A
S READERS OF RUE MORGUE’S TRAVELOGUE OF TERROR KNOW, THE WORLD IS FULL OF CREEPY ATTRACTIONS AND HORRIFIC HISTORICAL SITES JUST WAITING TO BE VISITED. And, as J.W. Ocker will tell you, a large concentration of these are located in New England. Birthplace of Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, the Northeastern part of America has enough ghastly tourist destinations to fill a whole book: like The New England Grimpendium (out now from Countryman Press), Ocker’s new guide to the macabre and ghastly sites of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
A lifetime horror fan, Ocker runs the blog
www.oddthingsiveseen.com,
where he documents his travels in search of the strange and unusual. Cur- rently a resident of Nashua, New Hampshire, his take on why this part of the continent has such a wealth of material for him is simple. “Age,” he explains. “It’s one of the oldest areas of the US. I’m originally
from the DC area, and down there everything is brand new, whereas here I have ten graveyards within a couple of miles of me that are hundreds of years old. History is often just a synonym for the macabre: wars, death. I guess that’s some kind of inspiration for people like King and Poe and Lovecraft, people born in New England.” Ocker’s Grimpendiumcollects the most horror-themed
of his blog posts, and many new additions, into a com- prehensive source of info on horror movie shooting loca- tions, cemeteries, horror icon homes, monsters and myths of the area. Lonely Planet it ain’t. “It’s not just a catalogue of haunted houses or folklore.
It has real things you can see, touch, experience,” says Ocker. Some of those things will likely be familiar: Lizzie Borden’s B&B, the Session 9 asylum-turned-apartment complex or the town of Salem. But then there are also quirky surprises: the Lake Champlain Monster (a.k.a. “Champ”) of Burling- ton, VT or a plaque commemorating the great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. Of particular interest to genre fans will be the detailed descriptions on visiting more than twenty locations used for horror films, from the grand manor houses seen in Let’s Scare Jessica To Death and Dark Shadows, to the churches used for The Witches of Eastwick and I Spit on Your Grave (1978), to the human cemetery featured in Pet Sematary and, a favourite of the author’s, the Beetlejuice bridge.
Sordid Sights: (left to right) The mummy at General Hospital, the Poe Memorial, and the International Cryptozoology Museum.
Ocker, who culled the info mostly from IMDb then set out with printouts
of Google maps and DVD screen grabs, lets you know which locations are off-limits private property and which can be traipsed through. (Somewhat surprisingly, few if any towns trumpet their places in horror cinema history, not even Martha’s Vineyards, seaside home of Jaws.) One gets the sense that these are off the beaten path. Even at a huge insti- tution in a major city such as Boston, you’ll probably have the attractions to yourself. “One of my favourite items in the book is the Massa-
chusetts General Hospital Mummy,” says Ocker. “The old operating room is a national landmark, anyone can just walk in; and there in the room you can see one of the first mummies that ever entered the US. Boston is such a huge tourist city with colonial attractions and this is by far the coolest thing I’ve ever seen there.” The Grimpendiumcan be enjoyed whether or not you
ever leave your own home. (In fact, intrepid travellers will want to pack a GPS, for the book does not offer the kind of handy at-a-glance maps typical of travel guides.) But for Ocker, the whole point is getting out there and expe- riencing the sites with your own eyes.
“Seeing the grave of an author or a filming location or something from
history makes everything about them seem more real,” he says. “Before visiting Poe’s grave, he was just a collection of stories to me – both in the sense of his work and the anecdotes about his life. Now that I’ve stood above his bones, his work takes on a different heft. Also, every time I watch a movie whose filming location I’ve been to, I feel like I develop some kind of stake in that movie. It gives you a new connection.”
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