Halloween Town Announces Third Annual Tribute to the Haunted Mansion Group Art Show
The Haunted Mansion theme park attraction has been a fan favorite ride inside the various Disney parks for decades now, and its influences have been felt far and wide within the genre for almost just as long.
If you’re living in the Los Angeles area and happen to fancy yourself a Haunted Mansion fan like many of us here at Dread Central, then you’ll definitely want to make sure you to head over to Halloween Town in Burbank on Saturday, June 30th, for their Third Annual Tribute to the Haunted Mansion Group Art Show that debuts that evening.
From 7 pm to 11 pm, Halloween Town (2921 W. Magnolia Blvd., Burbank) will be hosting the opening night gala, June 30th, for the exhibit, which will then be on display daily at the store’s Parlour Gallery through July 21st.
Announced artists that will be featured during the Haunted Mansion exhibition include William Basso, The Creep, Curioddities, Dienzo, Frank Dietz, Hideousboi, Eric Pigors, Daniel Horne, Bob Lizarraga, Queenie, Dan Szczepanski, Wolfinger and Zombienose.
For more information on Halloween Town and the Haunted Mansion Group Art Show, you can check out the official Halloween Town website.
Obamas’ lavish Halloween party amid American crisis
January 9, 2012
If you lived in America in October 2009, odds are pretty good that it sucked. The unemployment rate was 10.1 percent (the highest since the early 1980s) and the recession had all but ravaged the economy.
But if you were friends with Barack Obama, you might have had the time of your life.
While the rest of the country was collapsing and millions of Americans reconsidered the hope and change that they were promised only a year earlier, President Barack Obama and company hosted a lavish party at the White House complete with top-notch décor and an A-list of Hollywood hot-shots.
The Obamas celebrated their first Halloween on Pennsylvania Avenue by inviting thousands of area kids to trick or treat at their historic home during a well-publicized press even, but later on in the evening an invite-only soiree in the White House hosted Johnny Depp and Tim Burton as a lavish theme party inspired by the Alice in Wonderland film transformed the Obama household into a Hollywood set.
“Fruit punch was served in blood vials at the bar. Burton’s own Mad Hatter, the actor Johnny Depp, presided over the scene in full costume, standing up on a table to welcome everyone in character,” writes New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor in her upcoming tell-all exposé The Obamas, scheduled to hit bookstore shelves soon. The event occurred in conjunction with the release of Burton’s revamped version of the Alice in Wonderland story and the director went all out by re-doing the White House “in his signature creepy-comic style.”
“His film version was about to be released, and he had turned the room into the Mad Hatter’s tea party, with a long table set with antique-looking linens, enormous stuffed animals in chairs and tiered serving plates with treats like bone-shaped meringue cookies,” writes Kantor.
Meanwhile, others weren’t quite as lucky. While President Obama was serving up punch alongside Johnny Depp, the employment status of young black men in America that month was at 44.9 percent — only one out of every two African-Americans under 24 had jobs. And while thousands of DC homeless were going cold on the streets of the nation’s capital, Obama invited into his home an actor donned in the original Hollywood Chewbacca costume, after Star Wars director George Lucas dispatched entertainment of his own to go into the White House.
“White House officials were so nervous about how a splashy, Hollywood-esque party would look to jobless Americans — or their representatives in Congress, who would soon vote on health care — that the event was not discussed publicly and Burton’s and Depp’s contributions went unacknowledged,” Kantor writes in The Obamas.
In the two years since that lavish Halloween get-together, the first family has been ridiculed by the media for continuing splurges and extravagant spending. Even last month, critics attacked President Obama for promising the press that he would delay his Christmas vacation to iron out tax legislation in the White House — only for him to authorize two round-trip jaunts to Hawaii for his family and then himself, a holiday that has estimated to cost Americans around $4 million.
Kantor’s revelations is the icing on the cake for Americans feeling disenfranchised by a growing elite class of Americans and charges of a Washington in cahoots with Wall Street amounting daily. In response, the White House responded to Kantor’s book on Monday, dismissing it as old news not worth discussing.
“If we wanted this event to be a secret, we probably wouldn’t have invited the press corps to cover it, release photos of it to Flickr or post a video from it on the White House website,” White House spokesman Eric Shultz says in a statement.
Halloween Decorations Lead To Arrest Of 3 Sex Offenders
November 29, 2011
LOS ANGELES (CBS) — Three people on probation for sex crimes, including a man with a passageway leading from his bedroom to the basement, were arrested in a Halloween sweep intended to keep children safe, county officials announced Tuesday.
Forty probation officers visited 251 homes in the four-day “Operation Safe Halloween.” and found 229 probationers at home.
People convicted of sex crimes are prohibited from decorating their homes for trick-or-treaters and told to keep their porch lights off and curtains closed so that children get a clear message to stay away. Seventeen of the probationers were in violation of the conditions of their probation.
In one home, probation officers found a door in the floor of the probationer’s bedroom, covered by carpet and a piece of furniture, said Walter Mann, director of the Probation Department’s special enforcement operations unit.
When the officers pulled the door open, they found a 6- to 7-foot drop to a basement with a chair and a rope.
At another home decorated for Halloween, a man and woman, both probationers, came to the door to give out candy when the officers rang the bell. A search of the man turned up methamphetamine.
Supervisor Michael Antonovich thanked probation officers for their efforts today, recognizing their “proactive efforts to keep our community and our children safe.”
