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This is a historical video about the founding of The California Institute of the Arts. Uploaded with permission.

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Dear David FULL STORY (All Photos + Evidence) | VIRAL Ghost Story

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Interview HW: “Talk to me” reaction video - Sheryl

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Interview HW: “Talk to me” reaction video - Sheryl

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Interview-talk to me movie reaction-Sheryl.mov

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We were shown bits of this film in our layout class! It has a really interesting environment ; a lot of the set pieces are slanted to give an unsettling effect- creating a similar effect to a dutch tilt as a camera angle!

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I remember the clicking of their eyelids and servos whirring more than their singing and dancing. By the time I was growing up their appeal was already slowly going down in comparison to the arcade and games.

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Related to the Machado reading, if people wanted to look further into these folktale indices.

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Scenes of Horror - "Poltergeist," "The Exorcist," and "The Amityville Horror" - Art21

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Paul Pfeiffer discusses his diorama-inspired sculptures that play off of popular horror movies.

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Buck-Tick - Kiss me goodbye [Climax Together 1994 live concert]

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I watched this when I was 13 and it kinda unsettled me but I loved it.

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Portraits of…Japanese Punk Culture From The ’80s - CVLT Nation

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This music video shows the aesthetics of Japanese 70s-80s punk as well as how they designed their posters, fonts, and shows.

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STALIN'83 藤岡良次雄 Fujioka Ryojio, 中村達也 Nakamura Tatsuya, 遠藤ミチロウ Endo Michiro, 杉山晋太郎 Sugiyama Shintaro

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I thought it would be fun to share this article!

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6 New Horror Movies Releasing This Week Including ‘It’s a Wonderful Knife’

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It’s the first full week of November 2023, and with Halloween in the rear view, it’s only natural that the new horror releases will be slowing down a bit. But horror never truly sleeps. Here’s all the new horror releasing November 7 – November 12, 2023! For daily reminders about new horror releases,…

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Super 8 (2011) - Train Crash Scene (1/8) | Movieclips

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'It feels like an apocalyptic movie... and we are living in it"

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Officials have told them rashes, headaches, and vertigo are not from chemical exposure, but are "stress symptoms"

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In the days after a fiery February train derailment that likely poisoned the environment in East Palestine, Ohio with a range of highly toxic chemicals, Amanda Kenner and her family experienced the burning eyes, nose, throat and other symptoms widely reported among the population in the small town near the Pennsylvania border.

In the months since, as the media and world have largely moved, their lives have not improved much. Kenner's four-year-old son, who had asthma before the wreck, saw his symptoms become uncontrollable, forcing the doctor to change his medication, Kenner said. She and her eight-year-old son developed asthma, and they all have experienced nausea, diarrhea and headaches that they attribute to chemical exposure.

State and federal officials have told the Kenners the water, air and soil is safe, and their health issues have other sources. But the family, which lives several miles south of the accident site, is skeptical and still "relies on the kindness of strangers" who donate bottled water because they suspect their well is contaminated.

"It's an ongoing nightmare," Kenner said during a Thursday symposium to mark six months since the wreck and spill.

The Kenners are representative of the plight for many in the East Palestine region who say they still suffer symptoms stemming from chemical exposure. Independent university researchers have found 80% of residents they surveyed say new symptoms experienced since the wreck - headaches, rash, coughs, eye irritation, diarrhea - are still present, and about 40% said they suffer from post traumatic stress disorder.

Residents there say state and federal officials have downplayed residents' concerns and potential health threats, and sometimes offer contradicting information. That has generated deep mistrust, and residents say there's a sense of being left on their own.

Parts of a Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Photograph: Gene J Puskar/AP

"It feels like an apocalyptic movie ... and we are living in it," said East Palestine resident Misti Allison. The town feels like it was a "soundbite" and there is dismay over the perception that the situation is resolved, she said.

"[People] think it happened, it's terrible, but it's done with. But that's not true," Allison added.

About 50 out of 141 cars on the Norfolk Southern train derailed and exploded in a towering fireball over the town of 4,700 at the edge of the Appalachian hills. The fire burned near tankers carrying vinyl chloride, and, two days later, officials, fearing a "major explosion", conducted a controlled burn of vinyl chloride as a prevention measure. The state and federal government's response was largely viewed as inadequate, and it became the subject of national scrutiny and criticism.

Among other issues, the "controlled burn" likely released dioxin, PAHs and other chemicals that present long-term health threats. The EPA has said the level of dioxins in and around the town is safe, but a Guardian analysis by experts in February found the soil contains dioxin levels hundreds of times greater than the exposure threshold above which Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists in 2010 found poses cancer risks.

The EPA has done some testing for dioxin in the area's soil and has said it did not find elevated results. But that has been contradicted by independent research that found levels thousands of times above background levels.

The EPA has not checked residents for the chemicals, but independent researchers who tested blood samples say results should be back soon. A new program is also being developed by university researchers to check residents for butyl acrylate and vinyl chloride, and provide them with wristbands that can measure a range of toxic chemicals in the environment.

Donald Trump speaks in East Palestine in February. Photograph: Rebecca Droke/AFP/Getty Images

The findings will "direct the next steps we're taking," said University of Kentucky researcher Erin Hayes, who has helped organize the program.

Meanwhile, Purdue University researcher Andrew Welton presented evidence that the handheld devices Norfolk Southern's contractors used to check homes for chemicals were incapable of finding them. His evidence included Norfolk Southern test results that showed no chemical detections in a home where independent testing found high levels. Even though Norfolk Southern's contractors said they did not find chemicals, they noted they had to leave the home because of the overpowering chemical odor.

"The testing done on those buildings wasn't designed to find the contamination that could cause the illnesses," Welton said.

The EPA recently proposed a building decontamination program, but it does not include HVAC cleaning, indoor air testing and other measures, Welton said. He called on the agency to develop a more robust, systematic approach.

Residents who spoke at Thursday's symposium say legitimate indoor testing is a priority, and officials' refusal to do it is partly behind the mistrust. So is their denial that health issues stem from the wreck. Those ailments experienced by her family and others in the area flare when there is digging around the derailment site, Kenner said.

Residents say the officials have told them rashes, headaches and vertigo are not from chemical exposures, but are "stress symptoms".

"Our health has been diminished," Allison said "We've been told the soil is fine, the air is fine, the water is fine, but when you do your own research ... it's absolutely terrifying."

The definition of "safe" is very subjective, Kenner noted. Officials have been using federal chemical exposure standards developed for worker safety, which is calculated off of eight hours of exposure for a man. But that does not mean the 24 hour exposures for elderly people, children and immunocompromised people are safe, Kenner added.

In a vacuum of reliable official information and a climate of distrust, concerned residents have been organizing and supporting one another, and have created an advocacy group called the East Palestine Unity Council.

"Nobody has reached out to me, nobody is making sure I'm OK," said East Palestine resident Zsuzsa Gyenes, except neighbors and those who are a part of the council. At the same time, differences in opinion among residents over whether the town is safe have created divisions, which is "heartbreaking", Gyenes added.

The federal government has taken few meaningful steps to avoid another catastrophe, and East Palestine residents offered advice for the next city that faces a similar catastrophe. "You need to be your own advocate," Allison said.

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'It feels like an apocalyptic movie': life in East Palestine six months after toxic train crash

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Federal and state officials say the air, water and soil is safe - but locals in Ohio town are still suffering damaging symptoms

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One person was taken to the hospital in serious condition Sunday evening after a crash involving a Metro Blue Line train in the Central-Alameda neighborhood of L.A. that caused the car to overturn and temporarily trap the person in the wreckage, authorities confirmed to KTLA.

Crews with the Los Angeles Fire Department responded to the 5300 block of South Long Beach Avenue just before 7:30 p.m. on reports of the collision, according to LAFD.

Video from the scene showed the wreckage of the overturned vehicle, which sustained heavy damage. Metro crews could be seen working on a fence near the tracks that was knocked out of place during the accident.

Details are limited and it's unclear what led to the crash, but authorities said the driver of the vehicle was extracted by LAFD crews and taken to the hospital. One passenger on the train was evaluated by paramedics, though they declined to be taken to the hospital and no other injuries were reported.

The train itself remained on the rails, authorities added.

The Blue Line between the Slauson and Vernon stations was closed in both directions while police and firefighters worked in the area.

In the meantime, Metro said it was providing riders with shuttle buses between the stations.

