10 Ways To Know Your House is Haunted

With all of the haunted houses movies, books and video games available, have you ever wondered if your house is haunted?

Here's a handy list of things to watch for.

1. Your Hand of Glory gives you the finger.

2. The face of Jon Lovitz appears in the flames of your fireplace.

Acting!

3. Your new neighbors, George and Kathy Lutz, stare at you from their porch, shaking their heads with pity.

4. Every time you let out your dog, you remember that you don't have a dog. Yet you still end up picking big piles of poop up off your lawn. And this isn't Chihuahua poop, either. More like from a St. Bernard who sorely lacks an appropriate amount of fiber.



5. While you are having sex, your cat hisses and attacks your balls.

6. The moles on your back spell GET OUT. (Or maybe BE COOL? You know how hard it is to read the moles on your back in a mirror?)


7. The food in your fridge is moldy. I mean really moldy. Like the kind of mold H.P. Lovecraft writes about. And it's only been in there like - what? How long? Okay, never mind.


8. Your spouse develops stigmata. It tastes surprisingly like sriracha sauce.

9. Your house was built on the grounds of a former insane asylum, which was built over a pet cemetery located over an ancient burial ground...and you accidentally urinated on it while cursing God.

10. You reflect on the last ten years of your life and realize time was swallowed by an apparition. All you have to show for it are more wrinkles, belly fat, and a saggy set of cat-scratched balls.

I hope this helps you figure out if your house is truly haunted. If you can think of any more ways to tell if your house is haunted, let me know in the comments below!

Also, if you're looking for a great haunted house read, you can't do much better than Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House:

Bedlam - Boris Karloff, Val Lewton 1946

The 1946 movie Bedlam stars Boris Karloff as Master George Sims, the apothecary General, and Anna Lee as Nell Bowen. It was one of three movies that Karloff worked with producer Val Lewton on, and I'll talk about the other two in the near future.

I loved this movie. Karloff is magnificent, and the production values are top-notch. 

The screenplay was written by Carlos Keith (a pseudonym for Val Lewton) and Mark Robson, though as it says on one of the opening cards, the movie was inspired by William Hogarth's The Rake's Progress, plate 8, pictured here:

This is Plate 8 of Hogarth's work "The Rake's Progress"

The scene above takes place in St. Mary's Bethlehem Asylum, also known as Bethlem Royal Hospital, also known as Bedlam, and this is where the movie is centered.

Here's William Hogarth:

Hogarth's painting "Selfie with Dog" (I'm guessing on the title)
Okay, actually, it's called "Painter and his Pug" done in 1745.

The movie is beautifully shot in black and white, and Karloff is at his most...Karloffian...in it.

His voice, his pattern of speech is terrific. He plays the cruel director of the above referenced insane asylum, and unjustly imprisons Anna Lee's Nell Bowen in it. She shows kindness to the patients, and they eventually turn on Karloff.

At one point, Nell Bowen describes Karloff's Sims in this way; "He's a stench in the nostrils, a sewer of ugliness, and a gutter brimming with slop." It reminds me of how Karloff's later portrayal of The Grinch is described.

One of my favorite lines of the movies is when Karloff says to Lee: “So nice to find you here among the upper classes, Mistress Bowen, but that’s exactly where I expected you to be.  It’s a law of physics the lighter elements, like scum, rise to the top.”

Some of the language is cringe-worthy, but historically accurate, such as when the patients are repeatedly called 'loonies.' Also, as in real-life, people were allowed to pay to visit the asylum (for a fee) to see the patients in a cruel form of entertainment.

A bit of fun trivia, according to IMDB: "The dress that Anna Lee is wearing as she mounts her horse is the one Vivien Leigh made from the curtains in Gone with the Wind."

Jason Robards, Sr. (the father of the Jason Robards you are more likely familiar with) also appears in the movie as one of the patients.

Highly recommended movie.

You can buy the DVD of Bedlam (includes Isle of the Dead) here, or you can also rent it via streaming through iTunes.

Bedtime Stories for the Apocalypse III

You survived the first two volumes of Joel Arnold’s BEDTIME STORIES FOR THE APOCALYPSE…barely. Are you ready for volume 3?

BEDTIME STORIES FOR THE APOCALYPSE III

In this collection of 10 short stories you’ll meet:

A herd of cows protecting a dead woman from her abusive husband.

A beached mermaid on the shores of Lake Superior.

A group of friends whose love of Halloween keeps them together for a long, long time.

A little girl who deals candy – and something far more sinister – from her bright red wagon.

A teenager who must embrace the very dark side to survive a fate worse than death.

A mysterious visitor who drives a man mad with a strange smelling package.

These, plus four other stories, will keep you up late at night with a light on and your teddy bear screaming for mercy.

On Amazon

On B&N

On Smashwords

On Google Play

On Kobo eBooks

On Apple iBooks

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Paul Bunyan's Murderous Rampage Through the Great North Woods

As a horror writer, I see things with a bit of a different eye; a heavily bloodshot, bulging eye that if removed from my head will most likely take on a life of its own and hover over the faces of those fast asleep. Or maybe not, but what I mean is that many times if I hear or see something that interests me, the horror writer in me takes over and creates different scenarios, testing them and tossing aside the images that aren't compelling while holding onto those that make me feel as if I just swallowed a handful of chocolate covered espresso beans.

That feeling usually doesn't occur with just one something. Instead, it's a combination of somethings. It can't just be an interesting setting - there's gotta be some metaphorical meat juxtaposed with it to get my gears cranking.

For example, there's an old quarry in Rochester, MN that has always intrigued me. It was once part of the Second Minnesota Hospital for the Insane (soon more kindly named the Rochester State Hospital) - and the land was farmed, worked and quarried by the inmates. There were cattle to tend to, limestone to quarry, soap to make, produce to harvest, sheep to shear. This was apparently before the phrase "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" was taken seriously, since they believed that keeping the inmates working kept them from thinking too much about their problems.

Also on these grounds are man-made caves, carved out of the sandstone above the quarry in 1882 by inmates led by Thomas Coyne - a man who thought of himself at times as a prophet, and at other times as Jesus Christ.

Interesting setting with an interesting history with interesting characters.

The farm portion of this land - and the hill the quarry and caves rest on - was sold to the county in 1965 and was turned into Quarry Hill Park. The rest of the State Hospital closed in 1982 and was eventually remade into a prison.

While I grew up in Rochester, these caves were always open. You could hike up to them at any time and wander through them. Although the park officially closed at dusk, it didn't stop teenagers from sneaking up there with booze and lust on their minds, or perhaps the chance to experience a good scare.  Even during the day, there rarely seemed to be many people in the caves, and it often served as a semi-private place to make out in - although not all that comfortable if you didn't think ahead and bring a blanket.

There were also always rumors about satanic rituals being performed around the quarry. Rumors of small animals found sacrificed and hanging from trees, or pentagrams spay painted on the quarry's walls. At the time, it was exciting to think that such goings-on occurred in our little boring town (because isn't any town you live in boring when you're a teenager?) but if such things as pentagrams and dead animals actually were found, they were most likely the product of a couple drunk kids saying, 'Hey, let's fuck with people's minds, man!' Chortle, chortle, snort, snort. 'Yeah, I saw a dead raccoon back there. Got some string?'

The caves are no longer opened to the public, except on tours offered every now and then throughout the summer.

Bummer.

I've always wanted to write a book based on Quarry Hill. It's the kind of place that captivates me. Stokes the fires in my brain. Puts my 'nads on heightened alert.

It's fun to be a horror writer. And yeah - it's hard not to think of a giant like Paul Bunyan with his big axe running through the forest lopping off heads and painting the pines with fresh blood. That's just the way us horror writers are.

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One Decade, One Story - or how One Thing Leads to Another

This is the journey of one of my stories and its ripple effect over the last decade. It’s not the story that has earned me the most money (that honor goes to ‘Mississippi Pearl’) but it is one of my favorites.

I wrote “Some Things Don’t Wash Off” back in 2001. It was originally intended to be part of an anthology with a couple other writers I admired and met through the old Dark Tales message boards – the stories were all to be set at this out-in-the-boonies roadhouse full of strange characters and strange goings-on. The project never got off the ground, so I eventually submitted it to a pro-paying (at the time) online horror zine called Gothic.Net. The editor there liked it, but felt it wasn’t quite right for them. He asked me to send something else. Meanwhile, I had decided to attend the 2002 World Horror Conference in Chicago – mainly because it was in driving distance, and also it was a great chance to meet some of the folks I’d met through the Dark Tales boards. The conference was holding a short story contest sponsored by Weird Tales, so I submitted the story there. Long story short, I won the short story contest and won a hundred bucks.

