Halloween Countdown: October 26 - it really happened

A Resurrection Plant, eh?

That reminds me of something that happened to a friend of a friend of mine a while back. This guy worked the late shift at a warehouse in North Reading, and used to drive home along Route 62 during the wee hours. Well, this one time he was making his way down the dark and lonely state highway when he spotted something really weird along the side of the road. It was a potted plant -- some kind of fern, he said -- just sitting there on the shoulder of 62 westbound in the middle of the sticks with no sign how it ended up there.

It was late October, when the first killer frosts come to the northwestern suburbs. This guy figured that the plant would die if he didn't do something, pulled to the side of the road, and retrieved it. He wasn't the gardening type, but thought that maybe his mom or his girlfriend at the time could do something with it. Anyhow, he put it on the passenger seat of his '86 Monte Carlo and hopped back behind the wheel.

While the plant, being a plant, didn't move or say anything, the guy said he could sense a "really creepy vibe" from the potted fern. He said the interior of his car felt colder, even though he had the heater cranked to the max. (That's not uncommon for a GM car, though.) He also claimed to sense an "aura of sadness" coming from the plant and it got stronger as he got closer to the Wilmington town line.

The sensation abruptly stopped when he pulled up to the lights at the intersection next to one of the many giant luxury condo complexes recently plunked down in the northwestern suburbs. When he looked over at the passenger seat, the plant was no longer there.

He sped the rest of the way back to his apartment in Bedford. His roommate was still up when he got there and asked the guy why he seemed so jittery. The guy told about the mysterious fern, even though he knew how crazy the story sounded. The roommate didn't laugh, for he had worked part-time with landscaping firm near the area where the guy found the plant.

He told the guy about how a couple of years previous, a local nursery had gone up in flames when the greenhouse heater exploded. The force of the blast sent the contents of the nursery flying in all directions. The owner of the business decided not to rebuild, and instead sold off the property to an out-of-state residential development firm which cleared the land for a luxury condo development -- the very same development where the plant mysteriously disappeared from the guy's passenger seat.

So if you happen to be driving along Route 62 on some chill autumn night and see a solitary potted plant by the shoulder of the road, don't worry. It's just the Resurrection Plant making another sad, doomed effort to get back home....

(A little context, maestro!)

de tian - Beyond the Autumn - (from a 1980 EP) - This piece of DIY postpunk makes pefect music to haunt arthouses by.

Friday Night Fights: Not Afraid to Take a Risk

Once again, it's time to ring in the weekend with a little four-color chin music, with Captain Triumph serving as our bandleader this week:

(from Crack Comics #42, May 1946)
Hey, kids, don't forget to clean and disinfect your nutpick after each use! (It's also safe to say that one has passed beyond all accepted notions of dignity whenever white jodhpurs are involved -- especially so when they're hiked up near to the nipples.)

One of Quality Comics' roster of superheroes (later purchased by DC and incorporated into that company's superhero universe), Captain Triumph was the superheroic amalgam of the Gallant twins. By touching a t-shaped birthmark on his forearm, the not-dead Lance could merge with the spirit of his dead sibling Michael, thus becoming Captain Triumph and gaining a stock set of superpowers (flight, strength, invulnerabilty) . The character was something of a less versatile, Golden Age precursor to Deadman, with a touch of Captain Marvel tossed into the mix, but little else to distinguish him from his peers...

...at least until the third issue of James Robinson and Paul Smith's 1993 Elseworlds miniseries The Golden Age, which added a new, "adult" spin on the spectral sibling rivalry...

He makes it sound as if there's something wrong with an hour of hookers and crime-fighting...
Devo - Triumph of the Will (from Duty Now for the Future, 1979) - I love it when you talk totalitarian to me, baby.

(Viva Bahlactus!)

Halloween Countdown: October 20 – it keeps on haunting me

Faced with the looming spectre of cancellation, the producers of Jennifer Slept Here tried to spice things up a bit to boost the failing sitcom's ratings.*


Love triangles are complicated enough business without throwing possession by unclean spirits into the mix, though I confess that the notion of ectoplasmic catfights does have a certain sleazy appeal for me.

The Fall - There's a Ghost in My House (from The Frenz Experiment, 1988) - This is a nifty cover of a 1967 R. Dean Taylor hit (in Britain, at least). R. Dean Taylor is also the man responsible for my all time favorite karaoke selection, 1970's poignantly absurd "Indiana Wants Me."

* No, not really.

Halloween Countdown: October 14 – the logic of the spirits

Ghosts also have an irrational hatred toward apricot jam. Why? Because they just do, damn it! The dead do not operate under your faulty logic of the living, scoffer!

(It's all true, I swear. I saw it in Fate, along with an ad for a book describing an astral voyager's actual trips to pre-Colombian Mexico and Doggie Heaven.)

Air - Ghost Song (from The Virgin Suicides, 2001)

Halloween Countdown: October 16 – you better be good and you better pray

La Llorona is a Mexican weeping ghost, similar to the Irish banshee. There are many variations to the legend, involving a woman who drowns her children after being spurned by her lover, and is therefore doomed to walk the earth as a wailing, restless spirit (like a supernatural Susan Smith, minus the race-baiting). Wikipedia has a good rundown of the various tales and aspects of La Llorona. Especially interesting is how the nature of the spirit, tragic harbinger or malevolent entity, changes based on the social class of those telling the story.

Last winter, I was driving late at night to pick up my wife at Davis Square station, and while I was making my way down South Border Road, a parkway cutting through the Middlesex Fells reservation, I saw a woman in white swaying along the shoulder where the asphalt met the edge of the forest. It was probably some drunk teenager stumbling out of an arboreal beer bash, but it still made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end for a few minutes. I suppose I could have pulled over and found out for certain, but ever since that time Resurrection Mary stiffed me on gas money, I’ve been hesitant to stop for roadside manifestations from beyond.

Manic Hispanic is an ongoing side project featuring the members of various SoCal punk acts performing Chicano-themed reworkings of various punk classics. It’s a clever gimmick executed masterfully, to where I’ve come to prefer the revised versions of certain songs over the originals. Here’s their “She Turned Into Llorona”, playing off the Misfits’ “I Turned Into a Martian”, from their 2003 album, Mijo Goes To Jr. College. (Descendents fans will get the joke.)