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Violent crash with Metro Blue Line train overturns car

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One person was taken to the hospital in serious condition Sunday evening after a crash involving a Metro Blue Line train in the Central-Alameda neighborhood of L.A. that caused the car to overturn and temporarily trap the person in the wreckage, authorities confirmed to KTLA.

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THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES #1 - Anglerfish - Horror Fiction Podcast

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THE MIND-BENDING CULT CLASSIC ABOUT A HOUSE THAT'S LARGER ON THE INSIDE THAN ON THE OUTSIDE * A masterpiece of horror and an astonishingly immersive, maze-like reading experience that redefines the boundaries of a novel.

''Simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent-it renders most other fiction meaningless." -Bret Easton Ellis, bestselling author of American Psycho
"This demonically brilliant book is impossible to ignore." -Jonathan Lethem, award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn

Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth-musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies-the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.

Now made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices, the story remains unchanged. Similarly, the cultural fascination with House of Leaves remains as fervent and as imaginative as ever. The novel has gone on to inspire doctorate-level courses and masters theses, cultural phenomena like the online urban legend of "the backrooms," and incredible works of art in entirely unrealted mediums from music to video games.

Neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of the impossibility of their new home, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story-of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

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THE MIND-BENDING CULT CLASSIC ABOUT A HOUSE THAT'S LARGER ON THE INSIDE THAN ON THE OUTSIDE * A masterpiece of horror and an astonishingly immersive, maze-like reading experience that redefines the boundaries of a novel.''Simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious."

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https://archive.org/details/house-of-leaves-by-mark-z.-danielewski/mode/2up

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House Of Leaves By Mark Z. Danielewski : Mark Z. Danielewski : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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Another favorite!

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The THIRTEEN /  karma-カルマ- (Music Video FULL Ver.)

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What if West Anderson made a horror movie

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What if West Anderson made a horror movie

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I was talking with a couple people about this last week in class and just wanted to share it since its a great SNL sketch

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Just a funny video that made me realized how much the "icons" of horror have change over the time

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Modern Monster Mash - Key of Awesome #91

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My favorite song from one of the most influential Visual Kei pioneers, X Japan!

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This is originally a sculpture art by Izumi Kato but get its own horror background story through a fictional organization website.

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I had some references saved on Pinterest by Johanna Flanagan and really, really like her work (I am a big doll fan)! I tried to link her instagram but wasn’t sure if folks could open it on padlet; her username is @ thepalerook

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In case anyone runs into a paywall on the previous post.

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Essay by John Menick on the enduring connection between spiritualism and communication technology.

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There is a kind of cinematic prophecy, a big-screen dreamworld that eerily anticipates the real. An event erupts into our attention-a natural disaster, a political movement, a war, a celebrity scandal-and we feel we've seen it already in a film, with worse writing and better-looking actors. How this happens is anyone's guess. These are prophecies without a prophet, the result of no supernatural power. They are just a strange by-product of Hollywood narratives engineered to fill seats. How many times did movie terrorists attack Manhattan before 9/11? How many viral outbreaks did we endure before the coronavirus pandemic? As governments scrambled to contain the current virus, their actions recalled the plots of pandemic films like Contagion (2011)and Outbreak (1995). The US government may not have been prepared for a global catastrophe, but Hollywood had already prepped our imaginations, giving the events of 2020, not for the first or last time, an unwanted familiarity.

So we went inside, where screens colonized what was left of our time. In only a few weeks, friends, family, coworkers, political candidates, and celebrities were reduced to grids of faces in glitchy chiaroscuro. Online video conferencing had an unexpected leveling effect, in which celebrity-packed theater productions and family birthdays were nearly indistinguishable in their format and awkwardness. People we once saw in person every day now appeared on our computer screens, competing with emails and Netflix. Digitized, encoded, flattened, and backlit, other people became digital ghosts, neither fully present nor completely unreal. These digital ghosts proliferated, in homes and outside of them-ghosts that were no longer just weird or eerie but also melancholic and bored. The melancholy was paradoxical: one missed one's friends and family, even though one could see them all the time. See them, but not be with them. Presence, rarefied, was now reduced to a field of pixels.

For two decades, horror movie producers have been grinding out films in which ghosts travel over digital connections, terrorizing teenagers in chat rooms and inconveniently intruding into video calls. Sporting tech-titles like Unfriended (2014), Friend Request (2016), and Cam (2018), these films are released, it seems, as frequently as app upgrades. They feature formulaic plots in which an online suicide or disappearance or rumor is not what it appears to be. Ghosts, demons-even Satan himself-are lurking in the network. The purer examples of the genre are shot entirely on webcams (or professional cameras imitating webcams) and use grid formats identical to those of a video conferencing app. It's all very silly, with the expected exploitational admixture of hot-button issues (teen suicide, cyberbullying) and freak-out entertainment ( The ghost is right behind you!).

The haunted internet genre began with the upmarket template Pulse (2001), directed by Japan's horror master Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Pulse is the Rosemary's Baby (1968) of internet horror, a one-of-a-kind masterpiece that triggered countless rip-offs, spin-offs, remakes, and sequels, none of which re-create the movie's singular poetry. Pulse is an enlarging spiral of terror whose starting point is a hacker's suicide and whose outer curves contain a Tokyo emptied of people. In between is a plot involving an afterlife that has run out of room for the dead. With nowhere else to go, ghosts are downloading themselves into present-day Tokyo via a website featuring videos of wraithlike people in darkened homes. After a character discovers the website, ghosts begin appearing, the character commits suicide, and their apartment is declared "forbidden." Meanwhile, other characters receive phone calls from the dead, and images of darkened rooms proliferate across more computer screens. Room by room, almost the whole of Tokyo disappears into the afterlife. Pulse then shifts genres, becoming a post-apocalyptic film, with the few unlucky survivors wandering through a depopulated Tokyo, eventually trying to escape by boat to South America.

Pulse doesn't make any sense, but it doesn't have to. The film elevates mood over logic, free association over cause-and-effect, somehow giving lines like "Instead, they'll try to make people immortal by quietly trapping them in their own loneliness" an explanatory power. Pulse conceptualizes the internet as a necrotic space that warehouses ghosts, but also as a finite space, prone to overflowing into ours. Pulse is a film whose every frame is infected with a loneliness that spreads like a virus. Andwith that loneliness comes the lonely act of watching: people watching people on screens watching people on screens, with the film's audience, of course, the last link in the chain. In one instance, a character looks at a screen on which they can see themselves, from behind, looking at that same screen, opening up a mise en abyme of solitary looking.

Today, it's hard not to find Kurosawa's film premonitory. People isolating themselves indoors, their apartments filled with clutter. Solitary, unwitnessed deaths. Long hours spent in front of computer screens looking at other lonely people. Television reports of dead strangers, each absolutely ordinary in their smiling headshot. Depopulated cities, quieted by a viral outbreak, the remaining pedestrians transformed into the last people on earth.

2.

Every communication network addresses an absence: someone has left the room, the house, the country, this life, and we want them back. Our networks will only ever bring back a piece of that person-a voice, an image-but sometimes a piece is enough. It is not hard to see how a technology that traffics in these pieces might be confused with the ghostly, and how in our imaginations, our communication networks might be confused with the afterlife. Ghosts have been infesting communication networks long before Kurosawa's film, starting with the very first telegraph transmissions in America. The invention of the electric telegraph was synchronous with the rise of spiritualism in America. Both came out of a desire for communication-one with the living, the other with the dead-and both were optimistic gambles on the country's future.

Spiritualism-having emerged from the same wild cluster of New York counties that gave the nation Mormonism, Adventism, and Millerism-was a socially progressive movement. Many spiritualists were also feminists and abolitionists. Spiritualism drew its members mostly from the white middle and upper classes, educated men and women who were disillusioned with Protestantism's conservatism and patriarchy. They were determined to abolish slavery and give women the right to vote. (The house in Rochester that hosted some of the earliest séances was also a stop on the Underground Railroad.) Some Black political radicals gravitated toward the movement, including Sojourner Truth, who lived for a decade in Harmonia, a utopian spiritualist community. Spiritualism was one of the few women-led movements in nineteenth-century America, and more of its writers, artists, and mediums-the last, famous, highly paid, and sought after-were female than male. Historian Ann Braude has shown that spiritualism's stages and séance tables were among the few places women could have a voice in America at the time. (Though, paradoxically, not always with their own voices, as trance mediums were often said to be channeling the voices of dead men.)

