Ghosts, Limited

As I've written about before, despite having a complete disbelief in an afterlife, spirits, and hauntings, I do still enjoy watching shows and or movies about them. Although sometimes over the top, Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures can be entertaining, perhaps precisely because of their hammy performances.

So I tuned in last night to Animal Planet's "Demon Exorcist." I was first surprised to see it had nothing to do with animals -- which was good, because I never would have tuned in, and besides, I think they already have a haunted pets show or something -- and then surprised to find out it had no exorcisms either. Seriously, unless you count wiping some "holy water" on the doors and walls of a house, it was an hour of nothing.

I'm sure Father Karras would have been surprised to find out as well that all it took to remove a spirit from a house was a brief group prayer, the aforementioned holy water dispersal, and a simple incantation to leave the house. Poof! Gone!

Particularly since one of the "victims" had been haunted by several specters her entire life after giving herself over to the dark side to save her sister from the fate when they were just children -- sacrificed, as they were, by their own Satanist parents no less! -- basically saying "boo" to the demon sent him hightailing it out of the house. The woman and her sister seemed more to have some deep emotional problems than a case of demonic possession.

The second case had potential though. A family with three kids lived in a house that was supposedly possessed by a demon and they've been forced to resort to sleeping together in one room because of the haunting. The interviews with the kids built up some suspense that maybe there would be some raucous goings on, but alas! no. Results were the same: group prayer, a holy water dousing, and begone! It was laughable when after wiping the holy water all over the house the "demonologist" was surprised to see the remaining water turn cloudy. "I've never seen that before." Hey buddy, do you think you might have been transferring some dust from the walls to the water? And the wife seemed to describe what sounded more like having a wet dream rather than being attacked by an incubus.

Proof the "exorcism" was successful lie (lay? I can never remember which) in the reaction of the homeowners when they returned to the house. If they felt good about the place, then all was well. Seeing the mother and son stand looking into a closet and the mother saying, "Now that feels like a closet" was hilarious.

In short, there was nothing "there" there. It was just an hour long talkfest. Jason and Grant at Ghost Hunters, along with Zac and the boys at Ghost Adventures, have lowered the bar so far that shows like Demon Exorcist can get greenlighted. How many years has Ghost Hunters been on and they've never caught anything on camera that hasn't been able to be debunked as Grant pushing the envelope? Those darn ghosts only want to be filmed at the very edge of sight, not up close and personal, no matter how many cameras are placed in a house.

And other than Ghost Adventures flying brick in the first(?) episode -- where Zac and the others inexplicably ran screaming from the building rather than investigate further -- have been unable to catch proof of anything either.

So Demon Exorcist can now come on and purport to exorcise spirits from a house with little more than what you'd see staged by kids playing with an Ouija board -- and again filming even less "proof" than Ghost Hunters/Adventures -- and getting it on the air.

Don't waste an hour of your own life watching another episode of Demon Exorcist. It was simply awful.

Sculpting Update

Well, because I'm impatient I just wanted to dive right in to my "sculpting" so, let the consistency be damned, I used the paper clay I had on hand. I'm not unhappy with the result, though unlike Lauriebeast I didn't just pick up clay one day and suddenly discover I could create the Bride of Frankenstein. Still, with refinements and painting, it may be good enough to put out into the yard display and not have to hide it under low-light conditions.

Anyway, here are a couple of progress pictures.

The paper mache base skull with a cardboard tube neck, also mached.

After applying some of the facial features.

While the eye sockets look really large and wide here, they don't seem so big in person. And actually, I'll be adding more clay to the face to create a more saggy skin look and to achieve heavy-bagged eyes. Had to stop here, though, because the wife wanted to have a dinner-and-a-movie night with me. Damn, woman! You're interfering in the creation of art!

A Pound of Flesh

Or clay. Having seen such awesome sculpts from such artists as Dead Spider, Lauriebeast, and Terra (what's up with women having an excess of kickass sculpting skills?), I thought I'd try my hand at sculpting the head of my new prop I'm building, my yard display's gravedigger. Every cemetery needs someone to dig the graves and I've had to do the work up till now. So I'm hiring someone to take over for me.

