deadmanshandthecursed

[deadmanshandthecursed]

I don’t know what’s inside of my chest, but it’s not a heart. It’s something heavy, and aching, and chained to silence.

[deadmanshandthecursed]

I wrote this a decade ago. Maybe it was performative. Maybe it was one of those moments where I wanted the world to reassure me I was wrong.

I'm finally ready to embrace it, and the metaphorical existence of being a useful fucking idiot.

"One of my exes left me stating "You make a better knight than a prince." Another person dear to me stated something almost identical years later. After so many years of looking for a princess, it's almost comforting to figure out that I'm just here to fight dragons.

Carve something like that on whatever tombstone they leave me with. At least knights get a seat at the table."

[deadmanshandthecursed]

It was right about this time 4 years ago when last I saw you, kid. We sure gave your midway hell that night.

Under a Halloween full moon - the last for a long time, we were all so goddamn great.

I'm still at it, just like you said I would be. Took me a while to get back to myself, but I think I'm finally back. You'd have been proud this year. Gonna see some of your last works tomorrow when I visit Carnage for the first time.

Had one hell of a good season. Made sure that I closed each night with people that mattered, and made sure to take your advice.

Miss you, pal.

[deadmanshandthecursed]

Hey you.

Niles Scream Park, West Branch State Park, Moonville, Fright Farm - It's been a hell of a tour this year. I'm back in DMH - didn't know if that would happen again. My back is doing a lot better. It's amazing how much I've healed since I quit just waiting to die. Putting my mind to fixing my body now that I've mostly fixed my mind. It'll be a long climb out of the pit, but I've come farther than I expected to already.

The family's almost all back together now. Some rifts won't ever close, and some I wouldn't want to. You're still missed. You're still in the stories we tell, even to newcomers. In a way, you and your characters are part of legend. We may not set the table, but your place is still there. RIP's approach and philosophy has changed - concepts must grow and change like people do - but there will always be the knowledge that it would never have survived without you keeping me on the path.

You'd have loved this past weekend. Two of the best nights of the best crowds, followed by a day exploring waterfalls, whitewater rapids, and cozy little shops. I miss our adventures. No matter how good the time spent, there's always a piece missing.

We're already booking for next year. Haunts are approaching us like the early days. I called this a rebuilding year, and that's proven true. Obviously, I can't say it to the rest, but in a way there's no way to rebuild. From the earliest successes we had, you were always part of it. In a way, I think I keep at it so I can show you what's been accomplished if you ever change your mind. Hope is a dangerous thing, but it's also a thing that keeps us going.

Another day or so, and we're off to our final weekend. Going through Castle Blood Sunday after haunting Friday and Saturday. You'd love the Castle. You should make the drive sometime, even if just on your own.

So. Yeah. I miss you. Hope you had a good season.

[deadmanshandthecursed]

I said last year that I'd rather never haunt again than to compromise my dedication to #hauntersagainsthate

Turns out, that dedication was my ticket to the best weekend of haunting I've ever taken part in.

Life's a fucking ride. Wish you were here.

[deadmanshandthecursed]

I'm probably going to repost this every year.

This video kept me haunting last year, and then the whole thing with Ohio Valley Haunts at the Hoorah happened. But then Japes pulled me out of "I'm probably done" to "Holy fuck, I remember how good this is", and I was reminded of this video. MHC spun me out pretty bad, but Japes kept me in the game with the invite to Niles.

Then the weekend at Niles made me realize that I'm going to do this until I literally can't physically do it anymore - I don't know if that's healthy, but I do know that's what's going to happen. I'll probably die in costume, but fuck it if that ain't the cowboy way to go.

I even brought DMH back. Honestly, didn't know if that would happen again even if I stayed. I realized that he's inescapable too.

To all the haunters, once more unto the breach my friends...

Stay safe, stay healthy, stay scary.

One more season. I'm ante'd up. Deal me one more hand.

[deadmanshandthecursed]

A major step in setting things right. Keeping promises to ghosts.

I am still on that hilltop.

[deadmanshandthecursed]

Aside from my team's bookings at Moonville and Fright Farm this year, I've been personally invited to a charity event in Niles, Michigan in September.

