Onward, October

September 30, 2012 — One thing that I’ve never forgiven my parents for was the month of my birth. I started life in the bland month of April. Tulips, bunnies, sun dresses (I guess, resurrected gods is kind of cool in theory). Seems like a petty gripe on my part, but you should know that two out of my three brothers were born in October. That should’ve been my month, not the guy who came before me and the guy who came after.

Still, despite that, October is my month. Yours too, I think, if you’ve stuck with me this far into the OTIS Halloween Season Blog.

And tomorrow is October 1.

In some ways, that doesn’t mean anything. You, me, and every retailer worth its aisle space have been celebrating the season for weeks. But in other ways, it means everything. The advent of October relegates September to mere preseason. From here on out, the ranks of those who celebrate Fall and Halloween will swell like record-chasing pumpkins in the field. Television joins the costume party with entire schedules full of Halloween specials, movies, and commercials. Haunted houses everywhere go into full scare. The foliage ignites like forests full of fuses.

But there’s a downside to October 1.

In September, the season seems like it’ll stretch forever. October 31 is a mythical date on September 12, like the second coming of Christ or the day after the last day on the Mayan calendar. Now, even though our own calendar numbers start over at 1 and ascend, from here on out it’s a countdown to the glories of Halloween…as well as the sorrow as it departs for another year, leaving Fall to become more conventional. When pumpkins stop being jack-o-lanterns and start being pies. When everything switches to extended foreplay for the Christmas season.

So it’s time to double down on Halloween. On Fall. Because, in this month that saw the deaths of Edgar Allan Poe, Harry Houdini, and Vincent Price, we will also see the death of the season.

But some births, too (besides my brothers).

Tomorrow The New York Grimpendium finally streets after I’ve been talking about it for far too long. I only have left a small handful of photo essays based on the book to post in the coming week or two…but those few I’ve saved because they’re some of my favorites and I thought they’d look better date-stamped with a 10.

And, of course, even when I run out of Grimpendium posts, I’ll continue with my daily Halloween blog. In fact, pretty much all my stress today isn’t whether the book will do well. It’s whether I’ll miss my so-far perfect record of posting every day since September 12. Right now, that’s 19 posts in a row, but that shaky Jenga tower could fall disastrously any day as I still need content for 31 more.

Stick around, and we’ll see what happens.

In conclusion, 31 days sounds like a lot of time. It also sounds like precious little. Either way it’s going to be a good time.

If you doubt that, here’s a skeleton cooking breakfast in my kitchen.

The New York Grimpendium: Tahawus Ghost Town

My new book, The New York Grimpendium, comes out October 1 [UPDATE: Available now]. Like its predecessor The New England Grimpendium, it covers my experiences traveling to hundreds of death-related locations and artifacts in the region. Below is one of a series of photo essays from sites in the book that I’ll be posting over the next few weeks. If you live in or like New York, the book is for you. If you’re a bit morbid, the book is also for you, even if you’ve never been to the Empire State. After all, death is a punch line we all get.

September 29, 2012 — I’m not going to lie to you, Tahawus is kind of a drive-up ghost town. You don’t have to hike through wilderness, trespass on private property, or dig up esoteric maps off the Internet to find it. But it’s also one of the best ghost towns I’ve seen of the admittedly handful that I’ve visited on the East Coast.

Located in the Adirondacks on a large nature preserve, the 185-year-old ghost town was original built around an iron mine. Today, all the buildings that still survive teeter at a vicarious but almost aesthetically perfect balance between intact and decayed. In one of the buildings, the only one that’s in the process of being restored, in fact, is where Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was staying during a hiking trip when he learned that President William McKinley had been shot. Although the area is still in a pretty secluded spot, most of the buildings line a paved road that leads to one of the trailheads on the preserve, although more can be found back in the woods.

Theodore Roosevelt's Cabin

Read all about my visit to Tahawus in The New York Grimpendium, which is on sale now:

Salem vs. Sleepy Hollow, Part II

In Part I of Salem vs. Sleepy Hollow, we compared the main draw, size, atmosphere, and autumnal tinge of each location. At the risk of angering the Halloween spirits further, we'll continue to compare these two Halloween havens in the areas of holiday and historical attractions, literary lights, and main cemeteries.

Halloween Attractions

Both locations have an official name for their paranormal parties. Salem celebrates Haunted Happenings, which is just a non-stop Halloween party throughout the month of October that starts with a parade and ends with Halloween fireworks. That’s right. Halloween is Salem’s Fourth of July, as well as its Christmas and its New Year’s. There are costume balls and historic dramatizations and parades and tours and haunted houses. In fact, so numerous are the events that the city puts out a magazine-sized guide every year to list them all…and I’m sure it doesn’t list them all.

Sleepy Hollow only celebrates full-gallop on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays with its Legend Weekends. There you can go to the Great Jack-o-Lantern Blaze, bump around with things that go bump in the night on a haunted hayride, attend dramatic readings of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow at the Old Dutch Church (which was actually in the story), squint your eyes during lantern and candle tours, and plenty more. They pack a lot into those weekends. For most of the Legend events, you need timed tickets in advance, and the best slots can sell out quickly.

