Happy Halloween

 A few stories you might enjoy this Halloween:

 

Child's play Real story behind 'haunted' island of the Dolls in Mexico

Deep in the heart of the canals of Xochimilco—Mexico City’s last vestige of the Aztecs—is one of the world’s most haunted and tragic locations: the Island of the Dolls

New York Post

 

 Killer goods Museum devoted to serial killers & cults is pandemic's hot tourist spot

The Graveface Museum, which opened its doors on Valentine’s Day 2020, is filled with eerie oddities like Charles Mansion’s sweatpants, packets of Flavor-Aid taken from the scene of the Jonestown cult mass suicide and even the actual spine of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey.

 New York Post

 

Time marches on! Fascinating snaps show how the years take their toll on objects - from a moss-covered chair to the shadow of an ID photo on its plastic cover

Daily Mail

 

10 Creepy Corpses on Public Display

. . . after death, a persons’ corpse, embalmed or mummified, might be put on public display, as an exhibit visitors would pay to see. For we who yet live, this list of 10 creepy corpses that were on public display at one time or another suggests just how ghastly and gruesome such a posthumous fate would be.

 Listverse

 

10 More Cinematic Chillers & Thrillers Based on Horrific Crimes

 The[se] criminal offenses, which include body-snatching, train robbery, kidnapping, and fraud, involve the use of picks and shovels, dynamite, “burking,” pistols, ropes, knives, water, machine guns, and, yes, even cameras. In addition, each has inspired a cinematic chiller or thriller nearly as terrifying and electrifying as the crime itself.

Listverse

Quick Tip: Offer Readers More Than a Story

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

One of the pleasures of reading is experiencing (or, at least, being introduced to) new sights. Reading is travel by armchair. This is so even when one’s reading doesn’t happen to involve travel books. Stephen King takes his readers inside not only the geography of small towns, but also into their psychology and sociology. He helps his fans see not only what it is like to live in a small town but also what is means to live in such a community.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child show their readers what it is like and what it means to work for a big city museum, for a big city police department, for a big city newspaper; they also, quite frequently, show their readers what it is like and what it means just to live in and get around in a big city, whether by foot, in a taxicab, on the subway, or by bus. In their novels that are set in New York City, they always refer to landmarks, streets, and other physical locations. Some are known to many; others only to locals or the well traveled. For instance, in Cemetery Dance, the authors allude to Inwood Hill Park. Native New Yorkers are no doubt familiar with this park, but I had to look it up, first to see if such a place really exists (it does, as do many of the places to which Preston and Child allude) and, second, to see where it is. As it turns out, Inwood Hill Park is in northern Manhattan, along the Hudson River, west of Broadway and south of Knightsbridge Road. The New York City Department of Parks & Recreation describes the park as “a living piece of old New York”:

Evidence of its prehistoric roots exists as dramatic caves, valleys, and ridges left as the result of shifting glaciers. Evidence of its uninhabited state afterward remains as its forest and salt marsh (the last natural one in Manhattan), and evidence of its use by Native Americans in the 17th century continues to be discovered. Much has occurred on the land that now composes Inwood Hill Park since the arrival of European colonists in the 17th and 18th centuries, but luckily, most of the park was largely untouched by the wars and development that took place.

The park continues to honor and cultivate its environment. In 2002, the Urban Park Rangers launched a five-year bald eagle release project in the park, in hopes of re-introducing the bird species to New York City. In the summer of 2007, the park's Dyckman Marina was added to New York State's Hudson River Greenway Water Trail, a project aimed at reacquainting city dwellers with natural bodies of water and encouraging citizen stewardship.

Similarly, a hiking trail and the Hudson River Bike Trail offer visitors chances to appreciate large stretches of the park's natural beauty in an environmentally friendly manner.

Also importantly, the park manages to present modern conveniences like athletic fields, playgrounds, dog runs, and a barbecue area, in harmony with its natural assets. The Park stands as a functional, beautiful space, waiting to be appreciated and used.

