If you found a picture like the one above in a family photo album in a trunk in the attic, what would think? Would you be aghast at finding one of your favorite uncles in the group? Would your opinion of him change? Would you have questions? Would you make discrete inquiries of other family members? Try to recall details at family gatherings that you maybe dismissed as “quirky”? Would you spot the young boy in the bottom row and suspect “grooming”? Would your thoughts turn suspect and ugly?
Or would you find this picture and praise your uncle for a bold choice during a time acceptance couldn’t be guaranteed? Would you happy he had a place where he fit in? Would you consider that group “trail blazers”? Brave forerunners of today’s transvestite community? Would you be proud?
Well, my uncle IS in that picture. He was an Army Veteran, married to my aunt for over 40 years. They never had children—a horrible miscarriage early in their marriage left her unable to have children. But they loved all their nieces and nephews. They were happy and very much in love. He was one of my favorite uncles.
After his service in the Army was over, he found a good job and they settled close to my parents. He enjoyed sports cars—owned quite a few over the years—but they were all 2-seaters. My aunt and uncle’s lives centered on each other. And he adored playing softball and later basketball as well.
He was a member of a local softball league, and played as often as he could. In the late 1960’s he answered a call to join a different league—one dedicated to charity. The team was called Sally and her All-Stars. All the players on Sally’s team donated their time and talent to helping others. All the monies raised went to needy families or worthy causes. The catch? Every player donned a wig and women’s clothes. They didn’t shave (their legs or their faces…lol) or wear make-up–just the wigs and padded clothing.
(From their playbill) During the first four innings of the games, the players thrill their audiences with real serious ball playing—then, for the last three innings turn the thrills into laughter with comedy acts.
Crowds adored them! I remember laughing and cheering at numerous games when I was younger, and I do not enjoy baseball or it’s relatives. But these games were much more than that—they were hilarious. Later in the playbill, it’s stated that Sally and her All-Stars were undefeated—scoring 168 runs in 7 games while allowing opposing teams only 22 runs—so these were skilled athletes! They entertained us, had a ball doing it and they generated thousands of dollars for needy local families in the area.
So, yeah…when I see that picture… I’m PROUD of my uncle! He had hairy legs and a heart of gold.
With the holidays fast approaching, I found an amazing diet designed to help you de-stress…and these days, who couldn’t use that??
Sample Menu
Breakfast
½ grapefruit
1 slice whole wheat toast-dab of butter
8 oz skim milk
Lunch
4 oz lean broiled chicken breast
1 cup steamed spinach
1 cup iced tea (no sugar)
1 Oreo cookie
Mid Afternoon Snack
The rest of the Oreos in the package
2 pints Rocky Road ice cream
Nuts, cherries, whipped cream
1 jar hot fudge sauce
Dinner
2 loaves garlic bread
4 cans lite beer or diet soda
1 large sausage, mushroom and cheese pizza
3 Snickers bars
Evening snack
Sara Lee cheesecake (eaten directly from the freezer)
Rules for this diet:
If you eat something and no one sees you eat it, it has no calories.
If you drink a diet soda with a candy bar, the calories in the candy car are canceled out by the diet soda.
When you eat with someone, calories don’t count if you don’t eat more than they do.
Food used for medicinal purposes NEVER count, such as hot chocolate, brandy, toast, and, of course, Sara Lee Cheesecake.
If you fatten everyone around you, you will look thinner.
Movie related foods do not add calories because they are part of the entertainment package. Examples: Milk Duds, Red Hots, Tootsie Rolls and Red Vines
Cookie pieces contain no calories. The breaking process causes calories to leak out.
Things licked off knives and spoons have no calories if you are in the process of cooking something.
Foods that have the same color have the same number of calories. Examples: spinach and pistachio ice cream; mushrooms and mashed potatoes.
Chocolate is a universal color and may be substituted for any other food color.
Anything consumed while standing has no calories. This is due to gravity and the density of the caloric mass.
Anything consumed from someone else’s plate has no calories since the calories rightfully belong to the other person and will cling to his plate. (We all know calories like to cling!)
I have fond memories of trick or treating as a child. Up to a certain age, my dad would walk along with us girls, while my mom stayed home and handed out candy with my little brother. We wore costumes made of synthetic-easy to catch fire- fabric and plastic masks on elastic bands sure to obstruct your vision and make you sweat buckets. We always had trick or treat on a Friday evening from 6-8 pm and each house invited you in or at least tried to guess who you were. We had no flashlights, no reflective tape, no glow sticks. If you wanted candy, you took your chances.
The house at the end of our block was always decked out to the nines in spooky decorations. Scary music blared through speakers in the windows. The older couple was always dressed as a werewolf and a witch and they loved playing their parts to scare the neighbor kids. It was a grand tradition we always looked forward to.
Our Halloween treat bags would get full quickly because every house in a 4-block square had their lights on—meaning they were giving out treats! And oh, what treats we’d get—popcorn balls, full size candy bars, caramel apples and goodie bags! Those were awesome! Little paper treat bags filled with penny candies—even candy corn! (I love candy corn!)
The whole experience was creepy and such fun! Fast forward a few years (never mind how many) and the government has sucked the fun out of trick or treating. Gone are the spooky hours—now it’s held on a Saturday between 2-4pm. Gone are those masks too. Now it’s make-up (which is presumably non-toxic). The candy bars have shrunk; the popcorn balls are gone, as are the caramel apples. And those treat bags? Not allowed. Nothing unwrapped or homemade is permitted.
