The Whole Haunted World #11

What the heck's going on in India?

So I’m sitting in my house in the suburbs to the north of L.A. right now, listening to the Santa Ana winds roaring again outside (while a different kind of fire rips through a certain D.C. city on the other side of the country), and I’m trying not to think about stuff like this…

The year hasn’t been off to a great start, to be sure. I’d hoped by now to have more cool new articles to share with you; I’m working on one about what might just be history’s first great seance (when Odysseus called up the spirits per Circe’s instructions), and I love what I’m coming up with, but every time I get rolling…some new disaster hits. It’s been one stupid little thing (home repairs probably due to wind) to moderate things (difficulty breathing outside thanks to all the smoke and ash, a rush deadline on a sweet writing gig from an editor I will never turn down) to big things (I have a mysterious hole in my right arm that, while thankfully not cancerous, is nonetheless baffling my doctors and their attempts at treatment) and to maybe even bigger things (David Lynch was a lifelong hero and his passing hit hard).

I also want to start chatting more with all of YOU. I want us to have mutual fun here, learn from each other…but the time just keeps vanishing like…well, parts of my childhood that have recently gone up in flames.

This is all a long-winded way of saying this will be a short one, mainly just me poking in here to say “hi” and I hope YOU are surviving this crazy year (which - with apologies to The Carpenters - we’ve only just begun).

ASIAN GHOST VIDEOS

For some reason my social media has recently been showing me a lot of weird little videos of ghost scenes from Asia, mostly India. I don’t speak the language heard in these clips, but I can understand one word: “bhoot” (which is both spoken in the videos, usually by terrified witnesses shrieking the word, and used as a hashtag - #bhoot). Bhoot is the Indian word for ghost, but here’s what’s surprising about these videos: the ghosts on display more often than not look just like the ghost girl from The Ring – a woman with long black hair that covers her face, and wearing a long dress - although sometimes the ghost is a woman in red, or something that capers almost like a monkey. Why is this surprising? Because this isn’t at all how bhoots were once described.