All posts tagged: Haunted

Adele’s ‘haunted house’ claim scares off buyers of her old £6m mansion, says owner

Adele’s ‘haunted house’ claim scares off buyers of her old £6m mansion, says owner

Published by skeptic

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Typically, when a starry celebrity has lived in a home that comes up for sale, their very association with the property can add to its appeal for a potential buyer. However, this is far from the case concerning the £6 million country mansion Lock House in West Sussex, which Adele once lived in for six months, and according to the owner, scared off future buyers by saying it was haunted. The owner, Nicholas Sutton, has claimed in a planning statement that he has struggled to sell the Grade II listed house and is currently seeking permission to turn the ten-bedroom property into apartments instead because Adele made the home “unsellable”. The award-winning “Rolling in the Deep” musician appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2012 …

‘Haunted, Haunted’

‘Haunted, Haunted’

Published by skeptic

At eighty-one, the British filmmaker Mike Leigh shows few signs of wanting to retire so long as he can find funding for his projects. This has always been a tricky business because of his working method: he never has a script to show potential investors and often doesn’t even know what a movie will be […] Source link

Surrounded by Fighters and Haunted by Famine, Sudan City Fears Worst

Surrounded by Fighters and Haunted by Famine, Sudan City Fears Worst

Published by Sam

Fears of renewed ethnic slaughter in the Sudanese region of Darfur, where genocidal violence killed as many as 300,000 people two decades ago, have soared in recent days, with a looming assault on an embattled city that is already threatened by famine. The contest for control of El Fasher, the last city held by Sudan’s military in Darfur, has prompted alarmed warnings from American and United Nations officials who fear that mass bloodshed may be imminent. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations, told reporters on Monday that the city was “on the precipice of a large-scale massacre.” El Fasher is the latest flashpoint in a year-old civil war between Sudan’s military and the Rapid Support Forces, a powerful paramilitary group that the military once nurtured and is now its bitter rival for power. The conflict has devastated one of Africa’s largest countries and created a vast humanitarian crisis that U.N. officials say is one of the biggest in decades. The crisis also brings a sharp focus on the role of foreign powers …

A ‘cold-blooded killer’ called Smiley haunted L.A. How he finally faced justice

A ‘cold-blooded killer’ called Smiley haunted L.A. How he finally faced justice

Published by skeptic

The killer nicknamed Smiley sat in the last row of an Alaska Airlines jet, barreling toward Los Angeles and his past. During 14 years on the run, Jose Luis Saenz had cast a shadow over his old Boyle Heights neighborhood. He vanished after his first alleged murder in 1998. An informant warned that Saenz would keep killing until he was caught. He resurfaced on the Whittier doorstep of a man who’d lost more than half a million dollars in drug money. Police found the man shot to death in his front yard. After Saenz disappeared again, informants dished rumors: He was in Mexico, freelancing for drug cartels. He was in Guatemala, then El Salvador, slipping across borders to party at nightclubs in Los Angeles or visit one victim’s grave. Jose Saenz was first sent to prison in 1996. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) Arrested in Mexico, he sat on the Alaska Airlines flight in handcuffs, escorted by FBI agents to a city that had changed profoundly in his absence. By the time he stood …

A Haunted Discord Server Is the Last Good Place Online

A Haunted Discord Server Is the Last Good Place Online

Published by skeptic

In a charming game called This Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server that has been reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of (chat) rooms where each player takes the role of either an eponymous spirit or a paranormal investigator. Each character has a secret motivation, chosen at the start of the game: For investigators, their secret is the reason they are in the house; for ghosts, it’s what pins their shade to the mortal realm. Your MO is not to win but to “give away the game,” as the very purple game manual states. That means figuring out a way to communicate your secret to the other team. The problem is, you’re not allowed to just say it. Ghosts can interact with the game only via text-based chat. They can type descriptions of their hauntings, share images and GIFs, link to songs and videos, and add new rooms to the house. Meanwhile, investigators are confined to Discord’s voice call …

MJ the Musical review: Dark and dazzling production exposes singer’s late career for the haunted circus it was

MJ the Musical review: Dark and dazzling production exposes singer’s late career for the haunted circus it was

