Sarah ban Breathnach once described the atmosphere of a theater where live performances take place as "the smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd." It was one of her dreams to be a stage actress, and when I was younger it was one of mine too--until I realized I have no talent for it.

Theaters are haunted, by both the famous and the infamous--look at the contrasting stories of theaters haunted by, respectively, Edwin Booth and his murderous brother, John Wilkes. They are most commonly haunted by stagehands, who in the course of their duties spend more time in them than actors do. And smaller, local venues can be haunted by the anonymous actors who played their parts there but for one reason or another never moved on.

A friend of mine who has worked in all sorts of capacities in live theater told me this story. I have his permission to retell it, as long as I change names and the like.

He was working with a little theater group in a small town not far from Lake Erie some years ago. The building itself was built shortly after the turn of the last century, and was said to be haunted by an actress from the twenties or thirties, but nobody quite knew the whole story; they were sometimes strongly aware of her presence, but she was rather retiring for an actress, very seldom seen.

Because of conflicts within the group, he was shortly after his experience to leave it; his departure was not hastened by his encounter with a ghostly lady with a gun.

When he first saw her, she had her back to him. She was dressed in Victorian white, a tall slender woman with dark blond hair in a bun on the back of her head.



He didn't think much of it at first; there are always women in costume backstage in a theater. Then he remembered he was alone in the building--and they weren't doing a Victorian melodrama, so her costume was definitely out of place.

She turned around to face him, as if she had only just become aware of him. She was, he saw, holding something even more out of place than her costume: a small pistol, which she raised and without warning fired at him.

He could feel the bullet go through him, he says; and even now, after nearly two decades, the memory makes him tremble.

And then she was gone, and he was not bleeding. That's as much as he remembers; he left in a hurry.

Several years later, in a book of legends and ghost stories by a local author, he read her story. In the theater's early days, a young actor and actress had appeared opposite each other in a number of productions in which they played loving couples. Often, such roles bleed over into real life, and soon the pair were almost engaged.

Unfortunately, the young man was less than faithful, which drove his almost-fiancee mad with jealousy and rage. The last straw came when she found him backstage in a fairly compromising position with one of the company's ingenues. She went out and bought a gun. Within days, her false lover was dead; she shot him backstage as he was waiting to make an entrance.

She was adjudged insane, and confined to an asylum. Some years later, she managed to escape, and was--as my friend puts it wrily, in the best Ophelian tradition--found drowned in a nearby creek, like Hamlet's mad love.



And on that watery note, fair thee well.

http://auntornery.blogstream.com/

The above is a new blog by my dear old friend, Aunt Ornery. You may recall that Willard and I met up with her on that last shudder-inducing excursion we made to Wal-Mart with Madame Sadie? Well, Auntie's a good old soul. I've know her as long as I've known Willard. Do please drop over, give her a read, tell her Fairweather sent you. She'll be glad to hear from you.

Some time ago I wrote a piece about the Poe Toaster, who visits the grave of Edgar Allan Poe yearly on Poe's birthday, January 19th. I seem to recall speculating whether the Poe Toaster took his inspiration from the mysterious Lady in Black who has left flowers at the crypt containing the body of silent film star Rudolph Valentino. I still can't answer that one, but I've had a lot of fun doing research about the origins of the Lady in Black.

First, a brief bio of Valentino:



Born Rodolfo Guglielmi in Italy in 1895, he was sent to the United States in 1913 after a troubled childhood and adolescence. He made his way in New York City as an exhibition dancer (a skill that stood him in good stead during his movie career), busboy, and, rumor has it, a gigolo. He moved to Hollywood in 1919, changed his name to Rudolph Valentino, and began to appear in small parts in films, usually cast as the villain--thanks to his dark good looks. He became a major star in 1921's THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE, playing a French-Argentinian playboy who dies in WWI; this part led to his iconic role in the eponymous THE SHEIK.

His career did not last long; on August 15, 1926, he collapsed in a New York City hotel and died eight days later of peritonitis following a perforated ulcer. At the time of his death he was allegedly engaged to the actress Pola Negri, following on two failed marriages. Negri would claim, in later years, to have been the Lady in Black, who began delivering flowers to his crypt in what is now the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on the first anniversary of his death.

