internet explorers club | submitted for the approval of the midnight society…

It’s finally gloomy (rain! clouds! thunder! “chilly!”) for a brief moment in Los Angeles, so I’m going to devote IEC to weird and mysterious things that go bump in the night.

Atlas Obscura takes us down Clinton Road, or “America’s Most Haunted Road.” It’s great, because it’s coming from Atlas Obscura, which publishes weird things, but is written by a skeptic, so it’s a good balance.

[they] suggest that Clinton Road, with its few landmarks and long stretch of blank pavement, is an empty canvas upon which to paint your worst fears.

Airbnb ran a competition to spend Halloween night in the Paris Catacombs, and there is something quaint about the bed positioned under multiple memento mori. My favorite thing (apart from the gorgeous / creepy photos) is the amenities lists, which tells a story all its own: breakfast is available, but no bathrooms or wifi.

Molly Priddy writes on what attending a Bigfoot believers conference is like, and it is a gift:

Bigfoot, or Sasquatch – the terms seem interchangeable here – is spoken of throughout the day as the ultimate master of secrecy and concealment. For many of the people gathered in this room, it’s the assumption that Bigfoot, and no matter how quickly you turn around to see if something is following or watching you, he or she (yes, there are female Bigfoots) will be faster to hide.

In other cryptid news, I just found out about Qupqugiag, a ten-legged polar bear that terrorizes Inuit villages. The Cryptid Wiki entry posits that it could have been a hallucination but also “a chance it could be real as all the pollution in the ocean can warp creatures,” so YMMV.

The Atlantic talks about the rise of Buffy Studies, and digs into what precisely makes Buffy compelling, but also how we distinguish highbrow from low, and how the latter often turns into the former with the passage of time (Shakespeare, The Novel, etc).

By fighting the “Big Bad,” Buffy and her friends fight the monsters everyone faces—oppressive authority figures, meaningless rules, confining social norms, sexual awakening, loneliness, redemption—in other words, the terrors of growing up and finding one’s way in the world.

Etcetera: The ghosts in Crimson Peak were practical effects (!!!) enhanced by CGI (go see Crimson Peak btw). The New Yorker on The Joy of Bats. Have you all seen What We Do in the Shadows? Please stop what you’re doing and immediately watch it.