Another Year Odder: The 2018 State of the OTIS

It’s that time of year to swipe through our calendar apps and our photos in the cloud and the social feeds on our phones, to gaze through the fog of the near-past and take stock of the previous 365 days…because taking stock of the next 365 days is a really, really hard thing to do. My highlights of 2018 were pretty highly lit, I think.

1. Disney World

I visited Disney World for the first time in my conscious life this year (My parents took me before my brain fully formed—I don’t really have any memories of it). That means I entered my middle age years before I entered the Mouse’s gates. But I loved it. Absolutely. I totally understand why people get obsessed with it. Why they go only there on vacations. Why their closets look like Disney stores. If I lived in Orlando, I would dedicate OTIS to it. 

2. Cross-Country Trip

I’ve wanted to roll wheels between the coasts ever since I discovered the joys of roadtripping. This summer we did 4,130 miles in about 15 days, from the Atlantic shores of New Hampshire to the Pacific shores of Washington, seeing lots of oddities and wonders and hotel beds along the way. I think I could spend my life traversing back and forth between the coasts, like Jack Kerouac in On the Road, but with, you know, more stops at graveyards and giant statues. 

3. Baby 

In October, Lindsey and I put another human being on this peculiar planet, our third daughter, Olive Autumn. Nothing much more to say about that. Just need to mention it since I assume I’ll need to live in her basement one day and I need documentation that I heralded her arrival. 

4. OddThingsIveSeen.com

I visited more than a hundred oddities this year. On OTIS, I posted 38 OTIS Visit articles and eight general blog pieces this year. So that’s almost one per week. Not exactly the stats of a high-performance content engine, but it was a good pace for me. My favorite oddity visit I posted about would be maybe the grounds of a hollow sphere cult in Estero, Florida, or the crystal skull at the British Museum in London (which I visited in 2017) or the mummified serial killer head at the Wisconsin Dells. Eh, who am I kidding? It was definitely the mummified serial killer head. If I had to pick one of the most interesting oddities that I visited this year but haven’t written about yet, it's probably either the death site of Buddy Holly in Iowa or the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln in Maryland. 

5. OTIS Halloween Die-ary

The act of posting articles on OTIS has always been an act of journal-writing, but this year’s OTIS Halloween Die-ary completely stripped off the general-interest veneer of oddity visits and focused directly on the black and orange parts of my life. I wrote that die-ary for 61 straight days—all of September and October. Those entries included the entertaining bits and boring bits, the tangents and the only-of-interest-to-me bits. The exercise feels a tad self-indulgent, but, personally, I love having that record to look back on. Also, counting that two-month block of entries, I actually averaged two posts a week on OTIS. Manipulating statistics is fun. 

6. OTIS Club

We crossed the 70-member mark on OTIS for the first time this year. We also reached 135 newsletter issues. So technically, I posted three times a week on average, but you’d need to be an OTIS Club member to see a third of that content. The important point here is that the OTIS Club is going strong 2.5 years since its inception. This is the part where I beseech you to join. That’s right, I’m hoping an archaic verb will convince you. Only $1 a month gets you a membership card, one issue of the weekly newsletter a month, and access to Patreon updates. Or you can join at one of the higher tiers and get even more stuff (and gratitude) from me. Be one of my 2019 highlights! 

7. Book Life

We hit some nice milestones in my publishing career-hobby this year. First, I’m under contract for two books simultaneously for the first time ever. And not in the usual way authors go under contract for multiple books. These books are with two different publishers. Which is another milestone. It doubles the number of publishers I’ve worked with in my book life. Another milestone is that both books were sold by my agent, Alex Slater. I’ve never had somebody sell a book for me before, and without him, I wouldn’t have either of these projects slated for public consumption and judgment. Partnering with him has been a real highlight this year.

The final milestone is that one of those books, Twelve Nights at Rotter House, is adult fiction. It’s technically my second novel, but the first one, Death and Douglas, is a middle grade novel. You probably shouldn't let your kids read Rotter House, but that's up to you. It comes out this fall from Turner Publishing. I have a nonfiction book, Cursed Objects, coming out the fall after that from Quirk. So I’m a real author for two more years.

