Beheadings & Batman

As we travel into the new darkness being revealed in 2012, we should not forget the reality of beheadings in the background of the Batman blackness.

Batman Beheading

On Saturday, June 28, 2008, at Six Flags Over Georgia, 17-year-old Asia Leeshawn Ferguson of Springfield, South Carolina, scaled two six-foot fences and passed through restricted areas posted as dangerous to visitors. Ferguson jumped the fences and was then decapitated by the Batman roller coaster. 

Tim McLean's tatoo.

It should not be lost on people that the victim of the Canadian bus beheading (July 30, 2008) was a young man who told his friends he "loved being a carny," who sported the Joker-like tattoo (above) on his back. Tim McLean was headed to Winnipeg after working with the carnival in Edmonton, Alberta. His links to Joker/clowns/Jokawild and more were discussed, in depth, here.

Remember, The Dark Knight was released on July 18, 2008.

On August 5, 2008, The Boston Herald reporter Stephen Schaefer asked, "Is The Dark Knight cursed?"

It was only a matter of time until the mainstream media would catch on to this "curse." People have been mumbling about it since Heath Ledger died. As those watching for the curse of threes have noticed, Ledger died, Christian Bale was arrested and then Morgan Freeman has been in a tragic car crash.

Schaefer writes:

The box-office behemoth, expected to pass the $400 million mark this week, is notorious as being the late Heath Ledger's last completed movie.

Now Morgan Freeman, the 71-year-old actor who plays Batman's techie Lucius Fox, is in serious condition following a car accident in Mississippi late Sunday night.

The Oscar-winning actor was driving his wife's friend Demaris Meyer's 1997 Nissan Maxima when it rolled off Tallahatchie County Highway 32, flipping over several times. Meyer was treated for minor injuries and released.

Freeman, who was driving to his Charleston home, reportedly suffered broken ribs and was air-lifted to Regional Medical Center in Tennessee.

This tragedy follows assault allegations made last month by the mother and sister of "The Dark Knight" star Christian Bale. The 34-year-old Bale denied the charges. He'll be back in court next month.

The Dark Knight is dedicated to both the 28-year-old Ledger, who died of an accidental overdose last Jan. 22, and Conway Wickliffe, 41, a stunt supervisor who died in a freak accident in London while setting up a car crash.

Blogger Todd Campbell, after he read an early sharing of these thoughts, forwarded the following photographs to my attention, from the movie. He posted on this, as well, in 2008.

What do we find these photos have revealed?

Embedded within the movie was the Heath Ledger character, the Joker, using the Joker/Death card as his "business calling card," as pictured, shown holding a decapitated head. 

Schaefer wrote that The Dark Knight joined a grim list of "cursed" films. Most people are familiar with them.

Curses Abound

The Superman hex struck Christopher Reeve, who shot to fame after starring in the 1978 movie, after he broke his neck in a horse riding accident. Television's original "Superman," George Reeves died in an apparent suicide in 1969.

In June 2007, a teenager's legs were severed when cables snapped on the Superman  Tower of Power ride at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom in Louisville, Kentucky.

The 1982 horror classic Poltergeist was haunted by the premature deaths of two of its female stars. Vanity Fair celebrity scribe Dominick Dunne's daughter Dominique was murdered by her live-in lover soon after the film was finished. Heather O'Rourke, the film's child star, died in 1988 at age 12 of cardiopulmonary arrest prompted by Crohn's disease. For all of its sensationalism, in the end, the Poltergeist curse only documents four deaths.

I have written of the "Mothman Death Curse" online and specifically in the August 2004 issue of Fortean Times, with a list of over 80-related deaths, some of surprisingly young people and others of elder members of the crew, cast, and aligned associates of the film, in West Virginia and elsewhere.

VA Tech Beheading

On Wednesday, January 21, 2009, (a year after Heath Ledger's death) police reported a woman was slain on the Virginia Tech campus and decapitated. Xin Yang, 22, was killed after arriving at the campus from Beijing on January 8 to begin studying accounting, Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said.

The first 911 call came into police around 7:06 p.m., saying a woman was being assaulted inside the Graduate Life Center, just outside the Au Bon Pain cafe.

A police officer who responded to an emergency call has told how she entered the cafe to find the male attacker holding the female victim's head in his hand. Police say the victim was decapitated with a kitchen knife while having coffee at the cafe with the suspect.

Responding officers found the woman had been stabbed to death and beheaded. They arrested the suspect, a 25-year-old Chinese graduate student named Haiyang Zhu. He is a Ph.D. student in agricultural and applied economics. The police also recovered a large kitchen knife they believe was used at the scene.

Haiyang Zhu was charged with first-degree murder and is being held in Montgomery County jail.

Au Bon Pain - French for "place of good bread" - was founded by Louis Kane (remember the comic character Batman was created by Bob Kane) as a bakery in Boston's historically significant Faneuil Hall in 1978, known for Samuel Adams' revolutionary speeches and its famous grasshopper weathervane used to tell British spies from Patriots. In 1982 Au Bon Pain debuted a bakery cart at Logan Airport in Boston. Au Bon Pain Inc. (later renamed Panera Bread Company) went public in 1991, and today has 230 units worldwide.

The Au Bon Pain decapitation was the first violence on the VA Tech campus since April 16, 2007, when Korean student Seung-Hui Cho killed two students at West Ambler Johnston Hall, and then two hours later, after walking across campus to Norris Hall, killed 30 others and himself.

From Batman to Mothman, whether or not there are curses is not important. As the spectre of decapitations grows in the Mideast, we need to be aware. The fact that they have become part of popular culture and that there is a dark sense that there may be such things in the modern world, in the end, may be what becomes more significant. If they are foreshadowing other storms, dawns, and wicked things coming this way remains to be seen.

As seen in Sydney, Australia on September 15, 2012.