Tag: halloween

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Ghost Fishing

(left to right) Bob Roy, Barbara Roy, Emily Guenther, and Stephen Guenther (Photos: Toby Sells)

Ghosts haunt Earnestine & Hazel’s. 

You get that info in your Welcome to Memphis starter pack, tucked next to other fact cards that read, “Central has great wings” and “The trolleys ain’t for transportation.”

I’d heard about the bar’s many ghosts, and its haunted jukebox. Chris McCoy, our film and TV editor, had, too.

“The first time I ever heard about Earnestine & Hazel’s, the first thing they said was, ‘Oh yeah, it’s haunted,’” McCoy said. “There’s a lot more crazy stuff about this place besides that but … if any place is going be haunted around here, it’s this place.”

I’d heard. McCoy had heard. So had Abigail Morici, our culture editor. None of us were sure, however. None of us had ever had a paranormal encounter in the place. But I knew some people who had, some people with the tools, the know-how, the experience, and a dogged curiosity about what lay beyond the veil to help us turn our second-hand knowledge into, maybe, a firsthand experience. 

Last week, the investigation team from Historical Haunts Memphis showed us around Earnestine & Hazel’s in a spooky nighttime adventure that offered the ultimate Memphis Halloween experience, and, perhaps, a glimpse into the spirit world.

Prologue

I don’t work many nights. I get my journalism-ing done in daytime hours so that evenings are clear for family, dinner, and show-binging with my wife. But this was an offer impossible to pass up. 

I’m a ghost guy. Well, I celebrate all of paranormalia, really. And I mean really. For proof, look to my first book, published this year — Haint Blues: Strange tales from the American South. It’s full of ghosts, monsters, aliens, and even a psychic horse. Wrote a whole-ass book on this stuff, y’all. 

But I’ve never had a paranormal encounter. Never seen Bigfoot. Never spotted a UFO. And never have I ever had an encounter with anything even remotely ghostly — no apparition, nor shadow figure, shade, specter, phantom, presence, revenant … you get it. 

I’ve watched a million hours of ghost evidence videos on YouTube, enough to believe that likely 90 percent (or more) were hoaxed for cheap internet attention. But my mind was wide open heading into our guided spirit investigation last week. And as I left Cooper-Young, I also had my antennae up, a sort of low, gnawing anxiety that I could not quite put my finger on nor dispel as regular reporter jitters. 

Even as I turned onto South Main from Crump, the “ghost” in Ghost River Brewing took on a strange dread. I love Ghost River and I was truly excited to maybe encounter a real ghost. So what was this anxiety? I wasn’t sure. 

Then, I saw the caboose of a Canadian National train pass over me as I drove under the trestle, and thought I remembered that to be an omen of either good or bad. I couldn’t remember which. It didn’t matter. Because just thinking about it underscored that I was, in fact, having some sort of weird anxiety about the evening. Then, I saw the sexy-posing, winking screw on the Active Bolt and Screw Co. building and thought, “Well, there’s that, at least.”

Meet the Team

The Earnestine & Hazel’s building earns the bar’s “ragged but right” ethos. Usually, I revel at a chance to celebrate in those vaunted rooms of peeling paint, uneven floors, low light, and murky history. But that Tuesday evening, the bar slumped on the sidewalk, unlit and sad — like the face of friend lost in an unpleasant revery when they think no one can see them. And, yes, this description fits under the “meet the team headline,” for it was as big a character in our evening as any there with a pulse.

Thomas, a super nice guy in a Pantera T-shirt, unlocked the doors, pulled away the massive door bar, and allowed us entry, leaving us to our own endeavors. The lights seemed lower than usual, casting deeper shadows into an already dim room. Wheel of Fortune played silently on flat screens above, the audience applauding someone who’d just solved the puzzle — “Purple Rain, Purple Rain.” The air was close but not stifling, scented with roasted onions, a hint of stale beer, and the dusty passage of time.

Meanwhile, Bob Roy sat his blue tool tote on a table and began checking his many devices. Though the bag he rifled through was “the small one,” ribbed his wife Barbara Roy. 

“We started with just one cheap little meter,” Bob said. “A year later, we probably had $1,000 worth of equipment.”

That’s Bob all over, the data hound. He works in tech and trusts his tools to measure physical aberrations that may hint at a presence our eyes cannot see. 

Then, there’s Barbara, the sensitive one. Spiritual abilities run in her family, enough for her to once correctly foretell her sister’s pregnancy. She respects the spirits she connects with like the living. 

“I’ve always felt like there was more out there for us to understand,” Barbara said.

During the load-in, settle-in, meet-and-greet beginning of our investigation, Emily Guenther seemed at home in the darkened barroom, at ease, checking her phone and the windows. She’s a well-tuned empath, among other things, who has spent hours in that very place doing the very thing we were about to do, so her ease was no surprise. That experience was a calming influence for the uninitiated, like us, as she tried to contact spirits, even inviting one to sit in her lap. 

