Do Not Touch The Skulls

Click below for a really neat post over at The Skeleton Key blog...

Catacomb Culture

In love with this guy's work.
The bones of  Jeremy Ciliberto.

Catacomb Culture Instagram here.

This Is Kinda Awesome

Click below:

The Next In Line

"I don't mind skulls and bones," said Marie. "There's nothing even vaguely human to them.  I'm not scared of skulls and bones. They're like something insectile.  If a child was raised and didn't know he had a skeleton in him, he wouldn't think anything of bones, would he? That's how it is with me. Everything human has been scraped off these.  There's nothing familiar left to be horrible.  In order for a thing to be horrible it has to suffer a change you can recognize.  This isn't changed. They're still skeletons, like they always were.  The part that changed is gone, and so there's nothing to show for it. Isn't that interesting?"

Joseph nodded.

She was quite brave now.

"Well," she said, "let's see the mummies."

"Here, senora," said the caretaker.

He took them far down the hall away from the stack of bones and when Joseph paid him a peso he unlocked the forbidden crystal doors and opened them wide and they looked into an even longer, dimly lighted hall in which stood the people.

Ray Bradbury

Ghoul

Ghoul, n. A demon addicted to the reprehensible habit of devouring the dead. The existence of ghouls has been disputed by that class of controversialists who are more concerned to deprive the world of comforting beliefs than to give it anything good in their place. In 1640 Father Secchi saw one in a cemetery near Florence and frightened it away with the sign of the cross. He describes it as gifted with many heads and an uncommon allowance of limbs, and he saw it in more than one place at a time. The good man was coming away from dinner at the time and explains that if he had not been "heavy with eating" he would have seized the demon at all hazards. Atholston relates that a ghoul was caught by some sturdy peasants in a churchyard at Sudbury and ducked in a horsepond. (He appears to think that so distinguished a criminal should have been ducked in a tank of rosewater.) The water turned at once to blood "and so contynues unto ys daye." The pond has since been bled with a ditch. As late as the beginning of the fourteenth century a ghoul was cornered in the crypt of the cathedral at Amiens and the whole population surrounded the place. Twenty armed men with a priest at their head, bearing a crucifix, entered and captured the ghoul, which, thinking to escape by the stratagem, had transformed itself to the semblance of a well known citizen, but was nevertheless hanged, drawn and quartered in the midst of hideous popular orgies. The citizen whose shape the demon had assumed was so affected by the sinister occurrence that he never again showed himself in Amiens and his fate remains a mystery.

From Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary 

Image from the Willow Cove Haunt.

Corridor

Image by Attila Goloncser.

What If...

Lately I've found myself planning a haunted attraction. One of those pie in the sky things. I think I'll blame Eric from Haunted Overload. He proved that a haunted attraction doesn't have to be packed with animatronic movements and blasts from compressed cylinders. It's all about detail and atmosphere. So the question I keep asking is - can a haunted attraction be totally static, with no movement whatsoever except for fog and flickering candles. No actors, no startling scares, just creep factor. Would visitors feel cheated? Would they throw rotten fruit at me?

One of the scenes in my display would be a massive wall-t0-wall floor-to-ceiling crypt/catacomb/ossuary. Very narrow, very dark, and very long. Corpses and smashed coffins, some tree roots, and darkness.

Sorta like this beautiful photo from Opacity.us, but vile and dank.

It'll probably never happen, but it's fun planning it in my head.

Catacombs

A really fun idea.

I'd love to make a walk-through one of these days. I'd definitely do a catacomb passageway of some kind.

my-mania.com

The Dead

Back in the 80s, when I first discovered Ray Bradbury, I purchased THE OCTOBER COUNTRY for the Halloween-sounding title and was surprised to learn it was a collection of short stories. The notion of a novel having that title was thrilling, so I didn't know what to make of a bunch of unrelated short stories. I remember opening the book to the first short story and sitting on the floor in the dining room in my parents' home. It was a hot day in the summer and they had one of those giant old wall-unit air conditioners running. This one hummed like a massive generator about to spit out its last icy wind (which it eventually did on the day of my sister's high school graduation party - a particularly hot and violently humid day - proving that karma can affect machinery). I sat next to the air conditioner and read every story. It was the perfect way to start my love affair with Ray Bradbury. Every story was brilliant. Each one was so different than anything I had ever read before.

The story The Next In Line was about the Mexican catacombs and unfortunate mummified corpses that ended up lining the walls of the catacombs as a result of their poor families ceasing monthly grave "rental" payments. It was also the first time I had ever heard of the Mexican Day(s) of the Dead. I started collecting tiny skulls and skeletons immediately. And I started buying everything by Ray Bradbury that I could get my hands on.

"Here was a man, his stomach open, like a tree hollow where you dropped your child love letters when you were eleven! Her eyes entered the hole in the space under his ribs. She peeked in. He looked like an Erector set inside. The spine, the pelvic plates. The rest was tendon, parchment, bone, eye, beardy jaw, ear, stupefied nostril. And this ragged eaten cincture in his navel into which a pudding might be spooned."

You can read "The Next In Line" here.



Image source.