Jason Miller Bust

December 29, 2008 — If the 1973 movie The Exorcist had never been filmed, I’d have ended up with a few holes in my. And I don’t just mean in time spent watching the movie. Certainly that. But I’ve also visited the famous stairs and house exterior where the movie was filmed, been to the purported home of the boy whose real-life exorcism inspired the story, and seen just about every sequel, prequel, spoof, rip-oof, and documentary spawned by the film. Most baffling, I’ve even been published on the topic. When it comes to Exorcist-related experiences, the only thing really left on my list is actually casting out an unclean spirit myself.

So when a brand new opportunity arises for me to do something Exorcist-ic, it’s like Christmas. Especially when it occurs in December, and everything is decorated accordingly.

Normally I’m so late to the party that my hosts are on to their next party, but this time I get to present an oddity that was just unveiled this month, and which I visited mere weeks after its inauguration. As a result, writing about it suddenly feels a whole lot like reporting, with the accompanying creeping responsibility to attempt to accurately relay information, which I will try to fight.

Anticlimactically, I’m referring to the brand new bust of Jason Miller that now adorns the Piazza dell’Arte beside the Lackawanna County Courthouse in downtown Scranton, PA.

Jason Miller played Father Karras in The Exorcist (as well as in its triquel), and that by itself deserves an honorarium of some sort. I mean, besides the meager Oscar nomination that his performance garnered, of course. Don’t get me wrong. Max von Sydow was, is, and will forever be adulation-worthy, for reasons far preceding this movie, but also because he is the titular exorcist, after all. However, Jason Miller nailed with a sledgehammer the role of troubled priest who has to wrestle with both himself and Satan.

And as much as I’d like to think that the entire town of Scranton is that big a fan of the film, that’s not really why he’s busted there.

Miller grew up in Scranton, and won a Pulitzer (and a Tony) for a play he wrote called That Championship Season, which he set in that city. In fact, he won the award the same year that The Exorcist was released, so it was kind of a big year for him. Eventually, after a stint in California, Miller settled back in Scranton, and became active in the city’s theater scene until his death there in 2001 at the age of 62.

In fact, far from merely being honored with a random hometown-boy-turned-marginally-notable bust tucked away in the lobby of some local theater due to the earnest efforts of some minor lobbying group coinciding with the whims of some local politician, Miller was the entire inspiration behind the recent creation of the Piazza dell’Arte, a courtyard-like monument directly beneath the Spruce Street side of the looming tower of the Lackawanna Courthouse.

The monument is mostly a flat paved area with a central water fixture, the bronze bust of Jason Miller, and a wall of polished stone slabs etched with short bios of area-bred artists who achieved works that the city is okay claiming. The names aren’t really nationally recognizable, but some of their accomplishments are.

It’s a great idea in concept, but the execution seems too civic, too cold, and too unadorned for a monument celebrating art and artists. Incongruously, the monument also features a quote from Pablo Picasso, who I don’t think has any ties to the area. But, then again, wrong is a condition I’m chronically afflicted with.

The first slab in the wall is devoted to Miller and highlights in less than 60 words exactly what I’ve racked into 1000 here. However, I would like to point out one bit of phraseology in his stone bio, if only because the text is permanent and on display and I need another paragraph. It states that Miller was “the winner of a Pulitzer, Tony, Emmy and Academy Award nomination.” The statement seems to imply that he won nominations for all four, which is technically true, but fails to emphasize the fact that he won two of those awards. Alternately, the phrasing could also imply that he won three out of four of those nominations, which he didn’t.

Regardless, there are three of four clearer ways to have written this sentence, and don’t think I don’t realize that the same is true of most of the lines in this post. In scrutinizing this copy, it made me realize that although I’ve written copy for just about every flat surface possible in my career as a writer, I’ve never had the opportunity to write copy for a monument. It’s a good day when I find a new dream.

Miller’s bust is set off to one side of the Piazza on a stone pedestal that is engraved with a quote from Miller about his fondness for the area. It was sculpted by actor Paul Sorvino, famed back in the day for his role in Goodfellas and these days for fathering Mira Sorvino. He and Miller went back a ways, as Sorvino acted in both the original run of That Championship Season as well as the 1982 Miller-directed movie version of it.

Appearance-wise, the bust is somewhat underwhelming. Its likeness tends more toward Cold Miser from the Rankin/Bass special The Year Without a Santa Claus, and I’m not just being unduly influenced by the season. However, what it lacks in artistry it makes up with in style points. The bust is hollow, and inside is an urn of Miller’s ashes. Cool, huh? It gives me Idea Number 34 for my own earthly disposal. I’m thinking full un-cremated body encased in a bronze statue of myself. Except that I’m going to want it buried like a coffin and not displayed in a mediocre but well-intentioned memorial to art.

Across the street and down half a block from the bust is a red-brick apartment building where Miller lived at one time. The line-of-sight juxtaposition provides the opportunity for a great photo of the bust and building together. However, the canopy from the unveiling ceremony was still in place when I visited, and got in the way of the shot. Still, we did the best we could under that circumstance.

The Exorcist wasn’t the only film that Miller had an acting role in, of course, and the long-unexorcized devil on my shoulder has been jumping up and down for me to make a Rudy joke. The angel on my other is telling me to take the high road, that too many jokes about this well-meaning film have already been made. And the pale, flaccidly fleshed thing in between them knows that I spent the entire time writing this article trying to come up with a joke and failed. And that’s the real reason one’s not included.

Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden

December 15, 2008 — He earned a doctorate in nonsense words, catchy meters, inescapable rhymes, and sketches of fuzzy, floppy-skeleton’d creatures. And for that, Dr. Seuss, you get yourself a statue. Actually, a whole slew of them.

Theodore Seuss Geisel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. His wife of four decades committed suicide, a World War played a prominent part in his life, and he spent a decade and a half in the advertising business. All that sounds like a sad existence, but that’s because I’m leaving out the happy bits of his life. Like creating 40-odd sparsely worded and brightly illustrated children’s primers that forced the world to adore him or else.

And large-scale adoration usually results in instatuation. In this particular case, somebody dedicated some serious resources to the immortalment of Dr. Seuss, giving him not just a solitary statue in his likeness, but also three-dimensionalizing enough of his character creations to fill an entire funeral procession of bookmobiles.

The Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden was unveiled in 2002 in Seuss’s hometown of Springfield. Since that time, I assume even without knowing the state of the educational system in the area, that every kid on the Massachusetts-Connecticut line has been there on more than one field trip. The bronze sculpture garden was sculpted by Seuss’s step-daughter, Lark Grey Dimond-Cates.

