kind of Universal Pictures kind of atmosphere to this already very Creepy, creeping horror.

Billed as a wonderful feed for all sorts of farm animals, and just the thing to keep American hillsides, and their precious topsoil from melting away in the next downpour, pueraria lobata was introduced to America at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. Attentive participants listened, enraptured — hypnotized, if you will — to the plant’s near idyllic benefits: not only as an all-purpose feed, and soil rejuvenator, but also to how it was used by the Chinese and the Japanese for at least 2,000 years as a source for tea, cloth, paper, and starch.

But the plant’s nefarious schemes didn’t really succeed … excuse me, the plant’s miraculous benefits didn’t become really accepted till the it enraptured — hypnotized, if you will — the attendees of the Japanese exhibit at the New Orleans Exposition of 1884. There, Southern farmers were impressed by its noble floral legacy. From there it was an easy conquest … er, ‘a short time till it was widely in use through the South.’

It wasn’t just farmers that were amazed by the power of this plant. Alabama Polytechnic Institute spent many years heralding its praises and in the ‘30s the U.S. Department of Agriculture went wild trying get it distributed — paying as much as $8 an acre to locals to cultivate it. So insidious … er, so enthusiastic were the locals and experts, at first, that the South literally bloomed with festivals and fairs dedicated to this incredible vine from the far East.

Meanwhile, in this mountainous lair, Fu Manchu rubbed his hands together in cackling glee. “These Western fools, soon their lands will be –”

By I digress, and mix mythological metaphors. Suffice it to say that there are few, if any, festivals dedicated to Kudzu now.

Naming the devil — at least in this case — doesn’t diminish its power. Pueraria lobata, otherwise known as Kudzu, didn’t start out as the terror of the South. Not easy to cultivate, this member of the legume family takes some work to get going. But when it does … it really does.

The physiology of this kudzu sounds so much like a plan for green world domination that you just have to wonder if it has powers of persuasion in addition to its oriental superpowers: Kudzu’s roots can go as far as twelve feet deep, meaning you just can’t pluck it. In fact, to kill the demon weed can take as long as 10 years of persistent cutting, burning, grazing, and liberal use of herbicides. Even with this blitzkrieg of floral doom, there is no guarantee that this wily vine won’t just sneer and keep right on growing.

Speaking of growing, to give you a mind-blowing idea of how fast this little plant can grow, think of it this way — you can watch it. And it doesn’t even take glacial patience. Under perfect conditions, say anywhere in the South, Kudzu can push itself along at the rate of a foot a day. Go away for the weekend and your house could very well be gone — crushed under a blanket of verdant conquest.

Kudzu is a nasty critter — it might make good paper and tea, but it also systematically strangles anything in its path, literally squeezing the life out of anything it comes across.

To give you an idea of the extent this simple plant has in invaded our noble homeland, kudzu now covers a sizable area — not two thousand acres, not two hundred thousand acres, not just a million acres. From as far North as Massachusetts, as far West as Texas and Oklahoma, and even down to Florida where it has started to steadily eat the Everglades. Two million acres, people — two million acres of creeping, marching, strangling green.

Its isn’t just the terrain that kudzu has invaded: with the same dark sense of humor they exhibit towards everything else that has threatened their turf, Southerners laugh as their farms, homes, cars and even the occasional lethargic citizen is consumed by the tendrils of this green fiend.

James Dickey immortalized the demon-weed in his poem, “Kudzu”:

“In Georgia, the legend says
That you must close your windows
At night to keep it out of the house.
The glass is tinged with green, even so….”

Though my favorite maxim is one that’s delightfully close to terror, and one that I think conjures the real impact this creeping terror has had on all those it has touched — or strangled: “A cow,” they say, “won’t eat kudzu, but kudzu will certainly eat a cow.”

Even if you travel to their later meeting place, the sleepy little hamlet of West Wycombe, the locals spout the nonsense — telling tales laced with those Christian bogeymen images: hooded figures droning a litany of forbidden words while a naked offering is laid out on cold granite, awaiting the ritual blade in the hands of a Satanic Priest.

While the truth about the membership of the Monks of Medmenham, and later the Amorous Knights of Wycombe, isn’t as — well — Hammer Films material, the tale of its founding, membership, and rites is fascinating.

Oh, to be in England in the 1760s. The Colonies were behaving themselves, the Great British Empire was just that, and everyone — so it seemed — belonged to a club. There was one for just about every class, interest, or occupation: The Lying Club, where the truth was banned; the Ugly Club where the qualifications for membership were unhandsome, at best; the Golden Fleece where members took on such names as Sir Boozy Prate-All, Sir Whore-Hunter, and Sir Ollie-Mollie.

