The Great Halloween Specials Gap

It starts each November, the relentless march of Christmas specials. It'll march all the way to January. To be clear, I don't mean movie classics or theme episodes. I mean variety show or cartoon specials done just for the holiday: How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, A Year Without Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, and so forth, and so forth. And so forth. We still get new specials each year. Most fade quickly, but the hits stick forever, and the big studios won't stop trying. There's too much money to be made. 

Contrast that with Halloween. It isn't like Halloween is unpopular. I'm writing this before Labor Day, and the stores are already loaded up with decorations and candy. And yet, the years have given Halloween almost nothing by way of enduring TV specials. And franchises have tried: Disney, Bugs and Daffy, Garfield, and yes, the Grinch. 

Of course, one Halloween special has lasted, the one with plenty of merch online and on those aisle shelves: It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966). It's the exception that proves the specials gap rule. 

And yes, I think about these things sometimes. 

My theory: Christmas comes from a story. A rather famous story, as it happens, and the base themes and characters are baked in and widely known. Centuries of folklore expanded Christmas into a season, with ever-deeper narratives and recurring characters. A team writing a Christmas special need not explain flying reindeer. That team can threaten Santa's workshop or the family gathering from limitless angles. If the script has snow at the end, it's a viable pitch.

Not so with Halloween. Now, we've been scaring each other about ghosts and ghouls since oral storytelling first began, and we've threatened to come back and haunt our families for even longer. The origin themes of Halloween are the coming of winter and the thinning veil between our world and the next. What unites Halloween as a narrative engine are common experiences and common symbols. We've all passed a murky cemetery or felt the unexplained shiver down our spine. These are powerful appeals to our inner fears and primal instincts, not broadcast television-bankable TV specials.

At Christmas, we're all supposed to gather together as a family. Sooner or later, probably sooner, the family will need something to do, usually something to watch together, something warm or at least neutral enough to pause the squabbling. Something that Grandma can't argue is born of the devil.

Something with commercial breaks to sell you stuff. 

This is the exact point A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) tried to drive home, that commercialization ruins the spirit of Christmas. It's my single favorite Christmas special, probably because it nailed this message with humor and innocence. Between sponsor acknowledgements, that is. Coca-Cola bankrolled the whole thing. 

Charlie Brown might have hated it, but Christmas specials are a racket, one that can hawk more than soft drinks. Consumer brands can flog the latest toys, gift ideas for that special someone, and reminders that your neighborhood retailer has your essential this-and-that. And they can do it again next year. 

Halloween is more an event and experience. A popular event, and a lucrative one for many a business, but the customers are buying specific things: fun-size candy, Power Ranger costumes, animatronic hobgoblins, Count Chocula. Even with Halloween's retail boom, the Christmas market operates on a scale geometrically larger in terms of annual U.S. sales. Gifts, travel, decoration, office parties, and the money keeps flowing.

The Great Pumpkin was the third Peanuts special, commissioned only after the franchise scored big with A Charlie Brown Christmas and Charlie Brown's All-Stars. The Great Pumpkin would deliver another hit if it stuck to the formula and made Halloween playfully safe for family hour, a Christmas special in a costume. 

It had to be thus. A ghost story delivers an unsettling lesson, if it delivers a lesson at all. Put in Charlie Brown terms, a proper ghost story wouldn't have a beagle rising up out of the pumpkin patch. It would've been a ghost, and Linus would've either learned to dread the Great Pumpkin and never return, or it would've dragged him down into the vines forever, leaving poor Sally in utter dread. This too cometh your way, home viewers.

That is a flat-out terrible Charlie Brown special, but it has the bones of a solid horror tale. The Halloween spirit never made the jump to broadcast specials, but the time-honored horror story is hardly in ill health. Haunts and monsters continue to thrive in movies, in series television and October bingeathons, in theme parks and around campfires.

Okay, so Halloween specials may not have caught on as with Christmas. We can enjoy the experiences and movies and the ghost hunting shows. And maybe another seasonal classic like The Great Pumpkin might come along some day. As Linus said, there is always next year. Just you wait.

