Who were the Fasting Girls?

Mollie Fancher spent half a century in her bed. They called her “The Brooklyn Enigma,” but she was born your average, middle class New York gal. That all changed in 1865, when she gained fame from a freak accident in which she fell out of a horse-drawn trolley, and was dragged behind by her scarf.…

Meet Mrs. Madge Gill: The Outsider Artist Who Painted through the Spirit World

“Mediumistic Art.” It’s something we’d never heard of, until we uncovered the mysterious world of Mrs. Madge Gill. One of history’s most important outsider artists, Madge tended to her garden, her husband, and her children in what appeared to be the quiet life of a London housewife. But one day, she felt a stirring to…

So Matisse, Chagall, and the Headless Horseman Walk into a Church…

Tucked along New York’s Hudson River is the town of Sleepy Hollow, where old carriage roads can still be walked, and the woodlands feel just a bit darker than they should. It’s also home to the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, a gothic style church built in 1921 by the Rockefellers. Oh, and it happens to…

You’re Invited to the Executioner Island Slumber Party

Look carefully at the heart of the Long Island Sound in the night, and you’ll see it: a flashing white light, piercing the fog every ten seconds or so to steer boats away from the deadly shores of Execution Rocks. These are the icy waters where the British drowned their prisoners during the revolutionary war,…

The Secret World of “Ghost Shift” Midnight Manufacturing

The ship of Theseus, one of the oldest quandaries in Western philosophy, posits whether an object reconstructed with replaced parts can be considered the same as the original. But what if the ship is constructed with the same parts, in the exact same shipyard, only without the ship maker’s knowledge? It happens far more frequently than…

PHANTOMS of PARIS: The Midnight Wanderers

We all have it; that itch for exploring, to discover what’s behind the closed doors of our cities, under our feet and overhead. Urban environments hide buried secrets of the past all around us and if curious enough, we can find them. For a while now, I’ve been following the online imprint of a small…

All Aboard the Ghost Ship Hotel of Koh Chang

While most sun-seekers are happy sipping cocktails on a beach while relaxing on holiday, you’re more likely find me trekking through the overgrowth in my flip flops looking for an abandoned site, courtesy of an internet tip-off, determination and a bit of explorer’s luck. Now, if I could just get myself a ticket to the island of Koh Chang in Thailand…

The Venetian Island of No Return

If you’ve ever been to Venice, you’ll remember that it’s a chock-a-block city. Not just with with tourists but with houses, shops, palazzos and basilicas that seem to pile on top of each other, squeezed into every nook and cranny. In Venice and most of it’s surrounding islands of the lagoon, there is no more…

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The Haunting Magic of Ghost Buildings

Here at Messy Nessy Chic, we love all things curious, nostalgic and with a touch of wonder to them. And what could be more intriguing than a ghost building… A ‘ghost building’ isn’t a haunted mansion or a spooky house……in fact it isn’t a building at all! But rather, ghost buildings are the outlines of…

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All the Different Ouija Boards you Never Knew Existed

We all had a Ouija phase, didn’t we? Or at least most of us saw The Exorcist and know what can happen if you don’t say “Goodbye” to the spirit world before putting away the board. But did you know there are hundreds, maybe thousands of different talking boards out there? And not all talking boards…