But the final nail in the coffin of the holiday was the vans. After we were all grown and out of my parents’ house, they would sit on their front porch and hand out candy bars to the trick or treaters. A few years later, the vans started pulling up at the end of the block. The doors would open and larger kids (translation: teenagers) would pour out, sans costumes, and approach the houses. They wouldn’t even call out trick or treat. They just thrust their pillowcases out and expected treats. And since they weren’t wearing any masks, it was easy to tell that none of these “kids” lived in the surrounding neighborhoods. That’s when the magic of Halloween died for my parents.
Yup, American Freedom, made in China IS ironic. So are the following stories concerning ironic deaths.
‘GRIZZLY MAN’ EATEN BY BEAR
Timothy Treadwell loved bears. The problem is, bears didn’t love him nearly so much. Blonde-haired and a trifle feminine, young Timmy loved animals as a boy, then overdosed on heroin as a young man, and subsequently devoted his adult life to living among bears. Every summer for 13 years he’d have a bush pilot drop him off amid the savage wilderness of Alaska’s Katmai National Park to live among the giant grizzlies. He never got too close to them, but he made up names for them and sang songs for them and filmed them and claimed he loved them far more than he loved filthy humans and their stupid so-called “civilization.” But of course, it was the end of the 13th year that would prove unlucky for the rabid bear enthusiast.
Timothy thought he understood bears. What he clearly failed to understand is that bears are highly capable of killing him, not to mention frequently more than willing to do so. He stayed a week later than normal as the summer of 2003 started crashing into the Alaskan fall. During his final days, while he was camping out with his reputed girlfriend Amie Huguenard, he mentioned seeing a new bear that for some reason he didn’t quite trust. Perhaps it was this new interloping brown bear that devoured Timothy and Amie on that fateful autumn morning as they screamed in vain. Treadwell’s camera recorded the sound but not the video because the lens cap was still attached. German director Werner Herzog turned Timothy’s tragically ironic story into the brilliant 2006 documentary Grizzly Man. In the film, Herzog listens to the death audio on headphones and decides that not only shouldn’t it be included in the film, the tape should be destroyed.
MAN DROWNS AT POOL PARTY OF 100+ LIFEGUARDS
As the summer of 1985 drew to an end, the New Orleans Recreation Department was so proud that there were no drownings that season at the city’s swimming pools, they threw a huge poolside party for about 100 lifeguards, 100 more guests, and even four active lifeguards who were assigned to guard the pool and prevent something embarrassing from happening—like, you know, someone drowning to death. But the revelry continued for hours while 31-year-old Jerome Moody, a party guest but not himself a lifeguard, was lying lifeless at the pool’s bottom. His body wasn’t discovered until the party started winding down.
OWNER OF SEGWAY COMPANY DRIVES SEGWAY OFF A CLIFF
Segways, those annoying and inscrutable electronic sideways skateboard/pogo-stick self-propulsion “Human Transporter” devices that I must confess scare the shit out of me for reasons I cannot quite articulate, have never been more ironically tragic than on that day in 2010 when British investor Jimi Heselden, who’d purchased the company earlier that year, careened a Segway test model off the road and down an 80-foot cliff to his death. A coroner ruled that Heselden had died of “multiple blunt force injuries of the chest and spine consistent with a fall whilst riding a gyrobike.”
PRISONER ESCAPES ELECTRIC CHAIR, ACCIDENTALLY ELECTROCUTES HIMSELF After being convicted of sexual assault and murder, Michael Anderson Godwin was sentenced to death in 1983, which in South Carolina during the 1980s was administered via the electric chair. He successfully appealed his sentence and had it changed to life imprisonment. One night while sitting naked on a wet metal toilet and wearing headphones that were connected to his TV, he bit into a wire and accidentally zapped himself to death on his own makeshift prison-cell electric chair.
WOMAN AWAKES IN COFFIN, PANICS AND DIES OF HEART ATTACK
Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov—no, I don’t know how to pronounce it, either, and probably like you, my eyes just sort of skip over names that complicated—was a Russian woman whom doctors had declared dead in June of 2012. But during an open-casket wake, she awoke screaming in panic. She was rushed to a local hospital, where physicians declared she’d died of a heart attack.
SLEEP RESEARCHER FALLS ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL
Eugene Aserinsky is considered one of the pioneers of modern sleep research and is most famous for discovering REM (rapid-eye movement) sleep in 1953. Forty-five years later he slammed his car into a tree north of San Diego. It is suspected that he had fallen asleep while driving.
JOGGING GURU DIES WHILE JOGGING
With his cereal commercials and best-selling books such as The Complete Book of Running, Jim Fixx was the inescapable face of the 1970s’ jogging revolution. But in 1984 he fell down dead of a heart attack while performing the act that made him famous. An autopsy revealed one of Fixx’s coronary arteries was 95% blocked, while another was 80% clogged and still another was crammed with 70% fatty plaque.
ANTI-SEATBELT ADVOCATE KILLED IN CAR ACCIDENT A Nebraska man named Derek Kieper was so passionate about the idea that seat-belt laws violated his sacred individual liberties, he wrote an opinion column about it. Less than four months later, he died in a car accident. Two of his friends in the car survived. They were wearing seatbelts.