The Springfield memorial dominates an outdoor quadrangle surrounded on all sides like a circled wagon train by museums of the Springfield Museums Association. One of these museums, the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, features an ongoing exhibit on Seuss called, “Seuss on the loose in Springfield." The quadrangle itself, though open later than the museums around it, does have visiting hours, from 9 to 8 every day in the “s” seasons and 9 to 5 every day in the other two. We went pretty late and were the only ones there...except for a lonely security guard pacing around and wishing we’d leave so he could close down early and get on without whatever impossibly way cooler stuff he has going on in his life than guarding Seuss sculptures.

The sculpture garden is arranged in five different parts. Entering from the Springfield Museums parking lot we were first be accosted by a short solitary statue of the Lorax on a stump. Yup. He’s a preachy little bastard even in statue form. It’s no wonder the Once-ler ignored all his bluster. Once we got to the Lorax, we immediately saw the three main groups of the sculpture diagonally across the quadrangle. At our first giant, impressive, childhood-rushing-back-at-us sight of them, we wanted to run full tilt-toward them with our arms waving in the air like it’s the Forties and our sailor husband who just came home from the war effort is standing on the dock with his arms open. However, we first peeked around to make sure we weren't missing any other statues set apart from the main group. Good thing we did.

Tucked away just outside the corner of the quadrangle and pretty much hidden from the rest of the sculptures is a tall stack of 10 turtles in a fountain. You know the top one as Yertle, king of the turtles. I can’t remember the moral of the Yertle story, but I did come away from that statue with the firm-fixed belief that stacked turtles are just a great image no matter what the context, especially when they’re topped by an anthropomorphic caricature of Adolph Hitler. Oh, I guess I do remember.

At the far end of the quad from the Lorax and Yertle is the aforementioned trio of statue groups. The smallest but most important of the three depicts Seuss himself casually lounging at his drawing board, with the Cat in the Hat looming tall and thin at his side. If you’re across the country thinking, “Dang, I’d like to see that,” it’ll make your minute to know that a second casting of this solitary piece was installed at the amazingly architectured Geisel Library on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, which is something dang-I’d-like-to-see. [Update: Dang-I-saw-it.]

By itself, that one statue is enough to more than adequately honor the work and spirit of Seuss, M.D., but they must have had an endowment that needed spending, because they way didn’t stop there. Seuss faces another statue group, this one dominated by a giant 10-foot-tall book bearing the full text of his, Oh the Places You’ll Go! As a result, this was the first time I ever read a 10-foot-tall bronze book. Well, from start to finish, at least.

Taking the “You” in that title literally, the designers of the statue placed a bronze chair in front of the open book for photo ops. Miss Gertrude McFuzz from the story of the same name perches atop the book, and the Grinch and his antlered dog Max peek around one of the sides. It was this part of the statue that I was most jazzed to see, and I’ll probably go back to visit the sculpture in the snow so I can take my photo with the Mean One again for some future Christmas card.

Behind Seuss, the rest of his characters are exploding out of another bronze book (this one horizontal) with enough force to scare a child into not opening a Dr. Seuss book. The centerpiece is a giant, 14-foot-tall Horton the Elephant with Whoville safely at the tip of its snout at the highest point in the sculpture. Also featured in the arrangement are Thing 1 and Thing 2 from The Cat in the Hat, Sam-I-Am and his plate of spoiled eggs and ham, and Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose from his self-titled debut.

With the dopey, welcoming faces of the characters; the smooth, polished surfaces of the material; and the statues’ general gigantacity, the sculpture definitely accesses that primal ex-monkey instinct of ours to climb all over it. And that’s probably why there are signs posted against that. Although I don’t know how you’d explain to a child that inviting cartoon characters are not a part of a playground, but of a serious $6.4-million artistic tribute. Sculpture gardens are absurdly expensive, apparently.

Overall, though, and cost aside, the memorial is mortally on. By including so many characters and casting them all in bronze, the sculpture maintains the fun of its subject matter without losing its dignity of purpose. I imagine it would have been way tempting to gaud this thing out like Seuss Landing at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure in Orlando.

Standing in the midst of all those bronze bits of Seussery, I suddenly realized that I didn’t really know much about this man’s work. I mean, sure, I knew the Grinch because of the Boris Karloff-narrated and Chuck Jones-directed Christmas special that has made all of my Christmases that much better, and I had vague recollections of one or two of his books finding their way into my childhood, but I can’t really remember him having any real impact on me other than what I gleaned through osmosis from our surrounding culture. And while certainly The Grinch Who Stole Christmas! is enough for me to justify his existence, I hate not having an opinion on something apparently opinion-worthy enough that somebody else thought it merited a large, sprawling memorial.

So a few months later, I walked into Barnes & Noble, shoved children out of my way, grabbed every Dr. Seuss book off the shelf, bought a peppermint hot chocolate both because ’tis the season and to slightly make up for the fact that I was using the place of business as a free library, and started going through the stack. After grabbing a few art magazines to hide that embarrassing stack, of course, and then a few sports magazines to hide those art magazines.

In that manner, I sprinted through How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Green Eggs and Ham, The Lorax, Horton Hears a Who!, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (the non-bronze, non-10-foot-tall version), I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, The Sneetches and Other Stories, The Butter Battle Book, Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book, and The Cat in the Hat. Whew. That’s a lot of italicizing.

But this is the conclusion I came to: Don’t do what I did. For the love of sanity and all of your natural biorhythms, just don’t. Be content with the knowledge that Seuss engaged our children in an uncondescending way, developed a unique style of art and text distinct enough to merit adjectiving his name, and, most importantly, gave us the Grinch. That’s all anybody over the age of 10 needs to know.

Reverence Whale Tails

November 26, 2008 — In my last post, I wrote about Champ, the legendary lake monster of Lake Champlain, and his monument in Burlington, Vermont. But Champ isn’t the only water giant to which Burlington lays claim. Vermont may well be the only New England state without an ocean coastline, but it’s still known for its whales...kinda.

Just before you get to Burlington proper, above the shoulder of the northbound lanes of I-89 between exits 12 and 13, rise a pair of life-sized whale tales from the top of a hill as if they were diving down into the earth. I guess when you’re usually a sub-aqueous species but have a prehistoric monster hogging the nearest body of water, you have to adapt.