At the time, death was everywhere: children died often and young; slavery destroyed countless Black lives and would lead to civil war; and families were lost to what would become preventable diseases. First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln organized séances in the Red Room of the White House, some of which were attended by the president. Mrs. Lincoln was not alone: by 1890, forty-five thousand Americans were formally associated with a spiritualist society, though the number of believers was probably much higher.

Meanwhile, these same Americans were sending telegrams and learning to make phone calls, two technologies that, even to the educated, appeared to border on the supernatural. For the first time, the world was communicating with itself across great distances, nearly instantaneously, and spiritualism was right there to ride the wire. The "spiritual telegraph" became the movement's prime technological metaphor, though it was frequently literalized when some mediums offered their services for intercontinental communications. Scholar Anthony Enns writes of the medium James V. Mansfield, a.k.a. "the spirit-postmaster," whose arm would spasm during séances as if charged by "an electro-magnetic circuit, enabling [the spirits] to approach and influence the nerve-center of his motor system." This "human telegraph" would then tap out the letters with his finger, in a manner that was "business-like, orderly, and straight."

Spiritualism lacked a foundational book, and it had no real theology. The movement was many things, but it was also a theory of communication-a wild, pseudoscientific one, but a theory all the same. Its message was simple: there was an afterlife, and we could speak with it. By the turn of the century, spiritualism was a clearinghouse of supernatural communication technologies: table rappings, talking boards, automatic writing, spirit slates, trances, even fanciful machines. Some of these technologies, such as automatic writing, were far older than the United States itself, while others were as new as the telephone. Spiritualist publications freely sampled from the current scientific discourses on electricity and chemistry, and much of the movement's theorizing was done by scientists operating on the margins of their professions. Spiritualism designated its members as "investigators" rather than believers, encouraging a kind of light skepticism. Rarely, an investigator ranked among America's new scientific elite, as in the case of Thomas Watson, an assistant to Alexander Graham Bell.

Every Sunday in 1875, Watson convened a "spirit circle" with his childhood friend George Phillips. With Phillips leading, the table they sat around tipped and rapped in response to their questions-the efforts of a "disembodied spirit," according to Watson. Soon John Raymond, the future mayor of Salem, Massachusetts, joined them, and the three men graduated from rappings to ventriloquizing the dead. In one session, Raymond started convulsing and, perhaps in preparation for his political career, declaimed a thirty-minute speech from a dead orator.

For Watson, his parallel activities-the invention of the telephone and the séances-produced a paradoxical confusion between electricity and the spirit world. As he would later write of the séances: "I was now working with that occult force, electricity, and here was a possible chance to make some discoveries. I felt sure spirits could not scare an electrician, and they might be of use to him in his work." Notice the reversal: electricity was the true occult science, one that might explain the spirits away while also assisting the electrician in his scientific work.

Late at night, Watson spent hours "listening to the many strange noises in the telephone and speculating as to their cause." He heard snaps, grating sounds, a twirling like the chirping of a bird. He was the first to hear these sounds, and with scientific theories of electrical interference yet to arise, he speculated that they came from another planet. As Avital Ronell writes in The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, Watson "opened an altogether original channel of receptivity... [he was] the first convinced person actually to listen to noise."

By "noise," Ronell means electrical noise, static. Long before forward-thinking electronic-music composers made static a subject of serious listening, Thomas Watson was concentrating his ears on it, hearing what he thought might be interplanetary voices. Voices, music, soundscapes, the ghostly-the next century would search for signals where there were none, sometimes as a prank, more often in search of meaning.

The telephone would become the next century's great interrupter. Globally, the phone network fragmented attention. Dinners, quiet nights at home, intimate conversations, and reading time would rarely be free from intrusion by distant voices. Intimacy was rewired, near and far scrambled. Voices from the past, ex-lovers, bill collectors, family members looking for money-the phone suddenly produced anyone and anything we'd tried to forget. And why not the dead? Starting in the nineteenth century and running well into the twentieth, one could read of haunted phones and phone-switching stations, of calls from dead relatives and murdered lovers. In 1878, The New York Sun reported that calls coming from a telephone installed in a cemetery's office were waking a Catholic bookseller in the middle of the night. When it was found that no one had accessed the cemetery phone, and that the bell was mechanically operated, the cemetery owner locked and secured the room holding the phone. The calls continued, and everyone involved suspected a spirit was at work. On September 24, 1907, the Alexandria Gazette reported that a new phone exchange had been built in Wellesley, Massachusetts, because phone operators believed the old one was haunted. (A night operator had been found dead there two years earlier.) In the January 1933 issue of The Telephone and Telegraph Journal, a subscriber complained that after a repairman fixed their supposedly haunted phone, a rumor spread in the town that the house itself was haunted.

It took longer for the haunted telephone to cross from news into fiction, with Elliott O'Donnell's 1934 story "The Haunted Telephone" being one of the earliest known examples. It tells of a country doctor who, after answering a telephone call, finds that his identity becomes blurred with that of his disappeared predecessor. The story is also one of the earliest in which telecommunication causes confusion between the past and present. The plot of Nigel Kneale's now-lost 1954 BBC radio play You Must Listen sounds very much like the urban legends circulating in the margins of the press: After a phone is installed in a solicitor's office, the staff hears a
woman's sexual monologue on the line. (No voice ever responds.) The voice, they learn, is that of a mistress whose lover is refusing to leave his wife. She commits suicide and her voice haunts the line. Mario Bava's three-part film Black Sabbath (1963) features an episode in which the voice of a supposedly dead ex-boyfriend haunts a woman's phone. Around the same time, Richard Matheson adapted his short story "Long Distance Call" for a 1964 Twilight Zone episode ("Night Call"), in which a lonely elderly woman receives calls from her deceased husband. In the TV version, before she hears her husband's voice, the woman hears static on the other end of the line.

3.

In Arthur C. Clarke's 1965 short story "Dial F for Frankenstein," the phone network does not transmit the dead but becomes its own living being. Clarke's story is set in 1975, then the near future, on a day when all the world's phones ring in unison as a kind of planetary prank call. Everyone who answers the phone hears not a voice, not a recording, but "a sound, which to many seemed like the roaring of the sea; to others, like the vibrations of harp strings in the wind." But it is the sea sound that predominates, the rush one hears when listening to a conch shell, that "secret sound of childhood."

In London, at a café across from the Post Office Research Station, a group of engineers debate what caused the call. Was it a power surge? Or was it the recent satellite launch, intended to connect all the world's telephone networks? The group's amateur sci-fi author has an idea: Since Alexander Graham Bell, he says, the telephone system has been thought of as a giant brain, with each switch acting as a neuron. What if, after the satellite launch, the switches in the phone network reached a critical mass of connectivity? And what if, like a newborn, the network is now awake and looking for food?

As they talk, the lights flicker. A jet flies unusually low over the building. Later, a fire alarm rings. After that, a bank receipt shows an employee with almost one billion pounds in the bank. One of the engineers opens a newspaper, and although the layout has the normal columns of type and photographs, the text is scrambled into "a sea of gibberish." What is happening? The engineers guess that the new "supermind" is like a newborn baby: it's looking for food-electricity-while extending its reach and causing havoc. A BBC report confirms that across the globe there have been industrial failures, the launch of guided missiles, airplane groundings, the shutdown of stock exchanges. The communications satellites have cut themselves off from central control-there is no way of shutting them down. Then the BBC signal goes silent, leaving the engineers to consider whether humanity itself has reached its end.

When the story was published, none of Clarke's readers would have expected a fire alarm to connect to the same system that lays out a newspaper. There wasn't yet an internet, and telecommunication networks were a specialized topic. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, later claimed he read Clarke's story as a child and that it had inspired the Web's creation. Though, considering that the story ends in an apocalypse, it's hard to see why anyone might want to emulate it.

Predating Pulse by a few decades, "Dial F for Frankenstein" imagines a network that expands beyond its confines, laying waste to its makers. There is no ghost-for the first time, it is the network itself that is alive. Unable to speak, it prank-calls the world. And when the world answers, there is no spirit on the other end of the line ready to announce its arrival. What's calling is the line itself. Without a voice, without a soul.

