Thanks for visiting Pathological Lies. This page is simply a portal to various invented and fabricated sites that I have set up around the Internet. These sites are not necessarily intended to be hoaxes or to be misleading. Indeed, whenever I receive correspondence about any of the sites, I inform my correspondent that the site has no basis in reality and I have invented the whole thing. Instead, the sites are tests of credulity and my own examination into just how easy it is to blur the lines between fiction and fact.
Incidentally, I firmly believe that any information gathered from the Internet should be verified by some additional source. People who take “facts” presented on web sites at face value are only misleading themselves. Having said that, I am not at all opposed to folks who enjoy spreading lies and mongering rumors across cyberspace. Indeed, the Internet is the ultimate engine of unregulated self-publication — and I think that we can all have a lot of fun just so long as we don’t take much of anything out here seriously.
The sites below are all entirely fictional. I may have used real events and places as a basis for what I’ve written, but even these have been heavily modified to fit my own whims. There are only a few sites at the moment, but I continue to work hard at churning out others. They cover (or will cover) a wide range of believability and sometimes may be meant to duplicate or satirize other sites I have seen on the Internet.
Again — these web pages are an exercise of my imagination. They are intended as entertainment and nothing more. However, it is not at all my intention to be offensive to anybody. If you have a reasonable complaint about the propriety of something I’ve posted, please bring it to my attention.
I can be reached at [email protected].
This was the first site that I put up, after having visited several different ghost-related web sites of varying ridiculousness. Whilst reading those accounts, it occurred to me that they might just be all invented stories. Unless I was willing to visit the supposedly haunted areas, I had no tools for verification at my disposal. Ghost hunting, after all, is a terribly unregulated business.
Most of the places named in Ghosts of Chester are real places and I have been to many of them. However, I’ve never experienced anything supernatural or suspected that they were haunted. Many of the “legends” that I reference are also real legends that schoolchildren in the township tell one another — but they appear to have no basis in reality and nobody with any degree of responsibility takes them seriously.
The “ghost journal” doesn’t exist. I have never investigated paranormal activity anywhere and certainly have not kept a written account of anything of the sort. My adventures are all invented, as are all of the dates.
Visit Ghosts of Chester.
This site is something more of a wish-fulfillment fantasy for me. I take frequent and unreasonable exception at the poor usage that the English language suffers at the hands of amateur webmasters and composers of email. I’m far too nice to post and destroy actual examples of poor grammar, so I wrote some myself of which I could make fun.
I admit that the fun-making is all rather mean-spirited and cruel. I would certainly never say such things to actual persons, no matter how terribly they wrote. In real life, I am perfectly willing to spell and let misspell — although I do feel that language misuse frequently descends to the point of illegibility. If there were something I could do, I would do it. Instead, I can only continue to offer example of carefully written prose and hope that my quiet perseverance might inspire somebody.
Visit Your Grammar Wears Army Boots.
If I expected any of my sites to offend anybody, it would certainly be this one. Without credentials, without citations, and without even revealing my real name, I embark upon an argument designed to prove that Robert Frost plagiarized several of his poems from little-known volumes of poetry that he edited. Again, this site makes use of some real facts (Frost was indeed a consulting editor for the Holt Company) to spin off utterly insupportable lies.
None of the supposed amateur poets that I quote ever existed. Their volumes were never published and Frost certainly never saw them. As far as I know, Frost never plagiarized a word of anything. I can’t explain exactly why I decided to pick on the poor fellow and make such accusations — I just wanted to make the claims sound as credible as possible. At the same time, I have taken no pains to give the ostensible author of the site any air of legitimacy. This is truly a case where anyone with an ounce of healthy skepticism should realize that the burden of proof lies on the nameless joker making the preposterous claims.
Visit The Robert Frost Conspiracy.
Ostensibly the website of the fictitious Moderate Blowhard Party, this page offers a necessarily vague platform designed to make everybody — or (more likely) nobody — happy. Like a good moderate platform, it examines both sides to every issue and supports both (because, of course, in a two-party system there can never be more than two sides).
This site, I suppose, comes closer to parody than anything else in the catalog. Yet, I’m not really making fun of anything in particular — I’m rather simply acknowledging that most issues are more complex than they might first appear. The site is intended to be thought provoking, but only for me. Everybody else should find it utterly vacuous and devoid of any real content. The opinions expressed in Moderate Blowhards, by the way, are necessarily those of the webmaster — or those of anybody else, for that matter.
Visit Moderate Blowhards.