Erica Jurus's Blog, page 11

On hiatus this week

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An eerie poem for Halloween

This poem has long been one of my favourites. Written by Walter de la Mare, an English poet who passed away 1956, it’s one of his best known works. He also wrote short stories and novels, many of them about the supernatural. You can find all kinds of analyses of this piece on the internet, but I simply enjoy it for its mystery. I hope you do too. Happy Halloween!

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Codex Gigas, the Devil’s Bible

Just in case you were thinking that old books are dusty things collected by boring people with their heads buried in parchment, let me introduce you to the Devil’s Bible.

The Devil’s Bible – sounds like something Satanists would use, doesn’t it? Or maybe a tome written by the Prince of Darkness in a darkly humorous mood. But it’s a genuine Christian manuscript, although it has an odd quirk that gave it its infernal branding.

The book in question has two claims to fame.

It’s the world’s largest preserved medieval manuscript, measuring a whopping 36 inches tall, 20 inches wide and 8.7 inches thick. It weighs 165 lbs, and has 310 vellum pages, which were made of specially-prepared animal skin. (Apparently the hides of 160 donkeys were used.)

Codex Gigas. Source: By Kungl. biblioteket, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=216504

And, it has a full-page portrait of the Devil.

The Codex Gigas (“giant book”), using its official name, is not actually a Bible per se. It’s a historical hodgepodge – a compilation of the Christian Bible, an encyclopedia, two Jewish historical articles and one about Bohemia (now a part of the Czech Republic), and several short treatises on medicine, penitence, and exorcism (of course).

The portrait of the Devil faces an image of the Heavenly City on the opposite page, a piece of propaganda to illustrate the benefits of having a God-fearing life instead of a sinful one. Messaging like this was common in the Middle Ages; why waste a perfectly good page when you could bang home a service announcement?

Portraits of the Devil were used often during the Middle Ages, along with ‘Doom paintings’ depicting damned souls facing the Last Judgement, sometimes as large as a ceiling fresco. Imagine having such enormous and frightening imagery glaring down at you. The paintings invariably showed the horrifying consequences of not listening to the priest, with all kinds of creepy creatures, like toads and lizards, demons and Satan himself, eating sinners alive.

A classic ‘Doom’ painting by Stefan Lochner, Last Judgement, circa 1435. Source: By Stefan Lochner – Postcard, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153939

Like the Codex, Doom paintings were accompanied by glowing, beautiful depictions of Heaven, always on the left (as in, on Christ’s right hand). Jesus Christ would be seated at the top, along with the Virgin Mary and John the Apostle, as angels blew trumpets to raise the dead for judgement. Archangel Michael would be waiting with the scales to weigh one’s soul.

So the Devil making an appearance in a work like the Codex wasn’t unusual, although in this tome’s case he was rather large (19 inches tall) and intimidating, crouching on clawed feet with clawed hands raised upward threateningly, with a green face, huge red horns, and red smoke emanating from his nostrils.

Illustration of the devil, Folio 290 recto. Source: By Herman the Recluse (Medieval scribe) – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17534736

It’s not known definitively who created the Devil’s Bible, but scholars think it was likely the work of a single person, a monk named Herman the Recluse from Bohemia, some time during the early 13th century. In the Middle Ages, monks produced the most valuable manuscripts, toiling by lamp light in the scriptorium of their monastery for months on end, until the invention of the printing press by German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg somewhere around 1436.

What is known, thanks to a notation on the first page, is that Podlažice Monastery was the first known owner of the Codex Gigas. However, it’s unlikely that the manuscript was produced there because it was a small, poor monastery without the resources to undertake such an expensive project. After some journeying, the Codex was eventually brought to Prague in 1594. Emperor Rudolph II had asked to borrow The Devil’s Bible, promising to return it to the monastery when he was finished with it (but of course he never did).

Based on the amount of text inscribed on the vellum, and the beautiful illuminations, it’s been estimated that it would have taken up to thirty years to finish the book.

The gorgeously illustrated Opening of the Gospel of Matthew. Source: By Benedictine monastery of Podlažice – http://www.kb.se/codex-gigas/eng/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23297735

However, there is a legend that the scribe skipped the decades of potential work ahead of him by – dum, dum, dum – MAKING A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL to speed things up into a single night of labour. (Perhaps the scribe drew the Devil’s portrait from personal experience )

The manuscript stayed in Prague until the Swedish army took it as booty during the Thirty Years’ War. It was then brought to Stockholm, where it ended up in Queen Christina’s collections in the library at Stockholm Palace. On New Year’s Day in 1878, the manuscript was transferred to the newly-built National Library in Stockholm, which is the keeper of the Codex to this day, should you wish to see it in person.

There are many unusual versions of the Bible around, and many unusual books in general throughout history – one of the reasons the protagonist of my Chaos Roads novels, Romy Ussher, became an archivist, with such a fascination for ancient manuscripts. If you’d like to learn more about her, and her adventures, you can purchase a copy of the first book of the trilogy, Through the Monster-glass, on Amazon, Amazon Kindle, Kobo and GooglePlay.

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Vintage creature storytelling at its best: Ray Harryhausen

October is the month made for ‘creature features’, and one of my favourites is Jason and the Argonauts (1963). The story is a classic from the mythology of ancient Greece. It’s a grand heroic tale full of adventure, love and betrayal.

Jason was the son of Aeson, the rightful king of Iolkos, as well as the great-grandson of the messenger god Hermes, through his mother’s side, so perfectly endowed to try to reclaim his throne and overthrow the evil usurper, Pelias.

Pelias, Jason’s uncle shared the same mother as Aeson, but was fathered by the sea god Poseidon. Power-hungry, he overthrew Aeson and attempted to kill all of his half-brother’s descendants. However, Aeson’s wife Alcimede had a newborn son named Jason, and was able to save him from Pelias by having her female attendants surround the baby, wailing as if he were stillborn. Then Alcimede sent Jason away to be reared by the centaur Chiron to keep him safe and out of sight.

Pelias, still fearing that his unlawful kingship might be challenged one day, consulted an oracle, who warned him to beware of a man wearing only one sandal. Many years later, when Jason had grown into a man, Pelias hosted games in honor of Poseidon. Jason arrived in Iolkos, half-shod, (he lost one of his sandals in the river while helping an old woman, who was actually the goddess Hera in disguise, to cross). She blessed him, knowing what Pelias had planned.

The ancient Greeks’ lives were heavily entwined with the games and machinations of their gods, who seemed to have nothing better to do than interfere in the destinies of their subjects. One thing that did accomplish was great stories that continue to inspire storytellers and Hollywood to this day.

Anyway, when Jason entered Iolkos, he was announced as a man wearing only one sandal, and claimed his throne, to which Pelias replied, “To take my throne, which you shall, you must go on a quest to find the Golden Fleece.” Not sure why, but instead of defying Pelias on the spot, Jason accepted the challenge, perhaps to bolster his own claim through a show of courage and daring. Of course, he then gathered a ship and crew and embarked on the voyage that made him one of the most famous characters in Greek lore. Pelias, of course, was hoping that Jason would perish on the voyage and be out his hair forever.

The ship was called the Argo, and his crew of heroes were called the Argonauts. It was quite a cast of sailors, including Heracles (better known by his Roman name, Hercules); Castor and Polydeuces (aka Castor and Pollux, twin half-brothers, one of whom was the son of Zeus); the winged sons of Boreas, the North Wind; and even a female hero, Atalanta, cast out and exposed to the elements by her father, who’d wanted a son (a common practice in those days), but who was raised by a she-bear and became a fleet and strong warrior.

En route to Colchis, the land of the magical Golden Fleece, Jason and the Argonauts had to brave many adventures, and their work didn’t end when they finally arrived. The king of Colchis, Aeetes, naturally, was reluctant to part with one of his great treasures, but his daughter, Medea, a sorceress, fell in love with Jason and helped him, although after their successful escape with the Fleece, he betrayed her with other women (after which she exacted a terrible revenge). Later in life, Jason also ended up pissing off his powerful patron goddess, Hera, and died when his own ship fell on him. Such a tangled web of alliances made and broken, not all of which made it into the brilliant movie created in 1963.

The story of Jason and the Argonauts was so popular in ancient times that there were many variations on it. Hollywood chose a simple version that made a great script, and then brought on the fantastic animator, Ray Harryhausen, to produce the special effects.

Storytelling is a great gift of humanity, used from the dawn of language to pass along information, and then to entertain as well. Our brains are hard-wired to engage in a narrative – think of listening to someone’ funny story, or a sad one. These tale resonate with us because we can see ourselves in them, in the real-life foibles.

Telling a fantasy or science-fiction story, or a piece of lore/mythology, is harder to get across because as listeners/readers we have no direct reference to the monsters or alien places. The storyteller’s job, then, is to make these narratives relatable through emotion, or describing an unusual setting in such a way that we can picture it for ourselves.

The early radio plays had the art mastered, using “Foley artists”, named after sound-effects artist Jack Foley, a pioneer in the creation and use of sound effects to help listeners visualize what they were hearing over the radio.

With the advent of moving pictures, film producers had to invent special effects to be able to do the same thing for viewers – after all, the dastardly villains didn’t actually get killed off during the course of the movie, although sadly many animals were harmed.

To bring ancient and more modern stories to the big screen, exceptional techniques had to be developed, all without the use of computers. Actual models had to be constructed in miniature, and positioned many times to film them as if they were really moving.

Watching these movies, I’m always so impressed with how well the creatures work. As mind-blowing as a lot of the CGI effects are today, allowing producers to take us to impossible worlds, they just don’t have the ‘presence’ of an actual figurine or setting. The best movie producers still combine as much reality as possible into their films.

