Analogue of Horror

1. Current Work
2. Work in Progress
3. Resurrection Mary
4. A Dead Soldier's Teeth
5. Ed Gein
6. PumpkinHead
7. Beautiful Boy
8. Endurance
9. Note on Writing

Greetings! Michelle Ian... Native New Englander and Self-Proclaimed Horror Fanatic, dabbling in the Dark Arts of Suspense, Thrillers, and Horror. I also spend my free time sharpening my skills as a creative writer, aspiring to create three-dimensional and emotionally charged characters readers will not only identify with but follow throughout the story. One can also find me on

Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/michelleian_author/.

Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/138913192-michelle-iantosca

A secret never to be shared. A killer seeking vengeance. Is his nightmarish fiction about to become a bloody reality?

Michael Kerrigan is delighted with his success. With his well-received suspense novels putting him on the map, the popular author trades his dark past for meet and greets with adoring fans. But his borrowed peace shatters when a friend he thought he’d buried dead in the ground long ago shows up very much alive… and hellbent on wreaking murderous havoc.

Trapped in a deadly game of cat and mouse, Michael works furiously to uncover the shocking truth while dodging his assailant’s ruthless attacks. And with his sanity splintering as he processes years of suppressed guilt, sacrificing himself may be the only way to protect his loved ones from a crazed enemy’s relentless carnage.

Can Michael undo the sins of yesteryear before he’s the one thrown into a grave?

Self-Publishing: presale April 2023 (Follow up announcement via countdown start on Amazon and Barnes and Noble)

Time passed in a series of calculated but undeniable risks, justified by a single objective: revenge. The blood in his veins surged. He so longed for this moment. Yet, now that he was here in the flesh, it wasn’t as he expected it to be. The life of the great author Michael Kerrigan was, to his amazement, really not that great at all. His friend had become, in a lot of ways, like himself, secluded, a lone wolf.

You find out your childhood friend might just be a serial killer. What would you do? Try to kill him? Or report him to the police that you know won't be able to contain him?

Gabriel Connolly struggles with what’s right. Then, when he’s faced with pure evil, and realizes he has no choice, he tries to drown his soul-less friend in a river. But evil doesn't die.

And that’s just the start of Gabriel's new nightmare. You can’t cheat death, that’s the trick. Even worse, Gabriel realizes he may have passed on supernatural gifts to a heartless killer.

As fiendish plans and unspeakable atrocities are set in motion, Gabriel learns that he alone may hold the key to a series of terrifying events: a secret cabin in the woods, a hidden tomb housing a trail of dismembered corpses, the young killer who lingers in a coma intent on cheating death. And at last, a depraved madman hellbent on saving his only son’s life. Can Gabriel take back the gifts given and triumph over the wicked? And most importantly, will death lay claim in the end?

(Querying Stage-Update following the initial stages of publication.)

He knew how to purge the history on his search engine so as not to leave a trace. A geek from the special unit squad taught him that nifty little trick. A little stroke of the ego and those I.T. assholes would show you their Jockey’s if you told them it would assist in a case.

Chicago is the home to many ghost stories, but not a one holds a candle to the infamous Resurrection Mary, the hitchhiking ghost who haunts the roadsides of Archer Avenue. Mary has varying origins, but the most shared experiences put her untimely death sometime in the late 1920s to early 1930s, when she was either a victim of a fatal car crash on the way to a night of dancing or of a hit-and-run accident while she walking home in the rain.

Encounters

In January of 1979, a Chicago cab driver stopped to pick up a female passenger at the front gates of Resurrection Cemetery, residence to approximately 150,000 souls. However, before he could let her in, the mysterious woman disappeared.

Richard Crowe, a local historian and folklorist at the time of the sighting stated:

“I think that of all the ghost stories worth believing in, Resurrection Mary is the one with the best documentation. The witnesses that I’ve found are remarkably level-headed. And they’re primarily blue collar, middle-class types who have steady jobs and who have no other major claims to psychic encounters in their lives.”

