Budweiser Clydesdales

December 10, 2009 — To some, Christmas is about the virgin birth of a heavenly Savior in a feeding trough. To others, it’s a chance to treat strangers like friends, friends like family, and family like personal shoppers. For most of us, though, Christmas is a huge glowing red and green conglomeration of marketing, memory, materialism, and magic. Sure, somewhere in that tangle of Christmas lights is a Christ child that smells like ass (and cow and sheep and camel), and if you strip away some of the layers of wrapping paper, you’ll still find families taking a break from gathering around the television to gather around a twinkling Christmas tree. But, honestly, just as important these days to Christmas are Rankin/Bass puppets, Coca-Cola polar bears, Christmas ghosts, anthropomorphic M&Ms, suicidal Jimmy Stewarts, mall shopping, Star Trek Hallmark ornaments, Santa-Claus-as-celebrity-endorser, eggnog moose mugs, and Bing Crosby duets with David Bowie.

As you can tell, I would have written The Twelve Days of Christmas much differently. In fact, somewhere around day eight, I would have stuck in a team of giant equines with furry feet pulling a beer wagon. That’s right, Christmas also means Clydesdales. And all thanks to the marketing team at a beer company.

Clydesdales originated in Scotland some three centuries ago to be mere work horses. They were bred to have massive strength to pull loads and plows, with coats that made them able to withstand unpleasant climates while doing all that horrible labor. The result of the former was that they grew to gargantuan sizes—the latter, that they sported furred fetlocks called feather.

Strangely, horses are measured in different body parts than most of us are used to...hands instead of feet, but skipping straight to the translation, Clydesdales grow to over six feet in height, taller if you count their heads...which, through another bit of strangeness isn’t traditionally included in their height. They can weigh up to a ton (a God-awful size for a creature not supported by an ocean) and can carry a one-ton load at a steady five miles an hour. By comparison, I can carry one gallon of milk maybe 20 steps.

Clydesdales were bred for an unglamorous, humble life, but the very same features that made them fit for that lowly life destined them for glamour and fame. Like Danny Devito.

The association of Clydesdales with the Anheuser-Busch brewing company dates back to 1933. The Great Depression was in full swing, and Prohibition had just been repealed. You know, the best of times, the worst of times. In April of that year, the Busch heirs decided to give their father a present to celebrate the end of Prohibition. It was a team of trained Clydesdales hauling a decorated beer wagon. The effect of the horses was palpable and impressive, a feeling they suddenly realized they wanted associated with their Budweiser brand. Thus, they adopted the majestic Clydesdale as its mascot.

Of course, things don’t count until they get on TV, and the first Budweiser Clydesdales commercial didn’t appear until a couple decades later in 1956. I couldn’t find that commercial online, but here’s a version from like 1967 that’ll work for our purposes. Although not at all a Christmas commercial, in hindsight and complete prejudice, you can see (if you clicked the link) portents of it with the brief snow scene, the red and white of the Budweiser brand, and the general sleigh-and-eight-tiny-reindeer-ness of it.

However, in 1976, Budweiser marketers were able to turn Clydesdales into Christmas icons, and in so doing lucratively cement their brand with the Christmas brand...um, tradition...something really only Coca-Cola and maybe Macy’s has been able to do at that point in culture. I also couldn’t find that commercial online, but here’s a 1986 version. Fair warning, prepare for powerful nostalgia and intense feelings of good will toward man. It’s what Christmas and beer have in common.

These days, Anheuser-Busch breeds their own hundreds-vast herd in various locations across the country, often in the same place where they brew their beer. I happen to live a town over from an Anheuser-Busch plant that has an accompanying Clydesdale stable. The same stable, in fact, that supplied the horses for the original Budweiser Christmas commercial. The plant itself is a massive, blocky building that sits on a river. The giant scarlet “A” with inset eagle that is the company symbol is proudly emblazoned on its front side, and the edifice perennially belches out giant columns of steam from whatever Willy Wonka shenanigans go on inside.

But you don’t need a golden ticket to see inside it. Located at 221 Daniel Webster Highway in Merrimack, NH, the Anheuser-Busch plant is ludicrously visitor-friendly for a place that makes the devil’s brew. It offers daily tours, events, samplings, a gift shop, and one of the better community services I’ve ever heard of—free access to the Clydesdale stables and paddocks.

One day I’m sure I’ll take the plant tour, but higher on my list was the local Budweiser Clydesdales, which I’d been meaning to check out for a while. Every so often I’d see one of their beautifully decaled horse trailers tooling around town on its way to events across the country. The trailers are red with green, white, and gold Budweiser logos and a team of Clydesdales pictured on the side. Christmas for the length of a stoplight.

As I mentioned, you can visit the stables and take pictures of the giant horses in their stalls for free during regular hours; however, the first Saturday of every month (except for January through March) is Clydesdale Camera Day. Between one and three o’clock on those days, they bring out a fully bedecked Clydesdale and you can bring your camera and treat a magnificent species of animal like one of those faceless “beach body” cardboard cutouts, free of charge. It’s a pretty awesome opportunity.

My parents were in town this month, and, since family sits somewhere between inflatable lawn ornaments and Hess trucks on the Christmas tradition scale, I took them with me to see these Christmas/beer icons.

When we pulled into the plant, I was expecting a gate house or security of some kind. It is, after all, a pretty large complex, and beer is serious business. Instead, you just drive right on in, past the plant, past the gift shop, and on to the end of the parking lot where the stables are located. The stables are a picturesque place, far from mere ordinary-looking barns, and are apparently modeled after 18th-century German farmsteads. A row of red-roofed, wreath-festooned, pale yellow buildings with multiple gables and large red doors surround a paved courtyard and abut the white-fenced parcels that are the horse paddocks.

Crossing the courtyard to an enormous barn door marked “Entrance,” I wasn’t sure what to expect on the other side. Eventually, of course, gigantic horses, but I didn’t know what rigmarole I’d have to go through to get to them. It turns out, no rigmarole.

Immediately upon entering, you find yourself along a row of Clydesdale stables...which aren’t like any horse stables I’ve seen. These are more like zoo cages. I guess when you’re dealing with massive, iron-shod monsters, a plywood stall just doesn’t cut it.