ANTI-HELMET-LAW ADVOCATE DIES FROM MOTORCYCLE ACCIDENT HEAD INJURY
While proudly riding his roaring Harley down the road with his un-helmeted head exposed to the whistling winds of freedom during a 2011 protest ride against helmet laws, New York biker Philip Contos was flung over his handlebars and onto the sidewalk, where he died of a fatal head injury. A State Trooper claimed that a medical examiner told him Contos would have lived if only he’d been wearing a helmet.
DEATH ROW INMATE ESCAPES, IS BEATEN TO DEATH THAT NIGHT IN A BAR FIGHT
Troy Leon Gregg was a plucky and wily and crafty convicted murderer who along with three other Death Row inmates managed to escape the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville in 1980 one day before Gregg was to be put to death. Unfortunately, that night Greg was beaten to death during a bar fight in North Carolina.
BEACH BOY DROWNS
Of the five Beach Boys, only drummer Dennis Wilson could legitimately claim the name, for he was the only surfer in the bunch. Late one afternoon in 1983 he drunkenly went diving in Marina Del Rey to fetch some items he’d tossed overboard his yacht a few years earlier. He drowned to death, and the US Coast Guard buried his body at sea.
TV HOST KILLED IN THE OCEAN WHILE FILMING ‘OCEAN’S DEADLIEST’
Steve “The Crocodile Hunter” Irwin was a charismatic, khaki-wearing, danger-seeking Aussie who gained infamy by pressing his luck with all manner of ungodly beasts. His luck ran out in September 2006 while filming an episode of Ocean’s Deadliest in the Great Barrier Reef. An eight-foot-wide stingray struck him several hundred times with its tail spine. It pierced his heart and he bled to death.
LAWYER ACQUITS HIS DEFENDANT BY SHOOTING HIMSELF TO DEATH IN COURT
Clement Vallandigham was a valiant and noble Ohio lawyer who in 1871 defended a man named Thomas McGehan on murder charges. Vallandigham’s theory was that the victim had actually shot himself while in a kneeling position. To demonstrate that this was physically possible, Vallandigham recreated the event in the courtroom using a pistol he thought was unloaded. To his extremely brief dismay, it was loaded, and he accidentally shot himself to death, proving his legal theory and leading to his client’s acquittal.
MAN ‘PROVES’ GLASS WINDOW IS UNBREAKABLE BY FALLING THROUGH IT TO HIS DEATH
From most accounts, Garry Hoy was a brash, confident Toronto lawyer—perhaps too brash. One day in July 1993, as he had allegedly demonstrated so many times before, he showed a group of visitors that the glass window in his 24th-floor office was unbreakable by running headlong into it. Unfortunately, this time the window popped out of its frame and Hoy fell to his death in an act of autodefenestration. The glass, however, did not break, so technically he proved his point. But at what cost?
SHIP CAPTAIN KILLED BY A CANNON THAT WAS FIRING IN HIS HONOR
In the salty old year of 1794 somewhere off the Hawaiian islands, Captain John Kendrick‘s ship the Washington fired a thirteen-gun salute at another ship called the Jackal, which saluted back. Unfortunately, one of their cannons was actually loaded with grapeshot, killing Kendrick as he sat at his table on deck.
RADIATION PIONEER DIES OF RADIATION
Madame Curie is the first woman to ever win a Nobel Prize and is still the only woman to ever win it twice. She discovered polonium and radium but unfortunately spent so much time dabbling in radioactive materials that she fatally succumbed to aplastic anemia.
SNAKE HANDLER DIES OF SNAKEBITE
The Gospel of Mark clearly states that believers in Christ will be able to “pick up serpents” without being harmed, and the almost entirely Caucasian Pentecostal phenomenon of snake-handling is perhaps most vibrant in the tiny, beautiful state of West Virginia. Even though MackWolford‘s father had died from picking up serpents, Mack forged ahead to prove his faith in the Lord. After surviving three bites on three separate occasions, he fell dead from a fatal rattlesnake bite in May of 2012.
OVEN REPAIRMAN ROASTS TO DEATH IN OVEN
Two days before Christmas in 2010, a 54-year-old Liverpudlian named Alan Cattarall entered a giant industrial oven that baked plastic at 280 degrees to make kayaks. He sought only to make a minor repair, but the oven’s operator—his future son-in-law, Mark Francis—accidentally locked him in and flipped on the switch. While burning to death, Cattarall screamed for help but the sounds were muffled by the factory’s industrial noises.
GRANDSON OF GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE SUICIDE-BARRIER ADVOCATE JUMPS TO HIS DEATH FROM GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE
As a longtime member of the board of directors for San Francisco’s Golden Gate district, JohnMoylan had agitated tirelessly to erect suicide barriers on the Golden Gate Bridge, which to date has been the site of at least 1,600 suicides. In 2014—six years after the barriers were erected—Moylan’s grandson Sean successfully evaded the barriers and jumped to his death from the bridge.
WOMAN DIES DURING ‘DYING IN CONSCIOUSNESS’ SEMINAR
In 2011, a 35-year-old Canadian woman named Chantal Lavigne participated in a “detoxification” seminar called “Dying in Consciousness” that involved her being daubed in mud, wrapped up in plastic, swaddled in blankets, and having her head placed in a cardboard box for nine hours. She wound up being “cooked to death” after her body temperature raised to 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
HIS FATHER SHOT HIM WITH THE GUN HE BOUGHT TO PROTECT HIS FATHER
Soul singer Marvin Gaye possessed a rare talent, but he also hailed from a family that was unusually dysfunctional. Having developed extreme paranoia due to insufflating an estimated one million dollars’ worth of cocaine, Gaye took to wearing a bulletproof vest onstage and surrounding himself with armed bodyguards. For Christmas 1983 he gave his father a .38 pistol, ostensibly to protect himself from those who sought to prey upon the Gaye family fortune. Four months later after a violent domestic scuffle, his father used that pistol to fatally shoot his son.
