Happy Halloween 2013

October 31, 2013 — After today, it’s officially one less Halloween Season that any of us will ever experience. Sad, but awesome. The season’s all about endings…crops are cut down, death loses its taboo, the curtain of night falls faster. It’s one of the reasons I can’t celebrate Halloween all year ’round like some really cool people do (per se, at least…I certainly dig the morbid all year ’round). Part of the power of holidays, I think, is that they’re ephemeral. A melting snowman. A rotting jack-o-lantern. An empty box of chocolates. And that’s especially true of Halloween…says the guy who celebrates it for a month and a half.

I opened this year’s blog on Friday, September the 13th, complaining about how so much of my life was up in the air. Like skeet-shoot-up-in-the-air. But all the disruptions that were lining themselves up like shotguns in my life either didn’t happen or got pushed farther down my timeline or were just dealt with.

And me and mine got to experience a full, glorious Halloween Season.

Still, just as with every season, there were some great surprises.

Getting to talk to Jeffrey Combs was a huge one. Watching his movies was a non-elective part of my horror education back when I used to mainline horror movies in our attic in northeastern Maryland on a tiny TV thanks to a local video rental store that offered five movies for five days for five dollars. I’m talking VHS tapes here.

And that guy’s phone number is now in my cell phone.

Oh, and the maraschino cherry on that is somehow, as a result of that interview, my Twitter handle was inadvertently included in a Twitter conversation started by none other than movie legend Roger Corman himself (or whoever runs his Twitter account):

And while all that was definitely my highlight, the lesser lights were no less bright. Discovering the ruins of Medfield State Hospital was one of my favorite memories of this entire year, much less season. And then getting to see a piece of Edgar Allan Poe’s original coffin was surreal.

Also incredibly surprising was the amount of attention the silly post about my skeletons received. It’s kind of been everywhere online, but the biggest media outlets that contacted me for interviews and to run the pictures were The Daily Mail and Good Morning America. Getting major attention for something minor is a weird and much more preferred than getting minor attention for something major, I guess.

But, to be fair, here’s an exclusive Skull in the Family pick just for you guys:

Much of my Halloween Season was laid out in the pages of this blog, but there was so much that I just didn’t have time to write about. Like the books I read. Or the fact that, thanks to Netflix and my daughter, I watched more episodes of Goosebumps in one month than I did during the years that it was on television.

Or the strange situation that, this season, we watched more spooky episodic television than spooky movies. I mean we live in a time where Dracula, Hannibal Ector, Edgar Allan Poe, the Headless Horseman, zombies, witches (of East End and American Horror Story), psychos, and vampires are all taking prime-time spots instead of the usual barrage of cop and medical dramas. And while I can’t say they’re all great shows, I way dig the idea of taking my horror in hour increments...complete with Halloween-themed commercials.

Anyway, my season gets capped tonight by trick-or-treating for the second year in a row, after which we’ll hang out with friends, drink hard cider (or maybe faux Pepsi Jazz), and watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

Then the jack-o-lanterns will go dark.

Usually, after overdosing on the macabre throughout the season, I like to take a break from the morbid until Christmas. But this year, I dive right back into my Poe book project. After all, by the time the next Halloween Season rolls around, I want to be able to show you guys a book with a mustachioed man on the cover.

I mean, I’ll be around…maybe not publishing that many long-form articles over the next few months, but definitely posting other things, here, on the OTIS Facebook Page, Twitter. So stick with me. I’ll need you to distract me from my work frequently. It’s how I work.

Seriously, thanks so much for reading the OTIS Halloween Blog (and OTIS in general), sending me emails and hitting me up on the socials. For liking posts and pages and retweeting links and sharing posts with friends and not getting pissed that my site is light text on a dark background.

I like celebrating the season with you guys.

Random Halloween Season Photos Without a Good Title

October 30, 2013 — Tomorrow’s it. The day. Or, the way we celebrate the season, the last day. And while I’ll save all my usual celebratory mourning for tomorrow’s final Halloween Season post, the day before Halloween is still a good day to take stock…photos.