A woman directed us around the corner to where a line of cameras with people attached to them was forming. It was a smaller line than I thought it would be, but that could have been because of an imminent snow storm that was being predicted. The line went fast, but I would have been happy had the line been long and slow, as it would have meandered past the aforementioned stalls where horses with names like General and Buck walked around and generally flaunted their physical superiority to us.

Actually, though, there were only a few Clydesdales present that I could see. We were informed that a team of them had been sent down to Virginia for a holiday parade, which was slightly ironic because my parents had come all the way up from that area to see them in New Hampshire.

The horse that pulled camera duty that day was a magnificently rumped creature named Ringo, its mane and tail beribboned in red and white in what seemed a Christmas-y affectation, but in fact was actually just Budweiser-y. However, two nearby wagons that were decorated with Christmas bows, garland, and toys added to the Christmas feel of the colossal Clydesdale itself. I’m not sure exactly how tall Ringo was, but I’m right at six feet, and you can see in the picture how much he looms above me.

The event was pretty casual, and when it was our turn to take pictures, there was less pressure than you’d think there would be with a line of people behind you awaiting their turn for jpg memories. A handler holds the head of the Clydesdale, you step up, pat it on its massive flank, and then pose while whoever you brought along snaps a few pictures of you with the beast while the handler does her best to get out of the frame. After that, you can go on back to see the Clydesdales in their stalls or out in the paddocks...unless the people behind you in line ask you to take their picture for them first.

On our way out one of the staff asked us to sign up for a raffle for a used Clydesdale horseshoe, a giant piece of metal that at more than 20 inches long from end to end and weighing around five pounds screams mystery story murder weapon. It was at that moment that I realized that I really, really, really, really, really wanted a used Clydesdale horseshoe. Like letter-to-Santa want. Heck, like subpoena-to-Santa want. I promise not to kill anyone with it.

Merry Christmas to all.

UPDATE: Didn't win the raffle, but a kind OTIS reader sent me one instead.

Fremont Troll

November 23, 2009 — We tell our children fables to teach them important lessons about the world that they’re not quite ready for but that if they don’t still pick up pretty quick could really ruin their lives otherwise. Little Red Riding Hood warns them of the dangers of talking to strangers. King Midas cautions them to be careful what they wish for. And the Three Billie Goats Gruff teaches them that toll collectors are evil monsters. It’s the only one of those didacticisms that doesn’t have an exception.

Ever since that tale in which three goats try to cross a bridge lived under by a territorial troll with a taste for chevon, the association of trolls and bridges (it’s a non-profit) has become a common one. Strangely, though, not goats and bridges. While I can’t pretend to know why culture chose to couple one over the other, these days I have a reason to be pretty happy with how it turned out. You see, a goat doesn’t make as awesome a statue as a troll. And although that last sentence is going into my personal sentence hall of fame, I do wish it was more of a general philosophical statement than a literal one.

And somewhere in all the silliness of the past two paragraphs is a segue to the Fremont Troll that I’m too tired to complete.

The Fremont area of Seattle, WA, is full of carefully developed strangeness—signs that present it as the center of the universe; a seven-ton statue of Vladimir Lenin, a 53-foot-tall Cold War era rocket fuselage, and, if Flickr is to be believed, tons of naked bicycle riders...all the signs of a place trying too hard to have an identity. But all its self-proclaimed quirkiness is worth it for its crowning piece of public art...a crowning piece that it shoved right under a bridge.

Rising like an Earth God from the rock and dirt underneath the George Washington Memorial Bridge overpass on Aurora Ave is an 18-foot tall dust-colored sculpture of a bearded troll. Or the torso of one, at least. Made of two tons of ferroconcrete, this massive monster sits under an otherwise boring highway bridge like a scarecrow for homeless people, one eye a hubcap, the other stylishly covered in a waterfall of troll hair, and, in a nice touch that offers scale and connects it to the environment of the street in front of it, an actual Volkswagen Beetle trapped under its left hand.

The Fremont Troll is located at the intersection of N. 36th Street and what has come to be named Troll Avenue N. While I was there, a steady stream of admirers stopped to see it, including one little girl who wouldn’t stop climbing all over it and ruining everybody else’s photos. In retaliation, I ended up Photoshopping her (badly) out of existence. Somebody should have told her that fable. Curmudgeonism aside, crawling all over the creature is encouraged, but when you’re my age and have my level of coordination, that’s not something you can do in front of onlookers.

According to a metal plate affixed to a nearby rock, the sculpture was created in 1990 by Steve Badanes, Will Martin, Donna Walter, and Ross Whitehead and was sponsored by the Fremont Arts Council as part of a competition for a new art project. This design won because, well, I can’t imagine that any other artist came to the table with a two-story tall monster. Those things just win.

Originally, a time capsule was inserted into the Beetle as well that included, according to one of the artists, a bust of Elvis, some ashes of one of the artists’ friends, random drawings, and other stuff that people in the past think that people in the future might value. However, an act of vandalism that caused the time capsule to be minus an Elvis bust caused them to remove it and fill the Beetle in with concrete and sand. The sad part about that story is how much the future is now missing out on.

I hate being able to boil down an entire article into a single sentence, but the Fremont Troll is a pretty cool statue and worth putting on a Seattle itinerary. In fact, I think every town should do this (scare homeless people). Instead of state quarters and official birds, instead of sister towns and fiberglass statue community projects, we really should have state/town trolls. Heck, I'd even take the idea down to the neighborhood level. Customize it according to the whims of your local populace, but remember, it has to go under a bridge and you’re competing with the entire country. We will all judge you by your troll.

That’s about it for this oddity. Incidentally and on a personal note (and I debated with myself whether to mention this, but it’s that important to me), this is one of the few times you’ll catch me wearing shorts. I hate the things and feel like a British school child when I wear them. However, upon arriving in Seattle the night before, we discovered that the airliner had lost our luggage, so I was still in the same clothes that I had chosen for a cross-country flight that I had hoped to sleep through. It’s times like those that I see the advantages of being half buried in the ground.

