Halloween 2011 Blog

Happy Halloween Itself
10.31.2011

For a lot of people, today is the only day they celebrate Halloween. Here, we’ve been doing it for more than a month and a half. But one day or 50, the season still flies by so…freaking…fast. And ellipses don’t slow it down one…freaking…bit. But I don’t want to spend the last post of the Halloween 2011 Blog summarizing what wend on here on the blog since September 12 or trying to wring just one more page view from you guys. Like a mummy straight out of its sarcophagus, I want to tie up some loose ends...

Scared Out of Our Wallets
10.30.2011

Haunted house attractions are among my pet proofs that actual haunted houses don’t exist. You see, if someone came out and said, “This house is definitely haunted. If you enter, you are guaranteed to see harrowing stuff and things from another world will jump out at you. I would suggest hitting a Dairy Queen, instead,” there would be long lines of excited, cider chugging people wrapped around the block waiting to get in. We check out Horseman's Hollow in Sleepy Hollow, NY...

Buffy the Halloween Celebrator
10.29.2011

I finally get back to an age-old holiday tradition...TV watching, by looking at the Halloween episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For most people who watched this show, that era of their life spanned 1997 to 2003 with the show. For me, it started and stopped 2010 to 2011, when I finally got around to watching this series that everybody kept telling me to watch...

Walking in a Wicked Wonderland
10.28.2011 

Sorry to post about this again, but I just can’t shake the October snow from the shoulders of my vampire cape. At this point, it’s all melted, but they’re predicting an actual snowstorm this weekend for my neck of the woods, which is really going to hurt the skimpy costume quotient of our local Halloween parties and make all the ghosts extremely hard to pick out. All my pics from last night’s snowfall are, naturally, night pics. But my wife woke up early this morning to get some pretty awesome daytime shots of the October snow paying its respects at our neighboring graveyards...

Oct-snow-ber
10.27.2011

This evening I spent about an hour making screencaps of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Halloween episodes for tonight’s post, but that’s all been preempted. It’s snowing. Right now. Four days before Halloween. Suddenly it was the last scene from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Glowing orange was giving way to reflective white. Here are the pics in an impromptu post...

A Visit to the Arsenic and Old Lace House
10.26.2011

I think the one thing that’ll get humanity into the Universe Hall of Fame is that we can take shameful and inhuman acts of depravity and turn them into light comedy farce for the enjoyment of all. That takes talent. And some other things, probably. Take for example the horrid Archer-Gilligan murders, in which a nursing care provider in the early 1900s went on a decade-long killing spree of her wards, inspiring the fun-for-all-ages Broadway play and Halloween movie adaptation, Arsenic and Old Lace. I visit the house where it happened, talk about the movie a bit...

Knife, Candle, Jack-O-Lantern!
10.25.2011 

I’ve never seen a bad jack-o-lantern. Stick a flame inside them, and they’re all pretty cool for the short time they exist. I imagine that’s how God feels about people. There’s no way he admires all of us as fine examples of his creative prowess. But he’s probably like, “Hey, stick a soul in that one, and it’ll do just fine. It’s not like it has to live forever.” Ah, jack-o-lanterns. You bring me closer to God...

Headless Horseman: Tailgaiter Extraordinaire
10.24.2011 

Washington Irving used actual Sleepy Hollow/Tarrytown, NY, landmarks in his story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. On my most recent visit to the area, I retraced and video’d the route of Ichabod Crane from the moment he meets the Headless Horseman to the point where he ends up as a smashed jack-o-lantern and a legend worth the acting talents of Johnny Depp, Jeff Goldblum, and Ed Begley, Jr....

Losing Our Heads in Sleepy Hollow
10.23.2011

A few years ago, I wrote a 3,500-word piece on Sleepy Hollow, NY, and its neighbor village of Tarrytown for O.T.I.S. In it, I explained that the town was the place where Washington Irving lived and was buried. That it was here he set his famous story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow using the actual landmarks of the area. And that the town has fully embraced its patron author, headless spook, and important place in American literary history. I recently revisited the area in its full Halloween regalia and thought you'd dig seeing these recent pics...

The Short, Sad Life of Rotbert the Pumpkin
10.21.2011 

On September 19th of this year, we hastily carved a pumpkin. His name was Rotbert. He had only one purpose...to not make it to Halloween. This is his tragic story...


Remembering the Halloween Fallen
10.20.2011 

Every Halloween, many sacrifice themselves so that you and I can enjoy a better holiday. This season isn't over yet, but, today, I'd like to take a moment to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice for Halloween 2011. They may no longer be with us, but in a way, they will always be with us.
10.19.2011

In the suburbs of Boston, MA, in the town of Southborough, to be exact, they have the grave of a werewolf. Well, actually, it's the grave of an actor who played a werewolf in a movie. But, in the defense of the utter coolness of this grave, the actor was the first to ever play the monster in a major motion picture. "First to play a werewolf" goes on your resume, your tombstone, and in God's Book of Life, if I had my say in the way this world was run. As a bonus, that movie was a classic Universal Studios monster movie. But the actor wasn't Lon Chaney, Jr. It wasn't even Henry Hull. It was, well, check out the video...

Ouija Bored
10.17.2011

The extreme of Satanism and soul peril and the extreme of the toy store board game aisle. That was the reason more than anything that I’ve always wanted to try a Oujia board. The only one that my local Toys R Us had was a purple and green-boxed glow-in-the dark version stuck right between Farkle Frenzy and Candy Land. If the color of the box wasn’t enough to do it, the example question for the spirits on the back (“Will I star in my own music video?”) really threw it in my face that I wasn’t a part of the game’s demographic.

Same Salem, Different Halloween
10.16.2011

I live less than an hour from Salem, MA, that wonderland of witches that is reanimated every year by the chill breath of Autumn, so I visit the small city a couple of times a year…but always at least in October. And today was my October visit. Don't believe me? Here are the pics...
10.15.2011

If the box that the furniture came in had arrived at any other time of year, I would have sliced it up into manageable pieces, ignored the recycling receptacle because I hate how its design forces me to live with what basically is an open pile of trash sitting in my lawn, and thrown it into a nice, lidded garbage can. But because it’s Halloween, I was darkly moved. I knew that oblong box needed to be turned into a casket...
10.13.2011

The lessons that you’re supposed to take away from Boston’s historic cemeteries like the Old Granary Burying Ground are ones involving history, democracy, liberty, mortality. The only one I ever come away with, though, is that you can never have too many skulls and skeletons. Sure, every cemetery is brimming with bones, but the Old Granary is packed aboveground with these grisly bits of human framework…inscribed on just about every gravestone. I dig this and do not find it at all redundant...

New Hamster Wheelin'
10.12.2011 

On Sunday, we trekked an almost 300-mile loop of this state that only clamors for attention during elections and in that relatively small bit of area saw the grave of an astronaut, clambered through polar caves, saw an officially sanctioned UFO site, and drove across a mountain range at peak foliage. And that was only really half of our itinerary. New Hampshire really just needs a better PR agent. Here’s the proof...

Spirit Saved by Spirit
10.11.2011

We had grand Fall plans for yesterday, the Day of Columbus. The kind of plans you build an entire season around. The kind you look back on as being representative of why you love this time of year. But then we didn’t do it. Any of it. And all thanks to the fact that it was 86 degrees here in the middle of New England. However, our Fall day was saved by the most unlikeliest of heroes. Or likeliest, depending on your point of view...

Grave of Ichabod, Ichabod Crane
10.09.2011

Ichabod Crane’s namesake was nothing like the lanky, excitable, proto-Shaggy that was the main character of the story. Instead, the real Ichabod Crane was a military man who could’ve given Brom Bones what-fer (I assume, having only a layman’s knowledge of what-fer), serving in both the Marines and then the Army in a career that spanned half a century. In the latter of the two branches, he achieved the rank of Colonel, the rank currently engraven on his death monument...

Moll Dyer, Maryland's Actual Witch
10.07.2011 

Today, in the chummily named town of Leonardtown, beside an old jailhouse, is a smooth, unobtrusive, anonymous-looking, pillow-sized rock set on a manicured bed of mulch. No signs or plaques explain why this rock seems so carefully placed. But it’s supposed to hold the hand print of a witch...

8 Things I Learned from The Nightmare Before Christmas Commentary Track
10.06.2011

The audio commentary track to the movie features creator Tim Burton, director Henry Selick, and composer Danny Elfman. Unfortunately, they recorded their commentaries separately, so there’s no candid conversations, which is always the best part of any commentary track. The three tracks are woven together well, though, and somehow I was able to hear some stuff I hadn’t before, although only one was of crazy interest to me, which I’ve stuck in the last spot on this otherwise randomly ordered list...

Rue York
10.05.2011 

New York might have a shiny name, but underneath it's as dark and wormy as any other state. I know because I've been exploring that side of it for the past six months as part of my next book project, The New York Grimpendium, a sequel to last year's The New England Grimpendium. I still have a few months of exploring to do, but I thought I'd give everybody a sneak peek at just a tiny sampling of the hundreds of macabre sites and artifacts that I’ve been spending quality time with...

Hey, Hey, Hey...It's Halloween
10.04.2011 


Fat Albert was made for Halloween. He knows his way around a candy aisle, he would look good as an inflatable lawn ornament and, were he to exchange his signature red sweater for an orange one, he would finally validate poor Linus’s lonely vigils in the pumpkin patch...

Trick-or-Treating the Web II: 25 More Links to Halloween 2011
10.03.2011 

We are officially in October, which means that neither the service providers that have implanted tracking cookies on your hard drive nor that nosy ex who installed a keylogger on your computer can make fun of you for having an online history full of pages about the creepy, the spooky, the eerie, the funereal, the monstrous, and the downright disturbing. Here is some help for you with that...

Thank You, Thing
10.02.2011 

Googling “remote-controlled hand” yields tons of fascinating information about the amazing advances that medical science and engineering are accomplishing in the area of prosthetics, where we’re almost to the point that it’s better to have prostheses instead of our original biological parts. Of course, this article isn’t about anything so noble. It’s about a Halloween toy, and it has video...

Grave of the Vampire's Clasp
10.01.2011

I'm no Van Helsing, but I've seen my share of vampire graves. Mercy Brown's in Exeter, Rhode Island. Sarah Tillinghast’s, just a couple of miles away in the same town. The Ray family plot in Jewett City, Connecticut. The Spaulding graves in Dummerston, Vermont, for those that count them as such. The crypt of the Richmond Vampire in Virginia. Heck, even Bela Lugosi's grave in Culver City, California. But never once have I seen a vampire grave so clearly, well, labeled as Simon Whipple's in North Smithfield, Rhode Island...

Fear of a Black Cat
09.30.2011 

For ten months out of the year, I forget that I have a cat. But then Halloween comes along, and I see its sinuous black form squeezing between large orange pumpkins by the fireplace and rubbing against ratty witches and grimacing skeletons on the kitchen counter, and I’m suddenly okay with all the reasons I usually don’t want a pet. This article's pretty much filler. You can skip it...

Does the USDA Know You Have an Octopus in Your Corn?
 09.29.2011

At some point during this time of celebrating harvest, death, and harvest as a metaphor for death, I, like most people, end up at a farm at some point for a Fall festival, further fueling that cognitive dissonance as I see firsthand crops being grown and animals with bleak destinies moping around. That is, it would if I weren’t so busy running through cornstalks, gingerly petting animals that look bored enough to make use of those horns on their heads, and being pulled in circles by tractors with giant tires...

Poe-phenalia
09.28.2011 

It boggles my mind that there exists a market for mass-produced merchandise based on the life of an alcoholic, depressed, poverty-stricken, death-obsessed author who lived 150 years ago. If Edgar Allan Poe had only known that we’d commodity his spooky rep more than treasure his actual work he might, well, cash in on it and drink himself into a stupor, I guess. Some people are just doomed. Somehow, I've ended up with my share of this Poe-phenalia...

First a Scent, Then a Season
09.27.2011

Normally, I’m semi-adamant about holding off on flirting with the Halloween season until at least after Labor Day and more ideally until both the weather and Summer’s corpse get cold. I’m also pretty hypocritical since my stance on the season is still “start celebrating early, but not too early.” However, this year, on August 6, I broke pretty much everybody’s rules by attending a Halloween party. Well, actually, it was a marketing event that all the signage called a party, the Yankee Candle After-Life Party...

Tim Burton Exhibit: Jack Skellington is Taller in Person
09.26.2011

I have now breathed in particles off the leather outfit of Edward Scissorhands while waving to his bladed glove. I’ve been up close with all the characters from The Nightmare Before Christmas, including hanging out in a black light-lit room with Oogie Boogie. I’ve stood in the shadow of the Pumpkin King-like scarecrow from Sleepy Hollow and examined closely the warp and weft of the cape of the headless horseman...

Pretty Fly for a Fright Night
09.25.2011  

The other day, thanks to a Facebook poll that 1.5 of you participated in, I ended up introducing my wife to the wet gloppiness that is David Cronenberg’s 1986 gross-out, The Fly, in which an eccentric scientist played by Jeff Goldblum accidentally fuses with a housefly while experimenting with teleportation. If you’re laughing at that summary, it means you’ve never watched the movie. Afterward, I interrogated my wife to see what she thought about this movie that she watched for the first time, 25 years after it was released in theaters...

Medium? Well... Part 2
09.24.2011 

The second half of my recent reading session with an officially registered Lily Dale, NY, medium, in which we learn all about the fate of serial killers in the afterlife, talk a little about caterpillars and sweaters because, well, the dead are apparently chatty, and, finally, discover what I don’t at all do for a living.
09.23.2011 

This past weekend we trekked the width of the state of New York to visit Lily Dale, the famed community of spiritualists that’s been around since like the mid-1800s. Unfortunately, I can’t go into all the details of the place and the people we talked to since I have to save that for my book, but I can post a transcript of an actual reading session that I had with an officially registered Lily Dale medium because, well, what else am I going to do with that. It's long enough that I had to break it into two parts. In this first half, a dead minister drops by and we talk a little too much about nuts...