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Before Las Vegas, There Was… Newport, Kentucky?

Ah! Prohibition. Fortunes were made on both sides of the law. It gave rise to Elliot Ness and J. Edgar Hoover. Every large American city had pockets of Mafia and Mafia-adjacent activity. And it put one Cincinnati suburb on the map. Across the river lies Newport, Kentucky, reachable today by a freeway, the Taylor-Southgate Bridge, and the Purple People Bridge, which formerly carried US 27 and the Louisville &Nashville Railroad. It's now a pedestrian and bike bridge and frequently hosts events.

[Photos sourced from The Northerner to the best of my knowledge.]

But during prohibition, a man named George Remus, called the King of the Bootleggers, ran his criminal empire in Cincinnati from Newport. But a funny thing happened to George. Just as Prohibition came to an end, he got arrested for… Well… Bootlegging.

At the same time, Cincinnati was as mobbed up as any city in Ohio. The city fought back by creating Charter government, run by a city manager. What's a poor mobster to do? They packed up their casinos and dens of ill repute and moved over to Newport, now open territory. Soon, two types of joints opened: knock-out joints, your typical hole in the wall with some rooms upstairs where "hostesses" would entertain gentleman clients, and carpet joints, illegal casinos and, sometimes, brothels that operated in the open and would not be out of place in Las Vegas of the 1950s through the 1970s. One such carpet joint, located between York and Monmouth Streets near what is now the Newport Aquarium, later became a Jeff Ruby restaurant and now a mob-themed event center called The Syndicate. Since Ruby's days as owner, the Syndicate has kept its carpet joint motif. Many celebrities from Frank Sinatra to Marilyn Monroe frequented the more glamorous establishments. On the other hand, a young blackjack dealer and singer from Steubenville, Ohio, named Dean Martin, dealt at a knockout joint later occupied by a bar owned by Reds legend Tom Browning.

There was no Cincinnati mob to speak of. Newport wiseguys answered to the Cleveland mob, who in turn answered to what's now the Genovese crime family in New York. But others had a hand in the boom times, specifically Bugsey Siegel and Meyer Lansky had money in Newport. It became a proof-of-concept for what they would build in Las Vegas.

But the good times ended in the 1960s. A man named George Ratterman ran for Campbell County sheriff as a reform candidate. At the same time, Robert Kennedy received a mandate from his brother Jack to crack down on organized crime. So RFK (Sr.) set his sites on Newport. The mob, afraid Ratterman would mean the end of the mob in Newport, drugged him and tried to frame him by having a stripper named April Flowers (not her real name) pose with the unconscious candidate in an effort to derail his candidacy. Everyone saw the picture as a fake. By 1970, the operation was in tatters.

A few remnants lingered on after that. Larry Flynt bought a famous strip joint on Monmouth known as the Brass Ass. Flynt later sold it. The Brass Ass became a local tourist trap and only closed last month. The Syndicate, of course, exists as a mob-themed event center after hosting the Rat Pack and the like back in Newport's sin-and-vice heyday. But it's a, like, a respectable joint.

But if you want to know what drove the final nail in the coffin, look no further than the Bevery Hills Supper Club in neighboring Southgate.  The Club was the areas most famous carpet joint, still open long after gambling operations had been run out of Northern Kentucky. If the police raided, the gambling gear would be shoved into another room until the police did their business. And again, celebrities frequented the place as both performers and guests. But one night in 1977, a fire swept through the club, killing 165 people and injuring 200 more. The club was never rebuilt, and a memorial now stands on the site.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention one of the most infamous post-mob vice incidents in Newport. A Cincinnati City Council member drove over the late, lamented Central Avenue Bridge to Newport for a massage. As in one with a "happy ending." He wrote a check. It bounced. It became a running joke in Cincinnati for years. But...The councilman returned to Council next term, got elected mayor, and later became a well-respected anchorman on WLWT. Then he had his own talkshow.

The Jerry Springer Show.

 But his most infamous episode came about because the vice of Newport outlived the mob.

