The Uncanny Valley
Does Cosby really buy 10,000 lobsters for UMass every Halloween?
After my colleague Hunter Styles dispelled the myth that the characters in the Scooby Doo TV series were based on the academic personalities of the Valley’s Five Colleges, my attention should have immediately turned to another legend passed on to me when I was a wee...
The Uncanny Valley: Do Ghosts Haunt Spoleto?
by Hunter Styles Staff writer Amanda Drane has worked in the local food industry for 10 years, and she’s shared with us some truly great stories of her time in the kitchen, including a couple about the haunted room at Spoleto, an Italian restaurant in Northampton. One...
The Uncanny Valley: Why do some fast food fries cost more than burgers?
Why is it that a cheeseburger costs $1.22 at Burger King, while a small order of fries costs $1.70? Isn’t beef supposed to be more expensive than potatoes? Thanks for writing in, anonymous reader, with your puzzling — and discomforting — question. To figure out why...
The Uncanny Valley: Why are there ads on Springfield buses asking, ‘Do you know who murdered me’?
Buses are big and so are the advertisements they often host — that’s no surprise. What is jolting, however, is when the typical music or beverage ad is replaced with a giant placard offering a $50,000 reward for information regarding an unsolved murder from 2013....
The Uncanny Valley: WTF, Whose happy place is this?
My curiosity is piqued by a recent Facebook post by fellow Advocate writer Yana Tallon-Hicks in which she documented a creepy, abandoned house complete with a puzzling sign that read, “This is my happy place.” So, I head past the rolling greens of the Amherst Golf...
The Uncanny Valley: WTF, Are roadside signs offering to buy homes in ‘any condition’ a scam?
You’ve probably seen the signs — “Fast $$ for Houses,” “We Buy Ugly Homes” — tacked onto telephone poles or scrawled onto yard signs by the side of a main road. The advertising doesn’t inspire confidence. The hand-scrawled, occasionally misspelled signs scream scam....
WTF: Why does it say ‘Quota’ at the corner of Route 5 and Hampden Street in Holyoke?
For more than a decade, the island at the corner of Hampton Street and Route 5 in Holyoke has borne the word “Quota” — spelled out in flowers in the warm weather and black plastic edging in the cold. On my ride home from work down Route 5 south, I often wondered...
The Uncanny Valley: Jumpin’ Black Flash, A Cape Cod boogeyman
Spring-Heeled Jack, in addition to being the best-named apparition since the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, was a frequent haunter of Victorian London and, eventually, other parts of Great Britain. He was known and feared for his habits of sudden attack via tearing with metal...
The Uncanny Valley: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral
Behind the scenes at the Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke in the 1990s, Stephen Petegorsky made a delightful discovery: “hundreds of taxidermed animal specimens — most of them really ratty — stuffed in a storage closet.” He borrowed some stuffed animals for photo...
Freaky whales in the sky, I guess
Reporter Amanda Drane recently turned me on to this weird phenomenon that’s been recorded around the world. Out of nowhere, in the day or night, in the city or in the woods people have recorded the incredibly loud sound I can only describe as a giant sky whale...
The Uncanny Valley: UFO sightings
On the evening of March 17, a driver in South Hadley reported seeing a strange triangular craft in the sky with lights on each of its three visible points. After following the craft for a couple of miles, the driver pulled into the Village Commons parking lot and...
The Uncanny Valley: WTF? And Other Head-Scratchers, Road to Nowhere
“Curiouser and curiouser!” exclaimed Alice as she took her first steps into Wonderland. If she were making a trek through the Valley instead, we think she would say the same thing. Our little corner of the globe is chock full of odd people, secret places, and...E-Edition
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