Inwood Hill Park contains the last natural forest and salt marsh in Manhattan. It is unclear how the park received its present name. Before becoming parkland in 1916, it was known during the Colonial and post-Revolutionary War period as Cock or Cox Hill. The name could be a variant of the Native American name for the area, Shorakapok, meaning either “the wading place,” “the edge of the river,” or “the place between the ridges.”

Human activity has been present in Inwood Hill Park from prehistoric times. Through the 17th century, Native Americans known as the Lenape (Delawares) inhabited the area. There is evidence of a main encampment along the eastern edge of the park. The Lenape relied on both the Hudson and Harlem Rivers as sources for food. Artifacts and the remains of old campfires were found in Inwood’s rock shelters, suggesting their use for shelter and temporary living quarters.

In 1954 the Peter Minuit Post of the American Legion dedicated a plaque at the southwest corner of the ballfield (at 214th Street) to mark the location of a historic tree and a legendary real estate transaction. A living link with the local Indians who resided in the area, a magnificent tulip tree stood and grew on that site for 280 years until its death in 1938. The marker also honors Peter Minuit’s reputed purchase of Manhattan from the Lenape in 1626. The celebrated sale has also been linked to sites in Lower Manhattan.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, colonists from Europe settled and farmed here. During the Revolutionary War, American forces built a five-sided earthwork fort (known as Fort Cock or Fort Cox) in the northwestern corner of the park. It fell to British and Hessian troops in November 1776 and was held until the war ended in 1783. After the Revolutionary War, families returned to the area to resume farming.

In the 1800s much of present-day Inwood Hill Park contained country homes and philanthropic institutions. There was a charity house for women, and a free public library (later the Dyckman Institute) was formed. The Straus family (who owned Macy’s) enjoyed a country estate in Inwood; its foundation is still present. Isidor and Ida Straus lost their lives on the S.S. Titanic’s maiden voyage. When the Department of Parks bought land for the park in 1916, the salt marsh was saved and landscaped; a portion of the marsh was later landfilled. The buildings on the property were demolished. During the Depression the City employed WPA workers to build many of the roads and trails of Inwood Hill Park.

In 1992 Council Member Stanley E. Michels introduced legislation, which was enacted, to name the natural areas of Inwood Hill Park “Shorakapok” in honor of the Lenape who once resided here. In 1995 the Inwood Hill Park Urban Ecology Center was opened. It provides information to the public about the natural and cultural history of this beautiful park. Today the Urban Park Rangers work with school children on restoration projects to improve the health and appearance of the park. Complementing the work of the Rangers is that of dozens of Inwood “Vols” (Volunteers), who assist with park restoration and beautification (“Inwood Hill Park”).

Many of these features of the park are described in Cemetery Dance, both to develop eerie descriptions of atmosphere and to serve the demands of the novel’s plot. In Cemetery Dance, it is very believable as the possible refuge for voodoo priests, devotees of obeah, and zombies that Detective Vincent D’Agosta and Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast investigate.

A couple of other references in their novel, to Victor Turner’s The Forest of Symbols and Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, were also obscure, although I have heard of Durkheim. An Internet check, sure enough, turned up links to both volumes. One site even features online excerpts of Elementary Forms. In The Forest of Symbols, Turner investigates the function of ritual; in Elementary Forms, Durkheim takes on such topics as “the origin of the sacred,” “totemism,” “effervescence,” “the theory of religious forces,” and “the ambiguity of the sacred,” among others, some of which seems to inform the theories that Pendergast explores, if not embraces, in the novel as he investigates revenants, voodoo, obeah, and the mystical in general.

King’s depiction of small towns and of small town life, like Preston’s and Child’s depictions of their fictitious museum, real places in new York City and elsewhere, and their references to actual scholarly works of interest to their own narrative topics, enhances readers’ experience, offering something more than the stories themselves, which keeps readers satisfied and coming back for more.

Location, Location, Location!

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

In series of stories which are related to a central theme, a plot device for generating new types of antagonists and, therefore, conflicts, is necessary. Writers have come up with a large, and growing, variety of such devices, which tend to fall into a few categories, some of which may, occasionally, overlap. Horror writers, like authors of other types of fiction, should be acquainted with such devices and, when possible, create new ones of their own.

