What Did We See?

by Lillian Csernica on October 9, 2023

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TCL Chinese Theater, formerly known as Grauman’s Chinese Theater, is one of the most well-known landmarks in Hollywood. Like so many of Hollywood’s famous locations, it is said to be haunted.

The ghost most often associated with TCL Chinese Theater is Victor Kilian, a vaudeville performer who made the transition into motion pictures during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

In 1979, actor Victor Kilian was murdered in his apartment which was located one block away from Grauman’s Chinese Theater. He apparently had struck up a conversation with a stranger and they went back to Kilian’s apartment where it had been burglarized. The killer has never been caught, but the ghost of Killian can be seen on the sidewalk in front of the Chinese Theater where he is allegedly trying to find his murderer.

Haunted Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood

One night my best friend Pat and I were in Hollywood. We decided to go see The Last Samurai at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. The box office is at street level, then you take an elevator down to the floor with the actual theaters.

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Pat was already standing at the ticket window, which meant she had her back to me as I hurried down the hallway toward her. To my left stood the bank of elevators. A man and a woman were walking away from the ticket booth, about to get into the elevator going down. I called, “Hold the car!” Pat heard me and glanced back over her right shoulder, then turned to her left to walk toward the elevator. The two of us reached the elevator at the same moment.

There was no one inside. Pat looked at me. I looked at her. I described the man. She nodded and described the woman. We had seen the same two people. There was nowhere at all those two people could have gone other than into that one elevator.

Pat and I took the elevator down. When the doors opened, after a total of maybe fifteen seconds, we didn’t see anyone in that lobby. The doors for the individual theaters were far enough from the elevator that we surely should have seen the man and the woman before they stepped through one of those doors.

Ever since then I find myself hesitating before I enter an elevator.

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Who Ya Gonna Call?

by Lillian Csernica on October 6, 2023

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I have mixed feelings about paranormal investigation. Let me say up front that I am not a paranormal investigator. I make no claims to any form of expertise in that field. What I do know is based on reading a whole lot about the supernatural and related folklore around the world. I write and publish fiction based on fifty years of persistent fascination with things that go bump in the night.

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There are genuine investigators out there, people who have been trained in the scientific method along with the kind of investigative techniques used by law enforcement agencies. The most credible examples I’ve come across are Amy Allan, Cindy Kaza and Steve DiSchavi of The Dead Files, which has been running on the Travel Channel since 2011, now available on Discovery+. Whether or not one chooses to believe the results of their investigations, I think the show is worth watching. The variety of paranormal problems and the solutions suggested are based on solid research. All too often I’ve come across the recycled basics, the grab-and-go kinds of paranormal cliches that come from superficial research regurgitated by people who just parrot what they pick up from other amateur paranormal YouTube channels and don’t bother doing their own homework.

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Speaking of which, a case could be made for saying the most well-known paranormal investigation show is Ghost Adventures, headed up by Zak Bagans and his team. Their show premiered on The Travel Channel in 2008. Zak Bagans’ technique back then involved provoking the spirits with a variety of rude and stupid remarks. It’s in very poor taste to disrespect the dead and try to make money from doing so. I hated that, I hated Zak Bagans, and I hated the show. There was nothing to it, just a lot of leveraging the power of suggestion and the ghost hunting gizmos going off at dramatic moments.

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Let’s think about this. Suppose you were in mourning, spending every moment of every day trapped in the endless pain of your grief. You’re cut off from the life you’d been living, from the person or people you’d built your life around. The last thing you’d want to deal with is a bunch of TikTok wannabes running around the place you inhabit, badgering you with questions about private matters that are none of their business. They bring with them lots of cameras and sound equipment and all the gizmos favored by ghost hunters who are desperate for any kind of “evidence” that will get them more followers. I feel a great deal of sympathy for whatever spirits suffer this kind of onslaught. These “paranormal investigators” just keep nagging and poking around and trying to stir up trouble until they get anything they can construe as a response. If I was the ghost being exploited this way, I’d want to lash out just to give these jerks what they want so they’d pack up and go home.

The trouble is, they don’t just go home. They get on social media and tell everybody they got results, which brings even more mobs of wannabe Zak Bagans barging into the location with the same equipment and the same lack of genuine compassion. With this in mind, I was overjoyed to discover this excerpt of a stand up routine by comedian Matteo Lane.

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The Imp Of The Perverse

by Lillian Csernica on October 5, 2023

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In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story that explored in fictional form concepts that would later be examined in the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The title of the story, The Imp Of The Perverse, has passed into the English language as a turn of phrase referring to self-destructive urges or behavior. Poe himself describes it this way:

“We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink away from the danger. Unaccountably we remain… it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height… for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it.“

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As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, when I was a teenager I had a strong curiosity about all things supernatural. I read a lot of books, both fiction and nonfiction. I watched a lot of movies, both documentary and total make-believe. All of this research and exploration churned inside my mind and gave rise to this poem, published by editor Emerian Rich on HorrorAddicts.Net.

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EVIL SIRENS SWEETLY SINGING

Wake to the world of the darkness

Wake! To the world of the Night.

