Sunday 30 October 2011

Oetzi's Revenge

All Hallows Eve. The night when the veil that separates our world from the Other world is at its thinnest and the one time in the year when we glimpse for a moment the dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension where shadow and superstition lies, the dimension of imagination. Don't be afraid, take my hand and follow me through the veil into that other place.

It's 1991 and two German tourists, Helmut and Erika Simon, discover a 5300 year old mummified corpse and direct a team of archaeologists to the site in the Alps between Austria and Italy.
The body is encased in ice and the evidence shows that the man, nicknamed Oetzi after the area in which he was discovered, met with a violent death, having been shot with an arrow before having his skull smashed.
Then, the people associated with his discovery begin meeting with mysterious ends.
The first death occurred when the man who had who put the caveman's body into the body bag was killed in a car crash on the way to a presentation that he was due to give on the discovery of the dead man.
Then the mountain guide who lead the team to the frozen body died in an avalanche. On recoevery of the body, it was discovered that among his many fatal injuries, his skull was smashed.
Next was the cameraman who had filmed the recovery of Oetzi, collapsing and dying of an undetected brain tumor.
Helmut, the man who had actually found the Iceman, was then found dead, laying face down in a stream, where he had landed after falling off a 300 foot cliff. Was it a coincedence that when death came for him, he was face down in water with his skull smashed just like Oetzi?
In another macabre twist, the man that found Helmut in the river, then dropped dead himself, suffering a heart attack on the way home from Helmut's funeral.
The sixth person who had been there on that fateful day when the iceman was discovered died from complications with a medical condition and the final death (so far) was when the scientist who first examined the corpse, died of a blood disease.

Maybe there is a practical explanation for why all these people died, maybe it was all a bizarre coincidence or maybe it's a warning that there's a place between light and shadow where the dead can reach out and touch us. A night like tonight perhaps when the curtain between the living and the dead is tantalisingly pulled aside for the briefest of moments.

Was that noise outside your window really the wind? Somewhere, the dead eyes of a 5300 year old corpse are looking for it's next victim. Stay safe tonight.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

it wasn't wind. it was Oetzi! but now Oetzi has three eyes because I shot him between the eyes with my .45 automatic. Oh, he also has a double tap in his chest...

don't trespass in Texas damn it.

q