The German media theorist Friedrich Kittler was a collector of these kinds of calls, calls that said nothing, came from nowhere, sounded like the ocean or like a conch shell's roar. In his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, he writes about a dream of Franz Kafka's in which the writer finds two telephone receivers, or Hörmuschel ("listening shells"), on the parapet of a bridge. Kafka picks up both receivers and asks for news of someone named Pontus (the name of an ancient sea god). On the other end of the line he hears "a sad, mighty, wordless song and the roar of the sea. Although well aware that it was impossible for human voices to penetrate these sounds, I didn't give in, and didn't go away."

Kittler traces that static-like sea sound through early modern literature, from Kafka to a little-known 1907 short story by Maurice Renard. In it, a composer and his friend, grief-stricken by the loss of several of their dinner club members, alternate between listening to a recording of their dead friends and putting their ear to a seashell. One asks: "What if this ear-shaped snail stored the sounds it heard at some critical moment-the agony of mollusks, maybe? And what if the rosy lips of its shell were to pass it on like a graphophone?"

Later, Kittler discusses another lost short story, this one by Salomo Friedlaender, a.k.a. Mynona: "Goethe Speaks into the Phonograph." The story's conceit is that sound waves and voices never fade: "These [air] vibrations encounter obstacles and are reflected, resulting in a to and fro which becomes weaker in the passage of time but which does not actually cease." Build the correct machine, the story's professor protagonist believes, and you can snatch the sounds back from the past-in a way, resurrecting anyone you wish. His first test subject? The father of German literature, Goethe himself.

After a visit to the writer's tomb, the professor hooks up a microphone and phonograph to an anatomically correct re-creation of Goethe's larynx. He brings the contraption to the writer's study, placing the larynx on a tripod not far from where Goethe's mouth might have been. There, the professor and his audience listen to the writer speak with poet Johann Peter Eckermann about Newton's theory of color.

Kittler stresses that with the invention of voice recording, one could, for the first time, capture not just the sign of a thing but its physical residue, emanating waves frozen in wax. (The same could be said for photography, which captures the light bounced off bodies.) This fact changed how we thought about our media, its powers as well as its possibilities. Kittler does not seem very interested in spiritualism, though he would have found it offered a playground of strange media ideas. In particular, he could have discovered a cluster of theories that proposed that no image or sound is ever lost. Like in our own digital age of cloud storage and Time Machine backups, this is a dream of a past in which everything is recoverable. The dead come back if you know where to look-all you need is the right sensitivity or ingenious machine. An artificial larynx and a phonograph, maybe, or a supernatural talent allowing a person to miraculously repossess the past.

4.

Annie Denton Cridge claimed to be just such a person. Little is known about Cridge today. What survives comes from her spiritualist publication, The Vanguard; her stream-of-consciousness books, including My Soul's Thraldom and Its Deliverance; and the few traces researchers have found in archives. She was born in England in 1825. In the 1840s, along with her brother, the geologist William Denton, she immigrated to the United States. By age twenty-three, she was a writer, a memoirist, and a socialist. She was also a grieving mother who had seen her infant child's spirit rise from its body to be greeted by its deceased grandparents. From that moment, Cridge was an ardent spiritualist and claimed the ability to see ghosts.

According to her brother, Cridge was also a "psychometrist," a person who, by laying hands on an object, can glean information about the object's past. The term was coined by Joseph Rodes Buchanan, a physician and her brother's employer. In a journal he published, Buchanan wrote that psychometry, from the Greek for "soul measuring," was a gift available to certain people, who, just by touching an object, could learn something about its effects (if it was a medicine) or its previous owners (if it was a personal item). In experiments he describes at exhaustive length, Buchanan claims to have shown that individuals with "acute sensibility" could read the contents of a sealed letter by holding it to their head (thus anticipating Johnny Carson's Carnac the Magnificent by more than one hundred years). Others, when presented with a written autograph, could produce a "mental daguerreotype" of the autograph's owner. Buchanan's crackpot science could, he claimed, revolutionize human communication, medicine, archeology, and history. It might even lead, Buchanan wrote in a fit of the manic optimism that colors much of his writing, to the reconstruction of all of human creation.

Buchanan does not mention Annie Cridge in his 1885 Manual of Psychometry: The Dawn of a New Civilization, but her brother devotes space to her in his own 1863 book, Nature's Secrets: Or, Psychometric Researches. For several chapters, Annie and her sister-in-law, Elizabeth, are William Denton's star subjects. When presented with a host of rocks and fossils, first Annie and then Elizabeth narrates the objects' origins with novelistic vividness. After Annie is presented with a piece of limestone from near the Missouri River, she sees a hill by a river. When Elizabeth is presented with tufa from near Vesuvius, she has a vision of a violent eruption.

Psychometry's trigger is touch, but vision is its real operative sense. The women are presented as seers. "I see..." begins most of the testimonies. Though the telegraph might have been the medium's preferred metaphorical machine, for the psychometer, the world-governing metaphor was the daguerreotype. Like most of the pseudo-scientific writing on spiritualism, William's book begins with a reasonable premise: we retain memories that we unconsciously repress and bring back involuntarily at a later point. Denton then expands his theories to argue that objects retain unconscious impressions of what takes place around them, like a daguerreotype. Here he makes the leap: "In the world around us radiant forces are passing from all objects to all objects in their vicinity, and during every moment of the day and night are daguerreotyping the appearances of each upon the other." Enter Annie and Elizabeth, whose brains are "sufficiently sensitive to perceive [these radiant forces] when [their brains are] brought into proximity to the objects on which they are impressed."

In Denton's writings, history-the deep history of geology, or the more recent history of one's life-operates like a photograph, or, more accurately, a film strip. What is of interest in Denton's writings is not their scientific accuracy but his anticipation, almost by accident, of the cinematic apparatus. The first film cameras would be invented at the close of the century, but here is an idea that the world retains not just a single image of itself but a succession of images. When Cridge and Elizabeth narrate their visions, they are static-they are describing paintings, really-but on occasion their language suggests motion, as when Vesuvian lava flows into a boiling ocean. What Denton describes is a kind of cinema avant la lettre, history as a phantasmagoria, "the history of its time passed before the gaze of the seer." Far before Orwell and the Stasi and the National Security Agency, the world becomes a giant recording device, aimed in all directions, with total information awareness.

Nigel Kneale, the writer of the lost telephone radio play mentioned above, used these ideas in his cult TV show The Stone Tape, a bizarre 1972 BBC Christmas special in which a ghost is projected from the stone wall of an ancient house. (A ghost of a woman appears, falling from the same staircase over and over again, as if looped on a tape. The "tape," a group of scientists learn, is the stone itself.) Denton's ideas took a century to find their ideal home: on a TV show (among the first to be shot entirely on video) about ghosts who are trapped like images caught on video tape. This is the afterlife as media, as a space in which one's image is predestined to play in infinite reruns.

Likewise, spiritualism's afterlife is found in the movies, where it is doomed to repeat, perhaps forever, the same gestures and plotlines. In narrative films like The Uninvited (1944), The Changeling (1980), and Hereditary (2018),one can watch the familiar séances and psychometric visions; child ghosts who return to grieving mothers; and chalkboards writing their own messages. On occasion, one gets a complex evocation of the movement, as in Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper (2016). But more usually Hollywood depoliticizes spiritualism, stigmatizing its ideas and transforming its mediums into eccentric crones. Christianized, the lesson of Hollywood spiritualism is that one shouldn't play with Ouija boards and that Satan lurks in every basement.

There is, though, in films like Pulse, a residue of the movement's weird theories of mass communication, however dark this vision may have turned. The happy miracles of the "spiritual telegraph" have become the nightmares of the haunted internet genre. As scholar Jeffrey Sconce has written, spiritualism's optimism concerning communication technologies was greatly tempered, if not completely reversed, during the twentieth century. By midcentury, the dead were no longer up for a telephonic chat: they pestered, sabotaged, interrupted, and terrorized. In a word, they haunted. Now, with cloud storage and 24-7 connectivity, the past, it seems, is always recoverable. But it is impossible for us to believe that cell phones and Zoom calls will deliver this past free from worry and fear. The problem is not how to bring back the past, but how the dead can, once and for all, stay that way.

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There is a kind of cinematic prophecy, a big-screen dreamworld that eerily anticipates the real. An event erupts into our attention-a natural disaster, a political movement, a war, a celebrity scandal-and we feel we've seen it already in a film, with worse writing and better-looking actors. How this happens is anyone's guess.

