The haunted coast... Not!

As mentioned previously, I spent the past week on the Oregon Coast. We rented a house with some friends who have kids the same age as my son, and apart from a minor mishap on the last day (my son fell out of a treehouse and broke his right arm... just in time to start kindergarten...) we had a great time. Prior to our departure, I'd mentioned to Carnacki that I'd try and come back with some kind of scary stories. Coastal towns are good for that sort of thing, right? Wrong. Don't get me wrong - the topography of the coastline is hauntingly beautiful in and of itself, and the Seaside & Cannon Beach area have certainly seen their share of shipwrecks, but most of what I read about the area was, well, pretty sedate. There are ghost stories, but they're all different - there isn't anything notable or lurid enough to make the guide books as far as I could tell... Part of that probably has to do with the relatively recent history of these 2 cities. Now Astoria is probably another story - it hasn't bothered to sanitize its history as much, having been a rough-and-ready logging/ fishing/ shipping port. But we weren't in Astoria, we were south of Cannon Beach in the barely-even-there town of Arch Cape. There's a great state park there, and a phenomenal beachscape with shallow sea caves, an arch, and lush tidepools - but only one ghost of note: 'bandage man' (page down to 'Cannon Beach'). Apparently a bloody, bandaged apparition jumps into cars on Hwy 101. Unfortunately, Pacific Paranormal Research Society calls it an 'obvious urban myth'. Sorry, Carnacki... I'll pick a spookier place to go next time ;) I did find an ancient biography of Edgar Cayce on the bookshelves of our rental (the 1945 pulp edition of Sugue's There is a River), and while we were in Seaside we found a small magic shop (don't bother going to the URL, it's just a "coming soon" page) with some great vintage posters:

(not my photo, nor was it taken by anyone that was with us - Kyrielle's wonderful picture came up in my Google results) The shop had some fantastic "Carter the Magnificent" posters which the owner is going to start selling. I don't know if they'll be repros or originals, but I'm going to have to buy one and hang it in my office since that's my name (there goes that pseudo-anonymity). Not that I get anyone to call me "The Magnificent" very often, but still... We had a great time; we're glad to be back, and I must way that at times like this I'm tremendously thankful for online homes like this one.