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mythicallore · 5 years

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The Woman in Black and the Mystery of the Charfield Railway Children.

The Charfield railway disaster has long held the imagination and lingered in the memory of the town’s residents for generations. A mere 60 seconds was the difference between life and death for sixteen people in the late hours of October 10th, 1928 as a train filled with passengers crossed the English countryside. After colliding with another stationary train, gas cylinders ignited and within seconds the train was an inferno, consuming everything and everyone in its path. The crash was a national tragedy and a chilling and horrific scene for those who were there to witness it. But amid the burning wreckage and the charred remains of those aboard a mystery was revealed.

The strange events after the crash have left an everlasting question mark on the identity of two young victims who, to this day, remain unidentified. And then there were the subsequent sightings of a woman dressed entirely in black, who mysteriously arrived each year to lay flowers upon the children’s grave.

At 4.28am on Saturday, October 10th, 1928, a mail train headed from Leeds to Bristol was passing through the station at Charfield village, located in Gloucestershire, where another freight train was already parked. The night was described as misty by witnesses but the railroad officials had deemed the visibility good enough to not employ the use of the foggy weather signalmen.

If they had, it might have prevented the entire disaster.

According to post-crash investigations, juries found no fault with the signalman Henry Button, who accepted both this train and the goods train at the station before putting the red sign up for danger to bring the mail train to a stop so the goods train could leave safely. However, in the misty night air, the conductor Henry Aldington Aldington and his fireman Frank Want read the signal as green for clear and continued their journey through the station. Seconds before the collision, Want and Aldington saw the train in front of them and applied the brakes before they both ducked down to avoid the brunt of the initial impact.

When the trains hit, the mail train derailed partially, sending several carriages and the engine off the tracks and clear to the area surrounding the track. The rest of the train, was not so fortunate as the two vehicles telescoped and became wedged together under the nearby bridge. Horrifyingly, the gas cylinders of the first four cars were punctured in the crash, causing the gas to ignite and starting a fire that would be responsible for 14 of the 16 deaths in the crash. The 40ft high flames could be seen burning in the night sky from miles around.

Villagers nearby and attendants at the railway station immediately came rushing down to the tracks to try and free those who had been trapped inside cars with the quickly moving fire burning all in its path. Several survivors told guilt-ridden stories about leaving behind fellow passengers who were unable to be freed before the flames go too close.

Meanwhile, Aldington and Want immediately got into an argument with Button over the mix up of signals, but the systems employed for signaling made it nearly impossible that human error on Button’s part was responsible for the crash. And as the flames ate their way through the train, 14 more passengers died as their screams for help went, ultimately, unanswered, despite the best effort of first responders.

Of the 14 charred bodies, 12 were so badly burned they were recognizable to family members only by jewelry and personal effects found near them. Because of this, many family members of victims agreed on a mass grave, as provided by the railway company, to lay their deceased loved ones to rest. However, not all the body identifications were routine.

Two bodies believed to be that of a young boy and a young girl, perhaps brother and sister, were found in the wreckage but remained unidentified and unclaimed in the days and weeks following the crash. When it became clear no one was going to come forward for the two bodies, they were placed in the mass grave with the other victims.

The question of who the children were plagued those involved in the tragedy. Several theories began to pop up across the country about the identity of the children and why no one came to claim them. Among the theories that cropped up were that the two bodies weren’t human at all, but ventriloquist dummies. Another popular theory was that they were not the bodies of children, but instead of small riding jockeys. Some even claimed the entire story was a hoax generated by the media to make more of a story out of tragedy. There was also talk of a woman who came forward at some point claiming the bodies belonged to her two brothers but the assertation was never given much weight and never followed up on. Whatever passed through the rumor mill, the bodies remained unidentified.

And, like all good mysteries, it doesn’t end there. For years after the crash and burial, a woman in dressed entirely in black was seen periodically visiting the memorial for the two children in Charfield. Those who claimed to have seen the mysterious woman said she was old, frail, and had about her an air of great sadness. At the memorial, she would leave flowers before hastily departing in her chauffeur-driven limousine. No-one knew who she was or why she visited the memorial. Many began to speculate she knew something about the crash that no one else did and perhaps even the identity of the children. However, like many stories lost to time the woman in black ceased her visits in the early 1960s and her identity and purpose has remained a mystery ever since.