And that’s it. Even thought there’s a lot here, I don’t feel like it characterizes my year well. Good stuff happened, bad stuff happened, and frequently nothing happened at all. Years are years. So I hope your 2018 had enough good in it to make a short list, too. That’s all we really need to keep going. A short list of good things.

Happy 2019, everyone!

Sam Elliott vs. a Reindeer: Prancer Filming Sites

December 21, 2018 — The 1989 movie Prancer is what we who are usually in the Halloween business call a Sincere Pumpkin Patch—a rarity in the world of overly manufactured, overly set-dressed Christmas movies. Prancer has realistic ambiance, genuine heart, honest grit, and Sam Elliott. That’s all I need for a Christmas movie. And I can skip the first three, honestly.

Prancer is about a girl in snowy Three Oaks, Michigan, who rescues a reindeer with a bum leg that may be the actual Prancer of On Dancer, On Prancer fame. I’ve written about this movie before, so I’d say read that for my full take on it. But also because I was a better writer back then.

Earlier this year, when we discovered that our cross-country trip skirted the real town of Three Oaks, Michigan, where many of the scenes were filmed, we dragged those Google Map lines across the screen enough to get us there.

We visited a series of filming sites that form the corners of a tight box close to the tip of Lake Michigan. The Michigan-Indiana lines cuts directly through that imaginary box like a sword through a wicker basket laden with a pretty assistant.

The first stop on our Prancer tour was in New Carlisle, Indiana. We were there to see two sites. The first was the house of Mrs. McFarland (Cloris Leachman), where Jessica Riggs (Rebecca Harrell) takes out those burlap-covered Floribundas with her sled and later helps Mrs. McFarland clean and decorate to raise money to buy Prancer oats.

In real life, the mansion is the Old Republic House at 304 E. Michigan Street. It dates to 1806 and, these days, is an inn. Which means you can stay the night at a Prancer site. Unless, you know, it’s summertime and you still have like 75% of the country to get through before your vacation days run out. 

The second site is across the street from the Old Republic House: Zahl’s Elevator and Feed Mill. This low building and its tall silver silos feature briefly in the movie when Jessica finds the vet (Abe Vigoda) and convinces him to come to her house to help the reindeer she is harboring.

I know, I know. I took the photo from the wrong side of the building.

From there, we drove seven miles north, crossing the Michigan border to the town of Galien to pass by the farm where Jessica’s friend Carol lived. It’s at 17768 Pardee Road, but we didn’t stop for photos because we’d have had to trespass to get a good angle on the place. It only featured briefly in the movie, anyway, and we wouldn’t have put it on the map at all if it wasn’t directly on the way to our next stop.

Twelve miles later, we pulled into the town of Three Oaks, which was mostly unchanged from the movie. The big train intersection on Elm Street where the plastic deer were strung is right in the middle of the town. The intersection looked exactly the same…minus the rind of snow. Even the Big C Lumber is still there.

On the North end of Elm Street, where it intersects with Sycamore Street, is the Three Oaks Methodist Church where Jessica learns that she’s in the newspaper.

On the south end of Elm Street is the space between buildings that was the Christmas tree lot where Prancer was kept as a tourist draw by the town butcher. On one side is Drier’s Meat Market. On the other is the HQ of a production company called FilmAcres.

Drier’s Meat Market was actually worked into the movie as a plot point. Drier was the butcher who bought Prancer to keep Jessica’s father John Riggs (Sam Elliott—who almost singlehandedly keeps this movie from being too treacly) from blowing its antlered brains out. FilmAcres is the production company of John Hancock, the man who directed Prancer. The only reference I saw to Prancer in the entire town was a flyer taped to his door advertising his next movie project.

I assume during the Christmas Season, the town does more to play up its connection to the Christmas flick. Or, maybe, at three decades’ worth of distance, they don’t get as excited about it. Of course, next year is the 30th anniversary of the film, so maybe I just stopped by too early.