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2011/11/29/halloween-decorations-lead-to-arrest-of-3-sex-offenders/
2011 Halloween Light Show — Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO.
4 singing pumpkin faces, tombstones, hand carved pumpkins, strobes, floods and thousands of lights. Most all lights have been changed from incandescent to RGB LED so power consumption is a lot less than previous years. Also DMX added to show. All lights, faces and props are custom made (DIY) by me except for the roof line which are CCRs. Controlling channels have gone up 8X from last year. 1144 channels. Light-O-Rama. Riverside, CA
Haunted Places part 2
Among major cities, New York is especially rich with ghost stories. The spirit of Peter Stuyvesant, the city’s last Dutch colonial governor, has been seen stomping around the East Village on his wooden leg since shortly after his death in 1672. The author Mark Twain is believed to haunt the stairwell of his onetime Village apartment building, while the ghost of poet Dylan Thomas is said to sometimes occupy his usual corner table at the West Village’s White Horse Tavern, where he drank a fatal 18 shots of scotch in 1953. Perhaps the most famous New York ghost is that of Aaron Burr, who served as vice president under Thomas Jefferson but is best known for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. Burr’s ghost is said to roam the streets of his old neighborhood (also the West Village). Burr’s spectral activity is focused particularly on one restaurant, One if By Land, Two if By Sea, which is located in a Barrow Street building that was once Burr’s carriage house.
Haunted Places part 1
Some locations simply seem to lend themselves to hauntings, perhaps due to the dramatic or grisly events that occurred there in the past. Over the centuries, sightings of spectral armies have been reported on famous battlefields around the world, including important battle sites from the English Civil War in the 17th century, the bloody Civil War battlefield of Gettsyburg and the World War I sites of Gallipoli (near Turkey) and the Somme (northern France).
Another particularly active center for paranormal activity is the HMS Queen Mary, a cruise ship built in 1936 for the Cunard-White Star Line. After serving in the British Royal Navy in World War II, the 81,000-ton ship retired in Long Beach, California in 1967; the plan was to turn it into a floating luxury hotel and resort. Since then, the Queen Mary has become notorious for its spectral presences, with more than 50 ghosts reported over the years. The ship’s last chief engineer, John Smith, reported hearing unexplained sounds and voices from the area near the ship’s bow, in almost the same location as a doomed British aircraft cruiser, the Coracoa, had pierced a hole when it sank after an accidental wartime crash that killed more than 300 sailors aboard. Smith also claimed to have encountered the ghost of Winston Churchill–or at least his spectral cigar smoke–n the prime minister’s old stateroom aboard the ship. Many visitors to the Queen Mary have reported seeing a phantom crewmember in blue overalls walking the decks. Around the ship’s swimming pool, reports have been made of mysterious splashes and ghostly women in old fashioned bathing suits or dresses, along with trails of wet footsteps appearing long after the pool had been drained.
Three Famous Historical Ghosts
One of the most frequently reported ghost sightings in England dates back to the 16th century. Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry VIII and mother of Queen Elizabeth I, was executed at the Tower of London in May 1536 after being accused of witchcraft, treason, incest and adultery. Sightings of Boleyn’s ghost have been reported at the tower as well as in various other locations, including her childhood home, Hever Castle, in Kent.
America’s own rich tradition of historical ghosts begins with one of its most illustrious founding fathers: Benjamin Franklin. Beginning in the late 19th century, Franklin’s ghost was seen near the library of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; some reports held that the statue of Franklin in front of the society comes to life and dances in the streets.
Though many ghost sightings have been reported at the White House in Washington, D.C., over the years, perhaps no political figure has made so frequent an appearance in the afterlife as Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s 16th president, who was killed by an assassin’s bullet in April 1865. Lincoln, formerly a lawyer and congresseman from Illinois, is said to have been seen wandering near the old Springfield capitol building, as well as his nearby law offices. At the White House, everyone from first ladies to queens to prime ministers have reported seeing the ghost or feeling the presence of Honest Abe–particularly during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, another president who guided the country through a time of great upheaval and war.
Early Ghost Sightings
In the first century A.D., the great Roman author and statesman Pliny the Younger recorded one of the first notable ghost stories in his letters, which became famous for their vivid account of life during the heyday of the Roman Empire. Pliny reported that the specter of an old man with a long beard, rattling chains, was haunting his house in Athens. The Greek writer Lucian and Pliny’s fellow Roman Plautus also wrote memorable ghost stories.
Centuries later, in 856 A.D., the first poltergeist–a ghost that causes physical disturbances such as loud noises or objects falling or being thrown around–was reported at a farmhouse in Germany. The poltergeist tormented the family living there by throwing stones and starting fires, among other things.
What Is a Ghost?
The concept of a ghost, also known as a specter, is based on the ancient idea that a person’s spirit exists separately from his or her body, and may continue to exist after that person dies. Because of this idea, many societies began to use funeral rituals as a way of ensuring that the dead person’s spirit would not return to “haunt” the living.
Places that are haunted are usually believed to be associated with some occurrence or emotion in the ghost’s past; they are often a former home or the place where he or she died. Aside from actual ghostly apparitions, traditional signs of haunting range from strange noises, lights, odors or breezes to the displacement of objects, bells that ring spontaneously or musical instruments that seem to play on their own.
Halloween Superstitions Part 2
But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today’s trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living instead of the dead. In particular, many had to do with helping young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday—with luck, by next Halloween—be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it. In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes rather than popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl’s future husband. (In some versions of this legend, confusingly, the opposite was true: The nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.) Another tale had it that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her future husband. Young women tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands’ initials; tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water; and stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over their shoulders for their husbands’ faces. Other rituals were more competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry; at others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the first down the aisle.
Of course, whether we’re asking for romantic advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween superstitions relies on the good will of the very same “spirits” whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly.