"A beautiful woman, and a most horrid demon"

It's September 1, and the coolest kids declare that's the official start of Halloween Season. That's perfectly fine with me. We need all the horror escapism we can get these days, when the real world is scarier than Boris Karloff and Michael Myers. I've already been doing some posts that could qualify as Mild Fear 2022 since the blog reboot (1, 2), but I'll make this the first official post for that category of the year. 

It's also time for our family to finalize our 2022 Halloween Movie Festival, which will likely begin in September and bleed (ha!) into November. I'll share the lineup when it's done, but it's likely to include some lighter fare, like Mad Monster Party, Carry on Screaming!, My Name Is Bruce and the hard-to-find 1985 TV movie The Midnight Hour. We've also been working our way through the Hammer Dracula film series this summer. Because we can never get enough of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

Anyway, for tonight's fun little post, this is a newspaper clipping I found on Page 2 of the May 11, 1865, version of the Lancaster Intelligencer.  I don't know what was in the water 157 years ago, but this is quite the wild ghost tale. I think if I had been the editor in the newsroom, I probably would have asked for another source to verify this before sending it to the press. But that's just me. I'm no fun anymore.