The Rhedosaurus attacks a lighthouse in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
By Warner Bros. – Trailer for the film, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40492295

Ray Harryhausen was one of the greatest special effects producers of all time. His work influenced some of the most famous producers today, including Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, James Cameron, Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson.

Ray grew up in Los Angeles, and developed a love for both dinosaurs and fantasy stories at an early age, both of which influenced his later career as a pioneering effects artist. His parents encouraged his interests in films and in models, and he was inspired by the cinematic effects in such movies as The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933). He began experimenting with puppets and stop-motion animation, and started making short films in his parents’ garage.

After high school he met noted animator Willis O’Brien, who encouraged him to refine his skills. Harryhausen enrolled in both art and anatomy courses at Los Angeles City College, and later in film courses at the University of Southern California. He began developing the technique that made him a household name in the film industry: “Dynamation”, which made it appear that actors on film were interacting with life-sized monsters that were actually animated models.

So what is Dynamation exactly? If you’re a fan of mid-20th century sci-fi and fantasy movies, you’ve seen it in action, and it’s remarkably effective. The process is painstaking.

Creatures were constructed in miniature, with posable limbs and bodies, then brought to life through a technique called ‘stop-motion animation’. Typically, the miniature model of the creature was placed in a miniature set and photographed by a motion picture camera one frame at a time. For each frame, the pose of the model was changed slightly, so that when the film was played rapidly through a projector, it would appear as if the creature was moving by itself.

However, the technique had its weaknesses, as the miniature sets were expensive to construct and it was challenging to combine live action in the same frame as the slowly-posed creatures. But Ray Harryhausen came up with a better technique while working on a low-budget film called The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

He used a split screen, with rear projection. Split screen involved masking part of the camera lens to film one sequence, then changed the mask to the other part of the lens, rewound the film inside the camera, and filmed the complementary sequence. The technique was used for decades, particularly when the same performer played twins, as in the Patty Duke series and the Disney movie The Parent Trap.

For Dynamation, first the background image was filmed in actual space, such as a city street, with live actors doing something like running down the street away from a monster. The movie camera was locked into place to keep it from moving position.

The background film was then developed and loaded into a projector back at the studio, where the first frame was then projected from the rear onto a back projection screen made of a thin sheet of plastic, with the image appearing on the front of the screen. Another movie camera was then locked into position in front of the screen to rephotograph the film clip as it was projected onto the screen, to capture the new action.

A piece of glass was then placed between the camera and the screen, painted with black paint to block out portions of the image on the screen that were to be in front of the monster (the foreground) when seen by the camera. In our example this would be the bottom of the screen and the building from behind which the dinosaur emerges.

The miniature monster model was set up between the glass and the screen on a table, along with any props that the monster might interact with during the scene, like stomping on a car. The model had to be carefully positioned so that it matched size and position with the image on the screen as seen through the camera.

The film in the projector was then advanced one frame at a time, changing the model’s pose in each frame to simulate what it was doing (probably rampaging through the city). After the entire scene had been filmed both the projector and the camera were rewound back to the beginning, the sheet of glass was replaced by a new one painted differently in black to reshoot the foreground image that had been blacked out before.  

Models for the Allosaur in One Million Years B.C. (1966) and Talos from Jason and the Argonauts (1963) at the National Media Museum
By Chemical Engineer – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53225224

While that all sounds infuriatingly detailed and time-consuming, Dynamation did allow Harryhausen to avoid making a lot of expensive miniature sets, and also show close interaction between the human actors and the animated creature(s). He could synchronize the movements of the models with the previously-filmed action because the model was animated directly in front of the screen showing the human actors. This technique was used brilliantly in Jason and the Argonauts in the famous sword fight between the Argonauts and skeletons raised from the teeth of the Hydra by King Aeetes. Harryhausen made the fight even better, anticipating our modern ‘motion capture’ suits (such as the one used to film actor Andy Serkis’ physical portrayal of the creature Gollum in The Lord of the Rings) by using real stuntmen as doubles for the skeletal figures, which were later inserted into the scene.

Dynamation did have its own drawbacks, such as matching the different filmed sequences for lighting and colour, but it ushered special effect into a new era that lasted until CGI was invented.

In 1940 Harryhausen landed his first animating job, working for producer George Pal on a number of “Puppetoons”, which were short films that animated puppets by using a type of stop-motion photography. During a stint in the U.S. Army, he worked with director Frank Capra on propaganda films for the war effort. After being discharged, he created a series of short nursery-rhyme-based films for schools, but was  soon contacted by Willis O’Brien to help on Mighty Joe Young (1949), which featured an enormous ape. That film received an Academy Award for special effects. Harryhausen became the go-to animator for many movies during the course of his lengthy career, and a legend in the industry. He was well known for the Sinbad series of movies, and also created the special effects for the star-studded Clash of the Titans (1981).

In Harryhausen’s earliest films, the effects shots were created with careful frame-by-frame control of the lighting of both the set and the projector, dramatically reducing much of the degradation common in the use of back-projection at the time.  

He also used diffused glass to soften the sharpness of light on the animated elements, allowed better matching of the soft background plates.

Jason and the Argonauts is now considered a classic. Harryhausen regarded the film as his best, as do fans and film historians.

Among the film’s several celebrated animation sequences, the extended fight between three actors and seven living skeletons took over four months to complete, illustrating Harryhausen’s dedication to the art of storytelling.

Fighting Off The Children Of The Hydra’s Teeth | Jason and the Argonauts | Creature Features
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqRjDGAJ5dc

Incredibly, none of Harryhausen’s films were nominated for a special effects Oscar. He claimed it was because he worked in Europe, producing half of his films outside of Hollywood while he was living in London, but this oversight by the AMPAS visual-effects committee continued when Harryhausen lived in Los Angeles.

At the Academy Awards in 1992, actor Tom Hanks, in honoring Ray with a lifetime-achievement award, said, “Some people say Casablanca or Citizen Kane. I say Jason and the Argonauts is the greatest film ever made”. In 2008, the American Film Institute nominated the film for its Top 10 Fantasy Films list, and in 2004 Empire magazine ranked Talos, the gigantic metal statue protecting the Isle of Bronze that chased Jason and his crew after Hercules stole an artifact, as the second-best film monster of all time, after King Kong.

A few years later, when Harryhausen began working with color film to make The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, he experimented extensively with color film stocks to solve the color-balance problems.

Directors of Ray’s films had to agree to give him control of the conceptualizing of each film’s story, the script development, and the art-direction, design, and storyboards. His father machined the metal armatures of the creatures, while his mother helped make miniature costumes.

It was Ray’s producer/partner Charles H. Schneer who actually coined the word Dynamation as a merchandising term.

Harryhausen authored several books, beginning with Film Fantasy Scrapbook, followed by Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, then The Art of Ray Harryhausen, featuring sketches and drawings for his many projects. In 2008, A history of stop-motion model animation, A Century of Model Animation, was produced, and to celebrate his 90th birthday, the Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation published Ray Harryhausen – A Life in Pictures.

Harryhausen even had fun as an actor, including small comedic cameos in the 1998 remake of Mighty Joe Young, and the voice of a polar bear cub in the film Elf. He also appeared as a bar patron in Beverly Hills Cop III, and as a doctor in the John Landis film Spies Like Us.

In 1986, Harryhausen formed the Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation, a registered charity in the U.K. and U.S. that preserves his collection and contributions to the genre.

His influence on later producers and directors was profound. George Lucas said, “Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no Star Wars“. According to James Cameron, “… all of us who are practitioners in the arts of science fiction and fantasy movies now all feel that we’re standing on the shoulders of a giant. If not for Ray’s contribution to the collective dreamscape, we wouldn’t be who we are.” Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright stated, “I loved every single frame of Ray Harryhausen’s work … He was the man who made me believe in monsters.”

Harryhausen perhaps expressed the concept of storytelling best when he said, “If you try and make a fantasy too real, you bring it down to a mundane level. I never felt that was the final aim, to make everything too real in a fantasy film. It’s a dream.” I feel that’s where a lot of modern fantasy and sci-fi movies fail: the overwhelming urge to put too much realism into them, instead of including just enough to fire the imaginations of the viewers, just like the venerable radio broadcasts accomplished so well.

If you’ve never watched Jason and the Argonauts, you’re in for a real treat. It’s a first-class adventure movie, visually spectacular and so much fun to view. Then watch the 1995 series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys episode “Once a Hero” (season 2, episode 14), wherein Hercules, Iolaus and other former Argonauts help their former leader Jason, who’s lost his kingdom after leaving Medea for another woman and seeing his new family murdered. The Golden Fleece has also been stolen, and the heroes band together once more to bring it back on the Argo. In a delightful tribute to the movie, the goddess Hera, who hates Hercules, sends skeleton warriors to destroy them.

You can never have too many great skeleton fights, can you? Hope you enjoyed this retrospective, and some of Ray Harryhausen’s terrific special effects, just in time for a Halloween movie night perhaps.

The Hydra battle sequence in Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
By Columbia Pictures – Trailer for the film, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40500128

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Damn thee to hell, book thief!

Curses and hexes are possibly the oldest form of magic, going back to distant recorded history.

Magic was an everyday part of life for many ancient peoples around the world. Babylonians used clay tablets to dispel witchcraft and Romans made leaden curse tablets to defeat their enemies. Greeks hired professional magicians to create kolossoi, or voodoo dolls, or make curse tablets invoking gods tied to the Underworld like Hermes and Persephone. Amulets and charms were widely used as forms of protection.

But lest you think that curses were the province of pagans and witches, in 1525 the archbishop of Glasgow in Scotland pronounced a curse on the reivers (raiders) along the Anglo-Scottish border and their families, and caused it to be read out in all churches in the border area.

