The New York Ghost

[vovat]

Another Halloween gone by, and the Great Pumpkin never showed up. We had to settle for the Adequate Pumpkin. No, seriously, finding things to do on Halloween when you're an adult is kind of a challenge. I was allowed to dress up at work, but I didn't, as I didn't have the chance to put together a costume. There's also a Halloween-themed Oz story for which I've had the basic idea for about twenty years, and I thought maybe this year would be when I finally wrote it. I guess there's always next year. I actually just got an idea for another Oz Christmas story, but we'll see if anything comes of that. bethje and I did get to go on two haunted hayrides this year. We were hoping for more, but all the others either weren't running this year, or could only be paid for in a package deal with other stuff we didn't want. For some reason, everyone seems to be marketing zombie paintball, which combines two things that have never particularly interested me. The one we did go on last weekend, at a mulch place near Hammonton, was pretty fun.

On Halloween night itself, we went into Manhattan for a ghost tour of the East Village. We've been on these in Philadelphia and Ocean City before, and it was largely the same deal. A guide takes you on a tour of the area, and points out buildings where someone claims they saw the ghost of some famous person. I'm very much a skeptic when it comes to such things; the human imagination is a powerful thing, especially when planted with suggestions. Still, if there really are ghosts, their lives--er, afterlives--must be pretty boring. Sure, at first you can get some fun out of floating through walls and jumping out at people, but after a while that would probably get tedious. The lady who gave the tour last night wore a witch's outfit and performed in character as Peter Stuyvesant's wife Judith, complete with Dutch accent. She was amusing, and made jokes along the way. One of the places we stopped was McSorley's, a bar said to be haunted by Harry Houdini. The guide told us about how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle held a seance for Houdini's mother, but the magician didn't buy it because his mother didn't know English. Although I'm not sure the guide actually said this, I kind of got the impression this happened at the bar, when the Internet tells me it was actually in Atlantic City. I suppose it was just a good story involving Houdini and ghosts. Apparently Houdini and Doyle were good friends for a long time, but totally at odds on supernatural matters, and the seance was the last straw between them. What was more mysterious about the tour was how our group managed to shrink. There were three girls who started it with us and had Beth take their picture, but they disappeared not long after that. Hey, maybe they were ghosts! Or, you know, they had something else to do and slipped out onto the crowded Manhattan streets where nobody can ever find anybody without very specific directions. I was very tired by the time we got home, but we still have a few horror movies to watch.

To move to something that's scary in a totally different way, it came out recently that Jian Ghomeshi is abusive to women. I didn't really follow his television and radio career, but I was a fan of Moxy Früvous back in the day, and he always came across as pretty gentle. I guess that just goes to show how images can be deceiving. He claimed that everything he did with women was consensual, but: 1) according to several women, this is a lie; and 2) that carries no weight legally. Even if it HAD been consensual, I don't think that's the kind of thing you can do in casual relationships. I don't know much about BDSM, but everything I've heard about it suggests it's pretty much entirely about trust.

Comments

[suegypt.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you know the phrase Houdini secretly told his wife he intended to say from the beyond if he ever had a chance to break through from the other side (death)? The phrase that would let her know - when she attended a seance and tried to contact him - it was he?

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I can't recall if I've heard about that before, but it's mentioned on Wikipedia.