Black Gate

It doesn’t take much psychic ability to figure out a lot about a person just by walking through their front door. We look for subtle indications that our impression outside their abode was either right on or dead wrong. We keep an eye out for hidden aspects of their personality that might reveal themselves in subtle ways. For instance, did you stumble upon a racy mag stacked amongst the Better Homes and Gardens at your boss’ summer BBQ party? BINGO!

However, there are some people whose living arrangements simply scream out a more tangible and obvious message about what’s going on between their ears. As kids, their rooms were wallpapered with visual representations of what they were into, and the moment you walked through the door you realized that YES, this was clearly your friend’s personal space, for better or worse.

But what happens later, when those particularly expressive individuals get jobs and eventually, heaven forbid, expendable income?

Welcome to Chateaux du Goth Chick.

I want to preface what I’m about to tell you by saying that by in large, the really creepy stuff is relegated to my office, where I mentioned last week the cleaning lady refuses to go. This is fine with me, considering how fragile the voodoo doll collection is. The arrangement also makes it possible to simply close the door, thereby preserving the delicate sensibilities of some of my guests.

The rest of the house was done up with Mr. Goth Chick’s approval. As most of you gentlemen know, your biggest battle is to keep your surroundings from becoming too “girly” or worse yet, from looking like an advertisement straight out of a yuppie catalog. I can tell you with all due respect, Mr. Goth Chick has a whole different set of concerns.

So let’s take a little tour shall we?

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I’m sure you’d never guess this, but my taste is a little left of center. 

I have a full suit of armor I dubbed “Prince Vlad” which looms large over my comfy reading chair.  For my last birthday, my amazingly normal friends Mr. and Mrs. Disney presented me with a picture of Tippi Hedren from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, which was autographed by Tippi herself. I was nearly brought to tears I was so touched.  I have a full-on voodoo shelf with authentic trinkets from Africa and the Caribbean, which Madam Laveaux herself would envy. 

I think I should mention here that the Catholic cleaning lady will not go near my office.

As it would naturally follow, my sense of humor is a tad off too; as in I got a nearly fatal fit of giggles during a relative’s funeral.  Though I admit this was entirely improper and uncalled for, I take heart in the idea that the deceased would probably have found the cause as hilarious as I did. 

My parents continue to pull me aside and give me “the talk” about not embarrassing them before important family events, something Mr. Goth Chick finds especially amusing, but I think you see my point.

It is because of these unfortunate traits that I find myself drawn to the strange and unusual gems of the literary macabre; often those items tucked into back shelves at the book store or better yet, at the flea market.

In my defense, the written material which occupies the place closest to my blackish, goth chick heart wasn’t written for me specifically and did find its way to a publisher and into the general marketplace. 

Therefore, I conclude I must share this morbid sense of humor with others, closeted though you may be.

Which is why it my pleasure this week to share some my favorites with you.  Their titles speak to their literal subject matters so I’ve just included a couple of succulent tidbits from each.  Ironically, most of this advice would be just as easily at home in the latest “How to Succeed in Business” publication, but there you go.

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I have had the distinct good fortune of traveling to twenty-three countries and have, as I mentioned in prior posts, engaged in various ghost-hunting activities in more than a few of them.

But honestly, these expeditions are largely tourist-driven and aimed mainly at US and British travelers, which makes total sense. We started as a British colony so it follows that what scares the crap out of them would have translated across the pond to us.

But what about elsewhere in the world?

That got me to thinking about what scares people from other cultures and what, if anything, do those spooks have in common with ours? So I reached out to the many friends I have made along the way to ask them what haunts they grew up with.

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A year ago I would have said that if you didn’t live in the Midwest (and basically that means Chicago to me) you really don’t understand the true meaning of the word “cold.” 

Nothing turns you blue faster than that already chill Canadian air barreling its way south over a frozen Lake Michigan.  I mean, where else can you hear the term “freezing fog” as part of the normal forecast?

So why would any sane human being choose to live somewhere the temperature is at or below freezing more than half the year? 

In the immortal words of Chris Farley, who kept a condo in Chicago until his death in 1997, “The cold weather keeps out the riff-raff.”

Thanks to The Shining, we all know what happens if you don’t have meaningful mental stimulation during the dark months of winter.  Therefore, as we hunker down by the fire with our favorite form of entertainment, we scavenge for cool and unusual things to get our sluggish blood moving. 

