Ten months out of the year, OTIS is a chronicle of my visits to the unusual. But from September 1 to October 31, it werewolfs into a chronicle of my long Halloween Season, with daily die-ary posts about the black and the orange and my visits to spooky oddities. Party with me on the OTIS Facebook Page, Twitter, and Patreon. I also write spooky fic and nonfic. My newest, Twelve Nights at Rotter House comes out October 29!
Keep going for more Halloween posts.
September 20: Our Creepy Cocoon Is Complete
We’re even decorated outside. The giant purple ghoul towers above the yard, large black spiders hide in our bushes. The porch is ready for trick-or-treaters. Wait. That last line makes me suddenly sad. I’m imagining my early Halloween decorations out there wondering why trick-or-treaters aren’t coming tonight. And then wondering why they’re not coming the next night. And the next. Was it something they did? Are they not ghoulish enough decorations? Will they not get to fulfill their entire purpose for existence, the thing they waited all year in the dusty attic and the musty basement to do? Geez. That’s Toy Story-level disturbing. I’ll…have a talk with them later.
I’ll get Lindsey to take some of her trademark amazing photos of the inside decorations at some point (my indoor shots of the decorations are aaaawwwwful), but until then these shots from my phone of the outside should illustrate what my world looks like right now.
September 17, 2019: Halloween for the Ears
I didn’t do much seasonal stuff today. I was in Boston for work most of the day and then spent a huge chunk of the rest of the day commuting to and from said city and said work.
But that latter bit meant that I got a lot of listening done.
First, I listened to an interview with Dan Aykroyd on the Joe Rogan podcast. Aykroyd is fascinating. Get this. He’s been in the entertainment industry for a lifetime, was involved in some of the best comedy movies of all time, and has a friend roster that looks like an Oscar party. That means he has a lot of Hollywood stories. Great ones, I assume. And I have to assume, because in two hours of casual gabbing, he didn’t tell a single one. He spent the whole time talking about aliens and ghosts. Also vodka. Gotta love him for that. A man with interests.
He also has an encyclopedic (well, maybe Wikipedian) memory for paranormal event details, and I think mentioned every highlight of UFO lore and most of ghost lore over the course of the conversation. He’s also completely credulous. Bought in on everything without shame. And he bases that on the fact that he enjoys the stories wholeheartedly and believes the witnesses and investigators. I mean, I don’t think the guy has a cynical cell in him. In Rogan’s words, “I’m glad you believe. I’m glad there are intelligent people who believe goofy things.”
Actually, you only have to listen to the first hour of the interview. The rest gets rambling and disjointed—I assume because of the Crystal drivers they’re drinking (orange juice and Crystal Skull vodka, which is a business venture of Aykroyd’s). They also spend a chunk of time looking at cars on the internet together. Like I said, first-hour only.
My favorite anecdote, which admittedly happened toward the end of the podcast, was Aykroyd describing the time (he thinks while he was filming Dragnet) that he slept with a ghost. Not quite like that scene from Ghostbusters, but not too far off.
I met Aykroyd once, in the way that doesn’t count as meeting him (standing in line for an autograph). But it wasn’t at a convention, it was at my local liquor store here in New Hampshire (a place Joe Rogan also called goofy in the podcast), back when he first started hocking booze in skull bottles. The first photo in this post was from that moment, and I wrote about it here.
After that, I listened to this wild little Halloween album that just came out that’s basically an alternate-universe Halloween playlist. All the bands on it are fictional, and they perform original songs in various nostalgic styles, interspersed with fake horror movie trailers and other such vignettes. It’s a lot of fun. It’s called The Killer Sounds of Halloween, and it’s by Sean Keller. I mean, just look at that great cheesy-spooky cover art.
This kind of stuff is great. After all, there’s only so many times we can listen to Thriller on repeat (although I haven’t reach the limits yet in decades of Halloweens).
I did have a few surprises from Sleepy Hollow today, where I’ll be in a few weeks. My friend Jim Logan, who runs Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, sent me a photo of a costumed Headless Horseman (on a real horse!) holding a copy of Twelve Nights at Rotter House, which he did as a lark during a publicity photo shoot for the village. Way cool. And then I arrived home to find a book from him, too, called Chronicles of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow by Edgar Mayhew Bacon. It was originally published in 1897. Looking forward to digging into this one.
