Ah, one of the big joys of the year: putting up the Halloween decorations and transforming the house into something a little more eerie for the season! My parents did little in the way of Halloween decorations, sticking mainly to the cheap cardboard ones stuck in the window with a piece of Scotch tape. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Now that I have a family and a home to decorate, I guess we go a little bit further in our decorating! We range from cheesy skull and pumpkin garland to replacing our normal pictures with skeletal sketches of the same scene.
I hope you enjoy the photos below! As always, click the picture for the full-size/detail.
Last night, Meg and I went out for her birthday, the first time we had been out without the kids since, I think, our anniversary in April. Meg had the wonderful idea of dinner at Ali Baba on Main Street, Newark, and if you haven’t eaten there, you need to go poste haste!
I had the idea of going to Frightland after, and I don’t think I’ve had that much fun in ages. Now, this isn’t going to be one of my fake “reviews” where I give every little detail because I think this is something that has to be experienced by being there. We eschewed the rides and games in favor of the haunted attractions, all of them, starting with the hayride.
Even the line to the hayride was fun. They have a stage with a giant screen playing different music videos, and the DJ was throwing free stuff out to the line. The hayride was well worth the entire trip, and included a lengthy walking part through winding paths and dark buildings with plenty of moments of frights and screams. That is, if you’re Meg. She screamed several times while I smiled an laughed and savored every second of Halloween fun! I did get one good jump while walking a winding pathway, Meg hugging my arm until it went numb.
One thing in particular that stood out was the quality of the scenes, especially those that included giant animatronic monsters. The mood and lighting was perfect, the monsters were very well-made and trul ghoulish, and the timing of sound and visual effects was obviously perfectly rehearsed. The actors here and throughout the rest of the park varied from par to above average, and you could tell that some were more into it than others. A warning to parents: the hayride did involve some sexually-themed jokes, but only a very few.
The barn attraction was another winner. A winding indoor path with many scenes of misery and the macabre. Again, the timing of the scares was superb, and the attraction made exquisite use of anticipation to make the next jump all the worse. You look for someone or something to jump from any area that will hold a body, and every time they don’t, you’re pulse just runs a little faster. We got a sepcial treat with a teenager who went in with Meg and I because he didn’t want to go through alone. He told us that he wasn’t scared, so I helpfully let him take the lead! It was worth not being the first to see the next fright for the opportunity of hearing a tough, athletic high-schooler squeal like a 10-year-old girl. MUAHAHAHAHAAAAH!
The next and last attraction we went through was the Attic. Holy crap, you needs to experience this one! It even scared me the whole time we were in it! That’s all I’m going to say as I don’t even want to give away a tiny fragment of this experience! Go there. Now!
Unfortunately, we didn’t get to go through the Manor attraction, as it was already late and we had to relive our long-suffering babysitter. Frightland was well worth every penny we spent, and I truly wish I hadn’t waited as long as I have to go there. Frightland gets two skeletal thumbs up and one middle finger because the stupid DJ didn’t throw me a goddamn glow stick. A word of advice: bring someone who scares easily. It would not have been half as fun if I didn’t go with Meg!
Sewer workers were digging in front of an Ann Arbor home to find that the walkway to the front door was paved with grave markers. They pulled out nins of the paving stones to get to the sewer line before flipping one over to find inscribed on the stone:
Beloved Wife, Mother
Viola T. Bagnasco
1901-1969
There are 51 of the grave markers making up the walkway, only a few of which had to be moved for the sewer work. Current owner of the home is David Barsan, who just moved in with his fiancee less than a eek before the creepy discovery. His hope is that they are just misprints of gravestone orders, and is not sure whether he will keep the morbid path.
What a pussy! If I was lucky enough to find something like that in my yard, I’d turn them all over, then put creepy lighting around it on Halloween. Maybe some animatronic zombies bursting from the nearby earth.
And it turns out that his hope is correct.
Daneen Mabley, who lived in the Westfield Avenue home with her husband and family for 25 years until 2003, said the couple who owned the house before them installed the walkway.
One of the two, Mabley said, had a relative in the monument-making business. And the high-quality, 1×2-foot slabs they used for the walkway all had typos, misspellings or miscuts, Mabley said. (source)
Gravestone misprints are often used for other purposes, such as foundations or building markers, or fish tank bottoms. Whether or not there were bodies buried under these stones, they are still a grim reminder of 51 people that met their ultimate fate, AND THEY SHOULD BE MY GODDAMN DECORATIONS!