Here are some interesting tidbits that may entice me to get out of my Nightmare Before Christmas fuzzy slippers and venture forth.

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As 2009 comes to an end I find the events of the last twelve months firing past my sub-conscious like the recap sequence before one of those lame “it was all a dream” mini-series endings. 

Unfortunately any list of highlights from 2009, besides proving that reality is far more frightening than fiction, would also be intensely boring.  I’ll leave that to CNN and NPR. 

Instead, here are a few random thoughts – on Dacre Stoker’s Dracula the Un-Dead,  the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures show, HBO’s True Blood and the new Sookie Stackhouse novel, the upcoming film version of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, the return of the Halloween, Costume and Party Show to Chicago, and more.

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Mr. Goth Chick is a civil war buff and two summers ago on a road trip, we stopped off to tour the battlefield at Shiloh, spending the night at a gorgeous old southern mansion a few towns away, called Magnolia Manor. I found the place on a web search by Googling “haunted hotel Shiloh” (would you expect any less?). When I called for the reservations, the owner informed me that we would need to stay in the guest house behind the main building as the main house was reserved by a ghost hunting group filming a documentary.

Of course through a series of particularly smarmy tactics, I negotiated an invitation for us to join the ghost hunt.

On this trip we were already armed with some of our own equipment such as a digital voice recorder and a high speed video camera, but the leader of the group called Memphis Mid-South Ghost Hunters, was kind enough to provide me with an EMF detector as well.

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So last time I was describing the weird way I spend my vacations; namely freezing or roasting my extremities in damp places with puddles, while simultaneously holding a variety of electrical equipment, all in the name of provoking a paranormal occurrence. Real smart.  And did this ever pay off with some scream-worthy-TV-reality-show moments?

A couple, actually.

Creepy experience number one happened in New Orleans in Le Petit Theatre located in the heart of the French Quarter.  We were told the theater was haunted by several restless spirits, the most active of which were children who perished during one the many bouts of the plague which swept through the Louisiana swamps.  Le Petit had often been pressed into service as a temporary hospital and quarantine zone for children and many of them died there.

Our facilitator told us the spirits of the children were as mischievous as they had been in life, often playing tricks on both actors and patrons in the theater.  They also liked to touch the living, tugging on the purse straps or hair of ladies in particular.  The facilitator speculated the children were drawn to women, probably because they missed their mothers.

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I’ll bet you’ve noticed a rather interesting trend on your cable channels lately. Namely, ghost hunting reality shows.
 
I’ve counted no less than seven without even trying: The Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures and Most Haunted, The SyFy Networks’ Ghost Hunters, Ghost Hunters International, and Ghost Hunters Academy, The Discovery Channel’s Paranormal State, and one of my personal favorites, A&E’s A Haunting. 
 
Now, I could whip out my psychology degree and tell you that this saturation of fascination with the dead stems from a need to dodge the harsh reality of plunging stock markets and home foreclosures by indulging our primal attraction to the unknown, but that wouldn’t be entirely the whole story. 
 
I think it has way more to do with the fact that we’re all just closet adrenaline junkies, and at least some of these shows offer a few moments of genuine spine-tingling escapism. 

Then again, an equal number are train wrecks of over-acting we just can’t look away from.
 
But either way, it’s an addiction.  I can say this without compunction, as I’ve been addicted for years.
 

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In my favorite month of October, I spent an inordinate amount of time away from my beloved book stores opting for movies and TV instead.  Though I rarely pass on a horror flick in either venue, it’s equally rare for me to stumble across an offering that comes close to the entertainment value and overall creepiness of the vintage black and white, Universal Studio classics. 

Contemporary horror movies of late seem to be less about giving the audience a good scare and lean more toward what my friends and I refer to as “psychopath training films.”  Films like Saw and Hostel are bloodbaths that rely on their gross-out shock factor far more than actual scares. 

They do stay with you, but in my opinion, for entirely the wrong reasons.  Apparently theater goers have become so hard to impress that movie makers must resort to ever-more-realistic intestine-spilling, and must literally wire-snip our fingers off to get to our $10. 

Then came the month of October and a decidedly fresh, if perhaps a bit fetid, breath of air. 

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