Happy Halloween!

Halloween Party Madness

This week has been filled with planning for Halloween. Our annual Halloween party was last night and here are a few pictures of our nonsense.   I hope all of your Halloweens are as fun as ours has become!

Our little mortuary before the night made it too creepy.

We brought back fortune telling as a Halloween tradition.

My little Cthulu and his brother the brain eating zombie terrorized the party guests.

I decided I was too pregnant to stand half way through the party and let my husband, the pirate, bring me drinks.

We  borrowed the design for this creepy tree from http://mizerella.blogspot.com/2011/09/30-haunted-tree.html#comment-form   It turned out wonderfully and made our Hearth room into a haunted forest.  Our pet conure fit right in.

Crikey!

I read in the news the other day that, because of the popularity of text speak, traditional British words are dying out. So I think it's the duty of all of us to reverse this trend and start to introduce some of this vocabulary back into our work. This is my attempt and I expect you all to follow my example. See if you can guess which are the words in danger of dying out before clicking on the link above. Not sure I've used some of them correctly.

“Cripes!” exclaimed Dickens as he threw down his newspaper in disgust. “What bally awful news.”
“What is it?” enquired Darwin. “What malaise is troubling your mind? Has the tomfoolery of the rambunctious masses exploded into civil unrest?”
“Verily, if that were all that is wrong,” replied the renowned raconteur. “See for yourself.”
As the famous scientist picked up the sheet, the door opened and in walked their friend.
“Salutations!” declared Gladstone on entering the room. “And felicitations on your latest novel Mr Dickens. Rather a spiffing yarn I thought. I understand it has been lauded across the land.”
“Load of balderdash if you ask me,” said Darwin.
“Don't be such a cad,” said the novelist. “If I were a fighting man I would smite you down and quash those unkind sentiments of yours.”
“A woman is jilted by her betrothed and remains shut away wearing her wedding dress for the rest of her life? And that Pip seemed a laggardly fellow to me. Betwixt the two of them, I don't know which character was the most unbelievable. Unless I am lacking in some arcane knowledge.”
“For a naturalist you are unnaturally rude,” said Gladstone. “I thought it was a swell piece of fiction.”

Five Forgotten Halloween Traditions to Bring Back

Those of you who have been following my blog for a while might remember this post.  As I hang spiders and bake mummy dogs by the dozens for tomorrow's Halloween party, I thought it might be nice to reuse my favorite Halloween post from last year. Halloween is my favorite Holiday. It has a very long history that is often forgotten. Although Halloween's roots can be traced back to pagan practices, it's name came from Christians. Halloween was the time of year when the ancient Celts believed that the veil between this world and the "otherworld" became thin allowing for spirits to have more access to our world. This was, naturally, quite terrifying to the Celts. In order to protect themselves from the spirits, people built enormous bonfires and cast bones into them to scare the spirits away. They also dressed up as terrifying spirits to confuse wicked spirits into believing they were spirits themselves. The Celts called Halloween Samhain. It was the Catholics that came up with the name Halloween. The early Christians were masters at taking local pagan holidays and integrating into their own Christian days. Even Christmas was stolen from Saturnalia. Catholics took Samhain and made it All Saints day, a day to celebrate the spirits of all the deceased saint. All Hallow's Eve was the night before All Saints day. The term All Hallow's Eve was eventually shortened to Halloween.


Through Halloween's long history there have been many traditions that have been simply left behind. This saddens me. So here are some I think we should bring back.

1.Colcannon: This is an Irish dish made with cabbage, kale, and potatoes. Small coins and prizes are usually hidden in this dish making it a little treasure hunt. I admit, this dish sounds repugnant, however, if altered slightly to regular potatoes the treasure hunt in dinner form is great fun for kids and adults. Just don't swallow the pennies.

2. Barmbrack: This is another food tradition. It is a tradition Irish fruitcake baked into a ring. Items are placed within the cake that for tell the future. For example, if you find the wedding ring, you'll be married soon. Finding coins predicts great wealth.

3. Tricking: Back in the old days the trick in trick or treating had meaning. People would hit the streets causing mayhem and playing tricks on people in their costumes and the only way to avoid the "tricking" was to give out treats. What happened to the tricks? Not saying you should set your neighbor's lawn on fire or anything, but if stingy old Ms. Brown isn't giving out candy this year, some fake poo on her porch might be perfect.

4. Bonfires: Why not scare bad spirits away with fires? Fires are fun. I'm building a fire in my fire pit this Halloween.

5. Fortune Telling: There are many types of fortune telling done on Halloween night, but one's fortune was always believe to be most easily predicted on Halloween. Whether you were reading tea leaves, apple peals, or gazing into mirrors to see your future, a prediction made on Halloween was always accurate.

