Halloween Displays, Part III

Yeah, that isn't a good start....

I told you that we had a lot of material, and here comes a pile of it.

We surveyed Facebook, got some leads, followed up on them, and here's what we came up with. We'll have a few more issues before Halloween plays itself out this Saturday night.

Be sure to check out Part One and Part Two, if you wish.

We ran from Rochester to Whitman and then back South through Hanson, Halifax, Plympton, Carver and Plymouth.

We still have Duxbury and Cape Cod to go through. The weather cost us today and maybe tomorrow, and we may do Duxbury while we're trick-or-treating there.

Duxbury gets their own day, because we know a guy there who might be spending $5K on decorations, and we get full-size Snickers and so forth all up and down Washington Street.

The winds of today's storm may cost us our foliage hunting, which we will take up in earnest on November 1st. The South Coast and Cape Cod turn around then, anyhow.

Halloween is a pagan ritual, adopted by the Romans, modified to fit Christianity, imported from Europe and perfected by America.

Halloween celebrations were banned in colonial New England, as the Puritan forefathers weren't fans of pagan, superstitious celebrations. Halloween was the night before a solemn Holy day. Remember, these were people who frowned on Christmas, because it was too Church-like.

An influx of Irish immigrants helped popularize the Halloween traditions in America, and the traditions have held on to our present day.

It soon became primarily a children's holiday, although it is more of a children-of-all-ages thing.

No irony intended, I just had to shoot over a car.

America spent 6 billion dollars celebrating Halloween in 2010, and that was at the height of the Great Recession.  That ranks it 7th among money spent on American holidays, just behind Father's Day at #6 and way behind #1 Christmas at $130 billion.

There are more kids than fathers in America, but you can't handle Dad with two mini Kit Kat bars. You have to at least buy him a tie or something. That adds up.

Kids make it up at Christmas. It's a kid's world, we're just running it for them.

Most Popular Halloween Costumes, according to Google Trends and CNN:

#1, Harley Quinn

#2 Star Wars

#3 Superhero (Non Superman, Non Avenger...generic, Villain or Other, see #5,9,10)

#4 Pirate

#5 Batman

#6 Minnie Mouse

#7 Witch

#8 Minion

#9 Joker

#10 Wonder Woman

My Own Top 5 Halloween Shows/Movies/Stories

- It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

My personal favorite, also the source of the worst overdub video of all time.

- Halloween

I prefer the Carpenter one to the White Zombie one, but I am just one lonesome columnist.

- The Nightmare Before Christmas

I've never seen it, and I'm not sure this is even a  Halloween movie, but it seems to be everywhere, so we'll throw it up in the mix.

- The Fat Albert Halloween Special

The Cosby mansion is now the Worst Place To Trick Or Treat in Hollywood.

- The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

You can't deny the Headless Horseman his spot, he's sort of like Halloween's Santa Claus.

Films That Involve Halloween But Aren't Halloween Films

- To Kill A Mockingbird climaxes on Halloween, which is a sinister sentence to say about pre-teen Scout Finch.

- Arsenic And Old Lace has a Halloween wedding

- Regina steals Cady's BF at a Halloween party in Mean Girls

- The Exorcist, while not a Halloween film, was set in Halloween season.

- You know that Ernest Scared Stupid isn't set on Arbor Day, payer.

Worst Halloween Specials

- The Lou Grant Halloween Episode

- The Paul Lynde Halloween Special

- The Fall Guy "October The 32d" episode

- The Dukes Of Hazzard, "The Hazzardville Horror" episode

- The Smurfs, "The Legend Of Smurfy Hollow"

- Fraggle Rock, "The Terrible Tunnel."

We'll get a few more articles in before Halloween, thanks for checking us out!

Halloween Displays, Part II

Ain't no stoppin' us now! Cranberry County Magazine is driving through your town, photographing your yard... all in search of cool Halloween Displays! We don't ask, we take!

We posted Part One yesterday, and we'll be laying down the law all week, probably on the daily.

