The Paranormal Digest for Jan 10, 2026

From London to the Amazon rainforest, your guide to all things spooky

In the early days of the digest, I basically threw all kinds of spooky stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Nowaday’s, I like to try and tie at least a few of the pieces together to create a theme of sorts. This week, we start in London, but we very quickly leave the city in favor of the Amazonian jungle. It is a vast area that I am sure is filled with creepiness and undiscovered creatures. Okay, enough of my rambling, let’s get to the spooky stuff.

Haunted Location - The Tower of London

Dating back to the 11th century, the iconic tower in the heart of London has served multiple purposes over the years. It has been a palace, a prison, and an armory, but perhaps more importantly, at least from the scary side of things, it is also the site of multiple executions. With such a checkered past, it should probably come as no real surprise that there are countless ghosts rumored to still be living in the tower. Royalty tends to be the most reported, with Anne Boleyn arguably the most famous of all the spirits.

Urban Legend - The Green Children of Woolpit

This urban legend also takes place in England and is once again an old one. We need to travel all the way back to the 12th century for the first sighting of the children. In the village of Woolpit, a boy and a girl were discovered, both of whom had green-tinged skin, while also wearing strange clothing and speaking in a foreign tongue that was unrecognizable. Over time, they assimilated with the villagers, although their diet remained strange. Eventually the girl revealed that they were from a place called St. Martin’s Land, a place bathed in green light. A simpler explanation was that they were from St. Martin’s orphanage, operated by the Flemish, and suffering from malnutrition.

Creepy Cryptid - Mapinguari

If you think the sasquatch legend is only in North America, think again. In South America, there is a creature called the Mapinguari that is described as massive, humanoid, and very hairy. While this sounds a lot like the sasquatch, there are a couple of differences. This creature allegedly smells so foul that it can knock people unconscious, while it also has backward facing feet designed to fool trackers. The belief is that these creatures protect the forest and scare off those looking to harm the environment.

Video of the Week - The Beast of the Amazon

I will be the first to admit that I had never heard of the Mapinguari before researching for this piece, so I am definitely interested in learning more. If you are like me, then you will probably get a kick out of this video from the Best Documentary Channel on YouTube. Who doesn’t love a good creature background story?

Horror Book of the Week - Pray for Darkness by James Michael Rice

As I said at the top of this piece, I am trying to tie some things together with the digest now, so I thought it might be a good idea to stay in the Amazon rainforest for our spooky book of the week. After a bit of a search, I came up with Pray for Darkness by James Michael Rice. Creature features for the win, always.

Deadly Drabble - Vegan

The drink was supposed to serve as a meal replacement that trigged fat burning. In the beginning, the results were miraculous, the green powder delivering results that made GLP-1 shots become obsolete.

The demand for the powder, known simply as Vegano, was huge. Knock off variants began to appear, the all-natural ingredients from the Amazon replaced by inferior additives. The results were catastrophic.

Users began to vomit uncontrollably, lime green bugs mixed in among the puke. Those things escaped out into the world and began to feed on human flesh, growing with each nibble and getting hungrier and ever hungrier.

Random Weirdness - The Humpty Doo Haunting

While there are beliefs that the poltergeist activity in the small Australian town of Humpty Doo was mostly staged, it is still a cool story. This all happened in 1997-98, with the owners of a house in the town stating that they were being attacked by stones and other objects that seemed to materialize out of nowhere and then hurled by unseen assailants. The story caught the eye of the media, as well as a priest, who tried to exorcize the home. There is apparently video of a lot of this stuff, so I know where I am headed next.

I hope that you will all be headed back here again next week for another round of The Paranormal Digest.