On October 29, in the midst of Fortnight of Mild Fear, I wrote a post about a pair of hazy movie/TV memories that were lodged permanently in my brain and were driving me batty because I didn't have enough details to identify them.
Here's what I wrote about one of the mysteries:
There's very little to go by on this one. It's the ending of a horror movie from, I'm guessing, the late 1960s or early 1970s (based on my hazy memories of the production values and costumes). The "bad" guy, who is either a Frankenstein's monster type or a hunchback/Igor type, is trying to escape the police via a rooftop. But he is shot and falls to his death. Here's the part that stuck with me, though. He was carrying something bundled up in his clothes. As he lay dead on the ground, a few kittens emerge from his grasp and mew pitifully while walking around on his chest. That's it. That's all I have. I've long hoped that the moment involving the cats is specific enough to help lead me to answer. But, thus far, I've had no luck.
Tom from Garage Sale Finds recommended that I seek help from the brilliant and disturbed Kindertrauma website. I did, and Kindertrauma posted my two queries on November 9. That same day I got an answer to the above mystery.1
Turns out I was remembering 1971's Dracula vs. Frankenstein, a horrific dud of a horror film if ever there was one. I was correct about many of the details, too. And the Igor-like character was played by none other than the iconic Lon Chaney Jr. (1906-1973), in what was, sadly, his final film role.2
My biggest memory error involved the kittens. There were no kittens. It turns out there was only one animal, and it was a puppy — the only friend in the world that Chaney's character (named Groton) had.3
"The mad scientist is developing a serum made from the blood of exceptionally traumatized women. His specimens are collected by his hulking, mute manservant Groton (Lon Chaney, Jr.), who clutches a puppy to his chest when he's not wielding an ax. ... His body bloated from years of alcoholism and his voice silenced by the ravages of throat cancer, Chaney is a pathetic figure who lumbers through the movie, desperation etched into the lines of his face. His character, Groton, spends much of the film in a child-like state, so Chaney mugs wildly and pets a puppy, a shadow of his Lenny from [1939's] Of Mice and Men."
Footnotes
*Sorry to plop this down right sugar plum in the middle of the Christmas season, but I've been itching to get this posted.
1. My other query remains open, as far as I'm concerned. Regarding my memories of a short tale of evil spirits and a burning inn, someone has suggested that I'm remembering an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. But I don't think that's right. The mystery lives on.
2. According to Wikipedia, Chaney Jr., who portrayed Larry Talbot/The Wolf Man in so many memorable Universal movies, died of heart failure at age 67 on July 12, 1973 in San Clemente, California. His body was donated for medical research and was dissected by medical students. The medical school kept his liver and lungs in jars as specimens of what extreme alcohol and tobacco abuse can do to human organs. There is no grave to mark his final resting place.
3. I might need a tissue now.
Continued thanks to everyone who reads Papergreat, as it barrels toward the five-year anniversary of its first post! Lots of great stuff from you to get to today...
Zita Spangler: From St. John's Reformed to Rolling Green Park: Deborah Hoover writes: "I remember being taken to the park every year for the Hoover family reunion, but I was too small and it was too long ago. I don't remember anything about the park itself other than it being there. I do remember that my cousin, who was three years older, got to ride the coaster. Not wanting to be left out I asked to be taken on as well. Only to be told I was too small. Maybe next year they said. Unfortunately there was no next year, the park was torn down that winter. Considering they parked 8,000 cars at Knoebels yesterday (from Dick Knoebel himself) they may have jumped the gun on tearing Rolling Green down."
And westgordon adds: "Frostie is available from Ingles supermarkets, based in Asheville, N.C., with over 200 stores in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Frostie.biz is company site but it is extremely poor."
Old postcard featuring Markleton Sanatorium in Somerset County, Pa.: In the previous "From the Readers" roundup, an anonymous reader wrote: "The building is not there, I'm trying to find the coordinates so I can visit myself. I know I'm close, but I can't tell where the building was."
One month later, I received this anonymous comment — I'm assuming it's the same person: "The old road is grown in and you will have to walk on a logging road to get to the flat. It is .5 miles south of the bridge. I have hunted through the ruins of the building and only have [found] a few bricks and the foundation of the building. I live in the area and there is nothing to be found. Sorry for the bad news but I was interested when I walked across the building so I asked around and found information on this."
Two more ghostly vintage titles from Scholastic: Regarding Arrow Book of Ghost Stories, Linda Chenoweth Harlow, who is one of our best fans on Facebook, writes: "I have this!!!! I got it in elementary school. ... I'm 64 now."
Cheerful Card Company can help you earn extra money for the holidays: The memories keep pouring in! Bob Lunsford writes: "I am almost 69 and remember selling them for several years in my early and pre-teen years. I enjoyed selling them and enjoyed the money although I never sold 100 boxes in a year."
And John Everett writes: "I earned the money to buy my first bicycle this way. I think I had saved $19.50, the guy wanted $25 but my dad talked to his dad and I got it for $22.50 and my dad loaned me the $3. Schwinn Stingray, about 1971. It was a good experience, and I probably wouldn't have gotten a bike for Christmas as a neighbor kid had bonked his head on the pavement (no helmets then)."
Papergreat drew many readers for "Questions, answers & mysteries with Hookland's David Southwell" last month [Part 1, Part 2]. Most of the comments and reactions came via Twitter. Here, for posterity, are a few of them:
@HooklandGuide@Papergreat Just read to the end and had one of those WHEN YOU SEE IT moments, little snapping noises from inside my hat
On November 2, Tom from the awesome Garage Sale Finds website [http://garagesalin.blogspot.com/] was kind enough to take the time to comment on numerous Papergreat posts.
My recommendation for your free time this weekend is to take a deep dive into his website, which he's been operating since 2010. It's full of fascinating and nostalgic posts, and well worth your time if you enjoy history, ephemera, collectibles and the forgotten bits of history that end in cardboard boxes marked "25¢." Some of the great posts I've worked my way through so far include Unsung, Easley Street and Mott Ramsey.
Here's a roundup of the comments Tom left on Papergreat:
Run, little boys, run! Run from the Pumpkin Man! "I think the most horrifying thing about this postcard is that the two boys have no qualms about trampling their mate, leaving him behind as a sacrifice."
Movie and TV moments lodged in The Twilight Zone of your mind: "You might try searching for the plot line at kindertrauma.com or submit your own 'kindertrauma' and someone may very well recognize these movies." [Note: I have taken Tom's advice and there will be a dramatic update in the next week or so!]
The Three Investigators #1: The Secret of Terror Castle: "I had a brief fling with 'The 3 Investigators' around 6th grade. For some reason, the series never caught on with me. But I did love those end papers. I'm sure that's what made me pick up the book in the first place. The promise of ghosts in a graveyard had great allure."
I saved my favorite postcard from this year's dandy batch for the final day of Fortnight of Mild Fear. It's an undated Raphael Tuck & Son's Hallowe'en postcard. A non-scary witch in a red cape is sitting atop of ginormous pumpkin and giving a great big hug to a black cat. Which is really what All Saints' Eve is all about, if you think about it.
The card was never stamped or postmarked, but it was addressed and a short note was written. Its intended recipient was Miss Hattie Harding of Talmage Hill, New York. (I think that should be Talmadge Hill.)
Here's what the note states:
At first I thought the note was a bit dyslexic. But if you add a little punctuation, you get:
Remember me when this you see.
That big Halloween Freak,
J.A.C.
According to the Gerould/Jerauld Families Register Page, Hattie Harding lived from 1878 to 1968. She married Daniel Stewart Burwell in October 1900. They had three children and the middle child, Helen, lived to be 96, dying in 2002.
To celebrate Halloween Eve, here are a pair of full-color, dust-jacket illustrations by Robin Jacques, the longtime fairy-tale co-conspirator of Ruth Manning-Sanders.
Up first is 1980's A Book of Spooks and Spectres, featuring a grinning skeleton, bats, a green-haired phantom and the fantastically awesome Owl Head from the the Swiss tale "The Owl." (In that short tale, the spook eats everything a poor farmer has in house and barn. His constant cry: "I AM HUNGRY! GIVE ME TO EAT!")
The back of this dust jacket showcases a spook who has been turned to stone by the Christmas Day sunrise in the Icelandic tale "Dilly-dilly-doh!"
Second up is 1974's A Book of Sorcerers and Spells. This delightfully detailed illustration features containers with bats' tongues and snake venom, a frog (who is probably not actually a frog), an exotic bird, and a trio of wizardly men smiling while cooking something up in a cauldron.
Pack-o-Fun, a scrap-craft magazine that has been featured here before1, got things backwards in 1970.
The "Halloween Witchery" cover of the October issue that year was fairly cheerful and all in good fun. There's a stack of doughnuts, for goodness sakes! Things can never be too spooky when doughnuts are involved.
The issue explains how to create witch-themed decorations, cardboard-container costumes, a string of lights from plastic limes and lemons, pine-cone owls, and cat-themed, pipe-cleaner Halloween favors.
Everything is very festive. Nothing even rises to the level of Vincent Price spookiness.
Of course, I doubt it was ever Pack-o-Fun's intention to be anything other than a jolly and good-natured family magazine.
Or was it?
Perhaps you could say that, in 1970, Halloween came early for Pack-o-Fun. Witness the April cover...
This "MAY YOU HAVE THE TIME OF YOUR THIS HALLOW-E'EN!" postcard features a young boy, who we may assume is a pumpkin thief, being chased through a field by a person dressed as a ghost. Obviously, it's not a real ghost, because we can see the pants and shoes sticking out from under the white sheet.
I suppose that dressing up as a spook isn't the worst idea for protecting one's pumpkin patch. But it doesn't appear to have worked in this instance. That kid has a tight grip on his gourd.
All we know about this card is that the artist's initials are HBG and it's "L. & E. Serie 2272."
It was never stamped or mailed, but written on the reverse side are:
"Lester from Mama"
"1911"
"Signed Griggs"
And that probably won't be enough for any genealogist to work from. Perhaps we need a psychic or medium!
I'm referring to those hazy, uncertain movie and TV moments from your younger days. Moments that now drive you crazy, because you cannot confirm their titles ... or even if these things truly existed. Maybe you dreamed them.1
I had three such mysteries. I'm down to two.
The one I finally figured out — thanks, of course, to the Internet — is 1975's The Man From Nowhere, a spooky, hour-long drama produced by the UK's Children's Film Foundation.
