Original subtitles

Shocking injuries...

that mirror the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

A deadly disease

which begins with uncontrollable laughter.

And harmful devices implanted into the human body

by extraterrestrials.

Throughout history, tales of inexplicable maladies

to both the body and the mind

have stirred morbid curiosity and palpable fear.

From mysterious wounds that appear

for no apparent reason

to a peculiar madness that compels people

to dance themselves to death,

are these bizarre afflictions

merely fabrications of the mind?

Or could they arise

from unseen forces

that are beyond our comprehension?

Well, that is what we’ll try and find out.

Every spring, billions of Christians all over the world

gather to observe a solemn day of reverence called Good Friday.

According to Christian tradition,

Good Friday commemorates

the Crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ.

This sacred practice has been performed

for nearly 2,000 years

and involves attending mass,

the veneration of the cross,

and elaborate processions.

While Good Friday is a somber occasion,

the Crucifixion is a pivotal event

that is at the heart of Christianity.

When you look at the spirituality

of the Christian faith,

the Crucifixion of Jesus is not only a tragedy of death,

it’s a sign of the sufferings of Jesus.

When we think of the Crucifixion today,

we think of Jesus’ wounds when he was crucified,

which includes the holes in the hands,

in the feet, in the side,

we think of the crown of thorns.

So, there are lots of different, types of wounds.

It reminds us of what Jesus suffered for us.

The Crucifixion is clearly a profound cornerstone

of the Christian faith.

But curiously, for centuries,

people have suffered from a rare and disturbing condition

that is connected to the death of Jesus Christ.

This bizarre affliction is known

as stigmata.

Stigmata occurs when an individual

is marked in a physical way

that represents the wounds

that Christ suffered on the cross.

Most commonly, stigmata happens

in what is referred to as the five wounds of Christ,

which is two in the hands,

two in the feet, and one on the side.

Since the Middle Ages,

there have been untold thousands of cases.

In the strictest terms, stigmata,

although they do involve physical suffering,

are considered a blessing, a privilege.

It’s almost as if the stricken individual

is bearing a holy or divine burden.

How can wounds that mirror those of Jesus Christ

inexplicably appear on ordinary people?

It seems to defy all logic.

But perhaps clues about this phenomenon

can be found by examining

the first documented instance of stigmata.

The first recorded case of stigmata

occurred with St. Francis of Assisi in 1224.

St. Francis went to the mountains of La Verna

to meditate and to pray.

And then suddenly Francis had a vision of a seraphim.

A seraphim is a particular kind of angel,

a fiery angel with six wings.

And the seraphim held in his possession the crucifix.

His wings were wrapped around Jesus on the cross.

And from this crucifix, this image of Jesus,

came forth these rays,

and these rays penetrated Francis

in the form of stigmata.

Francis’ stigmata was incredibly intense.

Nothing like this had ever happened before.

And not only did he have wounds

that were openly bleeding on his hands,

Francis was quite ill after he received the stigmata,

and he died two years later.

Every day of those two years, he did, in fact,

suffer with stigmata.

Accounts of stigmata are both fascinating

and deeply unsettling.

For many Christians,

they are proof of divine forces at work in our world.

But many experts are skeptical

and insist that stigmata

must have a scientific explanation.

In terms of stigmata-like symptoms,

there are some medical conditions that have been

attributed to spontaneous bleeding,

but it’s still very much misunderstood.

One of them would be hemathrodosis.

It’s known as bloody sweat

because when the body is under extreme stress,

the sweat glands tend to become more fragile

and can bleed spontaneously.

It typically manifests as droplets of blood on the skin,

most commonly in the forehead, the arms and the legs,

without any apparent physical cause.

So there are instances where conditions

have been attributed to spontaneous bleeding.

But it can’t be said that they are

the exact cause of stigmata.

When a proposed stigmata occurs,

the Vatican typically will do everything possible

to account for the healing

within standard medical protocol.

The Vatican disputes, ignores,

or disproves vastly greater numbers

of miraculous claims than it actually validates.

And so, if the Vatican

is able to verify a stigmata,

they are considered miraculous.

Is it possible that a genuine case of stigmata

is an actual miracle, as the Vatican claims?

Many believe that the best evidence

lies in the story of the most famous case in modern history:

the Stigmata of Padre Pio.

