Welcome to Ghost Sightings

Ghosts are real. 

They exist at the edges of our minds to help us deal with the reality that one day we will die and no longer exist as we do right now. We might go our whole lives without ever seeing a ghost, but that doesn't mean we aren't followed by them.

I've never seen a ghost. I probably never will. But I know they're there to keep histories and memories alive for just a little longer.

About a month ago, I wrote a blog post about how ghost stories (at least the best ones) are rarely about the ghosts. You can read that blog post by clicking this link. 

That post primarily focuses on fictional stories and the ones that get passed down from generation to generation as a way to preserve culture or history. It wasn’t my first post on ghosts, nor was it the first time I brought up the fact that ghost stories are a good measure to discover what a culture values. This post will likely not be the last either.

Today I was feeling under the weather. Thankfully nothing COVID related (at least I haven’t heard of a crumbly stomach being associated with the virus). I ended up spending most of the morning under a pile of blankets with a cat curled up next to me and Unsolved Mysteries on in the background. I came back to full awareness when the episode playing was entirely in Japanese.

The episode in question was on the aftermath of the 3.11.2011 earthquake and tsunami. At first I was a bit confused as to why this was on Unsolved Mysteries as I hadn’t heard of anything unusual happening after the tragedy. Then ghosts were mentioned and things began to fall into place.

The episode wasn’t about a murder or disappearance that occurred in conjunction to the day, but about the trauma that happened to the people after over 15,000 were swept away by a wall of water. People began to see ghosts.

I don’t think this is all that unusual after such a horrific disaster. Though the episode does mention that ghost sightings are a rare occurrence in Japan after incidents of mass death (natural or man made), there is a cultural explanation for why this region of Japan had a high number of ghost sightings in the months and years after 3.11 (as the day has become known as).

Mass death isn’t normal. Sudden mass death is traumatic and leaves a gaping impression like a bullet hole.

The amount of death going on right now because of the pandemic feels so much worse. It's like a stab wound that hasn't closed properly and became infected. It'll likely leave a massive scar, if the wound ever heals.

I’ve been lucky. I haven’t seen the mobile morgues. My family has managed to avoid the worst of COVID. I’m still incredibly stressed by the situation.

We’ve seen how humans of the past dealt with pandemics and it was filled with images of death. The great plague that ravaged Asia and Europe in the Middle Ages left us with tons of paintings which featured dancing skeletons and iconography we still closely associate with death. The Dance of the Macabre is familiar enough to most modern people - even if they aren’t aware of its exact origin.

That particular disease really did look like something out of a zombie movie. COVID doesn’t have the tell tale disfiguration or gross puss filled boils like Bubonic or one of its similar plague buddies has. It’s not flashy and easily hidden away from the public eye. 

But the stress and trauma is all around us. I do wonder how our modern world will deal with it.

In the mid-2000s there was a huge uptick in paranormal investigative shows. I won’t deny that I enjoyed them back then. Although, now I much prefer seeing the story unfold rather than watch 40 of people wander around in the dark and then spend 10 minutes trying to tell me that there was a “ghost” on a recording. I like to think I’ve matured in taste since then, but it’s unlikely.

I’m not saying that the trauma of 9/11 was the reason for this sudden splash of TV shlock, but the timing is there. Kind of like how it wasn’t necessarily the counter culture of the 60s and 70s that led to the satanic panic of the 80s and 90s. 

But after traumatic events, we as humans seem to be drawn to what comes after life. Many times the trauma takes the form of ghosts.

I think there’s a reason Gettysburg is known for its battlefields and ghosts more than any other US city. The town and surrounding area was bombarded for three hot days in July. It’s the bloodiest battle to take place on US soil. And the town is filled with ghost stories about those three horrific days.

Will COVID correlate to another surge in live action ghost shows? Will we get more shows or movies like The Haunting of Hill House or Bly Manor? 

If anything, I do hope that the pandemic brings the end of the zombie. For years zombies were equated to disease and that we could fight our way out of it. Nothing remotely like the zombie apocalypse has happened. Please creative types, make zombies go away.