One of the best parts of the Halloween season is carving Jack O’ Lanterns and the resulting feast on toasted pumpkin seeds. Every year, I tr to do something a little different, and two years ago was one of my favorites, a very surprised looking pumpkin with a large serving fork that I had jabbed into the side of the head. Fun!
Take a look at the folk tale of Jack O’ the Lantern, care of Wikipedia, then enjoy some pictures from last night’s carving!
Set in the idyllic pastoral countryside of New Zealand, Black Sheep is a horror-comedy about weresheep. You read it correctly, weresheep. Now, New Zealand’s commerce is largely based on sheep farming, and it’s residents have gotten a reputation of being, to put it delicately, sheep fuckers. Not surprisingly, many of the jokes in Black Sheep are based along that line, but not enough to get tiresome. As always, significant spoilers after the break!
The post for 15 Days is delayed until tomorrow or late tonight if I can manage it. I have it almost done, but we carved pumpkins tonight, which was more fun anyways
Watch tomorrow for 15 Days: Black Sheep and 14 Days: Pumpkin Carving! As a consolation, enjoy This is Halloween from Nightmare Before Christmas!
I rarely remember my dreams past the first 10 minutes after waking. The exceptions are when I have an exceptionally bad nightmare, the kind that wakes me up screaming, then I remember it forever. These dreams still frighten and disturb me, so I’m going to write them down, but it whether I post them or not may come down to a flip of the coin. So, here’s a review of my worst dreams.
Tornadoes
Since I was very young, I have had recurring dreams of tornadoes. These are not memorable due to the waking up, screaming factor, but due to their frequency. These are by far my most common nightmare, and it doesn’t help that the tornado that hit the Air Force Base in New Castle a few years back passed within 100 yards of my car as I drove south on 95 that day after picking up my daughter from daycare. In these dreams, I’m usually trapped in a house, frozen with fear as I watch from a window as a tornado approaches. Normally, I wake up before the tornado hits, but once, recently, I didn’t wake and the tornado swept me up into the sky. I remember one dream in particular in which I was watching from the front window of the home of Steve, a childhood friend. The thick South Jersey pines of his neighborhood has been replaced by a vast, empty plain which was lit by a sick and dirty yellow light. I woke before the tornado hit, but that dream stays with me because of the intricate detail of it. In the dream, I glanced around the room, seeing items that were always there, the green clay ocarina kept on a small shelf by the window, the mountain dulcimer case kept by the barely used couch. I even remember the coffee and end tables, just as they were in the real world. The right factor of my tornado nightmares is a healthy 7, due to their mirror of my real life terror of them.
Through the window
I have noticed over the years that windows play a large part in my nightmares. Even in the inane ones where I’m being chased through an asylum by Freddy Krueger (real dream, but not nearly one of my scarier ones), the halls were full of large windows. This particular dream took place in my old apartment in Valley Stream off Baltimore Pike in Newark. This apartment had two bedrooms, and was long because of it. The layout was master bed, living area, secondary bed. The windows were on the back wall and overlooked the access street for the complex. In this dream, all the dividing walls of the apartment were gone, as was the furniture, and I could see from one end of the apartment to the other. I was standing in front of the window in the master bed, and my niece Ally (about 3 years old in this dream) was standing in front of the the sliding glass door in what was the living area. The entire apartment was lit by a brilliant and blinding blue-white light, the source of which was outside the apartment. I looked to my right and locked eye contact with my niece and after a beat, something burst through the window in front of her and dragged her outside, screaming. I couldn’t move, and I could barely make a noise. When I turned my attention to the window in front of me, looking in at me was a woman, her skin rotted and grey, but dried. Her hair was a horrible tangle of dirt and twigs, and she looked at me with brilliant green eyes, and I could see the whites of her eyes completely surrounding the iris. Again, I was unable to move and could only watch as it crashed through the window at me. This is when I woke up, screaming. This nightmare gets a 9.