Padre Pio was a Capuchin friar

who in 1918 celebrated mass

and immediately afterwards started bleeding

from the hands and feet,

but there were certain peculiarities about it.

It never scabbed over.

And it gave off a very sweet perfume

which is known as the odor of sanctity.

When Padre Pio was suffering from his stigmata,

he said that the pain was so extreme

that he thought he might die.

He was embarrassed by the blood

and embarrassed to be showing these marks on a regular basis.

And he was always trying to cover them

with the sleeves of his robe

so that people wouldn’t see the blood.

The Vatican’s response to great mystics in the Church

has often been to persecute them, at least initially.

They did that with Padre Pio.

They were skeptical.

At one point, they thought they were self-inflicted.

And so they, silenced him.

They basically shut him away in a monastery.

But thousands of people would go to attend his mass

and line up for confession for days.

It was not until long after

Padre Pio’s death in 1968

that the Vatican had relented

and saw him as a genuine stigmatist.

He was finally canonized

and beautified by Pope John Paul II.

This was at the beginning of the 21st century.

Now thousands of pilgrims

come from all over Italy and beyond

to venerate at his tomb every month.

And so his memory

is something that is celebrated

by Catholics in every part of the world.

When we look at cases of stigmata,

it’s a very profound experience

for those people who are suffering,

and we have photographs

of modern stigmatics quite agonized

with the pain that they had.

It’s very fascinating.

Anything that could represent,

a true communion

with the essence of Jesus Christ

is going to be something that people are interested in

and want to understand.

For the moment,

stigmata remains a controversial and captivating affliction

that offers no easy answers.

But in 16th century France,

another condition emerged

that was no less baffling.

It was a disturbing phenomenon

which led hundreds of people

to dance themselves to death.

This historic city built along the Rhine River

is known for its stunning network of canals,

remarkable medieval architecture,

and the famous astronomical clock

of Strasbourg Cathedral.

But over 500 years ago, in July of 1518,

this town was the site of one of the strangest

maladies in human history.

It’s known as the dancing plague,

and it started when a townswoman named Frau Troffea

spontaneously burst into dance.

Frau Troffea was said to have stepped

outside of her house in the city of Strasbourg

and then began to dance.

And she danced for hours and hours and hours.

And apparently, at first,

eyewitnesses thought that she may have been

trying to irritate her husband,

or that this was some kind of joke.

But then the dance stretched into the evening

and then into the night.

She collapsed.

She got up the next day

and began again.

And at that point, people realized

that a very strange phenomenon

was unfolding here.

Frau Troffea went on hopping around and dancing

in the heat of the summer, but she wasn’t enjoying it.

She was unfocused, glassy-eyed, dissociated,

and just jerking around and dancing.

And she actually couldn’t stop.

Frau Troffea reportedly

danced for a week straight.

The constant exertion took a toll on her health,

and she was sent to a remote monastery to recuperate.

But strangely, after Frau left Strasbourg,

the dancing didn’t stop.

Within about two or three weeks,

dozens more people had been consumed

by this same urge to dance and dance

for hours and days

in an altered state of consciousness.

By the end of August,

perhaps 400 people were all dancing.

In some cases, on and off for weeks.

Their toenails fell off, their feet were lacerated,

their shoes were full of blood.

And then some of them dropped dead.

It was estimated 15 a day dropped dead,

maybe 400 in all over the course of the two months.

It was a terrifying and terrible thing.

What’s so remarkable about these events of 1518

is that we have copies of the memos

sent among the members

of the governing circle of the city.

There are intense debates within the city

as to what is causing this outbreak of dancing.

And they make quite clear,

these people do not want to be dancing.

They are absolutely involuntary.

What could have possibly triggered

such a bizarre and deadly affliction?

At the time, the people of Strasbourg

began to suspect that the dancing plague

was the work

of the devil.

This was something that was seen as a form of possession.

So they started to look

at possible supernatural explanations.

And the first thing that they thought of

was this possibly being instigated

by the devil himself.

And so they tried to purge

every kind of sin from the city.

It didn’t work.

When banning sin failed,

the townspeople wondered if the dancing plague

was not the work of the devil

but rather a Catholic saint

by the name of Vitus.

St. Vitus is an important saint

in the late medieval European church.

There was a very strong belief

that there were a number of saints

who could both cure you of a particular disease

and, if you were a sinner,

then they would punish you by inflicting that disease.

