Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 58

The Weekly Morbid

October really is the best time of the year.

If you missed my lecture on the demolished pioneer graveyards of San Francisco at last weekend’s Death Salon, there’s a Storify compilation, so you can relive the whole glorious, fascinating day.

I got quoted in Travel & Leisure’s list of the World’s Most Beautiful Cemeteries.

Gothic Beauty magazine reviewed — and really liked — Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel in their October issue.

My exhortation to “Take You Children to the Graveyard!” (published on Scoutie Girl) has been getting some nice attention.  You can check the essay out for yourself here.

I survived another of my brother’s birthdays.

And I’m going to read some of “A Curiosity of Shadows” from The Haunted Mansion Project: Year One at tomorrow night’s Litcrawl.  I’m part of the Evening of Eternal Damnation at Casa Bonampak at 8:30. More details are here.

Ghost Stories Live this Saturday

Rain Graves, Dan Weidman, and I will read from Years One and Two of The Haunted Mansion Project at Casa Bonampak (1051 Valencia Street, San Francisco) on October 18 at 8:30 p.m. We’ll be reading as part of Eternal Press & Damnation Press’s Evening of Eternal Damnation reading during the final leg of the Litcrawl.

Hope you can join us.

Here’s a taste of what you’re in for:

In 2010, twelve writers and artists joined hostess Rain Graves and a team of ghost hunters for a long weekend at a haunted historical mansion in Northern California. The first Haunted Mansion Retreat was so inspiring—and so scary—that most of us jumped at the chance to do it again in September 2012. Some new blood was added to the mix and all of us looked forward to four days together in the haunted house.

I rode with Rain and Sèphera Giron up to the mansion on Thursday afternoon. Once we arrived, Rain put us to work. Sèph and I went up to the second floor to put name tags on beds so that everyone could find their assigned spaces. Sunlight flooded through the windows, highlighting the crisply made beds and cozy rooms. Mount Tamalpais loomed on the west, lush and green, enrobed in autumn.

Sèphera and I started with the familiar rooms at the top of the stairs: here was where S. G. Browne had been menaced by the Black Mass; here was Wes and Yvonne’s sunny corner suite; here was my friendly little blue room where a ghost had touched my hair.

We had just come out of the room that would be Chris Colvin’s. Sèph was telling me about the Black Mass that had harassed her and Rain in the corner room in 2010. We stood in the little hallway, sorting out our list and the name cards, when something large moved through the empty room we’d just left.

I looked up, startled, and met Sèphera’s eyes. “Did you hear that?” I gasped.

“Something is up here with us,” Sèph said. And smiled.

#

Friday night, most of us were writing in the first-floor parlor while the rest joined the GhostGirls’ investigation on the third floor.

Something heavy scraped across the floor above us: on the second floor, in the area where Yvonne, Wes, and I had our rooms. It sounded like a heavy piece of furniture—for some reason, I thought of a trunk—being dragged across the floor. None of us would do such a thing, conscious as we were of being in someone else’s house. We exchanged glances, but couldn’t explain what we’d heard.

Scott stomped down from the third floor. “What was that?” he demanded.

“We thought it was you,” someone said.

“We were all on the third floor,” he said. “Who’s on the second floor?”

“No one. We’re all right here.”

#

My blue room

After midnight, when I finally got brave enough to go upstairs to change for bed, I tried shoving the furniture around my room to see if I could replicate the noise we’d heard earlier.

The bed was on casters. It glided silently across the bare, unmarked floorboards. Nothing in my room could have made the heavy scraping we all heard.

#

The house seemed quiet on Saturday. Even the night passed peacefully. I felt pretty relaxed about the whole experience, until Yvonne teased me about sleeping with my light on.

I’d woken up in a puddle of moonlight, so I knew I’d shut the light off before I went to sleep. My room had been locked from the inside. No one had been in there touching the lights, but me.

Or so I thought.

#

So: twice now, a small group of writers and artists met at a haunted mansion in Northern California. What we find there excites us, terrifies us, and inspires us even after we leave. The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two is our documentation of the four intense days we spent together in the house in September 2012.

The contents range from the official site report prepared by the GhostGirls to survivors’ subjective accounts of their experiences to short stories and poetry inspired by the house’s atmosphere and the things that occurred there. Damnation Books published the book in 2013. It’s available from Amazon.