I had been fairly sure about the title. I had recollections of watching it in the early 1980s, possibly on Spotlight. I remembered a creepy man, dressed in black and wearing a top hat, who terrorized a young girl as she made her way through the forest. That was it.
The Man From Nowhere was one of dozens of films produced by the Children's Film Foundation, which was founded in 1951.2 My memories were pretty accurate. The plot involves a young girl named Alice (played by Sarah Hollis Andrews) who is sent to stay with her sick uncle. She is terrorized by The Man in Black, who always seems to know where she will be and pops up for several mild jump scares.
A 2013 DVD release3 gave the film some renewed attention. It has been reviewed and discussed on PopMatters and Nothing But the Night!
At least two clips from the film can be seen on YouTube. There is a five-minute excerpt from the beginning and another three-minute scene. Both feature Alice and The Man in Black. While his voice, which is electronically modified, remains unsettling, my 44-year-old self doesn't find him very scary any more. This was, after all, intended for children.
Finally, you can check out a collection of 200+ stills from The Man From Nowhere on a Picasa Web Album by "jonny 8 books." Those stills are the source of all the images that appear in this post.
* * *
While The Man From Nowhere is no longer a mysterious thorn in my mind, two other horror-themed fragments still bother me from time to time. Maybe something in these descriptions will ring a bell with someone:
1. A man arrives at an inn that is (of course) in the middle of nowhere. He checks in alongside another new guest, a middle-aged woman. During the evening, the man meets a beautiful young woman, who is also staying at the inn. They eventually go back to his room for a romantic engagement and are in the midst of said engagement when the clock strikes midnight and the woman turns evil and attacks him. (I think maybe her eyes change somehow.) It turns out that everyone in the inn, except for the man and the middle-aged woman who checked in at the same time, are malevolent beings intent on killing the guests. In the mayhem, a fire erupts. The man tries to save the middle-aged woman but cannot, so he flees the burning building. The next morning, the man and a police officer he told his story to arrive at the site of the inn. But there's nothing there. No inn. No sign of fire. Just an empty field. But not entirely empty. The corpse of the middle-aged woman is there, among the tall grass. The end. ... I'm pretty sure this was an episode of a horror anthology series, like Tales from the Darkside or Hammer House of Horror. And I think it was a British production. I saw it circa 1984.
2. There's very little to go by on this one. It's the ending of a horror movie from, I'm guessing, the late 1960s or early 1970s (based on my hazy memories of the production values and costumes). The "bad" guy, who is either a Frankenstein's monster type or a hunchback/Igor type, is trying to escape the police via a rooftop. But he is shot and falls to his death. Here's the part that stuck with me, though. He was carrying something bundled up in his clothes. As he lay dead on the ground, a few kittens emerge from his grasp and mew pitifully while walking around on his chest. That's it. That's all I have. I've long hoped that the moment involving the cats is specific enough to help lead me to answer. But, thus far, I've had no luck.
Footnotes
1. Or maybe they exist, and they dreamed you. Ponder that.
2. One of CFF's films was 1967's Calamity the Cow, which is most notable for starring a teenaged Phil Collins, a few years before he joined Genesis. YouTube has a generous clip from the film. Collins, coincidentally, is "no longer retired," according to a Rolling Stone article that was posted yesterday.
3. It was only, however, released as a Region 2 DVD in the UK, meaning it cannot be played on Region 1 players in the United States. Pfffft!
This colorful vintage postcard is titled simply "The Witch."
It's a fairly elaborate witch costume that involves a carved pumpkin, a pointy hat, a broom, a stick, a white sheet and oversized shoes. I'm thinking this witch has a 50-50 chance of tipping over at some point. Maybe the kid can just be a ghost if he loses his "head."
The real witch sitting on the crescent moon is a nice touch on this undated card, which is labeled "'HALLOWEEN' SERIES NUMBER 980" on the back.
The publisher was Julius Bien & Company, which was in operation from about 1850 to 1915. Some fun trivia: According to MetroPostcard.com: "By the 1880s the firm expanded into printing a wide range of chromolithographic material including advertising, posters, and trade cards. This would latter further expand into sets of comic, holiday, patriotic, religious, and sentimental postcards, typified by a highly graphic style."
This postcard was postmarked in the tiny village of Kempton, Illinois, but the year is illegible. According to Wikipedia, "A post office was established at the site of Kempton in 1869 and called Sugar Loaf. The name of the post office was changed to Kempton in 1878, when the village was founded and named after its founder, Wright Kemp." (I wonder how many Sugar Loaf postmarks are floating around out there?)
The card was mailed to the small city of Fairbury, Illinois, which is about 28 miles southwest of Kempton. (By roads, not crows.)
The note, written in tough-to-decipher cursive, states:
"Dear Kid: Am sending the papers, so you can see what is going on here. Dance in Cabery Wed. night. Halloween social here Sat. Night. Every body here all OK. When are you coming home? All of you come if you can. Would like to come out there but can't get away just yet. Love from all."
Cabery is about six miles north of Kempton, if you're keeping track of all this geography at home.
First up is Arrow Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Nora Kramer and illustrated by George Wilde.
