TALES OF THE DARK GOAT O' PENN'S WOODS, NIGHT FIFTEEN
6MIDNIGHT!
(OK, it’s not, but I’m about to leave work and head straight home to bed)
Man, Abraham Merritt went over like a lead balloon. Let’s move on to another Irish author of weird tales, Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu. Le Fanu is another of these 19th century writers who go on writing the story long after it’s ended, but I always found this particular story to have a kind of horror aftertaste, so maybe that works in a way? Anyway here, courtesy of Project Gutenberg USA, is:
Sheridan Le Fanu
Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40510/40510-h/40510-h.htm#Page_126
František Kupka
…a Czech emigre artist who lived most of his life in Paris, is our guest ghost artist tonight. This piece is from Kupka’s early occult period; he went abstract in 1909 and was a pioneer of Orphic Cubism, which, uh, is kind of interesting.
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My favorite LeFanu story, of which I can never remember the title so can’t find it, is about some people who rented a house that turned out to be haunted but who decided to stick it out until the lease was up, until one day they saw a disembodied hand over the baby’s cradle and left. I love it because, 1) it’s never explained and not particularly dramatic and 2) when I took a photography class and the teacher showed slides of Victorian family photography (which were mostly of the family-stands-around-a-bassinet-containing-a-blur-because-a-baby-can’t-stay-still), there was one slide of a baby in a bassinet with a hand clamped on its head to keep it from moving and I was like THAT’S WHERE IT COMES FROM! J. SHERIDAN LEFANU WROTE A STORY INSPIRED BY WEIRD FAMILY PORTRAITS THAT WERE THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY OF THE DAY! Seriously, it’s like a whole Paranormal Activity-thing.
@mossygreen - That sounds like the CHAPTER XII SOME ODD FACTS ABOUT THE TILED HOUSE—BEING AN AUTHENTIC NARRATIVE OF THE GHOST OF A HAND chapter from Le Fanu’s “The House by the Churchyard”.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17769/17769-h/17769-h.htm#Page_57
@aetris That’s it! So I couldn’t find it because I was looking for a free-standing short story and it was hidden in a novel! Thanks! Now I have to find the picture…
@aetris @mossygreen Do you know what Mediocrebot is responding to with Boo?
That was a weird story. Good though. It makes you want to see the painting, though it doesn’t exist
@Fuzzalini - The real Godfried Schalcken kind of specialized in candlelit paintings:
@Fuzzalini -
maybe what Mediocrebot is responding to with Boo?
@aetris That’s a lovely painting. We walked through the Norton Simon museum, and it’s pretty much a perfect history lesson in art (it’s laid out in chronological order) and the paintings from this era were our favorites. It’s almost like they achieved perfection, and then had to come up with something new and different (and not necessarily better).