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Stephen King's novel "Misery" that I just finished reading 

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Stephen King's novel "Misery" that I just finished reading 

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Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth

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Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth

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Regardless of how you feel about Doja Cat, her relationship to sensationalist horror conspiracy seems worth thinking about in terms of Disneygothic.

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Doja Cat - Paint The Town Red (Official Video)

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a macbeth-inspired horror-y noir-y immersive theatre experience

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a macbeth-inspired horror-y noir-y immersive theatre experience

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I was lucky enough to see this production (or technically walk through it) years ago, way before covid. I was pretty young and didn't totally know what I was headed into and it cracked open my brain in terms of what theatre can be and what art can be! I've never stopped thinking about this production.  I'll explain more in class but it's super cool and I would love to see it again with a different lens years later and see how I'd resonate with it now.

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Watch: The Cast of Sleep No More Share an Inside Look at Their Reopening

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Super inspiring trailer of an animator I follow! I aspire to make works of this caliber :) Content Warning: Animated blood, gore, creature horror, horror imagery

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Probably one of the most recognized scary TV logos of them all.
-Alyssa

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As a kid, I was scared of vintage production logos that would play on TV or VHS. Apparently a lot of other people experienced the same fear, even though these logos weren't created to be scary at all. I think that my nostalgia / fear of scary logos was the start of my interest in analog horror.
-Alyssa

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A picture of my roomie inside a very spooky place at campus

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A picture of my roomie inside a very spooky place at campus

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Monster House (8/10) Movie CLIP - The House is Alive! (2006) HD

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Michael Jackson - Thriller (Official 4K Video)

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extra link: https://www.fox6now.com/news/monster-jeffrey-dahmer-story-netflix

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1st report on Jeffrey Dahmer case (July 23, 1991) | FOX6 News Milwaukee

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Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971) The Death Of Augustus Gloop

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Psycho Killer by Talking Heads (Stop Making Sense)

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Psycho Killer by Talking Heads (Stop Making Sense)

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I love to read short horror stories...this is a pdf I found it a couple years back with scary stories that could be bone chilling

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The Simpsons - Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven

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ORDERING AMONG US POTION FROM THE DARK WEB AT 3AM!! *IMPOSTOR*

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I wanted to share a fun music video from one of my favorite bands, Sukekiyo! Actual song starts at 2:13 :)

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sukekiyo「Candis｣ Music Video (full ver.) from『SALUS』(2021.12.22 release)

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The Ballroom Dancers also sometimes referred to as the Waltzing Dead, are twelve ghosts that haunt the Haunted Mansion.

Description

In the Rides

The Ballroom Dancers appear in every version of the Haunted Mansion including Phantom Manor. The Dancers always appear in the Grand Hall where they are paired up into six couples, each with one man and one woman as they dance in circles to the music being played by the Organist, fading in and out of view in the process.

In Phantom Manor the characters are said to be the ghosts of some of the guests of Melanie Ravenswood's tragic wedding.

Individuals

There are a grand total of twelve dancers, six of them men and six of them woman. Although they are difficult to distinguish from one another upon examination of their animatronic figures you can make out their personal traits. Although it should be noted that certain traits such as hair colour can vary from park to park as in certain parks versions all-most of the men have brown hair.

A Yellow Haired and moustached Man in a grey suit. He is paired with the golden haired woman.

A Pale Pink haired man in a light blue-green suit. He is paired with the pale-pink haired woman.

An Orange haired man in a light grey suit. He is paired with the orange haired woman.

A bluish-green haired man in a light grey suit. He is paired with the turquoise haired woman.

A purple haired man in a white-salmon suit. He is paired with the purple haired woman.

A man in a green suit. He is paired with the woman in the green dress.

A Golden Haired Woman in a yellow dress. She is paired the they yellow haired man.

A pale-pink haired woman in a white-pink dress. She is paired with the man with pale pink hair.

An orange haired woman in an orange dress. She is paired with the orange haired man.

A Turquoise Haired woman in a blue and green dress. She is paired with the Turquoise Haired Man

A purple haired woman in a light violet dress. She is paired with the purple haired man.

A woman in a green dress. She is paired with the man in the green suit.

Other Appearances

Disney Parks

During the Seasonal Halloween festivities at the Disney Parks, the Ballroom Dancers often appear during parades where they are portrayed by cast-members.

Mickey's Boo-To-You Halloween Parade

The ballroom dancers are apart of the Haunted Mansion unit in Mickey's Boo-To-You Halloween Parade at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom. They are the third group, behind the tombstone float and in front of the Hitchhiking Ghosts. The dresses are pastel colors, much like the ride, while the suits are all white.

When rehearsing, the dancers are asked to come up with backstories for their characters. Their dances will contain hints to their lives. For example, if one of them was poisoned, their hand might be on their throats, or if one of them was electrocuted, they'll shake when they dance.

The ballroom dancers are apart of the Frightfully Fun Parade at Disneyland. They are the first in the Haunted Mansion units, before the mansion float with the Hitchhiking Ghosts. Their appearances are very similar to Boo To You, only the men wear dark grey suits instead of white.

Mickey's Halloween Celebration

The dancers were in front of the Illusion Manor float in Mickey's Halloween Celebration at Disneyland Paris. Their costumes were more ornate and detailed than in the American parks, themed to fit the time period that Phantom Manor takes place in. The costumes were color coded - purple, green, and orange - from head to toe for both the men and the women.

The female ballroom dancers appeared in this special dining experience, called the Bayou Belles. They were summoned by Dr. Facilier from The Princess and the Frog and joined him in his performance of "Friends on the Other Side" in the Blue Bayou.

Tokyo Disneyland's Story Beyond event for the Haunted Mansion identified two of the ballroom dancers as and Marilyn O'Hara, who are described as having met at the Mansion and their relationship while close, being strictly platonic.

In the Ghost Gallery the ballroom dancers were said to be the souls of six couples who attended a party at Gracey Manor and that they were killed after Madame Leota cursed them to dance for eternity as a form of punishment for them not paying enough attention to her.

The ballroom ghosts appear in the 2003 film adaptation wherein they are shown to be the souls of the men and women who attended the masquerade ball which Master Gracey's bride died at. They appear during an emotional climax of the film, when Gracey insists to Sara Evers that she is Elizabeth reincarnated. They appear around them, as he continues talking to her about it.

The special's Ballroom scene serves as an homage to the "At the Dance" sketches from The Muppet Show. The Waltzing Dead Muppets include Wayne and Wanda, Howard Tubman, Beverly Plume, and Beautiful Day Monster.

Due to an accident done while producing the animatronics to be reflected, the women are leading the men in their waltz which animatronic Blaine Gibson regarded as a screw up.
When asked about this, imagineer X. Atencio stated that the reason the women are leading the men is, "Because they're ghosts". While an accident, this detail does feed into the Haunted Mansion's themes regarding the freedom of abandoning the constraints of normalcy, while also subtly adding to the more surreal element of the Victorian ballroom.

They are achieved through a Pepper's Ghost affect

Originally there were going to only be six animatronics and the other six dancers were to be an additional illusion in which they would reflect the existing animatronics with a large mirror and cast that reflection into the scene. However before they began construction on the mirror they realized that the affect would create a seemingly infinite number of dancers instead of the intended twelve and imagineers chose to instead simply construct more animatronics.

Although the animatronics move in the proper direction, their reflections as seen on the ride are dancing backwards. This is most notable in both the Disneyland and Disney World versions of the ride. In Tokyo Disneyland and Phantom Manor, however, the reflected "ghosts" are now dancing in the right direction, as their animatronics' motion is reversed from the original.

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The Ballroom Dancers also sometimes referred to as the Waltzing Dead, are twelve ghosts that haunt the Haunted Mansion. The Ballroom Dancers appear in every version of the Haunted Mansion including Phantom Manor.

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"The happy haunts have received your sympathetic vibrations, and are beginning to materialize. They're assembling for a swinging wake... and they'll be expecting me. I'll see you all a little later."

The Grand Hall, also referred to as the Ballroom, is one of the major rooms of the Haunted Mansion and Phantom Manor.