I’m still feeling a little queasy. The only other time I’ve felt like this and didn’t actually get sick was when I had a horribly stressful month at work while I was still new to my career. I couldn’t eat for a couple weeks. COVID has wrecked my nerves in a similar way - don’t know why this was the week for my body to freak out.

I have never seen a ghost - though I wouldn’t mind the experience. I think it’s important to understand that ghosts are very real. Whether or not seeing them is a response to trauma or a suggestion of the mind to rationalize the unknown or they are in fact real is up to you the individual. Right now my body is physically responding to the stress of the pandemic. Years from now, my mind might process the trauma differently.

And boy has my generation lived through a lot of traumatic events. 

If you enjoyed this post or it really (pissed you off), please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope y’all like hearing from me.

Stay safe everyone.

Welcome to the Taboo Costume Ball

Halloween is on Thursday. Have you picked out your costume yet?

This weekend and next weekend are the defacto days to celebrate the season. Right after we get to skip Thanksgiving and go straight into Christmas decorating (as long as we are going by the decorations in the stores). However, for this last week, I get to bask in the creepy, macabre, and darkness of the season and no one can question me about it.

Halloween is one of the few times where it's okay to wear whatever you want...within reason. (Here's your annual PSA: Don't wear the clothing of another culture and call it a costume). You want to be a princess, be a princess. You want to be a witch, be a witch. You want to dress up as a slutty version of Crowley from "Good Omens", Neil Gaiman might retweet your costume on Twitter.

Don't think too hard about that last sentence, but yes, I really did come across that on Twitter earlier today.

I've never made it a secret that I love this season. I think it's the reminder that life eventually comes to an end and that there is a new beginning waiting for me when that happens, this year more so than most. I love the atmosphere, the sights and smells and tastes are all unique, but fleeting.

I don't really enjoy being scared, especially not in haunted houses, but the decorations and aesthetic are intriguing and different. It's a time for us to embrace the parts of life that we don't always want to acknowledge.

One of those things is the taboo.

Is it any wonder why sexy or slutty costumes are popular among some circles? Americans in particular continue to have a more conservative perspective on sex and sexuality. Not all Americans, but it is a distinct, if occasionally subconscious part of our culture. Halloween is one of the rare acceptable times that people can explore what titillates them and not be ridiculed for it.

This does sometimes go too far. I didn't need to know that a sexy handmaid's costume existed and sexy or slutty costumes depicting another culture should not be considered (PSA: please for the love of all that is sanity do not turn another culture's dress and make it a costume). Also children's costumes with the word "sexy" should not exist.

There are some things that should probably just not be done.

However, an adult expressing their sexuality is perfectly okay and Halloween provides a safe space for some people to do that.

I'm not one for sexy or slutty costumes. I prefer dressing up as something "dead" like a zombie or vampire. Death and the dead are another taboo topic that Halloween exemplifies.

Everybody dies.

It's what makes life worth living.

I prefer to spend the Halloween season acknowledging this part of the human condition. I like watching atmospheric movies and reading scary ghost stories. I don't really like being scared myself, I do not like haunted house attractions for example. I like being reminded that life eventually does end.

Halloween allows me to celebrate life while also acknowledging death.

And there's a certain amount of humor that goes with that. Horror and comedy are often two sides of the same coin. It's why movies like "Dale and Tucker Versus Evil" and "Scream" work so well as both horror stories and comedies. Sometimes we need to laugh in the face of what horrifies us.

One of my favorite actives during this season is to listen to spooky old jazz music from the early 1900s. A lot of the recordings are distorted and a little off putting. The songs about dancing with the dead or making deals with the devil can be both funny and spooky. But what really creeps me out is the idea that the people who I'm listening to, their recorded voices and playing instruments, they're all dead. Every single person in those recordings died years ago.

Yet, I feel connected to them. I feel like they could manifest themselves out of the music to dance with me in my living room. We dance together like in the "Danse Macabre".