The plot device of which I speak, which we may call an “antagonist generator,” is based upon a simple, but irrefutable, truth. Either the main character occupies a relatively stationary position and antagonists come to him or her, or the protagonist travels, encountering antagonists in the process. Therefore, depending upon whether the generator moves or remains stationary, it is either a mobile or a fixed one.


Mobile Antagonist Generator




Vehicle: A vehicle is any moving object, mechanical or natural, that transports the protagonist (and usually other characters) to a place in (or upon) which he or she encounters an antagonist with whom to engage in a conflict. The vehicle could be an airplane, an automobile, a bicycle, a boat, a bus, a comet, a planet, a ship, a spaceship, a train, or even a wagon train. Various vehicles are used in horror fiction to transport protagonists to rendezvous with hostile antagonists, including an automobile (Stephen King’s Christine), a ship (Ghost Ship, directed by Steve Beck), a train (Terror Train, directed by Roger Spottiswoode), and a spaceship (Alien, directed by Ridley Scott).


Fixed Antagonist Generators




Station: The station stays in place; it doesn’t travel. It performs a specific task or mission of commercial use or military significance. Within these broad guidelines, the station can be almost anything: a dentist’s office, a factory, a fort, a hospital, a library, a museum, a nursing home, a store, or a space station. It can be terrestrial or extraterrestrial. It might be natural, but it could be paranormal or supernatural. Examples of stations in horror fiction include Jurassic Park in the film of the same name (directed by Steven Spielberg), the island in H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining, and the Hellmouth in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (created by Joss Whedon). In these stories, the generator is stationary, and the protagonists, whether John Hammond and his guests, Edward Prendick, Jack Torrance and his family, or Buffy Summers, respectively, come to it, where they encounter their respective adversaries--dinosaurs, a mad scientist, ghosts, and whatever happens to crawl out of the Hellmouth on any given day.




Site: Like the station, the site is a fixed location; it does not move. Instead, it brings the antagonist to it--and, thus, to the protagonist. However, unlike the station, the site is not the location of any task or mission or, if it is, the task or mission is not commercial or military in nature and is, in and of itself, unrelated to the story’s conflict. An example of a site, as opposed to a station, is the body of young Regan McNeil, which is possessed by the devil in William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. Although Regan’s physiological processes may be considered tasks, her acts of ingestion, mastication, digestion, elimination, breathing, and so forth have nothing to do, in and of themselves, with the conflict that takes place between the devil and the story’s protagonist, Father Damien Karras, who comes to Regan’s house to exorcise the demon that possesses her. The jungle in Predator (directed by John McTiernan) is another example of a site, as is the Marsten House in Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot. The teleportation device on Star Trek (created by Gene Roddenberry) does not qualify as a vehicle, as it might seem to do, because it moves people, including Captain Kirk and his crew, but, remaining motionless, it does not move itself. Personnel can enter the teleportation device and leave it, and it serves a military mission, so it‘s not a platform (see below), but a station.




Platform: A platform is a stationary object (rather than a location). It may or may not perform a commercial task or serve a military mission, but, in any case, it is a thing which, as such, cannot be physically (that is, bodily) entered or exited by the protagonist, the antagonist, or any other character. An example of a station is the cellular telephone in Stephen King’s Cell, which performs a commercial task but doesn’t go anywhere--or, rather, it goes only where its owner is already going, under his or her own steam--but it brings antagonists to its user. It is a thing, which cannot be entered of exited. A trail or highway may also be a platform, since the path or the road itself does not move, although it is a means of facilitating the movement of the protagonist or the antagonist and may provide a commercial task or serve a military purpose. The trail is used to great effect in Stephen King’s The Stand and Robert McCammon’s Swan’s Song. Both a trail, of sorts, and another object--a ring--are platforms in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.


Additional Examples


To identify other antagonist generators, think of specific, individual stories you have read or watched. They need not be exclusively horror stories. For example, in C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia’s first volume, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, contains a magic wardrobe. The wardrobe's location is fixed, and it doesn’t perform a particular commercial task or serve a specific military mission. In other words, it’s a platform.


