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The Doclopedia #1,889
State Secrets: Alabama – The Spirit of Selma
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No government official in Alabama will ever talk about it. Neither will the FBI, although they’ve had people investigating it since 1971. Any regular folks involved clam up, too, unless you can catch one really drunk. We learned what we know because a couple of folks in Alzheimer’s care facilities talked about it. And we hacked the FBI’s “secure” database.
“It” is what is referred to, when it’s referred to at all, as “The Spirit of Selma”, although a better name might be the “Bloody Sunday Spirit”. Whatever you choose to call it, it first appeared 5 years to the day after the March 7, 1965 Selma to Montgomery civil rights march was attacked by police and newly deputized white men. That day, 17 marchers were hospitalized and 50 treated for other injuries.
Five years later, to the hour, some of those attackers started dying.
The first two were found beaten to death along Highway 80, just outside of town. The coroner determined that they had been beaten with 1960s era police nightsticks. The killing was written off as a revenge killing, but before anyone could be arrested and railroaded, things got strange and spooky.
The next day a former police officer was found hanging from the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The strange thing wasn’t that he was dead, because a lynching will do that to you. No, it was the fact that there was no visible rope holding him up. As soon as an officer climbed up and felt for a rope he couldn’t see, the body dropped onto the road.
Over the last 5 decades, 2 to 5 people, all men, all white, all racists, have died by beatings, hanging, trampling by horses, shooting, what is being called “hellfire”, and heart attacks brought on by extreme terror. Many of them were involved in in the Bloody Sunday events.
The deaths have been officially labeled everything from drunken driving to suicide to accidental death to natural causes. Nobody ever calls them murders, the state sees to that.
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The Doclopedia #1,890
State Secrets: Alaska – The Snow Man
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There could well be a hundred strange things going on in Alaska that nobody will ever know about. It’s a huge state mostly covered with wilderness and it has a small population for it’s size.
But one strange thing is known about, at least to state officials and the native people: The Snow Man.
This is not Frosty, folks. This thing is about 7 feet tall, humanoid shaped and as far as anyone can tell, either made of snow or heavily covered in it. No facial or body features have ever been seen. It also does not leave footprints in the snow. No excrement or urine attributable to it has ever been found. The Snow Man has never been known to attack a human or animal.
According to native legend, the creature was here when they got here, which would be about 14,000 years ago. It has been seen by white men since at least 1750. Nobody has ever seen more than one Snow Man, so it could well be the only one of it’s kind.
The Snow Man is not quite the secret that other strange creatures are, but the few historical mentions of it are attributes to native stories or the ramblings of old sourdoughs who’ve spent to long out in the wild alone.
So why does the state keep the Snow Man a well guarded secret? As a former head of the state police once said, “to keep every goddamn crazy in the world from coming here to catch it and causing trouble”. The native people fully agree with that.
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