Mutter Museum

November 12, 2009 — Since I started O.T.I.S. back in 2007, the two most recommended oddities that I’ve received from readers are the Winchester House in San Jose, CA, and the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, PA. A few months ago, I was able to cross the Winchester House off my list and will write about it soon, but the Mutter Museum I visited a while back. In fact, it was one of the first oddities I visited after starting this site.

Now, don’t get me wrong, seeing the Mutter Museum definitely made me want to sit on its front steps with a laptop and write up an entry on it then and there. However, I put it off due to their “no pictures” policy. After all, this is a grisly subject, and grisly demands pictures. However, I feel like every day there are like 12,000 articles published about the Mutter Museum, and I need to add mine to the cacophony before all the best observations, similes, and punch lines are used up. As a result, expect a lot of links to pictures from people with better press credentials or sneakier camera tactics.

I’ve been to my share of medical oddity museums since the Mutter Museum, but back then it was a first for me and completely the opposite of what I expected. Due to the macabre nature of its exhibits and, honestly, the curiously inelegant impression of its name, I figured the Mutter Museum would be a dark, cramped, slightly profane, and somewhat tawdry experience.

Instead, I was simultaneously delighted and disappointed to discover that it was a genteelly displayed collection surrounded by warm wood paneling, spotless glass cases, and the general aura of an auspicious library. I felt like I needed a velvet robe, a glass of sherry, and a monocle to walk around in it. Here's a link to a virtual tour of the museum. Feel free to skip the rest of this article.

The Mutter Museum is located at and run by The College of Physicians of Philadelphia at 19 South 22nd St., right in Center City. The museum originated as the private collection of Thomas Dent Mutter, a professor of surgery at Jefferson Medical College, also in Philadelphia. He donated his collection of medical specimens and anomalies to The College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1858, and since then, they’ve continued to add to the collection. According to their website, the Mutter Museum now has more than 20,000 items. Most of them gross.

The entire museum takes up only a few rooms of the building on two connecting floors. The first thing you see upon entering is a wall that looks like Attila the Hun’s trophy case. On prominent display in neat rows are a series of 139 human skulls. Apparently, this is another private-collection-turned-public, this time from a man named Joseph Hyrtl. I didn’t even know it was legal to collect skulls, and now I look at my collection of Happy Meal prizes with disgust.

Speaking of disgust, another major attraction in the Mutter Museum is a giant, distended colon. The thing is about nine feet long, 27 inches in diameter at its biggest point, and, when it was part of a living person, had more than 40 pounds of waste in it (sick, I know, but I can’t...stop...writing...about it). Of course, carrying around something like that inside his body eventually killed the man early in his life, but not before he was able to parade himself around at sideshows with inaccurately descriptive nicknames like the Balloon Man and the Windbag Man. Truth is more revolting than fiction.

These days, the preserved colon is stuffed with straw, but is no less repulsive. Just kidding. That makes it a lot less repulsive. Everybody describes it as looking like a giant worm, and in this case, the most obvious simile is the best. Postcards are sold in the lobby.

Also on display is the actual conjoined liver and a plaster death cast of the torsos and heads of Chang and Eng, the famous and original Siamese Twins, who were notable for a million reasons, but in this context because their autopsy was actually performed on site there at The College of Physicians. It’s kind of a full-service institution, that College of Physicians, and for that they get one of the most famous livers this side of Bill Wilson to boast about.

Impressively the Mutter Museum claims to have the tallest human skeleton (about seven and a half feet tall) on display in North America lurking within its exhibits. The “in North America” caveat definitely piqued my interest, but I haven’t been able to discover who in the world currently gets the gold in that Olympic sport. The human scaffolding at the museum shares a case with the three-foot-tall skeleton of a midget in an arrangement that screams sit-com buddies to me.

They also have the famous Soap Woman, the blackened body of a Philadelphia woman whose fat went through a environmentally instigated chemical transformation that literally turned her into corpse-shaped soap. I tried to do more research into that strange process, but kept coming across words like adipocere and saponification, which really didn’t clear up the matter for me of how a body can turn to soap, although I did learn that soap is made from animal fat in the first place and not ivory and Irish springs like I’ve been led to believe.

The important thing, though, is that she’s on display there in all her unabashed sudsy glory in a glass-topped coffin in the museum. On her face, instead of the grim, peace-of-death look that you get with a mummy or the mischievous grin of a naked skull, is the terrified expression of a rotted pumpkin. Man, describing things without relying on pictures is hard. I would trade way more than a thousand words for one of me standing with this exhibit.

Other highlights of the Mutter Museum include a cancerous growth that was removed from President Grover Cleveland, a piece of the thorax of John Wilkes Booth, the brain of a murderer named John Wilson, and tons of other similar items that would get anybody else who collected them the label of “ghoul.” It looks good on you, though, Mutter.

In fact, just about every item in the collection is worth individual article attention, and there are just too many diseases, deformations, dead babies, and other of God’s mistakes and curses on display to do the museum any kind of justice with a single article. Especially a picture-less one.

So now you no longer need to suggest the Mutter Museum to me, although it’s okay if you still want to or if you just want to send me your own clandestine pictures of the place to rub in my face. Finally getting to this topic does feel like cleaning out an old closet, though. That’s right, I had a seven-and-a-half-foot skeleton in my closet.

Never Sweater Weather Here: A Nightmare on Elm Street's Elm Street

October 26, 2009 — “Every town has an Elm Street.” That's the wisdom I took home in 1991 from Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, the sixth installment of the A Nightmare on Elm Street movie franchise. And while truer words have never been spoken by a bastard son of a hundred maniacs, only one town has the real Elm Street.

Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street came out in 1984, jumpstarting a series of movies and other media adaptations and creating a new cinema icon for a popular culture overly prone to bestowing icon status. Also, for unknown reasons currently being investigated by at least three different government-funded research institutes, the film series inspired the lyrics of a generation of rap stars including the Fat Boys, Naughty by Nature, and Will “Fresh Prince” Smith (“I'm your DJ now, Princey.”).

