Brochure for the Boris Karloff Wax Museum in Niagara Falls

Every October needs a little Boris Karloff. This is an undated brochure for the Boris Karloff Wax Museum, which was located at the corner of Oakes Drive and Buchanan Avenue in Niagara Falls, Canada. It was a longtime fixture of the entertainment district known as Clifton Hill, a touristy spot near the falls filled with museums (usually hokey rather than prestigious), arcades and similar attractions.

I can't find an official history of the museum, so much of what I've assembled here is via two sources:

• Reddit: History of Clifton Hill Part 3: "Wax Monsters and Mini Golf" (which is excellent)
• Universal Monster Army: A three-page message board thread about the Boris Karloff Wax Museum

The museum opened around 1968, and I found evidence on Newspapers.com that it still existed as late as 1992. It was built and managed by Robert Dunham, an entrepreneur behind numerous popular attractions in Niagara Falls. The Dunham family had a company named Waxattract that constructed wax figures and other components. Waxattract had a subdivision named Enter-Tech.

The brochure notes: "Once you step inside the Boris Karloff Wax Museum be prepared to enter an entirely different world. A world of the supernatural ... a chilling, eerie world ... a world that will eliminate common everyday thoughts and feelings. Thirty-three different scenes will boggle your mind and thrill your senses." It goes on to specifically mention Jack the Ripper, the Phantom of the Opera, the Mummy, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Medusa, zombies and the Devil himself.

But the museum wasn't entirely horror, it seems. You should read the entirely of the long and well-researched Reddit thread on the museum, but here's an excerpt: 

"The structure the museum was housed in had formerly housed the motel restaurant and gift shop on the lower floor and suites on the top floor. The bottom floor became the museum and gift shop, and looking at old photos it appears the rooms were kept above, but cleverly integrated into a castle-like facade. ... It was the first horror themed wax museum, but was by no means a total haunted attraction. What limited photos exist in the brochures show it being fairly well-lit, and describe many non-horror scenes like Charlie Brown, MLK, Santa, Lincoln and Snow White. It's heavy animation, lighting effects, sound design, and unique theme made it a massive success."

The thread on the Universal Monster Army message board includes images of some different brochures for the wax museum. Plus images of some nifty pennants from the gift shop. Several people also share their memories of touring the museum as children. This anecdote made me laugh: "My parents took me to Niagara Falls around 1970.  After a lot of begging, my parents dropped me off at the Wax Museum. As I recall, it was attached to a hotel. I bought my ticket in the lobby and looked at entry to the museum. It was all blinged out in cobwebs, skeletons, and other scary s**t. Well, I was too afraid to enter. I stood in the lobby for an hour and waited for my ride. When my parents showed up, I made up a complete description of the museum."

Writing for The Junior Reporter Club in the July 12, 1968, edition of The Evening Standard of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, young Judy Zajac shared her story about a family trip to Niagara Falls: "Both falls were very beautiful and I had a very enjoyable time. When we were leaving, we stopped at a wax museum. The name of the museum was Boris Karloff's Wax Museum of Horrors. When one enters, there is a statue of Boris Karloff. Some of the things in the museum are: The Living Heart, The Electric Chair, The Creatures, The Mummy and many more. They also had such things as Santa Claus, Little Red Riding Hood, and Snow White for younger children."

In July 1973, someone stole Dracula's red-and-black cape, valued at $300, from the museum, according to police reports. (That sounds like a good opening hook for a horror movie.)

Finally, here's a groovy advertisement from the August 30, 1969, edition of the Niagara Falls Review that describes a "ghost party" movie marathon at Hollywood Drive-In that was done in conjunction with the Boris Karloff Wax Museum.

The Sunbonnet Women of America and their 1925 Halloween seance

Witches! A seance! And a dance!

Oh my. It's a History Mystery. I want to know everything that can be known about the Sunbonnet Women of America. There are only a handful of clippings, all from 1925, about this group on Newspapers.com, and there's zilch on Google.