Even God uttered curses against Adam, Eve and the snake in the Garden of Eden for the unforgivable sin of seeking knowledge. For the snake He proclaimed:

And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

Cursed objects have usually, according to the legends that grow around them, been looted from a sacred place, or stolen from their rightful owners. The miscreants, and all subsequent possessors, suffer much misfortune. The Hope Diamond is supposed to bear such a curse,. According to legend, it was stolen from an eye of a sculpted statue of the Hindu goddess Sita, which clearly was a very bad idea. The trail of disaster is said to include (to name just a few):

A man named Jacques Colet, who committed suicide after buying the diamondPrince Ivan Kanitovski, who bought the stone from Colet, was killed by Russian revolutionistsA Turkish attendant named Hehver Agha, who was hanged for having it in his possession.Jeweler William Fals, who recut the stone and later “died a ruined man”Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who were deposed and beheaded

Authors and screenwriters love to use curses as an atmospheric vehicle for superstition and catastrophe. How many times in horror cinema has the Mummy brought ancient Egyptian revenge on anyone silly enough to dig him up! A ‘fairy tale’ beloved by many (including me) features the Beast, cursed for having behaved like an entitled jerk, and doomed unless rescued by love.

In ancient and medieval times, people even placed curses on their books, to befall anyone who dared pilfer them. Books were extremely valuable in the days before the printing press and bookstores in every city, and highly coveted. During those times, and for centuries following, people strongly believed in the power of curses, and such hexes were considered the only defense against theft. Perpetrators were destined to die an agonizing death, or, in medieval times, excommunication or damnation!

The earliest known book curse, issued by Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria in the 7th century BC and written on the tablets in the library at Nineveh, was a doozy:

“… Whosoever shall carry off this tablet, or shall inscribe his name on it, side by side with mine own, may Ashur and Belit overthrow him in wrath and anger, and may they destroy his name and posterity in the land.”

With the creation of manuscripts, produced on vellum, papyrus and paper from about the 5th century BCE, the curses were generally inscribed in the first or last page as part of the colophon (a statement containing information about the book’s publication). Medieval scribes were free to put whatever they wanted in that location, and each book curse tended to be unique. The Arnstein Bible, written in Germany circa 1172 (now in the British Library), included a pretty extreme torture for potential thieves: “If anyone steals it: may he die, may he be roasted in a frying pan, may the falling sickness and fever attack him, and may he be rotated and hanged. Amen.”

The scribe of a 13th-century manuscript kept in the Vatican Library had some fun with rhymes while he was at it:

“The finished book before you lies;
This humble scribe don’t criticize.
Whoever takes away this book
May he never on Christ look.
Whoever to steal this volume durst
May he be killed as one accursed.
Whoever to steal this volume tries
Out with his eyes, our with his eyes!”

The scribes had as much reason to pronounce a curse as the owners of the manuscripts. In the Middle Ages, scribes would toil for months on end to create a book, hunched over their copy tables and working by natural light alone because candles were too big a risk to the end product. The work was long, tiring and generally hard on both the eyes and body as the scribes painstakingly drew their error-free letters and illustrations.

With the introduction of the printing press, curses were then added via bookplates, allowing their owners to  declare themselves and the consequences of stealing their property.

When a manuscript or book legitimately changed hands, the new owner often felt compelled to dispel any previous curses. In 1327 the bishop of Exeter acquired a book with this inscription:

“This book belongs to Sc. Mary of Robert’s Bridge; whoever steals it, or sells it, or takes it away from this house in any way, or injures it, let him be anathema-maranatha.”

Covering all the bases, the bishop prudently added his own inscription: “I, John, bishop of Exeter, do nor know where the said house is: I did not steal this book, but got it lawfully.”

There were also document curses, used to protect the text written in the document. They were typically found in legal records like grants, charters and wills to prevent fudging. One document curse from an 11th century will stated:

“And he who shall detract from my will which I have now declared in the witness of God, may he be deprived of joy on this earth, and may the Almighty Lord who created and made all creatures exclude him from the fellowship of all saints on the Day of Judgement, and may he be delivered into the abyss of hell to Satan the devil and all his accursed companions and there suffer with God’s adversaries without end and never trouble my heirs.”

Well, damn, I wouldn’t mess with that!

So if you ever become the proud owner of a venerable old document, don’t be tempted to make any addendums, and if an old book, don’t take any chances with a centuries-old curse that may have been added – avow your right of possession, or some hideous fate will await you

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Tea and a ghost story

Why do we love ghost stories? Well, we have fun being scared. Even babies like being a little spooked, as in the game of Peek-a-boo we play with them, which has been described as ‘an infant jump scare’. When we read a good spooky story or watch a creepy movie, we’re scared without actually being in danger, and that raises our levels of endorphins – hormones that, along with reducing pain, also reduce stress and improve our mood. We get a little boost of pleasure when the story’s over.

The best ghost stories play on our innate fear of the unseen. We know there’s something out there, but without the information from our eyes, it could be anything, and grows ‘larger’ and more terrifying the longer we’re unable to tell what it is. We watch the characters in the story as they grow more and more frightened (perhaps because some of them are disappearing, one by one), and the storytelling invites us to project our fears onto them. We begin to live it with them, followed by enormous relief when it’s over and a certain euphoria that we stuck it out to the end. A study asked 262 adults how they felt before and after they entered an extreme haunted house, and 50 percent said they felt better after the visit.

There’s also a sense that, if there are ghosts, there must be an afterlife, which is an enormous comfort for most of us. Spiritualism, also known as occultism, wherein psychics and mediums attempt to contact spirits passed beyond the veil from their grieving, earth-bound loved ones, has been around for several centuries. Our modern fascination with haunted places and the ghost-hunting groups who investigate them taps into the same desire: to believe that there’s something beyond our far-too-brief lives.

So, in honour of the haunted atmosphere of October, I’ve written for you a short ghost story. Make yourself a cup of tea – maybe a good strong one, with a shot of brandy to warm it up against the night’s chill – and settle in for a scare. If there’s a storm brewing, or a thick blanket of fog drifting in, even better.

This is a different kind of ghost story. It’s set in the 1950s, with all the moral undertones of the decade, just to provide context, but it’s not a moralistic story in any way, so please don’t read anything into it. As you’ll see, it ties in with the setting of my Chaos Roads trilogy of novels, and it’s nothing more than a creepy story for you to enjoy as we enter Halloween season.

***

Alice Still Lives Here

by Erica Jurus ©

I’m everywhere. I see everything that goes on in this house. I see things people don’t want me to see.

Like my younger brother’s collection of nudie magazines that he hides at the bottom of an old box at the bottom of his closet. I see what he does when he reads them too.

Like my older sister’s attempts at pleasuring herself. She’s the pretty one in the family, but she’s too prudish to do anything with it. At school dances all the boys follow her around, hoping they can get her into a dark corner outside or into a car, but they don’t get anywhere.

So they come to me.  

I’m Alice, and I’m not pretty at all. Kinder people call me ‘plain’; from others I’ve heard the word ‘ugly’.

I don’t think I’m ugly, really. I like my eyes – they’re a nice green colour. But my face is bland, my lips are small, I don’t have much of a chin, and I do have a light moustache. I’ve tried removing the moustache with a new product one of the girls at school brought back from Toronto – it’s called Veet – but it leaves my skin red and irritated for a few days. I have to apply it on Friday nights and then dab makeup on over the weekend so no one knows what I’ve done.

My parents, you see, are pretty well off, and they’re active in Llithfaen society – what you might call pillars of the community. They’re successful farmers; our place, out on Hollowmede Road, is called Little Goblin Farm, after the variety of holly that grows around the house. We supply the grocery store in town, and my mom sells a lot at our stall at the Saturday morning market. My parents are often involved in activities at the church, my mother helps out at my brother’s school, and my father is on the town council.

Nothing is allowed to mar the ‘perfect family’ picture we present. Every Sunday we all dress in our best outfits to go to church, although I know that I’m a severe frustration for my mother because she can’t make me look pretty no matter how hard she tries.

How horrified George and Alma would be if they knew that their middle child will lift her skirt for any boy, or man, that asks. I’ve probably had more sex than my mom had in her entire lifetime.

I used to be the classic wallflower at high school dances, the one none of the boys asked to partner with. For the first couple of years, I hated going to the dances, and hated my parents even more for forcing me to go. Then my body began to develop, and I discovered that there was something the boys very much wanted from me.

I like it. For a few minutes, I hold the power. I’m desired. I like to see the lust in their eyes when they show up, and the satisfaction afterward. They leave right after, but I don’t expect them to stay. I don’t even want them to – no awkward conversation, no pretension. We’re both there for the same thing, nothing more.

Vera, and I had a fight over it a few weeks ago, because I had sex with her boyfriend. Harold is gorgeous – all the girls in our high school would die to go out with him. He’s athletic, not too bright, but funny enough to be popular. I think Vera was hoping to marry him after they graduated, but eventually his hormones and Vera’s tight legs got the better of him. I was in the right place at the right time, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Harold and I have had a few romps together, and he started spending more time with me than my sister. When she asked him what was the matter, the stupid twit actually told her. So she had it out with me behind the school. She called me a slut, and I told her she might have better luck with men if she loosened up a bit. Then she spit out the ‘ugly’ word, crying that I was as unattractive inside as out. I lost my temper and called her a frigid bitch who didn’t deserve her looks. We haven’t spoken to each other since.

A funny thing happened that day. After Vera fled in tears, an older male student appeared from around the side of the building. His name is Donald Lee; his family moved here last year because he wants to go to Tempus College when he graduates from Hillier High.

