When I read about some of the sea creatures chronicled by the Census of Marine Life project, I got chills.  There are some freaky things under water.  For a decade, the Census of Marine Life project has been attempting to make an organized list of all known existing marine life.  The results, published on August 2, admit that for every species we know of there are probably four more that haven’t been discovered.  In other words, the ocean could hold creatures even more monstrous than we imagine (kraken anyone?).

Inspired by the Census of Marine Life, I’m doing my own list: The Census of Horrific Marine Life that will haunt my nightmares.

These creatures look more frightening than most of the movie monsters we’ve come up with.  What do you think?  Does this make you want to do some deep-sea diving?  Does anybody have any species they’d like to add?

The Aquarium in Ice is located in Kesennuma, Japan, on the second floor of the seafood market building “Umi-no-Ichi”.  50 ice columns are on display with frozen octopus, crabs, and a variety of fish.  The aquarium is kept at minus 20 degrees Celsius, and visitors have to wear special coats while inside.  During summer, the inside temperature can be 50 degrees lower than the outside.

Aside from the temperature, there is something chilling about all these corpses trapped in ice.  When you look at the shapes without their liveliness, you really see how different marine life forms are from land-based life forms.

To promote the arrival of the Tim Burton exhibit at the Australian Center for the Moving Image, a headless horseman had free reign on the streets of Melbourne.  After stalking around on foot he took the perch in the drivers seat and even gave some lucky onlookers a ride in his coach.  True the headless horseman in Sleepy Hollow rides the horse and doesn’t drive a coach, and he often appears with a jack o lantern head, but this is still a pretty cool way to get attention.

This is the same retrospective of Burton’s artwork that was on display earlier this year at New York’s MOMA.  The exhibit opened in Melbourne on June 24 and will continue through October 10.  After Melbourne the exhibit is travelling to the Bell Lightbox in Toronto from November 22 to April 27.  Then it’s moving to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from May 29, 2011 through October 31.  I was so disappointed to miss the MOMA run and I’m ecstatic that I’ll finally get to see the exhibit in LA next spring.

Queen Mary gazes calmly at the viewer, taking stock of her surroundings.  Suddenly, her features contort into gruesome disfigurement and her mouth opens wide into a silent scream.

This digital poster was displayed on escalators in the London Underground subway system to promote a new show featuring Bloody Mary at the tourist attraction, the London Dungeon.  Bloody Mary (not to be confused with Mary Queen of Scots who met a bloody end when she was decapitated in 1587) ruled England for five years after her father King Henry VIII’s death in 1153.  She earned the nickname Bloody after she ordered 300 religious dissenters, including some notable clerics, to be burned at the stake.  She sought to restore Catholicism as the official state religion.

I love the poster, but I can see how it might take some by surprise and cause them to wet themselves.  Unfortunately, you’ve already missed your chance to see Mary transform from placid to demonic because the ads have been banned as too graphic after several parents complained that they were terrorizing children.

The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority rationalized the ban, saying: “We considered that the morphing image, and the juxtaposition of a calm face with a very scary one, were likely to startle and frighten young children.

“We noted the switch between the passive and frightening face occurred suddenly and unexpectedly, which could increase the shock value.

“We also considered that when the face morphed into the scary character, the bloody gashes, white flesh, rotting teeth, red eyes and the threatening expression meant it was not suitable for young children to see.

“We were of the view that the ad seemed to be setting out to scare and had overstepped the limit of acceptability in doing so because, although not frightening for adults, the image was likely to be shocking to young children and to cause them fear or distress without good reason.

“We concluded that the ad was inappropriate for display in an untargeted medium.”

A spokesman for the London Dungeon said that it had planned to use the digital poster during the rest of summer and Halloween, adding: “Bloody Mary killed over 300 heretics during her reign but was one of Britain’s lesser known villainous figures, overshadowed by her notorious father Henry VIII.

“The object of the advertising was to show the dark side of her personality and portray her as a villain.”

What do you think?  Is the image too scary for young children?  Is this an acceptable use of censorship?  Do you know how I can get one of these posters since they’re done with it?

To learn more about the London Dungeon and its newest attraction, visit its website.

On a tiny island in Mexico, thousands of dolls hang from trees, shrubs and small structures.  Exposed to the elements, they swing in various stages of decay.  This surreal environment is like no other place on earth. 