We questioned Facebook, and let the people dictate our travels. We covered a lot of ground, and here's some of what we found.

We caught this family in the act! Busted!

This family, in Plymouth, is unique in that we spoke to them before shooting. I generally avoid doing so. I'm a very large man, and I dress shabbily enough that generous people tell me that I look like a basketball coach... while others say that I look homeless. I'm not the guy you want to see walking into your yard, and I'd fully understand if someone shot me.

"That's the life, that I lead..."

Cranberry County Magazine will always be up in your spot. Jessica's very first article with me ended up with us being spoken to by a Detective, although that was pretty much 105% my fault. Hey, I thought Edaville Railroad was abandoned, like Rocky Point or Pripyat.... honest mistake, the detective understood fully.

I should never get out of the car, but sometimes I do.

No, we don't decorate our own yard. We have a pumpkin, and we may even carve it, but that's about it.

I have a pretty isolated house, not many people see it. No one in my neighborhood has had a trick-or-treater in the ten years I've lived here. I enjoy Halloween vicariously through creative people, just like you are doing right now.

I don't even take my own kid around the neighborhood, nor do any of the parents I see at the bus stop. I take my kid to a high-end neighborhood in Duxbury, where we aim for full-size candy bars. It works better than you'd think it would.

They may be on to me on Washington Street, however. We might have to try Shore Road in Chatham or Jerusalem Road in Cohasset this year.

Jessica, who is considerably smaller than I am, has already refused in advance and (forgive my Latin legalese) ad infinitum to wear a kid's costume and a mask to disguise her adult appearance and double our candy haul. I was kind of hoping for Sexy Nurse.

Also, if I am trick-or-treating with two kids, people will give me beer. Most suburban homeowners keep beer handy, and drop one on an adult herding around a sizable group of kids. A parent needs fortification on cold autumn nights.

Again, this strategy works better than you'd think it would.

Maybe things are different than when I was a kid. Maybe I got too big, and the decorations that scared me as a child now are like the 30" faux Stonehenge from Spinal Tap. Maybe I should blame shoddy Asian manufacturing.

It seemed like every house in Quincy in the 1970s was done up for Halloween. My 1980s hood in Duxbury was a bit less decorated, but that was also a highly isolated village that had maybe 20 people living in it after Labor Day.

It's the hyper-suburban forest/tree question... if you put a pumpkin or your steps and no one sees it, did you really decorate?

That's not a problem the people in the pictures you see today have, because Cranberry County Magazine cares enough to go out and document the fun.

Other things that I never encountered in the 1970s includes our aborted mission to the Pine Hills of Plymouth.

The Pine Hills looked tremendous on paper. Nice houses, rich people, and the sheer size of the place means that there must be a ton of kids. Of course it was going to be decorated.

We paused outside the entrance. We only had a little sunlight left to work with. The question that was stopping us... would a place like that have restrictions on decorations?

Time is money, daylight was wastin', and we didn't have any leads in that neighborhood. We headed inland, to the house with the spooky statues in the yard.

We weren't at Versailles, either.

Don't get me wrong, it was a sweet house, just maybe not statue-sweet. I'm pretty sure that this was Middleboro.

Middle Bro has some cool 1800s houses, and is spooky in her own right, but this yard was trippin' balls. I'd hate to go there at night, and would probably refuse to enter the yard unless they were handing out Kit-Kats or something yummy.

I'm lucky that I don't take LSD anymore, because this house would have broken me if I had been Walking With The King.

This is the most ostentatious flowerpot that I have ever seen. I think that may be Atlas.

The ladder implies that this house isn't finished yet, always a plus mark in the Hardcore category.

We sort of ran three trips so far. We did a Weymouth-Hingham-Norwell-Hanover run that started too late and was interrupted by a nice dinner at Wahlburgers.

The next day, we worked Plymouth, Kingston, Plympton and Halifax.