Seriously, Trigger Warnings

In 1989, I started graduate school at a university that I'll call The U because three decades have passed.  Maybe things have changed.  Anyway, there was a serial rapist working the campus, striking at night in certain parking lots and various locations around town where students and teachers lived.  

And quite a few of the graduate level history classes took place at night, including one in a professor's home.  In fact, once a rape occurred less than a block away from that house while we were in class.  So that worked out quite well for the professor, but it made for disturbing walks to and from the car for the rest of us.  

Yes, we female students including me always asked one of the guys in the class to escort us to our cars, and they always cooperated, so leaving class wasn't a problem.  The tough part was parking at night, when you got out of the car with your books and notebooks, trying to breathe normally, keep walking, while looking around like your eyes were on swivels...  One of the parking lots had had four assaults, and that's where I had to park for one class because it was  the closest to the building, and anywhere else would have meant that I'd have to walk through two other parking lots which were just as dangerous, because the rapist struck randomly.  

The administration never admitted that the rapes were going on. They did send out a "safety memo" that women should seek escorts at night, just as a matter of common safety.  No mention of the rapist.  And the campus police (more on them later) were never around at night.  A huge number of students signed a petition asking for campus police to monitor the parking lots - but the university said there simply weren't the resources to do that.  Just seek someone to escort you and stay out of dark spaces.  Ignoring the night classes.  The dark parking lots, where sometimes a light went out and wasn't replaced for a few weeks.  The dark street where the professor lived.  And back then, no cell phones…

Hell, I'm getting triggered just writing this.  Because that was a long stretch to live under constant tension and fear, and even after two years on the streets of L.A. as a teenager.  I guess I'd hoped life would get safer, especially at the posh university I'd been lucky enough to get accepted by.  Wrong.  

So I have a few comments about the Cornell 7 and the handling of Jane Doe's case.

Especially after reading what's been made available of the group text among the guys that started off with “Free p---y” in the house, continued with a discussion where one fraternity brother responded to that piece of information by writing “I f---ing love Chi Phi”; and another either sought or provided clarification, “Like you can walk in and whip it out,” and yet another, “Shop still open?” at 1:42 AM on Oct. 19, 2024.

As Monica Hesse said on WaPo:  

“Shop still open?” is a kind of wordplay that requires a little brainpower, especially when made at 1:42 a.m. Your mind may be fuzzy with alcohol or ketamine, but not so fuzzy that you cannot dig out your phone and add a question mark.

The question mark is needed because you do not know whether the woman — a student, just like you — is still there. You are not there, after all. You are in a different room. You are making a premeditated inquiry as to whether you should bother traveling to another part of the house in order to have sex with a woman you have identified as a shop. You have to think about it. You have to press send.

You do not know whether she is conscious or consenting. You are not texting her to find out. She could probably be a better judge of whether she was conscious or consenting, but you have instead decided to group-text your fraternity brothers, entrusting them to be the judge of whether the shop should be open. If you text the shop, you might learn that maybe it never wanted to be open in the first place.

The presence of a group text is both gobsmacking and banal. It conveys that whatever was happening in that room — however drunk or drugged everyone was in that room — several people still thought to document the evening in real time. To make it a bonding experience. To make it a party. To make sure everyone got to the shop before the shop woke up or tried to hide under covers or started crying or wished to get out of that room or did whatever else it is that shops do.

“Shop still open?” wrote one young man, and another wrote back, “Yeah.” (LINK)

Now let's get to the Tompkins County DA, Matthew Van Houten, who said that his decision not to bring charges was based on the contents of Jane Doe's signed 2024 statement. But he told CBS News New York's Saeidi on Tuesday that he had never seen the transcript of what Jane Doe told campus police before his office decided not to bring charges.

NOTE:  This transcript included the direct statements:

“I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.”

"And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."*

Anyway, Van Houten said,

"I'm going to follow up on this because this is news to me," he said.

When told Jane Doe had said she was confident she was raped, Van Houten said, "That wasn't information that I had, first of all. Second of all, that is a legal conclusion."

