Man vs the Thing in the Chair

In the spirit of Kindertrauma's "Name that Trauma!" feature, I'd like to share this old, strange memory I have.  Whether it was from a movie, a TV show, or a particularly vivid dream, I don't know.  It's just a fragment of something, but it's pretty freaky as it is.  In it, an older couple are checking something in an attic (it may not have been for the first time), and find a doll sitting in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth.  Anybody who came up to see this doll was terrified, even though it didn't do anything other than rock in the chair.

Now, a quick Google search doesn't bring up anything like it.  Just things like a 100-plus-year-old doll named Robert, and a link to the productivity black hole known as TVTropes (which I will not link to from here, thankyewverymuch.)  And, sure, creepy doll movies/TV episodes are a dime a dozen (I did peer into the aforementioned productivity black hole just to see), but I recently stumbled across something interesting that brought this whole thing up in the first place.  It's part of a phenomenon I call the Thing in the Chair.

I came across this last week while watching some old episodes of Dark Shadows, a few instances in the space of 10 episodes.  First, when governess Rachel went to investigate the mysterious tower room, the cliffhanger showed, just beyond the door, a cradle with two dolls in it, rocked by an unseen hand.  Then, after another cast member gets killed and revived via black magic as a zombie, Rachel (again!) wakes up to find him rocking in a chair right next to her bed (another cliffhanger).  Interestingly enough, the next episode has a scared-more-than-usual Carl Collins go into the bedroom to confront said zombie, similar to how my memory of the Thing in the Chair plays out.

As of this posting, I haven't seen how the zombie storyline goes from there, but let's look at the math.  Dolls are creepy (thank you, doll room in the Million Dollar Museum).  In fact, anything resembling a person, yet clearly not alive, but still somehow sitting up (like the aforementioned ambulatory dead guy) is pretty damn creepy.  Rocking chairs that rock on their own?  You bet that's creepy.  Combine them together, and you get the Thing in the Chair (which, surprisingly, doesn't seem to have been used as a title nearly as often as you'd think.  Maybe I'll crib it for a ghost story of my own).  In fact, I've had a real-life Thing in the Chair moment myself (though, in the interest of tact, I'll not talk about it now.)

Here's where I leave it to you, dear readers.   Have you ever come across the Thing in the Chair?  Or is there something else, some nagging fear-thing in the back of your mind?  Comments are open, so feel free to reply.

Man vs Arbitrary Goal Month

Yikes, did I really go through all of October with only one post to show for it?  Not even a post on Halloween?  (What kind of blogger with sometimes horror-related content am I?)  However, I had an epiphany, just after midnight, that just may change my blogging habits for the better.  Now, I hear that blogging about blogging is a sin, but this is something I feel needs to be shared.

Now, there is a certain writing challenge thingy out there on the internets for the whole of November.  I'm decidedly not participating this time around, rather than ambivalently not participating like previous years.  (Last year, I was psyched up to throw my horror western concept at it, but my user ID apparently got eaten during the registration process.  I still don't know how that happened, but I took it as a sign that maybe I didn't want to continue after all.)  This particular challenge emphasizes quantity over quality anyway, and given my propensity for self-editing (you don't want to know how many times I re-wrote this sentence), I would either give up entirely or have very little personal time remaining trying to meet that goal.

Monday night, after the Halloween festivities died down (that is to say, some left to make an early night of it, others left to attend the launch of the aforementioned writing challenge thingy, and the rest made repeated attempts to find, somewhere in town, a copy of somewhat-after-my-time witchy kids movie Hocus Pocus (And they call that a Halloween tradition?)  Just before I drifted off to sleep, it hit me.  What if, instead of focusing on a word-count goal set by someone else, I were to set my own goal in time with something I was already doing?  And thus was born Arbitrary Goal Month.

So, here's the gist of it.  For the month of November, I'm going to write at least five quality, substantial blog posts.  This way, I'm not bound to any one narrative (other than the ongoing text that is my life), and I can self-edit until I have something I deem "passable."  Will this experiment work?  It's too early to tell (and, having pushed this very post aside for four days, I already have my doubts).  At any rate, I'll be around throughout the month, with a few more words here or there.  Until next time, have a safe and happy Arbitrary Goal Month!