Yesterday, we finished Halifax after going through Rochester, Carver, Bridgewater and both parts of Whitman/Hanson.

Our two big remaining trips- and this is both weather and auto permitting- are Duxbury and Cape Cod. I may run a Bourne-Wareham trip today if I can sneak away from the Ol' Ball & Chain.

Stay Spooky!

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!

South Shore Foliage, 10/21/15

We rolled out with monster truck force all over the South Shore's interior as we tracked down the places that have already turned over. This is East Monponsett Lake, in Halifax.

This part of Massachusetts (Plympton, Route 106) gets some cool foliage. It just tends to be worked into the proverbial Sea Of Green. No, I have no idea why one tree is orange and every other one is green, that's between you and Mother Nature. I just click the camera and write the captions, friend.

You don't get those Vermont calendar pictures in Duxbury. I have no mountains to look down from, and too many pine trees. At times, I'm reduced to shooting at branches on a single tree.

We were gonna shoot video, but..well, trees don't really do that much. We were ready to turn the video on if a Sasquatch walked out of a South Halifax forest.

Kingston got some licks in, especially in the Jones River Reservoir area off Route 80. We started in Duxbury, then went into Kingston. We essentially flipped a coin as to left or right onto Rout 80, we went right and found this about 100 yards later.

If you take your glasses off, it looks like a tree fire. I should have rolled a smoke bomb under that, or maybe even exhaled a fat hit into the picture just before I clicked.

We got a cloudy day for Rural Exploration, but there was no wind, so we got some sweet lake-reflection shots.

We have mobile photography capabilities, they even come out sometimes.

With Monponsett Lake(s), we're in there like swimwear.

We're just warming up, so we have plenty of more work to do. We may still expand our reach up into the Athol/Ashburnham corridor, they're peaking right now.

We will also be all over the South Coast, South Shore, and Cape Cod. You know were good like that.

Early Season Bog-Trotting

With a name like Cranberry County Magazine, you know it's only a mater of time before we head out into the bogs.

One disadvantage we have is that, much like the foliage, the bogs are flooded and harvested from north to south, and we live in the far southern part of that equation. That means that our bogs aren't being harvested like the ones in other regions.

Of course, bogs tend to be large and difficult to manage, and they have to sort of draw a grid and work section-by-section. It takes time to cover all of those acres, so we will be able to get all stages of the cranberry harvest cycle just by stumbling around town.

Today, we'll roll through Carver, Wareham, Plympton, Duxbury and Buzzards Bay. There are bogs all over our reading area, and we'll try to pop in on the more scenic ones as the harvest season progresses.

Our light was sort of rough, as you can see. We get the kid off the bus at quarter to four, and we had to make our way out into Bog Country, aka Carver.

I'm not that into Creationism, but if I was, it wouldn't be hard to rationalize God making Carver right after He figured out that cranberry sauce was tasty... or perhaps even after He realized that you need cranberries to make a Cape Codder. He probably got to it very early in the Earth-making process.

"I'd better allot some space for cranberries... right abouttttt... HERE!" (points at map, about where Carver will one day be)... and it was Good.

I have no intention of digging up this information, but I would guess that there is more acreage devoted to cranberry farming in Carver than there is to housing the whole population of Carver.

Somebody- be it God or John Alden or whoever- really liked cranberries, because southeastern Massachusetts is literally covered in bogs.

That works for us. Gas is cheap, and so is Cranberry County Magazine.

As I said before, the light was less than ideal. I'd do better with a 11 AM start time. Notice here that the trees are lit wonderfully, but the bog was very dark. I was shooting with late-day sun and tall trees behind me. This is what you get.

This is sort of a warm-up for future articles where they are actually harvesting berries via flotation. We dipped all over Carver and her neighbors, and most bogs aren't being flooded yet around here. I know the guy in Buzzards Bay told me "after Halloween."

Only part of one bog on North Carver Road in Wareham was flooded and had floating berries, and that is the one you'll see splattered all over this article. The bog above is still getting ready to drop.

