Live People are Worse

Almost Halloween it is. I heard on the news it's now a $7 point-something billion dollar a year industry. I guess. We never had iParty around when we were kids and now you do. I suspect HazMat suits will be in vogue this year.

Some of you remember the Tylenol murders back in '82. Someone in Chicago deftly managed to replace the acetaminophen with cyanide and place them back on the shelf. It was all done artfully and the bottle nor pills looked tampered with. This was just prior to Halloween and this scared the shit out of parents nationwide after a few dropped dead from taking the altered pills. I think that ended traditional door to door trick or treating for good. Now kids attend “managed” parties at the Y or their Girl Scouts. 

At the Rathskeller at RIC, when I was a roadie for my brother's band for a Halloween party, I saw some guy walking around as a giant bottle of Tylenol. Gotta love sick humor. Hence my prediction for Hazmat suits this year.

Do cemeteries at nighttime scare you? I was of them as a kid till I was 18. At 18 we discovered it was a great place to have keg parties as the cops rarely patrolled graveyards. Ain't that a pure display of youthful smugness? A group of drunk teens, partying ontop of the graves of elders past.

None of us ever read the puritanical New England Primer meant to scare the shit out of 1700's kids.

“While youth do cheer, death may be near!”

I”ve probably walked through a couple of cemeteries out of curiosity and one I stumbled upon. None of those time was I worried about a half decomposed hand reaching out of the dirt to grab my ankle. The one I came upon accidentally was in the hills of Burrillville. There were about five headstones and all had the same family name. They were long since dead. Probably back to 1790's I'm guessing now. But what was weird, were that the death dates for the whole lot of them were days apart. Back then they all died from diseases called the flux, consumption or vapors. I'm guessing it was smallpox. That was a bit spooky, to see an entire family done in in a week and half.

Swan Point cemetery on Blackstone Blvd is pretty cool. This is where the fashionably wealthy go to die. Some of those crypts are meant to last past Judgment Day and are they ostentatious displays of wealth! Some others are artfully done with various themes. L.S Patriarca, Sullivan Ballou and the Sprague family are there.

I was dragged one time to Chestnut Hill cemetery in Exeter to see the “vampire” grave of Mercy Brown. I was incredulous about it as it was just some “story.” That was till I found out the circumstances of this poor girl's death. Then I became creeped out by the living, not the dead.

     “The Mercy Brown Vampire Incident, which occurred in 1892, is one of the    best documented cases of the exhumation of a corpse in order to perform rituals to banish an un-dead manifestation. The incident was part of the wider New England Vampire panic. Several cases of consumption (tuberculosis) occurred in the family of George and Mary Brown, in Exeter, Rhode Island. Friends and neighbors believed that this was due to the influence of the undead. Two family members' bodies were dug up, and, exhibiting the expected level of decomposition, were thought not to be the cause. Daughter Mercy, however, who was held in a freezer-like, above-ground vault, exhibited almost no decomposition. This was taken as confirmation that the undead were influencing the family to be sick. Mercy's heart was burned, mixed with water and given to her brother Edwin, who was sick, to drink, in order to stop the influence of the undead. The young man died two months later.”

Drink your sister's burnt heart ashes? The only Hocus Pocus I've played with were Tarot cards but I never went as far as BBQ cannibalism!

The last nighttime cemetery I walked through is a French/Canadian one by the river here, Notre Dame. It was part of a “dog walk” I'd do to avoid other dog walkers. What I found is that it was populated by a hundred thousand toads, a few foxes and opossums. There were no vampires, ghosts, poltergeists or slimy undead zombies wanting to eat my brains.

However, I was startled by one thing once. As we were doing our walk, I heard not too far off, the sound of someone's footsteps beating one hell of an escape. Perhaps I disturbed a local drunk or some pervert? Grave robber? I was glad to have a dog along then. I never went back after that. The living are far more scary than any corpse!