It was first published by Scholastic in 1960, and this is the seventh printing, from 1965. It's a wonderful cover — it would have easily landed in the Top 5 of last year's Scholastic Countdown — that's only slightly lessened by the blue-pen scribblings of some little devil long ago.
Karswell wrote about this volume in 2011 on the And Everything Else Too blog and included scans of much of Wilde's wonderful interior artwork, which you can check out there.
This is yet another Scholastic title that, not surprisingly, brings out nostalgic feelings in many. A few examples:
"It's been years since I read this book but it was one of my absolute favorites as a child. ... I'm buying this book now for my daughter and look forward to sharing these wonderful stories with her." (Reviewer on Amazon.com)
"I too loved this book as a child and sought it for over twenty years. Eventually I found one and it's a keeper. I can read this over and over. Sadly, the more modern ghost stories don't grab me like those from this era." (Commenter on And Everything Else Too)
"I think this must have been one of the first books I ordered thru the Scholastic Book Club when I was in grade school. ... I wish the local library had a copy, because I'd love to revisit it after all these years." (Reviewer on GoodReads)
"My mother would read to me from this book when I was a child back in the early 70's. I'm sure it was purchased by one of my older siblings at our elementary school's book fair long before I came along, as the book was well used by the time it entered into my memory. My mother would read aloud, 'The Wonderful Cat of Cobbie Bean' each October. Even as I aged I never tired of listening to my mother read this story aloud. I also crept to my bottom bunk bed and read the book cover to cover many times. ... Every October came and went with readings from this fabulous book. Halloween simply was not Halloween without this book. And with each year the book showed more and more wear and tear from all the affection and use." (Reviewer on Amazon.com)
The most-mentioned of the book's nine tales by reviewers and commenters is "The Wonderful Cat of Cobbie Bean," by Barbee Oliver Carleton, who is also fondly remembered for Mystery of the Witches' Bridge.1
"Cobbie Bean" is the longest tale in the book, taking up 37 of its 116 pages.
Other tales include Joseph Jacobs' amusing short version of the old folk tale "The King o' the Cats," featuring Tom Tildrum and Tim Toldrum; "The Water Ghost" by John Kendrick Bangs; and "The Woodman and the Goblins," a funny and spooky little story by J.B. Esenwein and Marietta Stockard.2
Today's second title is Ghosts and Witches Aplenty: More Tales Our Settlers Told. This is the followup to The Witch House and Other Tales Our Settlers Told, which was featured on Papergreat last October.
This well-creased copy was again written by Joseph and Edith Raskin, a husband-and-wife team, and was published by Scholastic in 1973. The illustrator was again William Sauts Bock, a Pennsylvania artist who now goes by William Sauts Netamuxwe Bock and has the website Heart and Soul Artworks.
Tales in the 124-page book include "The Riddle of the Room Upstairs," "The Ghosts of Gibbet Island," and "The Witch Who Spoke in Many Tongues."
Finally, the copyright page includes this amusing note:
"All the stories in this special Arrow edition of Ghosts and Witches Aplenty are complete and unabridged. However, the second and fifth stories of the original hard cover edition were omitted, since they were not about ghosts or witches."
This is probably the creepiest one in the batch of Mild Fear 2015 vintage Halloween postcards.
But what, truly, is the creepiest part? The Pumpkin Creature chasing boys through an autumn field? Or the boys themselves, who look like the horrific result of Tweedledum crossed with a pig. Are those their actual everyday clothes? Or were they dressed up and ready to attend a Halloween party when they were waylaid by Pumpkin Man?
The message on the back of the postcard, which is written diagonally, states:
"Dear Marvin
Would you run away from a Jack O Lantern like these 3 little Boys. My but aren't they frighten [sic]. I often think of you and your little sister. Love to your Mama. I am your friend. Miss Lille [sp?]"
I've mentioned a few times over the years, in passing1, that my favorite "mystery/adventure" series as a kid was The Three Investigators, the fictional team that was led by Jupiter Jones, had its office in a junkyard and hung out with the non-fictional Alfred Hitchcock.
I remember reading at least a dozen of the books, which had such great titles as The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot, The Secret of Phantom Lake, The Mystery of the Coughing Dragon and The Mystery of the Screaming Clock.2 In retrospect, some books in the series were a lot like high-brow Scooby-Doo, with criminals attempting to cover their tracks by deploying paranormal diversions. Jupiter Jones, with his sharp and skeptical mind, rarely fell for it. I enjoyed the heck out of these books. And I wanted my own secret base in a junkyard.
The series kicked off with The Secret of Terror Castle, written by Robert Arthur Jr. and published in 1964. Earlier this year, I bought a cheap, beat-up copy of the 1964 Random House hardcover edition. The nifty cover artwork is by Edward Vebell.
No list of other volumes in the series on the back cover.
Text error on page 47 (two lines flip-flopped).
A stitched textblock consisting of 6 signatures.
Uncut blue graveyard endpapers (not slit down the center at the hinges).
My copy has a list of six titles in The Three Investigators series on the back cover and and there is no text error page 47. But I didn't buy it because it's a first printing and I rarely collect books for their first-edition or first-printing status. I acquire book because I want to read them and/or they are cool. This book is just cool. And different from Random House's Hitchcock Cover paperbacks from the late 1970s and early 1980s that I grew up reading.
One of the cool things is the aforementioned "blue graveyard endpapers."3 Here's a look at a portion of them, by artist Harry Kane.