"If she had said those words, we certainly would want to have explored that more," Van Houten continued. "Like I said, that wasn't provided to me." (LINK)

 Now the Cornell Police Department reports ONLY to the Cornell CFO (Chief Financial Officer). And the victim only talked to the Cornell Police Department (remember what I said about university "police departments"?), who condensed 100+ pages of interview to 6 pages that "omitted some of the more forceful and definitive language she used. And it was missing her unequivocal statement that she had been raped." (LINK) The Cornell Police Department sent the condensed version to the CFO of Cornell University, and then it was sent to DA Van Houten, who did what is the standard thing you do for the university that keeps the city in business. Bury it.

“I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.”

"And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."*

Anyway, the Ithaca Police Department NEVER SAW THE STATEMENT, NEVER WAS TOLD ABOUT THE CRIME, AND SO NEVER INVESTIGATED, even though Jane Doe and her family thought they were involved in the investigation.  

PLUS

The night before she was gangraped, a student had overdosed from ketamine at that very Cornell frat house.
A recent campus climate survey at Cornell University found that 35% of undergraduate women reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact.

Guess what?  Nothing was done about any of these!  Wow!  What a surprise!  

OK. A couple of suggestions:

(1) Do not let universities and colleges handle their own sexual assault investigations ever again. Ever. Anywhere.  Campus police are basically there to break up street fights and keep things quiet. They ignore the rich frat houses and mop up bad situations. Bury things. They may be called "police departments" but they're not qualified. They certainly weren't back at The U and they apparently weren't at Cornell. 

(2) Ban fraternities.  I don't care how much money they have, or how they're conduits to "good futures".  There's too much bad shit that goes on, from hazings that end up killing students to alcohol and drug overdoses to sexual assaults.  And even though I realize doing this is like closing the barn door after the cattle escape, I really am sick of rapists, alcoholics, and drug addicts reaching high levels of power and influence.  At least the geyser might turn into a trickle.  

"Records show that from 2018 through 2024, more than 1,200 incidents of sexual assault, dating and domestic violence and stalking were reported to Cornell University’s Title IX office, USA TODAY has reported."  Read more at:   (LINK) I'm sure that NONE of them were publicized.  

(3) Quit the rhetoric that it's the woman's fault.  (I know, that's a dream...)  Young men can do stupid things, commit crimes, brag about it online, and the general rap is still, "Do we really want to ruin a young man's life over 20 minutes of action?"   

(Quote from the father of Brock Turner - at the time in a frat at Stanford - who violently raped an unconscious woman and got six months in jail.)  BTW, fun fact - the two men who stopped Brock Turner in mid-rape, chased him down, and held him until the police arrived were Two Swedish graduate students, Peter Lars Jonsson and Carl-Fredrik Arndt, may praise be to their names forever. So immigrants saved her. None of the frat brothers.  

ANSWER:  Yes, we do want to destroy a young man's life over 20 minutes "of action".  Because certain kinds "of action" destroy a young girl's life forever. 

(4) Recognize that in an authoritarian world, the real definition of power - unprettied, unsoftened - is the ability to do whatever you want and get away with it. And one of the absolute proofs of power, to sociopaths, psychopaths, and pack mobs, is the ability to do anything you want to someone subordinate/inferior to you and get away with it. Especially sexual dominance. That's why rape is a standard weapon in war, gangs, prisons or anywhere else where someone has to prove they're the ones calling all the shots.  

*BTW, when Jane Doe said “I can say with 100% percent confidence I was raped.” "And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."

This is exactly what Andrew Tate & his scumbag brother, and every other pimp has been doing since the dawn of time: get the woman back to the pad; drug her; rape her; beat her; share her around; humiliate her; repeat.

Drug, rape, beat, abuse, humiliate. That’s the pattern.  Time for that shit to STOP.

The Writing Life?

The rest of my year is shaping up with a lot of writing-related events. Or is it?  

When I attend Left Coast Crime I try to arrange to give a brief talk about the Brubaker case.  (The nutshell version: This guy stole tens of thousands of publications from 100+ libraries and my university was the one that caught him, after more than a year of investigating.) Chris Dreith attended the chat I did this year and invited me to speak, via zoom, to the Sacramento chapter of Sisters on Crime on October 17, 4 PM Eastern time..  It's free to the public, if you are interested.  You can register here.