I submitted “The Apple Tree Man” to Gothic.net due to the editor liking “Some Things...” and asking for something else. He accepted this other story and paid $250 for it.

A bit later, Darrel Schweitzer from Weird Tales contacted me and said they’d like to include “Some Things...” in an upcoming issue for which they paid me another $90.

Later that year, I attended the World Fantasy Convention, since it was practically in my backyard (Minneapolis) and there, the legendary George Scithers cornered me and asked why I hadn’t sent anything else yet to Weird Tales. I sorta fibbed and said I was working on something just for them (although the story I soon came up with was eventually rejected by them. But it was still nice to be asked for something from Mr. Scithers!)

In 2006, one of the attendees of WHC2002 remembered me and “Some Things...”, so when he noticed a call for Minnesota writers who had published professionally, he sent me an email about it. I submitted my story “Leave No Wake” to the Resort to Murder antho and it was accepted. I got to appear alongside some bestselling authors like William Kent Krueger and Ellen Hart. We even went on a mini-tour around the Twin Cities, which was much fun and a great experience. I also got on the invite list for the annual Write of Spring shindig hosted by the Once Upon a Crime bookstore in Minneapolis. (I have a story forthcoming in their Writes of Spring antho, which should be out in April). But I wouldn’t have seen that call for stories if it hadn’t been for the bloke who had remembered me and my story from the 2002 WHC.

In 2007 I sold “Some Things...” to Pseudopod for $100, and they did a wonderful audio version of it. (Click on the link for a listen!)

In 2009, I used “Some Things...” as my writing sample for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Gulliver Travel & Research Grant and won. I received $800 for that in 2010. I got the pleasure to help judge the next year’s entries for the grant, and this year I get to help judge for their Older Writer’s Grant.

In 2010, I included “Some Things...” in my short story collection Bait and Other Stories.

“Some Things Don’t Wash Off” has had a nice decade, and has led to some other nice writing gigs. So to you folks who are in the early stages of your writing ventures, remember that if you have a good story, it doesn’t have to just die on the vine of the first publication that accepts it. Sometimes you need to help it back on its feet, blow the dust off, and encourage it to keep on jogging along.

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This Minnesota Horror Author was a Big Scaredy-Cat

This here Minnesota horror author grew up as quite a scared little kid. I always had to sleep with the hall light on, because in complete darkness my imagination would conjure up the most terrifying explanations for whatever naturally occurring noises happened to reach my young ears. The settling house was a child killer taking one step closer to me. The creak of a bed in another room was some creature cracking its joints in anticipation of devouring me.

I always checked under the bed multiple times, making sure that I could see within every shadow to make sure nothing hid there. My closet door always had to be shut, and one of my parents always had to check inside. I made sure they moved aside the clothes and poked back into the corners sufficiently to allay my fears of something malevolent hiding within. And no, it couldn't be me who checked the closet, because what if something grabbed me while I felt for the back wall and dragged me into some hellish Narnia.

I went through cycles of deciding which was the best way to lie when trying to fall asleep. Some months I would lie facing away from the wall, so that I could best see my attacker. Other months, I thought it best to face the wall; that way, whatever wanted to eat me could just get it done and over with, without me having to suffer through so much anticipation.

I had such trouble falling asleep. I'd often lay awake in dread for at least an hour before sleep overtook me. And even so, I'd have nightmares, the kind of nightmares where something was behind me, chasing me, breathing down my neck, and I could only move in slow motion. When I tried to scream, only the most pitiful hoarse gasp would escape my lips. Thankfully at some point, I learned to take control of my dreams - to realize I was dreaming and give myself power over my nocturnal torments. But still, even after that, for a long time, I needed the hall light on, the space beneath my bed checked, and the shadows of my closet explored before I allowed myself to shut my eyes.