It’s a startling sight. You’re driving along the highway, eyes bored from the state-mandated lack of billboards and stomach wishing Vermont had more McDonald’s than it does, and suddenly you come across giant aquatic creatures planted in dirt. The whale tails are also visible from the southbound lanes. From that direction they're majestically backed by Vermont’s Green Mountains.

The whale tails are an art installation called Reverence, created by Jim Sardonis, an artist known for his animal sculptures. He created the work in 1989 out of 36 tons of black granite for a conference center project that never got completed. And what do you do with extraneous objects? You throw them to the side of the highway, of course.

Not content with just a blurry photo taken at highway speeds, I wanted to get up close to these extraneous objects to get more of an accurate sense of their full scale. It’s tempting to pull over to the side of the highway because they are so close to it, but I don’t recommend doing that unless you’re out of gas, have a flat tire, or like the feeling of enormous, inertia-laden tractor trailers whizzing by at highway speeds mere inches away from you.

Instead, take exit 12 off the highway, and then take a right onto the Theodore Roosevelt Highway, paralleling the interstate until you get to a business park called Technology Park. Drive around to the back of the park, which is actually the site of Ben & Jerry’s corporate headquarters, and park in the area dotted by large stone spheres.

At the back of this park is a small overgrown meadow of sorts with a slight path. Take that path past a tiny baseball field right up to the 13-foot-tall whale stems. You will get honked at from the highway, but it'll be jealousy honks.

While you’re in the business park, you might as well see Sarodonis’ other piece on the property, a granite bench-fountain combo in the shape of a spiral ammonite, the shell of a large, extinct mollusk. It's in one of the grassy areas of the parking lot among the earlier mentioned stone spheres. I didn’t find out about this piece until I returned from my jaunt, though, so I can’t vouch for anything other than my lack of preparation.

Strangely enough, Reverence isn’t Burlington’s only connection to these large fish-mammals. You can continue inanimate whale watching at the University of Vermont’s Perkins Geology Museum. The museum has on display Charlotte, a fossilized beluga whale skeleton unearthed near the city in the late 1800s and left over from the days when Vermont wasn’t so much a tourist destination as it was the bottom of a sea.

Fortunately for us in the Holocene Age, Burlington is a tourist destination instead of a sea and well worth visiting for reasons you won’t always find in highway rest stop brochures. With its metal monkeys, driftwood dinosaurs, and stone cetaceans, Burlington is definitely one odd safari.

We Are The Champions: The Lake Champlain Monster

November 20, 2008 — In my last article, I detailed the flying monkeys of Burlington, Vermont. If these flying monkeys had a natural predator, I’d imagine it would be large, reptilian, and aquatic. But that’s because I’m under the influence of Champ, the cryptozoologic wonder of Lake Champlain.

Lake Champlain is the defining feature of Burlington, although the body of water is large enough that it’s also the defining feature of a few other places, as well. While not quite the mini-ocean of one of the Great Lakes, it’s still big...large enough, in fact, to be shared by two states and Canada, as well as to impeccably hide a giant monster within its placid depths.

The people around Lake Champlain call their hydrous denizen “Champ,” of course, and it’s depicted as being the usual water-dinosaur-looking creature with a serpentine neck, small head, long tail, humped back, and funny little flippers for feet. Plesiosaur, is the currently held theory for the identity of the beast. And by theory, I mean absolute guess-in-vacuum.

You see, at some point in the history of towns on large lakes, somebody realized how lucrative to the local economy it could be to claim a lake monster. As a result, there’s a long tradition of reports of reports of reports of lake monster sightings in the world. For Champ in Lake Champlain, this dubitably goes back to the lake’s French discoverer, Samuel de Champlain, in the 1600s. And by “dubitably” I mean patently false. The first report of a sighting was back in the 1800s, and you usually only need one to get the ball avalanching. One bit of trivia that is true, though, is that P.T. Barnum once offered a reward for the capture of Champ, dead or alive or in any possible third stage of being. That guy always seems to be popping up in my research, no matter what I’m writing about.

Perhaps more important to the legend of Champ than the “eye witness” reports is that it has its one iconic, blurry photo. The picture was taken by Sandra Mansi in 1977 while vacationing with her family. It shows a remarkably driftwood-like object with no sense of scale protruding from the lake’s surface. And that’s pretty much the formula you need for a lake monster: a history of sightings longer than the lifespan of any possible biological entity and a controvertible photo. Oh, and a lake.

If I were really looking for Champ, Burlington is probably the last place I would check. Standing on the Burlington shore and looking out at Champlain, it’s difficult to imagine a monster rearing its terrifying head in all that crammed picturesqueness. At least, any self-respecting one. Mysterious water monsters go best with dank weed-strewn lagoons, murky pools, and isolated stretches of storm-colored water, not the layered mountains, bright sailboats, and charming lighthouse’d quay of Burlington. To get the semi-mysterious shot shown in this article, I had to time it just right and then painfully twist the camera to get as many boats out of the frame as possible, and then crop the finished image like a farmer.

However, if you’re a lake monster fan, there’s still a giant reason to go to Burlington, or at least a four-foot-square one. At the end of King Street, which leads right down to the harbor, is Perkins Pier. At the end of Perkins Pier, you’ll find a small, tombstone-like granite slab dedicated to Champ and “those people in Vermont who have sighted Champ and are in search of Champ.” That’s right. A Champ memorial.

It’s not the most memorable memorial you’ll come across in your life, but how often are you going to see a piece of stone dedicated to a figment, hoaxers, the gullible, the bad-sighted, the lovers, the dreamers, and me. Besides a cartoony depiction of the creature, it bears the monster’s pseudo-scientific name Belua Aquatica Champlainiensis. Scientists get bored just like the rest of us. Near the monument on this park-like pier are a few benches, where you can sit, stare out at the water, and lazily search for your own driftwood dinosaur.

This lonely stone isn’t the only way that the city of Burlington has embraced its monster. It has firmly wrapped both its arms and legs around Champ’s sinuous neck for what it hopes to be a grand ride. Champ has been labeled as an officially protected species by the government of Vermont (as well as the government of New York, but this article isn’t about them). Politicians also get bored. Also, like the flying monkeys, businesses often incorporate Champ into their trade-marking, the most notable example of this being Burlington’s Minor League baseball team. It’s the Vermont Lake Monsters, which is a much more impressive name and looks better on a baseball cap than the Vermont Hermit Thrushes, which, incidentally, is the official Vermont state bird.

Historically, my best ideas always come way too late to be of any use, and one such for this article would have been to find and take as many pictures of non-Champ objects in such a way that they look like great Champ pictures. I have the same idea for ghosts, too, and will get around to it the next time I’m just hanging around a cemetery in the dark. So, tomorrow.

