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The Historic and Haunted Ghost Town of Bodie
The old mining town of Bodie, California is America’s best preserved ghost town. Dating back to 1859, Bodie is literally frozen in time and looked after as an historic park. The town is both authentic and mysterious, with original fixtures, furniture, and personal items in the buildings left untouched since their residents abandoned them.
Bodie abounds with legends of the paranormal, but none more famous than the haunted Cain residence. The man of the house had an affair with their maid. After being publicly disgraced, the unfortunate maid took her own life and reportedly haunts the house.
The Cain house is open to the public and has provided accommodation for park rangers. People have reported ghostly apparitions and strange music. Staying overnight in the house, park rangers and their wives have experienced paranormal events such as hearing strange noises, being paralyzed in bed, and seeing items move by themselves.
The most frightening legend of Bodie is a mysterious curse that follows many visitors after they leave the town. Allegedly, Bodie’s ghosts serve as guardians to the town’s property, casting bad luck and misfortune to souvenir hunters who take anything with them.
Each month, Bodie’s park rangers receive objects and letters from people who admit to taking items and beg the rangers to put them back. The letters tell tales of horrible incidents such as mysterious illnesses, car accidents, and even death. The rangers frequently speak of these accounts and assure the senders that the objects are always returned to their original places.
(via salesses)
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Paul Octavious - Birds of Aperture (2006-12)
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up late w/ sore throat & thoughts on writing/life
a month has passed since beginning a new draft in a new form of a story i’ve flailed over since January 2012. what has failed as a short story, as a novella, appears very much to be succeeding as a play. i took a playwriting class in college, i’ve been working at a major regional theatre for a year, and reading great play after great play from the likes of Shepard, Kane, Albee, Mamet, Chekhov, Pinter, O’Neill, so on and so on, and i just wonder, why did i not take this form more seriously in 2008? at the very least, this immersive exposure to drama will absolutely change the way i approach and create prose fiction*. at most, maybe i’ve found the correct format for the voice (and to a hopefully unconscious extent, style) i’ve spent the last eight years cultivating through trial and error, success and failure, imitation and departure. there’s relief in discovering the correct form of self-torment.
*if i ever end up teaching fiction writing (my first love) anywhere, at any level, my students will read as many plays as they do short stories/novels/criticism. you wanna learn how to write great dialogue? read great playwrights.
- A story is most interesting to me as I’m writing it if I’m doing something strange with the time signature. I find that I’m the most dead and my writing is the most lifeless when I’m telling a story in a relatively conventional, chronological way. I think that in some ways a novelist’s raw material is time itself. What you do with it, how you compress some events or skip over them or take parts of the past and stretch them out so that they touch the future. I’m imagining a kind of malleable material. That’s what we’re messing around with most often.
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Very Miniature Literature Rant
Was reading an old review of Cormac McCarthy’s play THE SUNSET LIMITED & reviewer called it “hardly traditional theatre,” as it was “driven by dialogue rather than action.” Unconventional for a play to be driven by dialogue? THE ONLY THING THAT EVER MATTERS IN A PLAY IS THE GODDAMN DIALOGUE.
Addendum: I recognize that a play consists of myriad moving parts: set, acting, direction, costume design; there’s even the whole business side of it, but when we get down to brass tacks: it’s people standing on a stage saying words. It’s always about the words. Call me Snoot McSnob, but that’s how I feel.
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