The original Nightmare on Elm Street tells the story of a neighborhood whose teens are besieged in their dreams by a scarred, blade-gloved fiend in a fedora and striped sweater that turns out to be a child-killing janitor who had been burned alive in a fit of vigilantism by the parents of these teens back in the good old days. The basic premise of the flick is that if Kreuger kills you in your dreams, you die in the real world, making sleep equal death in more than mere metaphorical ways.

And the genius of the movie comes in that terrifying idea that the protagonists have to fight sleep in order to stay alive. Nobody wins that battle regardless of, well, anything.

I can’t remember if the town where the film takes place was named in the original movie, but at least later sequels named it Springwood, Ohio. To find that quintessential Midwestern town, the milieu of which would be relatable to a large percentage of his target audience, Wes Craven ranged far and wide across the Midwest, interviewing locals, scouring neighborhoods, examining test footage, and generally trying to incarnate the soul of everyday America onto celluloid. Just kidding. His lazy location scouts grabbed the nearest Hollywood neighborhood, which, minus the palm trees that slip into frame every once in a while, actually does a decent job by itself of standing in for an any-town neighborhood.

Obviously, when you’re in Hollywood, there is tons of cool stuff you should be doing instead of seeing the anonymous street where they filmed a horror movie about dreaming teenagers. But the thing is, if you’re in Hollywood, it’s ridiculously easy to come across the street. It’s located right in the shadow of the Hollywood sign and just two blocks from Hollywood Boulevard, with its dingy Walk of Fame, dingy Grauman's Chinese Theater, and all the fading memories of that area’s more glamorous times.

Elm Street is actually N. Genesee Avenue, a long road that, like most of the long roads in West Hollywood’s orderly grid, intersects with Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Sunset Boulevards—all those streets that cheesy 80s movies liked to make big deals of. The short section of N. Genesee where Nightmare was filmed is a nice, tree-lined neighborhood that seems too pleasant a place to be located in Los Angeles. At the very least, it doesn’t seem the kind of place that would have blood spewing from its beds and girls dragged across its ceilings.

Despite my earlier joke, the section has no palm trees...although those glorified dust mops do actually slip into frame when they filmed scenes elsewhere in town. I also didn’t see any girls in white dresses skipping jump rope, but I promised myself in advance I wouldn’t be disappointed if that turned out to be the case. Still disappointed, though.

The central house in Nightmare’s story is located at 1428 N. Genesee. It was here where Nancy, played by Heather Langenkamp, lived and where much of the trying-not-to-sleep occurred. Just across the street, at 1419, is the house of her boyfriend, who is played by Johnny Depp in the film. “Introducing Johnny Depp,” in fact.

These days, the houses look close to the same as they did back in 1984, with only the cars in the driveways being different. The house that stood in for Nancy's is the one pictured above with the green roof.

In some ways, this street is as much a celebrity as any whose hands gouge the sidewalk in front of Grauman’s. The character it plays is marquee’d in the title of the film, after all. That fact plus having the central geography of the movie match up in real life makes this filming location a different kind of fun to visit than many other filming locations.

At the very least, I figure it’s got to be an amazing neighborhood to trick-or-treat at for those who know its dark cinema past. In fact, I can’t help but imagine Wes Craven standing in front of 1428 during the filming and leaning over to Robert Englund as he’s getting his burn marks touched up to say, "You know, some day kids will dress up as you and trick-or-treat on this very street and at this very house." Actually, I know that didn’t happen. That kind of prescience would make the universe explode.

The original film was shot in other areas of Los Angeles as well, although after Elm Street itself, the rest is anticlimax. However, if you want to fully re-live Nightmare, the locations of some of the other scenes in the movie can be found on IMDb.com, as well as on any of the 1.7 billion A Nightmare on Elm Street fan sites out there on the Internet.

Although the glaring lack of knowledge evident in the past few paragraphs might seem to belie the fact, I did rewatch Nightmare before writing this article. The only new observation I have is, while I was prepared for Freddy to not be the punchline that he devolved into over the course of the series, I did find it strange to witness a world of people who didn’t already know who Freddy Kreuger was. That is a less-cool world.

A Holly, Jolly Funeral: Jerpoint Abbey

December 19, 2009 — Below are some pics my wife and I took in 2008 on a visit to the ruins of Jerpoint Abbey in County Kilkenny, Ireland. Some say that St. Nicholas, the man who inspired the story of Santa Claus, is buried nearby. Others say it's a myth...like Santa Claus himself. Either way, I didn't find out about the possible Yuletide connection until, well, three days ago, so I didn't put his grave on the itinerary. We just generally wandered among the ruins like ghosts with no clue of its Christmas past. Read about the whole story and see the specific spot here. But, to sum up, Santa Claus is dead. I bring tidings of great joy. Merry Christmas.

Not Santa Claus.

Jumanji Mural and Keene Pumpkin Festival

October 13, 2009 — Come for the random filming location. Stay for the awesome 40-foot-tall jack-o-lantern towers.

Jumanji came out in 1995 and made a brief splash in the mud puddle of popular culture not for its story, nor for the nostalgia of its source material (a 1981 children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg), but simply because of its name. Jumanji was fun to say, so people said it...often. Heck, it still is. Even typing the word has its joys and is worth all the italicizing I have to do to stick it in this article as much as possible.

Jumanji is the story of a boy named Allan who gets trapped in a magical jungle game for 26 years and can only free himself by helping some other kids finish the game he started while saving their town from all the jungle shenanigans that it releases.

I didn’t watch Jumanji when it originally came out in theaters, but for no real reason. To put that in perspective, I did watch Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie, Street Fighter: The Movie, and Judge Dredd: The Kind of Movie that same year. That was also the year of Showgirls, I guess. “Absolutely frightening.” Actually, this is kind of fun. Come to 1995 with me for a bit.

Anyway, when I finally watched Jumanji on DVD more than a decade later, I found myself pleasantly surprised and was satisfied with that small part it played in my life. Then I found out that the town where it was filmed was two hours from where I lived. And then I found out that the film makers left an artifact of sorts from their visit. And just like that, suddenly the movie took on a significance in my life that it really shouldn’t have. I had to visit it.