Emily’s husband, Stephen, served as a sort of a lead guide for us that evening. He, too, has spent countless hours investigating countless haunted sites, attempting to glimpse other realms in real life. In a Flyer story ages ago, I called Stephen the “Mayor of Spooky Memphis” for his familiarity with the city’s spirit side, a title I’ll renew here, but not just for his knowledge. Stephen can break down complex spiritual concepts and draw them broadly enough that even I can understand. 

Chris McCoy, who we met earlier, has worked on Memphis’ independent film scene for more than two decades. He loves a good story in the theater, but on the street, he’s a man of science. Ask him about rocketry or the chemical reasons hemp can get you high, and you’ll see what I mean. Still, it was plain Chris came to the evening with an open mind and an open heart. 

When I asked Abigail Morici, who we also met earlier, if she’d ever had a paranormal encounter, she immediately (and shockingly) replied, “Well, my mom says I had a ghost friend when I was 3.” Dorea, Abigail named the ghost girl. Though, when I asked her to spell it, she didn’t know. She was 3, she explained.

“I told my mom things like she wore pantaloons, and she came on a boat with her brother and her mom,” Abigail said. “We lived in New Orleans, in this house right by all the cemeteries. [Dorea died of] yellow fever, we think, maybe. It gave my mom the creeps and she won’t talk about it to this day.”

The Set Up

Our team assembled under the bar’s bare naked light bulbs by the downstairs bar. All the hands were shook, introductions made. Bob explained how he uses all his tools. Stephen explained the evening’s basic run-of-show. Then, he explained some of what we might expect. 

“Sometimes, especially here at Earnestine & Hazel’s upstairs and in the backrooms, at times it’s very heavy,” Stephen said. “It almost feels like barometric pressure, like you can almost feel a bit of pressure. 

“Some people get touched, never violently. You may feel, particularly women, someone touch your hair.” 

Then, he explained what we should not expect. 

“Ghost hunting is a bit of a misnomer; it’s really like ghost fishing,” he said. “You just go sit somewhere, set up your stuff, and wait. 

“A lot of the [ghost hunting] TV shows are about … 22 minutes long, without commercials. That might be days of filming — three or four days — edited down to the best parts.”

Much of the evening, Stephen warned, might be boring. We’d snug in somewhere, sit in the dark, and ask a lot of questions. Actually communing with the dead, it turns out, can be every bit as tough and tedious as any other worthwhile endeavor made to look easy by a charismatic TV host. (I’m looking at you, Bill Dance.)

Questions would form the core of our evening’s commune. That’s how we let the spirits know we were there and there to listen to them, not drink Hi-Life and draw cuss words on the wall. And there were a few best practices for those questions. 

Ask binary questions, not open-ended affairs. So, Stephen explained, instead of “What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?” ask “Do you like chocolate?” That way, a spirit can more easily communicate with the team — lighting up a motion sensor or tripping a meter rather than soliloquizing about frozen desserts. While the veil may be thin in places like Earnestine & Hazel’s, it can be hard to be heard through the curtains, it seems. 

Some other guidelines for clarity: Keep conversation to a minimum. Use your voice to “tag” human noises like passing cars, passing pedestrians, or even passing gas. (Stephen joked his team has a strict no-Taco-Bell rule before their investigations.) Phones go in airplane mode to not give trip electro-magnetic equipment for false positives.

With the team and ground rules established, it was time to wobble up the familiar wobbly back stairs and into the must-odored heart of the unfamiliar, the unknown.

We let the spirits know we were there to listen to them, not drink Hi-Life and draw cuss words on the wall.

The Black Room

You’ve sat in this room. Make a 180 right turn at the top of the stairs to the end of the hall and choose the room to the right. The walls are painted black, illuminated with a single blue light bulb. Being in this room with a beer and your friends is one crazy stitch in the fabric of this great city. But in that room with ghost hunters, the room vibrates with some silent expectation that had me focused to the very edge of senses. 

“Emily, if you sense anything, you let us know,” Stephen said as we settled into the Black Room’s squishy seats. 

“I sense the batteries in my audio recorder are dead,” Emily said. 

“So,” Stephen began, “we usually just start talking. This is Stephen. I’m here with Emily, Bob, and Barbara. We have some guests with us. They wanted to come over and hear and just kind of experience for themselves how it feels here. So many have expressed the presence of spirits here. So we hope that you’ll interact with us tonight. 

“We come peacefully, just to talk. We like to tell your stories. That’s how people live on. We tell their stories.”

Silence. Focused silence. Extended silence. I busied myself taking photos of the scene. Chris angled his phone video rig around the room. Abigail clutched her bag on her lap with two arms as if in fear of some ghostly ne’er-do-well. Bob moved a small, black, digital device back and forth. 

“It got up over one just a second ago,” Bob said, almost to himself as he watched the readings. This drew a mild hmm from Barbara.    

Stephen asked if any of the spirits were women and promised that the men in the room would leave if that made them feel more at ease. Silence. “Any waitresses or servers among us?” Emily asked. “The building was once a church,” Barbara said. 