Then there was the Monks of Medmenham Abbey. Meeting clandestinely on a spot of land somewhere along the Thames near London, this circle of Gentlemen came to typify the age, the era of the Great English Clubs.

Sir Francis Dashwood is one of my heroes — roguish, yet always the stalwart Gentleman; a prankster and jape, yet the author of the _Book of Common Prayer_ — Sir Francis was the center and guiding force behind the very special club, the one later to be known by the misnomer, the Hellfire Club.

Born in 1708, and a indirect descendent of Milton (“tis better to rule in Hell, than serve in Heaven”), Sir Francis was a great supporter of reforms as well as artistic advances. His estate at West Wycombe became a example progressive architectural design and intelligent land management. He was elected an MP 1762, in appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer the following year — and then the year after that elevated to the House of Lords. To add to these wonderful accomplishments, in 1766 (under Pitt) Dashwood was appointed Postmaster-General. Sir Francis, you see, was a man of accomplishment, of intelligence, ability, and — most certainly — wit.

Oh yes, for while Sir Francis was elevating his way through Parliament, he also created, and pretty much single-handedly maintained, his own special club. Unlike those other eccentric clubs of the time the Monks of Medmenham Abbey was a special organization — one dedicated to japing the Papists, providing a place where a gentleman of wit and sophistication might find a place to meet, drink, and — in general — raise a little hell.

The Monks certainly did that. First at their hidden little island, set inside a false ruin of an old Abbey, they met — clandestine greetings across the cool waters of the Thames, lanterns and torches lighting the way, the Monk-robed members gathering together to eat, drink, share amusing anecdotes and (can I say this here, Darren?) fuck like bunnies.

While there were definitely intellectual intercourse at those meetings of the Monks of Medmenham Abbey, it was rather plain-old-simple intercourse that kept them coming back. After 1763, when the cloaked and torch-bearing Monks had attracted some undue attention, they moved local to Dashwood’s own estate in West Wycombe — where the Lord de Despencer had constructed a veritable erotic, playful interpretation of Hades on — and under — Earth.

The hills around West Wycombe are soft chalk, ideal for tunneling — and that’s just what Sir Francis did. With his artistic and architectural eye he created a veritable maze of tunnels, underground rivers, chambers and gardens on his property, decorated with elaborate erotic sculptures, teasing portraits of the Knights of Wycombe (such as depicting Sir Francis with halo), and many small chambers for intercourse of both kinds. It was at Wycombe that the real Hellfire club began, a festive playground where the political, artistic, and intellectual elite of England met — engaging in dalliances with some of the most famous of London prostitutes. My favorite little jape of the society is that while it is pretty much incontrovertible that Ladies-of-Rentable-Virtue were present, it is also believed that — since both ‘Monks’ and ‘Nuns’ wore veils or masks, and identities kept very secret — lovers, wives, sisters, and daughters of other members were also there.

Now before you imagine (you filthy creature you!), English artists and intellectuals running around in a white-wig version of _Porky’s_, let me reassure you that while Eros was a major focus of the Knights, it was handled with grace and dignity — the Nuns could refuse any offer, or accept any offer, as they saw fit. It was a place of playful perversity, where free-thinkers could gather together to titter and mock the oppressive Jacobites and their domineering Pope. Rituals were held, yes, but with all the seriousness of rowdy jesters.

And what jesters they were — and this is what elevated the Amorous Knights of Wycombe to memorable heights. I’ve told you of Sir Francis, peer by day, Monk by night, but the other members — particularly the inner circle — shine with their own randy double-lives. Just listen to this litany of the famous and infamous who all took part in the elaborate games and fanciful parties in and under West Wycombe hill: The Earl of Sandwich (for whom the food was named), First Lord of the Admiralty; Thomas Potter, Paymaster-General, Treasurer for Ireland and son of the Archbishop of Canterbury; John Wilkes, MP, and Lord Mayor of London; Frederick, the Prince of Wales; Horace Walpole, Politician and author; Edmund Duffield and Timothy Shaw, the Vicars of Medmenham; Chevalier D’Eon de Beaumont, French diplomat; and — even possibly — our own bawdy intellectual, Benjamin Franklin. In addition to these noteworthies, West Wycombe also admitted the well-spoken rake or two, and some famous artists such as Giuseppe Borgnis, and Robert Lloyd.