From there we drove ten miles south, crossing back into Indiana to reach 701 E. 700 N in LaPorte. This final stop was a quick one, since it’s a private residence, but a meaningful one since it’s Riggs Farm, where Jessica and her father and brother lived.

From the road, you can see all the filming sites, laid out in a perfect balance of foreground and background as if painted there by an artist. In the foreground is the rustic white house. The mid-ground has the tall, red barn where Jessica found Prancer on her property. And, in the background is the low gray barn where Prancer spent most of the movie.

I don’t know if the people who live there watch Prancer every year or if they decorate their lawns with reindeer in December or if they’re completely over all that, but I want them to know that a guy and his family who were crossing the country seeing wonders slowed to a crawl outside their house last summer to say Merry Christmas.

Der Bingle All the Way: Bing Crosby’s Homes

December 15, 2019 — In general, my g-g-g-g-generation doesn’t listen to Bing Crosby songs (as dulcet as his tones are). We don’t watch Bing Crosby movies (as fun as the Road movies are). But come this time of year when sleigh bells silver the air, we cannot get enough of the dude. Bing Crosby is as Christmas as Kringle to most of us. His J-J-J-Jingle Bells and It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas blast through our Google Homes nonstop and his White Christmas and Holiday Inn (as not-Christmasy as those movies are) dance across our 60-inch 4K flatscreens like they’d just been dropped by Netflix this year.

Over the summer, we found ourselves in his home state of Washington, so we dropped by his house, unannounced. Actually we dropped by two of his houses, both times unannounced.

Harry Lillis Crosby, Jr., was born in the city of Tacoma in 1903. He was the fourth of seven children. He wasn’t born into the sparkly biz—his father was a bookkeeper—but Bing became one of the biggest sensations on the planet. A singer, an actor, a businessman—he was the entertainer triple-threat. But what I dig most about Bing is that he did it all while cultivating this uber-cool, breezy, laid-back persona. He conquered the pre-rock world without breakin’ a sweat. And, yeah, I know all this stuff about some of his sons, but what am I gonna do with that?

His birth home is still around, at 1112 North J Street. His father built the house, and today it’s a private residence in a line of private residences atop a small hill with nice view of Commencement Bay and directly across the street from a church. An almost invisible plaque set into the stairs leading up to the house humbly announces where the tiny mewling that would eventually become big-time crooning first started.

Because it was private, there’s wasn’t much to do there. Jump out of the car and self-consciously take a photo while totally missing the existence of the plaque, is what I did. But it’s his boyhood home that’s really worth the stop. When he was three, the family moved to Spokane, and rented for seven years.

It was during this time Bing got the nickname he hung a career on. When he was seven he was so into some kind of parody newspaper comic thing called the Bingville Bugle that people started calling him Bingo, which then became Bing. A real dumb way to get a lifelong nickname, but man what he did with it.

When he was ten, the family settled into another house that his pops built, also in Spokane. Its address is 508 E. Sharp Avenue. Today, the house is owned by Gonzaga University, a college Bing attended for a few years where he semi-studied law but didn’t graduate from. Gonzaga holds Bing’s archives, some 200 pieces of which are on display in that house, which it has turned into a museum.

The place is free to visit. You just have to say hello to the college kid personning the desk who was born two decades after Bing died on that golf course in Spain one month after he Christmas-duetted with David Bowie. His last words? “Let's go have a Coca-Cola,” David Bowie’s last words? I can’t find any record of them, but I really hope they were the same.

The museum covers only the first floor, which is three rooms and a kitchen. The rooms are filled with artifacts from both his life and career. Smoking pipes and photos and albums and pieces of clothing and awards, all kinds of cool stuff. And, yes, plenty of Christmas stuff.

One of the three rooms had a cardboard cutout of him. He was tiny. One of my daughters asked me if that was his actual size, and the docent called in from the other room, “That’s how big he was.” She was referring to the cardboard cutout, but she might as well have been talking about all the glitter in there. 