Also, this book has a cool bookplate indicating that it was once owned by Carol Downs. Given my fondness for vintage bookplates, it's what pretty much clinched this purchase.
Did you read The Three Investigators series when you were younger? If so, share your memories in the comments section. And be sure to check out Smolinske's amazing website.
Footnotes
1. Specifically and for the record, I have mentioned The Three Investigators in these posts:
2. In fact, all of the titles began with the "The Mystery..." or "The Secret..."
3. Here are some other Papergreat posts that feature the artistry of endpapers:
Here's a Saturday night quickie, one week out from All Hallows' Eve. This undated vintage postcard shows a well-dressed boy fleeing from a pair of ghosts/spirits/specters/phantoms/wraiths that have popped up from behind a trio of huge pumpkins and startled him. Won't he have a whale of tale to tell the folks back home? Think they'll believe him?1
The postcard was never mailed, but it was addressed to Moreau Morris (1894-1945) of Newburg, Iowa. The short message states: "Dear Friend, I wish you a happy Halloween. Cecil."
Footnote
1. Have you ever seen a ghost? If so, tell us all about it in the Comments section below.
It you are, like me, a member of The Facebook and if you are, like me, a big fan of gelatin molds, 1970s fashion crimes and things that are so tacky they become transcendent, then you should definitely be following The Kitsch Bitsch for your daily dose of jaw-dropping, gut-busting and, sometimes, horrifying images.
For example...
(Note, among many other things, how the cat is trying desperately to disappear into the background and avoid association with this nonsense.)
An additional reason to follow The Kitsch Bitsch on Facebook right now is that it's bringing its A+ game for Halloween.
Some of the the posts are pure silliness — smiling heads on platters, racy witch costumes and such. But mixed in (cue Vincent Price voice) are some mildly disturbing vintage photos from Halloweens past. For example:
Still there? And that's only half the fun. The other half comes when you dive into the comments, where snarkiness and one-liners rule the day.
So do yourself a favor and spice up your Facebook feed by adding The Kitsch Bitsch alongside Uncle Melvin's political rants, Aunt Judy's cat memes and those daily photos of the children of that woman you worked with for three months in 2009.
Here's a Postcrossing card that just arrived in my mailbox this week and seems like a great fit for Mild Fear 2015. It's a painting, titled "Uppsalahovet," that was made in the late 1850s by Swedish artist Carl Johan Billmark (1804–1870).
Gamla Uppsala ("Old Uppsala") is an ancient parish and a village in eastern Sweden. It was the home of the Yngling dynasty of Swedish kings (some of whom were real and some of whom were mythical).
The Royal Mounds date to the 5th or 6th century. Here's a bit more about them, from Wikipedia:
The Royal Mounds (Swedish: Kungshögarna) is the name for the three large barrows which are located in Gamla Uppsala. According to ancient mythology and folklore, it would be the three gods Thor, Odin and Freyr lying in Kungshögarna or Uppsala högar (from the Old Norse word Haugr meaning mound or barrow; cognate English Howe). In the 19th and 20th centuries, they were speculated to hold the remains of three kings of the legendary House of Ynglings and were thus known by the names Aun's Mound, Adil's Mound and Egil's Mound. Today their geographical locations are instead used and they are called the Eastern Mound, Middle Mound and Western Mound.
On the postcard, sender Natalia writes of Gamla Uppsala: "One can see these old mounds there and this beautiful medieval church. There is also a museum dedicated mostly to Vikings, it's very cool. There are also some buildings which form a small ethnographic museum."
Here's a Totally Not Scary Hallowe'en postcard with the following greeting:
A bat and a cat, green-
eyed pumpkins, too,
A nice crawly mouse and
best wishes for YOU
The "bat" in this case is the kind-looking old witch in a red cape. We also have, as described, a black cat, a caught mouse and a group of little pumpkin creatures with faces, sprouting from the ground. (It's not clear if they can move or if they are rooted, literally, to their spots.)
The pumpkin creatures look happy and friendly, except for the one to the right of the witch, who seems — and I'm surely reading too much into this — to be concerned for the welfare of the mouse.
The card was published by Whitney Valentine Co. of Worcester, Massachusetts, which was in business from 1858 to 1942. (Read more about that company's history at MetroPostcard.com.)
The card was postmarked on October 28, 1922 and mailed with a one-cent green George Washington stamp to a woman in Louisville.
As best as I can tell, the cursive note reads:
"Dear Sister
Just a few lines to let you know that we are well and hope you are the same. How is the folks getting along these days. I talked to Elsie a few days ago on the phone and she said She was not mad at me and She invited us to come down to her new house. Hoping to hear from you soon. With love to all.
Raymond
41 Longwood Ave.
Roxbury, Mass."
(Anyone else think Elsie was mad and was setting a trap?)
This time last year, I was in the midst of putting together a countdown of my 25 favorite Scholastic Book Services covers (among the ones I had ones I had on my shelves).
Now I have a few more spook-a-riffic titles on hand, and I will be weaving them into the Fortnight of Mild Fear.
First up is A Ghost a Witch and a Goblin, which is the comma-free title of a 48-page paperback first issued by Scholastic in 1970. (The fifth printing, from 1973, is shown here.) This is a very fun cover! Like Sunday's postcard, it includes a tree with a face and some red mushrooms. Add in a ghost and an owl and you have a dandy October book for schoolchildren.