Alas, nothing is forever — the tide turned, and when the now-Papal friendly popular opinion discovered the existence of our festive Monks, the scandal almost brought down the government with them. Even its own sense of nasty jape seem to have had a hand in the club’s fading. During one particularly intense mock black mass, ever-the-rogue John Wilkes took an ape, affixed it with a devil mask and released it during the service. The outrage was wonderfully hysterical — though telling that the Earl of Sandwich (said by many to be very ugly, and very ugly tempered) was said to have fallen to his knees and said, “Spare me, gracious devil. I am as yet but half a sinner. I never have been so wicked as I pretended!”

The last meeting took place in 1762, shaken by scandal, internal conflicts, the Monks simply fell apart. The caves fell into disrepair after the death of Dashwood, and soon the horror stories of the evil rites held there had hidden the truth; that it was once the festive and mocking domain of the Amorous Knights.

On a closing note, I have to relate one of my favorite events during the later part of the society. In a bitter hypocrisy after the foundering of the club, that disreputable Earl of Sandwich had the notorious wit John Wilkes on the stand — in no doubt an act of revenge. Proving himself beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was completely, utterly wicked, Sandwich belabored his previous fellow-monk until, in a fit of frustration at Wilke’s calm and witty rejoinders proclaimed, “Sir, you will either die on the gallows, or by the pox!”

To which, in a perfect closing to this tale of elegant mischief, Wilkes responded, without batting an eye: “That depends, Sir, on whether I embrace your principals — or your mistress.”

But in this festive afterlife there’s one form of theater that’s far more … well, unearthly. Its spirit is chaotic, infinitely changeable — an ethereal muse dressed in cardboard, pelts, or nothing at all, and its Saint is Samuel Beckett (with Godot ever waiting for his return), its king is UBU ROI, and its god is Alfred Jarry.

Not many have heard of the surrealist stage, but its safe to say that the French literati remember it well. After all, a massive riot breaking out after the premier or having fist fights erupt in the audience during the performance is not one of those things easily forgotten.

Its also a pretty darned good guarantee that anyone who knew the author of the play in question would have a hard time not remembering him. Jarry, after all, was damned close to being as surreal, as absurd, as his creations.

Born in Laval, Mayenne, France in 1873, Alfred quickly showed a precocious imagination. Terrorizing his teachers with his wit and satire, he immortalized one special professor in a very early draft of his — literally — riotous play UBU ROI at 15. Soon after, Jarry set out for Paris with big ambitions and a small inheritance.

In 19th century Europe, Paris was the place to be — and Jarry soon made his mark crafting various sequels to UBU and penning one of my own particular favorite novels: SUPERMALE, the story of a man who, after being fed a special scientific food, whoops a six man bicycle team and then accomplishes … well, shall we say some phenomenal erotic acts — until meeting his end in the clutches of an autoerotic mechanism

Jarry was an accomplished creator in many different forms: prints and lithographs, poetry, novels, and — of course — the theater. While all of his works are extraordinary, it is in front of the floodlights that Jarry truly shines. In fact, his first major production, created more than quite a stir — causing, as it did, the Great Parisian Critic Riot (or so I’ve dubbed it).

Paris, 1896: A theater packed with beret-wearing, croissant-eating, cigarette-smoking French intelligencia (as intelligencia as the French could get), journalists, and politicos all prepared for an evening’s entertainment — and what do they get? First, Jarry himself, dressed in his inimitable style: walking, moving like some kind of minuscule windup toy (Jarry is often referred to as a clockwork midget), in a loose-hanging dark suit, brilliantly white shirt, outrageously large bow tie, and with his black hair slicked back so severely as to look manufactured. First apologizing for the rough state of the production, Jarry then went into an over-long definition of his science of pataphysics (that has followers even today), concluding with the famous opening, “– as to the action that is about to begin, it takes place in Poland –that is to say, nowhere.”

Onto the stage stepped Fermin GÈmier (borrowed from another theater company) and uttered with conviction and bravado the opening line of, “MERDRE!”

Now to us jaded Americans, standing on a stage — or even a street corner — and merrily proclaiming “shit!” in as loud a voice as possible isn’t even gauche. For God’s sake, “crap” even shows up on prime-time these days. But this was 1896, this was Paris, this was France, and this was simply — my god — unheard of!

The theater was in turmoil — shouting, panicked exiting (handkerchiefs over mouths, suppressing vomit), a slug fest in the orchestra pit .. all delaying for at least half an hour the next line which was … well … “MERDRE!” again.