So not too bad a Halloween day after all, I guess.
September 16, 2019: Gin and Boris III
Which means, it’s also time for another Gin and Boris. The third one, in fact.
I won’t re-hash the whole story. It reflects a small moment during my week home after mom’s death, a simple way to include her memory in the season. Halloween should have already had that element in it anyway, like Dia de los Muertos.
Although, all that said, this should be Gin and Boris IV, but I didn’t do it last year. Based on last year’s Halloween Die-ary entry for this day, it looks like I did everything but to forget about it…and eventually failed. This year, after going back and forth all day, we decided we should do it this year.
The Old Dark House is based on a book by J.B. Priestley and directed by James Whale, who would also direct Karloff in The Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. I’d never seen the film before, although I have a dim memory of watching the 1963 remake.
It’s a classic setup before it was a classic setup: Various strangers are stranded due to a major storm at a creepy house with a creepy family, only to find that the house hides creepy secrets. Boris…doesn’t do much in it, although he is plot-pivotal. He plays the scarred, mute butler named Morgan who gets terrifying when he’s drunk. A monster, basically. And we all know he’s great at that. Although I missed his voice. I mean, I’ll listen to The Monster Mash 8,000 times in the next month and a half, and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas 8,000 times for two months after that, but I missed his voice tonight
And I know it’s not him in The Monster Mash. Stop it.
The movie was…fantastic. Instantly one of my favorites of the era. Perfect atmosphere. The opening scene where the three main characters are driving around in an old canvas-top in the sheeting rain at night along what looks more like a riverbed then the road. The way James Whale incorporated humor, the way he usually did, to make scenes even stranger. The cast was great, especially Melvyn Douglas. A pre-Hunchback Charles Laughton was in it. Ernest Thesiger, who would join Whale and Karloff again in Bride of Frankenstein as Doctor Pretorious. It also starred Raymond Massey, who would later play a Boris Karloff lookalike in the 1944 Arsenic and Old Lace.
Besides the atmosphere and the setup, what I really loved about the movie is that it’s mostly a group of people sitting around having awkward conversations in the dark.
Also, it should be said, in one scene, they even make a point about drinking gin. I don’t know. Feels like validation for this little tradition.
I watched The Old Dark House in great quality on Shudder, but you can see a lower quality version on YouTube. As usual, I embedded it below. You have to supply your own gin.
September 15, 2019: First the Fireplace, Then the World
So, instead, our big plans were to do some Halloween decorating.
Where we last left those cloth witches and plastic pumpkins and paper bats was on the concrete floor of my garage…STAGED.
We sorted through them, throwing away the ones that didn’t survive storage (although it’s really hard for me to throw away something with a Jack-o-lantern face. I taste its fiery tears for days afterward). Then, after we put on some seasonal tunes and brought in a selection to decorate with, Lindsey suddenly said, “We should be drinking ciders while we do this.”
And with that she was gone, like out the door, skid marks on the driveway.
I disappeared down to my office to squeeze in some writing while she was gone, and the next thing I knew she was…there…proffering me a golden cordial with a crunchy rim and a Granny Smith apple slice garnish. We then went through THE RITUAL.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“Try it,” she says.
“You’re not going to tell me what it is?” I ask.
“Just try it,” she says.
I pause and look at the glass and lift it to my face, pausing at my lips and wondering if arsenic has a smell and if you can read the ingredient list in her eyes, and then I quaffed.
It was amazing.
Thus fueled, we continued decorating. But, really, we concentrated on the fireplace. That’s the most important part of the house when it comes to decorating. We get that right, the rest of the house will be right automatically. It took us a while to figure out a plan for it, but once we did, it was just a matter of getting the pieces we had in place and then figuring out what we lacked and needed to pick up from the store. And that’s a pro-tip. Decorate before you buy.
So we’re about 25% decorated in the house, and that pitcher is 100% empty.
Since I don’t have an ending for this piece, let me pitch stuff!
- A new seasonal episode of Odd Things I’ve Seen: The Podcast is up, in which I answer these questions about Salem, Massachusetts: When should you go, what do you need to do there, what are my favorite spots, and how do I feel about dancing on corpses.
