Adventures with the other side

On a recent trip to New Orleans I went on multiple “haunted tours”, all were fun and interesting but one made me want to do more research on my own. On an evening vampire tour, our tour guide was a young man from Transylvania (how perfect if that); he started our tour by telling us everything we had previously learned about Vampires is wrong J . Now I know that these tours are put together to entertain and that stories are embellished, but by the time we were done I had gone from a non-believer of vampires to being on the fence, perhaps there was some truth to the stories. I have not become a believer in night creatures who turn into bats, cannot stand in the sunlight or sparkle, but I wanted to learn more about these legends so I have spent almost a year researching the stories he told us.   I was particularly interested in two instances, that of Jacques de St. Germain and that of the Carter brothers. Comte de St. Germain Comte de St. Germain is believed to ha...

Eklutna is a small Native Alaskan village about 20 minutes from my house in Palmer, it sits on the site where many Athabscan Indians lived as long as 800 years ago.   This Dena’ina Athabascan village is the oldest continuously inhibited location in the Anchorage area; and the last of eight villages that existed before the Alaskan Railroad was built in 1915, bringing many new people and cultures to the area. In 1840, Russian Orthodox missionaries began arriving in the area, the missionaries started to teach the native residents. With time most of the  of the Dena’ina people in the area converted to this new religion, and began to incorporate the Russian traditions with their own.   Prior to the arrival of the Russian Missionaries, the Dena’ina people would cremate their dead and then place the ashes in a basket by the river or in a tree. After the missionaries arrived, they told the Dena’ina people they could no longer cr...