However, I did go back and electronically flip through all of our pictures from our day in Burlington, and discovered one that looked like it could be subjected to the Champ treatment. I’ve since  Google Picasa’d this image into the indisputable proof of a lake monster you see in this article. Someone needs to interview me about it now.

Incidentally, I hope you understand the restraint I’ve exercised in this article by not once mentioning Loch Ness. Well, at least not twice. Oh, and if you want to see the original undoctored photo, keep scrolling.

Flying Monkeys

November 10, 2008 — Most people visit the city of Burlington, Vermont, for the pleasant waterfront of Lake Champlain, the quirky shops and restaurants on Church Street, and the cultural benefits that come with being a university town. All the right reasons. I went to Burlington for the flying monkeys, the prehistoric lake monster, and the land whales.

Whether they’re flying out of the posterior of Mike Myer’s Wayne’s World character or jumping around at the bidding of the green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, flying monkeys are both horribly comical and hilariously terrifying. And for some reason they adorn the roofs of two of the signature buildings of Burlington’s harbor.

If you drive down the hill of Main Street toward Lake Champlain, you’ll see at its terminus the old Union Station, now called the One Main building because of its address. One Main is a tall, dignified stone building beautifully back-dropped by the blue Adirondack Mountains across the lake. It’s quite the screensaver of a sight...that’s completely saved from beauty-to-the-point-of-blandness by a pair of black, jagged-furred flying monkeys made of steel perched atop the building’s roof.

A placard near the entrance of One Main that outlines the history of the building barely mentions them, stating only, “The ‘flying monkeys’ above the clock symbolize the link between Burlington’s proud past and its bold future—with a dash of creativity and fun!”

Besides seeming like it was written by a Highlights for Children writer, the statement reaches to the point of dislocated shoulder bones for some generically acceptable meaning. As if it’s not okay to have flying monkeys just for the sake of having flying monkeys.

Vermont’s state bird is the Hermit Thrush, in case you were wondering. It has no state primate. So why is a pair of flying monkeys king-of-the-mountaining in the most visible place in town? Spending their retirement years, is the answer.

This pair of creatures was originally created in the 1970s by a man named Steve Larrabee to expand upon the Wizard of Oz theme of a now defunct local waterbed store called “Emerald City.” Yup, they were in the advertising business. When that store went the way of, well, waterbeds in general, these flying monkeys needed a new home. Eventually, after a couple of decades perched at other locations around the area, they finally settled on One Main, and have been absolutely un-shooable since.

I guess they just stuck around long enough that people started digging them. Digging them enough, in fact, that more flying monkeys were called for. You can never have enough flying monkeys, it seems.

The most prominent of the two flying monkeys adorns the central gable of One Main and acts in the auspicious position of standard bearer, its steel claws wrapped protectively around a pole on which hangs, flutters, and whips (depending on weather and mood of the simiavian) the official flag of Vermont, which depicts a deer, a cow, but, sadly, no flying monkeys.

You have to step around to the backside of One Main to see the second flying monkey better, and once you do, you’ll see not just it, but two more, making a total of four flying monkeys so far in our Burlington safari.

These latter two are baby flying monkeys, adorable and hilarious and terrifying. The name of the city is carved into the stone of the building just beneath the trio, and the juxtaposition makes one think of words like juxtaposition. Behind the building, the sidewalk becomes an elevated terrace, so you end up closer to these sculptures than you are to the one on the front of the building.

Being so close to the winged primates allows you to see much more clearly how scary these creations are with their serrated black outlines and general flying monkeyness. They’ll also make you think that if evolution had gone in this slightly different direction, we’d be a much cooler species now.

Keeping up with the Joneses, though, is the unofficially named Lake and College building located just down the way from One Main. It has flying monkeys roosting atop its roof, as well, although this pair is newer, smoother, and made of undarkened copper so that they’re shiny, at least until time and the elements decide otherwise. They also look a little more like winged sloths than winged monkeys for some reason.

Standing in front of One Main, you can see one of these newer sculptures clinging to a turret of the roof of Lake and College. As you approach the building, you’ll see the other flying monkey howling majestically and oddly wolf-like above the Waterfront Theatre, one of the tenants of the building. The theater has even adopted this howling winged monkey as its symbol and includes a silhouette of the creature on its signage. And why wouldn’t you. It’s not every day that you get to include a flying monkey in your branding campaign.

Anyway, if you lost count or if I've done my usual adept job at muddling the most simple descriptions, Burlington has a total of six flying monkey sculptures on the roofs of its harbor buildings. Enough, I think, to merit their own day of Christmas. And I hope that idea pops into your mind every time that carol’s wassailed in your direction this upcoming Yuletide.

They're Still Coming to Get You Barbra: Night of the Living Dead Cemetery

October 28, 2008 — From the haughty tombs of Pharaohs to the humble country church graveyard, all burial grounds are historical records. They reveal the lives, deaths, and customs of those who’ve treadmilled this hamster ball of a planet before us. A few, though, are historical records beyond that. Like Evans City Cemetery in Evans City, Pennsylvania. It was in this rather nondescript little cemetery just north of Pittsburgh, that George A. Romero filmed the first scene of his landmark cinematic achievement, Night of the Living Dead.

I’ve already written about my trip to the Monroeville Mall where Romero filmed Dawn of the Dead, the sequel to Night of the Living Dead. I realize that’s a continuity gaff, but sometimes life orders things a bit differently. I’m still to this day waiting to live through my fourth grade year.

I’m not sure if any of the gravestones in Evans City Cemetery, from here on out referred to in this article as Night of the Living Dead cemetery, bear the birth year of 1968, but one ought to. In fact, overall it should read:

Beloved
Night of the Living Dead
(1968 - )
Loving Father of
The Modern Zombie and Modern Horror Film
In Our Hearts Forever
And Our Nightmares

Thanks to the film’s title, I don’t have to explain its plot, but I’m also not going to spend much space discussing the import of the movie, either…only because it’s a disappointing exercise. It’s one of those few movies that you don’t have to defend because pretty much everybody who needs to just gets the film for most of the right reasons. As a result, the film’s been lauded to the appropriate degree in the appropriate circles. And I hate that, of course. I just want to fight about things and call other people wrong.

But I will state for the sake of a punch line that this film helped bring about a fundamental philosophical shift in horror films from depictions of existence as morally meaningful to depictions of existence as mere survival, a shift that potentially affected other genres of film, as well. I’m not going to make any judgments here about the worth of the shift itself, but if you help cause a fundamental philosophical shift of any kind, I’ll call you bad-ass. And if you do that with cannibal dead people, I’ll call you Dirty Harry.

