My students teach me new things all the time. Sometimes, I wish they hadn't. During a discussion about genres, I was giving examples of traditional literature. This turned into ghost stories, then into Bloody Mary, and even scarier Urban Legend I'd never heard of...Blue Baby. Here's what the kids told me: If you stand in front of a bathroom mirror, you need to recite the saying "Blue Baby" thirteen times while pretending to rock a baby in your arms. After the thirteenth time, a baby will appear in your arms. If you don't throw it into the toilet and flush it[...]
Category
Legends
0 Over the past few days, I've been having the "horror" discussion a few times with a few different individuals. What is it? What makes it appealing? Does all horror fall under the same umbrella? Where do you draw the line between the things that creep and the things that scare versus the things meant to titillate and disgust? I think it's all relative -- we draw from experience and expand the lens on the things that dig into our history both as individuals and collectively. What scares me might scare you, but maybe not. In the effort to overturn a few rocks, to p[...]
Hi all! Today's real life creepy place is in Jamaica, and trust me, it's creepy as hell. The place I'm talking about, Rose Hall House, is considered one of the most haunted places in the Western Hemisphere and the sinister figure at its center, the eponymous White Witch, makes Elizabeth Bathory look like a little girl ripping heads off her Barbies. Rose Hall House is located near Montego Bay, and its legendary owner was a British-born woman named Annie Palmer. The house was built in the 1770s and restored in the sixties. The story of Annie Palmer, much like Ba[...]
Hello all! In the last few weeks, I’ve been on an Eastern European kick. Now it’s time for some creepiness much closer to home—at least my home. So I present to you not one, not two… but three real life creepy places right here in Montreal. Montreal is one of the first European settlements in North America. For two thousand years prior, the territory was inhabited by Algonquin, Huron and Iroquois tribes; in 1535, a French guy named Jacques Cartier arrived on the scene, named the St-Lawrence River, founded what would later be Quebec City, and then moved d[...]
With camping season upon us, I've been trolling the internet for various campfire-worthy spooky stories. We like to pack up our gear and head to the nearest body of water on the long weekends -- take a dip, lounge on the beach, swim out to the docks. There's nothing like a still black lake in the wilderness to inspire a fright -- especially when you can't see two feet below you in the water. It's easy to imagine the brush of seaweed as reaching fingers, straining to grasp your ankles and pull you down below. Love it. I'm a huge fan of monsters, so today, I've u[...]
Today's real life creepy place isn't so much creepy as mystical, but it holds a very special significance to me: I grew up in that neighborhood and went for daily walks in this park when I was a child. The park is one of the oldest in Moscow, in a neighborhood called Sokolniki ("Falconers"). Moscow is an old place with a rich history, and Sokolniki is no exception. The park got its name from none other than Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584), who was fond of hunting with falcons. A well-known Russian folk tale about a famous falconer is also said to be inspired by[...]
We horror writers are made of sturdier stock than most, right? We can handle a good scare without much psychological scarring. I think? Maybe? This is the lie I usually tell myself as I pop in another horror movie: "I can handle it." Telling myself that "I could handle it," I sat down for the first time to watch a series of Japanese horror films that basically destroyed my sleeping patterns for a the few following months. I bought a nightlight. I developed a habit of dashing from the bathroom, which is three feet away from my bedroom, once I'd shut off the ligh[...]
I have a lot of fears, guys. Lots of them. Heights, closed spaces, dense crowds, mob mentality, dentists scraping my teeth with those metal tools, the entire bottom of the airplane somehow falling off at 30,000 feet, the fact that every day my children are growing closer and closer to adulthood and I'm doing a terrible job at preparing them ... Some of those fears are more rational than others. But one fear I think we've ALL had at one time or another is the fear of being buried alive. What do you mean I've never had that fear? Seriously? Hmm. So that one's jus[...]
Saint-Petersburg is a city with a unique and oftentimes macabre history. It’s one of the “younger” Russian cities, founded in the eighteenth century (compared to Moscow, for example, which is more than 800 years old). It was built to be the new capital, then stripped of the title and re-baptized after the October Revolution in the early 20th century. It was one of the cities to suffer the most under a long and grueling siege during World War II. These days, the city regained its original name (after its founder the Tsar Peter I), but legends still suggest[...]
Today’s Real Life Creepy Place is not just a place but an event. An event that took place almost sixty years ago and to this day no one has any answers, only theories as to what really happened in Dyatlov Pass in the night of February 2nd 1959, when a group of nine tourists died under extremely strange circumstances. Dyatlov Pass is located in the northern Ural mountains, in Russia, on the mountain Kholat Syakhl. The mountain pass where the incident occurred has since been named Dyatlov Pass after the leader of the tourist group, Igor Dyatlov. In the Mansi l[...]