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...

Picnic Area #17 or, The Horror of Home

When you have been a strange child, nostalgia is a double edged sword. Walking through the park where you once spent so many hours is fraught with emotion. It's all fine one moment, recalling this bend of the road, the gravel beneath the swings, the water fountain where your hot and tired classmates lined up for a drink. Everything smells the same - the grass, trees and river still have the same sweet scent and you are amazed how much you remember despite having forgotten. When you have been a strange child, though, alongside comes an upwelling of old miseries.

Depression and alienation have effects that are hard to put your finger on. It's not so easy as cataloging a series of events. It means nothing to say. "I felt lonely in this spot" or "the bank of this creek is where I sat crying in despair". These are only expressions of things that happened The real horror is one of perception. Depression is like a wound in the mind

Amid the the sunnier memories, the feel of a nightmare emerges. The dense mat of live oak leaves crunching under my feet makes me nauseous. The webby light coming through the trees feels prickly. There is a yawning horror somewhere that I can't name, only sense its presence. It's here though, and comes back to haunt me in vague, uninterpretable dreams.

I had forgotten about picnic area 17. Reservations Only. It's always been there under the trailing oak branches, despite my forgetting. Snippets of far-off memory emerge - my sister's friends hoping to hide from prying eyes. My schoolmates in our Kindermaskenball costumes playing and clinging to branches like little monkeys in fancy dress, or sharing sodas with other girls whose names have been lost to me. It hardly matters. These are all just descriptions of things that happened. I had forgotten all of that long before yesterday as I was making my way to the springs, when suddenly it was there in front of me. The light coming through the branches was as it had always been, catching me in its sickening web.

There is no reason I can give, only that the wound in my mind makes it so.