Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,600 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 60 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

To every person–friend and stranger alike–who viewed this blog since its inception in early September: thank you. I hope you enjoyed it. See you again in about 10 months.

Image from Flickr (Nasmo2).

Last night we attended the famous Village Halloween Parade, as we do every year since moving to Manhattan. It was chaotic, colorful, and festive, as usual–though luckily a bit less crowded this year because it was on a Monday night.

Here are my favorite 10 photos I took at the event–plus one of me in my costume. Can you guess which one I am?  

A skeleton taking a digital photograph. Don't see that every day...

Patrick McGoohan from the Prisoner (an ultra-cool 1960s TV series).

The Female Hamburglar and Rage Guy (look him up).

A costume made of Metro cards. Anyone from NYC knows this must have been expensive!

Julie Speed‘s eerie paintings are quite unsettling, with an undecipherable symbolism that seems to me to depict utter dread.

Michael Ramseur captures haunted places (like the lunatic asylum below) with a childlike sense of color and perspective. Adding to their sense of foreboding, these painting are quite large (about 6 feet wide) in person.

Blanka Dvorak‘s macabre work is nightmarishly beautiful. I’m obsessed with her H.P. Lovecraft-inspired pieces.

A dear friend of mine, artist Tracy Dunbar, also depicts the dark and mysterious side of life. I love her unexpected use of the color green in these paintings to combine nature with the ethereal.

I went to 5th Avenue and saw some of the Halloween-decorated shop windows (mentioned in my previous post). In this window, the decorator was actually in the window putting up his design.

I also passed by an elaborately decorated brownstone on the Upper West Side.

Oh, and speaking of decorations, we “decked the halls” of our apartment…

We also went to the Danvers State Hospital–which, as previously mentioned, is now an apartment complex, but the Kirkbride Building is still standing.

We even found the Danvers Cemetery, including the old patient headstones, which only have numbers on them for identification (now these have been replaced with name plaques).

And in Salem, MA, we went to the Witch House, a house directly tied to the witch trials. During the trials, this house was inhabited by one of the key judges in the cases.

We saw lots of wax sculptures, like this one of Beetlejuice, in Count Orlok’s Monster Gallery, in Salem.

And last night, we attended the Halloween Extravaganza, at St. John’s Cathedral. An organist provided live accompaniment for a screening of the original Phantom of the Opera, followed by the Procession of the Ghouls down the aisles.

Oh, and today it snowed in NYC!

"New York Pumpkin" by Studdedmisfit (Deviant Art).

New York City is a great place to be for the Halloween season, despite its lack of yard haunts (due to the fact that no one here owns a yard).

Have you heard of the famous Christmas window displays in stores downtown? Well, those stores dress up their windows for Halloween too. Observe:

Photo by Naverna (Flickr).

Photo by Viridia (Flickr).

Photo by Naverna (Flickr).

Photo by Cosmicautumn (Flickr).

Photo by Cosmicautumn (Flickr).

These photos are from previous years; I plan to take some of my own later this week, so stay tuned!

Each year the talented performers and artists at Third Rail Projects create an immersive Neo-Victorian nightmare in a historic theater on the Lower East Side. The experience is called the Steampunk Haunted House, and it’s by far the most unique haunt I’ve ever attended.

The first time I went, I was amazed at how well the Steampunk aesthetic blended with the horror and magic of Halloween (indeed, I was terrified by a giant clockwork spider). Last year, as the event’s official documentarian, I watched the project develop from its early phases to opening night. The 2010 theme was “Beautiful Dreamer,” and it included nightmarish imagery like Victorian ghosts crawling backward over theater seats. Even though I had been behind the scenes and knew the setup, nothing could prepare me for the way all the elements came together.

Last week I sat down with Third Rail Project artistic directors Zach Morris and Tom Pearson to discuss this year’s incarnation of the Steampunk Haunted House, “Through the Looking Glass.” The current theme draws on elements from Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, but it is not a literal retelling of these stories. Instead, its more like the shared nightmare of Alice and Lewis Carroll himself–a mesmerizing blend of fantasy and reality.