I imagine all this as a kind of Hal Roach production: a quiet theater, all gas lights and finery, the ladies waving their fans, the gentlemen looking cool and earnest … then the lights drop, the curtains part, and there is Jarry with his robotic mannerisms, his pedantic speech, and then there is the king himself, Ubu in his sackcloth vestments. The audience waits, breath held, for that first line — and then there it is. And with “Shit!” bellowed from in front of the footlights the crowd bursts into a chaotic fracas.

Ubu, and Jarry, had arrived — and the world, and particularly Paris, would never be the same again.

The riotous first performance of UBU ROI would pretty much have lapsed into average weirdness if not for the personal eccentricities of his creator. Ubu, after all, didn’t do that much except speaking in Jarry’s trademarked monotone, broken sentences, stand there and bellow “Merdre!” once and a while. Jarry, on the other hand, had idiosyncrasies for a whole orchestra of surreal characters.

Living in a garret whose ceiling was so low that visitors had to always crouch lest they give themselves lobotomies on the gaslights, Jarry took to writing on the walls — filling every available space with his surreal creations. While drinking was common, Jarry took alcohol from a recreational libation to the height of personal picklement — drinking non-stop from morning till late at night. Booze wasn’t the only thing that Jarry indulged in — a connoisseur of fine dinning, Jarry would either stroll down to the Seine and dangle his rod for his supper or take in one of the many Paris eateries. There, though, he habitually ate his meals backwards — dessert to main course to entree to salad to soup to appetizer to bread.

In the days when dressing was something a gentlemen took pride in, Jarry always wore his signature big suit, huge bow tie, and green umbrella (Ubu Roi’s badge of office) — and he was never without his favorite fashion accessories, antique pistols. Jarry must have been quite the sight, toddling around Paris with his mechanized walk and clipped, artificial voice (and always referring to himself in the third person) — ah, but don’t stand and stare too long: those pistols weren’t just for decoration, and the diminutive Jarry was well known for discharging them at odd moments and at no particular target.

Finally, though., this perfected surreal lifestyle took it’s toll, and on All Saints day, 1907 he passed away from alcoholism and tuberculosis, at only 34. His last words, absurd to the end, were “I want … I want … a toothpick!”

The lights are down, the seats vacant. The props put away, the actors asleep in their beds. The theater is quiet — save for the ghosts … and one particular one, the king of the surreal stage, who stands there each night and proclaims in a loud, spectral, voice: “MERDRE!”

Perhaps, though the real world is denied her, it feels her presence nonetheless: Do some stare at peanuts and feel the awe and laughter of unseen audiences? Do others feel the elusive memory of hot savannas, the coughing call of hungry lions? And some unfortunate few, do they feel the bite of links around their necks, the mass of great weight parting their noble spines, blanking the world of the living, passing them onto that other sphere of the dead?

This is all speculation — all fantasy and conjecture. Truth, I do not know if she prowls the spectral side of the town, have no idea if the residents feel her presence in cotton-candy, big top dreams of circuses, or African visions of the wild. Hypothesis and imagination, yes, but I do know one thing as an absolute certainty — wherever Big Mary resides, whatever she is doing now, as her fabled nature describes, she has never forgotten what the people of Erin Tennessee did to her.

Most obviously, it isn’t something the little town likes to be reminded of. In fact, I’ve heard, if you go poking around the railway yards, digging in slag pits and under massive pikes of old rail ties, the local citizens get rather uncomfortable, almost testy: they don’t want to be known as the town that lynched the elephant.

Still, that’s just what happened — and the bones of Big Mary are there somewhere.

1916 was a big year for hangings, especially in Tennessee. Strange fruit hung from a lot of trees — but none stranger than that other import from Africa.

A star of the Charlie Sparks World Famous Shows, Mary record — to be fair — was not exactly spotless. Some remember 18, others swear only two men had been killed by the African cow elephant. But whatever past raps may have been on her sheet, the cold hard fact remains that what was done to Mary was definitely unusual, and no doubt cruel.

Billed as “the largest living animal on earth” — claiming to be even bigger than P.T. Barnum’s Jumbo — Mary was the star of Sparks’ third-rate circus. In brilliant flybills, she was touted as being able to flawlessly play 25 tunes on musical horns, and even bat .400. Of the other pachyderm’s in the show, she was the stand-out favorite — a mammoth diva.

Which is why Sparks’ decision can still make people scratch their heads in wonder: If Mary was so valuable ($20,000 — not a small sum in those days) when why was she given Red Eldridge as a handler — a man who had just days before been a janitor in the nearby town of St. Paul, Virginia. Even discounting the wisdom of hindsight, it does seem extremely puzzling that Sparks should give control of a known-to-be-unpredictable elephant to a man who job history could best be described as ‘bum’. A divergent thought springs to mind, a Machiavellian knot of suspicion: A failing circus, a temperamental elephant, and a ‘disposable’ handler — nothing like putting down a murderous elephant for gobs of publicity.

