The Girl Who Was Witched Away

It's December and a dread anniversary is approaching fast. The Christmas season is always hard. A vague sense of horror drifts down from the plains, with leaden skies and a landscape that seems impossibly bleak.It happened when I was ten; I really can't say more, otherwise I will freeze and not write another word.

It interests me, though, in an uncomfortable sort of way, to remember that I had two main books I was reading at the time. One was Tales of Terror, by Ida Chittum, and the other was Angela Carter's translation of The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. One was given to me by my sister. The other was a gift from my brother.Tales of Terror is still in my possession, but the fairy tale book was lost long ago. Perhaps I disposed of it in secret, as I found it unbearably creepy.

Indeed, I hadn't made the link with that translated book of fairy tales before I read Carter's classic The Bloody Chamber years later, but after reading only a few lines I was immediately hit with that sense of childhood dread. They had to have been written by the same person. An image search bore fruit - the illustrations by Martin Ware were burned into my brain.

I asked my mate, who'd never seen the book, to take a look at these illustrations and tell me what he thought.

"Good God" he said. "Is that from an Aleister Crowley manuscript? It's terrifying." 

It was good to know I hadn't been imagining things back then. All that winter, I'd been troubled by the spectre of Bluebeard's wife: the forbidden key bleeding endlessly in her pocket, forever marked by her shame.

The Tales of Terror book was much more comforting for being overtly scary, and the illustrations by Franz Altschuler were meant to be frightening, unlike Ware's stark, hard-to-put-your-finger-on unease. Actually, I had spent months gazing at it hopefully in Waldenbooks, itching to make it mine. It came as a present for Halloween, and by December of that year I had read it many times. 

The front cover is striking enough. The green ghosts rather reminded me of my old relatives, so it just seemed familiar and friendly, as strange as that may sound.

It was the back cover I really found unsettling.The plainness of the landscape. The sense of isolation. The shadows, which might indicate the time is just past noon. 

A lonely farmhouse on the hill. We all knew what happened in places like that. Or if not, we soon would. The landscape was familiar, even though I didn't live in the Ozarks. The Texas hill country looks much the same, especially as you wind upward where the towns get further and further apart. 

As it happened, we did make such a journey that December, in that gray empty space between traumas. We drove though Gruene on the way, which was still mostly a ghost town then - all abandoned buildings, fallow fields and the sound of rusted windmill blades turning. The water tower which looms on the horizon is notable for being the site of a suicide; the town manager, they say, tied a rope around his neck and flung himself off this mortal coil. All this is to say that the place disturbed me in a way that's hard to describe. You wouldn't recognize the town, the way it is now. Or maybe only a little. The old feeling is still there, in between the touristy shops. You just have to know what you're looking for. It shouldn't matter, except it does. I don't know why I recall traveling through that particular village that December. We kept driving and driving, beyond Austin and to God knows where, and I lay down in the back of the station wagon to shut out the sight of the hills and fields that seemed to go on forever.

Perhaps music could have been a distraction, but pop music was in a bad way then. Everything was ballads and minor keys and depressing. Or at least it seemed that way. The arpeggio and sighing chorus of Strawberry Letter chilled me to the bones. I couldn't shake it. Everything was wrong, but there was nothing I could do about it. I just lay there in the cold grayness, wondering if the feelings would ever stop. I couldn't foresee an end. That's one of the things trauma does to you - it takes away your future. 

There is an illustration from Tales of Terror that brings these feelings back for me, from The Woman Who Turned To Paper.

It was the one story in the book that was patently silly, but the illustration haunts me the way December haunts me. Somehow, it feels so much the same. And it's kind of funny, looking at what I've written above, one wouldn't think this would have had much influence on my artistic style. A person like me prefers to avoid old horrors,  not indulge them. Yet going through pictures for this post I found this little throwaway sketch:

I was somewhere between amused and disturbed to find it's nearly a combination of the Ware and Altschuler trees, above. It's amazing, what gets buried in the back of your mind.

There is one more book to mention here, or rather a story, though I hadn't read it yet. My copy of The Dynamite Book of Ghosts and Haunted Houses had not arrived from the Scholastic book club before school let out for the holidays. This was a disappointment, but it turned out my cousin had a copy at home, down south where she lived. She told me about it as we played around the area of the church where the hearses drive in, under the what do you call it, the porte-cochere. The first story in the book was called The Girl Who Was Witched Away, about a young girl who was proud of her red boots, but after the witch got her, all that was left were her bloody footprints in the snow. 

Above us, the sky was full of ice.

I don't have an illustration for this story, only one I made myself, years later.

from a photo. aged 10

The Girl Who Was Witched Away had been my primary reason for ordering the book, but by the time school resumed in January, I was rather a different person. Trails of blood in the snow and girls who went missing had lost all appeal. It's only in recent years I began to understand my childhood horror of tales like Red Riding Hood and Donkey Skin, the knowledge that lay beneath the surface without ever being spoken. No one in our family talked about the dangers of being female, but we knew it just the same.Carter's cautionary moral at the end of Bluebeard makes it clear that the young wife's travails were her own fault, after all.

