I had a great day yesterday!
I attended my first meeting / make & take of the Motor City Haunt Club (and joined!)
I wasn't sure what to expect, but their mission statement says they "exist to provide amateur / professional haunters and haunt enthusiasts of Metropolitan Detroit and surrounding areas an year-round outlet for their pastime of haunting and Halloween. The means by which the MCHC realizes this mission includes, but it not limited to: *Acting as a clearinghouse for haunting information and events in the Metro Detroit area *Contributing haunting and Halloween expertise to the general public * Promoting haunting and Halloween whenever possible"
How awesome is that? Have I found my tribe??
So we learned how to do some corpsing. I know what it is, and have seen many different tutorials on how to do it - but I've never actually done it myself.
There's me in the pink on the lower left!
(photo grabbed from the MCHC FB page)
We used pantyhose & liquid latex and of course I had to be difficult and grab the only bird the guy had brought. He mainly brought rat & bat skeletons so he was afraid he wouldn't be able to explain how to do the bird. But that was OK! Once I got the gist of what to do - I figured it out.
I took the pic of my bird in my car as I was leaving the campus (meetings are held in a lecture hall at the University of Detroit - Mercy) so the latex wasn't entirely dry yet - and I had wedged pieces of foam under its wings to hold them up until it dried. I was chatting with one of the other members and he suggested sticking feathers thru the latex on the wings.... love it! I have an envelope full of feathers from the back yard so it's totally do-able.
I think this will be a fun group. They do a lot of cool stuff, including putting on a garage sale that apparently keeps getting bigger & bigger! And in October they do member & pro haunt crawls - I wonder if they'd think mine would be worth driving out to see...? It is on the way out to Tillson Street, so that's a possibility!
While I was looking at the map Friday to see where the UD-M campus was, I couldn't help but notice that Woodlawn Cemetery was close by!
O.M.G.
I have been wanting to explore Woodlawn forever! It's where a lot of
famous Detroiters are buried - Edsel Ford, Horace & John Dodge, Rosa Parks, Aretha Franklin - to name a very few.
And since it was a cloudy, cold day - I thought I'd just drive thru and take a quick peek.
Oh wow.
(I must have said that 100 times!)
Gorgeous!
I saw a ton of deer roaming around.
Michigan's Governor 1921-1927
It's hard to see but whatever design is on the top of the stone in there looks like a smiley jack-o-lantern!
Horace & John Dodge
of the Dodge Motor Company
Jonathon Hudson of the department stores.
A lot of the stones / monuments were HUGE!
George Stroh, but likely not of the beer / ice cream family.
So once it warms up, I will have a plan as to how to tackle this cemetery in sections - it's just entirely too big to explore all in one day!