Over the years the Charfield railway disaster has been the topic of many films and books. Nick Blackstock’s novel Something Hidden paints a fictionalized history for the two unknown children, and many think it may not be far from the truth. Was the entire crash part of a massive conspiracy or cover up? Were the children simply orphans with no family to claim them? Did the woman in black really know something about the crash the rest of the world did not? Unfortunately, we may never know the answers.

However, in one last twist to the tale, local legend has it that in the area surrounding the crash site, people have witnessed strange sightings over the years of ghost children who stand together, hand in hand silently looking down the tracks. Locals say they are the children, patiently waiting for the day someone identifies them so they can finally rest in peace.

#paranormal #supernatural

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tillymint7 · 4 years

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Fiona James 🌈🦋

Fiona James is a professor and the founder of a new community art project and practices something called TRE therapy (Tension, Stress and Trauma Release) part of which is something called Heart Coherence. Fiona and her team has taken up residence in Bidston Hill, which is really close to where I live. For me this year has been full of strange connections and coincidences.

I had heard last year that an art group had moved into the old observatory building. Bidston Hill is a local beauty spot, but it’s also apparently one of largest ley line sites in the UK outside of Stone Henge. Bidston Hill has a very bizarre history.

Funnily enough, my first ever art project I did whist on my UAL art foundation course was about Bidston Hill. It has always a place that fascinates me for years since I was a kid.

The Hill has an old light house, an old flag signalling systems (as a kid I thought the holes 🕳 in the ground were swimming pools for fairies 🧚‍♀️ 😂) the team of scientist based at the observatory during the 2nd World War helped assist the UK to win the war. It’s also home to one of the country’s oldest windmills, which has so many mysterious stories of tragedy.

The Hill is also linked with strange rituals, pagan ceremony’s, Noric stone carvings, murders (sadly even in recent years), strange deaths, legends and folk tales, it was home to a Jack the Ripper suspect, endless ghost stories, stories of werewolves, and so many stories about witches and a cursed witches circle ⭕️ ....Modern day white witches are still practicing there today.

Fiona has started what’s sounds like an artists commune. Any creative can apply to work up there for a few months at a time. The residency can help progress your practice. Allowing creatives to make larger works and explore new ideas. I always find personally that a new space can really help with new direction.

The artist can also show their works in exhibitions during their residency. It’s so wonderful to hear that a place like this so close to where I live.

I think I would still be a bit scared of being up there at night (I’m such a whimp! 👀). Even though Bidston Hill it’s a beautiful place Iv always found the place a little unnerving as a child and that was before I found out it’s history....I’m 40 and still afraid of being outside in the dark alone. 😱😂

From having a background and several qualifications in health care and many years and studying. I know the health benefits of regular meditation.

Deep breathing improves our bodies health through increasing the level of oxygen, which in turn helps to focus and calm the mind. Its a medical fact that a calm mindset helps speed up the healing process. There is also a link between our mental health and our digestive system.

Another interesting factoid (if your a proud geek like me) 🤓: I also read that apparently munks, through meditation, can actually block out pain and slow down their pulse when they achieve their state of zen. This shows the power of a focused mind and breathing deeply. 🦋

That’s why I started a mindfulness meditation gathering group in uni. To me it’s more about us being in tune with our own bodies and filtering out all the madness which helps us reconnect with the world around us. I also feel this allows our creativity to flow more freely. Plus the long term health benefits. So many of us struggling with our mental health these days. It’s good to remember to take time out for ourselves.

Their is such a massive link between our mental health and our physical health. Thats why Iv never understood why mental health has always been the Cinderella section of our health service, personally I have always felt we should be treated holistically.

As a person who has suffered 2 nervous breakdowns and experienced psychological pain that lead to actually physical illness and hospitalisation. I know that reality and the dangers of not allowing ourselves time to reconnect with the world around us.

Their are so many conditions such as CFS, fibromyalgia, psychological trauma and physical trauma that can cause pain in the back, joints and just about anywhere in the body. This can be made so much worse through poor posture and overcompensating. Deferred pain through over compensating long term can actually cause further injury to both muscle and joints.

Fiona blew me away when explained her TRE Practice and talked about how the body by using Heart Coherence completely resetting itself through breathing deeply in an even pattern of breaths the effect of which lasting up to 6 hours. It’s amazing that something so simple can have such an instant physical benefit.

Hearing Fiona talk about the subconscious and gratitude was really interesting. Iv read a book before called ‘The Secret’ It is apparently based on an ancient practice called the laws of attraction.

The book talks about the keys to happiness and success are linked to our own thoughts and mindset. It also talks about the idea that the time we are living now in is actually formed by our passed thoughts and feeling, which I find crazy to think.