My biggest strength as a writer is that I use a lot of pictures. Sometimes I take them. Sometimes my wife does. But we take a lot. Like, if you had the thumbs of Superman, you could flip through all of them and see a movie of my entire life, with few gaps (my 20s were boring, anyway).

So I thought I’d gather a selection of random pics and make them an official part of the 2013 OTIS Halloween Season blog. Some of these are extras left over from other posts. Some are random ones that I never got the opportunity to post. Others wound up on Facebook, where they were seen by only 3% of the people who like the OTIS Facebook page (I’m still unsure how that works). Others were posted on the front page of OTIS and were doomed to deletion after the Halloween Season ends.

Mostly, though, this gives me an excuse to watch the entire season flash before my eyes before it dies.

Like most of you, we hit up the local Spirit Halloween store this year. I didn't post anything about it because
I didn't have any creative angle other than just posting pics of all their cool stuff and you'd probably already
visited yourself. Plus I'd already done that type of post during the 2011 Halloween Season. I still took pics
'cause I never know when I'll need a pic of a demon clown baby.

Same with grocery store Halloween. Did that last year. Didn't think it'd be
interesting to retread the idea, although I couldn't resist taking a pic of
this great Nabisco stand.

We also visited Druid Hill in Massachusetts but was underwhelmed enough to not bring it up.
Maybe I'll stick it in an OTIS Miscellany post sometime.

Posted this pic of my cat Eleanor on Facebook on the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's death.

I'd almost forgotten that the 2013 OTIS Halloween Season blog began on a Friday the 13th.

From my ongoing annual quest to find an actual pumpkin patch graveyard. So close.

Don't drink and die. Saw this while gathering the materials for this post.

Another foggy morning run-and-take-pics-of-someplace-cool shot.
We had a lot of foggy mornings this year in my town.

A few Jack-Os from this years Jack O' Lantern Spectacular at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence that
somehow didn't make the cut for my post on the visit.

Good old Washing Irving didn't feature as prominently in this Halloween Season as he's done in the past.
Still, we watched the new show based on his Sleepy Hollow story, and I saw him face to face at
the Hall of Fame of Great Americans while visiting it for Poe reasons.

Cheated a bit on the OTIS Halloween Blog this year with a piece in the Boston Globe.

I've written entire posts on Halloween cookies, but this photo was way more elegant than any of them.

This is how I work during the season. Thank God for widscreen monitors and Microsoft's snap feature.
The picture is from this post. The movie is The Evictors.

Here and below are some more detail pics of our decorated barn attic where we watched
Hocus Pocus and The Halloween Tree. Seems like so long ago.

Ah, Salem.

Serial Killers, Satanists, and a Gorgeous River View: Untermyer Park and Gardens

October 29, 2013 — Untermyer Park and Gardens is a beautiful, unique, European-style park in Yonkers, New York, with mosaic-lined pools, classical sculpture, fluted pillars, and a filigree gazebo, all overlooking the Hudson River. There’s just one thing. If an infamous serial killer is to be believed, it was the seat of a cabal of the most vile monsters on the planet.

The 43-acre gardens used to be part of the larger estate of Samuel Untermyer. He was a wealthy lawyer whose green thumbs were only partly from counting all his cash. He also dug horticulture, and during the first half of the 1900s erected the elegant private gardens that today are an elegant public park.

But it had its dark days. The place fell into neglect at some point after Yonkers took ownership, and eventually it hit a dark patch. In the 1970s, the place was rumored to be the abode of occultists who conducted esoteric rites involving animal sacrifices and pitched cartoon ideas to Hanna-Barbera. The skinned carcasses of dogs were found nearby, and people reported seeing torch fire in the gloom. Nobody complained about Jabberjaw.

But the reputation of the place got a whole lot darker when the Son of Sam brought it up as part of his defense.

David Berkowitz, the gun-toting serial killer who got his serial killer moniker from a telepathic dog, claimed to have hung out at the park with a coterie of anarchists, witches, pedophiles, and murderers, all bent on destroying the world one dead German Shepherd at a time.