St. Vitus was believed

to cause movement disorders,

including compulsive dancing.

So it made complete sense to people at the time

that if anybody was dancing wildly,

it’s because they’d somehow offended St. Vitus.

So what they then do is that they bundle people

into wagons and take them to a shrine

dedicated to St. Vitus

located about 30 miles north of Strasbourg.

Interestingly, they put red shoes on them.

They cover the red shoes in holy oil and holy water,

and they lead them round the shrine in a circle.

And then, we are told, most of the people

recovered their sanity.

So it seems that they cured it

by appealing to the supernatural beliefs

of the people who’d been afflicted.

Was the dancing plague both caused and cured

by a higher power?

While it made sense to people in medieval Europe,

in modern times experts have proposed

a more scientific theory.

They claim that this ghoulish dancing frenzy

was the result of mass psychogenic illness,

or as it’s more commonly known, mass hysteria.

Mass hysteria is when a group of people

are experiencing the same physical symptoms

without a definitive physical cause of those symptoms.

For example, if you’re in a social setting

whereby someone is experiencing a symptom,

you can then believe that that’s also happening to you.

There was an example of a girls’ boarding school

in modern-day what’s known as Tanzania now,

in the 1960s where over a thousand girls

had an outbreak of involuntary convulsions

and uncontrollable laughter.

There can be a host of symptoms for mass hysteria.

However, there’s no definitive scientific answer

for what causes groups to mimic certain symptoms and behaviors.

Today the most popular theory

for the 1518 dancing plague

is that this is an example of mass hysteria,

but it’s not always the case

that unusual behavior is mass psychogenic illness.

We’re talking about several hundred people

dancing for days or weeks, some of them dying.

Certainly, medieval peoples had popular theories

that this was direct intervention

from God, saints, or the devil.

And I think that partly it’s because the events

just seemed inconceivable, and so, ultimately,

we will never know what drove this phenomenon.

Was the macabre dance of death

the product of mass hysteria?

Or were the townspeople actually possessed by evil forces?

The truth behind this mystery may be lost to history,

but there’s another strange tale of torment

that has been thoroughly investigated

by modern scientists.

It involves a bizarre condition known

as the laughing death.

This group of tropical islands

located in the southwest Pacific Ocean

is one of the most remote places on Earth.

During the 1970s,

it was discovered that a local tribe, known as the Fore,

was afflicted by a strange and deadly illness.

The Fore people lived up in the mountains of this island.

There were probably about 36,000 of them

that were spread out across the mountain valleys

in northern, New Guinea.

They lived in 170 different hamlets

with people who spoke six different languages.

When the Westerners started to interact with the Fore,

missionaries and anthropologists found an alarming number

of them were dying of a strange disease

that nobody had really seen before.

One of the symptoms of this disease

is something that is known as pathological laughter.

Inappropriate laughter, giggling.

Major magazines and newspapers

called it laughing death.

At the time, experts estimated that the laughing death

killed 200 Fore people every year.

The Fore called the illness kuru,

which translates to "trembling" in their dialect.

The disease was puzzling to scientists,

who could not determine its cause,

and in 1981, Dr. Robert Klitzman

traveled to Papua New Guinea to try and solve the mystery.

When I went there for the first time,

I wasn’t sure what to expect.

But I learned many things.

Initially, it was called the laughing death,

which is sort of a misnomer.

People did engage in what seemed like laughter,

but it really was sort of uncontrollable expressions

and movements that they had.

Kuru causes a number of symptoms.

It is a neurological disease

somewhat similar to Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s.

The symptoms are loss of muscle control over one’s body,

shaking, inability to walk,

and it has mental symptoms as well.

So people may not be able to control their emotions

or what they say.

The disease was terrifying in many ways.

The symptoms usually, from start to the person’s death,

take about a year. It’s invariably fatal.

The Fore people believed that the disease

was caused by sorcery.

So they believed that a sorcerer would take something

that belonged to you and wrap it around a stone

and bury it and cast a spell on it.

And that may sound ridiculous to some of us,

but they’d say, "That’s just magic."

The world in which they lived was this kind of a world.

Was kuru the result of supernatural forces,

as locals believed?

It’s an intriguing notion,

but doctors eventually suspected that the real culprit

was that the Fore participated in the gruesome practice

of consuming human flesh.

When Western anthropologists began to study

some of the communities of Papua New Guinea in the 1930s,

they discovered practice of a ritualistic,

religious-based funerary cannibalism.