The Haunted Mansion

In all versions of the attraction, guests enter the Grand Hall from the Séance Circle and travel along a balcony overlooking the hall. A major party is underway as a multitude of transparent spirits engage in all sorts of revelry. A long dining table covered with decayed floral arrangements and dusty silverware plays host to a birthday feast, and whenever the orange-haired birthday ghost blows out the candles on a birthday cake at the head of the table, the other ghosts seated there vanish, only to reappear when the candles light again; nearby, an old woman disappears and reappears in a rocking chair. Several haunts drift into the hall from a hearse parked in a doorway, while cloaked wraith-like phantoms fly in through the broken windows from a stormy night outside.

While a number of ghosts - including the notorious Pickwick - gadabout on the chandeliers above the room, a pair of duelists emerge from their respective paintings on the far wall and take shots at each other, forever reenacting their age-old feud. The open floor whirls with waltzing couples as a ghastly organist plays Grim Grinning Ghosts on a pipe organ, where tiny spirits emerge from the pipes.

Upon reaching the end of the balcony, the doom buggies pass into the attic.

Phantom Manor

The scene, though much the same as its Haunted Mansion counterparts, has a few minor differences. The ballroom ghosts seem to have gathered for a wedding party, and a rotting wedding cake sits on the dining table, topped with the figure of a bride - the conspicuous space for a groom figure is empty. Melanie Ravenswood stands on a stairway across the hall, while the Phantom looms nearby and laughs. The other ghosts in the hall slowly fade in and out of view, leaving Melanie and the Phantom alone.

During the Holiday overlay at Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland's Mansions, the hall gets decked out with macabre Yuletide cheer. Jack's Coffin Sleigh appears in the place where the hearse is located and ghost present enter the hall from the sleigh. A huge gingerbread house always dominates the dining table - guests actually smell gingerbread in the air as they pass - while a titanic, dead Christmas tree covered in glowing ornaments takes up the dancing floor, though the waltzing ghosts continue to spin through the pile of presents underneath. Beyond, on the balcony, guests can see an open doorway into a previously-unseen library, where books rotate slowly through the air. The duelists try to shoot at Zero who is flying around the tree in the middle of the hall.

A grand ballroom is frequently visited over the course of the film, first when the Evers family arrive at the house and meet Edward Gracey for dinner. It's also the setting for the climax, involving a botched wedding ceremony and a huge, fiery dragon that emerges from the fireplace. Direct references to the ride are the presence of a huge dinner table where the Evers eat, the pipe organ, and dancing ghosts in the same place.

The ballroom itself appears as a level in the game which can be visited after completing the dining room, which is a separate level. In this level, the organ sends strong winds to prevent the player character Zeke Holloway from reaching the light switch, which is only behind it but Zeke manages to breach this by using spider webs shot by giant spiders. This is also the first level the player character fights the main antagonist, Atticus Thorn. In both this level and the dining room, characters from the ride also appear.

This incarnation is modeled on the ballroom seen in the film.

In the comics, the Grand Hall has been cursed by the Captain to keep the ghosts locked in a state of endless celebration, making them gradually lose their memories and never want to leave. This hypnotic effect can only be broken when one crosses the threshold of the hall. Danny Crowe nearly falls prey to the hall's effects, though is inadvertently saved by the Captain's own doing and eventually rescued by the Hatbox Ghost.

The Grand Hall appears in the special as the main gathering place for the Mansion's Muppety haunts and the setting for the " Life Hereafter" musical number.

The fireplace is moved closer to the organ as the far side of the room now houses a small performance stage (presumably built for The Great MacGuffin's magic shows) that is used for the vaudevillian "The Mansion Show", hosted by a ghostly Kermit the Frog and featuring the comedy of Gauzey the Hatbox Bear. The Ballroom Dancers' banter also provides an homage to the old "At the Dance" sketch from the original Muppet Show.

The grand hall appears in this film as the mansion's dining room and is heavily modeled after the grand halls seen in the ride. It houses a long table and a functional pipe organ for entertainment and also once functioned as a ballroom. Following the Hatbox Ghost Alistair Crump's defeat, the resident ghosts gather in this room to celebrate their victory. At the film's ending, the house' mortal residents celebrate Halloween with the resident ghosts.

The Grand Hall is a famously impressive scene and a show-topper for many guests, due to the see-through ghosts that take up the huge space. While many have wondered if holograms or computer technology were used to create the illusion, the effect is actually achieved through a very old theater technique and magic trick known as Pepper's Ghost. Since the effect makes use of a scene reflected through glass, the entire guest view of the ballroom is through a massive pane of glass that runs the length of the room.

In the Disneyland version of the attraction, the pipe organ is the same one used by Captain Nemo in the 1954 film, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, albeit that it appears differently, due to the bat note stand and the tall pipes that replaced the mirror and the fan-shaped pipes respectively.

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"The happy haunts have received your sympathetic vibrations, and are beginning to materialize. They're assembling for a swinging wake... and they'll be expecting me. I'll see you all a little later." The Grand Hall, also referred to as the Ballroom, is one of the major rooms of the Haunted Mansion and Phantom Manor.

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Alternate
Versions

Madame Blackheart
Madame Leota (Once Upon a Time)
Madame Pigota (Muppets Haunted Mansion)

Madame Leota is the spirit of a psychic medium residing in the Haunted Mansion. Manifesting as a disembodied head inside a misty crystal ball, she is able to send "sympathetic vibrations" to summon ghosts from the spirit world so that the guests may meet them, and join them in their "swinging wake."

In Disneyland Paris's Phantom Manor attraction, Madame Leota is present, but it is unknown if this is the same Leota appearing in the mainstream Mansion attractions due to having a different actress and it being unknown whether or not Phantom Manor exists in the same continuity as any of the Haunted Mansion attractions.

Her services were also advertised in the Thunder Mesa Daily Messenger.

In original concept art by Marc Davis, the character who would become Madame Leota was referred to as "the famous medium Madame Z" and she resembled an elderly cloaked woman. However this version of the character was vaguely referenced in Disney World's Big Thunder Mountain where a letter references a woman named Madame Zarkov who works in the Museum of the Weird as well as the now extinct Adventurer's Club where the same character made appearances.

Madame Leota is named after Imagineer Leota "Toombs" Thomas, who also provided the face for the medium's spirit in the attraction. During development of the Haunted Mansion, she and Harriet Burns were asked by fellow imagineers Rolly Crump and Yale Gracey to assist them in developing their projection technology. The two women aided Gracey by allowing him to record their likeness as her head was made stationary so he could experiment with the technology he was planning to use to project the face of Eleanor Audleyonto animatronic molds for ghosts in the attraction. However, while Harriet's facial features were apparently too small to prove effective in these experiments, Gracey and the Imagineering crew came to like Leota's demo-reel so much that (with her permission) they used her face as the model for the ghostly characters which come to be given the names of Madame Leota and Little Leota (the latter of whom Toombs voiced).

She is voiced by Eleanor Audley, the same woman who voiced Disney Villains Maleficent and Lady Tremaine in Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella respectively.

In the Haunted Mansion Holiday, however, Leota's face is modeled by her Leota Toombs' daughter, Kim Irvine, while her voice is provided by Susan Blakeslee, who voices Maleficent and Lady Tremaine in modern media along with Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmatians and the Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

In all versions of the Haunted Mansion, as well as Phantom Manor, Madame Leota can be found in the Séance Circle, either floating about the room or resting on a table in the center. She chants a plaintive incantation that conjures the spirits of the Mansion into visual form, so that guests can see the previously-invisible specters and haunts. Musical instruments and other objects levitate in the shadows in response to her supplications.

During the Holiday overlay at Disneyland, Disney World, and Tokyo Disneyland's mansions, Madame Leota's crystal ball takes on the appearance of a Christmas ornament as she floats through the air, reciting " The 13 Days of Christmas" while large tarot cards with characters from The Nightmare Before Christmas on them spin overhead.

Madame Leota's presence is slightly expanded in the Walt Disney World version of the attraction. In the family plot, guests pass her tombstone just before entering the Mansion. Those who stare long enough may notice the bronze face on the stone flick open very human eyes and stare at them for a moment. If guests pass through the Servant's Quarters they can also see a sign referencing Leota having had her own boudoir in the mansion.

Her presence extends beyond the Mansion to Liberty Square. The Memento Mori shop apparently belonged to Leota prior to her residence within the Haunted Mansion, the Medium having fled Salem, Massachusetts during the witch trials to settle in the Hudson River Valley and open the store; the rest of her story remains shrouded in mystery. In this shop Leota can sometimes be seen peering through a mirror hung on the wall, she also has a large portrait.

