Down The Rabbit Hole, Featuring The Hells Angels and Padre Pio

Growing up, our house was like a chapel.  We had holy water stoups, statues of the saints, pictures of the saints, crucifixes, palm leaves, and holy cards galore. Dangling from the pull chain to the light over our washing machine was a devotional scapular of St. Francis

Like this only older and dirtier     

...which my mother might have worn. (She never said, and I didn't ask. I just dicked with it until the string broke, and then put it in the washer, and it got washed, and it shrunk.)

Mom was a walking library on things like the Stigmata, which is probably why she liked St. Francis, who was poked full of holes;  the Lactation of St. Benedict...

Yup. Just....yup.   

...weeping statues, bleeding paintings, weeping crucifixes, weeping and bleeding statues, crucifixes and paintings, The Devils Nun, (also comprehensively perforated, poor woman) and other mysteries of Catholicism that involved the secretion of fluids for no good reason. That's why she was one of the early devotees of Padre Pio.

 Padre Pio was a priest who had been granted the Holy Stigmata.  

Starring Shia LaBoeff.  No shit. I'm not even Catholic anymore and I'm ashamed.   

This dude was the whole enchilada. He had the the Marks of the Scourge, the Mark of the Holy Cross, the Scars of the Crown of Thorns, the Wound of Longinus, and the Wounds of the Nails.  No, not Shia LaBoeff. Padre Pio. Keep up.

No,w bleeding and crying and secreting scented oils are not strictly the domain of Catholics and their belongings.  My grandmother told a story of a tintype of the deceased that wept.  And that sounds like a typical florid Victorian notion, doesn't it? Ghoulish and romantic at the same time, with a little folklore thrown in.

Thinking about this, I remembered a story I'd read in Easyriders Magazine (it could have been another publication. It was awhile ago.)  It was the story of the painting of Lovely Larry, which I thought was the original of a poster that was pretty popular in the late 1960s, which I cannot find to save my life, although I've come close.

OK. See the guy in the middle with the helmet, round glasses and striped shirt?  That dude was the only image on the poster, which I remember seeing for sale in 1968-71.  Can't find it for sour birdshit nowadays, though.  And it's not Lovely Larry. It's Frank Sedilek. This whole line of thought makes sense to me.
  

The story goes, LL's wrecked motorcycle had gotten lost after his death.  One of the ol' ladies was a bruja, and she said that she had spirit guidance from LL telling her the location of the motorcycle and hoping that it would be repaired and run again - and sure enough, she was right! There it was in some random dudes' hall closet.  It was brought out and re-built...and on that very day, the painting of Lovely Larry in the Hells Angels clubhouse had tears running down its face.

I looked up bleeding paintings, because why the hell not.  And by gosh I found a weeping painting. 

Of Willie Nelson.

Our Willie Nelson painting is bleeding. Haunted or nah? #scary #haunte... | TikTok

Oddly, it's on Japanese TikTok. I have no idea why Japanese people would be interested in a crying picture of Willie Nelson but there you go.

  

-I also found the story of a bacterium that can produce bleeding polenta.  BLEEDING FREAKIN' POLENTA PEOPLE. Can you imagine? You want to have a nice polenta and Oh Damn No That Shit Is Bleeding.

-The UK gives us this little menace:  The Inflammable Crying Boy. 

Which as far as I'm concerned is a sight better, artistically speaking, than a Keene Crying Kid picture. I mean honestly, who wants a picture of a crying kid?  

,,,my goofy teenage cousin Theresa, that's who. She had a roomful of the things     

Anyway, back to the UK crying boy picture.

   

Apparently if you have this thing hanging on the wall your house will burn down, and only this mysterious picture of the Crying Boy will remain, undamaged amid the smoking pyre of your former belongings.  So, like, Jon?  You and Arcati sweep the premises, OK? If you find one of these fuckin' things, GET RID OF IT.

- All over ancient Greece and Rome were statues that rambled around, made faces, wept, bled, spoke, and sweated. And nobody thought a thing of it. Apparently, that's what statues did, and you put up with it.  (I for one would be kind of grossed out by a sweaty statue.  I'd go next door to visit the one that wasn't sweaty.)  The statue of Apollo at Cumae cried a lot. You had to kill and animal and take a good look at it's liver to find out why.

Not like you'd know it from this happy scamp.  Of course he was holding a spear originally, so maybe he was happy about whatever he was about to stab. Or maybe he was going to test a cake for doneness. I don't know.  What I do know is Apollo loves to run around with his junk hanging out, which seems like it would have been distracting.

-Well what do you know. There is a statue of Buddha that moves and blinks and stuff. This guy is super excited about it.

I figured the Buddha for a contemplative kind of fellow. Apparently he likes to mess with his followers occasionally. Quelle surprise.

-In Atlanta, there is a freakin' Bleeding House.  Naturally, they tell you about all the photographs of the place with blood all over, geysering from the bathroom floor, running down the walls, just a mess - but do they show them?  NO.  Of course they don't.

I really hate this.  Always you hear about photographs taken of the really good places, like the Snedeker House for example, and yet nobody ever pops up with the things. And that Snedeker house, man, everything was going on there, from poltergeist activity, to a little ghost boy running around in Batman pajamas, to acts of sodomy performed by a pterodactyl-demon, which I for one would definitely have tried to catch on film. John Zaffis (paranormal investigator, on hand at the Snedeker house, along with his aunt and uncle Ed and Elaine Warren) even says there's pictures - and video! DAMMIT ZAFFIS PUBLISH THEM ALREADY or don't you have bills to pay? Shit or get off the paranormal pot already.

The book about this haunting, In A Dark Place, is pretty thrilling.  However, I have the same problem with the story that reviewer Michael from Goodreads has:

"And that's my problem with stories like these, of which I've read hundreds: no one ever seems to suspect that something supernatural is occurring until far too late. Seriously: I'd hear a menacing, disembodied voice exactly one time before I'd think, "Hmmm...I live in a funeral home. There are cold spots. It feels clammy. It's always dim. Maybe, just maybe..." The other thing I found frustrating was the family's seeming inability to tell each other what was taking place. Again, if our bed was vibrating, and Julie (my wife) was hearing tinny music, laughing voices, and footsteps moving through our hallway, I suspect she might mention it to me. Like, at the top of her voice the instant it happened. And—this is just me; not to be judgmental or anything—were I sodomized by a demon, I wouldn’t then worry about how expensive moving is. It would become a bit of a priority in my life to, you know, leave. Right. Then."

Well, that rounds it up.  What you need to take away from this is that there may or may not be inanimate objects out there that scream, pee, write bad checks and drive fast cars. You never know. Check your sofa. See if it screams.

AND HAVE YOUR CAMERA ON HAND DAMMIT.