In Bentley Little’s novel The Resort, the family of victims comes to the resort mentioned in the book's title, which does perform a commercial task, making it a station.


Needful Things, the curio shop in Stephen King’s novel of the same name, attracts the protagonist and others, causing them to come to it, and it performs a commercial function, so it is also a station.


The Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland, which attract film students to film a documentary concerning the local legend of the Blair Witch is another example of a site (Blair Witch, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez).


The museum in Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Relic is a station.


The retreat to which Karen Beatty repairs to recuperate after being sexually assaulted and suffering a miscarriage in Gary Brandner’s novel The Howling is a fixed location that serves a commercial task and, incidentally, as it were, introduces her to her antagonists, a colony of werewolves, so the resort qualifies as a station.


Other categories


Other categories besides the (mobile) vehicle and the (fixed) station, site, and platform antagonist generators may well exist, and this post isn’t intended to be exhaustive. It’s intended simply to get the basic idea across and maybe crank the engine of one’s own generators.

Everyday Horrors: Anglerfish

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

What lies beneath? Three-fifths of the earth’s surface is covered with water, and the oceans are deep. Strange, shadowy shapes weave and waver beneath the waves, suggesting fabulous creatures beyond human ken. As well as warnings of boiling seas, the maps of ancient and medieval mariners were crowded with images of mythical sea monsters that sailors swore they’d seen. These strange, misshapen creatures, sometimes of colossal size, greater even than that of the sailing ships from which, allegedly, they were seen, are revealing, if not of nature per se, of human nature, at least, and of the nature of fantasy.

Usually, scientists believe, such creatures have some real-world inspiration, but they are products of fear more than of observation, a part of something mysterious giving rise to something even more baffling and horrible. Exaggeration is often at work, too, in the creation of the serpents of the sea. Attributes are multiplied, enlarged, combined, or, in a few cases, denied. Jules Verne combined a parrot’s beak with an octopus to create the giant squid of which he writes in 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea, and the delta of a river may have given birth to the many-headed Grecian hydra that Hercules and Iolaus slew. Columbus, as we saw in a previous post, may have mistaken manatees for mermaids.

As an American Museum of Natural History piece points out, monsters are also born of misinterpretations, with seaweed being taken for sea serpents and a “deformed blacksnake” having been thought to be a newborn specimen. Moreover, stories told one place are retold in another region, and, often in the retelling, the monsters at their hearts are reformulated and recast, becoming different, at least, if not more hideous and menacing. Before long, there is such a disparity between the original monster and its offspring that any family resemblance is lost, and the two relatives are mistaken for entirely distinct creatures. Sometimes, such monsters are even “manufactured,” purposely, as hoaxes, as the article observes, citing none other than P. T. Barnum as a perpetuator of such a fraud. The showman’s version consisted of a monkey’s head, a fish’s tail, and, perhaps, fish bones and papier-mâché.

However, the world’s oceans, especially at their lowest depths, offers many a strange creature that, with a little modification, might well suggest possibilities for horror story monsters. We’re going to mention only one in this post--the anglerfish, which is known for its method of obtaining prey and its way of reproducing others of its kind.

A moveable fishing rod of sorts grows from their foreheads. It is baited, so to speak, at its tip with an blob of flesh that attracts would-be carnivores of the deep. The anglerfish can wiggle its fleshly fishing rod, called an illicium, in all directions to lure prey close enough to its jaws for the anglerfish to swallow them in a single gulp. The jaws spring into action automatically, by reflex, when the prey brushes its illicium. Some anglerfish are luminescent. Both jaws and stomach can expand so that the anglerfish can swallow prey twice its own size.

Some anglerfish have modified pectoral fins that allow them to “walk” upon the ocean floor, where it conceals itself in the sand or among seaweed. It can change the color of its body to camouflage itself.

Their method of mating is as peculiar as any of the anglerfish’s other characteristic behaviors. When the male reaches maturity, its digestive system degenerates to the point that it is no longer able to feed itself, and it attaches itself to the much larger female’s head, biting into her flesh. The male’s body then releases an enzyme that digests its mouth and the flesh of the female at the site at which the male has attached itself to her, fusing the two sexes so that the female and what is left of the male--eventually nothing but its gonads, or sex organs--share the same blood supply.