It's a uniting of the 'all stars' of the haunt industry, both old and new. Some haunters are coming out of retirement just for one last night. Four of the original "Scab Five" may be attending, and for the first time I'll get to haunt alongside haunters that inspired me to begin haunting twenty years ago.

I really thought I was done. I thought my seminar at MHC was a sendoff - a passing of a torch. A fitting epitaph on a pretty good run. Instead, it was a rennaissance. I've never interacted with as many haunters as I have over the last few months, and never been counted among these giants of my beloved industry. It's a new dawn. And we are rebuilding.

Seems that stupid fuckin cowboy gets at least a few more nights out of the bag. Adding an extra workout day to my week so he doesn't break me again.

Seven months ago, I was dying and writing goodbye letters. Today, I felt more alive than ever. What a strange life.

[deadmanshandthecursed]

My 2012 Kia Soul was The Nightmare. It died at 338,000 miles in 2018. Totaled in a wreck, but I walked away unscathed.

My 2014 Kia Soul was The Nocturne. It officially got totaled today at 301,000 miles. It kept me alive in that blizzard in December. She kept her footing during a wicked spinout during another blizzard in early 2022. She carried me to Pennsylvania where I met some of my best friends that have kept me alive in dark times.

If you got the good ending in RDR2 where Arthur says goodbye to his horse, you can imagine a modern day equivalent when I went to collect the last of my belongings from the car today.

Cars are just things. Objects. But for someone like me it goes a bit deeper. This job does it. The journey does it. I think I'll start that book, finally.

Either way, I left the photos I had on the visor in the car. It was time for those to be buried, too.

Onward.

Onward.

[deadmanshandthecursed]

That's us! We're the Roaming Spooks!!!

Excited to return for our third round of entertaining the festival.

[deadmanshandthecursed]

Grandma died in April. Her funeral was insulting. Trite poems read by people that didn't even know her. Then a stranger handed me that godawful 'Do not stand at my grave and cry" poem. I read it, sure, and with better inflection and soul than the paid-by-the-hour preacher read his psalm. But then they tried to close up shop and I stood up and told them to hold. They weren't going to cookie cutter funeral my grandmother if I had anything to say about it. Now it was their turn to listen.

"One of the last things grandma talked to me about was when I started storm chasing. In the days after she and mom feuded and before the dementia took hold, she and I saw a lot of each other. I stopped over twice a week on average and we'd talk for hours.

I wrote this a year or so before grandma asked me if I was ever afraid when I was chasing storms. It seems very fitting that I read it again today:

When you die, the energy in your body escapes as heat loss. Now, unless you're dying somewhere like space, that heat will dissipate and become part of our atmosphere. Our atmosphere is very good at taking heat and doing interesting things with it, like condensing into storms. Some of the heat will cause rain to fall. Some of the heat will turn to static electrical energy and split the sky as lightning. As hot air rises and colder (less heated, technically) air rushes in to take its place, the resultant wind will push the storm along. Sometimes that convective action produces what we know as tornados.

The Union soldier Sullivan Ballou once mused about his death in a letter to his wife Sarah, "if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah, do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for me, for we shall meet again." He died a few days after writing the letter at the first Battle of Bull Run.

Sullivan Ballou was right. All the tales of a fanciful afterlife are right -- from a certain point of view (thanks Obi-Wan). Consciousness is the product of a brain, and dies when the brain dies. But the energy powering it persists. As I described earlier, something in us is truly, inarguably, deathless.

Our energy literally comes from the stars and one day will return to the cosmos. Until then, we will occasionally light up the night as bolts of lightning. We will interact with our descendants long after even the memories of our life are lost to time.

"What do you do when you catch it? Isn't that scary?"

I greet each thunderhead as an old friend. I listen for the whispers of the dead upon the wind. I'm comforted in the night by the guiding flashes of what passes for heaven. And sometimes, if I'm very lucky, I see the unbridled fury of my ancestors.

One day, I will be that lightning, that rain, that terrible cloud that connects heaven and Earth by way of beautiful destruction.

So I am never afraid.

