The Michael Decon Program

[Corona Kitty]

Ha... still my favorite!


https://youtu.be/j_ekugPKqFw

You can put an eye out with those lighting bolt's.

[AZZERAE]

I appreciate your appreciation for my appreciation for K_Dubb.

[Corona Kitty]

I didn't know you were mad at K_dubb now.

[Dr. MD MD]

Seeing at the Speed of Sound
Lipreading, which makes one sense do the work of another, is a skill daunting to describe. Rachel Kolb, '12, deaf since birth, shares its mysteries.

MARCH/APRIL 2013
READING TIME 14 MIN

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Seeing at the Speed of Sound
Illustration: Julia Breckenreid
by
Rachel Kolb
I am sitting in my office during a summer internship. Absorbed by my computer screen, I do not notice when my manager enters the room, much less when he starts talking. Only when a sudden hand taps my shoulder do I jump. He is gazing expectantly at me.

"I'm sorry, I didn't hear you come in," I say.

"Oh, right." His expression changes: to surprise, and then to caution. He proceeds to say something that looks like, "Would you graawl blub blub vhoom mwarr hreet twizzolt, please?" I haven't the faintest idea what he said. I have no excuse, for I was looking straight at him. But despite my attention, something went wrong. He spoke too fast; my eyes lost focus.

"Um, could you repeat that, please?" I ask.

His eyebrows raise, but he nods and says it again. I sit up straighter, attempt to concentrate, but again it reaches my eyes as a garbled mess.

"It's fine," he answers. "I'll send you an email."

Well, at least I understood that part, I think as he walks out.

Lipreading, on which I rely for most social interaction, is an inherently tenuous mode of communication. It's essentially a skill of trying to grasp with one sense the information that was intended for another. When I watch people's lips, I am trying to learn something about sound when the eyes were not meant to hear.

Spoken words occur in my blind spot, a vacancy of my perception. But if I watch a certain way, I can bring them into enough focus to guess what they are. The brain, crafty as it is, fills in the missing information from my store of knowledge.

Want an example?

---- the ---- before --------- when ------------- the house

not --- cre --------------------- even ---- m------

Do you recognize the opening of "The Night Before Christmas"? Perhaps so, because in American culture the poem is familiar enough for one to fill in the blanks through memory. Filling in the blanks is the essence of lipreading, but the ability to decipher often depends on factors outside of my control.

It is my first week as a freshman at Stanford, and I feel lost. Instead of coasting through routine interactions with people familiar to me, I have thrown myself into a place where almost nothing is predictable. I sit down at a table of strangers. One of them, I realize, is the guy from the room next to mine. "What's your name?" I ask him.

He answers, but I frown.

"Could you say that again?" I say.

He does, but I still do not understand. The name starts with a B, and ends with a Y, but it is not a name I have seen before. Bobby, Barry, Buddyâ€"none of them match what I saw on his face.

My neighbor, sensing my struggle, mumbles, "Just call me Ben."

Later that day I find out his name is Benamy.

Rachel Kolb
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Profound bilateral hearing loss notwithstanding, Kolb earned her bachelor's in English with a minor in human biology and is working on a master's degree in English. She is managing editor of the literary magazine Leland Quarterly, active with Christian ministries and as a disability advocate, and president of the Stanford Equestrian Team. In November, she was named a 2013 Rhodes Scholar. (Photo: Greg Sorber / Albuquerque Journal)
Even the most skilled lipreaders in English, I have read, can discern an average of 30 percent of what is being said. I believe this figure to be true. There are people with whom I catch almost every wordâ€"people I know well, or who take care to speak at a reasonable rate, or whose faces are just easier on the eyes (for lack of a better phrase). But there are also people whom I cannot understand at all. On average, 30 percent is a reasonable number.

But 30 percent is also rather unreasonable. How does one have a meaningful conversation at 30 percent? It is like functioning at 30 percent of normal oxygen, or eating 30 percent of recommended caloriesâ€"possible to subsist, but difficult to feel at your best and all but impossible to excel. Often I stick with contained discussion topics because they maximize the number of words I will understand. They make the conversation feel safe. "How are you?" "How's school?" "Did you have a nice night?" Because I can anticipate that the other person will say "Fine, how are you?" or "Good," I am at lower risk for communication failure.

My companions could be discussing any topic in the universe: the particulate nature of matter, the child who keeps wetting the bed, the villa in Nice that they visited last summer. And, because the human mind is naturally erratic in conversation, ever distractible, ever spontaneous, this is just what will end up happening. How am I to predict the unpredictable? The infinity of the universe, and of man's mind, strikes me as immensely beautifulâ€"but also very frightening.

I don't like superficial remarks and predictable rejoinders, but staying in shallow waters is better than sinking. So long as I preserve my footing, I keep up the appearance of being able to converseâ€"to other people and, more important, to myself.

"You know, you could be a spy," David, who lives in my dorm, tells me as we are sitting at brunch.

"Why do you say that?" I ask.

"Because"â€"he leans in excitedlyâ€""because you could look through binoculars and lipread and understand everything people are saying!"

"Oh." I smile and cross my arms.

"Could you understand those people over there?" David points to a couple at another table. "Maybe," I say, without trying. I dare not explain that they're too far away.

The term "lipreading" implies that the skill is, in a sense, exactly like readingâ€"in which the words on the page are clear and perfectly legible. "Can you read my lips?" strangers ask when they meet me. (Never mind that the question is inherently illogical: If I couldn't lipread, how on earth could I answer?) As they ask it, I can see the other, unspoken questions reeling in their headsâ€"What if she can't? What will I do then? Mime?

When I answer that, yes, I can lipread, they relax. Then they prattle on as if all preconditions are off. Because I can "read" their lips, I must therefore be able to "read" everything they say. After all, it would be absurd for me to protest that I can sometimes read the words in a book, but sometimes not. Either you can read, or you can't. (Likewise, either you can hear perfectlyâ€"meaning hear and understand everythingâ€"or you can't hear at all. Forget hearing aids and microphones and other assistive devices.)

"How did you learn to lipread?" is another common query. I do not have a satisfactory answer. The truth is, I can't explain it. No more than I could explain how I learned to walk, or than anyone else could explain how she learned to hear and understand language. "Practice," I usually answer. Since I entered a mainstreamed public school in first grade, there have been no other deaf people occupying center stage in my life. My world is primarily a hearing one, and I learned to deal with this reality at a very young age. There was no reason to sign with anyone besides close friends and family, no reason to expect anyone to communicate on my terms. Surrounded by hearing people all the time, my only option has been to adapt, and lipreading is the skill that I have practiced most.

But this answer is too simple. The foundation for my success with communication was laid in my earliest years, at a deaf preschool. That was perhaps the only time in my life when I experienced full communication access each day. Everyoneâ€"students, teachers, speech therapists, parents, siblingsâ€"signed. From ages 2 to 5, I lived, breathed and conversed with people like meâ€"at least, as alike as a young child understands. There was no reason for me to doubt myself or my abilities, so I grew fluent and confident with language. I learned its nuances, its facial and emotional expressions. I learned that it was not inaccessible, as it would sometimes later seem.

Self-confidence fuels the desire to practice and protects against the degradation of communication breakdown; but my ability to lipread is attributable not only to my own efforts, but also to the contributions of others. When I was less than a year old, my parents started me in speech therapy, which I continued for 18 years. There, I encountered the visual and physical fragments of the sound that was so absent from my world. This sound was mysterious to me. I could not grasp itâ€"even with hearing aidsâ€"but I could see it. Under the tutelage of a succession of speech therapists, with support from my family, I became a student of its aftereffects.

In teaching me how to make sound's shapes with my own mouth, they taught me how to focus on their faces with the deepest intensity. Like a detective-in-training, I learned to recognize consonantal stops, the subtle visual differences between a "d" and a "g." (On the other hand, "p" and "b" are all but impossible to distinguish by lipreading alone, because their only difference is that one is voiced and one is not.) I learned how to zone in on the minutest changes in the muscles of the face. Over many years of drills and refinement, I learned how to construct the appearance of functioning like a hearing person. But I did not hear: I saw.

It is the first week of first grade, and the teacher has instructed us to line up by the door so we can follow her, duckling-like, to lunch. I do not know that she has asked us to line up in alphabetical order. My interpreter, who is usually around, seems to have disappeared. Satisfied to follow the other children, I take a spot in line and wait. Only then do I realize that my peers are talking, that they are rearranging themselves. I frown when the girl in front of me says something.