Published by Sam

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails There’s something nightmarish about the spectacle of Michael Jackson being endlessly, profitably exhumed by his estate: hologram appearances, posthumous albums, a forthcoming biopic, and now this fourth stage show about his life (following the West End’s Thriller Live, and two Cirque du Soleil extravaganzas). But miraculously, MJ the Musical doesn’t feel like just another cash grab – and that’s all thanks to the formidable writing muscle of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage (Sweat, Clyde’s), who exposes Jackson’s late career for the haunted circus it was. Admittedly, the production doesn’t directly tackle the paedophilia accusations – two sexual abuse lawsuits against the musician are currently making their way, albeit very slowly, through the courts – and perhaps a musical could never tackle the legal and moral complexities of discussing them. But Nottage’s portrait of Jackson, which follows the singer in rehearsals for his wildly extravagant 1992 Dangerous tour, never depicts …

Why Is the Slack Hold Music So Haunted and So Good?

Why Is the Slack Hold Music So Haunted and So Good?

Published by skeptic

When Danny Simmons finished his first Slack Huddle, the same thing happened to him as did me: He didn’t hang up, the music faded in, and he went hunting for the source. Only he wasn’t looking for a random auto-playing browser tab. He was trying to figure out how a long-ago basement recording session from his old house in Toronto was piping into his ears. Simmons is a lanky sound designer and—I truly didn’t see this coming—a mainly bluegrass musician based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He and Butterfield met back in college, when they were both in a band called Tall Guy Short Guy. (“I came in to replace the tall guy,” Simmons explains.) After graduation, Simmons became a gigging musician and Butterfield embarked on a failed career as a video game designer. Except Butterfield had a funny way of failing. He kept trying to build games and then accidentally building the internet instead. His first, Game Neverending, never ended up making much money but did include an infrastructure for sharing photos that became the …

The haunted faces of Jess Valice arrive at Almine Rech

The haunted faces of Jess Valice arrive at Almine Rech

Published by skeptic

The figurative painter, 27, lands her first solo show at the New York gallery.  A figure with exaggerated hands and feet saunters against a Dalí-esque landscape. A woman donning an afterthought of a dress cradles a goldfish bowl, her eyes expressive but the bags under them more so. People with ears the size of their face. Women, perpetually unimpressed. The figurative style of Jess Valice, a fast-rising Los Angeles–based artist making her Almine Rech solo debut (March 7–Apr. 20), has drifted in the five years she’s been working professionally. Sometimes her subjects’ exaggerated features swing towards Surrealism, only to swing back again towards more conventional Mannerist portraiture. What haven’t changed, however, are their expressions: stoic, impenetrable, flat. “I think the exaggerated features I made in the past [explored] my interest in abstraction whilst being consistently focused on the figure. However, I still refuse to include facial expression,” Valice tells ARTnews. Photo Courtesy of Almine Rech Contradictorily, the emotionless expressions of Valice’s figures heightens the emotional freight of her work. Viewers tend to project their own …

Fate of precious Henry VIII stained glass in dispute as ‘haunted house’ auction halted at last minute | Heritage

Fate of precious Henry VIII stained glass in dispute as ‘haunted house’ auction halted at last minute | Heritage

Published by skeptic

The fate of precious Tudor stained glass marking the union of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn is in dispute after its last-minute withdrawal from a private auction, the Observer has learned. Urgent intervention by conservationists prevented the sale of English glasswork “of exceptional importance”, including a window made in the 1530s as well as older ­medieval glass. The windows were hanging in a 16th-century Dorset manor and were destined for a private contents auction until spotted listed alongside vintage furniture and china. The rare stained glass lots were pulled from the bidding after a visit from Historic England and on the advice of the local council’s conservation officers. The roundels of heraldic glass have remarkable historic and cultural significance, according to experts, but were to have been auctioned in a clearance ahead of the sale of the whole of Sandford Orcas, a Grade I-listed building and a popular candidate for the title of England’s “most haunted house”. On a site visit Dorset Council officers “noticed historic stained-glass roundels and a coat of arms had been removed, despite both these …