Haunted & Creepy!

For those of you who don't know me well, I'm a Halloween freak. When it came to that one night of the year where we gave out candy, I made the little tykes earn it. Yep. I made the house and yard as scary as possible. 
So, it that spirit I give you some haunted and creepy houses and images that MOVE!
















Watch out! The ghost behind that first tree!







Here are some more witches which got away from me the other day...



I would not take an apple from this lady!








The following is from a Disney short from UTube, if you want to watch the rest. Back when Disney was in it's beginnings 1929. Called Silly Symphoney, the skelleton dance.

BOO!

It's most likely that someone you know has told you that they've seen, a ghost, or knows of a house, graveyard, or other spots which are haunted. By haunted I mean the cold drafts where there should be none, weird smells, misty objects that move and then disappear (especially around stairways), and sounds that can't be explained, such as rapping on walls, thunks, or objects that move or fall off walls. Or, maybe you've had such experiences? Either in your own home, or in another? And it need not be as creepy as these places either...

I've dealt with a ghost in our 1906 farm house from time to time, although as of late (for the past several years), it's been very quiet. The original people who built the house homesteaded the area. Their last name was McGurr, and I'll come back to this in a moment.

If you go to your bookstore (if you still can find one), right now I'll bet you can find a dozen or more coffee table books on haunted places. If you go on a tour of older homes, you'll likely be told that it is haunted. I've been told many times by people who work in the older buildings at NIU, where I drive a bus. Libraries and basements seem to be the best chance to find a ghost. There's a multitude of famous dead people who are said to be haunting famous places. Like Anne Boleyn who they say haunts the Tower of London. Or Rose who walks a famous graveyard near Chicago.

And some who have an unusual amount of supernatural, or unexplained phenomena happening night after night open up their homes around this time of year and attract thousands of visitors every year for tours, and make a little loot off of their ghosts--and why not? The glowing mist floating around the room would really raise the hair on my arms, for sure!

It's believed that around this time of year, Halloween, or Samhain (pronounced sow-'n) is when the veil between our world and that of the dead is thinnest, and it would be relatively easy to communicate with the spirits of loved ones who have died during the previous year.

Some people hire a spirit medium in order to contact the dead person who may be haunting a house. There are also those who investigate hauntings. We have people who do that in our area. I'm sure that is an interesting side-line.

Now, I'm going to tell you about our ghost(s). We've had some nights where banging on walls and other phenomenon happened around this old house, especially when we first moved in. One night, we were sitting watching TV when a strange clattering sound came from down in the basement. It sounded to me like a large round piece of metal fell, and made that wobbly sound before it settles. We have a cistern, that isn't very deep and I thought it sounded exactly like a covering might sound if someone were to lift one end and just let it fall. But there was/is no such covering on it.

We've lived in the old McGurr house for 20 years now. In the beginning we had a LOT of weird sounds and happenings. The usual was rapping on walls at night. Once I swear while in bed the sound of what might have been a shoe dropping maybe three feet on the other side of the bed had me holding my breath for a minute, waiting to hear anything else. My husband claimed to be asleep at the time. There were the steer horns that were above the threshold that fell, missing my husband by only a few feet, and a glass that--by his description--shot out of the cupboard and shattered when he opened the cupboard.

But the weirdest thing that happened was the day before we were to host the descendants of the McGurrs on a walk through the house as part of a family gathering (they requested it through the park district superintendent, and since we live here as park managers, we complied). This meant we had to clean the house, top to bottom. There are three floors--if you include the roomy attic. We were nearly finished, and left the one room that had a bad bug problem for last. the floor was littered with dead flies and so forth (bad seal around a window), and one of us had to go up and sweep the bugs up. My husband went up to do this, while I was busy doing something else at the base of the stairs.

 About a minute later my husband calls down to me "Did you sweep up the bugs up here?" he asked from the top of the stairs.

"No," I said.

"Well... who did? There isn't a bug anywhere," he said.

I ran upstairs, thinking he was joking. I got to the room and he was right. There wasn't a bug to be found anywhere. And unless one of us did this during an episode of sleepwalking (we aren't sleepwalkers), there is no explanation other than the ghost we came to call "Old Mrs. McGurr", who we had heard a number of little stories about, had come up and cleaned this room, knowing her off-spring were coming to visit. Weird. Right?

Well, the next day the grandchildren of the McGurrs--all grown with their own grand kids--came out for the tour, each of them had a memory about some part of the house. It was a nice visit. When the tour was over, I took a couple of the ladies aside, because they were talking about ghosts, and told them what had happened the day before. They looked at one another, and then one of them said, "That was the old mother." In other words, Mrs. McGurr, who slept in a small room, downstairs, which had become a bathroom.

Do you have any stories of hauntings, or ghosts?