Grandma and I spoke of death often - death never frightened her. Luxury of faith, I suppose. She said she never wanted a funeral. All she ever wanted, in her own words, were just 'lay me next to Jack and my dad and carry on.'

So now I do that. I miss you."

And then I took a rose from the casket and walked to my car.

In the months since Grandma left, I've spotted one tornado in person, and have called almost a dozen warnings from radar. "Still at it," she'd say. Storms have even more meaning now. Right now, I'm on a ridge above Middletown, watching a storm pass to the south. Nothing major, but beautiful all the same.

I'm trying to carry on.

[deadmanshandthecursed]

MHC. Probably my last. Plans to visit the East Coast convention next year, hopefully teach a class at Transworld, publish the book I've been writing, and that'll finish things up in this chapter of my life. With my inheritance on the way, I have decisions to make, and unless something drastic changes, I don't see myself in the haunt industry outside of being a creator. I didn't even attend the costume ball because putting on the costume at the hotel to test the fit just felt empty. Vital pieces are missing, and they're not coming back - so things change.

It felt great having the weekend comped by Transworld and being invited to be part of a queue acting panel, especially with the people I shared the panel with. A little bit of legitimacy felt good, and though I had no tribe with me to share the victory with, I still enjoyed myself.

Booked my season, mostly. We'll return to PA to reunite with old friends - a couple weekends at Fright Farm, maybe to make my peace with that whole ordeal, but also because they treated us great. A weekend in Michigan. A night at Moonville.

Moonville. There's even sadness there, even in contrast of the great things we've been doing. They made me part of the Moonville Rail Trail Association. We've got exclusivity for as long as we want it. But it's just not the same victory unless I'm on that hilltop with you. I hope you're having victories. I genuinely do. And I hope he celebrates them the way he should.

Brought a lost member back into the fold. It felt good to repair relationships and form new ones. Maybe if the next 18 months or so go well in that regard, it'll negate that first paragraph, but we'll see. The universe seems content to throw me curveballs as a matter of basic existence. I've brought haunter after haunter out of retirement. Maybe my greatest challenge will be to save myself from it.

A good weekend, but it's hard to top when things were the best. Everything is just a facsimile these days. I imagine things will snap into place eventually, but I've been waiting three years and the closest it's been has just been in dreams. Things have never taken this long to readjust, so I can only assume that they won't.

[deadmanshandthecursed]

A couple more months of guaranteed work like this, and I'll come off the road finally. It was inevitable. Maybe. Last year's feature finally paid off with steady work. Commercial work - A day rate of $600 just for a little bit of makeup and set assistance, $750 for prepro, seeing my work on television, and it's still not enough because it's not shared.

Lunch tomorrow with a producer that wants to partner with me. A studio job. No more gig work. A film festival - my own goddamn film festival just like I dreamed of. The pieces all fit. Well... most of them.

Two features this year. Steady commercial work. My own festival. So much I should be ecstatic about.

But every day I find myself at least one moment wishing I'd just gone to sleep in that blizzard.

[deadmanshandthecursed]

Shane A Howard

July 13 1982 - December 23 2022

That's what the gravestone was going to read.

Ten hours trapped in my car with no heat or defrost, subzero temperature, almost 40mph winds. I passed out once, but the brim on my hat hit the steering wheel and knocked me awake again. That would have been it. Done. Gone. Carve those numbers and cry for a weekend.

Not this time, though. Turns out I'm not done yet. 24 hours or so of recovery. Probably the closest I've ever been to dead. Apparently every ten years in December I almost die - not exactly the best tradition.

I'm back on the road tonight. Same route. Not too different weather. Better equipped vehicle. A few hours till Christmas. Fitting, I guess.

Miles to go before I sleep. I'm really fuckin' hard to kill. Time to live again.

[deadmanshandthecursed]

Back in production with six figure budget. First pass script and budget breakdown!!

Feels good, but pieces missing.

[deadmanshandthecursed]

I'm a lot of things, but I'm not a hypocrite.

My full pay from the Hoorah, sent directly to Haunters Against Hate. I've given up the only haunt were I would have settled for the sake of principles.

Back to the road.