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On or about the 15th of every month, a mysterious lowa City based magazine shows up in mail boxes and comic-book stores. It's cover features horror-film type and cryptic messages, but it's the disclaimer inside that makes it obvious this is no ordinary publication:
"Third Eye Over lowa contains adult situations, themes and lan guage, along with occult/religious themes which even lowa City residents might find offensive."
Third Eye Over Iowa, a monthlv magazine dedicated to the paranormal in the heartland, was started about sixth months ago by lowa City residents Todd Ristau, Vernon Trollinger, and Fredrick Norberg. The spooky stories a la grade-school camp outs that fill the pages are sent in by readers or researched by the three founders.
"We thought we'd dispute the fact that people who are interest ed in the occult are a pretty humorless bunch,Ristau said. 'We thought there was a niche for an occult and paranolulal humor magazine. We want to walk the knife's edge. We want to be some thing like the Weekly World News meets the'X-Files'in lowa.
Ristau and company began the magazine, which contains 20-30 pages of real and fabricated tales and costs .50 per issue, to expose the myths. Iegends and spooky happenings they have heard and read about over the years.
"People like a good yarn," Ristau said. "Most of the stories even the fictional ones have a grain of truth. People love good conspiracy stories. It makes them think they know the rules of the game if the game even has rules.
'We'd like to build a shadier mythic aspect in lowa. There's a lot more going on here than just growing corn."
The publication's October issue features the legend of the Black Angel in Oakdale Cemetery which turned the arm of a potential vandal dark black and is said to cause the death of anyone who touches it.
The same issue tells the creepy tale of three ghosts that haunt the fourth floor of Currier Residence Hall. According to the article, three co-eds committed triple suicide after hnding out they were all dating the same man, and their voices can still be heard in the hall today.
Not all of the stories in the magazine are such established legends. Ristau said articles are often fabricated from legends and myths around the world, and it is up to the reader to decide which stories are real lowa tales and which are made up.
"We do a lot of research," Ristau said. "There are some good inside jokes. Your average satanist would get a good chuckle out of some of this.
Lisa Swiss. manager of Moon Mystique, 114 1/2 E. College St., said although paranormal material is not the store's best seller, she sees potential for a boom in the market. Swiss said she has read all seven issues of Third Eye Over lowa and liked the spine-tingling tales.
"What I found interesting is there are things here in lowa that are paranormal." she said. "It's a really well put together 'zine "
Ristau said the magazine is sold in Des Moines, as well as at Moon Mystique, and has subscribers from as far away as New York and California. It's these people who keep the publication filled with ghoulish gossip, he said.
"Once you set yourself up as receptive to hearing about these things, people pull you aside in dark corners and say, 'This happened to me, but you can't use my name.' It's a way for them to get it off their chests without being exposed as a lunatic," Ristau said.
Even with strong reader feedback and contributions. Ristau said the magazine is still produced mainly for fun and entertainment.
"We're not doing this very aggressively," he said. "We never intended to make money from it. Like any conspiracy theory, word of mouth is the best conveyer."
The following reviews of our magazine ran in FactSheet Five:
Sun, 27 Apr 1997
There must be so little paranormal activity in Iowa that Third Eye had to
make some up. These spoofy news reports detail sightings of chupacabras,
ghosts, UFOs, and various other spooks.
Particularly fun was the woeful tale of the killer grain elevator that was
haunted from beyond and sported a plague of vile crickets. If that one
sounds a bit far-fetched, how about the Putnam Parallelogram that is the
terrestrial answer to the Bermuda Triangle? It obviously doesn't eat boats,
but instead opts for stray combines and other farm machinery. For those of
you with love trouble, there's also Sister Kasi, Iowa's Sensuous Czech
Visionary to advise you.
Wed, 27 May 1998
Third Eye Over Iowa - Tracking the Paranormal in America's Heartland
If one were to believe these humorous stories of unexplained phenomena, it
would mean Iowa was behind nearly every conspiracy and alien coverup
imaginable. What other state can boast of the "Putnam Parallelogram," flying
demon ships manned by "leprachans," death by cement eating, or the discovery
of Roman ruins? Don't misss the mystical advice of Sister Kasi -- "Iowa's
Sensuous Czech Visionary" or the rendezvous with a high priestess: "And for
the rest of the night we made love like psychotic eels." Fringe topics like
these are just dying to be spoofed and I'm glad they are finally getting their
due.
Mon, 19 Jan 1998
Third Eye Over Iowa
If you don't get enough weirdness from regular fringe zines, you can have some
made-up oddities from Third Eye. How about that rash of spontaneous chicken
combustion, the *Indiana Jones*-style recovery of the Sword of Tamerlane, and
the new hiding ground for alien spacecraft at Area Pottawattamie-21.
The Iowa Historian
The Newsletter of the State Historial Society of Iowa.
Volume 17, Number 2 Spring 2003 (on-line PDF file availible here.)
MUMMIFIED GIANTS "FOUND" IN KOSSUTH COUNTY
Iowa has a long tradition of historical hoaxes. One of the most infamous was the Cardiff Giant. "Discovered" by a New York farmer in 1869, the giant was actually a hoax carved from a block of Iowa gypsum and buried on the New York farm.
Iowa now has a new giant tale. Last fall, State Historical Society archeologist Dan Higginbottom opened an e-mail asking what he knew about the recently discovered Kossuth Giants. Dan, who has dealt with archeology in Iowa and the Midwest for 20 years, knew nothing of mummified giant remains being found in Kossuth County.