Burn with the fires of Hecate

Ache with the Devil’s delight.

Live in the land of Jung’s Shadow

Dance in the mind’s shady gloom

Dive into Charon’s black waters

Swing on the bellrope of Doom!

Hark to the Muse of the Lethe

Smash sanity’s last painful shard

Revel with your nightmare secrets

Give voice to the soul’s darkest bard.

Cry with your soul’s hundred voices

Fling wide the crypt in your heart

Bathe in the hungers within you

Damnation is only the start!

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A-Haunting We Will Go!

by Lillian Csernica on October 1, 2023

It’s October! Let’s kick off the 30 Days of Scary Fun with a ghost story.

I once had the delightful experience of volunteering in my younger son John’s seventh grade Creative Writing Class. On Back to School Night I’d been chatting with John’s teacher and she discovered that I write for a living. John’s Reading 180 workbook, which included a unit on Edgar Allen Poe. With Halloween right around the corner, I thought a writing lesson about something spooky might be fun. And then the real inspiration struck. What could be more perfect for Halloween than a haunted house story? We’d start out by thinking up all the different kinds of places a haunted house might be. A grass hut on the beach in Tahiti, an igloo in Alaska, a hotel or a camping tent or the traditional shabby manor house with strange lights and weird noises. Then we’d explore the basic idea using the journalist’s five questions: Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How!

The Haunted House

I asked the students what makes a classic haunted house. I encouraged them to think beyond what they’d already seen on TV or read about in books. What other kinds of buildings could be haunted? What other places where people could live might have ghosts? One young lady suggested a haunted fort. That was a great idea and I said so. One of the quieter boys spoke up about a space station. Another wonderful idea. When the students caught on to my enthusiasm and encouragement, more and more of them started speaking up.

Who

Who would be the main character? Would it be a living person? A ghost? Maybe even the house itself? I talked about each of these options, doing my best to keep it simple so the students had clear choices. It’s best to keep the number of characters small when writing a short story. This led to another major step in fiction writing, giving the main character a name. I spent a few minutes on the importance of names, where to find them, and how to make them up in a way that makes sense and sounds right.

What

What’s haunting the house? Is it a traditional ghost? One boy had chosen a pyramid as his “house.” The clear choice there: a mummy. The students were quick to mention the classic monsters such as werewolves, vampires, and Frankenstein. Cara, the student teacher, asked about different types of ghosts. I collect ghost story anthologies from the turn of the century. I’ve read about the mournful ghost, the vengeful ghost, the banshee, the Black Coach and the poltergeist. We focused on the poltergeist, the “noisy ghost,” a favorite element in scary movies. Once I explained this ghost’s talent for throwing dishes and furniture around, I saw the face of one boy light up. He wanted that kind of ghost. He started scribbling on his notepaper with a speed I recognized. Inspiration had struck!

Where

“Where?” is multifaceted question. There’s the location of the haunted house itself. The students talked about clifftops and deserts and swamps and the main street of a big city. I explained how the different countries and cultures where the story was set in are also key elements. A haunted house in Japan would be very different from a haunted house in New York City. Again I saw that faraway look in the eyes of the boys and girls as the wheels of their imaginations kept turning.

Why

Of all the five W Questions, “Why?” is my favorite. I asked the students to think about why the ghost was haunting that particular place. The young lady who chose a haunted fort told me her ghost was a soldier who wanted to go on guarding the fort. I said that made sense to me. The soldier had been dedicated to his duty in life, and that dedication remained even after he died in the line of duty. I asked for more ideas about why a ghost would haunt a particular place. We came up with buried treasure, some business the ghost hadn’t finished before he or she died, and the frequent motivation of revenge.

When

The question of when requires some complex thinking. When does the ghost do its haunting? At sunset? Midnight? When could also be the time of year. There are summertime ghosts, but the most dramatic time of year is the long winter night. I told the students about some of the greatest ghost stories ever written by such enduring names as A.M. Burrage, M.R. James and E.F. Benson. On the subject of winter, I used Hugh Walpole‘s “Snow” as my example. A truly chilling story, in many senses.

How

Every good story starts with a problem the main character has to solve. If the main character is the ghost, the question becomes how is the ghost haunting the house and how is that going to solve the problem? The kids had some great ideas, from scary noises and faces at the window to seeing weird things in mirrors. One of the boys really got into his story. He must have filled in at least three notebook pages and showed no sign of slowing down.

The students had done well, paying attention and participating. Then came time to bring out the art supplies. Construction paper, fuzzy black spiders, Halloween pumpkin stickers, googly eyes, and a big bag of cotton balls. I challenged the kids to tell me how many ways they could use the cotton balls to create a picture of their haunted houses. John himself suggested clouds. Another boy said spiderwebs. Someone else said ghosts. I showed the kids how to stretch the cotton very thin and glue it along the ground level to make the kind of low-lying mist you might see in graveyards. Those kids went at it with such energy and pleasure, making their visions become real before their eyes. The pyramid was marvelous. The space station was terrific. And John’s hotel looked positively grand.