It's almost Halloween! It's also Scorpio season.
Winchester Mystery House
Bentley Little is a new-to-me author, but he's been publishing novels for 35 years. The main character of The Handyman has a hazy memory of a troubling handyman who offered to help his family with a construction project. But their house became cursed after that. As an adult, the victim starts to meet more people who met the same handyman, despite living in different states over decades. I'll just say their bad luck goes beyond simply having badly built porches.
Because the villain is a builder, there's a lot in this book that alludes to the Winchester Mystery House. That's a sprawling mansion in San Jose, California, whose owner spent her Winchester (guns) inheritance-by-marriage during decades of additions. I don't believe in ghosts, but I do believe in numbers:
"From 1886 to 1922 construction seemingly never ceased as the original eight-room farmhouse grew, featuring: 24,000 square feet, 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 160 rooms"
I love WMH as a topic. It looks like a Cubist or Futurist painting, like something that's moving on the page. My partner recently went to a conference, and while he was gone, I took like 15 cardboard boxes, a box cutter, and a bunch of duck tape and built a WMH for our three cats.
So it was delightful to see a piece on Endless Mode last week about a new WMH pinball machine:
It has a macabre yet whimsical tone that’s in contrast to the grislier edge often found in horror or supernatural pins (I’m looking at you, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Evil Dead), and is far closer to Tim Burton’s family-friendlier territory than the blood and guts of slasher flicks. The game’s design smartly incorporates some of the mansion’s most infamous quirks, like a ramp that stands in for the staircase to nowhere and game modes that evoke its sealed rooms.
(I didn't know Disneyland's Haunted Mansion is based on WMH too.)
How Winchester Mystery House Became the Breakaway Hit of Pinball Expo
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The Rosicrucians
WMH was well timed with a wave of Spiritualism that began after the Civil War in the United States. This mystical theology is all about seances, mediums, and contacting ghosts. But it ties into a much longer and more global fascination with occult mysteries. I was delighted to learn that, elsewhere in San Jose, there's an entire campus of a mystical organization called AMORC. They're a branch of Rosicrucianism, a school of esoterica dating back centuries. AMORC was founded during the same time period when the WMH was . . . growing.
On the new Dropout.TV show Crowd Control, standup comedians talk to audience members who've been chosen for their eccentric or even tragic lives. The most recent episode had a lot of, um, supernatural-susceptible folks who made it kind of hard to be funny (sorry, I don't want to hear about someone's exorcist ghost sword if they're serious about it!), including a Rosicrucian.
If you like this era of occult spirituality too, Ghost Church by Jamie Loftus is a miniseries about the extant American Spiritualist compound in Florida, where Loftus visits and chats with a bunch of practitioners. She has an open mind and heart, and it's really a fascinating show.
Then I would point you toward another short series, the Behind the Bastards podcast episodes about Helena Blavatsky. She was an influential (derogatory) figure from the movement that became Theosophy.
Helena Blavatsky Behind the Bastards
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I'll wrap there and write again soon. This is a new blog about making connections between different media and ideas. You can sign up as though it is a newsletter, or copy it into your RSS reader.