It is without a doubt that Mary had a hand — er, ‘foot’ — in killing Eldridge. In this case there is no one-armed man, no figure on the grassy knoll. If we have to doubt the incident that took place in the town of Kingsport, Tennessee, it is not whether Mary murdered her handler, but rather the extenuation circumstances that led to it.

The exact turn of events are hazy, and in some cases conflicting, but they all converge and agree on some very firm points. Mary was being led to a pond near where the circus was camped to bathe with the other elephants, Eldridge — as usual — was poking Mary with his elephant stick, trying to get her to toe the line, when Mary struck at her handler. ‘Why’ is one of those cloudy issues: Was Mary in pain from an infected tooth? Did she simply have a bad day? My favorite theory is the most heartrending — that Mary had simply moved towards a discarded watermelon rind, and that Eldridge had prodded her savagely to get her back into line.

Keeping in mind the bias of the press towards this incident — even in 1916 people really didn’t want the doubt of lynching a basically innocent pachyderm — one of my favorite accounts is from the _Johnson City Staff_: “trunk vice-like about his body, lifted him 10 feet into the air, then dashed him with fury to the ground … and with the full force of her beastly fury is said to have sunk her giant tusks entirely through his body. The animal then trampled the dying form of Eldridge as if seeking a murderous triumph, then with a sudden … swing of her massive foot hurled his body into the crowd.”

No defense was offered for Mary; no jury of her peers deliberated the evidence, the circumstances; no judge passed sentence on her, seeking justice. Maybe Big Mary was guilty of the crime she’d been accused of, maybe there were explanations, more evidence that needed to be heard — or perhaps it was just a slow week, and the killing of an elephant was just the thing to liven things up a bit.

Her guilt, and her punishment, was taken for granted — Mary had to die, and it was as simple as that. But how do you kill a five ton elephant? It had been done before, and would be done again — by guns and even electrical by Thomas Edison, but this was Tennessee, damnit, … ‘and in these here parts we don’t take on this new-fangled way of doin’ things. Down here, we need to put a feller down, we just put a rope around his neck and do the job the old-fashioned way.’

Decided in good ol’ boy fashion, Mary was to die for her crime. Sparks, in a gesture of true compassion, didn’t make Big Mary perform the day she was killed — but he did guarantee mourners at her execution by making a huge announcement of the event, and offering attendance for the touching fee of zilch.

So Mary was taken to Erwin, and there she was chained by one leg to a rail directly beneath Derrick Car 1400 on September 13, 1916. The crane on the Derrick car was used for lifting locomotives free of their rails — and so it was thought it could handle the task of lynching Big Mary. 5,000 people crowded the rail yards that day, perhaps munching on the treats Mary had been given when she was the star of the show — or, to give an even bigger, bitter taste of irony, maybe some of slack-jawed yokels watched and ate sweet, sweet watermelon as Mary was prepared for death.

Like all really good executions, Mary’s was botched right at the start. A chain was looped around her neck, and from there to the boom of the derrick. The crowd was hushed, or maybe they just chanted “kill her” — whatever, quiet or bedlam, the end of Mary’s life was at hand. The signal was given, and the crane started to work. Slowly, ponderously, the African cow elephant was lifted … two feet off the ground, probably swinging furiously … three — then the sound of breaking bones, snapping ligaments — the roustabouts had failed to unchain her one leg from the rail.

Unusual? Definitely. Cruel? Her sentence had been to hang, not to be quartered. The chain, much too narrow of the job, snapped. She was smashed down onto creosote darkened ties, oil-fouled gravel. Screaming in pain — for her hip had been broken and one leg had been painfully wrenched — she thrashed around till one carnie, either stricken with conscience or seeing a chance to impress his buddies, climbed poor Mary like a minor, thrashing mountain, and attached another chain.

Then the sentence was successfully carried out: In pain, swinging her great legs, her mighty trunk, perhaps bellowing out a pitiful cry, the 10,000 pounds of Big Mary was hauled literally from this earth.

After she was dead, after the last citizen of Erwin, Tennessee had their fill of seeing her great body slowly swinging beneath the steel arm of Derrick Car 1400, Mary was finally lowered. Her tusks, it was said, were cut from her body. Her grave was then prepared — a massive pit somewhere out along the boxcars and rails, a vault for her gray remains.