- I’m doing a Facebook giveaway of two autographed Twelve Nights at Rotter House advanced reader copies. All you need to do is like the OTIS Facebook page (if you haven’t already) and then share it. The cutoff is Friday, September 20, at 8pm EST.
- I’ve started an email mailing list, for those who want to keep in the know about my major projects. It’s called the Jots and Jaunts of J.W. Ocker, and you can sign up here.
September 14: Rainstorms, a Nun Cemetery, and a Giant Face
Saturday was [Gomez Addams voice] gloriously overcast and cool and full of the blissful threat of rain. Miserable, some would call it. Life-affirming, is closer to our take. Still, any other time of year, that means staying cozy indoors and watching movies. And, we did that—with a Fall candle, Halloween cookies, and a horror movie, no less—but, because of the season, first we went right out into that impending storm.
We didn’t stray far. Only about half an hour from the house. But that underscores one of my core beliefs about oddity hunting, that within a tank or two of gas of any spot in the country you can find oddity. Even more so, the things I saw and tried to see today were things I’ve only heard about in the past few months and, in one case, learned about just today. Again, half an hour from my house and after a decade of hunting New England oddity. The weird stuff is out there.
En route, the rain curtained around us, but by the time we got there, it had abated. We had one umbrella among the five of us, a baby that shouldn’t get wet, and a camera that couldn’t, but we chanced it.
Turns out, the cemetery is in a forest behind an abandoned catholic school festooned with “No Trespassing” and “Cameras in Use” signs.
I still drove onto the lot. The best armor against “No Trespassing” signs is being a family of five with little kids, honestly. Nothing is less threatening than us. My kids were having a slightly different reaction, though. Mostly because my wife defined both “No Trespassing” and “abandoned” for them. They started freaking out a little about the police and a lot about nun-faces in the windows of the decrepit building. This latter one was more probable, I think, because there were definitely lights on inside that abandoned school.
I didn’t look for long, though. I didn’t want to leave the family in the car all illegal and such, nor did I want them trekking through wet forest. But I did make sure to run out of the forest like something was chasing me. Oh, Dad.
So kind of a bummer to not see the site, but not much of one. It’s close to me, so I’ll make it back after more research and with less panicky kids in the backseat and maybe in the winter when the trees are denuded.
However, Lindsey salvaged the moment by suddenly bringing up an oddity not five minutes away that I had never heard of—a seven-foot-tall statue of a face.
It was at Saint Anselm College in Manchester and looked like that thing Sean Connery flew around inside in Zardoz. The statue was actually originally up high in the air. Its intended purpose was as the pinnacle of the State Theatre of Manchester, an art deco movie house that had been erected in 1929, and torn down sometime in 1978. The statue represented the Muse of Comedy, and from old photos, was a striking sight high above the state’s largest city.
Then we headed home, my five-year-old sticking the word “abandoned” in every sentence for the entire drive. Once warm and dry and in front of a glowing rectangle on our wall, we ate Halloween cookies, watched Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and listened to the rainstorm outside.
This is the only good time to be alive.
Sweet Release: The Lollipop Cemetery
They established a village in 1792, and immediately needed a place to plant their dead. They placed their rot garden on what’s now South Shaker Road in Harvard and originally used more conventional stones as grave markers. In 1879, they replaced them with the cast iron lollipops, both because they thought the plaques would be easier to maintain and because they wanted to keep their dead ornaments humble.
The Lollipop Cemetery was given to the city of Harvard, which maintains it to this day, hence the fresh coats of white paint on the markers. Although, just one year I think it’d be dandy if they painted the plaques themselves in bright colors and kept the sticks white. Then it would really earn its nickname.
September 11, 2019: The Day We Accidentally Trick-or-Treated
Normally, we pull everything out into the actual main room we’re trying to decorate. It’s a little bit messy, and not ideal, but this year we realized we had a staging area. See, my garage is empty right now because one of the garage doors is broken and the repairman won’t honor the warranty because he’s diagnosing the issue as an act of God, because he knows him personally, I think. So all that means is the cars are outside in the driveway and we have this big concrete floor space that we can spread out our witches and jack-o’s and black cats like we’re prepping for a yard sale.
