At the center of one of the strangest criminal incidents in recent memory are Ursula and Sabina Eriksson, a pair of Swedish twins whose bizarre behavior was captured on CCTV and subsequently featured in a BBC documentary called Madness in the Fast Lane. After being thrown off a National Express coach (bus) to London for acting suspiciously and refusing to allow their bags to be checked, the pair were seen walking down the central reservation of the M6 motorway. What happened next has led to the formation of all sorts of wild theories about their true nature. The most common is that they are products of a modern European variant of the infamous MK-Ultra Project. Hard facts about the case are hard to come by, but at least two are not in dispute: 1) No drugs were found in their systems, 2) Neither had exhibited any symptoms of psychosis prior to this episode. The only official explanation rests on a rare psychological diagnosis called “Folie à deux” or shared psychotic disorder.

The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my deare friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King Btesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace.

It might sound like the province of H.P. Lovecraft and his notoriously apocryphal tome, The Necronomicon, but the practice of binding books with human skin is a historical reality. Many ivy league university libraries contain at least one example, including the treatise on Spanish law (Practicarum quaestionum circa leges regias Hispaniae) at Harvard that bears the inscription quoted above. Brown University has three, including a rare copy of De Humani Corporis Fabrica by Vesalius (which contains the lovely image copied here). Other morbid examples include court proceedings bound in the skin of the murderer convicted, and erotica bound with skin from human breasts.

Anneliese Michel was born in 1952 in Leiblfing, Bavaria. Diagnosed with epilepsy at 16, she thereafter slipped into a deep depression and began experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations of a decidedly religious nature which ultimately convinced her, her German Catholic family, and two local priests that she was suffering from demonic possession. Psychiatric treatment was terminated and she underwent sixty-seven exorcism sessions over a span of ten months. She eventually stopped eating and refused medical treatment. She died at the age of 23, weighing only 63 pounds. Her parents and the two priests were charged and convicted with negligent manslaughter. Whether madness or damnation, this brief excerpt from one session reveals the depths of her suffering.