The first person to ever encounter Resurrection Mary was Jerry Palus. The year was 1939. The place was a Chicago dance hall where Jerry was quite the regular. Jerry was smitten by a young blonde woman and immediately asked her to dance. He learned little about her, except that her name was Mary and she lived on the south side of town. He danced with the young woman all night. When it was time to leave, Jerry offered Mary a ride home. Before his death in 1992, Jerry was interviewed about his encounter with Resurrection Mary. He described the events of that evening:

"As we walked along to the street she says well you might as well take me down to Archer Road. And I said what for? I said you live up here where you told me. And she says no I want to go out to Archer Road.”

Jerry stopped in front of Resurrection Cemetery and let Mary out of the car. It was at that moment that she vanished before his eyes.

Actual article about Mary Bregovy’s death:

Still wanting to know more about the mysterious woman, the very next day Jerry drove to the house where Mary had said she lived. The woman who answered the door was Mary’s mother. When Jerry asked if he could see her daughter, the woman told him that Mary had been dead for five years.

“It’s then, Jerry said, that he understood why the woman he was dancing with that night was ice cold to the touch. He had worked in a funeral home for a while and it was the touch of a corpse.”

Years later, Richard Crowe learned the ghost was believed to be the restless spirit of a young woman named Mary Bregovy. Mary Bregovy had been killed in a traffic accident in 1934, a month before her 21st birthday. She was laid to rest in Resurrection Cemetery in her favorite white gown. Over the years, Resurrection Mary has been seen at various times, at dance clubs, in taxis, and walking outside the cemetery, looking for someone to take her home.

In 1980, Clare Rudnicki was driving along the front of Resurrection Cemetery, when she came across the infamous Mary: “I really didn’t think there was any ghost. You hear these stories and these old ghost tales but it’s never happened to me. But now I must say I think I’m changing my mind. I was just looking out the window as we were going down the street. And on the right hand-side of the road there was a girl walking. She was bright, very bright, like illuminating. She was just walking very slowly. I remember thinking oh my god it’s Resurrection Mary. And I can feel my stomach starting to turn. I was very frightened, I have to admit. It did scare me.”

Clare’s husband, Mark Rudnicki, was also in the car:

“We all went past it, turned around and came back and by the time we’d gotten back to where we’d originally seen her it had gone. Vanished.”

In October of 1989, Janet Kalal and a friend were out for an evening drive. They eventually found themselves at Resurrection Cemetery.

It was then, Janet recalled, that a pale young woman stepped in front of the car:

"There was no impact, there was no… bump to say that you know I had hit something. But I know she ran out… and I hit her. She was all in white and her hair and the dress were… flowing back. It was like a stream backwards, you know away from her. And I just saw this profile of a young woman.”

Does the ghost of Mary Bregovy really haunt Chicago? Or is Resurrection Mary just an urban legend? In any case, should you find yourself driving in the city late one night and happen to spot a pale young woman in a flowing white gown, you might think twice about offering her a ride.

In the 1800s a massive supply of dentures were made using the teeth of dead soldiers. Dentures were prevalent among the upper classes in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. High-sugar diets combined with attempted teeth whitening (which wore away tooth enamel instead of brightening it) left peoples teeth in a bad way. The easiest and most profitable way to acquire human teeth for dentures was to take them from the dead, and the battlefield at Waterloo presented thousands of recently-killed soldiers whose teeth were ripe for the taking.

Murder cases in which the killer tortures their victim, or desecrates their corpse, most assuredly cause a heightened sense of fear and of course, more media coverage. Ed Gein was one of these killers but he cannot be called a serial killer...

Ed Gein was born in Wisconsin in 1906, and was the second of two boys. His mother, Augusta, hated his father, who bounced from job to job and was a raging alcoholic. She maintained a heavy influence over her sons, and when they moved away to practical isolation, she cut them off from the world completely.

As a devout Lutheran, Augusta taught her sons about the sins of the world, how drinking was evil and that all women were prostitutes and instruments of the devil. She stopped both Ed and his brother Henry from leaving the house, unless they were going to school.

In 1944, while Ed and his brother were burning marsh vegetation around their property, the fire got out of hand. Firefighters were called, and after the fire was extinguished, Ed reported Henry as missing. He was later found dead, unharmed from the fire. The coroner ruled that Henry died of asphyxiation. Some say Henry was Ed's first victim, but he was never named as a suspect in his brother's death.

After Henry's funeral, Augusta had a paralysing stroke, leaving Ed to care for her completely. She died in December of 1945, leaving Ed devastated and totally alone.

Two years after his mother's death, Ed began visiting graveyards in the dead of night. He dug up the graves of nine women he hoped looked like his mother, took them home and treated their skin to create a leather effect. Once their skin was tanned, he started to create a woman suit using the remains of his victims, because he wanted to 'become his mother, crawl into her skin'.

Later, when he was finally arrested, Gein stated that he shot and killed a woman called Mary Hogan in 1945. She was a tavern owner, whose head was found in a wooden box on Ed's property. It is not clear what he did to her body.

At this point, Gein has admitted to one murder.

In 1957, hardware store owner Bernice Worden went missing. Ed was served by her at the store the morning she disappeared. Police searched his property and discovered Worden's decapitated body hanging in Gein's shed. According to reports, her body had been mutilated, and Gein had cut her from the top of her chest to her genitals, giving the impression she was 'dressed out like a deer'. Her cause of death was a single gunshot wound.

Upon further inspection of the property, police found numerous items made of human flesh and bones, including a wastepaper basket made of human skin, bowls made from human skulls, a corset made of the skin of a female torso and Mary Hogan's face in a brown paper bag.

Gein was arraigned for one count of first degree murder, and when found mentally unfit to stand trial, was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He died in 1984, at the age of 77.

Psycho (Norman Bates), Silence of the Lambs (Buffalo Bill), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Leather Face) were all major motion pictures, horror films with villains/killers loosely inspired by Gein.

Items found In Gein Residence

• Whole human bones and fragments.
• A wastebasket made of human skin.
• Human skin covering several chair seats.
• Skulls on his bedposts.
• Female skulls, some with the tops sawn off.
• Bowls made from human skin.
• A corset made from a female torso skinned from shoulders to waist.
• Leggings made from human leg skin.
• Masks made from the skin of female heads.
• Mary Hogan's face mask in a paper bag.
• Mary Hogan's skull in a box.
• Bernice Worden's entire head in a burlap sack.
• Bernice Worden's heart "in a plastic bag in front of Gein's potbelly stove".
• Nine vulvae in a shoe box.
• A young girl's dress and "the vulvas of two females judged to have been about fifteen years old".
• A belt made from female human nipples.
• Four noses.
• A pair of lips on a window shade drawstring.
• A lampshade made from the skin of a human face.
• Fingernails from female fingers.

“Keep away from Pumpkinhead,
Unless you’re tired of living,
His enemies are mostly dead,
He’s mean and unforgiving,
Laugh at him and you’re undone,
But in some dreadful fashion,
Vengeance, he considers fun,
And plans it with a passion,
Time will not erase or blot,
A plot that he has brewing,
It’s when you think that he’s forgot,
He’ll conjure your undoing,
Bolted doors and windows barred,
Guard dogs prowling in the yard,
Won’t protect you in your bed,
Nothing will, from Pumpkinhead!”

Inspired by a poem by Ed Justin, the original film was released to theaters on October 14, 1988

As a child, Ed Harley witnesses a man be killed by a monster. In the present day, Harley's son Billy is killed by a group of teenagers. Ed contacts a witch named Haggis, first asking for the resurrection of Billy and then for revenge against the teens. Ed then retrieves a corpse so Haggis could complete the ritual that summons Pumpkinhead. Meanwhile, the teens contemplate what to do, but are interrupted by Pumpkinhead who terrorizes them throughout the night.

You reap what you sew. This is a perfect lesson on why teenagers should not do reckless or stupid things. Well, will they ever learn?

A memorable line in the film is delivered by a teenager 'Bunt', who helps Ed Harley find the old witch Haggis after his son Billy is struck and killed by a motorcycle riding teen. When Ed tells Bunt to take him all the way, he hops from Ed's truck and says, "This is as far as I go. That old woman scares the piss out of me." Yes, I reckon she would.

