Last month I spent a weekend in my hometown, Bloomington, Indiana, and I finally got my hands on a video I’ve been wanting to find for years: Haunted Indiana, a classic low-budget horror compilation that ran on Bloomington public access starting in the early ’80s. Created by a couple of local filmmakers, it was an 18-minute-long collection of Indiana-themed paranormal tales, each one accompanied by music lifted from Psycho or another archetypal horror film. One story was about three young campers who pitch a tent in an empty clearing and wake up to find themselves in the middle of a graveyard; another was about a stretch of rural road that is haunted by the spirit of a man who was killed in an accident.

Like the Sleestaks, Haunted Indiana seems very silly to me today, but I found it pretty frightening when it was first broadcast, partly because a few of the stories played into my own childhood fears, as good horror stories often do. Seeing it now, I’m impressed by how effective most of the tales are, and I’m also struck by the flat Indiana accent of the narrator, whose calm delivery is funny and a little bit chilling.

Here’s the story I remember most:

As a kid growing up in Bloomington, Indiana, I was creeped out by Jaws, Sleestaks, and a cheesy local public-access show called Haunted Indiana. As an adult, few things have given me the heebie-jeebies more than recordings of so-called numbers stations—mysterious shortwave radio stations that broadcast endless blocks of seemingly random numbers. Shortwave listeners around the world have been encountering these cryptic broadcasts for decades. As this site explains, “All available evidence indicates that some of these transmissions may be somehow connected to espionage activities.”

The sounds that emanate from these stations are mysterious and hypnotic and eerie. If you were to listen to them alone in a darkened room at 3 a.m.—not that I have, mind you—you might find yourself believing you’re listening to the voice of Death itself. Music groups such as Stereolab and Boards of Canada have used samples from numbers stations in their own recordings, and the director Cameron Crowe used some in his movie Vanilla Sky.

And now, the hook for this post: The British label Irdial-Discs recently rereleased its 1997 four-CD set of numbers station recordings, The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations. Irdial’s main Conet Project page contains this description of the numbers station phenomenon and the questions it raises:

[Continue reading "The Conet Project"...]

No, seriously: Bill Laimbeer, the widely loathed giant who played center for the Detroit Pistons from 1982 to 1993, appeared as a Sleestak in at least one episode of the cheesy ’70s show Land of the Lost, a program that terrorized a generation of young kids on Saturday mornings. I discovered the Laimbeer connection on my own a couple of years ago, when I watched a two-episode LotL videotape I had bought during a bout of nostalgia. This obscure bit of trivia is, I admit, probably only of interest to North Americans born between about 1963 and 1973 who remember the nightmares caused by those hissing, rubber-suited monsters. Like the entire show itself, the Sleestaks seem hilariously campy now, but they were terrifying to a six-year-old. Also terrifying was the show’s incredibly weird music, a bizarre amalgam of eerie synthesizer bleeps and down-home banjo pickin’.

This image is from the opening credits of a Walter Koenig-penned episode called “The Stranger” that aired in late 1974, when Laimbeer was 17:

One of these Sleestaks is Laimbeer:

Laimbeer went from menacing Marshall, Will, and Holly as an adolescent to menacing the entire NBA as an adult.