HEALTH-FOOD PIONEER DIES ON LIVE TV
Jerome Irving Rodale earned a fortune as the publisher of numerous health-food books and Prevention magazine. During a taping of The Dick Cavett Show that never aired, the 72-year-old Rodale allegedly told the host that “I never felt better in my life” and that he intended to live to 100. But he died of a heart attack while the show was taping.
PRO-DRUNK-DRIVING COMEDIAN KILLED BY DRUNK DRIVER
Ex-preacher Sam Kinison built a huge following in the late 1980s as the “screaming comedian.” One of his routines involved a comic defense of drunk driving:
We don’t WANT to drink and drive.…But there’s no other way to get the fucking CAR back to the HOUSE!! How are we supposed to get fucking home?
In April 1992—less than a week after marrying his third wife and while driving to Nevada for a show—Kinison was killed by a 17-year-old drunk driver.
Psycho Body Double Killed in Shower
Myra Davis, whose professional acting name was Myra Jones, was involved in the production of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. She served as a stand-in for Janet Leigh, the woman who (spoiler alert for anyone who was born less than five years ago) was killed in the famous shower scene to the horrific, screechy strings.
In 1988, she was raped and killed by a man who was so obsessed with Psycho’s famous shower scene that he wanted to re-enact it upon Janet Leigh’s body double. Unfortunately for Myra Davis, the producers of the film had kept such a tight lip on how they shot the scene and which actresses they used that the information the killer gleaned over the years was skewed.
Davis never appeared in the shower scene. It was another actress, Marli Renfro, who served as Leigh’s body double and subsequently the body that audiences and the killer saw stab over and over again on the big screen. Not only was she killed in the same way someone was in the movie she was most famous for, but she wasn’t even IN the scene the killer was trying to recreate.
Today, the house is known as the Winchester Mystery House, but at the time of its construction, it was simply Sarah Winchester’s House. Sarah Winchester was the widow of William Wirt Winchester, heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Born around 1840, Sarah Winchester grew up in a world of privilege. She spoke four languages, attended the best schools around, married well, and eventually gave birth to a daughter, Annie. However, tragedy struck in her late twenties when Annie died, followed by the death of Sarah’s husband William more than a decade later. After William’s death in 1881, Sarah inherited roughly $20 million (over $500 million in 2019 dollars) as well as fifty percent of the Winchester Arms company which left her with a continued income equal to $1,000 a day (or $26,000 a day in 2019 dollars).
Newly in possession of a massive fortune and struggling with the loss of her husband and daughter, she sought the advice of a medium. She hoped, perhaps, to get advice from the beyond as to how to spend her fortune or what to do with her life. Though the exact specifics remain between Sarah Winchester and her medium, the story goes that the medium was able to channel dearly departed William, who advised Sarah to leave her home in New Haven, Connecticut, and head west to California. As far as what to do with her money, William answered that too; she was to use the fortune to build a home for the spirits of those who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles, lest she be haunted by them for the rest of her life.
In 1884, Sarah Winchester purchased what would later become known as the Winchester Mystery House. At the time of the sale, the house was a small unfinished farmhouse, but that quickly changed. Winchester hired carpenters to work around the clock, expanding the small house into a seven-story mansion. Due to the lack of a plan and the presence of an architect, the house was constructed haphazardly; rooms were added onto exterior walls resulting in windows overlooking other rooms. Multiple staircases would be added, all with different sized risers, giving each staircase a distorted look. Stranger so was the fact that many of the alterations seemed pointless. Staircases would ascend several levels then end abruptly, doors would open to solid walls, and hallways would turn a corner and end in a dead-end.
Additionally, Winchester insisted that the home be built exclusively out of redwood – however, she didn’t like the look of the wood, so she insisted it be covered with a stain and a faux grain. By the time the house was completed, over 20,000 gallons of paint had been used to cover the wood. By the turn of the century, Sarah Winchester had her ghost house: an oddly laid out mansion, with seven stories, 161 rooms, 47 fireplaces, 10,000 panes of glass, two basements, three elevators, and a mysterious fun-house-like interior.
Anyone who set foot in the home could tell that no expense had been spared. Gold and silver chandeliers hung from the ceilings above hand-inlaid parquet flooring. Dozens of artful stained-glass windows created by Tiffany & Co. dotted the walls, including some designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany himself. One window, in particular, was intended to create a prismatic rainbow effect on the floor when light flowed through it – of course, the window ended up on an interior wall, and thus the effect was never achieved.
Even more luxurious than the fixtures were the plumbing and electrical work. Rare for the time, the Winchester Mystery House boasted indoor plumbing, including coveted hot running water, and push-button gas lighting available throughout the home. Additionally, forced-air heating flowed throughout the house.
Unfortunately, in 1906, an earthquake struck San Jose, and the Winchester Mystery House sustained a hefty amount of damage. Thanks to the floating foundation (a foundation that equals the weight of the surrounding soil) the entire house was saved from collapse. The top three floors were ultimately removed, leaving the house with only four stories, as seen today.
Throughout the years-long construction of the Winchester Mystery House, Sarah Winchester would never confirm that she was building a haunted house. However, stories and rumors swirled throughout San Jose.
