E.C. Walsh Blogsphere

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.”

“Ball at the Mall” by yours truly

Stress ball, stress ball, I’ve squeezed you so much that my pallor doth pall.

Sometimes it’s so much I want to bounce off the wall,

But instead we will go to the mall.

Stop your bouncing on the escalator so I don’t fall.

All in all the crowds at the mall enthrall, but sadly my chances are small.

Yet I will resist deflowering a wall to avoid having someone make a police call.

And have doctors put me in a padded cell, where I would yell.

Anyone could tell that sulfur smell and know it was hell.

Stress ball, stress ball, who am I trying to impress ball?

Methinks I’ll have something to confess ball.

“Rondelet, Rondelet, Arriba!” by yours truly

What was I thinking?

Outcome was stinking.

What was I thinking?

May have been drinking.

So words are now linking.

New book should be inking.

What was I thinking?

Regarding ghost ships, one of the entries in the Life magazine I’m reading is for “The Queen Mary,” a former luxury liner permanently docked and now used as a hotel in Long Beach, Calif. (temporarily closed). When used in World War II, the ship mistakenly sheared another into half and killed 338 people. The entry notes that  before its WWII service, the ship had ferried U.S. bon vivants like Fred Astaire and Bob Hope across the Atlantic.

The most haunted place on the former ship , the entry notes, may be what was the first-class pool area, “home to Little Jackie, a five- or six-year-old girl who is perhaps the ship’s most famous ghost, one who is crying out for her mother.” The entry notes other haunting aspects of the ship, including a ghostly officer who died “after drinking poison that he thought was gin.” Well, many say alcohol is poison when taken improperly.

Artistically, two works come to mind. The first is “Ghost Ship,” a supernatural horror movie released in 2002. It seems to have elements of the Long Beach hotel. The other is the novel “Moby Dick,” perhaps the best-known work of fiction dealing with sea-faring. My main memory of the novel is of Captain Ahab pacing the deck in a brooding manner; I pace too.

 

 

Another entry from the Life magazine on haunted places. This is on Japan’s Suicide Forest, also know as Aokigahara Jukai, a 14-square-mile volcanic forest  at the northwestern base of Mount Fuji near Tokyo, Japan. Jukai means “sea of trees,” the most popular suicide destination in Japan, with at least 100 bodies found annually.

It seems to me Japanese society has some things in common with the Stoics with regard to suicide. One of the the things people find odd about  both is that they at least seem to condone suicide in some circumstances. I prefer Western religious attitudes that suicide is a sin, and whatever sins you may have committed, killing yourself is only adding to them.

There are two movies on the Suicide Forest or suicide in Japan that come to mind. The first is “The Forest” from 2016, an English-language film about an American woman who kills herself in the forest in a “sins-of-the-father-brought-upon-the-child” plot. The other is called “Imprint” by prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike. It is less than an hour long, and was initially banned for its graphic horror content, It was true to my experience as a Western reporter in Asia who, frankly, was interested in women there. If you have a strong stomach, it is a good example of Japanese horror.

Had an idea when younger that Communist countries have higher suicide rates because they are often avowedly atheist, and some people need God, or at least the idea of God, to really feel forgiven for what they have done. I have heard interpersonal forgiveness for heinous crimes is impossible. So something else is needed.

Had this idea while reading another Charles Krauthammer essay dealing with church and state, where he says the problem with the French Revolution was that it had “excessive rationalism” and “its twin, hatred of religion.” I have said before I am not devoutly religious, but I agree with Krauthammer that atheists are pursuing “a religion of pure reason to overthrow Christianity.” I have very personal experience with atheists trying to reform or clarify religious institutions and tragically failing. Sometimes, a gradualist approach to reform is better.

You can see for yourself on Wikipedia which are the top ten or so countries for suicide. Russia is right up there. I’m not sure what my point is, but atheists like Christopher Hitchens are correct that religious institutions can do damage. Renouncing religion entirely isn’t the solution, IMO.  It was the idea of my namesake Edmund Campion that the English would have been better reforming religion from within than starting a new one.

 

This is anecdotal and self-regarding (but entirely true) evidence about the Affordable Care Act. Since 2016 I have had almost no formal income, have been uninsured, have been denied Medicaid/Disability, had more than $100,000 in medical bills, and am not particularly wealthy. ACA has done nothing for me.

“Short and Sour” by yours truly

No one has to tell the truth,

But you may need a talk with Dr. Ruth.

Ah, the folly of youth.

It makes you want to sip vermouth.

 

Walking back from the store this evening, a distant neighbor called from his porch, “watch out.” In a few seconds, I noticed a bear was in his driveway along with two of her cubs. They were about 20 feet away. I said I was new to the neighborhood and didn’t know it had bears; he said, it’s rare. Bears are beautiful creatures but of course deadly when provoked.

More from the Life magazine edition on haunted places around the world. The entry on Paris notes Princess Obolensky fell almost 1,000 feet from the Eiffel Tower in 1931. She had recently married and seemed happy, but letters she had written found after her death showed she had killed herself. She was one of hundreds of people who have died jumping from the tower since it was built in 1889. In Waiting for Godot, Didi and Gogo recall the time they considered suicide from the tower, and the play ends with them again considering it. “No matter where you look, the City of Lights has a dark side–from spirits in the Louvre, which some have called the city’s most haunted building, to the eerie catacombs, and even nearby Versailles,” the magazine says. At Notre Dame, there is the hunchback, and the opera has a phantom. Other ghosts mentioned include Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, and Jim Morrison.

Another entry is about St. Patrick’s Purgatory in County Donegal, Ireland, where according to legend Christ showed Patrick a cave leading to Purgatory. The entry then cites other supposed entrances to Purgatory or Hell in Turkey, Turkmenistan, Iceland, the Czech Republic, Japan, Italy (see Virgil’s Aeneid), Pennsylvania, Kansas, New Orleans. In Norway, the word hell simply means “luck.” Maybe that is why Beckett found Dante to be funny.

 

“Ode to a Shopping List” by yours truly

Oh shopping list, shopping list,

You ensure nothing at the grocery store shall be missed,

All that food I can’t resist.

Brits might say this poem shows I am “pissed,”

And should instead pursue a tryst,

For F—‘s sake as they say there

In a manner I find devil-may-care.