The room was lined with Bing’s gold records and, in the middle of the room in a glass case, was his Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his turn as a loose-in-the-collar priest in the 1945 movie Going My Way.

And, yes, White Christmas glimmered among all that gold. Silver and gold decorations, indeed.

The museum’s not the kind of place you spend hours at, but it’s the kind of place you really should stop at. In my case, now I can say that I’ve been to his grave. I’ve been to his house. And I’ve used his bathroom.

Now I’m gonna have the hap, hap, happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap-danced with Danny fucking Kaye.

Sentenced to Hang Out, Not Hang: The Witch Cenotaph of Newbury

November 11, 2018 — We head out to a 17th century graveyard in Newbury, Massachusetts, to see a witch cenotaph...a witch cenotaph...a witch cenotaph...for a witch sentenced not to hang, but to hang out. Read about my previous visit here.

Halloween Die-ary: October 31, 2018 (Halloween Itself!)

“That thing doesn’t scare me anymore,” said Lindsey as she threw the large rubber spider I had hidden under her pillow to the foot of the bed, where its legs jiggled briefly on the comforter. That’s when you know Halloween’s over. When the rubber spider doesn’t work anymore (although it worked for two months, and I’m still half-wondering if she’s bluffing).

Today was about one thing and one thing only: Trick-or-treating. Or trick-r-treating. Or trick ‘r treating Or tricks-or-treating, if you believe It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

This year we decided to do our TRTing at my in-laws’ neighborhood. Last year, we TRT’d our new neighborhood, but it was sort of a slog. The houses were just far enough apart and the driveways just long and uphill enough to tire our youngest out pretty fast.

See the Die-ary entry for October 29.

This year, my eldest was a werewolf, my youngest a witch, my wife opted out, and I went as a…sheet ghost.

This was a long-held dream of mine. I’ve always wanted to cut holes in a sheet and wear it for Halloween. I don’t know why I haven’t. Probably because our sheets are all rubber. Or paisley patterned. But this year I did it. I was also semi-thinking of turning it into a Michael Myers costume by throwing a pair of glasses on top, but that seemed a little too topical, and I wanted the costume to be more classic. I love the classic Halloween costumes.

We wandered in the dark, looking for porch lights and glowing jack-o-lanterns to mine for sweets until the girls’ plastic orange jack-o pails were so full of candy brains that they were complaining about carrying them and I’d just about chocked to death on my own carbon dioxide under that sheet. We then hung out back at the in-laws for the rest of the night, where we watched local personality Fritz Wetherbee tell ghost stories on spooky stages. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard the word “necrophilia” spoken in a broad, New Hampshire accent by a bow-tied man with spectacles and a white beard.

Looking back over the season (which, by the way, is a lot easier to do when you journal every single day of the last 61), it’s hard for me to wrap my head around this one. It feels as if the season was constrained quite a bit due to the baby gestating, arriving, and then being here. But unless I lied throughout this Halloween die-ary, we did some serious stuff.

We saw Elvira live. Took a day trip through Vermont. Another through Massachusetts. Broke in a corn maze. TRT’d a haunted attraction. Carved jack-o-lanterns. Watched horror and Halloween movies and shows. Went to a Christmas themed amusement park. Decorated a horse stall. Decorated our front yard. Decorated an elementery school hallway. Decorated our living room—and learned that if you take those foam lawn gravestones and lean them against the walls of your room and on your mantel, it really makes your Halloween décor seem architectural. I’ll do this the rest of my Halloweens. We made popcorn balls and caramel apples. Ate candy with glow-in-the-dark wrappers. I guested on Coast to Coast AM. We visited astounding cemeteries less than half an hour from me that I’d never been to before.

