Tag: Halloween

Halloween–2025

BOO!

Today is the day for witches and goblins….the day we celebrate Halloween with candy and eggs (even though they may be expensive it is still a good ‘trick’ on this day)….

In my youth about 20 miles away was a party site for us teenagers….a great make out spot…..it was an old cemetery with large oaks, Spanish moss and seem to always have mist about it…..it was very eerie…..we started calling it the ‘Rock and Roll Graveyard”.

In honor of the day I will post this video of that spot from my teen years….

There was also a haunted house not half a mile from my house….it was on the beach and it was called the Merry Mansion….another short video about the house….

Sadly the structure was destroyed by Hurricane Camille in 1969….gone but not forgotten.

This was a story that ran in the local newspaper….

The Mississippi Coast is full of creepy tales and haunted estates, but Cahill Mansion, once in Gulfport, still sends chills down the spines of those who were around prior to the 1970s.

Cahill Mansion, once situated on Kimball Drive overlooking Bayou Bernard in Gulfport, was constructed around 1915 by William Stewart.

During World War II, Keesler Air Force Base took possession of the mansion, converting it into a Non-Commissioned Officer’s club. In a disturbing turn, a certain sadistic sergeant introduced gambling and prostitution to the premises. According to local legend, the sergeant presided over a torturous, dungeon-like system where many women were coerced into prostitution and even subjected to forced abortions. After his superiors learned of these horrific activities, the NCO club was closed down.

Read more at: https://www.sunherald.com/news/weird/article280736155.html#storylink=cpy

I am sure that others will have similar stories of eerie places in their neighborhoods….If so then please share with my readers.

I hope everyone has a great spook night and a great weekend…..as always….Be Well and Be Safe…..

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ego scribo”

Halloween 2024

I am still not recovering from the procedure of yesterday….the thing put my boney butt down….so I think I will lay low today and try my best to bounce back…..I am a walking zombie (no pun intended) so I will take it easy one more day.

Happy Halloween!

I guess I should post something spooky since it is All Hallow’s Eve…..

How about one of my now famous question?

You know I cannot resist a little whimsy or for that matter a little history.

One person will called it a ‘cemetery’ and another person will call it a ‘graveyard’….which is correct?

Eventually, we’re all going to end up in a graveyard. Or is that a cemetery? What’s the difference, anyway?

These days, the answer is “not much.” Both are places where we bury the dearly departed, and the words are often used interchangeably. But that hasn’t always been the case—in fact, the words’ meanings have sort of flip-flopped.

Cemetery is the older of the two words; it’s derived from the Latin coemētērium and first appeared in the mid-1400s. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), it “Originally applied to the Roman underground cemeteries or catacombs,” or galleries with tombs for bodies along the sides. The first known use from J. Capgrave’s Abbreuiacion of Cronicles, is just barely legible today: “Anicetus … was biried in the cymytery of Kalixt.”

Over time, the meaning of cemetery shifted from the underground catacombs to burial grounds closer to the surface, and by 1485, it had come to refer to the consecrated ground next to a church, a.k.a. a churchyard (a usage that, per the OED, is now obsolete). Since the 1600s, cemetery has referred to a more general burial ground, particularly “a large public park or ground laid out expressly for the interment of the dead, and not being the ‘yard’ of any church,” according to the OED. Think of places like Paris’s Pere Lachaise or Brooklyn’s Green-wood Cemetery, which were both planned with the express purpose of serving as burial grounds for large amounts of people, no matter their religious inclination.

Graveyard is a newer word, and was initially a much more religiously neutral one: When it first popped up in English in the mid-1700s, it simply meant “a burial ground.” The OED pinpoints 1767 as its first use, when it appeared in P. V. Fithian’s  Journal & Letters: “He meant it for a Satire upon the neglect of the people in suffering their Grave-Yard to lie common.”

While “burial ground” remains the OED’s sole meaning for graveyard, other sources—including some funeral providers, Dictionary.com, and the Huffington Post—say that these days, the word refers to smaller burial areas near churches. As Titan Casket puts it, “Graveyards are often associated with churches and are thus always located on church grounds. Owing to land limitations, graveyards tend to be smaller in size, and are, therefore, more challenging to secure. In most cases, graveyards only allow members of the same religion, and more specifically, the same church, to be buried on their premises.”

https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/graveyard-vs-cemetery

I know you guys were dying to ask that question….I did it for you…..and now you know.

Have a spooky good time.  And as always….Be well and Be Safe….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Halloween And History

I have another Round of medical starting at 0900 and god only knows when it will cease so this will be my only post today and hopefully I will be back up and writing for Halloween.

Tomorrow is the day for black cats, ghosts, ghouls and witches but on this day of days did anything happen in the chronicles of history?

Of course there was all kinds of events on this day…..

According to ancient pagans, Halloween is when the “veil” between the living and spirit worlds is at its thinnest, meaning the day is ripe for supernatural occurrences, haunting encounters, and tragic events. Here are 10 Halloween happenings that show October 31 isn’t just a spooky holiday.

