November is here and that means Halloween is over for yet another year, but there's still the great memories of a really fine Halloween season to enjoy!
First and foremost, to the one who makes sense of all my insanity, my best friend, my love, my wife: Happy Anniversary! It's been two years since we swaggered down to Las Vegas and had ourselves a kick ass wedding on Halloween. There have been great times and times that have pushed us both to the edge of reason, but I wouldn't want to spend it with anyone else in this world or any other.
This year we proved just how perfect we are for one another in the simplest way possible, by unknowingly getting each other the same card for our anniversary!
After the necessary evil that is re-caulking the bathtub two months ago, I was inspired to redo the bathroom Psycho-style as my anniversary gift to Niki. I'd been hanging onto a mini poster of the 1998 remake (not a great version of the movie, but a pretty cool poster) for a while now and Niki had shown me a bloody shower curtain/bathmat combo that just looked amazing, so after acquiring said combo and grabbing some matching towels and a frame for the poster, it all came together real nice and spooky.
I'd played around with the faucet while cleaning the bathroom one day and had the idea to install hot and cold running poison. Turns out it wasn't really that hard to do. Now our spooky ducks have got a creepy little lagoon of their own!
Since both Niki and I have an obsession with finding haunted houses and cool movie shoot locations and I'm a fiend for Stephen King related locales particularly, it was fitting that we spent time on Halloween in Niagara-On-The-Lake spotting scenes from the 1983 version of The Dead Zone directed by David Cronenberg.
First up was the famous murder scene gazebo built for the movie shoot and afterwards presented to the town as a gift.
Situated right at the north-east corner of town on King St. and looking out over Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Niagara River, the gazebo gives a fantastic view of Fort Niagara on the U.S. side.
It was only a block down King St. that we came upon the house used as Johnny Smith's apartment in the movie.
Located at 17 Byron St. and used as the rectory for the Anglican church next door, tales of ghosts haunting the house (as well as many of the other houses in town) abound.
A little further down King St. and making a left on John St. we came upon another famous Dead Zone location. The fictional Weizak Clinic is where Johnny Smith first woke up from his five year coma with the power of second sight.
Located directly across from an area called Butler's Barracks (well known for several ghostly sightings of soldiers from the War of 1812) and once the home of The Niagara Institute, the building used as the Weizak Clinic is now a private residence known as Randwood.
Continuing our adventure through both The Dead Zone and N-O-T-L's own local haunted legends, we made our way further south to the infamous Screaming Tunnel on Warner Road.
The scene of Johnny Smith and Sheriff Bannerman's psychic investigation before discovering the last victim in the gazebo, the tunnel provided the movie with some of it's most famous imagery. The spiderweb-like brickwork has been used for various international poster art for the movie over the years.
According to local legend, if you light a wooden match in the very centre of the tunnel you'll hear an unearthly screaming and the match will blow out, purportedly the spirit of a young girl caught in a fire in the tunnel. It was pretty windy, and Niki claims to have heard some creepy sounds as I investigated within (I'd forgot my wooden matches, though).
After all that time spent lost in the Dead Zone, Niki and I decided to get our Tommyknocker on and headed down to The Flying Saucer on Lundy's Lane in Niagara Falls for lunch.
My Favourite Martian.
Chillin' out somewhere near Mars.
A little souvenir I left behind for the folks at the Saucer in honour of our Dead Zone day and as thanks for a delicious lunch.Happy Halloween DE/VL fans! I hope everyone out there enjoyed our little photo tour of the Dead Zo . . . er, Niagara-On-The-Lake.
DE