"Uh, what?" I say, not understanding her.

She says it again, to no avail.

"What?" I repeat, frustrated at the way the words brush off her lips and fly away.

She repeats herself. This time I understand that it is a question. Well, most questions are easily answerable with "yes" or "no."

I decide fast, "Yes." Surely a positive response will make the girl happy.

Instead, she frowns, and I realize I have said the wrong thing. Panicking, I tell her, "No," then, "Um, I don't know."

She giggles, as if I have said something funny, and whispers to a friend. Then she says it againâ€"and everything clears in a rush. "What's your last name?"

As I answer, a cold surge rises in my chest. Without knowing it, I have made myself look too dumb to say my own name.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I lipread at all. I fear that I am betraying myself by accepting the conventions of the hearing world. I fear that I lack balanceâ€"that I am abandoning the communication tactics that work for me, in order to throw myself headlong at a system that does not care about my needs. When I attempt to function like a hearing person, am I not sacrificing my integrity to a game that I lack the tools to tackle, a game that in the end makes me look slow or stupid?

Deaf peopleâ€"meaning Deaf people who live solely in the Deaf community, and hold on to an inherent pride in their Deafnessâ€"often speak of communicating as they please and letting the hearing world "deal with it." They believe in the beauty and, dare I say it, the superiority of sign language. Spoken language, compared with the visual nuances of signing, might as well be caveman guttural grunts.

When I lipread, I leave the clarity of sign language behind. I attempt to communicate with hearing people on their terms, with no expectation that they will return the favor. The standards I am striving for seem ridiculous: I am trying singlehandedly to cross the chasm of disability. Might not my stubbornness be of more harm than good?

I struggle with this. Some days I wonder what it would be like if I refused to speak. I could roll out of bed one morning, decide to take control of my communication on my terms, and make everyone write it down or sign, as other Deaf people do. Some days I resent myself. I wonder if I am weak, ashamed or overly anxious to please.

I am 12 and at a summer camp for the deaf. The entire group has just gone whitewater rafting and is stopping to get ice cream. My peers line up by the counter, signing to each other about the flavors they want. I smile and join, finding the conversation perfectly normal. But when the clerk speaks to us, the other kids freeze like mice after the shadow of a hawk has swooped over the grass.

With a jolt, I realize that they have no means with which to understand this hearing woman. Most do not speak, go to deaf schools, have never had reason to learn to lipread. Their barrier is the same as mine, but completelyâ€"instead of partiallyâ€"insurmountable.

A younger Kolb is seen at summer camp. She is wearing a large hoodie and a baseball cap. She signs with her hands.HAPPY CAMPER: Summer camp was a place where everyone signed, but not everyone could lipread. (Photo: Courtesy Rachel Kolb)
"What did you say?" I ask the store attendant, looking her in the eye. My voice feels thick from disuse, but still I am aware of its clarity. The other kids stare at me, their hands slack.

"I said, would you like a free sample?" the attendant says. I understand her and sign the message to the others. They nod, and sign which flavors they want to taste. I repeat, speaking, to the attendant.

After the ordering, when I finally sit down, my own ice cream in hand, I feel strangely lightheaded. Thisâ€"being able to endow spoken words with meaning, rather than having them translated by somebody elseâ€"is new for me. Because I have so often felt powerless, I have never realized the power that I possess.

What would I do, I wonder, if I could not lipread? How could I ever stand it?

Some people are all but impossible for me to lipread. People with thin lips; people who mumble; people who speak from the back of their throats; people with dead-fish, unexpressive faces; people who talk too fast; people who laugh a lot; tired people who slur their words; children with high, babyish voices; men with moustaches or beards; people with any sort of accent.

Accents are a visible tang on people's lips. Witnessing someone with an accent is like taking a sip of clear water only to find it tainted with something else. I startle and leap to attention. As I explore the strange taste, my brain puzzles itself trying to pinpoint exactly what it is and how I should respond. I dive into the unfamiliar contortions of the lips, trying to push my way to some intelligible meaning. Accented words pull against the gravity of my experience; like slime-glossed fish, they wriggle and leap out of my hands. Staring down at my fingers' muddy residue, my only choice is to shrug and cast out my line again.

Some people, though not inherently difficult to understand, make themselves that way. By viewing lipreading as a mysterious and complicated thing, they make the process harder. They over-enunciate, which distorts the lips like a funhouse mirror. Lips are naturally beautiful, especially when words float from them without thought; they ought never be contorted in this way. There are other signs, too: nervous gestures and exaggerated expressions, improvised sign language, a tic-like degree of smiling and nodding.

I sense that such people are terrified of not being understood. What they do not realize is that, when they are not at ease, I cannot be either. I am used to asking for repetition when I miss something, but if I do, such people will only freeze. In their minds, they have not tried hard enough. They turn this into a failingâ€"instead of an unfortunate circumstance.

Encountering people who are nervous about lipreading gives me a strange complex. I wish only for them to be comfortable, not agitated or guilty. I want them to perceive me as more skilled, more normal, more approachable than they first thought. I do not want them to see me struggle. If I detect nervousness in a companion, I do my best to gloss it overâ€"and present a semblance of normalcy, not the chaos I feel inside.

But despite its frustrations and misunderstandings, lipreading is sustenance for me. I once heard that prominent deaf educator Madan Vasishta said that he would rather have an incomplete conversation with a hearing person, one on one, than a conversation using a sign-language interpreter in which he understood everything. I take his point: The rawness of unfiltered contact surpasses even the reassurance provided by translation.

When the connection clicks, when I can read the curve and flow of a person's face, my ebullience soars. Our exchange is less like taking wild guesses at my own risk, and more like using the deftness of strategy and skill. I interact with hearing people as if I am one of their own. That they don't notice, don't remember that I am deaf! However unconscious, that is the greatest compliment of all.

Daniel is from Singapore. He speaks English, but his accent makes his syllables march in dizzying formations. To my eyes, his every utterance is bewildering.

Most people, once they figure out that I have such difficulty understanding them, stop trying. They feel the breakdown in the air, as I do, and they cannot tolerate its weight. But not Daniel. One day, he walks into my dorm room, says hi, and looks down to type on his cell phone. Thinking him sidetracked, I look out the window and wait. But soon he comes closer and shows me the screen.

How are you today? it says.

I grin. I want to leap up and hug him. "I'm fine," I announce. "How are you?"

He types: I'm pretty good. Sorry about my accent. I know it makes it hard.

"It's all right," I say. "I really wish I could understand you."

Daniel shrugs and smiles. How are your classes? Have you written anything new lately?

Anyone passing by in the hallway, hearing only my voice, would find this an odd, one-sided conversation. But, for me, it is perfect clarity.

Everyone has an Achilles heel, something that exposes her weaknesses. Mine is darkness. When it is dark, my appearance of communicative normalcy no longer stands. No speaker, no understanding can reach me. There is no way for me to penetrate any mind but my own, or to grasp whatever words other minds might exchange.

That sounds bleak, but it isn't really. With utter darkness comes resignation, a kind of peace. When it is completely dark, the responsibility for communication is no longer mine. Lipreading, writing, seeing: There is nothing more that I can do. I am free to retreat into the solace of my thoughtsâ€"which, in the end, is where I can feel most comfortable.

It's dim lighting, or bad visual aesthetics, that is a torment. When there is even the slightest sliver of light, there is still a chance. When lighting conditions are impractical or when I cannot squarely see the person who is talking, I still try. More often than not, I frustrate myself in the effort.

With lipreading, each day brings a moment in which I literally cannot do it anymore. I grow too tired of the guessing game that I can never quite win. The muscles behind my eyes ache from the strain. (Hearing is very different from sight, in that it does not involve muscular tension. I think of ears as very passive, whereas eyes are continuously moving to focus and see.) Often my corneas go dry; my vision gets blurry. The words on people's lips melt away, sliding down their faces like condensation on glass. I am back in the blind spot again.

The audiologist sits in the booth, where I see her face from my seat in a soundproof testing room. It is time for the tests I take every few years to monitor the ongoing status of my hearing, sometimes for official disability documentation. We have just finished a tone-recognition test, and now she will ask me to repeat back the sentences she reads. It is, of course, pointless to say that I will not be able to do it.

She places a piece of paper over her mouth, and I hear her voice as garbled noise, individual units barely distinguishable. I sit helpless, but once in a while take a guess. At most, I catch a word, or two. After nearly 40 sentences, I struggle to remain composed. This, such a simple exercise for anyone else, but for me â€"

I see her lower the paper from her face. My eyes latch onto her clear, articulate lips. "The bag of candy was on the shelf," she says.