In 1947, a woman named Ditra Flame (pronounced fla-MAY) revealed that she was the original Lady in Black. Her mother was a friend of Valentino's. When Ditra was a young girl, she was hospitalized for a serious illness, and Valentino came to visit her. At that visit, she said, Valentino asked her to come to his grave to visit him once he was dead, for he did not wish to be alone. Ditra recovered, and when Valentino died some years later, she--by then a teenager--kept her promise to him. She only revealed her status as the original Lady in Black after a former showgirl named Marian Watson--who, like Pola Negri, claimed to have been Valentino's fiancee--claimed she was the Lady in Black. In later years, Flame stopped wearing black clothes on her anniversary visits to Valentino's crypt. There was no need; that role was taken up by a series of fakes.

Ditra Flame discontinued her visits in 1954, and began to go again in 1977; she continued to go to Valentino's crypt from then until her death in 1984. She is identified on her tombstone as the Lady in Black.

A woman named Estrellita del Regil began to visit Valentino's grave in the early 1970s, and is generally accepted as the second "official" Lady in Black. She continued in the role until 1993, when illness forced her to give it up. Since 1995, an actress named Vicki Callahan has been the "official" Lady in Black.

As it happens, Valentino and Edgar Allan Poe are not the only ones who have mysterious admirers who leave flowers on their graves. For many years, someone has left two dozen red roses on the grave of Queen Anne Boleyn, the second wife of the infamous Henry VIII of England, every year on the anniversary of her death. Anne was executed on May 19, 1536, and buried beneath the floor of the Tower of London's Chapel of Saint Peter ad Vincula. No one knows who leaves the roses; if anyone has ever been seen, nobody's talking...

And there is said--if Wikipedia is to be believed--to be a connection between Valentino's Lady in Black and the classic country song "The Long Black Veil," written by Marijohn Wilkin and Danny Dill in 1959. The Lady in Black is said to have inspired the song.

Interesting stuff. Till next time, fair thee well.

My contribution for the weekend. As always, please hold your yawns till the end.

I confess that as art goes I come from the "I know what I like" school. One artist whose works I genuinely like is the early Italian Renaissance painter Masaccio (1401-1428). In part this is because he was the first Italian artist whose works break completely from the stiffness of late medieval art, using perspective to give his paintings an almost three dimensional depth and shading to suggest heavenly gradations of light. Mostly though it stems from the fact that we know almost nothing about him outside of his art.

Born Tomasso Cassai (for his grandfather's profession of cabinetmaker) or, in other accounts, di Ser Giovanni di Mone, in 1401, he lost his father at the age of five. His mother remarried, but the next fact we know for certain is that he joined one of the seven main crafts guilds in Tuscany's capital city of Florence in 1422. It was members of this guild who gave him the nickname that has overshadowed his birth name: in English, "Masaccio" means something like "big, ugly Tom." He apparently was a big goodnatured lug of a man; the only image we have in paint of him is a self-portrait contained in one of his surviving frescoes. We also have no idea where he learned to paint, a very strange circumstance in an era when the great artists of the day ran workshops and schools and younger painters were apprenticed to them.

His career lasted a bare five years. In those five years he completed a number of paintings, many of them lost in the centuries after his death. The most famous of his surviving works grace the walls of the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, painted for a patron named Felice Brancacci for his family's private chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. Other works can be found in such far-flung locations as Berlin's Staatliche Museen, Florence's fabled Uffizi Gallery, and London's National Gallery.

In late 1427, Masaccio left some of the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel unfinished and relocated to Rome. We do not know why he moved; we only know that by the autumn of 1428, he was dead, two months short of his twenty-seventh birthday. One lurid account claims he was poisoned by a jealous fellow artist; another says he died "of grief and want" which suggests that, unable to get commissions in the highly competitive art community in Rome, he fell ill from malnutrition and was carried off by disease or outright starvation.

His influence can be seen in particular in the paintings of the late Renaissance painter and sculptor Michelangelo. I see a lot of Masaccio in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings, especially in the size and musculature of the figures.



Above is a detail from his painting of the Holy Trinity (1425), in Florence's church of Santa Maria Novella. The figures depicted here are the Virgin Mary and a "donor"--i.e. the patron who commissioned the painting. I couldn't find a picture of the full painting small enough to put on the blog, but the Trinity is depicted as God tenderly supporting a cross on which hangs the dead Christ, with the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove hovering between them. The whole scene is given perspective by a spatial structure in the form of a barrel vault, giving the impression that the whole painting is set into a hole in the wall, as art historian Giorgio Vasari wrote.

My favorite of all Masaccio paintings, however, is "Adam and Eve Expelled from the Garden of Eden," also known as "The Expulsion from Paradise" (c. 1427).