Another memorable scene in the movie is when Ed, after basically selling his soul to the devil for the revenge of his son's death, is driving back home. His son Billy's body is under a blanket on the passenger side seat. He stops on the side of the road to collect himself when Billy sits up and looks him dead in the face. "What have you done, Daddy?" Was Ed hallucinating from Grief? Hard to interpret. This movie tricked me. I thought it was going to be a low budget and hokey tale. Nothing of the sort. It was well done (and acted) in all the right places. Creepy, horrific and sad. Lessons to be learned from every character. I quote Haggis in the movie when Ed tells her to take the curse back but it's too late, so he yells, "Goddamn you!" To which Haggis replies with an old and crackling, witchy type of smile. "He already has son. He already has."

Jónsi, Jón Þór "Jónsi" Birgisson, an Icelandic musician, is the vocalist and multi-instrumentalist for the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. He is also known for his "angelic" falsetto. Haunting. The instrumental along with Jónsi's voice create a most haunting and rythymic work. The feeling quite palpable. One could almost taste the melancholy upon their breath.

Best interpretation of Lyrics.

My beautiful, beautiful boy

A mean boy...

Look away from me, let go of
Stars... go blink, your design...

Endurance (By Jack Kilborn) AKA J.A. Konrath 2010

WELCOME TO THE RUSHMORE INN

The bed and breakfast was hidden in the hills of West Virginia. Wary guests wondered how it could stay in business at such a creepy, remote location. Especially with its bizarre, presidential decor and eccentric proprietor.

ONCE YOU CHECK IN...

When the event hotel for the national Iron Woman triathlon accidentally overbooked, competitor Maria was forced to stay at the Rushmore. But after checking into her room, she quickly realized she wasn't alone. First her suitcase wasn't where she put it. Then her cell phone was moved. Finally, she heard an odd creaking under the bed. Confusion quickly turned to fear, and fear to hysteria when she discovered the front door was barred and the windows were bricked over. There was no way out.

...YOU'LL BE DYING TO LEAVE

One year later, four new female athletes have become guests of the Inn. Will they escape the horrors within its walls? Or will they join the many others who have died there, in ways too terrible to imagine?

ENDURANCE by Jack Kilborn
Are you brave enough to finish?

Kilborn's harrowing tale sinks into the flesh, the still beating fractions of one's heart. Dread encapsulates ones every sense of well-being.

An entire blood-line of deranged and incestuous rednecks are at play in this story by Kilborn.

Sick, horrific and gloriously twisted. A woman goes missing during a women's triathlon event in West Virginia. Her fiancé, along with the woman's mentally unstable brother go down to West Virginia, in hopes of finding answers to his lost love's disappearance. Along with that duo, the readers are introduced to a badass competitor (who has a prosthetic leg by the way), paired with a grandmother, mother, daughter team of triathletes who also cross the crazies path. All fall victim to the psycho, oversexed, inbred, family running the Rushmore Inn. Insanity, terror, horror, and more than a few bloodbaths ensue. I love this story and Kilborn's cut to the throat style of writing. It repeatedly beats you about the face and neck. A Horror fan's must read.

Horror Writer ‘Stephen King' on being a good novelist.

A good novelist does not lead his characters, he follows them.

A good novelist does not create events, he watches them happen

and then writes down what he sees. A good novelist realizes he

is a secretary, not God.

So says the King...

I hope you all enjoyed my newsletter.

Drop me a line with any comments or suggestions.

Until next time, remember...

YOU SHOULD BE WRITING.

buzzfeed.com (Dead Soldier's Teeth)

chicagohistory.org (Ed Gein)

bizarrepedia.com (Ed Gein)

en.wikipedia.org (Ed Gein)

unsolved.com (Resurrection Mary)

horrorgeeklife.com (PumpkinHead)

Ed Justin (PumpkinHead Poem)

Goodreads.com (Endurance) (Jack Kilborn)

en.wikipedia.org (Jónsi) (Sigur Rós)

Poltergeist Movie (JoBeth Williams)

Stephen King (Novelist) (Author Quotes)