He said that terrible things went down in the ruins of the park and that the dark cabal was the real Son of Sam killers. He claimed that his role was just as lookout during the attacks that killed six and injured seven over the course of a year from 1976 to 1977. Berkowitz didn’t accuse anybody by name because he said the group was still out there and that he feared for his family.

And it was because of this story that I found myself in the graffiti-covered ruins below the park.

I had just visited the Pine Street apartment building where Berkowitz lived during the killings. It had changed its address to avoid some of the attendant infamy, but it was there that Berkowitz heard the commands from the demon-possessed black dog of his neighbor down the way on Warburton Avenue.

His place was only a mile and a half from Untermyer Park.

The park entrance is at 945 North Broadway. It was immediately apparent that the gardens are a relic of another time, and even though it was clean and well-kept on my visit, its decay was evident.

Unfortunately, the garden portion, with its tiled pools and sphinx statues was locked when I arrived. That part is surrounded by ten-foot-high walls, but I could still peak in through the metal latticework of the front door. I’d especially wanted to see the medusa head tiled into the basin of one of the pools.

I was, however, able to walk under the short man-made tunnel to ascend to the gazebo that they call the Eagles Nest. And I was able to take the 100 Steps.

The 100 Steps is exactly what it sounds like, although most of the steps are so long and shallow that it’s almost more like a ramp. It takes you to the edge of a cliff overlooking the Hudson, the view framed by a pair of freestanding pillars.

This was my jumping off point.

From maps that I’d found, there was supposed to be the ruins of a gatehouse just over the right side of the steps if you’re facing the river, so I jumped over the side about halfway down the stairs. It was a steep incline covered in trees and overgrowth, but after earning a few scratches and startling a few deer, I landed at what was left of the gatehouse.

It was completely roofless, but the interior maze of walls was still intact. The entire thing was covered in a coat of graffiti that seemed to be of the usual bored-vandal sort.

Just in front of the gatehouse were the gates themselves, guarded on each side by a lion and a headless equine form that could have been a horse or a unicorn. I guess technically it could have been a centaur, too. Every headless horse is a possible centaur. They say the creatures were sculpted by Edward Clark Potter, who did the Fortitude and Patience lions in front of the New York Public Library.

Poking around, I saw that the easier way to get to the ruins was just to take the prominent dirt path from the upper area of the park. The path parallels the Hudson, and the statues are just a dozen feet or so off that path…although still missable if you’re not looking out for them.

The gatehouse could have been the meeting place of the supposed cabal, but there were other structures nearby in the past that aren’t standing anymore that are probably just as likely.

But I guess anyplace is as good as the other for plotting the demise of the world.

Look at the Stems on Those Gals

October 27, 2013 — Our annual jack-o-lantern carving night always starts the same way…running around town at the last minute trying to find any remaining pumpkin carving implements and candles amidst the sleighfulls of early Yuletide merchandise impinging on Halloween. It’s the most surreal part of the season.

And while I can’t lie and say my own head hasn’t a few times already turned on its compass toward the north pole (I actually bought a case of Cranberry Sprite Zero today), I’m still firmly rooted in the pumpkin patch of Halloween. Because of all the Halloween nights, the night we carve the jack-o-lanterns is the one most sacrilegious to taint.

But I’m not going to slip all orange and philosophical like in years past. I’m just going to talk pumpkins.

We used to choose our pumpkins for their shape and color. This year, and I guess it’s our burgeoning maturity, we chose them mostly for their gnarled stems. The headware kind of makes the pumpkin.

And look at the stems on these gals. You can hardly tell I had to superglue one back on because my kid broke it (why would they put handles on them if you aren’t supposed to use it?).

Anyway, we always watch a well-worn movie while we mutilate, and this year I kind of wanted to watch the way underrated Chipmunks Halloween movies (Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolfman and Alvin and the Chipmunks meet Frankenstein), but my wife was in a Beetlejuice mood. And you can’t stop a Beetlejuice mood, even if you own the Harry Belafonte box set. You have to satisfy it.