The law of attraction talks about how we are all magnetically connected to the energy of the universe and the energy we put out we attract back. Like that saying ‘misery loves company’ or the theory that some people are social vampires 🧛‍♀️ ....could that mean we actually attract them? 😱 I know I have many times. 👀 ...Constant negativity from other people makes me feel really drained.

So basically the theory is that what you expect and give out you attract. If you have negative expectations you attract negative people, events and experience and visa versa. It sounds simple, but hard to do 💯% of the time. I do try, but as you have probably read in past posts. I am prone to negative thoughts and paranoid spirals too (no shock there 😜). I decided I want to be as honest and open as I can on my blogs to try and become my true original self.

Sometimes I find it helpful to remember that even people who look like they have it all together can be the ones suffering the most. We all have public image we like to project. We all have our highs and lows. We shouldn’t be ashamed of them. What’s the point of being fake and protending to be positive 💯% of the time when it’s just not humanly possible for any of us. I read somewhere that apparently the closer our subconscious and concious selves are the happier we are.

I saw a lecture online with a professor (I can’t remember her name 🤦🏻‍♀️ I must look it up) but she said that all this pressure we feel to be positive all the time and demonising our normal feelings by labelling them as negative has a profoundly damaging effect. She said we have to acknowledge all our feeling. We have to then realise why we may be feeling them, then try and deal with them by allowing them to come through and out of our bodies other wise they get trapped and cause physical health issue.

I thought of this when Fiona talked blocked enegry from passed traumas getting trapped within our muscle tissue, which actually cause physical symptoms. The professor (who’s name I actually can’t remember) said to reject and ignore any human emotion is to have ‘dead peoples goals’ which I think makes perfect sense.....we feel the things we do because we are alive so we should embrace them so we can let them go.

Pain receptors are attached to the brain through the nervous system. The messages get sent to injury sights and respond to the pain via pin receptors🤓🧐 ....So I think what Fiona is saying is that these messages from our brain can get trapped/blocked due to trauma.

I’m not sure if I heard this right because it was so complicated, but Fiona talks about pain thought trauma. The system Fiona treats is actually controlled by the heart and these pathways exist inside this subcutaneous layer of membrane, which surrounds our body?

I was fascinated to find out from Fiona, that as a healer, she is actually able to unblock long term trapped energy pathways learned by the body through trauma. Through using Heart Coherence and TRE she can also somehow re-map the body and stop pain.

Fiona treats people by actually talking to the area of the body where the person is feeling pain, which she identifies as the site of the blocked pathway. It’s like she can communicate with the pain itself. It sounds so bizarre, but I would love to see it working and maybe even see if it could work for me. 🙏

Fiona also mentioned that we all have a 5 metre circumference energy field around us, I have heard that before, could that be linked to what people refer to as our auras?

I often wonder whether this force field we all have could be why, in times of stress or excitement, a crowded place can literally feel palpable, like you can feel the energy in the air radiating through our bodies in unison.

I know this is something Mark Wright is very interested in with regards to his work too. This idea that the body extends beyond it’s physical form.

It makes sense, because there is so much we don’t know about the subconscious mind, it literally functions 💯 % of the time and our conscious 5%. So is it really so unbelievable that our bodies can connect without touch? After all we are all made up of the same matter and energy. I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that healing powers can actually exist.

Fionas work sounds so interesting. I would love to find out more. I would definitely love to go up to Bidston when the crazy quarantine is all over and have a good long chat with her to find out more about her work. As Fiona said ‘Magic is just technology we don’t understand yet’

Humans have always feared science and anything new as it can be perceived as a danger or a threat, but thankfully we are living in times where are minds are open to new and exciting seemingly impossible things. Thankfully we are all less pitch folks and torches these days.

NOTES:

Take 10 mins

Brain has loads of syntactic connections syntactic change 2 hours or 3 days

Conscential reality

💯 subconscious

Magic is just technology we don’t yet understand

Field of energy of 5 met self energy

The heart the intuitive centre of our body. Relaxes body

Breathing resets body for 6 hours

Plasticity

Gratitude helps

Negative energies

Steven Portas

I deserve to have this change

It is safe to have this change and free to have this change

QEC practice Melanie Salmon QEC living .com

Calliban and the Witch - Silvia fredarichie

Practice TRE

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newstfionline · 6 years

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Abalonia: The Island Nation That Never Was

By Anne Ewbank, Atlas Obscura, June 28, 2018

In 1966, California newspapers began reporting a startling story. A B-movie actor and several California businessmen were making plans to build their own island. The chosen locale was 100 miles off the California coast, on a massive, submerged island known as Cortes Bank. Ostensibly, the goal would be to mine a rich vein of seafood, especially abalone. Only an accident kept them from building their island nation. It was going to be called “Lemuria,” the name of a lost continent. But the media coined another, more compelling name: “Abalonia.”

