Welcome! #CountdownToHalloween2022

 Welcome to the 2022 Countdown to Halloween!

I have been doing the Countdown every year (with varying degrees of success) since 2011 - which is also the year I started this blog!   I plan to post about setting up my cemetery (the story is explained in detail over in the right column), exploring some real cemeteries and exploring some cool local haunts. 

I'll also write about some neat events I plan to attend - for example....

I wasn't available to post on Saturday 10/1 because I was volunteering at the Haunted Garage Sale put on by the Motor City Haunt Club.  That was a super cool event and I hope there's a video on YouTube again this year.  I got there at 6am to help vendors bring all their goodies in from their vehicles, and then also got to shop before the doors opened to the public.     

I carried these guys in from the truck and a very short time later, carried them back out to my car!

Then I went around to all the vendors to give them the venue's wifi password if they needed it, then I sat in the lobby near the entrance with some other people at the table where the raffle boxes were.   People watching is so fun!

How awesome was this???  

The garage sale had free admission and it came with a raffle ticket.

Check out what you could have won!

There's the 12' skeleton, the 12' Inferno guy, the 12' witch, the 8' stack of pumpkins all from Home Depot and the 6' animated Grim skeleton from Spirit.  Nothing to sneeze at!

For the first 4 prizes, the winners weren't present, but the winner of the skeleton was one of the vendors, so when their name and number were called, we could hear cheering - so that was really fun to see their reaction. 

So anyhooooo.

Welcome to my little corner of the Interweb and I'll see you again soon!

...my Saturday

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!