Haunted Places

Want to get your Halloween Spook On?

Here are our top five locations guaranteed to give you the creeps this Halloween Season.

 

# 5 Myrtles Plantation

As a general guideline, we typically do not encourage our readers to visit haunted homes unless the location has at least a baker’s dozen of frequent entities. Otherwise, it is hardly worth their time and expense, but we will make an exception for Myrtles Plantation's reported dozen spooks.

Metaphorically speaking, you can’t swing a black cat around your television set this Halloween season and not catch a show that features the fascinating story of romance, murder, and hauntings that reportedly occur at this historic antebellum plantation. 
 
Learn more by visiting: The Myrtles Plantation

# 4 Mansfield Reformatory (aka Ohio State Reformatory)

Built to look like a German Castle, this former palace for the naughty, just gives you the willies looking at it! Who wants to spend time in a prison under the best of circumstances, let alone go to rusty, deteriorating, big house of boo?

Spirits are alleged to abound here! Visitors tell of satistic guards, forelorn prisoners, and even the warden’s own “accidentally” shot wife that still frequent the grounds. During the Halloween season, the facility has an extremely popular paid attraction (must be at least 13 years old) called Prison Experience: Dead Walk – they make it sound so nice!

Make your own prison break by visiting: Mansfield Ohio Prison Experience

# 3 St. Augustine Lighthouse

Unlike prisons, lighthouses are cool places to visit regardless if they are haunted or not. Here you will learn all about the original Blue Man (years before he formed a group) who likes to chill in the basement, as well as the tragic story of the former lighthouse keeper, whose daughters, along with another girl, drowned when the lighthouses supply trolley they were playing on suffered a catastrophic failure!

This is one Halloween beacon sure to lead you to haunted shoals. For more information, we dare you to visit: St. Augustine Lighthouse's Dark of the Moon tour

#2 Peoria State Hospital

This one is a no brainer – in fact, everything we post on our blog is a no brainer, but we do the best we can with the limited resources our DNA grants us.

Peoria State Hospital is always near the top of most recommend Haunted Places to visit list. Someone needs to investigate to see if there is a connection between weird castle designs in prisons and hospitals and frequency of haunting. Perhaps these designs are satellite dishes for the receiving departed.

It is also no wonder the patients here went insane, even the location had more names than Sybil. The facility has been called Peoria State Hospital, Bartonville State Hospital or Illinois Asylum for the Incurable Insane (how is that for an optimistic prognosis doctor!).

Find out more about their brand of crazy at: Peoria Asylum and Ghostly World

#1 Waverly Hills Sanatorium

Even if it wasn’t reported to be one of the most haunted places in America, Waverly Hills Sanatorium goes off the spooky richter scale. This expansive sanatorium once housed thousands of patients who were undergoing bizarre treatments for tuberculosis (the "White Plague").

The real human toll here was staggering. Most patients were sent here to die. Although the actual number of patients who died here might never be known the fact that the facilities tunnel has been nicknamed the “Death Tunnel” or “Body Chute” gives you some sense of the scale of the operation.

Here is how you can check in for treatment: Waverly Hills

It's a Wrap!

Well that wraps-up our recommendations for our top five locations to get you spooked this Halloween season. Whether you are a firm believer or an ardent skeptic, these locations are sure to get the hairs on the back of your neck to stand up!
 
As always, we welcome your thoughts and recommendations here at Halloween Fun for All.

Time for a Break?

by John Morgan

Micro Fall and Halloween Breaks

The daily challenges that most of us face, seem to be growing in complexity and urgency.
 
Just reflect on recent conversations with family, friends and colleagues - almost everyone is tasked with doing more, with fewer resources.

Frankly, it is a bear just to hold your own, let alone gain any forward momentum. Dysfunctional, seems to best describe most of our personal and professional lives.

Fortunately, we can all take microbreaks that allow us to hit the mental refresh button.

For example, yesterday, I had a rare business need to take the train from Sacramento to San Jose, California.

It was a welcome change. I brought plenty of work with me to maximize my three-hour trip, but I was amazed throughout the course of the journey how wonderful and refreshing brief glances out the window were for my spirit.

 

As I boarded the train and peeked out the window, I could see the fascinating old railyard buildings. All were in various states of disrepair, but thankfully, these buildings somehow seemed to walk that fine line of being “cool and intriguing,” rather than earning the moniker of: “Someone should do something about this mess - it’s a menace to the community!”

Within seconds of leaving the station, passengers find themselves going over the Sacramento River, where two old ghost steam paddle wheelers are alleged to materialize from time to time. Forever locked in an epic race to see who is the faster of the two vessels.
 

Old Town Sacramento can be seen along the eastern river bank. It is here where mysterious apparitions from beyond are reported to peer at tourists from the windows of surrounding old western buildings. Many more are said to interact with the living in the areas ancient underground tunnels.