A True Horror Story

Halloween is filled with horror stories.  Horror movies are on television and writers paper the world with stories of things that go bump in the night, but fiction is always slightly less terrifying than real life.  There is little in the world of fiction that can compare with the atrocities of the holocaust or the rape of Nanjing.   The Countess Bathory and Lady LaLaurie are more terrifying than any fictional serial killer.   So for tonight,  I will tell a true tale of a flesh and blood monster who is more terrifying to me than Freddy or Jason.

This is the story of a small man named Schafer.   Schafer was born into a time of violence and hatred and he embraced it was a lustful passion.   He was a German who was part of the Hitler youth in his childhood.  As a young adult, he embraced the Nazi mission and became a medic in the army, but his part in the Nazi atrocities was a small thing compared to the monster he was to become.  As an adult, he became a Lutheran minister and set up a home for orphaned children.   He seemed like a good man and many good German citizens followed him in his charitable crusade.   They more than followed him, they worshipped him.  To Schaffer's followers, he became a vision of God on Earth.  He became a symbol of Christian goodness in their eyes and he became a cult leader to his followers.  In 1959,  he founded the Private Social Mission.  Its purpose was to help poor children and those who followed him saw the goodness in this.  Yet, that same year, Schafer had to flee West Germany.  His followers fled with him and still believed in him, but the authorities wanted him for the sexual abuse of the very children he claimed to be trying to save.

Schafer took his hundreds of followers to Chile where he founded the  Colonia Dignidad community. In this community his followers worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day to create Schafer's ideal utopia.   It was in the Colonia that Schafer showed his true colors to his followers.   He surrounded the colony in barbed wire fences and had a watch tower at the center of the camp.  Descent or complaints were met severe punishment and torture.  Schaffer built a medical facility in the camp that became renowned as a torture facility.  Sex was strictly prohibited in the camp.  One of his ex-followers described his punishment for breaking the laws of the camp.   He and his wife had sex and she became pregnant.   The couple attempted to flee the camp, but were captured.   The woman was forced to have an abortion and tortured with electric shock and so was the man.  The only sex that was allowed in the camp was that between Schaffer and the new orphans he had brought to the camp and the other children of the camp.  He founded yet another orphanage and home for abandoned children and this time there was no limit to his cruelty.  Schafer sexually abused the children and subjected them to bizarre experiments involving electroshock to the genitals to try to prevent them from maturing into adults.

Schafer's torture techniques became so famous that when dictator Pinochette took over Chile, he paid Schafer to use his medical wing for torture of political prisoners.  Schafer's colony held the official torture chamber for the Pinochette dictatorship so Schafer had political sanction for his cruelty to his people and the people that were brought to him.   After the Pinochette dictatorship collapsed, people finally began to report the atrocities that had been committed to them by Schaffer.  Schafer fled the colony in 1997 after he was accused of child molestation and crimes against humanity.  He wasn't convicted until 2006.  He died in prison at the age of 88, but he thrived as the kind of monster that make fairy tale witches seem pleasant for decades.

I did wonder if the colony was haunted.  It seems a place that bore witness to such horror must hold ghosts, but it seems the colony still remains somewhat active.   In 2006,  there were still residents at the camp.  Schafer so sheltered his followers from the real world that even after the horror, they didn't know where to flee.  They had been trapped in a world of work where everyone still wore 1950s garb and sung German folk songs.  Those that live in the colony today don't speak of ghosts, but ask for forgiveness for the sins of their former leader.  Sometimes, the real monsters are more terrifying than anything anyone can dream of and Schafer was one of those monsters.

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A Horror Novel for Halloween!

My first novel was my darkest.   I think I was having a dark night of the soul when I wrote this one.  It was littered with sex, violence, and old gods.  I've changed a lot since I wrote this novel, but the novel itself has remained the same.   My inspiration for this bit of horror was the state hospital where I did my internship, Searcy State Hospital.  As soon as I stepped into this old, battered hospital with its dark history and old ghosts I knew something had to be written about it.  So I wrote Circe.   Even though this was my first book written, Circe is my fourth book to be released.   It was released in ebook format today.   If you read ebooks and you like sex, violence, and old demons that grab hold of the world through the voices of the insane,  this might be a good book for your Halloween reading!

I will be celebrating the release of this book with giveaways and fun once I have all the details!  I'm thinking I should give away something fun for this book like a Cthulhu hand puppet or a collection of Lovecraft short stories, since Lovecraft strongly influenced me when I wrote this book.  What do ya'll think?

Buy Now At:
http://lachesispublishing.com/proddetail.asp?prod=Circe