Halloween Die-ary: September 14, 2018


Man, I am like two handfuls of spider web and six AA batteries away from calling this house decorated. The inside, at least. The outside, we won’t do until October…although Lindsey told me that a house a neighborhood or two over has already unabashedly thrown its Halloween up outside. Need to have those guys over for drinks.

Tonight, we caught the documentary Haunters on Netflix. It’s ostensibly about home and professional haunts and the madcap people who haunt them, but it’s really about this one extreme haunt in California called McKamey Manor. You’ve heard about those, right? You basically sign up to get tortured. Bag over your head, dunked in a bathtub, spat on, smothered, pushed around, yelled at.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, for sure, but I don’t really consider those things either haunts or Halloween-related. They’re more like kink or fetish subcultures. So it was disappointing to me that the doc focused on that aspect. I tuned in because the trailer showed clips from Haunted Overload and Fright Kingdom, both here in New Hampshire and both of which I love. But they were only nominally featured. It was all about this wedding singer who liked to film people in extreme close-up getting tortured in his home in exchange for bags of dog food.


Although just hearing the word haunt repeated so many times in the doc did make me want to go back to Fright Kingdom or Haunted Overload soon. But with my partner pregnant and my oldest still a little young and skittish for that sort of thing, I probably won’t be hitting up any haunts this season.

After I post this entry, I’ll be planning our day trip for tomorrow. It’ll just be Lindsey and I, as our kids are staying at the grandfolks’s house. That means a more laid back jaunt. I’ve already put together a northern New York route, a northern Vermont route, and a northern New Hampshire route. All northern because we want to see if we can catch some patches of foliage changing. I showed the routes to Lindsey, and she chose Vermont. So I just have to shore up some details. It’s going to be a good one, though, with a few interesting oddities. I might even get the chance to shoot a vid. We’ll see.

We are taking off early for this trek, so I should be in bed, well, right now. Although these days, early is about 1 am for me.

I’m going to die early.