Tunnel Of Love

This is really creepy.  And the webs look totally real.  Imagine walking through this in a Haunt and then the tunnel gets narrower and narrower as you move through.  I wonder how many kids would make it all the way through.

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80's Krueger

Trying to ham it up like Robert Englund for the flash camera in my face.

The important thing is that I FELT like Freddy that night, despite my sweater being red and blue and not red and green.  I would open each kid's trick-or-treat bag with the blade of my index finger, so that was [hopefully] pretty scary for them.

Edgar Allan Poo

And the award for Worst Halloween Decoration goes to...

Trailer: The Exorcist - Believer

No no no no no.

NO no no.  No, no no no no NO.

No.  No... No no no no no and no.

Click below to see everything that's wrong with Hollywood all in one place.

They Are Taking Me Behind The Moon

There were at least 15 other humans with me. All of them screaming and panicking. This is what scared me. I didn't know what they were screaming about. I thought they knew something I didn't, so I got scared. Some were under the gel moving around I could see. Most were trying to escape. One man kept climbing half way out.

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Gangster: Revisited

Back in 2012, I wrote about a costume I wore for Halloween and a wardrobe malfunction that ensued.  You can read the post HERE.

Found a bunch of old photos the other night and one of them was a shot of us before we headed off on that fateful night.  I'm the tough guy on the right (my costumes were always last-minute)...

The Pascagoula Abduction

Still one of the most interesting UFO/abduction tales.

Click below...

Der Puppenwald

Images by MH Photography.

Unsolved Mysteries: Rainboy

This was featured on Paranormal Witness a number of years ago, and I had no idea Unsolved Mysteries had featured it first.  This is one of the creepiest paranormal/unexplained tales I've ever heard.  And having so many police officers as witnesses makes it even creepier.  

Click below...

A Mysterious Death In Todmorden

Click below for a very interesting abduction case...

Unsolved Mysteries: Missing Time

Click below...

Tombstones Of Foam

He gutted the pumpkins, the best in the bin.
He stabbed each some eyes, a nose, and a grin.

He rushed to the lawn – The Front Yard of Fear.
And set up his zombies he built through the year.

He constructed his graveyard with tombstones of foam,
And placed a cloth ghost in its gloomy crypt home.

- The Halloween Poem

I hate foam.  I've long ranted about those small white spheres that end up all over the place when you buy something new and you remove it from its cushioned box.  Before you know it, you have tiny white foam dots clinging to you like ticks. 

 

I have never ceased to marvel at the Haunter who masters the medium of foam.  They turn ordinary foam sheets into stuff that resembles real stone...  and even old rotted wood.  That is just something I could never master.  And will never ever attempt.  I was looking at my old Haunt photos and I cringe at the crudeness of these tombstones my brother and I made back in the 80s.  We upgraded them over the years, first with a layer of flour mache and then with added structures/protrusions (the first year was literally just carved foam sheets...and we eye-balled the shapes [and you can totally tell!]).

Below, a visual history of our crimes (but they got the job done):

A CLEVER MECHANICAL AND ELECTRICAL AUTOMATON

An interesting, novel, and pseudo-scientific attraction has recently been entertaining London audiences at the Hippodrome variety theater. This is a cleverly-constructed figure which apparently walks and writes automatically. It is called Enigmarelle," and is seemingly a mechanical and electrical combination. The figure stands exactly six feet in height, weighs 198 pounds, and is composed of 365 distinct and separate parts. As to composition, the feet are of iron, the lower limbs of steel and wood, while the arms are of steel and copper. The body is an insulated steel wire frame, cased with fiber and rawhide, while the head is of wax. 

Click the horrifying photo below for the story...

Thanks, Willow Cove, for the nightmare fuel!

Grimaldi: The First Modern Clown

This would make a great horror film.  The below excerpt is from a terrific article by Ed Simon:

The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi is a trauma narrative. It offers a a horrifying portrait of the abuse Grimaldi endured at the hands of his father; when the two performed together the father “fell upon his son at once, and beat him severely,” writes Dickens. “This was all taken by the audience as a most capital joke” and “the papers the next morning declared that it was perfectly wonderful to see a mere child perform so naturally.” A haunted man, Grimaldi would “sob and cry aloud, and suffer so much violent and agonizing spasms” his fellow actors feared he’d be unable to return for the second act. Yet return he did, always ready to “rally at the necessary time.”

In his own 1887 memoir, theater critic Thomas Goodwin recounted how Grimaldi visited a famed surgeon to find a cure for his melancholy. The doctor suggested he pursue “relaxation and amusement… perhaps sometimes at the theater;—go and see Grimaldi.’ ‘Alas!’ replied the patient, ‘that is of no avail to me; I am Grimaldi.’”

Click below for the article...

Abomination Of Abominations

Click below...

Now Watching: Gravity

Oh boy.  How can something like this exist?

As a James Horner fanatic, this song was on the COCOON soundtrack, and it caused me great stress as it would come on seemingly out of nowhere and you'd have to fast forward the cassette.  Or hear the song.