My original inspiration was Spider's Hemlock Densch, but I've seen quite a few characters now that have me casting about for my own character. I don't typically name my props as some do, but when he filled out his application for the gravedigger job, he wrote in Madog of the Dead so I guess I have to call him that.

My goal is to slowly turn my yard display into a Medieval church walk-thru. It's a multi-year project, if for no other reason that I work slow despite having tons of ideas. I like reading about other haunter's projects almost as much as I enjoy building my own so I find ways to waste enormous amounts of time.

Madog, by the way, was a Welsh prince said to have sailed to North America in 1170, thus predating Columbus's own journey by 300 years. There's actually a long tradition of "Welsh Indians," and some structures and ruins that were found in the New World and dated to well before the white man was known to have arrived, are attributed to them. I think there was a History Channel program about them. Maybe it was the SciFi channel (nope, still won't call it the SyFy channel).

For my purposes, Madog was also a riverman in the Brother Cadfael mystery series by Ellis Peters (like Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, Derek Jacobi is Cadfael in my head. Okay, Basil Rathbone could work as Holmes -- I liked his hard-drinking, chain-smoking style, but Robert Downey Jr. was just God awful!). Madog's job was to fish the dead out of the River Severen whenever someone fell in and drowned. Since I don't have a river in my yard -- and don't plan on digging out a channel for one (even for Halloween!) anytime soon -- Madog will have to be a gravedigger.

The difference between what I'm creating and what others have done before -- aside from their creations being awesome and mine likely sucking -- is that I actually won't be using modeling clay or similar media. I'm going to try and use a homemade paper clay recipe, the shredded newspaper used for blown insulation popularized by Stolloween.

I've been slowly adopting that to different skulls I've been creating to make certain features more prominent,  and figure I'd like to go a step further and see if I have any skill to use it for an actual sculpt. One of the challenges I've found previously, however, is the pulp clay I've been using thus far had a lumpy texture to it so I'm going to have to smooth out the mixture a lot more before it will be ready to use for features. Should be fun, though.

Now, you may be thinking  I have some form of ADD since my last post was about building entrance columns to my cemetery, and since it took me a little while to make two sides before I stopped and I haven't posted any update pictures since, the likelihood of them being finished is pretty slim. Well you'd be right (about them not being finished, anyway). Perhaps it is an attention deficit I suffer from, but also a groundswell of laziness too. I just don't feel like running to the Home Depot at the moment to buy the wood I need to complete the job. So why not start a new project?!

Having a couple of projects going at the same time though saves me from getting too bored with any one. But tomorrow I will be making the Depot run. Since I'll also be needing to buy lumber to finish my basement (see, not just laziness or ADD), throwing an extra board or two on the lumber cart for the columns will save me from making a special trip. Now whether I add a couple of lengths of PVC for Madog's body I haven't yet decided, because I might just craft that out of lumber too.

So far I've made my paper mache head that I'll use as a base and will be fiddling with the clay mixture today to begin the sculpt. I'll post some pictures when I have anything of substance to shop. That way I'll have a portfolio full of half-started projects but none completed!

Pillar of the Community

I started working on cemetery entrance pillars for my haunt today. I had put together two quick ones two years ago, using bathroom paneling my neighbor was throwing out but have wanted something better. And taller. The others were just a couple of feet high and although they served their purpose, now it's time to do a better quality job.

There are a lot of options available on the forums, but I've always been impressed by the ones built by Spider Rider. They have an appropriately aged, corrupt look that I'd like to emulate.

How to build was the next decision. I knew I wasn't going the bathroom paneling way again and extruded foam insulation is a common alternative. Then I saw Macabre Rob's paper mache effort on the forums and thought that was right up my alley. He actually made his pillars from a cardboard box and paper mache bricks from small boxes he collected for recycling. The finished result is awesome!

I began collecting my own "bricks" -- until I realized  the monumental task this would become. I like cheap, but Bob's got a lot more patience than I do. Hard to believe the finished work began as cardboard and paper mache.