Night of the Living Dead cemetery is located on Franklin Road just south of Evans City and about half an hour north of the aforementioned Monroeville Mall. You can’t see the cemetery from the road (and that’s not a personal crack; it’s because it’s surrounded by trees), but an unobtrusive wooden sign that wasn’t in the movie tells you where to turn.

I’ve seen Night of The Living Dead enough times that making the sharp right turn into the cemetery felt almost like déjà vouz. Scenes from movies often stand in as personal memories for me. You might think that pathetic, but while you’re reminiscing about the times you said something witty in front of your boss at the weekly business meeting or bought a week’s worth of groceries for under $100, I’m remembering the times when I animated the Statue of Liberty with pink slime and singlehandedly freed an entire building from terrorists at Christmas.

Turning my car into the cemetery (no mean trick, I can assure you) made me feel like I was in re-living the movie in a literal sense, following the exact path of Barbra [sic] and her brother Johnny as they drove in their Pontiac to pay respects to the dead, even though it turns out that the favor isn’t returned. To help further the enjoyable illusion, I started calling my fiancée, who was accompanying me, "Barbra" the entire time we were there. Which she didn’t think was funny, even after the 10th time. I also kept responding to everything she said with the phrase, “of the living dead.” Still do, actually.

Once we passed that first sign, we traveled up a forested road, past a redundant but more official-looking polished granite sign bearing the name of the cemetery and the year of its incorporation (1891), and to the open space of the cemetery...the Night of the Living Dead cemetery. Don’t forget that. The cemetery’s only impressive if you keep that in mind.

In fact, with its well-spaced headstones of polished granite in simple unflourished geometric shapes, the cemetery doesn’t look 120 years old at all. It’s small, open, has a few bushy trees growing throughout, and is dominated by a Soldiers' Monument that wasn’t featured in the movie and consists of a giant pillar topped by an eagle. In addition to not looking over a century old, the cemetery also hasn’t seemed to change much since the movie’s filming. The dead age well.

Immediately on our left as we entered the cemetery was the abandoned chapel featured in the movie. It’s the only building on the property, and its windows are still boarded up, so that little bit of continuity goes a long way in helping one imagine what this spot was like forty years ago when a tall bearded guy with thick hair could be heard barking out directions like: “Ok, now try to eat her” and “Make it look like you’re bashing his head against a tombstone.” From that point the path splits in two to encircle the cemetery, all of which you can pretty much see once you’re reached this vantage.

Honestly, for having such an important place in horror film, the cemetery itself isn’t spooky at all...if you go in the day...in full color…without a shambling dusty zombie who’s just killed your brother trying to break your car window open with a rock. Spooky’s all about context.

There were two spots in the cemetery that I wanted to find in particular, and I came prepared with screen caps from the movie to help me. The first was the grave that stood in for the siblings’ dearly departed, who was never explicitly identified in the movie but was more than likely their father. At least, I don’t think it was ever specifically mentioned, anyway. Maybe later in the film it was. I only re-watched the first scene to prepare for this article, though…well, that and I drove 600 miles from my house to visit the cemetery. So please hold the criticism.

It thought this spot would be harder to find. After all, in the movie you only see the blank back of a generic-looking grave (that is a personal crack), and the only real clues from the movie are the half a name on the back of an adjacent grave (“air”) that slips into the frame and a tree right beside the grave. The tree isn’t there anymore, but it still turned out to be an easy find because of the cemetery’s size and the fact that the pair of headstones is right on one of the main paths. The full name on the back of the adjacent grave is “Blair” and the one beside it that stood in for Johnny and Barbra’s father is the Cole family plot. To find it, just take a left where the paths diverge beside the old chapel and then go less then halfway along it through the cemetery. They’ll be on your right waiting for you. Tell them I said “Hi.”

Next, we wanted to find the monument that Barbra fell against while she watched her brother die in one of the least gruesome ways one can be killed by a zombie. This is a little past the Blair and Cole plots if you’re coming from the direction of the chapel, and it's also easy to find due to its tall, more-monument-than-headstone shape and the fact that the name is fully shown in the movie. The guy who’s buried there is named Nicholas Kramer (1842-1917). I did some Internet searching on him thinking that might be a cool angle, but judging by his Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, not so much.

After the graveyard scenes, the rest of the movie basically takes place in an old house situated nearby, which I would have visited as well had it not been demolished…but you knew that already because you saw the movie. Zombies wreck everything they touch.

Overall, there’s something organically satisfying about walking around a graveyard where a movie about the dead coming to life was filmed, especially such an important movie. Something also slightly boring, which is why this article goes out with a whimper.

So thank you, and good night...of the living dead.

Claude Rains' Grave

October 22, 2008 — He was nominated for four Academy Awards; acted alongside the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, and Jimmy Stewart; and was directed by the powerful megaphones of Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, and Irwin Allen. Yet for some reason this London-born actor is moldering in a tiny cemetery in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire.

His name? Claude Rains, and I had to go see his headstone. Not because he Casablanca’d with Humphrey Bogart or Notorious’d with Cary Grant or Lawrence of Arabia’d with Peter O’Toole. I had to visit his grave because, as you and The Rocky Horror Picture Show both know, Claude Rains was the Invisible Man.

That’s right. Bela is buried in California, Boris in England, and Lon Jr. was donated to science. But New Hampshire can claim the final resting place of its own Universal Studios monster, the Invisible Man from the 1933 film of the same name.

The Invisible Man doesn’t get as much face time as some of the other Universal monsters, even at this hallowed time of year, but that’s because...I can’t finish that pun. Still, he’s not exactly a monster of the exterior sort—no decaying skin, no reptilian scales, no sharp fangs, no beastly hair. Just a human-shaped, monocaine-addled bit of nothing covered in bandages, goggles, and a Mr. Potato Head nose. The disguised appearance of the Invisible Man is unnerving. When he blusters snowily into that English pub at the beginning of the movie, his facade is just as disconcerting as his big un-reveal a few scenes later.

However, despite his lack of overt outward monstrosity, in some ways the Invisible Man is the most twisted, terrifying creature in the Universal cannon. He’s fear of the unknown personified. He’s the utmost in attainable human evil. He’s a mass murderer who delights in all the most atrocious acts of human malevolence. And he cackles.