There are as many as eighteen families of anglerfish, including humpbacks, monkfish, frogfish, seadevils, footballfish, sea toads, and batfish. Those who have sampled them compare their taste to that of lobster tails.


“Everyday Horrors: Anglerfish” is the part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured in Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

The Horror of the Wax Museum

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

What’s horrible about wax? When it takes the form of a human being, it, like other statues, whether of marble, plastic, or some other material, becomes a stand-in for a body--but it is still. It is stationary. It does not move. It neither smiles nor frowns, laughs nor cries. It utters not a word. It doesn’t so much as breathe.

Were its lungs to move, at least, one might suppose the figure represented by the wax or clay or stone or plastic were merely paralyzed. Without breath, however, there seems no question but that it must be dead. Therefore, we must surmise that the wax figure, like other statues, suggests the dead rather than the living. A wax museum is a mausoleum, a house of death.

However, the figures, we also feel, may be only pretending to be dead. They may breathe when our attention is focused elsewhere. Their hearts may beat in secret. They may grimace, or even gibber, when we are, for the moment, absent, or otherwise occupied. They might even be revenants, returned from the dead, disguising themselves as mere effigies of the quick. Even if they do not move, they may be alive. They may be watching our every move. They may be thinking. They may be communicating with one another by some secret, silent means. They may mean us harm, and, when the moment is right, they may strike, hurting or even destroying us, before we’ve realized what’s afoot.

Wax figures of human form are mirror images of ourselves, but they are silent and still. They seem to mock us with their waxen visages. There’s something unreal about them; at the same time, there is something all too real about them. They are not quite right. They invite our study and our thought. They bid us to consider them, and, in meditating upon their smooth features and their too-bright eyes, to consider ourselves, too, for, in studying them, we study ourselves.

Who was this Winston Churchill, this Joan of Arc, this Abraham Lincoln? Are the stories we’ve heard of them true? Could this man have led England through the blood, sweat, toil, and tears of its World War II years? Did this slip of a girl really defeat the armies both of England and of Burgundy? Was she truly burned alive at the stake before being hailed as a saint? Surely not? How could such cruelty have been possible against a mere girl? Did this tall and gangly man in top hat and tails hold together a nation rent by a terrible civil war which pit brother against brother and North against South, and was a simple bullet in the head enough to bring his craggy, noble features to the ruin of the grave? Looking at their wax effigies, it all seems unlikely. It seems impossible. If the true-life counterparts of these figures could do such amazing feats, perhaps we, who are yet made of flesh and blood, might do likewise, we hope.

But there are horrible figures in wax museums, too, some real, others imaginary, and they also ask us to think of them and of ourselves, reflected off and projected from them. Consider this one, Adolph Hitler. Did this absurd little man with the odd mustache really kill six million Jews and nearly defeat the combined military might of the world? It seems preposterous. Or what about that one, Ted Bundy? Could such a handsome, clean-cut young man really have killed nearly thirty women, one as young as fifteen, without remorse, taking pleasure, in fact, in such monstrous deeds? Perhaps, if so, then such creatures as the vampire, the witch, the werewolf, and the mummy, also depicted in wax and set up in their niches and alcoves, upon pedestals, might also creep in the night or even stalk the corridors and chambers of this very house of wax!

Shadows may precede their footfalls, so we should keep careful watch.

We fear the wax museum for much the same reason that we fear the funhouse, wherein we can see little in the dark until a burst of flame reveals a leering face or a snarling mouth full of fangs. When such sights as these, or a headless corpse, a skeleton, or a dagger in a bleeding heart, are revealed to us, amid the flaring fire or the flashing lightning, we are shocked and frightened, but only because, in our imaginations, we have envisioned monsters much more terrible, much more horrible, much more dreadful. We have, in short, scared ourselves. Half to death, perhaps.

That’s why the house of wax--or, for that matter, a haunted house, a subterranean cave, a remote resort, an abandoned church, a deep forest, a scientific laboratory, or the attics or basements or closets of our childhood homes--frightens us half out of our wits. We create the monsters. We are they.