"The bag of candy was on the shelf," I say, instantly smiling.

"The rabbit ran into the hole," she says.

"The rabbit ran into the hole."

We continue, then she wags her eyebrows and turns off her microphone. A new trick! "The mouse stole the cheese," she says, soundlessly. Any hearing person would spin into murkiness, but I can see, and that is enough.

"The mouse stole the cheese," I say, wanting to laugh.

Several more, almost perfectly, before she lays down her pencil. We gaze at each other. "You're amazing, you know that?" she says, and I glance down, letting my eyes take a rest. I smile and I smile.

Rachel Kolb, '12, is a graduate student in English from Albuquerque, N.M., and a Stanford int

[WOTR]

Live Friday at 6 be there or go fuck yourself.

Can it be rescheduled? That conflicts with the time that I have set aside to watch Gabcast reruns.

[Corona Kitty]

I had no idea you were going deaf Doc.

[Corona Kitty]

Can it be rescheduled? That conflicts with the time that I have set aside to watch Gabcast reruns.

It's a free show.

[Dr. MD MD]

SUPERPREDATOR
The Media Myth That Demonized a Generation of Black Youth
By CARROLL BOGERT and LYNNELL HANCOCK
   
The epithet is a quarter-century old, but it still has sting: “He called them superpredators,” Donald Trump insisted in his final debate with Joe Biden. “He said that, he said it. Superpredators.”

“I never, ever said what he accused me of saying,” Biden protested. While there is no record of Biden using the phrase, much of the harsh anti-crime legislation embraced by both parties in the 1990s continues to be a hot-button issue to this day. From the moment the term was born, 25 years ago this month, “superpredator” had a game-changing potency, derived in part from the avalanche of media coverage that began almost immediately.

This article was published in partnership with NBC News.
“It was a word that was constantly in my orbit,” said Steve Drizin, a Chicago lawyer who defended teenagers in the 1990s. “It had a profound effect on the way in which judges and prosecutors viewed my clients.”

An academic named John J. DiIulio Jr. coined the term for a November 1995 cover story in The Weekly Standard, a brand-new magazine of conservative political opinion that hit pay dirt with the provocative coverline, “The Coming of the Super-Predators.”

Then a young professor at Princeton University, DiIulio was extrapolating from a study of Philadelphia boys that calculated that 6 percent of them accounted for more than half the serious crimes committed by the whole cohort. He blamed these chronic offenders on “moral poverty … the poverty of being without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach you right from wrong.”


John DiIulio defined the word “superpredator” on CBS News in April of 1996. CBS NEWS
DiIulio warned that by the year 2000 an additional 30,000 young “murderers, rapists, and muggers” would be roaming America’s streets, sowing mayhem. “They place zero value on the lives of their victims, whom they reflexively dehumanize as just so much worthless ‘white trash,’" he wrote.

But who was doing the dehumanizing? Just a few years before, the news media had introduced the terms “wilding” and “wolf pack” to the national vocabulary, to describe five teenagersâ€"four Black and one Hispanicâ€"who were convicted and later exonerated of the rape of a woman in New York’s Central Park.

“This kind of animal imagery was already in the conversation,” said Kim Taylor-Thompson, a law professor at New York University. “The superpredator language began a process of allowing us to suspend our feelings of empathy towards young people of color.”

The “superpredator” theory, besides being a racist trope, was not borne out in crime statistics. Juvenile arrests for murderâ€"and juvenile crime generallyâ€"had already started falling when DiIulio’s article was published. By 2000, when tens of thousands more children were supposed to be out there mugging and killing, juvenile murder arrests had fallen by two-thirds.

It failed as a theory, but as fodder for editorials, columns and magazine features, the term “superpredator” was a tragic successâ€"with an enormous, and lasting, human toll.

Terrance Lewis was 19 and returning from work in 1997 when Philadelphia police trapped him on a bridge, guns drawn, and arrested him for a murder that he spent 21 years in prison trying to prove he did not commit. Only last year did the judge finally throw out his homicide conviction, citing faulty eyewitness testimony.

“I’m a recipient of the backlash of that superpredator rhetoric,” said Lewis, now 42. “The media believed in the rhetoric. All the coverage from back in that era was to amplify that rhetoric.”

DiIulio’s big idea wasn’t original. His mentor as a graduate student at Harvard, the influential political scientist James Q. Wilson, had been warning for years about a new breed of conscience-less teen killers. (“I didn’t go to Harvard,” DiIulio told one interviewer. “I went to Wilson.”)

But DiIulio was a clever popularizer who quickly became a darling of the think-tank circuitâ€"and of the media. The Marshall Project’s review of 40 major news outlets in the five years after his Weekly Standard article shows the neologism popping up nearly 300 times, and that is an undercount.


The term “superpredator” first appeared in a cover story in The Weekly Standard 25 years ago this month. THE WEEKLY STANDARD
There was the Philadelphia Inquirer’s fawning magazine profile of DiIulio, who grew up there. (Until recently, Pennsylvania had the country’s largest population of people still serving life sentences without paroleâ€"for crimes they committed as children.) There was also a lengthy, mostly gentle New Yorker profile; a spot on The New York Times’ op-ed page; and an appearance on the CBS Evening News.

The media exposure led to conference invitations, which led to more media exposure. The word “superpredator” became so much a part of the national vocabulary that journalists and talk show hosts used it without reference to DiIulioâ€"including even Oprah Winfrey, in a segment on “Good Morning America.”

The Weekly Standard’s founding editor, Bill Kristol, now downplays the blockbuster cover story of his defunct magazine. But he admits: “It struck a nerve. And it caught on.”

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The notion of an impending wave of teenage savagery caught on among criminologists, too.

“How did these ideas get supported and weaponized throughout the decades? Academics also played a role,” says Jeremy Travis, then at the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department, and now at Arnold Ventures, a charitable foundation from which The Marshall Project receives funding.

James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University, says he never used the term “superpredator,” but he warned in numerous media appearances about the coming teen crime wave, and makes no apologies. “One of the things about forecasts is that they’re sometimes wrong,” he said.

Meanwhile, having sparked the media’s feeding frenzy, DiIulio soon started sounding doubtful. “The term ‘superpredator’ has become, I guess, part of the lexicon,” he told NPR in the summer of 1996. The word had “sort of gotten out and gotten away from me.”

Of the 281 media mentions of “superpredators” we found from 1995 to 2000, more than three in five used the term without questioning its validity. The remainder included writers who contested DiIulio’s thesis in op-ed articles of their own, readers writing outraged letters, or journalists quoting a number of dissenters in their articles.

Although it made the news pages, the term “superpredator” appeared most often in commentaries and editorials, and in newsmagazines. An emerging “journalism of ideas” would gather force through the 1990s as cable television and the internet took hold. News outlets that once focused on telling their readers the basic facts now felt they had to explain, in the words of one of Newsweek’s advertising slogans, “Why it happened. What it means.”

In January 1996, the magazine asked in a headline, “‘Superpredators’ Arrive: Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?” (Full disclosure: We both worked at Newsweek in the 1990s, and regret not protesting its crime coverage at the time.)

TRACKING MENTIONS
OF “SUPERPREDATOR”
We found nearly 300 uses of “superpredator” in 40 leading newspapers and magazines from 1995 to 2000. Fewer than 40% of these articles criticized the term. Here we show mentions from 1995 to 1997, when the phrase appeared most often.

The term “superpredator” first appeared in a cover story in The Weekly Standard, a new conservative magazine based in Washington. The author, a young academic named John DiIulio, Jr., warned of a coming wave of remorseless teen killers. The theory spread quickly through the media.
USE OF THE TERM
CRITICISM OF THE TERM
1996
1997
1998

The Chicago Tribune devoted its entire op-ed page to reprinting the article that had coined the term “superpredator” in the Weekly Standard. The notion of “superpredators” appeared early and often in editorials and columns in the Chicago Tribune.

Newsweek was the first major media outlet to jump on the “superpredator” theory, but not the last. All three of the major national newsmagazines ran big “superpredator” stories in 1996, reaching millions of readers. The authors worked at Newsweek at the time.

Presidential candidate Bob Dole warned on the campaign trail that “today’s newborns will become tomorrow’s super-predators.” The Associated Press article was picked up widely by newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, which frequently mentioned the term.

Syndicated columnists who wrote about “superpredators” were often picked up in local newspapers. The “ticking time bomb” metaphor was widely used.