“When it was a church, did a little girl fall down the stairs?” Barbara asked. 

More silence. Who else? The team asked if any among them had been cooks, clergy, or musicians — horn or piano players. Silence. Stephen said aloud he’d heard there were no spirits in Earnestine & Hazel’s, a gentle taunt to coax communication. Nothing.

Barbara said she’d spoken once with the spirit “Mr. George,” Russell George, the bar’s former manager who had committed suicide in the building, about his famous Soul Burgers, and their famously secret sauce. 

“Does anybody here know the secret?” Emily asked. 

There was a soft pause and Chris then softly said, “Worcestershire sauce and pickle juice.”         

After some gentle snickering, Stephen said to the spirits, “Chris just shared the secret. Is that okay?”  

The men eventually did leave the Black Room but it was not enough to bring any spirits to the fore. 

The spirits of Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, and B.B. King are said to frequent Nate’s Bar.

Nate’s Bar

You’ve been in Nate’s Bar, too, at the far other end (the front) of the building. There, Stephen said he’d heard reports of encounters with the spirits of Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, and B.B. King. He himself connected with the ghost of Wilson Pickett there one night. (The details are creepy and amazing. Ask him.)  

The team continued with familiar questions: Any one with us tonight? Anyone had a drink here? Silence. 

Stephen then turned on a spirt box. It’s a digital device that (to my unscientific ear) produces a skipping stutter of static. With them, ghost hunters can ask direct questions and, sometimes, get direct answers. When Emily asked, “Any musicians here?” amid a pause in the stutter, a voice could be heard to say, “yeah” or “yup.” Later, this prompted Stephen to begin talking about Ray Charles and his alleged carousing at the bar.  

“I don’t know why people have to bring out the negative all the time,” he began. “Clearly, we each have things we struggle with. So …” 

With that, one of the motion-sensor balls lit up in a sparkle of multi-colored lights. Barbara and I had been four feet from the dark thing for at least 15 minutes. Neither had moved to touch it — even to look at it — as it lit up. This drew shallow, excited gasps. This was the moment we’d planned for, organized for, and waited patiently for. 

“Oh, hello!” Stephen said. “Thank you! I hope you agree with that. You should talk about the good times and the contributions of folks …”

With this, another motion light dazzled in a spray of color, a different one, drawing another wave of muted, respectful exultation, and a “thank you” from Barbara.

Heading Home

There it was. Something I could not explain, in an environment I thought I knew. In short, it was a paranormal experience, my first in the more than 30 years since I fell into the rabbit hole of myth, legend, and the unexplained. 

In the moment, my heart raced and eyebrows went wide. Though, the situation called for respect and calm, I wanted to yell, “Holy fucking shit!” I didn’t.

Instead, I felt kind of warm. And in the place of that weird anxiety on my way there, my way home was a state of sort of quiet contemplation. Did I witness a sign or message from the dead? Did the veil open just feet from where I stood? If it did, what then? Is there an afterlife? If not, what did I see?

I decided to not think too hard about the answers to those questions. Instead, I put on some Wilson Pickett and decided that Bob was right. It’d be easy as hell to spend big money just to have that experience one more time.

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Fun Stuff Metaphysical Connection

Metaphysical Connection: The History of Halloween

Halloween is fun. Samhain is sacred. (Photo: Brenkee | Pixabay)

Halloween is a magical time of year for many people. It’s a time when we can let some of our inhibitions go temporarily. Halloween allows all of us to confront our fears in a controlled way via scary costumes and haunted attractions. Secular Halloween is fun, but there is a spiritual history behind the holiday. Many pagans and witches still observe the rituals and meanings behind it. 

For the Celts, who lived during the Iron Age in what is now Ireland, Scotland, the U.K., and other parts of Northern Europe, Samhain (pronounced saa-win) marked the end of summer and kicked off the Celtic new year. Ushering in a new year signaled a time of both death and rebirth, something that was doubly symbolic because it coincided with the end of a bountiful harvest season and the beginning of a cold and dark winter.

Samhain is one of the eight sabbats celebrated by Wiccans and other pagan religious groups. Pagans recognize a seasonal calendar known as the Wheel of the Year, based on the agricultural cycle of the U.K. The Wheel of the Year honors the blessings and changes of each season and acknowledges that the year has two halves — a light half (spring/summer) and a dark (half autumn/winter). 

We recognize Samhain as the third and final harvest festival. The first is Lughnasadh at the beginning of August. Lughnasadh celebrates the harvest of grains and the last of the summer fruits and vegetables. It is fondly called the bread holiday. The second is Mabon. Mabon is celebrated on the autumn equinox and is a time of balance, thanksgiving, and celebrating the harvest of the last of the fall fruits and vegetables. Some consider Mabon to be Witches’ Thanksgiving. 