My daughter, while possessing an amazing imagination, does not let that imagination take her down those same dark roads that I used to travel at night, thank heavens. Sometimes I wonder what exactly caused those fears of mine. I've never been able to figure that out. I guess I was just born a scaredy-cat, my psyche born full of the shadows witnessed within the womb.

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Jack the Blob Killer

“Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”

I remember these lines from the story Jack & the Beanstalk, even though I haven’t heard them for decades, because my mom used to read this story to me a lot as a child. It was one of my favorites. It was a frightening story, yet held the allure of riches. I wanted to climb a beanstalk (even though I couldn’t climb a regular friggin’ tree) and I wanted to be a tiny person in a cloud world of giants, hiding in crevices and behind the legs of enormous tables, while trying to find a bag of gold coins or the goose that laid golden eggs. The harp I could do without, because as I remember the story, she tried to get Jack caught by yelling for the giant when Jack snatched her. At the time, this seemed traitorous. However I now realize that if I were a magical harp and some stranger tried stealing me, I’d put up a fuss as well.

I often attribute my love of horror to things like seeing the Steve McQueen version of The Blob at such a young age – watching it by peaking out from behind a big easy chair – but perhaps it was this story that first inserted its little barbed hooks of horror into my psyche.

“Fee fi fo fum...” – the rhyme that the giant in the story repeated whenever Jack reappeared to steal something was my favorite part, because I knew it by heart and would say it along with my mom, both of us lowering our voices to a growl to be more menacing as we said it. But the imagery it evokes is quite violent. “I smell the blood...” – the giant can actually smell blood? Has he got a taste for it? If he catches you will he rip your head off and drink from your neck? “I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.” Again, not only will he drink your blood, he’ll tear out all your bones, as well. And not just remove them, but grind them. What does the giant do with your skin? Use it as toilet paper after he shits you out?

So Mr. Blob – you may have to relinquish your crown to the giant of Jack & the Beanstalk for the genesis of my love of all things that go bump in the night. But I still love you, anyway.

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What Scares You?

Before I sat down to write my novel Northwoods Deep, I’d come to the realization that not much scared me anymore, at least in terms of horror fiction. Don’t get me wrong. I love the genre. Always have and always will. But while horror fiction could thrill and excite me, it rarelyscared me. I hadn’t experienced that goose-bumps-on-the-arm feeling in a long, long time. Why? Had I grown jaded? Too cynical? Was I just not reading the right things?

So as I plotted my novel, I asked myself what scares me? It wasn’t vampires or werewolves or mutant jackrabbits. Sure, those can be vehicles for good scares when handled correctly, just as they can be vehicles for romance or comedy or angsty-teen novels. It wasn’t gore, even though I appreciate a well-written gore scene as much as the next fella.

What scared me?

I wracked my brain and eventually realized that my biggest fear was loss. Loss of family. Loss of my faculties. Loss of the control of my body, of determining my destiny. And what if I’d been responsible for the loss of someone I loved? How would I deal with it? Could I deal with it? That’s where the character of Jack came from; a man responsible for the loss of his mother in a drunk driving accident.

Jack’s sister Carol also suffers from loss; the loss of control amidst the chaos of an abusive ex-husband who refuses to leave her alone no matter what she does.

And Allen, their father, suffers from the loss of not only his wife at the hands of his son, but also suffers from the loss of his ability to cope with reality.

When this family – the Gunderson family – finds something hidden deep in the woods that hints at a new reality, although one merely hallucinatory – how much are they willing to sacrifice for it?

So…loss scares me. And while there is suspense and gore and even an evil entity in Northwoods Deep, these are not what make it a horror novel – at least not to me. These are not the things that really scare me. The thing that really scares me is that simple universal fear of loss, and of things never again being the same.

What scares you? If you want to write an effective horror novel, try to figure that out. Sure, you can use vampires and werewolves and mutant jackrabbits, but remember that they’re merely vehicles through which we can provide the scares – not the scare themselves.

And okay, I lied. Mutant jackrabbits really do scare the crap out of me.


*** This post originally appeared on Keith Blackmore's blog ***

http://keithcblackmore.com/guest-author-joel-arnold

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Death Rhythm

I wrote the majority of my novel Death Rhythm when I was in my early twenties. It was my first novel, and I didn’t really know at first if I had it in me.