That said, he also spends a lot of film time in simple mischief like stealing bicycles, slapping drinks out of people’s hands, and other general Three-Stoogery. He’s just as likely to knock a man’s hat off his head as cause a high-fatality train wreck. In fact, depending on your mood and thanks to director James Whale, you can watch The Invisible Man through on one occasion warmed with laughter and on another chilled with terror. But it took Claude Rains to bring the Invisible Man to full-blown megomaniacal life.

And as if playing the Invisible Man weren’t enough, Rains further embellished his Universal monster cachet by also starring as Larry Talbot’s father in the 1941 The Wolf Man and as the title role of the 1943 version of The Phantom of the Opera. Claude so reins.

So how did an Oscar-nominated, British-born actor with an impressive cinema resume end up in the middle of New Hampshire? I don’t know. But I could probably intuit a few reasonable guesses. Maybe it’s because the state has a nice, English-sounding name that would naturally draw a nostalgic expatriate. Or, and I’m admittedly stretching here, New Hampshire might just be a much cooler state than is generally figured by the populace at large. Then again, it could be as simple as he wanted to be invisible in his later years...wait, I want to take that joke back. Seriously, though, the monied always have places in the country, and even if Rains picked a place a little farther away, he was still close enough to New York City to work his craft. Regardless, he lived the last few years of his life in the Granite State, dying at the age of 77 in 1967.

And the proof of that is in a little front lawn of a graveyard called Red Hill Cemetery in Moultonborough, a small town on the northern point of Lake Winnipesaukee. The cemetery is surrounded by a white picket fence, and has only a handful of graves. It’s bracketed on three sides by houses, so it looks like just an empty house lot.

The cemetery is small enough that it only has a single dirt path that cuts through the middle of it and then exits out the back so that you can turn your car around in a clearing behind the cemetery. The address of the house across the street from Red Hill Cemetery is 289 Bean Road. I assume the cemetery itself has no address as we all know the attitude of the dead toward grocery store circulars.

Rains is buried beside the last of his six wives, Rosemary, under a unique pair of matching four-foot-tall bullet-shaped obsidian tombstones of Rains’ own design. Inscribed on his grave are a few lines from a Richard Monckton Milnes poem; on hers, a hybrid of a Christina Georgina Rossetti poem and a John Lodge Ellerton Hymn. I didn’t get much from the sentiments of eternity those epitaphs expressed, but, man, was I touched at what sat humbly on their graves.

In front of each of his and his wife’s headstones was a small freshly placed orange pumpkin, bequeathed by some unknown pumpkin fairy with a tremendous sense of whatever the word is for the quality of “just getting it.” The orange orbs looked great against the black granite slabs, but the aesthetics of the colors aside, it’s just a great idea. I want every grave to be adorned with a pumpkin at this time of year.

Of course, since Rains was buried here, I figured he probably lived nearby. It’s located on Rt. 109 in nearby Sandwich, NH, at the intersection of Little Pond Road and Wentworth Hill Road. In fact, that stretch of street in front of the house might itself be Wentworth Hill Road, but I’m not certain because country byways can get confusing. The number on the front of the house is 357, and it’s an L-shaped, white house with three columns, a red front door, black shutters, and out-buildings. All in all, it definitely fits the part of the country home of a rich and famous actor from the first half of the century, but then again I try to refrain from stereotyping when I can. Like most houses, it’s a private residence, so if you want to go see it don’t be jerky about it...like loitering too long in front of it for pictures and publishing the address online and stuff.

For me, it’s a day worth writing about when I get to visit the grave and house of a horror cinema icon in the thick of the Halloween season. It’s pure buttered marshmallows, though, to find a brand new reason to watch a classic movie.

Claude Rains was the Invisible Man. That is all.

...at the late-night, double-feature picture show.

Salem, MA

October 15, 2008 — You know that bit of awkwardness you feel when you’re pretty sure no introductions are necessary between two people, yet it’s still your social responsibility to assume otherwise and make a half-hearted attempt? Well...Reader, meet Salem, Massachusetts.

My original intent for this article was to put together an informative two-part summation of the witch-fest that is Salem. After all, there’s quite a bit of historic, cultural, and general oddity to this town, and I would need at least that much space to even do the topic slight injustice. Then I realized that at this time of year, even your most staid local paper will probably be running a piece on this popular tourist destination, so I need to differentiate myself somehow. And I probably should start doing that by not using phrases like “popular tourist destination.”

So I’ll forego all the historical background about the witch trials of 1692 and all the self-righteous caveats about its current exploitation in the town and tell you exactly how I do Salem...in one article or less.

First, I always go in October. Interest in cauldron-hunched hags seems more excusable in that month, and it is also, as a result, the time of year when Salem celebrates its month-long Haunted Happenings, a Halloween-tinted (nay, dyed) celebration when special events are scheduled, stores and attractions stay open later, wares are priced more expensively, street vendors proliferate, and the usual skim of witchiness that always overlays the town is given a second coat.

It’s also, of course, the time of year when it’s the most crowded. In fact, the closer you get to the end of the month, the more Bacchanalic the place becomes until it officially achieves madhouse status on H-Day. Which is why I go early in the month, on a week day preferably, to celebrate the Halloween season in general. One day I’ll have to celebrate Halloween night itself in Salem, I guess. Until then, I’ll stick to observing it sedately, with Halloween specials on the television, candy corn between my teeth, and goblin children at my door.

Still, putting up with a certain level of crowdedness is worth it to experience Salem in Autumn, when the weather is crisp, the leaves are aflame, and it’s much more enjoyable to walk down the Essex Street Pedestrian Mall with a plate of fried dough or hunker down on the Common to arrow through the digital shots you’ve so far imprisoned on your camera. Plus, I’ve got to be honest...there are going to be times while you’re in the town that you’ll feel a little silly for being there, and the crowds will make you feel less so, even if half of the people are wearing conical black hats and matching cloaks.

My first stop is always the Salem Witch Museum across from the Salem Common on Washington Square North. Not to go into it, though. Just to hang out around it. With its reddish medieval-looking exterior, striking statue of the town’s founder, and autumn decorations, it’s Salem on a postcard, and if you kill some time there and then skip the rest of the town you can still pretty much say you did Salem.

The one time I actually did go into the Witch Museum, I found it horribly misnamed. The museum’s a little one-room show involving an encircling diorama of life-size figures in scenes that are sequentially lighted and narrated to tell the story of the Salem witch trials. It’s a decent little show, but with such a great facade and all-encompassing name, it’s a bit of a let-down and not really worth the amount of money you have to pay to experience it...which is a running theme in Salem.

