As per usual, one thing led to another while I was wandering among the Victorian houses of Eureka, CA on my most recent jaunt. Struck me as sort of a ghost town (more on that in a minute).
The Louvre Cafe has clearly seen better times…
Associative jump to Victorian ghost stories, and, inevitably, Montague Rhodes James (1882 – 1936). He was a British medievalist scholar, widely respected as provost of King’s College, Cambridge and of Eton College, as well as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He also authored numerous volumes of ghost stories which had a large impact on the horror genre, partly due to their juxtaposition of humor and the supernatural.
One of his most famous stories, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad (1904), can be found in a collection called A Warning to the Curious. It is a clever and funny tale named after a poem by Robert Burns, filled with often ironic allusions to world literature, Shakespeare and Coleridge as well as the bible. It is about a stodgy, slightly off Professor enamored with his own rationality, who spends a week’s vacation at the sea coast, pocketing a bronze whistle he finds in an abandoned Knights Templar cemetery along the beach. Soon he feels as if he is being followed. When he inspects the whistle in his room, with weird inscriptions seeming to reference the bible, strange noises begin startling him during the night. In short order things get sketchy and the Prof will never be the same again, as you will be able to see for yourself, when watching this remarkable, brilliant short film made for the BBC in 1968, and starring Michael Hordern. Watch it for the character acting alone. Such a difference from today’s horror flics. It’ll make your day! Well, it did mine.
Although my day was already pretty good, having listened to a new music album by Paul Roland, the expert on turning Victorian murders, supernatural experiences or horror stories into the most pleasant songs. He transformed James’ stories into ballads, sung with the voice of a bard found in your nearest corner pub, publishing this enchanting collection just last week. Here is his version of Whistle and I’ll Come to You. How can you not like a song that starts with the lines “Professor Parkins was a man of few words, but all of them were long, oh so long…” or a songwriter, who manages to get the essence of a story crammed in verse form into a ballad without losing any of the essential narrative and wit.
A warning to the curious could also be found on the walking path along the bay in Eureka. The path, lined with encampments of houseless people, runs behind the large mall and a strip of motels where I stayed.
This small town has seen its share of horrors, both on the extending and the receiving end. It is a harbor town in Northern California in Humboldt County, which derived its name from the Greek motto εὕρηκα (heúrēka), which means “I have found it!” It was missed by the European explorers for the longest time, due to a combination of geographic features and weather conditions which concealed the narrow bay entrance from view, and so was settled relatively late, around 1850. It did not take that long – but 10 years, in 1860 – for settlers and gold seekers to massacre the native population, the Wiyot people, mostly women and children, at a time when the adult males were away for an annual ceremony. The remaining populations sought shelter at Fort Humboldt, but over half died of starvation, with the army withholding proper care.
Not done yet. In 1890, with recent economic downturns and a growing sinophobia and violent acts against Chinese immigrants, a group of 600 White vigilantes forcibly and permanently evicted all 480 Chinese residents of Eureka’s Chinatown.
Photographs of Victorian beauties in Eureka from the city website.
The city thrived on the lumber trade, extracting what they could from the surrounding Red Woods, as well as fishing, and these days tourist trade. The timber economy of Eureka rises and falls with boom-and-bust economic times, certainly declined after the Second World War and even more so after the 1962 Columbus Day storm that felled so many trees that there was a glut in the market. The region is also site to large earthquakes and in danger of tsunamis. After 1990, regulatory, economic, and climate change-related events led to a contraction of the local commercial fishing fleet as well. The city these days is struggling, and it is visible in many closed or for sale properties when you walk around.
It is also quite evident that people are suffering – California is currently the state with the largest number of houseless people, and Humboldt County is having an above average share of them. There are opposing forces, as we, of course, see all around the country, that differ in ways how to approach this difficult situation. There are those who want to pursue actions that criminalize the people living in tents and cars for lack of available alternatives. They are bent on preserving public space for parking lots rather than low income housing for poor people, with the general idea that their presence impedes on commercial interests in town, always regressing to the long disproven claim that the presence of the poor will attract more crime.
But not all is a horror story! The good people of Eureka soundly defeated a measure meant to exclude houseless populations from housing availability in the city center in favor of parking lots during the last election. Despite a millionaire and his buddies investing $1.6 or so million in a campaign to maintain exclusion, ballot measure F passed in favor of the vulnerable population.
The story now unfolds around efforts to increase penalties for those living outside. City Council meetings have become land wars between the factions who want to criminalize homelessness and those who want to go about the problem by other means. Emotions run high, but there is clearly a movement that tries to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
The center of the city has a lot of spiffy stores for tourists, an opera house and a terrific bookstore, Bookleggers.
Mostly, you find interesting stuff a bit further away or in the back alleys, just like in San Francisco – lots of creative murals,
and a clear proclivity for cats…
Maybe we need to turn to witch stories next….
And as this day’s news of the Pope’ death demands some acknowledgment – he prayed daily with and for the Gazans and repeatedly rebuked the Trump administration over its stance on migrants and the marginalized – here is Mozart’s Lacrima. I got the musical idea from a different source – one of my steady readers has a cool website from which I derive news about rock and metal music. They had a Lacrima of a different sort today, by a band named Ghost no less…. thank you, Fox Reviews Rock!