Halloween Posts

Halloween spookiness awaits at the Icebox Radio Theater

Recently, a post appeared on my Facebook feed announcing the Halloween season of the Icebox Radio Theater in a creepy way. Jeff Adams, artistic director of the community theatre company that records in International Falls but is heard around the world, wrote:

We’re finally ready to tell this story. Years ago when my daughter was still at home, we worked together on a photography project taking pictures of our century-old Minnesota home. When we exported the photos to a computer for editing, this image was among them.

The Slice: Spooky Scenes at Two Harbors Lighthouse

The Lighthouse at Lighthouse Bed and Breakfast in Two Harbors gets a little eerie on stormy days near Halloween.

In its series The Slice, WDSE-TV presents short “slices of life” that capture the events and experiences that bring people together and speak to what it means to live up north.

Halloween Banners


Got some photos of awesome Halloween memories? Want to share them with the PDD ghouls and goblins? Send them our way, we will add them to the banner rotation — the long skinny photos at the top of the page when you view Perfect Duluth Day on a desktop computer. (There are no photo banners if you are on a smartphone.)

Video Archive: WDIO-TV Halloween Weather Report

From the haunted film vault comes this 1970s clip featuring WDIO-TV weatherman Jack McKenna, two mice and Dracula. Also featured at the end are anchorman Dennis Anderson and sportscaster Bill Stefl.

Happy Halloween!

Zombie self defense at UMD

What better place to find big juicy brains to feast on than an institute of higher learning. UMD Chief Information Officer, Jason Davis, explains how to defend against a zombie attack using principles of Jujutsu.

The Slice: Haunted Ridge

The Haunted Shack has been bringing the scare to northern Minnesota for 26 years. The year’s spookenings are at Ru-Ridge Corn Maze in Carlton, about 10 miles southwestish of Duluth.

In its series The Slice, WDSE-TV presents short “slices of life” that capture the events and experiences that bring people together and speak to what it means to live up north.

Countdown to Halloween: Duluth Paranormal Society

The Duluth Paranormal Society has been featured in the Duluth News Tribune. Most interesting is its research into Sir Benedict’s Tavern on the Lake.

The DNT article includes links to other resources:

Minnesota Paranormal Study Group

Iron Range Paranormal Research

Happy Halloween. 🙂

Halloween Banners

ZombieBanner-Call

Got a great costume this year, or been to a good Halloween party already? We want to see your creepy, comical, kooky Halloween photos. And we’d love to add them to the banner rotation — the long skinny photos at the top of the page when you view Perfect Duluth Day on a desktop computer. (There are no photo banners if you are on a smartphone.)

Keep in mind, the proportions are extremely horizontal, so not every photo works when cropped. Click here for complete submission guidelines, but the basics are: 1135 pixels wide by 197 pixels high, e-mail them to [email protected].

If you’re not able to crop and size them, send the full image and we’ll do our best to crop it into a banner.

Countdown to Halloween: Nopeming

Nopeming has a special place in the paranormal of Duluth. The Travel Channel sent a team in 2015, as featured in the link above. The Duluth News Tribune covered its history in a 2017 article.

The Nopeming facility was in use until Nov. 25, 2002. Friends of mine have laughed that rooms and spaces shown on ghost hunting shows holding tormented souls were, in fact, the places they worked as food service workers in high school.

Countdown to Halloween: Twin Ports Paranormal Society

The Twin Ports Paranormal Society will “investigate the paranormal for people in need of help at no charge. Confidentiality will be respected.”

Countdown to Halloween: Lady Ocalat’s Paranormal Investigations

I’ve been to Lady Ocalat’s Emporium once, to buy some fake dove blood for purposes of writing with my new fountain pen. I don’t know entirely the relationship between the tarot reading services and the paranormal investigations, but Lady Ocalat’s website maintains a record of past paranormal activity, bigfoot sightings and UFO sightings.

Countdown to Halloween: International Paranormal Society

Gloria Doescher (left) shows Chris Julien (center) and Adrian Lee a photo of what her thermal imaging camera picked up during one of the vigils at Fairlawn Mansion and Museum in Superior. The three investigated the mansion along with other members of the International Paranormal Society, the first time in more than a dozen years that ghost hunters were allowed into the mansion. (Maria Lockwood / Superior Telegram)

The International Paranormal Society has visited Duluth multiple times. One of its visits included time on the SS William A. Irvin, another the mansion at Fairlawn. Adrian Lee, its founder, has a pretty unique gimmick — he talks about working at the intersection of history and paranormal science, spending time in archives to track historical records that help him make sense of the data his heat sensors and ghost boxes find. Triangulation yields truth, apparently.

Ripped at the Boogieman Project in 1999

[Editor’s note: Before the NorShor Theatre became a spiffed up Duluth Playhouse venue it hosted a variety of concerts and parties, such as the annual Boogieman Project at Halloween time. For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. He paid a visit to the NorShor and filed the report below, originally published in the Ripsaw newspaper.]

I was completely ripped. To the north of me stood a minotaur. To the south was Ernie from Sesame Street. To the east was a person dressed in about four hundred flashing colored lights. To the west was Kool-Aid Man. No, it wasn’t a bad case of delirium tremens, it was the NorShor Theatre’s fourth annual Halloween party, otherwise known as “The Boogieman Project.”

The NorShor was all decked out for a party of massive proportions. Live bands rocked the house in the main downstairs theater while all manner of freaks and weirdos got funky on the dance floor — a space in front of the stage where the seating was long ago removed. There was a bar setup in the theater to complement the usual one in the balcony mezzanine lounge, where even more bloody surgeons and Star Wars characters drank it up and raised hell to even more live music. God, I love Halloween.

Lizzie Naganab’s Glowing Grave

The “old” cemetery off Reservation Road northwest of Cloquet.

This book sparked a search into a Cloquet mystery from 87 years ago.

I’m not sure how I acquired the book, but there it sat, on the passenger seat of my car as I drove up Reservation Road northwest of Cloquet. There are some things you wish you could unsee — because a history buff like me wants all the facts. Alas, those facts can be elusive, especially so many years from an event. This was the case with a strange little entry in Six Feet Under: A Graveyard Guide to Minnesota.

I’m not into the morbid route to history that this little guide offers. That was my mother. She had dozens of books along the lines of “Wisconsin Death Trip,” “Hollywood Book of the Dead” or “Myths and Mysteries: Strange Stories of the Dead” on her shelves. Morbidly, she died earlier this year and perhaps that is how this book floated into my stacks. She redeemed herself in recent years by ditching the stories of others and digging into her own family history, a genealogy I greatly appreciate today.

Halloween Banners

ZombieBanner-Call

Time to go back one year and look through your pictures on your phone. We want to see your creepy, comical, kooky Halloween photos, we’ll add them to the banner rotation – those long skinny photos at the top of the page. Keep in mind, the proportions are extremely horizontal, so not every photo works when cropped. Click here for complete submission guidelines, but the basics are: 1135 pixels wide by 197 pixels high, e-mail them to [email protected]
If you’re not able to crop and size them, send the full image and we’ll do our best to crop it into a banner. Happy Halloween, we’ll start rotating the Halloween Banners this weekend.