It started with a vivid dream I had of being in an attic and discovering a locked metal box. I opened the box and found a pair of drumsticks and an old medal on a ribbon – an award for a drum competition that someone named Evelyn had won. Also in the box was a small piece of paper with a childish drawing of a snarling face, beneath which was written “Look out for Big Ed.” Though the drawing was simple, it was incredibly frightening. I also knew that the ‘Ed’ in the picture was female – an ‘Edna’. I knew that something bad had happened to Evelyn, and I knew that whatever this bad thing was had occurred at the hands of Edna.

That was my dream, and it stuck with me for a long time. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. There was so much mystery contained in it. So I started to write a novel, trying to figure out what had happened.

I wrote it in starts and stops. Scenes came to me:

            A guy walking over a narrow trail toward an old graveyard, autumn leaves crunching beneath his feet.
            A beheaded cat swinging from a tree.
            A teenage girl playing with corpses as if they were dolls.
            Gravestones covered in blood.
            A giant dream-phallus crushing someone against the ceiling like an insect.
         
And most importantly; a girl banging on an old field drum to drown out the maniacal ravings of her older sister – of Big Ed.

Yeah, I had a bit of a morbid imagination. I guess I still do.

I’d write a scene, and then maybe a month later, write another. I plotted as I went along, unsure of where the story was taking me. Eventually it started coming together.

I thought of it as a horror novel, but after it was finished and other people read it, they labeled it different things. One reader considered it psychological suspense. Someone else thought it was a mystery. Whatever anyone wants to consider it is fine by me. Hell, I guess you could even say there’s a little romance in it, although if you were to call it a romance, I’d recommend you get counseling.

It’s a short novel, about 65,000 words. I wrote two novels after it that were complete crap and will never see the light of day, and then a few more after that which I do like. But this one is my first born, and I think it has matured rather nicely.

It’s certainly not for everyone, but if you do like horror (or psychological suspense, or mystery) I hope you’ll give it a chance.

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More Writing What You Know

As a feller who enjoys writing horror, I’m always trying to think of interesting situations in which to put people in jeopardy. At the same time I’m trying to think of how to frame it in a frightening, or at least tension-filled, way. So I spend a good amount of time trying to come up with things that I’m afraid of.

Well, sort of.

Because some of the things I’m afraid of don’t really translate in a literal way to horror. For example, I don’t think H.P. Lovecraft ever wrote about the fear of trying to mingle at a party, or the prospect of being a cubicle-dwelling office drone for the rest of his life (shiver!). But – those experiences/feelings can still be used to create horror.

Pictured: Horror!

Take the fear of mingling with a group of strangers. While in and of itself, not very horrific for a lot of folks. But when I’m in that situation, I experience anxiety, self-consciousness, a fear of drawing attention to myself. What should I say? What if I try to talk to that person and they think I’m a bore, or annoying? Would I be bothering them? Everyone else seems to know each other. Maybe if I stand here quietly, no one will notice me (but maybe this will make me stand out even more.) Maybe I should just leave – can I leave without them noticing? And if I do leave, can I live with that? Another social opportunity down the drain? Unwarranted feelings in the above situation, sure, but I can transpose those feelings into a fictional narrative.

Pictured: Pointy-arrow-phobia

Say a character finds himself alone in a park late at night and he stumbles across a murder being committed. The character suddenly feels anxiety, doesn’t want to draw the killer’s attention, feels very self-conscious. Am I breathing too loud? Can the killer see me in this darkness? Do I dare try to run for it? Or should I attempt to help the victim, opening up the possibility of also becoming a victim? And if I don’t try to help, can I live with that? An opportunity to help a fellow human being missed?

That’s just another way of writing what you know. I’ve never stumbled across a murder being committed in a lonely park in the dark of night, but it’s fairly easy to transpose feelings from other situations I’ve experienced that have struck fear in me. 

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On Stephen King

I’ve noticed that it’s almost not cool to confess a love for Stephen King’s work – or maybe he’s taken for granted by so many of us.


‘Who’s you’re favorite horror author?’ they’ll ask.


I’ll try to think of all the new hot, cool authors out there, before stating my obvious choice, because, you know, an old stand-by just ain't fresh and - cool. But I'll eventually say, ‘Stephen King.’


‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ they say, unsatisfied. ‘But who else?’