Then in November I will have a table at Open Book, an event sponsored by Whatcom County Library System.  If I'm lucky I might sell a few books there.  In any case it will be fun. I have attended it twice, but never as an author.  I always learn something there. 

 

 

Every month the Wolfe Pack has a monthly zoom discussion  of Rex Stout's books. This December  the subject is Gambit and I have been invited to talk about it because I wrote an article about it in the long-gone journal The Armchair Detective.  (My only published literary criticism, actually.)

I'm looking forward to all of these events but I recently realized: all of these are writing-related, but none of them are writing.

These days if you want to have what I will laughingly call a career in writing you have to spent as much time promoting your stuff as you do creating it.  The time I am spending perfecting my speech on Brubaker is time I am not spent putting words onto an electronic page.  

When I started planning to write this piece (which, ahem, is also not going to earn me any money) I thought it would be a complaint.  However...

Whenever I give a talk about the Brubaker theft someone always asks: Have you written any fiction about it?  I have always replied: No, I don't want to give that bad man any more room in my skull.

But this week I thought of a way to write a short story based on the theft.  So, sometimes the publicity machine can crank up the writing machine.  And so the great circle of life is maintained.  Hoping you the same.

More Books I Recommend

 How did it get to be October already? The months seem to fly, don't they? Well, having just finished the third quarter of the year, it's a great time to share the mystery/crime books I enjoyed most during the last three months. 

They all happened to have been published this year. While none of them are perfect reads (what books are?), I did enjoy them and do recommend them.

So without further ado ...

 

The Women in White by Sarah Pekkanen

This is a dual-timeline story. The earlier timeline occurs in 1964 at a fictional college (that I understand was based on a real one). This college has a famous professor who is conducting parapsychology research. He finds four women with ESP and runs experiments on them. The professor is sadistic and treats the women poorly, but they all have reason to put up with it. (Being a woman in 1964 wasn't easy.) Then, one day, the four women disappear. 

The second timeline is set in the current day, when a young woman is hired as the caregiver of a recently widowed elderly woman, Betty, who was one of the four test subjects. Betty lives in a house that could have been plucked right out of the 1960s (think no modern conveniences). She doesn't know what she's missing, however, because she's rarely left her home in the last sixty years. Why? And what happened to the other three women? The newly hired caregiver is determined to find out. 

I found this to be an intriguing page-turner. The insights into ESP research was fascinating (and disturbing). The author did a good job of showing how the women became found family for each other and how they coped as the professor used their friendships to manipulate them. I wish the author had shown more of a range in the personalities of the men in the story (though I understand that the story dictated otherwise) and that she'd let the reader know more about what happened to the professor in the end. Nonetheless, this is a strong book. If you like psychological thrillers, I think you'll like this book.

 

A Cute Little Murder by Molly Harper

And now for something a little lighter. This book opens with prologue set fifteen years ago, as two teenage girls who run a true-crime podcast (based on crimes in their small town) are in the midst of busting their principal for a number of felonies. They're their high school's version of Veronica Mars, and the author really succeeded in capturing the vibe.

Then we fast-forward to present day. One girl has grown into a big-league true-crime podcaster. The other has become a forensic accountant. They aren't in touch (it turns out they weren't such good friends after all), until the podcaster needs the accountant's help solving a 1920s cold case in a soon-to-close hotel on a small island in the Great Lakes. As you can imagine, the original case might be old, but that doesn't mean there isn't someone who wants to stop the current investigation.

I found this to be a well-plotted story with fun twists, amusing characters, interesting sleuthing, enjoyable romance, and a good voice. The pacing was a little slow at times in the middle, and the main character (the accountant) reminded herself way too often that she was doing this for the money, but it still was a good read. I wish this were the beginning of a series, but it appears it's a standalone. 

