All posts tagged: Halloween

How Haunted Houses Prepared Me For Emergancies

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Every time I visit a haunted house, one thing inevitable occurs. No matter how big the group I walk through with is, I always wind up taking the lead at some point.  Usually this occurs during the dreaded pitch black room/maze/hallway that most haunted houses feature. Everyone freezes, as I slowly edge forward and feel for the wall. This is undesirable to most, since each dark room has the possibility of a hidden ghoul waiting to pop out. Some of the really sly houses leave it empty, and let the anticipation heighten exponentially as you move further in. Occasionally the floor has been altered and sinks, or fishing wire is hung from the ceiling (to simulate spider webs). The sudden surface changes and sensations are very disorienting. But I love pushing ahead to see what hidden scares are in the dark rooms. Until 10:30 am on Friday, June 8th, this was not a skill that had real life applications. That morning, I was kneeling in front of a filing cabinet in a storage closet searching …

The Apprehension Engine

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If you ever wondered how some of the hair raising sounds in your favorite horror movie are made, they may have been created with this instrument. The Apprehension Engine was created by film composer Mark Korven and musician Tony Duggan-Smith in order to create all of the spooky sounds they wanted to hear in movies without relying on a limited pool of digital samples. Listening to the instrument in person is described as being especially unsettling. Brad Wheeler with the Globe and Mail noted during a demonstration by Kroven that “As Korven manipulates the thing, the room’s temperature drops about 10 degrees and the composer’s tiny dog retreats to an upstairs closet.” If you were interested in owning one of these nightmare sound machines, the base cost is a mere 10,000.00. Not in your Halloween budget? Then enjoy some of the videos below, and check out some of the movies this instrument has been featured in, like The Witch and Cube.

Halloween Mood Board and Writing Prompts

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Over 2,000 years ago, Celtic pagans celebrated their New Year on November 1st. Called Samhain, it was considered the end of summer and the arrival of the dark half of the year. The night before, they would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward of ghosts. Celtic pagans believed that at this time of year the veil between the world of the living and the dead became thinner then at any other time of the year, and the ghosts returned to walk among the living. As time past, and and Christianity was introduced to the region, those traditions were merged with other Roman and Christian holidays into one day of celebration known as Halloween. In the colonial US, Halloween was celebrated sporadicly in some regions, spurred mainly by European immigrants in southern states, mainly as harvest festivals where ghost stories where told. It wasn’t until a flood of Irish immigrants, fleeing to the US to escape the Potato Famine in the middle of the 19th century, that this changed. The Irish brought their beloved Celtic …