It's the above clipping that first caught my eye. Headlined "Wicked Witches Listed At Pre-Halloween Seance," it's from the October 18, 1925, edition of The Sunday Star of Washington, D.C. — exactly 99 years ago today. The Sunday Star was the Sunday edition of the Washington Evening Star.

The first paragraph states: "The Sunbonnet Women of America wish to solve the problems of their business brothers and sisters, so they invite them to come and help invoke the wiles of the 'wickedest witches' in a pre-Halloween seance and dance Thursday evening, October 29, at the Central Armory, Eleventh and Clifton streets northwestern."

The invitation itself is in verse:

So the ancient near-witch, Sunbonnet Sue,

Extends a summons to all of you

Who'd dance and laugh and brew and plot

To try the luck of the witches pot.

Disguise yourselves in Halloween hues,

If you'd be favored in the pot that brews,

And present your card at the door of Fate

For the fun begins at half-past eight.

There are favors that may be got,

So be on time to brew in the pot;

You may not know, but it sure is true,

Sunbonnet girls are among the few

Descended from the Salem witches

And work their wiles for Halloween wishers.

"Now, come you all, so eager to learn

If Fate for you her wheel will turn.

The business men do recognize

The worth of Sunbonnets wary and wise,

So they have placed in the witches's pot

Some lovely things which they will plot

That may be won by only those

Who please the witches by their clothes.

Now, brothers and sisters, eager and true,

Dress up quite well, it may be you."

Yes, the 1920s were certainly roaring. This was not an event to be missed. Keep in mind, though, that it was held in the midst of the Prohibition. Given the very public nature of the event, it's unlikely that there would have been any alcohol openly served. But perhaps some was smuggled in or, ahem, conjured. Maybe some historians who are most astute than I am about the skirting of Prohibition laws see some hints within the witches' invitation regarding what would be available at the dance.

The last paragraph lists some of the newest members of the Sunbonnet Women of America, "all prominent in Government, professional and business circles." I'm going to list them here, because maybe this post will help someone track down something new about one of their ancestors:

Mrs. Susie Moore

Miss Helen E. Burnett

Miss Helen C. Clark

Miss Nita S. Hinman

Mrs. Amelia E. Byrne

Mrs. Elsie C. Gulli

Miss Elizabeth M. Wall

Mrs. Mabel Driver

Miss Elizabeth K. Prender

Miss Mabel J. Carter

Miss Bertha V. Zeller

Miss Alice M. Blandforth

Miss Margaret R. Shedd

Miss Annie Louis Carroll

Miss Edith L. Tate

Miss Madeline Diers

And just imagine, all of them descended from the Salem witches (wink).

Sifting through some of the other Newspaper.com clippings from 1925 sheds little light on the Sunbonnet Women of America. They are first mentioned in early May and seem to be associated with the National Club of the Younger Business Women. That month, they were organizing "the first annual organdy dance of the Sunbonnet Women of America."

An October 9 article specifically mentions the "Washington branch of the Sunbonnet Women of America" and its meeting to discuss the upcoming Halloween dance. 

And that's pretty much it. How long did the organization last? Did it actually have branches in multiple cities? Were they really witches? Did they all vanish after the October 29 seance and summoning? 

Maybe we should do a new seance and try to contact "Sunbonnet Sue" for an eyewitness recap. Stuff like that always ends well in movies. 

The terror of AI image generation

Deep into the spooky season of Mild Fear 2024 seems like a good time to check in with one of this year's most existential horrors: artificial intelligence. It's fairly certain at this point that AI will lead directly to the the doom of civilization, if not the entire Earth. But while we passively wait for the apocalypse — whether it's from economic collapse spurred by AI, autonomous AI warfare or simply the AI servers swallowing up every available joule of energy on the planet — we can also just sit back and do stupid things with AI.

I asked AI, for example, to generate images of me writing a Papergreat post. So here they are:

My cats and I have no further comment. 

