Halloween Links

Happy Halloween.  Here are some creepy links, a few of which are fun.

A Spooky Road Trip On Vermont's Haunted Highways

The Dog Suicide Bridge

The Haunting History of the Spring Garden Road Library Lands

National Building Museum Ghost Tours

October Featured Book

October Featured Category

Tour Disney's Real-Life Haunted Mansion, For Sale on eBay

More selections from 2008, 2009 and 2010.  I was busy last fall and work that pays gets priority over blogging.

Interesting Stuff May 1, 2009

A Little Microlending Goes A Long Way
Aging of Water Mains Is Becoming Hard to Ignore
Biofuel from algae
Corps of Engineers Unleashes FART (An April Fools post, so out of date in that sense, but still funny.)
Dungeons & Dragons Co-Creator Dies At 61
Empire State Building Plans Environmental Retrofit
Interesting Stuff Feb. 25, 2008
The New TV Remote: Your Bare Hand?
Recession slowing water investment to a drip
Say It Ain't So, Bill! USGS Will Use 'Groundwater' as One Word
Secret Message in Lincoln Watch Found
Spelling 'Groundwater' - Historical Note
This is awful: 1,500 farmers commit mass suicide in India
World's Rivers Losing Their Flow

Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose

Ambrose, Stephen E. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. 1996. New York: Touchstone, 1997.

Undaunted Courage is a biography of Meriwether Lewis. It is also, to a large extent, an account of Lewis’ expedition, co-led by William Clark, up the Missouri River, across the Rocky Mountains, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Coast and back again.


The Lewis and Clark expedition, the bicentennial of which was celebrated in 2004 through 2006, is rightly presented as the centerpiece of Lewis’ life. Ambrose shows how Lewis’ early life in the plantations and wilderness of Virginia, as a militia officer during the Whiskey Rebellion and under the political tutelage of Thomas Jefferson uniquely prepared Lewis to lead a company of explorer-soldiers with a broad mission. His life after the expedition was brief and troubled.

The western exploration, beginning in 1804 and ending in 1806, is the major focus of the narrative. It was more than simply a trip. Lewis and Clark were charged with scientific observation (particularly geography, botany and zoology), Indian diplomacy, establishing trade, and what might be considered a touch of espionage. With the exception of Indian policy, Lewis, Clark and their men performed admirably.

Lewis, throughout the mission and afterward, wanted to make it clear that he and Clark had equal parts in the leadership of the expedition. It is extraordinary that this worked so well. One gets the impression for the book that Lewis was the senior of these equals, which may explain it. Even so, Lewis seemed to prefer the close companionship of trusted peers and friends.

Lewis achieved great success while still relatively young, in his early thirties. Early success can be tough, but Lewis seems like a man who can handle tough situations. However, his few years of life after the expedition seem to be characterized by failure. Certainly, the political situation in the Louisiana Territory, where Lewis was appointed governor, was very difficult, and he may not have been cut out to be a politician and bureaucrat. However, he left important matters that were easily within his grasp undone. Notably, he never published the expedition journals, which more than anything else may have sealed his fame, supported his policies and multiplied the fruit of his exceptional labor.

The final years of Lewis’ life, which ended in suicide, raises many unanswered, and possibly unanswerable, questions. Even so, Ambrose’s biography of the man is an interesting story, and sometime and exciting tale of his great adventure.

Stealing Plots

I previously wrote about “stealing” characters.  In that essay, I described several characters from popular fiction and how they might be seen as variations on the same character template.  I suggested that a writer can modify and reimagine existing characters to create new ones.  Actually, I think that is probably how most characters are born, even if the authors aren’t consciously aware of it.

Similarly, plots can be “stolen.”  Some have suggested that there are a very limited number of plots, so in a sense all writers are stealing from a small pool.  On the other hand, there is a lot more to a story than just the plot, so it may not matter.  Let me illustrate the idea with some examples.

A Christmas Carol is one of the most popular, and I think one of the best, ghost stories ever written.  Charles Dickens’ novella was first published in 1843.  The story has been adapted to the stage (including opera), many films, radio, television (my wife and I are fond of the 1984 version with George C. Scott as Scrooge), comic books, and numerous pastiches.

The plot is well known.  Ebenezer Scrooge begins as a miser.  On a certain Christmas Eve, he is confronted by the ghost of his former business partner and three spirits who represent Christmases past, present and future.  The visions they show him convince Scrooge that his single-minded pursuit of money has deprived him of life.  He awakes Christmas morning as a new man committed to relating to his fellow man and putting his money to use.

Let’s reverse Scrooge.  Make him an extremely generous person instead of a miser.  In that case, he might be something like George Bailey.  Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, was the generous man at the heart of It’s a Wonderful Life.  His dream is to travel the world.  Instead, he delays his dream again and again to help his neighbors, his brother, and eventually his own wife and children.  It comes to a head when a mistake by his uncle brings imminent ruin to the savings and loan George runs. Faced with ruin, George sees himself as an utter failure.  He contemplates suicide in hopes that his insurance policy will rescue his family from financial ruin.

At this point, he receives a spiritual visit like Ebenezer.  In this case it is a single spirit, an angel named Clarence.  Like the Christmas ghosts, Clarence shows George a vision.  This is also an inversion of Dickens’ tale.  Instead of showing him a history of missed opportunities and blindness to the needs of others, Clarence reveals an alternate world in which George and his generous acts did not exist.  His brother is dead.  His wife is a frightened spinster (it’s hard to believe Donna Reed would have been overlooked by the marriageable men of Bedford Falls even holed up in the library with her glasses on).  The people are mired in poverty because he hadn’t been there to fight for access to credit so they could build homes and businesses.  The town is under the thumb of the miserly landlord Mr. Potter, himself a type of unreformed Scrooge.