Sometimes the term appeared in opinion columns addressing other subjects, with "superpredator" mentioned only in passing. But this, too, helped cement the term in the national lexicon.

By the end of the decade, the sharp decline in juvenile crime could no longer be ignored. Many newspapers began running stories about how “superpredators” had failed to appear â€" including the Chicago Tribune, which had earlier championed the theory.
It’s commonplace to blame local news media for exaggerated crime fears, especially local TV with its famous dictum, “if it bleeds, it leads.” But crime coverage went national in the 1990s. According to one study, at the beginning of the decade, the three national news networks ran fewer than 100 crime stories a year on their nightly news broadcasts. By the end of the ’90s, they were running more than 500. On NBC News, a February 1993 segment on “Nightly News” focused on teen killers in the suburbs and rural areas, while one in December 1994 warned of a crime wave as America’s teen population swelled.

The record doesn’t show then-President Bill Clinton using the word “superpredator,” but Hillary Clinton did as first lady. And he certainly helped amplify crime as a national story. Political reporters were dazzled by his legerdemain in stealing a traditionally Republican issue, promising more law enforcement on the streets and tougher penalties for juvenile offenders.

The 1994 Crime Bill, a package of mostly draconian federal laws, was national news. And Sen. Robert Dole, the Kansas Republican running against Clinton in 1996, with the economy humming and the Cold War over, needed an issue to hammer. When he talked about “superpredators,” that made national news, too.


Hillary Clinton used the term “superpredators” in a speech at Keene State College in Keene, N.H., in 1996. C-SPAN
As some criminologists explained at the time, what drove juvenile homicides in the 1990s wasn’t a new breed of violent teens. It was probably the greater availability of guns, making fights and gang rivalries among kids more lethal than before, said Franklin Zimring, a Berkeley law school professor. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, the truth was still putting on its shoes while the “superpredators” ran out the door.

State legislatures were already busy dismantling a century’s worth of protections for juveniles when the fear of “superpredators” gave them a new push. New York had started the trend in 1978 after 15-year-old Willie Bosket killed two people on the subway. The media led that charge, too: Gov. Hugh Carey read a sensationalized story about Bosket in the New York Daily News (“He’s 15 and He Likes to Killâ€"Because It’s Fun”), and immediately called a special session of the legislature that stripped children of many protections of juvenile court.


The New York Daily News wrote a story about 15-year-old Willie Bosket, who killed two people on the subway, in 1978. THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Illinois followed suit, starting in 1982. At the end of Denver’s media-driven “summer of violence” panic in 1993, Gov. Roy Romer pushed through an “iron-fist” overhaul of Colorado’s juvenile justice system. By the end of the 1990s, virtually every state had toughened its laws on juveniles: sending them more readily into adult prisons; gutting and sidelining family courts; and imposing mandatory sentences, including life sentences without parole.

Readers who had already been subjected to a steady stream of horrific stories about child killers were primed for the “superpredator” theory. In Chicago, gruesome murders by children rocked the city in the early 1990s, including the case of Robert Sandifer, an 11-year-old whose love for cookies earned him the nickname “Yummy.” He was being sought for the murder of a 14-year-old girl in late summer 1994, when he was himself murdered by brothers Cragg and Derrick Hardaway, ages 16 and 14.


Derrick Hardaway was sentenced to 45 years in prison for driving the getaway car in Robert Sandifer's murder when he was 14. LAWRENCE AGYEI FOR THE MARSHALL PROJECT
The local crime became a national story. Time magazine put Yummy’s picture on the cover: “So Young To Kill. So Young To Die.” By the time Derrick Hardaway was sentenced in adult court in 1996, at the height of the “superpredator” frenzy, he got 45 years in prison for Yummy’s murder. Not for pulling the trigger, but for driving his brother’s getaway car.

“I hate the media,” said Hardaway, who was released in 2016, in an interview last month. “I feel like I was convicted through the media.”

“The reaction was, the way to stop this crime problem is to hit ‘em hard,” said Don Wycliff, then the editor of the Chicago Tribune editorial pages. “I don’t recall a lot of persuasive dissenting voices at that time.”

When the “superpredator” concept was born a year after Yummy’s death, the Trib was all in. Just 10 days after DiIulio’s piece, the editorial board cited him in its argument for bringing back orphanages. A prominent and widely syndicated columnist for the Tribune, Bob Greene, advised readers to “stop thinking of the superpredators as merely some projected future phenomenon [but] something based on current fact.” The Tribune even devoted its entire op-ed page to reprinting DiIulio’s Weekly Standard piece.

“What can I say?” Wycliff said. “It seemed to explain a lot of things.”


BOOKSHELF
Essential books on criminal justice, selected by The Marshall Project staff
The Chicago Tribune would later publish exceptional work uncovering years of police abuse and misconduct by local prosecutors. But reporter Maurice Possley said his sources sometimes asked, “Where was the Tribune when all this bad stuff was going on in these courtrooms?”

Journalists of color say that a lack of diversity in American newsrooms influenced criminal justice coverage. Black reporters at the Tribune were so dismayed by their White editors’ narrow outlook that in the early 1990s, one of them, Dahleen Glanton, organized a minivan ride to the city’s Black neighborhoods.

“There were top editors who had never been to the South Side of Chicago,” she remembers. (The editors most directly responsible for the Chicago Tribune’s op-ed page when it reprinted DiIulio’s piece, Wycliff and Marcia Lythcott, are both Black. Neither one remembers making the decision to run it. “I hated that term,” Lythcott says now.)

By the late 1990s, the “superpredator” mania was dying down. “Young killers remain well-publicized rarity,” a Tribune headline said in February 1998. “‘Superpredators’ fail to grow into forecast proportions.”

In 2001, DiIulio admitted his theory had been mistaken, saying ''I'm sorry for any unintended consequences.” In 2012, he even signed on to a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting a successful effort to limit life sentences without parole for juveniles. (DiIulio’s wife said he was not available for comment for this article due to ill health.)

As the Biden-Trump debates showed, politicians now feel the need to backpedal from the term. When she was running for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton was pressed to apologize for using “superpredators” 20 years before.

Few media outlets have apologized for “superpredators.” The Los Angeles Times conceded in September that “an insidious problem ... has marred the work of the Los Angeles Times for much of its history … a blind spot, at worst an outright hostility, for the city’s nonwhite population.” Indeed, our analysis shows that the L.A. Times used “superpredator” more than any other major newspaper. But it was hardly alone in branding a generation of young men of color as animals and paving the way for harsher juvenile justice.

“If we don’t acknowledge the impact of what past stories did," said law professor Taylor-Thompson, "I’m not sure the media’s behavior will change.”

Carroll Bogert is president of The Marshall Project. LynNell Hancock is professor emerita at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Additional research was provided by Kio Herrera and Noya Kohavi, and was sponsored by a grant from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

Source: Non-scientific review of all mentions of "superpredator" and its variations in 40 major U.S. news outlets from 1995 to 2000.

[Corona Kitty]

They weren't wrong about their assessment.

[Dr. MD MD]

I Bought a Witches’ Prison
In 2005, Vanessa Mitchell moved into her dream home, a former medieval jail where England’s witches waited to hang and burn. When paranormal phenomena forced her to flee, she became convinced it was possessed by evil spirits. This is her true story.
Jeff Maysh
Jeff Maysh
Oct 27·25 min read

St. Osyth is a cursèd little village in the county of Essex, 83 miles east of London, at the edge of the North Sea. The town’s 4,600 souls live in medieval cottages arranged around a 12th Century monastery, and in cheap mobile homes that the British call caravans. St. Osyth’s exact origins remain a mystery, and over the centuries its townsfolk have survived floods, invasions, and monsters both imagined and real. In fact, every page of its wretched history is soused in the supernatural.