Cortes Bank has long been considered a valuable yet perilous spot. Ships need to dodge Bishop Rock, which lurks a few feet below the surface, marked by a warning buoy. The site fosters a rich environment of sea life, making it a diving destination today. It’s also a legendary surfing site, because Cortes Bank produces some of the tallest surfable waves in the world. For Joe Kirkwood, Jr., Richard Taggart, and Bruce McMahan, the attraction was the sea life: They hoped to build an island outpost where they could harvest and ship seafood plentifully and cheaply. However, they didn’t know about the waves.

The group was an eclectic bunch. Kirkwood was most famous for appearing in film versions of the comic strip Joe Palooka. He was also a talented pro golfer, and owned a bowling alley. Taggart and McMahan were California abalone canners. Also involved, among others, were savings and loan group president Robert Lynell and aquatic expert James Houtz.

Their plan was to drag a decommissioned World War II freighter, the SS Jalisco, to Cortes Bank and scuttle it in a shallow area. Afterwards, they would haul rocks and even garbage out to the Bank, to create a terra firma from which sweet, fleshy abalone could be harvested. And they would rule their new nation of Abalonia. In October 1966, Taggart gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug to the Los Angeles Times. “I know it sounds fantastic,” he said, “But we’ve consulted experts in international law and they say there’s nothing to prevent us from starting our own country if we want to.”

Much of the history of the “Abalonians” has been compiled by a journalist, who also coined the term “Abalonians.” In 2011, Christopher Dixon published Ghost Wave, a history of Cortes Bank and the explorers, treasure hunters, and surfers obsessed with it. One chapter was devoted to the Abalonia tale. “The idea of someone trying to resurrect a sunken island is such an American idea to me,” he says.

By the time Dixon was writing his book, many of the Abalonians had died or gone to ground. Trying to find Kirkwood or someone associated with him was a bust. Until one day, someone anonymously sent him a package. Inside was a scribbled-over manuscript and fistfuls of photos of the Jalisco. The manuscript, says Dixon, was Kirkwood’s account of the dramatic sinking of the freighter and his own near-death, which he had apparently written up for Sports Illustrated but never published. Even better, he soon got a call from James Houtz, who was on the Jalisco that fateful November day.

“You’re really taxing my brain, kiddo,” Houtz says when I reach him at his home in Dana Point, California. Now 79 years old and retired, he took a break from wrangling grandchildren to tell me how he joined the Abalonia venture. A diving and underwater demolitions expert, Houtz had served in the Navy. A self-professed thrill-seeker, he gained fame diving Death Valley National Monument’s Devil’s Hole, a geothermal pool that’s home to the world’s rarest fish. His experience turned somber when, in 1965, two young divers disappeared into its watery depths. Houtz was flown in to find them, but only found a mask. The publicity around the tragedy led to Houtz receiving a call from Kirkwood.

“It was nuts,” Houtz says of Kirkwood’s plan. But he was young and daring, only in his late 20’s. Soon, he was in, intrigued by the challenge. “In my opinion, the impossible takes just a little bit longer. A little bit more thinking.” And, of course, he wanted “a cut of the pie.” Serving as both an aquatic expert and financial backer (he took out a second mortgage on his house), Houtz says he was the one who came up with the idea of scuttling a freighter to build the base of Abalonia. The team found the Jalisco in a “mothball fleet” up in Berkeley. After stripping the ship of everything that could be sold for salvage, it was outfitted as a seafood processing enterprise. By planting the ship near Bishop Rock, the shallowest part of the Bank, fisherman could start harvesting seafood right away.

The dream of Abalonia was expansive. The spot would also be a hive for commercial fishermen, Kirkwood believed, and they could build a runway for planes. Ships could stop to refuel, and there could even be gambling. Even building the island would be subsidized, since Kirkwood claimed he was teaming up with City of Los Angeles to build Abalonia out of the city’s trash. It seemed like an impossible dream, but Kirkwood had a way of making it seem possible. Houtz remembers Kirkwood as boisterous and extremely charismatic. But Houtz also says that Kirkwood had an irresponsible streak, something that may have sunk Abalonia.

