By Anna Hadingham1
Like a lot of other weird creepy children, I loved horror and scary stories from a disturbingly young age. I devoured every R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike book I could get my little sweaty fourth-grade hands on. While my parents slept, I’d sneak downstairs to the TV room, armed with a stash of SnackWell’s Devil’s Food cookies, to watch Tales from the Crypt, my face pressed just inches from the screen. But what truly messed me up was seeing the nightmare-inducing 1980 film The Changeling at a friend’s house and thus forth assuming every squeak in the night was the ghost of a sickly turn-of-the-century boy in leg braces coming to stroke my hair while I slept.
For me, scary stories were and very much still are an exhilarating release, a chance to be brave and surrender all control to the dark, terrifying abyss. My partner Matt and I spend every October watching gobs of gory, gruesome films and accidentally eating all of the Halloween candy well before the 31st.
And speaking of being terrified and surrendering all control to the unknown, we are now expecting our first child. It’s been a difficult, loss-filled path to get this far; I wish I could simply be excited and joyful that the pregnancy is going well so far but after many repeated miscarriages dread and trepidation hover around me like a John Carpenter score.
Last Saturday evening, after a particularly brutal conversation with Matt about finances and fear and climate change and how drastically our lives are soon about to change, we decided we needed a little spooky soothing of the sweet variety.
As we set out into the night, we felt the first real chill of fall in the Portland air. Soon the skies will turn gray, the crows will fill the air, and all of the wonderful weirdos and goths and vampires will return to their natural habitat.
For the first time ever, we headed to the Rimsky-Korsakoffee House, a Portland institution that is famously “home of the casually threatening atmosphere.” It’s a cozy Victorian house full of twinkly lights, mismatched antique furniture, haunted mechanical tables that rise up and spin and shake unexpectedly, and a terrifying mannequin with a five-o-clock shadow under blinding fluorescent lights in the bathroom.
Our lovely, fishnet-clad waitress brought us a plate of warm ginger cake topped with spiced caramel sauce and a side of not-too-sweet whipped cream. The cake was simply delicious; it was moist, and deeply spiced but not too dense. I often find caramel sauces sickly sweet but the one poured over this cake was a different story; it was more about salty browned butter, cloves and cinnamon than treacly sweetness and we basically licked the plate clean.
After washing down our cake with some spiced apple cider and listening to the classical piano music and the laughter of the cheery late-night dessert revelers around us, my dread started to recede. It's still terrifying to think how much is still out of my control and ultimately up to chance and biology, but in that moment I felt enormously grateful just to be here–to be sitting across a wobbly table from a fellow horror-loving weirdo who is attempting to make a family with me.
Unfortunately, as soon as I got back to the privacy of my home, my nauseous, pregnant body violently rejected the cake Exorcist-style in the bathroom.
I would still go back for more!
Name drops: Rimsky-Korsakoffee House
A special thank you to this week’s illustrator, Amelia Stebbing2. See more of their work here.
Anna Hadingham is an educator, theater artist and youth worker. she has spent over 15 years supporting a grassroots youth arts organization in Guatemala, and is currently working to produce a new documentary about their work called Comparsa.
Amelia Stebbing is an illustrator and designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Originally from South Florida, Amelia loves creating images with the bold attitude and colors of a childhood by the sea. While always utilizing geometric shapes, Amelia loves illustrating weird characters, funky arrangements, and spooky narratives.