I visited Salem four times this season—more times than any other season (not counting 2015, the A Season with the Witch year), one of which was to give a talk. In fact, I gave two talks this season, both of which were totally fun and allowed me to meet a lot of cool people, some for the first time, some for the first time IRL, and some for the second and third times. And while both events were great, the Salem appearance might have been one of my favorite moments of the entire season. My whole family got to listen to me speak, which has never really happened due to their ages and logistics. My eldest wanting to sit on the front row and come up on stage right before the talk is a forever-embedded-in-my-brain-cells moment for me. It was also special because the talk was a part of Salem Horror Fest. And because I finally got to give a talk on A Season with the Witch in Salem itself. The month that book came out was the same month my mother died, so I tamped down on appearances and so never got to talk about this book in the city that it is about. This event felt like a correction for that.

Making the Halloween Die-ary my primary content was a fun experiment. In some ways, it felt like less work than other years. In other ways, it felt like much more. I was still able to do about a dozen standalone articles, and, honestly, I would say some two dozen of the die-ary entries would have been standalone any other year. I’m not making any predictions for next year, but that’s only because crystal balls don’t work as well after October.

Obviously, the birth of my third daughter was the centerpiece of the season, the giant table jack-o-lantern of a family dinner that doesn’t exist as a Halloween tradition. I’ve said this before, but I’ve always wanted to have an October birthday (two of my brothers have them), so this feels like righting a wrong. Also, it adds a nuance to my season going forward.

So thanks everyone who followed along. Thanks for sending me emails and letters and posting social media comments, offering me encouragement and celebrating the season along with me. That feedback kept this thing going, for reals. I’m definitely one for screaming into the void, but there’s only so much even I can do. Thanks also to everyone who used the season as an excuse to join us in the OTIS Club for even more seasonal shenanigans.

And that’s it. The end of the ninth OTIS Halloween Season. Keep Halloween in your hearts. And remember to pull them out of your freezer and check for mold spots every once in a while.

Halloween Die-ary: October 30, 2018

A brief thank you to those who have followed along for this strange, strange project called the OTIS Halloween Die-ary. Happy Halloween!

 

Halloween Die-ary: October 29, 2018

Today we suddenly realized that we were supposed to help our eldest decorate one of the horse stall doors at her barn for Halloween. It’s one of those classic “forgot a school project was due” situations. Happens like once a month.

She had an original plan for the project a couple weeks back, but it wasn’t the “do it in one night” type of plan. So we had to put our heads together. Felt like one of those Halloween baking competitions on the Food Network where we have 45 minutes to whip together a half-scale zombie out of modeling chocolate and fondant. I kind of hate that I know those terms.

After some terse in-fighting and a lot of sketching, our eldest came up with a good idea that involved cannibalizing some of our living room decorations. But we still needed one more thing: A life-sized paper monster. In my head it needed be like one of those cardboard skeletons or vampires with hinged limbs that you see everywhere…except for when you need them, of course.

So my eldest and I ran out to Party City and jumped into the fray of last-minute costume-hunters. Didn’t find exactly what we were looking for at Party City, so we went next door to Joann’s, whose Halloween section had shrunk to a single bank of shelving. Nothing there, so we went next door to Big Lots. But it was full Christmas. Then, on a lark, we went next door to Home Goods, where we didn’t expect to find what we were looking for. We just wanted to see if they’d gone full Christmas. Yup.

Finally, we returned back to Party City and settled on a five-foot-tall plastic cling of a Grim Reaper that we thought would work. We’ll see how it all comes together when we go to the barn tomorrow. I also stopped in that same strip mall at the liquor store. I ended up grabbing that Captain Morgan Apple Smash rum in the spherical container that looks like a green cartoon bomb.

Tonight’s movies were Phantom of the Megaplex with the girls—another Disney Channel joint, this one from 2000 and starring Mickey Rooney. It was okay, but the concept of people dealing with the day-to-day of working at a megaplex was a fantastic one. I’d watch a show like that. Later that night, I made an Apple Smash Diet Coke and watched Adam Green’s Digging the Marrow on Shudder. It was entertaining enough, but the best part to me was when the character played by Ray Wise namechecks my town of Nashua, New Hampshire…for probably the only time in the history of cinema.

Happy Halloween Eve Eve!

Halloween Die-ary: October 28, 2018

Taking my kids trick-or-treating at an old warehouse with blood spattered walls and hallways full of corpses and ghouls has become a Halloween tradition for me.