  1. Polls opened for the 11th U.S. presidential election // 1828
  2. Hundreds perish in the Monmouth steamship disaster // 1837
  3. Nevada becomes the 36th state // 1864
  4. The “last great cavalry charge” secures an Allied victory during World War I // 1917
  5. The deadliest month of the flu pandemic concludes // 1918
  6. Mussolini celebrates Fascist Party power in Rome // 1922
  7. Harry Houdini dies under mysterious circumstances // 1926
  8. A German U-boat sinks the Reuben James // 1941
  9. Sammy Baugh plays the best individual game of the best individual football season of all time // 1943
  10. “Monster Mash” remains at the top of the Billboard 100 // 1962

Interesting stuff, huh?

But let us continue with the Halloween history stuff.

Halloween is slippery. There’s no clear reason to celebrate on October 31. It doesn’t mark the anniversary of anything. The date is next door to a religious holiday, but Halloween isn’t a religious holiday itself. Modern Halloween practices and tropes are knitted together like a cultural sweater, partly from disparate ancient traditions, religious rites, and folk practices (maybe), and partly from modern sources. There is no clear line from any past holiday to current Halloween, and everything we believe about where Halloween “came from” could be speculation and any thoughts about what it means are opinions. A true folk holiday, Halloween is a muddy, confusing collection of practices that owes as much to Peanuts comics as it does to Medieval Catholicism.

The most commonly repeated Halloween origin story says that the holiday began with the Samhain (pronounced sah-win or sow-in) celebrations of the Celts in Ireland, England, and Northern France. The date of November 1 or October 31 is about halfway between the autumnal equinox and winter solstice, and ninth century Irish literature describes gatherings and feasts marking Samhain, the day when ancient burial mounds were opened, and with them, portals to the Otherworld, the land of the Gods and the dead. Later, the theory goes, these practices were Christianized, renamed “All Hallow’s Day” and “All Hallow’s Eve” by the early Church, and that’s where we get Halloween.

Or maybe not. The idea that Halloween comes from pagan rituals usurped by Christians originated with Welsh scholar Sir John Rhŷs, and he didn’t back up his theory with a ton of evidence. Some modern historians maintain that ties between Celtic celebrations and early Christian practices are tenuous, and medieval Christian festivals provide the real blueprint for the holiday. We know that medieval Christians celebrated All Saints’ and All Souls days during the observance of Allhallowtide—the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead—by holding community feasts, emphasizing dead souls, decorating skeletons, and other Halloween-like activities. So what did they need Samhain for?

(There is so much more history about the day)

https://lifehacker.com/entertainment/real-history-of-halloween

I shall return and back to normal self (fingers crossed)

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The Halloween Tradition

Today is the day that some get all fuzzy about….Halloween. But why do we get thusly?

First let’s start with the ‘why’……

Halloween season is in full swing, with people subjecting themselves to haunted houses, scary movies, and ghoulish costumes. And why? Not to take all the fun out of the festivities, but two researchers in Scientific American have two words to explain this fascination with—and even embrace of—horror: predator inspection. The principle is familiar to researchers in the animal kingdom, and it serves an evolutionary purpose, write Athena Aktipis and Coltan Scrivner. “Morbid curiosity is a powerful way for animals to gain information about the most dangerous things in their environment,” they write. “It also gives them an opportunity to practice dealing with scary experiences.”

Take a gazelle that encounters a cheetah in the savannah, for instance. If the gazelle had to run each time this happened, it would be “physiologically expensive.” The gazelle is better off if it runs only when the cheetah is hunting, and to figure that out, it must fight the instinct to flee and observe its would-be predator to learn things. The broad principle extends to humans: When we expose ourselves to scary situations of the fictional variety, we are on some level preparing to handle real danger. “Today people inspect predators through stories and movies,” write Aktipis and Scrivner. Games, too. New ones used by researchers measure “biofeedback” and reward players who stay calm under stressful scenarios. The upshot of all this: “Embrace the Halloween season with abandon—and then bring that same energy to the challenges of the times we’re living in now,” write the researchers.

Read the full story.

Now that you have a grip on the why we will move on to some historic Halloween…..

Every year during the evening of 31st October, children dress in scary costumes and visit their neighbours declaring ‘trick-or-treat’, all in the hope of filling their little buckets with sugary goodies.

For many, Halloween is a fun-filled tradition that entertains the little ones, gives us an excuse to decorate our homes with spooky attire and provides an opportunity to enjoy some good old-fashioned pumpkin carving.

Like many of our annual celebrations, modern Halloween is the product of centuries of evolution with roots dating back to Pagan times. Over the years, traditions surrounding Allhallowtide (31st October – 2nd November) have come and gone or evolved into new ones.

