Grave Encounters
I have been back from Providence for several days now, though not as many as I should have been, for reasons that I’ll get to in a moment. As always, NecronomiCon was a joy of a convention, and I missed spending time with more people than I managed to see. That said, I think I safeguarded my energy and my health sufficiently that I am only somewhat ragged and tattered after my return.
The return trip itself didn’t help. My flight from Providence to New York went fine, but my flight from New York on to Kansas City was delayed and delayed and delayed. Eventually, I ended up getting a hotel room for the night and flying out on a much more timely plane the next day.
The location of that hotel room proved a serendipitous capstone (or should that be tombstone?) on an unexpected theme of the entire trip. The hotel was, you see, directly across the street from a sprawling necropolis straight out of a Fulci movie (Brandon Kawashima, one of the many people I wanted to see more of at NecronomiCon) dubbed it “Hotel Fulci.”)
To make things even better, when night fell, the lights of the city caught certain reflective headstones in the midst of that boneyard and made them glow eerily. At least, that’s what I tell myself. We all really know that it was ghosts.
Hotel Fulci was only the latest sepulchral stop on my visit to NecronomiCon. While I was staying in the hometown of everyone’s favorite racist uncle, I naturally stopped by a few Lovecraftian landmarks, including the requisite photo of the Shunned House, which I had also done the last time I was in town. However, this was the first time that I went out to visit Lovecraft’s grave, with its very famous epitaph.
That trip was one of a couple of gravesite tourism trips that I took with Mike Bukowski and Jeanne D’Angelo. And while I didn’t get to spend as much time as I wanted with anybody while I was in Providence, it was great to go grave-hopping with them.
Besides Lovecraft’s grave and the environs of Swan Point, we also made a short road trip to visit Lizzie Borden’s grave in Fall River, Massachusetts. While there, we discovered that the same cemetery was also home to the grave of writer and actress Cornelia Otis Skinner, which was particularly exciting for me, as Skinner memorably plays the lesbian-coded Miss Holloway in The Uninvited.
Of course, I did a lot of other stuff, besides grave tourism while I was in Providence. I hosted movies, talked on panels about subjects ranging from John Carpenter to Jean Ray to the Hollow Earth, went to bookstores, watched movies, talked with friends both old and new, ate good food, played bodyguard to a bunny, wandered the streets, and much, much more.
Now, though, I’m back home. It’s good to be home, and I’m gradually recovering from my adventures, just in time to start a new one, as I’ll be hosting a FREE screening of Matango as part of the Horror Pod Class at the Stray Cat Film Center right here in my very own Kansas City in just a few days!
Come out and see us on August 29 at 7pm and watch one of my favorite weird movies of all time!
