Marilyn Manson-- This is Halloween

Ghosts of the Alamo – Haunted San Antonio

Purported Alamo Ghost Picture

What echoes remain of the more than 259 Texian defenders and the nearly 1500 Mexican Army troops who lost their lives at the Alamo? Are their ghosts still there? If you ask many in San Antonio, Texas they will tell you that spirits, ghosts of those doomed men, still walk the grounds of old mission. In fact the Alamo is considered by many to be one of the most haunted sites in the nation. It’s no wonder, considering the history of the place and it should definitely be on the travel agenda of any ghost enthusiast.

In 1836 Texas was part of Mexico ruled by the dictator General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, the so-called “Napoleon of the West.” Many citizens of the United States had come to Texas years earlier their rights as foreign-born landowners guaranteed by the Mexican constitution. When Santa Anna decided to nullify the constitution Texans were incensed and a revolt ensued.

The bombardment of the Alamo by cannon fire went on for thirteen days and nights as the approximately 200 defenders sat inside, surrounded by an army of 5,000. In the end all but the women and children were killed.

“I’ll never go back in the Alamo again,” swears Jorge, a native of San Antonio. “It was closing time and the guard was locking up. I looked over to where the case is that displays Bowie’s knife and I noticed a man standing there gazing into the display case. I figured he must have been an enthusiastic docent because he was all dressed in old fashion clothing.”

“Then I realized I was looking at a ghost. I know it sounds crazy, but I realized I could see right through him,” Jorge explains.

Ghost stories about the Alamo go back to the days right after its fall. The bodies of the defeated Texas defenders were reportedly stacked up and burned, never receiving a Christian burial.

When Mexican soldiers were ordered to return to the mission and completely destroy it they were met by a giant ghostly figure standing atop the mission brandishing a ball of fire. Terrified they retreated. The ghost appeared again when the commander went to get the job done, and he too fled in fear.

Another frequently sited ghost is that of a little girl dressed in white who appears in the top window of the building that is now the gift shop. People outside see her and naturally assume that she’s looking out from the second story. They step inside to discover that there is no second story and the window is twenty feet above the floor, and that the ghost is no longer there.

Whatever your feelings about ghosts, the Alamo certainly does exude a haunted air. It’s hard not think of all the men who lost their lives on that ground and wonder if their restless spirits aren’t still lingering.   

Haunted Texas: Devil's Backbone

From the SA Express News:

There's weirdness in the winds that roll over the top of the Devil's Backbone.
Residents sometimes hear stallions galloping through the darkened canyons. But no one has ever seen any horses. And when they check the ground later, there are no hoof prints.

Charlie Beatty has heard the horses, and more. He claims to have stumbled upon unexplained cold spots — patches of chilly air — in distant corners of his ranch. This has happened in mid-July.

Dozens of locals and passers-by, meanwhile, have reported ghostly sightings of Confederate soldiers, Apache chiefs and lost travelers on the roadside, in pastures and at their doorsteps. The apparitions always disappear when confronted.

If you want to buy antiques, head west to Blanco. If you want science, head east to Texas State University in San Marcos.

But if you want more ghost stories than you can shake a severed head at, you'll need to come to the Devil's Backbone, the Hill Country's hub of ethereal hijinks and paranormal shenanigans.

Book Trailer: Mike Stellar- Nerves of Steel by KA Holt

I've been posting a few book trailers lately because the subject is one I've been thinking about. I think this one makes really great use of very simple elements.

Favorite Halloween Movies?-- Ours is the Company of Wolves

From the NYT:

The film, directed by Neil Jordan and written by him and Angela Carter, based on her story, begins as a dream prompted by a young woman's sense of sibling rivalry and then, within the dream, opens up into a series of tales within tales. Some of these are told by the dreamer Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson), the contemporary young woman who becomes Red Riding Hood, and some are told by Red Riding Hood's eerily kind, actually menacing old grandmother (Angela Lansbury).

Mr. Jordan, his set designers and his special-effects people have made a movie that looks like a cross between something by Jean Cocteau, not at peak form, and a horror movie from Hammer Films. It's set mostly in a wonderfully artificial-looking studio forest, stocked with trees that turn into houses, toads that are life- size but toadstools that are 12 feet tall, plus rats, snakes, owls and wolves - dozens of them, many disguised as men.