They practice some weird religion from the Orient. Donald attends the special prayer sessions at school, but he doesn’t participate, just sits there quietly. He’s not bad looking, and I wouldn’t mind a tumble with him, but he’s never shown the least interest. I was very surprised to see him come over to me after the fight.

His eyes were serious as he said, “You must be very careful, Alice Gosselin.”

I leaned back against the brick wall of the building, drawing my corduroy jacket closed. It was just three weeks from Halloween and the afternoon air was carrying a real chill. “Really. Why is that, Donald Lee?” I said in a  deceptively pleasant voice.

“You have desperately hurt your sister. There will be retribution.”

My pleasant façade vanished. “That’s none of your damn business, asshole.” Pushing off from the wall, I turned to stomp away, but his hand on my arm caught me.

“Please listen. I fear for you. As this new season turns, the gates of Hell open and ghosts who punish grave misdeeds roam the earth. You are in danger.”

“I’m sure,” I said dismissively. A cold wind had risen, making me shiver. That’s all it was, nothing else. “I don’t believe in all that crap.”

He cocked his head, looking ridiculously cute. In the mood I was in, I was ready to tackle him and see just how far I could get. But his next words sent a chill down my spine. “You carry a great deal of bitterness. You’ve found a way to disperse it for a few minutes, or hours, but it never goes away. And now you’ve injured someone who was innocent. For the hungry ghosts, you glow with darkness, and they will find you easily.”

I was cold, and angry – and yes, bitter. “Well, I imagine it’s probably too late for me, anyway.” Not that I believed him, but what was the worst these hungry ghosts might do – haunt me? I gave a little laugh.

“It isn’t, if you make amends to your sister, change your ways and pray for mercy.” His eyes were pleading.

I was having far too good a time to change anything. A small voice from deep inside me said Is this how you want to live the rest of your life? An easy lay? Aren’t you worth anything more?

Shut the hell up! I told it fiercely. My conscience was rearing its annoying head, and I was definitely not in the mood.

“Sorry, Donny, I just don’t feel like doing all that. My sister needed a good wake-up call, if you ask me. And I like the sex, so that’s not going to stop. Thanks for the advice, though.” This time I turned and walked away.

“Goodbye, then.” His voice was sad.

Vera has kept away from me since then. Our brother Gregory could sense that something happened, but he’s prudently stayed out of it.

Harold’s interest has waned, but that’s okay. There’s always someone else.

Otherwise, things have been normal. Until three days ago.

I was at the small desk in my bedroom, doing homework. Luckily for me, I received all the brains in the family, so school assignments are a breeze. When I finished, I gave the essay a pat, got up to cross the room, and slid up my sash window so I could lean out and smell the night air. The moon was full, casting a pale light over our fields. In the copse of trees behind the house, I could hear an owl hooting.

As I inhaled deeply and listened to the sounds in the darkness, a mist began to drift across our lawn. I love fog, especially at this time of year. If we were lucky, it would stay around for the Halloween party at school tomorrow night.

Closing the window except for a small crack to let the air keep wafting in, I turned off the overhead light, hopped onto my bed and picked up a book I was halfway through reading. I was part way through the next chapter when I noticed how chilly the room had become. Drawing up my comforter over my legs, out of the corner of my eye I noticed that mist was coming in through the small gap between my window pane and the sill. I watched it in stupefaction for a few seconds – how could it be doing that? My bedroom is on the second floor, and fog never rises that high. And the more I stared at it, the more I could see that it was a strange colour, like rotting grapes.

I jumped up from the bed and stepped towards the window to slam it closed, but the mist gathered itself together and headed straight for me, closer and closer, backing me up towards the opposite wall. Soon I was pressed against the pale flowered wallpaper, my hands splayed out in front of me as if to stop the advancing vapours.

“Get away from me,” I snarled. What kind of shit was this?

Whispers began to surround me, worming their way through my skin and into my brain. Darkness, bitterness, a cold heart… darkness, bitterness, a cold heart… darkness, bitterness, a cold heart… 

“Don’t I deserve something good in my life?” I hissed. “Everyone calls me ugly. I don’t deserve that. I just found a way to get boys to spend time with me. They never would otherwise!”

Callousness, cruelty… Your sister’s heart bleeds. Your brother is embarrassed to hear people talk about you. Your parents are ashamed. No care for them. No thought for other women betrayed. How will you defend that?

I stiffened. How do you answer them? my unwanted conscience pointed out.

Shame crept up from my stomach to my ears. I hadn’t thought of gossip; I hadn’t thought anyone else knew. I hadn’t thought of any wives or girlfriends, although part of me figured that if they’d been decent in bed their men wouldn’t have sought me out.

No answer? We thought not. Your bitterness has consumed you. You have hurt many people, all to make yourself feel better. You did not wait to see what goodness life might bring along. The mist surrounded me; I could feel its wet clamminess, as well as an implacable sense of purpose. A chill began to seep deep under my skin, into my bones, into my very cells.

“No, wait!” I cried. “I can repent. I can change!”

You were given warning. You were given the chance. You laughed it away.

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. My body began to shake with cold and dread. I wanted to call out to my parents, but though I managed to open my mouth, I couldn’t make any sound come out. My eyesight began to fade, as if a succession of veils were being drawn across. No, please, please, please! I pleaded silently.

There was no answer. Abruptly my shivering stopped. I could see my bedroom again, but there was something clouding my vision, like looking through a length of beige chiffon. There was some kind of pattern as well; I struggled to focus my eyes. Slowly flowers began to appear; they looked familiar.

My body felt strangely stiff. I could move a little, but it was a struggle. The more I tried, though, the easier it became. Finally I was able to take a step forward.

The mist was gone. I breathed a sigh of relief; it seemed I’d had a narrow escape. Drifting to the window, I tried to close it, but I couldn’t make anything happen. My hands wouldn’t grasp the wooden frame, and they looked weird, insubstantial.

I stepped back and looked down at myself. Through my legs and feet I could see the weave in my green and brown rag rug. What the…?

Oh God. Realization hit me like an icy shroud. I was no longer part of the living world. The spirits were now my kindred – I could feel them out there, lingering around the town, each on their own haunted errand. I began to shake again, and something inexorably drew me back toward the wall, until I faded right into the lathe and plaster. I hid there, as if the wall could shield me from the new reality I’d become part of. I cried, but no tears fell…

It’s Halloween night, 1952. I’m still here, out on Hollowmede Road. Inside our farmhouse, I’m everywhere.

***

Author’s note:

Hungry ghosts are a concept from Buddhism and Chinese traditional religion. They’re beings who are driven by intense emotional need. It’s believed that they can arise in various ways, including from a violent or unhappy death, or from neglect by their descendants. In one philosophy, lower-level evil deeds during life will cause a soul to be reborn as a hungry ghost, including killing, stealing and sexual misconduct.

According to Chinese tradition, the month of the fall harvest opens up the gates of hell, and hungry ghosts are free to roam the earth seeking food and entertainment; families are required to offer prayers to their deceased relatives and burn ‘hell money’ to help their ancestral spirits live comfortably in the afterlife.

In my darker tale, the ghosts are out delivering retribution to souls they consider irredeemable. But what happens to Alice and her family as time goes on? Well, that’s a story for another dark and stormy night.

My choice of tea would be a stiff cup of Russian Caravan, a somewhat smoky tea born of the months’-long tea caravans that transported heavy packs of tea from China to Russia across the mountains in the 18th century. During the nightly encampments, both the traders and their tea-laden camels would draw close to the fire to stay warm, and the tea would pick up a smoky flavour. This became so popular that Russian Caravan tea became a fixture even to modern times, and is made by blending Lapsang Souchong, an intensely smoky tea, with Keemun and Oolong to produce the same effect. Russian Caravan is a robust tea, so if you’re going to pair a treat with it, you’ll want stronger flavours that are complemented by the tea – perhaps a hearty cheese with pumpernickel bread, or a slice of rich gingerbread loaf.

I hope you enjoyed this twisted little tale and would love to hear your thoughts. (Only comments that are thoughtfully and respectfully presented will be posted.) The story is based on someone I once knew (although in her early twenties) who behaved the same way for the same reason, and I extrapolated how that might have turned out in a world entwined with the spirit realm.

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The Kraken Strikes Back

I’ve always found the legends of sea monsters rather fascinating. The depths of the deep blue ocean have long held mysteries – scientists are still trying to research them all – and are so vast that they could easily contain gigantic creatures terrorizing ancient mariners.

Legends of sea monsters go back more than two millennia, and are found in almost every culture with a sea coast. They even persist today – the largest ‘Nessie’ hunt ever just took place last month in Scotland, even though there’s never been any credible evidence that the creature actually exists.

Medieval maps often showed monsters cavorting in the seas beyond the shores of the known world. Cartographers decorated fine maps with them (on display in fine homes or castles) to entertain people who, because of the difficulties of travel in that period, weren’t able to visit the places on the maps themselves. Maps made for navigators heading out on expeditions would have been drawn with more practical information, even though the sailors would have been wary of monsters lurking out there somewhere.

Furthering the general mystique, strange carcasses have been washing up on shores for several centuries at least. A few have been identified as decayed shark and whale remains, but some remain unexplained. The Stronsay Beast washed ashore in the Orkney Islands, Scotland, after a storm in September 1808. It was measured by a carpenter and two farmers and recorded as 4 ft wide and 55 ft long (later disputed), and a circumference of about 10 ft. Its skin was smooth if stroked from head to tail but rough if stroked in the other direction. There were bristle-edged fins, a row of bristles down its back that glowed in the dark when wet, and three pairs of appendages that were described as ‘paws’ or ‘wings’. An anatomist in London, England, decided that it must have been a basking shark, but the description of all the appendages, as well as a sketch made at the time, bear no resemblance to any kind of shark. The old mystery continues!

