A Final Resting Place

I'm weird. I've found I actually enjoy visiting cemeteries. Their peace and tranquility is certainly a part of the allure, but the tombstones, monuments, and mausoleums are what really attracts me. And the more overrun and unkempt the cemetery is, the better!

Obviously this passion arose from my haunting for Halloween, visiting cemeteries to get ideas for carving tombstones out of foam. But I've since found myself going to a cemetery to walk and take in the scenery for no other reason than it was quite relaxing. Not the "flat stone" cemeteries with markers that are really just plaques laying on the ground, but the burial places where there are monuments to those interred within.

Yet it also stems from my love of history. It's why I also love abandoned buildings, particularly those that have longbeen forgotten. I enjoy trying to imagine the history of the place, the people that populated it, and the stories the building could tell. There's something about finding an old, cracked plate or a rusted knife on a rotted countertop and thinking about the day it was placed there. What the person who lived there was thinking and how they came to leave the place but not take the knife or plate with them.

Or factories where the grass has grown tall in the parking lot. The windows have long since broken out by vandals and the walls covered in graffiti, but at one time people were walking through the gates of the grounds in the morning drinking a cup of coffee. That sort of history fascinates me.

There was a sumptuous book called "Ruin" which was a collection of black and white photos of old mills, bridges, grain elevators, storefronts, and more. It should be on my coffee table.

No doubt, though, this love of a dilapidated past was born of my trips to upstate New York to visit my grandmother's farm. Located in Afton, NY, we'd travel for hours and it was with a sense of relief when we hit the "beebee road," a gravel track that took us up to Tracy Rd., so named for the big, propertied family that lived there.

My grandmother's farm was along Tracy Rd. but to get there we had to pass the "first farm," a ramshackle hut that at some point had been turned into a hunter's shack. It was set back from the road amid high weeds, the wood grayed from years of exposure. My mother would tell us stories about growing up in that shack, where the cow poked its head through her bedroom window right over her bed and having to walk through the snow to go to the outhouse in winter.

It's not how I remember it

It's gone now, as is the second farm. The third farm still stands, but is on its way to a similar fate as the first farm. The house sat at the top of a hill and had been a grand white structure with a portico porch running across the face of building. It commanded the view of the 188-acre dairy farm they ran, with pastures streaming out in front and wheat fields behind. A windbreak of poplar trees still stands, as does the giant, single elm out in the middle of the trees.

The farm has since been divided up by developers and houses now dot the fields where I once ran in my youth, catching frogs in the hand-dug watering hole, walking with the cows down to pasture. I visited a couple of years ago and was slightly distressed to see a calf tied up on the home's front lawn just as someone would leash a dog. The house has indeed fallen on hard times, no longer looking as I or any of my family members remembered it. Gone are the columns and the cement porch, replaced by a small wooden structure, almost utilitarian in nature.

I got to all this reminiscing and thinking of ruined buildings and forgotten cemeteries -- and my adoration for all of them -- because I just finished watching a show on cemeteries on Netflix called "A Cemetery Special," a show that highlighted a number of cemeteries around the country, including Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery, the Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh (I may try to take that in when I go to Hauntcon), and the Cypress Lawn cemetery in California.

It wasn't particularly in depth, and I thought it could stand to focus a little more on the unique architecture that dots their hillsides, but I ended up thinking how odd it was how much I enjoyed old cemeteries.

As I said, I'm weird.

Going Medieval

I think I've mentioned before my dilemma with Halloween decorating: where I prefer a darker, moodier, atmospheric tableau my wife tends towards lighter, cuter designs. Where I like rot and death, she prefers quaint and kitsch.

So far I've given her the run of the inside of the house while I've been allowed to take over most of the front yard. Some of our yard props are still too lighthearted for my taste, but we have an uneasy truce that allows me to have control over most props (probably because I'm the one making them!).

This year I want to take my display to a higher plane, and I've been musing about how best to achieve the effect I'm looking for. I've previously said I was looking at various ideas, such as a Grand Guignol theme along with a medieval one. I've decided now against the former because I think that would rely too much upon blood and guts. One of the charms of the Grand Guignol theater was the level of torture and gore they brought to the stage. Since I'm looking for something creepier than just oozing blood, I've decided I will go with a macabre medieval set. For some reason, the period encompassing the rise of the Black Plague in medieval England seems appropriately atmospheric enough.

"The plague, I hear, encreases in the towne much, and exceedingly in the country everywhere." -- Samuel Pepys

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that death was literally at everyone's door. The village of Eyam in Derbyshire is perhaps best known as the "plague village" because of its willingness to seal itself off from the outside world when the plague arrived there. Of the 350 villagers that lived there prior to the Black Death's arrival, only 83 survived.

"How many noble men, how many beautiful ladies, how many light-hearted youth, who were such that Galen, Hippocrates, or Asclepius would declare them the healthiest of all humans, had breakfast in the morning with their relatives, companions, or friends, and had dinner that evening in another world with their ancestors!" -- Boccaccio

Death and ruins seem to be an appropriate feeling for Halloween, decay and decrepitude. Thus I've decided to expand my Halloween haunt to include my side yard where I'll be able to channel trick-or-treaters to venture to get their candy. So I've begun sketching out ideas for how I'd like the side yard to look.



Passing beneath an arbor, you travel along a narrow stone path that opens up into a wide patio area. An elevated, wrap-around porch is on your left while a tall picket fence runs along the right. I'm envisioning a stone arcade of ivy and moss-covered gothic arches lining the lower wall of the porch. Above will be the tattered remnants of aged banners.

Since I also want to try my hand at using some of the new papier mache methods I've discovered to build larger, human-like props I think I'll be able to incorporate one or two back here as well. The picture above shows my sketch of a plague doctor, the poor souls whose duty it was to visit the houses of the ill to see who had the plague and who did not. From what I've read, they weren't real doctors at all (the real ones had fled the cities), but merely brave individuals who were appointed the task of sealing up a house with any infected individuals inside.



The creep factor comes from their outfits. Dressed in long robes to protect their skin from exposure, they wore great beaked masks that were filled with aromatic herbs to fend off the foul smell of the dead and dying. Their eyes were protected as well with goggles and their broad-rimmed hats protected their heads from any airborne attack. One or two of them standing around the patio (or peering back over their shoulders at you while they tend to the dying) might be creepy indeed. Plague-bearing rats climbing over everything would be part of the scene.

These two sketches are the start of my ruminations as to how I'd like the haunt to develop. As more ideas arise and as the prop building develops, I'll post more thoughts here.

Rich