Da-das That Time Forgot

Even werewolf da-das eventually discover their feminine side.

The Wolf of Allendale/Hexham Skull Mystery Gets Weirder (And Maybe a Bit More Ancient?)

Drop that cup!

Like spooky skulls, the number 72 pops up in all world myths, myths being ancient mnemonic devices for teaching and remembering all sorts of astronomical thingies (e.g., it takes 72 years for the earth to turn through 1 degree of arc; 12 houses of the zodiac, each a 30 degree chunk of sky associated with a specific constellation, the gestalt used to describe The Precession of the Equinoxes, etc.). This all makes sense.

Anyway, since it's 72 days till Halloween, Da-da thought it high time for some long-winded spooky somnium that doesn't make any sense at all. This is what Da-da's all about.

Da-da recently (re)discovered the story of  The Wolf of Allendale/The Hexham Heads on Lon Strickler's blog, Phantoms and Monsters, which gets plain weird when you get to what happened in 1972 (72 again!):

Bizarre Hexhamshire: The Wolf of Allendale / The Hexham Heads

In February, 1972 the Robson boys were weeding their parent's garden not 10 minutes walk from where the 'Wolf of Allendale' stalked the woods. The pair soon unearthed two carved stone heads both about the size of tennis balls. A few nights after the discovery, neighbour Ellen Dodd was sitting up late with her daughter when both of them saw what they described as a 'half-man/half-beast' enter the bedroom. Although both mother and daughter screamed in terror, the creature seemed disinterested and walked off down the stairs. It was heard to be 'padding down the stairs as if on its hind legs', and the front door was later found open.



Dr. Anne Ross took an interest in the apparently Celtic carved stone heads and took possession of the Hexham pair. She had several others that were similar and wanted to compare them, believing these were at least 2000 years old. Dr. Ross lived and worked in Southampton at the time, and had heard nothing of the strange goings-on and apparent return of the 'Wolf of Allendale' associated with the carved heads. A few nights later at around 2.00am, she woke from sleep feeling cold and frightened. Looking up she saw a strange figure in the doorway of her bedroom. She later stated:

It was about six feet high, slightly stooping, and it was black, against the white door, and it was half animal and half man. The upper part, I would have said, was a wolf, and the lower part was human and, I would have again said, that it was covered with a kind of black, very dark fur. It went out and I just saw it clearly, and then it disappeared, and something made me run after it, a thing I wouldn't normally have done, but I felt compelled to run after it. I got out of bed and I ran, and I could hear it going down the stairs, then it disappeared towards the back of the house.

Dr. Ross simply dismiss the event as a nightmare, but when she later returned home with her husband, archaeologist Richard Feacham, they found their teenage daughter, Berenice, distraught and in tears. After some coaxing she managed to explain the reason for her state, and Anne suddenly realized that she had not been dreaming the night before. As Berenice later told, she had returned to the empty house at 4.00pm. As it opened the front door she saw a large shape rushing down the stairs toward her. Halfway down, the thing suddenly stopped and vaulted the banisters, landing with a soft thud like a heavy animal with thickly padded feet.

Dr.Ross decided that the stone heads were the source of the problem, and promptly disposed of her whole collection. The Hexham finds were soon passed into the hands of other collectors, including the British Museum, where they were displayed to the public for a short time until reports of eerie occurrences forced them into storage.

Reportedly, the stone heads were examined at Southampton and Newcastle Universities for proof of their age. Chemist Dr. Don Robins noticed that the stone heads contained a large amount of quartz, therefore hypothesizing that they were somehow storing energy. The heads were later buried in an undisclosed location however, this resulted in unusual goings on in the area of the burial. Now the heads seem to have disappeared without a trace. These artifacts have disappeared from public knowledge and their current whereabouts are unknown.

Spooky. Anyway, Da-da had read about this latter account from 1972 -- 72 again, spooky! -- but had never seen any of the skulls involved, until now. He recognized them as being perhaps part of the ancient game of Noughts & Crosses, otherwise known as Tic Tac Toe, played as far back as the Ancient Egyptians (and who knows where they got it -- it's OLD):

Noughts & Crosses, aka Tic-Tac-Toe.

Look familiar? Those heads the two boys found in Hexham could be part of an Egyptian Noughts & Crosses game. It's been Da-da's pet theory for years that the Ancient Egyptians had some involvement with the ancient, prehistoric British Isles (besides similar symbolism, some even boast Egyptian place names, like the Pharaoh's/Faros Islands, the SET-LAND/Shetland Islands, etc.).

But so what, big deal. What has all this to do with little crystaline skulls and multiple freaking werewolf manifestations (not to mention the mechanism of how one conjures the other)? Well... could THIS be what the above witnesses were seeing...

Boo!

...Anubis, Egyptian god of the dead, Egypt's oldest god? (Not The Grateful Dead, that's a whole other dog-headed god entirely.) He's admittedly a bit too civilized here, so let's picture him a little coarser and hairier and more powerful, like this from artist, Ramy Magdy:

"RRARG, I'm runnin' down your stairs, fools! Boo!"

Not sure why this be the case, but Da-da's just here to point out patterns. As Da-da has said many times, being A Man Called Da-da -- and living in a haunted house -- has prepared him for accepting all sorts of bizarro events (weird diaper changes, projectile vomiting, small child levitation, bigfoot in the shower, etc.), so he takes all this stuff at face value. Of course, it really doesn't matter, but if you're digging in your garden in the British Isles and you uncover some little skulls, or an ancient noughts & crosses/tic-tac-toe board, you might wanna just box them up and send them to the Queen. She LOVES werewolves, being one herself; here she is, getting ready to transform:

We are SO not amused. And we are SO going to rip your throat out with our fangs and claws.

That Werewolf Look of Parenthood

Time for bed, time for bed, time for bed, time for BED, TIME FOR BWWARRGGRRRGRGG!

Da-da's OTHER Secret Burger Recipe of HORROR

A great cheeseburger would really help right about now.

Da-da's OTHER Secret Burger Recipe of HORROR (here's is the first one) isn't that secret or horrifying, but if you smear it all over your face and stumble down the street moaning, you might serve as a serviceable zombie... which won't keep you from getting sucked into that pesky vortex. What? That's right, Da-da's talkin' 'bout Labor Day. Speaking of barely tenable workaday segues, your best Labor Day zombie burger experience will have as ingredients some or all of the things you normally put on the exterior of your burger, like ketchup, mustard, wombats, adamantine steel, etc. Many places use this simple recipe, though adamantine steel is only available from select wolverines, and even then, it's a tough harvest.

Da-da was reminded of all this while trapped in a possessed evil dead cabin in the woods over the summer, though mostly because he planned poorly and found he had NONE of his regular Da-da Burger ingredients. (Not having shallots or Dijon was the real horror, seconded only by Da-da's electric scalp massager gaining consciousness.) Trumping that, the giant mosquitos, 90-degree heat and bleeding floor boards, this impromptu burger recipe really helped. It seems overly simple, but works well.

Da-da's OTHER Secret Burger Recipe of HORROR

4 lbs ground beef

1/2 onion, minced

2-3 T. yellow mustard

4 T. ketchup
dash of garlic powder

S&P

Mix with your hands and squish until homogenous. (Da-da loves that sentence.) Form into patties and dust with a little garlic powder, S&P and GRILL, grill like THE WIND. Even zombies will think twice about eating you if you've got a Da-da Cheeseburger in your gnarled paw.

So, what do werewolves, burgers and Labor Day have to do with one another? [spooky music UP] Da-da's pretty sure you're about to find out.

Labor Day and werewolves and cheeseburgers go together like ham and ster.