It's mid-October, and it's the perfect time to get frightened. Haunted houses and scary movies offer cheap thrills in relative safety and comfort. Horror novels will gnaw into the back of your brain and make you second guess yourself. A chapter or two of Uzumaki will make sure you don’t sleep at night.
However, if you ask me, the scariest thing has always been reality.
Truth gets under the skin far easier than a far-fetched story. John Wayne Gacy, Jr. is not an imagined monstrous murder like Jason Voorhees. He was a real monster who attacked and killed teenage boys. He dressed up as a clown and performed at birthday parties. That is infinitely more unsettling than a zombie with a machete.
This is why ghost walks will always trump a haunted house in terms of the take away. Ghost walks are organized tours of historically haunted sites, offering in-depth descriptions of the horror that may have taken place directly where you stand. The stories told are often real or at the very least urban folklore rooted in reality. Often the stories are relatable, tragic and gruesome.
I remember going on a ghost walk in my hometown and learning the horrible fate of a young woman who was stabbed 10 times by an ex-lover. Perhaps it is not all that scary when written down, but when told by an effective actress, it sent a shiver down my spine.
Ghost walks are also an effective way to learn a town’s history without a learning setting. It is hard to imagine when Bloomington was just a small town without even a post office. Yet through a ghost walk, through learning the gruesome past of unfortunate past residents, you gain a sense of what it was like. History comes alive in front of your eyes.
Take, for example, the story of the arm devouring girl. In Owen Hall, a young nursing student was seen as stuck-up by the girls in her class. They decided to pull a prank on her by tying a cadaver's arm to lamp in her room. They waited until the girl came back to watch the hysterics. When they didn’t hear the screams of fright that they wanted, they burst into the room. Instead of a terrified girl, they found something worse. The girl had turned into a cannibal and was chewing on the deceased flesh in a fit of madness.
The only drawback to ghost walks is that they can be boring if you're not into it. You have to engage and be interested in order to connect with the stories being told. Unlike other scary mediums, the horror is not readily found. It must be dug up through consideration of what was said. Like a scary story told at a campfire, it isn’t scary as it is being told, it's scary when you're alone in the dark.
True horror lies within what humans are capable of. True horror is that your neighbor could be a psychopath who fantasizes about cooking your liver with fava beans. Ghost walks let you glimpse at monsters of the past and let you fret about whether you’ll meet a monster of the present. Remember, reality is stranger than fiction and much more depraved.