The contractors who worked on the house reported Winchester having daily seances with local mediums, in an effort to reach “good spirits.” These “good spirits” were reportedly consulted to find out how to best appease the spirits whom she was allegedly building the house for. These spirits are reportedly what called Winchester to make so many illogical additions to the home.
Far after the construction was completed, Winchester continued to make efforts to appease the victims of the Winchester rifles. Out of the 13 bathrooms in the home, only one was functional, in an effort to confuse any ghosts wishing to haunt a spigot. Furthermore, she would sleep in a different room every night in the Winchester house, and use secret passageways to get from room to room so that no spirits could follow her.
In the years Sarah Winchester lived in the house, the residents of San Jose whispered about its strange construction and even stranger inhabitant, but it was in the years after her death that the wild stories became even wilder. After her death in September of 1922, Sarah Winchester left all of her belongings to her niece, Marion, who had served as her personal secretary later in life. However, the Winchester Mystery House was never mentioned in her will, adding to the mystery of the home. After appraisers deemed the house worthless due to its strange design, damage from the earthquakes, and long-winded construction, Marion took everything in it and auctioned it off. The current owners of the house claim it took six weeks to empty the house of all furniture, though the report is uncorroborated.
After the house was emptied, a local investor purchased the home for a cool $135,000. Just five months after Sarah Winchester died, the Winchester Mystery House was opened to the public for tours.
Inside the home…some of it looks quite lovely…some is just bizarre.
Sleepy Hollow is a village in the town of Mount Pleasant, in Westchester County, New York. The village is known internationally through “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, an 1820 short story about the local area and its infamous specter, the Headless Horseman, written by Washington Irving, who lived in Tarrytown and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
The “Legend” relates the tale of Ichabod Crane, a lean, lanky and extremely superstitious schoolmaster from Connecticut. Throughout his stay at Sleepy Hollow, Crane is able to make himself both “useful and agreeable” to the families that he lodges with. He occasionally assists with light farm work, helping to make hay, mend fences, caring for numerous farm animals, and cutting firewood. Besides his more dominant role as the Schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane also assists the various mothers of the town by helping to take care of their young children, taking on a more “gentle and ingratiating” role. Crane is also quite popular among the women of the town for his education and his talent for “carrying the whole budget of local gossip,” which makes him a welcomed sight within female circles.
As a firm believer in witchcraft and the like, Crane has an unequaled “appetite for the marvelous,” which is only increased by his stay in “the spell-bound region” of Sleepy Hollow. A source of “fearful pleasure” for Crane is to visit the Old Dutch wives and listen to their “marvelous tales of ghosts and goblins,” haunted locations, and the tales of the Headless Horseman, or the “Galloping Hessian of the Hollow, as they sometimes called him.” Throughout the story, Ichabod Crane competes with Abraham “Brom Bones” Van Brunt, the town rowdy and local hero, for the hand of 18-year-old Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and sole child of wealthy farmer Baltus Van Tassel. Ichabod Crane, a Yankee and an outsider, sees marriage to Katrina as a means of procuring Van Tassel’s extravagant wealth. Brom, unable to force Ichabod into a physical showdown to settle things, plays a series of pranks on the superstitious schoolmaster. The tension among the three continues for some time, and is soon brought to a head. On a placid autumn night, the ambitious Crane attends a harvest party at the Van Tassels’ homestead. He dances, partakes in the feast, and listens to ghostly legends told by Brom and the locals, but his true aim is to propose to Katrina after the guests leave. His intentions, however, are ill-fated, as he fails to secure Katrina’s hand.
Following his rejected suit, Ichabod rides home on his temperamental plough horse named Gunpowder, “heavy-hearted and crestfallen” through the woods between Van Tassel’s farmstead and the farmhouse in Sleepy Hollow where he is quartered at the time. As he passes several purportedly haunted spots, his active imagination is engorged by the ghost stories told at Baltus’ harvest party. After nervously passing a lightning-stricken tulip tree purportedly haunted by the ghost of British spy Major André, Ichabod encounters a cloaked rider at an intersection in a menacing swamp. Unsettled by his fellow traveler’s eerie size and silence, the teacher is horrified to discover that his companion’s head is not on his shoulders, but on his saddle.
In a frenzied race to the bridge adjacent to the Old Dutch Burying Ground, where the Hessian is said to “vanish, according to rule, in a flash of fire and brimstone” before crossing it, Ichabod rides for his life, desperately goading Gunpowder down the Hollow. However, while Crane and Gunpowder are able to cross the bridge ahead of the ghoul, Ichabod turns back in horror to see the monster rear his horse and hurl his severed head directly at him with a fierce motion. The schoolmaster attempts to dodge, but is too late; the missile strikes his head and sends him tumbling headlong into the dust from his horse.
The next morning, Gunpowder is found eating the grass at his master’s gate, but Ichabod has mysteriously disappeared from the area, leaving Katrina to later marry Brom Bones, who was said “to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related”. Indeed, the only relics of the schoolmaster’s flight are his discarded hat, Gunpowder’s trampled saddle, and a mysterious shattered pumpkin. Although the true nature of both the Headless Horseman and Ichabod’s disappearance that night are left open to interpretation, the story implies that the Horseman was really Brom (an extremely agile rider) in disguise, using a Jack-o’-lantern as a false head, and suggests that Crane survived the fall from Gunpowder and immediately fled Sleepy Hollow in horror, never to return but to prosper elsewhere, or was killed by Brom (which may be unlikely, since Brom was said to have “more mischief than ill-will in his composition”). Irving’s narrator concludes the story, however, by stating that the old Dutch wives continue to promote the belief that Ichabod was “spirited away by supernatural means”, and a legend develops around his disappearance and sightings of his melancholy spirit.