Photo Credit: Steve and Sara Emry

Historic Attractions

Now, despite what I’ve said so far about these two destinations, when you remove Halloween from them, neither totally dries up like old, dropped leaves or unbobbed apples. Both date back to colonial times and, as a result, have amassed quite a few reasons to visit beyond their spooky reputation.

For instance, Salem is full of colonial-era buildings and all the history that comes along with that. In addition, Salem Harbor is one of its defining features and was an important ocean port for hundreds of years.

Sleepy Hollow’s history is best traced through its many mansions and manors that line the Hudson River Valley. The most important ones are open to the public and include the 170-year-old castle-like Lyndhurst Manor (which also stood in for Collinwood Mansion in both of the 1970s Dark Shadows movies); Kykuit, home to John D. Rockefeller and his descendants; Phillipsburg Manor, a 300-year-old plantation; and Van Cortlandt Manor, to name a few.

Lyndhurst Manor, Sleepy Hollow

The Witch House, Salem

Another important Sleepy Hollow property is Sunnyside Manor, home to Washington Irving. Had Irving not added to our canon of nightmares with his Headless Hessian, he still would have been one of early America’s most influential writers, although it would have been for Christmas instead of Halloween. His writings on the subject helped create Christmas as we know it today, and even influenced Charles Dickens’ writings on the subject. Also, next to the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Irving’s most well-known story is Rip Van Winkle. The character even has a Hudson River bridge named after him, about two hours due north of Sleepy Hollow.

Now, Salem sees Sleepy Hollow’s Washington Irving and calls with one Nathaniel Hawthorne, making that city also worth a literary pilgrimage. Hawthorne was born in Salem, lived and worked there for a good chunk of his life, and was a descendant of Judge John Hathorne, one of the major villains of the Salem Witch Trials. Today, you can see a massive statue of the writer on a boulevard named after him, visit his birth home and some other places that he lived and worked, and tour the original House of the Seven Gables that inspired his novel of the same name.

Main Cemetery

What’s a Halloween destination without a cemetery? And Sleepy Hollow and Salem each feature a cemetery as one of their main attractions.

In Sleepy Hollow, it’s the tandem Sleepy Hollow Cemetery/Old Burial Ground, which share a border but don’t observe it, so I’ll refer to it as a single entity. Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is a large, classic cemetery. Windy roads, a stream, forests, mausoleums. It’s also the final resting place of Washington Irving himself, features graves with surnames used in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and was the spot where the Headless Horseman arose every night. That’s a cemetery with some provenance.

Salem has the Burying Point, which dates back to 1637 and is right in the middle of the city. It features a humble memorial to the victims of the trials and is the final resting place for some of the players, as well as a Mayflower passenger. It’s also full of those awesome thin, slate tombstones topped by winged skulls popular in Colonial New England.

However, it doesn’t really have the ambiance of a great cemetery, since it’s so tiny, is in such a busy location, and lacks a diversity of death markers. However, what it loses in ambiance it gains in convenience, since even among the dead you’re just eight steps from the party, and the cemetery is often uniquely awash in machine fog from the nearby haunted house and the smell of funnel cakes from snack vendors.

The Burying Point, Salem

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow

Conclusion

Obviously, I’m not trying to heirarch these two great Halloween sites. They share as many similarities as they claim distinctions. In the end it just comes down to whether you prefer your spooks headless or hanged, whether you vote Pilgrim or Knickerbocker in presidential elections, whether you’re a Disney’s Hocus Pocus person or a Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow one.

Truthfully, though, the two places are only four hours apart, and you should visit them both at least once in the too-few Halloween seasons that we’re given on this planet.

The New York Grimpendium: Ripley’s Shrunken Head Collection

My new book, The New York Grimpendium, comes out October 1 [UPDATE: Available now]. Like its predecessor The New England Grimpendium, it covers my experiences traveling to hundreds of death-related locations and artifacts in the region. Below is one of a series of photo essays from sites in the book that I’ll be posting over the next few weeks. If you live in or like New York, the book is for you. If you’re a bit morbid, the book is also for you, even if you’ve never been to the Empire State. After all, death is a punch line we all get.

September 27, 2012 — I know, I know. If my book is filled with obvious tourist destinations like the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum in Times Square, then there’s no real reason to read it. The thing is, I couldn’t write a comprehensive book about death-related sites and artifacts in New York and not include this particular location of the famous museum chain. First, because they have a range of amazing and morbid artifacts that include a mummified hand, trepanned skulls, a vampire killing kit, medieval torture devices, a cross section of the head of an 18th century French criminal, and a series of skulls and worn as jewelry or used for decoration by various exotic peoples. Mostly, though, Ripley’s Times Square is in the Grimpendium because they have the largest collection of authentic shrunken heads on display in the world, 24 in all. Sadly, that’s 24 more than I have.