Death Salon interview: Megan Rosenbloom

Today, the third Death Salon conference is taking place in San Francisco.  (There may be still a handful of tickets available, so if you’re interested, come on down to Fort Mason.)

I am curious about the women behind the Death Salon project, so I’m going to interview some of them. Earlier interviews with Annetta Black and Elizabeth Harper are already up (see previous post arrow above), with more to come next week.

Megan Rosenbloom is co-founder and director of Death Salon and a member of the Order of the Good Death. She is the Associate Director for Collection Resources at the University of Southern California’s Norris Medical Library.

How did you get interested in death?

Megan Rosenbloom: Well, I was raised Catholic, which I think has at least a little to do with it. Mostly, it was from being a medical librarian and working in the history of medicine and rare books, interacting with all of these texts and seeing the struggles that doctors went through to try to prevent death. People often ask me what death has to do with medicine and it always sort of shocks me. Death is the end of medicine. I think it’s fascinating.

How did the idea for the Death Salon come about?

MR:  Mortician Caitlin Doughty inducted me into the Order of the Good Death. We all started chatting online about how fun it would be if we could get together and share ideas. It majorly snowballed from there. Since we were both in LA, it seemed like the obvious choice for the first event. I decided to help plan it because I’m reasonably good at that sort of thing. Next thing you know, here we are.

How far would you like to see the Death Salon go?

MR:  That is a really good question and, surprisingly, one I’ve never been asked before. We get requests all the time from people to have Death Salon in their city. Since we’re not like Death Cafe — in that it’s curated solely by us (and that’s how we want to stay) — there is a limit to the amount of events we can do in any given year. However we keep doing more than we anticipated, and it keeps making us want to do more, but Death Salon is never going to be our full-time jobs or anything. We’re hoping to get some content online soon so that people who can’t physically come out to an event can still interact with the ideas.

What’s your favorite morbid item in the Norris Library’s collection?

Illustration from Tables of the Skeleton and Muscles of the Human Body

MR:  So hard to pick, but I think it’s probably the Albinus Tables of the skeleton and muscles of the human body 1749. It’s got really beautiful, whimsical engravings. The book goes from my nose to my knees when I have to carry it, which is kind of comical. It’s a real show-stopper.

I hear you’re writing a book.  Is it death-related?  When will it be available?

MR:  Wouldn’t I like to know! I am writing a death-related book, but it’s very much in flux right now — back and forths with agents, trying to make it the best it can be — so it’s still very much a work-in-progress. Hopefully, I will have more concrete information soon.

You can connect with Megan on Twitter & Instagram @libraryatnight or meganrosenbloom.com.

Megan will be speaking at the Death Salon in San Francisco this evening.  Here’s the description of her talk:

Megan Rosenbloom – Books of the Dead: Death Imagery from the Library Vaults

While researching her book in libraries across the U.S. and abroad, Megan has collected examples of interesting death images and objects safely kept in the best research libraries’ special collections. Take a tour of some beautiful and macabre illustrations, photos, and objects that the public rarely gets to see.

The whole schedule of this weekend’s lectures is here.

Death Salon interview: Elizabeth Harper

Elizabeth is the lifelike one on the left. On the right is the incorrupt body of St. Paula Frassinetti. A little Italian nun insisted on taking this picture of them together.

This weekend, the third Death Salon conference is taking place in San Francisco.  (There are still a handful of tickets available, if you’re interested, but the evening only tickets are sold out.)

I am curious about the women behind the Death Salon project, so I’m going to interview some of them.

Elizabeth Harper writes All the Saints You Should Know, a blog about bodies, bones, relics, lore, and oddities from the Catholic Church. She is a regular contributor to Atlas Obscura and has been featured on Slate, MSN, The Mirror, and Los Angeles Magazine. She’s lectured at the Morbid Anatomy Museum and is a Death Salon advisory board member.

How did you get interested in death?

