More on haunted places as Halloween draws closer.
A year after a man had murdered six members of his family in a waterfront Dutch Colonial home in Amityville, NY, newlyweds George and Kathy Lutz bought the home in 1975 at a “bargain-basement” price that outweighed its infamy. The Lutzes claimed soon after moving in to have experienced phenomena including red eyes at the windows, swarms of flies, ooze coming from the walls, and a sepulchral voice screaming, “Get out!” Not an expert on this topic but have an armchair theory: the couple were still partying after their honeymoon and were either tripping or going through withdrawal from drugs and/or alcohol with hallucinations. That combined with buyer’s remorse led them to think they were living with a supernatural curse.
The Life magazine entry for the Salem, Massachusetts, witch hunt suggests to me that there was racial bitterness behind events that sparked the trials that convicted and hanged 19 townspeople in 1692. A Caribbean slave working for the village’s minister had been telling the fortunes of the minister’s daughters and their friends who later showed signs of possession. Thus began the “notorious witch hysteria” that interestingly ensnared women and men. Hysteria is a loaded term because some psychiatrists previously attributed it only to women, its ancient Greek root word referring to female anatomy. One definition is a disorder “whose symptoms include conversion of psychological stress into physical symptoms (somatization), selective amnesia, shallow volatile emotions, and overdramatic or attention-seeking behavior.” The trials reflected the long-running sense of sexually repressed white people in America blaming blacks at least in part for their crises. The slave, Tituba, blamed the Devil for her actions, but her comment may have been sarcastic. In any case there is plenty of evidence of historical consequences of the trials from the factually based Nathaniel Hawthorne novel The House of the Seven Gables set more than 100 years later, to the Great Salem Fire of 1914 that left half the town homeless (fulfilling a curse made at one of the executions), to a series of town sheriffs who died in office of heart trouble or retired with blood problems, literally bad blood.
On a lighter note, a few one-liners for a lovely lady putatively met in Bangkok (probably told many times before):
- L—, are you ready to tie one on?
- L—, may I fit on your futon?
- L—, I hear you like Cantonese food. Are you also a wanton…I mean a wantin’…I mean a wonton woman?
- L—, I noticed you have a clam in your aquarium. Why are you clams so d— shellfish? Don’t clam up on me, please.
- L—, is it true your family has ties to the mafia?
- L—, can’t get to the phone right now; all tied up.
- L—, English isn’t your native tongue, so please remember when the minister asks, “do you take this man, etc.,” the ideal response is, “I do,” not, “doo-doo.”