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| My crew: Sarha, William, Arianna, Shay |
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| Chucky dressed as a girl. We named 'her' Chuckles. Ha. She was a hit, she got an honorable mention during the live podcast with Angry Grandma and Jake! |
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| Yours, Truly |
Lexington opened its doors to the strange and liminal last weekend, and I walked through them willingly, gratefully, like crossing a threshold between worlds. Scarefest—that beautiful collision of horror and hope, where the dead mingle with the living and everyone wears their fascinations like second skins.
The air thrummed with energy. Costumes transformed ordinary bodies into extraordinary visions—latex and lace, blood and beauty, the careful architecture of fear made tangible. But it was the Warren Museum display that held me captive, that pulled me into its orbit like gravity. All those haunted artifacts arranged behind glass, each one a story, each one a doorway to something we're not supposed to understand. The cursed objects hummed with their own dark frequency—toys and mirrors and things that should be innocent but aren't, could never be again.
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| The real Annabelle doll |
And Annabelle. That fucking doll. I stared at her—or it, or whatever animates the cloth—and felt the hairs on my arms rise like tiny antennae receiving signals from somewhere else. The rational part of my brain said it's just a doll, just fabric and stuffing, but something older, something that lives in the hindbrain where instinct dwells, whispered better safe than sorry. So I did it. I sprinkled myself with holy water from the museum's own supply, let the drops fall on my skin like a benediction, like armor. Just in case. Because some things you don't take chances with.
I met celebrities—those strange creatures who exist simultaneously as themselves and as our projections of them. Artists who create worlds with their hands. A medium who supposedly speaks to the spaces between here and there. Angry Grandma and Jake were surprisingly, wonderfully sweet—the camera captures one version of a person, but standing beside them for a photo op, you glimpse the human underneath. The warmth of real presence, not performance.
I searched for Juliette Lewis through the crowds, my eyes scanning for that particular brand of chaotic brilliance she carries. But she remained elusive, a ghost I couldn't catch, and maybe that's fitting for a horror convention. Some encounters are meant to stay in the realm of the almost, the nearly, the what if.
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| Paranormal Author, Katherine Stringfield. She was such a sweet, intelligent lady. |
By the time we left, my body dragged itself through space like something half-formed, exhaustion settling into my bones. The sensory overload of it all—the lights, the crowds, the constant hum of collective excitement—had wrung me out completely. But I carried treasures home with me: two collective works, one from a fiction writer who turns verse into tales of the supernatural another from that medium who moves between worlds via poetry.
Supporting indie authors feels like an act of solidarity, a recognition that we're all out here making things because we have to, because something inside us demands it. We're all swimming against the current, publishing our truths in whatever form they take, hoping someone somewhere will hold our words and feel less alone.
Scarefest reminded me why I love the horror community—these people who gather to celebrate the darkness, who understand that beauty and terror often wear the same face, who know that sometimes you need to stare directly at what frightens you to remember you're alive.
I came home exhausted, yes. But also filled. Reminded that there are still spaces where the weird and wonderful congregate, where connection happens face-to-face, where the uncanny becomes communion.
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| Proof that no matter where I go in life, I will find an iced coffee! |