The exterior scenes in Jumanji were filmed mostly in Keene, NH, which is in the southwest corner of the state. The film makers came, renamed the town Brantford, unleashed their ILM-rendered animals to run amok in the town, gave a bunch of locals “I met Robin Williams” stories, and then left…their only trace a large mural advertisement on a brick wall in the middle of town for a fictional shoe store whose primary purpose in the story was to give a badly wigged David Alan Grier a high-tops gag.

All right, it has a little more to do with the story than that. The fictional shoe company is called Parrish Shoes, it was central to the economy of Brantford, and it was owned by Allan’s father. After Allan reappears decades later from his imprisonment in the game (as Robin Williams), he learns that his father grew so despondent over the mysterious loss of his son that he let the family business fold, pretty much taking down the town with it. Allan is overjoyed to learn that his usually detached father really did love him after all. Oh, and sad to see how the town ended up.

Part of setting up the town to look like it had a shoe factory that was fundamental to its existence (the exterior of which was actually filmed in North Berwick, ME), the movie makers painted a large advertising mural for Parrish Shoes on the side of one of one of the buildings downtown. Made up of a white rectangle and a some images of men’s footwear back when it looked like women’s, it bears the name of the company, the phrase, “Available at Anthony’s Quality Clothier,” and the date of the company’s founding, 1850.

Surprisingly, the mural was actually used in the film less than you’d think relative to the work hours spent painting it in the first place. In fact, it was only seen briefly a couple of times blurred in the background. You’d think they’d use it to better establish continuity in a movie that spans a couple of decades and opposite ends of economic prosperity (1969: boy bicycles past the proud and shining example of the town’s prosperity; 1995: Bum urinates against the flaking and forgotten image from the town’s heyday). But I guess I don’t make movies for a reason. 14,000 probably.

According to one of the anonymous uploaders of Wikipedia, the film makers actually removed the mural when they were wrapping up production. However, the locals liked it so much, they had it repainted. From what I could tell through the background blur, it does look like the film makers might have graffiti’d the mural up a bit for the 1995 scenes, so if it really was repainted, that might factor in, as well.

I feel like I say something similar in every single article, but the mural’s pretty easy to find (I guess I don’t look for things that would take anything other than Google effort to uncover). It’s located at the beginning of West St., right off the central square of Keene where Main St. splits into Court St. and Washington St. In that square is a small park with a gazebo and the pedastal’d statue of a standing soldier, which can be seen at various times during the movie, but most notably during the animal stampede scene. Another similarly placed statue from that movie, a man on horseback that is supposed to be one of the Parrish forefathers, is actually a movie prop.

After learning about the Jumanji mural, I became way more susceptible to references to Keene, so it was probably for that reason that I learned about the annual Keene Pumpkin Festival.

Now, there are few things in this life I like more than pumpkins, but one of those is pumpkins with angular, candle-lighted features carved into them...jack-o-lanterns, or as my phonetic pronunciation has them, “jackal lanterns.” And while lots of places throw festivals dedicated to these large orange gourds, few places do it like Keene. As a result, I decided to mass murder birds and time my visit to the mural for the day of the festival.

Every October, the population of Keene swells from its usual 20,000 to three or four times that on the day of the pumpkin festival, with each attendee caring under their arms a beheaded vine-spawn ready to have a hot candle placed in its cranium to chase away the evil spirits. In fact, on eight different occasions, Keene has set the world record for the number of jack-o-lanterns assembled in one spot, with the most recent record being 28,592 at the 2003 festival. However, in 2006, the bullies down in Boston used their massive native population to needlessly take the record at 30,128, which the city currently still holds.

When I went last year for the 18th annual festival, it was a blustery, rainy evening...but that didn’t quell the spirits of the attendees, nor the live flames inside the pumpkins. In fact, volunteers with lighters were constantly walking around ensuring the latter. As to the former, it’s hard not to have fun when you’re shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people in an Autumn dusk surrounded by Halloween wonder. In fact, there were so many people there that I was too embarrassed to have my photo taken with the Jumanji mural and waited until a few months later to return for it...which is why there is snow in some of the pictures. Merry Halloween from O.T.I.S.

There are, of course, various festival-type things to do (and eat) at the celebration, but mostly you mill around in crowds and look at jack-o-lanterns carved with faces, pictures, words, and anything else that provides a window for the soft, yellow interior flame that is the jack-o-lantern’s finishing touch. Unfortunately, that also meant annoying advertisements for local businesses, some spelled out in individual letters spanning rows 15 pumpkins long. If anything should be sacred, it’s pumpkin flesh. Personally, though, I just want demon faces etched into my Halloween fruit. I also want to start measuring distances in pumpkins.

And Keene was certainly orange with pumpkins on that day. They were everywhere, stuck in tree branches, balanced on curbs, arrayed on five-foot-tall wooden stands that lined the length of the main street and ended in a maze of pumpkins at the aforementioned town square. In addition, at various points giant pumpkins of the sort you usually see coddled in blankets and baby oil for competitions were gleefully mutilated into monster jack-o-lanterns.

The most eye-catching bit, though, was the pair of giant, 40-foot-tall, tiered towers of glorious jack-o-lanterns that flanked Main St. In fact, if I hadn’t of stuck so many adjectives in that sentence I’d probably have more to say about them. The entire celebration ended with a fireworks display in the night sky held up by one of those towers. I don’t usually equate Halloween with fireworks, but it definitely makes sense that the only way to put a period on tens of thousands of glowing pumpkins is to make loud, bright explosions in the sky.

I found out later that Keene ended up with 25,568 jack-o-lanterns that year. I don’t care if it’s not a record. It’s still Heaven made of Halloween. Jumanji.

Betty and Barney Hill Abduction, Part II: The Gas Station Bathroom Exhibit, the Official Hill Archives, and the Incident at Exeter

September 30, 2009 — ...and the best thing about writing a Part II is that you don’t have to come up with any type of creative introduction other than to just recap Part I. So here goes. In the previous article, I recounted the semi-reenactment on the part of me and my wife of the fateful trip of Barney and Betty Hill, famous alien abductees, as well as our visit to their eventual final resting places. I say semi-reenactment, of course, because our retracing of their route left out the bits about being hijacked by aliens and having our noses lit up by an extraterrestrial game of Operation. Not by choice, mind you.