So I'll be opting for a more "traditional" insulation design. Below are a few of the early construction pictures.

The Process

The first thing I did was ripped a few 2x4's that had previously been part of my cheesy guillotine I threw together my first year haunting down to 2x2 thickness.

I then pre-drilled holes in the ends of the cross braces to prevent them from splitting.

I attached cross braces at the top and bottom, and then attached two braces about three quarters of the way up. This will be where my lanterns I picked up at Curby's will be attached.

 To provide a mounting surface for them, I attached a plywood board.

This was as far as I got today. Obviously I didn't tax myself too hard, but I've at least started. As I go along I'll continue to update the process and at some point I may finish and have a tutorial to share at the same time.

An Ass-Grabbin' Grave Grabber

Yesterday I went to the NJ/PA Make & Take group in Neptune with NoahFentz where the project du jour was a grave grabber. The mechanism designed by niblique71 (Greg) is apparently slightly different than other similar builds on the Internet and forums as it allows for a more straight hand movement. In many of the props built, the hand moves in more of an arc.



Of course, there's a reason for that because we're trying to turn a circular motion into a linear movement. Adding more "linkages," apparently helps that out.


I wasn't initially keen on building the prop, but figured my doghouse where my failed reindeer/cat/dog creation was previously housed would be better served by a grave grabber like this. But I think there's still too much arc movement in the design, so I'm scouting around now for designs (I know I've seen them!) that translates the circular movement of a gear motor to a straight linear motion.

Greg's tutorial shows the movement towards the end, but if you want to build one yourself, it's a great video to watch nonetheless.



I did find a thread on HauntForum which led me to this design of a Grave Peeper by stokstad that uses the gear motor to create a straight up-and-down motion. Laying that down flat would seem to give me the straight reaching motion I'm looking for (it's also very cool the head turning mechanism stokstad designed into his Peeper).



Does anyone know of any other links that would discuss converting a round motion into a linear one?

A Bad Day Haunting...

...or just talking and thinking about haunting, is better than a good day at work. And today wasn't bad at all. In fact, it was a very good day, spent talking and thinking about haunts and Halloween.

Got to hang out with my buddy Noah Fentz who operates the award-winning home haunt The Creepy House Next Door and have our own mini make-and-take. We actually worked in The Creepy House, well upstairs from the haunt, anyway.

While I was corpsing my groundbreaker, Noah worked on a wig head he's putting together for a step-by-step tutorial. I don't think I'm telling stories out of school by mentioning it since he does have on his site a section devoted to it, only that it says the tutorial is coming soon. And it is. I was there. He's working on it!

I also got to pour my first plaster of Paris skull casting. Actually, Noah showed me how to do it using one of his latex molds. He did the first half of the pour, I did the second, and then he showed me how to separate the mold from the cast. Very cool. That is now my next goal, to make my own latex mold so I can cast skulls regularly. The result is the picture above. Once it firmly sets in a few days, I'll sand it and paint it for use this Halloween.

A fun lunch, excellent discussion about haunting and the haunters we know, and an all around good day hanging out with good people. Here's to more days like this.

A Stiff Arm Block

I've been working on my latest groundbreaker, mache-ing the arms into their proper position. It took a little longer than I anticipated because while the left arm is twisted back behind it helping to lift the corpse out of the ground, the right arm is stretched out in front of it, reaching forward to grasp at any passersby.

Because the arm does reach forward I wanted to make sure it was sturdy enough that it wouldn't droop over time or worse break off. Also, because I am thinking about storage afterwards, I thought to make the arm removable and figured a PVC joint (the arm itself is mache-covered PVC) would be best.

I quickly discovered that since I didn't plan for this ahead of time soon enough, the shoulder where it would join would eventually weaken. So this arm will be "welded" into the rest of the body to make it secure. Next time, however, since I'm building more of the infrastructure of my groundbreakers with PVC I'll incorporate the appropriate joints into the framework from the beginning rather than trying to stick it on as an afterthought.

But the underlying mache is now complete and following a coat of spar varnish to protect the mache from the elements, the corpsification will begin. Feels good getting back into the groove.