And you know what happens next, right? Panic. I’ve told you about this. I always find a new way to panic about Halloween decorations. This year’s panic is that it doesn’t look like we have enough. I know what it is. It’s that pile of Halloween up against the big empty garage, it’s the regret that I don’t have a life-sized Headless Horseman. But I can bottle the panic a bit because today is not Decoration Day. That is another day. Today was the day we rescued all of our freaks and ghouls from the Christmas blowmolds that have been holding them captive in my attic and basement since January.
And mission accomplished.
However, this won’t be her first Halloween. It’s her second. Although she was only nine days old for the first one.
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September 10, 2019: A Green and Black Autumn
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| This is the entire show in one frame. |
And I’m still not sure why she started watching it, but I like that she’s doing it. I foresaw her throwing an episode or two on every other night or so, me joining her for my favorites, and us talking about the show a lot. Otherwise I’d watch her journey from afar.
But, little did I know it, just a few notes form Mark Snow’s theme would pull me to the couch more often than not no matter what I was doing. Even for that gender-bending Amish episode I never really liked (I just need more of the concept fill out, dammit).
And now, when we should be filling our evenings with seasonal programming, we often still want to watch The X-Files. And I know I could do worse than watch a spooky show like that during the season, but The X-Files was never seasonal watching to me, although for a while there it was impossible to avoid photos of couples being Mulder and Scully for Halloween.
I mean, there isn’t really a full-on Halloween episode of The X-Files, even though there are two Christmas ones. The show evokes a lot of things for me, but not Halloween.
Of course, because she’s watching them in order, we didn’t pick the episode we watched, which happened to be Soft Light, near the end of Season 2. The one with Tony Shalhoub walking around with a black hole shadow. An interesting episode, for sure, but more a science fiction episode and the least spooky in a series that’s like 99% spooky episodes. Oh well.
Also, this entry is a warning that we’ll probably be doing that throughout the season, meaning this might turn into an X-Files blog.
September 9, 2019: The Unlikely Fall Duo of Mountain Dew and Rankin/Bass
And that’s how we found ourselves at Wal-Mart. Ha. Didn’t find much, though. The store was in transition, as they say. Just a few bins of Halloween candy fighting against the back-to-school shelves full of notebooks and pencils. However, we did find the new Mountain Dew VooDEW that seems to be the seasonal comestible that every Halloween head is talking about this year. So we grabbed a few bottles, the diapers, bought some subs, and took them home to pair with something spooky to watch with the kids.
On the way home, we fell behind an ice cream truck prowling through our neighborhood like some saboteur sent from those fiends in Summer Town. Which is a real danger because it's a great excuse for my kids to lose their minds over the idea of ice cream from a van and turn the night into a summer social. But no way were we going to let him damper our dark. So we turned the radio up loud to cover up the jingle and pretended it was an ambulance in front of us.
And that question mark is a reference to the gimmick, the classic “mystery flavor” that junk food likes to do because sometimes those food scientists go a little too mad with their unholy chemicals and don’t know what they’ve created, so they test it out on all of us.
The special we watched was one I discovered recently while lurking on Dino Drac After Dark: The 1972 Rankin/Bass animated special Jack O’Lantern. That’s right, Rankin/Bass, best known for its stop-motion Christmas specials.
The story involves a leprechaun who inhabits a jack-o-lantern that the kids use to build a scarecrow who protects the family farm from a couple of witches and their horde of ghostly demons. The whole thing is basically a magic battle. Not a bad pitch.
So a simple night, but it kept the fires of Autumn—and myself—stoked.
September 8, 2019: Home Improooooovement
But this year I heard about a life-sized Headless Horseman decoration at Home Depot that might be everything I want in life, so we went to see it today. A little bit of context for that: I’m a homeowner, and I rarely go to Home Depot. I kind of just let the house decay gracefully around me. Because I care about the planet.
This year I haven’t yet bought a single Halloween decoration (not counting a few hand-me-downs), but in this orange palace of lumber and plumbing fixtures, I was tempted by…everything: The green skeletons, the rocking chair witch, the inflatable tree, the combo witch-skeleton thing, even the Canadian pumpkins sitting in bins outside. I don’t know. They just kind of hit close to my aesthetic, I guess.