For the past three years, I’ve taken them to Fright Kingdom’s Hardly Haunted event. Fright Kingdom is a single-building multi-haunt here in Nashua. It’s a really great one. And, of course, it’s usually for adults. But the last Sunday afternoon in October, they transform it into a kid’s Halloween Party venue.

Or they try to.

The staff at Fright Kingdom throw children’s character masks on all their movie monster props and exhibits on the indoor Monster Midway—Spiderman strapped to Pumpkinhead’s gourd. Jake of the Neverland Pirates atop Freddy Kreuger’s burned visage. A mask of Mickey Mouse atop the mask of Michael Myers. They then have face painting and coloring activities and a dance floor and ice cream and costumed characters to interact with like Snow White and Elmo and those inflatable T. Rex’s that are infesting the world. It’s a Halloween party.

But then, the real brilliance: They let the kids trick-or-treat the actual haunts.

They take a section of the five haunts, use tarps to cover up bloodstains and grisly scenes, throw more kids masks onto ghouls (and sometimes kid ghouls), and then station staff in welcoming costumes with small cauldrons of candy at various turns of the maze for kids to trick-or-treat instead of neighborhood porches.

My favorite part of this experience is listening to the guides who lead the trick-or-treaters through the maze try to explain away bloodstains and decay and cobwebs as food stains and the dangers of not cleaning rooms. It’s pretty great. Because here’s why.

The kids aren’t fooled.

Kids spend their whole lives trying to peek through the fences we erect around them to see the all the horrors of the world that we’re hiding. That’s why they’re constantly bombarding us with questions, waiting for us to slip up, to say something contradictory or accidentally honest.

Fright Kingdom’s Hardly Haunted embraces that metaphor. I mean, you could throw an event like this at the mall and it would be a great dry run for your kids’ costumes and a way to get candy, but it wouldn’t be near as interesting or compelling as trick-or-treating in an actual haunt. It wouldn’t be near as…Halloween, the holiday that teaches kids to flay the monsters that usual scare them and wear their skins for door-to-door rewards.

Now my four-year-old won’t stop begging me to seee the movie with the demon in the well after seeing Samara from The Ring on the midway, despite the Dora the Explorer mask she wore. My eight-year-old hushes her in a frightened panic every time. I still haven’t decided either way.

At home with our small candy haul, we watched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, despite the groans from my eldest. She hates this cartoon, although she hasn’t been able to articulate to me why. She’s usually up for anything. Some future season, I’ll dig into that. Afterwards, Lindsey and I started on The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix and Expedition Unknown: The Search for the Afterlife on the Travel Channel.

Three more days until it’s time to think about mandatory gift giving and saccharine TV programming and moralistic metaphors and lost family members all the other horrors of Christmas. And more lying to our children, of course.

Halloween Die-ary: October 27, 2018

I liked today. Like, a lot.

Woke up to a nor’easter in progress. Torrential rain and gusting winds blowing yellow leaves through the sky like flocks of birds fleeing from ghosts. My father brought a box of Halloween donuts from Dunkin’ for breakfast. Purple and black and orange icing and sprinkles and, of course, the legendary spider donut.

We ate those donuts while watching spooky docu-programming. Outside, the weather continued to rage. I have this great living room arrangement where the TV hangs beside tall windows that look onto the forest at the edge of our back yard. I can see live foliage while watching TV this time of year.

Afterwards, we had visitors for the newborn child. Wise men, shepherds, you know the deal. So the house got lively for a while.

After that, my father had to head home to the Mid-Atlantic, so me and my eldest ran to the chaos of a mall Target during a rainstorm to pick up some Pumpkin Masters carving tools. We do this every year, and I have no idea what happens to the previous Pumpkin Masters tools. These days, the array of Pumpkin Master utensils is staggering. I joked during a previous OTIS Halloween season that we’re almost to the point where we could swap out all the Thanksgiving silverware and utensils with Pumpkin Masters tools. I think we’re just about there.