The magnificent Red Queen. Image by Chad Heird.

Photo of Alice Liddel, taken by Lewis Carroll.

Lewis Carroll’s biography reveals that he was a conflicted man. As an Anglican deacon and a mathematician, he delved into both religious and worldly knowledge. His health was poor, he had an embarrassing stammer, and he seemed to idealize the innocence of children. The character Alice was based on a child Carroll knew named Alice Liddle, whom he began to create stories for. Naturally, the stories he told her reflected his own struggles with philosophy and logic, imagination verging on fear, and curiosity that leads outside reality.

It seems Carroll was the perfect embodiment of Victorian Era–a time when exciting new ideas and inventions were being introduced, and people were torn between clinging to old traditions and embracing the new. With reason came logic, but with logic came the existential question of whether logic truly holds in reality. And sometimes these new technological innovations could result in unexpected horrors. The contradictions of this era inform the Steampunk movement.

This evening I experienced the Steampunk Haunted House myself. Like dreaming, wandering through this house is an illogical adventure. Symbolism abounds: mirrors reflect but can also be transparent, little girls stand staring in white dresses, and hallways lead into pitch-dark labrynths. Familiar characters from the book appear (the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit), but in human form, and they ignite curiosity with eye contact, gestures, and mind tricks. Red, white, black, cards, roses: the story comes to life in the darkness of the haunt, but in a twisted form–a distorted mirror image of the books and their author. The Steampunk-style devices add a grinding inevitability to the haunting experience, giving the space the dread of a doomed machine. The enveloping madness is intoxicating and utterly spellbinding.

The Steampunk Haunted House is on Oct. 22, 23, and 26-31 at the Abrons Arts Center.

Danvers State Hospital, by Jeremy Barnard.

“Some of the patients … they come back.”

Session 9 is a remarkable horror film. It tells the story of five construction workers hired to remove asbestos from an abandoned insane asylum. As they try to complete the job over the next week, the building begins to affect them.

Soon one of the men discovers audiotapes of patient sessions and listens to them, becoming fascinated with a female patient who was affected with multiple personality disorder. Her story starts to parallel the madness overtaking one of the construction workers. One man starts hearing voices, another man goes missing, and the mystery slowly unfolds to reveal an unexpected ending.

The most incredible fact about this movie is that it was filmed on location at a real mental institution. In fact, the writer of the film penned the script with the location in mind. Danvers State Hospital was built in 1874 and closed permanently in 1985. This asylum was where the frontal lobotomy was developed, back in 1948. By the time the film was made in 2001, the building had been abandoned for about 15 years. Therefore, more than any other fictional film I’ve seen, this one oozes with authenticity. Every scene is imbued with the sad and creepy feeling of dread that one can imagine permeates a building with this history. And in addition to being a clever and truly affecting movie, Session 9 is a valuable piece of celluloid that captures a dark piece of the past that has now been erased.

Surely the grounds of the hospital must be cursed. The hill on which Danvers was built happens to be the same site where the infamous Salem Witch Trial judge John Hathorne condemned many people to death. In addition, the building withstood several freak arsons over the years. Renovations on the hospital began right after Session 9 was made, and the original building has now been mostly torn down. What resides there now, in its place? Condos.

For a great story on a writer who put out an online request to be invited to watch Session 9 inside one of the Danvers condos, click here.

All photography by Jeremy Barnard, taken during the building’s abandonment. 

You know you want it.

We make pumpkin bread every year, using a recipe we Frankensteined from several online sources. The loaves are deliciously moist, dense, and have a great flavor of fall spice.

Of course, the bread is best when made with fresh (pie) pumpkin. However, it can also be quite successfully made with canned pumpkin. If you want to make it with fresh pumpkin, start with one large pie pumpkin. Cut it in half, remove the seeds, and then cut the rest into large chunks. Put in a pot, cover with water, and boil for about 10-12 min. Then peel off the skin and puree the meat in a blender.

So here’s our “top-secret” recipe! We usually make it without nuts or chocolate so we can have it for breakfast with coffee. It’s killer. Enjoy!