The illustrations were done by Rosalind Fry, and, sadly, I can't find any confirmed biographical information about her online. ("Mystery artists" were an all-too-common theme during last year's Scholastic Fest countdown.) I did find a Rosalind Betty "Roz" Fry, who lived from 1915 to 2013, but that short obituary mentions only her church office work and that she was "very active with the craft fair." There are no mentions of being a published, professional illustrator. So it's not clear whether that's the Fry we're looking for.
Fry's books were published in the 1960s and 1970s. Her other titles include Three Giant Stories, Lost at the Fair, The Three Wishes, Tree for Rent, A Baby Starts to Grow, and Is This My Dinner?
The book's three folk tales, meanwhile, are reworked versions from other sources, likely making this a very inexpensive production for Scholastic. (I hope Fry received a nice check!) The last page of the book lists these sources:
"The Ghost Catcher" is based on "The Ghost Who Was Afraid of Being Bagged," a story from Folk Tales of Bengal by Lālavihārī De, published by Macmillan, London, 1883.1
"Baba Yaga" is translated and adapted by permission of Flammarion et Cie from BABA YAGA (a "Père Castor" book), retold by Rose Celli, copyright 1932 by Ernest Flammarion, Paris.
"The Goblin and the Tailor" is based on "The Sprightly Tailor," in Joseph Jacobs' collection, Celtic Fairy Tales published by David Nutt, London, 1892.
Footnote
1. The "modern" English spelling of Lālavihārī De is Lal Behari Dey. He lived from 1824 to 1892 and was a a Bengali Indian journalist and Christian missionary.
Reprinted with permission. From the September 13, 2015, @HooklandGuide tweet: "Mr. @maximpetergriff and I are trying hard to get this rare title back into print."
Before we dive headlong into Part 2 of the Q&A with author and Hookland creator David Southwell, I want to revisit some of his quotes from Part 1 that resonated with me. It's my personal list, of course. Everyone will mine something different and precious from the in-depth thoughts, memories and stories that David has been kind enough to share.
"The 70s were a high-water mark for weirdness. A strange, febrile time to be a child exposed to the psychic chaff of the mass media."1
"The core concept of using a travel guide as a format to tackle landscape, memory, folklore and the rest of territory I wanted to cover, most of the nomenclature, it all came out in an intense 16-hour burst of work."
"Writers tend to carry ideas in the neglected pockets of their mind for years, if not decades. We walk along, pick up shiny pebbles of fact, glinting impressions of where we have been — stuff them into those pockets where they jostle and tumble with our imagination and then pull out these mad concepts."
"I grew up in this whole cycle of folklore linked to the landscape of the castle ruins, the woods, the alley behind the grand houses."2
"You don't need fancy intellectual words and concepts by dead French theorists to engage with place. Landscape punk is a DIY, screw-the-over-intellectualism and just heed the call-response nature of landscape."
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You mention Arthur Machen at times. What other authors are favorites who have influenced you, especially as it relates to telling the tale of Hookland?
As soon as you do anything which is looking at the unreality of literature, which uses a series of short stories interconnected by common themes, anything which could be said to be magical realism, then you have to admit the influence of Jorge Borges. So Machen and Borges are in the mix of influences. As is Angela Carter for that glorious sense of gloomth which shaped me as a teenager.3 Hookland also owes a huge debt at some level to both Robert Aickman and Alan Moore. Though, there is one writer who without their influence Hookland in the form of a travel guide would certainly not exist and that is Paul Nash. He is one of the key artists, photographers and writers in terms of my influences. Alongside John Betjeman and others, Nash wrote travel guides for Shell in the 1930s. His guide to Dorset was a direct leaping off point for me creating The Phoenix Guide format as a way of painting the invisible of Hookland. Even if you have never visited Dorset, his guide is creates a powerful, lyrical sense of it in that guide. It is one of my favourite books.
Maxim Peter Griffin seems to be an individual with a very particular set of skills. How did he get involved with the Hookland project, and how does he manage to come across such amazing finds?
If I talk about Maxim Peter Griffin, I am going to say things like genius and one of the big pleasures of the whole Hookland ride so far. Everything I hope Hookland is — a playground, an adventure, a motor of the imagination fueled not by Phoenix gas, but the uroboros action of fiction eating the tail of memory, memory eating the tale of fiction — he gets and responds to.
Aside from our totally unplanned and off-the-cuff collaborations within the boundaries of Hookland, I hope that he and I will work on a landscape punk comic at some point. I'm not qualified to speak about him on his behalf so, in his own words:
Stonemason - time served
Painter - sometimes I sell things - I give a lot away
Illustrator - published
some cartography - in public places on signs on walls
typography ( lump that in with masonry )
I am interested
and I like to play
play is important
( don't bother with the ideal - eat the apple with the peel - Kurt Schwitters )
I'm a little younger than Mr Southwell but I know where Hookland is.
You can find Hookland in your local charity shop quite easily.
Hookland is a good idea.
