Halloween Displays Around SE Massachusetts: Part One

We had a fairly good series of thoughts the other day.

- We should do a Halloween Display article.
- Very few singular people can give a list of 250 or so houses with cool displays (I am now one of these people).
- Why not use Facebook (I spam our articles over every You Know You're From ____ When... page in the region, and have access to scores of such groups) to get a good list going?
- Gather up the suggestions (we had a few hundred) and start mapping routes for several road trips.
- Spill our results out over a series of pre-Halloween articles.

We rarely start off with that much of a game plan, so this will probably end up working out OK.

We got a bevy of suggestions for where to look. We ranged from Plymouth (the Slenderman-looking Tim Burton guy at the top of the article) to the skeletal Wizard of Oz scene we saw in Weymouth, to wherever else our travels took us.

Facebook was very handy. We got a pile of street names. Some got repeated, always a good sign. I'm still getting suggestions as I write this, but fear not- we have enough pictures for several days of articles on this subject.

We got a few bum steers (we had several in a row on our first run), but we also stumbled onto some cool stuff, so it sort of balanced out. I'm not into Wicca, but I think they're big on Mother Earth and all, and nature loves a balance. My own logic is witchy enough that we went home happy most of the time.

Rich people plaza.... nice setup, though. It needs a Zombie, right in that empty spot near the hay bales.

We drove down a lot of Massachusetts streets doing this series of articles. Some towns stood out more than others, but not by a wide margin (editor's note: we haven't done Deluxebury yet) Most people don't decorate at all. Among those that do, most are subtle. A pumpkin, a scarecrow, a few cornstalks... you know, the regular.

We set out to find people who went in a little deeper. I'm talkin' ten-foot-spider-swallowing-a-human-in-front-of-a-two-hundred-sixty-one-year-old-historical-register-property deep.

Apparently, things get a little more ultraviolent on Bartlett's Green than I was previously led to believe.

The spider also looks like hes doing the Baby Bird with some poor intern, but that was most likely not the intent of the sculptor.

That spider, a Kingston resident, doesn't dare try that act in Duxbury. If he did, he'd get tuned up by Duxbury's legendary Green Dragon. The GD holds it down off Route 3A in Duxbury. There are those who say that he stares into your soul as you drive by him.

The Green Dragon does year-round duty, but he gets extra powers on Halloween. If you ever look up at the nearby Myles Standish monument and wonder where his sword went.... well, it got busted off quick-fast when Myles tried that St. George stuff with the Route 3A Dragon. You know... back in the day.

Kids dress in all sorts of costumes. They sometimes favor horror (my kid had to be carefully edged away from Creepypasta-themed costumes), but they sometimes go out as a Princess or a Cowboy or an Astronaut. Its not always horror, although it was for most of the history of the activity.

However, people who decorate their lawns almost always go for Horror. I checked out almost every town, including yours. I saw a lot of chainsaw massacres and MacBeth-ian witch gatherings, but I rarely saw innocent Haloween decorations. I can think of one, a Peanuts-themed setup in Halifax that I'll get to in another article.

We'll throw in the obligatory warning that I am a much worse photographer than Jessica is. As you see below, we also have some trouble shooting at night.

I may take another crack at this shot above, It's off Herring Pond Road in Plymouth, and I pass it all the time. Even a hack photographer will get lucky if Stephen he shoots enough.

Our principal value to you is our legs. We covered a lot of ground doing this article, and we aren't done yet.

We'll try to drop an article a day up until Halloween hits. If your town got jobbed this time, fear not. We'll probably get to it in a few days.

Stay Spooky!

Weymouth Hurricane Planner

We have two maps from FEMA to check out today. The map above is a Hurricane Inundation map, and it depicts storm surge from a direct hit hurricane visiting Weymouth at mean high tide. It also shows what sort of storm would be needed to soak certain regions, which we'll get to in a minute.

The map is from the combined efforts of FEMA, MEMA, NOAA and the NHC. They use the funny-weatherman-titled SLOSH model of storm surge estimation. They do not depict freshwater flooding.

The colors relate to the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity, and break down like this:

Light Green = Category 1 hurricane. Hurricane Gloria was one of these, and the offshore Halloween Gale was, too. Although not a tropical system, the Blizzard of '78 did Cat. 1-style damage.

Dark Green = Category 2 hurricane. Hurricane Bob was one of these.

Yellow = Category 3 hurricane. We've only had five of these hit New England since the Other Man arrived in 1620, the most recent being Hurricane Carol in 1954.

Pink = Category 4 hurricane. We've had one in recorded New England history, and it struck in 1635.

Flesh = One Hundred Year FEMA Food Zone. This is the "100 year storm" you hear people speak of, but you have to go pre-Colombian to find them ("going pre-Colombian" means using salt marsh soil samples to look for sand layering associated with large hurricanes). New England has had storms in the Category 4+ level in the 1100s, the 1300s, and the 1400s.

Sorry about Flesh, but my knowledge of color names was and continues to be heavily influenced by whoever was in charge at Crayola in the 1970s.

We shall leave the street-by-street analysis to the reader, who can use the links I'll throw in at the end of the article to zoom in on their own house if it suits them.

Note that you don't need to be in a shaded area to get yourself a quick and sudden Ending. You can have a tree fall on you, have your car washed out in street flooding, step on a downed power line, get purged by looters, enjoy the Robespierre treatment from flying shingles, be summarily executed by National Guardsmen, or even stumble into a sharknado. There's no shortage of ways for you to get Left.

With that in mind, we now present to you the down-there-somewhere Evacuation Zone map.

Remember, you don't HAVE to leave when 5-0 tells you to. Also remember that the cop you read the Constitution to before the storm may be the one who has to fish you out of the drink when the ship hits the fan.

The E-map is easier to read, as it is made up of only two colors.

Red = Get Out.

Yellow = Get the f*** out.

Hurricane Inundation Maps

Evacuation Maps

Worst Hurricanes To Hit New England

List of all hurricanes to hit New England

FEMA

MEMA

NOAA

NHC