In Ghost Wave, Dixon conjectures that Kirkwood kickstarted the Abalonia venture in a rush, fearing the federal government would bring it to a halt. At the time, Houtz noted that there was a storm on the coast of Japan, but thought it wouldn’t have too much of an effect. On November 13, the Abalonians and their crews left out of the Balboa Bay Club late in the evening. The SS Jalisco was on its way, from where it was docked far up north in Richmond, California. Barges full of rocks, provided by McMahan, were scheduled to follow soon after.

Houtz had already been to the Bank, scouting for the ideal way to lay the ship down. He had set down a runway of buoys, and with two anchors and long chains, he planned to put the Jalisco into a precise spot before scuttling it. While he had seen some of Cortes Bank’s large swells, putting down the planned “Volkswagen-sized” rocks would likely have protected the Jalisco, he says. Ironically, when the Jalisco arrived near Bishop Rock, they floated on a calm sea. “The kind you kind of dream about. It was just so flat and so smooth,” Houtz remembers. But soon, slight swells started rocking the freighter. The effects of the far-off storm, in the form of a massive North Pacific swell, was arriving.

Both man-made and natural disaster struck. Houtz says he left much of the preparation of the Jalisco to Kirkwood. When Houtz, Kirkwood, and three others clambered aboard, one of the anchors and much of the vital anchor chain (necessary for situating the freighter) was missing, sold for extra money as salvage. Plus, the diesel engine that powered the chain spool compressor was broken. Putting the freighter in the right place would be nearly impossible. Meanwhile, the swells were getting larger, lifting the Jalisco up 20 feet and dropping it. One swell crushed the freighter against Bishop Rock. “It just thundered. It just crunched. It just hit,” Houtz says. The Jalisco plunged down: The hull had been punctured by Bishop Rock.

The 7,000-ton freighter twisted and turned. A massive wave loomed, then swept over the freighter, snapping the anchor chain. Kirkwood grabbed ahold of a jackstaff, but the others were slammed against the side so hard that Houtz broke a rib. The Whitney Olson, the tugboat that had dragged out the Jalisco, valiantly came close to the side to rescue the trapped men. One man made it over, another jumped into the water. Houtz, Kirkwood, and another man, Will Lesslie, were left on the Jalisco, but not for long.

Kirkwood refused to let go of the jackstaff, insisting that the water couldn’t wash him away. “Joe, you’re out of your mind,” Houtz remembers saying. Another massive wave was coming, a wall of green water. Heavy barrels of diesel were tossed off the deck: looking as light, Houtz says, as after-dinner mints.

Sheltered behind the ship’s superstructure, Houtz was drenched but fine. But Will Lesslie and Kirkwood were taken overboard. A stunned Houtz, wearing a life jacket, leapt into the water and made it over to the Whitney Olson. An almost-drowned Kirkwood was swept beneath the entire length of the Whitney Olson, only to miraculously emerge relatively unharmed. Everyone on the Jalisco escaped with their lives.

The freighter wasn’t so lucky. Smashed by the waves, Dixon writes in Ghost Wave, “the entire superstructure tore completely free of the deck in a colossal mingling of water and steel.” Months passed before it sunk fully beneath the water. Houtz and the others were whisked away, to be interrogated by FBI agents who arrived via helicopter.

Houtz emerged physically and financially battered. No seafood empire rose from the waves--his investment was shot, and his rib was broken. The Abalonians parted, and Houtz never spoke to Kirkwood again. Kirkwood managed to dodge legal repercussions for the Abalonia affair, though there was a Coast Guard investigation.

The concept of Abalonia may have been mad, but Kirkwood did well for himself, buying a Hawaiian golf course and selling it in 1987 for $50 million. McMahan became a wealthy hedge fund manager whose lifestyle was the subject of tabloids. And maybe Abalonia wasn’t so bad of an idea after all. Another corporation started making noise about building an island at the spot soon after the Jalisco went down. The federal government squashed it by claiming Cortes Bank as U.S. territory.

As for Houtz, he soon recovered and even went back out to Cortes Bank. Occasionally is it clear enough to see San Clemente Island in the distance, he says. But other than the buoy, it’s a vista of empty sea. “It’s beautiful, but it’s eerie,” Houtz says.