In Phantom Manor, Madame Leota chants in both English and French to call wayward souls to a ghostly wedding party. Misty shapes materialize around the room as guests pass through.

Her history and connection to Ravenswood Manor is completely unknown however in 2018 during the giant renovations being made to the attraction a poster could be found on the wall surrounding Phantom Manor which references her past in Thunder Mesa as having been a Medium and Fortune Teller.

Leota plays a major role in the Ghost Post story, at first being a force opposed to the Committee of Wandering Ghosts and their plans to recruit mortals to help the Haunted Mansion's residents. She gradually begins sensing the presence of the Phantom Radio app as the player uncovers more clues and listens in to her conversations, and eventually contacts the player through it to berate and challenge their psychic ability. Should the player prove they are attuned to the spirit world, Leota will begrudgingly accept that perhaps they can help after all, and then tasks them with finding some of the ghosts lost in the fog.

Eventually, Leota becomes more of a guide to the player, providing instructions and aid to uncovering the mystery. With the player's help, she is able to pinpoint the location of the Forgotten Room in the Mansion, and helps the player through a spirit board reading to learn an incantation to free the ghosts. By the end of the final challenge Leota has accepted the role these mortals have played, and recognizes them as true and worthy mediums to the spirit world.

Leota makes a cameo in the queue area for Star Tours: The Adventures Continue, with her crystal ball inside one of the suitcases that passes through the luggage scan. When he sees her suitcase, the droid scanning the luggage makes a reference to the ride.

In the defunct Superstar Limo ride in Disney's California Adventure, she had a cameo of sorts, summoning agents in a stretch limo.

At the Town Square Theater in Magic Kingdom's Main Street, U.S.A., in the queue for Mickey's "backstage at a Magic Show" themed meet and greet is a Crystal Ball labelled, ""Leota" Crystals Model 1969" on a shelf with Mickey Mouse's magic equipment.

Leota appears on the artwork for one of the gondolas in Walt Disney World's Disney Skyliners.

A poster along the Disney Springs Christmas Tree Trail advertised, "Mme. Leota's Music Lessons from Regions Beyond" and depicts her candles and crystal-ball. This poster also alludes to Little Leota by asking clients to bring their death certificates.

During the Haunted Mansion 50th Anniversary event's opening show at Disneyland, Madame Leota appeared in human form at the Fantasmic stage on Tom Sawyer's Island after her incantation was played. She appeared alongside four undead Cadaver Dans and proceeded to summon the Waltzing Dead who she controlled like marionettes. Leota also did regular live seances from the balcony of the Disneyland Dream Suite, with narration from the Ghost Host describing her skill as a medium was something she possessed even as a child.

Leota makes a cameo among Disney Villains in Mickey's House of Villains, briefly being seen on a table during the song "It's Our House Now!" alongside an Opera Ghost.

In the animated film The Princess and the Frog, which is set in New Orleans, Madame Leota's tombstone can be seen in the climax which takes place in a cemetery.

Madame Leota is played by Jamie Lee Curtis. Known even in the modern day as the greatest medium to have ever lived, Madame Leota was called to Gracey Manor to assist William Gracey in contacting the spirit of his deceased wife Eleanor. Over the course of a year, Leota and Gracey would hold regular seances that ended up calling a wide variety of spirits to the Mansion, albeit Eleanor remained elusive. Though Leota warned Gracey that inviting this many spirits from regions beyond could get more dangerous, the seances kept going with over 930 ghosts in all being summoned to the Mansion. A mishap during one seance caused a malicious spirit, the Hatbox Ghost, to arrive. This spirit tricked Gracey into poisoning himself by forging messages from Eleanor's spirit. When Leota tried banishing the Hatbox Ghost, he would end up pulling her into her own crystal ball and locked her in a trunk in the attic.

In the modern day, when the house falls into the ownership of Gabbie and Travis, the group they put together to help them solve the mystery of the Mansion's hauntings is led to find Leota by the wandering spirit of Gracey. Leota assists them by telling her story and instructing them on assembling the materials needed to perform a banishing spell strong enough to trap the Hatbox Ghost. In the film's climax, with the assistance of Harriet, her spirit is able to leave her crystal ball and fully materialize to help perform the spell, though she notes that she'll have to return to the ball afterwards remarking that it is roomier than it looks. Like the 2003 film, this version of Leota becomes part of Gabbie and Travis' family and, while not shown, is implied to be celebrating with them , the other mortal guests, and the ghosts during Halloween.

Madame Leota briefly appeared in the seventh season of the ABC television drama Once Upon a Time alongside her shop Memento Mori where she was a member of a group of sorceresses known as the Coven of Witches. The shop gets tracked down by the combined efforts of Zelena (the Wicked Witch of the West) and Killian Jones (Captain Hook).

Miss Piggy plays the role of Leota as Madame Pigota. The sounds of the music in her seance room are provided by a ghostly version of the Electric Mayhem (serving as a Phantom Five plus one), who interrupt her when Gonzo and Pepe come into the room. When calling a break, Gonzo asks her to call on a specific spirit, presumably MacGuffin, but Pigota declines, claiming reception in the Mansion is lousy while also breaking the fourth wall to complain about her minimal screentime. She sends them to the Ballroom through a door with a glowing "Exat" sign (as its hard to find a rhyme for bat), and asks a Maid (played by Kim Irvine) to clean her crystal ball. She makes a brief appearance later in the climax as Gonzo rushes through the Endless Hallway to find a way to the Attic.

In the video game adaptation, Madame Leota was voiced by Lisa Donahey and serves as the secondary protagonist, guiding the player character, Zeke Holloway, during his quest to restore the mansion while riding around in his satchel.

In this incarnation's backstory, Leota once served the Order of Shadows, the evil organization led by Atticus Thorn. After learning of their true intentions to conquer the afterlife, she was rescued by the last members of the Brotherhood of Souls, whom she joined with the intention of ending the threat of Atticus Thorn and the Order of Shadows. Later on, when Atticus attacked the mansion in search of the Beacon of Souls, the object which he sought to use to carry out his evil plan, he trapped Leota in her crystal ball, which limited her powers significantly. At the game's conclusion, she and the remaining ghosts become Zeke's mentors and guides in his career as an author.

While the video game Leota retains the same gypsy/Romani background and traits evident in the Haunted Mansion franchise, the noticeable difference is her Southern accent, unlike the ride wherein she speaks with a sinister Eleanor Audley tone and accent. This implies that the video game Leota is a Romani who was born and grew up in the Southern United States (commonly called as American South).

Main Article: Madame Leona

In Epic Mickey, a spirit known as Madame Leo na who is an unused prototype of Madame Leota appears in the Library of Lonesome Manor, where she tasks Mickey Mouse with restoring the damage done by the spirits and Blotlings.

Madame Leota appears as a main-antagonist in the video-game Kinect Disneyland Adventures where she traps the player inside of the Haunted Mansion after they disturb her during a ritual. She then proceeds to make the Stretching Room start stretching and later on is defeated by the player in her Séance Chamber by flashing a light at her.

Madame Leota was born in the Louisiana swamps to a kidnapped gypsy and a voodoo priest. Uneducated in everything but the occult, she grew up learning that other people were nothing but cattle and that everyone has weak spots and can be easily influenced. She was a very bitter person and was known to fly into rages at the least provocation. However, even though she had a bad temper, Leota was most dangerous when she was calm and could think things through. She was very sly and the other village people shunned her.

Leota finally moved to New Orleans and began reading palms and holding seances. Although some were exaggerated by special effects, by and large, her powers were genuine. She was bilking many people out of their money, and when she met Master Gracey she saw a real opportunity. She moved into the Mansion and it became easy for her to run the life of Gracey.

His wife Lilian hated Leota. When Lilian tried to get rid of Leota, the Madame hypnotized her into performing her old tightrope act and leaping to her death. Leota then convinced George to marry Emily, for she needed more money, just as he did. But not wanting another woman in his life, Leota locked the trunk that Emily was hiding in.

Leota planned to use the Mansion as a portal to another world, to call in more powerful spirits. George refused to permit her-- in the resulting argument he learned that Leota had killed his wives. George then attempted to flee, but ended up in the attic as his escape routes were cut off since Leota was controlling the servants and spirits. As Leota cast a spell to imprison George in her crystal ball, he hung himself rather than be caught. With his death, the spell went awry and backfired, trapping Leota in her own crystal ball. To this day, Leota still commands some small power, but not as she was before.