The village is named after the granddaughter of England’s last Pagan king. According to legend, Osyth was beheaded by Danish Vikings but managed to walk to the nunnery carrying her severed skull in her hands. In 1171, the village was burned down by a fire-breathing dragon. Then came the witches. During a Satanic panic in 1582, 13 local women stood trial for witchcraft and two swung from the gallows.
In the more peaceful era of 2005, 30-year-old sales executive Vanessa Mitchell arrived in St. Osyth to view a house for sale. Number 14 Colchester Road is a former medieval jail known as “the Cage.” It famously housed the 13 St. Osyth witches, including Ursula Kemp, who was hanged for murdering her neighbors with black magic. “I remembered seeing the plaque outside,” Mitchell told me on a Skype call. “I don’t remember being scared of it.” She had grown up in the village and used to walk past the mustard-colored building on her way to school. “My earliest memories are just being fascinated by the house. I remember being drawn to it,” she said.
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Vanessa Mitchell in the Cage. Credit: Peter Lawson, East News
Dark-haired Mitchell, who was single and free-spirited, didn’t want to live in a boring apartment like everyone else. The Cage was different: It had stories to tell. During the 1800s it had been rebuilt in brick and remained a jail until 1908, holding local scofflaws before their trial. In the 1970s a developer turned the cells into a living room and added two bedrooms upstairs with enviable views over the monastery grounds. It was just the kind of quirky home Mitchell desired â€" and a historical gem. She decided: “I’ve got to buy the house!”
Despite being one of only seven medieval cages left in Britain, the St. Osyth Cage had languished on the market for several months. The owner jumped at Mitchell’s offer of £147,000 ($191,765). “I could see myself living there and one day meeting someone and getting married,” she recalled. “Just like everyone else when they get a new start.”
Mitchell had returned to St. Osyth after 12 years working in the cutthroat timeshare business, selling vacation homes in Tenerife and Scotland. Working abroad had made her fiercely independent but also insulated her from rumors that swirled about the Cage. A middle-aged couple claimed that books flew off their shelves. Tenants broke their leases and fled. Ambulances often idled outside, their blue lights illuminating the ancient pub next door. Inside the King’s Head, drinkers gossiped about a previous owner who had recently hanged himself.
Mitchell heard about the suicide, but was not afraid of spirits. “My Dad never believed in ghosts. End of subject,” Mitchell said, curtly. She had grown up in another ancient house in St. Osyth with abandoned servants’ quarters and floors that groaned in the night. Hidden in the basement were ‘priest holes,’ she claimed, for when the monastery was raided “and the monks would need to escape.” Blood-curdling screams often rang out in the night, but they weren’t evil spirits: Mitchell’s mother was a foster parent who cared for the addicted babies of heroin and crack users.
“I didn’t know about the history of the witches,” Mitchell admitted. She did know that a skeleton believed to be Ursula Kemp had been discovered in unconsecrated land nearby, with iron stakes driven through its arms and legs to prevent the witch from rising and wreaking havoc on the villagers. She also knew that the alleyway behind the Cage was called Coffin Alley, because that was how dead bodies were carried from the jail to their burial sites. For many homebuyers, termites or faulty wiring can be deal-breakers, yet Mitchell seemed to mistake these morbid red flags for quirky historical details that added value to her home. “I was completely unprepared for what was to come,” she said.
Less than four years into her residence, Mitchell claimed her life was destroyed by paranormal activity that confounded investigators, police officers, and the church. She saw objects fly around the kitchen. She was punched, bitten, and thrown to the floor. Mysterious figures floated through her home and attacked her guests. During Mitchell’s ownership, the Cage became “the most talked about active haunting in the country,” according to John Fraser of The Society for Psychical Research. After an investigation, Fraser compared it to 112 Ocean Avenue in New York â€" the demonic family home in the Amityville Horror.
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“The Cage” at 14 Colchester Road. Credit: Florent Lambert, Home Domus 360
Mitchell couldn’t wait to move in. One afternoon in mid-2005, she and her roommate, Nicole Kirtly, 27, carried boxes up the creaking wooden stairs. They had grown up together in St. Osyth, and were polar opposites: Mitchell was iron-willed and outspoken, while Kirtly describes herself as a blonde ditz. Kirtly was recuperating from cancer treatments and worked casual shifts behind the bar in the King’s Arms. She’d heard all the rumors about the Cage: “There was one family that lived there while I worked in the pub,” Kirtly told me. “And the son kept setting fire to his bedroom. Someone said it was because he was possessed.”
While Kirtly unpacked her belongings, Mitchell plugged in her electric kettle to brew a celebratory cup of tea in her old-world kitchen. As the real estate agent’s listing described, the house retained its old-fashioned charm, with original wooden beams that criss-crossed the walls. When she heard footsteps, Mitchell turned, expecting to find Kirtly. Instead she saw an ominous “black fog” drifting through a door. Mitchell was aghast. She had broken out in a cold sweat. When she peered out the window into Coffin Alley, she watched Kirtly lift another box from the car, and vowed to keep the incident a secret from her sick friend â€" and paying tenant.
Mitchell showed Kirtly around their new home. Downstairs, the former prison room and ominous wooden cage door were considered original. In the fireplace, Mitchell found an iron chain with a large hook that appeared to be a relic from the building’s prison days. During a spring cleaning, Mitchell sifted through decades of creepy old photographs and documents left behind by tenants.
“I was able to get my hands on the house deed records that go back many generations,” she later wrote in a memoir, Spirits of the Cage. “I discovered that the house has changed hands on average every three-and-a-half years since it was built, with the exception of only two cases. One example being a man who purchased the property for £150 and sold it only a matter of weeks later, for just £100.” The pattern revealed in that document would have deterred many buyers, but even if it had arrived earlier, Mitchell had been struck by a love-blindness often experienced by homebuyers.
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Left: Original front door. Center: The “Prison Room.” Right: The staircase. Credit: Vanessa Mitchell, Florent Lambert
Mitchell found another unsettling document among some papers in the kitchen. “It was a death certificate of the guy that hung himself there, six months before,” she told me. “I remember thinking, what a month to kill yourself, you know, near Halloween.”
Next, Mitchell lifted up an old rug, and screamed. “We had an infestation of thousands and thousands of maggots,” she said. Nicole scrubbed the floor with bleach while Mitchell swept the larvas into the street. They discovered other issues with the house. It was freezing cold even on warm days. Strange drafts wafted the scent of baking bread, pipe smoke, and a sour smell that turned Mitchell’s stomach. Then, one morning not long after she moved in, she heard three loud knocks on the door. On the doorstep Mitchell found a startled boy with spiky hair, wearing a school uniform â€" not a ghost, but flesh and blood.
“Oh, really sorry!” said Freddie Young, who was 12, “I don’t mean to upset you, but, you know, it’s tradition for me.” Young explained that his grandmother â€" who he called ‘Nan’ â€" was a white witch. Nan used her powers for good not evil, he explained. She’d warned him not to walk past the Cage without knocking three times “as a sign of respect to the witches…to ward off the evil.” Mitchell stood in shock as the boy turned and ran away down Coffin Alley.
Despite its strangeness, Mitchell thought her little corner of St. Osyth was magical. “I couldn’t have wished for a better place to be,” she told me. Through her bedroom window she watched stags rutting in the monastery grounds. She drank in the King’s Arms with the locals until the street lights flickered off. At midnight, the village plunged into darkness and it felt like walking through the 1500s. All you could hear was the crackle of fireplaces, as smoke drifted into the bible-black sky.
When Ursula Kemp walked along these same streets 400 years earlier, St. Osyth was a broken town with a desecrated monastery. “It would have felt like the ends of the earth,” said Marion Gibson, Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter. “It was a society of people who were forced together…a kind of powder keg of festering resentment.” Kemp was likely middle-aged, illiterate, and poor, yet respected as a cunning woman â€" a type of magical individual who, in exchange for coins or cheese, could cure colds or place the occasional curse. One day in 1582, Grace Thurlowe, a neighbor, called on Kemp to help her sick child. Kemp recited a spell three times: “A good child, how thou art loden.” The boy recovered.
A bitter disagreement erupted over payment. When Thurlowe’s newborn baby fell from her cot and snapped her neck, she accused Kemp of causing the death by witchcraft. These accusations were rife in Essex, where the poor sometimes faked bewitchment to receive money given in pity, and cunning folk interfered in local disputes. back then, courts tried individuals for crimes associated with their witchcraft rather than for witchcraft itself, and nobody in Essex was above suspicion. Husbands accused wives. Children accused their mothers. Grace alerted her employer and local magistrate, Lord Bryan Darcy, who arrested Kemp and threw her in the Cage. Darcy’s father had been “bewitched to death,” authorities believed. This inspired his crusade against what he called: “Sorcerers, wizzardes…witches, wise women.”
By the summer of 2005, Vanessa Mitchell had settled into the Cage and discovered a tremendous sense of freedom. She had found a new job selling caravans at a nearby vacation park. There, her charming smile and well-honed sales pitch cast a spell over the older customers. “I was earning six, seven grand a month on commission,” she told me. With Kirtly helping to pay her mortgage, Mitchell had never felt wealthier.
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Nicole Kirtly and Vanessa Mitchell in the Cage. Credit: Vanessa Mitchell
Kirtly stayed home while Mitchell went to work. On weekends they howled along to Oasis records and drank wine. It wasn’t the settling down that Mitchell had imagined, but it was bliss. Then, strange things started to happen. Both women saw tiny bright lights floating through the house. “Things would just disappear and turn up in bizarre places,” Kirtly told me. “As you walked through the door, you had a feeling as if, like, you’re trying to wade through jelly.” Sometimes, at night, the heavy latch on Kirtly’s bedroom door rattled, as if someone was trying to break in.
Freddie Young became a frequent guest. “Some days I’d knock and we’d chat and catch up about things,” he said. Young told Mitchell he lived with his grandparents in the old bakery. It had once burned down in a fire, he said, and Nan often saw the ghosts of the baker’s three daughters. Grandad spent his days drinking in the King’s Head, which is how Young found out about the witches. He was sitting outside the pub when he saw an old woman in the Cage’s window. Nan gave him a lecture about the afterlife. His grandmother wasn’t a witch with “a freaky-deaky pointy hat and a cauldron,” Young explained. “But she always had some kind of lotion or potion on the go.” Nan always steered clear of the Cage when she flew through the village on her mobility scooter.
