Blog Archives for November 2012

“Lincoln” (A Nickell-odeon Review)

Investigative Briefs with Joe Nickell
November 26, 2012

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is a masterful recreation of the Civil War president and the efforts that led to the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (ratified December 6, 1865), abolishing slavery.

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Bell Witch Cave

Investigative Briefs with Joe Nickell
November 21, 2012

As a sidelight to the excellent 2012 CSIcon event in Nashville, I was able to make an excursion on October 27 to Tennessee’s “haunted” Bell Witch Cave with a favorite co-investigator, Vaughn Rees (who drove to the conference from his home in Ensenada, Mexico!).

Old Anti-Catholic Hoax Continues

Investigative Briefs with Joe Nickell
November 14, 2012

Recently, I bought an intriguing book in an antique shop: Maria Monk: Secrets of the Black Nunnery Revealed. It was undated but was obviously a reprint of an older volume. Purportedly, in the 1830s, the author escaped from a Montreal convent where priests entered through a secret tunnel to have sexual relations with the defenseless nuns. If a child resulted, the infant was baptized, strangled, and thrown into a basement lime pit (Monk n.d., 130–31). Pregnant herself, Monk escaped to have her baby and pen the tell-all tale. Or so she claimed.

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Remembering Paul Kurtz

Investigative Briefs with Joe Nickell
November 08, 2012

Here is my elegiac tribute to Paul Kurtz (1925–2012), the founder of the worldwide skeptics movement.

HORROR-SCOPE FOR SKEPTICS

Investigative Briefs with Joe Nickell
November 06, 2012

This incorporates the very latest in astro-illogical forecasting by Nickell-o the Seer.

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