One such tradition was ‘Souling’, the medieval precursor to trick-or-treating, which revolved around the giving of a small round cake in exchange for prayers. The practice remained popular in Britain until the mid-20th century but has now been largely forgotten.

To understand how Souling came to be, we have to go back 2,000 years to the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain (pronounced ‘Sow-in’), which was traditionally celebrated on 1st November. Meaning ‘summer’s end’, Samhain represented the changing of the seasons.

https://www.history.co.uk/articles/souling-the-forgotten-halloween-tradition

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

This does it for me today….if you celebrate Halloween in any form please be careful….and as always….Be Well and Be Safe.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Halloween–2022

Today is the day we set aside of observe some pagan ritual that we have re-labeled as Halloween.

In that vain I would like to offer up a ‘spooky’ post in honor of this day.

Have you wished you could somehow access the thoughts of your dead loved ones?

If so I have a post for you……

On its face, it’s not that strange that James Vlahos can talk to his father, John, any time he wants to on the phone. He can ask him about his favorite sports team when he’s curious. Or when he wants to ask him what his favorite song is. When the feeling strikes, Vlahos can just shoot his dad a message to see how he’s doing. Whatever it is, his dad is always quick to respond—sometimes with a straightforward answer, and sometimes with a joke.

But here’s the thing: Vlahos’s dad is dead. He passed away in February 2017, due to stage-4 lung cancer. The person Vlahos can chat with today on his phone isn’t his father exactly. It’s an AI chatbot that father and son created after the family learned about John’s terminal diagnosis.

“We knew we were going to lose and were scrambling to find ways to remember him,” Vlahos told The Daily Beast. “Meanwhile, I was working on a book about conversational AI, so I was learning about all of these ways that we can teach computers to talk in human-like ways.”

Vlahos came to the idea rather suddenly. Instead of simply recording John’s memories and stories on audio or video, he could have a more interactive way to revisit his father’s memories and personality through the same AI technology he was already exploring. “That was what gave me this idea that I could make this memory-sharing chatbot that I came to call Dadbot,” Vlahos said.

 

He went on to pen a story about Dadbot for Wired in 2017. Then word started to spread. Emails and calls came in from people from all over the world who were dying or who had dying loved ones that wanted to create similar chatbots of their own. Would you make a Mombot for me? Would you make a Dadbot for me? This became the inspiration for HereAfter AI, a web app created by Vlahos that lets you “preserve meaningful memories about your life and interactively share them with the people you love,” according to its website.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/chatbots-by-james-vlahos-and-hereafter-ai-are-letting-you-talk-to-the-dead

Interesting, eh?

I do not need this ‘service’ for I was close with my father and knew full well what his thoughts were….he was a screaming bigot, he was also commenting on the female anatomy….and those were the main themes of his thoughts.

Check it oit and tell me your thoughts.

Happy Halloween

“lego ergo scribo”

The Devil–What You Know Is Wrong!

It is Halloween and if normal there will be all sorts of creatures out and about…..and that included “devils”…

Speaking of the Devil….what you think you know is probably wrong……

The Devil is one of those figures that pretty much everyone has heard of, and pretty much anyone who’s heard of him has a good idea of what his deal is. They know what he looks like, what his real name is, what his secret origin story is, and all about how he wages war against God for the souls of humankind from his blazing kingdom of the damned in the depths of Hell.

And while for many people, the Devil is a folkloric figure or even just a metaphor, many others believe in a literal Devil who has real impact on the world. So even though it would be impossible to be “wrong” about a folkloric Devil, if you want to believe in a biblical Devil, you should know what the Bible does — and more often, doesn’t – say about him. Spoilers: all the things you know from the first paragraph are wrong.

The Devil isn’t God’s archenemy

In the popular conception of the Devil, he is the embodiment of pure evil, and as such, he’s God’s opposite number. The idea is that God and Satan are constantly at war with each other for the souls of humanity, each sending out their angels against the others’ in order to destroy their greatest enemy. This view, however, isn’t supported by the Bible at all. As the Encyclopedia Britannica points out, it’s only in post-biblical Jewish literature that Satan becomes an adversary of God. The idea of Satan as the ruler of fallen angels who rebelled against God simply does not exist in the Hebrew scriptures.

The idea of more or less equal forces of good and evil battling against each other likely entered into Jewish (and subsequently Christian) thinking as a result of the Jews being exposed to the more dualistic religion of Zoroastrianism when they were exiled to Babylon in the 6th century B.C.

While in the New Testament Satan is portrayed more clearly as an enemy of God, he’s still not anywhere close to equal in power. The best he can do is try to tempt Jesus into abandoning his mission of salvation and worship him, all of which Jesus resists without much effort. It’s only weaker-willed humans like Judas who succumb to Satan’s power. Satan and his minions don’t stand a chance against Jesus.

….Read On…..

Read More: https://www.grunge.com/268331/things-people-get-wrong-about-the-devil/

Happy Halloween and just pleased to able to make that wish in person….

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”