Now, Cortes Bank is notorious, the rusted wreck of the Jalisco beneath the water making it even more dangerous for surfers (though it is a lush diving site). Houtz says he wasn’t aware of how massive the waves could get at Cortes Bank. He’s also not sure what would have happened if the Jalisco had been outfitted correctly. “The Jalisco was pretty fragile when it comes right down to it,” Houtz says. But he thinks that if it had been a calmer day, it might have survived long enough to be protected by the incoming rocks. Abalonia could have risen after all.

#Abalonia #Cortes Bank #Ghost Wave

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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The first part of “The School Shooting” is called “First hour of my last day.”

“I already knew the day would be hell,” the anonymous first-person narrator tells us. The day proceeds like a regular one until an intercom announcement sends the school into lockdown: There’s a shooter in the building. The narrator comforts his sobbing girlfriend, telling her everything will be okay as they hide in their classroom. As the faceless shooter approaches, the narrator attacks him, taking down the shooter and saving lives, but taking a stray bullet in the process:

But as he hit the ground

His gun hit the ground

Im scared the bullet rushes out

Though this story is short — just a scant four pages — it’s representative of what you find when you delve into the hundreds of school shooting stories being written on Wattpad, perhaps the most quietly influential website you’ve never heard of.

On the behemoth self-publishing platform, the most popular stories — typically romance and fanfiction — boast YouTube-level traffic, amassing hundreds of millions of views, or “reads.” Despite a huge audience reach and enjoying the patronage of Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood, Wattpad habitually flies under the mainstream radar; its most notable achievements to date are launching the One Direction fanfic turned best-seller After and galvanizing the Filipino film industry with a string of movie adaptations of Wattpad stories.

Wattpad’s relative obscurity probably has something to do with its main demographic of teens and preteens. But lately, the kids on Wattpad are contributing, in their own way, to a very mainstream national conversation — by churning out stories about school shootings.

The “hot” category of school shooting fiction on Wattpad is a mixed bag. Scroll past a host of stories related to Columbine and its shooters and you find a Voltron fanfic, a Criminal Minds fanfic, and a fic about a school shooting involving the bands Leathermouth and My Chemical Romance. There are romances built around the drama of a school shooting, as well as more traditional horror stories. And then there are other stories. One claims to be an account of a real school shooting threat; many more present terrifying fictional accounts of what a potential school shooting might be like.

There, on a site usually dedicated to painting innocent fantasies about being Harry Styles’s girlfriend, teens and preteens are living through a culture so dominated by guns that fears of their schools going on lockdown and fantasies of martyring themselves to save their friends have seeped into the stories they tell.

The school shooting stories on Wattpad involve characters of all ages. They’re bright and bubbly sixth-graders on their first day of school. They’re seniors in high school prepping for homecoming, college, or prom.

The incidents nearly always start in one of two ways — with the popping sound of gunshots and screams coming from a hallway, or with intercom announcements putting the school on lockdown or into a Code Red: “This is not a drill.” The students nearly always wind up fending for themselves, either because the teachers are absent or because they are quickly dispatched with bullets. Inevitably, students wind up alone, unarmed and unaided.

These stories meticulously catalog potential hiding places. Bathroom stalls are the most popular by far, but there are also crannies in classrooms, storage closets, people-size lockers, kitchens. Then there are the surreptitious escape routes: second-floor windows and little-used cafeteria exits. Fear of being caught out in the open looms large: In one story, three sixth-graders get trapped in an empty classroom with no way out and no protective cover that’s able to hide all three of them. The story ends there, on an incomplete cliffhanger.

The identities of the shooters rarely matter in school shooting fiction; when the shooters are given attention, they tend to comment on the anxieties of school life and the pressure to perform. In one story, a school shooter’s attempt to explain how hard the pressure of his life has been is so compelling that after he dies, the narrator picks up the gun and continues the shooting spree himself.

In another story, a new girl turns out to be an obvious misfit who can’t make friends and takes her revenge on her classmates. Usually, however, the shooters are faceless, rarely given characterizations or even names — they’re classic horror villains, described as crazy, insane, mental, psychos, maniacs, or simply weirdos. As one story notes, “No one knew who it was. Frankly, no one cared.”

The exception to this rule is that of the Columbine fanfic. This is the most popular variant of school shooting fiction on Wattpad, to the extent that it almost functions as a separate genre. Modern teens continue to be fixated with Columbine, but most of the 800 stories associated with Columbine on Wattpad are more properly a form of what-if fanfiction that attempts to love, redeem, or empathize with the Columbine shooters. That sets Columbine fic well apart from most other Wattpad fiction, which is concerned with processing theoretical shootings that haven’t happened yet.

