{"id":17984,"date":"2017-08-01T20:05:47","date_gmt":"2017-08-02T00:05:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=17984"},"modified":"2017-08-01T20:05:47","modified_gmt":"2017-08-02T00:05:47","slug":"inside-aurora-were-not-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/inside-aurora-were-not-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"INSIDE AURORA: We’re not alone"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Scott Johnston<\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019re not alone (mentally insert spooky X-files type music here).
\nThere are dozens of locations called \u201cAurora\u201d out there all over the world. There are towns in Suriname and South Africa, suburbs of the cities of Turin, Italy and Victoria, Australia, and even an island in the South Pacific.
\nAnd the U.S. is obviously crazy about the goddess of the dawn, as there are no less than 23 states with a municipality called \u201cAurora\u201d.
\nBut that\u2019s not the spooky part.
\nLocal historian David Heard gives very entertaining \u201cSpirit Walks\u201d highlighting the ghosts and otherworldly goings on in our Town.
\nAn example of this is Annie, the spirit that apparently resides in the basement of the Filly on Yonge Street. Not surprisingly, the cemetery is another locally favoured haunt of the supernatural.
\nBut my research has shown that some of these other Auroras can give us a spectral run for our money.
\nAurora, Illinois seems to have its share of ghosts, with a number of haunted structures.
\nAurora, Nevada is an actual ghost town, which was abandoned in the late 1800s when the local gold mine closed. Today, there\u2019s not much of it left, as pieces have been carted away to use as building materials in other less dilapidated nearby settlements.
\nBut that\u2019s just an empty town. Much more spooky are the Aurora Islands.
\nThese three islands were discovered in the South Atlantic in 1762 by the Spanish ship named, not by any coincidence, the Aurora. They were spotted again several times over the following decades by other ships, but by 1856 they had completely vanished.
\nWere they swallowed up by the sea in some natural calamity like an earthquake or tidal wave? Did all the previous ships\u2019 crews partake in too much grog and hallucinate seeing them? Are they some mysterious landmass moving through time and space like the central island in the TV series \u201cLost\u201d?
\nWho knows, but they\u2019ve never been seen again. Someone with a flair for the dramatic has said this is \u201cone of the great unsolved mysteries of the sea\u201d.
\nOn land, and perhaps stranger still, is the town of Aurora, Texas, where a UFO crashed in 1897. This wasn\u2019t just some meteor that was witnessed by someone who perhaps like the ships crews in the previous story had had a bit too much to drink.
\nApparently a cigar-shaped craft slammed into the local judge\u2019s property where it took out the windmill and exploded into a zillion pieces.
\nDozens of people came out to take a look at the crash site and grab souvenirs in the form of pieces of the ship, which were described as being made of some sort of strange metal.
\nEven more interesting, the pilot was recovered and described by the local military as \u201cnot of this world.\u201d Whatever its interstellar denomination, he\/she\/it was even buried with full Christian rites in a local cemetery.
\nGranted, like the elusive Aurora Islands, no trace of either the spacecraft or its occupant has been identified in modern times, so the possibility this was hoax is pretty strong, but this story hasn\u2019t been completely disproven.
\nSo the fact that we potentially have a ghost or two in our Town does not make us unique among our Aurora namesakes around the world.
\nBut it does suggest that we\u2019re in good spectral company.<\/p>\n

Feel free to e-mail Scott at:
\nmachellscorners@gmail.com<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Scott Johnston We\u2019re not alone (mentally insert spooky X-files type music here). There are dozens of locations called \u201cAurora\u201d out there all over the world. There are towns in Suriname and South Africa, suburbs of the cities of Turin, Italy and Victoria, Australia, and even an island in the South Pacific. And the U.S. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-opinion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-4G4","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-29 18:20:12","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17984\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}