Phantasmal Crime

Familicide is impossible to understand. How does a family member kill their entire family? There is a traditional folk ballad with a very macabre subject. That subject is the massacre of a North Carolina family by the name of Lawson. This song details the gruesome events that took place on Christmas Day in 1929. The ballad is titled "The Murder of the Lawson Family" and was written by Walter “Kid” Smith of Virginia in 1930 and recorded by the Carolina Buddies for Columbia. It begins: "Twas on last Christmas evening.  The snow was on the ground.  At his home in North Carolina  The murderer was found." Charlie Lawson was born in 1886 in Lawsonville, North Carolina. In 1911, at the age of 25, Charlie married the love of his life, Miss Fannie Manring, who was nineteen. The couple would eventually have eight children: Marie, James whom they called Arthur, William, Carrie, Lucinda whom they called Maybell, James, Raymond and Mary Lou. Charlie had followed hi...

Long Island is the largest and longest island in the contiguous United States. The island stretches from New York Harbor to Montauk Point, which has become popular in conspiracy circles for something called the Montauk Project. These were a series of secret government projects conducted at Camp Hero at Montauk, Long Island. Did these experiments ever really happen? In the world of Stranger Things they did, but in ours, that is for you to decide. What has happened on Long Island, is death and in the case of these departed dames, it seems to have led to some hauntings. The largest freshwater lake on Long Island is Lake Ronkonkoma. The mysterious waters of this lake have spawned legends and some tall tales that even include a claim that piranhas rove the dark depths of this bottomless lake. Is it really bottomless? Are you willing to take a deep dive to find out? There are those that swear the water has a magical healing power and the Algonquin People would travel from mile...