Scary! (Part II)
While I was looking through my photographs I came across some pictures that reminded me of another scary story, although this is a different kind of scary. Specifically, the "not very" kind.
I don't know why I love ghost stories so much, but I do. You keep your grand canyons, your scientific discoveries, your miracle of birth... I wanna see a book fly across the room by itself, dammit. My one drawback, though, is that I'm a terrible cynic. Hell, even my own ghost story failed to persuade me about the existence of ghosts and ghoulies...
Picture it: New Orleans, November 2001. A young [*ahem*] woman wanders the streets of the French Quarter with her travelling companions, wide-eyed and looking for fun and excitement. What is the first thing she does? Does she go to a jazz club, losing herself in the soulful rhythms that pulsate through the music? No. Does she sample some of the distinctive culinary dishes and libations made famous in this part of the world? No. Does she hang off balconies and flash her naughty bits to drunken college students? You wish. No, instead she takes a Ghosts and Graveyard tour.
My friends Michelle and Deborah and I eagerly took the tour and found out about the history of some of the neighbourhoods, walked through one of the graveyards, heard all about Marie Laveau, etc. It was interesting of course, and gave us a chance to wander around the great architecture and things, but it was definitely not scary.
After we were finished and had had a cooling drink (chartreuse is nasty, by the way), I still had a hankering for some scariness. After all, New Orleans is supposed to be filled with the voodoo and the spirits and the spooky and the whatnot. So far I hadn't seen much of that.
I had read about "the most haunted house in New Orleans" in my friend's guide, though. You can't actually go INTO the house, mind you (someone happens to live there, the big spoil sports), but when people go past it on tours... some people have been known to FAINT RIGHT IN FRONT OF IT!!
*cough*
Yeah, well, also it is said that people's camera's mysteriously DO NOT WORK when they try to take a picture of this terribly haunted house. So of course we had to go and take some pictures and see for ourselves.
We tracked it down in the neighbourhood and we all went with our different cameras and took a picture of the (frankly not all that haunted looking) house. I looked through the camera and hoped that when I went to press the button IT WOULDN'T WORK! BECAUSE IT'S SO HAUNTED! But no, I pressed the button and all was normal. Disappointed, but not really surprised, I looked down at my camera and watched the "pictures taken" digital counter change from 4 to 5. And then something odd happened.
It started to rewind.
Now, my camera is an automatic, not like the old ones where if you wanted to rewind in the middle of a roll you just switched a button (and I accidentally did that a couple of times in my life). But on this camera if you want to rewind in the middle of a roll you have to take a pin and find the tiny pin hole and press it to rewind it (probably because customers were sick of accidentally wrecking their rolls of film). But I had not taken a pin and done all of that. IT DID IT ALL BY ITSELF!!
Yay! I had a ghost story! Or, my camera is a just a huge piece of crap! (Both of the other girl's cameras worked fine.) Still, I was excited thinking about getting my pictures back. Perhaps there would be a person in the photo EVEN THOUGH THERE WAS NOT ONE THERE WHEN I TOOK THE PICTURE! Or some kind of weird blurriness or something? Er...? I mean, having to spend the money on a whole roll of film and having to pay for developing and then only getting five pictures from it isn't very damn supernatural, just kind of expensive and annoying. I wanted more, dammit.
Anyway, we enjoyed the rest of our trip in New Orleans, blah, blah, blah. When I got back home I took a few minutes to tell my roommates about my trip, as well as my scary spooky story. They were not very impressed, so I just went up to my room to unpack. I opened the door and saw something on the floor. A couple of batteries. What the? I opened it wider and saw broken pieces of plastic. Apparently my wall clock had fallen off the wall and smashed on the floor. The hands were all broken when I picked it up and they hung limply at 6:30. Again: what the? I asked my roommates if something happened while I was gone. Nope, they didn't know anything about it (I had four other roommates back then and none of them had heard it, which only means it happened when no one was home - or that one of them came into my room and smashed my clock themselves).
Oh, well. There's nothing odd about things falling off walls. Sort of thing that happens all the time, what with gravity and all. But since I had just finished telling my camera story I decided to incorporate the two things to make them scarier. The next day I sent an email to Deborah (she is roommates with Michelle) about my ghostly act of a weak nail. I got an email back from her almost immediately stating that they found some odd things in their bedrooms, too. It seems that a picture of Deborah's had fallen off the wall as well, and Michelle had a heavy fishbowl knocked off her night table.
OOOoooOOOoooOOO, ngh?
Well, okay. Not so much OOOoooOOOoooOOO as yyyyAAAAaaawwwn, but I'm trying to make a story here. Sure, things fall off of walls, kitty cats are notorious for pushing fishbowls off of tables (and they have two kitties at home) and cameras malfunction occasionally. When you look at it in that light, well, there is nothing exciting about these events (let alone interesting). But if you look at it as a complex series of ghosts MAKING THINGS NOT WORK AND PUSHING THINGS OFF OF STUFF CUZ THEY'RE MAD AND DEAD AND SCARY, well, then you've got yourself a campfire story my friend.
If not a blog entry.
Oh, by the way, the pictures of the house came out boring. I even used a loupe to see if there was anything out of the ordinary in them. Nope. Just some guy's house. Some guy who's probably sick of strangers taking pictures of his house. Poor dope. Heheh.
Anyway, next week: An even more creepy encounter in New Orleans. Bwaahahahaha, etc.