Elizabeth Harper: For me, the places where the living and the dead can mingle together are very soothing. Saint John Chrysostom wrote about getting away from “the tumult of affairs and the throng of everyday anxieties” at the tombs of the martyrs. I feel the same way. To me, crypts are sensually pleasing. There’s nothing better than leaving streets teeming with people, cars, noise, and heat for somewhere cool, silent, and dim, where you’re almost always alone but just steps beneath the crowds. Visually, the combination of Renaissance and Baroque craftsmanship, the patina of age, and human remains is sublime. You’re surrounded by greatness. The lives of the saints include some of the best aspects of human nature: generosity, bravery, fortitude. The art created to house their bones is equally humbling; I don’t think I could wash the dust off Bernini’s chisel well. And yet, I’m not hopeless or anxious down there. The combination of bones and art inspires this very tranquil feeling that I must persevere and calmly try to do better and be better every day I’m alive. So I guess my interest in death is really more about life. Thinking about death changes the way that I live.

How did you connect with the Death Salon?

EH: In real life, I’m a lighting designer for theatre and events. When Megan Rosenbloom started putting together the first Death Salon, I jumped in and offered to help coordinate the cabaret. Around that time, I had also just published a long-form piece on my blog about mortification of the flesh and female saints. Colin Dickey asked if I would be interested in presenting on the day Morbid Anatomy was curating. It went well, so here I am.

How far would you like to see the Death Salon go?

EH: I say let’s go as far as people will have us. Every time we go to a new location, there are different co-currators and presenters from the community. There’s always something new to learn about or experience. At the heart of Death Salon is a real love of learning, so I think the more diverse scholars and artists we can host, the better the events will be. Death, after all, is universal. So not only can we diversify culturally, but we can also diversify through time. Every culture has a past, present, and future of death. Someone out there can tell us something interesting about it.

What’s your favorite morbid story about a saint?

EH: I’m very fond of St. Lucy, a second-century Roman martyr. I have a large print of her in my office that shows her holding her eyes on a plate. According to one version of her legend, Lucy was determined to give her dowry to the poor and remain an unmarried virgin, but her family betrothed her to a young pagan. When the young man complimented Lucy’s eyes, she gouged them out, gave them to him, and said, “Now leave me to God.” He turned her over to the emperor for being a Christian. She was beheaded.

Are you writing a book?

EH: I am. It’s a nonfiction book of essays. Each chapter takes you on a different walking tour of Rome and explains the history and lore behind some of the more unusual (and sometimes seemingly morbid) Catholic sites. So from home, you can learn all about the history of bone-art or incorrupt saints or demonic artifacts. If you’re in Rome, you can use it as a guidebook to some very unusual and little-known places.

Elizabeth will be speaking at this weekend’s Death Salon on Saturday afternoon.  Here’s the description of her talk:

Elizabeth Harper – The Public Corpse: Exploring Death Rituals and the Spaces Dedicated to Them in Rome Death is not the end of the road for Catholics in Italy. Though the public  display of corpses and bones may seem macabre, these traditions illustrate a spiritual and physical journey that begins at death. It’s a journey that takes us through the liminal space between here and the afterlife and between flesh and bone; where the impermanence and even embarrassment of the human body and its functions only underscores the permanence and dignity of the soul. In this illustrated talk, we’ll take a virtual walking tour of Rome through its crypts, purgatorial societies, tombs, and shrines and find this message of life hidden in places devoted to death.

The whole schedule of this weekend’s lectures is here.

Death Salon interview: Annetta Black

Annetta Black in Bodie

This weekend, the third Death Salon conference is taking place in San Francisco.  (There are still a handful of tickets available, if you’re interested, but the evening only tickets are sold out.)

I am curious about the women behind the Death Salon project, so I’m going to interview some of them.  First up is Annetta Black, founder of San Francisco’s Odd Salon and curator of the San Francisco Time Travel Project lectures at the California Historical Society.

How would you describe your work?

Annetta Black:  I’m a reader and writer and enthusiastic history nerd in the Bay Area. I love finding odd or overlooked stories from the past and sharing them so that everyone can appreciate how crazy amazing the world is and was. For the last several years, I served as Senior Editor at Atlas Obscura, as well as head of their exploration branch, the Obscura Society. This year I launched a collaborative cocktail hour lecture series called Odd Salon in the Bay Area with two partners — which is really just an excuse dedicate a couple evenings a month to cocktails in good company and learning something weird, together.

How did you get interested in death?