Life is short, so around Halloween, I take the time to be myself as much as possible. I wear my favorite goth clothes and steampunk jackets. I wear make-up that distorts my face and do my hair a little different. I express myself how I want to without worrying about society judging me.

So enjoy Halloween . Take the kids out trick or treating. Go to a party. Watch a scary movie or explore a haunted house. Find a costume and be the person you never thought you'd be for a night.

It'll all be over come November 1st.

But seriously, don't dress up as someone else's culture.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.

Until next week.

Welcome to Losing a Beloved Pet

My dog, Gertrude, died on Tuesday. On some level I'm still processing that she's gone. I just saw her while vising my mom in Michigan for the holidays. On another level, I knew that it was very likely to be the last time I saw her.

Gertrude was nearly 14 years old. We had had her since she was a tiny puppy who could barely jump onto the couch. She grew until she was nearly 3 times the size that we had thought she would be (75 lbs versus 35 lbs). I especially loved her awkward puppy phase where she was nothing but legs and ears.

She was my first Facebook profile picture and the first time someone tried to make fun of my blog, they specifically referenced how they "didn't want to hear about my dog" (I blocked them). She was a constant companion during high school and always happy to see me when I came home for a visit after I moved away. She was a Boarder Collie German Shepard mix and could fit in my dad's hand when she was a puppy. She was sort of friends with our cat, Karma. In the last years of her life, she got to play with her adopted sister Millie.

I'm glad she had a good long life.

She wasn't my first dog or even my first pet. My sister and I raised hermit crabs for a long time before we finally got our first dog. He was an equally wonderful dog who would never have allowed anything bad to happen to the family. It was tough when he died and we waited a while before adopting Gertrude.

Pets are wonderful family members, and yes they are family. It's nearly impossible not to love a dog or cat or hamster or any of the other furry critters that come into our lives. I'll even give people who raise reptiles as pets credit. The amount of pictures of cute pet snakes on Pinterest alone can have me falling into a black hole of saying "aww" for an hour or two.

There are many days I wish I had a pet with me. I'd love to come home to an excited pooch happy to see me. But it's just not possible right now. Pets are a huge responsibility and I couldn't commit to having one with my current lifestyle. Plus I'm super allergic to most pets that aren't dogs.

Instead I raise plants.

Plants aren't animals, though, and they are hard to cuddle with (especially my temperamental cactus). Also, when a plant dies, I don't feel quite as bad. Don't get me wrong, I'm still sad when I accidentally kill one of my plants, but I've taken steps to only look after really hardy plants that are really hard to kill.

My emotional attachment to a pet is a lot higher than to a plant. I am still adverse to watching any emotionally driven movie or horror movie with a dog in it. It's an almost automatic hard stop if a dog, cat, or horse dies. I've heard a number of authors state that they avoid killing a pet (especially a dog) because it will generate enough hate mail to fill their entire house.

A pet's passing is something that hits us right in our basic emotions. I cried for a few hours while I tried to process that Gertrude was gone. Other people also understood how I felt. Everyone who has heard of Gert's passing has been very nice and sending me their condolences.

I wasn't the only person in my sphere of friends to have lost a furry family member. From what I was able to gather, these beloved pets were also older and had lived good long lives. They were loved and cherished until the end.

I'm going to miss Gertrude. She was awesome.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really hit you in the feels) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.

Welcome to the Darker Side of Things

Halloween is fast approaching! Have you guys picked out a costume yet?

Halloween has always held a special place in my heart. The decorations, the costumes, and the TV specials were always fun this time of year. I loved dressing up for Halloween (still do when I can). I always had to be either something dead or scary. One year, when I was dressed as a vampire, I scared my next door neighbor so bad that he refused to go trick or treating. I think he was barely one or two years old at the time.

Though I love most things about the season, I’m not a huge fan of haunted houses. Don’t get me wrong, the decorations and costumes are fantastic, but I can’t deal with the sensory overload that sometimes happens to me with the flashing lights and loud noises. Plus I really hate jump scares - they’re not actually scary, just startling.