That was more than a year ago now. In the missing time since then, we’ve come across other Hill-related oddities worth visiting in New Hampshire, including a homemade alien abduction exhibit in a gas station bathroom and the official university-held collection of original artifacts and documentation from the Hill incident.

I’m going to start with the former because, well, you stopped reading the sentence at that point. I am, however, including the giant caveat that it’s easy to make tons of topics seem more worth writing about by just throwing lots of hyperbolic phrases decorated with capital letters and exclamation points at them. In this case, though, it’s going to be impossible to do better than the simple phrase “homemade alien abduction exhibit in a gas station bathroom.”

And that’s exactly what it is. The strange bathroom can be found in the town of Lincoln, at the Franconia Notch Irving Express gas station located right off exit 33 on I-93/Route 3, the same route down which the Hills traversed that dark night decades past

Upon pulling up to a pump, the first inkling you get that this gas station is more than mere pit stop is the large eight-foot-square painting of a spindly, big-headed alien standing in the middle of a dark forest road, which is hanging beside the ice freezer where any other gas station would have a vinyl banner hawking beer, cigarettes, and stale snack cakes. Above the painting are the words, “First Close Encounter of the Third Kind, Betty and Barney Hill, Sept. 19th, 1961."

I didn’t notice this until after I’d returned and was sorting through the pictures from my visit, but the painting is actually signed and dated way down in the corner, inches above the paved parking lot. The author’s full name is difficult to make out for sure, but the last name is probably Thibeault and the first name seems to start with an A. He or she shouldn’t be too hard to track down, though. Just look for the person with the “painted giant alien tableau for gas station” feather on their resume. The date on the painting, though, is most definitely 2009…making this relatively breaking news on my part (working on the “relatively breaking news” icon as we speak).

After I pretended to fill up my gas tank, all the while merely checking out the painting, I went inside to see the inevitable alien-themed wares for sale. The gas station had some, of course, although not as many as I thought an eight-foot-square painting of an extraterrestrial would presage. Clustered around the register counter were various trinkets in alien form, including day-glo inflatables and key chains, as well as a few copies of the Marden and Friedman book Captured, which I referenced in Part I of this article.

As I started to leave the station, trying to weigh whether the outside painting by itself was enough to merit more than a passing mention in this article, my bladder made a better decision than my brain. I memorialized the moment with a Twitter post at the time. When I walked into that gas station’s single unisex bathroom, I felt like Ali Baba discovering the phrase, “Open, Sesame.”

The walls inside this relatively spacious bathroom were plastered all over with articles about the Hills and other alien incidents, facsimiles of official documentation, drawings of extraterrestrials, photographs, spreadsheets (yup, spreadsheets) regarding alien encounters, and, most oddly (if possible), images from random science fiction shows and movies, including Star Trek and Alien, both of which were tacked up in positions of honor right above the commode.

It looked like one of those rooms they have in police detective movies, where evidence and assorted paper slips are tacked everywhere on boards while the protagonist tries to fit them together to solve some crime “before it happens again.”

The coolest thing about the display was probably that it was in a bathroom. Unfortunately, for that same reason, propriety doesn’t allow you to stay in there long enough to take it all in. Might be a good thing, though. If you stick around in there long enough, that bathroom might make you believe.

At the very least, it’ll make you leave with a big grin of satisfaction, nodding to the cashier like you’ve just been indoctrinated into some private and rare mystery before buying a Twix, a Coke Zero, and an alien key chain and getting into your car and driving off into the sunset. Or at least, that’s how my time at the gas station ended, minus the sunset. It was noon, and I was headed south.

Anyway, I expect access to cheesy stuff like extraterrestrial museums in gas station bathrooms, but I was surprised at being allowed anywhere near this next bit of oddity. It turns out that, in the spring of 2009, the Betty and Barney Hill archive, which had been donated to the University of New Hampshire in Durham, went on temporary public display at the Milne Special Collection and Archives Department of the UNH library.

The archive includes letters and personal journals from Betty and Barney Hill, audio tapes and transcripts of their hypnosis sessions, essays, newspaper clippings, reports, photographs, artwork, and even artifacts from that surreal night.

Because I couldn’t make it to see the display during the regularly operating Milne Special Collection hours, I took the rare step of contacting them to see if it was possible to view the exhibit after hours and the even rarer step of being honest about who I was instead of lying about being a TIME magazine reporter.

One of the curators at the UNH library, Dale, responded to my e-mail and informed me that she’d be more than happy to allow me to see the display after hours, despite the low level of professionalism on display at my O.T.I.S. website. Dale is what we in the business call “awesome.”

We went up to Durham expecting to just spend a few moments gawking and photographing the few items of the enormous collection that were actually on display, and we certainly got to do that. The public exhibit was located in a hallway on an upper floor of the library, where the Milne Special Collection and Archives Department is housed, and included one of Betty’s handwritten journals, a box of her notes on extraterrestrial sightings, a few pieces of artwork including a paper mâche bust and painting of an alien, some photographs of the couple, and other assorted bits. Just enough to satiate the superficial level of interest I have toward everything in life.

The piece I was the most interested in from the start, even before arriving, was the purple dress Betty wore the night of her abduction, for that reason and because she claimed to have found some unidentifiable pink, powdery substance on it that apparently defied scientific analysis. Also because I’m into women’s fashions of the 1960s. They had the dress displayed on a mannequin torso inside one of the glass cases. Immediately apparent is the missing swatch that had been removed for analysis, and the discolored patches from the mystery substance was evident as well. The analysis findings were posted on the wall near the dress, but they must have been over my head, because I don’t remember them (my brain has evolved a method of blocking things out that I don’t understand...it’s a handy survival mechanism).

Anyway, the dress should have been the highlight for me, but then Dale offered us the chance to see the files containing most of the original materials from the archive. After dragging her to the nearest computer and showing her my site again, she still maintained that it was okay, so we pulled up a chair and I played the part of studious researcher that I’d seen so many times in the movies.