AB:  I have two colliding paths — the first is a childhood love of cemeteries. I have always enjoyed walking amongst tombstones, reading inscriptions and finding little rhyming poems, and the challenge of deciphering the symbols in the statuary. As an adult and a writer, I have found myself drawn to stories of doomed expeditions, of failure and death is remote corners of the world. I’m fascinated by the ways in which one person’s death is a heroic tragedy, while another is an embarrassing failure. Of course,I have found, when you dig in, that neither is ever perfectly the case.

How did you get connected with the Death Salon?

AB:  I met Megan Rosenbloom through a mutual friend and went to go visit the collection of rare medical books she takes care of at USC. When I heard that they were planning a Death Salon, I sent Megan a note suggesting a story on the silver linings in the legacies of dead explorers. I ended up as the opening speaker for Death Salon in Los Angeles, which was amazing.

How far would you like to see the Death Salon go?

AB:  I am very excited to see more people from more disciplines get involved in this dialog. There are so many stories, from the personal to historic and academic angles. I don’t think it would be possible to exhaust the options, so I’d like to see it go as long, and in as many places, as possible.

While some of the stories are funny, the underlying mission is more of a challenge: to explore our fears of death and dying, talk about how we can both better understand grief and our own mortality, and also attempt to free ourselves of a little bit of this fear about something that is, after all, completely inevitable and natural.

What’s your favorite morbid story?

AB:  My favorite morbid story is the tale of Inês de Castro of Portugal, who was (allegedly) exhumed and made queen two years after her death by King Pedro I. According to legend and art, Pedro was so in love with his dead mistress that had her dressed in royal finery, propped up in a throne, and then forced his court to swear allegiance and kiss her skeletal hand. It should be noted that she had been beheaded, making this at least a little logistically complicated. In the end, Inês and Pedro were buried in gorgeous matching coffins placed feet to feet so that when they rise, they will face one another again. The coffins are carved with scenes of apocalyptic glory and carved with the words “until the end of the world.” It’s sweet.

Are you writing a book about your dead explorers?

AB: I am actively working on turning the assorted stories of expeditions which ended badly into book form. Still in the early stages, but yes, I am working on it.

Annetta will be speaking at this weekend’s Death Salon on Saturday evening.  Here’s the description of her talk:

Annetta Black - Dead Soldiers & Utopian Dreams: The Vernian Visions of Dr. Benjamin Lyford, Civil War Embalmer

On the battlefields of the divided Union, Dr. Benjamin Lyford was part of a new generation of death professionals, developing new (and secret) techniques for embalming in order to send bodies of fallen soldiers home for burial. Later he brought his practice here to San Francisco. Across the water in Tiburon, he sought to create “Hygeia,” a health-obsessed Utopian village designed to keep death at bay. Remnants of his legacy speak to the lasting impact of the atrocities of war, the cult of health that sprung up in post-Civil War America, and our evolving relationship with the preservation of the dead.

 The whole schedule of this weekend’s lectures is here.

Morpheus was Here

Earlier this year, I struggled with the decision to return my adopted cat Morpheus to the SPCA.  He had a very complicated immune disorder that led to problems from teeth to tail. After thousands of dollars and monthly vet appointments, my 18-month-old boy kept getting worse and worse.  If I kept him, I knew I was going to have to put him down sooner rather than later.  Instead, I gave up and took him back.

It helped that the intake clerk was amazed by the stack of vet paperwork I brought with me.  The vet was impressed by the sack of medicine I dragged along.  They accepted that I was making the right decision for my poor sick boy, but I still cried all through filling out all the paperwork.  What was his favorite toy?  Did he sleep on the bed?  All their very reasonable questions were too painful.

My poor rumpled boy

Afterward, in the midst of my second-guessing and grief, an artist reached out to me.  She wanted to make a shrine to Morpheus.  She asked me to send her some of his favorite toys (milk rings).  I also sent a couple of his whiskers.

The beautiful shrine came in yesterday’s mail.  Inside an antique cigar box stands a soft paste porcelain cat (dug up from a factory in Germany c. 1890, she says). A 1920s salt shaker urn holds one of his catnip mice and the milk rings.  A perfume bottle (found on a beach) holds his whiskers.  The back is papered with a vintage map of California.