Samhain is the final harvest of the fall season. This would have been a time when our ancestors brought in any remaining grains and vegetables from the fields and slaughtered animals to supply meat for the upcoming winter. Special bonfires were lit, which were deemed to have protective and cleansing powers. The animal harvest at Samhain may be one of the reasons that death is associated with it. However, nature grows dormant now, which is likely another reason we associate death with this time of year. 

According to Irish mythology, Samhain (like Beltane) was when the “doorways” to the Otherworld opened, allowing supernatural beings and souls of the dead to come into our world. While Beltane was a summer festival for the living, Samhain was often considered a festival for the dead. 

The origins of Halloween are so closely tied to Samhain, it would be easy to say that your Halloween celebrations are much like Samhain celebrations. There’s lots of overlap, but one of the biggest differences between them is intention and reverence. 

Many Wiccans will perform a Samhain ritual close to October 31st — the date we have standardized as Samhain/Halloween. Samhain rituals typically honor deities associated with death and rebirth from various cultures, calling out to our ancestors and honoring them or leaving them offerings. Some people put up an ancestor altar at this time. 

Halloween is the commercialized version of a religious holiday, giving it a slightly different energy from the origins of Samhain. Many Wiccans and pagans enjoy Halloween as a part of Samhain. Some of us will decorate our homes or workspaces with seasonal decor. We carve pumpkins, go to corn mazes and haunted houses, and buy a ridiculous amount of candy. We may likely end up in a costume at a party, eating and drinking with our community — much like our ancestors. We can do all of these fun and exciting things for Halloween, so long as we understand that when we begin the religious portion of our seasonal rites, we must do that part with reverence and intention. Halloween is fun. Samhain is sacred. 

Emily Guenther is a co-owner of The Broom Closet metaphysical shop. She is a Memphis native, professional tarot reader, ordained Pagan clergy, and dog mom.

Categories
Fun Stuff Metaphysical Connection

Metaphysical Connection: Witchy Crafts

Labels can give your witch bottle some pizzazz. (Photos: Emily Guenther)

October is here and that means we’re all on the hunt for everything witchy. A relatively easy thing you can do this season is create a witch bottle. Typically witch bottles are spells or tools used in manifestation work. But if you are looking for a cute, decorative item to add to your Halloween décor, you can make a witch bottle for decoration. 

Making a decorative witch bottle can be a fun activity for the whole family and a great way to express your creativity. You’ll need jars. Any size will work so long as the mouth is big enough to add things into the bottle and it has a lid to seal it. You’ll also want glitter, mica powder, dyes, foil paper, or other pretty items to add to your jar. Once you have all your supplies, let your creativity flow. Add any glitter, mica powder, dye, or foil into your bottle. Fill with water and put the lid on the jar. If you’d like to make it extra witchy, you can melt wax over the top or add a label to the bottle. It can be easy to make your own labels to tie to the jar, but you can also purchase some witchy stickers while you’re collecting supplies to go in the bottle. I made a few of these up for a party I threw years ago and they stayed up in my house for years. 

Making an intentional witchy bottle is not much different, but it will depend on what you want to manifest. In order for your bottle to be effective, you have to begin with a very clear goal. The ingredients and tools you should use change based on what type of love you’re looking to invite into your life. Do you want to find long-lasting, romantic love? Are you hoping to strengthen familial bonds and connections? Visualize a very clear image of what this spell jar’s success looks like to guide and inform the whole creation process.

Once your intent is set, it’s time to select a jar and begin deciding which ingredients, tools, and other implements you may want to include. I encourage you to put a good amount of thought into this and be thorough. Make sure you have everything you need when beginning, to avoid breaking your concentration to fetch something in the middle of it. This would be disruptive and could affect the spell’s viability. Spend some time researching herbs, oils, and symbols associated with your desires. 

Most spell-crafters agree that it’s important to energetically and spiritually cleanse the immediate space where you’ll be working. This ensures that no unwanted energies will interfere with or muddle your spell. Try out different methods, or combinations of methods, to figure out which ones feel best to you. You don’t have to stick to any one method, either. Feel free to change it up depending on your mood or the intent of the witch bottle. Four different methods you can use to spiritually prepare your ritual space are sound cleansing, smoke cleansing, cleansing with visualization, and space cleansing with crystals. 

Now it’s time to build your jar. I often start by adding written intentions to witch bottles because that helps to set the intention for the rest of the bottle’s creation. There are no hard-and-fast rules to the assembly, so please feel free to assemble yours in the ways that feel most appropriate to you.

There are a few different ways to seal your finished witch bottle. Wax sealing, sealing with tape, cloth sealing, and using sigils to seal the spell jar spiritually are the most commonly used methods. After your spell jar has been assembled, it’s time to give it a concentrated boost of magickal energy to activate it and set its power into action. There are several ways of doing this: through visualization; by using athames, wands, or clear quartz points; or by shaking the jar. Shaking the jar is one of my favorite ways to activate a witch bottle, especially those that are water-based. 

Whatever you decide to do, enjoy the witchiness of October — and happy manifesting! 