Sketch of the Stronsay beast made by Sir Alexander Gibson in 1808; By Sir Alexander Gibson – http://www.geocities.com/capedrevenger/beachedcarcasses.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3128402

The most notorious of the sea monsters was the Kraken, a fearsome beast that was said to be able to capsize an entire ship with its enormous tentacles. This behemoth was said to haunt the waters between Iceland and Norway, and was described by Dano-Norwegian missionary and explorer Hans Egede in 1734.

Egede, basing his knowledge on fishermen’s reports, described a creature several miles long, “having many heads and a number of claws”. When it surfaced, it seemed to cover the whole sea. It used its claws to capture a variety of prey – from fish to men to entire ships – and carry them down into the depths. The fishermen said they could mount the kraken and catch huge numbers of fish that it seemed to attract; however, should they ever capture the monster, the only way to avoid their own destruction was to pronounce its name so that it would return to its watery lair.

Then a Danish author and bishop, Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan, fed the legends in a book called The Natural History of Norway said that mermaids, sea serpents and the Kraken existed. Well, who would argue with a bishop? Authors Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, and Jules Verne, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, even referenced Pontoppidan’s writings.

In 1866, author Victor Hugo wrote of a large octopus called a pieuvre and tied it into the kraken of legend, and when a French malacologist (a scientist who studies molluscs), Pierre Denys-Montfort, published an engraving of a gigantic octopus attacking a ship, the creature became synonymous with kraken monsters ever after.

“Le Poulpe Colossal” by malacologist Pierre Dénys de Montfort, 1801, from the descriptions of French sailors reportedly attacked by such a creature off the coast of Angola. By en:Pierre Denys deok4 Montfort / fr:Etienne Claude Voysard – from en:Image:Colossal octopus by Pierre Denys de Montfort.jpg where it was uploaded by en:user:ffdhhlSalleman., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=977733

In 1866, author Victor Hugo wrote of a large octopus called a pieuvre and tied it into the kraken of legend, and when a French malacologist (a scientist who studies molluscs), Pierre Denys-Montfort, published an engraving of a gigantic octopus attacking a ship, the creature became synonymous with kraken monsters ever after.

Montfort believed that the kraken was the same creature that Pliny the Elder (in the first century CE) described as a man-killer that tore apart ships and killed the sailors. He blamed colossal octopuses for the loss of ten warships under British control in 1782, for which he was roundly ridiculed.

However, in 1813 a ship named Niagara, sailing from Lisbon to New York, logged a sighting of a 200 ft long marine animal floating in the sea, purportedly covered in shells with a lot of birds sitting on it.

What mariners may have been seeing were actually giant squid, which can grow up to 50 ft in length.  Almost the length of their own ship, these massive sea creatures must have been terrifying at the time.

Giant squid are deep-ocean dwellers, and so difficult to track down that the first images of them in their natural habitat were only taken in 2004 by a Japanese team of researchers. Sadly, scientists have tried to study them by capturing live specimens to bring back to a lab, but the specimens invariably die. Octopuses and squid are highly intelligent animals.

They belong to a group called Cephalopods, which have large, well-developed brains. They’re highly social, and can communicate visually using a diverse range of signals produced by changing their posture or locomotion, the colour of their skin and even the texture of the skin.

They’re extraordinary hunters who’ve adapted brilliantly to the presence of humans in their habitat. Octopuses will steal bait out of lobster traps and are also known to climb aboard fishing boats to hide in the containers that hold dead or dying crabs, their favourite food.

The prehensile arms with highly sensitive suction cups on octopuses, squid and cuttlefish allow them to grasp and manipulate objects. In captivity, octopuses require stimulation or they’ll become lethargic, so their keepers give them toys and puzzles. They’ve been observed in ‘play’ behaviour, repeatedly releasing toys into a current in their aquariums and then catching them.

If they’re feeling peckish, octopuses have even been known to climb out of their tanks, cross the lab floor and enter another aquarium, where they eat the crabs and then return to their own aquariums.

Cephalopods can solve complex puzzles and remember the solutions to them, such as unscrewing the lids of containers and opening latches on boxes to obtain the food inside.

They also seem to feel despair, and have been known to throw themselves out of their laboratory tanks to commit suicide on the floor. It makes one wonder who the monsters are, the sea creatures or the researchers who insist on capturing them just to study them more closely.

However, because of their intelligence, since 2022 all vertebrates, cephalopods, and decapods have been recognised as sentient by the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022, and that is a very positive development.

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True Crime Victorian Style

Looking deceptively innocent today, in Victorian times the Thames as a cesspool of crime and death

It’s only forty-one days to Halloween, so it’s time to introduce a little eeriness to my blog

True crime is extremely popular these days, with plenty of reality shows to watch on television, as well as fictional series that have capitalized on the trend – e.g. Only Murders in the Building, one of my favourites (Martin Short is fantastic in it), and Based on a True Story, starring Kaley Cuoco (haven’t seen it yet). Our modern world has plenty of crime to choose from, especially in the 2000s with instantaneous news transmissions via numerous media outlets online.

But Victorian England beat us by over 100 years, with just gossip and a few highly-sensationalized news publications to inform you of what was going on. When extreme crimes hit the news, they terrified local citizens.

At the beginning of the 19th century in England, the government imposed hefty taxes on newspaper publishers to try to keep them from giving the government bad press. This meant that the cover price of papers rose, to the point where they often cost more than the daily wage of the average working-class person. To combat this, pubs and coffee houses opened “reading rooms”, where patrons could hear the news read aloud for them.

Unfortunately (in a dismaying parallel to modern social media), journalists then began to embellish news items to increase the chances of having them read aloud, and this type of news ‘reporting’ certainly got attention.

Later in the century the government taxes were decreased and many more publications sprang up. By 1885 there were six morning papers and five evening papers just in London, with many more through the rest of the country, and they all still kept whipping the reading public into a frenzy.

Londoners at the time were given the impression that their city was rife with violent crime, even though that was rare (most police work dealt with petty crimes, such as theft and pickpocketing). Cases of gruesome crimes – and especially when more than one hit the news in the same time period – created widespread hysteria in the city.

Such was the case with the so-called Thames Torso Murders, also called the Embankment Murders, which confounded the police in the 1870s and 80s.

Thames Division of the London Metropolitan Police Force on duty near Tower Bridge in the 1800s. Source: www.thamespolicemuseum.org.uk/gallery.html

In May of 1887, workers in the Thames River Valley village of Rainham pulled a bundle up from the river that contained a female torso. During the next few weeks, more parts from the same body were found in various parts of London, until the entire victim was able to be reconstructed, except for the head and upper chest. The poor woman’s identity was never discovered, and the killer wasn’t found.

In a situation that seems completely bizarre now, London doctors decided that the body wasn’t dissected for medical purposes, but they also weren’t able to provide a cause of death or even prove that a violent act had taken place, so the jury gave a verdict of “Found Dead.” The best that the medical community came up with was that whoever cut up the body had a certain amount of medical knowledge.

We take a lot for granted with modern forensics. Charles A. Hebbert, an assistant police surgeon at the time, cited in his case report the difficulties involved in investigating victims found in the water. Length of time immersed, and possible injuries from passing boats, made it hard to decide whether there’d been an accident or foul play. Dismemberment and scattering created additional problems, destroying many of the clues modern police would rely on today, like any information from wherever the crime had been committed, how the bodies had been transported, and anything else that might have been washed away. Doctors had trouble identifying the age of the victim, what condition they’d been in while alive, their height, and sometimes even their gender. 

Complicating things, the Thames had long been a depository for dead bodies. City records from 1882 showed that 544 corpses were found in the river, of which 277 cases were unresolved. The London Times ran an article on June 15, 1882 stating that “the facilities afforded by the river for the perpetration of secret murders was one that need to be addressed” and complaining about “the general laxity that prevails in our arrangement for ascertaining the causes of suspicious deaths”.

To the police, the 1887 crime seemed similar to that of another dismembered torso found in the Thames fourteen years before, when a policeman rowing on the Thames found the left quarter of a woman’s torso in some mud off Battersea waterworks. Later that day other policemen found the right side of a woman’s torso by Brunswick Wharf, and portions of lungs in other locations in Battersea. The following day, gruesomely, a woman’s face with scalp attached was found, then a right thigh and shoulder with part of an arm. The local police surgeon reassembled the sections in a workhouse and said that a blow to the head was likely the cause of death.

Reports of the discovery prompted numerous people to visit the corpse to see if they could identify her. There were a lot of missing women in London at the time, which had a population of over 6 million people in a crowded, labyrinthine, soot-fogged and crime-filled city. 

In 1873, rumours had spread that the crime was a joke by some medical students, since the body was so dexterously dismembered. A reward of £200 was offered for information, but nothing came of it, and there was never even a criminal profile of the perpetrator worked up. It was thought likely that the victim was one of thousands of London’s prostitutes, who weren’t high on the list of crimes to be solved. The body was buried at Battersea cemetery, although the victim’s face was preserved at the workhouse by its medical officer.

However, in September, 1888, another dismembered female body was found, with pieces distributed in the Thames and various other London locales, followed by yet another the following June.

It was enough for the police to conclude that a serial killer was at work. Then, in April 1888, Jack the Ripper’s killing spree began. Initially, it was suggested that the torsos were the work of the Ripper, but the methods were too different: while  “Jack” gruesomely mutilated his victims, the Thames killer surgically dismembered his. Interestingly, there was speculation that the Ripper also had some medical knowledge.