It’s the Halloween aesthetic that I truest find beautiful. The leaves are changing colors, then falling to the ground. The air smells crisp and a little smoky at times. There’s an ever lingering reminder that with life eventually comes death.

I love it.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while now, you’d have notice that I really like witches and the Gothic aesthetic. I’m a big sucker for movies like Sleepy Hallow and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (even with the silly accents and over sexual tones). I read the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft over and over again.

Death is the overarching theme of the season with some villainy and chaos on the side. I think there’s a reason the Sanderson sisters are so fondly remembered even though they are planning on murdering children in the movie Hocus Pocus. They’re everything fun and evil about the season. They’re threatening, but not too threatening.

For a while now, I’ve been working on creating a collection of poems that I feel fit into the Gothic style. I’ve written about 30 poems so far and, though I’m n where near close yet, I would like to try to get them published next year. I might even include some ink drawings.

A lot of these poems focus on death and what comes after. I take great joy in playing with expectations such as using limericks, tropically a playful or funny poem style, and use that format as though it were on a gravestone.

I’ve been told by a few people that my work can be delightfully demented.

Or maybe I was using that term to describe my sense of writing style. I don’t always like it when something is scary to be scary or depressing to be depressing. That isn’t how I am always able to work through my emotions. I often twist and bend these expressions to where it might take a bit to realize exactly what I’m writing about.

Death can be absurdly funny, like in the movies Scream, Scary Movie, and Final Destination. There’s a part of me that’s satisfied when the villain is killed off for good to triumph, like in Hocus Pocus or pretty much every Disney Villain ever.

There’s nothing wrong with being fascinated with the darker side of things. True crime stories and ghost hunting shows are still popular. There’s a mortician who hosts a YouTube channel and explains different things about her job (it’s called “Ask a Mortician”. People still visit sites of mass destruction, murder, and battlefields whether as reminders of the past or to satisfy a morbid need.

I’m not sure where my fascination with the darkness in life comes from. It could be that I need to have some kind of exposure to the worst side of nature so that I can appreciate the best.

It’s hard to know what to do with extreme negativity when you’re not regularly exposed to it. How do you empathize with an experience you’ve never lived through, but know that other people have? How is it possible to understand another person’s pain when you can’t comprehend where that pain came from?

Seeking out darkness isn’t bad. I find that it’s just another way for me to make peace with the experiences I’ve witness and lived through.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.

Until next week.

Welcome to the Gothic: the Appeal of Darkness

The Gothic genre is filled with tales of mystery, macabre, and dark atemosphere. There are plenty of ghosts, monsters, and victims. Though not exclusively tied to the horror genre, most Gothic tales include elements of horror (as I have written in previous blog posts), but why?

What attracts us to that dark atemosphere?

I can only answer this question for myself. Personally, I find the dark side of life to be just as fascinating and beautiful as the dramatic and comedic, sometimes even more so. However, there’s one element that shines through above all else in Gothic tales and that’s mortality. Horror and Gothic stories bring audiences to the edge of death, whether through tragedy, mayhem, or the supernatural.

Everyone dies - it’s a guarantee of life - but we don’t often like to acknowledge it.

Young people often think they’re invincible, that the seductive hands of death won’t touch them for a long long time. Why should the young worry about death? Yet in the Gothic genre, it is the youth who are often facing the most horrific and tragic of situations. They must confront their mortality before the end of the story...or succumb to it.

I haven’t a clue how older people feel about death. I doubt that there is a collective feeling on the subject. Some might welcome it at the end of their lives, others might continue to fear it. I’d rather think of death as the end of one journey and the start of the other. The older individuals in the Gothic stories I’ve read were occasionally the victims of the younger generation’s ambition, such as in A Tale Tale Heart. There are other older people in these stories who help guide the younger generation, such as Van Helsing in Dracula.

Death is the overly dramatic lurker in these stories. It’s not quiet. Most characters know that it’s around, but not how to avoid it.

