Happy Halloween everyone!  With those holiday greetings and gay happy meetings, when friends come to call…it’s the hap- happiest season of all!  Hmm…perhaps I’m confused with Christmas.

Regardless, it’s a holiday, y’all.  Or a semi-holiday anyway.  Okay, it’s a pagan ritual that any God-fearing person should really not be celebrating lest they be doomed to hell and damnation.  I, for one, choose not to celebrate Halloween in the pagan sense, but more in the sense of celebrating the Kit-Kat bar.  The great love of my life.

I also choose to celebrate paranormal tales of spookery and ghostly hijinks…whether they are true or not.  And that is why I participated in a ghost walk tour in the small town in which my mother was raised.  Not that my mother has anything to do with it—it’s just that her hometown is apparently overrun by spectral spirits (come to think of it…that kind of explains some things).  The local community theatre was smart enough to see some money in all this supernatural nonsense, so they gathered some facts from the vast number of paranormal experts that visit the area, and they put together a theatrical, ghost-telling stroll through the town square.  Actually, it was quite entertaining!  And theatrical!  Oh people, it was theatrical.

Just to give you a sense of the intense theatrics involved, please watch a few seconds of this video promoting the tour.  I beg of you, for all things holy and non-Halloweenish.  Watch!  And listen!

Bless her heart.

So, here I am with Big H, Phoo, and a gaggle of other friends preparing to be spooked (thanks again Didi for organizing the big event!):

During the walk, we were able to go inside the old Gwinnett County jail that dates back to the early 1800s.  The iron bars are still intact on the windows and cells of the jail.  If you look closely behind the Xerox copy boxes in the following picture, you can see a patch where an imprisoned slave had tried chipping his way out.  I’m pretty certain that the Xerox copy boxes hampered his escape.

We circled and listened to tales about the Gwinnett County Courthouse in the town square, which is now home to the Gwinnett Historical Society.  There has been a courthouse on this square since 1872.

The courthouse was once flanked by two large oak trees, which were sadly used as hanging trees.  One tree was recently removed due to disease, but the other remains and has been proven by experts to have heavy paranormal activity surrounding it.  Looks pretty spooky to me…

We also visited The Singin’ Bean karaoke coffeehouse, which was a war veterans hospital in the late 1800s.  Apparently, three ghosts frequent this establishment.  One of the ghosts, Beau (on old army general), is associated with a tragedy that will befall upon you if you actually see him.  I tried not to look while I was taking the picture…

The tour lasted for approximately 90 minutes—the perfect amount of time, as it was getting colder by the second.  But, I actually learned a couple of new things about Lawrenceville that I had never known before.  My grandmother has owned a home in that small town since the early 1950s, and I thought that I had heard it all.  Apparently, I can tell her a few stories now.  And I will tell them in Madame Macabre’s voice.

Have fun trick-or-treating tonight!  As for me, I plan to turn out all the lights and lock myself in the basement with 4 taped hours of Survivor and a bag of Kit-Kat bars.  No evil spirits allowed.