A photograph of Mary was circulated sometime thereafter — and it is sadly true that while the means of her demise were never given much thought, the black and white evidence of her dangling beneath the crane was the cause of some bickering: of the hanging there could be no doubt, but was the photograph real?

Somewhere in the real yards of Erwin, Tennessee the bones of Big Mary rest — a sore point for the little town, a part of it’s history the residents would rather soon forget. But for Mary, wherever she is now, there is a certainty, an absolute that is definite despite all conjecture and oral history: Big Mary will never, ever forget.

“I don’t know, Mr. Bones, what WAS 16 feet high, moved at 35 miles-per-hour, and killed 21 people in 1919?”

“Well, before I tell ya, I’m going to first have to tell you about the sweet brown liquor called rum.”

No, before you ask, an elephant didn’t get smashed and went on a killing spree (though in another column I might talk about how Mary, a killer pachyderm, was lynched by a monster crane) — this is rather background on a certain gruesome catastrophe that, while unspeakably fatal, was also particularly — almost comically — unusual.

Not to blow the surprise, but if you happen to live in Boston, you might want to simply go onto the great fiction on this website. Your parents and grandparents have probably already spoken, with hushed seriousness, of this certain day — January 15, 1919 — though you may have replied, “Right, sure –”

Liquor has always been a big cash cow. It is with no exaggeration that businessmen have said that you can’t go broke investing in sin — and an almost guarantee big seller has always been alcohol. Cheap materials, easy to produce, high profit margin, and with addicted consumers, booze is a entrepreneur’s dream — especially in the years before 1919. But this WAS 1919, and a nightmare was lurking not too far away — a nightmare, that is, for those Americans who like a little sip now and again, and for the business that tried to meet that tipsy demand. In other words: Prohibition.

It was no wonder that the Purity Distilling Company of Boston, Massachusetts tried, before Prohibition went full-swing, to push the limits of their steam-heated, 2 million storage tank by — shall we say, ‘a bit too much’ — and subsequently caused what has been called one of the most bizarre industrial accidents in American history.

Okay, I won’t keep you waiting too long (god knows what people’s attention-spans have deteriorated down to — what with the intervention of the web, and all), the prime ingredient used in the manufacture of rum is good-old, slower-than-in-January, molasses.

So, ladies and gentlemen of cyberspace, I present to you: The Great Molasses flood.

In an irony only found in truth, this event really did take place during January — through, alas, an unusually warm January. Had the weather been a bit more typical, this really would have been a really comical flood — one in which the “victims” would have had time to notice the on-coming calamity, pack their things, move all their belongings, and maybe even have a leisurely meal, before the brown wall of molasses would have been anywhere near them.

But, as I said, the weather was anything but typical — forty three degrees, almost shirt-sleeve — a beautiful day in old Boston town. Women were doing their washing and cleaning, sailors were strolling the cobblestone streets, the Boston elevated railway (the EL) was clicking and clacking overhead, and, in general, it was a very typical morning.

And, also typical, the Purity Distilling company was going full-bore, just topping off its huge tank of steam heated, so as to flow better, molasses — but then, as we say in the parlance of the writer of “weird” columns, “something very un-typical” happened.

I’ve read several different accounts trying to pin down exactly happened that day, a bit before noon. They all agree, pretty much, on the cause and the culprit, but what’s funny is that they get a bit fuzzy in regards to what happened to that 2 million plus tank. Locals reported, at first, a banging and tapping sound, then the rivets holding the tank popped free (sending post-traumatic Doughboys diving for cover) and then “it” happened. Ranging from “explosion”, to “rupture”, to “implosion” the descriptions all agree on one definite fact — a little over two million gallons of warm, sticky molasses … well, how else can I put it? Got away –

Located at 529 Commercial Street, in the North End, the tank burst, sending huge hunks of steel whirling down into the town, and — way faster than one would expect from molasses in January — a wall of sticky doom rolled down into Boston.

It’s hard to think of flowing molasses as terrifying. I mean, seriously, go into your kitchen and get some. Go ahead … I’ll wait. Got it? Good, now open it up and pour it at your feet. Yeah, I know, this might take a while. You might want to catch up on some reading, do some housework … Geese, look at the dust on those cabinets. Still nothing? It’s just slowly creeping out? Well, you see what I mean — molasses just doesn’t make it onto the creepy scale. Okay, there’s a slight similarity to The Blob, but molasses won’t exactly put the fear of sugar into Steve McQueen. A diabetic, sure, but Steve McQueen? Hardly.