In a Postscript (sometimes unused in certain editions), the narrator states the circumstances in which he heard the story from an old gentleman “at a Corporation meeting at the ancient city of Manhattoes“, who didn’t “believe one-half of it [himself].”
The Village
Located 25 miles north of New York City along the eastern shore of the Hudson River, The Village of Sleepy Hollow offers a unique blend of natural beauty and urban amenities along with world-renowned historic landmarks and modern attributes.
While an unusual name, “Sunnyside” is a name for a home in Sleepy Hollow. Washington Irving took over ownership of the structure in the year of 1835. At that time, it was nothing more than a small, ordinary cottage. He and his family worked hard to renovate the structure, and took great pride in the final project. This home is a beautifully designed structure that sits on the bank of a river – the Hudson to be exact. You can get a good look at the river by a small, secret path that leads from the home to the banks of the river. It has been said that apparitions have appeared, doing various tasks. It is believed that the nieces of Irving are often seen tidying up the home. Many have claimed to have seen Irving himself.
If you would like to visit the grave of the famous Washington Irving, you can do so at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. While there, you can also discover the final resting places of the following famous individuals: Andrew Carnegie, William Rockefeller, Walter Chrysler, and even the notable Elizabeth Arden. It has been said, on more than one occasion, that an apparition has been seen among the graves. Many who have walked through the cemetery often express the fact that they hear silent whispering which cannot be explained.
Old Dutch Church and Burial Ground – The burial grounds that are located at the Old Dutch Church are said to be among one of the oldest ones in all of the United States. It is said that the popular “Headless Horseman” can be clearly seen making his route through and around these burial grounds. When visiting here, you can see some very popular names on the grave stones. These include Eleanor Van Tassel Brush, who Washington Irving used a personality called “Katrina” from his story. Abraham Martling, who was reflected as the character “Brom Bones” can also be discovered here.
Patriot’s Park – If you go to the area that is between the cities of Sleepy Hollow, and Tarrytown, you will discover a park. During the American Revolutionary War, the Americans captured a soldier that was of Hessian decent. He was immediately executed by way of beheading. An apparition that lacks a head is often said to linger throughout the park grounds. Irving took this legend of the soldier that is headless for his tale.
The next time you find yourself in Philadelphia, you may want to consider paying a visit to the infamous Mütter Museum. It was founded in 1863, after Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter donated his collection of medical anomalies, wax models, diseased specimens, and medical equipment to The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Today, the museum boasts a collection of over 20,000 specimens, with about 15 percent on view to the public—and that’s PLENTY!
While serving as a storehouse for the anatomically peculiar, the museum’s display of tens of thousands of provocative items gives an eerie, beneath-the-surface perspective of what physicians study on a daily basis. Inside you’ll find a wide smattering of abnormal body parts remaining preserved in fluid, skeletal formations — like that of a 7’6” man — that don’t seem quite physically possible and tastefully displayed diseased and enlarged organs residing within glass-encased oak frames.
Medical oddities of all kinds captivate visitors, but highlights include Marie Curie’s electrometer, Dr. Benjamin Rush’s medicine chest, slides of cells from Albert Einstein’s brain, and, most spectacularly, the death cast of Chang and Eng, the original “Siamese Twins,” whose autopsy was performed in the museum. There’s also the “Soap Lady” and a 139 collection of human skulls.
Though it was originally intended for biomedical research, the Mütter Museum is a funhouse for those with a morbid sense of curiosity. But be sure to skip lunch before your visit, lest you lose your meal. In no particular order, here are some of the CREEPIEST exhibits.
1. Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection
The otolaryngologist (a doctor that studies disorders of the ears, nose, throat, head and neck) Chevalier Jackson was a physician who worked at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia in the early 1900s. He became famous for developing new methods to remove foreign objects from the human body, such as things that had become lodged in his patients’ airways. Nearly all the foreign objects he removed from throats, esophagi, and lungs over his 75-year-long career in medicine are on display at the Mütter Museum. These 2,374 objects include “buttons, pins, nuts, coins, bones, screws, dentures and bridges, small toys, among many other items.”
2. Books Bound with Human Skin
You’ll find several anthropodermic books, or books bound in human skin, at the Mütter Museum. The museum’s neighbor, the Historical and Medical Library, holds the largest collection of anthropodermic books in the world. There you can see three books bound in the skin of a woman named Mary Lynch, who died from trichinosis (a parasite that comes from pigs). During her autopsy, a large portion of skin from Mary’s thigh was saved, and three medical books about childbirth were bound with it.
3. Baby Born with No Skull
One of the largest collections at the Mütter Museum is what they call “wet specimens,” parts of the human anatomy preserved in jars of formaldehyde. Because of their fragile nature, the 1,300 jars representing every part of the human anatomy are kept in constant rotation. One particularly disturbing specimen is a baby born without a skull: a fetus that could not sustain life outside the womb.
4. Hyrtl Skull Collection
Mütter’s Hyrtl Skull Collection is made up of 139 human skulls which belonged to Viennese anatomist Joseph Hyrtl, whose life work was the study of the Caucasian population of Europe. Hyrtl wanted to show variation in cranial anatomy as an argument against essentialist theories about race. Each skull is mounted on the wall, and many are inscribed with Hyrtl’s notes about the person’s age, place of origin, and cause of death.