The Papua New Guineans who engaged in cannibalism

saw the consumption of the brain

as a way of imbibing that person’s lifeforce.

It was a devotional practice.

When they practiced cannibalism, at one feast,

I calculated that there were 56 people present.

53 of whom then died of the disease.

So it was pretty devastating.

Now, every time someone died, they would consume the brain.

I met people, for instance, who would say,

"Well, I ate a foot" or "I ate a hand,"

and they were still alive.

And so the concentration of the kuru

was highest when they would consume the brain.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that eating human brains

is not good for your health,

but how did this practice lead to the bizarre

laughing symptoms of kuru?

Kuru is caused by something called a prion,

an infectious protein that is in all of our brains.

And in roughly one out of every million people or so,

it flips the wrong way.

And when it’s flipped,

it could lead to other proteins

flipping in our brain and forming clumps

that could kill brain cells.

Kuru probably happened because someone

in the Fore group had such a protein flip the wrong way.

And that person was then consumed by other people,

and that led to proteins in their brains flipping.

And when they died, they were eaten,

and the rest is history, continued to spread.

The story of kuru is as fascinating as it is disturbing.

But what’s even more unsettling is that this type of disease

has harmed people not just in Papua New Guinea

but all over the world.

Except we call it mad cow disease.

In the 1980s,

British cattle became stricken with mad cow disease

because farmers feed them supplements,

and these supplements are made up of dead cows

infected with prion disease.

And then people would consume that.

Eventually, over the course of 15, 16 years,

178 people in the UK died

from what became known as mad cow disease.

Mad cow disease

or neurodegenerative diseases such as kuru

can manifest upwards of 70 years after the ingestion

of some contaminated, um, food or livestock.

And so it’s very unclear as to whether or not

it can happen in the future.

The study of kuru is important for many reasons.

One is, of course, the fact that the symptoms in humans

from eating an infected cow are basically

the same symptoms that we saw with kuru.

So they provided this unique glimpse

on what can cause a disease that’s different

than what anyone had thought before.

The fate of people who fall victim

to the laughing death gives a whole new meaning

to the phrase "You are what you eat."

However, our next story

of inexplicable suffering concerns

not what we choose to consume

but rather what might be surgically inserted inside us

without our knowledge because there are thousands

of individuals who claim

that they were the unwilling recipient

of an alien implant.

A group of experts

from multiple universities

publish a controversial study titled

Unusual Personal Experiences.

The report finds that, according to national polls,

roughly 3.7 million Americans claim

to have been abducted by extraterrestrials,

a phenomenon that is referred to as the UFO abduction syndrome.

But what’s even more startling is that many respondents stated

that extraterrestrials surgically operated on them

and implanted a foreign object into their body.

People who report having implants

have claimed all sorts of physical symptoms.

These implants are not something they want in them.

Some claim very bad headaches from them,

some claim extreme pain at the place

where the implant was inserted in them.

Others will claim incidents of problems

with their vision or their hearing.

Most abductees believe these objects

are used to track them and find them

when they are abducted again.

Skeptics say

these are sometimes shards of glass,

or little bits of metal that have become embedded

for very earthbound, natural reasons...

A result of an injury, a self-inflicted wound.

But medical studies have shown that those who believe

that they have these alien implants inside them

are utterly convinced.

Beyond the pain and terror caused by discovering

an alleged extraterrestrial object lodged inside their body,

many so-called alien implantees

also suffer from an even more disturbing symptom.

They claim these implants have actually invaded their minds.

The most compelling things about some of these

alien implant reports are the fact that the people,

the hosts,

claim they’re hearing voices.

The earliest mentions of alien implants

were as communications devices

for the creatures that come in the night.

They’re getting messages, and they would say,

"I feel as though there’s another person inside of me."

Is it possible that the remarkable claims

of supposed alien implantees are true?

And if so, then what exactly are these mysterious objects

that are being inserted into people’s bodies?

Podiatrist Dr. Roger Leir

publishes a controversial book titled

The Aliens and the Scalpel.

In his extraordinary account, Dr. Leir reveals

that he has surgically removed foreign objects

from several people’s bodies,

and he firmly believes these objects

were extraterrestrial in origin.

Dr. Roger Leir, who is now deceased,

claimed to have extracted

more than a dozen alien implants from subjects.

