Halloween Hurricane

"Those are the voices of twelve thousand killed in a typhoon, seven thousand killed by a hurricane, three thousand buried by a cyclone. Am I boring you? That's what the wind is. It's a lot of people dead. The wind killed them, took their minds to give itself intelligence. It took all their voices and made them into one voice. All those millions of people killed in the past ten thousand years, tortured and run from continent to continent on the backs and in the bellies of monsoon and whirlwinds. What a poem you could write about it!"

-Ray Bradbury, The Wind, from The October Country

It's like Bradbury wrote this story for a Hurricane on Halloween.

Halloween 2010 Pictures

The whole story: http://watchthenight.blogspot.com/2011/07/revenge.html

I owe a lot of credit to PumpkinRot for the huge amount of inspiration he provides daily. Particularly, the witch jars and some of the pumpkin designs are heavily influenced by his work.

The Revenge

In the legends that were told around roaring fires on cold autumn nights, the horsemen never showed himself until nightfall. These days, people walking past the churchyard could hear the pounding of phantom hooves on the packed earth of the road as the horizon darkened the first segment of the disk of the falling sun. Some of the travelers claimed to see the figure on horseback out of the corner of their eye. Those that were brave enough to turn their head and look at the shadow saw nothing. Just an entanglement of bare branches against an orange sky littered with cold cobalt clouds.


Sightings of the horseman always took place on the road through the forest, well outside of town. Now, people living on the back streets of the village claimed to hear him stalking the cobblestone lanes in the early hours of moonless nights. They would wake from their sleep to hear the unearthly high-pitched neigh of a horse outside. But when they parted the heavy winter curtains of the bedroom window they only saw whispers of fog floating in the road. The ethereal vapor swirling about as if someone had just ran through it.

Of course there were those in Sleepy Hollow that felt these stories were completely absurd. Tales of the horseman had been told since the first time a war cannon was fired near the Hudson. And in the twenty some odd years since that time, the tales of the horseman were very clear about the specter’s habits, none of which bared any resemblance to the whispers that circulated today. Around every sewing circle there were those who vehemently denied the current rumors, citing past stories such as the one involving the old schoolmaster as corroboration. Others insisted that the ghoul was growing frustrated after years of looking for his missing piece.

Finally, one November evening a story emerged that some would say proved the rumors.

Alison Van Houten lived on her family’s farm at the edge of the forest, just outside of town. The Van Houten family was one of the most well respected families in Sleepy Hollow, despite their lack of wealth. When the Eikenboom family lost their home to a fire several years earlier, the Van Houten’s were the first come to their aid with more than enough food from their humble pantry and the best clothes in their closets. And in the rare case that Van Houten family would ask for a small loan as a last resort, their creditor would be paid back more than he was owed over time.

At the age of seventeen, Alison was the oldest of the Van Houten children and was known to help care for her younger siblings. Although quiet at times, she was valiant and steadfast and above all else honest.

Imagine the shock of the townspeople when Alison burst into the Inn that November evening. She was without a coat despite the early winter wind and her clothes were torn and dirty as if she had fallen badly. As everyone in the Inn crowded around to help her she began to tell the tale that no one could forget.

She had been walking along the road to the north of town, near the old church. The sun had begun to dip below the horizon as the air began to turn frigid. Suddenly out of the corner of her eye, Alison had seen a shadow like many Sleepy Hollow residents before her. She apprehensively turned, hoping there would be nothing there like in the rest of the stories. Instead she saw a large cloaked figure sitting upon a massive black stallion. The horse was covered in grime and the remnants of dried up vines clung to his coat. The figure was draped in black rags that danced in the wind. Alison would say that the fabric was tattered and scorched as if from riding through the fires of Hell. A hood covered the creature’s head. But as the last rays of sunlight hung in the cool air, Alison could see without a doubt that there was no head beneath the hood. The horse breathed heavy and began to stomp the earth.


Alison turned and ran. The horseman waited, almost as if to give her a head start, but within seconds he was right behind her. The horse began to overtake her and out of the corner of her eye, she could see the horseman’s reaching hand. Before she had a chance to make a move an icy, gnarled hand grasped the back of her coat and began to drag her alongside the horse. Thinking quickly, Alison lifted her arms over her head and out of the coat and hit the earth with a thud. She expected to feel a deathly grip on her neck, but nothing. Looking up she saw the road was empty except for a rolling mist up ahead. Alison got up and ran to town as fast as she was able, stopping at the first building she encountered, the old Inn.



