It’s sometime after ten and we’re standing in front of Old Yard holding an eighteenth-century lantern replica with a tin roof, holds slotted into it to let the heat escape. We’re dangling it over the wall that separates the parking lot from the cemetery. The candlelight reflects off a small slabbed tombstone — isolated from the rest of the graves without any real indication why. It could be a dissenter’s plot. I run over the number of reasons why someone might be buried as a dissenter in 19th century Stowe: usual reasons include not adhering to the popul[...]
Tag
hauntings
1 I wish I had a ghostly tale to tell, one where I had a scary encounter, one to knock your socks off! Sadly, I do not. Not even close. Ghosts fascinate me. What lingers on the other side of the veil makes me quiver with delight. A movie about ghosts? I'm there, the first in line. A show that follows ghost hunters? I watch them all. Any TV series that tells real life experiences? Ghost hunting? I've been...twice. And will go again, just ask me. Dude. Ghosts. Are. Intriguing. Why? Because we don't know everything. Maybe we can't know everything, which mak[...]
Today we kick off Ghost Week here at The Midnight Society! Some people are skeptics when it comes to ghosts. Not me. I have never been a skeptic. Why? I’ve lived in a haunted house. I have experienced things that cannot be explained. I have seen orbs with my own two eyes, in the middle of a cemetery at midnight flitting through the sky. And no, I hadn’t been drinking at the time. In honor of Ghost Week, I thought I’d tell you a little story about one of my first ghostly experiences at an old house I lived in when I was a child. With t[...]
When we discuss folklore, the stuff of legends particular to certain areas, we're not always discussing the story itself -- we talk about the hype that surrounds it; makes it bigger than it probably is. The fact is, a lot of the pop culture we get our hands on today lies roots in stories that were told a couple of centuries ago. I can't say that this suggests that there's no original horror stories anymore, far from it; it's interesting, however, that the origin points for the things we find scary now might actually have kernels of truth to them because they're so[...]
You can leave out the ghosts and give me a derelict, once-enchanted-looking building, and I'd find a story in the remains. I won't complain if there's a haunting, but old houses, churches, barns, asylums, mansions, greenhouses, theatres, and the like are magical places all on their own. I set my creative roots often in settings, and let my imagination take me to the worlds where those old ruins once cast formidable shadows on their inhabitants. Settings become characters. Settings have their own stories locked away in the walls. Sometimes, you find a skeleton[...]
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[...]