The first items I pulled out were the original stained pencil drawings that Betty and Barney had sketched of the spaceship that had accosted them and the famous star map that Betty claimed was shown to her by one of the alien crew. This was actually way cooler than the dress to me. I’d seen these rude drawings reproduced in books since I was a child, and here were the originals, right in my very own white-linen-gloved hands. Oh, those weren’t mine. Dale gave them to me to wear to protect the delicate photos from the horrible oils that my hands excrete. She could tell I was that type, I guess.

Next were the hypnosis transcripts. They had the original tapes, and it would have been swell to hear them, but they were off being digitized or somesuch other more worthwhile purpose than me excreting oils on them, or they were there and I was too chicken to push my luck and ask to hear them, I can’t remember. Still, the transcripts were the next best thing, and I got to read the dramatic memories of Hills’ emotional abduction experience vividly surfacing/being falsely created right in the moment.

After that, we read through a few more letters and journal entries and viewed a few more photos before taking our leave, grateful to the UNH library, and Dale personally, for the great opportunity and cautiously watching the skies on our drive home.

Actually, I probably need to apologize to you for speaking about the exhibit in such glowing terms since the Betty and Barney Hill collection is no longer on public display. However, something tells me that UNH will have to bring it out again in two years for the for the 50th anniversary special deluxe edition of the event.

In one of her letters that I got to read with my shamefully naked eyeballs, Betty Hill typed the phrase, “P.S. New Hampshire is swarming with UFO’s.” Besides being a great documentary title on the subject, she was right in a way. Her incident wasn’t the only high-profile UFO event that occurred in that state in that decade.

On a September night in 1965, on a dark road just outside of the town of Exeter, a local 18-year-old hitchhiker by the name of Norman Muscarello witnessed some intensely bright, low-lying aerial lights unearthly enough to panic him into going to the police.

And while that’s usually the point in every tabloid-published UFO story where the account dies with a resounding “wacko,” in this particular case it’s where the story gets interesting...and borderline credible...or as close as these types of accounts get to that famed wonderland, at least.

Muscarello was able to convince the local authorities to accompany him back to the spot that night. Two officers, David Hunt and Eugene Bertrand, returned to the location on Route 150 between Exeter and Kensington where the cosmic jacklighting occurred and actually witnessed the phenomenon at close range themselves. Meanwhile, other corroborating reports of strange sky sightings came in to the police station.

And that’s why the Incident at Exeter started making at least national headlines (possibly international...it’s hard for me to gauge the whole world sometimes), finding itself in various media reports, Air Force files, and a snug little niche in the overall UFO mythology.

Besides alien visitors, the time of year, the decade, and the national response, the other thing that the Hill abduction and the Muscarello experience had in common was investigative reporter and columnist John G. Fuller. In 1966, he published best-selling nonfiction works about each of these incidents (The Interrupted Journey and The Incident at Exeter, respectively), further ensuring that these stories would stay afloat amidst the flotsam and jetsam of the surface that is popular culture.

Now, the fine print on this story is there’s an air force base in nearby Portsmouth, and according to the official Air Force explanation there were some sort of military air activity going on at the time. However, even if the Air Force hadn’t of admitted to anything, it’s a reasonable assumption that strange lights are still an FDA-approved side effect of Air Force bases. And while that’s enough of an explanation for a lot of people, the story still just won’t die no matter how many attempted murderers it has.

In fact, in September of 2009, the town of Exeter celebrated its first festival commemorating the 44-year-old event. I missed going, but that’s a mistake I hope to correct at future festivals.

These days, the relevant area of Route 150, also known as Amesbury Road, where Muscarello witnessed the UFO activity is mostly taken up by an equestrian center, the white fences of which nicely delineate the fields that made him famous.

In the end, the cops never caught the aliens. Some say they still roam those horse pastures, awaiting just the right shade of night and just the right errant hitchhiker...unaware that the practice stopped being cool by the end of the 1970s.

New Hampshire in the 60s, man. One day I’d like to get my hands on the 50-year-old intergalactic travel brochure that blurbed, “When in the Milky Way, visit New Hampshire"


UPDATE (6.10.2013): I accidentally found myself refilling at the gas station a few weeks back for the first time since my original visit. There's still that glorious plastic-protected alien mural on the front of the station, and they've added a chalkboard adjacent to it so that you can write about your own encounters. They also still sell alien-themed gifts beside the usual gas station cups of jerky and months-old Frosted Honey Buns. The only change, and this was a little bit sad to see, was that they took all the materials that decorated that bathroom and moved it to the wall of the store itself, just under the ceiling where it's hard to read. But the real problem is that they just lack the style of a bathroom museum. It's still worth a stop, though, whenever you have that all-too-familiar craving for Swedish fish and alien lore.

Also, since , the state of New Hampshire has officially recognized that terrifying September night with a historical roadside sign.

Betty and Barney Hill Abduction, Part I: The Route and the Graves

September 10, 2009 — You’re in danger of missing an anniversary, so consider this article a calendar reminder. In a little over a week, on September 19, 2009, we’ll all happily arrive at the 48th anniversary of the supposed alien abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Don’t worry, you still have time to run out and get a card.

On the night of September 19th and on into the early morning of September 20th in the year 1961, husband and wife Barney and Betty Hill were traveling back from vacation in Montreal to their home in Portsmouth, NH, when, according to their story, they were followed by a spaceship and eventually accosted, kidnapped, examined, and then released back into the wild by its extraterrestrial crew.

The event has since become the best documented and most famous case of alien abduction in the history of ufology, introducing into mainstream culture such what-was-life-like-before-them terms as “hypnotic regression,” “missing time,” and “anal probe,” as well as cementing a template for the current mythology of alien visitors in both our fictions and the abduction claims that have succeeded it. The story of the Hills grew big enough, in fact, that it prompted a best-selling book by John Fuller entitled The Interrupted Journey, inspired a television movie called The UFO Incident starring James Earl Jones, and was subjected to debunking by famous intellectual Carl Sagan.