But as one of the prime tenements of horror goes, a little something might not be frightening, but a LOT of something is usually terrifying.

Brown, slow, sticky, sweet molasses — in 1919 — certainly was.

Steam-heated, and moving a LOT faster than one would normally expect, with a dull, muffled roar the brown goo surged out from the Purity Distilling company’s crumbling storage tank and rumbled down into Boston’s North End. Carrying along huge, jagged sections of the tank, the wall of molasses crushed trolley cars, swallowed trucks, horses and carts, and knocked buildings off their foundations. Flying debris from the tank smacked into, and crushed, a firehouse, trapping many inside and killing one.

Some of the tank, propelled by both the tank’s collapse and the surging brown terror, tore into the supports holding up the Atlantic Avenue elevated train, twisting and snapping the steel tresses and collapsing the track. A heroic motorman, seeing the wall of sticky doom roar into the supports and the rails ahead vanish into the cascading molasses, reacted with enviable cool — walking to the rear of the coach and reversing the engines, stopping the train from dropping off the tracks and into the molasses. After an experience like that, one can naturally wonder if any of those people, and that motorman in particular, developed hysterical diabetes or at least took their coffees less sweet.

The wall of sugary destruction continued on its path down into Boston, the 15 foot high roaring monster swallowing people, horses, and property — tearing apart buildings, turning clapboard into splinters, and brick walls into tumbling avalanches of shearing stone.

The greatest fatalities seemed to have been in a Public Works building, where a number of municipal employees were eating their lunch. The molasses slammed into the building, shattering it, and throwing fragments fifty yards further into the city. A second city building was similarly torn from its foundations, the tenement above collapsing into kindling.

Literally a tidal wave, the molasses swallowed dozens of people, rolling and crushing them under its brown mass. Dozens were critically injured by the debris picked up and carried by the sticky mess, while others were simply crushed to death by the heavy molasses.

Slowly, as the molasses began to congeal, it’s 35mph assault ebbed until it moved a bit more to nature — but by then it was too late for the 21 people killed by collapsing buildings, or swallowed by the fatal sugar, or the 150 others injured. Sailors from the anchored _Nantucket_ were the first to arrive, trying to pull survivors from the molasses, and giving aide where they could. Horses, their legs broken, screamed and thrashed in the sticky mess — silenced only after being put down by the pistols of the Boston police.

The clean-up of Boston was almost as surreal as the flood itself. Hoses were run from the harbor, and saltwater was used to try and clean up the mess. But saltwater and molasses were not a great mix, and soon the whole area was buried under a foaming brown mess.

Molasses is rather persistent stuff — sticky, staining, the town was covered with it for months. Anyone who had anything to deal with Boston felt its presence in some way — a brown stain, a street as sticky as a cinema floor, the pungent aroma of sugar hanging over the city like a nauseating glaze.

Unusual, certainly — fatal, most definitely, the Great Molasses Flood remains to this day one of my all-time favorite urban disasters. If anything, if proves that just about anything can be terrifying — and fatal — if you set enough of it moving fast enough. Oh, and there’s one other thing, about the Great Molasses Flood:

Never has death ever been so sweet.

Then comes the meal itself, a presentation worthy of a truly great showman. Perhaps the company is shocked silent, staring at the flesh with puzzlement and terror, gastronomic rebellion threatening even at the thought, let alone the taste, of what is offered. But our hosts simply laugh heartily, spear a succulent morsel and consume, what the other diners would consider unconsumable, with relish.

If what they say is true, that you are what you eat, then the Bucklands — father William Buckland and son, Francis Trevelyan Buckland — must have been composed of some very, well, ‘interesting’ stuff. Eating, you see, was more than just a predilection of the Bucklands: it was closer to an oral obsession.

In fact, compared to other extreme ‘individuals’, the Bucklands stand way out — more than anything for the audacity and surrealism of their diets. It would be easy to discount them as neurotics who, say, only ate foods of a certain color, or who took “scientific” dietary regimens of dubious repute to extremes — but the Bucklands, you see, weren’t any of that. It’s just best to say that the Bucklands had unusual tastes.

But like the best of the British eccentrics, the Bucklands look quite respectable when viewed via the blinders of the Royal register or Who’s Who. Between the two of them, they were responsible for London’s drains, deduced that glaciers had at one time covered Britain, put gas lighting in Oxford, and were geologists of no mean repute.

But it was in the area of eating that they truly divert.

William Buckland, for instance, said that until he ate a bluebottle fly, mole had been the most disgusting thing he had consumed.