The vast numbers of poor people in London were easy pickings for these murderers. Author George W. M. Reynolds wrote an indictment of the miseries of London’s worst-off in 1844:

“The most unbounded wealth is the neighbor of the most hideous poverty…the crumbs which fall from the tables of the rich would appear delicious viands to starving millions, and yet these millions obtain them not! In that city there are in all five prominent buildings: the church, in which the pious pray; the gin-palace, to which the wretched poor resort to drown their sorrows; the pawn-broker’s, where miserable creatures pledge their raiment, and their children’s raiment, even unto the last rag, to obtain the means of purchasing food, and – alas! too often – intoxicating drink; the prison, where the victims of a vitiated condition of society expiate the crimes to which they have been drive by starvation and despair; and the workhouse, to which the destitute, the aged, and the friendless hasten to lay down their aching heads – and die!”

Charles Booth, a British ship owner and social reformer, published a map of London’s financial strata that gives a sad image of how the majority of people lived amidst slums and crime compared to the narrow window of those well-fed and clothed.

Part of Charles Booth’s poverty map showing the Old Nichol, a slum in the East End of London. Published 1889 in Life and Labour of the People in London. The red areas are “middle class, well-to-do”, light blue areas are “poor, 18s to 21s a week for a moderate family”, dark blue areas are “very poor, casual, chronic want”, and black areas are the “lowest class…occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals”.
By Charles Booth – http://www.umich.edu/~risotto/maxzooms/ne/nej34.html (cropped). Original: Charles Booth's Labour and Life of the People. Volume 1: East London (London: Macmillan, 1889)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26694694

On June 4, 1889, a female torso was found in the Thames, followed by more body parts in the water the next week. By this point the Ripper killings appeared to have stopped. An investigation once again concluded that the perpetrator must have had medical knowledge, although at the inquest it was stated: “the division of the parts showed skill and design: not, however, the anatomical skill of a surgeon, but the practical knowledge of a butcher or a knacker”. The woman appeared to have been dead only 48 hours. She was around eight months pregnant. An official cause of death was never established, but at least the jury concluded that it was “Wilful murder against some person or persons unknown”. Like preceding victims, the head was never found, but somehow the woman was identified as Elizabeth Jackson, a homeless prostitute from Chelsea.

On September 10, 1889, a police constable found the heavily beaten headless and legless torso of an unidentified woman under a railway arch at Pinchin Street, in Whitechapel. The killing seemed to contain elements of both the Ripper and Thames killings, as the abdomen had been severely mutilated. Police decided that the murder was committed elsewhere and then the dismembered parts disposed of around the city, but no other sections were ever found. Again, the identity of neither victim or killer were ever discovered.

By 1890 the Torso murders seemed to have wound down, although In June of 1902 a woman’s torso was found in an alley in Lambeth. It was never identified.

There have been suggestions that there were actually three killers operating in London during these murders. It was possible that more women had fallen victim but were never discovered amid all the human and animal remains floating around in the Thames (a revolting thought). More modern analysis of the Torso murders points out the organization of the killings, systematically dismembering the victims and then dropping the parts around London like puzzle pieces for the authorities. There didn’t seem to be any taunting messages to the police, though, as you might expect in that situation.

All the victims over a roughly 29-year span were similar – vulnerable working-class women – and the bodies violently desecrated. The methods of all two or three killers indicated some amount of anatomical knowledge and perhaps a certain degree of skill. None of the killers were found, and if there was a third one, he remained completely in the shadows.

The Torso Murders became buried under the highly publicized Ripper Murders – as if, by removing his victims’ identities, the Torso killer (or killers) eliminated them from public consciousness, and perhaps that was an even more insidious crime than “Jack’s”.

Mystery is always intriguing, but I worry about the detachment with which we tend to view the victims, who suffered horribly, as well as anyone who may have cared for them. At least the Ripper’s victims, whose names were all known, will never be forgotten.

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The colour brown: boring or eloquent?

A small town in eastern Ontario changing into its fall clothing

Brown is a September colour; it always makes me think of ‘back-to-school’, of walnuts and chestnuts on the ground, the bindings of books, tree leaves changing to tan and rust and fluttering off branches to dance on the wind.

I don’t think brown gets enough respect. While it’s not flashy, it carries so many qualities – richness, comfort, earthiness, depth.

Decades ago, when my hubby and I bought our house and tried to develop our personal style, I turned to all the decorating magazines I liked to read for help. Without any analysis, I simply cut out photos of rooms that appealed to me, and after I’d compiled an assortment, what I discovered was that every single one of them was done in earth tones and natural textures. While I enjoyed small splashes of colour, in artwork or decorative pieces, the rooms that I wanted to live in were calm, nature-toned sanctuaries.

Earth tones don’t have to be boring or monochromatic. There are so many different shades and textures – the grain in a beautiful piece of wood, whether polished to glow softly under lights or left in its natural form with all its knots and personality; a beautiful beige or taupe leather sofa; the light-and-shadow weave of wicker and rattan.

Calming, soft brown tones in a hotel bedroom

As a writer, brown is so evocative that it might only need a single word to describe something – think ‘chocolate’, ‘coffee’, ‘sand’, ‘fawn’, ‘mahogany’…

If you’re not on the same page yet, I promise that by the end of this post I’ll have you convinced of what a gorgeous colour brown really is.

According to public opinion surveys in the United States and Europe, brown is people’s least favorite colour, sadly. It’s often associated with plainness, poverty and rusticity, even though it’s widely seen in nature – soil, wood, autumn leaves, wildlife.

In Ancient Rome, brown clothing was associated with the lower classes, and with barbarians (anyone the Romans considered uncivilized and in need of conquering). Brown would have been the cheapest colour to produce for clothing, either in the material itself – in those times, clothing was made from animal skins, tree bark, large leaves, and eventually cotton, flax, linen, wool, all of which are naturally shades of beige/brown – or the easy-to-produce brown plant dyes. Producing colourful clothing, especially the famed ‘royal purple’, was considerably more expensive. And so, the Roman name for the poor in the city was pullati, i.e. “those dressed in brown”.

In the Middle Ages, each social class was expected to wear a color that matched its station – for the poor, it was grey or brown (as if being poor wasn’t bad enough in itself, they had to wear their status around all day). Brown robes were worn by monks as a sign of their humility and poverty. In 1363 there was even a statute requiring poor English people to wear a coarse homespun cloth made of wool, which was dyed with pigments from the woad and madder plants to give it a dull brown or grey shade called “russet”.

The magnificent wood-clad Trinity College Library in Dublin, Ireland

For some reason there seemed to be a disconnect between the beauties of nature, of lavish brown animal furs that edged the clothing of the aristocracy, and of the rich browns of wooden furniture and architecture, and the brown colours that meant poverty. My hubby and I have visited many mansions in various parts of the world, where magnificent carvings and furniture in brown-toned woods illustrate the great wealth of the inhabitants. Maybe the dichotomy was as simple as the contrast between the carved and polished wood and the dirt and mud that the poor lived in – refinement vs crudity.

Brown as a manufactured colour has a fascinating history.

It’s been used in art since prehistoric times, mainly made with umber, a natural clay pigment that’s one of the oldest tints in history. Paintings using umber have been dated to 40,000 BC.

Clay ovens in New Mexico, called ‘horno’, bake really well and are enjoying a renaissance

The Ancient Greeks and Romans also produced a fine reddish-brown ink, made from the ink of cuttlefish, called sepia. This ink was used by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and other artists during the Renaissance, and by artists up until the present time.

However, in the Middle Ages, dark brown pigments were rarely used in art; painters and manuscript illuminators preferred bright, distinct colors such as red, blue, green and gold. With the advent of oil painting in the late 15th century, artists began making far greater use of browns. During the Renaissance, artists generally used four different brown pigments: raw umber, raw sienna (a reddish-brown earth mined near Siena, in Tuscany), burnt umber, made by heating Umbrian clay until it turned a darker shade, and burnt sienna, heated for the same effect.

In the 17th and 18th century artists really got into creating chiaroscuro effects, where the subject of a painting popped against a dark background – an effect they created using shades of brown.

At a Chinese Lantern Festival in Nashville, TN, glorious shades of brown enhance the other brilliant colours in the displays

Over the centuries, brown has been treated fickly by the masses. In the late 20th century, for example, brown became a common symbol in western culture for ‘simple and inexpensive’, as in brown paper lunch bags. Conversely, bleached white bread was seen as better quality than its ‘poorer’ cousin, brown bread.

Today, in our health-conscious era, the colour brown represents wholesomeness and naturalness – wholegrain brown breads are trendy, and natural unbleached sugar is available everywhere. (I also much prefer the flavour of organic, brown-coloured sugar that still contains its natural molasses – it actually tastes like something, as opposed to the bland sweetness of refined white sugar.)

Mouth-watering freshly baked bread at a farm market in Ireland

Brown is the predominant human and animal eye color in the world, coming from a dominant gene. Other colours like blue, for example, are from a recessive gene, which means that if a baby receives a blue gene from one parent and a brown gene from the other, the brown will dominate and the child’s eyes will be brown. The brown gene became dominant because it conferred an evolutionary benefit: the excess melanin that causes brown irises protects the eyes from sunlight. As a result, brown eyes have been more common in warmer, sunnier climates.

In human hair, brown is actually the second most common color, after black. Although other eye and hair colours tend to stand out more, some of the most famously attractive people in the world are brown-haired and eyed – Sophia Loren, Clark Gable, Catherine Zeta-Jones. (Elizabeth Taylor had brown hair, but was legendary for her violet eyes.)

A large number of mammals and predatory birds have a brown coloration that’s most likely used for camouflage, since many environments, like the savannah or a forest floor, are brown and green. Most mammals are ‘dichromats’ (they have only two kinds of photo-receptors in their eyes instead of three like humans do) and can’t easily distinguish something like brown fur from green grass. Of course, this also works for the prey, as when snowshoe hares change colour from white to brown when spring arrives.

