Black Gate

Last week I happened to catch an episode of Haunted Places on the Travel Channel in which The Stanley Hotel was being profiled.

If you’re not familiar, this is the amazing location in Colorado which was Stephen King’s inspiration for The Shining. His stay there freaked him out so badly that to this day the author claims he’s convinced Mrs. Stanley is still hanging around playing the piano in the drawing room where she dropped dead in 1936.

The 1980 movie The Shining starring Shelley Duvall and Jack Nicholson is definitely in my Top Ten, and in a moment of weirdness (yes, just one moment) I suddenly became obsessed with what happened to the little kid with the famous finger friend “Tony” (remember, it was his finger that kept saying the unforgettable “REDRUM,” which is “murder” spelled backwards).

The documentary footage that came with the anniversary edition of the DVD shows director Stanley Kubrick as highly protective of little Danny Lloyd during filming. So much so that an interview with the six-year-old clearly indicates he was unaware he was shooting a horror movie at all, and instead thought it was some sort of action or mystery story.

IMDB.com said very little about Danny, who virtually disappeared after his iconic role, acting only once more in 1982.

He would be 35 years old now, and according to the web site is currently a college professor who in 1999 was somewhere in the Midwest, in 2007 was in Elizabethtown, KY, and then moved on to a college in Missouri.

I hate to admit this, but I am an expert cyber-stalker.

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Though I am an unapologetic fan of the Harry Potter books and movies, not to mention the upcoming theme park at Universal Studios, Florida, I have been a fan of sorcery and magic for most of my life.

I can trace this fascination back my discovery of the 1975 Disney flick Escape to Witch Mountain and the Brain De Palma classic The Fury, though both story lines dealt with telekinetic matters rather than witchcraft. The Fury tells the heinously enjoyable tale of a young woman who can cause any old scar you might have to burst open if you’re around her when she gets agitated. Let’s face it, watching Samatha breeze through her housework with the twitch of her nose in Bewitched couldn’t really hold up against the ability to make people bleed out of their eyes by looking at them.

No, my hard-core interest really kicked in when I read what remains one of my top ten favorite books of all time, Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour. It lavishly follows the history of the Mayfair witches from 1689 through modern times, documenting decades of consequences connected to the family’s innate abilities, as well as the fortune and misfortune brought on by their guardian demon. It was also the book that started my love affair with New Orleans.

The story attracted the attention of Warner Brothers, who optioned the rights, but alas, the movie version descended into development hell where it continues to languish. But from that point on, tampering with a little practical magic became a bit of a hobby for me.

Recently I came across a gem of a book, Le Grimoire Enchante (“A Sorcerer’s Cookbook”) that is not only beautifully bound in coffee-table format, but is printed in an opulent Victorian style with intricate illustrations. Each dish produces a particular result and has a list of easy-to-locate ingredients, along with the context of the spell and preparation instructions. Recipes such as Borage Bread, an ancient Greek treat slipped to those from whom you wish to extract a confession, and Raspberry-Hawthorn Jam, used by the Celts to protect loved ones, fill 231 pages of this historically fact-filled volume. And with no “eye of newt” to be found anywhere, you can quickly cook up your own love or money potion just in time for dinner.

For more traditional charms there is The Book of Spells, another one of my favorites, which I received as a gift when I was between jobs. This hardcover pocket book contains magic from all parts of the world including the Middle East and Asia along with fascinating background information on both the spell itself as well as the ingredients. When I received the book there was a ribbon marker between the pages called “A Ritual to Pave the Way to a Good Career.” Come on, you’d have tried it too.

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