The truth is, there are much better ways of finding out the true story of the witch trials than going to Salem or any of its attractions, even if that attraction does include period-dressed mannequins and a half hour worth of narration. However, you can go into the gift shop for free, and that’ll help set the mood you need to explore the rest of the town.

Outside the museum looms the towering statue of Roger Conant, the founder and first governor of Salem. It’s a great dramatic statue with a billowing cloak that makes the first settler of Salem look like a superhero. I’ve written entire articles on statues, but that’s pretty much all I have for this one.

Salem is a harbor town, and if it didn’t have witches, it would probably put more of its eggs in its maritime history basket. Derby Street parallels the water, and I usually walk it both for that reason and because it drops me off outside a candy store called Ye Olde Pepper Companie (keep it down, spell check). The place claims to be the oldest candy company in the country, but it holds a special place in my life because it was here that I discovered clove drops. I like to pretend that discovery changed my life, but in reality, it usually just makes the rest of my visit in Salem a bit more clove-flavored.

Across from the Ye Olde Pepper Companie is the House of the Seven Gables, the inspiration for the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel of the same name. Hawthorne lived in Salem, and his life and works are another basket for Salem’s eggs that would be more ballyhooed if it weren’t for the spotlight-hogging witch trials. I’ve already covered this attraction here on O.T.I.S. It’s another place in Salem that I usually go to but don’t go in.

However, after I posted that article, I received enough responses encouraging me to actually take the tour that I ended up doing so on my most recent trip. I've got to admit, it wasn’t bad. I also got to check off “use a secret passageway” off my lifetime to-do list, but I still got that prickly, slightly panicked feeling in my skull that the world was passing me by while I was on the tour. I'll just never like group tours, I guess. Also covered in that article is the impressive Nathaniel Hawthorne statue on Hawthorne Avenue that depicts him as yet another member of the Justice League of Salem.

Once I have some hard candy to chip my teeth on and the smell of dead sea things in my nose, I then back-track along the painted red line that is the Salem Heritage Trail toward the epicenter of Salem’s Haunted Happenings shenanigans to see the Witch Trial Memorial and The Burying Point cemetery on Charter Street. Or, more accurately, to go through the Witch Trial Memorial to see the The Burying Point cemetery.

The memorial is merely an open space surrounded by a low wall with inset stone ledges for benches around the perimeter and some barely visible witch trial victim quotes engraved on the paving stones of the threshold of the enclosure. It’s a subtle memorial that makes you forget that you’re even at a memorial...which is problematic, I think...and funny.

Created in 1637, The Burying Point cemetery beside the memorial is pretty much as old as American cemeteries get. In it are buried a couple historical notables including a Mayflower passenger and John Hathorne, one of the villains of the witch trial hysteria and great-a-few-times grandfather of the already mentioned Nathaniel Hawthorne. The cemetery is small, open, and filled with those thin tombstones popular in those times, many of which feature that classic winged skull motif that looks like an Edward Gorey doodle.

Now, I’ve been to more cemeteries than is probably proper, but this is definitely one of the stranger cemetery experiences I’ve had. Normally, I feel half out of place at the graveyards I visit, which I guess I should clarify, I visit for aesthetic, historic, or cultural reasons. Maybe one or two morbid ones, as well. Regardless, I still often feel like if I’m not visiting a dead relative, I don’t really belong there.

However, at The Burying Point, it’s literally like a party, which I guess often still implies a place where I don’t belong. In this case everybody’s welcome to mingle among the gravestones while eating carnival-type foodstuffs and treading festively above the dead. This convivial atmosphere is due to the fact that in October it’s hemmed in by Salem’s “Haunted Neighborhood,” an area that features haunted house attractions, wax museums, and vendors selling those aforementioned carnival-type foodstuffs. As a result, funhouse screams, ware hawking, and teenagers loudly overreacting to each other are the soundtrack for your cemetery stroll.

Throughout my meanderings about the town, I do go into gift shops. They’re everywhere in Salem. One of the better places for it is the Essex Street Pedestrian Mall, which, in addition to stores, has various tented vendors and street performers lining the way during Haunted Happenings. It was here that I first discovered mead, which has since become a favorite liquor of mine on a list that’s becoming so long that the word favorite has started to lose its meaning.

At the end of this lane is the Bewitched statue, sponsored by the cable channel TV Land in its ongoing quest to make classic TV more permanent than it should be. Now, I absolutely (and I don’t use this word lightly) dislike the statue. I’m not totally sure why. Maybe it’s because it’s a horrible likeness of Elizabeth Montgomery, who I think I had a crush on when I watched the show in summer syndication as a child. Maybe I expected her to be dressed as a witch instead of a house dress for purposes of enstatuation. Maybe it’s the cheesy-looking textures of the statue. Or maybe it’s because the entire thing looks like it should be a weather-vane than a statue.

The first time I saw it, I had planned to take a picture with it, but was so disappointed that I didn’t even take one of it by itself. And that says a lot because I once took a picture of a seal carcass on a beach a few months back just because I encountered it. I can’t believe you clicked on that. For the sake of article completeness, I took a picture of the statue on my last venture into the town. I’m starting to get used to it, but I will always remember my initial disappointment. That is also what I plan to say about life on my deathbed.

And that’s pretty much it. I usually skip the rest of the museums and attractions. The Witch House sounds cooler than what it really is, I’m saving the Peabody Essex Museum for another time, and anything else with the words “museum” (or “tour,” for that matter) in its name has a good chance of being overpriced, underwhelming, and cobbled together from household materials. Salem generally has a pretty liberal definition of "museum."

So now you know exactly who not to do Salem with. Other people wring way more enjoyment from all the various events happening in the town at this time of year. I know this because I feel like I’m surrounded by them every time I go. I think it comes down to the fact that I’m both easily conflicted and very inconsistent on where I stand in regards to the cheesy.

On one hand, I’m embarrassed by the whole Wiccan, New Age silliness that pervades a lot of the town, as well as the painfully touristy bits...even though those touristy bits give me something to do. On the other hand, I dig it when towns form identities beyond stupid sports teams and generic historical worth, and I dig the more macabre aspects of the town...which I’m also embarrassed about. In the end, though, it’s a great Fall town, and that makes it a great town to me.

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UPDATE: I have a new favorite place in Salem: Count Orlok's Nightmare Gallery. If you find yourself in Salem, love horror movies, or just want to spell yourself a bit from witches, this is a place you'll want to check out to make your Salem visit complete.