In most of these other fics, the emphasis is almost always on the victims and the survivors — and the horror scenarios they do and don’t survive. The main characters frequently get shot; their friends and siblings frequently end up dead or seriously injured. In one story, the captain of the cheerleading squad survives a school shooting by playing dead beneath the body of her best friend:

People screamed. I screamed. Bullets flew out of guns. Camila slumped on top of me, knocking me in to the ground. I was lying on the ground, Camila on top of me. There was a hole in her head. Her brains were on the wall behind us.

“Imagine,” reads the summary of one story. “Imagine a shooter coming to your school to kill as many people as he can before he turns the gun to himself. Imagine what horrors, what fear would arise among you. Even more frightful, imagine what it would be like for that person to be you.”

“Of course,” reads one story, told from the perspective of two sixth-grade girls. “This is how we die.”

As stories of teenage angst tend to do, these stories rely on an awareness of the fragility of life. They draw on the heady emotion and melodrama of death, tragedy, and terror. In this sense, as child psychologist Ellen Braaten told me, they’re built on longstanding tropes.

Braaten, the associate director for the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, described the school shooting genre of fiction as being similar to the way a teen might glamorize going through the experience of having cancer, dying young, or living during war — in essence, “making something romantic out of something really scary and awful.”

“When you’re really feeling afraid, one way to gain control is to tell the ghost story yourself”

Braaten speculated that these stories are “about students putting themselves in a situation they feel like they’re in … working through their inevitable worst fears.”

It’s no secret that teens are drawn to gritty, angsty stories fraught with life-or-death scenarios. Entire genres of young adult fiction cater to this tendency, from 13 Reasons Why to The Fault in Our Stars to Ellen Hopkins’s entire best-selling oeuvre, which covers a range of dire teen issues from drugs to suicide.

It’s not really even new that kids are writing this kind of story themselves; lots of kids with access to a pen and a notebook have scribbled angsty existential missives somewhere inside them. The advent of the internet has just made sharing those feelings with other teens easier than ever. On Wattpad, which gained its massive underground success primarily as a mobile reading and publishing app, teens and preteens publish and view each other’s fiction by the millions. On Wattpad, a search for “cancer” generates more than 100,000 results; one of the most popular cancer stories has nearly 30 million views.

What does seem new, though, is that teens are working through their fears and anxieties about life and death using school shootings as the setting. In essence, teens and preteens who have grown up with the real possibility that they could live through (or die in) a school shooting have incorporated this reality into the kind of cathartic angst fiction usually reserved for more typically deleterious fare — a cancer scare, a plane crash, drug use, or suicidal ideation.

“Art is a place where we displace our worst fears and wishes,” Braaten said. “Anytime you’re putting something like this out there, it’s because you want to be heard. I think this is a wonderful outlet for students and teens to sort of work through one of their worst fears.” And Wattpad, she noted, is a place where “they can do it anonymously and quickly.”

What’s perhaps even more telling than the amount of fiction where the school shooting is the focal point of the story is the amount of fiction where it isn’t. Disturbingly, school shootings often form the mundane backdrop of stories with completely different plots. In many stories, the event of a school going on lockdown is just a boring part of a student’s everyday life. In multiple stories, there ultimately is no shooting, and the threat dissipates into a boring, wasted couple of hours for the students.

In several stories, the lockdown is used as an excuse for a romantic meet-cute. One, a fanfic about YouTubers Jake Paul and Erica Costell, uses a school shooting as the backdrop for a budding romance. Written in the wake of the Parkland shooting, it has Jake noting, “Us cuddling during the Code Red was amazing but sad at the same time.”

In these stories, the need to romanticize tragedy becomes very literal, a way of fantasizing about the heightened emotional connection felt at such moments while simultaneously grappling with the potential for loss of life, for instantaneous separation from their beloved.

Criminal psychologist Arthur Lurigio described the catharsis of this kind of fiction as similar to that of a horror film. “It’s scary but it’s not scary — it’s not real. Where you’re a little bit scared, a little bit excited, but the outcome is not going to hurt you.” Lurigio pointed out that these genres of school shooting fic are all about control for the students. “When you’re really feeling afraid, one way to gain control is to tell the ghost story yourself.”

Controlling the narrative seems to be a main point of these stories. “This writing has a sense of empowerment, of being able to control what’s uncontrollable and baffling,” Lurigio said. “Think about the degree of vulnerability these kids are feeling in general, and it’s being expressed now in a way it’s never been expressed before.”

