I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: ANTONIO CORA-“The Cellar” (from The Blair Witch Project) (1999).

A lot of the music I listen to is weird and probably creepy to other people, but I don’t necessarily think of songs as appropriate for Halloween or not.  So for this year’s Ghost Box stories, I consulted an “expert”: The Esquire list of Halloween songs you’ll play all year long.  The list has 45 songs–most of which I do not like.  So I picked 11 of them to post about.

I was getting bored of the Esquire list so I found this fun little tidbit of spookiness.

The Blair Witch Project was a low budget, DIY-looking movie.  The soundtrack is a compilation with songs on it (Josh Blair’s Witch Mix), but this track is from the actual movie soundtrack.  I couldn’t exactly tell if there was a release of the actual movie soundtrack, but the last track on the disc is similar to a video I found online for the “end credits theme.”

Excluding the intro, which has 30 seconds of dialogue from the film (“Heather’s Apology”), this track is a five-minute DIY, nightmarish ambient score.

It is largely quiet with rattling, echoing sounds.  An online thread (therefore of dubious truth) says that the score was made with the sound of sticks breaking and being thrown into a culvert (or some such) then slowed down dramatically.

There’s some kind of droning sound throughout (maybe a synth, but who knows).  It seems to slowly percolate while things scrape and bang.  There’s a few louder noises that really stand out, but there’s no momentum or narrative to the soundtrack.  It’s just a sort of endless low grade scare.

Don’t listen at bedtime.

[READ: October 27, 2019] “Last Call for the Sons of Shock”

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

This is once again a nifty little box (with a magnetic opening and a ribbon) which contains 11 stories for Halloween.  It is lovingly described thusly:

Oh god, it’s right behind me, isn’t it? There’s no use trying to run from Ghost Box III, the terrifying conclusion to our series of limited-edition horror box sets edited and introduced by Patton Oswalt.

There is no explicit “order” to these books; however, I’m going to read in the order they were stacked.

This story was the most genuinely scary and horrifying in the box because it was the most real.

It was powerful, painful and horrible.  But it was written so well, I couldn’t look away.

The narrator, Greg, opens by saying he once saw a sign on a subway pole that said “Wet Pain.” He assumed it meant “Wet Paint,” but now he’s not so sure.

He tells the story of his friend Dean.  Dean was brought up in the South and moved to New Jersey.  He and Greg worked together on construction jobs.  “No one expected a white reformed redneck from New Orleans and a black gay geek from Park Slope like me to become best friends, least of all us, but we did.”

On his first visit to meet Dean’s wife, Lynn, when Greg rang the bell,

a short Afro crowned a dark pretty face, big gold hoops hung on either side of her broad smile.  She feigned shock when she saw me, raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes as she turned back to yell at her husband ‘Omigod Dan, You didn’t tell me he was a NEGRO!”
I loved her immediately.

They all got along very well and Greg was a little jealous of their relationship which was solid and strong.

And then Dean’s mother died.

Dean flew back to New Orleans to take care of things there.

Dean began drinking as he started going through the stuff.  He was finding all kinds of weird, old, relics of New Orleans’s racist past.  He planned to throw them away unless they seemed like they might be valuable and he needed the money.

Dean also seemed to be talking about his wife in more hostile terms.  Greg chalked it up to the stress of his mother’s death and Lynn’s real unhappiness with moving to New Orleans even for the short term.

Dean told Greg that he was sending him something.

The next day a large package arrived.  It was a panoramic picture over three feet long of

a huge crowd at the base of the Washington Monument, ghostly pale women and children in the foreground scattered in a semi-circle around the edges of an open clearing.

Outnumbering them many times was a multitude of men that extended back to the horizon as far as the eye could see dressed in dark street clothes or light robes, with and without hoods, many with left arms outstretched in a salute to the monument, to their fellow Ku Klux Klansmen, to their families, their country, and their God “

In precise handwriting at the bottom was written “Gathering of the Klans” August 8th, 1925.

He shuddered at the image and said it was the causal audacity of it all that scared him the most.

When Dean called him, he asked about the package.  Greg said he couldn’t believe it all.  They lightened the mood and Greg asked if Dean was related to any of the people in the picture.  Greg said probably, we’re all inbred down here.

Greg decided to frame the picture.  “We need reminders” of what other people have been through.

Greg had some work that kept him busy for a few days so when he talked to Dean again, things were very diffident.   Dean was very drunk and when Greg asked about his wife Dean replied, “Bitch is fine, boy, why you want some of that?”

The narrator is instantly furious at being called boy.  He had never been called boy before by anyone.  How could his best friend have said it?

Greg tells Dean he’ll talk to him when he sobers up.

Greg met his friend Winston at the local gay bar.  They had drinks, commiserated about Dean and then left.  As they were walking out a car drove by, shouted Faggot! and threw something at the window.  No one was hurt but this was too much.

Greg says that over the next few weeks he noticed a rise in hate crimes, some related to 9/11, others not.

But he went back to thinking about Dean.  What was going on with him?  It was either internal–he was having a mental breakdown, or external–an evil infecting America.  Demons, haunts, call them hungry ghosts…it could have started in Spain during the Crusades.  Maybe something woke that.  He looked at the picture hanging in his study.

Then Greg heard about the Hurricane barreling down on New Orleans.  [The real world impacting this story is what makes this whole thing even more frightening].

He called Dean to tell him to evacuate but Dean is having none of it.  Dean answered, “S’what the damn bitch downstairs says.  Not leavin’ my home, boy.  Don’t need damn niggers tellin’ me what to do.”

Greg is stunned by the language usage (as was I frankly).  He tells Dean he’s not like this, but Dean laughs at him, “You think I been bit by a hungry ghost?”

Greg has another encounter with a casual racism the next night and he has about had it with the world.

Then the hurricane touched down in Florida. People were evacuating New Orleans.  Greg’s phone rang,.  It was Dean. He continued to call Greg nasty names but the menace was worse.  Then Greg heard Lynn scream.

How could he get in touch with the police from half a country away without Dean knowing?  He needed to keep Dean on the line.  He thought about what to do when the line went dead.

Damn, this was a scary, horrifying story.  Whether superstition or just old fashioned racism, this story feels all too real.  It also feels scarily prescient when just over ten years later the horrible scum that gave rise to all of this hatred has risen it’s head once again.  Almost 100 years after the contents of that picture.

Read Patton Oswalt’s take here.