Take a look outside.
Halloween is here.
The sun-splashed streets and woodworks of the New York City backdrop have suddenly taken an early vacation. They’ll be back in the spring of 2009, unless the anxiety that’s been generated through all the relentless Global Warming chitchat (Did Al Gore really invent the internet?) is actually forced into the forefront.
The jacked up jack-o-lanterns sit along the pin-drop quiet streets, carved up and creepily grilling you from every which way. Skeletons hang from the houses, their delicate, fragile bones whirling in the October wind.
Black cats prowl around suburban homes like the leaders of lonely light-lacking labyrinths. The crisp leaves crumbling under the weight of autumn and slightly brisk weather has shelved our shorts and the trees of Orange foliage are beginning to materialize.
A trip into the quaint village of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., which is sandwiched in between Yonkers Ave. and Dobbs Ferry, is indicative of this.
A slow drive along the streets of Euclid Ave. is enough to get a young kid or teenager revved up for this year’s Halloween festivities. The police unit will be hounding down the Hastings youth, hellbent on confiscating their eggs and shaving cream. These kids will have a lot more on their minds than chocolate sweets, Child’s Play marathons, and ill, lid-lifting costumes. Mischief is what they are all about, and their commitment to it is of highest order.
If there’s any bone-chilling aspect of Halloween, however, it’s the presence of an old, creaky house where bloody, unsolved mysteries cracked the surface decades ago. The house on 36 Calumet, located about two blocks from Reynolds Field is historically parallel to the Myers home in Haddonfield, Ill.
It’s one house that won’t attract any trick-or-treaters on Halloween night. And, on the evening prior to this, there’s no chance any of the city’s youth will dare go near it. For the better of a decade, it’s rumored to be the most haunted residential home in the Westchester County district.
Hype, hearsay, and horror have moved around Hastings’ empty streets at a pretty frenetic pace. They say this happened there, that happened there, the town bounced it from everyone’s memory bank and likes to forget that anything took place there. They keep the story from their children because they don’t want to pollute young minds or generate anxiety. They don’t want kids exposed to that kind of reality and they don’t want to scare away potential residents or tarnish the neat, liberal lovable, cohesive community reputation the village has garnered.
The red blood stains are still visible on the wall through the back window in the master bedroom. It’s Gushing red, crimson, sticky blood that gives hawkers nightmares. It allows the mythic mystery to grow and carry on, from class to class, generation to generation, as Hastings is continuously reminded of something it would have liked to forget about a long time ago. Some of the stories are believable, to an extent. Others are blown out of proportion.
There’s no document of it. The October 31 Rivertowns Enterprise is no where on file in the local library, the Journal News story about it has also been discarded. Nobody has proof of what actually went on that one, twisted evening. And to this day, most people tend to just deny it. Police officers have no recollection of it, there too busy storming the woods for underage drinkers and peddling out parking tickets. The townies will tell you one story after another about what happened.
It’s been so fabricated over the years you just are not sure what to believe. But you know something happened, and something continues to flush the Hastings youth into detective mode every Halloween. They want answers. The parents, most of them, don’t have them. They say nothing ever happened, and that the house was the home to the Office Ink before a business man from Pennsylvania bought it out in 1992 and that it’s a story created by “punks” to scare little kids on Halloween.
Thus, the former home of the Hastings’ Office Ink (which has since shifted its office to the center of town, adjacent to the Hastings Fire Department) and the place that claimed the troubled and still-missing Rick Garrison has since been fixed up.
Still, the basement, once plagued by asbestos and cracked paint and woodcut coat hangers (made by Garrison in middle school during his favorite class, technology) helps make this joint the most talked about real estate amongst the townsfolk. Around this time of year, it only festers. Who lives there now? How come the mailman passes by it with his nose turned, breath held, and never has any mail for the resident? Why has paranoia spread like wildfire, instilling fear in the Hastings youth—none of whom will ever dare entering the home on Halloween night?
A lot of Hastings residents aren’t at their houses during All Hallows eve. Still they leave a bucket of candy for the trick-or-treaters to treat themselves too, and perhaps some Party City decoration with a HAPPY HALLOWEEN sign on the door.
Not at 36. The lights are shut. The old, creaky, 1984 Oldsmobile that’s parked there sporadically is no where to be seen.