He was one of very few people with surgical training

who was willing to extract such claimed objects.

He would have patients coming in,

"Doc, Doc, my foot, there’s something wrong with it."

When he X-rayed it, he would see these strange objects in there,

and the patients would tell the story

of encountering a strange presence.

What Roger discovered is that, in these alien implants,

the body not only did not reject the object

but made it a part of the body.

No artificial object on this planet acts like that.

In 2013, Dr. Leir contacted

acclaimed documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell.

The doctor wanted to give Corbell unprecedented access

to film his 17th implant removal surgery.

The resulting documentary

is aptly titled Patient Seventeen.

Dr. Roger Leir called me,

and first thing in my mind is,

I thought this was absolute

woo-woo, untangible, ridiculous, ridiculous stuff.

But he says, "Look, I would not have spent

"this much time and effort and money

"and my blood, sweat and tears on this

"if there wasn’t something to it.

Just film a surgery."

So I brought my camera, I went in.

And what really struck me

was, here’s a guy,

he’s about to get on that operating table

and have his body cut open

to remove a foreign body,

and he doesn’t know what it is.

And I don’t know what he was looking to find other than,

"Hey, maybe there’s an implant made by an alien

that’s in my leg."

Because Patient 17 did have abductive experiences.

After the implant removal surgery,

Dr. Roger Leir wanted to give me

a kind of autonomy on my investigative work

on what it is that he cut out of this man’s leg

by sending it myself to a national laboratory,

getting the raw data, and then reporting that in.

When we got that analysis back,

the isotopic ratios,

which are kind of a good measuring stick

or barometer for things that are

not terrestrially found on Earth,

they were off the charts,

indicating that it was non-terrestrial,

not forged here on Earth.

I can tell you that as a fact

that when you get a sample that reads like that,

it’s worthy of further investigation.

The more we come aware of the presence

that there are UFOs in our skies,

the more we realize that it is quite likely

that there are millions of people on this planet

walking around with alien implants in their feet,

in their hands, have no knowledge of it.

For what purpose? We don’t know.

Could millions of people

have been implanted with alien devices

and not even know it?

Wow. It’s a fascinating theory.

But there’s a much older mystery

that’s no less intriguing.

It concerns an ancient nobleman

who attempted to heal his numerous ailments

with the power

of magical stones.

Atop Salisbury Plain

stands arguably the most iconic ancient structure in the world.

Stonehenge.

Constructed around 3100 BC,

this enigmatic monument

has captured our collective imagination for centuries.

But what most people don’t realize

is that this Stonehenge landscape is also

a massive graveyard.

Throughout the area,

thousands of ancient skeletons have been recovered.

And apparently many of the deceased

suffered from devastating afflictions.

The area around Stonehenge is absolutely littered

with people who have got all sorts of traumas,

from the mundane through to some very serious conditions.

It’s very clear that many of them had

physical injuries that had gone on... broken arms,

all the usual range of things.

For example,

one of the skeletons of those people,

on his left knee, the kneecap is missing.

There was some kind of trauma.

The second thing which is obviously

wrong with him is that there is an abscess

on his jaw which must have been excruciating in life.

Also, what we can see from recent studies of DNA

is that around about the time that Stonehenge was being built,

there was a plague circulating in the area.

So we have to think of the prehistoric past

that we’re talking about around Stonehenge

as something which is actually very dangerous.

People dying, people being hurt

through these different illnesses

and plagues and diseases.

It’s easy to assume that so many people buried near Stonehenge

suffered from numerous ailments because

they simply lived in ancient times

and did not receive proper medical care.

But according to archaeologists,

the truth may be far more intriguing.

In 2008, an important discovery was announced

regarding Stonehenge.

There was a discovery of a mass of skeletons

buried in the region,

and 50% of these skeletons discovered

had come from somewhere else.

So what does this tell us?

They came here for something.

It’s possible that Stonehenge

could have been used as a healing site,

a type of temple for healing.

Did ancient people travel to Stonehenge

in order to be healed?

And if so, what made them think

that coming to this mysterious monument

would cure them?

Some say the answer can be found

by examining the stones themselves

and, more specifically,

what are known as the bluestones.

Around Stonehenge, the outer structure is made

from essentially local stones.

That’s the things we often see.

But inside Stonehenge,

we have these bluestones.