Seeing Ghosts Cover Reveal

Hello, my pretties. Look at this cover, will you? I remember when I saw this cover, when I learned Jimmy (James Garcia Jr.) had a cover reveal for his next new book, and this was jaw-dropping gorgeous. I simply couldn't wait till the day I could present it. And here is another version, the actualy front cover, but I thought this picture with the old house was simply wonderful and had to paste it up on top. Okay, ready?

This is a real departure from Jimmy's usual horror genre, as he tells us it is paranormal romance. And I'm certain this story will wow you. Sounds too good to pass up. The following is the description of the book:

Paul Herrera finds himself bequeathed a mysterious old house near the California central coast by a deceased aunt he never knew. The woman who shows it to him is the spitting image of his wife, taken from him three years before in a senseless car accident which also took his unborn son. While he deals with the ghosts of a past he cannot let go, there are new ghosts Paul must deal with - alone for the week in the expansive two-story house that he will soon didscover holds many secrets. Eventually, he will see that he is surrounded by ghosts as he struggles to hold onto the only thing that he has left in this world - his sanity.

Pretty spooky and intriguing. I want to know if Paul can deal with his "ghosts".

And the facebook event link is  https://www.facebook.com/events/424796797616236/

Seeing Ghosts is scheduled for release on June 5th.
And if you'd like to visit his blog, I suggest you do to keep up-dated for this and all his other books, my goodness, he has two others already out and more on the way. This man is one busy dude!

Dance on Fire blog: http://jamesgarciajr.blogspot.com/2013/04/seeing-ghosts-cover-reveal.html?showComment=1367270709374#c7277036031073589570

Panster or... Prankster?

I don't know where I got it, but I've always wanted to be the trick side of trick-or-treat, and scare the bejezus out of kids--young and old, if I could manage it. If trick-or-treaters wanted the delicious caramel apples that we made up just for them (we're talking 70'-80's here), then they had to get through the wierd sounds, ghouls, monsters, and ghosts I had set up in my yard... and they never knew which ones were "live". Take the one year I had my nephew wearing a mask, gloves, and a hooded sweatshirts (yeah, that's what they are called), and had him sit next to the front door. It was the last hurtle the little tykes had to go through. My actor underneath all the clothes and mask didn't move, until the precise moment, and then, only his hand, which was draped over the railing next to the door would move. Ohhhh! the screams! I loved it! We never had a soaped window or eggs thrown.

But it didn't need to be Halloween to make visitors scream. There was the time I had a small group of girl friends over from my high school for a "slumber party". I lived then in a rather large house. Larger than what the other three girls lived in. Plus it was old. I never knew how old until much later, it dated back to Civil War era. So, I used to tell them that it was haunted, which it wasn't, but that was me being the story teller back then.

I knew the time would be right to initiate my brother in at least one of my pranks that night before he left. You see, my room was situated over a closet on the first floor. The underside of the steps in front of my room, in fact, were easily accessed if one had a handy chair placed in the right spot in the closet below. My brother agreed to go into the closet downstairs, while we were all gathered in my room talking--and calling up boys and hanging up. What brother wouldn't want to be in on making girls scream?

We were all in my room and the knock came. I let one of the others answer--wouldn't be right I answered, the whole thing wouldn't work.

So, Alice answered and, of course, there was no one there.

The other two gasped and they looked out into the hallway, checked the room next to us, thinking they'd find the trickster. No one there.

The knock came again. Again they opened in. Again there was no one there. This creeped them out and they screamed and were beside themselves.

"I told you the house was haunted," I reminded. They certainly believed me now. There was no apparent logical way the knock came from anyone. Hahah!

Later on we played this silly game called "purple coffin" where you imagined your enemy--or someone you really hated--in a purple coffin, obviously dead from something.

After we played this, I knew I had to quickly rig up something that looked like a coffin, and put it in place so that they would come across it on their own. I had this old suitcase, a doll and something purple, and a flashlight. I got it ready for when we'd come down to make pizza (the kind in a box).

I said nothing to any of them. The coffin was set up in a room beyond the dining room, and could be seen from the kitchen doorway. The only way to the bathroom was through the dining room. You could not miss that light aimed into the "coffin" on the doll laying there. I should have become a director. I had directed a home made 8mm. film starring my nephew as "Dracula", and neice as his victim. I'd made a bat and at the right moment the bat disappeared and in it's place (on film), "Dracula" appeared. My niece now directly blames me for making her so screwy. You're welcome, honey!

Anyway, my anticipation hig, I bided my time as we made our pizza. We ate and drank pop. And then the first one had to go visit the bathroom. Perfect! Martha was the most skittish of them all. On her way out of the kitchen, she faced that far room with the doll and coffin. She let out a screach and backed up, crying "Purple coffin! Purple coffin!"

After they all got over the scare, I showed them what I had done. Needless to say I didn't host any more sleep overs at my house. I think that one lasted them.

As a side note, my "enemy"--from our "purple coffin" game I saw her the very next day at school on crutches. Someone told me that she had stepped on a needle.