Emily Guenther is a co-owner of The Broom Closet metaphysical shop. She is a Memphis native, professional tarot reader, ordained Pagan clergy, and dog mom.

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News News Blog

Mr. Lincoln’s Costume Shoppe to Close After 34 Years in Overton Square

Barry Lincoln inside Mr. Lincoln's Costume Shoppe.

Mr. Lincoln’s Costume Shoppe, a Midtown landmark for more than three decades, will close on Friday, May 31, 2024.

Barry Lincoln, the longtime owner and shop’s namesake, is retiring after building his business into a must-visit spot for Memphians wanting to look sharp for Halloween.

I interviewed Mr. Lincoln himself about how he got into the costuming business, and why he’s leaving it all behind. But the good news is, he wants to sell the shop. So, maybe this is one Memphis tradition that can continue.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

On Scary Stories and Psychology

Gather ’round the campfire for some scary tales. (Photo: Dlrz4114 | Dreamstime.com)

The first book series I remember being immersed in was Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I have a distinct memory of lying on the floor, elbows dug deep into the carpet, thumbing through them for the first time. I was probably 8 or 9 years old, my eyes half-closed in fright upon passing a page with one of Stephen Gammell’s ghastly illustrations. While the twisted tales of ghosts and ghouls, death and decomposition, and mania and murder were probably not quite fit for young minds or eyes (“the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out”), I eventually read the three installments several times through. The stories and drawings embedded themselves into my psyche in a strange way — and taught me more about mortality and fear than I’d yet to learn from real-life experience. It’s likely that Scary Stories contributed to my eventual attraction to horror movies and the macabre. Creepshow, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th were among my favorite films long before I had any business watching them. And Halloween — along with all its spooky accoutrements — has always been my favorite holiday. Oddly enough, there was something I liked about being afraid, dipping my toes into these uncomfortable emotions through terror-inducing scenes on paper or screen.

Interestingly, there’s some science behind this. Research has been done on the enjoyment of horror and fear (i.e. films, haunted houses, murder podcasts). In a Psychology Today article, “On the Psychology of Horror Movies,” Mathias Clasen, Ph.D., writes of studies conducted by the Aarhus University in Denmark’s Recreational Fear Lab: “We think that horror provides an imaginative context in which people can play with fear. Horror movies invite viewers to immerse themselves in threat scenarios,” he writes. “ … those horrors stimulate the fear system with which evolution has equipped us. And because the fear system evolved to respond selectively to ancestrally relevant threats, the threats depicted in horror movies tend to reflect dangers that have haunted our species for thousands or even millions of years.”

The New York Times also explored this in “How Horror Stories Help Us Cope With Real Life,” saying, “Scary movies, books, and podcasts can help people think through how they would respond to threats and prepare them for worst-case scenarios … and consuming horror in controlled doses may actually be helpful for our mental health.”

In purposely consuming content that instills fear, we’re activating our fight-or-flight response, and this can help purge real-life, everyday anxieties and negative emotions — actually offering a type of catharsis. “Some studies have found that people who are feeling nervous or are prone to anxiety are drawn to horror films,” the Times’ Melinda Wenner Moyer continues. “Perhaps scary movies provide a new focal point for their worries: Instead of ruminating over, say, finances, they can worry about the zombies they’re watching.”

We get an endorphin rush viewing such scary scenarios — watching villains hunt down victims, for example — but from a safe vantage point. And today, we’ve got plenty of real fears — and things that make us feel unsafe — to sort through: unrelenting rises in cost of living, gun violence, war, global warming. And we can’t exactly hide our faces behind soft blankets to dispel them. Embracing and immersing ourselves in fictional fears might help us feel more in control in a seemingly out-of-control world.

As you settle into this Halloween holiday, don your creepiest costume, and gather around a fire, be sure to share the supernatural stories from this week’s cover story, “A Haunting in Memphis.” The tragedies, mysteries, and myths therein may provide some unexpected comfort this spooky season.

Categories
Fun Stuff Metaphysical Connection

Metaphysical Connection: Spirits of Halloween Past

An ancestor altar (Photo: Emily Guenther)

We are fast approaching Halloween and Samhain. There are many different cultures that celebrate the end of summer/fall and the beginning of winter and the dark half of the year. Samhain (pronounced sah-win) is a holiday originating from an ancient Celtic spiritual tradition that honors the changing of the seasons as well as our ancestors. 

It is believed that during this time of year the veil or mists that separate our world from the Otherworld, where our ancestors and other spirits reside, is at its thinnest. This means that communicating with our spirit allies and ancestors can be easier at this time of year. It is not uncommon to see an uptick in people wanting tarot readings in October. If the veil between our world and the Spirit world is easier to cross, then performing divination readings during this time may allow messages to come through more straightforwardly. 

