Kissing Dead Girls

Ladies and Ghouls, I'm pleased to announce my new column on the paranormal appearing monthly on Bookslut, a "Ladies' Night in the X-Files," if you will. The first piece is on Stephenie Meyer's first installation of the Twilight series. I hope you enjoy it, and I'd love to know what you think!

Also: RIP to the King of Pop.

The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall

When I was a wee one, I loved Ghost Stories (with a capital G, and S). I had this crazy book called the Usborne book of GHOSTS, and I read it so often that it literally disintegrated in my hands. I went on a mad search for the thing several summers ago when I was home, but alas, it appears to have vanished.

The first story in this collection was one about "The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall." The story also included an accompanying photograph, reproduced below.



Now, as I'm writing this, I realize this photograph is most likely a hoax, and that the shadowy figure looks like a statue of the Virgin Mary. If you look closely, you can see the triangle feet, where her robes fall around her, and it appears as if her hands are in the praying position. In actuality, the perpetrator of this hoax probably figured out a way to superimpose a photograph of a statue over the stairs.

But when I was ten, man, I believed this. I believed it so hard. And the accompanying story makes you WANT to believe it. That's the fantastic thing about really great ghost stories. You want these spirits to exist, because their stories are so dramatic.



The deal with the Brown Lady was that she was supposedly Dorothy Walpole (1686-1726), the sister of England's first Prime Minister. She wanted to marry the second Viscount Townshend, but her father wouldn't allow it. Finally, after the death of Townshend's first wife they were finally married. Of course by this time Dorothy had started a love affair with this guy named Lord Wharton. When Townshend learned of the affair, he supposedly bricked Dorothy up in Raynham Hall, where she either

a) died of a broken heart
b) died of a push from Townshend down the stairs
c) died of boredom

And it it her ghost that haunts the halls. An extension of the same story is that guests at Raynham Hall have reported to seeing her walk towards them, a shadowy female figure who comes more and more into focus the closer she gets, and that right as she's face to face, you realize she has. no. eyes. Just sockets! And then, hoping you're sufficiently creeped out, she vanishes.




There is yet another caveat to the story, that, in hopes of getting rid of the ghost, the owners of Raynham Hall took to exploring the house to find the remains of one such woman. The story goes that the skeleton of a young woman was found, and promptly buried at a nearby nunnery. The Brown Lady hasn't been seen since.

Ghost Ship(s)

Could the icicle Godzilla monster be the cause of the Titanic wreck?

I have always been fascinated by shipwrecks, and various other secrets of the deep. In middle school, I was so obsessed with Titanic that I actually memorized the entire timeline of the wreck, and the number of people killed (fyi: 1,571). So fascinated am I, that I've even seen Ghost Ship, quite possibly the worst scary movie ever made, starring the lovely Julianna Margulies of ER fame. (Warning: clip below contains graphic content).

The movie, of course, is a spin-off on a much classier myth of "The Flying Dutchman," basically a bad-ass pirate who's doomed (in death) to roam the seas until he can find some poor lady to love him. Check out Wagner's opera version, it's pretty awesome. There's another little movie that's pretty much stolen the Dutchman's thunder, too. You may have seen it.


So I was pretty jazzed when I opened my issue of New York to discover an article called "Secrets of the Deep," about all the goodies lying in New York harbor.

• Apparently there are over 300 wrecks in the lower Hudson, most of which remain a secret as they are archeological sites.
• There's a freight train near Peekskill! It fell off the drawbridge in 1865!
• Suicides. "When homicides and suicides end up in the river during winter, they often stay underwater until April, when decomposition speeds up, bloating them with gases . . . The worst I ever saw," says an NYPD scuba diver, "was half in the mud, half out. The skin was peeling back, the critters were eating it."
• Lots and lots of cars.
• A piano and a giraffe. "Another time, they found the corpse of a giraffe that had fled a circus." :(
• 404 ice cream trucks. (Good Humor dumped them to build an artificial reef).
  
• Dreamland: One of coney island's first theme parks. It burned down in 1911.

SO COOL.

There's also a rumor that Lake Lanier, the man-make lake in Georgia houses an entire town under the water, including a race-track and movie theater. I once heard tell that a scuba-diver was even able to swim into the movie theater and sit in one of the seats. The Army denies that there's anything under the lake, but last year, when Georgia suffered a severe drought, a steeple from a church popped up and the speedway was exposed.

I love the idea that there's an entire world underneath the ocean. Like, what?!