By contrast, this bog below (in Duxbury) was flooded by her reservoir. We'll come back and check her out later.

You need all of that water for the bogs. Most and maybe all bogs are built near a copious supply of water. They sort of pump it in and out of the bogs as they need it, either to feed the cranberries or to protect them from the cold.

I don't know how they did it before the Industrial Revolution, and this may have required the efforts of 100 men and a bucket line for all I know. Now, they just use pumps.

Those little houses that you see on cranberry bogs usually contain the water pumping equipment. One of the structures may be an outhouse, so don't drink any water from them until you talk to someone who works there.

We want you healthy.

Here are the little houses. It's a bit blurry. The shot REALLY sucked before I got into the editing, and I don't edit photos very well.

The reason that you flood bogs, besides doing so to loosen the berries for harvesting, is to protect them from freezing temperatures.

Otherwise, everything gets all icy. This is a bad thing to have happen to fruit which you plan to harvest.

We did have a freeze the other morning, and OF COURSE the team went out to find a frozen bog for some ice pictures. We are up at the dawn and driving for miles and miles to get you shots like the one below.

OK, it's across the road from where I live., and I stared at it for 5 minutes before "taking a picture of it" occurred to me.

They may have already harvested that part of the bog, or else that could be an Epic Fail. I'm not agricultural enough to know for sure. They are always very kind to my photographers and I, so I'm hoping this is No Big Deal.

That bog (Mann Farms, in Buzzards Bay) has some sort of project going on that merits having a giant crane out there. We'll sneak out there for a pictorial when the dice come up that way for the column.

Eventually, they flood the bog and let it freeze. Then, they put a skim coating of sand on it.

I knew at least one kid in my school days who thought that bog owners sanded the ice to keep kids from skating on a Liability Ice Arena. No. They're actually just giving the vines a fresh coat of sand.

The sand goes on the ice, the ice melts, and the sand settles into the bogs all uniform-like. Gravity handles the distribution process well enough. The sand method was invented on Cape Cod by a man who noticed that cranberries grew really well in areas that the ocean had covered with sand after a storm.

Therefore, bogs keep mountains of sand handy for the winter, just like the Highway Department does.

We worked until the sun set, so we'll give you some cranberry bog sunset shots.

Here's the one I took:

Here's the one I edited:

We'll be back with more soon, and I promise to put Jessica and Sara on the camera next time.

Forty Whacks: A Visit To The Lizzie Borden House

Lizzie Borden is Fall River's most famous resident, and let that one sink in for a second.

Marshfield's most famous resident is Daniel Webster. The village of Monponsett has the "Kilroy was here" guy. Ruth Wakefield rules Whiman's history for inventing the Toll House Cookie. Frances Ford Seymour was Henry Fonda's wife, Jane Fonda's mother, and a Fairhaven High School graduate.

Myles Standish (or perhaps Joe Perry) is the most famous person from my hometown of Duxbury. He killed more people than any Borden did, but he also had a job where killing was sort of expected of him.

Lizzie Borden, if you believe the Hype, did her dirt by her lonesome, and pretty much for personal reasons. She didn't use the typical Angel Of Death poisoning motif, no. She got her hands dirty.

Lizzie Borden is famous for the alleged axe murders of her parents. It is a crime that has transcended time, and even has a nursery rhyme attached to it.

Seeing as Fall River became famous as the town with the worst crime rate in Massachusetts, with a pile of different nationalities killing/assaulting/raping each other, it's kind of funny that the tone was set by a blue-blood white girl from that era when everyone walked around all herky-jerky like a Charlie Chaplin film or Babe Ruth highlights.

Fall River has always been a little bit ugly ever since.

Special rates for serial killers and patricide proponents...

It all started on a nice street in Fall River, directly across from a brand-spankin' new St. Anne's church.

Kids will be kids, and Lizzie was just like lots of spoiled rich ones. Lizzie and her sister had a rich father (Andrew) and a new stepmother. There were some money issues with the miser father, and the kids hated the stepmother, Abby. Lizzie referred to her stepmom as "Mrs. Borden."