5. Conjoined Liver of Chang and Eng Bunker
Chang and Eng Bunker were Thai-American conjoined twins who were born in 1811 and died in 1874. They were joined at the sternum and shared a liver. Other than that, however, they were two fully-grown, independent men. The two made a life for themselves in North Carolina, and even got married to a pair of sisters. Chang had 11 children, and Eng 10. The fused liver that the two shared is now on display at the Mütter museum, as is a death cast of their torso.
6. Two-Headed Baby
In addition to Chang and Eng’s liver, the Mütter Museum also owns a large collection of conjoined fetal specimens, including a two-headed baby, as part of their wet specimens collection. Known as “Jim and Joe,” this two-headed baby, in a jar full of formaldehyde rests in the Gretchen Worden room, named after the Mütter Museum’s beloved curator who died in 2004.
7. John Wilkes Booth’s Vertebra
History buffs will love the specimen of the spineless (get it?) man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Shortly after Booth was killed during a shootout with the police, his body was sent to Washington, where it was autopsied. The three vertebrae (3rd, 4th, and 5th) were removed to allow access to the bullet, and sent to the College of Medicine in Washington, D.C. Some of that vertebrae and a piece of his thorax ended up on display at the Mütter Museum.
8. The Soap Lady
Exhumed in 1875, the Mütter Museum’s Soap Lady gets her name from the waxy, soap-like condition of her remains. Corpses high in body fat are prone to this rare chemical condition, which preserves the body in a waxy coating of broken-down fat called adipocere. Scientists at the Mütter Museum believe the Soap Lady died sometime in the 1800s. Her corpse was exhumed from a local cemetery to make way for construction, and Joseph Leidy, a professor of anatomy at the University of Philadelphia, jumped at the chance to study the unusual phenomenon.
9. Jaw Tumor of President Grover Cleveland
Another highlight of the wet specimens collection is a large tumor that was extracted from President Grover Cleveland’s jaw in 1893. With the country in financial turmoil, Cleveland didn’t want to upset the American populace even more, so he had the surgery on a boat and said he’d had a tooth extracted. Luckily the tumor was benign, but it left Cleveland with a significant disfigurement.
10. The Skeleton of Harry Eastlack
Harry Eastlack, born in 1933, suffered from an extremely rare condition known as fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, or FOP, in which the repair mechanism in the bones of the body works in overdrive, turning muscle and other tissue into bone. By the time Eastlack died in 1973, just short of his 40th birthday, his entire body had ossified, and he could barely move his lips to speak. His unusual skeleton is on display at the Mütter museum.
11. The Eye Wall
12. Soccer Ball-Sized Ovary
If the eye wall and the baby without a skull weren’t enough to put you off your lunch, one of the highlights of the wet specimens is a soccer ball-sized cancerous ovary. Creepy enough to motivate you to book that yearly physical?
Lizzie Borden, born July 19, 1860, was tried in court for the murder of her stepmother, Abby Borden, and father, Andrew Borden. Although she was acquitted, no other person was accused and she remains infamous for their murders. The murders occurred on August 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Abby Borden was found face down on the floor next to a bed; Andrew was found sprawled across the sitting room couch. Their skulls had been smashed in. A hatchet was found in the cellar, and suspicion fell on their 32-year-old daughter Lizzie, who also lived in the house. Lizzie claimed to have discovered the body of her father about 30 minutes after he came home from his morning errands. Shortly after, the maid, Bridget Sullivan, found the body of Lizzie’s stepmother.
It was said that Lizzie did not get along well with her stepmother, and that they had a falling out years before the murder occurred. Lizzie and her sister, Emma Borden, were also known to have conflicts with their father. They feared their stepmother’s family had designs on the family’s money and property, and they disagreed with his decisions regarding the division of that property. Her father was also responsible for killing her pigeons that were housed in the family barn.
Just before the murders occurred, the entire family fell ill. Since Mr. Borden was not a well-liked man in town, Mrs. Borden believed foul play was involved. Although Mrs. Borden believed they had been poisoned, it was discovered that they ingested contaminated meat and contracted food poisoning. The contents of their stomach were investigated for toxins following death; however, no conclusions were achieved.
Lizzie was then arrested on August 11, 1892. She was indicted by a grand jury; however, the trial didn’t begin until June 1893. Her sister was out of town at the time and was never a suspect. The hatchet was discovered by the Fall River police; however, it appeared to have been cleaned of any evidence. A downfall for the prosecution occurred when the Fall River police didn’t properly execute collection of the newly discovered forensic fingerprint evidence. Therefore, no potential prints were lifted from the murder weapon. Although no blood-stained clothing was found as evidence, it was reported that Lizzie tore apart and burned a blue dress in the kitchen stove a few days following the murder because it was covered in baseboard paint. Based on the lack of evidence and a few excluded testimonies, Lizzie Borden was acquitted for the murder of her father and stepmother.
Lizzie and Emma inherited a significant portion of their father’s estate, which allowed them to purchase a new home together. The Borden sisters lived together for the following decade. Although free, Lizzie was considered guilty by many of her neighbors, and thusly never enjoyed acceptance in the community following her trial. Her reputation was further tarnished when she was accused of shoplifting in 1897.
In 1905, Emma abruptly moved out of the house that she shared with her sister. The two never spoke again. Emma may have been uncomfortable with Lizzie’s close friendship with another woman, Nance O’Neil, although her silence on the issue has fueled speculation that she learned new details about the murders of her father and stepmother. No member of the household staff ever offered additional information on the rift, even following Lizzie’s death.
