Weekend Compendium: 6 January 2016
Identified as a “Speak No Evil” monkey, but seems to embody modern angst on the eve of the Chinese Year of the Monkey. http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/478210
Mrs Daffodil has not been idle this week, but shares a caustic commentary on “The Ladies’ Man,” in case the upcoming High Feast of St. Hallmark throws you into the company one of those serial adorers so unwittingly fatal to a girl’s reputation.
She also tells of a Wisconsin lady-inventor, a Mrs Gearing, who created a woodsy costume: a romper lined with sawdust, which was somehow supposed to emancipate Womankind. Simply barking.
Stealing a leaf out of my own book, Mrs Daffodil shares an interview with a hairdresser who styles the coiffures of corpses in Dressing the Hair of the Dead and comments on the use of “dead hair” in wigs and chignons.
On Sunday Mrs Daffodil intends to give us some tips on how to look our best for the photographer—from about 1865 to 1921. Bring talcum powder and blue gauze.
This week at the Haunted Ohio blog, I tell of a flap at Drayton Church, haunted by a uncanny black bird seen perching in the sanctuary and heard fluttering in the vault.
While it is hard to conceive of such a thing, a French widow claimed that her bouncing baby boy was begotten by her ghostly husband–dead for several years. Perhaps a too-fertile imagination was at work here.
From the archives, to whet your appetite for Valentine’s Day, Hearts and Powers, Cardiac Witchery.
Several of my favorite links this week: How to be sensitive to the beliefs of others while being sacrificed in a wicker man.
A ritual horse burial from the War of 1812? I’ve been to Fort Meigs (see Haunted Ohio V: 200 Years of Ghosts) and met a couple of ghosts there, but didn’t see any horses.
One more dash of humor in this cartoon, which I’ll just say is about Roman soldiers, so as not to give away the punch line.
Just a reminder that the Chinese New Year–the Year of the Monkey–begins 8 February.
The Staffordshire potteries’ somewhat alien conception of a monkey. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O151213/figure-unknown/
In one of those little fortean moments, a howler monkey has been reported in an Ohio park.
Mrs Daffodil invites you to join her on the curiously named “Face-book,” where you will find a feast of fashion hints, fads and fancies, and historical anecdotes
You may read about a sentimental succubus, a vengeful seamstress’s ghost, Victorian mourning gone horribly wrong, and, of course, Mrs Daffodil’s efficient tidying up after a distasteful decapitation in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales.
Chris Woodyard is the author of The Victorian Book of the Dead, The Ghost Wore Black, The Headless Horror, The Face in the Window, and the 7-volume Haunted Ohio series. She is also the chronicler of the adventures of that amiable murderess Mrs Daffodil in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales. The books are available in paperback and for Kindle. Indexes and fact sheets for all of these books may be found by searching hauntedohiobooks.com. Join her on FB at Haunted Ohio by Chris Woodyard or The Victorian Book of the Dead.