But death isn’t the only dark figure lurking around. The more Gothic tales I read, the more I feel like I’m being drawn into a twisted fairy tale. Ghosts, ghouls, and fairies all have the potential to pop up in Gothic tales. Magic, spells, and curses all seem more real in the Gothic setting. If I were to guess why, it would be because the main setting of these tales feels so different from my modern world.

Things weren’t nearly as clean and sterile as they are now. Indoor plumbing wasn’t common until the 1900s. Medical sciences are constantly improving, they feel so much more advanced than a hundred years ago, let alone two hundred. We know so much more now than ever before in human history.

I often feel that our modern world takes some of the mystery out of life, whereas the height of the Gothic period seems so very mysterious by comparison. I don’t know if people in the 1800s felt that way as well. Especially since they would have felt that their society was the panicle of modern science and technology.

Yet, superstitions and interest in the supernatural remain, even to today. People continue to try to spot the paranormal during historical ghost tours in some of the world’s oldest cities and as does the fear of crossing a black cat. Some people might laugh at the idea of witches casting spells in today’s modern world, but witchcraft has grown a large following since the early 1900s. Scientists agree that Earth is billions of years old, but some people are still convinced that the earth is actually flat.

I’m very curious as to how the decades surrounding the new millennia will be remembered. What will people a hundred years from now think about our superstitions and omens. Will they think the vampire craze of the mid 2000s meant that people actually thought vampires were sparkly?

But getting back to the topic at hand...

Darkness doesn’t have to be frightening. It can be a chance to conqure the unknown or hide within its mysterious embrace.

Humans have this uncanny need to be both uniquely special and a member of a group. Understanding the mysteries of the unknown, being able to see in the dark so to speak, can make us feel like we’ve stumbled onto information that is only meant for a select worthy few. It can make someone feel more knowledgeable and thus more powerful.

Sure, embracing the darkness in life can mark you as an outsider, but most people don’t go it alone. They have friends who are also interested in these topics, who want to know these secrets. People form their own group who accept their interests and share in their knowledge.

Regardless, it can be fun to Hear stories about the darker side of life...as long as I don’t live them.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please, like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope,you guys like hearing from me.

Until next week.

Welcome to Folklore and Mythology Part 4: Life After Death

Happy New Year everyone - let's talk about death!

Or at least the stories associated with death because there are a lot.

Confused about why I chose this topic as my kick off to 2018? That's alright, I'm often confused by where my mind goes when it's left to wander around without a focal point to focus on. But I've been traveling around the Internet (and received a request to look into the myth of Sisyphus - basically the story of a guy trying to get out of dying) and stumbled upon a ton of mythology and folklore about that unknowable experience that is death and the afterlife.

I'm not really surprised by the number of stories associated with death, the afterlife, and dealing with the dead. It's one of the greatest mysteries about life. What happens after we die?

There are a lot of theories. The atheists I've talked to all say that there's nothing after death. Basically we just go poof. Reincarnation is another popular possibility and one I favor (one life time is just too short to experience everything this world has to offer). However, places such as underworlds seem to pop up a lot in the different mythologies and religions I'm most familiar with.

Growing up as a Protestant Christian, I was taught that good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell. My Catholic relatives might have talked about Purgatory on occasion (and were a little confused as to what happened to the Souls there when the Papacy no longer recognized it), but it wasn't really part of my belief system.

Of course, Christianity isn't the only religion in the world and doesn't have a monopoly on afterlife doctrine and it has gone through a number of changes over the years. There are a number of influences from Greek and Roman mythology (*cough Hades *cough), not to mention Norse mythology (*cough Hel *cough).

In fact, one of the most famous depictions of Christian afterlife, Dante's Divine Comedy, could easily be described as gratuitous self-insert fanfiction. Sadly, these aren't my words, I stole them from Overly Sarcastic Productions (I might reference this YouTube channel a lot in this post).

I could go on about the many depictions of Heaven and Hell (like I've written in all my posts about Folklore and Mythology), but that would create a sub-series into this series and I would prefer to avoid doing that. I also don't want to just list off the many different afterlife places that ancient people said they were going to. That would take forever and require more research than I'm willing to put into this post.

