The World of Lore: Dreadful Places
In keeping with the month of October, this week’s book of the week returns to The World of Lore, this time with Dreadful Places, by Aaron Mahnke.
Last year, we went through Monstrous Creatures, and this year’s book by Mahnke explores haunted places. This volume is almost entirely ghost stories. And he focuses a lot on the ghost stories here in America, although he does touch briefly on ghosts overseas.
It’s interesting because where possible, he tracks down the history behind the folklore, like the legend of the Richmond vampire. Richmond, Virginia is a pretty old city, by American standards, although it has nothing on cities like Rome, London, Baghdad, or Hanun. But whereas Monstrous Creatures explored the legend of vampires with a tie into consumption, the Richmond vampire does tie in to a pretty unfortunate historical event in Virginia, and that is the October 1925 collapse of a train tunnel. Basically, everyone in the tunnel died except for one poor bastard, Benjamin Mosby. Why would I call a survivor of a horrible tragedy a poor bastard? Not just for the memory and the horror one invariably experiences as a sole survivor of a catastrophe, but that when he crawled out of the wreckage, his teeth were sharp from having been broken during the blast, causing cuts in his mouth, so that he was bleeding from his mouth. And his skin was basically sloughing off his body. When the accident happened, he had been standing right in front of a train’s open coal door, shoveling more fuel into the fire. The tunnel collapsed, causing the boiler to explode, soaking Mosby in scalding water. His flesh was parboiled off his body. He died the next day, probably in unspeakable agony.
He covers New Orleans, with its history of voodoo, including voodoo queens Marie Laveau and Julie White, it’s history of smuggling with the Lafitte brothers and the war of 1812. And the torture house of Madame Delphine LaLaurie.
He covers how tragedy creates legend, including the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911, and how, while the building still stands, people in the building report smelling smokes, and hearing screams of women jumping to their death rather than risk being burned alive.
There are places of accidental tragedy, where the idea was conceived with the very best intentions, but quickly overrun by sorrow, like Danvers State Hospital, in Danvers, Massachusetts, which was intended to be an insane asylum where those who were mentally unwell could recover. Instead, it was quickly overpopulated and understaffed, with inhumane treatment of inmates becoming the order of the day, including visits by Dr. Walter Freeman, the lobotomist who we learned about last year in Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong by Dr. Paul A Offit.
The infamous Stanley Hotel, iconic inspiration for Stephen Kings The Shining, and Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, which was designed and built to house 300 inmates in the 1830s. Just 90 years later, in the 1920s, it was housing 2000. With that sort of inmate to guard ratio, the only way to keep the inmates in line was torture. This, as you may have guessed, left its psychic mark. While Eastern State is now a museum, it’s said to be a very haunted museum. Al Capone served time there, when it was so grossly overcrowded, and allegedly brought one of the ghosts back with him. Although, it’s entirely possible that the ghost that was haunting him was really a byproduct of his syphilis addled brain.
He discusses Waverly Hills Sanatorium, which was initially a hospital for those afflicted by consumption, but it was a hospital with a one-way ticket. Once you checked in, you never checked out…even after death.
And of course, no book about famous hauntings would be complete without the legendary Winchester Mansion in San Jose, CA.
Haunted cemeteries, haunted woods, and haunted lighthouses are all discussed, all with this sense of…did that really happen? And quite a few of the stories leave you pondering the darkness, and wondering if the abyss really is staring back.
He does not specifically mention, but it’s pretty obvious to anyone even slightly keyed into pop culture, how these dreadful places have influenced and made appearances in Hollywood.
I mean vampires, are obvious, so I’ll skip them, but New Orleans…The third season of American Horror Story: Coven was practically a love letter to New Orleans, including both Marie Laveau as played by Angela Bassett and Kathy Bates giving a knockout performance as Madame Delphine LaLaurie…like seriously, only Kathy Bates could make you feel sorry for that psychotic fuck.
Danvers State Hospital was the direct inspiration for Arkham Insane Asylum of Batman lore, and inspired HP Lovecraft’s eldritch horror stories. I think it may also have inspired American Horror Story season two, Asylum, but I couldn’t find anything directly linking those two.
The Winchester Mystery House was given life in Hollywood’s movie Winchester starring Helen Mirren, and Waverly Hills Sanatorium was mentioned in Supernatural season 11.
Even lighthouses causing madness has jumped to film with the 2019 Robert Eggers directed film The Lighthouse, starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. Eggers has a real panache in exploring these themes, as his I believe first directed film was The Witch, which was also amazing at setting a creepy tone, and really tapping into what the early English settlers believed, and how the unknown can feed fear.
Much like Monstrous Creatures, Dreadful Places was a quick jaunt through folklore and darkness, kind of a PG-13 version of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, with actual history thrown in for background and flavor. If you like to ponder the darkness that exists out there and want to know where to go for the ghosts this Halloween, than I recommend The World of Lore: Dreadful Places as a good start for your ghost hunting.
This book was originally reviewed on YouTube on October 9, 2022, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.