That October, Mitchell and Kirtly decided to throw a Halloween party at the Cage. They both dressed like stereotypical, if sexy, witches. “Stripy tights, pointy hats…little short dresses,” recalled Kirtly. Hours before the guests arrived, they were applying black lipstick when they heard a huge crash downstairs.
“What’re you doing?” Mitchell shouted down.
Kirtly appeared from her bedroom.
“What are you telling me off for? I haven’t done anything!”
The two witches looked at each other but said nothing. Then they crept down the stairs. They felt a presence in the house, but no one was there.
In the days following Halloween, the energy in the home completely changed. “The TV [volume] was going up and down, it was just ridiculous,” said Mitchell. Fridge magnets flew across the room. Kirtly saw a soda can slide across the kitchen table on its own. The old chain â€" that Mitchell believed dated to the jailhouse days â€" had started to swing violently at night, and the door to the hallway slammed shut with a bang. Then, at night, Mitchell started to hear the disembodied voices of infants, just like her mother’s heroin babies.
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Photographs seen in the Cage. Credit: Vanessa Mitchell
Soon after, Mitchell and Kirtly marched over to the village church and asked to see the vicar. Both women recall a meeting with Rev. Martin Flowerdew, who Kirtly described as a “trendy vicar.” Beloved Rev. Flowerdew, 50, wore a tidy beard and a controversial earring, and was fascinated with the archaeology of St. Osyth. He agreed to visit the Cage, Mitchell said. (Rev. Flowerdew declined to comment for this story.)
“The vicar walked in, and he sat down in the front room and we had a really long chat,” Mitchell recalled. Kirtly had gone out for the day, and when Mitchell gave the vicar the tour, the Cage was eerily silent. “He started getting his robes and his holy water out and everything, and I said, ‘is this common?’”
“I’m going to tell you this,” Mitchell remembers the Vicar saying. “‘I’ve been in lots of parishes…but never since I’ve come to the parish in St. Osyth have I had so many people coming to me in private, and coming to me in church, saying I need you to come to bless the house, I’ve got a haunted house.’ I can tell you of at least four houses up this road I’ve been into. I’m not going to tell you what houses they are, because that’s private.’”
The vicar recited some prayers, Mitchell recalled. Then they took a second walk around the house. Everything was quiet until they reached the upstairs bathroom. Both the bathtub faucets were gushing water.
“I told you!” Mitchell cried. “I told you!”
She said the vicar agreed there was something not right about the house. “He said ‘I can feel it…if you have any more problems, call me.’”
“Of course it didn’t change anything in the house,” Mitchell said. She never called the vicar back.
Despite the horrors at home, things were looking up for Mitchell’s love life. While she was selling caravans in nearby Seawick one day, a customer arrived from London with a friend, named Jay. “He was very handsome, very funny…I fell for him,” Mitchell admitted. Soon Jay was living in the Cage. “He didn’t believe in ghosts or anything like that at all,” she said. “And I remember we were sitting in bed one evening watching TV, and he had a Coke can by the side of his bed, and it literally flew off and smashed on the other side of the room.”
During a whirlwind romance, they decided to get married in Las Vegas, but Mitchell got cold feet. What if she was jumping into something that would become a nightmare, like her current real estate investment? “I cancelled it a few days before. He wasn’t the right person,” she said. They stayed in touch, but Mitchell was sleeping alone again. “I was sleepwalking,” she recalled. “Same time every night…I ended up waking up every night in the hall. By the hanging place where [the previous owner] had hung himself,” she said. It felt like the house was goading her. She’d hear voices in her head that whispered: Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself.
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Mitchell was relieved when Kirtly’s boyfriend Jim moved into the Cage. “He didn’t believe in ghosts or the paranormal,” Mitchell wrote, but after several months in the Cage he “flatly refused to be left alone inside the house.” The three roommates made a pact: “Under no circumstances would we leave any one of us alone inside the old prison, for any reason at all. We began to plan our lives and daily schedules around that single, unbreakable rule.” But in October of 2006, Kirtly told Mitchell that she and Jim were moving out. They were expecting a baby. “I couldn’t blame them,” Mitchell recalled. The Cage was no place for children. By then, she was slowly accepting that it might not be a place for any living being.
To avoid being alone, Mitchell filled the Cage with visitors. One afternoon, she invited Kirsty Williams and her husband Neil for drinks. Neil, who was serving in the British Army, was the first to see the blood. Twenty or thirty droplets of deep red blood splattered the floor, as if dropped from a pipette, or a bleeding nose. Williams told me: “I’m a nurse. I work in cancer, in hematology. I definitely knew that was blood, but couldn’t explain it…it wasn’t there when we arrived.”
Everyone panicked as Mitchell searched for a credible explanation: “The first thing we’re thinking is shit, somebody has a door open, or a window open, and a cat’s come in that’s injured.” Maybe it was one of the crows that often flew inside the Cage and smashed against its windows trying to escape. But they found nothing. Mitchell took it as a warning.
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Crows often flew into the Cage and smashed into the windows. Credit: Vanessa Mitchell
Mitchell’s friends started to feel uneasy about visiting the Cage. “There was another incident,” Williams told me. “Vanessa felt what she described as something, or somebody, biting her ear!”
“I just absolutely screamed!” Mitchell recalled.
After two years in the Cage, Mitchell had given up searching for rational explanations for the strange activity. Cell phone towers, electromagnetic fields, and practical jokers were no longer feasible. She had come to terms with living alongside the spirit of “one or more witches.”
Then, in the summer of 2007, Mitchell felt unwell.
“I kept on going back to the doctor and he kept on giving me loads and loads of tablets. He thought I had pelvic inflammatory disorder,” she told me. At the hospital, a nurse smeared cold gel onto her stomach, and applied an ultrasound wand. The nurse saw the issue: “You’ve got a five-and-a-half-month-old baby in there.”
Mitchell screamed!
She refused to look at the screen. Being a single parent was not in her plans. But raising a child in the Cage was impossible. “I knew that a baby’s never going to be safe in that house,” she recalled. A blind panic rose inside Mitchell. I can’t even cope with this house alone, she thought. How the hell can I do this?
Back in 1582, single mother Ursula Kemp sat in the Cage alone and stewed. She had been separated from her eight-year-old son, Thomas Rabbet, and faced accusations that could send her to the gallows. Then, Lord Darcy offered leniency if she confessed to the charges. She had no choice, said Historian Marion Gibson. “Imagine if you’re a poor village woman, and the big man in authority comes down from the big house and says, ‘now, tell me about how you’re a witch.’” Darcy transported Kemp sixteen miles by wooden cart to stand trial in nearby Chelmsford. Meanwhile, he started to turn the village and her family against her.
During a chaotic trial, Kemp’s brother Lawrence accused her of bewitching his wife, who “immediately gasped and died.” Thomas, her son, told the court about his mother’s “familiars,” four imps, two cats, one sheep, and a toad that sucked her blood. A neighbor, Annis Letherdall, accused Kemp of sickening her child. The evidence was clear, Letherdall announced. When she carried her baby past Kemp’s house, he screamed.
Eager for the court’s mercy, a sobbing Kemp dropped to her knees and confessed. She also accused 12 other St. Osyth women of witchcraft. All were dragged to court, but two were not indicted, two were discharged, four were acquitted, and four were found guilty but reprieved. Kemp was betrayed. She was sentenced to death alongside another accused witch named Elizabeth Bennet. They were likely paraded through the town and hanged before a cheering crowd.
England learned little from the St. Osyth witch trials. Parliament later passed the Witchcraft Statute of 1604, officially ruling witchcraft as a crime in itself, punishable by death. Vigilantes searched the country for witches and murdered them for cash. In 1645, a failing solicitor named Matthew Hopkins appointed himself England’s ‘Witchfinder General.’ Based in Manningtree, a five-minute gallop from St. Osyth, Hopkins killed an estimated 230 women. Most, like Kemp, were buried in unconsecrated land with their bodies pointing north-south. The Essex witch trials echoed through time, said Gibson: “Salem isn’t in Essex County for no reason. These [American] communities were seeded by the communities back at home in Essex, and they took their beliefs with them, and they replicated the whole thing in the New World.”
In 1921, a St. Osyth man was digging in his backyard on Mill Street when he discovered two skeletons. Charles Brooker declared them witches and charged tourists sixpence to peer into their grave. This enterprise lasted until 1932, when an unexplained fire engulfed Brooker’s home, and a fireman fell into his witch pit. Fearing a curse, locals reburied the bones, but they were eventually sold to England’s Museum of Witchcraft, and later to an eccentric artist named Robert Lenkiewicz. After Lenkiewicz died in 2002, a British documentarian named John Worland petitioned his estate to rebury the bones in St. Osyth, where they belonged. In Worland’s film, The Witch Who Wouldn’t Stay Buried, solicitor Peter Walmsley, a solemn executor of the Lenkiewicz estate, admitted that strange phenomena followed the bones. “Things have tipped over,” he said. “Windows have closed themselves, which would have been rusted open.”
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Tourists paid sixpence to view Ursula Kemp’s skeleton. Credit: John Worland
By September of 2007, different troubles were bubbling in the UK. There were signs of a global recession brewing, and British banks had started going bust. St. Osyth residents panicked. “People lost their houses here, my mortgage doubled literally overnight,” Mitchell recalled. Due to her variable rate mortgage, her payment increased to £900 ($1,175). “I just got bit by bit into debt,” she said. Without Nicole’s rent, Mitchell worried about supporting a baby.
As a recession loomed, fewer customers bought caravans. Sometimes Mitchell slept in a caravan at work to save gas money driving home. A deep depression gripped her. “I remember just being like a robot at work,” she recalled. Her commission evaporated.
At home, the attacks seemed to increase as her stomach grew. Mitchell recalled the spirits becoming violent, too. “I was looking in the mirror, and all of a sudden, I felt two hands shove me, and I hit the floor, and I fell into the spare room. If I were to fall the other way I’d have gone straight down those stairs,” she said. Mitchell lay on the floor, scared of going into labor. If I move an inch, she thought, I’m gonna be in trouble.