Isla de Las Munecas, Spanish for Island of the Dolls, is located between Xochimico and Mexico City on Teshuilo Lake.  Legend has it that three young girls were playing in the area until disaster struck and one drowned in a canal.  Tales of haunting kept people off the island until Julian Santana Barrera decided to make it his home in the 1950s.  A hermit by nature, Julian went without electricity, running water or other utilities and grew his own food.  To protect himself from malicious spirits, he started collecting discarded dolls and hanging them around the island.  Many were fished out of the waters that surrounded him.  Other dolls were brought as trade for Julian’s delicious vegetables.  And some were gifts for the poor little girl who met a tragic end.

Julian believed that the dolls would bring happiness to the spirit of the little girl.  He also built her an alter.  In a bizarre twist, Julian drowned in 2001 in the very canal that supposedly took the girl’s life.  Now some people believe that he’s haunting the island as well.  Stories of whispering and shifty dolls have prompted visitors to bring gifts with them to appease the ghosts.

The Isla de Las Munecas is fascinating.  The intention to honor the loss of a child is sweet and touching, but the result is often creepy.  Instead of celebrating life the dolls convey images of death, decay and horror. 

To visit the Isla de Las Munecas, you take a “trajinera” from the Cuemanco Pier.  The trip takes two hours each way, but the scenery is supposed to be beautiful.  I hope to make the trek someday.

 

The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum is a sprawling, monster of a building.  Its guts hold two and a half miles of corridors and sixteen wards.  The stone walls are up to two and a half feet thick.  We wandered all four floors of the main building and visited the oldest part of the asylum, known as the Civil War wing.  There are four main hotspots for paranormal activity in the hospital, but as we listened to our tour guide Sue Parker, it was clear that unexplained phenomena had occurred at every turn. 

Sue had actually worked as a nurse in the hospital when it was still open and she knew its secrets and rhythms.

Lily’s Room

One of the first things we did was enter a room with peeling sunny yellow wallpaper, pale green paint and the spirit of a little girl named Lily.  Lily’s mother was a patient in the hospital and she spent her brief life on the grounds.  After dying of pneumonia at age nine, she never left.  Sometimes she plays ball with visitors or interacts with the music box that sits on the window sill.  We kicked Lily’s ball a bit and asked her to kick it back to us, but she didn’t.  Sue told us that Lily does not like men, and since we had a male in our group that may be why we couldn’t coax her to play with us.

It was in a patient room, not unlike the one above, that a patient was last seen alive.  Nothing in the room looked out of place, but the patient had disappeared.  A few days after he’d gone missing, the smell in the room was overwhelming.  The patient’s body was discovered, wrapped in a sheet and shoved up against the wall under the bed.  The bedcovers concealed the body from anybody looking into the room.  Who killed the patient?

In Shutter Island, all of Ashecliffe Hospital hosts the criminally insane, but even in the film the most dangerous and violent patients are segregated into Ward C.  The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum was a hospital that held a diverse group of patients — from minor mental deficiencies and disabilities to the violently psychotic.  The picture above shows the building where the criminally insane patients lived removed from the rest of the patients.  We couldn’t go into this building because it still has a lot of asbestos inside.  You can see that the structure is much more fortress-like than the general wards.

While we couldn’t visit the building that housed the criminally insane, Sue did take us to the floor where the most extreme cases were kept in the main building.

Isolation

I was already restrained in a straight jacket, but apparently that wasn’t enough, because Sue put me alone in an isolation room for uncontrollable patients.  The room was small and bare, and there was no way to open the door from the inside.  When I wouldn’t stop screaming, Sue closed a second, solid door.  The heavy clang of the door sent chills through my spine as I realized I was trapped in an empty room.  Well, I hoped it was empty.  What if I was disturbing angry spirits by screaming and banging on the door?  Sue let me out after a few long, tense moments, but I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that it wouldn’t be very hard to lock someone behind the one-way door and leave her to die. 

When we reached the ward that housed violent men, we sat on the floor of a room and Sue told us a terrifying tale of the three men that once lived there.  One of the men was particularly disturbed and irked that his simpleton roommate continually swayed and made noises at night.  With the help of the third roommate, the angry man used a sheet to hang the patient.  The two men played with the swinging patient for awhile.  Unsure if he was dead when they put him on the floor, the angry man lifted a bed and dropped a leg so that it bashed in the patients’ skull.  Sure the patient was dead now, the murderer went to tell a nurse what he had done.  For some reason the doctor didn’t want to move the murderer to the building for the criminally insane.  He’s still alive today, living in a different hospital.  The air in the room was oppressive.