While I was looking through my photographs I came across some pictures that reminded me of another scary story, although this is a different kind of scary. Specifically, the "not very" kind.
I don't know why I love ghost stories so much, but I do. You keep your grand canyons, your scientific discoveries, your miracle of birth... I wanna see a book fly across the room by itself, dammit. My one drawback, though, is that I'm a terrible cynic. Hell, even my own ghost story failed to persuade me about the existence of ghosts and ghoulies...
Picture it: New Orleans, November 2001. A young [*ahem*] woman wanders the streets of the French Quarter with her travelling companions, wide-eyed and looking for fun and excitement. What is the first thing she does? Does she go to a jazz club, losing herself in the soulful rhythms that pulsate through the music? No. Does she sample some of the distinctive culinary dishes and libations made famous in this part of the world? No. Does she hang off balconies and flash her naughty bits to drunken college students? You wish. No, instead she takes a Ghosts and Graveyard tour.
My friends Michelle and Deborah and I eagerly took the tour and found out about the history of some of the neighbourhoods, walked through one of the graveyards, heard all about Marie Laveau, etc. It was interesting of course, and gave us a chance to wander around the great architecture and things, but it was definitely not scary.
After we were finished and had had a cooling drink (chartreuse is nasty, by the way), I still had a hankering for some scariness. After all, New Orleans is supposed to be filled with the voodoo and the spirits and the spooky and the whatnot. So far I hadn't seen much of that.
I had read about "the most haunted house in New Orleans" in my friend's guide, though. You can't actually go INTO the house, mind you (someone happens to live there, the big spoil sports), but when people go past it on tours... some people have been known to FAINT RIGHT IN FRONT OF IT!!
*cough*
Yeah, well, also it is said that people's camera's mysteriously DO NOT WORK when they try to take a picture of this terribly haunted house. So of course we had to go and take some pictures and see for ourselves.
We tracked it down in the neighbourhood and we all went with our different cameras and took a picture of the (frankly not all that haunted looking) house. I looked through the camera and hoped that when I went to press the button IT WOULDN'T WORK! BECAUSE IT'S SO HAUNTED! But no, I pressed the button and all was normal. Disappointed, but not really surprised, I looked down at my camera and watched the "pictures taken" digital counter change from 4 to 5. And then something odd happened.
It started to rewind.
Now, my camera is an automatic, not like the old ones where if you wanted to rewind in the middle of a roll you just switched a button (and I accidentally did that a couple of times in my life). But on this camera if you want to rewind in the middle of a roll you have to take a pin and find the tiny pin hole and press it to rewind it (probably because customers were sick of accidentally wrecking their rolls of film). But I had not taken a pin and done all of that. IT DID IT ALL BY ITSELF!!
Yay! I had a ghost story! Or, my camera is a just a huge piece of crap! (Both of the other girl's cameras worked fine.) Still, I was excited thinking about getting my pictures back. Perhaps there would be a person in the photo EVEN THOUGH THERE WAS NOT ONE THERE WHEN I TOOK THE PICTURE! Or some kind of weird blurriness or something? Er...? I mean, having to spend the money on a whole roll of film and having to pay for developing and then only getting five pictures from it isn't very damn supernatural, just kind of expensive and annoying. I wanted more, dammit.
Anyway, we enjoyed the rest of our trip in New Orleans, blah, blah, blah. When I got back home I took a few minutes to tell my roommates about my trip, as well as my scary spooky story. They were not very impressed, so I just went up to my room to unpack. I opened the door and saw something on the floor. A couple of batteries. What the? I opened it wider and saw broken pieces of plastic. Apparently my wall clock had fallen off the wall and smashed on the floor. The hands were all broken when I picked it up and they hung limply at 6:30. Again: what the? I asked my roommates if something happened while I was gone. Nope, they didn't know anything about it (I had four other roommates back then and none of them had heard it, which only means it happened when no one was home - or that one of them came into my room and smashed my clock themselves).
Oh, well. There's nothing odd about things falling off walls. Sort of thing that happens all the time, what with gravity and all. But since I had just finished telling my camera story I decided to incorporate the two things to make them scarier. The next day I sent an email to Deborah (she is roommates with Michelle) about my ghostly act of a weak nail. I got an email back from her almost immediately stating that they found some odd things in their bedrooms, too. It seems that a picture of Deborah's had fallen off the wall as well, and Michelle had a heavy fishbowl knocked off her night table.
OOOoooOOOoooOOO, ngh?
Well, okay. Not so much OOOoooOOOoooOOO as yyyyAAAAaaawwwn, but I'm trying to make a story here. Sure, things fall off of walls, kitty cats are notorious for pushing fishbowls off of tables (and they have two kitties at home) and cameras malfunction occasionally. When you look at it in that light, well, there is nothing exciting about these events (let alone interesting). But if you look at it as a complex series of ghosts MAKING THINGS NOT WORK AND PUSHING THINGS OFF OF STUFF CUZ THEY'RE MAD AND DEAD AND SCARY, well, then you've got yourself a campfire story my friend.
If not a blog entry.
Oh, by the way, the pictures of the house came out boring. I even used a loupe to see if there was anything out of the ordinary in them. Nope. Just some guy's house. Some guy who's probably sick of strangers taking pictures of his house. Poor dope. Heheh.
Anyway, next week: An even more creepy encounter in New Orleans. Bwaahahahaha, etc.
posted by Alanis at
3:38 PM
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