It turns out that two separate web sites (www.stevequayle.com/Giants/index2.html, which copies from what was clearly intended as a parody at yawp.com/3rd-i) carry a story that seems like something from the X-Files but with just enough balderdash to remind one of P. T. Barnum. Reflecting a subtle sense of humor and knowledge of Iowa history, the story goes like this: A Kossuth Center farmer who sports the name of 1950s rockabilly/country western singer Marvin Rainwater found the giants. Marvin knew that he needed the help of archeologists from Georg Von Podebrad College located in Zoar. The archeologists uncovered robes made from the same long red hair found on the mummified giants reportedly being stored at the Kossuth County Chapter of the State Historical Society.
The truth is that both Kossuth Center and Zoar are abandoned towns, and no college bears the name of Georg Von Podebrad, a fifteenth-century Bohemian king. Nor is there a Kossuth County Chapter of the State Historical Society. That didn't stop an Ohio student from calling the State Historical Society to find out more about some robes in museum storage made of long red hair!
The internet opens up a new world of possibility for instigators of hoaxes. Staff at the State Historical Society stand willing to help web browsers separate fact from fiction.
From The Iowa City Press-Citizen
Sunday, October 26, 2003
Iowa City Has Vast Haunted History
Sunday Q&A By Jeff Charis-Carlson
This week's Q & A is with Todd Ristau, graduate of the University of Iowa's Playwriting Workshop, former editor of Third Eye Over Iowa," and self-proclaimed paranormal investigator (retired).
Q: When you lived in town during the 1980s and 1990s, you used to lead tours of "Haunted Iowa City." How does the local haunted history stack up against that of New Orleans and other places?
A: I don't think it's near as famous. The university would want to pride itself more on provable facts, but there are plenty of ghost stories. My favorite was always that of the screaming ghost up in the Hall Mall. I don't know if anyone has seen it lately, but it was always one of the favorites on the tour.
Q: One of the key stops on your tour must have been Oakland Cemetery's nine-foot-tall "Black Angel," which has stood for somewhere between 85 and 90 years as a grave marker for three members of the Feldevert family. What is it about that statue that attracts so many myths?
A: It's so weird because it's so big and so menacing. One usually thinks of angels as being all white and lightness, and it's so big and black. And it really is menacing with its head bent slightly. It's not looking toward heaven or toward hell but toward some sort of purgatory, which is what all the mausoleums and graves start to remind you of. And then there's the fact that it's supposed to come from Europe and how it's surrounded by that slab. While I don't condone such behavior, it's always been a great place for underage drinkers to go, lie down on the slab and polish off a six-pack. There are all kinds of stories that could be made up in such a fashion. Then there's the business of having the fingers lopped off - it's just creepy.
Q: What are the other scary spots in Iowa City?
A: Again, I don't know if any of these are for certain, 100 percent true, but there's always story of the skull doodles of Kathryn S. There's supposed to be one specific apartment building - or a house converted into apartments - that had a murder there. The death had gone undiscovered, but anyone who moved into the building found themselves doodling skulls uncontrollably. It turned out that the only part of the body that hadn't been burned in the furnace was the skull.
Q: That story seems to be more of an urban legend. What's the unique spin that Iowa City adds to such ghost tales?
A: First, there is a rich tradition of Iowa ghosts, as that series of haunted farmland books will attest. I think it's in part because of the regional isolation, because of the darkness of the nights and because of the sad and lonely country cemeteries that are increasingly disappearing as housing additions crop up over them. It all inspires the imagination. What about Iowa City specifically? Well, think about the backdrop I just described and add the waves of people from more urban areas passing through Iowa City. Ghost stories are a good way to energize the mind and imagination when you've run out of things to do besides hit the bars and go to the mall. And when you hear about things you normally associate with more urban areas - like a fair number of murders, including mass killings - Iowa City starts to seem like a veneer of something normal hiding the awful Lovecraftian truth just below.
Q: How does H.P. Lovecraft fit into all this?
A: That was our whole inspiration for Third Eye Over Iowa. We were following how Lovecraft threw open his entire work by asking people to write additions to his mythos. The great thing about Lovecraft is that there is a kind of everyday quality about it, but if you take a moment to scratch the veneer of normalcy, you never know what you're going to find.
I mean, prowl around the grounds at ACT, and it's really easy to let the mind wander and see sinister things that are probably not really true. For example, did you ever notice how, on the grounds of ACT, there is a pretty clear druidic influence on the stone work?
Plus, in Iowa City, you have that imposing and scary Old Capitol, with its arcane secret history, seated in the middle of the Pentacrest, which conjures occult imagery.
You have the left over residue of native peoples who left their names on the landscape of Iowa but are suspiciously absent. There are lots of woods and the remains of pest houses where people died of terrible diseases. The list goes on.
Iowa is terrifically scary mostly because it is so often held up as the standard of normalcy that the rest of the nation compares itself to in order to judge their own sanity. It is tempting to tilt the scale a bit, you know, so that maybe New York doesn't seem so weird when you find out about Satan worshiping farmers and pagan barns where witches have orgies.
Q: If you were still in Iowa City, what would you be doing this Halloween.
A: Since Halloween is on a Friday night this year, I guess I'd be spending it doing a very creepy No Shame Theatre skit.