Masaccio painted exclusively on biblical themes. This one has brought the story of the Fall and Adam and Eve's punishment by being banned from Eden alive for me in a way the words on the page cannot. In her book SISTER WENDY'S 1000 MASTERPIECES, Sister Wendy Beckett, Carmelite nun and art historian, pinpoints its emotional impact: "No artist has entered more deeply into the horror of the expulsion from Paradise than Masaccio. It is a refugee situation that he portrays: home and happiness swiftly turned into loss and misery. It is this position of exile, so painfully familiar to our own times, that we can well appreciate." I've never been to Florence, but the first time I saw a picture of this painting my breath literally caught in my throat.

Worth noting that Masaccio apparently painted his figures of Adam and Eve nude, and some later painter--possibly Filippino Lippi, who completed some of the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel some six decades after Masaccio abandoned them--added fig leaves to them. In the late twentieth century, a cleaning removed the fig leaves. In any case, there is no eroticism implicit in the painting--only grief and contrition and fear. The great brooding swordwielding angel who blocks the way back in to Eden has a look of such sympathy and sorrow on its face as to move me to tears.

So Eden sank to grief--as Robert Frost wrote in another context.

One day I hope to get to Florence. And the first place I'm going to sightsee (after a good authentic Tuscan meal, of course) will be the Brancacci Chapel. Surely I won't be the only overawed slackjawed tourist standing gawking before the majesty and genius of a man who gave us more beauty in five short years than most artists do in a lifetime.

And on that note, fair thee well.

Happy Valentine's Day, everybody. Got a story for you from Willard's family's recollections. She's been hors de combat for the past three weeks, between oral surgery and a car accident; she's improving, but she told me to make what I could of the story of the Valentine bride.



Along Conasauga Creek, in the shadow of the Unicoi Mountains, stand the remains of an old military fort, built by the US Army in the 1830s, just before they began rounding up the Cherokee who lived in the area and forcing them off to Oklahoma on the infamous Trail of Tears. In later years, after the fort was deserted, the area in which it stood was a favorite walk for a young courting couple. They didn't get to spend much time together; he worked on the railroad, and she was still living at home, helping her mother raise a large and boisterous family, and, when she was needed, helping out neighbors as well.

Though he was a shy young man, he eventually took his courage in his hands and told her he loved her, and asked her to be his wife. She joyfully agreed, and they made plans to meet at their minister's house on Valentine's Day, two weeks away; there they would be married, and like all young couples, they believed they would live happily ever after. They parted at her front door, exchanging sweet chaste kisses and promising to meet at the preacher's house at the end of the long two weeks.

He went back to work on the railroad, daydreaming as he worked of his lovely bride-to-be; she returned home. The first week she spent making her dress for the wedding. The second week she fell ill. For several days her life was despaired of, but at last, on the very day before her wedding, she seemed to take a turn for the better.

The next morning, the young groom arrived at the preacher's house bright and early, eager to meet his bride, go through the brief ceremony in the minister's study, and begin married life. To his surprise, though, his bride was late. He was becoming really worried when, to his relief, he heard soft footsteps coming down the stairs. "Ah," he thought. "She must have been getting ready up there."



A moment later, his bride stood at his elbow, smiling at him. She looked lovely, but was much paler than usual. Even worse, she seemed to have lost her voice: when the minister asked her the beautiful simple questions of the ceremony, she only nodded.

And then, the minister told him to take her left hand and place the broad gold wedding band he had bought on her finger.

The instant he touched her, she vanished.

The frightened groom and the minister rushed out of the house in a frenzy and ran all the way to her family home. In the yard, they stopped; they could hear sounds of sawing and hammering in the barn, and, in the house, the ominous sound of weeping women.

The young lover went into the house, his heart growing colder by the moment. Inside, lying on a bed, was his bride. She was dead, and the women of the family were laying her out for burial, while the men in the barn built her coffin. On a chair by the bed lay her wedding dress; it would now be her graveclothes.

She had been helping with nursing duties for a family up the holler that had been stricken with typhoid fever, a common ailment in the old days of poor sanitation. She had seemed to rally on the day before her wedding, but by morning she was dead.

After her funeral, her groom left the county, but everyone remembered the strange events at his wedding. To paraphrase the poet Alan Seeger, she to her pledged word was true; she did not fail that rendezvous.

Many years later, now an elderly man, her groom returned and lived out his days in the shadow of the Unicois.

He never married.

He remained faithful to his Valentine bride.



The picture of the ghostly bride was taken in 1936 at Raynham Hall in Great Britain, and is said to depict the Hall's famous Brown Lady in her wedding dress. This picture is a rarity--it is one that has never been debunked.

And on that spectral note, fair thee well.