They’re called bluestones because they do

have a kind of a bluey-greeny color to them

and they also have white spots inside them.

We’ve got a number of strands of evidence which support the idea

that these stones were being used for healing.

One of them is that we know from scientific studies

that those stones come from Southwest Wales,

in what we know as the Preseli Hills.

It’s about 140 miles or so as the crow flies from Stonehenge.

The stones in the Preseli Hills

must have been considered special in some way.

Because we can trace back through folklore accounts

of people using water in association with the stones

to help promote healing.

And so Stonehenge was a place of healing, I’m sure.

We shouldn’t, though, compare it to a modern hospital.

Because medical science back then

was much more to do with belief.

It was much more to do with faith.

Stonehenge was all about using belief,

using the power of the bluestones

as the means by which health care was dished out, as it were.

For some, the idea that ancient people

constructed a massive stone monument

for mystical healing purposes may sound far-fetched.

But the profound truth is that,

for thousands of years,

human beings have journeyed far and wide

in search of miracle cures,

and millions of people continue to do so today.

If you want to make sense of Stonehenge

as a healing place, think of Lourdes in France,

where people still come even today

looking for a cure from the Virgin Mary.

Now, you imagine in the Bronze Age,

you would come to Stonehenge to touch the stones,

to say a prayer.

It was the last hope

that they can cure whatever ailment it is

that’s killing them.

These ancient cultures, particularly in Britain,

were immersed in the traditions

of believing in the power of nature.

And certainly something as majestic as these stones

would be something that could have an energy

that could potentially help them.

It’s fascinating to think that 5,000 years ago

the ancient people of Britain

may have gone to Stonehenge as a last resort

to heal afflictions they didn’t understand.

And curiously, there’s a bizarre malady

occurring in Portugal

that even modern scientists can’t comprehend.

Only, this condition doesn’t harm the living,

but rather the dead.

While there are many bizarre afflictions

which attack the living that are utterly confounding,

surprisingly, in this historic and picturesque city,

the same can also be said

for the deceased.

There’s a law in Portugal

that people who are buried

must essentially be exhumed after a few years,

when they’ve decomposed, and whatever remains

is crushed down into a box

and then placed into a wall.

The reason for that

is that there’s a shortage of space

in cemeteries in Portugal.

Here’s the weird thing:

half the bodies brought up have not decomposed.

Many of them have, in effect, come up mummified.

Now, that’s odd because Portugal is a fairly warm, hot country.

You’d expect bodies to decompose faster.

So why the bodies are remaining mummified

and refusing to decompose is something of a mystery.

What could possibly cause so many dead bodies

to be turned into mummies?

It’s a disturbing conundrum,

and, in fact, this phenomenon isn’t limited to Lisbon.

Throughout Portugal, families are unfortunately

discovering that the remains of their loved ones are being...

abnormally preserved.

The fact that bodies are not decomposing

in Portugal is distressing for the people

who are having to dig them up

and then answer the question,

"Well, now what do we do with them?"

If you can’t crush them up and put them in a box,

because they refuse to decompose, what do you do?

Put them back in the ground again?

So this really is a hugely traumatic event

for families who’d lost sons, fathers, mothers, and daughters.

For now, the people of Portugal

continue to worry about the remains

of their dearly departed.

But if history is any indication,

human beings will keep looking upon bizarre afflictions

with both fascination and dread,

as we have for centuries.

In the 19th century,

millions of people flocked to freak shows

to ogle people with all sorts of bizarre afflictions.

And I think the same mentality is still there

in human beings to some extent.

We think, "How can these people possibly live

with these extraordinary things wrong with them?

How can they bear it?"

And then most of all, we think,

"Awfully glad it’s not us."

There’s a mixture of fear and titillation

around our fascination with bizarre ailments.

We’re worried about what might happen to us

and at the same time we’re relieved

that it hasn’t or hasn’t yet.

So we like to dip our toe into circumstances

that remind us of our mortality,

of our fragility,

of what could happen to us but hasn’t.

Perhaps what’s so unsettling

about strange tales of torment

is that it’s unclear how, when, or why

inexplicable afflictions strike.

From harrowing accounts of stigmata

to the disturbing dance of death,

these maladies serve as a chilling reminder

that we could be vulnerable

to enigmatic and harmful forces

that we don’t fully understand.

And at any moment,

we might fall victim to troubling conditions

that remain... unexplained.

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