Alison Van Houten would recover from her experience after several weeks, but would later move south to what was once known as New Amsterdam to avoid being a constant topic of conversation in the sleepy village. Of course there were those that doubted her story completely, using past legends to support their argument that this could not have taken place. But those in the river valley that held the legend as sacred believed her. When they told the story around roaring fires on cold autumn nights they would say that having not been able to find a suitable head, the horseman now came searching for souls.

More pictures here.

I owe a lot of credit to PumpkinRot for the huge amount of inspiration he provides daily. Particularly, the witch jars and some of the pumpkin designs are heavily influenced by his work.

Tim Burton Awesomeness at the Museum of Modern Art.

There was so much cool stuff at the exhibit. Rooms filled with drawings and paintings. One of the rooms included all movie related items such as the Edward Scissorhands costume (Johnny Depp must be small), the Headless Horseman's cape (so much stuff going on that you don't see in the movie), 3 Batman Cowls, the Catwoman suit, the Penguin's baby carriage, the Corpse Bridge Puppets, and best of all the Nightmare Before Christmas Puppets (probably close to 20 of Jack's heads, each with a different emotion) and the Vincent puppets!

Close Encounters

After possibly years of ignoring the weatherman telling me when the International Space Station was visible in the sky, I finally decided to take a look. It's pretty cool. After checking it out last night I looked online and found this handy website that told me the station would be visible again tonight. I decided to set up my camera tonight and took these pictures with a 30 second exposure. The first pictures are fairly unfooled around with. The second picture of each set is enhanced to make the space station more visible.

Jacob

It's only about 3 months late, but I finally have pictures of the Halloween display I created this past year. The idea for the scarecrow design and lanterns comes from the always inspiring PumpkinRot.



The crows were particularly bad that year, continually raiding the corn crop. Jacob’s father told him to build a scarecrow to stave off the birds. That afternoon, Jacob went out to the birches on the far side of the fields. He collected three large limbs from the speckled white trees, picking up twigs along the way. Back at the house, Jacob bound the three larger limbs together with twine, creating the letter ‘Y’ out of the wood. Next, he took what had once been his father’s old, tattered flannel shirt. Jacob had found it in the barn where it had been waiting to be shredded into rags. He carefully slid two of the branches into the worn brown and orange check sleeves.

The pumpkin patch was to the west of the corn fields, just on the outskirts of the woods. It was still early in the season, but Jacob searched the twisting green vines until he found a pumpkin large enough. It was dark orange and flat and wide. He heaved the gourd out of the dirt it had rested on all summer and carried it back home.



Sitting on the back porch, Jacob hollowed out the pumpkin and with a carving knife he created a face of two askew triangles eyes and a grinning mouth full of jagged teeth. He took the wooden body and pumpkin head out to the clearing in the center of the corn fields. He placed the post of the scarecrow into the ground and carefully added the fleshy skull on top. To finish off his creation, Jacob tied bundles of twigs to the end of each arm. The primitive being now reached to the sky with thin and gnarled wooden fingers. Satisified, Jacob headed home.



In the days that followed, Jacob returned to the fields many times to check on his scarecrow. Each time he visited Jacob found feathers entangled in the scarecrow’s twisting trap of fingers. Several crows lay dead on the ground nearby. Jacob was proud of his work. Not only were the birds staying away from the crops, but they were literally scared to death to go near that field. But, Jacob also had misgivings about the dead birds. Something seemed off about the whole thing. And in the middle of the night when Jacob would awake in his bed, he would swear he heard the scrapping of twigs against his bedroom window even though there were no trees on that side of the house.



The months passed and the chill of November swept through the valley and winter followed. The harvest was long over and the crops were gone. But while the extra pumpkins rotted in the field, the scarecrow’s head became dry and hard. His mouth began to sag and his teeth curled in slightly but his grin was still there. And so he stood under the grey clouds of the winter sky waiting for the next growing season.

Armistice Day

"I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind"

-Kurt Vonnegut
Breakfast of Champions

One of my favorite Vonnegut quotes. World War I is long over. I wonder if the veterans of World War II heard the voice of God at the end of the war. Or maybe just the scream of the atom echoed in their ears at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.