It is a memory brew.
when I was a student I was a cleaner at the college and I had keys
-but there was a cellar at the art college that had been forgotten - it was full of every skeleton imaginable
cases full of butterflies and spiders - medieval pottery - worked flints - all sorts - for life drawing - but stuffed in this room now and forgotten -no one knew it was there - no one ever mentioned
it was just there - waiting , if you like - I spent hours in there - rooting through stuff - a mounted bat skeleton in an archive box full of lead musket balls - you can't make that sort of thing up -
That room was a fragment of Hookland, elsewhere.
Hookland is an actual place
Everything in the archive already exists
It is a matter of being there when it is found
'Three things make a English village - a pub, a church and a secret not to be shared with outsiders' - C.L. Nolan pic.twitter.com/fOq4iUENlp
You have talked about how Hookland is becoming its own shared universe (perhaps, in a way, like the Wold Newton Family). What are some of the mentions it has received elsewhere?
In many ways Hookland is the reverse of the Wold Newton Family. That approach — trying to retrospectively link together existing fictions in a web of continuity their creators never intended — is fun at some levels, but to me in that case, ultimately reductionist. Past the joy of geeking out by creating continuity, it doesn’t enrich. Unlike the deepening of say taking the Cthulhu Mythos as a continuity, I actually think Wold Newton diminishes the achievement and intents of Maurice Leblanc, Robert E. Howard, Dashiell Hammett and others. Their characters are wonderful enough as first imagined and written. For me, they do not need, nor in many cases benefit from, being part of the Wold universe.
Hookland was always about creating this haunted space that anyone could play in. As authors we often create spaces where we want others to feel they have lived in, but then deny them permission to stay. Permission to build and explore in their own way. It is not about continuity like the Wold Newton Family, but about giving others a pre-charged landscape to use as either leaping off point or background.
I have tried to create a space where others can walk inside, take what they want, but not be constrained by having their take on Hookland as tied up to part of a bigger story. There are bigger tales working through the entries in The Guide — stories that not so much just cross-reference each other, but cross-hatch to form bigger narratives — but someone using the shared universe of Hookland can happily ignore them.
The Guide functions as a bit of a bible for Hookland. If it says that C.L. Nolan died in 1937 or the Electric Messiah was lost in 1855, that is the fact that it makes a mess to contradict. However, in Hookland, facts are always there to build fictions on.
It is slowly starting to be used as a shared universe. There's a British horror film in production in the moment that uses Hookland as a fictional county merely as a layer of background in dialogue. Authors like R.J. Barker and Gary Budden have used Hookland as setting in short stories and author Tim Dedopulos is currently writing a detective novel set in the county — a glorious affair, like a 1970s occult Inspector Morse. It has been used as inspiration for tracks by musician David Padbury. I am getting a lot of requests now to use Hookland, so I’ve actually had to create a small document to answer questions that writers want to know, even if the answers are not given directly to readers. Questions like how many hours on the train is Hookland from London and what is the origin of the county’s name.
Here is an excerpt from that Hookland document, its bible, that Southwell provides to authors and creators and has agreed to share here:
What is in the name of Hookland?
Hookland if you look in an obscure legal dictionary is defined as "land sown and ploughed every year." This felt right to me. It's redolent of the English pastoral landscape, it resonates with the Old English language and its link to land and place. To me it also summons the image of ghost soil — place ploughed and sown by the cycle of birth and death. Of course, it has Hook in it. Given Hook is the name of a village in every part of England, it becomes and everywhere. There is also the oblique reference to the word hooky — to play truant — and the phrase hooky street — the place where one buys counterfeit goods.
What are your hopes regarding the culmination of your work on Hookland? A new book? Re-publication of The Phoenix Guide to Strange England? BBC series?
Hopes for a project always fall into two camps — there are the actual manifestations of the project you would like to see and then there is the way you hope your work connects with its audience. In terms of the latter, I wanted to create a guide to Hookland that not only led you into county, but into the neglected areas of your own memory. In many ways, all fiction is a magical act and Hookland is very consciously an act re-enchantment. My hope is that for readers it opens up a sense of uncanny in their engagement with landscape. That it connects them with a sense of weirdness that has been edited out of our cultural dialogue in the last few decades. If Hookland restores mystery to our anyone's sense of place, then it has done its job.
In terms of manifestations of the inside of my head, I always had the idea that Hookland would be more than a book. From the start I wanted it to be a shared universe you might get a postcard from or some other form of souvenir. Items from the Hookland Museum of Curiosities gift shop. An unreal place producing the sort of objects and ephemera we use to reinforce belief in the existence of places that we have never been to. I've never been to Boston, but I have a Boston Celtics T-shirt someone who went there sent me as a gift that makes me think they actually made a journey to see a game at The Garden. Leigh Wright and I have started to think about an album of Hookland music. Radio signals from the past that bounce back and can be picked up on an AM car radio if you drive down to where the cliffs at Nook struggle with the sea. Snippets of jingles and shows from the pirate radio stations that used to operate from the abandoned Maunsell forts just outside territorial waters and tracks reflecting the county's musical heritage between 1963-1979. From the Mod Psych and Freakbeat of the 1960s to the proto-ambient Darkscape and punk of the 1970s — I've fictional band biographies and liner notes ready, but getting that sort of project together musically is a mammoth task, so it's not imminent.