But I was certainly the most tempted by the Headless Horseman. He’s about eight feet tall, is animatronic, and speaks in an impressively spooky voice that was obvious that the team behind it didn’t just record Mark in shipping after three shots of Tequila. The horse’s eyes light up green and the Jack-o’s eyes light up yellow. The horse gallops, moves his head, and—I learned when I reached under its nethers and pulled out a large black dangly hose—has a fog machine hook-up. Beautiful.
Also, expensive. It was over $250. I’d have to open a haunt attraction and write that off to excuse the purchase. I mean, it’s probably a worth-it price, honestly, but $250 can buy some really cool stuff that you don’t have to store in the basement ten months out of the year. Although you and I both know that this would be permanently placed beside the living room sofa.
Actually, the real plan is to let other people buy it, and then nab it off Facebook Marketplace in two years when they realize they have no place to store it and Home Depot has all new giant cool Halloween things to buy.
I feel like this entry is making me come off as cheap.
September 7: Ancient Dirt and Old Stones
Still, we really wanted to jump in the car and get out into the world because bright orange blobs are starting to appear on farm stands and the air was cold-clean, the only way I like to breathe it. So we decided to go sideways to the North Shore of Massachusetts—the stretch of coastline between Boston and New Hampshire—where we hit up three sites we’ve never been to before.
Mary Bradbury was in her late 70s when she was accused, tried, and convicted of being a witch during the Salem Witch Trials. Apparently, there were some among the god-fearin’ who believed she could take on animal forms, including that of a blue boar. However, despite being convicted of being said blue boar, she was able to wait out her sentence until the trials disbanded. She lived for another eight years, dying in 1700 at age 85.
She is also, as I found out while visiting the Salem Witch Museum while I was writing A Season with the Witch, the ancestor of none other than Ray Bradbury himself (and for those of you who picked September 7 as the first mention of Ray Bradbury in this OTIS Halloween Season, please claim your prize). You can read about that moment here.
So it’s a fascinating grave for me for all those reasons: Colonial, witchery, and Ray Bradbury.
The downside is that her tombstone is in pieces and probably mingled with the tombstone shards of others in her family. It is literally a pile of rocks half-buried in the ground like somebody started tiling the cemetery and then gave up. They don’t even list her on the notable burials placard at the entrance to the cemetery.
After that, it was off to Maudslay State Park in Newburyport. Me and mine were going to tramp into the forest to find what was left of ancient Native American mounds. Level of difficulty: They aren’t marked in any way and are easily mistaken for, well, the forest floor.
We have a million old cemeteries in New England, but actual surviving Native American sites are rare, despite this place being the Land of Thanksgiving.
In Maudslay State Park are about 3,000 feet of low tubular humps about a foot tall and three of four feet wide veining the forest among the walking trails. At one point, they were all interconnected, but have been severed by time and weather and those same trails. The mounds are really hard to see, as they are low and covered by leaves and fallen trees. In fact, I’d say that they are impossible to see if you’re not looking for them. They are also really hard to photograph. Just note the bending of the light in these photos. The prevailing theory is that the mounds were built by the Pennacook and used for ceremonial purposes (a catch-all category in archaeology) because midden heaps and burial mounds are contained humps of dirt.
One of the reasons they think these features are Native American as opposed to colonial is because about a mile away there was an actual Pennacook burial mound. It was excavated in the 1970s, and multiple skeletons were found, the oldest dating to 7,000 years. That mound seems to have disappeared since then, but there’s a lot of documentation on it.
After that it was on to the Witch’s Stone in Newbury. Well, it was on to Mexican for lunch, and then it was on to the Witch’s Stone, a four-foot tall stone with a carved figure taking up its entire front surface.
The stone was commissioned in 1723 by John Dummer to memorialize his father Captain Richard Dummer. It shows a man dressed in 1600s garb. It got its nickname of Witch’s Stone because of the circular symbols surrounding the man like a hex and because Massachusetts people think everything involves witchcraft (rim shot). It’s also called the Father’s Stone, which makes more sense.
And that was it. A bunch of dirt and stones for our first road trip of the season. Just enough of one to get me itchin’ to break north for some serious miles and some serious foliage-covered oddity.
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