Thanks again to Angie Candell for taking amazing photos.  Thanks Michael and Megan for coming and taking pictures and helping me in and out of the straight jacket.  A huge thank you to our tour guide Sue for giving us so much time to explore the Asylum and telling us so many stories.  And thank you to Rebecca at the asylum for coordinating the trip.  Everyone we encountered at the Asylum was supportive.  They told us we were the first to come take pictures in costumes, which really surprised me (because it seems so obvious!) but they had no problem with our escapades.  I wanted to get the feel for what life in a historic asylum would have been like, and I accomplished that goal.  I’m glad I made it out alive!

I hear things like, “you should be committed” and “get help” all the time.  Typically I’m running away from mental hospitals, not trying to get into one.  But out of my obsession with the film Shutter Island sprang a fixation on visiting a historic asylum.  The asylum in the film, Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, is a fictional facility.   A lot of Shutter Island was filmed at the Medfield State Hospital in Massachusetts, but that building is closed.  You can visit the grounds, but I don’t think anyone is allowed inside.  Luckily the Shutter Island publicity clued me in to a historic hospital you can visit in Weston, West Virginia.  I wrote about it in February and then for months I would not let it go.  I told anyone who would listen that I desperately wanted to go there.  I refused to let the fact that I live clear across the country in Los Angeles deter me.  Some people might call that a mania.

Of course if I’m going to do something amazing like go to a 150 year old asylum, I need to do it in style.  I used the excuse to get something I’d wanted for a few years now: a straight jacket shrug by AngryGirl Gear.  She created an impractically-long sleeved and buckled masterpiece that is absolutely the coolest thing I’ve ever owned.  (Now that I have it I won’t take it off, and not just because I can’t work the zipper with my hands trapped in the sleeves.) 

As you can see, I couldn’t.  We had about an hour before our tour to wander the front of the grounds and take the pictures you see here.

Come back tomorrow to see photos of the interior of the asylum and read about some of the inhabitants that haunt it to this day.  To see more of Angie Candell’s photography, visit her website.  To see more of AngryGirl Gear straightjackets, visit her website or her Etsy shop.  To find out more about visiting the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, visit their website.

If you haven’t figured out my deep affection for all things Edgar Allen Poe, you’re not reading this blog very carefully.  When I was organizing my East Coast excursion I knew I wanted to tour the areas of Baltimore that were significant to Poe.  Poe spent three years of his life in Baltimore, from 1833 to 1835, and died when he returned here in 1849.  I recruited Michael and Megan to keep me company.  Our plan was to stop at five Poe-themed destinations: A statue of Poe by Ezekiel Moses, The Poe House, Poe’s Grave, Church Hospital, and the Annabel Lee Tavern.

When we pulled up to the intersection where the Poe statue was, it was immediately apparent that we weren’t going to be able to get the pictures that we wanted.  The statue is in a plaza in front of the Law School of the University of Baltimore and there was a big party or something going on.  Right behind the statue there was a podium set up and someone was speaking.  Worse, there were garish balloons tied to the statue.  We decided not to stop.

So we continued on to the Poe house, a museum in a small house where Poe actually lived for three years.  This was the attraction I wanted to see the most.  So I was a little crushed when we got to the door and it wouldn’t open.  I had called on Tuesday to confirm their open hours for the week, but when I called the number posted on the door again the recording said the museum wouldn’t be open until Friday at noon.  I only planned on spending one day in Baltimore.  Friday is a driving day and we were going to stop at Antietam.  Now we’re planning on trying to get to the museum when it opens and heading west from there.

Our first two planned stops were a bust.  I was beginning to wonder if we were going to get to see any of the sites I wanted to see that day.  Luckily the rest of the day went better.  We stopped at the Westminster Burial Hall to see Poe’s grave.  Someone had left one red rose on the platform.  Its dying, withered state made it more beautiful and fitting than a thriving bouquet would have been.

We decided to sit at the grave and soak it in a little.  Michael, Megan and I took turns reading aloud the short story Berenice.  Poe wrote this suspense story during his time in Baltimore and it has his signature macabre style.  It builds to a gruesome and thrilling ending.

Next we headed to Church Hospital, where Poe died on October 7, 1849 at the age of 40. The exact cause of Poe’s death are unknown though he had been plagued with ill-health and alcoholism for years.   The hospital is closed to the public, but I wanted to see the outside.

We were weary from our travels, but we found the perfect way to end the Poe-themed day at the Annabel Lee Tavern.  The Tavern has been open since 2007 and its decor and menu celebrate all things Poe.  I was in heaven from the moment we approached the outside and saw how it was decorated.

