So I had this dream, which I’m not going to cut for today, because I just don’t feel like it, and because sometimes you start a tradition like that just so you can break it from time to time. If my dream stuff bores you, you can stop reading now, but the reason I’m not going to cut is because I’m going to be linktastic in this entry and it will be appropriately Halloweenesque and much fun will be had by all. So. Live with the not having to click read more for the dream stuff this once.
This past weekend I had a very uneasy not-quite-nightmare dream. I dreamed that I was having a fight with my husband, and that we were at this sort of farmer’s market/flea market/garage sale where everyone sold their sellable goods out of their front yards. So the whole neighborhood was like this market and you could get vegetables from people’s gardens or bricabrac (hmmmm, should that have been hyphenated? Leave me a comment and solve the conundrum, Elaine!). At any rate, I’m going along, looking through people’s junk, and then we get to my new house, and I can see OUR junk. Though now we are in our basement and looking at the things the people who had the house before us left behind. And there’s this object, a sort of one lensed viewmaster thing that has a tapered narrow top end and a wider squareish but with rounded corners bottom end. It’s possible the bottom is even curved slightly, so that it will rock if it is set down (also possible that’s an embellishment of my waking mind. These things are sometimes difficult to sort out, specially when I wait several days to post the dream.) The item would show brief movies, sometimes with sound, when you pushed a button in the top or the bottom (yes, the button moved around). The thing is, the item was haunted. It would flip on and play the shorts (all strange, full of strangers, but non-threatening – vaguely reminiscent of the art student style of the filmed bits in The Ring, if you’ve seen that) on its own. It was making me pretty anxious and I kept flipping it off and it kept coming back on by itself and finally I got so mad (and scared) that I picked it up and told it – well, tried to tell it – that if it didn’t cut that out I was going to kill it. However, my mouth was glued together and I could do no more than mutter my intent. Not that I had any doubt as to whether the thing heard me. I pondered then, if it was killable, or if I had just issued a threat I wasn’t going to be able to follow through on. I wondered if it knew that I might not be able to kill it.
I know exactly why I had this dream, and I’m going to tell you. It’s because that afternoon I had been looking up haunted places in St. Louis. I’m not much of a supernaturalist, and I’m generally on the fence about ghosts, possession, and hauntings. It’s not so much that I don’t believe weird stuff happens, as I have at least one completely unexplainable incident of my own witness, but it’s more like I’m just not sure the explanation for the weirdness is restless spirits, or aliens, or stuff that run the normal parapsychological gamut. However, as a horror enthusiast as well as an avid urban legend follower, there’s an automatic interest in ghost stories and tales of hauntings for me.
So it turns out there’s a haunted house with an intriguing history in the neighborhood where we’re buying a house. While I can’t say I want to live in a haunted house, I sure wouldn’t mind driving by one and looking at it. In addition to the Gehm House in Webster Groves, there’s also Edgewood Children’s Center. That doesn’t even start in on St. Louis itself, which apparently is the site of the real exorcism on which the famous movie is based. It’s also home to the Lemp Mansion. I read over these and several other stories the afternoon before I had the dream.