 

The Primrose Murder Society by Stacy Hackney

After her husband goes on the lam for white-collar crime and the government takes her house and money, Lila and her precocious, Murder She Wrote-obsessed daughter, Bea, age ten, need a safe place to land. They find The Primrose, an upscale fifty-five-plus building. They're allowed to move in temporarily, rent-free, because they promise to clean out the apartment of a recently deceased hoarder. 

Then a rich man in the building dies, and he's left $2 million to whoever solves the cold case of his granddaughter's death in that very building. What's a woman in need of cash to do but to take on the case, especially when her daughter keeps pushing her to do it? Heck, Bea would handle the investigation herself if Lila would stop reining her in.

The novel is filled with a strong mother/daughter relationship, fun (if sometimes annoying) secondary characters (the neighbors--including a retired police detective who thinks he wasn't good at his job), a well-plotted mystery, and a bunch of amusing moments with witty dialogue. It's a solid series starter. As one reviewer said, it's a "delightful story about perseverance, overcoming odds, found family, friendship, and believing in oneself." It's this author's first mystery, and she did a good job. I'm looking forward to the next book in the series, coming next spring.

 ************

And now for a little BSP: 

Three weeks ago I wrote about the new anthology Hooked on Urban Legends--and Murder!, which I edited with Donna Andrews and Marcia Talley. This fun anthology has seventeen stories involving ghosts, monsters, human bad guys, and, of course, crime. (You can read that blog post here.) On Tuesday, October 20th, at least a dozen of the authors with stories in the book will appear on a zoom where they'll talk about their stories and share tips for writing short stories. 

The authors scheduled to appear are: Donna Andrews, Ellen Byerrum, Barb Goffman (yes, that's me), Kathryn Holland, Smita Harish Jain, Meghan Lewis, Jane Limprecht, Alan Orloff, Pat Remick, Daphne Silver, Robin Templeton, and Marcia Talley. We're still hoping a few more might be able to attend.

The event will begin at 7 p.m. Eastern Time on 10/20. You can register to attend by clicking here. We hope to see you there.

Oops

 

Mistakes, I’ve made few, but then again, too many to mention.  And more, much more than this, I did it any way I could figure out. 

            When people ask me how I’m able to make a certain piece of wood working, the only honest answer is, “A series of mistakes, randomly interrupted by moments of good fortune.”   I think the only difference between a person who succeeds at a craft, and one who doesn’t, is

the willingness to try.  Failure is not an option, it’s inevitable.  A completed project is the result of winnowing the number of mistakes down to a tolerable, and amendable, few.  Thus, making mistakes is not as important as knowing how to reorganize the flaws. 

            For this, the most important ingredient is humility.  When it comes to craft, we are all born sinners.  Accepting this is the road to endurance and faith that persistence, seasoned by patience and presence of mind, will see you through. 

            Some mistakes achieve an unexpected good.  We’ve heard about Velcro, Post-it notes and microwave ovens, but I have experienced a number of occasions when a colossal blunder resulted in a far better outcome.  This usually happens when I’ve made my intended effect impossible, so I’m forced to redesign the whole thing, turning a repair into a pleasing improvisation.     

Architects have known about this for a long time, probably because buildings are so big and take so long to put together that learning how to glorify a goof was an important strategy.   

            Not unlike building a novel.  I’m sure this is how many of you write.  Perhaps it’s the only way to write anything halfway decent. Anne Lamott’s shitty first draft is actually an exercise in dispensing thousands of mistakes that call for ingenious corrections.  Our most inventive writers are probably people who generate mistakes at scale, writing themselves out of one pitfall after another.

           

            The Grand Master of fortuitous mistakes is nature herself.  For every living thing, reproductive success is a numbers game.  The reason an individual produces far more eggs or sperm than needed to complete the transaction is it increases the odds for an acceptable match.  A byproduct of these multitudes is that little errors creep into the genetic scheme. It’s regrettable that the word “mutation” has a vaguely negative connotation.  Truth is, without mutation, we wouldn’t have evolution, since natural selection needs a toolbox of mis-made parts from which to select the preferred attribute for continued survival.   

