“There is no end to the old houses, with resounding galleries, and dismal state bedchambers, and haunted wings shut up for many years, through which we may ramble… and encounter any number of ghosts.” –Charles Dickens
Picked up a copy of the Life magazine special edition “The World’s Most Haunted Places: Creepy, Ghostly, and Notorious Spots” today on a whim. It was originally published in 2015 and reissued this year. It begins with the above Dickens quote. It has an interesting “one-world” design with five sections that each describe haunted places throughout the world. Here are two of its entries that attracted me at an initial glance.
First: the Psycho house where Ed Gein, the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s fictional movie, lived. When discovered by police in 1957, Gein had been living alone in an isolated farm house in Plainfield, Wisconsin, following the death of his mother. The real horror was much worse, of course, than Hitchcock’s movie. The entry notes that his father was an alcoholic who pre-deceased his mother who was a religious fanatic and appears to have told her two sons possibly misogynistic things about women (she had wanted a daughter). Gein’s story was also an influence on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.
Second: the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, built by inventor F.O. Stanley in 1909 and visited by Stephen King in 1974 on vacation with his wife and young son. King said he had a nightmare there about his son being pursued by an evil entity that inspired his 1977 novel The Shining. The Stanley is, according to a paranormal investigator, “a Disneyland for the spirts,” and the magazine entry notes rumored spirits including that of a maid who intimately joined married couples, a maintenance man strictly enforcing an 11 pm curfew, a humming ghost in the concert hall, and the wraith of a lothario offering unwanted attention to female patrons.
It will soon be Halloween.