It had nothing to do with justice or fairness, this knowledge; only the reality of death on the edge of winter. 

Two Little Ghosts

There is a story that's supposed to go with this picture, but I don't have permission to write it yet. What I can tell you is that a dozen years ago, I had a very strange dream. I stepped outside into a whirl of blowing leaves, and when the leaves scattered on the sidewalk, there was a painting of two faces there. It seemed like I should know them, but somehow I didn't know them at all. The second thing I can tell you is that only one of the faces is a ghost.

Drawing Down The Moon

If you look at things in a certain way, even that muddy puddle at the end of the drive seems like magic. :p

As Above, So Below

After the recent rains, I was surprised to see acres of white flowers spring up overnight. After all, it's the end of a drought-stricken summer, when nearly everything is dead-brown dry and long since given up the ghost.

  

At first (not knowing overmuch about flowers) I thought they were wild onions, but when evening came and clouds of glorious lemony-vanilla scent started wafting from the fields, I realized they must be rain lilies.

In the dark, the fields of luminous white blossoms seemed to mimic the field of stars in the sky. I thought, "as above, so below". 

Although as far as I know, the stars in the sky do not smell like lemony-vanilla. 

It would be pretty awesome if they did, though. :)

Conversational Ghosties and Standing Stones

I've never seen a megalith, though I hope to one day. I have seen ghosts, though never in conversation. ;)

Mementos

It's been a long time since I've posted, months and months. Not because I haven't wanted to; it's just the circumstances of my life have been too difficult to allow for blogging. It's been a hard slog and that's no lie. It's hard not to lose oneself in the middle of so many demands. But maybe making an effort will do some good. While poking around in the storage shed, I found these sketches in a drawer. I made them a couple of years ago and while I didn't want to throw them away at the time, I didn't think much of them - hence the bottom-of-the-drawer treatment. Looking at them now, they don't seem so bad. Not perfect by any means, but kind of cute in an off-beat way. At any rate, it's nice to find a memento from happier times.

What Once Was (Or, Guess What, Victoria Is Still Creepy)

(note: I wrote this back in December. I'm just now dragging it out of draft.)

Last month, I went back to Victoria, returning to a house I once stayed in many years ago. It was a bit sad and nostalgic, because it was at a major turning point that I had come to stay back then, on the eve of starting a new life in a new place. Now that time has long passed, the couple who lived in that house are gone, the people we worked with are gone, everything is irrevocably changed.  

Well, one thing is the same, something I'd forgotten after being away for over a year. In my current town, you couldn't take a spooky-looking picture if you tried. In Victoria, all you have to do is point your camera at random and snap:

See? Which was really the idea behind this blog - my wish to document what made that particular town so very strange, even if the strangeness went unnoticed - or at least unmentioned - by the majority of people (the minority who did mention it admitted to being spooked as all hell). 

It did catch me by surprise, though, after all this time. Snapping away with the camera, mostly out of boredom,.and seeing something very different turning up in the viewfinder than what I'd seen with my own eyes.

Case in point - 

 I don't like posting my own photo on this blog in any recognizable fashion, but it's kind of necessary here. I had entered the bedroom I once slept in, nigh on twenty years ago when I was but a young thing, and I thought, ah, let me take a picture for memory's sake. Here is the mirror I once gazed at, the daybed I once slept in, exactly as I remember it, an ordinary little room in an ordinary little frame house, nothing special or unique outside of personal attachment...

Oh, no, wait a minute. Apparently I had been sleeping in Dr. Dread's Mausoleum of Doom without realizing it. (enlarge to get the full effect)

Sadly, there are no non-creepy photos to compare these against. I took plenty, but some things are just too terrible to bear looking at.

This was all very interesting, so I got a little curious about how the rest of the house would photograph. How would I, product of the 70's, look in the 70's era kitchen? The 70's weren't creepy. They were tacky, but not creepy.

Well, it was fine, except in the photo it looks like a potential crime scene: Or like that bit in a movie right before something bad happens:

After that, I ventured into the room in the house that I did find overtly creepy, the den everyone had always seemed to avoid. I would soon find out why.

While setting up the camera and finding a suitably dramatic pose, I think I manged to tick off whatever was in there, because I definitely began to feel a presence. It was not pleased. The self-timer was set to take three shots, but I was so spooked that I couldn't manage to stay long enough for all three.

I'm normally more curious than afraid when it comes to haunted houses and mysterious presences, but this was a truly awful feeling.

There is something really wrong with these photos, something besides bad lighting and noise. I often take photos with poor light experimentally, to better understand how lighting affects the image. No, it's something else. Something looks wrong with my shadow, like it's someone else, standing behind me...

And another thing, harder to pinpoint. It's as if I don't want to look too hard, because there might be something there I don't want to see hiding in the image. It's like that with all of the photos I took that night, the sense of another presence there, watching the camera watching me.

Maybe that's the thing about Victoria, for those who notice it  - it's not just the sodden air and the swollen ground, the isolation or the tension and angst swirling like a low-lying fog - those things are obvious, only those in deepest denial could miss them. It's something else there - the spirit of the place, immaterial, watching, just out of sight.

Or maybe it's just all those bloody clowns...