Dark Origin.
Gaspard was born in Paris in 1815 to a laundress and a painter. His father soon disappeared, rumored to have left for the South Seas. His mother died in 1830 from cholera. Orphaned Gaspard spent some time on the streets before he was sent to live with three uncles in New York.
In a lower East End tenement Gaspard attempted to live a reasonable life, raising hens and a rooster in a small patch behind the tenement, and keeping a mole, a mouse he named Herman and a cat named La Cataire as pets.
However his uncles, all petty crooks, also employed him in a number of criminal schemes. Skilled at pickpocketing and various persuasion schemes, including luring newcomers to New York down alleyways where one of his uncles would be waiting. Small, frail, and often overlooked Gaspard also showed a talent for shoplifting and supplemented his income selling stolen candy to neighborhood children.
All three of Gaspard’s uncles died in quick succession. Uncle Tendre went first, knifed in a bar fight following a particularly successful side-street robbery. Uncle Potelé, who had ambitions of being an opera singer, despondent after yet another unsuccessful audition, either fell or jumped into the Hudson River. His body was recovered some days later. Uncle Puant’s death was the most mysterious, caused by a gas explosion at a local theater that was otherwise empty at the time.
Neighbors would recall Gaspard being despondent over the deaths of his uncles but also irritable, claiming they were still with him in the tenement building, unwilling to let him sleep or be alone. Gaspard took to drinking heavily, regaling fellow saloon patrons with stories of his uncles not only tormenting him but driving away potential renters who might help him maintain the building. One night, drunk but also possibly having taken laudanum, he wandered through the train yards and fell asleep on some tracks. He was only twenty-seven.
Death, of course, was not the end for Gaspard, but the beginning of a new phase. Puzzled at finding himself still conscious, he returned to his former tenement building. There he found the spirits of his three uncles still present; it was they who taught him to manifest himself so he’d be visible to the living. For them it was a way to torment “the fleshies”, although, as incorporeal beings there was little harm they could do.
Soon the tenement was also occupied by a widow and her two children. As the widow struggled to pay the rent and faced threats of eviction, or worse, from the landlord, Gaspard had an epiphany. Perhaps he could free himself from his confinement by good deeds. He’d never liked the landlord anyway. Taking on a childish appearance, with an oversized head, large eyes, and a broad smile so as not to frighten the widow and the children, Gaspard nevertheless convinced the landlord the tenement was haunted by malevolent forces. The landlord, a deeply superstitious man, quickly handed over full ownership of the building to the widow.
Finding himself still tethered to the Earthly realm he decided to continue his strategy of benefiting others, still convinced good deeds would ultimately win his release. He would go on to befriend a good witch, a thousand-year old ghost, several more children, and a pair of Space Police officers.
Over time his name would be Anglicized, but he didn’t mind. At least he didn’t mind it so much as the fact that, no matter how many good deeds he performed, he seemed no closer to passing on to the next phase of the afterlife, or fading altogether. He began to think he should perhaps turn the other way, even follow the examples of his uncles, instead of just being Casper, the friendly ghost.
Hello. I’m Cthulhu, and I’d like to welcome you to my MasterClass(tm).
The death of Tony Dow a few months ago reminded me that, for as much as I claim to be an Edgar Allan Poe fan, I’ve never read one of his most famous stories, The Murders In The Rue Morgue. If you’re wondering how those things are connected you don’t know me very well because anyone who knows me just takes it as a given that my mind makes these bizarre leaps—and maybe yours does too, if you think about it, especially if you think about making bizarre leaps. Anyway there’s a throwaway line from an episode of Leave It To Beaver where Wally tells his younger brother—and I’m paraphrasing from a distant memory—“I’m reading this story called The Murders In The Rue Morgue. It’s pretty good. It would be even better if I didn’t have to read it for school.” The line gets the standard canned laughter to let viewers at home know it was supposed to be funny, but a lot of kids still, I’m sure, hear that and think, Yep, he’s right. It stuck with me too at the time I saw it because on the show, I think, Wally was in junior high and so was I, and, like him, I was getting my first introductions to Poe in school, although for me it was a really creepy recording of The Tell-Tale Heart that the teacher played because it was close to Halloween, and, in class textbook, The Cask Of Amontillado, and I liked them both so much I went to the library and read half a dozen other Poe stories—the horror ones, although I kind of fell off after The Fall Of The House Of Usher left me cold, and not in a good way. I’ve learned to appreciate it much more since then.
Most modern horror films with a supernatural bent—and even some that lean more toward science fiction, even ones inspired by folklore rely on three basic monster types: vampires, werewolves, or zombies or some other form of animate dead which are different from vampires in that they’re usually not sexy or all that good at conversation. Aside from the occasional creepy doll or killer clown there’s not that much variation. But storytelling predates recorded history by—well, we don’t know since no one bothered to write it down, and folklore is filled with all sorts of creatures that could easily inspire their own franchises. Here are a few:
I’m kind of a stickler for traffic rules: stop signs, speed limits, signaling, at least putting pants on before I get in the car even though we don’t have leather seats so I wouldn’t stick to them, wearing my seatbelt—you get the idea. Sometimes I know the rules don’t have to be strictly followed. There are times when I can see enough of an intersection from a distance that I know I don’t have to stop because there aren’t any cars coming the other way. I do it anyway because I worry that if I get in the habit of breezing through the intersection one of these days I won’t look when there is another car coming. I even have some history with this. Riding my bike as a kid I got in the habit of not stopping at intersections because there were so few cars around, and then I almost got hit by a driver who also didn’t stop.
I used to play an online fantasy game that, being a cheap knockoff of World of Warcraft, which I’ve never played, had most of the usual trappings: castles, goblins, various other monsters that I’d go out and kill even though most of them hadn’t done anything to me personally, swords, magic spells, and meandering landscapes I-or rather my avatar-would traverse in search of adventure and various tasks. I felt a little guilty about it, feeling I was wasting my time, mostly because I was wasting my time. Not that there’s anything wrong with video games–I have plenty of friends who enjoy them and get a lot out of them; it’s just the way I felt about my own experience.