The mystery was born in 1980. It was the last time anyone had an account of Garrison’s whereabouts. Garrison, then 17, was a student at Hastings High School. A bit demure but certainly creative in his ways, the dedicated art student and top runner on the boys Varsity Cross-Country team (he still holds the 2nd fastest 5K time in school history) was having so much difficulty with the rigors of the high school experience and college applicant process that one day he packed his bags and trekked up to the Hastings Pool area. He later moved his few belongings into Nemsees, a well-known teen hangout where the kids poured to get pummeled and kegs were the theme.
Before moving in with an old lady (for $150 a month) at 36 Calumet, he stayed in the woods. He simply sat there, staring into oblivion and entertaining thoughts that nobody can penetrate. He would sit there, in meditative state…waiting, waiting, waiting, for someone to emerge from the dust and instantly notice him. His whole life, he felt neglected by society. He felt invisible to the Hastings High outside world, despite the efforts to blend in. He had a penchant for making people laugh with hilarious, otherworldly, crass and over-the-top jokes. But still, he was an outsider looking in…
Then, on Halloween night 1979, all hell broke loose. The community hit the panic button after learning that two teens had been slaughtered and that a killer armed with a machete and two ancient ratchets was on the loose. Garrison was a patient at the Ecko New York Mills psychiatric department and placed on potent drugs (depression, lack of sexual drive, and OCD were the main side effects of Garrisons tiny pills of blue luster) back in 1974. He had been living off of them, as they were an everyday commitment in his life. The doctor warned him that the pills were to be taken meticulously and he can not skip days.
He never heard the end of it from his peers. “What are you on birth control, you sick fuck?” Dave Thomas, who was apparently one of Garrison’s biggest nemesis’, would say to him… Thomas, he of the smart-ass attitude, well-sculpted build, football pedigree, and habit of landing the most attractive girl in class, was one of Garrison’s biggest problems. He would bait him and make fun of him and put him on blast whenever females were present. He penetrated Rick’s head and stayed there—growing, growing, growing, into this demonic creature that Rick felt he had to eventually thwart. He wrote about what a “horrible human being he is” in his diary, noting that he was “as fake as they come."
Girls liked Rick at first, they liked his skinny running legs, his calm demeanor, intensely private nature and his peaceful poetry.
One day, he walked into school wearing cut-up jeans and a Greatful Dead t-shirt. “What’s up, mushroom Rick?” Asked Mike Millsap, who, along with Marina Marquette was slain on October 31, 1980. “I didn’t know tree-hugging faggots like you were still existent in the community.” TO BE CONTINUED….
Will I find a place more frightening than Blood Manor this October (https://mail.quinnipiac.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=c8bdcb3f1bd04ec6b919176aba83c05a&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.bloodmanor.com). I mean, I was born in Manhattan. Now I find myself there every other night, wondering if I will also die there. The Manor’s founders and spearheads Jim Faro, Jimmy Lorenzo, and Mike Rodriguez have established a hell-house that will have you popping valium and smoking cigarettes before each thrill-riding tour through the cryptic crib.
Last Friday, I encountered enough to convince me that the apocalypse was on the horizon. The “piano man” who jumped out on me as soon as I led a group of scared schoolboys (You don’t get fright houses like this going to liberal arts colleges in Massachusetts and Connecticut, though there is probably a buffet-line of smoking hot broads draped in sexy attire), the hungry, sumo wrestler sized man and the Sling Blade midget who had me sweating bullets through the houses elite décor last time I had the audacity to return his coldhearted stare down.
It’s a nuthouse.
The members of the house are permanent residents who live for this night. They have October 31 penned in the household calendar all-year around. I was in City Island, NY tonight on business, but I checked out some of the spook spunk the nautical community has to offer. One house decorated to the brim with grinning goblins, well-chiseled pumpkins and wicked witches. Pretty tight. Still, Blood Manor is front-loaded with every cold-blooded killer’s wet dream ingredients, underscored by the Anaconda-like creature that treats you at the entrance. Rehydrating the mindset of those who have made it out alive, it’s a fucking blood-lettered nuthouse. Absolutely crazy. Coming from me that says a lot. Check it out.
-Zach Smart