As if he's been around too long to be cool.


Remember how when you were a teenager eager to get your driver’s license, and then you finally get it and you can finally take the car out on your own? It was such a freeing experience, the first giant step toward independence. That car took you places, man! And it was thrilling – you got to choose where to turn, choose which roads to take. There was no one to tell you to roll the windows up or down or turn off the air conditioner or change the radio station.


Your ability to drive took you into that adult world of work and freedom and sex. For so many of us, our cars were the only privacy available if we wanted to get out from under our parents’ noses - where else could we take our girlfriends or boyfriends to experience those first sexual fumblings? Or - at the very least our cars could transport us to that old graveyard at night, where there were only the dead to witness our youthful exuberances.


But then...


But then you begin to take the old, reliable car for granted. You forget how amazing it was and still is.


Stephen King is kind of like that.


My older brother had a paperback copy of The Shining. You remember the silver one with the black silhouette on the cover? That’s the one. Anyway, I’d seen it sitting on his bookshelf for quite a while, and one summer day, when I was bored and nothing was on TV (only three channels, mind you!) and there was nothing else to read, I picked up that novel, and...


And my life changed.


Please realize I already enjoyed reading at that time, and was fairly well-read for my age. So it wasn’t that it opened my eyes to reading.


But...it did. It re-opened my eyes to reading.


It was the way he crafted the words – the way he used italics and sentence fragments, forcing my eyes race to across the page, starting and stopping and pausing to his rhythm – a rock-and-roll kinda rhythm. He created a pulse in that novel that attached itself straight to my heart and forced the blood to nearly burst through my skin.


Of course the storytelling was top-notch, too. Without the storytelling, all the writing tricks in the world wouldn’t have helped.


But his ability to tell a story...


Wow!


I was thirteen years old when I read The Shining, and after reading the last sentence of that novel, I had to have more. I proceeded to read every novel he had out at that time and every short story of his I could find. And my parents, God bless ‘em, always bought me his newest hardcover for my next handful of birthdays. It was always my favorite present.


So now, all these years later, all of these Stephen King novels later, I think readers take him for granted.


I know that I sometimes do.


‘Yeah, of course he just wrote another great novel, but so what else is new?’ they say.


Sorta like he’s a car. ‘Runs great, been driving ‘em for years, so?’


So without the car, man, it’s one hell of a long and tedious journey from here to there. Dig?


Maybe we’ve grown a little old, perhaps a bit too large around the middle to make love in the back seat of our cars, but they can still take us places – amazing places, places you wouldn’t fuckin’ believe...


So yeah, I’m happy to admit that Stephen King is my favorite author. He’s brought me on some of the best journeys, some of the most exciting road trips – and so many of them! And best of all, the engine on that thing still purrs like a son-of-a-bitch.

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Why Horror?

I was one of those kids with a closet full of living, breathing monsters, bogeymen and your general serial killer-types, waiting to creep out and do their worst to me as soon as my parents fell asleep. The reason I’m still alive is surely attributable to those early years of constant vigilance and my insistence on keeping the hall light on. My parents also had a role in my survival, in that I often made them check the closet and prove to me that there was nothing hiding in there. The inhabitants of the closet always seemed to sense them coming, however, since they were never present when Mom or Dad opened the closet and put on a show for me of shuffling the rack of clothes and reaching to the back to touch the bare wall. I also did much checking under the bed. What would’ve happened if there actually had been a monster, bogeyman or serial killer, I don’t know – but at least I would’ve seen it coming.

So how did that child version of me soon fall in love with the horror genre? I don’t know exactly, but maybe I learned that watching horror movies or reading horror novels and stories was a way to be able to control the frights. I could always close the book or magazine, or turn off the television.

Or could I?

That’s one of the great things about horror – sometimes you know you should stop watching or reading if you want to get a decent night’s sleep, but you can’t. There’s no way to stop; the narrative keeps dragging you along, kicking and screaming, and won’t let you out of its grip until the end.

But usually, when it does finally let you go, you realize that you’re still safe. The book or the movie or the magazine didn’t kill you, it didn’t eviscerate or disembowel you while you weren’t looking. And that’s pretty damn cool. And believe me, you need to be safe and whole to keep vigilant against the monsters who live in  the closet and under the bed.

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