Walker
The last one that I’m going to tell about, as I’m making myself very unnerved by recalling so many at once, takes place in my childhood neighborhood of Tabernacle. Tabernacle was a densely wooded area of South Jersey, where many of the roads were still paved in dirt, and lead only deeper into thick forest. In the dream, I found myself hiking down Powell Place Road, a paved road, but lined in little but large pines on either side. It’s pitch black, and I’m wearing a hikers backpack, just barely able to see the road in front of me, except for when a car passes, always oncoming, lighting up the area with their headlights. As the third car passes, it outlines a person walking down the middle of the street ahead of me, a black shape made stark by the rays of approaching lights. I keep walking, noticing from successive approaching cars that I’m rapidly catching up to the walker. As another car passes, I see detail of the walker more clearly, he is is wearing work pants, and a stained green hoodie covered by a filthy brown jacket. Still, I keep walking and catching up. As I get within arms reach, I make a final quick burst to pass the walker, but as I am right next to him, another car passes, illuminating us both. When this happens, the walker quickly turns, grabbing me by the shoulders and forcing me to face him. As I struggle to break his hold, I notice that his face is round, dirty, and unshaven. He has black, empty sockets where his eyes should be, his lips upturned in a snarl or horrible smile. Then, I wake up, screaming. This nightmare rates a 10, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.
There are others, some of which rate an 11 on the Spinal Tap scale, but I don’t think I’m quite ready to give those a voice. Quoting Neil Gaiman from the Sandman series, “Dreams are weird and stupid and they scare me.” They are the only times where everyone gives up their life to a fantasy that few can control, and we all do it every night. Given how commonplace they are, how do they have this power to give us such happiness or such terror? Why is it so difficult to take charge of something that’s going on in your own mind?
Loving birthday wishes to the most amazing woman I have ever met and who has graciously agreed to spend the rest of her life with me!
Part of your birthday gift is advice: be very careful which embarrassing pictures you place on the Internet. There’s always going to be some asshole that showcases them!
It’s time to face the peril that I’ve been dreading all goddamn day. The enemy: Boo Berry. The challenge: survival. This ancient spectre of misery and damaged intestinal tracks has blighted the darkest corners of my mind and haunted my most macabre nightmares. Look at him, taunting me with his inexplicably toothy smile. Ghosts shouldn’t have teeth, should they?
Bring it, you heavy-eyelidded son of a bitch! You won’t break me!
The cereal is oddly dark, an omen of my prospects for the future. The marshmallows are the same as in Frankenberry, so I won’t won’t bore you with he same joke. My heart’s just not in it. Well, here goes…
Maybe my spirit is a little bit broken. As I’m preparing for my ultimate demise, it’s relevant that the show that’s on the TV is Discovery’s Destroyed in Seconds, a show that displays different things being demolished in relatively short amount of time. The next segment on the show is about my will to live. I’ve stalled enough… here goes…
Hey! Not bad! The sweetness is there, but it’s not nearly as cloying as Frankenberry. No heart palpitations, no veins trembling in my arms, and my shaken love of life has not been altogether destroyed! Well, I guess my stomach is revolting a little, but I think I’m gonna make it.
Boo Berry, no matter how much you look like classic movie bad-ass Peter Lorre, you are weak! WEAK, BITCH! HAHAHAHAAAAH!
Since Yummy Mummy and Fruit Brute no longer exist, thus ends my rekindled acquaintance with ultra-sweet, deadly children’s cereal. I’m glad it ended on a high note, specifically my continued existence, and hope that you have enjoyed it as much as I didn’t!
Yesterday, you read my experiences with Count Chocula, the first in 3 rounds of Monster Cereal Madness. I am writing this effectively last night, and will be taking a bowl of the amazingly pink strawberry cereal known as Frankenberry. Let’s take a look at this sugar-packed nightmare.
Okay, here’s the bowl of what I am about to put in my body. My photography skills are terrible, so you don’t really see how menacingly pink this cereal is. We’re still on for the gym tonight, right Ed?
Here’s the individual components of the cereal.
There’s the ubiquitous crunchy ghost, a brownish bat, a pink Frankenberry head, a white ghost, and a blue… thing. It looks like a blob, so Frankenberry gets props for giving the nod to the 1958 horror classic.
Now, let me do this before it gets soggy or I lose my nerve. This is starting to seem like a really bad idea…
…
Oh, dear god, WHY? This may not be worth entertaining you ingrates. I feel like I just ate one strawberry in a gallon of cream with a pound of sugar in it. How did I survive childhood with all of my teeth and stomach lining intact? This may not stay down. One minute, please…
Okay, my stomach is contorting in ways that would make Olympic gymnasts envious. Luckily, my nerves are singing with the frantic vibrations of of a Moby track, pre-1994. I think I’m going to go wait for sugar-induced death.
Look tomorrow for the continuation of my misery with Boo Berry. Hope you bastards are happy.
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