One of the easiest things a person can do to honor their ancestors is to create an ancestor altar. Ancestor altars are relatively easy to do, you just need to find a place for it to go. Generally the best place to put an altar is where it will not be disturbed, whether that is up high on a bookcase or in the bedroom so visitors don’t feel the need to pry. Depending on your religious or family tradition, there may be certain things that you must have on the altar. If you have no such requirements, build your altar in a way that feels right to you. Many people use a white tablecloth on their ancestor altar, as white is the color of purity, spirit, and is the highest vibrational color there is. My ancestor altar is on a built-in bookshelf in my office, and I do not use a cloth on it because I think it would look cluttered. 

Once you have a good space, it does not matter how big or small, fill your altar with photos and mementos of your loved ones. If you do not have photos of your deceased loved ones, add something that makes you think of them. I have a great uncle who I loved dearly. He was a horticulturalist and teacher. I have a stick with a pinecone on the end of it on my ancestor altar for him. To me it represents his love of nature and plants, and it also came from his childhood home. You can also type or write a list of names of your beloved dead and place it on the altar. 

Once you have added your loved ones to your ancestor altar, it is time to leave them offerings. It is always good to honor our ancestors, but it is better if we feed them. We know that everything we do requires energy. If we believe that our ancestors can visit us, then we know their visitation takes energy on their part. It is our duty, both because we can and because we love them, to give them offerings that will replenish their energy. If we give them energy, it will make it easier and more appealing for them to visit us. Typical offerings for the ancestors include water, their favorite foods, and even their favorite items or hobbies. Did grandpa like to gamble? Put some dice or playing cards on the altar for him. Did your aunt love macaroni and cheese? Make a big dish of it and place some on the ancestor altar for her and the family. The ancestors will take the energy they need from the food. 

We would all do well to remember and honor those who came before us, whether they are family or not. Without our ancestors’ decisions and actions, none of us would be where we are now. Although October is a time of year when we think more about the collective ancestors, they deserve to be honored every day. One of the ways we can honor them is by being the best version of ourselves we can be and working to make the world a better place for the next generation, who will call us the ancestors.

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Art We Recommend We Recommend

Monster Market Rises From the Dead This Weekend

This weekend, Monster Market returns for its seventh annual pop-up, this year at the Medicine Factory. And as with years before, it’s expected to be a graveyard smash. 

Founded by illustrator Lauren Rae Holtermann, better known as Holtermonster, the weeklong market opens on Friday, October 13th, and will feature “weird” art, oddities, apparel, home decor, and more, made by over 80 makers from all over the country. (Think Dracula earrings, cemetery photos, Bigfoot illustrations, carnivorous plants … honestly, “weird” covers it.)

Holtermonster, whose own work finds influence in pop culture, comics, and horror, says when she first started selling her work at markets and festivals, “I felt like I was always kind of the odd one out, like style-wise. And so, if my people weren’t coming to the markets I was selling at, I thought wouldn’t it be kind of fun if I could make a special event for all the weird people and weird makers?” Thus, Monster Market was born.

Since that first year in 2017, Holtermonster says the market has only grown, even when it went online for a few years due to Covid. “Since this year it’s coming back [fully in-person], I really wanted to bring the community into it more,” she adds, “so I picked more local makers than we usually do.”

One such local maker new to Monster Market is Cassie Rutherford of Curio Creations, who makes terrariums “created from ethically sourced butterflies, bones, plants, and the curiosities in between,” as their Instagram bio states. Another whom Holtermonster points out is tattooist Nour Hantouli, who will sell preserved tattoo specimens on pig skin (they’ll also sell non-taxidermy stickers). And, of course, Holtermonster will sell her work, including shirts, stickers, and this year’s Time Warp Drive-In posters.  

Monster Market’s opening night on Friday at 5 to 9 p.m. will include bites by Loaf Memphis and Allie Trotter’s Whisks of Doom, plus cocktails by Cameo and Old Dominick Distillery, and brews by Meddlesome Brewing Company and Wiseacre Brewing Co. (Holtermonster says you can expect the food and drinks to be on theme.) St. Francis Elevator Ride will also spin spooky tunes, and Creature Studio will provide an AR experience all week long. 

The market will be open Saturday-Wednesday, October 14th-18th, noon-7 p.m., at the Medicine Factory. Whisks of Doom will have a Wake & Bake Sunday morning at 11 a.m., complete with tasty breakfast treats and cold brew coffee. 

The event is card only. Find more information, including a full list of vendors, here.  

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News The Fly-By

MEMernet: Painted, Tweet of the Week, and Scary!

Posted to Facebook by Paint Memphis

Memphis on the internet.

Painted

Muralists from the across the country descended on the Ravine and the Edge District last weekend for the annual Paint Memphis festival.

Tweet of the Week

Posted to X by Paul Young

“THANK YOU MEMPHIS!”

Scary!

Posted to X by @songsbychaplin

Spooky season is upon us and, yes, we know how some of you feel about the phrase “spooky season.” Either way, amazing yard decorations have sprung up all over town.

One Central Gardens home outdoes itself every year with a blend of horror and political commentary. This year’s design has former President Donald Trump behind bars.