Burke & Hare & Jack o' Lantern Cocktails
09.22.2011 

It’s John Landis’s first movie in over a decade; it stars Simon Pegg and Andy Serkus; it features cameos by Christopher Lee, Tim Curry, and Ray Harryhausen; it’s about the two most notorious body snatchers in European history; and it takes place in an excellently realized 1800s-era Edinburgh. Burke and Hare is a movie with a lot going for it…yet, unfortunately, somehow I didn’t quite go for it. No worries, though. We fixed that with a great little seasonally relevant cocktail...

The Ramones Wanna Be Buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
09.21.2011 

Before the Ramones answered the question for all of us, I’d never personally considered whether or not I wanted to be buried in a pet cemetery. Now, thanks to that ear-driller of a song that gets played every Halloween season, I can’t help but answer it 20 times a day myself until Burl Ives finally comes along and knocks it of my head by throating Holly, Jolly Christmas through his Van Dyke...

Edgar Allan Poe's Boston: He Wants to Give it Back
09.20.2011 

The place where L. Frank Baum was born paved its sidewalks with yellow bricks. The place that gave the world Oscar Wilde installed a statue of the author right across from his home. The place where Edgar Allan Poe was born demolished his house and the entire street on which it sat, and then decades later quietly slapped a plaque dedicated to him on the side of what is now a burrito joint...


Trick-or-Treating the Internet: 25 Links to Halloween 2011
09.19.2011 

Still putting off celebrating Halloween until, well, Halloween? Well, you’re behind the Internet, that’s for sure. Right now, the entire web is covered in more black and orange than an orgy of tigers on the field of Oriole Park at Camden Yards...






Vincent Price Has Risen from the Dead
09.18.2011

So, I don’t know if you guys heard, but Vincent Price was resurrected a few months ago…and it was all thanks to a bunch of meddling kids and their dog...



Shelving Halloween
09.17.2011 

We’re all mourning (and contributing heavily to) the demise of the physical bookstore. One day soon, thanks to Internet retailers and e-readers, we’ll no longer be able to marvel at the accumulated knowledge and silliness of humankind collected in a single large room, flip through magazines that we’d never want delivered to our own houses, and leisurely get lost in a labyrinth of tall bookshelves as we randomly judge books by covers. However, lost in all this losing is that the death of the physical bookstore means the death of the holiday book display table...

An Autumn Road Trip in Summer
09.16.2011  

It was meant to be our last road trip of the summer, but in some ways it ended up being our first road trip of Autumn. A couple of weeks ago, we headed to one of the most northern parts of the state of New York for a day to see a few sites for a project I’m working on. The pins in our Google map included a tomb, a mansion, a castle, and some giant metal statues. A pretty decent Saturday, I think...



 8 Things from In The Mouth of Madness Worth Making a List Over
09.15.2010
Halloween is usually celebrated Edgar Allan Poe style—black cats, tombs, haunted mansions, sometimes an orangutan. But every once in a while it’s okay go H.P. Lovecraft with the holiday, theming it with elder gods, ancient cults, and fish people. One way to do the latter is to watch John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1994)...



09.14.2011

It's stupid how much time I've spent in graveyards in my life, considering how much time I’ll be spending in one when I'm dead. Still, I like to visit them. They don’t judge you there. Actually, there are a ton of good reasons to visit graveyards. At their best, cemeteries are full of history, nature, and art, and they encourage important meditations on existence and induce pleasant feelings of superiority over the dead. The relevant reason here, though, is that you can meet famous people...


09.13.2011

Get up. Stare in determination at the bland expanses of our interior walls, which are adorned only by the random empty nail, scuff mark, or smashed bug. We like to characterize the décor style as avant-garde.  It’s D-Day. Decoration Day. Deathoration Day. The starting line of the Halloween season. Halloween doesn’t begin until you decorate, but fortunately decorate is a word with a wide definition. And we exploit it...


09.12.2011

For the past 12 months, there's been a prominent sign in the retail district of my New England town that reads Halloween Express in dripping orange letters on a black background. It's a leftover from last year’s seasonal store that I wrote about here, and it's been both annoying and jarring to see it piercing the dull gray sky of winter, the Simpsons sky of spring, and the blue oven sky of summer. However, as of today, like the proverbial broken clock, the sign is finally right…it’s Halloween again...


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