As for the faces we gave our fruit, my wife went back-of-the-head-Charlie-Brown classic, and my daughter wanted hers to look “dead” (and apparently loving it). I, well, I messed up. I had this whole face planned on paper. It was going to be a lost soul kind of pumpkin, with sad eyes and a mouth dripping the moans of the damned.

However, in my fervor to give life, I automatically gave it evil eyes. I guess it’s my default setting. Now the jack-o looks more feral and foaming (although every once in a while, I can't un-see the mouth as a massive mustache). I guess that’s okay. You can’t mess up a jack-o-lantern. One of these years, I’m going to write down all my jack-o-lantern lessons in list form.

So now our trio of pumpkins is hollowed, cut, and lit. All that remains is to roast their seeds and then, come Thursday, they get set on the cold wood of the porch to lure children to our door.

Somehow, a carved head is the last leg of the season.

Is Poe Home?

October 26, 2013 — I’ve never flown roundtrip in a single day before. But I did it today. For Edgar Allan Poe.

One of the bigger reproaches of my life is that I lived a quarter of a century in the state of Maryland, but had never been to the Poe House. I mean, I discovered his work while living in the state, visited his nearby grave on many occasions, and, while a Marylander, never lived more than an hour and a half away from the Poe House at any given time. Admittedly, that latter might go without saying. Maryland is a small, weirdly shaped state.

For a while there I thought it was a permanent mistake. For the past year, the Poe House has been closed for weird, vaguely budgetary, vaguely political reasons.

But that changed today for me. All thanks to a nice flight deal from Southwest, my parents, the motivation of the looming deadline for my Poe travelogue, and the Poe House itself coming up for a brief gasp of air.

Not wanting to miss the Halloween crowd, the Poe House has opened its doors in October with free admission. The only catch is that’s it’s only been open four hours a day, and only on the weekends. It’s a prelude to the house opening again in 2014, hopefully, permanently. But my book deadline couldn’t wait that long.

The line to get into the house was pretty long from the moment it opened. Partly that was the demand for all things Poe, partly the limited hours after being shuttered for so long, and mostly because they can only allow 15 people at a time into the house.

Because, man, it’s small.

Poe lived there in the early 1830s with four of his relatives. It was half of a freestanding duplex at the time, an artist’s rendition of which you can see in one of the included pictures. The place has three bedrooms upstairs and two small rooms below. While he lived there, he couldn’t have put more than three words together without slinging ink at a housemate.

However, despite its humbleness, this is the home where he met his wife. The home where he wrote Berenice and King Pest (two of my favorite and too-often-overlooked works of his). The home where he lived when his MS. Found in a Bottle won $50 dollars in a short story contest for the local paper, helping to jumpstart his writing career.

Fortunately the line for the Poe House moved pretty fast. Unfortunately, that’s because there’s not much to see inside. A tea set, a telescope, and a chair…all of them related to Poe to varying degrees, the two former of which being possessions of his foster family, the Allans, and probably used by Edgar, and the chair being supposedly his. The most interesting item is the small, portable writing desk that, while also the property of the Allans, might have been taken with him during his short stint as a student at the University of Virginia.

Poe’s room is in the attic, and only one person at a time is allowed to slither up the narrow, ladder-like steps to poke their head over the glass barrier that prevents entry and peer around. It’s furnished with period pieces.

But that’s cool. The house itself is really the artifact. And it’s only one of three of Poe’s homes still extant in the country, the other two being in the Bronx and Philadelphia. And maybe that’s two more than most famous authors get, but still this is Poe, we’re talking about here.

I’ll go deeper into my my experience at the Poe House in my book, but the point here is that no longer do I have to feel the weighty, private shame every time I read about his life in Baltimore, see a Ravens game on TV, or travel home for the holidays. I’ve now trod the boards of Poe’s house. Squirmed up its tiny staircases. Stared at its bare walls like I assume they did in that pre-television era.

Basically, I’ve been to what should be one of the most touted places in my home state. Maybe when it opens next year, it’ll finally become that.

Oh, and, so you know, I wrote most of this post in an airport bar playing Cream’s greatest hits after three amaretto sours and having just read the chilling ending of Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home. So if the mood of this post reads weird that’s why.