Cheetahs on the prowl in Kenya blend into their multi-textured brown surroundings

The shades of brown in the animal kingdom are varied and beautiful, from the sleek golden-tan colour of lions to the ruddy brown of a majestic reticulated giraffe to the furry coats of colder-climate mammals. Sadly, for most of these animals, their lovely hides made them collectible commodities that decimated their populations, but fortunately a few decades ago people began to take a stand against killing animals just for their skins. With animal-spotting trips increasing in popularity across the planet, we now have a thriving culture of capturing memories with a camera instead of a rifle.

A Kenyan Reticulated Giraffe is resplendent in the morning sunlight

Brown as camouflage has also been embraced by humans. The colour buff dates back to the 17th century, and was named after the undyed buffalo leather that soldiers at the time wore for protection. It’s a common colour in nature, like the sands of many deserts. Shades of brown became a popular color for military uniforms – widely available and blending well into outdoor landscapes.

In 1775, at the outbreak of the American Revolution, the first Continental Congress wanted the official uniform color to be brown, but in many militias the officers were already wearing blue and in 1778 George Washington was asked to design a new uniform. He ended up making the official color of all uniforms blue and buff.

Similarly, in British-ruled India, 19th century soldiers wore a yellowish shade of tan, which became known as khaki from the Urdu word for dust-colored. The color was adopted by the British Army for their Abyssinian Campaign and then in the Boer War, and the United States Army followed suit, as well as the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.

Shots of Bushmills Irish Whiskey, made for over 400 years, perhaps gave solace to British soldiers far away from home

The colours of tan, khaki and brown also became associated with adventure. In 1909 former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt led, on behalf of the Smithsonian, a massive safari to British East Africa (now Kenya), the Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) and up the Nile to Khartoum in Sudan. The expedition made headlines around the world, and both the colours of Africa (browns and rusts of the animals, the sandy landscape) and the tan/khaki clothing that Roosevelt and his party wore became synonymous with heading to exotic places.

Yours truly in safari clothes in Zambia, sitting at the edge of Victoria Falls

Those colour associations became cemented in the Indiana Jones movies – Indy’s iconic clothing, and the entire setting of the first film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, from the cave and boulder in South America to the classrooms and libraries of the university where he was a professor to Marion’s bar in Tibet to the deserts of Egypt and craggy rocks of Malta. Indiana Jones-themed décor invariably includes all the colours of his outfits and escapades.

Indiana Jones-themed decor at a college event

In the marketing world, brown represents ruggedness – probably an extension of the adventure concept. The United Parcel Service (UPS) delivery company has trademarked the colour Pullman Brown for their trucks and uniforms. The colour was formerly used for the luxurious Pullman rail cars during the Golden Age of Travel, and was chosen by UPS both for that association of a high-end product (and because brown is easy to keep clean).

In culinary circles, so many delicious foods are shades of brown – your morning cup of coffee, the comforting and autumnal cinnamon spice, chocolate in its many variations… We bake our bread to have a beautiful golden-brown crust, and toast our bread to give it a lovely brown colour and extra flavour. We cook sugar over high heat to create rich, sweet caramel. We sauté onions to caramelize the sugars they hold and make them extra scrumptious, or we coat them in fluffy batter and deep-fry them for a crusty golden coating. Seared meat, potato chips and French fries, the crispy brownness of cheese under the broiler – the list goes on and on.

Banana bread pudding with rich caramel sauce, Portrush, Ireland

Being surrounded by nature is very soothing and refreshing for the spirit, and I particularly love everything brown, from the pungent scent of good soil to the textured bark of trees to the different kinds of rock surfaces.

A tiny island in the 1000 Islands chain in the St. Lawrence River

Inside my home, the walls, floors and most of the furniture are all in shades of brown and cream. Usually the first comment people make to us when they visit is how relaxed they feel in our spaces. We have a squashy sofa and loveseat in our living room in a distressed leather that looks like grey-brown elephant skin, which fits perfectly with our travel vibe. But the overall impression is one of comfort and serenity, which comes from the colours of nature and all the woodsy textures we have. I wish I could grow plants to add to the ambience, but even my thumb is brown as opposed to green.

I’ve never been able to manage perfectly-cut tea sandwiches, but these still hit the spot

When I’m sitting and writing, reading a good book or watching an intriguing murder mystery on television, my beverage of choice is a cup of steaming, amber-coloured tea. I had no idea how wonderful proper tea was until my hubby and I had it in England – at a tearoom on a street near Windsor Castle, on a damp and chilly day. Our server brought out cups rich in aroma and flavour, like nothing we’d ever had in Canada at that time. (That was when I became addicted to high-quality tea, both the culture and the wide world of different varieties and tastes – and the excuse to have delightful sweets.)

Far from being boring, brown is one of the great colours of history. It may not be a rare colour, and it doesn’t jump out at us visually, but it has so much depth and nuance. Let’s give it the recognition it deserves, as it warms us, soothes our souls, houses us richly, clothes us elegantly and feeds us well. And in a few weeks we can become children again for a while as we romp through piles of crackly brown fallen leaves!

Shuffling through fallen leaves on a gorgeous fall dayStunning formations in Carlsbad Caverns, New MexicoBreathtaking browns and greys against a piercing blue sky in the Andes mountains in Peru

All photos in this post were taken by the author, or are in her collection, and none may be used without my express permission. E. Jurus.

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Beware the Headless Horseman! — Sleepy Hollow Country in NY State

Cute bumper sticker spotted at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

My childhood was shaped by an eerie scene of cattails alongside a road that were beating, in the rising wind, a tattoo like ghostly hoofbeats upon a dark and lonely road.

I’ve loved Disney’s The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), an animated adaptation narrated by Bing Crosby, from the moment I first watched it on television, and viewing it every October is now an annual Halloween tradition. Despite the light-hearted ambience, the animated short very effectively captures the ghostliness of Ichabod Crane’s ride home through the haunted woods of Sleepy Hollow and his terrifying encounter with the Headless Horseman. (I now have it on DVD and can watch it whenever the mood strikes.)

“On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveller in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless!— but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of his saddle!” Washington Irving. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The pretty, rolling countryside around the town of Sleepy Hollow – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

Well that would creep me out too!

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is writer Washington Irving’s most famous and most beloved work. There’s something about Ichabod’s arrogance, brought down by a wild chase on a dark night, and the spectre of the rearing black horse and the apparition hurtling its head at Ichabod that has created a lasting impression on our collective imaginations.

Irving set his story in the Hudson River Valley of New York State, an area that had been embroiled in the American Revolutionary War. There was the Battle of White Plains in October of 1776, after which the countryside thereabouts was occupied by the British forces, while the Americans dug in north of Peekskill. In between the two, Westchester County was a lawless wilderness.

Driving through Westchester County – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

Among the various combatants and mercenaries, there was a group of Hessian Jägers, sharpshooters and horsemen from Germany who fought for the British. The character of the Headless Horseman in Irving’s short story was said to be one of those Hessian soldiers who was decapitated, and it may have been loosely based on the discovery of a real Jäger’s headless corpse in the locale of Sleepy Hollow and later buried by the Van Tassel family. The Van Tassel family existed in real life – you can see their graves in Sleepy Hollow cemetery – and Irving borrowed the name for the wealthy family in his story.

Additional inspiration for the Headless Horseman came from Irving’s travels through Europe, where headless horsemen often appeared in stories from Ireland to Germany to Scandinavia. In the tales, these horsemen usually afflicted people who were arrogant and scheming – just like Ichabod Crane in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, who liked to get himself invited to his students’ homes for free meals and angled to marry the pretty Katrina Van Tassel for her father’s wealth. Irving wrote The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.,which included the famous ghost story, while he was staying in England, and clearly drew on all of these various influences.

Irving actually lived in Tarrytown twice in his life. His family was from Manhattan, part of the city’s merchant class. His mother named him after George Washington, and when Irving was six he even met his namesake when the president was living in New York city after his inauguration.

Irving was apparently an unenthusiastic student who loved adventure stories and regularly snuck out of class to go to the theatre. When he was fifteen there was an outbreak of yellow fever in Manhattan. Yellow fever  no longer exists in North America (it wasn’t original to our continent but had come over from Africa with the enslaved), but at the time it was considered one of the most dangerous infectious diseases, and so Irving’s family sent him upriver to stay with one of his friends in Tarrytown.

During that stay he took the opportunity to explore, making several trips up the Hudson River and through the Catskill Mountains that were to become the setting for Rip Van Winkle. He also became familiar with the nearby town of Sleepy Hollow and all its local ghost stories, and the entire area inspired him profoundly. “Of all the scenery of the Hudson”, he later wrote, “the Kaatskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my boyish imagination”.

A picturesque bridge we came upon driving around the Hudson River Valley – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

He began writing when he was 19, under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle, starting with a series of letters to the New York Morning Chronicle that were commentaries on the city’s social and theater scene. Still worried about his health, his brothers sent him on the tour of Europe for a while. When he returned, he began studying law in New York City, but still made an indifferent student and barely passed the bar exam. In the meantime, he’d begun socializing with a group of literate young men and created a literary magazine that was a moderate success, spreading his name and reputation.

And here’s an interesting little tidbit: it was Washington Irving who gave New York City the nickname “Gotham”, in the 17th issue of his magazine, from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “Goat’s Town”.

Not long after, he began writing books, and the rest is, of course, history.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is the tale of a rather ridiculous man named Ichabod Crane, a schoolmaster from Connecticut who was already extremely superstitious by the time he arrived in the secluded glen of Sleepy Hollow, near the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town. Sleepy Hollow was renowned for its haunting atmosphere and numerous ghost stories. Residents claimed that the area had been bewitched during the early days of the settlement, and they often experienced various supernatural and mysterious occurrences. The most infamous spectre was the Headless Horseman, the “commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air,” who “rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head”.