1978 Halloween movie marathon at MacArthur Drive-In in Orange, Texas

This newspaper advertisement (via Newspapers.com) was in the October 27, 1978, edition of The Orange Leader of Orange, Texas. It showcases a five-film Halloween movie lineup that was slated for the next night, Saturday, at the MacArthur Drive-In. It's an interesting slate that would have ended just a few hours before dawn, for those who stuck it out (or fell asleep in their cars).

Based upon movie lengths and allowing for about five-minute intermissions between movies, this is roughly when the movies would have started:

7:30 p.m. — The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972, PG)

9:05 p.m. — Return to Boggy Creek (1977, G)

10:35 p.m. — Nurse Sherri (1977, R)

12:10 a.m. — House of Psychotic Women (1976, R)

1:45 a.m. — The Mysterious Monsters (1975, G)

3:15 a.m. — It's over! Go home!

Children under age 12 were allowed to attend. I reckon the idea was that they'd have fallen asleep in the back seat by the time the R-rated films started, lest they see something that scars them for life.

The Legend of Boggy Creek is a super-low-budget, documentary-style horror film about an Arkansas cryptid that was fairly popular on the 1970s drive-in circuit. Parts of it served as an inspiration for The Blair Witch Project, decades later.

Its unauthorized sequel, Return to Boggy Creek, has nothing to do with the original and can barely be termed a horror movie. It's definitely the clunker of this MacArthur Drive-In lineup and was probably included because the licensing rights were dirt cheap. Of note, it features Gilligan's Island's Dawn Wells and Diff'rent Strokes' Dana Plato. One reviewer on IMDb called it "a movie that would make some Walt Disney movies look dark. Really, this movie was just a bunch of light fluff with virtually no boggy creek creature to be seen."

Nurse Sherri has a rating of 3.8 out of 10 on IMDb, so it was no prize either. But, in attempting to follow in the footsteps of The Exorcist, it probably had enough shocks, blood and titillation to keep the adults awake and eating popcorn from the snack bar. It also features the horror of this sofa; imagine that on a huge drive-in screen.

At first I was confused in attempting to research House of Psychotic Women, because that's also the title of a 2012 memoir/film studies book written by Kier-La Janisse. It's also the title of a themed collection of movies that Severin and Janisse teamed up to release a few years ago. Then I figured out that House of Psychotic Women is the title of the edited American release of the 1974 Spanish horror film Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, starring Paul Naschy. The American title served as the inspiration for Janisse's book title. Anyway ... Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll is definitely not a film you'd want your kids in the backseat to wake up during. They might catch an eyeful of eyeballs in a bowl of water, for one thing. 

Last up was The Mysterious Monsters. Its rating is incorrect in the advertisement. It's a G-rated documentary hosted by Peter Graves that discusses Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and other popular 1970s cryptids. It's fairly well-regarded, as that genre goes, but I can't imagine it was keeping many people awake that deep into the witching hour. Maybe it should have replaced Return to Boggy Creek as the second movie! 

I'd love to program a Halloween movie marathon for a group of horror fans. I think it would be more fun at an indoor theater, with quality picture, quality sound and no worries about weather or bugs. Maybe, after some ruminating, I'll do a post later this month about what movies I would include in such a marathon. And I'd love to hear in the comments what your dream Halloween movie marathon would be!

But drive-in theaters represented a wonderful time in the history of movies, too. And they definitely helped to further the horror genre through the 1970s. There's a Facebook page devoted to memories of the MacArthur Drive-In in Orange, Texas. According to that page, the drive-in opened in 1950 and, in January 1983, "slipped into history like most drive-ins."

Intellivision's "Night Stalker," my first survival horror video game

Thanks to Dad's business connections, we were among the very early owners of an Intellivision home video game system. Sometime in 1979, we hooked it up to the hefty television set in our living room in Clayton, New Jersey, and played Major League Baseball, The Electric Company: Math Fun, and Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack.

