This is going to be for a Tattoo poster, rather than doing the old school 40s and 50s tattoo style, I thought I would shoot for a different era.
I received a Fortean Times in the mail today and was pleased to see a great article on the use of Mummified Cats as good luck charms - though I am hoping any cats that were used for such purposes were already quite dead before placing them inside walls or up in attics).
When living at SCUD, right after we all moved in, someone was puttering around out back and discovered a very, very old mummified cat tucked away deep inside the ancient cement shed out back. It was brought it in and it became the house mascot, which we named Spike. If you look at the earlier blog post with the photo of Wilum playing the harp, you will see Spike in the upper left hand corner of the photo.
Now I find out from this article that is was very common for cats to be placed inside of walls to ward off evil spirits, keep away witches, the evil eye, avoiding fire and even vermin. I feel so bad thinking about any of those poor creatures being put behind walls while still alive.
One of my SCUD-mates ended up collecting quite a few mummified cats that were found beneath old houses, but Spike was still the best looking of all the mummified cats. I have to say though, having Spike in that old fire-trap that was SCUD (quite literally a tinder-box), we never had a single fire while living there, so maybe Spike worked?
The bats have been taking over the nights since it has been warm, and they chatter all night long. It is quite a cacophony of sound and it gets so loud I am afraid of even going outside because you can see them in the sky just swooping and flying everywhere.
And the last couple nights, I have heard an owl hooting and it is a sound that kind of makes the hair stand a bit on end. I love it. And the raccoons, when they get going, it sounds like some beast coming up from the depths of hell because of the racket they make, snorting and squealing. I thought when I first heard them, that the church across the street had become infested with demons, it was a terrifying sound that I had never heard before. Now, it is just a regular sound I barely even notice anymore.
The husband and I have been going out for nightly walks, and I can always tell when the local funeral home is cremating someone (as they were last night) because the air smells a little like BBQ, that sweet tangy smell of cooking meat. And sure enough, when we pass the funeral home, the lights are on and you can see the heat shimmers coming off the top of the stack on top.
Back in the early 1990s, Cam and I met a cremationists (who was still in High School and for the sake of the story, I will call him "Ron") who said he worked at a very old and well-known funeral home in Seattle - the night shift, all by himself. Cam and I asked if we could come by and check it out, neither of us had ever been inside a funeral home before and Ron was more than happy to have the company.
So at around 11 pm on a Friday night, Cam and I drove to the funeral home and I have to say, driving up to it was like driving up to House on Haunted Hill, a large and imposing old structure that fit the scary funeral home stereotype perfectly.
We were escorted inside and Ron gave us a pretty extensive tour, starting at the top where the embalmer lived (his apartment was unlocked so we got to go inside) and I was shocked to see a baby coffin in the middle of his apartment. Ron said that it weighed a ton (not really but it weighed a LOT) and it was just too heavy to carry downstairs so it is pretty much a permanent fixture of the apartment for whoever lives there.
Then he took us to the office spaces, where I pulled open a few drawers and plucked out death certificates and other miscellaneous ephemera and from there, he took us to the Coffin Room! Wow, amazing! It was like a car lot, all those coffins open and ready to go. I was hoping to see something resembling those amazing Victorian coffins, but no such luck. These coffins were overly large and gaudy and I didn't see a single one I liked. They reminded me of big, ugly American cars sans wheels.
Then off to the Slumber Room but no one was slumbering at the time. It had an organ (which I read is no longer there) which we turned on and sound came booming over the speakers and I nearly peed my pants! While Ron was giving us the tour, he also told us about the ghost that seemed to haunt this particular funeral home.
Apparently it always starts as a huge swirling black mass and begins its journey from the basement, starting at the cooler and then floats up the stairs to the next floor, then to the next until it finally reaches the top of the building. Once it reaches the room with the baby coffin, it seems to throw itself out one of the small window panes. Below is an old photo of the funeral home, you can see all the little window panes on the upper floors:
When Cam and I heard about that, we made it a point to drive by the funeral home and check the windows and sure enough, invariably one of the window pane were blown out and covered with cardboard. And it was never the same window pane.
After checking out the main floor rooms, Ron then said he would take us downstairs to where the bodies are stored, embalmed, cremated and processed.
This will be continued in my next blog post in a few days.
I will finally start a much anticipated framed curio tonight. I have to meet with one of the carpenters who is working on our house sometime this week-end so that he can cut one of my human skulls in half. I like to work with halves rather than whole skulls, easier to put in a frame. He cut another one I in half for me and it turned out just perfectly. Plus I have three or four removable calvarium and I need a large hole drilled in the top of just one of them. I suppose I could do it with a hand drill, but I kind of don't want to be breathing in skull dust, plus I might crack it and darn it, these skull caps don't come cheap.
That huge monster freelance job I worked on will be unveiled at Comic Con, dates are July 23-26, 2009 (Preview Night the 22nd) and will be at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California. Click here for the link.
When my client announces the project that I worked on, I will of course post the info here.
As some of you know, I have an odd fascination with leeches and I mentioned in an earlier blog post about a book that was sent to me, Those Amazing Leeches. Below is the book and a wet specimen leech that I just happened to have in my cabinet:
Here is more of a close-up.
What shocked me, was the land leeches roaming around out there, waiting for dinner to show up. As it says in the book, when it feels the vibration of dinner coming, it stands up and moves by flipping end over end (shudder) until it reaches its prey. I think I would keel over in a dead faint if I saw a bunch of these things flipping end over end towards me! Leeches drink only blood. Like little vampires.
The husband handed me a small white bag today and this is what was in it:
This is NOT a Hostess product, but three large locally made wonderful, rich and exotic chocolate truffles. There were originally four, but I ate one. Yum.
