#HALLOWEEN: BUY ME THIS: HAUNTED AIR

 

Anonymous Halloween photographs from c.1875–1955—truly haunting Americana, with a foreword by David Lynch

I want this - a collection of photographs from Halloweens past, showing people in their costumes in the midst of October pageantry. Some are eerie, some are cutesy, and some make me yearn for decades long gone where Halloween was celebrated in a purer way.

I'd been doing this already for years: scavenging Internet for old photographs of people in their Halloween best. Turns out I could have just bought myself the danged book. Perhaps I'll treat myself in anticipation of my favorite day soon coming down the pike. Or perhaps you will. Because you love me.

Synopsis via Amazon is way better:

The photographs in "Haunted Air" provide an extraordinary glimpse into the traditions of this macabre festival from ages past, and form an important document of photographic history. These are the pictures of the dead: family portraits, mementos of the treasured, now unrecognizable, and others. The roots of Halloween lie in the ancient pre–Christian Celtic festival of Samhain, a feast to mark the death of the old year and the birth of the new. It was believed that on this night the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin and ruptured, allowing spirits to pass through and walk unseen but not unheard amongst men. The advent of Christianity saw the pagan festival subsumed in All Souls' Day, when across Europe the dead were mourned and venerated. Children and the poor, often masked or in outlandish costume, wandered the night begging "soul cakes" in exchange for prayers, and fires burned to keep malevolent phantoms at bay. From Europe, the haunted tradition would quickly take root and flourish in the fertile soil of the New World. Feeding hungrily on fresh lore, consuming half–remembered tales of its own shadowy origins and rituals, Halloween was reborn in America. The pumpkin supplanted the carved turnip; costumes grew ever stranger, and celebrants both rural and urban seized gleefully on the festival's intoxicating, lawless spirit. For one wild night, the dead stared into the faces of the living, and the living, ghoulishly masked and clad in tattered backwoods baroque, stared back.

 

 

A Halloween gift for TEOS.

#HALLOWEEN: SIBLINGS

#HALLOWEEN: BLACK CAT

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

 

#HALLOWEEN: A VERY BUCKLEY HALLOWEEN

This is the Buckley Family. The children’s names were Susan and John. As a Halloween joke, all the kids in the neighborhood were going to get a dummy and pretend to chop its head off. The Buckley children thought it would be hilarious to actually murder their mother, so when the kids walked up the the door, they got an axe and slaughtered her. Once everyone figured out what they had really done, they called the police, but the kids were long gone by then. The only picture of them was this photo, taken by a trick or treater. The mothers body was later found half eaten.

31 DAYS OF #HALLOWEEN

Another October is upon us. They seem to come rather quickly while somehow also taking forever to get here. That makes no sense, really; yet, you know exactly what I'm talking about, don't you?

For another year, The End of Summer will be celebrating Halloween every single day of October. There is some fun stuff lined up that I hope you'll enjoy. We've got several contests/giveaways on the horizon, an interview with a pretty delightful singer/songwriter, a surprise/personal announcement from yours truly, along with the usual: a new entry in Unsung Horrors, Shitty Flicks, some recommendations for October viewing/reading, and lots more. I hope you'll check in every day for a tiny piece of Halloween I'll be sharing. You might just win and/or learn yourself something.

Happy October, chums. Let's get observin'.

BUGS DON'T BUZZ

A beautiful video for a beautiful song.

AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR