The Holiday Season in the Bay Area has recently taken a particularly dark turn.

First, there was the gruesome Dec. 6th slaying of San Francisco resident Clayton Hanson in his Richmond District apartment. That was followed by the Dec. 9th mass killing of four members of the Bourne family in the family home in San Jose.

The killings of Clayton Hanson and the four members of the Bourne family (parents Kurt and Dorothy Bourne, son Alex, 16, and daughter Connie, 14) were particularly savage, and have been trailed by rumors of some sort of large predatory animal being involved, rumors that local officials have neither confirmed nor denied. Other rumors of death cults performing some manner of Satanic rituals have also arisen following the killings. No arrests have been made and the officials in San Francisco and San Jose are all keeping the lid screwed down tightly on this investigation.

It is amid this atmosphere that has some area residents worrying about a new serial killer stalking the region (and others wondering if some sort of large exotic pet has gotten loose from some private zoo) that a wave of sightings of a most macabre Christmas spirit are being reported.

It has been dubbed by locals the "Mortuary Sled", and sightings of it were reported here first. Regular PNS readers will recall our Really Real Bulletin of December 6th "Visions of Murderplums", which related an email from one of a group of devil-horned revelers who had been coming home from the previous night's Krampusnacht party at Madame Voodoo's Maison Diabolique when they all saw a flaming, reindeerless Santa's sleigh traversing the night sky. Kris Kringle had been seemingly been hacked to death with a cleaver, and on his lap rode a dead, frozen child.

That description has been passed around the Northern California memeosphere more times than a bottomless bong at a Burning Man theme camp. Now people from all over the greater Bay Area are firing off-emails and blog posts claiming to also have seen what one local described as "Rob Zombie's bad Christmas dream". People who say they have seen this "Ghost of Christmas Murders Past" report their personal jolly-quotient sinking through the floor just thinking about it. And parents all over the Bay Area are trying to reassure their children that Santa Claus is alive and well and not, in fact, one of the victims of the killings in the news.

Some locals are saying the visions of the fiery death-sleigh are negative psychic-energy manifestations in response to the killings during the holiday season. Others opine that they are harbingers of further holiday murders to come. More than one source has pointed out that Clayton Hanson was killed on Dec. 6th, the Feast of St. Nicholas in the Catholic tradition (Dec. 19th in the Orthodox Christian tradition). And everybody who's viewed it agrees that it's one of the most disturbing images they've seen.

Now Aztlan-based multidisciplinary art-subversivist Fernando Jimenez-Santiago and his cadre of cross-platform creative cabalists have completed a 72-hour marathon mural painting of just that image, and it's causing quite a stir.

You see, the mural is on the side of a building in San Francisco's Mission District, and features Mexican folk-saint Jesus Malverde turning his back on the disemboweled Father Christmas and the icy young corpse that rides with him aboard his no-horse, open-flame sleigh. Many residents of the strongly Latino and Catholic neighborhood have expressed outrage at the subject matter, especially given the time of year and the murders that have occurred.

But Jimenez-Santiago has the support and permission of the building's owner, Señora Felicia del Toro. Señora del Toro claims to have had the same vision as Fernando, and authorized him to paint the mural on the building she owns that houses a laundromat and a bar.

When I asked Fernando why he painted this particular mural, he replied, "I was visited in a vision by Jesus Malverde. Why he chose me, I'm not sure. I'm not even Sinaloan. I was born in Riverside, California, and grew up in Veracruz, Mexico. Also, my partners & I are openly bringing art and culture back and forth across the border, not smuggling mota y coca.

"But still, there he was, a ghost out of so many corridos coming to deliver a message to me. And his message was This flaming Santa stuff, this is crazy gringo shit. This is not our myth. And we should just stay out of it. Señora del Toro received the same vision, and so this mural is the message to the community she feels we were charged to deliver.

"I personally don't believe in visions. I don't believe in Jesus Malverde. But what I can tell you is this mural represents exactly what I saw in the vision I don't believe in. And Señora del Toro says it represents what she saw, and she's willing to indulge a bunch of loco cross-cultural trans-paradigmatic art-rebels to address to what she believes is going on spiritually here in NorCal."

We here at PNS will keep you updated as this story progresses.

Also, reports are coming in of a flying-squad of Vatican warrior-priests recently dispatched to the Catholic Diocese of San Jose, California, directly from Rome. This is believed to be in response to possible Satanic connections to the Hanson and Bourne killings. Sources indicate that the armories beneath the Vatican have been opened and the true Sword of Charlemagne has been issued to the commander of this troop of neo-crusaders. Again, we'll keep you updated as we learn more.

And remember – if it alters your brain chemistry and changes your perceptions, it's psychotropic.

-M.I. Farreal is chief correspondent for the Psychotropic News Service, a long-time Bay Area edge-culture commentarian, forteana enthusiast, and founding editor of the now-defunct techno-sociology and entheogenic music magazine "Hella Futura".