As her due date neared, Mitchell asked a plumber to install a new bathroom. He ran terrified from the house after hearing heavy footsteps, she said. A friend tasked with repairing an electrical fault in the Cage told Mitchell that ‘a force’ tried to push him down the stairs.
Only Freddie Young, now a chatty teenager, wanted to spend time at the Cage, much to Nan’s dismay. “She cast some kind of protection thing on me,” Young said. But when he arrived at the Cage, something happened that chilled his bones. “As I walked in, clear as day in my ear hole, a man said to me: ‘That shit won’t work here!’”
Young spun around. There was no one there.
The man soon presented himself, Mitchell said. “I’m just watching TV and I’ve seen this man, but I could only see him from the waist up. And he was gliding very, very slowly, looking at me, gliding past the beams. I saw him so clearly. He even had, you know, like laughter lines. He had black spiky hair. And he had old fashioned clothes on. But I couldn’t see him from the legs down.” Mitchell sensed he could have been a jailor.
On Christmas Eve of 2007, Mitchell gave birth to her first child, Jesse. She took him home to the Cage, carefully avoiding the prison room. Mitchell went straight back to selling caravans. “Work was impossible,” she said, “because I wasn’t sleeping at night.” A new sales manager had joined the company, and for the first time in her career Mitchell felt bullied. “He stopped me from being able to go out on the show ground to pick up business. So I basically stopped making money,” she recalled. Every night she drove home to her hell house, where she had reluctantly become the latest in a long line of terrified owners. “Living inside the Cage was grueling,” she wrote about that time. “The longest slog of my life. It drove me to the brink of exhaustion and nervous breakdown.”
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Baby Jesse only slept in Mitchell’s bedroom, in the modern part of the building. She was angry that her life had been reduced to a small room. One night, she awoke to the sound of footsteps pounding up the stairs with a boom-boom-boom! The metal latches crashed against the door, as if someone was about to burst in. “It was so violent and so quick,” she recalled. “And my heart was bursting out of my chest.” And then nothing. Mitchell became a nervous wreck as the attacks continued night and day. “I was brushing my teeth, and I was hit on the bum. Early morning, getting ready for work. This hit was so hard and aggressive.”
In desperation, Mitchell confided in friends and colleagues. A manager at the caravan park had a daughter who could help. Wendy was a local police detective with an interest in the supernatural â€" she now runs a Facebook page called Horrible Haunted History. Wendy told me she does not use her psychic powers for police work, and asked to be referred to by her first name only, as she still works for the police. “I didn’t realize how bad it was,” Wendy said, recalling the day Mitchell begged her for help.
“The police won’t do anything, Vanessa,” Wendy told her. “You’re talking about something people don’t understand.”
Wendy agreed to visit the Cage. She didn’t last long. “Almost immediately after I walked over the threshold â€" banging headache. It felt like somebody was trying to crush my skull. And that old cliché, I felt like I’m being watched. I had a really bad feeling like something terrible was about to happen,” she said.
Late one night, three loud knocks pounded the front door. Young burst in. He’d had a blazing argument with his grandmother. “Granddad was dying,” he recalled. “Nan was carrying on, screaming, crying, and it was all a bit mad.” So he ran down to the Cage. He knew it was midnight because the street lights had flicked off. Mitchell said he could stay, but there was only the sofa downstairs. In the prison room.
“I’ve managed to fall asleep,” Young told me. “It was very, very dark. And I kept brushing my face. It felt like there was something on it, like a spider…and I opened my eyes in the end. And I looked down. And next to me â€" and I shit you not â€" there’s, there’s a woman, and she’s on her knees, and she’s stroking my head and brushing my hair!”
Terror froze him. “I can’t scream,” he said. “I can’t breathe, I can’t do anything.” Eventually the woman vanished. Young kept his eyes open until sunrise, then fled.
Mitchell now slept while holding Jesse close in bed, which she knew was dangerous. “That was just the situation I was in,” she explained. The one time she put him down for a second, mysterious forces threw him off the bed and onto some drinks she kept on the floor. “Lord have mercy, the glasses didn’t break,” she told me. Mitchell wanted out before the haunting claimed her sanity. “When I finally came to realize this was not a fight I was going to win, I began to think seriously about an escape plan,” she wrote.
Image for post
Illustration: Corey Brickley
It was now February of 2008, and a winter chill swept across Essex. At nightfall Mitchell found herself in the street, unable to summon the courage to go inside. She tucked baby Jesse inside her coat to protect him from the cold. She thought to herself: What’re you gonna do? You have to go in, his stuff’s in there. You’ve got work in the morning. “And the snow started falling on his little head,” she recalled. If you don’t go in, you’re gonna freeze anyway. Then she took a deep breath and pushed open the ancient door.
Tired and weary, Mitchell broke her own rules. With Jesse asleep, she crept downstairs to press some clothes for the morning. Alone in the prison room, she pushed an electric iron across a blouse. Just then, a jaunty, electronic song filled the room. She looked down at her feet and saw several toys had come to life. “Jesse’s Thomas the Tank Engines, four or five of them all at once, started chugging around my feet,” she said.
“Jesse!” She screamed, climbing the stairs two at a time.
“There was a bloke standing at the top of the stairs,” she recalled. Not a burglar, but a ghostly figure standing between her and Jesse. Mitchell had no choice but to dash past the apparition to grab her son. As she cradled her baby, she broke down in tears. “I’d rather be homeless,” she decided. “I’m not living there because it’s unlivable.”
Mitchell put the Cage on the market, naïvely hoping for a quick sale. Not a soul was interested. Who would be? After a few agonizing months, she moved in with a friend nearby. “I felt pissed off that I had to leave because it was my house, and I knew it was going to put me in more financial trouble,” she said. At the end of that long, harrowing summer of 2008, Mitchell removed the last of her furniture from the Cage â€" by daylight, and with the help of friends. When the driver pulled the van up outside, he saw in a bedroom window the shadowy figure of a woman.
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Mitchell called moving out “pure relief.” It was also the start of more problems. She tried to rent the Cage to another old friend from the village, who called on a psychic to clear the house. As soon as the woman saw the Cage, she refused to enter. That tenant moved out after four months, then a young couple with a baby lasted half that time. When Mitchell sought help from the church, she learned that the vicar had moved to another parish, 200 miles away. Rev. Flowerdew told a local newspaper that he had suffered a nervous breakdown after a block of concrete crashed through his car windshield.
With no tenants, Mitchell faced bankruptcy, and needed answers. In 2010, she wrote to The Society for Psychical Research, a scientific organization established in 1882 to examine claims of psychic and paranormal phenomena. John Fraser of the SPR’s Spontaneous Cases Committee visited the Cage and conducted interviews with Mitchell, her friends, and former residents.
“I think the Cage is a good case, because similar things have happened to a lot of people,” Fraser told me, comparing it to history’s famous poltergeist cases. “The one problem with the Amityville case is you have only the family as evidence, which is a very, very narrow evidence base.” The fact that Mitchell’s witnesses are reputable professionals â€" Williams is a cancer nurse, and Young is now a school teacher â€" made the case more reputable to Fraser. In his book Poltergeist! Fraser spoke to other paranormal investigators who Vanessa allowed to inspect the Cage.
One investigator had left the house with angry red marks on her legs. “The blistering was later examined by a doctor and diagnosed as being burn marks,” wrote Fraser. Kim Sondergaard, of a Danish Parapsychology group, told Fraser he was prodded and bruised on his leg. “[I was] standing in the courtyard… then I broke down… I started to cry uncontrollably,” he told Fraser in a recorded testimony.
Word of a serious paranormal investigation soon reached England’s amateur ghost hunters, who descended on St. Osyth carrying spirit boxes, ouija boards, and night vision cameras. Seizing an opportunity, Mitchell advertised the Cage as a haunted holiday home, and leased it to companies who charged visitors £35 ($45) to attend ghost hunts. The British tabloids dispatched reporters from the Sun, Daily Mail, and Daily Express, who called the Cage “the most haunted house in Britain.” A retired police officer claimed to have snapped a photograph of four ghosts carrying a dead witch in Coffin Alley. Others captured witch-like faces and even a ‘Satanic goat.’ (“It was an upside down parka coat,” Fraser told me.)
During this media circus, some suggested that Mitchell had embellished her paranormal experiences. “She has made quite a lot of money,” said Worland, the documentarian. Of the Cage’s supernatural activity, he added: “I think it’s a load of bollocks.” Mitchell doesn’t care. The women of St. Osyth are no strangers to accusations.
They say falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it. In 2012, Worland asked Archaeologist Jacqueline McKinley to inspect the St. Osyth skeleton. She concluded that the person was not Ursula Kemp, but a male. And the iron spikes were “recent” additions designed to enhance the witch story. In the Clacton and Frinton Gazette, Charles Brooker’s grandson, Paul, made a confession: “Grandad put the nails there. He embellished things.”
On April 15, 2012, Worland achieved his mission: The bones were reburied in unconsecrated land in St. Osyth, in a ceremony witnessed by Pagan and Christian representatives. It didn’t stop the curse of St. Osyth. Regulars abandoned the King’s Arms, and the owner shut its doors. Then on July 26, 2016, a car driving along Colchester Road mysteriously crashed into the Cage. The driver couldn’t explain how he lost control of the BMW. Mitchell had another son in 2016, but her relationship with his father ended too. Over the next three years, the Cage and the King’s Arms lay silent, apart from the occasional slamming door, or rattling chains, or the cries of infants echoing in the night. So the rumors went.
Then, last year, Mitchell found a new realtor who staged the property with broomsticks and books about the unexplained. On January 7, 2020, she accepted an offer of £224,000 ($300,000). The sale made international news, but after fees, taxes, and interest, Mitchell cannot calculate the extent of her losses. All she gained was a valuable lesson in hardship. “I’d learned about being terrified of something you can’t do anything about,” she told me. “I can deal with anything now.”
After some legal delays, the new owner of the Cage plans to move in by December. Mitchell felt it was her duty to warn her. The buyer is a divorcée who hoped to make a new start in St Osyth. The woman had no time for stories of the supernatural, Mitchell said.
“She doesn’t believe in ghosts at all.”
Credits
Words: Jeff Maysh
Illustrations: Corey Brickley
Lettering: Joanna Lisowiec
Editor: Aaron Gilbreath