A lot of things had passed the learned lips of William Buckland and his son Francis Trevelyan — so much so that it is a wonder that the zoos of England during their lives (the early and middle 1800’s) didn’t warily count their lions, zebra, elks, snakes, and emus each and every night, praying that another species hadn’t been gastonomically rendered extinct by this — consummately consuming — dynasty

Why the Bucklands chose to indulge these rather — excuse me, once again — tasty indulgences is pure conjecture. Oh, sure, they both had some rather elaborate mechanisms to explain their bizarre mastications. William Buckland, the father, for instance was the organizer of the Society for the Acclimatization of Animals in the United Kingdoms — which, aside from giving the very _Avengers_ like acronym A.A.U.K., gave him, and sometime thereafter his son, a wonderful excuse of importing new species to Britain to ease the food crisis to dine on such things as kangaroo, sea-slug, porpoise head, rhinoceros, earwigs, and (yes, you may shudder) a puppy.

The fact is that the Bucklands like to eat — so much so, and having such exotic tastes, that one would have to wonder if some of their dinner guests, aside from finding themselves facing — say — a plate of panther might also suffer the concernation, the terror of perhaps finding themselves as the next course: Filet of Bishop? Roast of Lord? Stew of Noble?

Without blowing the joke, rest assured that aside from one documented incident, the Buckland’s reserved their tastes to species other than their own — but that by no means limits their weirdness factor. Besides trying just about everything that waddled, slithered, trotted, hopped, crawled or any other form of animalian locomotion, the Bucklands also had opinions about what they consumed.

Aside from his distaste for bluebottle flies and mole, the senior Buckland also noted a lavish meal of crocodile was a wash, as were some of his more exotic dinners including mice on toast. His son also had his opinions, reserving horseflesh as one of the more disgusting things to have passed his lips — and considering the source, that is no mean feat. Though, as quoted Catherine Caufield’s indispensable _The Emperor of the United States of America and other Magnificent British Eccentrics_ ,he stated that, while not tasty, horses could easily be put towards other handy uses: “People who wish to have relics kept of favorite horses should have their ears preserved. They make nice holders for spills; the hoofs also make good inkstands; and the tails mounted on a stick as an excellent thing to kill flies.”

Francis Trevelyan was also a fan of living animals — though considering his diet it is safe to assume that when they joined the choir invisible there wasn’t much left to bury, whatever was left being mostly in the pantry. At one point, he had African mongooses, a South African river hog, a jackal, a raccoon, an eagle, a buzzard, and a bear. Walkies much have been quite the experience ….

To give an example of what the Buckland estate must have been like, a relative related the anecdote of stumbling over a soft object at the foot of the stairs one night. Upon further examination, she was rather amazed — as well as other emotions more obvious — to discover it was a dead baby hippopotamus. About her discovery, Francis could only scold: “You should be more careful. You might have damaged it. Hippopotamuses don’t grow on trees, you know.”

Even on his deathbed, the younger Buckland’s thoughts were on exotic fauna — a sentiment that must have brought the spirits of many an animal some consternation: “I think I shall see a great many curious animals.” And consume them, no doubt, with great spectral enthusiasm.

The senior Buckland’s knowledge of the animal kingdom often allowed him to perform some quite amazing Sherlockian analyses — though two distinct ones must have sincerely ennobled him to the Catholic church: while on honeymoon, Mr. and Mrs. Buckland visited a local shrine where, it was said, resided the bones of Saint Rosalia. One look it all it took for Buckland to loudly proclaim: “Those are the bones of a goat!”

Much later, both Bucklands were present at another miracle, the blood of a saint that were supposed to be appear fresh each morning on the floor of a cathedral. One sniff, one taste, was all it took for the elder to bellow out, “Bat urine!”

Safe to say that wherever William Buckland went after shaking himself free of this mortal coil could never been hot enough for the Pope.

The consummation of this quick look at the lives, and diet, of the remarkable Bucklands has to conclude with a story about the elder: the plates are empty, the wine is almost gone, the sherbet is a fading memory, cigars are looming … the meal is just about done.

But one last treat, one last morsel in a very rich and fulfilling life. Once William Buckland was visiting Edward Harcout, the Archbishop of York, an esoterica collector of some renown. Seems this Harcourt had been present during the Revolution and had managed to acquire a great prize — a trophy he kept in a special little velvet-lined case.

Shown this prize, Buckland could not resist: “I’ve eaten a great many things, but never the heart of a king” and with that he snatched up the embalmed heart of Louis XIV and swallowed it.

Bon appetite!