I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PHISH-“Intro” (MGM Grand Garden Arena, Friday 10, 31, 2014).

In honor of Halloween, these Ghost Box stories will be attached to a recent Phish Halloween show [with quoted material from various reviews]. 

Known for dawning musical costumes to celebrate [Halloween], Phish broke with tradition last year to offer a set of original music.  The Phish Bill read that Phish’s musical costume would be a 1964 Disney album of sound effects – Chilling, Thrilling Sounds Of The Haunted House.  But it wasn’t a cover set. Phish played original music set amongst an incredibly psychedelic, theatrical graveyard stage accentuated by zombie dancers and a ghoulish MC.  At the start of the set, the stage was cleared before a graveyard came to the foreground.  Smoke filled the air, zombie dancers appeared, and music filled the venue. A haunted house was brought to the front of the stage, which eventually exploded, and all four-band members appeared, dressed in white like zombies. 

When the lights went down for the second set, attendees witnessed a crazy scene on a stage set up to look like a graveyard. During the intro, a Haunted House was pushed out by stage hands as dancers dressed in ghoulish attire paraded around. It soon became clear the band was setup within the Haunted House and just like the famed Storage Jam from the group’s Super Ball Festival, the crowd couldn’t actually witness Phish performing.

Opening with a few spooky synth notes, a guitar and drum melody rises out of the waves.  It is spookyish, but feels more comically spooky–just like the Disney record..

[READ: October 16, 2017] “The Clock”

Just in time for Halloween, from the people who brought me The Short Story Advent Calendar comes The Ghost Box.

This is a nifty little box (with a magnetic opening) that contains 11 stories for Halloween.  It is lovingly described thusly:

A collection of chilly, spooky, hair-raising-y stories to get you in that Hallowe’en spirit, edited and introduced by comedian and horror aficionado Patton Oswalt.

There is no explicit “order” to these books; however, on the inside cover, one “window” of the 11 boxes is “folded.”  I am taking that as a suggested order

This was a good story to start with.  Not super scary, but nicely creepy.

It begins with the narrator replying to a spooky story from a friend–sympathizing that seeing a woman sleep walking  must have been frightening.  He says that he has never met a person like the sinister sleepwalker, but it reminded him of something that happened twenty years ago.

He was staying with his Aunt (you might remember her poodle, Monsieur).  There a  woman staying with the Aunt as well–a Mrs Calbe–who was “recuperating” after an unfortunate incident that required “all of her staff to be fired.”

He didn’t like Mrs Caleb and felt she did not like  him.  Nevertheless, when she heard he was en route to Lewes for a gathering, she asked him to go to her house to pick up her wind-up clock.  She had been away from home for  two weeks and needed this item .

He reluctantly agreed and found himself walking up to her house feeling “quite a like a burglar.”

He entered the house and found that it had been sealed up–sheets on infuriate and windows closed–as if she wasn’t planning to return for a while.  It was musty but nothing untoward.  She said the clock might be in a couple of places.  He finally tracked it down in one of the bedrooms upstairs.

But when he found it, it was ticking.  And unless this was one of those special 14 day clocks, it was pretty unlikely to still be ticking. He grew nervous as he picked it up.  He began to wind it, hoping it was at the end of its coil.  But it drew tight almost immediately.  He knew that someone else had wound it.  Recently.

When he hears the sound of something–something not human–coming up the stairs he has little choice left.

I enjoyed the brevity of this story and the rather comical (despite being creepy) tone, especially the final line