Like Scrooge, George is changed by his vision.  He sees that his life is worth something and that his sacrifices bought him a lot of love.  In the end, returned from his walk in the dark alternate universe, that love is displayed by a return of generosity from his many friends that saves him.

These beloved stories don’t have the same plot.  However, one is a variation or alteration of the plot of the other.  This plot archetype doesn’t have to be so serious.

Topper, either the book by Thorne Smith or the movie starring Cary Grant, is an example of this plot played for laughs.  Cosmo Topper is a banker.  He is bored with his job.  He is somewhat alienated from his wife who clings to respectability.  He has money and status, even what might have been considered a good marriage in a time when such relationships were as much about business as love, but he has no fun and it is wearing on him.

The ghosts are a piece of work, too.  George and Marion Kerby are a wealthy couple who die in a car accident.  Instead of shuffling off to the afterlife, they find themselves stuck on earth.  They have never done something substantive, either good or bad, in their entirely frivolous lives.  They decide to fix the situation by helping their old friend Topper.

In this case, all the major characters are a type of Scrooge.  Topper has let his job, money, and status keep him from a life of fun and serious connection.  The Kerbys had so little meaningful connection to other people that they neither helped nor harmed another soul.  Even Topper’s wife Clara has sacrificed intimacy in her marriage to focus on social climbing.

So Topper is visited by spirits like Scrooge and Bailey.  Instead of taking a serious look at life, it is presents a screwball comedy.  The Kerbys drag Topper into all kind of risqué situations he would normally not get into.  Misunderstandings abound and Topper is embarrassed repeatedly.  The ghosts are have good intentions, but they are not very competent.  Topper feigns irritation at the hijinks, but in his heart is having a ball and doesn’t want the haunting to end.  Clara feels humiliated by all the trouble Topper is getting into, but fear of losing him to a wild life reminds her of how much she loves him.

Through a series of screwy events, the characters undergo a Scrooge-like change.  The Toppers loosen up and rekindle their love.  They discover that their intimacy as a couple is more important than jobs, wealth or status, though they don’t have to completely give up those things.  The Kerbys take responsibility for themselves and their actions.  They finally put Topper’s needs ahead of their own and do something substantively good, opening the doors of heaven.

You can probably see that these stories are related by more than similarities in plot.  They have a common theme.  All of these stories are about connecting to others in relationships.  Bailey is a little different from the others in that he starts out blind to all the good that has resulted from his seemingly humble touching of the lives of others.  Scrooge, the Toppers and the Kerbys are isolated for various reasons, mostly of their own making, and need to discover that relating to others is the main thing.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic of English literature. I’m writing a review of it because I want some horror to feature on Halloween.

Dorian Gray is, in my mind, a weird tale. Wilde produces a sense of creepiness that begins even in the seemingly light and hopeful first chapter. The title portrait is a supernatural object that horrifies and fascinates Gray. He is preserved in youth and beauty, and possibly even saved from the consequences of evil deeds, but the portrait become a mirror to his dark and sinful soul, something that eventually becomes too horrible for him to endure.

In addition to being a weird tale, it is a moral tale. Gray has beauty, wealth, and status, but he gives himself over to any kind of wickedness if their might be pleasure in it. At first, it is the infatuation of a hollow love for the actress Sibyl Vane. When she disappoints him on the stage by failing to present an ideal picture of love because acting it seems shallow compared to her real passion, he rejects her. Her suicide nearly turns him off the path he is pursuing, but when the thrill of the moment passed, he nearly forgot her. The sins of youth and ignorance turn more willful as he falls into using drugs and prostitutes. Eventually he murders a man. The book hints at other wrongdoing, possibly homosexuality, affairs with married women, seduction for the sake of its own pleasure, gossip, excessive drink, greed, blasphemy and leading  others into all these things.

The book could be a social commentary on the upper class of his time. With all the advantages they had, they were still corrupt. A fortunate life is not a sign of a good person. As with Job, poverty and hardship are not indications of an evil life.

Some think Wilde is exploring own life in the book. One can read hints of homosexuality in Basil Hallward’s feelings toward Gray (Basil paints the portrait), and in Gray’s feelings toward Lord Henry Wotton. Possibly Wilde was critiquing his own aestheticism, finding that it did not necessarily lead to a higher morality, but could as easily lead one to an immoral, selfish, and consuming pleasure-seeking.

In the book, Wilde never comes out and says what his intentions are, if he has any at all in terms of exploring himself, his society, or notions of beauty, art and morality. It seems clear, though, the Wilde suggests a person cannot be separated from his deeds and his consequences as Gray is with the aid of his magical painting. A man, his deeds, and their consequences may not be the same thing, but they are linked in a powerful way. When Gray tries to destroy the painting that bears the ugliness of his soul, he plunges the knife into his own heart.

Though some have accused Wilde of writing an immoral book, one could as easily argue that he wrote a very moral book. Gray is sympathetic to a degree, but he is an evildoer destroyed by the evil he did. The reader can contemplate issues of art, beauty, and morality for himself. Along the way, he can enjoy a creepy thrill.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray.  1890. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003.