In the greater storyline for the comics inspired by the Ghost Gallery, Madame Leota is a wandering Roma who comes to Gracey Manor offering to use her powers to quiet the unruly spirits of the Mansion. She attempts to make amorous advances on William Gracey but is rebuffed, much to her scorn. Eventually her contact with the dead connects her to the vengeful souls of Gracey's former crew and reveals that he was once the pirate Captain Blood. Leota uses this knowledge to fool Gracey into thinking she had cleansed the Mansion, while secretly summoning the ghosts on the day his wedding to Emily de Clare.

The ghosts end up killing Emily, and Gracey strangles Leota to death in an act of revenge, though she died in the midst of a seance that was meant to summon the dead, causing the eventual discovery of the Mansion by wayward souls looking for a home. Leota's soul becomes bound to her crystal ball, and, despite this, does not realize she has died, only thinking she is still in a heavy psychic trance. When the Mansion hits 1000 ghosts, a botched curse she was enacting when she was killed goes into effect and causes the Mansion to disappear into the underworld, which frees her spirit from the crystal ball upon arrival to the other side.

She is said in the illustrated book The Haunted Mansion: Haunted Happenings to be the wife of Mr Gool.

Disney Kingdoms Comics

Madame Leota is one of the benevolent spirits of the Mansion in the Disney Kingdoms story, using her supernatural powers to call Danny to the house. She believes he is the only hope to free the manor's spirits from the clutches of the nefarious Captain, and offers him advice.

Leota is one of the few spirits that actually died on the grounds of the Mansion, making her have some measure of supernatural power within the house. However, these powers are severely weakened thanks to the Captain's curse, proven when she is unable to re-manifest when the Captain smashes her crystal ball. Leota is restored only after Danny lifts the curse keeping the ghosts of the Mansion from haunting.

Leota is a reoccurring character in the Tales from the Haunted Mansion book series. She's first named in the second volume, Midnight at Madame Leota's, where the main character seeks her out to connect with his sister. According to the text, she was power enough to convince skeptics. When he comes to her seance circle, she gives her incantations from the ride and orders two ghosts to escort him to the ballroom, lest he be late.

In the seventh Kingdom Keepers novel, The Insider, Madame Leota makes an appearance as a villanous Overtaker in the Haunted Mansion's basement in Disneyland. She attempts to scare Maybeck and Charlene to death, but when presented with a mirror she retreats to the shadows, horrified of her own ugly face.

Disneyland/Walt Disney World

"Serpents, and spiders, tail of a rat...

Call in the spirits, wherever they're at!

Rap on a table, it's time to respond...

Send us a message from somewhere beyond!

Goblins and ghoulies from last Halloween...

Awaken the spirits with your tambourines!

Creepies and crawlies, toads in a pond...

Let there be music from regions beyond!

Wizards and witches, wherever you dwell...

Give us a hint... by ringing a bell!"

"Goblins and Ghoulies, creatures of fright,

We summon you now... to dance through the night!

Esprits et fantômes, sur vos fiers destriers,

Êscortez dans la nuit la belle fiancée!

Warlocks and Witches, answer this call!

Your presence is wanted at this ghostly ball!

Des douze coups de minuit aux mâtines sonnantes,

Nous valserons ensemble, macabre débutante!

Join now the Spirits in Nuptial Doom:

A ravishing Bride... a vanishing Groom."

"On the Thirteenth day of Christmas, my Ghoul Love gave to me:

Thirteen Rings of Power, embracing strength that never ends,

Twelve signs of the zodiac that rule the future and transcend,

Eleven candles floating, their scent of mystery in the air,

Ten telling tea leaves, that swirl with secrets yet to share.

On the Ninth day of Christmas, my Ghoul Love gave to me:

Nine magic crystals, that sparkle with a force that is pure,

Eight balls of knowledge, that answer with a truth that is sure,

Seven pearls of wisdom, to keep my love bewitched to me,

Six mystic mirrors, reflecting futures yet to be.

On the Fifth day of Christmas, my Ghoul Love gave to me:

Five lucky charms, to understand the right from wrong,

Four wheels of fortune, to spin their rich and golden song,

Three lifelines, extending help to those in need,

Two passion potions, [so] that love and romance may succeed.

On the First day of Christmas, my Ghoul Love gave to me:

A Star! A brilliant star for my fortune card tree!"

"Clobber, clobber

The ugly Slobber.

Melt him away,

And away he will stay."

"Pumpkin spice lattes and a vampire bat,

you must find a door with the glowing "Exat"

"Horntoads and lizards, fiddle and strum,

Please answer the roll by beating the drum.

Harpies and furies, old friends and new,

Blow on a horn, so we'll know that it's you."

Madame Leota has a spell-book open beside her table which has her incantations written upon it.

In an 1990s-era script for a Haunted Mansion movie, Madame Leota was a contemporary psychic named Madame Leota Crump that was identified as the owner of the Museum of the Weird by way of her van.

In Phantom Manor, Leota is both portrayed and voiced by Oona Lind. This is the only version of Leota to be portrayed and voiced by the same actress.

During the Haunted Mansion Holiday and Haunted Mansion Holiday Nightmare overlays, she is played by Kim Irvine, Leota Toombs' daughter, and voiced by Suzane Blakeslee, the current voice of Maleficent and Lady Tremaine.

She was named in a piece of cut narration from the Ghost Host: "Perhaps Madame Leota can establish contact. She has a remarkable head for materializing... the disembodied..."

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Madame Leota is the spirit of a psychic medium residing in the Haunted Mansion. Manifesting as a disembodied head inside a misty crystal ball, she is able to send "sympathetic vibrations" to summon ghosts from the spirit world so that the guests may meet them, and join them in their "swinging wake."

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I went to the store to buy my angel halo for Character Animation party (the theme was Angel & Devil), I was on my phone and didn’t pay attention to my surroundings. I got spooked by this scary scarecrow and I screamed :)

I heard the clerk laughed behind me, AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!
(I went back and filmed this video to scare my brother)

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I believe in the other side and the easiest way to create connections with the other side is Ouija board and people often  use it as some sleepover game and it could be dangerous

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9 Rules For Night Shift On Halloween At The Cemetery 

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9 Rules For Night Shift On Halloween At The Cemetery 

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I love to listen to creepy pastas at night.
This one was my first creepy pasta I ever heard and at the time it terrified me but now it is my personal favourite. This is not the exact the one I used to listen to but I like this one too.  Hope you enjoy it :)
Incase you wanna hear it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6vFhlH982g

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"9 Rules For Night Shift On Halloween At The Cemetery" Creepypasta

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Weird and spooky chemtrail/smoke I spotted outside Calarts' Main Building

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Weird and spooky chemtrail/smoke I spotted outside Calarts' Main Building

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Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2019)

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Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2019)

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#nightmareonelmstreet #documentary #freddykrueger #queer

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A picture I took of a creepy cross I found nearby Hollywood Bowl

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A picture I took of a creepy cross I found nearby Hollywood Bowl

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"...may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you, haunt me then. I know that ghosts have wandered the Earth. Be with me always. Take a new form. Drive me mad, only do not leave me."

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Wuthering Heights - Catherine's Death (HD)

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Fairy Tales: Cinderella by Carole Caroompas

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Fairy Tales: Cinderella by Carole Caroompas

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#fairytales #disney #painting #mocala

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Yotsuya Kaidan at Santa Fe Museum of Folk Art

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Yotsuya Kaidan at Santa Fe Museum of Folk Art

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#kabuki #ghost #oiwa # costume #japan

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Article on Wednesday as Marketing Success 

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Article on Wednesday as Marketing Success 

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#wedesday #nyt #trends #horrorbusiness

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#museumoffolkart #mexicocity #skeleton

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#lacma #surrealist #painting #romania

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#gothic #romance

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Kate Bush - Wuthering Heights (1978) • TopPop

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The Castle that Bram Stoker based Dracula's on is now a kitschy tourist attraction, with a restaurant. #kitsch #gothic #architecture #classic

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Bran Castle Video Tour - History & Photos - Tickets & Schedule

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Looking for Bran Castle Video Tour? Find videos and photos of the most popular castle in Romania. Buy tickets online and enjoy your visit.