With that written, I want all of you reading to take a quick detour to YouTube to watch this video on underworld mythology and this one about a guy kidnapping death by Overly Sarcastic Productions (see, I told you guys they'd be referenced again) you can get a quick overview of a few myths I've been looking into. I'll wait for you to come back...

My general feelings on underworld and death mythology is that it's trippy as all get out. They have two basic flavors such as when one member of a loving breeding couple dies tragically or someone doesn't want to die, captures death, and causes tons of problems because of the situation (insert facepalm here).

Then there's the mythology and folklore about Death itself (not the act of dying, the physical embodiment of death). Usually, I think of Death as the skeleton like figure cloaked all in black, carrying a scythe known as the Grim Reaper. It's the image that has been ingrained in America's popular culture. Lindsay Ellis did a really interesting YouTube video on the depiction of Death in popular culture (mainly movies) and how this image has barely changed over the years.

The idea of Death as a person has actively been a part of my culture since I was a kid. I remember watching the shows "The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy" and "Dead Like Me". J. K. Rowling and Sir Terry Pratchett created their own versions of Death for their respective fantasy worlds. The common denominator between all of these versions is that Death just kind of wants to do their job and doesn't like it when the natural order is messed with.

The dementors from Harry Potter look a lot like the modern interpretation of the Grim Reaper

Or at least that's my interpretation of all the folklore and mythology about this subject that I've been exposed to.

Also if you do try to rescue your dead loved one from death/the underworld, don't turn around until you've gotten back to the land of the living.

I'm off go back to working on my coming-of-age-horror novel (which is partially why I did this research in the first place - no spoilers). Hopefully I'll be able to finish it before it's 2019. Until next week.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.

Welcome to Icons Part 3: When an Icon Fades

This past week we lost a major icon in the music industry, Chester Bennington. Linkin Park was one of my favorite bands in the 2000s. I loved singing along whenever one of their songs popped up on the radio station (DC 101.1 was all I listened to back then). His music spoke the angsty teenager that I was. Hearing about his death was tough and I might have played nothing but Linkin Park for the past few days.

Within minutes of people hearing about Chester Bennington's death, people were posting on social media how his music changed their lives. Some people posted about how Linkin Park's music helped them get through the worst parts of their lives. Others mentioned how his work inspired them at a time when their lives felt directionless.

We've recently lost a lot of iconic people. Not just musicians, but also actors, models, authors, and political activists. Some lived long full lives, while others passed away after a long battle with illness, and a few lost their lives in tragic accidents. When someone who is iconic dies, people will stop whatever they are doing and type out a message on social media, telling everyone what this person meant to their lives, even though many times they've never actually met.

Iconic people are able to touch so many lives with their work. They can seem so much larger than life, that when we loose them, we fell like we are loosing a part of ourselves. I know people who still mourn the death of Robin Williams and will post tributes to him on his birthday (heck I've been known to cry while watching his older movies).

The first major iconic death that I was aware of was when Princess Diana died. At the time, I had no idea who she was, what she stood for, or why so many people loved her. I only knew about her death because my mom started crying when she heard the news. Back then, I didn't understand why my mom would cry because someone she had never met died. Clearly she meant something to my mom, but it wasn't like they were friends. I'm older now and, hopefully, a wise enough to understand that just because you don't know someone personally doesn't mean they can't touch your lives in a positive way.

Princess Diana meant a lot to many people, as did Prince, and Alan Rickman, Debbie Reynolds, Carrie Fisher, and David Bowie. I could name hundreds of iconic people whom we have lost in the past ten years. Each one helping to shape and influence people they might never have met.

Icons mean something and can represent anything. They can appear out of no where and occasionally fade just as quickly. They inspire us. They influence us. They can change our lives. When an iconic person dies, we mourn them and celebrate their lives. We remember the amazing things they have done and why we had such strong emotions for them.

Death is tragic, even if it is inevitable. When a person dies, they don't just fade away from our collective conscious. We remember them and tell their stories to the next generation.

Thank you for reading. Until next week.