The central Red Riding Hood story as played out here appears to be taken fairly straight from the Brothers Grimm. The film makers, however, have more than fleshed out the character of Grandmother, who is full of esoteric advice, such as ''Beware of windfallen apples and of men whose eyebrows meet.'' She also knows a thing or two about wolves. ''The worst kind of wolf is hairy on the inside,'' she says. ''The wolf who ate your sister was hairy on the outside, and took her straight to heaven.''

Clinic: the Witch

On the run up to our favorite holiday, we're posting some extra Witch-themed stuff just to get in the right frame of mind. Certainly things will be strange around here for a few days.

Radiacs: She's My Witch

Just a little witch-themed entertainment as we await the Day of the Dead, Samhain, All Hallows Eve...

Recipe for Day of the Dead: Sugar Skulls

Receta: Sugar Skulls
Ingredients
• 2 cups powdered sugar
• 1 egg white
• 1 tablespoon corn syrup
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/3 cup cornstarch
• Food coloring of different colors
• Candy sprinkles
• 1 fine paintbrush
• Candy sticks

Preparation
Sift sugar into a large mixing bowl. In another bowl, mix the egg white, corn syrup and vanilla.

Slowly pour the liquid into the powdered sugar. Mix with your hands until a sandy dough forms.

Form dough into a ball. At this point you can continue or you can refrigerate dough for later use.

Lightly dust the surface of a cooking board with cornstarch as well as your hands. Pinch off a heaping tablespoon of dough and shape it into a skull.

Press the candy sticks into the bottom of each skull. If you’re using them, lightly press colored sprinkles into the soft candy.
Let the candy dry overnight.

Use the paint brush with food coloring to decorate the skulls when dry. You can also use icing (one that will dry hard) with a fine tip to decorate them.

inside-mexico.com
Of course, here we have sugar skulls all of the time, as well as pan de muerto and other ghastly treats, but once a year the rest of the world joins us in our morbid state of mind.

The Hunger: Bauhaus

Because it's five AM and I'm thinking about The Hunger, Bauhaus and Catherine Deneuve.
The Hunger, Crackle: The Best Of Bauhaus

Ghosts Calling Cell Phones?

GHOSTS are trying to make contact with living friends using mobile phones, a paranormal expert claims.
The number of mystery calls to mobiles attributed to spooks has rocketed by 43 per cent in the last four years, a study found.

Spectre investigator Phil Hayes from Paranormal Research UK believes a third of all hauntings are now through mobile phones.

The calls often feature heavy static and the voice sounds faint and distant, he revealed. Nine in ten show as "withheld number" or "000000000000" on caller ID.

Seems that ghosties are going mobile. We're thinking of starting a ghost hotline here in the Black Mansion, so that any of the departed who are feeling talkative can call up. Who knows what fascinating things they might say? I wonder if they prefer cells to landlines. The photo above is supposedly a ghost in a phone booth, which could help explain a few things, eh?

Book Trailer: Dirty Little Secrets

Dirty Little Secrets

Book Trailer: benjamin Pratt Keepers of the School

Song for Tonight's Full Moon

It Might As Well Be Swing

Darned Interesting: Quantum Entanglement

Physicists have long been puzzled over a mystical link between particles called entanglement – and now they've established this bizarre connection in a new experiment.

When two or more particles are entangled, they retain a connection even if separated across an entire galaxy. If an action is performed on one particle, its linked partner will also respond.

From Livescience

Fans of Awsomeness Check Out These Deep Sea Creatures

Into The Deep: Exploring The Earth's Oceans

Song for Midnight During a Lunar Eclipse: Angelo Badalamenti

Twin Peaks (Season One TV Soundtrack)

Book Trailer: Jeremiah Bloom and the Amulet of Osiron

Jeremiah Bloom and the Amulet of Osiron

Stephen - Pop Odyssey Radio | Myspace Video
Jeremiah Bloom and the Amulet of Osiron

Poem For Wednesday-- Limits

Limits (excerpt) By Jorge Luis Borges

Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Borges: Selected Poems

Touch of Evil: Your Future's All Used Up

You're close
and you smile to me
but I, I cry softly.
I don't hold you
for I feel that you
are already thinking of the end of the trip.
Sadly, ravens cry in the dark.
Let the horse go slower.
Let me still have the illusion
that I still see you
in the sleigh with the bells
in the valley, deep in snow.