Keep an eye on our Insta this month for a reboot of our series on the best Halloween yard decorations in Memphis. If you know of some good ones, send them please to toby@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
News The Fly-By

MEMernet: The Flyer Looks at the River and Halloween on IG, Memphis Affirmations

Posted to Instagram by Memphis Flyer

Memphis on the internet.

Insta-Flyer

Memphis Flyer staffers Chris McCoy and Bruce VanWyngarden recently went out to get some fresh views of the shrinking Mississippi River.

Posted to Instagram by Memphis Flyer

Flyer staffer Toby Sells had fun last week visiting some of the Memphis area’s best Halloween decorations, from Cooper-Young to Bartlett’s Halloween Cove.

Affirmations

Posted to Instagram by Memphis Affirmations

This IG has not been updated since April, but it’s worth a look. Memphis Affirmations really is an affirmation board for Memphians.

But instead of phrases like “I am enough” or “I am brave and bold,” we tell ourselves, “I will not have my first LSD trip be at the Lamplighter Lounge” or “I will be stronger than 95 percent of the Memphis power lines.”

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News News Blog

An Interview with a Ghost Hunter

Photo: Tanya Vandesteeg | Instagram

With Halloween rapidly approaching and the veil between this world and the next getting thinner, the Memphis Flyer couldn’t help but reach out to local paranormal investigator Tanya Vandesteeg to learn more about her ghostly occupation. By trade, Vandesteeg is an entertainer, having written productions and having performed in various musicals and at Disney World, Universal Studios, and SeaWorld. Now she, along with business partner Stephen Guenther, runs Historical Haunts Ghost Tours and conducts investigations with the Historical Haunts Team, which she co-founded. 

Memphis Flyer: How did you get into the paranormal?

Tanya Vandesteeg: I was the creepy girl in school — I guess, I still am. I grew up in Texas and we moved a lot. To make friends with everybody in my new school, I would always just ask them things like, “Oh, what’s the local legend in your town?” I was always really curious about it, and I was always really wanting to debunk it, too.

But I was really into it. I would see portals in my room when I was a small child, like these really spinning weird things. My mind’s always in the supernatural. Things have always come to me and been attracted to me. I always knew there was something else there, so it never was even a question in my life.

So, in college, I found a group of us that wanted to go hunt these things a little more. And then in Orlando, I formed another group, and then I lived in Los Angeles where I did some stuff there. It wasn’t until here where I got into really an official paranormal group. And that’s how I met Stephen [Guenther], and then we decided to break off that group and make our own group, and the rest is history.

What makes someone more sensitive to the paranormal?

I don’t know what makes a person more special than others. Some can see the full body apparitions. Some don’t. Some don’t wanna see it and they see it anyway. I think it’s a gift. I think it can be genetic. I think it also depends on what blood type you are, what astrological sign you are. More closed-off signs don’t tend to attract spirits as much as other signs. 

We always say love and gratefulness are the highest levels of vibrations. And so if you’re loving and caring and grateful and thankful, you’re going to vibrate on that level [of the spirits].

What does a paranormal investigation look like?

If someone says they have a haunting in their house, we offer our services for free. We send a questionnaire; we do interviews. We wanna make sure that we’re a good fit. Like, we don’t do exorcisms; we’re not demonologists. But once we say, “Okay, this is a good fit,” we get the team together and we’ll set up some of our equipment, like K-II meters, which read electromagnetic fields. And a lot of times people will sense things or feel things that are actually natural because if you have too many electromagnetic fields running through your house it can create feelings of paranoia, feeling like somebody’s staring at you from behind.

One of the last cases that we were on, they had all these mesh boxes for their Wi-Fi in this really small living room, and all of our devices were going off like crazy. I even felt heavy sitting in that room. We call it a fear cage because it’s natural electromagnetic fields that are surrounding you, but they’re creating a kind of a supernatural environment. We unplug everything and then we show them our meters. Everything’s clear.

So we try to debunk as much as we can before really investigating. We set up cameras, motion detectors, and our team will go through all of the footage. A lot of it is putting headphones on and listening to see if there are any voices we didn’t pick up while we were there — those are called EVPs, electronic voice phenomena. We compile all the footage and we come back with the client. We’re like, “Okay, this is what we found. This is what we didn’t find.”

What kind of hauntings have y’all come across?

There is the whole thing of attachments. Typically, if something’s tied to the land or tied to the house, it won’t go with you. That’s one of the initial questions that we have when people have an investigation. Like, how old’s your house? How long have you experienced this? Have you experienced this before you lived here or experienced it after you moved here? Then we can figure out if something’s tied to you or something’s tied to the house. Typically, it’s the house, land, or an object in the house. Very rarely are you gonna have something that’s just following you around in life. If you believe in your spirit guides, like ancestors, loved ones, that’s a little different.

What kind of tools do you use?