If you really want to go large on the value of error, whatever existed before the Big Bang contained tiny quantum fluctuations, deviations from the norm.  This meant the universe didn’t start off perfectly configured, but instead, what cosmologists charmingly describe as slightly lumpy.  This meant that when expansion created the universe we ended up with galaxies, stars, and planets, one of which is our current residence.

            This is what I’d call a happy accident. 

            I’ve recently mentioned the delusion of perfectionism.  Nothing is perfect, and if it was, it wouldn’t do us much good.  It would just sit there in a smooth slab of static nothingness.  It wouldn’t grow, change, evolve or adapt.  This doesn’t mean there’s no point in trying to make things better. You just can’t make them perfect, and neither should you try.   

            Say what you will about the advanced technology we live with today, it mostly works.  It’s all pretty much based on quantum mechanics, which everyone applies, though no one really understands.   If you could boil down the unfathomable complexity of quantum theory, the remaining nugget would be probability.  Probably.  Outcomes are not predetermined, but rather the consequence of infinite, unknowable and evanescent interactions.  Heisenberg proved that “here and now” is ultimately an approximation. 

            This wouldn’t happen in a perfect world, but lucky for us, irregularity and imprecision makes the whole thing operational.  It’s been built into the system since the first nanosecond.  You might regret a mistake, but there’s no shame in it.  So have at it.  That’s why we have copy editors, imperfect as they are.   

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fraudulent Færies

Subject: A Conan Doyle, circa 1920.
Genuine, for certain real, not fake,
Lumière KinemaColour fauxtograf™
on loan to SleuthSayers, courtesy
British Museum archive collection.

Doyle and Houdini and science and such,
Séance and fairies concern overmuch.

The words physics and psychics come to us from Greek via Latin. The spellings might seem similar, but physics in Greek related to physical things, especially nature, whereas psychics suggested soul. Forgive me, but I'm in the former camp.

My classmate Lela with kindness told me I was a ‘rational bigot’. She’s not wrong and I cherish her evaluation. When it comes to psychic phenomena, I side with the Amazing Randi: provide evidence, unambiguous proof. Unlike, well, the most highly regarded icon in our profession.

Embarrassingly, when it came to spiritualism and the supernatural, the wonderful and prolific Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was dismayingly gullible. He was so unlike Sherlock Holmes that it hardly seems credible he could so superlatively depict his coldly rational protagonist.

I mentioned the magician Randi, but Doyle was, you might be surprised to learn, once a close friend of Harry Houdini. The famed magician went to lengths to dissuade the author from his utter belief in the occult, efforts that eventually broke their friendship.

From the Mouths of Babes

Thus we set the stage for a pair of Yorkshire cousins who, aided by flitting fairies, fooled much of the adult world, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. For proof, they proffered photographs of petite figures hovering in the air.

1^st Cottingley photo

To be sure, young girls have fooled adults before. The Fox sisters, Leah, Maggie, and Kate, introduced the world to séances in 1848. After a hundred eighty years and an eventual admission of fakery by one of the sisters, séances still have believers. Simply visit Cassadaga, Florida, a town of soothseekers.

Much earlier in 1692, the Salem witch trials began with antics and accusations by three pre-teen girls, 9yo Elizabeth (Betty) Parris, her cousin 11yo Abigail Williams, and Ann Putman, age 12. The latter child became a prolific inculpater who, along with a number of teenagers, over time denounced nearly half the village of practicing witchcraft. And adults believed them.

Back in England

5^th Cottingley photo

The Christmas 1920 issue of The Strand carried photographs of fairies photographed by two young cousins in Cottingley, West Yorkshire, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. There were doubters, but skeptics were few and believers were many.

A few months later, the same magazine published a followup by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was couched as a reasonable exploration of the subject, but it’s clear Doyle not only accepted the evidence of fairies, but also supernatural phenomena in general. (As a side note, Doyle was also taken in by the Piltdown Man hoax.)

Without further ado, here’s the original article and here’s Doyle’s defence.

No fairies were harmed in the making of this article.

Even though I don’t believe in fairies, I’m setting out a dish of cookies. Just sayin’.