Sleepy Hollow, NY, Part II: It Was a Horseman, a Dead One…Headless

September 30, 2008 — Previously on OTIS, we found ourselves in the Hudson Valley region of New York, exploring within the real-life village of Sleepy Hollow all the landmarks that Washington Irving used in his Halloween-inducing story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. We also looked at some of the homages sponsored by the town’s citizens who are proud that the story has given them a unique identity to lord over the rest of us unliteratured unfortunates. Now it’s time to check out the area landmarks from Washington Irving’s actual life. Let’s start with his death.

If memory and that link in the previous paragraph serve me right, I left you standing on a bridge staring up at a small church...admittedly, the worst stance you could assume when you’re loitering in the territory of a demonic rider with a penchant for chopping off heads. And if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen here. Behind that small church known as the Old Dutch Church is a cemetery known as the Old Dutch Burying Ground. Here it was in the story that the Headless Horseman was thought to be buried and from which he sallied forth each night to go head-shopping. It’s also here where Washington Irving himself is buried. Sort of.

Behind the church are actually two cemeteries that, like Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow themselves, share a vague, almost useless boundary that has been the cause of more than one border war by the corpses interred therein. The three-acre parcel dates from colonial times, and the 85-acre cemetery that surrounds it is called Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. It dates back to 1849, and it is in this latter cemetery that Irving is buried. You see, not only did Irving set his characters in the Hudson Valley, he also set his own life and eventual remains there, proving in word, deed, and death how much he esteemed the place. To avoid confusion, I'll just talk about the cemetery as a single entity.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is actually one of my favorite cemeteries for merely intrinsic reasons. And by merely intrinsic I mean that even if it didn’t have the hellacious specter of a dark headless apparition that “tethered his horse nightly among the graves,” I’d still like it just for the way it is. The natural landscape is varied, with assorted hills and scenic irregularities, enough trees to drop showers of colors in autumn, and a pleasant, rock-strewn stream meandering through it. The unnatural landscape is varied as well, with much-aged tombstones, statuary, and crypts of diverse styles and stones, as well as impressive mausoleums set right into the hills. Of course, that first sentence in this paragraph is in no way meant to deny the fact that I also way dig that I had to cross a Headless Horseman Bridge to get there.

One out of the three times that I have visited the cemetery so far in my life, a table was set up in front of the gates, right beside the Old Dutch Church. On it were displayed various Headless Horseman-themed wares for sale or theft for the monied or deft-handed, respectively. They were also dispersing maps of the cemetery with directions to Irving’s and other notables’ graves. If that Brigadoon-style souvenir table isn’t there when you arrive, I’m pretty sure there are maps around. There's also a sign in the cemetery pointing the way to Irving's bones.

Irving’s grave isn't too deep in the cemetery. It's in the southern part (the north/south-running Route 9 borders the cemetery, and you can use it for your compass), directly on the border of the two cemeteries that I earlier promised to only reference as one. His plot is well-demarcated, hemmed in as it is by a black cast iron gate with Irving emblazoned on it in white. The gravestone itself is white and round like a worn tooth and is crowded on all sides by other worn teeth that aren’t as white or as round.


The cemetery also features graves from whose epitaphs Irving lifted a couple surnames for his characters in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Like the Van Tassels. No Ichabod Cranes, though. To find the man whose name he used for his protagonist, you’ll have to go to a Staten Island cemetery.

Another highlight of the cemetery can be found near the eastern border. Crossing the stream that runs through and along the cemetery, and which I guess is technically a river since it’s called the Pocantico River, is a wooden bridge that locals unofficially call the Headless Horseman Bridge.

With its crossed-stick railings, it looks just like you’d imagine the bridge would have looked in the story...that is, unless you've seen Disney’s animated version so many times that you can’t help but imagine it as a covered bridge. That and it’s wide and sturdy enough to drive a car across. It spans the same river that, just outside the cemetery gates, the original bridge from the story crossed.

If you’re a Dark Shadows fan, the cemetery boasts a holding crypt featured in the first Dark Shadows movie. Also in that vein, a mansion just down the road from Sleepy Hollow called Lyndhurst stood in for the Collinwood castle in both of the original Dark Shadow movies and is cared for by the same preservation group in charge of Irving’s home.

Irving’s home goes by the name of Sunnyside. Now, you might think that an uncharacteristic name for the final abode of a man who has terrified generations with his tale of a decapitated equestrian (I’m running out of different ways to say headless horseman), but the fact is, Irving has given posterity much more than just a headless horseman...even though he didn’t have to.

He also brought us Christmas as We Idealize It, named the New York Knicks, and gave Batman a place to call home. And that’s in addition to the as-yet-unreferenced character who overslept into the future...which now that I write it like that doesn’t seem any more special than what I do every single Monday morning.

Regardless, Sunnyside is a beautiful, large, red-roofed, cottage-like building overgrown with voluminous billows of some kind of creeper vine that can’t help but beatifically overlook the Hudson River. It’s an absolutely idyllic little place both in location and in construction that makes me ill to my stomach. If I lived in such an inspiring setting I’d prolifically write American classics, too. My beige townhouse overlooks a parking lot and more beige townhouses, and that only inspires me to imbibe the Cartoon Network and pay for wrong-address pizza deliveries.

You can only visit Sunnyside itself though the dreaded group tour, which is led by the dreaded period-costume-clad guide. However, you can drop by the gift shop that’s set a little bit away from Sunnyside without joining a tour. It’s a good place to pick up copies of his work to take back to his grave to get autographed. Outside the gift shop you’ll find a pedestal’d bust of Irving, which is a head without a body and funny enough in the context of this article to unnecessarily define. The tour of Sunnyside itself is pleasant but really exactly what you’d expect, with the highlight being the actual study where he wrote.

Other than the Irving Memorial that I've never seen because the Internet only recently told me about it, that’s pretty much all the important Irving-related stuff in the area that I know of (unless you want to drive two hours north to cross the Rip Van Winkle bridge...which is a nice drive, actually, that parallels the Hudson). However, there’re still plenty of spooky shenanigans in the area during the Fall. I can personally recommend the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor, another nearby property run by the Historic Hudson Valley organization, and the area’s Legend weekends are also a good time.

Now that my article is over, I feel better giving you the following one. It’s the website for Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, and is pretty much the most informative graveyard site on the Internet. I’ve stolen tons of information from it for this article and have used it in the past to plan trips there. It’s more thorough than this post, has a larger range of pictures, and doesn’t make you want to throw pumpkins at the author’s head because he’s way overstayed his welcome on your computer screen.