Spooky wookie mixed bag
smaller than usual, because I don't understand Imperial measurements
Here’s a heartwarming picture: A 7 or 8-year-old, dressed as the grim reaper, with mask and scythe, out with his mom to walk the dog.
I saw the boy in northern Vermont in mid-October; he had apparently been wearing the costume since October 1, which means that his mom had barred him from wearing the grim reaper costume “until October.”
I was told that they walked the dog like this every afternoon, a slow stroll with scythe. Death out walking the dog.
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When I was in year seven, one of my friends used to get out her Ouija board when our group convened at her house, and we’d conduct seances in a cupboard. I had never heard of a Oujia board before, and it’s important to note that this friend, K, had transferred to our school from an international school in Seoul and knew about all kinds of witchcraft like nachos and Adam Sandler movies. Later on, she broke the pixie-cut ceiling. Her dad worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, I think, so she had lived in a few places and I considered her a higher-order being with an impossible store of life experiences.
We’d do the chant, then ask if there were any spirits present. The planchette would float over to yes and then we’d ask a name, which it would spell out. At that point, I could never think of a good question to ask a ghost, probably because as a child, you have no good experience of loss — very few ghosts to call on.
I later tried doing seances at a friend’s house closer to home and the planchette never moved.
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Attending childbirth classes, Rachel Cusk wrote, “is like attending classes for death.”
A 1987 med-school thesis on physician-authors looked at William Carlos Williams’ writing about childbirth, concluding that delivery is, in short, a horror show. The analysis is actually darker than Williams’ actual writing: “Williams describes here the insult endured by the senses in the delivery room. The doctor cannot avert his eyes—he must watch every bit. Even when the baby appears, it can look like a lump of slimy flesh, a huge tumor. It is with the first cry that the miracle occurs; blood and mucus on its face, the lump becomes a little life. Its presence reminds us of our liquid, biological nature.”
Samantha Hunt created a work, The Unwritten Book, from her late father’s unpublished manuscript, adorning the text he left behind with her own exhumation of the family and of the ghosts that accompany her/us everywhere. “Is a postcard a ghost?” she asks. She is haunted by her own birth. “When I was very young I had a dream about a small door. Crouching through the door, I passed into a series of scarlet, velvety rooms, smell getting smeller, a birth canal in reverse.” With Hunt, you never forget that the other plane is close by: “Death sometimes takes children.” The trick is learning to live with them: her mother doesn’t mind spirits living in their house, but asks them politely not to show themselves.
Scout: “Mum, when are you going to die?”
*“When Richard Bergh painted Death and the Maiden in 1888, he used his wife Helena as the model for the young woman with the Grim Reaper hot on heels. The painting was a premonition of his wife’s true destiny as her life came to a sudden end the following year.” — The Stockholm Review
Two spooky things
My kids were very into Halloween this year, so I ordered a skeleton to hang off our front verandah. Only I am still shit at converting imperial to metric, so when it came, it wasn’t life-size but child-size, which is much, much creepier.
This piece of art Japhy brought home from daycare once
Goodies
Nina Li Coomes on jet lag and living in two places:
“With each trip, I carried with me the fear that I had grown too static, not able to endure the shift in perception and place.”
You may enjoy this New York Times report (a “how-to” in the real estate section) on people who believe that spirits reside in their house. As usual, the comments in some case exceed the reporting:
Thank you for reading this mini KAFKA’S <3 <3 <3 Happy hauntings, team!
Great article ! Brings me back to my childhood and Halloween.