The town of Sleepy Hollow has made the most of its namesake story – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

Of course, all of this fed into Crane’s imagination, and he loved to visit the Old Dutch wives and listen to their eerie stories. None of this would possibly have led anywhere were it not for Crane’s rivalry, with a rowdy local  hero named Abraham “Brom Bones” Van Brunt, for the hand of 18-year-old Katrina Van Tassel, the only child of wealthy farmer Baltus Van Tassel. Whatever Brom’s motives may have been, Ichabod saw dollar signs in a potential marriage to Katrina.

Brom, unable to force Ichabod into a physical fight for Katrina, ended up playing a series of pranks using Crane’s superstitions. Things came to a head one autumn night when everyone attended a harvest party at the Van Tassels’ homestead.

Throughout the evening Crane did his best to claim Katrina’s hand in marriage, but failed. Depressed, he left the party to ride home on his plodding mount, a plough horse named Gunpowder, through the woods between the Van Tassels and the farmhouse in Sleepy Hollow where he was staying. His progress was slow through the murky night, and after all the spooky stories he’d heard at the part, he grew increasingly apprehensive with each noise he heard. (If you’ve never experienced the almost absolute darkness of the countryside without electric lighting, I can tell you from personal experience that it is intensely unnerving.)

The journey took him past several famously haunted spots, including a lightning-stricken tree where the ghost of British spy Major André was said to hang out. As Ichabod neared the bridge adjacent to the Old Dutch Burying Ground, he was stunned to see a cloaked rider missing its head. Even more terrifying was the sight of the head perched on the rider’s saddle.

You can walk across the actual renovated bridge – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

This could only be the spirit of the dreaded Headless Horsemen, and Ichabod’s only salvation would be to reach the bridge over the Pocantico River, which, according to legend, the spectre couldn’t cross.

“ “If I can but reach that bridge,” thought Ichabod, “I am safe.” Just then he heard the black steed panting and blowing close behind him; he even fancied that he felt his hot breath. Another convulsive kick in the ribs, and old Gunpowder sprang upon the bridge; he thundered over the resounding planks; he gained the opposite side; and now Ichabod cast a look behind to see if his pursuer should vanish, according to rule, in a flash of fire and brimstone. Just then he saw the goblin rising in his stirrups, and in the very act of hurling his head at him.” Washington Irving. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

I won’t elaborate any further in case you haven’t read the story or watched any of the many film adaptations. Irving’s original story leaves it open to debate whether the spectre was real or another hideous prank by Brom Bones. The whole tale is so evocative that it has inspired numerous productions on film and television, including my favourite (the Disney version); the rather strange 1999 horror movie by Tim Burton that strayed pretty far from the original plot; episodes of Charmed and Ghost Whisperer; and a horror series I really enjoyed, Sleepy Hollow (2013 – 2017), which delved deeply into the Revolutionary War and Ichabod’s ‘actual’ role as an operative for George Washington, then getting resurrected in the modern day and battling the supernatural forces of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The great writer, diplomat and architect is buried in Sleepy Hollow – his headstone has had to be replaced three times because so many visitors rub it – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

Several years ago I was thrilled to discover that quite a few of the locales in Irving’s story actually exist, and can be visited. The entire Hudson River Valley is permeated with Washington Irving’s legacy and spirit, and makes a marvelous road trip in the autumn, when the entire area pulls out all the stops with Halloween-themed events.

The Hudson River Valley has embraced their most favourite historical resident – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

When my hubby and I visited the first time (we loved it so much we repeated the trip just a few years later, and it’s within an easy drive from southern Ontario where we live), we based ourselves in Poughkeepsie, which is fairly central to all the interesting attractions. The valley itself is beautiful in October, with the Hudson River threading through all kinds of charming, well-preserved towns, magnificent turn-of-the-century estates and glowing fall colours.

Irving returned to Tarrytown (modern spelling) later in life and built his own home called Sunnyside (he was multi-talented). You can tour the house and grounds, and also participate in a variety of delightful Halloween programs for children and adults.

Sunnyside, Washington Irving’s self-designed home in Tarrytown, NY – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

Within the vicinity, visit the actual town of Sleepy Hollow. You can stand on the Sleepy Hollow Bridge and wait to see if you hear ghostly hoofbeats, as well as take a tour of the Old Dutch Church and Burying Ground. Irving himself is buried in the cemetery, along with the real Van Tassel family and, more contemporary to us, quite a number of famous people like the infamous hotel queen Leona Helmsley. Apparently the real headless Hessian soldier is also buried somewhere there, in an unmarked grave. The cemetery had just begun offering tours the first year we went, and the tours have grown enormously in popularity ever since.

The Old Dutch Cemetery is one of the oldest in the U.S., and you’ll see quite a few headstones that are being swallowed by the trees next to them – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

There are numerous lavish and/or historic estates, from the Gilded Age ‘cottage’ of the Vanderbilts to exotic Olana (the home of famous Hudson River School artist Frederick Church) to Clermont State Historic Site, dating back to the mid-1700s. The Livingstone family that built it was involved in the Revolution, and when we were there the estate held a recreation of a 1920’s Halloween party for the children, where the ‘spirits’ of deceased family members made a guest appearance both inside and out on the evening ghost tour.

Frederick Church, one of the most famous painters of the Hudson River School, incorporated Middle Eastern accents seen on his travels when he built Olana in Greenwood, NY – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reservedClermont mansion decorated in vintage 1920s Halloween style for the evening’s haunted event – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

One of the most fascinating places to visit, even for we Canadians, is the lifelong home and estate of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the town of Hyde Park in Dutchess County. There’s an enormous amount of history there, and the house had many famous visitors, including Queen Elizabeth II and Winston Churchill. Out back you’ll find the Peace Garden, which holds two pieces of the Berlin Wall carved into silhouettes. The grounds are extensive and great to explore, and as Canadians we were amused to see a very large flock of Canadian geese taking over the front lawn.

Two pieces of the Berlin Wall in the Peace Garden at the FDR estate in Hyde Park, NY – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

The valley is peppered historic small towns (including our personal favourite, Rhinebeck) filled with beautiful old homes, cool shops (the town of Hudson is renowned for its antique stores) and interesting places to eat (see the Beekman Arms in Rhinebeck, a pre-Revolution inn with a delightful tavern and good food).

The tavern at the Beekman Arms Inn, Rhinebeck NY – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

There are wonderful farm markets to explore as you drive around (we had the best chocolate milk ever from the Wayside Stand of the Montgomery Place Orchards, operated by the gorgeous Montgomery Place Estate, which houses Bard College). In the autumn, look for any place with piles of pumpkins for sale!

Lovely Montgomery Place mansion, near Barrytown NY – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reservedThe numerous farm markets in the Hudson River Valley are fun to explore and a treasure trove for foodies – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

All of the estates have gorgeous rolling properties along the Hudson where you can spend hours strolling, so do wear hiking-worthy clothes and shoes, and bring your camera!

Beautiful & extensive grounds of the Vanderbilt estate, Hyde Park, NY – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

The haunted offerings are plentiful. Two of our favourites (more have sprung up since we were there) are: the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson, where more than 7,000 illuminated carved pumpkins light up the night in various configurations on a night-time stroll through the property (there’s also a fabulous gift shop at the end!); and The Headless Horseman Hayrides and Haunted Attractions in Ulster Park on the west side of the river. The Headless Horseman is the coolest haunted attraction hubby and I have ever been to – 65 acres of: haunted corn maze, a superb 20-minute hay wagon ride through the creepy woodland trails and lots of scares, several haunted houses, several incredible shops filled with some very stylish Halloween merchandise, refreshment stands and more. You’ll need to book tickets and an entry time before you arrive, but once you’re inside you can stay as long as you want. The theme changes every year, so you won’t see the same thing twice. This place is very highly-rated and I can’t say enough about it. Cameras aren’t allowed inside, so I can’t show you any personal photos, but you can get a very good idea on the website.

Signage at entrance to the Headless Horseman attraction in Ulster Park, NY – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

If you’re a fan of the original 1960s television series Dark Shadows, Lyndhurst estate will be a mecca for you: it was used for the exterior shots in the two movies, House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Night of Dark Shadows (1971). The lavish mansion at different times housed some of the cream of early-20th-century New York society, including mayor William Paulding, merchant George Merritt and railroad tycoon Jay Gould. You can take tours of the house and explore the grounds. This year in October Lyndhurst is hosting a Dark Shadows Meet & Greet with two of the stars of the tv series, Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played “Maggie Evans” and “Josette DuPres” and Marie Wallace, who played “Eve”, “Megan Todd” and “Jenny Collins”.

Lyndhurst mansion, Tarrytown NY – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

There’s so much going on in ‘Sleepy Hollow country’ in NY State that even with two visits my hubby and I haven’t come close to seeing everything – which just means we’ll have to go back for a third In fact, there’s too much to tell you about in this post, but there are numerous sites where you can do some research to make your own shortlist for how ever long you’re able to be in the area (see below). I’ve provided links to many of our favourites, but I suggest you sit down one afternoon with a cup of tea and maybe a pumpkin scone and do some armchair exploring online.

Visit Sleepy HollowI Love NY, Hudson River ValleyHudson Valley TourismHudson River Valley Heritage SitesLonely Planet – Hudson ValleyTrip Advisor

Whenever you decide to go, have a hauntingly good time!

From Ontario, the drive through NY State to get to the Hudson River Valley is beautiful in the autumn – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

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