THIRT13EN GHOSTS

Christmas is just around the corner, while Halloween is about to do a body slam with you!

Well, All Hallow's Eve, locally as Undas or Undras, is more of a sentimental occasion in our culture rather than our western counterparts. This may be due to our Asian influences and ancestry whom value the spirits of our departed. Artifacts from pre-Spanish occupation suggests that we hold our predecessors in high regard and respect.

In the Southern Tagalog region, it has become a celebration with the dead. Families gather in their panchon and bring food while the children play around. Some even gather the melted wax from candles and shape it into a ball. With all the fun and people around you'd think it's a fiesta!

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On my way to work I was seeing scenes from Thirteen Ghosts in my head. I remember not really getting into the storyline but quite curious about the 12 ghosts in the Black Zodiac. So for you guys who are also wondering or thinking of a good Halloween costume for parties:
[Thanks Wikipedia of the info.]

The first twelve of the thirteen ghosts that make up the fictional "Black Zodiac" each have their own unique back stories. Although these stories were not described in the film, the production and make-up teams explain their guidelines on the DVD. Cyrus narrates each ghost's back story. They also seem to increase in danger posed as their numbers increase.

 The First Born Son - The First Born Son is the ghost of Billy Michaels, a boy who loved Cowboy films. One day a neighbor found a real steel-tipped bow and arrow in his parents' closet. He challenged Billy to a duel, with Billy using a toy gun. However, his plaything was no match for the arrow, and he died when the neighbor shot it through the back of his head. In death, Billy is in his cowboy suit and holding a tomahawk, with the arrow still protruding from his head. His ghost whispers "I want to play" or "play with me."

The Torso - The Torso is the ghost of a gambler called Jimmy "The Gambler" Gerald. One day he made a deal with a rich business man, and when he bet heavily on a boxing match and lost, he tried to renege his bet and slip out of town, and so sealed his fate. The mob and the winning boxer, to whom he owed money, caught up with Gambino and cut him into several pieces, wrapping them in cellophane and dumping the corpse into the ocean. His ghost is just his torso, trying to walk around on its hands, while his head lies nearby screaming within the cellophane.

The Bound Woman - The Bound Woman is the ghost of Susan LeGrow, a girl with very rich and wealthy parents. Susan was born privileged and she had a penchant for dating one individual boy and cheating on him with another boy. This left a long trail of broken hearts. Susan’s senior year in high school she dated the star football player Chet Walters. On the night of her school prom, wherein Susan and Chet were named Prom Queen and King, respectively, Chet found Susan with another boy. The next morning the boy was found dead and Susan was missing, and two weeks later her body was found buried at the 50 yard line of the school football field. Chet was convicted and sentenced to death. Right before his execution he was quoted as saying “The bitch broke my heart so I broke her neck”. Her ghost is hanging suspended with her Prom dress on and Chet’s tie around her neck and her arms tied behind her back.

The Withered Lover - The Withered Lover is Jean Kriticos, Arthur's wife. She was burned severely saving her family from a devastating house fire, and died of her wounds in the hospital. Her ghost initially appears in a hospital gown, hooked up to an IV pole and showing severe burns on her face, however, after the destruction of the machine, her ghost is wearing her normal clothes and her burns have vanished. Unlike the other ghosts, she is not a vengeful spirit, electing to help her family.

The Torn Prince - The Torn Prince is the ghost of Royce Clayton, a gifted baseball star in high school, albeit with attitude issues and a superiority complex. In 1957 he was challenged by a greaser named Johnny to a drag race, but was killed as his car spun out of control and flipped over; the cause of the accident was a cut brake line. He was buried in a plot of earth that overlooked the baseball diamond. His ghost carries a baseball bat, and parts of his face and body are torn to shreds from when he was dragged under the car. His ghost also uses his bat as a powerful weapon and in his cell, he sits atop the upturned car which ended his life.

The Angry Princess - The Angry Princess is the ghost of Dana Newman who had the natural beauty of a goddess but also had an inability to recognize it. By the time of her early 20’s, a string of abusive boyfriends fueled her low self-esteem and lead her down a spiral of self-loathing from which doctors struggled to save her. Her desperate search for perfection lead her to find employment with a plastic surgeon, where her wage was paid in nose jobs, breast implants and other procedures. Alone one night at the clinic, Dana tried to perform surgery on herself in a desperate attempt to remove an imperceivable imperfection on her face. However the unorthodox procedure went horribly wrong and she was left blind in one eye. She committed suicide in the bathtub by slashing herself to death with a butcher knife until her veins ran dry. When she was found people said she was as beautiful in death as she was in life. Her ghost is naked still holding the same knife she killed herself with, showing all the wounds.