Oddly, it's grown on me over the years.  But this video is horrific and PURE gold at the same time.  Please watch it until the end, as there's a strange "robotic rap" that is heavenly.  You'll never be the same again.

Click below...

The Haunted (1991)

A TV movie that was pretty creepy back in 1991 and still holds up (for the most part).

It dealt with the Smurl poltergeist and the creepy photo below of the real family pretty much proves that it was all true (though based on that logic, photos of my miserable family prove we had a poltergeist of our own...  and we didn't [not that I know of]).

Click below for a very simple and spooky scene (I wish modern ghost films would do the subtle stuff more often)...

Abduction

"I was probably about 5 years old or so ... and a bright blue light would come in to the room and the door would open, and there would be like, a foggy kind of misty blue light, just shining through the whole house," Audrey said. "And these two figures would come in..."

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A Carny Tried To Kill Us

I feel like I went to more carnivals as a kid than most human beings.  But maybe they were more common in the late 70s and 80s? (I base that on nothing.)  I know that the high school behind our house would let one set up shop annually in its large parking lot.  So we went every single year.  Then one would set up in a field a mile or so from that high school.  We spent a lot of time every year visiting multiple carnivals.  An annual tradition.  In fact, a very comforting sound during the summer months, as I slept in my room, would be the strange humming and mechanical exhales from the big, tired machines that traveled on the backs of trucks from state to state.  You'd hear people laughing and screaming late into the night.  We'd lean against our bedroom screen window and look to the right, past some large trees behind our house that lined the perimeter of the high school.  You could see the fluorescent tube lighting that dotted each obnoxious ride, like those small ufo's that showed up at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind - with every assortment, color, and combination of lights.  I recall the year The Octopus arrived.  A massive angry thing that would spin with its giant wavy arms.  It raised and lowered shrieking teens as an extremely loud hydraulic burst of air would be released that sounded more like scraping metal about to catapult the patrons against the side of the school.  Or our house.

And we loved it.

We would go unchaperoned, of course.  We'd win small stuffed animals that smelled like dust.  Or wood-framed mirrors that said Jack Daniels or Twisted Sister.  And one time you could even win a small bowl with a real goldfish in there (imagine that horrible fate...  being a carnival fish).

Well, I can think of a worse fate.  The Carny.

Where do they come from?  Who were they?  Do they travel with the carnival?  Are they hired as part time employment when the carnival is scheduled to arrive?  I do know this:  they were scary.  And they unnerved us.  Silent and tired, smelling of tobacco and grease.  They were like something you'd read about in a Ray Bradbury story where they'd just appear from a summer storm.  Like those rare ones when you can smell the hot concrete being cooled by large heavy drops of rain.

Or they were just people down on their luck in need of work.  Or they were happy and enjoyed the freedom of moving from one location to another, providing thrills and joy.  But the only problem there is that they never EVER appeared to be happy.  In fact, it was always the contrary.  They seemed to be a million miles away, while operating a machine that could literally kill you.  They seemed to be miserable.  And worse:  Resentful of our presence. 

 

One particular evening, late into the night, we boarded the Round Up (the ride at the top of this blog post).  Pretty standard by way of carnival rides.  The carny at the controls angrily gave us instructions as we boarded the ride:  "When the ride ends, DON'T exit until it comes to a complete stop."  He seemed really mad about this.   

The ride spun us.  It rose and fell, like a hubcap spinning on the ground.  We laughed and shouted and marveled at our bodies being squished by centrifugal force.  And then the carny ended the ride and the Round Up began slowing.  It leveled off as it spun slower and slower.  Just as it was about to stop spinning, we all exited our weird cubbies along the circular wall of the thing.  We undid the cheap chains at waist level that would have provided zero support in the event of an accident.  

If you recall, this was in complete violation of the carny's pre-ride instructions.  And he became furious, but in his cold carny way.  So, he simply turned the ride back on.  Imagine being a child and realizing you were in the middle of a ride that was about to accelerate to a point of pressing you to death.  I can't stress the extreme fear we had as we ran to the walls which were now a blur as this metal horror started to rise again on one side.  We were all terrified.  And the carny knew it.  He was smiling with his unsmiling mouth; I was certain of it.  

But then something more terrifying happened.  He spun us for an exceptionally long period of time.  I recall believing I would die on that thing.  That actually isn't an embellishment in the least.  He kept it at top speed until we were all lifeless and crushed, and on the verge of tears and panic.  He tried to kill us.

So it finally comes to a rest and this nightmare of a man has won his battle with a bunch of ten-year-old kids.  We waited to exit.  Waited until that thing was frozen still.  I wish I did one of those splits where you crotch-punch someone as I exited the ride past the carny, but I'm certain they would have found me the next morning in the local creek.  Face down.  

Here's pretty much what the carny looked like:

Trailer: NOPE

Please, Movie, make aliens scary again.

Click below...