Tag Archives: ghost story

goodness, manfolk

This was a terrible plan

OMG RUN HARRY POTTER

Boyfriend is leaving for a job in London tomorrow 😦  He’ll be gone for about ten days, and we’ve been meaning to see The Woman in Black, so we decided to cram it in before he left.

What a terrible idea.

I read the book recently, and it’s a good old-fashioned ghost story.  The movie is… similar, but more of a Hollywood-style, evil-thing-jumps-out-of-a-dark-corner, heart-stopping, crap-your-pants type of scary (in that order).  The short version is: I was not prepared for the level of scary this movie had in store for me, and now Boyfriend is LEAVING ME ALL ALONE HOW COULD HE.

Having said that, if they were going to make it that scary, it had to end the way it did, with some good fortune (if you can call it that) for this poor man.  But right after that, the very last shot, a close-up of the woman, and then she looks at you and AAAAAAAAGGGGHHH!  So fucking scary!

I was curled up against boyfriend, cutting of circulation to his left arm the whole movie.  A couple of times, when the woman got really mad, I had to close my eyes.  Once, I turned to Boyfriend and declared, “Ok, all done now, I want to go home.”  He laughed and shushed me; I was only half kidding.

It’s not that I’m so easily frightened; it’s the combination of the empirical scariness of the movie, combined with how totally unprepared I apparently was, and what an unwelcome surprise my lack of preparedness was.  Here’s the breakdown I made.

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goodness

Run, Ichabod, RUN!

holy shit where's his head?!

It’s not often my mind is BLOWN by something I’m working on Office Job.  Today was an especially awesome exception.

I hope I’ve made it perfectly clear how much I love old-timey spooky stuff.  I was editing a list of addresses for our mailer today when I found the following address mixed into the bunch:

### Ichabod Lane

WTF ICHABOD LANE?!  So I looked it up and SLEEPY HOLLOW EXISTS, PEOPLE (in New York).  Let your imaginations run wild.

I loved this story as a kid.  And poor Ichabod!  We all watched the disney cartoon version, but I wanted something darker out of this story, something sinister and inescapable.  The Headless Horseman has some pretty neat origins in old folktales, and is the best kind of bad guy: inexplicable, invulnerable, inconceivable.  There’s no explaining how he can exist, there’s no killing him, and there’s no understanding him.  He just is and always will be, a specter watching every bridge, an untraceable, unstoppable, bloodthirsty ghost.

Like I said, he’s the best.  I also completely love Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow.  I may have to watch it when I get home tonight.

Initiate countdown for when I visit Sleepy Hollow, NY!

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anime, goodness, nerd

Spooky manga!

nothing like a creepy doll peeking through the window to keep you up at night

I showed Diminutive Roommate some manga the other night, specifically Mail of the horror genre, and let me tell you: she is freaked out.  It’s about a detective whose clients hire him to exorcise ghosts.  Spooky!  Diminutive Roommate is currently reading through the second issue in as many days.  She came into my room last night to sit on my bed with me while we both read our respective ghost stories because she didn’t want to read it alone.

One chapter involves a little girl who was stuck in an elevator.  As she climbed out, the elevator drops and chops off her legs.  At first, the ghost of just her legs is occasionally seen standing around in the elevator.  But the little girl dies a few years later, and a ghost of just her upper half can be seen dragging itself around the building in search of her legs.  Yikes.

Naturally, there was an article in the LA Times this morning about a woman who was in an elevator that got stuck between floors.  Apparently, she “climbed out of the elevator, but the car started moving again…The car dropped onto her, crushing her.”  She died.  I sent the article to Diminutive Roommate.  We may or may not be sleeping with the lights on tonight.

The Mail series is really excellent.  If you want to be spooked without too much gore, this is perfect.  There is, of course, death, and some murders, but the majority of the stories center around the mysterious circumstances surrounding the hauntings.  The author, Housui Yamazaki, is also the illustrator, so he gets to do exactly what he wants with each page.  The result is some of the scariest page-turns I’ve ever experienced.  Once, I was so spooked, I literally burst out laughing and had to put the book down for a minute while my heart hammered in my chest.  And it wasn’t gross or gory, it was just a well-done story arc that climaxed at a page turn and freaked me out.  Highly recommended.

heeeeere kitty kitty kitty

As long as we’re on the topic, I have to mention The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.  Housui Yamazaki illustrates this one, too, and it’s pretty great.  It has more gore than Mail, but there’s a surprising amount of humor in it.  I found myself laughing aloud at the dialog in every issue.  The premise is that a group of college graduates are having trouble finding work, so they group together to use their weird abilities (dowsing for bodies, speaking to the dead, etc.) to help the dead reach a place where their souls can rest, often resulting in shenanigans and various tom-foolery.  It’s a good, spooky time.

If you’re not into manga, I understand, really.  But these two are worth a shot.

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