 The Pilgrimess - The Pilgrimess is the ghost of Isabella Smith. In 1695 during colonial times Isabella sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in search for a warm comfortable home in New England, but the tight-knit townsfolk didn’t trust outsiders which isolated her from the town. But problems had begun not too long after she arrived: the town's livestock began to die mysteriously so the local preacher judgmentally accused her of witchcraft. She denied the claim but the town quickly turned against her. As more livestock started to fall ill, the preacher acquired a mysterious illness. The town rallied into a frenzy, cornering Isabella in a barn which they lit on fire. However, moments later Isabella miraculously crawled out still alive without a single burn on her skin, clothes, or hair. So instead she was sentenced to a slow death in the stocks where she stayed for weeks on end while children stoned her, women cursed her, and men spat on her. The humiliation grew far worse than the pain, so finally Isabella came to starvation. Her ghost is walking around with her hands still locked in the stocks covered with a few cobwebs and dry leaves.

 The Great Child & The Dire Mother - The Dire Mother is the ghost of Margaret Shelburne who was a shy woman who could never stand up for herself - partly because she rose to only a mere three feet in height ever since childhood. She was constantly stared at for her ridiculously small size and her own mother would sometimes dress her like a doll, but Margaret didn’t care as long as she found some perverse form of acceptance. A carnival barker named Jimbo placed her on display in his freak show. Margaret found this life terrible, and one night while sweeping the donkeys' pin she was raped by another carnival freak. Her son, Harold “The Great Child,” was born as a result of this rape, and eventually weighed over three hundred pounds (136 kg). Since infancy, Margaret spoiled Harold. As a result, he remained in diapers his entire life. While the circus workers teased and tormented them relentlessly, the two became very close and protective of each other. One day some circus workers decided to play a cruel joke on Harold by kidnapping his mother. Angered and enraged, he set out to look for his mother but when he found her she had died of suffocation in the sack she was kept in. Filled with anger, Harold violently chopped the workers to death with an axe, and kept their remains and placed them on display for paying customers to see. Later, when Jimbo found out what Harold had done, he ordered an angry mob to rip and tear Harold apart. Their ghosts are always together and The Great Child still holds the axe he used to kill the circus workers with. In the original script, their deaths were different. It's explained in the director's commentary on the DVD that their original deaths were that Harold suffocated on his own vomit and as a result fell onto his mother, thus suffocating her as well. It wasn't until later that this idea was disregarded as the directors felt it was too weak a character background. It is this story line though that explains why Harold has vomit all over his bib, and why his mother is feeding him in their cell. 

The Hammer - The Hammer is the ghost of a blacksmith, George Markley, who lived in a small town in the 1890s. He was wrongfully accused of stealing, and when threatened with exile, refused to leave town. A gang led by his accuser hung his wife and children and burned their bodies; in revenge, George used his sledgehammer to beat the culprits to death. He was then subjected to a cruel form of frontier justice by the townsfolk, being chained to a tree and executed by having railroad spikes driven into his body with his own sledgehammer. As a final touch, they cut off his hand and attached the sledgehammer - handle and all - to the hand that was cut off. His ghost is seen with the railroad spikes protruding from his body and a sledgehammer for a left hand. 

The Jackal - The Jackal is the ghost of Ryan Kuhn. In 1887 Ryan was born to a prostitute. By the time of his mid or late-adult years, Ryan developed a sick insatiable taste for the female gender, and he began attacking prostitutes and stray women with the cunning of a wild animal. Feeling a desperate need of help, he committed himself to Borinwood Asylum. After years of imprisonment in a padded room, Ryan went insane, scratching at the walls so violently that his finger nails were torn completely off. The doctors kept him permanently bound in a strait-jacket and tying it tighter when he would act up causing his limbs to contort horribly. However, Ryan gnawed right through it, so the doctors stuck him in a dark basement cell and locked his head in a cage. There he grew to hate all mankind screaming madly and cowering whenever approached by people. When a fire broke out in the asylum everyone but Ryan escaped. His ghost is in his undone strait-jacket and his head locked in the half-way broken cage. If he encounters fire of any kind his ghost will disappear.

 

 The Juggernaut - The Juggernaut is the ghost of a serial killer named Horace "Breaker" Mahoney. Standing seven feet tall, he was of such grotesque height and appearance that everyone ostracized him as a child. His mother abandoned him at birth, so his father raised him, putting him to work in the junkyard crushing old cars. After his father died, Horace was left on his own, and soon went mad. He would pick up female hitchhikers on the road and drive them back to his junkyard, then tear them apart with his bare hands and feed them to his dogs. One day he picked up an undercover female police officer, who called for backup, bringing a SWAT team to surround the junkyard. Since close combat was impossible, the police instead struck the yard, and arrested the giant. However, Horace broke free from the cuffs, and three officers lost their lives. Quickly, five SWAT officers took out their guns and brought Horace down in a hail of bullets. When he finally went down, they shot an extra round of ammunition into him, "just to be safe." His ghost still shows bullet holes all over his clothing, and the round that finished him, in the center of his forehead. According to Dennis, Horace killed nine people when he was alive, and another thirty-one approx as a ghost, then many of Cyrus's assistants and Dennis himself.