AG
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The American Tradition of Christmas
Christmas is not exclusively an American holiday. I don’t need to tell you this, but there are a fair number of traditions that, based on the founding principals of this great nation, SHOULD NOT have carried over. The original colonies of the United States left their homeland to seek religious freedom and worship God in their own way, but the Puritans really didn’t put too much stock in celebration. Christmas was made illegal to celebrate, and all of its various accouterments were considered unholy. As the Founding Fathers almost exclusively came from these colonies, it is a wonder some of these traditions survived the turning of the years. And between…
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Hauntings 7 – WAVERLY HILLS SANATORIUM
Nothing like a good old fashioned early-20th century asylum to get the old sixth sense tingling, right? How many horror movies, psychological thrillers, and ghost stories have featured an asylum wherein everybody died save one, crazed patient who either a) killed everyone, or b) died himself and is haunting the dreams of randy teenagers…. A lot of what we know about the limits of human psychological endurance came from research done by the Nazi’s during the rise of Hitler and subsequent world war that followed, but a large portion of that research was grounded in the experimentation done by burgeoning psychologists (then called “alienists”) in places such as Waverly Hills.…
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Hauntings Part 6 – CLIFFORD’S TOWER
Clifford’s Tower in York, England has seen many deaths over the centuries. Henry VII used to hang the corpses of his enemies there as a warning to his rivals, and it has been used as a prison, but perhaps one of the most poignant points in it’s long storied history is in 1190. Anti-Semitic attitudes were on the rise in the northern part of England, and despite having the protection of the crown The Crusades were used as an excuse to attack local Jews, but this was more of a thinly veiled debt-avoidance tactic. Many nobles owed the Jewish moneylenders more than they could pay back. Anti-Semite riots broke out…
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Hauntings 5 – Ghosts of St. Paul’s Chapel
Okay, let me be clear here, if I wasn’t already. I am a skeptic. I wouldn’t believe in ghosts at all if I hadn’t seen them with my own two, admittedly bad, eyes. But, to borrow a phrase. “I see dead people.” Over the American holiday of Thanksgiving (lets be clear, I am American and I love me some Thanksgiving, that was for YOUR BENEFIT, Britons!), I have had the opportunity to visit New York City with family. I crossed a few things off my bucket list, like watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade live, taking the NY subway, and most importantly, visiting the site of the Twin Towers. Before…
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The Story of a Saxophone in New York City
This is a story told to me by a transient NYC native who told me to call him “Boss.” This is transcribed word for word from a digital recording device I used to make the recording. Boss would not let me take a picture of him or his saxophone, but he let me record him telling this story. I have used correct spelling but I have not touched the grammar. BOSS: Eight million stories in New York, give or take a few hundred thousand. Eight million different lives going in different directions at any given moment. My horn starts sometime in the 1920’s. Can’t rightly remember the year it was…