Annabel Lee is the title of the last poem Poe ever wrote.  This tavern was made for me!  The walls are purple with quotes from the poem.  Ravens appear on the wall and on the glasses.  The menus is written in an elegant cursive. 

We wouldn’t be honoring Poe if we didn’t imbibe a little alcohol.  The cocktails have names from Poe’s life and works.  Megan ordered the Tell-Tale Tini, a drink made of Van Gogh Espresso, White creme de cacao, black raspberry liquour and cream.  It had a lavender color and tasted like dessert.  I ordered the Raven, a deep purple drink made of Stoli Rasberry, Stolie Blueberry, Stoli Blackberry, Stoli Vanilla, Blue Curacao, cherry juice and cranberry.  It tasted strongly of alcohol.  Michael took a sip, blanched, and said it tasted the way ethanol smells.  It’s like a Poe Long Island Ice Tea and I think Poe would have enjoyed it, I know I did.  About four sips in I was feeling pretty good. 

All three of us are vegetarians, and the menu doesn’t have a huge selection of vegetarian options, but luckily the items they do have sounded good to us.  Michael and Megan each got a Spinach and Portabello Mushroom Burrito, and I had Macaroni and Cheese that was “fortified with Raven licquor.”  Why haven’t I poured alcohol into my mac and cheese before?  It’s the best innovation I can think of.  The macaroni was an appetizer portion and it was so good (and I was so drunk) that I ordered a second helping.  We all agreed that the food was excellent.  I wanted to move in.

Annabel Lee Tavern is at 601 South Clinton Street in Baltimore Maryland.  It opens daily at 4pm.  Visit their website for more information.

Wednesday I began my East Coast adventure with my cohorts Megan and Michael.  Michael had to do some school stuff, but Megan and I spent the afternoon in Washington DC.  I’ve been to DC a few times and I’ve seen most of the national landmarks.  This time I wanted to do something different, something darker.

Our first stop was the Smithsonian Natural History Museum.  I wanted to see the special exhibit: Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th Century Chesapeake.  By examining skeletal remains of early American colonists from Jamestown, Virginia and St. Mary’s City, Maryland, scientists have gained insight into how they lived and died.  The displays were well-done.  From a skull degraded by syphillis to a baby who likely died from lack of vitamin d because it was swaddled too tightly, each of the remains on exhibit presented a mystery and a hypothesis.  It was mind-blowing to read how scientists determined an unidentified corpse was of a woman who was born in England and moved to Maryland based on bone analysis that showed how her diet was wheat based and then corn based.

Next we headed to the Ford Theater where Lincoln got shot.  I was hoping to see the murder weapon they have on display.  It turned out that the Ford Theater is a much bigger tourist spot than I anticipated and they were already out of the tickets we needed to go through.  Dejected, we hailed a cab for our final DC stop: Asylum.

Asylum is a bar I found on Yelp.  It’s a good thing I did, because we never would have stumbled on the funky neighborhood it was in without outside help.  With black chandeliers and red curtains in a medieval setting, the bar reminded me of True Blood’s Fangtasia.  Asylum has two floors, but we hung out in the dim lower level. 

While it’s primarily a bar, Asylum has a pretty good dinner menu.  I had a blackened tofu sandwich with waffle fries and Megan had quesadillas.  The happy hour specials were great.  We each had three drinks and an entree and our total bill was around $40.

On the bar, Megan introduced me to Erotic Photo Hunt, a touchscreen arcade game where you pick out the differences between two deceptively identical photos of a barely clothed woman.  I’m now addicted.  We wanted to beat the highscore, or at least get on the leaderboard.  Most of the high scores were controlled by “Poopstain,” and he was going down.  His highest score was 414,000.  Alas, even after multiple attempts, our high was only 311,000, and we didn’t make the board. 

There was a concert starting at 9:30, but Megan and I had to catch a train back to Baltimore.  There weren’t too many people in the bar when we left, but it wasn’t empty.  I recommend Asylum for anyone who likes divey, local bars with a chill but grim atmosphere.

If you want to go to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, visit their website for more information.  The Written in Bone exhibit will be there until February 6, 2011.  Asylum is located at 2471 18th St., Washington DC.  They open at 5pm everyday and you can also visit their website for more details.

Participating in a Zombie Walk is on my list of things to do, but I think it would be hard to top the one that recently took place in Moscow.  I learned about it via My Disguises and the gorey costumes are fantastic.  It looks like there was a big horde of undead with some expert special effects makeup artists.  I wish I was there!  Instead, I have to live vicariously through the pictures and youtube video.

To see more visit My Disguises or this photo gallery.