[AZZERAE]

[The Michael Decon Program this Friday at 6 o' clock] conflicts with the time that I have set aside to watch Gabcast reruns.

The GabCast should always take precedence over The Michael Decon Program.

[AZZERAE]

I didn't know you were mad

You're the one telling your own listeners to go fuck themselves.

[Corona Kitty]

You're the one telling your own listeners to go fuck themselves.

I was doing my best falkie impression.

[Corona Kitty]

The GabCast should always take precedence over The Michael Decon Program.

I agree, it needs help!

[AZZERAE]

It's free

God forbid! I thought you were all about the Benjamin's.

[AZZERAE]

I was doing my best falkie impression.

Very good.

[AZZERAE]

it needs help!

Thank you for your service.

[Corona Kitty]

Thank you for your service.

No, thank you for your service.

[Corona Kitty]

https://youtu.be/AcdQy1XnpJc

[AZZERAE]

No, thank you for your service.

Thank you for thanking me for my service.

[Corona Kitty]

Thank you for thanking me for my service.

I thank you for thanking me for your services.

[AZZERAE]

https://youtu.be/AcdQy1XnpJc

Haha, y'know, I remember Falkie's appearance on your show. Its one of the few I actually did listen to (mainly due to time zones, you're live while I'm asleep in SA). I believe the show title was 'George Senda: A Life Well Lived'. It did amuse me at the time.

Edit: I never heard the above clip before. I'll forward it to Lee so we can cover it on the next GabCast.

[AZZERAE]

You kept playing "TRIGGERED", "TRIGGERED", "TRIGGERED" over the air. And Falkie was like, "What?! What is that???"

[Corona Kitty]

Haha, y'know, I remember Falkie's appearance on your show. It's one of the few I did listen to (mainly due to time zones, you're living while I'm asleep in SA). I believe the show title was 'George Senda: A Life Well Lived'. It did amuse me at the time.

Edit: I never heard the above clip before. I'll forward it to Lee so we can cover it on the next GabCast.

I honestly don't know why he got so mad at me. Even after following his instructions, he was still mad as hell with me. He even went as far as to calling me up a few times at 3-4 am. I think he thought he would be disrupting my sleeping, what a fool.

[whoozit]

I honestly don't know why he got so mad at me. Even after following his instructions, he was still mad as hell with me. He even went as far as to calling me up a few times at 3-4 am. I think he thought he would be disrupting my sleeping, what a fool.

Mr Senda is a huge get for any show.  He brings a lot of weight and gravity to the interview.

[Corona Kitty]

Mr Senda is a huge get for any show.  He brings a lot of weight and gravity to the interview.

I agree, he brings a tremendous amount of weight.

[Corona Kitty]

https://youtu.be/vvqUtfgfPnc

Live tomorrow 6 pm pst

[AZZERAE]

I honestly don't know why [Falkie] got so mad at me. Even after following his instructions, he was still mad as hell with me. He even went as far as to calling me up a few times at 3-4 am. I think he thought he would be disrupting my sleeping, what a fool.

Bitch move. Maybe he was transitioning at the time. I heard Little Sean was a woman now.

[Nyewalker]

https://youtu.be/vvqUtfgfPnc

Live tomorrow 6 pm pst

Apparently Hogue went out on a limb and predicted Biden would win the popular vote ... How does he do it !!!

Forecast Winner Of the Popular Vote The American Majority's Choice For President of the United States. If Biden wins the popular vote, I will be 14 and 0 picking the popular vote since 1968.

[Nyewalker]

Did Nostradamus predict that MV would dump Azzerae from the Gabcast

Century V - Quatrain 23

The two contented ones will be united together,
When for the most part they will be conjoined with Mars:
The great one of Africa trembles in terror,
Duumvirate disjoined by the fleet.