I can’t begin to tell you how touched I am by this.  One of the hardest parts of giving Morpheus up was that I had no focus for my grief.  When my last cat died, I put his ashes in an antique silver sugar bowl.  Morpheus left nothing behind but a hole.

Please check out Monica’s other artwork at http://bodirsky.com/.  She makes lovely, very moving assemblages.

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Signs

The Horror Writers Association is encouraging its members to post a selfie of themselves holding (or wearing) a sign that encourages reading, writing, or viewing horror.  Here’s mine.

You can view the whole collection, which includes people like Peter Straub, Maria Alexander, editor Stephen Jones, and a whole lot more.

A lot of the horror selfies have props or makeup.  Mine was taken in my office last night and features Nyampire and the catbus from My Neighbor Totoro over my shoulder.  It’s my attempt to show you can be serious and lighthearted simultaneously while you’re exploring the shadows.

Now I’m going to go read some horror.  I’ve got Dana Fredsti’s Plague World cued up on the treadmill.

This week’s Photo Challenge on WordPress is to photograph a sign.  You can see the whole range of blogs on the subject here.

A True Story for Halloween

Several years ago, I visited New Orleans for Halloween.  While at the Westgate Gallery — at that time, the world’s only gallery devoted to the necromantic arts — I met a mortician who told me a story that still makes me shiver.  I’d love to share it with you:

This was filmed by Samuel Klatchko at the Hypnodrome, during the book tour for Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues: True Stories of the Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox, and Unusual.

Death Salon is coming to San Francisco

Loren Rhoads:

Still working on my speech for the Death Salon next weekend, but here’s a morbid tidbit from it to tide you along.

Originally posted on Cemetery Travel: Adventures in Graveyards Around the World:

The Jewish cemeteries in what is now Dolores Park, San Francisco

I’m going to miss another Cemetery of the Week tonight because I’ve been working on my speech for next weekend’s Death Salon here in my hometown.  Want to come and hear it in person?  There are still some tickets left.  Here’s the link.

The line up of speakers varies from my historical view of cemeteries in San Francisco to Jill Tracy talking about writing music in the Mutter Museum after hours to Caitlin Doughty (Ask a Mortician) talking about her new book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.  There will be talks about working as a death doula, postmortem facial reconstruction, Santa Muerte, and funeral food traditions — and much, much more.

I missed the Death Salon in London earlier this year, but I was lucky enough to attend the initial Death Salon in Los Angeles last…

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Good Stuff Behind the Scenes

I haven’t been blogging much lately because so much is going on with my writing that I can’t share yet.  I want so much to tell you…

I was interviewed by a journalist I really admire for one of the local weekly papers.  I think the feature is being printed on my birthday.

Wish You Were Here is being reviewed next month in a magazine I love and have been reading for almost 15 years.  I am so excited about seeing that review!

I’ve seen the cover painting for The Dangerous Type, but it isn’t finalized yet, so I can’t share.  I adore it!  I’m going to need to make some extremely minor changes in the book to match the cover better, but I’m excited to do that because:

1) Someone painted a cover for my book — that’s a dream come true!

2) The artist totally got what I wanted for the character.  Before I saw the painting, Raena was just words and a hazy image in my head.  Now she’s sort of a real person.

I apologize for all the vagueness.  Hopefully, I can reveal more soon.

In the meantime, I’ve been working on my slides for my talk about the pioneer cemeteries of San Francisco at the Death Salon next month.  That’s been a process of whittling down all the stuff I know and making it fit the time I’m allotted. I am really, really excited to talk about San Francisco’s history at Fort Mason — and I cannot wait to see all my Death Salon muses again.

And we got a new kitten.  She was feral and has needed a lot of love and attention, more than I expected.  I know pets are supposed to bring your blood pressure down and extend your life, but my last two new pets have had the opposite effect.  Hopefully, she will adjust to the fact that people like to move around and settle in at last.  Her name is Amulet.

Finally, I wrote a series last week about the National AIDS Memorial Grove on CemeteryTravel.  I’m really pleased with how the pieces turned out.  Please check them out starting here: http://cemeterytravel.com/2014/09/16/touched-by-a-cemetery-the-national-aids-memorial-grove/.