Nightmare at Mystery Mansion

Another long-lost treasure, reclaimed for one dollar at a second-hand bookshop. Awesome.

Further into the Unknown

I've been looking for this book for years. Another mysterious disappearance from the local library. Very odd.

It's also very odd that after scouring the internet for it, I found it lying on the classroom floor this morning. It's one of the books in my teachers collection for bored kids. And it's beautiful.

Some cool definitions from the book:

Corpse Lights: Flickering flames that are seen at times in graveyards. They are caused by gases seeping through the earth from corpses buried in shallow graves.

Shades of the Dead: A term to describe the dark, shadowy forms in which spirits of the dead sometimes appear.

He let me keep it.

Come For A Ride On The Ghost Train

When I was four, there was one book I was O-B-S-E-S-S-E-D with. "The Ghost Train". It was a picture book, in which the reader rides a carnival Ghost Train. One page I particularly remember was the woods. The train-track twists off between gnarled trees with scary faces. You flip-the-flap and suddenly all the trees reach their arms up and their mouths get about five times longer, as though they were about to swallow you whole.

I would get it out of the library study it, read it again and again and study it some more. When I had to return it, I would simply re-issue it again and again. I would draw my own versions of it. Then, one sad, sad day a few months later, I went to the library to issue my favourite book, and... it wasn't there. I looked and looked and looked but it wasn't there. I asked the staff for help, and there was no sign of it on their catalogue, none of them seemed to remember it either. It had completely disappeared. No trace, full on, magic, disappearance. Poof.

And I've been looking for it ever since. I trawled the internet for it, to no avail. This was the INTERNET! It had to be on here somewhere. No such luck. I begin to think I had actually imagined it. Simply a fragment of my imagination. Maybe it was a book I was born to write, and I had actually had some sort of religious experience. A prophecy. I could totally see myself writing it in the future.
But I was so sure it was real.

One day I finally located it on amazon.com http://www.amazon.co.uk/Come-Ghost-Train-Colin-Hawkins/dp/0744577942

Turned out it was called "Come for a Ride on the Ghost Train". I had been looking for the wrong book all along. I was planning on ordering it from amazon, but the shipping prices were ridiculous. Anyway, today I went into the awesome Arty Bees Bookshop, just off the coolest street in Wellington. I was looking for that book.

I found it.

WHOA! WHAT?! I found it?! And my mind blew open in that instant. It was there. In my hands. Covered in my bloody brain tissue.

Some photos of it in all of it's nostalgic glory:

I love life.