Lurigio told me the school shooting fiction could be seen as a basic form of therapy for students. “In working with patients, we have them diary, writing about their lives and thoughts and scenarios, and using that as a tool in therapy. This may be a way to process school shootings and give kids a false sense of control. They’re the ones who are the masters of what happens and doesn’t happen.”

We can see that need for control in a very direct sense. One story is a first-person account of the 2012 shooting at Perry Hall High School in Baltimore, by a user purporting to be a student who was then in attendance. (The user did not respond to my requests for verification or comment.) “‘Please let everybody be okay’ was the only thought going through my mind,” she wrote. “I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that something like this could happen at my school; the school that I had always felt so safe in.”

The difference in tone and focus between this student’s mostly matter-of-fact description of living through the event and the highly fantastical, dramatized versions many of the teen writers are imagining is striking. “I thought about every ‘What If’ question possible,” she writes about her reaction after the event. Eventually, she says, “I stopped asking myself these questions,” because she realized there was no point to asking them after the fact.

In a sense, then, the emergent school shooting genre seems to have come about because students are running through all of these potential “what if” scenarios well before they play out in reality. It’s not only about control; it’s also arguably a means of preparedness.

Looking at these stories from this angle, it’s hard not to find them devastating. One story, “School Shooting,” is written by a user with the word “unicorn” in their handle, from the point of view of a sixth-grader; the author told me that they wrote the story following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, as a way of paying homage to the bravery of the Parkland students.

It’s practically a litany of survival scenarios playing out in high-drama action-adventure form. It shows kids working together as an ensemble to thwart, undermine, and escape the shooter. After their teacher is dispatched, they grab weapons and turn them on their attackers. They run for exits only to find them locked, so they turn to windows instead. On the playground, the narrator spots “a little kid crying”:

She had a bullet shot in her leg.

“Cmon ride on my back.” I said

“I can’t. It hurts.” she said

I decided to carry her. Good thing she was light.

Wattpad skews young. The company claims 90 percent of its users are millennials and Gen Z; a majority are girls and women between the ages of 13 and 24. It’s reasonable to assume that the ages of these characters reflect the ages of their writers. And so we have 11- and 12-year-olds writing about disaster preparedness, noting fire exits, psyching themselves up to leap out of windows, and looking out for kids younger than them — all while envisioning themselves as essentially abandoned by an older generation. Remember, there are hardly ever adults in these stories, not in the moments when it counts.

“It’s as if the statement is: Adult world, you have not taken care of us, you continue to not take care of us,” Lurigio told me. “The kids are the ones who are leading, not adults, and that’s a role change.”

Lurigio explained that it’s important to consider that these stories are expressions of real trauma — not lurid, far-fetched fantasies. “[School shootings] have lasting impact, not only on the victims but on kids who see it on the media over and over again. After 9/11, we had what we described as concentric circles of trauma. They have vicarious victimization. I think seeing this on the news over and over again absolutely is a micro-trauma to the kids who are not part of it.

“So this is akin to 1950s campfire storytelling,” he said. “But this is much more serious, with life-altering consequences.”

One fic, “The Gunman,” chronicles the day of a school shooting by jumping through the points of view of multiple characters. “I would never get married, have kids,” one thinks when encountering the shooter. “I’d never buy my own house, get my own car, or even learn to drive! The husky I dreamed of getting one day would never happen.”

But not all the stories are hopeless. Many of them are about students finding their own power and changing things for the better. Jade, a.k.a. xxjademariexx, is a freshman at a New Jersey high school. Her story, “After the Shooting,” depicts a group of high school students who mount a successful gun control protest in their state after a terrifying attack on their school. “I wrote about this because gun violence is a major thing in this country that no one wants to talk and hear about,” she told me. “It also needs to be talked about more than it is.”

Jade said that few within her community support gun control. “They’re all super conservative and think more guns is the solution for a safer country. I see it in a different light that may have been portrayed by my story.”

For Jade, the important aspect of her story isn’t the school shooting — it’s the aftermath. “There’s always that fear that a shooting will happen,” she said. Writing the story allowed her to express not only that fear but also a political stance she can’t always communicate in real life.

“I want to change everything,” she writes as her story ends. “I want everyone to be safe and not fearful. I want to stop school shootings like Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas and all the ones in between and before. I want to stop police from killing people by the color of their skin. I want to stop the suicide rate from going up by guns. I know this country will never be perfect, but I really do want to make America great again. We will be the generation to make America great again.”

Javier Zarracina/Vox

Original Source -> The kids are writing school shooting fiction

via The Conservative Brief

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