From Marlene Dietrich's German language version of Rogers and Hammerstein's "Surrey With a Fringe Top," from Oklahoma. Dietrich's German version was recorded during the war. Somehow a goofy ditty becomes strange and sad in translation. Hemmingway said of her "If she had nothing more than her voice she could break your heart with it."
Touch Of Evil (50th Anniversary Edition)

It Was Enough to Have Been a Unicorn

Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So: A Memoir

At the end of his life, which had included financial ruin in the Great Depression, his wife's barbiturate addiction and death by overdose, and then his own lung cancer, Doc said, "It was enough to have been a unicorn." What he meant was that he got to do art. It was magic to him that his hands and mind got to make wonderful things, that he didn't have to be just another goat or horse.

When I worked on the Harvard Medical School admissions committee, artistic achievements were referred to as "extras." The arts are not extra.

If my great-grandfather Bernard Vonnegut hadn't started crying while doing inventory at Vonnegut Hardware and hadn't told his parents that he wanted to be an artist instead of selling nails and if his parents hadn't figured out how to help him make that happen, there are many buildings in and around Indianapolis that wouldn't have gotten built. Kurt senior wouldn't have created paintings or furniture or carvings or stained glass. And Kurt junior, if he existed at all, would have been just another guy with PTSD-no stories, no novels, no paintings. And I, if I existed at all, would have been just another broken young man without a clue how to get up off the floor.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

Song for Saturday: Creepy Jackalope Eye

The band is Supersucker, and they seem to have a keen understanding of the elusive jackalope. Maybe they'll amble over to these parts and check out the jackalope breeding program here at the Black Mansion.
La Mano Cornuda

Elvis Does Nirvana

via Dangerous Minds. James "the King" Brown had a hit in England with this version of Nirvana's "Come as You Are" back in 1999.
Gravelands

Check Out the Incredible Climbing Goat

These guys are amazing. From the Daily Mail:

The gravity-defying goats typically live in very steep and rocky terrain at altitudes of up to to 4,600m and have no fear of falling whether climbing up or down the 160ft dam wall.
And they aren't doing it just to show off.
It is thought the goats are actually grazing, licking the stones for their salts.

Even in West Texas goats don't manage this. Somebody should get these critters a salt lick, though.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1320728/Herd-mountain-goats-climb-160ft-near-vertical-Cingino-dam-Italian-Alps.html#ixzz12RtKM59T

Reading "Bamboo and Blood," by James Church

I highly recommend it. James Church's Inspector O books are so good my head exploded three times yesterday alone. His latest is "The Man With the Baltic Stare," which was equally fantastic, and which I read last week. Here's the prologue to "Bamboo and Blood":

Each note was a bell hanging from its own brass hook, an infinity of them cleverly attached to the smooth and rounded edges of the sky. When streams froze, when branches on the trees were solemn and stiff, when every single thing was wrapped in the brutal hush of solitary survival, it was then her song would come to me from where she stood alone on the wooden bridge. No matter how wide I spread my arms, I could not hold the music of her voice. It echoed from the hills, and danced the icy stairways that led, at last, to the emptiness between the northern stars. Strange, what the senses do to each other-- how a raw wind against the skin makes the heart uneasy, how in the crystalline black of long nights, memories become voices close beside you. The Russians love to write about it. They think they are the only ones who know the cold.

The plots of Church's books are subtle and unpredictable, set in the odd, inscrutable culture of North Korea, where nothing is ever as it seems. Church, not the novelist's real name, has worked inside that sealed off country for decades and the books provide a rare glimpse into a world very few Westerners know much about. And the writing is perfect. Everyone should read James Church.

"Spirits of the Dead" by Edgar Allen Poe

Thy soul shall find itself alone
'Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone;
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.

Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness- for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again
In death around thee, and their will
Shall overshadow thee; be still.

The night, though clear, shall frown,
And the stars shall not look down
From their high thrones in the Heaven
With light like hope to mortals given,
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee for ever.

Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,
Now are visions ne'er to vanish;
From thy spirit shall they pass
No more, like dew-drop from the grass.

The breeze, the breath of God, is still,
And the mist upon the hill
Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token.
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!
The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (Signet Classics)