At 9 AM on 8/4/1892, everyone was all right. By 11 or so, the Borden sisters were orphaned.

Abby got done up first. Her attacker was facing her, and hit her right in the face with an axe. She fell, the attacker pinned her down, and Abby took 18 more axe shots to the back of the head. Andrew, who was sleeping, took 11 shots, including one that split his eye.

The murders were remarkably brutal and bloody, although the "forty whacks" thing is an embellishment. Of course, when you're talking "axe wounds to the dome," the numbers are merely academic and matter only to coroners and nursery rhyme writers. Very few people are going to say "Bah, she only took 19 axe strikes to the head, not 40. What a lightweight!"

S'up?

It looked just like that, except it was more bloody, less blurry, and Chloe Sevigny wasn't there. No, I don't know what Chloe was doing in Fall River. She has been linked romantically to Duxbury philanthropist Stephen Bowden before, but we can find no confirmation of that story and it may be apocryphal.

Lizzie looked shady almost right away. A maid put her upstairs with the stepmom's body at the time of her murder. Lizzie found her father's body, perhaps by looking under her axe. This was 122 years before that crime scene investigator show with LL Cool J, so forensic investigation was piss-poor during this time- despite this being an era when Sherlock Holmes was popular.

Lizzie was too calm, gave the 5-0 many contradictory answers, and she was caught burning a dress on the stove after the murders. She was shown to have been seeking to purchase poison before the murders. The attorney trying her later sat on the US Supreme Court, but Lizzie handled him, too.

About 100 years before the term "OJ jury" was coined to describe a dozen stupid jurors, Lizzie Borden found an OJ jury. As guilty as Lizzie looked, there was little forensic evidence standing against her. She was acquitted of the murders, after the jury had deliberated for only 90 minutes.

"Yeah, I'm a backdoor mannnnnn..."

Fall River wanted nothing to do with her, even after she was Not Guiltied. She bought a new house, changed her name to Lizbeth and set about spending her share of Daddys loot (Andrew Borden was worth whatever 7 million dollars was worth back then). She threw lavish parties that many contemporary celebrities attended.

The Lizzard may have even snagged herself some celebrity skin, as rumors of an affair between her and actress Nance O'Neill still get kicked around. There are some interesting letters between the two, although NON went strictly dickly with her 1916 marriage. Borden lived and died as a spinster, albeit a well-off one.

Lesbian or not, I bet Nance slept with one eye open at the Maplecroft house that Borden moved to after the trial.

Other than a shoplifting incident that didn't result in an arrest, Borden lived the rest of her life quietly. She patronized the arts, left a fortune for the Animal Rescue League, and didn't, say, hack anyone (else) to death with an axe.

A black cat... crossing our path... at Lizzie Borden's House... on October 13th

Lizzie got a nursery rhyme ascribed to her for the rest of History. I was unaware of there being more than one version, but there seem to be three.

From Wikipedia

Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.

Also

Lizzie Borden took an axe
Gave her mother forty whacks,
Then she hid behind the door,
And gave her father forty more.

Also

Lizzie Borden took an axe
and gave her mother forty whacks,
when the job was finally done
gave her father forty one


Remember, kids... Mom got 18 or 19, Dad got 11. Even combined, no one got 40 whacks... except the lady who runs the B&B there now, of course....

She is very rarely tailgated, even in Rhodey.

Lizzie got pneumonia, and died in like 1921 or something. Plenty of good seats were left at her funeral. She was buried next to her estranged sister.

She was a force of nature, a murderess during a time when women were supposed to be timid. She was a wealthy woman, but ostracized by the local well-to-do. She was a patron of the arts, a lover of animals, and only Paul Bunyan- maybe- is more famous for swinging an axe.

Some of the better theories:

- Fugue State Lizzie, who was Miss Borden operating under a Dissociative Disorder featuring reversible amnesia.

- Lesbian Lizzie, caught in the act by Stepmomma while slappin' hips with Bridget Sullivan. Stepmom was less than understanding, so Lizzie brained her with the first heavy item she found, and then finished her off with an axe. She confessed this crime to Dad, who also reacted in an axe-worthy manner.

- Perfectly Reasonable Lizzie, daughter of a miser millionaire who refused to put indoor plumbing into the house.

- Sullivan, the Borden's maid, confessed to helping Lizzie by changing her testimony. Sullivan is also listed as a suspect. She married a man later, so she was bisexual at best and abused help at worst in this scenario.

- William Borden, an illegitimate son, may have killed him after an extortion bid failed.

- Emma Borden, Lizzie's sister, kills for the same cash Lizzie scored. She established an alibi in Fairhaven, snuck back into Fall River at just the time when both parents were napping, killed both parents, and then galloped back to Fairhaven ahead of the telegram man with the bad news. Emma inherited a pile o' money after the deaths, and scrutiny fell upon her more oddball sister.

- John Morse, Lizzie's uncle. An infrequent guest at best, he arrived in town one night before the murders.

- A guy named "Manny."

- OK, I just made Manny up.

Bad Axe, Michigan deserves a franchise, as does the lesser known town of Patricide, Utah.

Lizzie is long gone, but you can still check out her spot. The Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast is just the place to take Mom and Dad when you see the nursing home bills. Hell, bring your disaffected goth teen daughter, she might get into History.

They also have tours. As the sign says, they run from 11 AM to 3 PM. I think it was $17 to get in, I may have it confused with nearby Battleship Cove, which I was also too cheap to pay for.

I went to the Cove back when I was teaching, with a bunch of my ghetto landlubber kids. It does rule, but it doesn't fit into this story, so we'll come back to it later.

Battle Cove is part of Free Family Fun Days or whatever that program we wrote about is. We'll check it out then. Two adult admissions to Battleship Cove would be worth more than Cranberry County Magazine is currently worth, although we may rally between now and Thanksgiving.

I don't think that the Lizzie Borden B&B is part of the Free Family Fun Days.

Of course we looked for ghosts. The B&B is rumored to be haunted, and it does have an eerie vibe about it. A lot of blood spilled in that house, and they even have the horror-movie-requisite scary ass daughter.

The Borden website does have Ghost Cams, but I was already on the grounds. Granted, I was too cheap to go in, and I don't work for the newspaper that my only press pass is from anymore.

So, being 6'5" or so, I just walked by the rooms, stretched out my big geek arm, and fired a few shots into whatever windows I could reach. I was hoping to sneak up on the ghosts.

Yeah, it worked about as well as you'd think it would. Don't say that I didn't try. I just didn't try for $34 worth.

Nothing to see here, let's move along...

The scene of a double axe murder is a funny place to put a B&B. I wonder what else is out there? Is there a Jeffrey Dahmer Steak House in Wisconsin? Maybe there's a Lane Staley Apothecary or a Christopher Reeve horse-racing track?

Come to think of it... not too far to the North, there's a city getting a lot of tourist money out of the fact that a bunch of near-primates slaughtered every sketchy person in town in a witch hunt.

I think Salem got 19 bodies, but our Lizzie did her dirt by her lonesome... always impressive. The first two are always the hardest.

We bought a coffee mug. I try not to disappoint people like the Bordens. I don't even like to disappoint the people who own the house now. I'm a bury-the-hatchet type, if you'll pardon the pun.

It may have been done before my time, but why is there not a Lizzie Borden movie?

Chloe Sevigny or however she spells that could play Lizzie. She can at least find the house. If she did play Lizzie, I'd go heavy on the Bridget Sullivan angle.

Hey, it's two murders, pretty much one after the other. We'll get a little Johnny Cochran or maybe Atticus Finch in the court scenes, but we need Action. Chloe and Bridget type action. This isn't 12 Angry Men we're talking about, folks.