Erika Engelhaupt > Quotes

“There’s nothing abnormal about being a little abnormal.”
― Erika Engelhaupt, Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science

“This kind of scientific boldness is something the world could use more of. All too often, we’re hemmed in by our fears and our sense of propriety. Some subjects simply aren’t discussed, or aren’t taken seriously as topics of investigation. Sometimes that’s because we collectively feel they’re gross or embarrassing—like secretions. Or sex. Or dead bodies.”
― Erika Engelhaupt, Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science

“And most of all, let’s be more blunt.”
― Erika Engelhaupt, Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science

“King James is more famous today for his version of the Bible than for his belief in diabolical practices. But in 1597, more than a decade before the King James Bible was published, he wrote a treatise on demons and sorcery called Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue. The king was obsessed with the occult, and with witches in particular, having flushed out a coven of at least 70 in 1590, when he was still known as King James VI of Scotland. The witches were tortured using devices like the “breast ripper”—which is exactly as horrific as it sounds—until they confessed. Eventually, some 4,000 people were burned at the stake in Scotland’s witch trials. In Daemonologie, the king wrote of his belief in cruentation as a way to mete out justice: In a secret murther, if the deade carcase be at any time thereafter handled by the murtherer, it will gush out of bloud, as if the bloud were crying out to the heaven for revenge of the murtherer, God having appoynted that secret super-naturall signe for tryall of that secret unnatural crime.*”
― Erika Engelhaupt, Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science