Lizzie died of pneumonia in Fall River, Massachusetts, on June 1, 1927. Emma Borden died days later in Newmarket, New Hampshire. The case has never been solved.
The House is now a Bed & Breakfast. Mr. Borden’s “couch of death” disappeared years ago — supposedly it was stored in a warehouse that was destroyed by a hurricane — but Lee Ann Wilbur (the previous owner) found a nearly identical replacement that is now the most sat-on piece of furniture in the house. The carpeted floor next to the death bed is also popular. “More people lie on that spot, and have posed on that spot, than do on the couch.”
Over at the county historical museum, the curator of Lizzie Borden’s Murderabilia told us that the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast was voted one of the scariest places on earth by the viewers of Scariest Places On Earth. Even levelheaded Lee Ann conceded that “something’s going on here,” and told us of phantom footfalls and unnatural gusts of wind, especially when guests use the Ouija Board in the sitting room. House cat Max acts as her paranormal alarm system. “When he has issues with the house, I’m gonna have issues with the house.”
Of course, most visitors here WANT an encounter with Lizzie’s pulp-headed parents. Abby Borden’s death room is the most popular rental in the house. For the murder anniversary night Lee Ann put it up for auction online (in 2008 it went for $405.00). “I haven’t had anybody have a heart attack yet,” she says, “but I have lost people around 2 AM. And there are no refunds if you leave.” Visitors can pull their lace coverlets over their heads if the ghosts pop in, but those who run for the exit don’t get breakfast — and that’s a shame, since it’s designed to be similar to the one that the Bordens ate on the morning of their murders.
NOTE: Lee Ann put the property up for sale and it was bought in 2021 by Lance Zaal, who is no stranger to the ghosts and spirits world. He is the creator of Lily, a supernatural doll that wards off ghosts and ghouls around Halloween. He also operates US Ghost Adventures, which offers ghost tours in over 35 states.
Did you ever hear that expression…”It’s not the destination…It’s the journey”?
Well, some people like to go out in style—and by some people I mean mostly men–but some of these hearses are pretty ingenious and they do cater to certain tastes.
The Ghostbuster Hearse
Tombstone Motorcycle Hearse
Venetian Water Hearse
REO Funeral Hearse
Bears Tailgate Hearse
Tesla Hearse
The Eureka Hearse
Armored Vehicle Hearse
Ferrari Hearse
1942 Cadillac Fleetwood
Shrine On WheelsHearse
Monster Soul CollectorHearse
1991 Toyota Crown Hearse
The Beluga Hearse
The Taxi Hearse
The Greenies Hearse
The Jetson Hearse
The “Even-the-Zombie-Apocalypse-Won’t-Stop-Us-From-Burying-You” Hearse
The All-in-OneHearse
and finally…The Cremator Hearse: it self cremates!
You can find all these options AND MORE at the links…LOL
Resembling a fortress standing guard over the town of Jim Thorpe (formerly known as Mauch Chunk), the historic Old Jail Museum is a beautiful two-story stone structure. The prison was opened in 1871 and through the years held the worst murderers and criminals imaginable, many of whom left their mark… literally. After hundreds of inmates passed through the doors, it was closed in 1995 and then purchased by Tom McBride and his wife, Betty Lou, of Jim Thorpe.
The building itself contains approximately 72 rooms, including 27 cells, basement dungeon cells used as solitary confinement until 1980, women’s cells on the 2nd floor, and the warden’s living quarters across the front of the building.
The building is best known as the site of the hanging of seven Irish coal miners known as Molly Maguires in the 1800’s. The Molly Maguires were a secret organization, composed mainly of Irish Catholics, that started one of the first labor movements in the country. Since the Irish were not well regarded by society at that time, one of the only jobs they could get in PA was working in the local coal mines. It was intense physical labor where workers only got pennies for their long hours. They bought all their own work equipment from the bosses, and had to pay rent to the coal bosses who owned their houses. The Molly Maguires, who had enough of the slave-labor conditions, murdered the coal management while vandalizing the mines and mining equipment. They were arrested, tried, and later found guilty.
On June 21, 1877, today known as the Day of the Rope, Alexander Campbell, Edward Kelly, Michael Doyle and John Donohue were hanged at the same time on gallows erected inside the Old Jail Museum cell block. On March 28, 1878, Thomas P. Fisher was hanged here, and on January 14, 1879, James McDonnell and Charles Sharp were also hanged on the same gallows.
The Handprint
Before their hanging, the men proclaimed their innocence and today historians believe many of the condemned men were falsely accused of murder. Before his hanging, one of the men, thought to be Alexander Campbell, put his hand on the dirty floor of his cell and then placed it firmly on the wall proclaiming, “This hand print will remain as proof of my innocence.” That hand print is visible today for everyone to view. Past wardens tried to eradicate it by washing it, painting it, and even taking down part of the wall and re-plastering it. But the hand print still remains.
Besides the hand print, visitors will experience a number of supernatural occurrences including shadows, footsteps and loud bangs from the solitary confinement cells. Legends say that these are the spirits of inmates or the ghost of the warden himself “checking up”. In the warden’s apartment objects will move near the old kitchen area, assumed to be the warden’s wife because she cooked for the prisoners herself. The Old Jail Museum is open for ghost tours at various times of the year—but makes an excellent Halloween adventure!
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Sew Colorful 