(Interestingly, our next-door neighbor was an early adopter of a different sort — upstairs, he had a massive personal computer that, from my memory anyway, took up a third of a room with its CPU, monitor, and disk — or cassette — drive. He wowed my friend Mike and I with a computer baseball game, a game that involved exploring underground passages and avoiding a troll and, as I very hazily recall, a detective game that was mostly text. It seemed, in retrospect, to be something that he put together himself, not one of the smaller commercial computers that would have been available at the time, such as an Apple II or TRS-80. But I'm trusting my memory as an 8-year-old here.)

Over the new few years, we acquired many more Intellivision cartridges through Dad's ongoing business relationship with Mattel. It was an awesome perk, and it made us bit of an outlier in a world where the more-popular Atari home video game system was outselling Intellivision about 6 to 1. 

One Intellivision game we eventually had was Night Stalker, which was released in 1982 and became a family favorite, although perhaps not quite as addictive or popular within the household as Astrosmash. (Other family favorites included Snafu, B-17 Bomber, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin, and Utopia, which was a bit ahead of its time as a sim game.)

Looking back, I view Intellivision's Night Stalker as forerunner of the gaming genre that would eventually be called Survival Horror. That term came into popular usage around 1996 with Resident Evil, and, generally speaking, it describes games in which the player has limited resources and other obstacles to overcome while facing overwhelming supernatural enemies. The website Retro Refurbs agreed in this 2021 post that Night Stalker fits the bill as early survival horror.

I haven't played a ton of survival horror over the years, because I'm fairly mediocre at videogaming. But some that I've played are Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Resident Evil – Code: Veronica and Realms of the Haunting (a PC game). I dabbled with Silent Hill and Dino Crisis, but didn't get very far. I think Infocom's The Lurking Horror also counts, even though it's a text-based game. The Lovecraftian writing by Dave Lebling is terrifying at times. The most recent survival horror I've played, probably, was a Slender Man game on my iPhone. That creepypasta creep is too creepy for me.

Anyway, Night Stalker is a great game that's still deeply embedded in my memory. All you can do is try to survive to until the next level. There is no winning. It's just mounting panic and stress until your lives run out and you die. Fun times! The gist is that you're stuck in a maze with bats, spiders and an endlessly spawning battalion of killer robots that are increasingly deadly. Your ammo is limited and it's a constant scramble to acquire more. So, half the time you're totally defenseless, unless you choose to hide in your centrally located bunker, a strategy that merely delays the inevitable. The killer robots start out stupid and escalate to Terminator level, even gaining the ability to destroy your only sanctuary. The most advanced killer robot is invisible. Death is inevitable, and there is no catharsis beyond shutting off the gaming console and going outside for some fresh air. Maybe I'm taking the analogy too far, but it was perhaps a fitting game for the 1980s, in which we lived with the constant fear of nuclear armageddon.

Retro Refurbs wrote: "There’s no way to win. But in many ways, this means that it is survival horror in the purest sense: the entire point of the game is simply to survive for as long as you can. And that’s it."

Night Stalker's sound effects are limited mostly to bullets being fired and explosions. But behind them on the soundtrack, there's an unwavering electronic pulse that fits perfectly with the game's existential dread. As one YouTube commenter noted: "I remember the sheer terror and excitement of this game. That deep, twanging bass noise in the background haunts me to this day."

As a final note, I wonder now if the title of this 1982 game is a tip of the hat to the 1972 TV movie The Night Stalker, which featured the debut of Carl Kolchak, the journalist who investigates supernatural phenomena. Killer robots would have been right up his alley, though he would have found a way to actually defeat them.

Here are some of the pages from the Night Stalker manual...
 

Related posts

• Activision's Freeway: It was like Frogger, but for chickens
• Activision's Fishing Derby: The most humane way to catch fish
• Would you like to play a game of Wizzardz & War Lordz?
• 32 years ago we asked: "So What's Wrong With Playing Video Games?"
• Intellivision manual for "The Power of He-Man"
• Snapshot & memories: All kids do these days is play video games
• Book cover: "How to Master the Video Games"