Black Gate

HellsGate — the house

Most of us grew up with a local Jaycees or some other community organization putting together their annual ‘haunted house’ every October. With tickets in the neighborhood of $5 each, my friends and I would make the rounds, hitting several in a weekend as more of a social event than the adrenaline rush of real scares, which were hard to come by when your best friend’s parent or older sibling was behind the semi-cheesy mask and resale-shop costumes.

These days however, haunted attractions are decidedly more elaborate and sometimes permanent establishments. Instead of ‘haunted walks’ through the local forest preserve, or forays through mazes of black Glad bags and PVC, Halloween season thrill-seekers can expect to treat themselves to multi-thousand-dollar special effects and real actors in Hollywood-worthy costumes. Of course, tickets are closer to $50 than $5, but you get what you pay for.

And did we ever when over the weekend Black Gate photog Chris Z and I road tripped nearly two hours to visit HellsGate Haunted House, ranked #11 in the industry magazine HauntWorld’s annual list of the Scariest Haunted Houses in the Nation – and that is out of 5000 entries. Obviously, you don’t rank that high on the list without some impressive moves, and we were particularly interested to see an effect in use which we first saw on the show floor at the Haunted Association and Attractions Show last March. The owner of HellsGate, John LaFlamboy, purchased one of the biggest show effects, a $16K, ‘life size’ animatronic dragon, right off the show floor and we couldn’t wait to see how it turned out.

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This is kind of funny, until it isn’t.

Asteroid 2015 TB145 (which reminds me of LV-426 for some reason) was discovered uncoincidentally back in 2015, and its initial appearance made a lot of people’s “reasons to avoid the outside world” lists. The rock, which looks just like a giant human skull, showed up around 300,000 miles from Earth right on Halloween. This time around it’s going to be late for the occasion, and thankfully quite a bit farther away.

The asteroid, which has a peculiar oblong shape, was captured in an image by astronomers who first noted its skull-like appearance. It didn’t take long before the rock’s heavy metal look took on a life of its own, with some nicknaming it the “death comet,” and “death asteroid.”

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is one of a handful of organizations that keeps tabs on objects that come within notable distance of Earth, forecasts that 2015 TB145 will come within around 24 million miles of Earth this year, and it will do so on November 11th. After that, the “asteroid of death” will take a long hiatus from Earth, not appearing near our planet again until after 2080.

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Each year I have the pleasure of traveling abroad, in part to seek out the folklore and legends of other cultures. Though every country I have visited (53 as of this trip) has its own take on the supernatural, I find it fascinating that from Egypt to Germany, and Iceland to Singapore, every culture without fail agrees that ghosts, demons and witches most definitely exist.

On this year’s visit I discovered Lithuania, a country full of fairy tales and legends about its history, geography, and its people. Many of these amazing stories never make it outside of the country, often due to the language barrier. However, you need only to sit and talk to a native Lithuanian to learn the mystic legends that surround their country. Following the advice of one such local I set out to pay a very early morning visit to Raganų Kalnas, Lithuanian for Witches Hill.

Located in the sleepy little island village of Juodkrante just off the coast, Witches Hill is situated on a long, narrow islet called Curonian Spit. It is made up of beautiful sand dunes and dense pine forests, and the only way to get to it is via ferry leaving from the town of Klapedia, which only adds to the magical quality of the location.

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