At home, we taped black trash bags to the floor, wiped the rain off our pumpkins that we’d picked up from Lull Farm, cued up Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow on the black rectangle, and got to carving our jack-o-lanterns. I’ve written about this ritual a lot over the years on the OTIS Halloween Season Blog. In quick precis, I believe it’s the Halloween climax. Not the parties. Not trick-or-treating. This. Metal blade in orange flesh. Having fun turning something harvested into something monstrous. So it’s not just the climax. It’s the metaphor for the whole season.

This year was a year of firsts for the jack-o-lantern ritual. First time with five pumpkins. First time our eldest wielded her own carving knife (I still remember the first time we had to buy a THIRD pumpkin). First time our middle child was old enough draw her own face and be engaged with the whole process (she panicked when she saw that the lines she’d drawn on her pumpkin weren’t straight).

After the ceremonial lighting of the jack-o-lanterns (the electric candles for which I pilfered from our fireplace decorations), we baked up the pumpkin seeds (butter and Old Bay this year), sent the kids off to bed, and Lindsey and I finally finished The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix.

I’m still thinking about this one, but my initial reaction is that the first eight episodes are great (with episodes 5 and 6 achieving brilliance). The show gets shaky during Episode 9. And Episode 10 might be irredeemable. Like I said, I’m still thinking about it, but there’s a good chance I could change my mind about the last two episodes, but there’s one thing that I’m bedrock sure of: The last line of narration in this series is so godawful, bone chillingly bad that I almost wish I hadn’t watched any episode in the series just to not have that line stored forever in the neurons of my brain.

That said, the show was a big part of this year’s Halloween Season for us, giving us something to watch anytime we needed it.

I finished the night sometime around 2 am after being interviewed about A Season with the Witch by Ian Punnett on Coast to Coast AM, in between commentary on secret elites looking to arrest control of the world back from the United States and the possibility for Tonopah, Nevada, being the new Roswell since it’s being hidden from Google Maps.

I love this season-and-sometimes-the-world.

Halloween Die-ary: October 26, 2018

We kept things chill today, almost as a time-dilation device. My father’s in town to see the new baby, but he’s only here briefly, so we kind of lazed around the house. The weather helped. It was cold. High of 42. And Lindsey is on home rest and the baby hasn’t developed the carapace to deal with those temps (carapaces are a genetic trait in my family). So staying at home seemed right. The secret to extending short visits is keeping things simple. Hanging out. Group-watching something inoffensive. Planning meals.

That night, though, my father and me and my two eldest and our dog went for a night stroll. Which is a fine enough Fall adventure. Flashlights were passed around (well, the one flashlight we had. The rest used flashlight apps on phones), and we all walked out into the chill and the dark under the stars and the looming shadows of the trees around us.

My backyard has enough variety to make that interesting. It’s ringed by a forest and features a hill and some gardens. We poked flashlight beams around, looking for wildlife, but they were apparently hunkered down from the cold or out celebrating the Halloweekend at parties. We eventually wandered to the front yard, the defining feature of which is usually a pair of giant trees but at this time of year is a 15-foot-tall glowing purple ghoul.

After about 20 minutes or so, we were going to head back into the house, when my eldest asked if we could maybe walk around the neighborhood first. She was feeling it. The night, the dark, the season, the complete change in reality at this time of year. Everyone else headed back in, and the two of us walked the block, taking in the Halloween decorations. Shining lights on our local abandoned house (that I’ve heard is up for auction soon so might not decay into further abandonment over the years as I'd hoped). We kept the feeling going for a while before returning to warm our bones inside the house.

I finished the night working on a spooky kids book project that I’m way excited about but which is constantly getting shoved down on my writing priorities list. I got a good review of Death and Douglas today and that kind of inspired me to start focusing on it again.

Tomorrow, we’re supposed to get a Nor’easter. That means lots of rain. And wind. And other things perfect for a late October Saturday. Thinkin’ we’ll put on some spooky movies and carve us up some jack-o-lanterns while the weather does its worst around us.