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Exciting, New Feature!

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Blogs are often soapboxes for their authors’ viewpoints. While there is nothing inherently wrong with that, the blog may become little more than navel-gazing, the sound of one hand clapping, if the author is not careful.
My intention in this blog has been to bring to my readers new information about metaphysical locations from all around the world. While I will continue down that path, I have decided to also branch out onto other paths, exploring metaphysical practices and beliefs; personalities and events. To make sure that I cover these areas effectively, I will be hosting guest blogs on this site in addition to my own. I hope you find this new approach to be an interesting one; leave a comment and let me know what you think.

I am pleased to report that C.M. Mayo will be my first guest blogger. I have known her and her work for many years and I’m sure her blog will fascinate you. Here’s a little bit about her:
C.M. Mayo is the author of the novel The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, which was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by Library Journal. She is also author of the widely-lauded travel memoir, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico, and Sky Over El Nido (one of my favorite books), which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

Founding editor of Tameme, the bilingual Spanish/English) chapbook press, Mayo is also a translator of contemporary Mexican poetry and fiction. Her anthology of Mexican fiction in translation, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, was published by Whereabouts Press in March 2006.
I could fill this blog with all of C.M. Mayo’s awards and accomplishments but instead, I’ll refer you to her Website at www.cmmayo.com  where you can read it all for yourself.
Without revealing too much about her upcoming blog on this site, I can say that C.M. has recently translated Francisco I. Madero’s Spiritist Manualfrom Spanish into English. Madero was the leader of Mexico’s Revolution of1910 and became that country’s president. But he also had a life-long fascination with Spiritism.
Table-tipping anyone? Stay tuned for C.M. Mayo’s intriguing blog!

The Dudleytown Curse – Part II

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My first visit to Dudleytown occurred at least twenty years ago, in a time when cameras were still using something called “film.” I had gone there to do some research on an historical piece I was writing. Jay Baca, a frequent visitor to Dudleytown, served as my guide. We were the only two people on the mountain. Although it was a beautiful and sunny summer day, the deep woods cast cool shadows over the crumbling stone walls and cellar holes of ruined houses. The woods were eerily quiet; not a single bird sang.
I took many pictures of the old walls, cellars and wells, all overgrown with thick vegetation. In one cellar hole I discovered a broken Ouija board and felt a shiver course through my spine. I left the board there.
After I returned home and developed my film, I was shocked to discover what looked like a face peering at me from one of the cellar holes. Colored like the vegetation, it resembled a “Green Man.” Thinking I was looking at a pattern of leaves and bushes that just happened to resemble a face, I enlarged the photo. The face became only more distinct. That’s when I called Ed and Lorraine Warren—America’s godfather and godmother of ghost hunting—and told them what I had found.
I lived in the same Connecticut town as the Warrens and they invited me to bring my photos to their home. They examined the photos and said that I had captured some kind of anomaly, but they were not all surprised and proceeded to haul out a collection of scores of photos they had taken at Dudleytown, each of them marked by unrecognizable streaks, blurs, and various colors, all of which they said had paranormal origins.
Over the years many people have explored Dudleytown and have felt unexplainable chills and cold spots and have captured photographic anomalies. There have also been reports of satanic rituals taking place there, although that has not been verified (but I do wonder about that Ouija board I found there so long ago).
Dudleytown is located on private property and the police routinely roust out trespassers so it’s not an easy place to visit today. Still, its legends—and maybe its ghosts—still linger. Sharp in my mind, their stories are the inspiration behind my paranormal novella, Dark Entry, available as an e-book on Amazon.com. Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Entry-ebook/dp/B008OZEWTS/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1346003398&sr=1-1&keywords=dark+entry

The Dudleytown Curse – Part I

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Tucked up in the hills of northwestern Connecticut is a ghost town called Dudleytown. Settled in the eighteenth-century the hamlet’s history is rife with stories of Indian massacres, murder, suicide, fatal accidents, disappearances, and insanity. So much mysterious calamity plagued Dudleytown—also nicknamed Dark Entry—that by the nineteenth-century the settlement had been abandoned. Today, all that remains of Dudleytown are crumbling stone walls, cellar holes and a few foundations, all hidden in the deep, dark woods.
Some people think that Dudleytown’s trials and tribulations could be directly tied to a curse that followed the Dudley family. Before any Dudleys came to America, two of them had already lost their heads to the executioner’s axe in Merry Old England. Edmund Dudley was executed in 1510 for supporting a plot to overthrow King Henry VIII—who seemed to be quite fond of beheading people. Like father, like son, as John, Edmund’s son, also went to the chopping block years later for again trying to overthrow the crown. Finally getting the message, John Dudley’s son Robert fled England. Eventually, the Dudleys arrived in America. Joseph Dudley was born in Saybrook, Connecticut in 1674 and it was three of his sons that brought property in the hills of Cornwall that became known as Dudleytown.
Other settlers followed the Dudleys into the woods and it wasn’t long before tragedies began falling upon them like autumn leaves. Some Dudleytown residents died at the hands of Indians during the French and Indian War. In 1774, an epidemic wiped out an entire family named Carter. Another Carter family, relatives, moved to upstate New York, devastated by the loss of their kin. There, Indians tomahawked to death the head of the family, Nathaniel Carter, as well as his wife and infant; the Indians kidnapped the other three Carter children and brought them to Canada.
In 1804, a Revolutionary War veteran, General Herman Swift, went insane when lightning struck and killed his wife Sarah as she stood on their front porch. In 1872, Mary Cheney, the wife of the famous journalist Horace Greely, killed herself; she had been born in Dudleytown.
Toward the end of the nineteenth-century few residents remained in Dudleytown, but the curse of the Dudleys was still at work. After John Brophy’s wife died of consumption (tuberculosis), his two children disappeared into the woods. Brophy then set fire to his house, burning it to the ground, and walked away from Dudleytown; he was never heard from again.
In 1920, Dr.William Clark from New York City built a summer home in the now abandoned Dudleytown. With some friends he established the Dark Entry Forest Association with the intent of maintaining the former settlement and woods as a nature preserve. A few years later, Dr. Clark was called to the city on an emergency, leaving his wife alone at their house in Dudleytown. When he returned home, he found his wife cowering in a corner. She had gone insane and spent the rest of her life in a mental asylum. No one knows what happened to her but some people say that “something” from the forest attacked her.
Today, Dudleytown remains part of the Dark Entry preserve. It is private property and trespassers are prosecuted. Yet, the curious continue to sneak into the woods to find evidence of the Dudleytown curse . . . or worse.
Stay tuned to find out what they have discovered.