Believe it or not, we use these little cat toys with motion detectors in them, so sometimes we’ll line them down a hall to see if something will set them off. We’ll also set up these laser grids, and if a spirit comes through it, it’ll manipulate it. 

There’s the Spirit Box, which is a device that scans through AM and FM channels really fast to create white noise. We ask a question like, what’s your name? And something answers back that we might hear with our ears or if we don’t, we’ll see if something was caught on the audio recorder.

We have dowsing rods, which are really fun. They’re some of my favorite investigative tools; they’re just rods and you can ask questions and the spirits can manipulate them. “If so-and-so is here, can you cross the rods?” We also use K-II meters and ask questions to see if the spirit will light a certain color for an answer.

Paranormal investigative tools (Photo: Abigail Morici)

Have you ever seen a ghost? 

We always joke that we’re always looking for the tap-dancing ghost — somebody who looks full body, standing in front of us, going, “Here we are.” It just doesn’t happen that way. I always say the moment I see the tap dancing ghost, I’ll retire. That being said, we have seen full body apparitions. We’ve seen what would look like shadow figures.

There are also spirits that try to look like us, like imitation spirits, but they can never get the smile right. You can research that; it’s through all of history. One day, I left my best friend’s house, and then I drove down the street and saw my best friend standing next to a tree. And then she would smile and it would be really creepy, but it wasn’t her. But things don’t scare me. I get startled, but I don’t get scared.

Are there malevolent forces?

You will find what you’re looking for, and that’s what we always tell people if they wanna be an independent ghost hunter. Any joker with a flashlight and a cell phone could be a ghost hunter now. And that’s the problem — people are breaking in places, going in places they shouldn’t, doing things they shouldn’t. And I’m all about being a paranormal investigator, but do it right and do it safely. Not only physically, but spiritually. Whatever your religious beliefs are, you have to keep yourself protected because there are what we call the cockroaches of the spirit world. They’re lower vibrating, lower frequency, I wouldn’t say demonic or evil, but they’re just not good. And they will attach to you if you are not protected enough.

Like, on Ghost Adventures with Zak Bagans, where he goes into these houses and he is like, “Come at me and slap me and hit me” — that’s why he gets slapped and hit all the time ’cause you will find what you’re looking for. That’s his schtick, but we don’t recommend going and doing that. We don’t allow that on any of our tours or investigations. No provoking. We don’t call out spirits to fight us or scratch us or any weird things like that. Why would you go to somebody’s house in their location and make fun of them? We believe that they’re just differently living. 

But if you’re going to look for evil, you will find it.

Historical Haunts tour guides Damon and Amber (Photo: Abigail Morici)

Have you ever had an experience with something malevolent? 

One investigation was really heavy. A little 2-year-old was getting scratched. I was on a couch and I put my knees on my chest because all of a sudden I just started feeling not okay. We all started coiling up. We had to call our friend from New York, who can go into the spirit world and see what’s going on. She said there was something there that was not … not nice. And she had to get rid of it. 

Turns out one of the young kids in the house was trying to sell this soul to the devil. We were like, “Stop it.” Then we had a lecture.

Once our friend got rid of it, we could feel the whole environment change. We had a beautiful investigation after that. We contacted the father who had passed, and he came through on our Spirit Box and said things that we didn’t know about and told them he loved them. That’s the most rewarding thing about investigations — when families can find comfort.

Do you have any spirits that you — for lack of a better word — stay in touch with?

Two doors down from the Broom Closet [where Historical Haunts arranges tours], there was a patrolman that was brutally murdered — Edward Broadfoot — in 1918. His spirit haunts the building. There’s still a blood stain on the floor. It’s all down in the basement. But he comes through all the time. We were just on our tour the other night, and we talked with him with dowsing rods. He’s a good friend of ours. We helped get him his memorial at Forest Hill as well. 

But, yeah, we always call out the spirits around here. At Court Square, there’s a little boy that died in the fountain. Claude Pugh is his name. It was in all the papers at the time. [Read more about Claude here.] Claude knows us really well.

The Haunted Memphis Bus Tour stops at Court Square’s fountain where Claude Pugh’s spirit resides. Attendees have the chance to communicate with him, using the group’s investigative tools. (Photo [captured poorly by] Abigail Morici)

We’ve made more friends with spirits out there. There’s a sailor or a soldier — we can’t figure out, but we know that when there are more younger girls on the tour, he comes out more often. There’s sometimes a male spirit there that is kind of intimidating and he’ll chase off all the other spirits and make our equipment go crazy.

Sometimes I walk down the street and I’m like, “Is everybody I’m looking at, are they real?” It’s like, what if we are seeing ghosts and we just don’t know?

Historical Haunts’ tours include the Haunted Memphis Bus Tour, Haunted Pub Crawl, Memphis True Crime Tour, Walking Ghost Hunt, Memphis Brew Bus, and Ghost Hunt at Earnestine and Hazel’s. You can schedule a tour here. 

If you are experiencing paranormal or unexplained activity, you can reach Historical Haunts’ investigative team here.