Well, not necessarily doom. Maybe it is a happy glowing eyeball. Your call! Either way, they’re fun and easy to make. I had a group of 4th and 5th graders make a bunch for one of our first BOOOk Fairs. They loved it. I can honestly say that I have never seen such diverse eyeballs in my life. These are fast, easy and striking: a lot of bang for your buck.
Richard Estep is a local Longmont, Colorado resident and paranormal investigator. He co-founded and is team leader of the Boulder County Paranormal Research Society. In The Haunting of Asylum 49, Estep takes his team to Utah to investigate the old Toole Valley Hospital outside Salt Lake City. To make things even more intriguing, the hospital was purchased after it closed down by Kimm Andersen and his wife (co-author Cami) who turned it into Asylum 49: a full-contact haunted house. It is also open to the public for ghost hunts.
This combination of potentially haunted location combined with the excitement and ins-and-outs of a Halloween haunt makes for a thoroughly gripping narrative as we follow the team’s exploration of the old building over Halloween week, 2015. Continue reading
Worried about vampires? No need to, after you have a few of these delectable cookies. I know! Garlic! In cookies!
Absolutely. The garlic is rendered subtle and sweet by a quick boil and a soak in maple syrup. The combination with dark chocolate, a sprinkle of sea salt and a nice buttery cookie is irresistible.
You’ll be picking delectable little bits of sweet garlic out of your teeth for the rest of the night! Except maybe don’t indulge on date night. Just saying.
Disturbing laboratory test tubes. Filled with bugs and bright not-liquid stuff. A.k.a., Jello bugs!
I needed a non-liquid alternative to colored water in test tubes for a mad-scientist display. Solution: jello.
Personal field testing revealed that regular jello will stand at room temperature (a pretty warm room) for just barely five days before it begins to get moldy. Plenty of time to gross-out small children without precipitating an unfortunate bio-hazard event.
This is terribly fun to do. Enjoy!
(Paige McKenzie, Alyssa Sheinmel, Weinstein Books 2015)
It is unusual to find a young adult story that deals with demonic possession. This one does.
Sunshine is a relatively normal teenager other than the fact that she was adopted as a baby and is very into vintage clothing and “old-fashioned” things. Shortly after her sixteenth birthday her life changes for the weird. Sunshine and her mom, Kat, move from sunny Texas to gloomy Washington state and Sunshine begins to notice strange things about their rented house. Footsteps. Repositioned objects. Childlike crying. A mysterious feeling of cold that only she feels. Yes, her house is haunted. But events take an even more serious turn when her mother grows increasingly distant and strange. Helped by her new friend, Nolan, Sunshine learns that she is not exactly human, and that it is up to her to save her mother’s spirit from demonic annihilation. If Sunshine fails this initial test of supernatural abilities, her mother is lost forever.
My Haunted Library 