Even Mothman has been reported on the Tower Bridge which can viewed just south of Old Sac.
 

In minutes, you pass one of the major wetland bird sanctuaries in North America as you travel across the Yolo Causeway. Ducks, geese, pheasants, pelicans, and even sandhill cranes can be viewed as you make your way over this large floodplain. The influence of Fall was seen everywhere, even though the temperature outside was in the 90s.

The first station stop occurs near UC Davis and from the train you can see the agriculture student’s fields of corn and pumpkins. Next you travel through Dixon, which recently held the title for the world’s largest corn maze!

For the remainder of the journey, I was treated to sight after sight of images of Autumn and Halloween. From my window I could see the eerie looking Ghost Fleet in Suisun Bay, catch sight of the supposedly haunted Alcatraz and USS Hornet, and view the Oakland Raider stadium, as well as view construction going on for the new 49er stadium in Santa Clara.

The entire trip afforded brief reminders of how beneficial it is to simply take a moment to reflect on the world outside our typical challenges and life routines.

Even if you cannot travel, simply view various web sites of places you would like to see or better yet, challenge yourself to explore subjects or places that you have never focused on before. A great starting point is to see where your blog is being viewed and make it a point learn more about the people and things in that part of the world. Which reminds me that I need to find out how Halloween is celebrated in Moldova!

Let's face it, we all need to take a break from time to time. If nothing else, it will afford you a fresh perspective from daily grind. As always, we appreciate you taking a macrobreak with us here at Halloween Fun for All.

Grave Thoughts

By John Morgan
Halloween Symbols

GRAVESTONES

 

Picture a dark, windy night, you hear the crack of distant thunder, leaves crunch as you approach the cemetery, as you open the creaky cast iron gate to the cemetery, a cat lets out a banshee-like shriek and bolts past you…You get the picture, besides, we were running out of clichés.

Few things are spookier than cemeteries, gravestones, and our bad creative writing.

 

And you thought math was hard

Death is a tough subject. It is like looking at your bills to pay pile, eventually you will have to deal with it – but there are so many others things you would prefer to be doing first. One epithet put it this way:

 

 

Great, so even in death, we are still haunted by debts! Hopefully you have the mettle to stay with us as we step through the cemetery gates and enter the world of gravestones, headstones, and crypts.

This is one Halloween symbol that will make our traditional ancient Greek, Roman, and Celtic friends look like the "New Kids on the Halloween Block."

 

Stones in the Stone-Age

Neanderthals and early man left indicators of memorializing those who passed away by performing various burial rituals. It appears, they frequently took great pains to ensure that their fellows were buried in deep caves and pits.

There were some very practical, as well as spiritual, reasons for memorializing the dead. Clearly people need to show respect and remembrance for the departed, but proper inurnment (is also theorized) reduced the spread of disease and kept scavengers from, well, scavenging.

 

What good are you?

The first headstones and markers were not much more than heavy stones placed over the burial site. The conjecture here has been twofold:

1.      Reduces scavengers success rate

2.      The dead stay put!

 

 

Which will it be...the Carrot or the Stick?

It is fascinating to see the evolution of headstones. Designs moved from a simple rock, to frightening winged death head figures and skulls. This symbolism was not lost on the people of the day: “Better start living a virtuous life or there will – literally - be hell to pay!”

The Victorian era designs incorporated sweet pudgy cherubs, elaborate majestic crosses, billowy white lambs, and large sorrowful angels.

Of course, people did try to “dress to impress,” individuals and families with power would – and still do – build elaborate “I love me” shrines (think Facebook but with a lot more marble) as tributes to their greatness and success.

 OK, OK, we hear you…we will try to stay focused on how this all relates to Halloween.

People are dying to see your Halloween decorations

Today, as we rapidly approach Halloween, people are in their garages and workshops preparing to build their own Halloween graveyards. Check out this video on how realistic you can get!

And what would a tombstone be like if it failed to have personalized witty inscriptions. Such as, "Here Lies The Pillsbury Dough Boy. He will rise again."
 

What will future Halloween decorations look like? We recently spoke with a Director with the Northern California Neptune Society and he indicated that in California approximately 50% of people are opting for cremation over a traditional burial. So perhaps in the coming years, people will be "urning" for a different type of lawn decoration.

 

The ceremonies and rituals associated with memorializing are thought to strengthened the bounds of family and community. Grieving is a very natural part of how humans (and some animal species) cope with death. Look at this amazing article: Chimpanzees grieving

 

Till the bitter end

Even though designs and materials have changed through the years and are still evolving, one thing hasn’t changed our desire to memorialize, grieve and reflect on those who “assume room temperature.”  As someone put it, “Death must be great, because no one has come back from it yet!” …well at least that is until we run out of rocks!

 

 

Jack & Charmian London's Grave

Glen Ellen, CA