Ideally The Phoenix Guide to Strange England will manifest as it always was in a parallel dimension — a traditional travel guide you can browse at your leisure. However, I'm told it is too experimental to be published, so it might be a hard slog and a long season before it happens. I am hoping that I will be publishing an anthology of short stories written by other authors set in Hookland next year and if there is interest, I would like to put out a small volume of C.L. Nolan's work, a Hookland miscellany. If I do, it will never be an e-book, but a very limited, pre-ISBN, pre-Amazon artifact — a copy or two of which I will slip surreptitiously onto library shelves.4
I hope there will be some more collaborations. I would be heart-broken if there isn't a full set of Maxim Peter Griffin's Hookland Horror cards at some point. I'd love to see a Hookland comic book. I am open to any collaboration, open to anyone manifesting the county in a creative, playful or unsettling way. If someone wants to make an audio drama based on it or read the stories, I'd support that in the way I'd support anyone playing with material I am putting out. Hookland is so informed by the visual culture of strange documentaries, odd folk horror films of the late 1960s/early 1970s that I grew up with that I would love to see it become a basis for a fakelore documentary or a film, but in the end, others always make a decision on whether you work deserves to make that sort of translation.
Is there anything you can tell us about when Mrs. Dribbage might finally get the online gift shop up and running? Some of us, who shall remain nameless, are especially intrigued by the idea of Hookland postcards.
I am the lowest of the lo-tecs. I have an Edwardian soul. I surprise myself that I can manage Twitter. I am primarily a writer and I lack the skill sets to set up an online shop or even a decent Kickstarter. I know words, I know editing and making anything written better. It is my only barterable skill and I'd be happy to exchange it for firewood, Jura Superstition or some decent Tex-Mex ingredients, but while it gets books written, it doesn't help make Mrs. Dribbage's online version of the Hookland Museum of Curiosities gift shop happen. This means at the moment all you can get from the gift shop are hand-drawn maps of the county, bags of bay leaves from Cunning Mundle's tree or fudge — all real items if anyone wants to email me and barter something for them. I am delighted to say that I recently sold a map of Hookland to someone in Hollywood. I love the idea of hand-drawn map to a fictional English county being on the wall of Californian den. When I did a talk about Hookland and landscape punk at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival earlier this year, I think people were totally mystified by there actually being free Hookland fudge, but everyone who got some will provide testimonials that it tastes fabulous.
The idea for postcards was originally to turn some of the images into actual postcards and to send them out, complete with a Hookland postmark and a short twitter-esque line or two to those who bought them. I'm not sure there would be enough interest to do this though. I've even investigated producing playable postcard — like the old flexidiscs, but made from record-player playable cardboard — but again, I'm not sure there is enough interest to justify that sort of glorious ephemeral madness just yet.
The ultimate manifestation of Hookland for me in some ways would be to recreate part of its mythical Museum of Curiosities in an actual museum and gallery. A raft of objects and artworks, film screenings and talks representing and telling the strange stories of the county and through that telling the story of the strangeness of the 1970s, the richness of the ghost soil of English folklore. It would of course come complete with things you could actually buy in the host museum's gift shop. I cannot see it happening, but there might one day be a Hookland LitFest — a literary festival for a place that doesn't exist. The responses by other writers to Hookland have been so impressive I'm inspired to actually try and put an event like that on. After all, I never thought there would be a real, drinking in a London pub, C.L. Nolan Appreciation Society every two months. Hookland leaks in odd ways. Fiction has this wonderful way of making reality.
Finally, is there anything I haven't asked that I should have? Anything specific or important that you'd like to convey to those who are learning about Hookland for the first time?
You probably should have asked about the influence of Doctor Who, Quatermass, Nigel Kneale5 and children's TV in the 1970s such as The Changes and Children of the Stones. About physical locations that directly inspired parts of the landscape of Hookland. About how a car ride with J.G. Ballard was the turning point in my engagement with place. About who I would most like to see play in the Hookland universe. You should have asked about The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories.
I suppose the only thing can I add is how some of the best response I have had to Hookland is from those who send me angry, scalding emails railing against me for making "dishonest stories" (as if there is any other kind), making bits of Hookland so convincing I make them "waste time" trying to find C.L. Nolan books. For a word spiv, a missive from a U.S. academic resorting to CAPITALS to tell me off for inventing Betjeman quotes "about a place that doesn't exist" suggests I might just be doing something right with my version of weird Albion.
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Indeed, I clearly did not ask enough questions! Perhaps there will have to be a Part 3 with Southwell some day, delving into some more of these great and mysterious and nostalgic topics.
I'll leave you with this video from the aforementioned 1977 series Children of the Stones, a fitting way, I think, to wrap up these two posts.
Wyrd Daze — the multimedia zine of speculative fiction + extraordinary music, art, and writing
Hookland website (still a work in progress, but with some fascinating morsels)
Footnotes
1. Two words: Hans Holzer.
2. Which is why kids need to get outside more these days. And helicopter parents need to let them.
3. Gloomth is a great word! It was apparently coined by Horace Wapole in the 18th century.
4. This makes me very happy. See the 2013 post "Eight awesome things you'll never find inside e-books."
5. At this point, given how many shared interests there are between Southwell and myself, it probably will not surprise anyone to learn that Five Million Years to Earth (originally titled Quatermass and the Pit) is one of my favorite science-fiction movies.
