Spooky

I watched, on and and off and for the umpteenth time this afternoon, The Shining, for my money one of the best and scariest movies ever. I like its look and feel -- bleak and beautiful and creepy -- and the blood pouring from the elevators, and irritating Shelley Duvall, and that sweet little boy and his Big Wheel.

I'm definitely more drawn to spooks and ghosts and mouldering things than I am to, say, Freddy Krueger. Miss Havisham always freaked me out, as did Wentworth-by-the-Sea, in between its past and current heydays. My dad had his high school graduation dance there, after which the hotel closed for decades. I remember talking with a dean at a community college I worked at; she and her husband snuck into the Wentworth's carriage house and found the place set up, perfectly, eerily, for a dinner that would never be held.

I've done my own b&e's over the years (more e than b), including one at an abandoned house in my hometown, which was still entirely furnished, and featured an odd whirled-in hole in the kitchen floor into which the refrigerator was toppling, and my foot going through the ceiling in the upstairs hall as I tried to get a closer look at a gramophone and a stack of records. I've also thrilled at the idea of someone laying her icy fingers on me, a la the scary imagined bits in Anne of Green Gables.