Last year, on the night of the 47th anniversary of the event, I and my wife got into our car, drove up to northern New Hampshire, and then re-traced the route taken by Betty and Barney Hill on that fateful night. We chose this randomly numbered anniversary because we had just moved to the Granite State and didn’t want to wait three years for a more momentously numbered one. In addition, I like commemorating events a few years before it makes sense to because then everybody who is prompted by timely media interest on the more legitimate anniversary to research it will come across my article. Life is made up of a series of schemes.

So right before New England officially switched over to its renowned Autumn outfit, we trekked north to Lancaster, NH, waited for the appropriate hour of darkness, and then basically turned the car around and drove back home. Technically, we should have started in Montreal, I guess, but the Hills’ trip didn’t start getting interesting until hereabouts and 2008 was a time of great confusion over what documentation you needed to cross the Canuckian border.

I had prepped in advance for the trip by reading Captured, a recently published account of the Hill abduction and its aftermath that was co-authored by Kathleen Marden, the niece of Betty Hill, and Stanton T. Friedman, nuclear physicist and famous UFO guy. That’s in addition to my life-long preparation of watching every alien abduction movie I could get my hands on, including Communion, Close Encounters, Fire in the Sky, Altered, and whatever clips I could find on YouTube of the so far unreleased-to-DVD The UFO Incident.

The temperature on the night of our own journey was crisp, bordering on cold, and the sky was perfectly clear for UFO watching. We popped the X-Files series soundtrack into the car stereo and took off, our eyes enthusiastically searching the sky, with the occasional glance spared for the darkness of the road in front of us.

According to their accounts, the Hills were driving south on Route 3 when they noticed an erratic light in the sky that seemed to be following them. Eventually, that erratic light grew into a strange ship, which soon landed, trapping the Hills. The ship’s inhabitants then escorted the dazed couple into the spacecraft and subjected them to the scientific rituals of some sort of intergalactic catch-and-release program.

The Hills described the physical appearance of the aliens as Irish Nazi Jimmy Durantes. Also as what has become known as classic “grays” with thin, short bodies, oversized heads and large, dark eyes that even those of us who haven’t been abducted can now instantly recognize thanks to the flypaper that is popular culture. Obviously, that latter description doesn’t sound anything like an Irish Nazi Jimmy Durante, but the Hills’ story is a little confusing on the appearance of the aliens, as well as on other points. I don’t mean for that to sound cynical. It was a rough night for them.

Actually, most of their memories of the night were unearthed a few years later, under hypnosis and further reflection. Their immediate impressions of the night were hazy, disjointed, and included stretches of missing time—everything a long, midnight trip through the mountains of New Hampshire would be even without alien interruption.

Certainly our own more recent trek down that same road seemed if not as surreal as the Hills’ experience, at least somewhere in the same thesaurus entry. But I guess that’s more because of what it was intrinsically, a late-night re-enactment of an event I don’t believe happened in the first place but am still kind of glad that a lot of people kind of do.

Of course, the whole story is actually more detailed and complex than my summary, but I’ve got a lot to pack into this two-part article and can’t spend too much time on the actual reason for the article. Plus, some of the details will be more relevant in Part II, where I’ll have to come up with all new excuses of why I’m not delving into them.

During the Sixties, the main route for getting from the top of New Hampshire to the bottom was Route 3. It still pretty much is, just with the addition of an interstate highway. As a result, the Hills’ approximate route is easy enough to follow, as long as you pay attention to where it merges and unmerges with Interstate 93. And I mean you because I didn’t and ended up having to retrace my own steps in order to retrace theirs.

In fact, due to the Hills own fuzzy recollections of that night and the various road and zoning changes over the past 50 years, we still might not have followed their course exactly, but we also didn’t get abducted, probed, or have our memories erased (that I remember), so I count it as a trade-off.

Even though a lot of the route is highway, much of it is still unlighted and highly spooky at the time of night that we drove it, especially through the mountainous Franconia Notch area. Just like the Hills did 47 years before, we pulled over and got out of our car at various points along the route. Of course, they were checking out the pursuing UFO in disbelief and being terrified into flight. We were merely taking pictures and spooking ourselves back into the car.

Also like the Hills before, we passed by various landmarks, including what used to be the rock formation known as The Old Man of the Mountain. Back in the Hills’ day, he still had a face. These days, he’s nothing but landslide remnants and an awkward New Hampshire marketing icon. When we drove past it, we could detect the smooth black outline of its decapitated stump against the stars. We also passed by the 75-year-old Jack O’Lantern Resort in Woodstock, with its pumpkin face sign that the Hills probably would also have passed back then.

As to the actual touchdown point of the encounter, the spot is basically unknown, even to the now-deceased participants. Betty claimed to be able to find it later in life, but by then she was so immersed in UFO culture and her status within it that even UFO believers were starting to doubt some of her assertions.

Finally, we made it home...completely uninterrupted, I’m loathe to add. I basically spent the whole trip forgetting to turn off my high-beams for passing cars going in the opposite direction, braking for phantom moose, and wondering if anybody else on the road was saying, Large Marge-style, “On this very night, 47 years ago, on this very stretch of road...” For the record, I also didn’t see anything I could have even forced myself to mistake for a UFO, but then again, I probably would’ve mistaken an actual UFO for not being one, I’m so skeptical in general.

In the end, for us, it was only a three-hour tour. For the Hills, it lasted until their dying days. Barney passed away at the young age of 46 due to a cerebral hemorrhage, eight years after the incident. Betty died in 2004, after living a long life fully enmeshed and celebrated in UFO culture. They’re both buried at the back of Greenwood Cemetery off North Rd. in Kingston, NH. Below each of the names on their cemetery plaques is stated, “of The Interrupted Journey.”

Anyway, as I mentioned, we’re now only a few days away from the 48th anniversary of the event, and in the intervening year since our little expedition, we’ve had a couple of other Hill-related adventures, which I’ll recount in Part II of this article.

The best thing about writing Part I of a two-part article is that I don’t have to come up with a tidy conclusion yet...

Part II gets a whole lot cooler with a New Hampshire gas station dedicated to the event and the original records, hypnosis transcripts, and artifacts from that night, access to which was kindly granted by the University of New Hampshire. I'll even get into the thematically and geographically related Incident at Exeter.