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Hitchin’ a ride
The other day, I was chatting with a few of the officers after work (for those of you who don’t know, I work in the Communications div for our local Police dept) and the suggestion came up that I should have one of my Skeletons riding shotgun in my personal vehicle. My sister had recently sent me a photo from a local Walmart of a similar scene, and I had thought to myself at the time, “how cool is that”. Since I have a spare Bucky hanging around waiting to be corpsed, I figured why not. The next afternoon, I strapped him in, gave him some eyeballs and a hat, and set off for work.
The stunt was well received by the guys, and we all had a few good laughs about it, but for me, that just wasn’t enough. In efforts to catch the reactions of passersby while driving, I decided to leave him strapped in for a while. That was a week ago.
My kids all love the idea, and graciously take a back seat for “Bubba”, a name he earned from the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. hat that he dons. They love checking the reactions of people on the street as we drive by.
The best part of this story came when I returned to work yesterday after a 3 day weekend. I was informed of a call to the Police dept, received a few days prior, from a concerned citizen. The caller was reporting a black 4 door sedan with a human skeleton riding in the passenger seat.
Looks like Bubba will have to spend a few more weeks in the car. 
2010 Pumpkin Garden
Our 2010 pumpkin garden
I have, for several years now, tried to grow pumpkins in my vegetable gardens. Until last year, success had not visited my patch. Small gardens of too few plants, under-watering, and a lack of knowledge the likely culprits in much of my failures. Last year, my success was limited to 4 grapefruit sized (or slightly larger) pie pumpkins that, due to a late planting, never turned orange. Incomplete pumpkins, but pumpkins nonetheless.
This year, I decided to do things a bit differently. I remembered from several years back that some of my best pumpkin plants had emerged from the remains of an un-carved pumpkin left to rot over the winter. Those plants grew at an amazing rate and, had they been allowed to keep growing, they would have likely fostered my first successful pumpkins. Sadly, the pumpkin that was left to rot over the winter, was left in my mother’s flower garden. I did transplant a few of those plants, but they failed me thereafter. my assumption, both then and now, is that the meat and guts from the pumpkin fed the plants. So this year, I put that theory to the test. I saved all of the remains from the 15 pumpkins that we carved last Halloween. Shortly after Halloween, I tilled the meat into the soil, spread the guts and seeds around in a 4′ x 8′ section in my garden, covered it all with straw, and just let them be. Winter came and went, and in the spring several dozen plants emerged.
If you look closely, you can see one of the pumpkins up against the chain-link fence near the top.
This year, I’ve also learned that the way I’ve been watering my pumpkins in past years has been all wrong. Allowing the leaves to get wet during watering encourages this type of leaf mold that these plants are very susceptible to. With that in mind, I wet out and bought a soaker hose, which seems to be working out quite well.
It is now nearing the end of June, and I have my first pumpkins on the vines. 2 so far, each about the size of a baseball, with several more female flowers about ready to open. While this is by no means indicative of success, it is a promising start.
Plans are now in the works to increase our gardens real estate. My wife and I have decided to expand our garden by several hundred square feet. In fact, we will be increasing the size of our garden by nearly 200%, from the current 182 sq feet to a total of 544 sq feet. Now I’ll have room for more pumpkins, and maybe a small crop of corn. SWEET!
With that said, I wish all of you home pumpkin growers great success!
One of our first pumpkins for the 2010 growing season.
Corpse Eyes
One of my '09 Groundbreakers with and without eyeballs.
Ive decided that, despite my previous position on the subject, I am becomming more receptive the look of eyeballs in corpses. I used to think that, for the sake of realism, eyeballs had no place in a well rotted corpse. As a corpse begins to rot, eyeballs would be one of the first thing to go; so why put them in a ground-breaker, right? Well, maybe not.
Throughout my life, I have always been a bit OCD, and quite the perfectionist when it comes to my art. I was the kid who was never good at cartoons and caricatures, but could make a pencil portrait look like a black and white photograph. Creating surreal works posed a problem, not because I couldnt do it, but rather that my brain kept telling me that it just didnt look “right”.
In recent years, I have slowly allowed more of the surreal to creep its way into my work, and as I do, I realize that I really enjoy it. I am beginning to accept the fact that realism is not always the best option; that “unreal” can be so much more expressive. This holds especially true in the area of Halloween props. Fine details and realism are often lost to the dimly lit atmospheres that we create, and more often than not, our guests are not permitted to get close enough to the props to appreciate the detail. It is the exaggerated details that often fetch that “creep factor” that we, as home haunters, seek to achieve.
Different eye positions can alter the mood or attitude of your prop
Macabre Discovery
It was decided, very soon after moving into our new home last year, that the 1970′s paneling in our dining room/den would be among the first things that we would remove. Last week, My wife decided that I had spent entirely enough time toying with Halloween props for the coming year, and that it was time to make good on the promise to remove the dark brown paneled walls and make way for some brighter colors. As expected, the paneling had been glued down so the drywall behind it was also in need of replacement, so down came the drywall as well.
The fully intact skeleton of a common field mouse.
It was about halfway down the wall between the Den and the Kitchen, above a cutout in the wall between the two rooms where I made a somewhat rare discovery. As I tore down the drywall, there stood before me, a complete and fully intact skeleton of a mouse. There was very little flesh remaining, probably only enough to keep the skeleton assembled in the creatures final pose. While it’s not uncommon to come across skeletal remains of mice, especially up here in the great northeast, this is the first time I have ever come across one still assembled.
While my love for the dark and often gruesome images of Halloween might suggest otherwise, I am not ill of heart. I hope that this poor creature met its end in peace. That being said, how cool would a replication of a skeletal mouse (or rat) be sitting atop a tombstone in a cemetery full of ground-breaking corpses. Hmmm, Ideas they are a-brewin’.
New 2010 Tombstones
So I’ve gotten a start on some of my new tombstones. This year, I wanted to step it up a notch. Ive been trying out a few new methods, and I, thus far, am very happy with the results. I have plans to complete at least a dozen stones this winter/spring, with at least one vaulted obelisk that will double as a fog chiller (can’t wait to get that one started). Here’s a look at the first two new stones for the 2010 season.
My first props for the 2010 season, a pair of 17th century tombstones
Happy Holidays
Happy Holidays from The Haunting Grounds
Regardless of what holidays you observe, We wish you all a safe and happy holiday season.