Read all about my visit to the Ripley's Believe It or Not! Times Square Museum in The New York Grimpendium, which is on sale now:

Salem vs. Sleepy Hollow, Part I

September 26, 2012 — It’s Autumn. The Halloween season. And you want to go to a place where the Halloween atmosphere is so thick you need a monster mask to breathe it. Where Halloween seeps up from the ground, discoloring the foliage. Where the holiday decorations look permanent. Where the apples on the trees ripen caramel-covered, candy corn grows by the cob, and Oreo creme is always orange. Where the witching hour arrives every 60 minutes. Somewhere Halloween has been building up for hundreds of years.

You have two choices. Salem, Massachusetts, or Sleepy Hollow, New York.

I’ve been to both of these locations numerous times and plan on going to them again this season. This two-part post is my attempt to compare my experiences at these preeminent Halloween destinations. A few things to keep in mind while reading this, though. First, I’ve never been to either place on Halloween itself, as I have other traditions for that particular calendar square. However, I’ve spent many an October day wandering the orange-and-black-festooned streets of both of these macabre municipalities. In fact, if you subtract all my memories, but leave me with my Salem and Sleepy Hollow ones, I’ll look back on a full life with no regrets.

Second, I also need to emphasize that this post is a comparison of the two places during the peak season, Autumn, as in the off-season both places retreat a bit into their sarcophagi and the experience changes in fundamental ways.

Main Draw

This part you already know, but let’s start the comparison nice and official-like. In the black corner, the center of the Halloween vortex that is Salem are the Witch Trials of 1692, which took place there and in locations nearby. The event is commemorated by museums, reenactments, preserved historic houses, graves of some of the players, and monuments to the tragedy.

In the orange corner, the seed that grew into a Halloween Tree in Sleepy Hollow is the 1820 Washington Irving story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which was based specifically on that spot of Colonial America and its landmarks. Today, you’ll find sites from and inspirations for the story, dramatizations, statues dedicated to it, and the house and grave of its author.

Size

Salem is an actual city and is twice as big population-wise as the villages of Sleepy Hollow and its Siamese twin Tarrytown put together. Salem has more than 41,000 residents, while Sleepy Hollow claims just under 10,000 and Tarrytown just over 11, 000. This one fact impacts most of the categories for this post and is probably the biggest difference between the two.

That said, both places are considered “suburbs” of major cities. Salem is just 15 miles northeast of Boston, while Sleepy Hollow is 15 miles due north of New York City.

So more people live in Salem, but a bigger population has access to Sleepy Hollow. Further making the scale tremble with all that see-sawing is that Salem seems to be the more famous Halloween location of the two and pulls in a larger number of out-of-town tourists as a result.

Basically, what I’m saying is that I’ve been in traffic jams at both places.

So if you're the type that can have an experience ruined by too many like-minded souls, then early October is the time to visit either place. All the seasonal attractions have started by then, but the full crowd frenzy has not yet descended on either. And if you're of the opposite personality, and love having strangers pressed against you from sides you didn't even know you had, then the closer you go to H-Day, the more exciting your visit will be.

Atmosphere

Salem can feel like a mad carnival at times, especially its famous Essex Street Pedestrian Mall: People in extravagant costumes; vendors everywhere hawking food, wares, and experiences of various qualities; and plenty of opportunities for both good and bad decisions.

Sleepy Hollow, on the other hand, isn't quite as capitalized on, so while it can get crowded, it’s never really in the "dangerous party" way that Salem can get when it’s half in its mead. In Sleepy Hollow, it's more like in the "accidentally went to the zoo on field trip day" way. That’s also because a few of the important destinations in the Sleepy Hollow/Tarrytown region mandate a car, spreading out the crowds somewhat, while Salem is almost completely walk-able.

So, in general, if you’re looking for nice, quiet moments to commune with the Holy Spirit of Halloween, you can find it in Sleepy Hollow if you’re semi-diligent enough. If you want to crowd-surf on the pointy hats of witches and the bloody horns of demons, Salem is where you should be. Again, that’s in general. If you go enough times to either to know them well, you can pretty much dictate your own experience there.

Autumn Stuff

At both places, a candy apple and cup of cider are almost always within arm’s reach. Of course, in Salem, because of its density, there are plenty more places to grab food and drinks, at either a fair booth or a restaurant. Not that you can’t find a good place to quaff a quaff in Sleepy Hollow. I seem to remember one night that started out gin and tonic-y, continued through a few gun-shots of sambuca, and then ended with a haunted house and public urination. And that’s kind of what I meant by communing with the Holy Spirit of Halloween.

Naturally, you also want the perfect Autumn backdrop for whatever you do. Salem is more urban, and most of its seasonal shenanigans occur downtown. It does have a couple of parks, though, and since it is in New England, perfectly color-corrected foliage is just jaunts away in every direction…well, except east. That way lies Salem Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. Just a wetter style of Autumn, I reckon.

Meanwhile, Sleepy Hollow is just one stop of many on the magnificent Hudson River Valley. The main drag parallels the river and crosses it right there at the Tappan Zee Bridge. Just driving around, you’ll accidentally come across amazing views of river-reflected gold and red foliage, and many of the historic estates that are open to the public have hundreds of acres of Autumn surrounding them.

No need to choose a winner yet. Continue to Salem vs. Sleepy Hollow, Part II, which examines the Halloween traditions, the year-round attractions, and their feature authors and cemeteries.