Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Guerilla Art

Was looking at my Wind Ghost in the basement yesterday and I think I'm close to taking him out and finding a suitable tree on which to hang and leave him. Probably by a highway. An ideal location would be in the window of an abandoned house by the side of a traveled road, but that's probably not going to happen. A big ol' ugly tree will do.

[Halloween] guerilla art was brought up by Jon once in a comment in an earlier blog post. I've often thought of leaving a corpse hanging out of the mud near a drainage ditch, or stuffed into the stump of a tree along a path in the woods, but I always ended up feeling like a criminal scheming the death of someone - death by heart attack. I know that I'd LOVE to have that happen to me. To have that brief moment of horror and shock and panic as I scrambled to get a closer look. Then I'd realize it was fake and fully grasp the event, and be thankful that it happened to me. But that's me. Maybe I wouldn't be too thankful if I truly believed it was real and called 911 or ran through the woods to get help (probably tripping over a log and falling face-down into some old wet fungus). Not sure if there are laws specifically written for such things. I'm assuming there are.

So I'll keep it simple. A ghost, blowing in the wind and caught by a passing car's headlights. As Jon wrote in that comment "This is the kind of thing that inspires local legends. Please do this and please photograph it."

Will do.

Image source.



Info on Street Art

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Awesome. I've been wanting to do this sort of thing too. I think the times that it's considered criminal is if it turns into a "bomb threat" or something similar, such as one case a number of years ago where someone made a fake aquatic mine by gluing styrofoam cups onto a beach ball and painting it black. They had to send a bomb-squad out in a boat to recover it, and discover the hoax.

Ghoul Friday said...

It's a really cool idea (nice one, Jon). I'd love to stumble upon a scene in an unexpected place.

And yes, I would go more the ghost-route than the corpse or black box route ;)

Grim said...

I've been thinking about leaving the scarecrow that I've used the last couple of years off the side of a road, maybe just inside the woodline where it would be barely noticed. I keep imagining a small child riding in a car looking out the window and spotting it, then telling their parents who would think that it was just an over-active imagination.

I would also like to leave my Grim prop somewhere, but I can't part with it just yet.

Ruthie said...

A friend of mine told me about "geo-caching"? Wouldn't that be fun to start a haunted prop or Halloween stuffs in general treasure hunt?

That way, maybe we can share our love of the spooky with others.

Who knows, one of us might get the tombstone or body part they have been looking for.

But you would have to play fair and leave something behind!

JHMDF said...

I have seen some crazy stuff driving through the country so many times and its always so much fun thinking of why and how things got there.....an abandoned car at the edge of the woods, a unidentified creature crossing the road....cant wait to see the pics Rot, and you should check on it weekly and take photos if its still there to show its decay.